Sleep Story: How 2 Stop Worrying & Start Living: Ch 26,27,28

Enjoy this sleep story to help you drift off into a peaceful slumber while hearing motivational suggestions authored by Dale Carnegie. His book, "How To Stop Worrying and Start Living" is a classic written in 1948 and offers a plan to help us make the most of our lives, be productive and live in the present moment. Today, I am reading the last 3 chapters in Part 7: Ch 26, 27, and 28. These chapters focus on creating great work habits, banishing boredom, and how to not worry about insomnia.

Transcript

Hello,

My name is Hilary LaFawn,

And I'm so grateful that you have joined me today to explore Chapter 26,

27,

And 28 of How to Stop Worrying and Start Living by Dale Carnegie.

This is the conclusion of Part 7,

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

Enjoy this sleep story to help relax your mind and body for a great night's rest.

Before we begin,

Settle yourself in your bed and find your most comfortable position.

Take a few deep,

Long breaths and feel the gentle,

Soothing support of your pillows,

Sheets,

And blankets.

Let them cradle your body as you relax and settle in.

Let's begin Chapter 26,

Four Good Working Habits that Will Prevent Fatigue and Worry.

Good Working Habit Number One.

Clear your desk of all papers except those relating to the immediate problem at hand.

Rolland L.

Williams,

President of Chicago and Northwestern Railway,

Once said,

A person with his desk piled high with papers on various matters will find his work much easier and more accurate if he clears that desk of all but the immediate problems on hand.

I call this good housekeeping,

And it is the number one step towards efficiency.

If you visit the Library of Congress in Washington,

DC,

You will find five words painted on the ceiling,

Five words written by the poet Pope.

Order is heaven's first law.

Order ought to be the first law of business,

Too,

But is it?

No.

The average desk is cluttered up with papers that haven't been looked at for weeks.

In fact,

The publisher of a New Orleans newspaper once told me that his secretary cleared up one of his desks and found a typewriter that had been missing for two years.

The mere sight of a desk littered with unanswered mail and reports and memos is enough to breed confusion,

Tension,

And worries.

It is much worse than that.

The constant reminder of a million things to do and no time to do them can worry you not only into tension and fatigue,

But it can also worry you into high blood pressure,

Heart trouble,

And stomach ulcers.

Dr.

John H.

Stokes,

Professor,

Graduate school of medicine,

University of Pennsylvania,

Read a paper before the National Convention of the American Medical Association,

A paper entitled Functional Neurosis as Complications of Organic Disease.

In that paper,

Dr.

Stokes listed 11 conditions under the title,

What to look for in the patient's state of mind.

Here is the first item on the list.

The sense of must or obligation,

The unending stretch of things ahead that simply have to be done.

But how can such an elementary procedure as clearing your desk and making decisions help you avoid this high pressure,

This sense of must,

This sense of an unending stretch of things ahead that simply have to be done?

Dr.

William L.

Sadler,

The famous psychiatrist,

Told of a patient who,

By using this simple device,

Avoided a nervous breakdown.

The man was an executive in a big Chicago firm.

When he came to Dr.

Sadler's office,

He was tense,

Nervous,

Worried.

He knew he was heading for a tailspin.

But he couldn't quit work.

He had to have help.

While this man was telling me his story,

Dr.

Sadler says,

My telephone rang.

It was the hospital calling.

And instead of deferring the matter,

I took time right then to come up to a decision.

I always settle questions,

If possible,

Right on the spot.

I had no sooner hung up than the phone rang again.

Again an urgent matter,

Which I took time to discuss.

The third interruption came when a colleague of mine came to my office for advice on a patient who was critically ill.

When I had finished with him,

I turned to my caller and began to apologize for keeping him waiting.

But he had brightened up.

He had a completely different look on his face.

Don't apologize,

Doctor,

This man said to Sadler.

In the last ten minutes,

I think I've got a hunch as to what is wrong with me.

I'm going back to my office and I'm going to revise my working habits.

But before I go,

Do you mind if I take a look in your desk?

