How to Stop Worrying and Start Living (39 page)

In less than a month I became aware that I had stomach ulcers. Probably cancer.

My chief war activity at that time was chairman of the War Activities Committee of the Screen Publicists Guild. I liked to do this work, liked to meet my friends at guild meetings. But these gatherings became matters of dread. After every meeting, I was violently ill. Often I had to stop my car on the way home, pulling myself together before I could drive on. There seemed to be so much to do, so little time in which to do it. It was all vital. And I was woefully inadequate.

I am being perfectly truthful-this was the most painful illness of my entire life. There was always a tight fist in my vitals. I lost weight. I could not sleep. The pain was constant.

So I went to see a renowned expert in internal medicine. An advertising man recommended him. He said this physician had many clients who were advertising men.

This physician spoke only briefly, just enough for me to tell him where I hurt and what I did for a living. He seemed more interested in my job than in my ailments, but I was soon reassured: for two weeks, daily, he gave me every known test. I was probed, explored, X-rayed, and fluoroscoped. Finally, I was instructed to call on him and hear the verdict.

"Mr. Shipp," he said, leaning back and offering me a cigarette, "we have been through these exhaustive tests. They were absolutely necessary, although I knew of course after my first quick examination that you did not have stomach ulcers.

"But I knew, because you are the kind of man you are and because you do the kind of work you do, that you would not believe me unless I showed you. Let me show you."

So he showed me the charts and the X-rays and explained them. He showed me I had no ulcers.

"Now," said the doctor, "this costs you a good deal of money, but it is worth it to you. Here is the prescription: don't worry.

"Now"-he stopped me as I started to expostulate-;"now, I realise that you can't follow the prescription immediately, so I'll give you a crutch. Here are some pills. They contain belladonna. Take as many as you like. When you use these up, come back and I'll give you more. They won't hurt you. But they will always relax you.

"But remember: you don't need them. All you have to do is quit worrying.

"If you do start worrying again, you'll have to come back here and I'll charge you a heavy fee again. How about it?"

I wish I could report that the lesson took effect that day and that I quit worrying immediately. I didn't. I took the pills for several weeks, whenever I felt a worry coming on. They worked. I felt better at once.

But I felt silly taking these pills. I am a big man physically. I am almost as tall as Abe Lincoln was-and I weigh almost two hundred pounds. Yet here I was taking little white pills to relax myself. I was acting like an hysterical woman. When my friends asked me why I was taking pills, I was ashamed to tell the truth. Gradually I began to laugh at myself. I said: "See here, Cameron Shipp, you are acting like a fool. You are taking yourself and your little activities much, much too seriously. Bette Da vis and James Cagney and Edward G. Robinson were world-famous before you started to handle their publicity; and if you dropped dead tonight, Warner Brothers and their stars would manage to get along without you. Look at Eisenhower, General Marshall, MacArthur, Jimmy Doolittle and Admiral King-they are running the war without taking pills. And yet you can't serve as chairman of the War Activities Committee of the Screen Publicists Guild without taking little white pills to keep your stomach from twisting and turning like a Kansas whirlwind."

I began to take pride in getting along without the pills. A little while later, I threw the pills down the drain and got home each night in time to take a little nap before dinner and gradually began to lead a normal life. I have never been back to see that physician.

But I owe him much, much more than what seemed like a stiff fee at the time. He taught me to laugh at myself. But I think the really skilful thing he did was to refrain from laughing at me, and to refrain from telling me I had nothing to worry about. He took me seriously. He saved my face. He gave me an out in a small box. But he knew then, as well as I know now, that the cure wasn't in those silly little pills-the cure was in a change in my mental attitude.

The moral of this story is that many a man who is now taking pills would do better to read Chapter 7, and relax.

