Evolution did not build us to be in a constant state of stress 24/7. We were built to feel stress to get us moving when the big cat pounced out of the brush so that we could flee for our lives, but now, we are under constant stress to be wealthier, fitter, have the best new thing or worried about what’s going on around the world or from work.

Being in a constant state of stress will destroy your health. Your body was built to deal with stress for short amounts of time, but the complicated and competitive world we live in nowadays can have you stressed out for days or even months at a time.

We get stressed out watching the news or scrolling through social media, watching a scary movie or by thinking about something that happened a year ago that still haunts us to this day. We stress out about the smallest things like picking the right shoes for an event or whether or not we sounded a bit awkward in a social exchange. We stress out about the future and all of the things we have to do tomorrow and the next day or about that deadline coming up.

That stress will add up to cardiovascular problems, neurological problems, and those stress hormones you are releasing influence the “on-off” switches that activate certain genes. And some of those are the genes you don’t want activated if you want a long and healthy life. It can affect your socioeconomic status later in life and your socioeconomic status early in life can affect your health and increase your chances of being victim of depression and anxiety later in life.

I’m not denying that there are healthy types of stress or advocating for the reader to believe that stress is a completely negative thing, but that for all the worrying people do about health, it seems that stress, which has an incredibly large effect on health, is rarely combatted. Instead, we combat the symptoms and not the root cause which may very well be that you have been chronically stressed for far too long.

Using the Principle of Correspondence to recognize that a mental state of stress corresponds to a physical state of stress, it becomes obvious that regulating your mental stress will have the effect of reducing the physical stress on the body.

One of the best tools I have ever found for dealing with stress is from How to Stop Worrying and Start Living, by Dale Carnegie which is to live in “day-tight compartments.” What does that mean to live in day-tight compartments? Well, it is a term keyed by Sir William Osler, who was a Regius Professor of Medicine at Oxford University, the man who organized the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine.

Sir Osler read the words of Thomas Carlyle and his life changed forever. Those words where: “Our main business is not to see what lies dimly at a distance, but to do what lies clearly at hand.”

Sir Osler lived by those words and one day on a voyage across the Atlantic, he saw the effectiveness of water-tight compartments on the vessel he was travelling on. He likened the water-tight compartments to the philosophy he had been living by and delivered these words at a speech he gave to students at Yale.

“Now each of you is a much more marvelous organization than the great liner and bound on a much longer voyage. What I urge is that you learn to control the machinery as to live in ‘day-tight compartments’ as the most certain way to ensure safety on the voyage. Get on the bridge and see that at least the great bulkheads are in working order. Touch a button and hear, at every level of your life, the iron doors shutting out the Past- the dead yesterdays. Touch another and shut off, with a metal curtain, the Future- the unborn tomorrows. Then you are safe- safe for today. Shut off the past! Let the dead past bury its dead.. Shut out the yesterdays which have lighted fools the way to dusty death.. The load of tomorrow, added to that of yesterday, carried today, makes the strongest falter. Shut off the future as tightly as the past.. The future is today… There is no tomorrow. The day of man’s salvation is today. Waste of energy, mental distress, nervous worries dog the steps of a man who is anxious about the future.. Shut close, then, the great fore and aft bulkheads, and prepare to cultivate the habit of a life of ‘day-tight compartments’.

Being a Navy man myself, this passage resonates with me. Our boats and ships are designed to ensure that if the worst was to happen, that the boat would survive and one way that goal is accomplished is with water-tight compartments. The boat is designed with water-tight compartments so that in the event of flooding, the boat will not sink because the mighty insurge of the sea will be isolated to the affected compartment and the rest of the boat will be saved.

This is why I love the metaphor of living in ‘day-tight compartments’ because the past and the future are like the flooding of your ship, and being the captain of your ship, you must live in ‘day-tight compartments’ to ensure your ship does not sink because you let the worries and stresses of the past and the future flood and sink your ship.

That doesn’t mean to never think about the future, not at all, what it means is to do what you can today for the future you desire and to stop worrying about everything else. Plan for the future, but remember that all you have is today, and that what you have to do today is enough to worry about. There is no need to add additional stress to the problems of the day, it will only make your burden harder to carry and steal away some of the mental and physical energy you have to accomplish tasks today for a day that may never come to pass.

All the worrying and stressing you do about the past and the future will rob you of the joy of the day. You may have a big goal for the future or perhaps you have an approaching deadline that is causing you a great deal of stress, but you must remind yourself that the only time you have to accomplish something towards that goal is today. You can plan for the future but do what you can in that direction today and leave the stress of tomorrow for tomorrow if there is nothing else you can do for it today.

Take things one step at a time. Thinking about all of the things you have to do can cause a great deal of stress because you’re thinking of all of those things you have to do all at once, and you have to realize that you cannot do everything at once, you only have today to do something about it, so take it one task at a time and focus only on that task.

Carnegie tells the story of a man named Ted Bengermino, who suffered from combat fatigue that led to a complete physical breakdown. On top of that, he was on the verge of a complete mental breakdown due to the mental stress of his personal life, but he was saved by a doctor who gave him some life-changing advice:

“Ted,” he said, “I want you to think of your life as an hourglass. You know there are thousands of grains of sand in the top of the hourglass; and they all pass slowly and evenly through the narrow neck in the middle. Nothing you or I could do would make more than one grain of sand pass through this narrow neck without impairing the hourglass. You and I and everyone else is like this hourglass. When we start in the morning, there are hundreds of tasks which we feel that we must accomplish that day, but if we do not take them one at a time and let them pass through the day slowly and evenly, as do the grains of sand passing through the narrow neck of the hourglass, then we are bound to break our own physical or mental structure.”

I think we can all benefit mentally and physically by dealing with our stress in ‘day-tight compartments,’ blocking out the past and the future and taking things one task at a time.

There is one more quote I would like to share that I learned from Carnegie’s book by Robert Lewis Steveson that I often repeat to myself when I am having a tough and stressful day.

“Anyone can carry his burden, however hard, until nightfall. Anyone can do his work, however hard, for one day. Anyone can live sweetly, patiently, lovingly, purely, till the sun goes down. And that is all life really means.”

When taking on a hard task, dealing with a difficult job or working for a better future, remember that you only have to do it for a day, and that is today. Then you wake up the next day with new tasks, new challenges and remind yourself you only have to endure until you go to sleep because you only have today, and you only have to get through today. Live in ‘day-tight compartments’ and take tasks on one at a time and you will be able to manage your stress.

Carnegie ends his chapter on living in ‘day-tight compartments’ with questions for the reader to answer and I will leave them here for you:

1. Do I tend to put off living in the present in order to worry about the future, or to yearn for some “magical rose garden over the horizon”?
2. Do I sometimes embitter the present by regretting things that happened in the past- that are over and done with?
3. Do I get up in the morning determined to “Seize the day” – to get the upmost out of those 24 hours?
4. Can I get more out of my life by “living in day-tight compartments”?
5. When shall I start to do this? Next week? … Tomorrow?.. Today?