Sleep Story: How To Stop Worrying & Start Living: Ch 23,24,25

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 first 3 chapters of Part 7: 6 Ways to Prevent Fatigue and Worry and Keep Your Energy and Spirits High. Chapters 23, 24, and 25.

Transcript

Hello,

My name is Hilary LaFawn,

And I'm so grateful that you have joined me today to explore Chapter 23,

24,

And 25 of How to Stop Worrying and Start Living by Dale Carnegie.

This is 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 23,

How to Add One Hour a Day to Your Waking Life.

Why am I writing a chapter on preventing fatigue in a book on preventing worry?

That is simple,

Because fatigue often produces worry,

Or at least,

It makes you susceptible to worry.

Any medical student will tell you that fatigue lowers physical resistance to the common cold and hundreds of other diseases.

And any psychiatrist will tell you that fatigue also lowers your resistance to the emotions of fear and worry.

So preventing fatigue tends to prevent worry.

Did I say tends to prevent worry?

That is putting it mildly.

Dr.

Edmund Jacobson goes much further.

Dr.

Jacobson has written two books on relaxation,

Progressive Relaxation and You Must Relax.

And as Director of the University of Chicago Laboratory for Clinical Psychology,

He has spent years conducting investigations and using relaxation as a method in medical practice.

He declares that any nervous or emotional state fails to exist in the presence of complete relaxation.

That is another way of saying you cannot continue to worry if you relax.

So to prevent fatigue and worry,

The first rule is,

Rest often.

Rest before you get tired.

Why is that so important?

Because fatigue accumulates with astonishing rapidity.

The United States Army has discovered by repeated tests that even young men,

Men toughened by years of Army training can march better,

Hold up longer,

If they throw down their packs and rest 10 minutes out of every hour.

So the Army forces them to do just that.

Your heart is just as smart as the US Army.

Your heart pumps enough blood through your body every day to fill a railway tank car.

It exerts enough energy every 24 hours to shovel 20 tons of coal into a platform three feet high.

It does this incredible amount of work for 50,

70,

Or maybe 90 years.

How can it stand it?

Dr.

Walter B.

Cannon of the Harvard Medical School explained it.

He said,

Most people have the idea that the heart is working all the time.

As a matter of fact,

There is a definite rest period after each contraction.

When beating at a moderate rate of 70 pulses per minute,

The heart is actually working only nine hours out of the 24.

If the aggregate,

Its rest periods total a full 15 hours per day.

During World War II,

Winston Churchill in his late 60s and early 70s was able to work 16 hours a day,

Year after year,

Directing the war efforts of the British Empire.

A phenomenal record.

His secret?

He worked in bed each morning until 11 o'clock,

Reading reports,

Dictating orders,

Making telephone calls,

And holding important conferences.

After lunch,

He went to bed again and slept for an hour.

In the evening,

He went to bed once more and slept for two hours before having dinner at eight.

He didn't cure fatigue.

He didn't have to cure it.

He prevented it.

Because he rested frequently,

He was able to work on,

Fresh and fit,

Until long past midnight.

The original John D.

Rockefeller made two extraordinary records.

He accumulated the greatest fortune the world had ever seen up to that time,

And he also lived to be 98.

How did he do it?

The chief reason,

Of course,

Was because he had inherited a tendency to live long.

Another reason was his habit of taking a half-hour nap in his office every noon.

He would lie down on his office couch,

And not even the President of the United States could get John D.

On the phone while he was having his snooze.

In his excellent book,

Why Be Tired,

Daniel W.

Joselin observed,

"'Rest is not a matter of doing absolutely nothing.

Rest is repair.

There is so much repair power in a short period of rest that even a five-minute nap will help to forestall fatigue.

' Connie Mack,

The grand old man of baseball,

Told me that if he didn't take an afternoon nap before a game,

He was all tuckered out at around the fifth inning.

