Stop Worrying
Why the things you’re worrying about are doing more damage than you may think, why you’re overthinking your worries and how to overcome it
Recently I’ve been reading this book called ‘How to Stop Worrying and Start Living’ by Dale Carnegie in which the book teaches you simply what it states in the title — ‘How to Stop Worrying and Start Living’.
Throughout the book, Dale Carnegie states the negative effects worrying can have on both our mental and physical health which includes examples such as the formation of Stomach Ulcers, Heart Disturbances, Hugh Blood Pressure and even tooth decay. When talking about the effects of worry, he quotes the doctor Dr O. F. Gober (the chief physician of the Gulf, Colorado and Santa Fe Hospital Association), stating ‘Seventy per cent of all patients who come to physicians could cure themselves if they only got rid of their fears and worries. Don’t think for a moment that I mean their ills are imaginary. Fear causes worry, worry makes you tense and nervous, affects the nerves of your stomach and actually changes the gastric juices of your stomach from normal to abnormal and often leads to stomach ulcers. You do not get stomach ulcers from what you eat, you get stomach ulcers from what eats you.’
This statement was then backed up by a study of 15,000 patients treated for stomach disorders at the Mayo Clinic. Four out of five had no physical basis for their stomach illnesses. Fear, worry, hate, supreme, selfishness and the inability to adjust themselves to the world of reality were largely the causes of their stomach illnesses and stomach ulcers. As Dale Carnegie states ‘Both Mental and Physical health are tied together stronger than you may think’.
And this is only one of the hundreds of drawbacks that worry has on people. Worry can also cause a loss of motivation, an easy form of procrastination, and just simply have major downsides on a person’s life and this is why mental health is so, so important. One quote that has resonated with me a lot whilst reading this book is this: ‘I probably would never have been able to do this if i had kept on worrying because one of our worst features about worrying is that it destroys our ability to concentrate. When we worry, our mind jumps here and there and everywhere, and we lose all power of decision. However, when we force ourselves to face the worst and accept it mentally, we then eliminate all these vague imaginings and put ourselves in a position in which we are able to concentrate on our problem’.
So, how do you ‘Stop Worrying and Start Living’?
There are many factors that answer this question, but after reading the book by Dale Carnegie I’ve compiled my top 3 practices that have had the largest effect on breaking my worry habit.
- Live in Day-tight compartments — In the spring of 1871, a young man called Sir William Osler picked up a book and read twenty-one words that had a profound effect on his future. Those twenty-one words were: ‘Our main business is not to see what lies dimly at a distance, but to do what lies clearly at hand’. In other words, live your life day by day and focus on the tasks at hand and not worry about the future.
‘Shut off the future as tightly as the past, the future is today, there is no tomorrow, the day of man’s salvation is now. The best possible way to prepare for tomorrow is to concentrate with all your intelligence, all your enthusiasm, on doing today’s work superbly today. That is the only possible way you can prepare for the future’.
‘Only ask for today’s bread. It doesn’t complain about the stale bread we had to eat yesterday, and it doesn’t say: ‘It’s been pretty dry out in the wheat belt lately and we may have another drought — and then how will I get bread to eat next fall — or suppose I lose my job — how could I get bread then? No, this teaches us to ask for today’s bread only. Today’s bread is the only bread we can possibly eat’.
- The magic formula of Willis H. Carrier — Willis H. Carrier was once in a job in which he had to remove the impurities from the gas so it could be burned without injuring the engines. But unforeseen difficulties arose in which Willis wasn’t able to meet the guarantee he’d made. ‘I was stunned by my failure. It was almost as if someone had struck me a blow on the head. My stomach, my insides, began to twist and turn. For a while, I was so worried I couldn’t sleep.’
To overcome this, Willis used 3 steps.
Step 1 — ‘I analysed the situation fearlessly and honestly, and figured out what the worst was that could happen. No one was going to shoot me, that was certain. There was a chance I could lose my position and there was also a chance that my employers would have to remove the machinery and lose the $20,000 we’d invested
Step 2 — ‘After figuring out what the worst was that could possibly happen, I reconciled myself to accepting it. I said to myself that this failure will be a blow to my record and it might possibly mean the loss of my job, but if it does, I can always get another position. After discovering the worst that could possibly happen and reconciling myself to accepting it, if necessary, an extremely important thing happened: I immediately relaxed and felt a sense of peach that I hadn’t experienced in days’.
Step 3 — From that time on, I calmly devoted my time and energy to trying to improve upon the worst which I had already accepted mentally.
a — Ask yourself what’s the worst that can happen if I can’t solve my problem.
b — Prepare yourself mentally to accept the worst
c — Then calmly try to improve upon the worst which you have already mentally agreed to accept
- Write it down — This third practice is the most simple yet has had the biggest effect on myself and my worries.
Simply get a notebook (or something digital, but something analogue like a notebook or a piece of paper is better in my opinion) and write everything down that you’re worried about. This allows you to comprehend all of your thoughts and worries, and more often than not, your worries seem a lot worse in your head than they do on paper.
You can then see all of these worries sitting on the paper rather than have them rolling around in your head like loose marbles and come to a conclusion on what you want to do to solve them.
- Analyse — To get an idea as to how likely the outcome of a worry is to occur you want to:
a — Get the facts
b — Analyse the facts
c — Arrive at a decision — and then act on that decision
‘Half the worry in the world is caused by people trying to make decisions before they have sufficient knowledge of which to make the decision.’
Here’s the story of a soldier named Frederick J. Mahlstedt who used statistics and the law of averages to get over his worries: ‘Early in June 1944, I was lying in a slit trench near Omaha Beach. As I looked around my trench — just a rectangular hole in the ground — I said to myself, ‘this looks like a grave’, which I couldn’t help saying to myself ‘Maybe this is my grave’. When the German bombers began coming over at 11 pm, and the bombs started falling, i was scared stiff. For the first two or three nights, I couldn’t sleep at all. And by the fourth or the fifth night, I was a nervous wreck. I knew that if I didn’t do something, I would go stark crazy. So I reminded myself that five nights had passed, and I was still alive; and so was every man in our outfit. Only two had been injured, and they had been hurt, not by German bombs, but by falling flak from ur own aircraft guns. I decided to stop worrying by doing something constructive. So, I decided to put a roof over my slit trench to protect myself from flak. I told myself that the only way I could be killed in that deep, narrow slit trench was by a direct hit; and I figured that the chance of a direct hit was not one in ten thousand. And after a couple of nights looking at it in this way, I calmed down and slept even through the bomb raids.’
When Dale Carnegie asked Dean Hawkes about the worry he states ‘I think I can honestly say that my life is now almost totally devoid of worry. I have found that if a man will devote his time to securing facts in an impartial, objective way, his worries will usually evaporate in the light of knowledge. ‘
‘What are the chances, according to the law of averages, that this event I am worrying about will ever occur’ — Comprehend your worries and you’ll realise how much bigger they seem in your head than they actually are, once analysed.
What I’m Currently Reading
‘How To Stop Worrying And Start Living’ by Dale Carnegie — Yes, it’s the book this whole blog is based on, so as you may imagine, I really, REALLY recommend it and I think you could learn a lot from it as I have done myself.
Buy it here — amazon.com/how-to-stop-worrying-and-start-living
Fact of the week
We get goosebumps to ward off predators — It caused our ancestors to appear bigger than they were, helping to ward off predators when they were frightened or on the defense, but with modern humans having less body hair, goosebumps no longer cause us to look that much more intimidating.
Article of the week
