How To Stop Worrying - Stress Relief for Everyone

Chapter 1. A Tainted History: How Worrying Has Affected People Since the Dawn of Time: From the Caveman to Hitler

Worry: it is the thing that seems to inherently define the human race. If a human isn’t worried, he’s necessarily uneasy. After all: shouldn’t he be worried about something? Shouldn’t he be worried about not being worried?

This worrying is a necessary part of life, and it has affected people since the dawn of time.

Worry: A Look at the History

Imagine a caveman, crawling out of the dry brush balancing on his wide, thick feet. His brow is furrowed and his animal skins hang loosely, swaying soundlessly as he pads the dust towards his prey for a better shot. He is out in the open. Vulnerable. What now?

The caveman who survived, the one who ate and attracted a mate and fed his offspring, acted. He did not hesitate or dwell in doubt. He took in all the information he could, made a quick and intelligent choice, and then took three bounding leaps before spearing a wooly mammoth from point blank range. And his nervous nelly friend, the one who shuffled nervously and calculated every angle before flip-flopping seven times between advancing and retreating: well he was the wooly mammoth’s dinner.

In this pre-historic mammal eats pre-historical mammal world, there are historical examples of the process of natural selection in nearly every generation. Those who worry too much, who throw away their intelligence and confidence on waiting for problems that will never come, are doing themselves a disservice. From Roman Emperor Dominitian, to French Emperor Napoleon, to German Fuhrer Adolf Hitler, to Soviet Union Premier Joseph Stalin, to American President Richard Nixon, history is punctuated by intelligent men with excellent prospects, all taken down by their own paranoia. These leaders may be great examples of how to fall apart under pressure, but they are the perfect counter examples of how to handle stress and power. Worrying like they did only leads to tragedy. The bigger they are, the harder they fall.

Worry in the Roman Emperor Realm

Roman Emperor Dominitian is not in good company, but in great company. As a body of people, the Emperors of the Roman Empire probably staged more coup d’etats and more assassinations than any other group in the history of the world. They had a wildly enlarged sense of self and in Dominitian’s case that gave way to genuine paranoia and a tightly held belief that plots were constantly in the works to end his life. This only intensified his brutality and cruelty. Always looking over his shoulder (at nothing) made him erratic and dangerous. He impregnated his niece, made her get an abortion which resulted in her death, and then deified her. It seems impossible to imagine a successful leader who could be this irrationally illogical.

Emperor Napoleon

French Emperor Napoleon spent much of his career overcompensating for his shortcomings as a child who made it into the elite world of French military schools by the skin of his teeth and essentially without two francs to rub together. His struggle to adopt the French language and customs was real, but his lifelong fear that everyone thought him inferior to the task at hand was a crippling impediment created by his own mind. His imagined need to prove himself made his eyes bigger than his stomach, like that time he escaped imprisonment to reclaim France and ended up worse off than before, albeit after a brief resurgence of success. In Napoleon’s case it was really worrying about what everyone else thought that did him in.

Soviet Worries

Soviet