How to Stop Worrying and Start Living

That’s a powerful stat, eh?

So, why should you care about stopping your worry habit?

Well, in addition to the fact that being a worrier makes you a bummer to be around (sorry to break it to you :), you’re destroying your health—reducing your energy today and trimming years (decades?) off your life.

Carnegie quotes a Dr. Montague: “You do not not get stomach ulcers from what you eat. You get ulcers from what is eating you.”

And a Dr. Alexis Carrel: “Those who do not know how to fight worry die young.”

And some philosopher guy named Plato: “The greatest mistake physicians make is that they attempt to cure the body without attempting to cure the mind; yet the mind and the body are one and should not be treated separately!”

Alright. So, you don’t need any (more) convincing on the WHY, right? Time for the HOW!

That’s Chapter 1 in a nutshell. “Live in Day-tight Compartments.” Carnegie’s a bit of a quote machine like me and goes from Jesus to Montaigne and Dante to Carlyle.

Jesus: “Have no anxiety for the tomorrow.”

Montaigne: “My life has been full of terrible misfortunes most of which never happened.”

Dante: “Think that this day will never dawn again.”

Carlyle: “Our main business is not to see what lies dimly at a distance, but to do what lies clearly at hand.”

Horace: “Happy the man, and happy he alone, | He, who can call to-day his own: | He who, secure within can say: | “To-morrow, do thy worst, for I have liv’d today.”

The Big Idea: “Shut the iron doors on the past and the future. Live in Day-tight compartments.”

And ask yourself these questions:

1. “Do I tend to put off living in the present in order to worry about the future, or to yearn for some ‘magical rose garden over the horizon’?
2. Do I sometimes embitter the present by regretting things that happened in the past—that are over and done with?
3. Do I get up in the morning determined to ‘Seize the day’—to get the utmost out of these twenty-four hours?
4. Can I get more out of life by ‘living in day-tight compartments’?
5. When shall I start to do this? Next week? … Tomorrow? … Today?”

GREAT questions to reflect on.

(btw: the answer to #5 is: TODAY! :)

Have you read Loving What Is by Byron Katie? Brilliant book. (You’ll dig the Notes.)

Basic idea? She says: “I realized that it’s insane to oppose it. When I argue with reality, I lose—but only 100% of the time.” Hehe. I love that. And: “If you want reality to be different than what it is, you might as well try to teach a cat to bark.” :)

You want to stop worrying and start living? QUIT ARGUING WITH REALITY. Or, in the words of William James: “Be willing to have it so.”

Arguing with reality is one of the absolute BEST ways to RUIN your life.

As Deepak says in his great book The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success (see Notes): “This means that your acceptance of this moment is total and complete. You accept things as they are, not as you wish they were in this moment. This is important to understand. You can wish for things in the future to be different, but in this moment you have to accept things as they are.”

Of course, in challenging times, we want a better future (whether that’s 5 seconds from now or 5 days or weeks or years), but we MUST accept what is. From that place, the tension melts, the worry evaporates and we connect to Source and have all the strength we need to embrace the moment and take the next constructive step toward creating our ideal life.

And the best part?

We can enjoy THIS MOMENT.

No matter how challenging it is.

As Marcus Aurelius says in his classic Meditations (see Notes): “So here is a rule to remember in future, when anything tempts you to feel bitter: not, ‘This is a misfortune,’ but ‘To bear this worthily is a good fortune.’”

Amen. So:

1. What’s stressing you out right now? I am stressed out about: ______________________________________________________

2. What can you do? I can do this about it: _______________________________________________________

3. What will you do? I will do this: _______________________________________________________

4. Cool. Now DO IT!

That. Is. Genius.

We all seem to want the fancy new techniques or the check-me-out-I’m-really-smart intellectual philosophies. But I *love* the good ol’ fashioned obvious truths.

And I equally LOVE the way Carnegie puts it here: “knowledge isn’t power until it is applied; and the purpose of this book is to remind you of what you already know and to kick you in the shins and inspire you to do something about applying it.”

That pretty much sums up my intention with these Notes. Move my foot up from a kick in your shins to a kick in your butt and we’re there!

So, two things:

1. First, specifically about worry: What spilt milk are you worrying over? What in your past are you STILL ruminating about, complaining about, losing sleep over, etc? The relationship? The family argument? The job? The missed opportunity? The whatever. When, exactly, do you plan to move on? (NOW might be good. :)

2. Second, what piece of wisdom do you KNOW to be true but for whatever reason you have yet to EMBODY? Remember “Knowledge isn’t power until it’s applied.” So, what’s the knowledge you need to apply? And when do you plan to apply it? (Now’s always good. :)

Knowledge I KNOW but have yet to apply: __________________________________________________________________

__________________________________________________________________

__________________________________________________________________

__________________________________________________________________

__________________________________________________________________

I will apply this knowledge starting: *NOW*

Carnegie gives us a chapter-full of the benefits of using relaxation as a means to reduce worry—and the fact that preventing fatigue is a huge step toward preventing worry. He starts by making the point that it’s *impossible* to be totally relaxed and worried at the same time. Impossible. That alone is enough advice to solve most of our worry.

