How to Stop Worrying and Start Living: Dale Carnegie

by Dale Carnegie

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.

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.

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!

As Tennyson declared when he lost his most intimate friend, Arthur Hallam: “I must lose myself in action, lest I wither in despair.”

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.

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!

“Without purpose, the days would have ended, as such days always end, in disintegration.”

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.”

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. 

A well-known legal maxim says: De minimis non curat lex- “the law does not concern itself with trifles.” And neither should the worrier-if he wants peace of mind.

Disraeli said: “Life is too short to be little.” “Those words,” said Andre Maurois in This Week magazine, “have helped me through many a painful experience: often we allow ourselves to be upset by small things we should despise and forget. ... Here we are on this earth, with only a few more decades to live, and we lose many irreplaceable hours brooding over grievances that, in a year’s time, will be forgotten by us and by everybody. No, let us devote our life to worth-while actions and feelings, to great thoughts, real affections and enduring undertakings. For life is too short to be little.”

Rudyard Kipling forgot at times that “Life is too short to be little” .The result? He and his brother-in-law fought the most famous court battle in the history of Vermont-a battle so celebrated that a book has been written about it: Rudyard Kipling’s Vermont Feud. The story goes like this: Kipling married a Vermont girl, Caroline Balestier, built a lovely home in Brattleboro, Vermont; settled down and expected to spend the rest of his life there. His brother-in-law, Beatty Balestier, became Kipling’s best friend. The two of them worked and played together. Then Kipling bought some land from Balestier, with the understanding that Balestier would be allowed to cut hay off it each season. One day, Balestier found Kipling laying out a flower garden on this hayfield. His blood boiled. He hit the ceiling. Kipling fired right back. The air over the Green Mountains of Vermont turned blue! A few days later, when Kipling was out riding his bicycle, his brother-in-law drove a wagon and a team of horses across the road suddenly and forced Kipling to take a spill. And Kipling the man who wrote: “If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs and blaming it on you”- he lost his own head, and swore out a warrant for Balestier’s arrest I A sensational trial followed. Reporters from the big cities poured into the town. The news flashed around the world. Nothing was settled. This quarrel caused Kipling and his wife to abandon their American home for the rest of their lives. ...

Rudyard Kipling and the most famous legal battle over a "stack of hay"

Pericles said, twenty-four centuries ago: “Come, gentlemen, we sit too long on trifles.” We do, indeed! Here is one of the most interesting stories that Dr. Harry Emerson Fosdick ever told-a story about the battles won and lost by a giant of the forest: On the slope of Long’s Peak in Colorado lies the ruin of 3 gigantic tree. Naturalists tell us that it stood for some four hundred years. It was a seedling when Columbus landed at San Salvador, and half grown when the Pilgrims settled at Plymouth. During the course of its long life it was struck by lightning fourteen times, and the innumerable avalanches and storms of four centuries thundered past it. It survived them all. In the end, however, an army of beetles attacked the tree and leveled it to the ground. The insects ate their way through the bark and gradually destroyed the inner strength of the tree by their tiny but incessant attacks. A forest giant which age had not withered, nor lightning blasted, nor storms subdued, fell at last before beetles so small that a man could crush them between his forefinger and his thumb. Aren’t we all like that battling giant of the forest? Don’t we manage somehow to survive the rare storms and avalanches and lightning blasts of We, only to let our hearts be eaten out by little beetles of worry-little beetles that could be crushed between a finger and a thumb?

A Giant eaten up by Beetles

To break the worry habit before it breaks you, here is Rule 2: Let’s not allow ourselves to be upset by small things we should despise and forget. Remember “Life is too short to be little.” 

I gradually discovered that ninety-nine per cent of the things I worried about never happened.

You and I could probably eliminate nine-tenths of our worries right now if we would cease our fretting long enough to discover whether, by the law of averages, there was any real justification for our worries.

General George Crook-probably the greatest Indian fighter in American history-says in his Autobiography that “nearly all the worries and unhappiness” of the Indians “came from their imagination, and not from reality.”

When Al Smith was Governor of New York, I heard him answer the attacks of his political enemies by saying over and over: “Let’s examine the record ... let’s examine the record.” Then he proceeded to give the facts. The next time you and I are worrying about what may happen, let’s take a tip from wise old Al Smith: let’s examine the record and see what basis there is, if any, for our gnawing anxieties.

