How to Stop Worrying and Start Living

🍎 Healthy brain food

"Keep busy. The worried person must lose himself in action, lest he wither in despair."

— Dale Carnegie, How to Stop Worrying and Start Living (1948)

Introduction

How to Stop Worrying and Start Living
Full title	How to Stop Worrying and Start Living: Time-Tested Methods for Conquering Worry
Author	Dale Carnegie
Language	English
Subject	Worry; Stress management; Personal development
Genre	Nonfiction; Self-help
Publisher	Simon & Schuster
Publication date	1948
Publication place	United States
Media type	Print (hardcover, paperback); e-book; audiobook
Pages	306
ISBN	978-0-671-03597-6
Goodreads rating	4.2/5  (as of 6 November 2025)
Website	simonandschuster.com

📘 How to Stop Worrying and Start Living is a self-help book by Dale Carnegie, first published in 1948 by Simon & Schuster and kept in print by Simon & Schuster’s Gallery Books imprint. The book presents practical, “time-tested” methods to reduce worry—clarifying problems, accepting worst-case outcomes, and practicing “day-tight compartments”—taught through case histories and step-by-step formulas. Its structure moves from fundamental facts and analysis to breaking the worry habit, cultivating resilient attitudes, handling criticism, and preventing fatigue, concluding with dozens of first-person “How I conquered worry” stories. In 1948 it topped the New York Times nonfiction list (e.g., 1 August and 19 September), and Time called it a “more practical guide” that displaced Peace of Mind at summer’s end. The publisher reports more than six million readers and notes the title was “updated for the first time in forty years” with a 320-page trade paperback on 5 October 2004.

Chapter summary

This outline follows the Gallery Books trade paperback edition (5 October 2004; ISBN 978-0-671-03597-6).

I – Fundamental Facts You Should Know About Worry

📦 1 – Live in "Day-tight Compartments". Sir William Osler told Yale students to imagine a ship’s captain sealing watertight bulkheads with the press of a button, then urged them to do the same with their days—shut the “iron doors” on yesterday and tomorrow to make today safe. That image threads through practical vignettes: a Saginaw, Michigan, book saleswoman who taped “Every day is a new life” on her windshield to steady herself on lonely rural routes, and broadcaster Lowell Thomas keeping Psalm 118 visible in his studio to anchor attention in the present. Additional cues include John Ruskin’s paperweight carved “TODAY” and Osler’s desk copy of Kalidasa’s “Salutation to the Dawn,” all set to keep focus within a single twenty-four-hour frame. Carnegie also notes how half the hospital beds are taken by people crushed by “accumulated yesterdays and fearful tomorrows,” linking worry to breakdowns that present focus can help avert. The section ends by turning the metaphor into a routine: shut the past, shut the future, and work the day until bedtime. This approach reduces rumination and preserves cognitive bandwidth, making action possible where anxiety would otherwise paralyze. Live in 'day-tight compartments'.

🪄 2 – A Magic Formula for Solving Worry Situations. Over lunch at the Engineers’ Club in New York, Willis H. Carrier—then leading Carrier Corporation in Syracuse—recounted a failure from his Buffalo Forge days: a gas-cleaning system he installed at Pittsburgh Plate Glass in Crystal City, Missouri, could not meet guarantees. Facing a potential $20,000 loss and sleepless nights, he devised three steps: define the worst that could happen, accept it mentally, then improve on it. Acceptance calmed him enough to run tests, propose $5,000 of additional equipment, and turn the project from a looming loss into a $15,000 gain. Further examples include a New York oil dealer who stopped a blackmail spiral by accepting the worst and thinking clearly, and Earl P. Haney of Broken Bow, Nebraska, who bought a casket during an ulcer crisis, traveled, regained his health, and later sold the casket back. Acceptance collapses vague catastrophizing into a bounded scenario, reduces arousal, and frees attention for problem-solving. Once fear is metabolized, the mind can concentrate on the next practical move. Acceptance of what has happened is the first step in overcoming the consequences of any misfortune.

⚠️ 3 – What Worry May Do to You. A New York City smallpox scare sets the scene: thousands queued at hospitals, firehouses, and precincts; more than 2,000 medical staff worked day and night, even though only eight cases—and two deaths—were recorded in a city of nearly eight million. No one rings our doorbells to warn about worry, which quietly does far more damage. A Santa Fe Railway physician, Dr. O. F. Gober, reports that many patients could recover if they shed fear, describing how worry twists stomach nerves and alters gastric juices—insights echoed by Dr. W. C. Alvarez at the Mayo Clinic. A Mayo study of 15,000 stomach-disorder patients found four out of five had no organic cause; emotional conflicts dominated. Another Mayo researcher, Dr. Harold C. Habein, studied 176 business executives (average age 44.3) and found over a third showed ailments of high-tension living: heart disease, ulcers, or high blood pressure. The cumulative evidence is clinical and sobering: worry erodes concentration and physiology, trading years of life for temporary performance. Treating facts squarely and acting within today’s limits breaks this spiral. Business men who do not know how to fight worry die young.

