Worry is the most popular form of suicide. Worry impairs appetite,
disturbs sleep, makes respiration irregular, spoils digestion, irritates
disposition, warps character, weakens mind, stimulates disease, and saps
bodily health. It is the real cause of death in thousands of instances
where some other disease is named in the death certificate. Worry is
mental poison; work is mental food.
When a child’s absorption in his studies keeps him from sleeping, or
when he tosses and turns from side to side, muttering the multiplication
table or spelling words aloud, when sleep does come, then that child
shows he is worrying. It is one of Nature’s danger-signals raised to
warn parents, and in mercy the parent should take a firm stand. The
burden of that child’s daily tasks should be lightened, the tension of
its concentration should be lessened, the hours of its slavery to
education should be cut short.
When a man or woman works over in dreams the problems of the day, when
the sleeping hours are spent in turning the kaleidoscope of the day’s
activities, then there is either overwork or worry, and most likely it
is the worry that comes from overwork. The Creator never intended a
healthy mind to dream of the day’s duties. Either dreamless sleep or
dreams of the past should be the order of the night.
When the spectre of one grief, one fear, one sorrow, obtrudes itself
between the eye and the printed page; when the inner voice of this
irritating memory, or fear, looms up so loud as to deaden outside
voices, there is danger to the individual. When all day, every hour,
every moment, there is the dull, insistent, numb pain of something that
makes itself felt through, above and below all our other thinking, we
must know that we are worrying. Then there is but one thing to do,—we
must stop that worry; we must kill it.
The wise men of this wondrous century have made great discoveries in
their interviews with Nature. They have discovered that everything that
has been created has its uses. They will teach you not to assassinate
flies with paper coated with sweetened glue, for “the flies are Nature’s
scavengers.” They will tell you just what are the special duties and
responsibilities of each of the microscopic microbes with telescopic
names. In their wildest moods of scientific enthusiasm they may venture
to persuade you into believing that even the _mosquito_ serves some real
purpose in Nature, but no man that has ever lived can truthfully say a
good word about worry.
Worry is forethought gone to seed. Worry is discounting possible future
sorrows so that the individual may have present misery. Worry is the
father of insomnia. Worry is the traitor in our camp that dampens our
powder, weakens our aim. Under the guise of helping us to bear the
present, and to be ready for the future, worry multiplies enemies within
our own mind to sap our strength.
Worry is the dominance of the mind by a single vague, restless,
unsatisfied, fearing and fearful idea. The mental energy and force that
should be concentrated on the successive duties of the day is constantly
and surreptitiously abstracted and absorbed by this one fixed idea. The
full rich strength of the _unconscious_ working of the mind, that which
produces our best success, that represents our finest activity, is
tapped, led away and wasted on worry.
Worry must not be confused with anxiety, though both words agree in
meaning, originally, a “choking,” or a “strangling,” referring, of
course, to the throttling effect upon individual activity. Anxiety faces
large issues of life seriously, calmly, with dignity. Anxiety always
suggests hopeful possibility; it is active in being ready, and devising
measures to meet the outcome.
Worry is not one large individual sorrow; it is a colony of petty,
vague, insignificant, restless imps of fear, that become important only
from their combination, their constancy, their iteration.
When Death comes, when the one we love has passed from us, and the
silence and the loneness and the emptiness of all things make us stare
dry-eyed into the future, we give ourselves up, for a time, to the agony
of isolation. This is not a petty worry we must kill ere it kills us.
This is the awful majesty of sorrow that mercifully benumbs us, though
it may later become, in the mysterious working of omnipotence, a
rebaptism and a regeneration. It is the worry _habit_, the constant
magnifying of petty sorrows to eclipse the sun of happiness, against
which I here make protest.
To cure worry, the individual must be his own physician; he must give
the case heroic treatment. He must realize, with every fibre of his
being, the utter, absolute uselessness of worry. He must not think this
is commonplace,—a bit of mere theory; it is a reality that he must
translate for himself from mere words to a real, living fact. He must
fully understand that if it were possible for him to spend a whole
series of eternities in worry, it would not change the fact one jot or
tittle. It is a time for action, not worry, because worry paralyzes
thought and action, too. If you set down a column of figures in
addition, no amount of worry can change the sum total of those figures.
That result is wrapped up in the inevitability of mathematics. The
result can be made different only by changing the figures as they are
set down, one by one, in that column.
The one time that a man cannot afford to worry is when he _does_ worry.
Then he is facing, or imagines he is, a critical turn in affairs. This
is the time when he needs one hundred per cent. of his mental energy to
make his plans quickly, to see what is his wisest decision, to keep a
clear eye on the sky and on his course, and a firm hand on the helm
until he has weathered the storm in safety.
There are two reasons why man should not worry, either one of which must
operate in every instance. First, because he _cannot_ prevent the
results he fears. Second, because he _can_ prevent them. If he be
powerless to avert the blow, he needs perfect mental concentration to
meet it bravely, to lighten its force, to get what salvage he can from
the wreck, to sustain his strength at this time when he must plan a new
future. If he _can_ prevent the evil he fears, then he has no need to
worry, for he would by so doing be dissipating energy in his very hour
of need.
If man do, day by day, ever the best he can by the light he has, he has
no need to fear, no need to regret, no need to worry. No agony of worry
would do aught to help him. Neither mortal nor angel can do more than
his best.
If we look back upon our past life we will see how, in the marvellous
working of events, the cities of our greatest happiness and of our
fullest success have been built along the rivers of our deepest sorrows,
our most abject failures. We then realize that our present happiness or
success would have been impossible had it not been for some terrible
affliction or loss in the past,—some wondrous potent force in the
evolution of our character or our fortune. This should be a wondrous
stimulus to us in bearing the trials and sorrows of life.
To cure one’s self of worry is not an easy task; it is not to be removed
in two or three applications of the quack medicine of any cheap
philosophy, but it requires only clear, simple commonsense applied to
the business of life. Man has no right to waste his own energies, to
weaken his own powers and influence, for he has inalienable duties to
himself, to his family, to society, and to the world.