But if he did go to sleep,

If only for five minutes,

He could last through the entire doubleheader without feeling tired.

" When I asked Eleanor Roosevelt how she was able to carry such an exhausting schedule during the twelve years she was in the White House,

She said that before meeting a crowd or making a speech,

She would often sit in a chair or Davenport,

Close her eyes,

And relax for twenty minutes.

I once interviewed Gene Autry in his dressing room at Madison Square Garden,

Where he was the star attraction at the World's Championship Rodeo.

I noticed an army caught in his dressing room.

I lie down there every afternoon,

Gene Autry said,

And get an hour's nap between performances.

When I am making pictures in Hollywood,

He continued,

I often relax in a big,

Easy chair and get two or three ten-minute naps a day.

They buck me up tremendously.

Edison attributed his enormous energy and endurance to his habit of sleeping whenever he wanted to.

I interviewed Henry Ford shortly before his eightieth birthday.

I was surprised to see how fresh and fine he looked.

I asked him the secret.

I never stand up when I can sit down,

And I never sit down when I can lie down.

Horace Mann,

The father of modern education,

Did the same thing as he grew older.

When he was president of Antioch College,

He used to stretch out on the couch while interviewing students.

I persuaded a motion picture director in Hollywood to try a similar technique.

He confessed that it worked miracles.

I refer to Jack Chertoch,

Who was one of Hollywood's top directors.

When he came to see me several years ago,

He was then head of the short-future department of MGM.

Worn out and exhausted,

He had tried everything.

Tonics,

Vitamins,

Medicine.

Everything helped much.

I suggested that he take a vacation every day.

How?

By stretching out in his office and relaxing while holding conferences with his staff writers.

When I saw him again two years later,

He said,

A miracle has happened.

That is what my own physicians call it.

I used to sit up in my chair,

Tense and taut,

While discussing ideas for our short features.

Now I stretch out on the office couch during these conferences.

I feel better than I have felt in 20 years.

Work two hours a day longer,

Yet I rarely get tired.

How does all this apply to you?

If you are a stenographer,

You can take naps in the office as Ennis and did,

And as some good one did.

And if you are an accountant,

You can stretch out on the couch while discussing a financial statement with the boss.

But if you live in a small city and go home for lunch,

You may be able to take a 10-minute nap after lunch.

That is what General George C.

Marshall used to do.

He felt he was so busy directing the US Army in wartime that he had to rest at noon.

If you are over 50 and feel you are too rushed to do it,

Then buy immediately all the life insurance you can get.

Funerals come high and suddenly these days.

You and your spouse may want to take your insurance money and marry a younger person.

If you can't take a nap at noon,

You can at least try to lie down for an hour before the evening meal.

It is cheaper than a cocktail and over a long stretch.

It is 5,

467 times more effective.

If you can sleep for an hour around 5,

6,

Or 7 o'clock,

You can add one hour a day to your waking life.

Why?

How?

Because an hour's nap between the evening meal plus 6 hours sleep at night,

A total of 7 hours,

Will do you more good than 8 hours of unbroken sleep.

A physical worker can do more work if he takes more time out for rest.

Frederick Taylor demonstrated that while working as a scientific management engineer with the Bethlehem Steel Company.

He observed that laboring men were loading approximately 12.

5 tons of pig iron poor men each day on freight cars and they were exhausted at noon.

He made a scientific study of all the fatigue factors involved and declared that these men should be not loading 12.

5 tons of pig iron per day,

But 47 tons per day.

He figured that they ought to do almost four times as much as they were doing,

But not be exhausted.

But prove it.

Taylor selected a Mr.

Schmidt who was required to work by the stopwatch.

Schmidt was told by the man who stood over him with the watch,

Now pick up a pig and walk.

Now sit down and rest.

Now walk.

Now rest.

What happened?

Schmidt carried 47 tons of pig iron each day while the other men carried only 12.

5 tons.

