Book SummaryHow to Stop Worrying and Start Living, by Dale Carnegie

1-Page Summary1-Page Book Summary of How to Stop Worrying and Start Living

In the bestselling classic How To Stop Worrying and Start Living, Dale Carnegie—author of How to Win Friends and Influence People—offers timeless advice and practical methods for cultivating a happier, more worry-free mindset.

In this guide, we’ll first explore what causes worry and how it negatively impacts your mental and physical well-being. We’ll then explore Carnegie’s solutions for living a happier, worry-free life in four parts:

• Part 1: Focus on One Day at a Time explores how limiting your focus to the present alleviates worry and promotes mental clarity.
• Part 2: Analyze Your Worries explains how to approach specific worries to calm your concerns and come up with constructive solutions to your problems.
• Part 3: Cultivate a Positive Attitude clarifies how a negative attitude contributes to stress and habitual anxiety and presents methods to approach life more optimistically.
• Part 4: Manage Three Common Worry Triggers—Criticism, Work, and Finances suggests preventative measures against common causes of stress and anxiety.

Introduction: The Cause and Effect of Worry

To effectively combat worry, it’s important to understand what causes it. According to Carnegie, the cause of worry is simple: It’s a result of focusing outside of the present—overthinking the past and harboring anxiety about the future.

(Shortform note: Carnegie’s definition of worry differs slightly from that of psychologists, who assert that all worries, even those focused on the past, concern future events. You only worry about the past in terms of how it might affect your future.)

Each morning, you’re granted a limited amount of time and energy to focus, get things done, and make the best of your day—there’s only so much you can handle mentally and physically. However, Carnegie explains, worrying about the past and future creates additional burdens that use up your limited time and energy and distract you from focusing on what you need to do today.

(Shortform note: Psychologists back up Carnegie’s claim that worrying squanders your mental energy: Worrying triggers neural activity in the regions of the brain required to direct attention and concentrate. The more you worry, the more neural activity it requires—leaving you with insufficient neural resources to concentrate on everyday tasks.)

Carrying the weight of your worries overwhelms you, creates fatigue, and results in irrational thoughts that make small concerns appear more serious than they are. As a result, it creates unnecessary stress and anxiety.

(Shortform note: While it’s true that worry contributes to stress and fatigue, psychological research shows that worry and stress feed off each other—creating more of a cyclical relationship than Carnegie suggests. This is because stress and fatigue reinforce your inclination to worry: Feeling stressed or tired makes you feel overwhelmed and impels you to focus negatively—for example, on what’s not going well or bad things that could happen. This train of thought further increases your worries.)

Though the cause of worry is simple, Carnegie emphasizes that its effects on your health are not. Over time, even small, daily worries deteriorate your mental and physical health: you may experience symptoms such as depression, anxiety, ulcers, headaches, insomnia, cardiac issues, diabetes, and rashes.

(Shortform note: Research on stress clarifies how worry contributes to health problems. Worrying tricks your body into believing that you’re in danger and triggers it to release stress hormones, such as cortisol and adrenaline. These hormones prepare you to fight or flee from “danger” by pumping extra fuel (sugar and fat) into your bloodstream. However, since your worries rarely relate to life-threatening situations that require a burst of physical activity, your body doesn’t use these hormones and fuel. They end up accumulating in your bloodstream and interfering with how your body regulates vital functions—contributing to numerous mental and physical complications as Carnegie suggests.)

Part 1: Focus on One Day at a Time

Since worry results from focusing outside of the present, Carnegie’s first solution to overcome worry and safeguard your mental and physical health is to practice living one day at a time. Limiting your focus to one day at a time shuts out worries about the past and future and ensures that you only carry one day’s worth of stress at a time. Shedding the weight of your worries preserves your energy, encourages mental clarity, and allows you to manage each day more efficiently. As a result, it cuts unnecessary stress and anxiety from your life.

(Shortform note: According to Eckhart Tolle (The Power of Now), focusing on the present moment provides far more benefits than just alleviating worry: It allows you to accept your life as it happens and maintain a feeling of inner peace and happiness. This is because practicing present-moment awareness calms your internal monologue, thus reducing critical thoughts you have about yourself or your experiences. Since your critical thoughts often impede your ability to feel...

How to Stop Worrying and Start Living Summary Part 1: The Cause and Effect of Worry

Though it’s consuming and can easily rule your life, the emotion of worry is fairly simple—it’s focusing outside of the present. Worry is based on overthinking the past and harboring anxiety about the future.

One Day at a Time

The most basic way to combat worry is training yourself to shut your mind off completely from the worries of yesterday and tomorrow, instead focusing all your attention and energy on the present moment. This is essential to alleviating stress and anxiety. When you worry about the past and future, those stresses and anxieties get added to your present load—you’ll always be carrying three times the weight you need to. When you’re carrying the weight of excess worry, you’re easily stretched to your mental limits. This causes anxiety and unclear, disorganized thinking.

