How To Stop Worrying And Start Living

How To Stop Worrying And Start Living is a self-help classic which addresses one of the leading causes of physical illness, worry, by showing you simple and actionable techniques to eliminate it from your life.

When you’re worried you’re not busy doing things, but since taking action is the only thing that can improve your situation, every minute spent worrying is a minute that doesn’t make your life better.

But to reduce the amount of worrying in your life, you first have to find its cause. There are several, of course, but one of the biggest ones is confusion. We never know what’s going to happen next and it drives us insane.

Take Galen Litchfield, for example, who was a civilian and later prisoner of war stuck in Shanghai during WWII, when it was occupied by the Japanese. He’d hidden a few valuable items from them, so when he heard that a Japanese admiral had found out on a Sunday night, he freaked out. He knew what he could expect to be thrown inside the notorious torture chamber of the Japanese secret police on Monday – but he didn’t know what that would look like, which caused him a great deal of stress.

He used this three-step approach to deal with it:

Get your facts straight by writing down what you know and what you’re worried about. Analyze those facts to figure out your options. Make a decision and stick to it.

Galen wrote down that he was worried about being tortured to death, and when he asked himself what he could do about it, he came up with either fleeing, explaining himself or acting like nothing happened. He picked the last option and stuck with it, only to find out the next day that his Japanese admiral had calmed down and made nothing more than an angry remark to him.

There’s nothing like some good old common sense to disarm your worries.

One thing that’s crucial when applying the above strategy is timing. If you spend all of your time analyzing the facts and trying to make a decision, until the thing you’re worried about actually happens, you won’t have won much. That’s where a time limit can help. To implement this, you can adapt an idea from trading and investing: the stop-loss. A stop-loss is used to limit your financial downside. For example, if you buy 200 stocks for $10 and set your stop-loss at $8, your trading software will automatically sell all of your stocks if they fall to $8 or below, ensuring your maximum total loss is capped at $400 ($2*200). If something causes you stress, grief or anxiety, like a friend picking a fight over…