II – Basic Techniques in Analyzing Worry

🔍 4 – How to Analyze and Solve Worry Problems. Herbert E. Hawkes, longtime dean of Columbia College, told students that “confusion is the chief cause of worry,” and he refused to decide anything before he had the facts—even if a meeting loomed at three o’clock next Tuesday. That stance translates into a sequence: get the facts, analyze them on paper, then decide and act. To keep emotions from skewing judgment, pretend you are gathering evidence for someone else and, like a lawyer, build the case against your own position before you choose. The method anchors with Galen Litchfield’s 1942 crisis in Shanghai, where a Japanese “army liquidator” threatened him with the Bridge House prison over a disputed block of securities. Litchfield went to his room at the Shanghai YMCA, typed out two questions—what he was worrying about and what he could do—and then listed four concrete options with consequences. He picked the fourth—go to the office as usual on Monday—kept his composure when the admiral glared, and six weeks later the danger passed when the officer returned to Tokyo. He later summed up that most of his worry evaporated once he made a clear decision and started executing it. Clarity shrinks fear; writing and deciding shift attention from ruminating to action.

📊 5 – How to Eliminate Fifty Per Cent of Your Business Worries. Leon Shimkin at Simon & Schuster in Rockefeller Center spent years in circular, tense meetings until he replaced free-form talk with a one-page memo answering four questions: what the problem is, its cause, all possible solutions, and the solution the presenter recommends. Once he enforced the rule, three-quarters of the time he used to spend in conferences disappeared, and even necessary meetings took about a third as long because the work had been done in writing. He found that in most cases the right answer “popped out” before anyone needed to meet at all, and the firm moved from worry to execution. Then, insurance salesman Frank Bettger in Philadelphia audited a year of calls and discovered that 70% of his sales closed on the first interview, 23% on the second, and only 7% beyond that. He cut follow-ups after the second visit, reallocated time to new prospects, and nearly doubled the cash value of each call. Structure forces reality into view and reduces ambiguity; pushing analysis and choice into a brief, concrete template conserves energy for action.

III – How to Break the Worry Habit Before it Breaks You

🧠 6 – How to Crowd Worry Out of Your Mind. In an adult-education class in New York, a student Carnegie calls Marion J. Douglas described losing a five-year-old daughter and, ten months later, a second infant who died five days after birth. Sleepless and unable to eat, he tried pills and travel without relief until his four-year-old son asked him to build a toy boat; three hours of focused work gave him his first peace in months. Douglas then walked his house, listed repairs room by room—bookcases, stair steps, storm windows, leaky taps—and over two weeks tallied 242 jobs, which he set about completing. He filled his calendar with two nights of classes in New York, civic work, and school-board duties, leaving “no time for worry.” Other examples echo this pattern: Winston Churchill working eighteen-hour days, Charles Kettering immersed in early auto experiments, and soldiers treated with “occupational therapy” so every waking minute was busy. Single-task absorption crowds out rumination. I must lose myself in action, lest I wither in despair.

🪲 7 – Don't Let the Beetles Get You Down. Robert Moore of 14 Highland Avenue, Maplewood, New Jersey, recalls March 1945, 276 feet down off Indochina aboard the submarine Baya (SS-318). After a plane spotted them, a Japanese minelayer hunted the boat for fifteen hours; with the fans off, the air climbed past 100 degrees, yet Moore shivered with fear as depth charges burst within fifty feet—close, but not the seventeen feet that would tear open the hull. The crew survived the major danger, and Moore later noticed how the small annoyances on land—petty slights and delays—bothered him more than the crisis had. Additional vignettes reinforce the point: Kipling’s Vermont feud over a load of hay that drove him from his American home; Dr. Harry Emerson Fosdick’s Long’s Peak tree, felled not by lightning but by beetles; and Wyoming highway chief Charles Seifred, who turned a mosquito swarm into an aspen whistle while he waited at a locked gate in Grand Teton. Reframing irritants and choosing a playful or constructive response preserves attention for work that matters. Let's not allow ourselves to be upset by small things we should despise and forget.

⚖️ 8 – A Law That Will Outlaw Many of Your Worries. On a Missouri farm, a boy helping his mother pit cherries burst into tears because he feared being buried alive; thunderstorms, hellfire, and even an older boy who threatened to cut off his “big ears” crowded his mind. Years later he learned that ninety-nine percent of such fears never happen; the National Safety Council puts the annual chance of being killed by lightning at roughly one in 350,000, while premature burial is rarer still. This generalizes into the law of averages: insurers such as Lloyd’s of London profit by betting—via policies—that feared disasters seldom occur, and peacetime mortality between ages fifty and fifty-five matches the per-thousand fatalities at Gettysburg. At Num-Ti-Gah Lodge on Bow Lake in the Canadian Rockies, Mrs. Herbert H. Salinger of San Francisco described eleven anxious years transformed when her lawyer husband taught her to check base rates: a sliding car on a dirt road to Carlsbad Caverns, a tent rattling in a mountain storm, even a California polio scare all yielded to calm assessment and prudent precautions. Calibrating risk with real frequencies drains the drama from vague dreads. By the law of averages, it won't happen.

