Great episode!

Aaaaah! A social worker with his head on straight instead of the standard issue touchy-feely apologist model.

No offense, Mr. Sellars, but your industry does attract a fair share of those weenies. I loved this episode and hope you become a frequent guest.

I loved the show today.I would love to hear from this guest again. It was really good to hear from someone who in in the same field as myself and actually doing what I am working towards. Very inspirational.

There is a book called “finding serentity in the age of anxiety”, it splits anxiety into 3 types:

natural anxiety
toxic anxiety
sacred anxiety (fear of god related to one’s mortality etc)

I feel that the best book on anxiety is Dale Carnegie’s”How to stop worrying and start living”,
To me it is like the bible on the subject, and it quotes the bible in a few places.

I seem to have found that that book is online here for free in it’s entirety:

http://www.trans4mind.com/Carnagie.pdf

Here is an excerpt from that book, Dale Carnagie mentioning how he started teaching classes on business and how that led to classes on anxiety:

As the years went by, I realised that another one of the biggest problems of these adults was worry. A
large majority of my students were business men-executives, salesmen, engineers, accountants: a
cross section of all the trades and professions-and most of them had problems! There were women in
the classes-business women and housewives. They, too, had problems! Clearly, what I needed was a
textbook on how to conquer worry-so again I tried to find one. I went to New York’s great public
library at Fifth Avenue and Forty-second Street and discovered to my astonishment that this library
had only twenty-two books listed under the title WORRY. I also noticed, to my amusement, that it
had one hundred and eighty-nine books listed under WORMS. Almost nine times as many books
about worms as about worry! Astounding, isn’t it? Since worry is one of the biggest problems facing
mankind, you would think, wouldn’t you, that every high school and college in the land would give a
course on “How to Stop Worrying”?

Yet, if there is even one course on that subject in any college in the land, I have never heard of it. No
wonder David Seabury said in his book How to Worry Successfully: “We come to maturity with as
little preparation for the pressures of experience as a bookworm asked to do a ballet.”
The result? More than half of our hospital beds are occupied by people with nervous and emotional
troubles.

I looked over those twenty-two books on worry reposing on the shelves of the New York Public
Library. In addition, I purchased all the books on worry I could find; yet I couldn’t discover even one
that I could use as a text in my course for adults. So I resolved to write one myself.
I began preparing myself to write this book seven years ago. How? By reading what the philosophers
of all ages have said about worry. I also read hundreds of biographies, all the way from Confucius to
Churchill. I also interviewed scores of prominent people in many walks of life, such as Jack Dempsey,
General Omar Bradley, General Mark Clark, Henry Ford, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Dorothy Dix. But
that was only a beginning.

I also did something else that was far more important than the interviews and the reading. I worked
for five years in a laboratory for conquering worry-a laboratory conducted in our own adult classes.
As far as I know, it is the first and only laboratory of its kind in the world. This is what we did. We
gave students a set of rules on how to stop worrying and asked them to apply these rules in their own
lives and then talk to the class on the results they had obtained. Others reported on techniques they
had used in the past.
As a result of this experience, I presume I have listened to more talks on “How I Conquered Worry”
than has any other individual who ever walked this earth. In addition, I read hundreds of other talks on
“How I Conquered Worry” talks that were sent to me by mail-talks that had won prizes in our classes
that are held in more than a hundred and seventy cities throughout the United States and Canada. So
this book didn’t come out of an ivory tower. Neither is it an academic preachment on how worry
might be conquered. Instead, I have tried to write a fast-moving, concise, documented report on how
worry has been conquered by thousands of adults. One thing is certain: this book is practical. You can
set your teeth in it.

———————————–

I can’t say enough good things on this book

Here is the table of contents:

