How To Stop Worrying & Start Living

by Dale Carnegie

Keep reminding yourself that getting interested in your job will take your mind off your worries, and, in the long run, will probably bring promotion and increased pay.

He lived to the age of eighty-one, this man who had rarely had a sound night’s sleep; but if he had fretted and worried about his insomnia, he would probably have wrecked his life.

Paul Kern, a Hungarian soldier, was shot through the frontal lobe of his brain. He recovered from the wound, but, curiously enough, couldn’t fall asleep.

The doctors said he wouldn’t live long. But he fooled them. He got a job, and went on living in the best of health for years. He would lie down and close his eyes and rest, but he got no sleep whatever. His case was a medical mystery that upset many of our beliefs about sleep.

“One of the best sleep-producing agents which my years of practice have revealed to me is—prayer. I say this purely as a medical man. The exercise of prayer, in those who habitually exert it, must be regarded as the most ad-equate and normal of all the pacifiers of the mind and calmers of toe nerves.

We already know that the mind and nerves can’t relax while the muscles are tense— so if we want to go to sleep, we start with the muscles.

“when I had trouble sleeping, I would practice rolling up my eyeballs into this position, and I found that in a few seconds I would begin to yawn and feel sleepy. It was an automatic reflex over which I had no control.”

Samuel Untennyer

“More money is not the answer to most people’s financial worries.

“is not that they haven’t enough money, but that they don’t know to spend the money they have!”...

we have to have a plan for spending our money and spend according to that plan.

“People who live on budgets,” Mrs. Stapleton told me, “are happier people.”

By reading a book entitled How to Figure the Odds by Oswald Jacobyan authority on

We may be worried because we can’t keep up with the Joneses; but the Joneses are probably worried because they can’t keep up with the Ritzes; and the Ritzes are worried because they can’t keep up with the Vanderbilts.

“If you have what seems to your insufficient,” said one of Rome’s greatest philosophers, Seneca, “then you will be miserable even if you possess the world.”

even if we owned the United States with a hog-tight fence around it, we could eat only three meals a day and sleep in only one bed at a time.

I had often heard people say that ninety-nine percent of the things we worry and stew and fret about never happen,

Remember, today is the tomorrow you worried about yesterday. Ask yourself: How do I know this thing I am worrying about will really come to pass?

have always felt that one of the chief reasons for success in life is enthusiasm.

At another time when I was terribly depressed, I forced myself to become physically active almost every hour of the day. I

have also learned that patience and time have a way of resolving our troubles.

I soon found that I couldn’t worry about myself and laugh at myself at once and the same time. So I’ve been laughing at myself ever since.

is: Don’t take yourself too seriously. Try “just laughing” at some of your sillier worries, and see if you can’t laugh them out existence.

I kept saying to myself: “Nothing is important but my health. Nothing is important but my health.” I kept reminding myself that losing sleep and worrying would destroy my health.