Dr.

Sadler opened up the drawers of his desk,

All empty,

Except for supplies.

Tell me,

Said the patient,

Where do you keep your unfinished business?

Finish,

Said Sadler.

And where do you keep your unanswered mail?

Answered,

Sadler told him.

My rule is to never lay down a letter until I have answered it.

I dictate the reply to my secretary at once.

Six weeks later,

The same executive invited Dr.

Sadler to come to his office.

He was changed,

And so was his desk.

He opened the desk drawers to show there was no unfinished business inside the desk.

Six weeks ago,

The executive said,

I had three different desks in two different offices and was snowed under by my work.

I was never finished.

After talking to you,

I came back here and cleared out a wagonload of reports and old papers.

Now I work at one desk,

Settle things as soon as they come up,

And don't have a mountain of unfinished business nagging at me and making me tense and worried.

But the most astonishing thing is I've recovered completely.

There is nothing wrong anymore with my health.

Charles Evans Hughes,

Former Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court said,

Men do not die from overwork.

They die from dissipation and worry.

Yes,

From dissipation of their energies and worry because they never seem to get their work done.

Good working habit number two,

Do things in the order of their importance.

Henry L.

Dougherty,

Founder of the Nationwide City Service Company,

Said that regardless of how much salary he paid,

There were two abilities he found it almost impossible to find.

Those two priceless abilities,

First,

The ability to think,

Second,

The ability to do things in the order of their importance.

Charles Luckman,

The lad who started from scratch and climbed in twelve years to president of the Pepsodent Company,

Got a salary of $100,

000 a year and made a million dollars besides.

That lad declared that he owed much of his success to developing the two abilities that Henry L.

Dougherty said he found almost impossible to find.

Charles Luckman said,

As far back as I can remember,

I have gotten up at five o'clock in the morning because I can think better then than any other time.

I can think better then and plan my day,

Plan to do things in the order of their importance.

Frank Becher,

One of America's most successful insurance salesmen,

Didn't wait until five o'clock in the morning to plan his day.

He planned the night before,

Set a goal for himself,

A goal to sell a certain amount of insurance that day.

If he failed,

That amount was added to the next day,

And so on.

I know from long experience that one is not always able to do things in the order of their importance,

But I also know that some kind of plan to do first thing is indefinitely better than extemporizing as you go along.

If Joe Bernard Shaw had not made it a rigid rule to do first things first,

He would have probably have failed as a writer and might have remained a bank cashier all his life.

His plan called for writing five pages a day.

That plan inspired him to go right on writing five pages a day for nine heartbreaking years — even though he made a total of only $30 in those nine years,

About a penny a day.

Even Robinson Crusoe wrote out a schedule of what he would do each hour of the day.

Good Working Habit Number Three.

When you face a problem,

Solve it,

Then and there,

If you have the facts necessary to make a decision.

Don't keep putting off decisions.

One of my former students,

The late H.

P.

Howell,

Told me that when he was a member of the Board of Directors of U.

S.

Steel,

The meetings of the Board were often long drawn-out affairs.

Many problems were discussed.

Few decisions were made.

The result?

Each member of the Board had to carry home bundles of reports to study.

Finally Mr.

Howell persuaded the Board of Directors to take up one problem at a time and come to a decision.

No procrastination,

No putting off.

The decision might be to ask for additional facts.

It might be to do something or do nothing,

But a decision was reached on each problem before passing on to the next.

Mr.

Howell told me that the results were striking and salutary.

The docket was cleared,

The calendar was clean,

No longer was it necessary for each member to carry home a bunch of reports.

No longer was there a worried sense of unresolved problems.

A good rule,

Not only for the Board of Directors of the U.

S.

Steel,

But for you and me.

Good Working Habit Number Four Learn to organize,

Deputize,

And supervise.

Many business persons are driving themselves to premature graves because they have learned never to delegate responsibility to others,

Insisting on doing everything themselves.

Result?

Details and confusion overwhelm them.

They are driven by a sense of hurry,

Worry,

Anxiety,

And tension.