To break the worry habit before it breaks you-here is Rule 3: “Let’s examine the record.” Let’s ask ourselves: “What are the chances, according to the law of averages, that this event I am worrying about will ever occur?” 

I often think of an inscription on the ruins of a fifteenth-century cathedral in Amsterdam, Holland. This inscription says in Flemish: “It is so. It cannot be otherwise.”

Here is a bit of sage advice from one of my favourite philosophers, William James. “Be willing to have it so,” he said. “Acceptance of what has happened is the first step to overcoming the consequence of any misfortune.”

“It is so. It cannot be otherwise.” That is not an easy lesson to learn. Even kings on their thrones have to keep reminding themselves of it. The late George V had these framed words hanging on the wall of his library in Buckingham Palace: “Teach me neither to cry for the moon nor over spilt milk.” The same thought is expressed by Schopenhauer in this way: “A good supply of resignation is of the first importance in providing for the journey of life.”

Jesus said that the kingdom of heaven is within you. That is where the kingdom of hell is, too. We can all endure disaster and tragedy and triumph over them-if we have to. We may not think we can, but we have surprisingly strong inner resources that will see us through if we will only make use of them. We are stronger than we think.

When total blindness closed in, Tarkington said: “I found I could take the loss of my eyesight, just as a man can take anything else. If I lost all five of my senses, I know I could live on inside my mind. For it is in the mind we see, and in the mind we live, whether we know it or not.” In the hope of restoring his eyesight, Tarkington had to go through more than twelve operations within one year. With local anaesthetic! Did he rail against this? He knew it had to be done. He knew he couldn’t escape it, so the only way to lessen his suffering was to take it with grace. He refused a private room at the hospital and went into a ward, where he could be with other people who had troubles, too. He tried to cheer them up. And when he had to submit to repeated operations-fully conscious of what was being done to his eyes-he tried to remember how fortunate he was. “How wonderful!” he said. “How wonderful, that science now has the skill to operate on anything so delicate as the human eye!” The average man would have been a nervous wreck if he had had to endure more than twelve operations and blindness. Yet Tarkington said: “I would not exchange this experience for a happier one.” It taught him acceptance. It taught him that nothing life could bring him was beyond his strength to endure. It taught him, as John Milton discovered, that “It is not miserable to be blind, it is only miserable not to be able to endure blindness.”

Booth Tarkington's Blindness

Am I advocating that we simply bow down to all the adversities that come our way? Not by a long shot! That is mere fatalism. As long as there is a chance that we can save a situation, let’s fight! But when common sense tells us that we are up against something that is so-and cannot be otherwise- then, in the name of our sanity, let’s not look before and after and pine for what is not.

The late Dean Hawkes of Columbia University told me that he had taken a Mother Goose rhyme as one of his mottoes: For every ailment under the sun. There is a remedy, or there is none; If there be one, try to find it; If there be none, never mind it.

Henry Ford told me much the same thing. “When I can’t handle events,” he said, “I let them handle themselves.”

“There is only one way to happiness,” Epictetus taught the Romans, “and that is to cease worrying about things which are beyond the power of our will.”

No one living has enough emotion and vigour to fight the inevitable and, at the same time, enough left over to create a new life. Choose one or the other. You can either bend with the inevitable sleet-storms of life-or you can resist them and break!

The masters of jujitsu teach their pupils to “bend like the willow; don’t resist like the oak.”

At first, the manufacturers tried to make a tyre that would resist the shocks of the road. It was soon cut to ribbons. Then they made a tyre that would absorb the shocks of the road. That tyre could “take it” .You and I will last longer, and enjoy smoother riding, if we learn to absorb the shocks and jolts along the rocky road of life. What will happen to you and me if we resist the shocks of life instead of absorbing them? What will happen if we refuse to “bend like the willow” and insist on resisting like the oak? The answer is easy. We will set up a series of inner conflicts. We will be worried, tense, strained, and neurotic. If we go still further and reject the harsh world of reality and retreat into a dream world of our own making, we will then be insane.