🤝 9 – Cooperate with the Inevitable. In northwest Missouri, a boy jumped from the attic of an abandoned log house and a ring on his left forefinger snagged a nailhead, tearing the finger off; after it healed, he stopped bothering about what could not be undone and got on with his life. The lens widens with executives who practice the same stance—J. C. Penney saying he would not worry if he lost every cent, Henry Ford letting events “handle themselves,” and K. T. Keller at Chrysler acting when he can and forgetting the rest—plus Sarah Bernhardt, who faced a leg amputation in Paris and replied, “If it has to be, it has to be.” The lesson appears in many guises: Epictetus’s counsel in Rome, a Mother Goose rhyme remembered by Columbia’s Dean Hawkes, and evergreen forests in Canada that survive ice by bending. Acceptance eases inner conflict and frees energy for adaptation. If it has to be, it has to be.

⛔ 10 – Put a "Stop-Loss" Order on Your Worries. At 17 East 42nd Street in New York, investment counselor Charles Roberts recounts how master speculator Burton S. Castles taught him to cap losses by placing a stop-loss order five points below the purchase price. Roberts adopted the rule and then exported it beyond Wall Street: if a friend was more than ten minutes late for lunch, he left; if resentment rose, he limited how long he would feed it. Examples pile up of paying “too much for the whistle”: Gilbert and Sullivan severing their partnership over a carpet bill; a Missouri aunt nursing a slight for fifty years; Lincoln refusing to spend half his life in quarrels; and Franklin’s childhood whistle turned lifetime parable about false estimates. The practical end is a checklist: how much does this matter, where is the limit, and have I already paid more than it’s worth. I put a stop-loss order on every market commitment I make.

🪚 11 – Don't Try to Saw Sawdust. From a window, dinosaur tracks in a garden—shale slabs purchased from Yale’s Peabody Museum, certified by the curator as 180 million years old—illustrate how no one can go back to change them, just as no one can change events even 180 seconds past. An account of losing more than $300,000 launching adult-education branches shows how months of brooding taught nothing that a clear post-mortem couldn’t have taught faster. A Bronx hygiene teacher, Mr. Brandwine of George Washington High School, dramatized the lesson by smashing a milk bottle into a sink and ordering students to study the wreckage, then move on. Fred Fuller Shedd told graduates you cannot saw sawdust; Connie Mack said you cannot grind grain with water that has already gone down the creek; Jack Dempsey accepted his loss to Gene Tunney and redirected his energy into restaurants, hotels, and exhibitions. Analyze, bank the lesson, and refuse to re-live the scene. When you start worrying about things that are over and done with, you're merely trying to saw sawdust.

IV – Seven Ways to Cultivate A Mental Attitude That Will Bring You Peace and Happiness

🗣️ 12 – Eight Words That Can Transform Your Life. A radio program question frames the point—what is the biggest lesson learned?—and the answer is thinking itself. It cites Marcus Aurelius’s eight words and contrasts “concern” with “worry” using a New York street-crossing vignette: concern sizes up facts and acts; worry circles without end. Norman Vincent Peale’s maxim about thought shaping character appears alongside an example from broadcaster Lowell Thomas, whose “With Allenby in Palestine and Lawrence in Arabia” shows triumphed so strongly in London that the opera season was postponed six weeks. The through line is practical: choose thoughts as you choose tasks, then live them out in tone and action. Our life is what our thoughts make it.

💸 13 – The High Cost of Getting Even. At Yellowstone Park, tourists watch a grizzly bear stride into the lights to eat hotel garbage while a ranger, Major Martindale, explains that only one creature dines unmolested beside it: a skunk. The moral is plain—some fights cost too much. From trapping skunks in Missouri to “two-legged skunks” on New York sidewalks, the chapter shows how resentment hijacks sleep, appetite, blood pressure, and work. A Milwaukee Police Department bulletin warns that trying to get even hurts the avenger most; medical notes add that chronic resentment tracks with hypertension. Scripture’s “forgive seventy times seven” is reframed as preventive medicine, and a Spokane case shows a café owner dropping dead in a rage over a saucer of coffee. General Eisenhower’s rule helps: don’t spend time thinking about people you dislike. Let's do as General Eisenhower does: let's never waste a minute thinking about people we don't like.

💌 14 – If You Do This, You Will Never Worry About Ingratitude. A Texas businessman fumes eleven months after giving $10,000 in Christmas bonuses—about $300 each to thirty-four employees—and receiving no thanks. The lens widens: Samuel Leibowitz saved seventy-eight men from the electric chair and got no letters; a relative scorned Andrew Carnegie’s bequest because $365 million went to charity while he received “only” a million; even in the Gospel story of ten lepers, only one returns. Samuel Johnson’s line that gratitude requires cultivation becomes policy, not a complaint, and the guidance turns domestic: model appreciation at home so children absorb it. The practical fix is to stop keeping score, give for the joy of giving, and train gratitude where you can influence it. Let's not expect gratitude.