It is hard to learn to delegate responsibilities,

I know.

It was hard for me,

Awfully hard.

I also know from experience the disasters that can be caused by delegating authority to the wrong people.

But difficult as it is to delegate authority,

Executives must do it if they are to avoid worry,

Tension,

And fatigue.

People who build up big businesses and don't learn to organize,

Deputize,

And supervise usually pop off with heart trouble in their 50s or early 60s.

Heart trouble caused by tension and worries.

Want a specific instance?

Look at the death notices in your local paper.

Chapter 27 How to banish the boredom that produces fatigue,

Worry,

And resentment.

One of the chief causes of fatigue is boredom.

To illustrate,

Let's take the case of Alice,

An executive who lives on your street.

Alice came home one night utterly exhausted.

She acted fatigued.

She was fatigued.

She had a headache.

She had a backache.

She was so exhausted she wanted to go to bed without waiting for dinner.

Her mother pleaded.

She sat down at the table.

The telephone rang.

The boyfriend.

An invitation to a dance.

Her eyes sparkled.

Her spirit soared.

She rushed upstairs,

Put on her Alice blue gown,

And danced until three o'clock in the morning.

And when she finally did get home,

She was not the slightest bit exhausted.

She was in fact so exhilarated she couldn't fall asleep.

Was Alice really and honestly tired eight hours earlier when she looked and acted exhausted?

Sure she was.

She was exhausted because she was bored with her work,

Perhaps bored with her life.

There are millions of Alice's.

You may be one of them.

It is a well-known fact that your emotional attitude usually has far more to do with producing fatigue than has physical exertion.

A few years ago,

Joseph E.

Barmak,

PhD,

Published in the Archives of Psychology a report of some of his experiments showing how boredom produces fatigue.

Dr.

Barmak put a group of students through a series of tests in which he knew they could have little interest.

The result?

The students felt tired and sleepy,

Complained of headaches and eye strain,

Felt irritable.

In some cases,

Even their stomachs were upset.

Was it all imagination?

No.

Metabolism tests were taken of these students.

Their tests showed that the blood pressure of the body and the consumption of oxygen actually decrease when a person is bored,

And that the whole metabolism picks up immediately as soon as he begins to feel interest and pleasure in his work.

We rarely get tired when we're doing something interesting.

For example,

I recently took a vacation to the Canadian Rockies up around Lake Louise.

I spent several days trout fishing along Coral Reef.

Fighting my way through brush higher than my head,

Stumbling over logs,

Struggling through fallen timber,

Yet after eight hours of this I was not exhausted.

Why?

Because I was excited,

Exhilarated.

I had a sense of high achievement.

Six cut throat trout.

But suppose I'd been bored by fishing.

Then how do you think I would have felt?

I would have been worn out by such strenuous work at an altitude of 7,

000 feet.

Even in exhausting activities as mountain climbing,

Boredom may tire you far more than the strenuous work involved.

For example,

Mr.

Kingman,

President of the Farmers and Mechanics Savings Bank of Minneapolis,

Told me of an incident that is a perfect illustration of that statement.

In July 1953,

The Canadian government asked the Canadian Alpine Club to furnish guides to train the members of the Prince of Wales Rangers in mountain climbing.

Mr.

Kingman was one of the guys chosen to train those soldiers.

He told me how he and the other guys,

Men ranging from 42 to 59 years of age,

Took these young army men on long hikes across glaciers and snowfields and up to sheer cliff of 40 feet,

Where they had to climb with ropes and tiny footholds and precarious handholds.

After 15 hours of mountain climbing,

These young men,

Who were in the pink of condition,

They had just finished a six-week course in tough commando training.

They were utterly exhausted.

Was their fatigue caused by using muscles that had not been hardened by the commando training?

Any man who had ever been through commando training would hoot at such a ridiculous question.

No,

They were utterly exhausted because they were bored by mountain climbing.

They were so tired that many of them fell asleep without waiting to eat.