And he practically never failed to work at this pace until the three years that Frederick Taylor was at Bethlehem.

Schmidt was able to do this because he rested before he got tired.

He worked approximately 26 minutes out of the hour and rested 34 minutes.

He rested more than he worked,

Yet he did almost four times as much work as the others.

Is this mere hearsay?

No,

You can read the record yourself on pages 41 through 62 of Principles of Scientific Management by Frederick Winslow Taylor.

Let me repeat,

Do what the Army does,

Take frequent rest,

Do what your heart does,

Rest before you get tired and you will add one hour a day to your waking life.

Chapter 24.

What makes you tired and what you can do about it.

Here's an astounding and significant fact.

Little work alone can't make you tired.

Sounds absurd,

But a few years ago scientists tried to find out how long the human brain could labor without reaching a diminished capacity for work.

The scientific definition of fatigue.

To the amazement of these scientists,

They discovered that blood passing through the brain when it is active shows no fatigue at all.

If you took blood from the veins of a day laborer while he was working,

You would find it full of fatigue toxins and fatigue products.

But if you took a drop of blood from the brain of an Albert Einstein,

It would show no fatigue toxins whatever at the end of the day.

So far as the brain is concerned,

It can work as well and as swiftly at the end of eight or even 12 hours of effort as in the beginning.

The brain is utterly tireless.

So what makes you tired?

Psychiatrists declare that most of our fatigue derives from our mental and emotional attitudes.

One of our England's most distinguished psychiatrists,

J.

A.

Hadfield,

Says in his book,

The Psychology of Power,

The greatest part of the fatigue from which we suffer is of mental origin.

In fact,

Exhaustion of purely physical origin is rare.

One of the most American's distinguished psychiatrists,

Dr.

A.

A.

Brill,

Goes even further.

He declares,

100% of the fatigue of the sedentary worker in good health is due to psychological factors,

By which we mean emotional factors.

What kind of emotional factors tire the sedentary or sitting worker?

Joy,

Contentment?

No,

Never.

Boredom,

Resentment,

A feeling of not being appreciated,

A feeling of futility,

Fury,

Anxiety,

Worry.

Those are the emotional factors that exhaust the sitting worker,

Making him susceptible to colds,

Reduces output,

And send him home with a nervous headache.

Yes,

We get tired because our emotions produce nervous tensions in the body.

The Metropolitan Life Insurance Company pointed out that in a leaflet on fatigue,

It stated hard work by itself seldom causes fatigue,

Which cannot be cured by a good sleep or rest.

Worry,

Tenseness,

And emotional upsets are three of the biggest causes of fatigue.

Often they are to blame when physical or mental work seems to be the cause.

Remember that a tense muscle is a working muscle.

Ease up.

Save energy for important duties.

Stop now right where you are and give yourself a checkup.

As you read these lines,

Are you scowling at the book?

Do you feel a strain between the eyes?

Are you sitting relaxed in your chair?

Or are you hunching up your shoulders?

Are the muscles of your face tense?

Unless your entire body is as limp and relaxed as an old rag doll,

You are at this moment producing nervous tension and muscular tension.

You're producing nervous tensions and nervous fatigue.

Why do we produce those unnecessary tensions in doing mental work?

Daniel W.

Jocelyn says,

I find that the chief obstacle is the almost universal belief that hard work requires a feeling of effort,

Else it is not well done.

So we scowl when we concentrate.

We hunch up our shoulders.

We call on our muscles to make the motion of effort,

Which in no way assists our brain in its work.

Here is an astonishing and tragic truth.

Millions of people who wouldn't dream of wasting dollars go right on wasting and squandering their energy with recklessness of seven drunken sailors in Singapore.

What is the answer to this nervous fatigue?

Relax,

Relax,

Relax,

Learn to relax while you are doing your work.

Easy?

No.

You will probably have to reverse the habits of lifetime,

But it is worth the effort for it may revolutionize your life.