💎 15 – Would You Take a Million Dollars for What You Have?. On a 1934 walk down West Dougherty Street in Webb City, Missouri, Harold Abbott—then broke, debts piled up, bound for the Merchants and Miners Bank—meets a man with no legs rolling along on a wooden platform with roller-skate wheels and blocks in his hands. The stranger greets him cheerfully; Abbott feels suddenly rich to have two legs, asks the bank for $200 instead of $100, and gets both the loan and a job in Kansas City. He pastes a reminder on his bathroom mirror and keeps it there; elsewhere, Eddie Rickenbacker reduces hardship to first principles after twenty-one days adrift in the Pacific: if you have water and food, don’t complain. The chapter ends by pricing human assets: eyes, legs, hearing, family—wealth beyond the Rockefellers if you refuse to sell them. Would you sell both your eyes for a billion dollars?

🪞 16 – Find Yourself and Be Yourself: Remember There Is No One Else on Earth Like You. A letter from Mrs. Edith Allred of Mount Airy, North Carolina, recounts shyness and isolation, then an overnight turn after a chance remark—“insist on their being themselves.” She studied her own temperament, learned what colors and styles suited her, joined a small club despite stage fright, and slowly built confidence until she felt happier than she had imagined possible. Ministers and educators—James Gordon Gilkey and Angelo Patri—warn that trying to be someone else breeds neurosis. Hollywood director Sam Wood tells aspiring actors to stop becoming “second-rate” copies, and employment director Paul Boynton says the biggest interview mistake is faking answers. Cabaret singer Cass Daley stopped hiding her buck teeth, leaned into them, and became a radio and film headliner; the point is not cosmetics but authenticity. William James adds: most people use only a fraction of their abilities. Identify strengths, drop imitation, and act in ways that fit your character. No matter what happens, always be yourself!

🍋 17 – If You Have a Lemon, Make a Lemonade. At the University of Chicago, Chancellor Julius Rosenwald of Sears, Roebuck credits the rule he lives by: “When you have a lemon, make lemonade.” Thelma Thompson of 100 Morningside Drive, New York City, moved near her husband’s wartime post in the Mojave Desert; in 125-degree heat and blowing sand she wanted to quit until two lines—“Two men looked out from prison bars…”—pushed her to explore cactus, prairie dogs, and sunsets, befriend local artisans, and write a novel, Bright Ramparts. Far south, a Florida farmer monetized a rattlesnake-infested, barren plot by canning meat, selling skins, and shipping venom, enough to rechristen the local post office “Rattlesnake, Florida.” In Atlanta, Ben Fortson lost both legs in a 1929 car accident and eventually found new life in reading and courtesy after rage got him nowhere. Accept facts, search for leverage, and convert liabilities into assets. When fate hands us a lemon, let's try to make a lemonade.

🌤️ 18 – How to Cure Depression in Fourteen Days. To gather proof, a $200 “How I Conquered Worry” contest drew judges Eddie Rickenbacker (Eastern Air Lines), Dr. Stewart W. McClelland (Lincoln Memorial University), and H. V. Kaltenborn (radio news), who split the prize between two entries. One winner, C. R. Burton of Whizzer Motor Sales of Missouri, Inc., 1067 Commercial Street, Springfield, Missouri, described orphaned boyhood, ridicule at school, and the turnaround that began when Mrs. Loftin told him to get interested in classmates and see how much he could do for them; soon he led the class and helped neighbors milk cows, cut wood, and tend stock. Dr. Frank Loope of Seattle, arthritic and bed-ridden for twenty-three years, adopted “Ich dien” (“I serve”), organized a Shut-in Society, and averaged 1,400 letters a year to cheer other invalids. Psychiatrist Alfred Adler gives the chapter its prescription in What Life Should Mean to You: stop circling the self and find one way each day to please someone else. Mrs. William T. Moon of 521 Fifth Avenue, New York, tested that on Christmas Eve, leaving her empty apartment, comforting two church-wandering orphans, and discovering her spirits lift in a single day. Prosocial action breaks self-absorption; mood follows behavior. You can be cured in fourteen days if you follow this prescription.

V – The Perfect Way to Conquer Worry

👪 19 – How My Mother and Father Conquered Worry. On a Missouri farm along the 102 River, floods ruined crops six years out of seven, hog cholera forced burnings, and even a bumper corn year collapsed when Chicago cattle prices fell; after a decade, the family was in debt with the bank in Maryville threatening foreclosure. At forty-seven, the father’s health cracked; medicine could not restore appetite, and he hovered near suicide, once stopping on a bridge over the 102 to decide whether to jump. The household routine, however, never missed: nightly Bible reading—often “In my Father’s house are many mansions”—and prayer on their knees in the farmhouse. The mother’s steady faith carried the family until the crisis passed; the father lived forty-two more years and died at eighty-nine in 1941. Later, study and doubt gave way to practical serenity: faith and habit—prayer, ritual, song—absorbed dread and restored poise. Of course, the sovereign cure for worry is religious faith.

