The Tribune

By Rev Canon S

Sebastian Campbell

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

– Dr Alexis Carrel

LEON Shimkins became a leading American businessman when he advanced a strategy to declare war against worry. In his own words: “For 15 years I spent almost half of every business day 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. Consequently, many of us in business or leadership positions of any kind are inefficient, unhealthy, emotionally unstable and most unhappy.

How many Bahamians are on tranquillizers? I am not sure I can support statics that claim the Bahamas as the fifth happiest country in the world. Shimkins’ strategy in attacking worry is adaptable. He stopped the procedure that had anyone speaking (arguing) without preparation. Every employee who wishes to present a problem has to first prepare a memorandum answering four questions:

1. What is the problem?
   

2. What is the cause of the problem?

3. What are all possible solutions to the problems?

4. What solution do you suggest?
   

How often we waste hours worrying about a situation and beating around the bush while blowing hot air. Sounds Bahamian to me! This country can be far more productive if we became more intentional and strategise 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 have done that they find in many cases they don’t have a problem or that the solution is all too obvious. So why worry? A family lost their five-year-old daughter, the family thought they could not endure the pain. Then months later they had a baby girl, a fitting replacement, so they thought. 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 six-year-old son asked, “Dad, build me a boat.” He 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 to “weep as one without hope.” Worry was the order of the day. Finally the father had to concede to the persistent pleading of an unrelenting son. It took hours to build that model boat. It was then he realised that those hours spent building that boat were the first hours of mental relaxation and peace that he 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 is ideal to have senior citizens in workshop with our children. Many of our senior citizens are bored and invest many hours in worries about indiscretion in their younger lives. How many others of us worry about problems that haven’t even happened? 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 Winston Churchill said when he was working 18 hours a day at the height of the war. “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 instant 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 World War II army psychiatrists were challenged to remedy emotionally destroyed soldiers who came home so shaken by their experience that they were called “psychoneurotic”. The doctor’s 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 now used by psychiatry when work is prescribed as though it were a medicine. It is not new. The old Greek physicians were advocating it 500 years before Christ was born! Keeping busy was described as anaesthetics 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 plunder… the remedy for worry it to get completely occupied doing something constructive.”

“The secret of being miserable is to have the leisure to bother about whether you are happy or not,” said George Bernard Shaw. To break the worry habit, then, we apply the simple rule: keep busy. The worried person must lose himself in action, lest he withers in despair.