You found out, didn’t you, that you could focus on either thought in turn, but never on both simultaneously? Well, the same thing is true in the field of emotions. We cannot be pepped up and enthusiastic about doing something exciting and feel dragged down by worry at the very same time. One kind of emotion drives out the other. And it was that simple discovery that enabled Army psychiatrists to perform such miracles during the war.
When men came out of battle so shaken by the experience that they were called “psychoneurotic”, Army doctors prescribed “Keep ’em busy” as a cure.
Every waking minute of these nerve-shocked men was filled with activity-usually outdoor activity, such as fishing, hunting, playing ball, golf, taking pictures, making gardens, and dancing. They were given no time for brooding over their terrible experiences.
“Occupational therapy” is the term now used by psychiatry when work is prescribed as though it were a medicine. It is not new. The old Greek physicians were advocating it five hundred years before Christ was born!
The Quakers were using it in Philadelphia in Ben Franklin’s time. A man who visited a Quaker sanatorium in 1774 was shocked to see that the patients who were mentally ill were busy spinning flax. He thought these poor unfortunates were being exploited-until the Quakers explained that they found that their patients actually improved when they did a little work. It was soothing to the nerves.
Any psychiatrist will tell you that work-keeping busy- is one of the best anesthetics ever known for sick nerves. Henry W. Longfellow found that out for himself when he lost his young wife. His wife had been melting some sealing-wax at a candle one day, when her clothes caught on fire. Longfellow heard her cries and tried to reach her in time; but she died from the burns. For a while, Longfellow was so tortured by the memory of that dreadful experience that he nearly went insane; but, fortunately for him, his three small children needed his attention. In spite of his own grief, Longfellow undertook to be father and mother to his children. He took them for walks, told them stories, played games with them, and immortalised their companionship in his poem The Children’s Hour. He also translated Dante; and all these duties combined kept him so busy that he forgot himself entirely, and regained his peace of mind. As Tennyson declared when he lost his most intimate friend, Arthur Hallam: “I must lose myself in action, lest I wither in despair.”
Most of us have little trouble “losing ourselves in action” while we have our noses to the grindstone and are doing our day’s work. But the hours after work-they are the dangerous ones. Just when we’re free to enjoy our own leisure, and ought to be happiest-that’s when the blue devils of worry attack us. That’s when we begin to wonder whether we’re getting anywhere in life; whether we’re in a rut; whether the boss “meant anything” by that remark he made today; or whether we’re getting bald.
When we are not busy, our minds tend to become a near-vacuum. Every student of physics knows that “nature abhors a vacuum”. The nearest thing to a vacuum that you and I will probably ever see is the inside of an incandescent electric-light bulb. Break that bulb-and nature forces air in to fill the theoretically empty space.
Nature also rushes in to fill the vacant mind. With what? Usually with emotions. Why? Because emotions of worry, fear, hate, jealousy, and envy are driven by primeval vigour and the dynamic energy of the jungle. Such emotions are so violent that they tend to drive out of our minds all peaceful, nappy thoughts and emotions.
James L. Mursell, professor of education, Teachers’ College, Columbia, puts it very well when he says: “Worry is most apt to ride you ragged not when you are in action, but when the day’s work is done. Your imagination can run riot then and bring up all sorts of ridiculous possibilities and magnify each little blunder. At such a time,” he continues, “your mind is like a motor operating without its load. It races and threatens to burn out its bearings or even to tear itself to bits. The remedy for worry is to get completely occupied doing something constructive.”
But you don’t have to be a college professor to realise this truth and put it into practice. During the war, I met a housewife from Chicago who told me how she discovered for herself that “the remedy for worry is to get completely occupied doing something constructive.” I met this woman and her husband in the dining-car while I was travelling from New York to my farm in Missouri. (Sorry I didn’t get their names-I never like to give examples without using names and street addresses- details that give authenticity to a story.)
This couple told me that their son had joined the armed forces the day after Pearl Harbour. The woman told me that she had almost wrecked her health worrying over that only son. Where was he? Was he safe? Or in action? Would he be wounded? Killed?
