Quit Your Worrying! | Page 9

work or
responsibilities. They go gadding about restless and feverish because of
the empty vacuity of their lives, a prey to worry because they have
nothing else to do. If I were to put down and faithfully report the
conversations I have with such people; the fool worries they are really
distressed with; the labor, time and energy they spend on following
chimeras, will o' the wisps, mirages that beckon to them and promise a
little mental occupation,--and over which they cannot help but worry,
one could scarcely believe it.
As Dr. Walton forcefully says in his admirable booklet:
The present, then, is the age, and our contemporaries are the people,
that bring into prominence the little worries, that cause the tempest in
the teapot, that bring about the worship of the intangible, and the
magnification of the unessential. If we had lived in another epoch we
might have dreamt of the eternal happiness of saving our neck, but in
this one we fret because our collar does not fit it, and because the
button that holds the collar has rolled under the bureau.[A]
[Footnote A: Calm Yourself. By George Lincoln Walton, M.D.,
Houghton, Mifflin & Co., Boston, Mass.]
I am not so foolish as to imagine for one moment that I can correct the
worrying tendency of the age, but I do want to be free from worry
myself, to show others that it is unnecessary and needless, and also,
that it is possible to live a life free from its demoralizing and altogether
injurious influences.

CHAPTER III
NERVOUS PROSTRATION AND WORRY.
Nervous prostration is generally understood to mean weakness of the
nerves. It invariably comes to those who have extra strong nerves, but
who do not know how to use them properly, as well as those whose
nervous system is naturally weak and easily disorganized. Nervous
prostration is a disease of overwork, mainly mental overwork, and in
ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, comes from worry. Worry is the
most senseless and insane form of mental work. It is as if a
bicycle-rider were so riding against time that, the moment after he got
off his machine to sit down to a meal he sprang up again, and while
eating were to work his arms and legs as if he were riding. It is the
slave-driver that stands over the slave and compels him to continue his
work, even though he is so exhausted that hands, arms and legs cease to
obey, and he falls asleep at his task.
The folly, as well as the pain and distress of this cruel slave-driving is
that we hold the whip over ourselves, have trained ourselves to do it,
and have done it so long that now we seem unable to stop. In another
chapter there is fully described (in Dorothy Canfield's vivid words) the
squirrel-cage whirligig of modern society life. Modern business life is
not much better. Men compel themselves to the endless task of
amassing money without knowing why they amass it. They make
money, that they may enlarge their factories, to make more ploughs, to
get more money, to enlarge their factories, to make more ploughs, to
get more money, to enlarge more factories, to make more ploughs, and
so on, ad infinitum. Where is the sense of it. Such conduct has well
been termed money-madness. It is an obsession, a disease, a form of
hypnotism, a mental malady.
The tendency of the age is to drive. We drive our own children to
school; there they are driven for hours by one study after another; even
when they come home they bring lessons with them--the lovers of
study and over-conscientious because they want to do them, and the
laggards because they must, if they are to keep up with their classes. If

the parents of such children are not careful, they (the children) soon
learn to worry; they are behind-hand with their lessons; they didn't get
the highest mark yesterday; the class is going ahead of them, etc., etc.,
until mental collapse comes.
For worrying is the worst kind of mental overwork. As Dr. Edward
Livingston Hunt, of Columbia University, New York, said in a paper
read by him early in 1912, before the Public Health Education
Committee of the Medical Society of the County of New York:
There is a form of overwork, exceedingly common and exceedingly
disastrous--one which equally accompanies great intellectual labors and
minor tasks. I allude to worry. When we medical men speak of the
workings of the brain we make use of a term both expressive and
characteristic. It is to cerebrate. To cerebrate means to think, to reason,
and to reach conclusions; it means to concentrate and to work hard. To
think, then, is to cerebrate. To worry is to cerebrate intensely.
Worry is