But the guides,

Men who were two and three times as old as the soldiers,

Were they tired?

Yes,

But not exhausted.

The guides ate dinner and stayed up for hours,

Talking about the day's experiences.

They were not exhausted because they were interested.

When Dr.

Edward Thorndyke of Columbia was conducting experiments in fatigue,

He kept young men awake for almost a week by keeping them constantly interested.

After must investigation,

Dr.

Thorndyke reported to have said,

Boredom is the only real cause of diminution of work.

If you are a mental worker,

It is seldom the amount of work you do that makes you tired.

You may be tired by the amount of work you do not do.

For example,

Remember the day last week when you were constantly interrupted?

No letters answered,

Appointments broken,

Trouble here and there.

Everything went wrong that day.

You accomplished nothing whatever,

Yet you went home exhausted and with a splitting headache.

The next day everything clicked at the office.

You accomplished forty times more than you did the previous day,

Yet you went home fresh as a snow-white gardenia.

You have had that experience.

So have I.

The lesson to be learned?

Just this.

Our fatigue is often caused not by the work,

But by worry,

Frustration,

And resentment.

While writing this chapter,

I want to see a revival of Jerome Kern's delightful musical comedy Showboat.

Captain Andy,

Captain of the Cotton Blossom,

Says in one of his philosophical interludes,

The lucky folks are the ones that get to do things they enjoy doing.

Such folk are lucky because they have more energy,

More happiness,

Less worry,

And less fatigue.

What your interests are,

There is your energy also.

Walking ten blocks with a nagging wife or husband can be more fatiguing than walking ten miles with an adoring sweetheart.

And so what?

What can you do about it?

Well here is what one stenographer did about it.

A stenographer working for an oil company in Tulsa,

Oklahoma,

For several days each month.

She had one of the dullest jobs imaginable.

Filling out printed forms for oil leases,

Inserting figures and statistics.

The task was so boring she resolved in self-defense to make it interesting.

How?

She had a daily contest with herself.

She counted the number of forms she filled out each morning and then tried to excel that record in the afternoon.

Each counted day.

She totaled and tried to better it the next day.

The result?

She was soon able to fill out more of these dull,

Printed forms than any other stenographer in her division.

I happen to know this story is true because I married that girl.

Here is a story of another stenographer who found it paid to act as if her work were interesting.

She used to fight her work,

But no more.

She is Miss Valli G.

Golden of Elmhurst,

Illinois.

Here is her story as she wrote it to me.

There are four stenographers in my office and each of us is assigned to take letters from several men.

Once in a while we get jammed up in these assignments.

One day when an assistant department headed that I do a long letter cover,

I started to rebel.

I tried to point out that the letter could be corrected without retyping,

And he retorted that if I didn't do it over,

You would find someone else to do it.

I was fuming.

Also,

I was mad I was being paid a salary to do just that work.

It suddenly occurred to me there were a lot of other people who would jump at the chance to do the work.

I began to feel better.

I suddenly made up my mind to do my work as if I actually enjoyed it,

Even though I despised it.

Then I made this important discovery.

If I do my work as if I work faster when I enjoy my work,

So there is seldom a need now for me to overwork or work overtime.

This new attitude of mine gave me the reputation of being a good worker.

Miss Golden used the wonder working as if philosophy of Professor Hans Valhinger,

He taught us to act as if we were happy and so on.

If you act as if you are interested in your job,

That bit of acting will tend to make your interest real.

It will also tend to decrease your fatigue,

Your tensions,

And your worry.

A few years ago,

Harlan H.

Howard made a decision that completely altered his life.

He resolved to make a doll job interesting,

And he certainly had a doll one.

Washing plates,

Scrubbing counters,

And dishing out ice cream in the high school lunchroom while the other boys were playing ball,

Or kidding the girls.

Harlan Howard despised his job,

But since he had to stick to it,

He resolved to study ice cream,

How it was made,

What ingredients were used,

Why some ice creams were better than others.

He studied the chemistry of ice cream,

And became a whiz in the high school chemistry course.

