How to Stop Worrying and Start Living / Как перестать беспокоиться и начать жить

6 – How To Crowd Worry Out Of Your Mind

I shall never forget the night, a few years ago, when Marion J. Douglas was a student in one of my classes. (I have not used his real name. He requested me, for personal reasons, not to reveal his identity.) But here is his real story as he told it before one of our adult-education classes. He told us how tragedy had struck at his home, not once, but twice. The first time he had lost his five-year-old daughter, a child he adored. He and his wife thought they couldn’t endure that first loss; but, as he said: “Ten months later, God gave us another little girl – and she died in five days.”

This double bereavement was almost too much to bear. “I couldn’t take it,” this father told us. “I couldn’t sleep, I couldn’t eat, I couldn’t rest or relax. My nerves were utterly shaken and my confidence gone.” At last he went to doctors; one recommended sleeping pills and another recommended a trip. He tried both, but neither remedy helped. He said: “My body felt as if it were encased in a vice, and the jaws of the vice were being drawn tighter and tighter.” The tension of grief – if you have ever been paralysed by sorrow, you know what he meant.

“But thank God, I had one child left – a four-year-old son. He gave me the solution to my problem. One afternoon as I sat around feeling sorry for myself, he asked: ‘Daddy, will you build a boat for me?’ I was in no mood to build a boat; in fact, I was in no mood to do anything. But my son is a persistent little fellow! I had to give in.

“Building that toy boat took about three hours. By the time it was finished, I realised that those three hours spent building that boat were the first hours of mental relaxation and peace that I had had in months!

“That discovery jarred me out of my lethargy and caused me to do a bit of thinking – the first real thinking I had done in months. I realised that it is difficult to worry while you are busy doing something that requires planning and thinking. In my case, building the boat had knocked worry out of the ring. So I resolved to keep busy.

“The following night, I went from room to room in the house, compiling a list of jobs that ought to be done. Scores of items needed to be repaired: bookcases, stair steps, storm windows, window-shades, knobs, locks, leaky taps. Astonishing as it seems, in the course of two weeks I had made a list of 242 items that needed attention.

“During the last two years I have completed most of them. Besides, I have filled my life with stimulating activities. Two nights per week I attend adult-education classes in New York. I have gone in for civic activities in my home town and I am now chairman of the school board. I attend scores of meetings. I help collect money for the Red Cross and other activities. I am so busy now that I have no time for worry.”

No time for worry! That is exactly what Winston Churchill said when he was working eighteen hours a day at the height of the war. When he was asked if he worried about his tremendous responsibilities, he said: “I’m too busy. I have no time for worry.”

Charles Kettering was in that same fix when he started out to invent a self-starter for automobiles. Mr. Kettering was, until his recent retirement, vice-president of General Motors in charge of the world-famous General Motors Research Corporation. But in those days, he was so poor that he had to use the hayloft of a barn as a laboratory. To buy groceries, he had to use fifteen hundred dollars that his wife had made by giving piano lessons; later, had to borrow five hundred dollars on his life insurance. I asked his wife if she wasn’t worried at a time like that. “Yes,” she replied, “I was so worried I couldn’t sleep; but Mr. Kettering wasn’t. He was too absorbed in his work to worry.” The great scientist, Pasteur, spoke of “the peace that is found in libraries and laboratories.” Why is peace found there? Because the men in libraries and laboratories are usually too absorbed in their tasks to worry about themselves. Research men rarely have nervous breakdowns. They haven’t time for such luxuries.

Why does such a simple thing as keeping busy help to drive out anxiety? Because of a law – one of the most fundamental laws ever revealed by psychology. And that law is: that it is utterly impossible for any human mind, no matter how brilliant, to think of more than one thing at any given time. You don’t quite believe it? Very well, then, let’s try an experiment.

Suppose you lean right back now, close your eyes, and try, at the same instant, to think of the Statue of Liberty and of what you plan to do tomorrow morning. (Go ahead, try it.) You found out, didn’t you, that you could focus on either thought in turn, but never on both simultaneously? Well, the same thing is true in the field of emotions. We cannot be pepped up and enthusiastic about doing something exciting and feel dragged down by worry at the very same time. One kind of emotion drives out the other. And it was that simple discovery that enabled Army psychiatrists to perform such miracles during the war.