William James says in his essay,

The Gospel of Relaxation,

The American overtension and jerkiness and breathlessness and intensity and agony of expression are bad habits.

Nothing more,

Nothing less.

Tension is a habit.

Relaxing is a habit.

And bad habits can be broken.

Good habits formed.

How do you relax?

Do you start with your mind or do you start with your nerves?

You don't start with either.

You always begin to relax your muscles.

Let's give it a try.

To show how it's done,

Suppose we start with your eyes.

Read this paragraph through.

When you've reached the end,

Lean back,

Close your eyes and say to your eyes silently,

Let go,

Let go.

Stop straining,

Stop frowning,

Let go,

Let go.

Repeat that over and over slowly for a minute.

Didn't you notice that after a few seconds,

The muscles of your eyes began to obey?

Didn't you feel as though some hand had wiped away the tension?

Well incredibly as it seems,

You have sampled in that one minute the whole key and secret to the art of relaxing.

You can do the same thing with the jaw,

With the muscles of the face,

With the neck,

With the shoulders,

And the whole of the body.

But the most important organ of all is the eye.

Dr.

Edmund Jacobson of the University of Chicago has gone so far as to say that if you can completely relax the muscles of the eyes,

You can forget all of your troubles.

The reason the eyes are so important in relieving nervous tension is that they burn up one fourth of all the nervous energies consumed by the body.

That is also why so many people with perfectly sound visions suffer from eye strain.

They are tensing with the eyes.

Vicki Baum,

The famous novelist,

Said that when she was a child,

She met an old man who taught her one of the most important lessons she had ever learned.

She had fallen down and cut her knees and hurt her wrist.

The old man picked her up.

He had been a circus clown,

And as he brushed her off he said,

�The reason you have injured yourself was because you don�t know how to relax.

You have to pretend that you are as limp as a sock,

As an old crumpled sock.

Come,

I�ll show you how to do it.

� The old man taught Vicki Baum and the other children how to fall,

How to do flip-flops,

And how to turn somersaults.

And always,

He insisted,

Think of yourself as an old crumpled sock.

Then you�ve got to relax.

You can relax in odd moments,

Almost anywhere you are.

Only don�t make an effort to relax.

Relaxation is the absence of all tension and effort.

Take ease and relaxation.

Begin by thinking relaxation of the muscles of the eyes and your face,

Saying over and over,

�Let go,

Let go,

Let go and relax.

� Feel the energy flowing out of your facial muscles to the center of your body.

Think of yourself as free from tension as a baby.

That is what Galli Curci,

The great soprano,

Used to do.

Helen Jepson told me that she used to see Galli Curci before a performance,

Sitting in a chair,

With all her muscles relaxed and her lower jaw so limp it actually sagged.

An excellent practice.

It kept her from becoming too nervous before her stage entrance to prevent fatigue.

Here are four suggestions that will help you learn to relax.

Number one,

Relax in odd moments.

Let your body go limp like an old sock.

I keep an old maroon colored sock on my desk as I work.

Keep it there as I remind myself of how limp I ought to be.

If you haven�t got a sock,

A cat will do.

Did you ever pick up a kitten sleeping in the sunshine?

If so,

Both ends sag like a wet newspaper.

Even the yogis in Indy say that if you want to master the art of relaxation,

Study the cat.

I never saw a tired cat,

A cat with a nervous breakdown,

Or a cat suffering from insomnia,

Worry or stomach ulcers.

You will probably avoid these disasters if you learn to relax as the cat does.

Number two,

Work as much as possible in a comfortable position.

Remember that tensions in the body produce aching shoulders and nervous fatigue.

Number three,

Check yourself four or five times a day and say to yourself,

�Am I making my work harder than it actually is?

Am I using muscles that have nothing to do with the work I am doing?

� This will help you form the habit of relaxing.

As Dr.

Harold Fink says,

�Among those whose psychology is best,

It is habits two to one.