Stressed? Relax. TOTALLY relax.

The point is simple: you can prevent WORRY by preventing FATIGUE. How do you that? A lot of ways. But the smartest is to rest before you’re tired. Carnegie cites the U.S. Army, your heart, Winston Churchill, Rockefeller, Thomas Edison and many others to prove his point.

The U.S. Army? Rests its soldier ten minutes out of every hour they march. BEFORE they get tired. And they’re overall efficiency goes up.

Churchill? Worked 16 hours a day in his late sixties and early seventies during World War II. His secret? He worked from bed a *lot,* took naps and rested frequently.

Rockefeller (lived to 96) took a half-hour nap EVERY noon.

Edison attributed his enormous energy and endurance to his habit of sleeping whenever he wanted to.

And, how about the coolest example? Your heart. As Carnegie says: “Your heart pumps enough blood through your body every day to fill a railway tank car. It exerts enough energy every twenty-four hours to shovel twenty tons of coal onto a platform three feet high. It does this incredible amount of work for fifty, seventy, or maybe ninety years. How can it stand it? Dr. Walter B. Cannon, of the Harvard Medical School, explained it. He said ‘Most people have the idea that the heart is working all the time. As a matter of fact, there is a definite rest period after each contraction. When beating at a moderate rate of seventy pulses per minute, the heart is actually working only nine hours out of the twenty-four. In the aggregate its rest periods total a full fifteen hours per day.’

Wow. That’s amazing.

So, how about you? Are you taking enough rest?

If you’re worried, check in and see if you’re also fatigued. And then know that it’s *impossible* to be totally relaxed and worried. So get relaxed. :)

(Speaking of which, it’s time for my 9:30 am meditation. Seriously. Hehe. brb. :)

… More on fatigue: “Psychiatrists declare that most of our fatigue derives from our mental and emotional attitudes… What kinds of emotional factors tire the sedentary (or sitting) worker? Joy? Contentment? No! Never! Boredom, resentment, a feeling of not being appreciated, a feeling of futility, hurry, anxiety, worry—those are the emotional factors that exhaust the sitting worker, make him susceptible to colds, reduce his output, and send him home with a nervous headache. Yes, we get tired because our emotions produce nervous tensions in the body.”

How about some how-to’s on relaxing?

1. “Relax in odd moments. Let your body go limp like an old sock.” Carnegie says he keeps an old maroon dress sock on his desk to remind himself to relax. Classic.
2. “Work, as much as possible, in a comfortable position.” Ten years ago when I was a stressed out 25-year old CEO with 45 employees who’d raised $5m to finance my first business (eteamz.com) during the dot com boom of the late 90’s, I used to get what I’d call “Frankensteined”—my neck wouldn’t move because it was so tight. I realized that all the tension was adding up, exacerbated by the fact that I had my computer monitor set up so I had to look to my right while typing. Not comfortable. In fact, DUMB. Do you look STRAIGHT at your computer monitor? If not, please fix that today. Seriously. Get comfie and RELAX while you work.
3. “Check yourself four or five times a day, and say to yourself, ‘Am I making my work harder than it actually is? Am I using muscles that have nothing to do with the work I’m doing?’” Love that. I often set my stop watch’s timer to repeatedly count down from 30-minutes. When it beeps it’s a brilliant reminder for me to pause, stretch out quickly, shut my eyes, breathe deeply, relax, say a few mantras and do a quick re-charge. You might dig that. It’s amazing to see just how much tension can build even doing stuff we love!
4. “Test yourself again at the end of the day, by asking yourself, ‘Just how tired am I? If I am tired, it is not because of mental work I have done but because of the way I have done it.’” Know that if you’re cranky or tired, it’s probably because of the tension you allowed to build during the day. RELAX. Breathe, crumple yourself up like an old sock and keep the fatigue and the worry away! :)

Hah. That’s awesome.

And sooo true.

Tim Ferriss in his great book, The 4-Hour Workweek, says something along the lines of “Don’t worry about what other people think. They don’t think that often, anyway.” :)

Funny.

Fact is most people rarely think and when they do, it’s more likely to be worrying about what YOU think about THEM than about something going on with you.

So, a key way to stop worrying and start living?

Get totally independent of the good or bad opinion of others!!!

Classic. You giving yourself the leisure time to be miserable?

Well, spit on your hands and get to work on something constructive already, will ya?!? :)

Of course, as we’ve discussed, we need time to reflect and envision our ideal lives but be careful lest you spend too much of that time in anxiety. If you find yourself worrying, go back up there to the four step worry-busting formula and rock #4. (The just do it part. :)