Autoconditioning: The new way to a successful life

By Hornell Hart and David De Angelis

This book represents a new breakthrough in the Science of Psychology and shows you how to give your life new meaning and purpose, and how to live consistently on a plane of confidence, satisfaction, and achievement.

This is a book offering a simple and workable method of overcoming emotional difficulties, easily applied and readily learned.
Millions of people will find it extremely valuable and useful.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Stargatebook
• Release date: Apr 10, 2024
• ISBN: 9791223026762

Book preview

BOOK I. - Today, Science Can Teach You to Be Happy

CHAPTER 1 - A New Discovery About How to Achieve Happiness

• Can science teach people to be happy?

Can science teach people happiness? Normal people, that is-not psychopaths. Nine out of ten normal people get depressed at least occasionally. Half of the population suffers painful depressions every week or two. Depressions, even in normal people, can develop into a serious disease - sometimes ending in suicide.

• Our machine civilization-and happiness

Did it ever occur to you that our civilization bends most of its energies to the attempt to get rid of misery and to create happiness? Industry, agriculture, the arts, medical science, and religion all toil strenuously, often heroically, in trying to avert hunger, cold, heat, disease, loneliness, death, and other sources of human pain. They work to cultivate the thrills and comforts of the human body, mind, and spirit-delicious food, sweet music, laughter, and the sense of achievement. In our vast industries and endeavors to promote these ends, our engineers and scientists have invented instruments to measure such things as speed, temperature, money cost, and even the loudness of the laughter of an audience. Our technologists have worked hard to measure the means by which pain can be averted and joy created.

But up till now we have lacked accurate and ready instruments to measure the end-results of human struggle - namely, the happiness or unhappiness of consumers and producers.

• The invention of a happiness-meter

For some decades past, scientists at the University of Chicago, at Columbia University, and at other research centers have been inventing scales to measure happiness. At Duke University this problem has been a subject of investigation for more than 15 years. Finally, this research came to a climax in a series of hundreds of experiments, out of which emerged a new discovery.

The discovery has two basic aspects. First, it presents a simple and swift method for measuring the degree of happiness or unhappiness of a person at a given moment. This part of the discovery may be likened to the invention of the fever thermometer, the electrocardiograph, or the technique for measuring blood pressure. The surge and ebb of happiness and unhappiness are as much a symptom of a person's psychological and social health as the rise and fall of temperature and blood pressure and the changes in the pattern of heartbeat are symptoms of the health or disease of the body.

How the Duke Mood-Meter is better

The tests for measuring happiness which had been developed at other research centers had been cumbersome to give, and they had to be scored by experts. The Mood-Meter, which has been perfected at Duke University, can be taken by oneself, and scored by oneself, within two minutes. It gives such reliable and valid results that the one who takes it for several days produces a fever-chart of his own mood fluctuations. A copy of this Mood-Meter is printed on Page 5, with instructions for using it to measure your own ups and downs in happiness and unhappiness.

Changing Your Moods from Unhappy to Happy

The second part of the discovery that has been made at Duke is a process whereby changes can be achieved in the attitudes which make people happy or unhappy. It has been found that whether a person is joyful or miserable depends not merely or even mostly on what happens to him, but rather on the attitudes he takes.

For example, a rattlesnake, if we met one on a wild mountainside, would be for most of us a very menacing stimulus. Many people would shriek with fear or freeze with terror if they met such a snake in the open. Yet a naturalist might have a surge of joy at seeing a rattler. And a collector for a zoo might feel a thrill when he thought of the cash which he would get by selling the reptile.

• Can you turn rattlesnakes into assets?

But how can the common garden-variety of person achieve the attitudes which turn fear and despair into courage and joy when he meets the rattlesnakes, the bludgeonings of fate, the pummelings of outrageous fortune? That such changes can actually be achieved by autoconditioning is the very core of the discovery which has been made at Duke University. Perhaps the best way to demonstrate this achievement is to sketch briefly two outstanding cases.

The Case of the Once Fearful but Now Joyous Bride

Before Mary Dolan started autoconditioning, she recorded Mood-Meter reactions such as can be seen at the left side of her chart. Four times during the preliminary period from July 21 to 26, Mary's Mood-Meter line plunged down below zero - once to only the Frustrated level, but three other times to the Discouraged-Disgusted zone. Then, after two weeks of autoconditioning, she began to register consistently in the range between Encouraged and Joyful, as shown in the right-hand half of her chart.

• Why Mary got depressed

What were the factors in Mary Dolan's life which were sending her plunging down into the depths of disillusionment, discouragement, and depression? As she herself explained it, there were four major causes.

Mary (who was a good Catholic) was about to marry a young man who was a Protestant. They were very much in love. He was a splendid young businessman. He had agreed fully to the conditions required by the Catholic church for giving its sanction to the marriage. But the families on both sides were deeply disturbed at the idea of their children marrying across the religious boundary, and grief was being stirred up, over and over again, by problems related to the wedding.

Mary's second cause for depression was more long-standing. Ever since her early childhood, her mother and father constantly had been quarrelling. The home atmosphere had alternated from being extremely chilly to being violently hot with hate.

Third, Mary had a much-loved brother who had been training to be a military aviator. Just at the peak of the difficulty about the wedding, she heard from him that he had failed an examination and could not be an army flier.

