Stress has infiltrated everybody’s life, and it seems we are unable to exclude it from our everyday activities. This book teaches readers to recognize and analyze their worries before learning how to break and master worry habits. In the words, of author Dale Carnegie, it is nothing more than “a collection of successful and time-tested recipes to rid our lives of worry.”
Who is it for?
Best suited for people who worry too much ad are desperate for practical advice on how to reduce the amount of stress in their life.
In “How To Stop Worrying and Start Living” you’ll learn:
1. What the three-step anti worry techniques are.
2. Which five questions you can ask yourself before you get tempted to worry in the future.
3. How to cultivate a positive attitude in seven simple steps.
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Dale Carnegie’s biography
Dale Carnegie was an American lecturer and bestselling author, one of the pioneers in the field of self-improvement, corporate training, and public speaking guidance. He wrote a dozen books and about as many course booklets, including the all-time bestsellers “How To Win Friends and Influence People,” and “The Quick and Easy Way To Effective Speaking.”
Read, watch or listen to more books from Dale Carnegie. Go to our other book summary of Dale Carnegie.
How To Stop Worrying and Start Living Review
This book (alongside other works by Dale Carnegie) can change lives. The book tackles the issue of worry head on. It states that of all the liar’s in the world’s most of them are often our own fears and worries; worry doesn’t remove your problems, but it does remove your peace. He starts off by researching the causes behind the worry and then gives useful advice. The advice he offers is really helpful. It’s a classic book that should be read if you’re depressed and want to get better.
How To Stop Worrying and Start Living book tackles the issue of worry head on.
Dale Carnegie
The advice Carnegie gives can be found everywhere online, but he pairs it together with compelling stories about people whose lives were transformed by taking the worry seriously. Some of my favorites include:
How To Stop Worrying and Start Living by Dale Carnegie Book Summary
We’re so accustomed to stress that we’ve almost become numb to it.
If you don’t trust us, then try doing nothing for 30 seconds. Can you? You might be able to do it if you really put your mind to it.
And that’s because our minds almost immediately steer us in some unwanted direction (I forgot to ______!) before doing a U-Turn to head into the world where we worry about things we don’t want to think about (What if they called?) so that it can finally arrive at the most unwelcome thought: I should be working.
Frighteningly enough, in the absence of concerns such as these, most individuals feel as if something is lacking from their lives, as though something is just too calm and peaceful to be genuine. What they do not realize, however, is that it means they have actually settled on a lifestyle that will never be stress-relieving.
Written in 1948, Dale Carnegie’s How to Stop Worry and Start Living has grown to become a classic self-help book and one of the best on self improvement ever written. It aims help readers recognize and analyze the worry habits they have developed before teaching them how to stop worrying and start living by cultivating a mentally right mindset.
The author admits that How to Stop Worry and Start Living doesn’t contains “anything new in them,” and is only a collection of “successful and time-tested recipes” to rid your life of worry. “We already know how to live a good life,” writes Carnegie, “we just haven’t applied it. The purpose of this little book is to restate and illustrate many ancient and basic truths, and then to kick you in the shin and make you do something.” As always our job is to wrap this wisdom into a smaller package so that we can start applying it right now!
Let’s go!
21 thought-provokingly words to banish worry for good.
Have you ever heard about a guy named William Osborn?
Well, you should have!
He was the most renowned physician of his time, Regius Professor of medicine at Oxford, one of its founders, the instigator of the bedside clinical training, one of the greatest diagnosticians ever to use a stethoscope, and one of the greatest physicians of all time. According to Carnegie, he’d be none of these things if he hadn’t read, in the spring year of 1871, in his 21st year of life, 21 words written in the 21st year by Thomas Carlyle: “Our main business is not seeing what lies dimly at distance, but doing what lies clearly at hand.” Osler turned this sentence from Carlyle into his creed and he constantly relayed it to his students.
