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Worry is a dissociation and deflection of attention, a confusion of mental focus by anxious concern for incidentals and neglect of the essential element." It is also "deliberation turned toxic." Most Oriental languages have no word for such a typically modern state of mind. Although "forethought is essential to intelligent living, it is only when apprehension is ruled by nervous anxiety . . . that worry injures us." Brooding, it follows, is "meditation made sick by fear." Confronted by situations that we do not know how to face, or do not want to face, our concepts of the kind of action possible for us are limited by patterns of thought formed in childhood by fears of consequence or opinion, by a morbid love for our own unhappiness, by distorted evaluations of the situation based on ingrown prejudice rather than fact. We thereupon begin to worry and "the moment a man begins to worry he imperils his mind." The symptoms are plain. "There is no isolation so poignant as that which worry brings. At such a time life slips from our grasp, average contacts no longer assure us, people become strangers, to whom we talk across an unseen gulf. Smiles that .'Drought comfort somehow mock us, as if the world had become a pantomime and our intimates the weriest shadows. The day's routine stretches like a solitary waste; there is fatigue in our souls." There are three stages: the first, or stimulating phase, when there is a fair chance of facing the facts; the second, or inhibiting period, marked by self-indulgence, wandering attention, faulty observation; the third, or paralyzing stage, when bodily disorders set in, ranging from stomach ulcers, hyperacidity, twitchings, tremors, stammering, to pyloric spasms, constipation, diarrhea, insomnia.
After a chapter devoted to the pace of U. S. life, called "Is Uncle Sam Insane?", Dr. Seabury boldly faces the problem of worry created by an insecure economic order. Says he: "Wrong social conditions that we refuse to change precipitate trouble. . . . Neurotic personal conditions we refuse to face intensify it. If we are not carrying disorder inside, we will meet the outside confusion with poise." He says that as a psychologist Emerson was more radical than Freud, asks readers to "consider how different Emily Dickinson would have been had she gone to Vassar and been a roommate of Edna St. Vincent Millay."
The Author: Dr. David Seabury's real name was Dresser until he legally changed it to his mother's maiden name. Born in Boston, he published How to Worry Successfully on his 51st birthday. Previously he wrote four volumes of the same type (Unmasking Our Minds, Growing into Life, What Makes Us Seem So Queer, Keep Your Wits). Educated at Boston's Chauncy Hall School, in Florence, London, Paris, Munich, Rome and Harvard, Dr. Seabury began practice as a psychologist in Manhattan at the age of 29, became consulting psychologist for New York City in 1921. Married, and living now in Ossining, N. Y., he is the founder of the Centralist School of Psychology.