How To Stop Worrying And Start Living

2. Relax in odd moments. Let your body go limp like an old sock. I keep an old, maroon-coloured sock on my desk as I work-keep it there as a reminder of how limp I ought to be. If you haven't got a sock, a cat will do. Did you ever pick up a kitten sleeping in the sunshine? If so, both ends sagged like a wet newspaper. Even the yogis in India say that if you want to master the art of relaxation, study the cat. I never saw a tired cat, a cat with a nervous breakdown, or a cat suffering from insomnia, worry, or stomach ulcers. You will probably avoid these disasters if you learn to relax as the cat does.

3. Work, as much as possible, in a comfortable position. Remember that tensions in the body produce aching shoulders and nervous fatigue.

4. Check yourself four or five times a day, and say to yourself: "Am I making my work harder than it actually is? Am I using muscles that have nothing to do with the work I am doing?" This will help you form the habit of relaxing, and as Dr. David Harold Fink says:

"Among those who know psychology best, it is habits two to one."

5. Test yourself again at the end of the day, by asking yourself: "Just how tired am I? If I am tired, it is not because of the mental work I have done but because of the way I have done it." "I measure my accomplishments," says Daniel W. Josselyn, "not by how tired I am at the end of the day, but how tired I am not." He says: "When I feel particularly tired at the end of the day, or when irritability proves that my nerves are tired, I know beyond question that it has been an inefficient day both as to quantity and quality." If every business man would learn that same lesson, the death rate from "hypertension"

diseases would drop overnight. And we would stop filling up our sanatoriums and asylums with men who have been broken by fatigue and worry.

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Chapter 25: How The Housewife Can Avoid Fatigue-and Keep Looking Young One day last autumn, my associate flew up to Boston to attend a session of one of the most unusual medical classes in the world. Medical? Well, yes, it meets once a week at the Boston Dispensary, and the patients who attend it get regular and thorough medical examinations before they are admitted. But actually this class is a psychological clinic.

Although it is officially called the Class in Applied Psychology (formerly the Thought

?How To Stop Worrying And Start Living? By Dale Carnegie 120

Control Class-a name suggested by the first member), its real purpose is to deal with people who are ill from worry. And many of these patients are emotionally disturbed housewives.

How did such a class for worriers get started? Well, in 1930, Dr. Joseph H. Pratt-who, by the way, had been a pupil of Sir William Osier-observed that many of the outpatients who came to the Boston Dispensary apparently had nothing wrong with them at all physically; yet they had practically all the symptoms that flesh is heir to. One woman's hands were so crippled with "arthritis" that she had lost all use of them. Another was in agony with all the excruciating symptoms of "cancer of the stomach". Others had backaches, headaches, were chronically tired, or had vague aches and pains. They actually felt these pains. But the most exhaustive medical examinations showed that nothing whatever was wrong with these women-in the physical sense. Many old-fashioned doctors would have said it was all imagination-"all in the mind".

But Dr. Pratt realised that it was no use to tell these patients to "go home and forget it".

He knew that most of these women didn't want to be sick; if it was so easy to forget their ailments, they would do so themselves. So what could be done?

He opened his class-to a chorus of doubts from the medical doubters on the sidelines.

And the class worked wonders! In the eighteen years that have passed since it started, thousands of patients have been "cured" by attending it. Some of the patients have been coming for years-as religious in their attendance as though going to church. My assistant talked to a woman who had hardly missed a session in more than nine years.