“Shut off your past!” he was reported to have lectured. “Let the old past bury its old. Shut out the yestersays which have lit fools the way to dusty deaths. The load of tomorrow added to that of yesterday carries today, makes the strongest fall. Shut off the future tightly as the past. Tomorrow is today. There is nothing to come.” Did Osier mean that we should not try to prepare for tomorrow?
Of course not!
He was just very aware that, to use Carnegies interpretation, “the most effective way to prepare for tomorrow would be to concentrate with all your intellect, all your energy, on doing today’s task superbly today.’ So, begin doing that! Begin developing the habit of life of “day-tight compartments.” Remember Christ’s prayer: “Give us this day our day-to-day bread.” Today is the only kind of day you can possibly eat, therefore there is no point in complaining about yesterday’s bread or wondering about what kind day you’ll eat if you loose your job tomorrow.
Today is the only day you have in the most direct sense imaginable. It’s time you understood this, and turned it into a powerful symbol of living in general.
3 magic steps to overcome worry in any situation
Willis Haviland Carrier was the man who started the air-conditioning business. He invented the first electric air conditioner in the early 1900s.
Of course, he did not become a pioneer overnight. He had worked for the Buffalo Forge Company for many years before becoming a pioneer.
Once upon a time, I was given an assignment to install a gas-cleaning machine in a plant of a large glass company. Since the process of cleaning gas was very new, unexpected problems arose. The cost of the project would amount to $20,000 approximately half a million in today’s money.
Carriage was stunned by his failure; “It was almost like someone had hit me on the head,’ he told Carnegie during a luncheon meeting. ‘My stomach, my insoles, began to twist and tangle. For a while I could not sleep.” And once he realized that worrying would do nothing but make things worse, he figured out a solution to his problem without worrying.
The anti-worried technique developed by Carrier in the late 1800s is quite simple and can help anyone, even today, deal with any type of trouble.
It consists of three steps:
Step 1: Ask Yourself: “What is the worst that could possibly happen if I can’t solve my problem?” Step 2: After figuring it out, prepare yourself mentally to deal with it if necessary.
After accepting the worst outcome, try not to get upset if things don’t go well. Nothing worse than the worst can possibly happen, so you have no reason to be upset.
Acceptance of what has happened will be the first step towards overcoming the consequences of any misfortunes.
And this is what the Carrier Method is all about.
Analyze and solve worry problems by following these four rules.
Try it, and your worries will disappear.
To achieve that, you need to equip yourself with a toolbox which can help you tackle these challenges head-on.
It is a straightforward four-step technique that you can start applying today. Start How To Stop Worrying and Start Living with these rules:
Rule 1: Know the facts.
“Half the worries in the world are caused by people who try to make decisions before they know enough about the subject matter to make an informed choice.”
Rule 2: After considering all the facts as carefully and thoroughly as possible, come to an informed decision.
Write down exactly what your concern is, and next to that write down what you can and cannot do about it. Once you’ve written those two lists, compare them. You may find that one of the items on your list is actually not something you can control. In that case, you should focus on the item on your list that you can control.
Rule 3: Once your decision has been made, act!
When once a decision is made and action is the order of the hour, dismiss absolutely all responsibility for the outcome. After all, you have thoroughly examined the situation, and acting is the last thing you should do. In fact, you should not act at all. You should simply let things happen naturally.
Rule 4: When you’re tempted to worry about a particular problem, ask yourself these questions and answer them as accurately as you can:
What is the problem?
What is the cause?
What are all possible ways to solve this problem?
Which is the best solution?
It will save you lots of time and energy, not to mention anxieties, worries, and stress!
6 laws to break the worry habit before it breaks you
You can break the worry habit by sticking to these 6 rules:1) Don’t worry about what others think.2) Don’t worry about being perfect.3) Don’t worry about making mistakes.4) Don’t worry about failure.5) Don’t worry about success.6) Don’t worry about the future.