He was so interested now in food chemistry that he entered the Massachusetts states,

College and majored in the field of food technology.

When the New York cocoa exchange offered a hundred dollar prize for the best paper on the uses of cocoa and chocolate,

A prize opened to all college students,

Who do you suppose won it?

That's right,

Harlan Howard.

When he found it difficult to get a job,

He opened a private laboratory in the basement of his home in Amherst,

Massachusetts.

Shortly after that,

A new law was passed.

The bacteria in milk had to be counted.

Harlan Howard was soon counting bacteria for the 14 milk companies in Amherst,

And he had to hire two assistants.

Where will he be 25 years from now?

Well,

The men who are now running the business of food chemistry will be retired then or dead,

And their places will be taken by new young lads who are radiating initiative and enthusiasm.

25 years from now,

Harlan Howard will probably be one of the leaders in his profession,

While some of his classmates to whom he used to sell ice cream over the counter will be sour,

Unemployed,

Cussing the government and complaining that they never had a chance.

Harlan Howard might never have a chance either if he hadn't resolved to make a dull job interesting.

Years ago,

There was another man who was bored with his dull job of standing at a lathe,

Turning out bolts in a factory.

His first name was Sam.

Sam wanted to quit,

But he was afraid he couldn't find another job.

Since he had to do this dull work,

Sam decided he would make it interesting.

So he ran a race with one of the mechanic operating a machine beside him.

One of them was to trim off the rough surfaces of the machine,

And the other was to trim the bolts down in the proper diameter.

They would switch machines occasionally and see who could turn out the most bolts.

That was the start of a whole new series of promotions.

Thirty years later,

Sam was president of the Baldwin Locomotive Works.

But he might have remained a mechanic all of life if he had not resolved to make a dull job interesting.

H.

V.

Coultenburn,

The famous radio news analyst,

Once told me how he made a dull job interesting.

When he was 22 years old,

He worked his way across the Atlantic on a cattle boat,

Feeding and watering the steers.

After making a bicycle tour of England,

He arrived in Paris,

Hungry and broke.

Pawning his camera for $5,

He put an ad in the Paris edition of the New York Herald and got a job selling stereo-opticon machines.

I can remember those old-fashioned stereoscopes that we used to hold up before our eyes to look at two pictures exactly alike.

As we looked,

A miracle happened.

The two lenses in the stereoscope transferred the two pictures into a single scene with the effect of a third dimension.

We saw distance.

We got an astonishing sense of perspective.

Well as I was saying,

Coultenburn started out selling these machines from door to door in Paris.

He couldn't speak French,

But he earned $5,

000 in commissions that first year and made himself one of the highest paid salesmen in France that year.

He told me this experience did as much to develop within him the qualities that make for success as did any single year of study at Harvard.

Confidence?

He told me himself that after that experience,

He felt he could have sold the Congressional record to French housewives.

That experience gave him an intimate understanding of French life that later proved invaluable in interpreting on the radio European events.

How did he manage to become an expert salesman when he couldn't even speak French?

Well,

He had his employer write out his sales talk in perfect French and he memorized it.

He would ring a doorbell,

A housewife would answer,

And Coultenburn would begin repeating his memorized sales talk with an accent so terrible it was funny.

He would show the housewife his pictures and when she asked a question,

He would shrug his shoulders and say,

An American,

An American.

He would then take off his hat and point it to a copy of the sales talk in perfect French that he had pasted at the top of the hat.

The housewife would laugh,

He would laugh,

And he'd show her more pictures.

When H.

V.

Coultenburn told me about this,

He confessed that the job had been far from easy.

He told me there was only one quality that pulled them through,

His determination to make the job interesting.

Every morning before he started out,

He looked into the mirror and gave himself a pep talk.

You have to do this if you want to eat.

Since you have to do it,

Why not have a good time doing it?

Why not imagine every time you ring a doorbell that you're an actor before the footlights and there's an audience and they're out looking at you?

After all,

What are you doing is just as funny as something on the stage,

So why not put a lot of zest and enthusiasm into it?

