How To Stop Worrying And Start Living

"your mind is like a motor operating without its load. It races and threatens to burn out its bearings or even to tear itself to bits. The remedy for worry is to get completely occupied doing something constructive."

But you don't have to be a college professor to realise this truth and put it into practice.

During the war, I met a housewife from Chicago who told me how she discovered for herself that "the remedy for worry is to get completely occupied doing something constructive." I met this woman and her husband in the dining-car while I was travelling from New York to my farm in Missouri. (Sorry I didn't get their names-I never like to give examples without using names and street addresses- details that give authenticity to a story.)

This couple told me that their son had joined the armed forces the day after Pearl Harbour. The woman told me that she had almost wrecked her health worrying over that only son. Where was he? Was he safe? Or in action? Would he be wounded? Killed?

When I asked her how she overcame her worry, she replied: "I got busy." She told me that at first she had dismissed her maid and tried to keep busy by doing all her housework herself. But that didn't help much. "The trouble was," she said, "that I could do my housework almost mechanically, without using my mind. So I kept on worrying.

While making the beds and washing the dishes I realised I needed some new kind of work that would keep me busy both mentally and physically every hour of the day. So I took a job as a saleswoman in a large department store.

"That did it," she said. "I immediately found myself in a whirlwind of activity: customers swarming around me, asking for prices, sizes, colours. Never a second to think of anything except my immediate duty; and when night came, I could think of nothing except getting off my aching feet. As soon as I ate dinner, I fell into bed and instantly became unconscious. I had neither the time nor the energy to worry."

She discovered for herself what John Cowper Powys meant when he said, in The Art of Forgetting the Unpleasant: "A certain comfortable security, a certain profound inner peace, a kind of happy numbness, soothes the nerves of the human animal when absorbed in its allotted task."

?How To Stop Worrying And Start Living? By Dale Carnegie 37

And what a blessing that it is so! Osa Johnson, the world's most famous woman explorer, recently told me how she found release from worry and grief. You may have read the story of her life. It is called I Married Adventure. If any woman ever married adventure, she certainly did. Martin Johnson married her when she was sixteen and lifted her feet off the sidewalks of Chanute, Kansas, and set them down on the wild jungle trails of Borneo. For a quarter of a century, this Kansas couple travelled all over the world, making motion pictures of the vanishing wild life of Asia and Africa. Back in America nine years ago, they were on a lecture tour, showing their famous films. They took a plane out of Denver, bound for the Coast. The plane plunged into a mountain.

Martin Johnson was killed instantly. The doctors said Osa would never leave her bed again. But they didn't know Osa Johnson. Three months later, she was in a wheel chair, lecturing before large audiences. In fact, she addressed over a hundred audiences that season-all from a wheel chair. When I asked her why she did it, she replied: "I did it so that I would have no time for sorrow and worry."

Osa Johnson had discovered the same truth that Tennyson had sung about a century earlier: "I must lose myself in action, lest I wither in despair."

Admiral Byrd discovered this same truth when he lived all alone for five months in a shack that was literally buried in the great glacial ice-cap that covers the South Pole-an ice-cap that holds nature's oldest secrets-an ice-cap covering an unknown continent larger than the United States and Europe combined. Admiral Byrd spent five months there alone. No other living creature of any kind existed within a hundred miles. The cold was so intense that he could hear his breath freeze and crystallise as the wind blew it past his ears. In his book Alone, Admiral Byrd tells all about those five months he spent in bewildering and soul-shattering darkness. The days were as black as the nights. He had to keep busy to preserve his sanity.