Another friend says that nervous prostration could not be so easily disposed of. He says he frets because he is tired. In point of fact, I think the principal reason he gets so tired is because he frets. But I did not tell him so for fear of an explosion. The effect of psychotherapy on the man who is not anxious to be psychotherapied is like that of water on parched earth. If you let it lie, it may percolate, but there is no use trying to rub it in! And even suppose a person is tired, much of the consequent fret is a mere obsession, or fixed idea. What I mean is this: The association “tired and cross” has become so fixed in our minds that to separate them would do violence to our ideas of the proprieties. But just try the experiment once, as I have elsewhere suggested, of going home after a hard day's work, saying to yourself, “Why tired and cross; why not tired and good-natured?” You will find it a good deal easier than you think to carry out the suggestion, and the chances are you will give your family a surprise party. Or better yet, at the outset of your day, try this experiment: Start out with the determination that you will do each piece of work in its turn without unnecessary fret, without burdening your mind with such questions as whether So-and-So will keep his appointment, whether So-and-So will pay his bill, whether So-and-So will understand your motives, and whether your business is all gone and will never come back again for the thousandth time. Try the experiment of limiting your thoughts to the task in hand, dismissing the one just finished and leaving the next one to take its turn. When you have entrusted someone else with a part of your work, dismiss that part from your mind and, most important of all, hold yourself in readiness to react comfortably instead of irritably to the ordinary incidents of life. If you succeed in doing this you will be surprised to find yourself comparatively fresh at the end of a hard day's work, and I venture to predict, meantime, that your affairs will not suffer.

This sort of training is by nature easier for some than for others. There are sweet-apple trees and sour-apple trees. If we happen to be a sour-apple tree, it will take considerable pruning and grafting of ourselves to produce the kind of fruit I have in mind. But if we succeed we shall be better than he who taketh a city; in any event the net result will mean progress. It is greatly to a man's credit if he can accumulate wealth without capital to start with; the same is true of good spirits; they are like lost spectacles - it is hard to find them without them.