“If we had cut the tree at the ground before trimming off the branches, it would have broken nearby trees in falling. It is easier to handle a tree the smaller you can make it,” so explained the tree man.

The vast tree of worry which over long years has grown up in your personality can best be handled by making it as small as possible. Thus it is advisable to snip off the little worries and expressions of worry. For example, reduce the number of worry words in your conversation. Words may be the result of worry, but they also create worry. When a worry thought comes to mind, immediately remove it with a faith thought and expression. For example: “I’m worried that I will miss the train.” Then start early enough to be sure you get there on time. The less worrying you do, the more likely you are to start promptly, for the uncluttered mind is systematic and is able to regulate time.

As you snip off these small worries you will gradually cut back to the main trunk of worry. Then with your developed greater power you will be able to eliminate basic worry, i.e., the worry habit, from your life.

My friend Dr. Daniel A. Poling gives a valuable suggestion. He says that every morning before he arises he repeats these two words, “I believe,” three times. Thus at the day’s beginning he conditions his mind to faith, and it never leaves him. His mind accepts the conviction that by faith he is going to overcome his problems and difficulties during the day. He starts the day with creative positive thoughts in his mind. He “believes,” and it is very difficult to hold back the man who believes.

I related Dr. Poling’s “I believe” technique in a radio talk and had a letter from a woman who told me that she had not been very faithful to her religion which happened to be the Jewish faith. She said their home was filled with contention, bickering, worry, and unhappiness. Her husband, she declared, “drank far too much for his own good” and sat around all day doing no work. He weakly complained that he couldn’t find a job. This woman’s mother-in-law lived with her and the latter “whined and complained of her aches and pains all the while.”

This woman said that Dr. Poling’s method impressed her and she decided to try it herself. So the next morning upon awakening she affirmed, “I believe, I believe, I believe.” In her letter she excitedly reported, “It has been only ten days since I started this plan and my husband came home last night and told me he had a job paying $80 a week. And he also says that he is going to quit drinking. I believe he means it. What is even more wonderful, my mother-in-law has practically stopped complaining of her aches and pains. It is almost as if a miracle has happened in this house. My worries seem to have just about disappeared.”

That does indeed seem almost magical, and yet that miracle happens every day to people who shift over from negative fear thoughts to positive faith thoughts and attitudes.

My good friend, the late Howard Chandler Christy, the artist, had many a sound anti-worry technique. Scarcely ever have I known a man so filled with the joy and delight of life. He had an indomitable quality, and his happiness was infectious.

My church has a policy of having the minister’s portrait painted sometime during his pastorate. This portrait hangs in the minister’s home until his death, when it reverts to the church and is placed in a gallery along with pictures of his predecessors. It is usually the policy of the Board of Elders and Deacons to have a portrait painted when in their wise judgment the minister is at the height of his good looks (mine was painted several years ago).

While sitting for Mr. Christy, I asked, “Howard, don’t you ever worry?”

He laughed. “No, not on your life. I don’t believe in it.”

“Well,” I commented, “that is quite a simple reason for not worrying. In fact, it seems to me too simple—you just don’t believe in it, therefore you don’t do it. Haven’t you ever worried?” I asked.

He replied, “Well, yes, I tried it once. I noticed that everybody else seemed to worry and I figured I must be missing something, so one day I made up my mind to try it. I set aside a day and said, ‘That is to be my worry day.’ I decided I would investigate this worry business and do some worrying just to see what it was like.

“The night before the day came I went to bed early to get a good night’s sleep to be rested up to do a good job of worrying the next day. In the morning I got up, ate a good breakfast—for you can’t worry successfully on an empty stomach—and then decided to get to my worrying. Well, I tried my best to worry until along about noon, but I just couldn’t make heads nor tails of it. It didn’t make sense to me, so I just gave it up.”

He laughed one of those infectious laughs of his.

“But,” I said, “you must have some other method of overcoming worry.” He did indeed, and it is perhaps the best method of all.

“Every morning I spend fifteen minutes filling my mind full of God,” he said. “When your mind is full of God, there is no room for worry. I fill my mind full of God every day and I have the time of my life all day long.”

Howard Christy was a great artist with a brush, but he was an equally great artist with life because he was able to take a great truth and simplify it down to its basic fact, namely, that only that comes out of the mind which originally you put into the mind. Fill the mind with thoughts of God rather than with thoughts of fear, and you will get back thoughts of faith and courage.

Worry is a destructive process of occupying the mind with thoughts contrary to God’s love and care. Basically that is all worry is. The cure is to fill the mind with thoughts of God’s power, His protection, and His goodness. So spend fifteen minutes daily filling your mind full of God. Cram your mind full of the “I believe philosophy,” and you will have no mental room left to accommodate thoughts of worry and lack of faith.

Many people fail to overcome such troubles as worry because, unlike Howard Christy, they allow the problem to seem complicated and do not attack it with some simple technique. It is surprising how our most difficult personal problems often yield to an uncomplicated methodology. This is due to the fact that it is not enough to know what to do about difficulties. We must also know how to do that which should be done.

The secret is to work out a method of attack and keep working it. There is value in doing something that dramatizes to our own minds that an effective counterattack is in process. In so doing we bring spiritual forces to bear upon the problem in a manner both understandable and usable.

