Sixteen Ways in Which This Book Will Help You
Preface How This Book Was Written——and Why
Part One Fundamental Facts You Should Know about Worry
1 Live in "Day-tight Compartments"
2 A Magic Formula for Solving Worry Situations
3 What Worry May Do to You

Part Two Basic Techniques in Analysing Worry
4 How to Analyse and Solve Worry Problems
5 How to Eliminate Fifty Per Cent of Your Business Worries

Part Three How to Break the Worry Habit Before It Breaks You
6 How to Crowd Worry out of Your Mind
7 Don't Let the Beetles Get You Down
8 A Law That Will Outlaw Many of Your Worries
9 Co-operate with the Inevitable
10 Put a "Stop-Loss" Order on Your Worries
11 Don't Try to Saw Sawdust

Part Four Seven Ways to Cultivate A Mental Attitude That Will Bring You Peace and HappIness
12 Eight Words That Can Transform Your Life
13 The High Cost of Getting Even
14 If You Do This, You Will Never Worry About Ingratitude
15 Would You Take a Million Dollars for What You Have？
16 Find Yourself and Be Yourself: Remember There Is No One Else on Earth Like You
17 If You Have a Lemon, Make a Lemonade
18 How to Cure Melancholy in Fourteen Days

Part Five The Golden Rule for Conquering Worry
19 How My Mother and Father Conquered Worry

Part Six How to Keep from Worrying about Criticism
20 Remember That No One Ever Kicks a Dead Dog
21 Do This——and Criticism Can't Hurt You
22 Fool Things I Have Done

Part Seven Six Ways to Prevent Fatigue and Worry and Keep Your Energy and Spirits High
23 How to Add One Hour a Day to Your Waking Life
24 What Makes You Tired——and What You Can Do About It
25 How The Housewife Can Avoid Fatigue
——and Keep Looking Young
26 Four Good Working Habits That Will Help Prevent Fatigue and Worry
27 How to Banish the Boredom That Produces Fatigue, Worry, and Resentment
28 How to Keep from Worrying about Insomnia

Part Eight How to Find the Kind of Work in Which You May Be Happy and Successful
29 The Major Decision of Your Life

Part Nine How to Lessen Your Financial Worries
30 Seventy Per Cent of All Our Worries...

Part Ten "How I Conquered Worry"——32 True Stories
……

 

How This Book Was Written and Why
In 1909, I was one of the unhappiest lads in New York. I was selling motor-trucks for a living. I didn't know what made a motor-truck run. That wasn't all: I didn't want to know. I despised my job. I despised living in a cheap furnished room on West Fifty,sixth Street——a room infested with cockroaches. I still remember that I had a bunch of neckties hanging on the walls; and when I reached out of a morning to get a fresh necktie, the cockroaches scattered in all directions. I despised having to eat in cheap, dirty restaurants that were also probably infested with cockroaches.
I came home to my lonely room each night with a sick headache——a headache bred and fed by disappointment, worry, bitterness, and rebellion. I was rebelling because the dreams I had nourished back in my college days had turned into nightmares. Was this life？ Was this the vital adventure to which I had looked forward so eagerly？ Was this all life would ever mean to me—— working at a job I despised, living with cockroaches, eating vile food——and with no hope for the future？ ... I longed for leisure to read, and to write the books I had dreamed of writing back in my college days.

 

16 Find Yourself and Be Yourself: Remember There Is No One Else on Earth Like You
I have a letter from Mrs. Edith Allred, of Mount Airy, North Carolina. " As a child, I was extremely sensitive and shy," she says in her letter. "I was always overweight and my cheeks made me look even fatter than I was. I had an old-fashioned mother who thought it was foolish to make clothes look pretty. She always said: 'Wide will wear while narrow will tear' ; and she dressed me accordingly. I never went to parties; never had any fun; and when I went to school, I never joined the other children in outside activities, not even athletics. I was morbidly shy. I felt I was 'different' from everybody else, and entirely undesirable.
"When I grew up, I married a man who was several years my senior. But I didn't change. My in-laws were a poised and self-confident family. They were everything I should have been but simply was not. I tried my best to be like them, but I couldn't. Every attempt they made to draw me out of myself only drove me further into my shell. I became nervous and irritable. I avoided all friends. I got so bad I even dreaded the sound of the doorbell ringing！ I was a failure. I knew it; and I was afraid my husband would fired it out. So, whenever we were in public, I tried to be gay, and overacted my part. I knew I overacted; and I would be miserable for days afterwards.