When men came out of battle so shaken by the experience that they were called “psychoneurotic”, Army doctors prescribed “Keep ‘em busy” as a cure. Every waking minute of these nerve-shocked men was filled with activity – usually outdoor activity, such as fishing, hunting, playing ball, golf, taking pictures, making gardens, and dancing.

They were given no time for brooding over their terrible experiences.

“Occupational therapy” is the term now used by psychiatry when work is prescribed as though it were a medicine. It is not new. The old Greek physicians were advocating it five hundred years before Christ was born!

The Quakers were using it in Philadelphia in Ben Franklin’s time. A man who visited a Quaker sanatorium in 1774 was shocked to see that the patients who were mentally ill were busy spinning flax. He thought these poor unfortunates were being exploited – until the Quakers explained that they found that their patients actually improved when they did a little work. It was soothing to the nerves.

Any psychiatrist will tell you that work – keeping busy – is one of the best anesthetics ever known for sick nerves. Henry W. Longfellow found that out for himself when he lost his young wife. His wife had been melting some sealing-wax at a candle one day, when her clothes caught on fire. Longfellow heard her cries and tried to reach her in time; but she died from the burns. For a while, Longfellow was so tortured by the memory of that dreadful experience that he nearly went insane; but, fortunately for him, his three small children needed his attention. In spite of his own grief, Longfellow undertook to be father and mother to his children. He took them for walks, told them stories, played games with them, and immortalised their companionship in his poem The Children’s Hour. He also translated Dante; and all these duties combined kept him so busy that he forgot himself entirely, and regained his peace of mind. As Tennyson declared when he lost his most intimate friend, Arthur Hallam: “I must lose myself in action, lest I wither in despair.”

Most of us have little trouble “losing ourselves in action” while we have our noses to the grindstone and are doing our day’s work. But the hours after work – they are the dangerous ones. Just when we’re free to enjoy our own leisure, and ought to be happiest – that’s when the blue devils of worry attack us. That’s when we begin to wonder whether we’re getting anywhere in life; whether we’re in a rut; whether the boss “meant anything” by that remark he made today; or whether we’re getting bald.

When we are not busy, our minds tend to become a near-vacuum. Every student of physics knows that “nature abhors a vacuum”. The nearest thing to a vacuum that you and I will probably ever see is the inside of an incandescent electric-light bulb. Break that bulb – and nature forces air in to fill the theoretically empty space.

Nature also rushes in to fill the vacant mind. With what? Usually with emotions. Why?

Because emotions of worry, fear, hate, jealousy, and envy are driven by primeval vigour and the dynamic energy of the jungle. Such emotions are so violent that they tend to drive out of our minds all peaceful, nappy thoughts and emotions.

James L. Mursell, professor of education, Teachers’ College, Columbia, puts it very well when he says: “Worry is most apt to ride you ragged not when you are in action, but when the day’s work is done. Your imagination can run riot then and bring up all sorts of ridiculous possibilities and magnify each little blunder. At such a time,” he continues, “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.”

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.

“At night,” he says, “before blowing out the lantern, I formed the habit of blocking out the morrow’s work. It was a case of assigning myself an hour, say, to the Escape Tunnel, half an hour to leveling drift, an hour to straightening up the fuel drums, an hour to cutting bookshelves in the walls of the food tunnel, and two hours to renewing a broken bridge in the man-hauling sledge. …

“It was wonderful,” he says, “to be able to dole out time in this way. It brought me an extraordinary sense of command over myself…” And he adds: “Without that or an equivalent, the days would have been without purpose; and without purpose they would have ended, as such days always end, in disintegration.”

Note that last again: “Without purpose, the days would have ended, as such days always end, in disintegration.”

If you and I are worried, let’s remember that we can use good old-fashioned work as a medicine. That was said by no less an authority than the late Dr. Richard C. Cabot, formerly professor of clinical medicine at Harvard. In his book What Men Live By, Dr. Cabot says: “As a physician, I have had the happiness of seeing work cure many persons who have suffered from trembling palsy of the soul which results from overmastering doubts, hesitations, vacillation and fear… Courage given us by our work is like the self-reliance which Emerson has made for ever glorious.”