One of the best illustrations of this technique strategy against worry was a scheme developed by a businessman. He was a tremendous worrier. In fact he was fast getting himself into a bad state of nerves and ill-health. His particular form of worry was that he was always doubtful as to whether he had done or said the right thing. He was always rehashing his decisions and getting himself unnerved about them. He was a post-mortem expert. He is an exceptionally intelligent man, in fact a graduate of two universities, in both instances with honors. I suggested that he ought to work out some simple method that would help him to drop the day when it was over and go ahead into the future and forget it. I explained the gripping effectiveness of simple, dramatized spiritual truth.

It is always true that the greatest minds have the best ability to be simple, that is, they have the capacity to work out some simple plans for putting profound truths into operation, and this man did that in connection with his worries. I noticed that he was improving and commented on it.

“Oh, yes,” he said, “I finally got the secret and it has worked amazingly well.” He said that if I would drop into his office sometime toward the close of the day he would show me how he had broken the worry habit. He telephoned me one day and asked me to have dinner that evening. I met him at his office at closing time. He explained that he had broken his worry habit by working out “a little ritual” that he performed every night before leaving his office. And it was very unique. It made a lasting impression upon me.

We picked up our hats and coats and started toward the door. By the door of his office stood a wastebasket and above it on the wall was a calendar. It was not one of those calendars where you see a week or a month, or three months, it was a one-day calendar. You could see only one date at a time, and that date was in large print. He said, “Now I will perform my evening ritual, the one that has helped me break the worry habit.”

He reached up and tore off the calendar page for that particular day. He rolled it into a small ball and I watched with fascination as his fingers slowly opened and he dropped that “day” into the wastebasket. Then he closed his eyes and his lips moved, and I knew that he was praying, so was respectfully silent. Upon finishing his prayer he said aloud, “Amen. O.K., the day is over. Come on, let’s go out and enjoy ourselves.”

As we walked down the street I asked, “Would you mind telling me what you said in that prayer?”

He laughed and said, “I don’t think it is your kind of prayer.” But I persisted, and he said, “Well, I pray something like this: ‘Lord, you gave me this day. I didn’t ask for it, but I was glad to have it. I did the best I could with it and you helped me, and I thank you. I made some mistakes. That was when I didn’t follow your advice, and I am sorry about that. Forgive me. But I had some victories and some successes, too, and I am grateful for your guidance. But now, Lord, mistakes or successes, victories or defeats, the day is over and I’m through with it, so I’m giving it back to you. Amen.’”

Perhaps that isn’t an orthodox prayer, but it certainly proved to be an effective one. He dramatized the finishing of the day and he set his face to the future, expecting to do better the next day. He co-operated with God’s method. When the day is over, God blacks it out by bringing down the curtain of night. By this method this man’s past mistakes and failures, his sins of omission and commission gradually lost their hold on him. He was released from the worries that accumulated from his yesterdays. In this technique this man was practicing one of the most effective anti-worry formulas, which is described in these words, “… but this one thing I do, forgetting those things which are behind, and reaching forth unto those things which are before, I press toward the mark for the prize of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus.” (Philippians 3:13-14)

Other practical anti-worry techniques may suggest themselves to you, and I should like to hear of those which after careful use prove effective. I believe that all of us who are interested in self-improvement are fellow students in God’s great spiritual laboratory. Together we work out practical methods of successful living. People from everywhere are kind enough to write me about their methods and the results attained. I try to be helpful in making tested methods available to others through books, sermons, newspaper columns, radio, television, and other media. In this manner there can be developed a great many people who have the know-how for overcoming not only worry but other personal problems as well.

To conclude this chapter in a manner designed to help you go to work now to break the worry habit, I list a ten-point worry-breaking formula.

1. Say to yourself, “Worry is just a very bad mental habit. And I can change any habit with God’s help.”

2. You became a worrier by practicing worry. You can become free of worry by practicing the opposite and stronger habit of faith. With all the strength and perseverance you can command, start practicing faith.

3. How do you practice faith? First thing every morning before you arise say out loud, “I believe,” three times.

4. Pray, using this formula, “I place this day, my life, my loved ones, my work in the Lord’s hands. There is no harm in the Lord’s hands, only good. Whatever happens, whatever results, if I am in the Lord’s hands it is the Lord’s will and it is good.”

5. Practice saying something positive concerning everything about which you have been talking negatively. Talk positively. For example, don’t say, “This is going to be a terrible day.” Instead, affirm, “This is going to be a glorious day.” Don’t say, “I’ll never be able to do that.” Instead, affirm, “With God’s help I will do that.”

6. Never participate in a worry conversation. Shoot an injection of faith into all your conversations. A group of people talking pessimistically can infect every person in the group with negativism. But by talking things up rather than down you can drive off that depressing atmosphere and make everyone feel hopeful and happy.

7. One reason you are a worrier is that your mind is literally saturated with apprehension thoughts, defeat thoughts, gloomy thoughts. To counteract, mark every passage in the Bible that speaks of faith, hope, happiness, glory, radiance. Commit each to memory. Say them over and over again until these creative thoughts saturate your subconscious mind. Then the subconscious will return to you what you have given it, namely, optimism, not worry.

8. Cultivate friendships with hopeful people. Surround yourself with friends who think positive, faith-producing thoughts and who contribute to a creative atmosphere. This will keep you re-stimulated with faith attitudes.

9. See how many people you can help to cure their own worry habit. In helping another to overcome worry you get greater power over it within yourself.

10. Every day of your life conceive of yourself as living in partnership and companionship with Jesus Christ. If He actually walked by your side, would you be worried or afraid? Well, then, say to yourself, “He is with me.” Affirm aloud, “I am with you always.” Then change it to say, “He is with me now.” Repeat that affirmation three times every day.