Part One – Fundamental Facts You Should Know About Worry
l 1 – Live in “Day-tight Compartments”
l 2 – A Magic Formula for Solving Worry Situations
l 3 – What Worry May Do to You
Part Two – Basic Techniques In Analysing Worry
l 4 – How to Analyse and Solve Worry Problems
l 5 – How to Eliminate Fifty Per Cent of Your Business Worries
m Nine Suggestions on How to Get the Most Out of This Book
Part Three – How To Break The Worry Habit Before It Breaks You
l 6 – How to Crowd Worry out of Your Mind
l 7 – Don’t Let the Beetles Get You Down
l 8 – A Law That Will Outlaw Many of Your Worries
l 9 – Co-operate with the Inevitable
l 10 – Put a “Stop-Loss” Order on Your Worries
l 11 – Don’t Try to Saw Sawdust
Part Four – Seven Ways To Cultivate A Mental Attitude That Will Bring You Peace And
Happiness
l 12 – Eight Words that Can Transform Your Life
l 13 – The High, Cost of Getting Even
l 14 – If You Do This, You Will Never Worry About Ingratitude
l 15 – Would You Take a Million Dollars for What You Have?
l 16 – Find Yourself and Be Yourself: Remember There Is No One Else on Earth Like You
l 17 – If You Have a Lemon, Make a Lemonade
l 18 – How to Cure Melancholy in Fourteen Days
Part Five – The Golden Rule For Conquering Worry
l 19 – How My Mother and Father Conquered Worry
Part Six – How To Keep From Worrying About Criticism
l 20 – Remember That No One Ever Kicks a Dead Dog
l 21 – Do This-and Criticism Can’t Hurt You
l 22 – Fool Things I Have Done
Part Seven – Six Ways To Prevent Fatigue And Worry And Keep Your Energy And Spirits High
l 23 – How to Add One Hour a Day to Your Waking Life
l 24 – What Makes You Tired-and What You Can Do About It
l 25 – How the Housewife Can Avoid Fatigue-and Keep Looking Young
l 26 – Four Good Working Habits That Will Help Prevent Fatigue and Worry
l 27 – How to Banish the Boredom That Produces Fatigue, Worry, and Resentment
l 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
l 29 – The Major Decision of Your Life
Part Nine – How To Lessen Your Financial Worries
l 30 – “Seventy Per Cent of All Our Worries …”
Part Ten – “How I Conquered Worry” (32 True Stories)
• “Six Major Troubles Hit Me All At Once” By C.I. Blackwood
• “I Can Turn Myself into a Shouting Optimist Within an Hour” By Roger W. Babson
• “How I Got Rid of an Inferiority Complex” By Elmer Thomas
• “I Lived in the Garden of Allah” BY R.V.C. Bodley
• “Five Methods I Use to Banish Worry” By Professor William Lyon Phelps
• “I Stood Yesterday. I Can Stand Today” By Dorothy Dix
• “I Did Not Expect to Live to See the Dawn” BY J.C. Penney
• “I Go to the Gym to Punch the Bag or Take a Hike Outdoors” By Colonel Eddie Eagan
• “I Was ‘The Worrying Wreck from Virginia Tech'” By Jim Birdsall
• “I Have Lived by This Sentence” By Dr. Joseph R. Sizoo
• “I Hit Bottom and Survived” By Ted Ericksen
• “I Used to Be One of the World’s Biggest Jackasses” By Percy H. Whiting
• “I Have Always Tried to Keep My Line of Supplies Open” By Gene Autry
• “I Heard a Voice in India” BY E. Stanley Jones
• “When the Sheriff Came in My Front Door” By Homer Croy
• “The Toughest Opponent I Ever Fought Was Worry” By Jack Dempsey
• “I Prayed to God to Keep Me Out of an Orphan’s Home” By Kathleen Halter
• “I Was Acting Like an Hysterical Woman” By Cameron Shipp
• “I Learned to Stop Worrying by Watching My Wife Wash Dishes” By Rev. William Wood
• “I Found the Answer-Keep Busy!” By Del Hughes
• “Time Solves a Lot of Things” By Louis T. Montant, Jr.
• “I Was Warned Not to Try to Speak or to Move Even a Finger” By Joseph L. Ryan
• “I Am a Great Dismisser” By Ordway Tead
• “If I Had Not Stopped Worrying, I Would Have Been in My Grave Long Ago” By Connie Mack
• “One at a Time, Gentlemen, One at a Time” By John Homer Miller
• “I Now Look for the Green Light” By Joseph M. Cotter
• How John D. Rockefeller Lived on Borrowed Time for Forty-five Years
• “Reading a Book on Sex Prevented My Marriage from Going on the Rocks” BY B.R.W.
• “I Was Committing Slow Suicide Because I Didn’t Know How to Relax” By Paul Sampson
• “A Real Miracle Happened to Me” By Mrs. John Burger
• “Setbacks” BY Ferenc Molnar
• “I Was So Worried I Didn’t Eat a Bite of Solid Food for Eighteen Days” By Kathryne Holcombe
Farmer

Great resources everyone!
If I can add my two cents I also recommend this particular episode of the c-realm podcast: http://c-realmpodcast.podomatic.com/entry/2008-01-16T16_45_54-08_00

The second half of the episode is a discussion with Kathy McMahon, founder of PeakOilBlues.com about the range of psychological reactions which commonly manifest themselves in people who come to appreciate the implications of peak oil.

Although our community probably has broader concerns than peak oil (and some may not be concerned with peak oil at all) I find the discussion highly applicable.

I have said many times that my successes are not due to more skill or talent, just that I’m more tenacious and not afraid to fail. If I fail, it is an educational experience. I think we teach kids to be afraid to fail, so they are afraid to try.