He told me these daily pep talks helped him transform a task that he had once hated and dreaded into an adventure that he liked and made highly profitable.

When I asked Mr.

Coultenburn if he had any advice to give the young men of America who are eager to succeed,

He said,

Yes,

Go to bat with yourself every morning.

We talk a lot about the importance of physical exercise to wake us up out of the half-sleep in which so many of us walk around.

But we need even more,

Some spiritual and mental exercises every morning to stir us into action.

Give yourself a pep talk every day.

Is giving yourself a pep talk every day silly,

Superficial,

Childish?

No,

On the contrary,

It is the very essence of sound psychology.

Our life is what our thoughts make it.

These words are just as true today as they were 18 centuries ago when Marcus Aurelius first wrote them in his book on meditations.

Our life is what our thoughts make it.

By talking to yourself every hour of the day,

You can direct yourself to think thoughts of courage,

Happiness,

Thoughts of power and peace.

By talking to yourself about the things you have to be grateful for.

You can fill your mind with thoughts that soar and sing.

By thinking the right thoughts,

You can make any job less distasteful.

Your boss wants you to be interested in your job so that he will make more money.

But let's forget about what the boss wants.

Think only of what getting interested in your job will do for you.

Remind yourself that it may double the amount of happiness you get out of your life,

For you spend about one half of your waking hours at your work,

And if you don't find happiness in your work,

You may never find it anywhere.

Keep reminding yourself that getting interested in your job will take your mind off your worries and in the long run will probably bring promotion and increased pay.

Even if it doesn't do that,

It will reduce fatigue to a minimum and help you enjoy your hours of leisure.

Chapter 28 How to keep from worrying about insomnia Do you worry when you can't sleep well?

Then it may interest you to know that Samuel Uttermeyer,

The famous international lawyer,

Never got a decent night's sleep in his life.

When Sam Uttermeyer went to college,

He worried about two afflictions,

Asthma and insomnia.

He couldn't seem to cure it either,

So he decided he would do the next best thing,

Take advantage of his wakefulness.

Instead of tossing and turning and worrying himself into a breakdown,

He would get up and study.

The result?

He began ticking off honors in all of his classes and became one of the prodigies of the College of the City of New York.

Even after he started to practice law,

His insomnia continued,

But Uttermeyer didn't worry.

Nature,

He said,

Will take care of me.

Nature did.

In spite of the small amount of sleep he was getting,

His health kept up and he was able to work as hard as any other of the young lawyers of New York.

He worked even harder.

For a while,

He worked,

They slept.

At the age of 21,

Sam Uttermeyer was earning $75,

000 a year,

And other attorneys rushed to courtrooms to study his methods.

In 1931,

He was paid for handling one case,

What was at the time probably the highest lawyers' fee ever paid,

A cool million dollars cash on the barrel head.

Still he had insomnia,

Read half the night,

And then got up at 5 a.

M.

And started dictating letters.

By the time most people were just starting work,

His day's work would be almost half done.

He lived to the age of 81,

The man who rarely had a sound's night sleep,

But if he had fretted and worried about his insomnia,

He would probably have wrecked his life.

We spend a third of our lives sleeping,

Yet nobody knows what sleep really is.

We know it is a habit in a state of rest in which nature knits up the raveled sleeve of care,

But we don't know how many hours of sleep each individual requires.

We don't even know if we have to sleep at all.

Fantastic?

Well,

During the First World War,

Paul Kern,

A Hungarian soldier,

Was shot through the frontal lobe of his brain.

He recovered from the wound,

But curiously enough,

Couldn't fall asleep.

No matter what the doctors did,

They tried all kinds of sedatives and narcotics,

Even hypnotism.

Paul Kern couldn't be put to sleep or even made to feel drowsy.

The doctors said he wouldn't live long,

But he fooled them.

He got a job,

And he went on living the best of health for years.

He would lie down and close his eyes and rest,

But he got no sleep.

His case was a medical mystery that upset many of our beliefs about sleep.