VI – How to Keep From Worrying about Criticism

🐕 20 – Remember That No One Ever Kicks a Dead Dog. In 1929, at the University of Chicago, thirty-year-old Robert Maynard Hutchins was inaugurated as president of what was then called the nation’s fourth-richest university; when a friend noted a harsh editorial, his father shrugged, “no one ever kicks a dead dog.” Examples make the line concrete: a fourteen-year-old Prince of Wales bullied at Dartmouth (the British naval college), cadets later admitting they wanted to brag they had “kicked the King.” A Yale president once warned that electing Thomas Jefferson would debauch the nation; crowds even hissed George Washington and a cartoon imagined him at a guillotine. Explorer Robert E. Peary reached the North Pole on 6 April 1909, lost eight toes to frostbite, and still drew jealous attacks from Navy superiors until President William McKinley intervened. After Ulysses S. Grant’s first great Civil War victory, he was arrested within six weeks—envy answering achievement. Prominence attracts potshots; treat it as side-effect, not verdict.

🛡️ 21 – Do This—And Criticism Can't Hurt You. Marine Corps legend Smedley Butler, nicknamed “Gimlet-Eye,” told how thirty years under fire had thickened his skin; eventually, curses rolled off and he no longer turned to see who was talking. A New York Sun lampoon of Carnegie’s own night class once sent him fuming—until he realized most buyers never saw the article, most readers soon forgot it, and nearly everyone thinks mainly about themselves from breakfast to midnight. Eleanor Roosevelt recounted advice from Theodore Roosevelt’s sister: act by conscience because you will be criticized either way; a Dresden-china existence is the only sure way to avoid attack. At 40 Wall Street, Matthew C. Brush learned to stop patching every complaint and instead to do his best and “put up the umbrella,” letting the rain of comment run off. Weigh fair critique; ignore the rest.

🤦 22 – Fool Things I Have Done. A file labeled “FTD”—“Fool Things I Have Done”—holds written records of blunders. From that starting point it turns to H. P. Howell, who died on 31 July 1944 after a career that ran from a country-store clerk to chairman of the Commercial National Bank & Trust Co., 56 Wall Street; each Saturday night he opened his engagement book and audited the week—what went wrong, what went right, and how to improve. Benjamin Franklin’s nightly scorecard of thirteen faults shows the same discipline: isolate a weakness, contest it, and log progress. In the marketplace, Charles Luckman at Pepsodent insisted on reading critical mail over praise, and Ford polled workers to invite complaints. Be your own sternest critic before rivals do it for you; treat criticism as data and build weekly routines.

VII – Six Ways to Prevent Fatigue and Worry and Keep Your Energy and Spirits High

⏰ 23 – How to Add One Hour a Day to Your Waking Life. At the University of Chicago’s Laboratory for Clinical Physiology, Edmund Jacobson showed that “any nervous or emotional state” disappears in the presence of complete relaxation; the chapter then points to the U.S. Army tests proving that even trained troops march farther if they throw down their packs and rest ten minutes out of every hour. Walter B. Cannon of Harvard explains why this rhythm works. Winston Churchill institutionalized the same idea in wartime London—working in bed until late morning, then taking an hour’s nap after lunch and another before dinner; John D. Rockefeller scheduled a daily half-hour office nap so inviolate that even presidential calls waited. Frederick Winslow Taylor’s Bethlehem Steel experiment makes it quantitative: “Mr. Schmidt” lifted 47 tons of pig iron a day—nearly four times his peers—by working 26 minutes each hour and resting 34. Prevent fatigue instead of curing it; build brief rests and, when possible, a late-day nap.

😴 24 – What Makes You Tired—and What You Can Do About It. A laboratory finding leads: blood flowing through an active brain shows no “fatigue toxins,” so the organ can work as well after eight or even twelve hours as at the start. J. A. Hadfield calls most fatigue mental; A. A. Brill says that for healthy desk workers it is entirely emotional. Metropolitan Life’s guidance agrees—worry and tension do the damage, and a tense muscle is a working muscle. William James’s “Gospel of Relaxation” reframes this as habit: Americans scowl, hunch, and strain at tasks that require none of that. Jacobson’s drills begin with the eyes—responsible for roughly a quarter of nervous energy—coaching them to “let go,” then releasing face, jaw, neck, and shoulders. Practical checklists turn the idea into routine: comfortable positions, four or five relaxation scans a day, and an end-of-day fatigue audit. Relaxing while we work restores energy and steadies mood. Relax! Relax! Relax! Learn to relax while you are doing your work!

🧖 25 – How to Avoid Fatigue—and Keep Looking Young!. In 1930, Dr. Joseph H. Pratt—an Osler pupil—founded a weekly “Class in Applied Psychology” at the Boston Dispensary after finding many outpatients with crippling symptoms but no organic disease. Eighteen years on, thousands had improved; one longtime attendee recalled spells of blindness and a “floating kidney” diagnosis, then years of steady health after learning to calm worry. The clinic pairs medical exams with practical coaching: talk problems out for catharsis (Dr. Rose Hilferding), keep an “inspirational” notebook, make a next-day schedule to beat hurry, and deliberately notice a spouse’s virtues. Home regimens—lying flat for support, tense-and-release drills, rhythmic breathing—loosen the mental knots that fatigue tightens. Lie flat on the floor whenever you feel tired.

