Chapter 3 – What Worry May Do To You
Business men who do not know how to fight worry
die young.
-DR. Alexis Carrel.
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Some time ago, a neighbour rang my doorbell one evening and urged me and my family to be vaccinated against smallpox. He was only one of thousands of volunteers who were ringing doorbells all over New York City. Frightened people stood in lines for hours at a time to be vaccinated. Vaccination stations were opened not only in all hospitals, but also in fire-houses, police precincts, and in large industrial plants. More than two thousand doctors and nurses worked feverishly day and night, vaccinating crowds. The cause of all this excitement? Eight people in New York City had smallpox-and two had died. Two deaths out of a population of almost eight million.
Now, I have lived in New York for over thirty-seven years, and no one has ever yet rung my doorbell to warn me against the emotional sickness of worry-an illness that, during the last thirty-seven years, has caused ten thousand times more damage than smallpox.
No doorbell ringer has ever warned me that one person out of ten now living in these United States will have a nervous breakdown-induced in the vast majority of cases by worry and emotional conflicts. So I am writing this chapter to ring your doorbell and warn you.
The great Nobel prizewinner in medicine, Dr. Alexis Carrel, said: “Business men who do not know how to fight worry die young.” And so do housewives and horse doctors and bricklayers.
A few years ago, I spent my vacation motoring through Texas and New Mexico with Dr. O. F. Gober-one of the medical executives of the Santa Fe railway. His exact title was chief physician of the Gulf, Colorado and Santa Fe Hospital Association. We got to talking about the effects of worry, and he said: Seventy per cent of all patients who come to physicians could cure themselves if they only got rid of their fears and worries. Don’t think for a moment that I mean that their ills are imaginary,” he said. “Their ills are as real as a throbbing toothache and sometimes a hundred times more serious. I refer to such illnesses as nervous indigestion, some stomach ulcers, heart disturbances, insomnia, some headaches, and some types of paralysis.
“These illnesses are real. I know what I am talking about,” said Dr. Gober, “for I myself suffered from a stomach ulcer for twelve years.
“Fear causes worry. Worry makes you tense and nervous and affects the nerves of your stomach and actually changes the gastric juices of your stomach from normal to abnormal and often leads to stomach ulcers.”
Dr. Joseph F. Montague, author of the book Nervous Stomach Trouble, says much the same thing. He says: “You do not get stomach ulcers from what you eat. You get ulcers from what is eating you.”
Dr. W.C. Alvarez, of the Mayo Clinic, said “Ulcers frequently flare up or subside according to the hills and valleys of emotional stress.”
That statement was backed up by a study of 15,000 patients treated for stomach disorders at the Mayo Clinic. Four out of five had no physical basis whatever for their stomach illnesses. Fear, worry, hate, supreme selfishness, and the inability to adjust themselves to the world of reality-these were largely the causes of their stomach illnesses and stomach ulcers. … Stomach ulcers can kill you. According to Life magazine, they now stand tenth in our list of fatal diseases.
I recently had some correspondence with Dr. Harold C. Habein of the Mayo Clinic. He read a paper at the annual meeting of the American Association of Industrial Physicians and Surgeons, saying that he had made a study of 176 business executives whose average age was 44.3 years. He reported that slightly more than a third of these executives suffered from one of three ailments peculiar to high-tension living-heart disease, digestive-tract ulcers, and high blood pressure. Think of it- a third of our business executives are wrecking their bodies with heart disease, ulcers, and high blood pressure before they even reach forty-five. What price success! And they aren’t even buying success! Can any man possibly be a success who is paying for business advancement with stomach ulcers and heart trouble? What shall it profit a man if he gains the whole world-and loses his health? Even if he owned the whole world, he could sleep in only one bed at a time and eat only three meals a day. Even a ditch-digger can do that-and probably sleep more soundly and enjoy his food more than a high-powered executive. Frankly, I would rather be a share-cropper down in Alabama with a banjo on my knee than wreck my health at forty-five by trying to run a railroad or a cigarette company.
