worry, and to offer easily understood and commonplace suggestions which any
one may practice daily and continuously, at last automatically, without
interfering with his routine work or recreation. Indeed the tranquil mind
aids, rather than hinders, efficient work, by enabling its possessor to
pass from duty to duty without the hindrance of undue solicitude.

In advising the constitutional worrier the chief trouble the physician
finds is an active opposition on the part of the patient. Instead of
accepting another's estimate of his condition, and another's suggestions
for its relief, he comes with a preconceived notion of his own
difficulties, and with an insistent demand for their instant relief by drug
or otherwise. He uses up his mental energy, and loses his temper, in the
effort to convince his physician that he is _not_ argumentative. In a less
unreasonable, but equally difficult class, come those who recognize the
likeness in the portrait painted by the consultant, but who say they have
tried everything he suggests, but simply "can't."

It is my hope that some of the argumentative class may recognize, in my
description, their own case instead of their neighbor's, and may of their
own initiative adopt some of the suggestions; moreover, that some of the
acquiescent, but despairing class will renew their efforts in a different
spirit. The aim is, not to accomplish a complete and sudden cure, but to
gain something every day, or if losing a little to-day, to gain a little
to-morrow, and ultimately to find one's self on a somewhat higher plane,
without discouragement though not completely freed from the trammels
entailed by faulty mental habit.