On the other hand, shutting out worries about the past and future ensures that you’re only carrying one day’s worth of stress at a time, which allows you to keep your thinking clear and logical.

Prepare for the Future by Living One Day at a Time

Not worrying about the future doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t prepare for it. Of course, it’s necessary to save for...

Shortform Exercise: Practice Focusing on the Present

Too often, we focus on the unchangeable past and the far-off future rather than fully living in the certain present.

Describe one way that ruminating on the past disrupts your ability to live in the present. (For example, you worry that you made a bad first impression on a colleague, so you’re withdrawn and uncomfortable while talking to him in the present.)

How to Stop Worrying and Start Living Summary Part 2: The Foundation of Worry Management

The most foundational anti-worry tool is thoughtful analysis. Analysis helps neutralize your emotions and breaks worrisome situations down to their basic facts so that you can look at them clearly and calmly. This allows you to make sound decisions and find the best possible solutions.

Worry Analysis 101

There are three parts to thoughtfully analyzing and working through worry.

Part 1: Get the Facts

It’s important to gather all the information you can about the situation, as this gives full clarity to it. If you’re worrying about something without full information about it, you don’t know exactly what you’re worried about. This can cause you to get stuck on “what-ifs” or make decisions based on false or incomplete information.

When you’re gathering facts, be sure you’re gathering all the information possible. It’s often tempting to only seek out and use information that confirms your thinking, but this prevents you from seeing the situation from all sides and making a fully informed decision. Of course, it can be difficult to remain unbiased—**when you’re faced with worry and emotions are high, you’ll naturally reach for information that makes...

Shortform Exercise: Analyze Your Problem and Make a Decision

When faced with a problem, you’re much more likely to find a solution by analyzing the situation than worrying about it.

Describe the facts of a situation that you’re currently worried about.

Shortform Exercise: Put an “Emergency Stop” on Worry

If you find yourself in a stressful situation with no time for analysis, put an emergency stop to your worries and try to find ways to improve your circumstances while you await the outcome.

Describe a stressful issue that you’re currently waiting for the outcome of.

How to Stop Worrying and Start Living Summary Part 3: Break Your Worry Habit

Like most people, you probably often find yourself caught up in a sense of generalized worry about your day-to-day life. These worries are difficult to work through using worry analysis, as they’re usually not based on specific issues that you can gather facts and information about. Rather, this generalized worry is simply a habit to be broken. There are six ways you can break your worry habit.

Method #1: Keep Busy

Often you’ll find that worry and anxiety creep up during your idle moments. Keeping your body and mind as busy as possible is an effective way to keep worry at bay, and perhaps forget about it completely. This is because it’s impossible to actively think about two things at once—for example, try simultaneously thinking about what you had for breakfast this morning and a task you need to complete tonight. You’ll find that you can think of both of these things in turn but not at the same time.

In the same way, your emotions can overrule one another—you can’t feel joy and despair at the same time, for example. When you keep your mind occupied with productive and positive thoughts, it can’t also be occupied by worry and anxiety.

• For...

Shortform Exercise: Reframe the Small Stuff

Small worries have the power to take over your thoughts and emotionally exhaust you. Reframe the way you think about them to take away their negative power.

Describe a small annoyance that’s taking up space in your mind. (For example, it’s been raining for a week, or your child keeps interrupting you while you work from home.)

Shortform Exercise: Move Forward From a Past Action or Decision

While you can’t go back and change your past actions and decisions, you can work on managing them in the present.

What is a past action or decision that you’re ruminating on? (For example, moving to a city you don’t like or acting very rudely toward a waitress.)

How to Stop Worrying and Start Living Summary Part 4: Seven Rules for a Happier Mindset

The happier your everyday mindset is, the harder it will be for worry to take over as your primary emotion and the more easily you’ll gloss over small problems and irritations that could otherwise build into stressful issues. There are seven rules for maintaining a generally happy mindset.

Rule #1: Attitude Is Everything

Attitude is much stronger than we often give it credit for—in fact, it’s strong enough to not only control your mental perceptions but also warp your physical perceptions.

• A psychiatric study found that hypnotizing men and telling them that they were very weak reduced their grip strength by 72 pounds, and telling them that they were very strong increased their grip strength by 41 pounds.

It’s important to be aware of your attitude’s power to control how you perceive the world around you because many of your problems and worries don’t stem from your actual circumstances—they stem from your perception of your circumstances.

• For example, Carnegie tells the story of a young man who was living a miserable life in Minnesota—he was constantly unhappy about his salary, his looks, his relationship, and his social life. He ran away to...

Shortform Exercise: Change Your Actions to Change Your Attitude

When faced with a stressful situation, it can be hard to break out of your worrisome thoughts by mental power alone. Adjust your attitude by doing something productive.

Describe a stressful or worrying situation you’re currently dealing with. (For example, there will be layoffs at your work next month, or you have to get surgery with a long recovery period.)

