Part Three How to Break the Worry Habit Before It Breaks You
第三篇　如何改变忧虑的习惯

6 How to Crowd Worry out of Your Mind

I shall never forget the night, a few years ago, when Marion J.Douglas was a student in one of my classes.（I have not used his real name. He requested me, for personal reasons, not to reveal his identity.）But here is his real story as he told it before one of our adult-education classes. He told us how tragedy had struck at his home, not once, but twice. The first time he had lost his five-year-old daughter, a child he adored. He and his wife thought they couldn't endure that first loss; but, as he said, “Ten months later, God gave us another little girl—and she died in five days.”

This double bereavement was almost too much to bear.“I couldn't take it,” this father told us.“I couldn't sleep, I couldn't eat, I couldn't rest or relax. My nerves were utterly shaken and my confidence gone.” At last he went to doctors; one recommended sleeping pills and another recommended a trip.

He tried both, but neither remedy helped. He said, “My body felt as if it were encased in a vice, and the jaws of the vice were being drawn tighter and tighter.” The tension of grief—if you have ever been paralysed by sorrow, you know what he meant.

“But thank God, I had one child left—a four-year-old son. He gave me the solution to my problem. One afternoon as I sat around feeling sorry for myself, he asked:‘Daddy, will you build a boat for me?'I was in no mood to build a boat; in fact, I was in no mood to do anything. But my son is a persistent little fellow! I had to give in.

“Building that toy boat took about three hours. By the time it was finished, I realised that those three hours spent building that boat were the first hours of mental relaxation and