For when you are using up strength to fret, you are simply robbing yourself of the vitality which would be used directly in the cure of your illness." Not only that, but the strain of fretting increases the strain of illness, and is not only preventing you from getting well, but it is tending to keep you ill.
When we realize that fact, it seems as if it would be an easy matter to stop fretting in order to get well.
It is as senseless to fret about an illness, no matter how much just cause we may feel we have, as it would be to walk west when our destination was directly east.
Stop and think of it.

Is not that true?
Imagine a child with a pin pricking him, kicking, and screaming, and squirming with the pain, so that his mother--try as carefully as she may--takes five minutes to find the pin and get it out, when she might have done it and relieved him in five seconds, if only the child had kept still and let her.
So it is with us when Mother Nature is working with wise steadiness to find the pin that is making us ill, and to get it out.

We fret and worry so that it takes her ten or twenty days to do the good work that she might have done in three.
In order to drop the fretting, we must use our wills to think, and feel, and act, so that the way may be opened for health to come to us in the quickest possible time.
Every contraction of worry which appears in the muscles we must drop, so that we lie still with a sense of resting, and waiting for the healing power, which is surely working within us, to make us well.
_We can do this by a deliberate use of our wills._ If we could take our choice between medicine, and the curative power of dropping anxiety and letting ourselves get well, there would be no hesitancy, provided we understood the alternatives.
I speak of fretting first because it is so often the strongest interference with health.
Defective circulation is the trouble in most diseases, and we should do all we can to open the channels so that the circulation, being free elsewhere, can tend to open the way to greater freedom in the part diseased.

The contractions caused by fretting impede the circulation still more, and therefore heighten the disease.
If once, by a strong use of the will, we drop the fretting and give ourselves up entirely to letting nature cure us, then we can study, with interest, to fulfill other necessary conditions.

We can give ourselves the right amount of fresh air, of nourishment, of bathing, and the right sort of medicine, if any is needed.
Thus, instead of interfering with nature, we are doing all in our power to aid her; and when nature and the invalid work in harmony, health comes on apace.
When illness brings much pain and discomfort with it, the endeavor to relax out of the contractions caused by the pain, are of the same service as dropping contractions caused by the fretting.
If one can find a truly wise doctor, or nurse, in such an illness as I refer to, get full instructions in just one visit, and then follow those directions explicitly, only one visit will be needed, probably, and the gain from that will pay for it many times over.
This article is addressed especially to those who are now in health.
It is perhaps too much to expect one in the midst of an illness to start at once with what we may call the curative attitude, although it could be done, but if those who are now well and strong will read and get a good understanding of this healthy way of facing an illness, and get it into their subconscious minds, they will find that if at any time they should be unfortunate enough to be attacked with illness, they can use the knowledge to very real advantage, and--what is more--they can, with the right tact, help others to use it also.
To see the common sense of a process and, when we have not the opportunity to use the laws ourselves, to help others by means of our knowledge, impresses our own brains more thoroughly with the truth, especially if our advice is taken and acted upon and thus proved to be true.
It must not be forgotten, however, that to help another man or woman to a healthy process of getting well requires gentle patience and quiet, steady, unremitting tact..