In addition to those three sources of grief, Mary was taking work in summer school which had discouraged her deeply. To receive her A.B. Degree, she had to get at least a B in a course in organic chemistry, and she was stumped by some of the experiments.

•She learned the formula

At that stage, right in the midst of her series of plunges into depression, she was introduced to the Four Don'ts and the Three Do's. (This, you will note, is the subject of Chapter 3.) The lecture which presented these seven rules gave her quite a lift. She resolved to grapple with her problems with real courage and faith.

• By autoconditioning, Mary solved her problems

But she met a basic difficulty. She found that these good resolutions disappeared quite rapidly when her problems reared their heads again. She had planned to be married in a Catholic church, but then she got a letter stating that if the wedding were held there her fiancé's family would not attend. At once, Mary's new-found courage vanished, and she plunged once more into depression.

At this point, Mary was introduced to the second part of the Duke discovery. She had been recording the ups and downs of her Mood-Meter chart; now she was introduced to the autoconditioning technique for changing one's attitudes. She discovered that, by using this remedy, it is possible to live consistently on a level of cheerful purpose and cooperative courage -as can be seen from the right-hand side of her chart.

The shift from repeated depression to consistent courage was not won all at once. After a few days of holding her new level, she got word that her small sister had fallen downstairs and broken her arm. This brought a new plunge below the zero line. But the dip was only to Downcast, not to Discouraged. She put her new skill to work and was able again to react courageously instead of with attitudes of fear and defeat.

• She doubled her happiness

The results of her autoconditioning between July 26 and August 25, as appraised by Mary Dolan herself on October 11, was to double her sense of courage, cheerfulness, satisfaction, and enjoyment of life. Nor was this a mere temporary flash in the pan. On October 11, Mary estimated that her enjoyment of life during the first two weeks of October had been between 50 per cent and 100 per cent greater than it had been before she learned about autoconditioning. She summed it up, on October 11, as follows:

My enthusiasm for the method has not diminished in the least. I still use it frequently as a valuable technique in keeping up my good spirits as well as for trying out new experiments.... I certainly have remained in my cheerful, enthusiastic frame of mind.

• It strengthened her religious faith

In the process of retraining herself under guidance, Mary found new spiritual insight. The smouldering series of conflicts about the wedding were turned to friendly goodwill by her agreeing to a short postponement in order that needed adjustments might be worked out. She is going forward into her wedded life as a courageous bride, sure of her new-found paths to joy and creative living.

How Autoconditioning Helped with Family Troubles

• Robert came from a struggling family

Our second case shows how autoconditioning cured a college boy of chronic depression at a time when he seemed to be facing stark tragedy.

Robert Hare, who was just starting his senior year at college, was preparing to study medicine. He had a 16-year-old brother and a 13-year-old sister. His father was a salesman. His mother had gone to work to help earn the money to send him to college, and his grandmother had joined the household to keep house and cook meals. The family had bought a home and a car, both on the installment plan, and had recently invested in a new cookstove to encourage the grandmother. The younger children were not too diligent about helping around the house, and when their mother came home from work, she was inclined to do a considerable amount of scolding, without much good result.

•He met a great crisis

The day before the autoconditioning experiment started, Hare's father had a heart attack, and was taken to the hospital, where he remained for some weeks. Robert's plans to prepare for medicine - and even to finish college - were threatened.

Shocked by this fact, and worried about the other problems in his home, he plunged repeatedly to the Downcast, Disillusioned, Downhearted. Discouraged, and Depressed, levels on his Mood-Meter.

As his first project in the experiment, Robert undertook to condition himself to react to this menacing situation with courage and with spiritual faith. Later he conditioned himself to be a channel of courage to his father, his mother, and the rest of his family when he visited them. He also carried on autoconditioning experiments to improve his study habits and his social relations.

• Autoconditioning transformed his character

His father's heart attack occurred toward the end of July. On August 25, Robert reported the following results of his autoconditioning experiments:

I haven't been sinking into depressed moods as often as I did before I learned of autoconditioning. My Mood-Meter Self-Chart shows that the frequency of reactions down toward the lower end of the Mood-Meter has shrunk almost to the vanishing point. From August 15 to 22, my Mood-Meter score only once went down below Happy and then only to Determined. My roommate has told me he noticed lately that I never get into a depressed mood... By means of autoconditioning I have learned to spend a shorter length of time with a problem but understand it better than I did when I put more time on it. Before autoconditioning, I shied away from projects that presented a challenge. Now I enjoy tackling such problems.

Autoconditioning has changed my social attitudes. I have learned to adjust myself to be a pleasant individual in a crowd. I have learned to control my irritation when visitors come to my dormitory room at unwanted times. I have made friends with previously unwanted associates. And I have learned to use misfortunes as assets instead of liabilities.

• Robert's roommate also solved problems by autoconditioning

The roommate commented that Robert had been more considerate of him lately. When Hare explained autoconditioning to his roommate, the boy asked for help. He suffered from being shy around strangers, especially girls. Hare and the roommate carried out an experiment in which they conditioned the boy to feel more at ease with girls. Then they double dated, and the roommate discovered a new ability to keep the conversation going and to forget his shyness. He decided to keep up the experiment because he had found that it really