Shake the habit of fretting and stewing about problems that don't exist.

It's amazing how many people live in a "what if" world. Projecting medical problems is an excellent and all-too-common example of this.

My doctor once told me that medical students are notorious for imagining that they've contracted some terrible disease. The reason, of course, is that they study diseases on a daily basis. Because they are trained to be constantly on the lookout for the life-threatening symptoms they are learning about, it's understandable that they would sometimes imagine they have some of those same symptoms.

Can there be a better definition of joy than the feeling you have when the results of your prostate exam, colonoscopy, pap smear, or mammogram come back negative? Until you get that thumbs-up feedback, it's easy for your mind to play tricks on you and stress you to the limit. It's a classic example of being stressed over a problem that doesn't exist. The problem becomes real only if, and when, the results come back positive.