When I asked her how she overcame her worry, she replied: “I got busy.” She told me that at first she had dismissed her maid and tried to keep busy by doing all her housework herself. But that didn’t help much. “The trouble was,” she said, “that I could do my housework almost mechanically, without using my mind. So I kept on worrying. While making the beds and washing the dishes I realised I needed some new kind of work that would keep me busy both mentally and physically every hour of the day. So I took a job as a saleswoman in a large department store.
“That did it,” she said. “I immediately found myself in a whirlwind of activity: customers swarming around me, asking for prices, sizes, colours. Never a second to think of anything except my immediate duty; and when night came, I could think of nothing except getting off my aching feet. As soon as I ate dinner, I fell into bed and instantly became unconscious. I had neither the time nor the energy to worry.”
She discovered for herself what John Cowper Powys meant when he said, in The Art of Forgetting the Unpleasant: “A certain comfortable security, a certain profound inner peace, a kind of happy numbness, soothes the nerves of the human animal when absorbed in its allotted task.”
And what a blessing that it is so! Osa Johnson, the world’s most famous woman explorer, recently told me how she found release from worry and grief. You may have read the story of her life. It is called I Married Adventure. If any woman ever married adventure, she certainly did. Martin Johnson married her when she was sixteen and lifted her feet off the sidewalks of Chanute, Kansas, and set them down on the wild jungle trails of Borneo. For a quarter of a century, this Kansas couple travelled all over the world, making motion pictures of the vanishing wild life of Asia and Africa. Back in America nine years ago, they were on a lecture tour, showing their famous films. They took a plane out of Denver, bound for the Coast. The plane plunged into a mountain. Martin Johnson was killed instantly. The doctors said Osa would never leave her bed again. But they didn’t know Osa Johnson. Three months later, she was in a wheel chair, lecturing before large audiences. In fact, she addressed over a hundred audiences that season-all from a wheel chair. When I asked her why she did it, she replied: “I did it so that I would have no time for sorrow and worry.”
Osa Johnson had discovered the same truth that Tennyson had sung about a century earlier: “I must lose myself in action, lest I wither in despair.”
Admiral Byrd discovered this same truth when he lived all alone for five months in a shack that was literally buried in the great glacial ice-cap that covers the South Pole-an ice-cap that holds nature’s oldest secrets-an ice-cap covering an unknown continent larger than the United States and Europe combined. Admiral Byrd spent five months there alone. No other living creature of any kind existed within a hundred miles. The cold was so intense that he could hear his breath freeze and crystallise as the wind blew it past his ears. In his book Alone, Admiral Byrd tells all about those five months he spent in bewildering and soul-shattering darkness. The days were as black as the nights. He had to keep busy to preserve his sanity.
“At night,” he says, “before blowing out the lantern, I formed the habit of blocking out the morrow’s work. It was a case of assigning myself an hour, say, to the Escape Tunnel, half an hour to leveling drift, an hour to straightening up the fuel drums, an hour to cutting bookshelves in the walls of the food tunnel, and two hours to renewing a broken bridge in the man-hauling sledge. …
“It was wonderful,” he says, “to be able to dole out time in this way. It brought me an extraordinary sense of command over myself. …” And he adds: “Without that or an equivalent, the days would have been without purpose; and without purpose they would have ended, as such days always end, in disintegration.”
Note that last again: “Without purpose, the days would have ended, as such days always end, in disintegration.”
If you and I are worried, let’s remember that we can use good old-fashioned work as a medicine. That was said by no less an authority than the late Dr. Richard C. Cabot, formerly professor of clinical medicine at Harvard. In his book What Men Live By, Dr. Cabot says: “As a physician, I have had the happiness of seeing work cure many persons who have suffered from trembling palsy of the soul which results from overmastering doubts, hesitations, vacillation and fear. … Courage given us by our work is like the self-reliance which Emerson has made for ever glorious.”
If you and I don’t keep busy-if we sit around and brood- we will hatch out a whole flock of what Charles Darwin used to call the “wibber gibbers”. And the “wibber gibbers” are nothing but old-fashioned gremlins that will run us hollow and destroy our power of action and our power of will.