If you and I don’t keep busy – if we sit around and brood – we will hatch out a whole flock of what Charles Darwin used to call the “wibber gibbers”. And the “wibber gibbers” are nothing but old-fashioned gremlins that will run us hollow and destroy our power of action and our power of will.

I know a business man in New York who fought the “wibber gibbers” by getting so busy that he had no time to fret and stew. His name is Tremper Longman, and his office is at 40 Wall Street. He was a student in one of my adult-education classes; and his talk on conquering worry was so interesting, so impressive, that I asked him to have supper with me after class; and we sat in a restaurant until long past midnight, discussing his experiences. Here is the story he told me: “Eighteen years ago, I was so worried I had insomnia. I was tense, irritated, and jittery. I felt I was headed for a nervous breakdown.

“I had reason to be worried. I was treasurer of the Crown Fruit and Extract Company, 418 West Broadway, New York. We had half a million dollars invested in strawberries packed in gallon tins. For twenty years, we had been selling these gallon tins of strawberries to manufactures of ice cream. Suddenly our sales stopped because the big ice-cream makers, such as National Dairy and Borden’s, were rapidly increasing their production and were saving money and time by buying strawberries packed in barrels.

“Not only were we left with half a million dollars in berries we couldn’t sell, but we were also under contract to buy a million dollars more of strawberries in the next twelve months! We had already borrowed $350,000 from the banks. We couldn’t possibly pay off or renew these loans. No wonder I was worried!

“I rushed out to Watsonville, California, where our factory was located, and tried to persuade our president that conditions had changed, that we were facing ruin. He refused to believe it. He blamed our New York office for all the trouble – poor salesmanship.

“After days of pleading, I finally persuaded him to stop packing more strawberries and to sell our new supply on the fresh berry market in San Francisco. That almost solved our problems. I should have been able to stop worrying then; but I couldn’t. Worry is a habit; and I had that habit.

“When I returned to New York, I began worrying about everything; the cherries we were buying in Italy, the pineapples we were buying in Hawaii, and so on. I was tense, jittery, couldn’t sleep; and, as I have already said, I was heading for a nervous breakdown.

“In despair, I adopted a way of life that cured my insomnia and stopped my worries. I got busy. I got so busy with problems demanding all my faculties that I had no time to worry. I had been working seven hours a day. I now began working fifteen and sixteen hours a day. I got down to the office every morning at eight o’clock and stayed there every night until almost midnight. I took on new duties, new responsibilities. When I got home at midnight, I was so exhausted when I fell in bed that I became unconscious in a few seconds.

“I kept up this programme for about three months. I had broken the habit of worry by that time, so I returned to a normal working day of seven or eight hours. This event occurred eighteen years ago. I have never been troubled with insomnia or worry since then.”

George Bernard Shaw was right. He summed it all up when he said: “The secret of being miserable is to have the leisure to bother about whether you are happy or not.” So don’t bother to think about it! Spit on your hands and get busy. Your blood will start circulating; your mind will start ticking – and pretty soon this whole positive upsurge of life in your body will drive worry from your mind. Get busy. Keep busy. It’s the cheapest kind of medicine there is on this earth – and one of the best.

To break the worry habit, here is Rule 1:

Keep busy. The worried person must lose himself in action, lest be wither in despair.

7 – Don’t Let the Beetles Get You Down

Here is a dramatic story that I’ll probably remember as long as I live. It was told to me by Robert Moore, of 14 Highland Avenue, Maplewood, New Jersey.

“I learned the biggest lesson of my life in March, 1945,” he said, “I learned it under 276 feet of water off the coast of Indo-China. I was one of eighty-eight men aboard the submarine Baya S.S. 318. We had discovered by radar that a small Japanese convoy was coming our way. As daybreak approached, we submerged to attack. I saw through the periscope a Jap destroyer escort, a tanker, and a minelayer. We fired three torpedoes at the destroyer escort, but missed. Something went haywire in the mechanics of each torpedo. The destroyer, not knowing that she had been attacked, continued on. We were getting ready to attack the last ship, the minelayer, when suddenly she turned and came directly at us. (A Jap plane had spotted us under sixty feet of water and had radioed our position to the Jap minelayer.) We went down to 150 feet, to avoid detection, and rigged for a depth charge. We put extra bolts on the hatches; and, in order to make our sub absolutely silent, we turned off the fans, the cooling system, and all electrical gear.