Some people require far more sleep than others.

Toscanini needed only five hours a night,

But Calvin Coolidge needed more than twice that much.

Coolidge slept 11 hours out of every 24.

In other words,

Toscanini slept away approximately one-fifth of his life,

While Coolidge slept almost half of his life.

Worrying about insomnia will hurt you far more than insomnia.

For example,

One of my students,

Ira Sadner,

A Ridgefield Park,

New Jersey,

Was driven nearly to suicide by chronic insomnia.

I actually thought I was going insane,

She told me.

The trouble was in the beginning that I was too sound a sleeper.

I wouldn't wake up to the alarm,

And the result that I was getting late to work.

I worried about it,

And in fact my boss warned me that I would have to get to work on time.

I knew that if I kept oversleeping,

I would lose my job.

I told my friends about it,

And one of them suggested I concentrate hard on the alarm clock before I went to sleep.

That started the insomnia.

The tick tick tick of the blasted alarm clock became an obsession.

It kept me awake,

Tossing all night long.

When morning came,

I was almost ill.

I was ill from fatigue and worry.

This kept on for eight weeks.

I can't put into words the tortures I suffered.

I was convinced I was going insane.

Sometimes I paced the floor for hours at a time,

And I honestly considered jumping out the window and ending the whole thing.

At last I went to a doctor I'd known all my life.

He said,

Ira,

I can't help you.

No one can help you,

Because you've brought this thing on yourself.

Go to bed nights,

And if you can't fall asleep,

Forget all about it.

Just say to yourself,

I don't care a hang if I don't go to sleep.

It's all right with me if I lie awake until morning.

Keep your eyes closed and say,

As long as I just lie still and don't worry about it,

I'll be getting rest anyways.

I did that,

Said Sandra.

In two weeks' time I was dropping off to sleep,

And less than a month I was sleeping eight hours and my nerves were back to normal.

It wasn't insomnia that was killing Ira Sandler.

It was worry about it.

Dr.

Nathaniel Kleitman,

Professor of the University of Chicago,

Had done more research work on sleep than any other living man.

An expert on sleep,

He declared that he had never known anyone to die from insomnia.

To be sure,

A man might worry about insomnia until he lowered his vitality and was swept away by germs,

But if it was the worry that did the damage,

It was not the insomnia itself.

Dr.

Kleitman also said that the people who worry about insomnia usually sleep far more than they realize.

The man who swears I never slept a wink last night may have slept for hours without knowing it.

For example,

One of the most profound thinkers of the 19th century,

Herbert Spencer,

Was an old bachelor,

Lived in a boarding house,

And bored everyone with his talk about his insomnia.

He even put stoppings in his ears to keep out noise and quiet his nerves.

Sometimes he took opium to induce sleep.

One night he and Professor Stace of Oxford shared the same room at a hotel.

The next morning Spencer declared he hadn't slept a wink all night.

In reality it was the professor who hadn't slept a wink.

He'd been awake all night by Spencer's snoring.

The first requisite for a good night's sleep is the feeling of security.

We need to feel that some power greater than ourselves will take care of us till morning.

Dr.

Thomas Heislap of the Great West Riding Asylum stressed that point in an address before the British Medical Association.

He said,

One of the best sleep-producing prayer agents with my years of practice have revealed to me in prayer.

I say this purely as a medical man.

The exercise of prayer and those who habitually exert it must be regarded as the most adequate and normal of all pacifiers of the mind and calmers of the nerves.

Let God and let go.

Jeanette MacDonald told me that when she was depressed and worried and had difficulty in going to sleep,

She'd always get a feeling of security by repeating,

Poem 23.

The Lord is my shepherd,

I shall not want.

He maketh me to lie down in green pastures.

He leadeth me besides the still waters.

But if you're not religious and have to do things the hard way,

Then learn to relax by physical measures.

Dr.

David Harold Fink,

Who wrote Release from Nervous Tension,

Says that the best way to do this is to talk to your body.

According to Dr.

