posted 11-18-2003 01:41 PM            

2. After you've done your best to deal with a situation, avoid speculating about the outcome. Forget it and go onto the next thing.

3. Keep busy. Keep the 24 hours of your day filled with these three ingredients: work, recreation, and sleep. Don't allow yourself time for abstract thinking.

4. Don't concern yourself with things you can't do anything about. Armchair generals don't win battles, but they do have nervous breakdowns.

5. For the time being anyway, eliminate daydreaming completely. Stop building air castles.

6. Don't procrastinate. Putting off an unpleasant task until tomorrow simply gives you more time for your imagination to make a mountain out a possible molehill. More time for anxiety to sap your self-confidence. Do it now, brother, do it now.

7. Don't pour woes and anxieties to other people. You don't want their sympathy - it'll merely make it easy for you to feel sorrier for yourself.

8. Get up as soon as you wake up. If you lie in bed, you may use up as much nervous energy living your day in advance as you would in actual accomplishment of the day's work.

9. Try to arrange your schedule so that you will not have to hurry. Hurry, a blood brother to worry, helps shatter poise and self-confidence, and contributes to fear and anxiety.

10. If a project seems too big, break it up into simple steps of action. Then negotiate those steps-link rungs in a ladder...one at a time. And don't allow yourself to think about the difficulties of step number two until you've executed step number one.

What were you worried about this time last year?
Can't remember?