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I Learned To Stop Worrying By Watching My Wife Wash Dishes

By

Reverend William Wood

204 Hurlbert Street, Charlevoix, Michigan

A few years ago, I was suffering intensely from pains in my stomach. I would awaken two or three times each night, unable to sleep because of these terrific pains. I had watched my father die from cancer of the stomach, and I feared that I too had a stomach cancer-or, at least, stomach ulcers. So I went to Byrne's Clinic at Petosky, Michigan, for an examination. Dr. Lilga, a stomach specialist, examined me with a fluoroscope and took an X-ray of my stomach. He gave me medicine to make me sleep and assured me that I had no stomach ulcers or cancer. My stomach pains, he said, were caused by emotional strains. Since I am a minister, one of his first questions was: "Do you have an old crank on your church board?"

He told me what I already knew; I was trying to do too much. In addition to my preaching every Sunday and carrying the burdens of the various activities of the church, I was also chairman of the Red Cross, president of the Kiwanis. I also conducted two or three funerals each week and a number of other activities.

I was working under constant pressure. I could never relax. I was always tense, hurried, and high-strung. I got to the point where I worried about everything. I was living in a constant dither. I was in such pain that I gladly acted on Dr. Lilga's advice. I took Monday off each week, and began eliminating various responsibilities and activities.

One day while cleaning out my desk, I got an idea that proved to be immensely helpful. I was looking over an accumulation of old notes on sermons and other memos on matters that were now past and gone. I crumpled them up one by one and tossed them into the wastebasket. Suddenly I stopped and said to myself: "Bill, why don't you do the same thing with your worries that you are doing with these notes? Why don't you crumple up your worries about yesterday's problems and toss them into the wastebasket?" That one idea gave me immediate inspiration-gave me the feeling of a weight being lifted from my shoulders. From that day to this, I have made it a rule to throw into the wastebasket all the problems that I can no longer do anything about.

Then, one day while wiping the dishes as my wife washed them, I got another idea. My wife was singing as she washed the dishes, and I said to myself: "Look, Bill, how happy your wife is. We have been married eighteen years, and she has been washing dishes all that time. Suppose when we got married she had looked ahead and seen all the dishes she would have to wash during those eighteen years that stretched ahead. That pile of dirty dishes would be bigger than a barn. The very thought of it would have appalled any woman."

Then I said to myself: "The reason my wife doesn't mind washing the dishes is because she washes only one day's dishes at a time." I saw what my trouble was. I was trying to wash today's dishes, yesterday's dishes and dishes that weren't even dirty yet.

I saw how foolishly I was acting. I was standing in the pulpit, Sunday mornings, telling other people how to live, yet, I myself was leading a tense, worried, hurried existence. I felt ashamed of myself.

Worries don't bother me any more now. No more stomach pains. No more insomnia. I now crumple up yesterday's anxieties and toss them into the wastebasket, and I have ceased trying to wash tomorrow's dirty dishes today.

Do you remember a statement quoted earlier in this book? "The load of tomorrow, added to that of yesterday, carried today, makes the strongest falter." ... Why even try it?

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I Found The Answer-keep Busy!

By

Del Hughes

Public Accountant, 607 South Euclid Avenue, Bay City, Michigan

In 1943 I landed in a. veterans' hospital in Albuquerque, New Mexico, with three broken ribs and a punctured lung. This had happened during a practice Marine amphibious landing off the Hawaiian Islands. I was getting ready to jump off the barge, on to the beach, when a big breaker swept in, lifted the barge, and threw me off balance and smashed me on the sands. I fell with such force that one of my broken ribs punctured my right lung.

After spending three months in the hospital, I got the biggest shock of my life. The doctors told me that I showed absolutely no improvement. After some serious thinking, I figured that worry was preventing me from getting well. I had been used to a very active life, and during these three months I had been flat on my back twenty-four hours a day with nothing to do but think. The more I thought, the more I worried: worried about whether I would ever be able to take my place in the world. I worried about whether I would remain a cripple the rest of my life, and about whether I would ever be able to get married and live a normal life.

I urged my doctor to move me up to the next ward, which was called the "Country Club" because the patients were allowed to do almost anything they cared to do.

