Chapter 13 Eliminate mental worries

People who do research in libraries and laboratories seldom break down because of worry, because they don't have time to enjoy this "luxury". I will never forget that night a few years ago.A student in my class, Marion Douglas, told us that his family had suffered tragic tragedy, twice.The first time he lost his 5 year old daughter, a very sweet child.Both he and his wife thought that they could not accept this reality and bear this blow.However, misfortunes never come singly, "10 months later, God gave us another little girl—and she died after only five days." The ensuing blows were almost unbearable. "I couldn't take it," the father told us. "I couldn't sleep, I couldn't eat, I couldn't rest or relax. My spirits were broken like never before. My confidence was gone." Finally he went to see a doctor .One doctor advised him to take sleeping pills, another advised him to travel.He tried both methods, but none of them helped him.He said: "My body seems to be clamped by a big pincer, and the pincers are getting tighter and stronger." - If you have ever felt numb from sorrow, you can understand that sorrow Put him under pressure.

"However, thank God, we also have a child - a four-year-old son, who made us find a solution to our problems. One afternoon, I sat there sadly, and he asked me: 'Daddy, can you Build me a boat?' At the time, I wasn't in the mood to build him a boat. In fact, I wasn't in the mood for anything. But my son is such a pestering little fellow that I had to go along with it do it. "It took me about 3 hours to build the toy boat. After the boat was built, I found that the 3 hours of boat building was the first time I had the opportunity to relax my mind during this period.

"This big discovery jolted me out of my trance and made me think a lot—the first time I've been thinking seriously in months. I've found that if you're busy doing something that requires planning and thinking, It was hard to have time to worry anymore. For me, all my worries while building that boat were gone, so I decided to keep myself busy. "The next night, I looked at each room and made a list of all the things to do. There were many small things such as bookshelves, stairs, curtains, door knobs, door locks, leaky taps, etc. that needed to be fixed. It's unbelievable that I made a list of 242 things that needed to be done in two weeks.

"In the past two years, most of that has been done. Plus, I've filled my life with inspirational activities: Two nights a week, I go to New York City for an adult education class, And I've been involved in some small town events. I'm chair of the school board now, attend a lot of meetings, and help with fundraising for the Red Cross and other agencies. I'm so busy right now that I hardly have time to go concern." There is no time to worry, which is what Churchill said when the war was so tense that he needed to work 18 hours a day.When someone asked him if he was worried about such a heavy responsibility, he said, "I'm so busy that I don't have time to worry."

Charles Kettering encountered a similar situation when he invented the automatic ignition for automobiles.Mr. Kettering served as the vice president of General Motors for a long time, in charge of the world-renowned General Motors Research Company, and he retired not long ago.However, he was so embarrassed that he had to use the straw piled in the barn as a laboratory.All the expenses of the family depend on the $1,500 his wife earned from teaching piano.Later, he had to borrow $500 against his life insurance.I asked his wife if she was worried during that period?She replied, "Yes, I was so worried that I couldn't sleep, but Mr. Kettering wasn't worried at all. He was too busy working all day to worry."

The great scientist Buster also once spoke of "the peace found in libraries and laboratories".Why find peace there?Because people who work in libraries and laboratories are usually so engrossed in their work that they don't have time to worry about themselves.People who do research rarely have mental breakdowns, because they don't have time to enjoy the "luxury" of worry. How can something as simple as "keep yourself busy" be able to get worry out of your mind?Because there is such a theorem: No matter how smart a person is, he cannot think about more than one thing at the same time-this is one of the fundamental theorems discovered by psychology.Let's do an experiment: Suppose you sit back in a chair, close your eyes, and try to think at the same time about the Statue of Liberty and what you plan to do tomorrow morning.

At this time, you will find that you can only think about one of them in turn, but not both at the same time, isn’t it?The same goes for your emotions.For example, we cannot be passionate about doing something exciting and at the same time procrastinating because of worry.One feeling drives out the other—a discovery so simple that some psychotherapists in the military were able to perform medical miracles in wartime. When some men retreated from the shock of their experiences in the field, they all suffered from a condition known as "psychological debilitating disease."Doctors in the military mostly take a "keep them busy" approach to treatment.

Give these mentally battered people a lot of energy every moment except sleep time, fishing, hunting, ball-playing, golfing, photo-taking, flower-planting, and dancing, etc. Time to reflect on those horrible experiences. A new term used by modern psychiatrists is "occupational therapy," that is, using work as medicine.This is not a new method, as it was used by ancient Greek physicians 500 years before Jesus was born. In Franklin's day, the Philadelphia Quakers also used this method. In 1774, a man visited a Quaker sanatorium and was shocked when he saw mental patients busy spinning and weaving.He believes that those poor and unfortunate people are being exploited.Later the Quakers explained to him that they found that the patients really got better only when they were working, because their nerves could be stabilized at work.

