Quit Your Worrying! by George Wharton James
page 27 of 181 (14%)
page 27 of 181 (14%)
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Such conduct has well been termed money-madness. It is an obsession, a
disease, a form of hypnotism, a mental malady. The tendency of the age is to drive. We drive our own children to school; there they are driven for hours by one study after another; even when they come home they bring lessons with them--the lovers of study and over-conscientious because they want to do them, and the laggards because they must, if they are to keep up with their classes. If the parents of such children are not careful, they (the children) soon learn to worry; they are behind-hand with their lessons; they didn't get the highest mark yesterday; the class is going ahead of them, etc., etc., until mental collapse comes. For worrying is the worst kind of mental overwork. As Dr. Edward Livingston Hunt, of Columbia University, New York, said in a paper read by him early in 1912, before the Public Health Education Committee of the Medical Society of the County of New York: There is a form of overwork, exceedingly common and exceedingly disastrous--one which equally accompanies great intellectual labors and minor tasks. I allude to worry. When we medical men speak of the workings of the brain we make use of a term both expressive and characteristic. It is to cerebrate. To cerebrate means to think, to reason, and to reach conclusions; it means to concentrate and to work hard. To think, then, is to cerebrate. To worry is to cerebrate intensely. Worry is overwork of the most disastrous kind; it means to drive the mental machinery at an unreasonable and dangerous |
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