🧰 26 – Four Good Working Habits That Will Help Prevent Fatigue and Worry. Roland L. Williams, president of the Chicago & North Western Railway, opens bluntly: a cluttered desk breeds confusion; clear everything except the single problem at hand. Then a clinic-floor demonstration from Dr. W. S. Sadler: decide issues immediately, keep drawers for supplies only, and dictate answers before a letter leaves your hand. Habit two—do first things first—draws on Henry L. Doherty and Charles Luckman; Franklin Bettger set a nightly target and rolled misses forward. Habit three is to decide on the spot when the facts are in; H. P. Howell persuaded the U.S. Steel board to finish one issue at a time. Habit four—organize, deputize, supervise—warns that executives who refuse to delegate often “pop off” in their fifties from tension. Together these habits strip away ambiguity, shorten drift, and replace rumination with throughput. My rule is never to lay down a letter until I have answered it.

🎯 27 – How to Banish the Boredom That Produces Fatigue, Worry, and Resentment. The case of Alice, a stenographer, shows the trap: after a day of dull work she staggers home “exhausted,” yet a last-minute call to a dance lifts her until three in the morning without a trace of fatigue. Archives of Psychology experiments by Joseph E. Barmack explain why—boredom lowers oxygen use and blood pressure, and subjects report headaches and irritability that reverse the instant interest returns. Bankers and guides in the Canadian Rockies echo the pattern: absorption sustains energy. The “as if” rule runs through the chapter, bolstered by William James: behave as if you were eager and you become more eager. Reframing tasks, adding a contest, or supplying meaning converts fatigue signals into design prompts. Act “as if” you were interested in your job, and that bit of acting will tend to make your interest real.

🌙 28 – How to Keep from Worrying About Insomnia. Samuel Untermyer chose to use wakeful hours rather than fight them—reading half the night, dictating at five a.m., earning $75,000 a year at twenty-one and a $1,000,000 fee in 1931, and living to eighty-one. Evidence converges: Dr. Nathaniel Kleitman at the University of Chicago never knew anyone to die of insomnia; Herbert Spencer complained he “hadn’t slept a wink” while a roommate lay awake listening to him snore; and a World War I case describes a soldier who never slept after a frontal-lobe wound yet worked and stayed healthy for years. Prayer, slow breathing, and physical fatigue help; the practical cure is to stop fearing wakefulness, rest quietly, and let habit reset. Remember that no one was ever killed by lack of sleep.

VIII – "How I Conquered Worry"

💥 29 – Six Major Troubles Hit Me All at Once. In the summer of 1943, C. I. Blackwood—proprietor of Blackwood–Davis Business College in Oklahoma City—watched six crises arrive at once and lay awake dreading dawn. War emptied classrooms; the city’s airport plan threatened his home; a dry well, bald tires, and college hopes for his daughter amplified pressure. He typed the worries, filed the sheet, and forgot it; eighteen months later he found the list and saw that none had happened. Writing fears down contained them; time returned scale and facts. Remember, today is the tomorrow you worried about yesterday.

📣 30 – I Can Turn Myself into a Shouting Optimist Within an Hour. Roger W. Babson of Babson Park, Wellesley Hills, Massachusetts, used a ritual for bad days: pull a random history volume and read an hour—Prescott or Suetonius—and present troubles shrink by comparison. Perspective, not pep, does the work; zooming out steadies judgment for the next useful move. Read history! Try to get the viewpoint of ten thousand years—and see how trivial your troubles are, in terms of eternity.

🧍‍♂️ 31 – How I Got Rid of an Inferiority Complex. Elmer Thomas, later a U.S. senator from Oklahoma, remembers being fifteen, six-foot-two, 118 pounds, and so thin classmates called him “hatch-face.” He trapped skunk and mink to fund tuition at Central Normal College in Danville, Indiana; after eight weeks he passed an exam, earned a third-grade teaching certificate, and took a $2-a-day job. A speech contest win multiplied his confidence and launched a path through DePauw, law, and politics. Small, public wins shift identity; action displaces rumination. I would have been a failure in life if I had let those worries and fears whip me.

🏝️ 32 – I Lived in the Garden of Allah. R. V. C. Bodley—after advice from T. E. Lawrence—lived seven years with Arab nomads in the Sahara. Under a three-day sirocco, hosts shrugged “Mektoub!” (“It is written”), slaughtered doomed lambs to save ewes, and moved flocks without complaint. Acceptance first, then action: a posture that sidelines worry and frees energy for repair. And then get busy and pick up the pieces.

🧹 33 – Five Methods I Have Used to Banish Worry. Professor William Lyon Phelps of Yale found that absorption displaced pain—eye trouble vanished during a thirty-minute speech; lumbago disappeared while lecturing at sea. After a breakdown at fifty-nine, he buried himself in Carlyle’s biography and recovered. He prescribed vigorous play, deliberate relaxation, and time perspective—asking how he would view a “bad break” in two months and adopting that posture now. Focus, exertion, stillness, and perspective each interrupt the worry loop. I live every day as if it were the first day I had ever seen and the last I were going to see.

