Why can "keep yourself busy" drive away troubles? Because there is a law here-psychology proves that no matter how smart a person is, his mind can't think of more than one thing at the same time. Let's do an experiment. If you lean back in your chair now, close your eyes and try to think: Liberty, what are you going to do tomorrow morning? You will find that you can only think about one thing in turn, but not two things at the same time, right? From your feelings, it's the same. We can't do an exciting thing with excitement, and at the same time, we stop because of anxiety. At the same time, one feeling will drive away another feeling.
It is such a simple discovery that military doctors engaged in psychotherapy can work miracles in wartime.
Some people retired from the battlefield often suffer from "mental weakness", and military doctors treat them with "keeping them busy". Apart from sleeping, these mentally frustrated people are allowed to engage in activities every minute: fishing, hunting, playing ball games, taking photos, planting flowers, dancing and so on. This simply doesn't allow them time to recall their terrible experiences.
"Occupational therapy" is a term used by modern psychologists, that is, taking work as a medicine to treat diseases. This method was adopted by doctors in ancient Greece in 500 BC.
In Franklin's time, Quakers in Philadelphia also used this method. 1774 someone visited Quaker sanatorium and found that mental patients were busy spinning and weaving, which surprised them. They think that these poor patients are undergoing forced labor. Later, Quakers explained that they found that those patients can really get better only when they work, because work can calm their nerves.
The famous poet henry longfellow almost went crazy after his young wife died of burns. Fortunately, he has three young children to look after. He is both a father and a mother, taking them for a walk, telling them stories, playing with them, and keeping the feelings between their father and son in the poem "Childhood" forever. He also translated Dante's Divine Comedy. Being busy made him regain his inner peace. As Bennison once said when his best friend Arthur Harlan died, "I must immerse myself in my work, or I will be troubled in despair."
For most people, "working hard" probably won't be a big problem when they are busy. However, after work-just when we can enjoy leisure and happiness freely-the devil of worry will start attacking us. At this time, we often start to think about what achievements we have made in our lives, whether our work is on the right track, whether what the boss said today has a "special meaning", or whether our hair is beginning to go bald. ...
When we are not busy, there is often a vacuum in our minds. Every physics student knows that "there is no vacuum in nature." As soon as the incandescent light bulb breaks down, air will immediately enter and fill the part called vacuum in theory.
When your mind is free, there will be something to fill. What is this? Usually it's all kinds of feelings. Why? Because anxiety, fear, hatred, jealousy and envy are all controlled by our thoughts, they will drive away all calm and happy thoughts in our thoughts.
James Marshall, a professor of education at Columbia Normal University, put it very well: "Worry hurts you the most, not when you take action, but after a day's work. At this time, your imagination begins to be confused, making you exaggerate every little mistake. Your mind is like a rampaging car without bullets, smashing everything to pieces. The best way to eliminate anxiety is to keep yourself busy and do something meaningful. "
No university professor can understand this truth and put it into practice. During World War II, I met a couple who lived in Chicago. They told me that their son joined the army the day after the Pearl Harbor incident. The lady almost damaged her health because she worried about her son's life every day.
I asked her, how did she overcome her worries later? She replied, "I keep myself busy." At first, she dismissed the maid and tried to keep herself busy with housework, but it didn't work. "The reason is that my housework is basically mechanized and I don't have to think at all. So when I make the bed and wash the dishes, I will always worry. I found that I needed a new job to keep me busy every hour, so I went to a big department store as a clerk. "
"Great," she said. "Customers surrounded me and asked me questions about price, size and color. I didn't spend a second thinking about things other than work. I want to know how to rest my feet at night. I fell asleep after eating every day, and I had neither time nor physical strength to worry about. "
She discovered this, just as John Cobb Booth said in the book "The Art of Forgetting Unhappiness": "A comfortable sense of security, inner peace and a feeling of being slow to respond because of happiness can make human beings calm down when they concentrate on their work."