Any psychotherapist can tell you that work—constantly busy—is the best cure for mental illness.The famous poet Sir Henry Longfellow discovered this truth after the death of his young wife. One day his wife lit a candle to melt some envelope wax, and the flame ignited the clothes.Longfellow tried to save her when he heard her cries, but she died of severe burns.For a long time Longfellow could not shake himself from the dreadful experience, and nearly went mad.Fortunately, his 3 young children require his care.Despite his grief, he still has work to do to take care of his own children.He took them for walks, told them stories, played games with them, and immortalized their father-son bond in the poem "Children's Hours."At the same time he also translated Dante.All these tasks together made him so busy that he completely forgot about himself and regained his peace of mind.As Bennyson once said when his best friend Arthur Harlan died: "I must let myself be absorbed in my work, or I shall be absorbed in my misery."

For the vast majority of people, "immersing themselves in work" probably won't be a problem when they are busy doing their daily work.But after get off work—when we are free to enjoy our leisure and pleasure—the devil of worry attacks us.At this time, we often can't help but think about what kind of achievements we have in our lives, whether we have done a good job, whether the sentence the boss said today has "something special meaning", or whether our heads are starting to go bald. up... When we're not busy with a task, our minds often become a vacuum.Every student of physics knows that "there is no vacuum in nature".Break an incandescent light bulb, for example, and immediately air will enter, filling the theoretically empty space.

