6 ideas
Seishin kogo sayo: attending to a bodily or mental sensation intensifies it, and the intensified sensation draws still more attention, locking the person into a self-reinforcing loop. Symptoms of shinkeishitsu are therefore manufactured by focused vigilance rather than by any underlying physical defect.
The nervous temperament is not weakness but an unusually strong desire to live well (sei no yokubo), which turns inward as hypochondriacal fear of anything that might threaten it. The same energy that produces the fear, redirected toward constructive action, becomes the cure.
The patient first undergoes about a week of isolated bed rest with no distraction, then light solitary work, then heavier physical and purposeful work, and finally a return to ordinary social life. Each stage cuts off escape from feelings and gradually reconnects the person with action, so attention moves from symptoms to tasks.
Feelings cannot be controlled directly by will, so trying to eliminate anxiety only feeds it. The cure is to let feelings remain exactly as they are while doing what needs to be done, since feelings shift on their own once they are no longer fought.
Shiso no mujun: neurotics construct an idealized picture of how their minds and bodies should feel and then fight the gap between that picture and actual experience. Seeing symptoms as the product of this demand for mental perfection shifts the target of treatment from the symptom to the unrealistic standard.
When isolated with nothing to do, the patient's anxiety first peaks and then naturally subsides, after which boredom produces a spontaneous hunger for activity. Treatment deliberately harnesses this felt urge rather than persuading the patient, so the move into work springs from their own desire.