Outside the crucifixion of Jesus, the most famous death scene in all history was the death of Socrates. Ten thousand centuries from now, men will still be reading and cherishing Plato’s immortal description of it-one of the most moving and beautiful passages in all literature. Certain men of Athens- jealous and envious of old barefooted Socrates-trumped up charges against him and had him tried and condemned to death. When the friendly jailer gave Socrates the poison cup to drink, the jailer said: “Try to bear lightly what needs must be.” Socrates did. He faced death with a calmness and resignation that touched the hem of divinity. “Try to bear lightly what needs must be.” Those words were spoken 399 years before Christ was born; but this worrying old world needs those words today more than ever before: “Try to bear lightly what needs must be.”

Death Scene of Socrates

During the past eight years, I have been reading practically every book and magazine article I could find that dealt even remotely with banishing worry. ... Would you like to know what is the best single bit of advice about worry that I have ever discovered in all that reading? Well, here it is-summed up in twenty-seven words-words that you and I ought to paste on our bathroom mirrors, so that each time we wash our faces we could also wash away all worry from our minds. This priceless prayer was written by Dr. Reinhold Niebuhr, Professor of Applied Christianity, Union Theological Seminary, Broadway and 120th Street, New York. God grant me the serenity To accept the things I cannot change; The courage to change the things I can; And the wisdom to know the difference. To break the worry habit before it breaks you, Rule 4 is: Co-operate with the inevitable.

The Most Powerful Prayer to deal with Inner Turmoil & Worries

Man alive! How I wish I had had the sense, years ago, to put stop-loss orders on my impatience, on my temper, on my desire for self-justification, on my regrets, and on all my mental and emotional strains. Why didn’t I have the horse sense to size up each situation that threatened to destroy my peace of mind

One night a century ago, when a screech owl was screeching in the woods along the shore of Walden Pond, Henry Thoreau dipped his goose quill into his homemade ink and wrote in his diary: “The cost of a thing is the amount of what I call life, which is required to be exchanged for it immediately or in the long run.” To put it another way: we are fools when we overpay for a thing in terms of what it takes out of our very existence. Yet that is precisely what Gilbert and Sullivan did. They knew how to create gay words and gay music, but they knew distressingly little about how to create gaiety in their own lives. They created some of the loveliest light operas that ever delighted the world: Patience, Pinafore, The Mikado. But they couldn’t control their tempers. They embittered their years over nothing more than the price of a carpet! Sullivan ordered a new carpet for the theatre they had bought. When Gilbert saw the bill, he hit the roof. They battled it out in court, and never spoke to one another again as long as they lived. When Sullivan wrote the music for a new production, he mailed it to Gilbert; and when Gilbert wrote the words, he mailed it back to Sullivan. Once they had to take a curtain call together, but they stood on opposite sides of the stage and bowed in different directions, so they wouldn’t see one another. They hadn’t the sense to put a stop-loss order on their resentments, as Lincoln did. Once, during the Civil War, when some of Lincoln’s friends were den...

Lesson from Thereou, Lincoln, Gilbert and Sullivan

Leo Tolstoy, author of two of the world’s greatest novels, War and Peace and Anna Karenina. According to The Encyclopedia Britannica, Leo Tolstoy was, during the last twenty years of his life, “probably the most venerated man in the whole world.” For twenty years before he died-from 1890 to 1910-an unending stream of admirers made pilgrimages to his home in order to catch a glimpse of his face, to hear the sound of his voice, or even touch the hem of his garment. Every sentence he uttered was taken down in a notebook, almost as if it were a “divine revelation” .But when it came to living-to ordinary living-well, Tolstoy had even less sense at seventy than Franklin had at seven! He had no sense at all. Here’s what 1 mean. Tolstoy married a girl he loved very dearly. In fact, they were so happy together that they used to get on their knees and pray to God to let them continue their lives in such sheer, heavenly ecstasy. But the girl Tolstoy married was jealous by nature. She used to dress herself up as a peasant and spy on his movements, even out in the woods. They had fearful rows. She became so jealous, even of her own children, that she grabbed a gun and shot a hole in her daughter’s photograph. She even rolled on the floor with an opium bottle held to her lips, and threatened to commit suicide, while the children huddled in a corner of the room and screamed with terror. And what did Tolstoy do? Well, I don’t blame the man for up and smashing the furniture- he had good pr...