Shortform Exercise: Make Lemonade

Setbacks become less worrisome when you focus on the valuable lessons they can teach you.

Describe a current or recent setback. (For example, you got hit with a huge unexpected expense, or your relationship just ended.)

How to Stop Worrying and Start Living Summary Part 5: The Power of a Higher Power

The role of a higher power and faith in your life shouldn’t be based on the belief that your religion is “the” religion or comparison between the values of your religion and others. Rather, religion should show up in your life as something that makes your life better and happier, and helps you renew the spiritual values that give you inner strength and courage, hope, satisfaction with your life, and purpose.

Religion and prayer are strong forces against the worry and stresses of everyday life—and of course, the physical symptoms of worry. This is because prayer fulfills three worry-alleviating needs:

1. It helps you articulate your worries. It’s impossible to work through a problem when you don’t fully understand what the problem really is. When you process your worries aloud in prayer, you’re able to work through them and find the core issue.
2. It allows you to share your worries and feel less alone. Worries and problems are heavy—especially when you’re carrying them alone. Unloading your worries to a higher being gives...

How to Stop Worrying and Start Living Summary Part 6: Dealing With Worry About Criticism

Having tools to keep your general mindset relatively worry-free frees up mental energy to deal with larger, more specific types of worry. In this next half of the summary we’ll examine three common worry triggers—criticism, work, and finances—and methods for managing them.

One aspect of life that triggers anxiety in almost everyone is criticism. As natural as a negative reaction to criticism may be, it’s important to learn how to control your emotions and examine criticism with clear judgment because it often has the potential to teach valuable lessons. There are three ways that you can keep negative emotions to a minimum when you receive criticism: remember that you’re not perfect, do your best, and think of unjustified criticism as a compliment.

Remember That You’re Not Perfect

Without fail, we’ve all done foolish and regrettable things or made bad decisions—and often, received justified criticism for what we’ve done. Often, we instinctively react to this criticism in the worst possible way, either becoming angry and defensive or worried sick about what people must think of us.

**The best way to deal with justified criticism is to recognize that it’s a...

Shortform Exercise: Rethink Unjust Criticism You’ve Received

Though unjust criticism might sting, it can be considered a compliment—it means you’re doing something that merits jealousy and attention.

Think of the last time you received unjust criticism. Describe the situation you were in when you received it.

How to Stop Worrying and Start Living Summary Parts 7-8: Dealing With Worry About Work

One of the most common sources of worry for many people is work—to-do lists become overwhelming, dead-end jobs feel frustrating, and competition breeds insecurity. It’s important to get your worries about your work under control because work occupies a huge part of your life. Naturally, worry about work starts to touch aspects of your life outside work such as your hobbies, your relationships, and so on. There are three main ways to reduce your work worries: Search for ways to enjoy the job you do have, seek out and pursue work you genuinely enjoy, and establish good, healthy working habits.

Search for Ways to Enjoy Your Work

One significant way that work can contribute to your fatigue and worry is boredom. It does this in two ways:

• Physically: Boredom slows down your body by decreasing your blood pressure and oxygen consumption. This leaves you feeling sluggish.
• Mentally: Boredom makes you feel resentment and frustration toward your work—negative emotions that quickly drain your mental energy. And, when you’re bored your thoughts more easily wander, meaning you spend more time ruminating on your worries.

On the other hand, when you’re interested in...

Shortform Exercise: Find a Way to Enjoy Your Work

Finding a way to enjoy your work can reduce your boredom and worry and increase your energy.

Describe the work you do that makes you feel bored, frustrated, or anxious.

How to Stop Worrying and Start Living Summary Part 9: Dealing With Financial Worries

Research finds that most people think that just a 10% increase in income could solve all of their financial problems. However, your income usually isn’t the problem—it’s the way that you spend it. If your income were to increase by 10%, your spending would likely increase by 10% as well.

Financial problems aren’t solved with a higher income. Financial problems are solved by making a clear plan of how you’re going to use your money—and sticking to the plan. There are 10 rules to keeping your finances under control and easing your financial worries.

Rule #1: Write Down the Facts

Write down everything you spend your money on—from large expenditures like rent down to occasional orders at Starbucks. This is a time-consuming task and takes practice to remember—but the good news is, you don’t have to track your expenses forever. Track meticulously for at least one month, ideally three months.

This practice will help you build an accurate picture of where your money goes. Many people think they know exactly how they’re spending their money—but this exercise surprises almost everyone who does it.

Rule #2: Create a Personalized Budget

Once you have an...

Shortform Exercise: Reflect on Your Spending

Many people are guilty of “lifestyle creep”—responding to increased income with increased spending on unwise purchases.

What did your spending look like before your most recent income increase? (For example, going out to eat was a once-a-month luxury, you bought a lot of your clothes from thrift shops, and you lived in a small studio apartment.)