Feeling Stressed? Try 1930s Psychology

Over the years, I have acquired a lot of self-help books. It's actually reached a point where I've had to impose a boycott on self-help (an idea I got from a fantastic self-help book).

Most of the people I know seem to find these sorts of books and programs off-putting, because so much of it promises that you can accomplish anything you want once you realize your potential—and once you get past the cat-poster affirmations, you're given no blueprint for really getting anywhere.

Three days later, the euphoria of possible full-scale change has worn off, and you feel like a failure.

The worst is when these books try to make you hurry the hell up to change everything about your crummy, subpar self. What does it all boil down to? Failing a lot and finding your passion now, I said now, damn it, because it already took you twelve thousand nanoseconds just to read this paragraph and YOUR LIFE IS TICKING AWAY SO WHY AREN'T YOU PASSIONATE?! Do you even KNOW how many nanoseconds that is? According to the Food Network, it's the exact same number of Twizzlers it would take to encircle the Earth 12,130 times!

Sorry, I could only find enough to encircle my torso.

Changed yet? No?! Loser. (I meant that in a life-affirming way.)

Frankly, nothing shuts me down faster than a panicked assurance that my life is ticking away every second I'm not engaged in whatever the hell my passion is supposed to be. I guess some people find this motivating, since the citation of one's draining hours is a very popular self-help technique, but there's no way to be sure how many of these people can sustain that motivation for very long before getting overwhelmed and giving up.

Oh, tragedy. All those wasted hours, wrapping around the earth like artificially flavored strawberry licorice. Still, amid all this candy coating of pointless affirmations, I have actually come across some very helpful stuff (for me, anyway). Usually these have a Zen aspect to them, like Thomas Sterner's The Practicing Mind, or they make you look at the way you actually are and give you a roadmap to actions you can take immediately, such as the works of Barbara Sher.

The most intriguing one I've found, though, is something I came across entirely by accident in the stacks of Swem Library at William & Mary. I'm not offering it here as an example of how you should live your life, but the advice in it is strikingly familiar. In a good way.

Don't Give up Because of Your Crummy Handwriting

I'm talking about a faded, red book with 1930s car-grille lettering stamped on the spine. It is called Streamline Your Mind, by psychologist James Mursell. He was best known for his books on music education, adopted by schools, but this general self-help book seems to have been lost in the shuffle over the decades. Although it never reached the same popularity as the works of Dale Carnegie or Arnold Bennett or William Danforth, Mursell manages to say, regarding the matter of self-improvement, a fair number of the same things I'm finding in the modern canon.

Let me go get some Earth-encircling Twizzlers and tell you what I mean.

In 1936, "streamlining" was a fairly new concept, employed by "scientists and practical engineers" as they sought better and faster and easier ways to bring humanity into the future (cue sprightly, industrious Rube Goldberg assembly-line music).

Mursell felt that this new-fangled notion could be useful in the quest for self-improvement. His book puts the reader on the couch, a theoretical patient bemoaning his sorry, mediocre life. Mursell diagnoses the problem as "your toleration in yourself of needless personal inefficiency in an age which requires efficiency....Nature has given you just so much power. About that there is nothing [the psychologist] can do....But...if you really are the average man you are putting to productive use only a fraction of the power you possess."

I think I know what's causing the ringing in your ears, ma'am.

"An old fashioned car or an old fashioned ship cannot be streamlined. They can only be junked. But you are different. You can reorganize yourself. You can rebuild your mental contours. And this process of rebuilding, of streamlining, has an old and familiar name. It is what we call learning."

How does Mursell suggest we go about this? Hire a glowering 1930s Pink Floydish schoolmaster to stand over us with a whip, amid assurances that it will build character and warnings that we can't have any pudding because we and the Brits have very different ideas of what constitutes "pudding"?

Hey! Carnegie! Leave them kids alone!

Nope. Here's where Mr. Mursell takes us in the quest for betterment:

"Can one always learn? May it not be that success and failure are due to inborn ability or its lack, and that we can do little about it?...Are we licked before we start?" No, because "One man may have a greater fund of native mental energy than another. And he will go further if he uses it effectively. But that is a pretty big 'if.' Nothing can make a twenty horsepower car perform as well as a hundred horsepower car if conditions are equal. But what if the small car is efficiently streamlined and the big one is not? The fact that some people may have a bigger mental endowment than you is no argument for quitting. On the contrary it is an argument for making every scrap of ability and power that you possess count to the limit."

Furthermore, "Mere repetition is not the cause of learning. If you want to improve a skill you already possess, or to acquire a brand new one, do not rely chiefly on lots of practice. Going over something again and again is by no means the quickest way to master it. Indeed, if this is all you do, mastery may never come...One may repeat a performance innumerable times without improving." He advises, instead, a more focused approach. It's extremely important how you go about the job of learning and what elements of the new skill you put your efforts into.