� Number four,

Test yourself again at the end of the day by asking yourself,

�Just how tired am I?

� If I am tired,

It is not because of the mental work I have done,

But because of the way I have done it.

I measure my accomplishes,

Says Daniel Joslin,

Not by how tired I am at the end of the day,

But how tired I am not.

He says,

�When I feel particularly tired at the end of the day or when irritability proves that my nerves are tired,

I know beyond question that it has been an inefficient day both as to quantity and quality.

If every businessman in America would learn the same lesson,

Our death rate from hypertension would drop overnight,

And we would stop filling up our sanitariums and asylums with people who have been broken by fatigue and worry.

� Chapter 25,

How to avoid fatigue and keep looking young.

One day last autumn,

My associate flew up to Boston to attend a session of one of the most unusual medical classes in the world.

Medical?

Well,

Yes,

It meets once a week at the Boston Dispensary,

And the patients who attend it get regular and thorough medical examinations before they are admitted.

But actually,

This class is a psychological clinic.

Although it is officially called the class in applied psychology,

Formerly the thought-control class,

A name suggested by the first member,

Its real purpose is to deal with people who are ill from worry.

And many of these patients are emotionally disturbed housewives.

How did such a class for warriors get started?

Well,

In 1930,

Dr.

Joseph H.

Pratt,

Who by the way had been a pupil of Sir William Osier,

Observed that many of the outpatients who came to the Boston Dispensary apparently had nothing wrong with them at all physically,

Yet they had practically all the symptoms that flesh is heir to.

One woman's hands were so crippled with arthritis that she had lost all use of them.

Another was in agony with all the excruciating symptoms of cancer of the stomach.

Others had backaches,

Headaches,

Were chronically tired,

Or had vague aches and pains.

They actually felt all these pains.

But the most exactive medical examinations show that nothing whatever was wrong with these people in a physical sense.

Many old-fashioned doctors would have said it was all in the imagination,

All in the mind.

But Dr.

Pratt realized that it was no use to tell these patients to go home and forget it.

He knew that most of these people didn't want to be sick.

If it was so easy to forget their ailments,

They would do so themselves.

So what could be done?

He opened this class to a chorus of doubts from the medical doubters on the sidelines.

And the class worked wonders.

And the years that have passed since it started,

Thousands of patients have been cured by attending it.

Some of the patients have been coming for years,

As religious in their attendance as though going to church.

My assistant talked to a woman who has hardly missed a session in more than nine years.

She said that when she first went to the clinic,

She was thoroughly convinced she had a floating kidney and some kind of heart ailment.

She was so worried and tense that she occasionally lost her eyesight and had spells of blindness.

Yet today she is confident and cheerful and in excellent health.

She looked only about 40,

Yet she held one of her grandchildren asleep in their lap.

I used to worry so much about my family trouble,

She said,

That I wished I could die.

But I learned at the clinic the futility of worrying.

I learned to stop it.

And I can honestly say now that my life is serene.

Dr.

Rose Hilferding,

The medical advisor of the class,

Said that she thought one of the best remedies for lightening worry is taking your troubles over with someone you trust.

We call it catharsis,

She said.

When patients come here,

They can talk their troubles over at length until they get them off their minds.

Brooding over worries alone and keeping them to oneself causes great nervous tension.

We all have to share our troubles.

We have to share worry.

We have to feel there is someone in the world who is willing to listen and able to understand.

My assistant witnessed the great relief that came to one woman from talking out her worries.

She had domestic worries.

And when she first began to talk,

She was like a wound up spring.

Then gradually,

As she kept on talking,

She began to calm down.

At the end of the interview,

She was actually smiling.

Had the problem been solved?

No,

It wasn't that easy.

But what caused the change was talking to someone,

Getting a little advice,

And a little human sympathy.

What had really worked,

The change was the tremendous healing value that lies in words.

Psychoanalysis is based to some extent on this healing power of words.