In this "Country Club" ward, I became interested in contract bridge. I spent six weeks learning the game, playing bridge with the other fellows, and reading Culbertson's books on bridge. After six weeks, I was playing nearly every evening for the rest of my stay in the hospital. I also became interested in painting with oils, and I studied this art under an instructor every afternoon from three to five. Some of my paintings were so good that you could almost tell what they were! I also tried my hand at soap and wood carving, and read a number of books on the subject and found it fascinating. I kept myself so busy that I had no time to worry about my physical condition. I even found time to read books on psychology given to me by the Red Cross. At the end of three months, the entire medical staff came to me and congratulated me on "making an amazing improvement". Those were the sweetest words I had ever heard since the days I was born. I wanted to shout with joy.

The point I am trying to make is this: when I had nothing to do but lie on the flat of my back and worry about my future, I made no improvement whatever. I was poisoning my body with worry. Even the broken ribs couldn't heal. But as soon as I got my mind off myself by playing contract bridge, painting oil pictures, and carving wood, the doctors declared I made "an amazing improvement".

I am now leading a normal healthy life, and my lungs are as good as yours.

Remember what George Bernard Shaw said? "The secret of being miserable is to have the leisure to bother about whether you are happy or not." Keep active, keep busy!

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Time Solves A Lot Of Things

By

Louis T. Montant, Jr.

Sales and Market Analyst 114 West 64th Street, New York, New York

Worry caused me to lose ten years of my life. Those ten years should have been the most fruitful and richest years of any young man's life-the years from eighteen to twenty-eight.

I realise now that losing those years was no one's fault but my own.

I worried about everything: my job, my health, my family, and my feeling of inferiority. I was so frightened that I used to cross the street to avoid meeting people I knew. When I met a friend on the street, I would often pretend not to notice him, because I was afraid of being snubbed.

I was so afraid of meeting strangers-so terrified in their presence-that in one space of two weeks I lost out on three different jobs simply because I didn't have the courage to tell those three different prospective employers what I knew I could do.

Then one day eight years ago, I conquered worry in one afternoon-and have rarely worried since then. That afternoon I was in the office of a man who had had far more troubles than I had ever faced, yet he was one of the most cheerful men I had ever known. He had made a fortune in 1929, and lost every cent. He had made another fortune in 1933, and lost that; and another fortune in 1937, and lost that, too. He had gone through bankruptcy and had been hounded by enemies and creditors. Troubles that would have broken some men and driven them to suicide rolled off him like water off a duck's back.

As I sat in his office that day eight years ago, I envied him and wished that God had made me like him.

As we were talking, he tossed a letter to me that he had received that morning and said: "Read that."

It was an angry letter, raising several embarrassing questions. If I had received such a letter, it would have sent me into a tailspin. I said: "Bill, how are you going to answer it?"

"Well," Bill said, "I'll tell you a little secret. Next time you've really got something to worry about, take a pencil and a piece of paper, and sit down and write out in detail just what's worrying you. Then put that piece of paper in the lower right-hand drawer of your desk. Wait a couple of weeks, and then look at it. If what you wrote down still worries you when you read it, put that piece of paper back in your lower right-hand drawer. Let it sit there for another two weeks. It will be safe there. Nothing will happen to it. But in the meantime, a lot may happen to the problem that is worrying you. I have found that, if only I have patience, the worry that is trying to harass me will often collapse like a pricked balloon."

That bit of advice made a great impression on me. I have been using Bill's advice for years now, and, as a result, I rarely worry about anything.

Times solves a lot of things. Time may also solve what you are worrying about today.

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I Was Warned Not To Try To Speak Or To Move Even A Finger

By

Joseph L. Ryan

Supervisor, Foreign Division, Royal Typewriter Company 51 Judson Place, Rockville Centre, Long Island, New York

Several years ago I was a witness in a lawsuit that caused me a great deal of mental strain and worry. After the case was over, and I was returning home in the train, I had a sudden and violent physical collapse. Heart trouble. I found it almost impossible to breathe.