🧗 34 – I Stood Yesterday. I Can Stand Today. Dorothy Dix refuses self-pity: live one day at a time, stop borrowing trouble, lower expectations of people to preserve affection, and use humor to keep perspective when calamity invites hysteria. Competence grows by locking attention to today’s tasks. I have learned to live each day as it comes and not to borrow trouble by dreading the morrow.

🌅 35 – I Did Not Expect to Live to See the Dawn. J. C. Penney traces his lowest point to the years after 1929: blame and insomnia drove him to the Kellogg Sanatorium in Battle Creek. In the chapel he heard “God will take care of you” and felt the fear break. A trusted frame—faith, music, Scripture—reset appraisal and physiology. From that day to this, my life has been free from worry.

🥊 36 – I Go to the Gym to Punch the Bag or Take a Hike Outdoors. Colonel Eddie Eagan—Rhodes Scholar, athletic commissioner, and Olympic champion—uses sweat as cure: golf loops, squash, Adirondack skis. Big mental mountains shrink after the body is taxed; exertion interrupts rumination. I find the best antidote for worry is exercise.

🎓 37 – I Was "The Worrying Wreck from Virginia Tech". Jim Birdsall at Virginia Tech lived in anxious loops until a professor taught a three-step fix: identify the exact problem, find its cause, and act immediately. Working from facts instead of fear, sleep returned and grades recovered. Worrying is just a vicious habit you have learned.

📝 38 – I Have Lived by This Sentence. Dr. Joseph R. Sizoo—then president of New Brunswick Theological Seminary—found a line that became a daily anchor: “He that sent me is with me—the Father hath not left me alone.” A short, chosen sentence can steady attention when events swirl. It is the Golden Text of my life.

📈 39 – I Hit Bottom and Survived. Ted Ericksen’s brutal Alaska salmon season—twenty hours out of twenty-four on a 32-foot boat—reset his hardship scale. After that, almost nothing compared, and courage returned. One severe test can compress future worries to size. It is good to know that we have hit bottom and survived.

🙈 40 – I Used to Be One of the World's Biggest Jackasses. Percy H. Whiting, of Dale Carnegie & Company, lampooned his hypochondria until panic lost its power. Comic deflation punctures anxious thought and returns attention to ordinary living. Try 'just laughing' at some of your sillier worries, and see if you can't laugh them out of existence.

🔗 41 – I Have Always Tried to Keep My Line of Supplies Open. Gene Autry kept integrity in money matters and a fallback (his telegrapher’s key) while moving from railroad work to radio, records, and film. Redundancy shrinks worry by replacing all-or-nothing bets with reversible moves. I have protected my line of supplies.

🪔 42 – I Heard a Voice in India. E. Stanley Jones collapsed from heat and strain until surrender and a new rhythm restored energy. He later lectured globally without fatigue. Surrender reframed symptoms; routine held. If you will turn that over to Me and not worry about it, I will take care of it.

🚪 43 – When the Sheriff Came in My Front Door. Novelist Homer Croy lost his Forest Hills home in 1933; acceptance stopped the backward pull, and steady work rebuilt his life. Forward motion crowds out rumination. There’s no place to go now but up.

⚔️ 44 – The Toughest Opponent I Ever Fought Was Worry. Jack Dempsey used self-talk, prayer, and rehearsal to override catastrophic imagery in training camps. Prepared phrases and rituals occupy the mind and restore composure. Old Man Worry was an almost tougher opponent than the heavyweight boxers I fought.

🙏 45 – I Prayed to God to Keep Me Out of an Orphans' Home. Kathleen Halter cared for an injured brother in Warrenton, setting alarms for injections, working twelve-hour days, and repeating a private rule: be grateful for anything not worse. Busyness plus gratitude left little room for resentment. Dear God, please let my mummy live until I am old enough not to go to the orphans' home.

🌪️ 46 – My Stomach Was Twisting Like a Kansas Whirlwind. Cameron Shipp’s Warner Bros. post brought ulcer-like symptoms; tests showed no ulcers. He tossed the pills, napped before dinner, used humor and perspective, and returned to normal. Treat worry, not work, as the problem. All you have to do is quit worrying.

🍽️ 47 – I Learned to Stop Worrying by Watching My Wife Wash Dishes. Reverend William Wood’s clinic tests found strain, not cancer. Mondays off, clearing old sermon notes, and “one day’s dishes at a time” restored steadiness. Live in day-tight compartments; set limits; relax while working. I was trying to wash today's dishes, yesterday's dishes and dishes that weren't even dirty yet.

🧩 48 – I Found the Answer. Del Hughes left the ward nicknamed the “Country Club” busy: bridge at noon, oil painting in the afternoon, carving and psychology readings. Absorption replaced brooding; lungs healed. Structured, absorbing tasks crowd out rumination. Keep active, keep busy!

⌛ 49 – Time Solves a Lot of Things!. Louis T. Montant Jr. filed worries in a desk drawer for two weeks; many deflated on their own. Strategic delay externalizes fear and lets facts change. Time may also solve what you are worrying about today.

🚫 50 – I Was Warned Not to Try to Speak or to Move Even a Finger. Joseph L. Ryan collapsed after court testimony. Radical acceptance—“Thy will be done”—loosened panic; a slower rebuild followed and cardiograms improved. Accept the worst; then calmly work to better it. My heart was so weak I was warned not to try to speak or to move even a finger.