Fink,

Words are the keys to hypnosis,

And when you constantly can't sleep it's because you have talked yourself into a case of insomnia.

The way to undo this is de-hypnotize yourself,

And you can do it by saying to the muscles of your body,

Let go,

Let go,

Loosen up,

And relax.

We already know that the mind and nerves can't relax when the muscles are tense,

So if we want to go to sleep we start with the muscles.

Dr.

Fink recommends,

And it works out in practice,

That we put a pillow under the knees to ease the tension of the legs,

And then we tuck small pillows under the arms for the very same reason.

Then by telling the jaw to relax,

The eyes,

The arms,

And the legs,

We finally drop up to sleep before we know what's hit us.

I've tried it.

I know.

One of the best cures for insomnia is making yourself physically tired by gardening,

Swimming,

Tennis,

Golf,

Skiing,

Or just by playing physically exhausting work.

That is what Theodore Dreiser did when he was a struggling young author.

He was worried about insomnia,

So he got a job working as a section hand at the New York Central Railway.

And after a day of driving spikes and shoveling gravel,

He was so exhausted he could hardly stay awake enough to eat.

When men are completely exhausted,

They sleep right through the thunder and horror and danger of war.

Dr.

Foster Kennedy,

The famous neurologist,

Tells me that during the retreat of the 5th British Army in 1918,

He saw soldiers so exhausted that they fell on the ground where they were and fell into a sleep as sound as a coma.

They didn't even wake when they raised their eyelids.

And he said he noticed that invariably the pupils of the eyes were rolled upwards in the sockets.

No man ever committed suicide by refusing to sleep,

And no one ever will.

Nature would force a man to sleep in spite of all of his willpower.

Nature will let us go without food or water for longer than she'll let us go without sleep.

Speaking of suicide reminds me of the case of Dr.

Henry C.

Link describes in his book,

The Rediscovery of Man.

Dr.

Link was vice president of the Psychological Corporation,

And he interviewed many people who were worried and depressed.

In his chapter on overcoming fears and worries,

He tells about a patient who wanted to commit suicide.

Dr.

Link knew arguably,

And knew arguing would only make the matter worse,

So he said to the man.

If you're going to commit suicide,

You might as well at least do it in a heroic fashion.

Run around the block until you drop dead.

He tried it not once,

But several times,

And each time felt better in his mind,

If not in his muscles.

By the third night he had achieved what Dr.

Link intended in the first place.

He was so physically tired,

And physically relaxed,

That he slept like a log.

Later,

He joined an athletic club,

And began to compete in competitive sports.

Soon he was feeling so good,

He wanted to live forever.

So to keep from worrying about insomnia,

Here are five rules.

Number one,

If you can't sleep,

Do what Samuel Uttermeyer did.

Get up and read,

Or work until you feel sleepy.

Number two,

Remember that no one was ever killed by lack of sleep.

Worrying about insomnia usually causes far more damage than sleepiness.

Number three,

Try prayer,

Or repeat Psalm 23 as Jeanette MacDonald did.

Number four,

Relax your body.

Number five,

Exercise.

Get yourself so physically tired,

You can't stay awake.

So this is the end of part seven,

And in a nutshell,

Six ways to prevent fatigue and worry and keep your energy and spirits high.

Here are six reminders.

Rule number one,

Rest before you get tired.

Rule number two,

Learn to relax at your work.

Rule number three,

Learn to relax at home.

Rule number four,

Apply these four good working habits.

A,

Clear your desk of all papers,

Except those relating to the immediate problem at hand.

B,

Do things in the order of importance.

C,

When you face a problem,

Solve it then and there,

If you have the facts necessary to make a decision.

D,

Learn to organize,

Deputize,

And supervise.

Rule number five,

To prevent worry and fatigue,

Put enthusiasm into your work.

And finally,

Rule number six,

Remember no one was ever killed by lack of sleep.

It is worrying about insomnia that does the damage,

Not the insomnia.

This is the end of our sleep story for tonight.

Thank you so much for allowing me the precious gift of your time.

Until next time,

Good night.