The Tribune

By Father Sebastian Campbell

“Those who do not know how to fight worry, die young.”

– Dr Alexis Carrel

Leon Shimkins, a guiding force at Simon & Schuster publishers, became a leading American businessman when he advanced a strategy, gleaned from popular lecturer Dale Carnegie, to declare war against worry.

In his own words: “For 15 years I spent almost half of every business say holding conferences, discussing problems. We would get tense, twist in our chairs, walk the floor, argue and go around in circles. When night came, I would be fully exhausted.”

Many of us can identify with this testimony, especially in these stressful economic times. Consequently, many of us in business or leadership of any kind are inefficient, unhealthy, emotionally unstable and most unhappy.

How many Bahamians are on tranquillisers? A study a few years ago declared the Bahamas was the fifth happiest country in the world. I don’t believe that.

Shimkins’ strategy in attacking worry is adaptable. He stopped the procedure of anyone speaking or arguing without preparation of what they had to say.

Instead, he said that every worker who wished to present a problem had first to answer four questions:

• What is the problem?

• What is the cause of the problem?

• What are all possible solutions to the problems?

• What solution do you suggest?

How often we waste hours worrying about a situation and beating around the bush while blowing hot air and getting nowhere. Sounds Bahamian to me!

This country could be far more productive if we became more intentional and strategised our attack on useless worry.

Shimkins discovered that his strategy worked. In order to answer those four questions his employees had to get all the facts and think things through. And after they had done that, they found in many cases they didn’t have a problem or that the solution was obvious. So why worry?

A family lost their five-year-old daughter. They thought they could not endure the pain. Ten months later they had a baby girl – a fitting replacement, so they thought. But in less than a year she, too, died.

Life for that family was now in shambles. The father had lost all hope.

One day his son of six asked: “Dad, build ma a boat.” The father was determined to chase the son away. Not only was he not willing to build a boat, he was in no shape to do anything but “weep as one without hope”. Worry was the order of the day for that dad.

Finally, the father had to concede to the persistent pleading of his unrelenting son. It took hours to build the model boat. And it was then that the father realised that those hours spent building the boat were the first hours of mental relaxation and peace he’d had in months.

This proved that it is difficult to worry while you are busy doing something that requires planning and thinking. So why worry when you can keep busy?

An idle mind is the devil’s workshop for emotional destruction. So many of our senior citizens are ever so idle, all day long. In far too many nursing homes there is no programme to absorb the clients in meaningful, creative activities.

Summer time, or any school-break, is an ideal time to have senior citizens in workshops with our children. Many of our senior citizens are bored. They invest many hours in worries about indiscretions in their younger lives.

How many of us worry about problems that haven’t happened and may not occur? Our idle minds are destroying us.

It begins in the mental and soon captures us in the physical and holds us captive sometimes even unto death.

“No time for worry!” That is what the late British Prime Minister Winston Churchill said when he was working 18 hours a day at the height of World War II. “I’m too busy,” he said. “I have no time for worry.”

One of the most fundamental laws ever revealed in psychology is: It is utterly impossible for any human mind – no matter how brilliant – to think of more than one thing at any given time. Close your eyes and at the same time think of your job and what you plan to do for your children.

Tried it? What are the results? You probably found out that you could focus on either thought in turn, but never on both simultaneously. During the Second World War, army therapists were challenged to remedy emotionally-destroyed soldiers who came home so shaken by their experience that they were called “psychoneurotic”. The doctors’ prescription was “keep ‘em busy as a cure.”

We must give ourselves no time to brood over terrible experiences. “Occupational therapy” is the new term used by psychiatry when work is prescribed as though it were medicine. But it is not new. The old Greek physicians were advocating it 500 years before Christ was born!

Keeping busy was described as an anaesthetic for sick nerves. Nature fills idle minds with worry, fear, jealousy, hate and envy. These are violent emotions that will drive out of our minds all peaceful, happy thoughts and emotions.

A professor of education, James L. Marsell, put it like this: “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…the remedy for worry is to get completely occupied doing something constructive.”

And playwright, critic, political activist, the late George Bernard Shaw, said: “The secret of being miserable is to have the leisure to bother about whether you are happy or not.”

To break the worry habit, we apply the simple rule: keep busy. The worried person must lose himself in action lest he wither in despair.