Ever since the days of Freud,

Analysts have known that a patient can find relief from his inner anxieties if he could talk,

Just talk.

Why is this so?

Maybe because by talking we gain a little better insight into our troubles,

Get a better perspective.

No one knows the whole answer,

But all of us know that spitting it out or getting it off our chest brings almost instant relief.

So the next time we have an emotional problem,

Why don't we look around for someone to talk to?

I don't mean,

Of course,

To go around making pests of ourselves by whining and complaining to everyone in sight.

Let's decide on someone we can trust and make an appointment.

Maybe a relative,

A doctor,

A lawyer,

A minister or a priest.

Then say to that person,

I want your advice.

I have a problem and I wish you would listen while I put it into words.

You may be able to advise me.

You may see angles to this thing that I can't see myself.

But even if you can't,

Will you help me tremendously if it would just sit and listen while I talk it out?

Talking things out then is one of the principle theories used at the Bonston Dispensary class.

Here are some other ideas we picked up at this class,

Things you can do in your home.

Number one,

Keep a notebook for inspirational reading.

Into this book,

You can paste all the poems or short stories or quotations which appeal to you personally and give you a lift.

Then when a rainy afternoon sends your spirits plunging down,

Perhaps you can look at this recipe for dispelling the gloom.

Number two,

Don't dwell too long on the shortcomings of others.

One woman at the class who found herself developing into a scolding,

Naggy and haggard faced wife was brought up short with the question,

What would you do if your husband died?

She was so shocked by the idea that she immediately sat down and drew a list of all her husband's good points.

She made quite a list.

Why don't you try the same thing next time you feel you're married to a tyrant?

Maybe you'll find after reading your spouse's virtues that he or she is a person you'd actually like to meet.

Number three,

Get interested in people.

Develop a friendly,

Healthy interest in the people who share your life.

One ailing woman who felt herself so exclusive that she didn't have any friends was told to try to make up a story about the next person she met.

She began in the bus to weave backgrounds and settings for the people she saw.

Number four,

Make up a schedule for tomorrow's work before you go to bed tonight.

The class found that many people felt driven and harassed by the unending round of work and things they must do.

They never got their work finished.

Rule number five,

Avoid tension and fatigue.

Relax,

Relax.

Nothing will make you look older sooner than tension and fatigue.

Yes,

You've got to relax.

Strangely enough,

A good hard floor is better to relax on than an inner spring bed.

It gives more resistance.

It's good for the spine.

All right then,

Here are some exercises you can do.

Try them for a week and see what you do for your looks and disposition.

A,

Lie flat on the floor whenever you feel tired.

Stretch as tall as you can.

Roll around if you want to.

Do it twice a day.

B,

Close your eyes.

You might try saying as Professor Johnson recommend something like this,

The sun is shining overhead,

The sky is blue and sparkling,

Nature is calm and in control of the world,

And I am nature's child and I'm tuned with the universe.

Or better still,

Pray.

C,

If you cannot lie down because you can't spare the time,

Then you can achieve almost the same effect sitting in a chair.

A hard upright chair is the best for relaxing.

Sit upright in the chair like a seated Egyptian statue and let your hands rest,

Palms down on the tops of your thighs.

D,

Now slowly tense your toes and then let them relax.

Tense the muscles in your legs and let them relax.

E,

Quiet your nerves with slow steady breathing.

Breathe from deep down.

The yogis of Indi were right.

Rhythmic breathing is one of the best methods ever of discovering for soothing your nerves.

F,

Think of all the wrinkles and frowns in your face and smooth them all.

Loosen up the worry creases you feel beneath your brows and at the sides of your mouth.

Do this twice a day and maybe you won't have to go to a health club to get a massage.

Maybe the lines will disappear from the inside out.

That is the end of our sleep story today.

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

Until next time,

Good night.

Reviews

Interesting, love your voice 🙏

Dont even know how the story went- was asleep too fast!