When your mind empties, it is filled with something, usually your feelings.why?Because emotions such as worry, fear, hatred, jealousy, and envy are controlled by our minds, and these emotions are very violent and tend to drive out all peaceful and happy thoughts and emotions in our minds. James Marshall is a professor in the Department of Education at Columbia Teachers College.He makes this clear: "You are most vulnerable to worry, not when you are busy at work, but after you have finished your day's work. That's when your imagination will Confused, making you think of all sorts of ridiculous things, exaggerating every little mistake. At this time, your mind is like an unladen car, going on a rampage, destroying everything, even yourself. Debris. The best way to get rid of worry is to keep yourself busy and do something useful." It is not that university professors understand this truth in order to put it into practice.In fact, this principle is not profound, and it is not difficult to understand it and put it into practice.During the war, I met a housewife living in Chicago who told me she had found that "a good way to relieve worry is to keep yourself busy and do something useful."I was on my way back from New York to my Missouri farm when I met this lady and her husband in the dining car. The couple told me that their son had joined the Army the day after Pearl Harbor.The woman was so worried about her only son that it almost seriously damaged her health.She often wondered: where is he?Is he safe?Still at war?Will he be injured or killed? I asked her how she overcame her anxiety.“I kept myself busy,” she replied. She told me that she first fired the maid, hoping that doing housework would keep her busy, but it didn’t help much. "The problem," she says, "is that I always do my chores mechanically and without thinking, so when I'm making my bed and doing the dishes, I'm always worrying. I've found that I need some new work to keep me going. Every hour of every day, I kept my body and mind busy, so I went to work as a salesperson in a large department store." "Now," she said, "I immediately found myself in a vortex that seemed to be in constant motion: customers crowded around me, asking me questions about prices, sizes, colors, and so on. I didn't For a second, I think about things other than the work at hand. At night, I can only think about how to rest my feet. When I finished dinner, I lay on the bed and fell asleep quickly. Don't worry about your physical strength." What she discovered was, as John Cobbler Poss put it in his book The Art of Forgetting Unhappiness: "A comfortable sense of security, an inner peace, And the feeling of unresponsiveness can make people calm when they are concentrating on work." Blessed are those who can actually do this.Osa Johnson, the most famous female adventurer in the world, recently told me how she came out of depression.Maybe you've read her autobiography, A Bound to Adventure.If there is any woman in the world who can be associated with adventure, it is only her.When she was 16 years old, Mr. Martin Johnson picked her up from the streets of Chanati, Kansas, and put her down in the virgin forest of Borneo. He married her. For 25 years, the couple from Kansas have traveled almost all over the world, filming the disappearing wildlife of Asia and Africa. They came back to the United States 9 years ago, giving lectures and showing the movies they made.While flying to the West Coast in Denver, their plane crashed into a mountain, Martin Johnson died instantly, and the doctors said Osa would never get out of bed again.But they didn't know about Osa Johnson. Three months later, she was sitting in a wheelchair and speaking in front of many people.During that time, she gave more than 100 speeches, all in a wheelchair.When I asked her why she did it, she replied, "I do it so I don't have time to be sad and worry." Osa Johnson discovered the same truth that Mr. Dennison - who predated her by a century - said in verse: "I must immerse myself in the work, or I shall writhe in despair." Admiral Bader also discovered this, because he lived alone for five months in a small Antarctic hut covered with ice and snow.In that world of ice and snow, there is an unknown continent that is larger than the United States and Europe combined.Admiral Bader spent five months alone there, without any living beings around him.It was unnaturally cold, and as the wind blew past his ears he could hear his breath almost frozen, like crystal.In his book "Solitude", he described the five months of his life that he spent in a sad and terrible darkness.He must be constantly busy to keep himself from going mad. "Each night," he said, "before I blow out the lights, I make it a habit to allocate the next day's work. That is, to arrange for myself what to do next. For example, an hour to check the escape For the tunnel used, it took half an hour to dig a horizontal pit, an hour to figure out the fuel containers, an hour to dig out a place for books on the wall of the tunnel where the flying object was hidden, and another two hours to repair the mop. A man's sled..." "Being able to divide time," he said, "is a very good thing, it gives me a sense of being in charge of myself..." He added, "If I don't do it, my life has no purpose. And Without a purpose, these days will go on as usual and fall apart in the end." If we worry about something, let's remember it!We can think of work as a great form of therapy.The late Dr. Richard Copperpot, formerly a professor at Harvard Medical School, said: "I am glad to see that work can cure many patients. They are infected by excessive doubts, hesitation, hesitation and fear. The disease brought about by waiting. The courage brought to us by work is like Emerson's self-confidence that never fades." If we're not busy all the time—if we're sitting around worrying—we're going to generate a whole lot of what Darwin called "crazy thoughts."And these "crazy thoughts" are like the legendary goblins, they will hollow out our minds and destroy our willpower and ability to act. I knew a businessman in New York who used his busyness to drive away those "wandering thoughts" so that he had no time to worry and worry.His name was Cubble Langman, and he was also a student in my adult education class.His experience of conquering worry was interesting and unique, so I asked him to join me for a midnight snack after class.We sat in a restaurant until midnight, talking about his experiences. Here's the story he told me: "Eighteen years ago, I suffered from insomnia because of excessive worrying. I was short-tempered and so nervous that I nearly had a nervous breakdown. "I'm not without reason. I was the financial manager of Crown Fruit Products on West Broadway in New York City. We invested half a million dollars and packaged strawberries in one-gallon jars. For 20 years, we have been making this Grown strawberries in gallon cans and sold them to ice cream makers. Then our sales suddenly plummeted because the big ice cream makers, like National Dairy, etc., were ramping up production, and to save money and time, they Both buy strawberries in 36-gallon barrels. "Not only can we not sell strawberries worth 500,000 US dollars, but according to the contract, we have to buy another 1 million US dollars worth of strawberries within the next year. We have already borrowed 350,000 US dollars from the bank. If the money is not paid, and the loan cannot be renewed, of course I am worried. "I rushed to our factory in Watsonville, California, and tried to convince the general manager that things had changed and that we could be doomed. But he wouldn't believe it, and blamed the problems on New York companies and those who Poor clerk. "After several days of requests, I finally convinced him to stop using the packaging and put the new ones on the fresh strawberry market in San Francisco. This pretty much solved most of our problems, so I should no longer Worried, but I'm still a little bit worried. Some say worrying is a habit, and I've gotten into it. "When I got back to New York, I started worrying about everything, the cherries I bought in Italy, the pineapples I bought in Hawaii, etc. I was so nervous, I couldn't sleep, and like I said, the spirit was almost It's about to crash. "In desperation I made a lifestyle change that cured my insomnia and stopped worrying. I kept myself so busy that I had to give all my energy and time so that I had no time Go worry. I used to work 7 hours a day, now I start working 15-16 hours a day. I arrive at the office at 8 o'clock in the morning and wait until midnight. I take on a new job and take on new responsibilities. When I got home in the middle of the night, I always fell on the bed exhausted and fell asleep soundly in seconds. "After about 3 months of this, I got rid of my worrying habits and returned to normal working 7-8 hours a day. This happened 18 years ago, and since then, I have no more insomnia and worried." Bernard Shaw summed it up and said: "The reason why people worry is that they have free time to think about whether they are happy or not." Therefore, if you want to eliminate worry, you don't have to think about it, gear up and keep yourself busy, so that your The blood will quicken and your mind will sharpen -- keeping yourself busy is the cheapest and most effective cure for worry in the world.