🧽 51 – I Am a Great Dismisser. Ordway Tead closes mental files when he closes his desk; unfinished issues remain at the office. Hard boundaries and single-task focus reduce rumination and keep problems solvable. Second: I am a great dismisser.

❤️‍🩹 52 – If I Had Not Stopped Worrying, I Would Have Been in My Grave Long Ago. Connie Mack chose praise over fault-finding, sleep and naps over stewing, and the next game over the last loss. Aim recovery at tomorrow’s contest; let effort, not anxiety, do the compounding. I stopped worrying twenty-five years ago…

🩺 53 – I Got Rid of Stomach Ulcers and Worry by Changing My Job and My Mental Attitude. Arden W. Sharpe traced illness to factory work he disliked and a pessimistic peer group. Returning to selling and curating company changed mood and health. Environment and fit shape well-being.

🚦 54 – I Now Look for the Green Light. Joseph M. Cotter saw a semaphore flip to green as a streamliner departed Chicago. Engineers leave with only the next signal visible; he adopted the same logic—act on the next clear cue, not the entire route. By praying each morning, I get my green light for that day.

⏳ 55 – How John D. Rockefeller Lived on Borrowed Time for Forty-five Years. At fifty-three, John D. Rockefeller, Sr., looked like a “mummy” from tension and worry—alopecia, digestive trouble, acidulated milk for meals. Later he shifted to routine, outdoors, and absorbing philanthropy; stress abated and he lived to ninety-eight. Purpose reframed ego threat; steadier habits lowered arousal. He was “dying” at fifty-three—but he lived to ninety-eight!

😵‍💫 56 – I Was Committing Slow Suicide Because I Didn't Know How to Relax. Paul Sampson’s “fast life” ended when a nerve specialist prescribed deliberate relaxation throughout the day—at desk, meals, wheel, and bedtime. Repeated down-regulation turned worry from reflex into skill gap. He told me that I was committing slow suicide because I didn’t know how to relax.

✨ 57 – A Real Miracle Happened to Me.. Mrs. John Burger’s postwar months—husband in another city, children scattered, sleepless nights—broke when action returned: rejoining her husband, gathering the children, and rebuilding routines. Purposeful busyness restored control. And it was then that the real miracle happened.

🥣 59 – I Was So Worried I Didn't Eat a Bite of Solid Food for Eighteen Days.. Kathryne Holcombe Farmer read this book, adopted its steps—accept the worst, then improve; use the Serenity Prayer; push small tasks into the present—and within weeks appetite and sleep returned. I can sleep nine hours a night now.

Background & reception

🖋️ Author & writing. Dale Carnegie (1888–1955) was a Missouri-born lecturer and early pioneer of modern self-improvement, best known for How to Win Friends and Influence People (1936). Published in 1948, How to Stop Worrying and Start Living draws on Carnegie’s teaching and assembles practical routines and case histories to turn anxiety management into usable habits. The prose favors plain instructions, checklists, and examples—analyzing worries, adopting “day-tight compartments,” and cooperating with the inevitable. A refreshed Gallery Books trade paperback (320 pp) appeared on 5 October 2004; the publisher notes this was the first update in forty years. Core bibliographic facts are concordant across OCLC (U.S. first edition: Simon & Schuster, New York, 1948; xv, 306 pp) and the National Library of Australia (World’s Work, London/Melbourne, 1948; x, 325 p.).

📈 Commercial reception. The book reached number one on the New York Times nonfiction list on 1 August 1948 and again on 19 September 1948 (as compiled from NYT lists). In its year-end survey, Time reported that Joshua Loth Liebman’s Peace of Mind was supplanted late that summer by Carnegie’s “more practical guide,” indicating strong mainstream demand. Simon & Schuster continues to list the title across formats and claims more than six million readers.

👍 Praise. Time characterized the title as a “more practical guide” to equanimity during its 1948 run, a succinct endorsement of its utility. Reviewing Steven Watts’s biography of Carnegie, The Washington Post praised Carnegie’s knack for writing “fast-paced” books that keep readers engaged—an observation often applied to this worry manual. Encyclopaedia Britannica summarizes the book as a collection of “commonsense” techniques to prevent stress, underscoring its pragmatic voice.

👎 Criticism. A 5 June 1948 New Yorker “Comment” column lampooned the prescriptions, joking that they heightened anxiety rather than curing it. Later critiques have questioned whether Carnegie’s formulas can shade into manipulative boosterism; The Washington Post noted that the “charge of cynicism” lingered even after this “less-scheming” bestseller. The Guardian ties mid-century “compulsory cheerfulness” at work to advice popularized by Carnegie.

🌍 Impact & adoption. Dale Carnegie Training continues to adapt the book’s principles in contemporary programs, including guidance on “day-tight compartments” and the “four working habits” for preventing fatigue. The organization reports broad participation in courses built on Carnegie’s methods, reflecting sustained adoption beyond publishing. Ongoing publisher availability across print, e-book, and audio further supports continuing use by new audiences.

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