My copy of How To Stop Worrying and Start Living is quite old now. The printing date is 1984. I can’t remember who gave it to me or if I bought it myself. But when you look at the outlined pages of my copy one thing is clear. As a young woman, I went through this book with great care.
I needed to. The young me was full of fears, mostly hypochondriacal. Also I worried about money, about other people’s reactions to me and what I was doing, and the wellbeing and safety of my children (mostly about health) and husband (mostly about accidents). My whole life was hanging by a thread!
It took many years for me to truly get a handle on a personal philosophy. Today I could summarize my view as “we live in hope.” In the meantime, Carnegie’s book gave me some tools to deal with a worry habit that was turning my 20’s into one long panic attack.
How do I stop worrying all the time?
According to Carnegie, you have to slowly train your brain over days and weeks to release it’s hard-fought habit of worrying. He recommends reading his book chapter by chapter, reading each chapter a second time, and keeping a journal to estimate whether your worry level is improving. Here’s an outline of his strategies:
Techniques of How to Stop Worrying and Start Living:
- Live in “day-tight compartments;” focus on today.
- Accept the worst, analyze the problem try to improve on the worst, and go forward.
- Keep busy and avoid rumination.
- Get the facts and let them make your decision for you.
- Remember that worry wastes time that could be spent productively enjoying all the wonderful things that go with being alive.
- Most of the things you worry about will never happen. Ask yourself, “what are the odds?” If the odds are against your worry, use that fact to put off worrying until later. Much later.
- Stop trying to argue with fate. Accept reality and live with it.
So this is how to have a worry-free life?
Basically. The first chapter in Carnegie’s book is probably the most well remembered and adapted, and was to me the most memorable: “Live in Day-Tight Compartments.” The book recommends remembering that the past is dead and the future unknown, so all we have is the moment we’re in. That echoes other philosophical approaches to life. The 12 Steps slogan “one day at a time,” and the Lord’s Prayer’s “Give us this Day our Daily Bread” are similar.
Of course, you could hire a psychologist, or go to a support group, but if it’s just worrying you’re concerned about, this book may do the trick. Life really is difficult! It can be painful and full of unpleasant surprises. Nevertheless, by training our minds to respond calmly and coolly, we can have a pretty good time in the moments between the disappointments and problems.
Dale Carnegie Never Talks About Breathing Techniques.
This book is old school, so breathing techniques, creative visualization, not to mention crystals and past lives have nothing to do with it. Spirituality in this book is simple and general and involves an all-knowing creator, but the work is supposed to be done by you, the reader. The most important message in the book is that you are your own best weapon to deal with worry. And you have to train to overcome your worry, like a runner trains for a marathon.
“Ninety-nine percent of the things I worried about never happened,” Carnegie writes.
He’s doing better than me in this regard — Back in my 20’s I had worries that were one in a thousand or one in a million. Honestly my worries back then were so preposterous that I can’t think of any that came true. One or two, maybe, in my life. Disasters came, sure. They just weren’t the ones I worried about.
As for the googleable NSF research which says that 80 percent of our thoughts are negative, that 95 percent of the thoughts are recurring, and finally that we have somewhere between 12,000 and 60,000 thoughts a day, Carnegie never had access to information of that type.
Carnegie Researched the Old Fashioned Way
He did his research on his students in his public speaking courses. He interviewed people on how they handled worry, mostly people he met, with a couple of luminaries of his day thrown in for good measure. And then he read books from Confucius to Saint Paul to Charles Darwin. The result is the granddaddy of self help books. Here’s a one minute precis from Heroic Wisdom Daily.
In conclusion, I must say that although it’s been decades since I read the book, the ideas have stayed with me. That, I think, is the mark of a great book: the ability of the words and ideas to remain through your life. How to Stop Worrying and Start Living does that.
Carnegie includes many quotes from great authors and philosophers of history and this is my favorite.
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.
Mind over matter, people, that’s what this is about. The book, and if you take Carnegie’s view, our lives as well.
Read and it get better. 😉
