How To Stop Worrying And Start Living

Don't think for a moment that I mean that their ills are imaginary," he said. "Their ills are as real as a throbbing toothache and sometimes a hundred times more serious. I refer to such illnesses as nervous indigestion, some stomach ulcers, heart disturbances, insomnia, some headaches, and some types of paralysis.

"These illnesses are real. I know what I am talking about," said Dr. Gober, "for I myself suffered from a stomach ulcer for twelve years.

"Fear causes worry. Worry makes you tense and nervous and 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."

Dr. Joseph F. Montague, author of the book Nervous Stomach Trouble, says much the same thing. He says: "You do not get stomach ulcers from what you eat. You get ulcers from what is eating you."

Dr. W.C. Alvarez, of the Mayo Clinic, said "Ulcers frequently flare up or subside according to the hills and valleys of emotional stress."

That statement was 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 whatever for their stomach illnesses. Fear, worry, hate, supreme selfishness, and the inability to adjust themselves to the world of reality-these were largely the causes of their stomach illnesses and stomach ulcers. ... Stomach ulcers can kill you. According to Life magazine, they now stand tenth in our list of fatal diseases.

I recently had some correspondence with Dr. Harold C. Habein of the Mayo Clinic. He read a paper at the annual meeting of the American Association of Industrial Physicians and Surgeons, saying that he had made a study of 176 business executives whose average age was 44.3 years. He reported that slightly more than a third of these executives suffered from one of three ailments peculiar to high-tension living-heart disease, digestive-tract ulcers, and high blood pressure. Think of it- a third of our

?How To Stop Worrying And Start Living? By Dale Carnegie 19

business executives are wrecking their bodies with heart disease, ulcers, and high blood pressure before they even reach forty-five. What price success! And they aren't even buying success! Can any man possibly be a success who is paying for business advancement with stomach ulcers and heart trouble? What shall it profit a man if he gains the whole world-and loses his health? Even if he owned the whole world, he could sleep in only one bed at a time and eat only three meals a day. Even a ditch-digger can do that-and probably sleep more soundly and enjoy his food more than a high-powered executive. Frankly, I would rather be a share-cropper down in Alabama with a banjo on my knee than wreck my health at forty-five by trying to run a railroad or a cigarette company.

And speaking of cigarettes-the best-known cigarette manufacturer in the world recently dropped dead from heart failure while trying to take a little recreation in the Canadian woods. He amassed millions-and fell dead at sixty-one. He probably traded years of his life for what is called "business success".

In my estimation, this cigarette executive with all his millions was not half as successful as my father-a Missouri farmer- who died at eighty-nine without a dollar.

The famous Mayo brothers declared that more than half of our hospital beds are occupied by people with nervous troubles. Yet, when the nerves of these people are studied under a high-powered microscope in a post-mortem examination, their nerves in most cases are apparently as healthy as the nerves of Jack Dempsey. Their "nervous troubles" are caused not by a physical deterioration of the nerves, but by emotions of futility, frustration, anxiety, worry, fear, defeat, despair. Plato said that "the greatest mistake physicians make is that they attempt to cure the body without attempting to cure the mind; yet the mind and body are one and should not be treated separately!"

It took medical science twenty-three hundred years to recognise this great truth. We are just now beginning to develop a new kind of medicine called psychosomatic medicine-a medicine that treats both the mind and the body. It is high time we were doing that, for medical science has largely wiped out the terrible diseases caused by physical germs--