And speaking of cigarettes-the best-known cigarette manufacturer in the world recently dropped dead from heart failure while trying to take a little recreation in the Canadian woods. He amassed millions-and fell dead at sixty-one. He probably traded years of his life for what is called “business success”.
In my estimation, this cigarette executive with all his millions was not half as successful as my father-a Missouri farmer- who died at eighty-nine without a dollar.
The famous Mayo brothers declared that more than half of our hospital beds are occupied by people with nervous troubles. Yet, when the nerves of these people are studied under a high-powered microscope in a post-mortem examination, their nerves in most cases are apparently as healthy as the nerves of Jack Dempsey. Their “nervous troubles” are caused not by a physical deterioration of the nerves, but by emotions of futility, frustration, anxiety, worry, fear, defeat, despair. Plato said that “the greatest mistake physicians make is that they attempt to cure the body without attempting to cure the mind; yet the mind and body are one and should not be treated separately!”
It took medical science twenty-three hundred years to recognise this great truth. We are just now beginning to develop a new kind of medicine called psychosomatic medicine-a medicine that treats both the mind and the body. It is high time we were doing that, for medical science has largely wiped out the terrible diseases caused by physical germs–diseases such as smallpox, cholera, yellow fever, and scores of other scourges that swept untold millions into untimely graves. But medical science has been unable to cope with the mental and physical wrecks caused, not by germs, but by emotions of worry, fear, hate, frustration, and despair. Casualties caused by these emotional diseases are mounting and spreading with catastrophic rapidity.
Doctors figure that one American in every twenty now alive will spend a part of his life in an institution for the mentally ill. One out of every six of our young men called up by the draft in the Second World War was rejected as mentally diseased or defective.
What causes insanity? No one knows all the answers. But it is highly probable that in many cases fear and worry are contributing factors. The anxious and harassed individual who is unable to cope with the harsh world of reality breaks off all contact with his environment and retreats into a private dream world of his own making, and this solves his worry problems.
As I write I have on my desk a book by Dr. Edward Podolsky entitled Stop Worrying and Get Well. Here are some of the chapter titles in that book:
What Worry Does To The Heart
High Blood Pressure Is Fed By Worry
Rheumatism Can Be Caused By Worry
Worry Less For Your Stomach’s Sake
How Worry Can Cause A Cold
Worry And The Thyroid
The Worrying Diabetic
Another illuminating book about worry is lion Against Himself, by Dr. Karl Menninger, one of the “Mayo brothers of psychiatry.” Dr. Menninger’s book is a startling revelation of what you do to yourself when you permit destructive emotions to dominate your life. If you want to stop working against yourself, get this book. Read it. Give it to your friends. It costs four dollars-and is one of the best investments you can make in this life.
Worry can make even the most stolid person ill. General Grant discovered that during the closing days of the Civil War. The story goes like this: Grant had been besieging Richmond for nine months. General Lee’s troops, ragged and hungry, were beaten. Entire regiments were deserting at a time. Others were holding prayer meetings in their tents-shouting, weeping, seeing visions. The end was close. Lee’s men set fire to the cotton and tobacco warehouses in Richmond, burned the arsenal, and fled from the city at night while towering flames roared up into darkness. Grant was in hot pursuit, banging away at the Confederates from both sides and the rear, while Sheridan’s cavalry was heading them off in front, tearing up railway lines and capturing supply trains.
Grant, half blind with a violent sick headache, fell behind his army and stopped at a farmhouse. “I spent the night,” he records in his Memoirs, “in bathing my feet in hot water and mustard, and putting mustard plasters on my wrists and the back part of my neck, hoping to be cured by morning.”
The next morning, he was cured instantaneously. And the tiling that cured him was not a mustard plaster, but a horseman galloping down the road with a letter from Lee, saying he wanted to surrender.