“Three minutes later, all hell broke loose. Six depth charges exploded all around us and pushed us down to the ocean floor – a depth of 276 feet. We were terrified. To be attacked in less than a thousand feet of water is dangerous – less than five hundred feet is almost always fatal. And we were being attacked in a trifle more than half of five hundred feet of water – just about knee-deep, as far as safety was concerned. For fifteen hours, that Jap minelayer kept dropping depth charges. If a depth charge explodes within seventeen feet of a sub, the concussion will blow a hole in it. Scores of these depth charges exploded within fifty feet of us. We were ordered ‘to secure’ – to lie quietly in our bunks and remain calm. I was so terrified I could hardly breathe. ‘This is death,’ I kept saying to myself over and over. ‘This is death! … This is death!’ With the fans and cooling system turned off, the air inside the sub was over a hundred degrees; but I was so chilled with fear that I put on a sweater and a fur-lined jacket; and still I trembled with cold. My teeth chattered. I broke out in a cold, clammy sweat. The attack continued for fifteen hours. Then ceased suddenly. Apparently the Jap minelayer had exhausted its supply of depth charges, and steamed away. Those fifteen hours of attack seemed like fifteen million years. All my life passed before me in review. I remembered all the bad things I had done, all the little absurd things I had worried about. I had been a bank clerk before I joined the Navy. I had worried about the long hours, the poor pay, the poor prospects of advancement. I had worried because I couldn’t own my own home, couldn’t buy a new car, couldn’t buy my wife nice clothes. How I had hated my old boss, who was always nagging and scolding! I remembered how I would come home at night sore and grouchy and quarrel with my wife over trifles. I had worried about a scar on my forehead – a nasty cut from an auto accident.

“How big all these worries seemed years ago! But how absurd they seemed when depth charges were threatening to blow me to kingdom come. I promised myself then and there that if I ever saw the sun and the stars again, I would never, never worry again. Never! Never! I Never!!! I learned more about the art of living in those fifteen terrible hours in that submarine than I had learned by studying books for four years in Syracuse University.”

We often face the major disasters of life bravely – and then let the trifles, the “pains in the neck”, get us down. For example, Samuel Pepys tells in his Diary about seeing Sir Harry Vane’s head chopped off in London. As Sir Harry mounted the platform, he was not pleading for his life, but was pleading with the executioner not to hit the painful boil on his neck! That was another thing that Admiral Byrd discovered down in the terrible cold and darkness of the polar nights – that his men fussed more about the ‘ ‘pains in the neck” than about the big things. They bore, without complaining, the dangers, the hardships, and the cold that was often eighty degrees below zero. “But,” says Admiral Byrd, “I know of bunkmates who quit speaking because each suspected the other of inching his gear into the other’s allotted space; and I knew of one who could not eat unless he could find a place in the mess hall out of sight of the Fletcherist who solemnly chewed his food twenty-eight times before swallowing.

“In a polar camp,” says Admiral Byrd, “little things like that have the power to drive even disciplined men to the edge of insanity.” And you might have added, Admiral Byrd, that “little things” in marriage drive people to the edge of insanity and cause “half the heartaches in the world.”

At least, that is what the authorities say. For example, Judge Joseph Sabath of Chicago, after acting as arbiter in more than forty thousand unhappy marriages, declared: “Trivialities are at the bottom of most marital unhappiness”; and Frank S. Hogan, District Attorney of New York County, says: “Fully half the cases in our criminal courts originate in little things. Bar-room bravado, domestic wrangling, an insulting remark, a disparaging word, a rude action – those are the little things that lead to assault and murder. Very few of us are cruelly and greatly wronged. It is the small blows to our self-esteem, the indignities, the little jolts to our vanity, which cause half the heartaches in the world.”