EXERCISE 1

Sit down in a comfortable chair, preferably one with arm rests, close your eyes, and imagine you are biting into a thick, juicy slice of lemon. With a little practice this imaginary lemon will actually make your mouth water.

EXERCISE 2

Remain seated in your chair, keep your eyes closed, and now shift your thoughts from the lemon to your shoes. It should not take you too long to realize, perhaps for the first time, how very uncomfortable it is to wear shoes. It does no matter how well they seemed to fit until this moment, because you will now become aware of pressure points and other unpleasant sensations, like friction, the bending of your toes, the tightness of the laces, heat or cold, and the like. Repeat the exercise until the wearing of shoes, until now a simple and trivial necessity, becomes a decidedly uncomfortable problem. Buy a new pair and notice that no matter how perfectly they seemed to fit in the store, they will soon produce the same discomfort as the old ones.

EXERCISE 3

Still seated in your chair, look through the window into the sky. With a little bit of luck you will soon notice a large number of tiny, bubble-like circles in your visual field. When you keep your eyes fixed, the circles will gradually drift downward; when you blink, they jump up again. Notice further that these circles appear to grow in size and number as you concentrate on them. Consider the possibility of an insidious eye disease, for it is clear that your eyesight will be severely impaired once these circles finish covering your entire field of vision. Consult an ophthalmologist. He will try to explain to you that you are worrying about something that is perfectly harmless and normal, namely, what are called floaters. Now assume, please, that he was either in bed with the measles when this disease was taught to his class in medical school, or that out of sheer compassion he does not want to inform you of the nature of your illness.

EXERCISE 4

Should you have difficulty with Exercise 3, there is no need for despair. Your ears offer an equivalent opportunity for worry. Go to a quiet room and you will soon notice a humming, buzzing, whistling, or similarly monotonous sound in your ears. In everyday situations this sound is drowned our by the noise around you, but with enough attention to it, you will hear it more and more often and it will become louder. Go to see your doctor. From this point on proceed in accordance with Exercise 3, except that the physician will try to minimize your symptom by calling it a perfectly normal tinnitus.

(Special instructions for medical students: You may skip Exercises 3 and 4, since you are already fully engaged in discovering within yourself the five thousand symptoms that alone form the basis of internal medicine, to say nothing of the other medical specialties).

Watzlawick Paul(1983). The situation is hopeless, but not serious (The pursuit of unhappiness). New York: W.W. Norton & Company.