Steiner's practical cure for modern nervous fidgeting: small daily exercises that strengthen the etheric body and the will of the I.
Overcoming nervousness in Steiner's sense is not calming the nerves but rebuilding the inner members that govern them. Nervousness, he taught in 1912, shows a weakened etheric body and a will that the I no longer firmly holds. The cure is exercise of the soul: reverse-order recall, conscious handwriting, attentive movement, and the practised renunciation of harmless wishes, each one re-anchoring the spirit in the deed.
In Steiner's Own Words
The etheric body can be strengthened by performing another exercise, in this case, for the improvement of memory. By thinking through events, not only in the way they occurred but also in reverse sequence, that is, by starting at the end of an event and pursuing it through to the beginning, will help to make the etheric body stronger. Historical events, for example, which are usually learned in chronological sequence, can be followed backwards. Or a play or story can be thought through in reverse from end to beginning. Such exercises when done thoroughly are highly effective in consolidating and strengthening the etheric body.
What it Means Today
Steiner addressed a 1912 Munich audience already complaining of an epidemic of nerves, of people who scurry from thought to thought and cannot finish one, who put a brooch down each night and lose it by morning. His diagnosis stays legible a century on. He did not reach for sedation. He prescribed small acts that force the human I back into contact with what the body does: recall the day backwards, redraw your own letters, occasionally use the left hand for what the right hand does, and let a harmless wish go unsatisfied on purpose. Each act asks the will to govern habit rather than habit to govern the will.
The same instinct lives on in anthroposophic biography work and in the evening Rückschau, the backward review of the day taught in anthroposophic psychotherapy and in Waldorf teacher training, where one re-walks the hours from evening to morning to school attention and steady the inner life. Both descend directly from this lecture, later printed by SteinerBooks as How to Cure Nervousness. Thalira synthesis: what a clinic treats as anxiety, Steiner met as a loosening of the I from its own deeds, so the remedy is not quieter nerves but a will rejoined to the act, rebuilt one deliberate exercise at a time.
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