Systematically Practice "Healthy-Mindedness"

"The measure of mental health is the disposition to find good everywhere," said that most famous moralist, Ralph Waldo Emerson.
The idea that happiness, or keeping one's thoughts pleasant most of the time, can be deliberately and systematically cultivated by practicing in a more or less cold-blooded manner, strikes many of my patients as rather incredible, if not ludicrous, when I first suggest it. Yet, experience has shown not only that this can be done, but that it is about the only way that the "habit of happi­ness" can be cultivated. In the first place happiness isn't something that happens to you. It is something you your self do and determine upon. If you wait for happiness to catch up with you, or "just happen," or be brought to you by others, you are likely to have a long wait. No o n e can decide what your thoughts shall be but yourself. If you wait until circumstances "justify" your thinking pleasant thoughts, you are also likely to wait forever. Every day is a mixture of good and evil—no day or cir­cumstance is completely 100 per cent "good." There are ments and "facts" present in the world, and in our personal lives at all times, which "justify" either a pessi­mistic and grumpy outlook, or an optimistic and happy outlook, depending upon our choice. It is largely a mat­ter of selection, attention, and decision. Nor is it a matter of being either intellectually honest or dishonest. Good is as "real" as evil. It is merely a matter of to what we choose to give primary attention—and what thoughts we hold in the mind.
Deliberately choosing to think pleasant thoughts is more than a palliative. It can have very practical results. Carl Erskine, the famous baseball pitcher, has said that bad thinking got him into more spots than bad pitching. "One sermon has helped me overcome pressure better than the advice of any coach," he said. "Its substance was that, like a squirrel hoarding chestnuts, we should store up our moments of happiness and triumph so that in a crisis we can draw upon these memories for help and inspiration. As a kid I used to fish at the bend of a little country stream just outside my home town. I can vividly remem­ber this spot in the middle of a big, green pasture sur­rounded by tall, cool trees. Whenever tension builds up both on or o f f the ballfield now, I concentrate on t h i s relaxing scene, and the knots inside me loosen up." (Nor­man Vincent Peale, ed., Faith Made Them Champions, Englewood Cliffs, N.J., Prentice-Hall, 1954.)
Gene Tunney tells how concentrating on the wrong "facts" almost caused him to lose his first fight with Jack Dempsey. He awoke one night from a nightmare. "The vision was of myself, bleeding, mauled and helpless, sink-jjjg to the canvas and being counted out. I couldn't stop trembling. Right there I had already lost that ring match which meant everything to me—the championship. . . . What could I do about this terror? I could guess the cause. I had been thinking about the fight in the wrong way. I had been reading the newspapers, and all they had said was how Tunney would lose. Through the news­papers I was losing the battle in my own mind.
"Part of the solution was obvious. Stop reading the papers. Stop thinking of the Dempsey menace, Jack's kill­ing punch and ferocity of attack. I simply had to close the doors of my mind to destructive thoughts—and divert my thinking to other things."