The best way to go about this? "Make a start! Begin! Write a story. Get up and make a speech, even if only for half a minute....Whatever the job you have in mind, get busy at it."

Great drive, but he forgot to mention improving one's fashion sense.

And while you're learning this new thing, "Don't be afraid of making mistakes, so long as you keep the experimental attitude." Errors are inevitable, and certainly there is a need to guard against learning something the wrong way, repeating the error until that becomes your habit. But "you must be on your guard against the insensate tendency in human beings to start banging their heads against stone walls, and indeed to keep up the performance until sheer pain and misery and despair makes them stop." How do you avoid having this frustration set in? "Make your early tries very easily, very slowly, very calmly, and with just as little anxiety as possible....Your business at first is not to perform perfectly; your business is to feel yourself out on the job."

The examples of endeavors he gives are at least sort of relevant today—improving your golf swing, your ability to speak in public, your, ah, typing skills, your...handwriting skills...(someone really came and lay on Mursell's couch all depressed because of their chicken scratch?) "Perhaps you want to learn by heart a poem or a bit of prose. A most valuable piece of advice—exactly like the advice of the golf professional—is, take it easy at first."

Among G.I. Joes, Typo was second in popularity only to Sgt. Slaughter.

There's no talk of noses to the grindstone or stiff upper lips. Mursell wants you to fumble about, try things, even make a fool of yourself if it means you're getting somewhere, so long as you don't work yourself so relentlessly you just decide to give up.

"In the early stages of learning, when the new skill is just in process of being created out of chaotic clumsiness, work only for short periods and space those periods widely....Do not say to yourself: 'I'm going to stick to this job until I've mastered it.'...It may quite probably be that at the end of half-and-hour's practice you will feel that you have learned absolutely nothing. Do not be too much discouraged. The learning process is not like building a wall. It is like inventing a machine. And you cannot always see the work progressing. You have to discover what changes are needed to improve the streamlining."

So, all this must be addressed to the younger crowd, right? The idea of learning well into old age is a twenty-first-century concept, isn't it? "I cannot learn because I am too old," Mursell's jazz-age patient groans. "I shall always be a dub at golf because I was thirty-five when I took up the game. I wish I could play the piano but I didn't study it when I was a child and my hand was still flexible. No one can master a foreign language if he starts when he is over twenty, so it is useless for me to try. A new job at forty? Impossible! I couldn't tackle it."

Bosh, says Mursell. "Mature men and women in evening courses in high schools and universities do about as well as younger people." He adds, in a blunt way you probably wouldn't hear today, "A stupid old person will not learn as well as a bright young one; and a stupid young person will not learn as well as an able old one. If we disregard everything but the difference in age, ability to learn seems to be about the same....We say that it would be ridiculous for us to take up dancing or painting or writing or salesmanship at forty. It might be ridiculous, but it is far from impossible....If your learning is expertly directed many of the effects of lack of time can be overcome."

Make a start. Baby steps. Slow improvements at first so you can build ability and confidence. Make your practice deliberate, not just repetitive. Age isn't that much of a barrier in terms of learning. Talent is useful, but effort often counts for more. Do these ideas sound familiar?

If you've read The Talent Code, Talent Is Overrated, Mindset,and/or any other (comparatively) new studies, if you've heard about the vaunted 10,000 hours of deliberate practice, then you'll recognize all of these concepts. Except that they're ninety years old, not twenty.

Slow Down, My Good Fellow!

What I find most interesting is that there is no emphasis on hurrying the hell up with your damn learning. You would think Mursell's approach would be to inform his Depression-era audience that streamlining one's hours is an essential part of streamlining the mind. Heck, in 1936, the average life-bemoaning person supposedly had fewer years of said life to bemoan than the depressed sad sack of today. But even if Mursell's stressed-out patient has fewer years in which to better himself, there's none of that desperation. As a matter of fact, Mursell urges his patient, "Do not hurry. Do not be ashamed to loaf, for learning can take place sometimes while you loaf." Amen. Don't have time to loaf? Turn off all your electronic devices and get into that backyard hammock straightaway.

And have a smoke, while you're at it!!

Mursell didn't need modern behavioral studies—the 10,000 hours of practice, the learning-happy myelin hugging the neurons in your brain, or the...weren't there children trying not to eat marshmallows in there somewhere?—to inform us of a simple concept. "Properly directed learning gets results with a minimum of effort and in a minimum time. It is not a grind. It is a thrill. You find yourself mastering your own resources, moving faster, travelling further on a given expenditure of energy. What could be more fascinating?"

Good news, everyone--hands-free typing is just around the corner!!