And how good it is to be able to do this. The world-famous female adventurer Osa Jonson told me how she got rid of her troubles. Osama Jonson/kloc-married at the age of 0/5. For 25 years, she and her husband have traveled around the world, photographing extinct wild animals in Asia and Africa. Nine years ago, they returned to the United States, gave a travel speech and showed their famous movies. When they flew to the west coast, the plane crashed into a mountain and her husband died on the spot. The doctor said she would never get out of bed again. However, three months later, she gave a speech in a wheelchair. When I asked her why she did it, she said, "I did it because I didn't have time to be sad and worried."
Admiral Budd lived alone in a snow-covered Antarctic cabin for five months, and there was no life within 100 miles of Fiona Fang, Fiona Fang. It's so cold that even breathing is frozen. In Loneliness, he described his five-month life in the dark, which was both difficult and terrible. He said he had to get busy to avoid going crazy.
"Before turning off the lights at night, I will arrange the work for the next day. For example: one hour to check the escape tunnel, half an hour to dig a hole, and two hours to repair the dragging sled ... "
"You can arrange the time separately. Is very beneficial. Give me a feeling that I can dominate myself. Otherwise, life will have no purpose. Without a purpose, these days will pass as usual, and finally it will be a mess. "
The late Richard Coppert, a former professor at Harvard Medical School, pointed out in his Living Conditions: "As a doctor, I am glad to see that work can cure patients. They are infected with diseases caused by excessive fear, hesitation and hesitation. And work can bring courage, just like Emerson's self-confidence that never disappears. "
If we can't be busy all the time, but sit and worry, then there will be a lot of things that Darwin called "thinking" in our minds, and these "thinking" are like the legendary fairies, which will empty our minds and destroy our will.
I know an entrepreneur in new york who uses his busyness to get rid of those "fancies". Let yourself have no time to worry and worry. His name is Quber Longman, and he is also a student in my adult education class. His experience of overcoming anxiety is very interesting and special. So, after class, I invited him to have dinner with me, and we sat in a restaurant until late at night, talking about his experience. This is a story he told me:
18 years ago, I lost sleep because of excessive anxiety. I was nervous, irritable and unstable. I thought I was going to be schizophrenic.
I'm so worried for a reason. I'm the financial manager of new york Crown Fruit Products Company. We invested 500,000 dollars to pack strawberries in a gallon jar. For 20 years, we have been selling this one-gallon strawberry to ice cream manufacturers. Then for a while, our sales plummeted. Because the output of those big ice cream manufacturers, such as the national dairy company, has increased sharply. In order to save money and reduce costs, they all bought 36 gallons of barreled strawberries.
Not only can we not sell strawberries worth 500,000 dollars, but according to the contract, we must continue to buy strawberries worth 1 10,000 dollars next year. We borrowed $350,000 from the bank. Now, we can neither pay off our debts nor raise the money we need, so I am very worried.
I rushed to our factory in Watson Willis, California, to let our general manager know that the situation has changed and we may face the fate of destruction, but he refused to believe it and blamed all these problems on the poor salesman of new york Company.
After several days of requests, I finally persuaded him not to pack strawberries in the old way, but to sell new products in the fresh strawberry market in San Francisco, which could solve some of our problems. I shouldn't worry anymore, but I still can't do it. Worry is a habit, and I have developed it.
After returning to new york, I began to worry about everything again. I'm so nervous about the cherries I bought in Italy and the pineapples I bought in Hawaii that I can't sleep. Like I said just now, I'm going to have a nervous breakdown.
In despair, I changed a brand-new way of life, cured my insomnia and made me no longer worry. I try to keep myself busy, so busy that I have to spend all my energy and time and have no time to worry. I used to work seven hours a day. Start working every day from 15 to 16 hours. I arrive at the office at eight o'clock every morning and stay until midnight. When I got home in the middle of the night, I always fell into bed exhausted and fell asleep soon.
After almost three months, I finally got rid of my worrying habit and returned to the normal state of working seven or eight hours a day. This happened 18 years ago, and since then, I have never suffered from insomnia and anxiety.
Bernard Shaw said it very well. He said, "The secret of being sad is to have free time to think about whether you are happy or not." So forget it. Keep yourself busy, your blood will start to circulate, and your mind will become sharp-keep yourself busy, which is the cheapest medicine and the best medicine in the world.
The best way to eliminate anxiety:
Keep yourself busy.
Complete works of Carnegie