Leo Tolstoy's Married Life - "A Living Asylum"

So, to break the worry habit before it breaks you, here is Rule 5: Whenever we are tempted to throw good money after bad in terms of human living, let’s stop and ask ourselves these three Questions: 1. How much does this thing I am worrying about really matter to me? 2. At what point shall I set a “stop-loss” order on this worry -and forget it? 3. Exactly how much shall I pay for this whistle? Have I already paid more than it is worth?

I discovered long ago that “it is easier to teach twenty what were good to be done than to be one of twenty to follow mine own teaching.”

If you were to read everything that has ever been written about worry by the great scholars of all time, you would never read anything more basic or more profound than such hackneyed proverbs as “Don’t cross your bridges until you come to them” and “Don’t cry over spilt milk.” If we only applied those two proverbs-instead of snorting at them-we wouldn’t need this book at all. In fact, if we applied most of the old proverbs, we would lead almost perfect lives.

I have always admired a man like the late Fred Fuller Shedd, who had a gift for stating an old truth in a new and picturesque way. He was editor of the Philadelphia Bulletin; and, while addressing a college graduating class, he asked: “How many of you have ever sawed wood? Let’s see your hands.” Most of them had. Then he inquired: “How many of you have ever sawed sawdust?” No hands went up. “Of course, you can’t saw sawdust!” Mr. Shedd exclaimed. “It’s already sawed! And it’s the same with the past. When you start worrying about things that are over and done with, you're merely trying to saw sawdust.” When Connie Mack, the grand old man of baseball, was eighty-one years old, I asked him if he had ever worried over games that were lost. “Oh, yes, I used to,” Connie Mack told me. “But I got over that foolishness long years ago. I found out it didn’t get me anywhere at all. You can’t grind any grain,” he said, “with water that has already gone down the creek.”

Can't saw sawdust neither grind any grain ¡!

Warden Lawes told me about one Sing Sing prisoner- a gardener-who sang as he cultivated the vegetables and flowers inside the prison walls. That Sing Sing prisoner who sang as he cultivated the flowers showed a lot more sense than most of us do. He knew that. The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ, Moves on: nor all your Piety nor Wit Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line, Nor all your Tears wash out a Word of it. So why waste the tears? Of course, we have been guilty of blunders and absurdities! And so what? Who hasn’t? Even Napoleon lost one-third of all the important battles he fought. Perhaps our batting average is no worse than Napoleon’s. Who knows?

Part Three In A Nutshell - How To Break the Worry Habit Before It Breaks You RULE 1: Crowd worry out of your mind by keeping busy. Plenty of action is one of the best therapies ever devised for curing “wibber gibbers”. RULE 2: Don’t fuss about trifles. Don’t permit little things-the mere termites of life-to ruin your happiness. RULE 3: Use the law of averages to outlaw your worries. Ask yourself: “What are the odds against this thing’s happening at all?” RULE 4: Co-operate with the inevitable. If you know a circumstance is beyond your power to change or revise, say to yourself “It is so; it cannot be otherwise.” RULE 5: Put a “stop-loss” order on your worries. Decide just how much anxiety a thing may be worth-and refuse to give it any more. RULE 6: Let the past bury its dead. Don’t saw sawdust. 

Emerson said: “A man is what he thinks about all day long.” ... How could he possibly be anything else?

The great philosopher who ruled the Roman Empire, Marcus Aurelius, summed it up in eight words-eight words that can determine your destiny: “Our life is what our thoughts make it.”

“You are not,” said Norman Vincent Peale, “you are not what you think you are; but what you think, you are.”

Concern means realising what the problems are and calmly taking steps to meet them. Worrying means going around in maddening, futile circles.

What is the difference between concern and worry?

‘He who conquers his spirit is mightier than he who taketh a city.’

I was shocked to see myself in my true light: here I was, wanting to change the whole world and everyone in it- when the only thing that needed changing was the focus of the lens of the camera which was my mind.

When moments of uneasiness try to creep in (as they will in everyone’s life) I tell myself to get that camera back in focus, and everything is O.K.