I know a business man in New York who fought the “wibber gibbers” by getting so busy that he had no time to fret and stew. His name is Tremper Longman, and his office is at 40 Wall Street. He was a student in one of my adult-education classes; and his talk on conquering worry was so interesting, so impressive, that I asked him to have supper with me after class; and we sat in a restaurant until long past midnight, discussing his experiences. Here is the story he told me: “Eighteen years ago, I was so worried I had insomnia. I was tense, irritated, and jittery. I felt I was headed for a nervous breakdown.
“I had reason to be worried. I was treasurer of the Crown Fruit and Extract Company, 418 West Broadway, New York. We had half a million dollars invested in strawberries packed in gallon tins. For twenty years, we had been selling these gallon tins of strawberries to manufactures of ice cream. Suddenly our sales stopped because the big ice-cream makers, such as National Dairy and Borden’s, were rapidly increasing their production and were saving money and time by buying strawberries packed in barrels.
“Not only were we left with half a million dollars in berries we couldn’t sell, but we were also under contract to buy a million dollars more of strawberries in the next twelve months! We had already borrowed $350,000 from the banks. We couldn’t possibly pay off or renew these loans. No wonder I was worried!
“I rushed out to Watsonville, California, where our factory was located, and tried to persuade our president that conditions had changed, that we were facing ruin. He refused to believe it. He blamed our New York office for all the trouble-poor salesmanship.
“After days of pleading, I finally persuaded him to stop packing more strawberries and to sell our new supply on the fresh berry market in San Francisco. That almost solved our problems. I should have been able to stop worrying then; but I couldn’t. Worry is a habit; and I had that habit.
“When I returned to New York, I began worrying about everything; the cherries we were buying in Italy, the pineapples we were buying in Hawaii, and so on. I was tense, jittery, couldn’t sleep; and, as I have already said, I was heading for a nervous breakdown.
“In despair, I adopted a way of life that cured my insomnia and stopped my worries. I got busy. I got so busy with problems demanding all my faculties that I had no time to worry. I had been working seven hours a day. I now began working fifteen and sixteen hours a day. I got down to the office every morning at eight o’clock and stayed there every night until almost midnight. I took on new duties, new responsibilities. When I got home at midnight, I was so exhausted when I fell in bed that I became unconscious in a few seconds.
“I kept up this programme for about three months. I had broken the habit of worry by that time, so I returned to a normal working day of seven or eight hours. This event occurred eighteen years ago. I have never been troubled with insomnia or worry since then.”
George Bernard Shaw was right. He summed it all up when he said: “The secret of being miserable is to have the leisure to bother about whether you are happy or not.” So don’t bother to think about it! Spit on your hands and get busy. Your blood will start circulating; your mind will start ticking -and pretty soon this whole positive upsurge of life in your body will drive worry from your mind. Get busy. Keep busy. It’s the cheapest kind of medicine there is on this earth-and one of the best.
To break the worry habit, here is Rule 1:
Keep busy. The worried person must lose himself in action, lest be wither in despair.
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Chapter 7 – Don’t Let the Beetles Get You Down
Here is a dramatic story that I’ll probably remember as long as I live. It was told to me by Robert Moore, of 14 Highland Avenue, Maplewood, New Jersey.
“I learned the biggest lesson of my life in March, 1945,” he said, “I learned it under 276 feet of water off the coast of Indo-China. I was one of eighty-eight men aboard the submarine Baya S.S. 318. We had discovered by radar that a small Japanese convoy was coming our way. As daybreak approached, we submerged to attack. I saw through the periscope a Jap destroyer escort, a tanker, and a minelayer. We fired three torpedoes at the destroyer escort, but missed. Something went haywire in the mechanics of each torpedo. The destroyer, not knowing that she had been attacked, continued on. We were getting ready to attack the last ship, the minelayer, when suddenly she turned and came directly at us. (A Jap plane had spotted us under sixty feet of water and had radioed our position to the Jap minelayer.) We went down to 150 feet, to avoid detection, and rigged for a depth charge. We put extra bolts on the hatches; and, in order to make our sub absolutely silent, we turned off the fans, the cooling system, and all electrical gear.