• Stay busy. Worrying doesn’t solve problems; it only makes them worse. So if you’re feeling anxious, try to distract yourself. Learn a new language, play a musical instrument, or go to the gym. Anything that takes your mind off of your worries will help.
• Don’t bother about the little things. Carnegie describes the little details that make your life miserable as “the termites of life. ” And that’s quite a true statement if you ask us! Because of this, the Romans constantly repeated the phrase “the eagle doesn’t catch flies:” because like the law, don’t worry about the little things.
• Use the law-of-averages to outlaw your worries. If something is unlikely, then it probably won’t happen. Start asking yourself, “What are the odds against my worrying?” • Cooperate with the unavoidable. Be a stoic: if you know something is beyond your control, then accept it. Tell yourself, “It is so; it can’t be otherwise.” • Put a “stop loss” order on your worries. In the world of trading, a stop loss is an order by which a trader buys or sells a stock once the price hits a certain level. Apply this principle to your own life as well: ‘Decide just how much worry a thing may be worth, and refuse to give it any more.’ For example, tell your friend that you’ll wait for him for ten minutes and no longer. If he doesn’t show up, leave.
• Let the past be the past. Or, to use Carnegies metaphor: don’t saw dust just throw it away.
Cultivate a positive attitude by doing these things
There are many lists and mini-manuales on how to overcome worry, but we’ll finish our summary with a bit of a more positive guide from it
This one is based not on don’ts but on do’s, and its goal is for you to reach the right kind of mindset so that you won’t have to worry about anything but eliminate them instead.
It’s a sort-of prevention guide consisting of seven rules How To Stop Worrying and Start Living:
Rule 1: ‘Our life is what we think it is’, said Marcus Aurelius 2,000 years ago. Never forget that! Fill your mind with thoughts about peace, courage, health and hope.
Rule 2: Don’t try to make friends with your enemies. They’ll just end up hating you. Follow General Eisenhower’s rule: don’t waste any time thinking about people you don’t like.
Rule 3 is a simple three-part rule: 1) Do something
• Expecting gratitude is not a bad thing. Jesus healed ten people who were leprous, and only one thanked him. Why should it matter if you are in question?
• In addition to lower your expectations, raise your level of presence in the world of other people: start giving more, not only literally, but also (and much more importantly) metaphorically! Not because you’ll get anything back, but simply, for the joy in giving.
• Do what you would like others to do. Gratitude and generosity are “cultivated traits”: train other people (from your children) to be thankful and generous.
Rule 4: Count your blessings–not your troubles!
Rule 5: Don’t imitate others: Find yourself and do everything you possibly can to remain yourself. Envy is ignorance, said Emerson, and imitation is suicide. Rule 6: When life gives you lemons, make lemonade.
Rule 7: Forget about your unhappiness by getting involved in making things better for others. “When we are kind to others,” wrote Benjamin Franklin once, “we are best to ourselves.”
Concluding
How To Stop Worrying and Start Living is an old book, but it’s still relevant today.
It is a collection of other people’s thoughts and ideas, which abound with inspirational quotes and pieces of advice from famous thinkers and scientists, intellectuals and writers and it is structured in such a way that helps its reader put its wisdom into practice almost immediately.
If you enjoy reading books about how to stop worrying and start living, How to Stop Wringing Your Hands and Start Living is as close to a perfect book as one can hope to find. The same holds true for anyone who thinks they worry too much and are desperately trying to reduce the amount of anxiety in their lives.
Never forget that, far more often than not, the root cause of your problems lies within yourself. Start focusing on today, and you’ll live a far more peaceful and happy life. Find Sibylla F. Partridge’s “Just For Today” program, start following it and tackle most of your problems, as you simultaneously increase the amount of joy you experience.
I hope you enjoyed reading and listening to our book summary of How To Stop Worrying and Start Living by Dale Carnegie.
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