Don't Manage Stress – Eliminate Stress With Dr. Mort Orman

Welcome to the D ship podcast, where we provide inspiration, motivation and education to help you transition from the challenges of divorce to discover the freedom and ability to live life on your own terms. Are you ready? Let's get the shift started. Hello, and welcome to another episode of the D Shift. I'm really excited to have you here today. Because today we have a true specialist on something that I think that we all need to focus on. I'd like to introduce you to Dr. Mort Orman. He is a an internal medicine physician with over 40 years of experience as an anger and stress elimination expert. So we all have anger and we all have stress, whether it's through divorce or just through life. So Dr. Mort, I'm so happy to have you on the show today.

Well, thank you for having me morning. I'm pleased to be here.

And so my my here's my burning question you are, you're an internal medicine physician, what got you to then start focusing in so much on anger and stress? What, what's the origins of that?

You said it being an internal medicine physician. I mean, I started, you know, I started feeling stressed when I was in college and, and then in medical school, it intensified, I had a lot of anxiety, I had a lot of anger issues, a lot of relationship issues and things like that. And then I opened up my own medical practice, and you get a whole bunch of you know, it's like the stress of running a small business, which they don't prepare you for medical school. So I had all these stresses coming down on me. And then my patients were coming to me thinking that I'd be able to help them with their stress and their stress. And I didn't know how to deal with mine. And so it was like it was a double whammy, you know, because I felt frustrated, I didn't know what to do with their problem, they would unload about, you know, not only their health issues, but if their marriage was in trouble, or if they're in trouble with their kids, or trouble at work or whatever. So they would unload all this stuff expecting that I might be able to do something for them. So it always kind of snowballing. And then the other thing is I could see over time, the effects of anger and stress on my patients and on their health and on their life. So I'm sitting there watching this every day, you know, seeing 20 patients, and doing that over a period of time, you know, most people when you go to work, that's not your experience, you know, you don't see the damage that stress does over time, right, you know, maybe you feel or something like that. But I was actually seeing the damage and seeing people get heart attacks and strokes and get addicted to substances and eventually get divorced or something like that, because they had a lot of anger, they had a lot of stress. And so I knew that this, this train, stress train was coming for me. And I tried tried all the traditional stuff, traditional anger management, stress management, stuff, and it really didn't work well for me. So I made a fortunately I made a decision to start doing personal development, we're very early on in my medical career. And a lot of doctors and busy people don't have time to do that. But I made it a priority. And I started learning all kinds of stuff that I was never taught in medical school. You know, I started learning things about myself as a human being. You know, I mean, I said that they send you out there to take care of human beings, but they don't really teach you about human beings.

First person, I've heard the first medical professional, I've talked to you that has said the exact same thing. So yeah,

so So I mean, I was learning all this stuff from some really smart people. And, and I was starting to realize that a lot of the ideas that I had, about life, about myself about stress about anger, a lot of the ideas that I have weren't true. You know, they've been given to me by other people or by so called experts or whatever. So I was finding these, you know, that I had all these blind spots. And I had all these misconceptions and errors in my thinking. And it kind of opened me up, you know, to asking more questions. So I started, well, what if everything we're being told about stress is wrong, or whatever everything we told about anger is wrong. And so I decided to pursue those questions. And that took another couple of years of research and training people and trying to understand what was true and not true. And then I finally hit upon a system that I developed from all that exposure that finally enabled me to just cure most of my stress problems. So I went from having a tremendous fear of public speaking. So like, I could never do this back then. I never would have I never would have volunteers flip here. I would have been shaking, trembling, just just a basket case. But I figured out how to get rid of all my public speaking anxiety. I had a terrible track record and my relationships with women were just horrible failure after failure after failure. I was able to turn that all around. And I also had a lot of anger. I mean, it was a very angry guy. I was very volatile. I get angry at my patients. I get angry at my parents. I took a tennis and I was like John McEnroe on tennis. People may be too young for that reference. But he was he was, he was in his prime when I was taking tennis lessons. And I would stomp around the court and thrash my racket and yell at myself and scream and bother the people playing on either side of me. And at the Racket Club that I joined in, I just couldn't control it, you know, I just nothing until I really had a bunch of these insights. And then I was finally able to stop being an angry person. And the last 40 years of my life, I've had almost no anger at all. And when I do get angry, I know exactly what's causing it. I know exactly, not just what's causing it outside, but what's causing it inside me. And I can identify those causes, I can deal with them very quickly. And in 30 seconds, a minute, you know, I can realize where I miss perceive something or made the wrong assumption or didn't see things exactly as they are that Magra goes away, you know, didn't have to punch a punching bag and have to run five miles or take deep breaths, or count to 10, or any of that kind of stuff. So yeah, so I discovered all these discovered system for getting rid of most kinds of stress that I was experiencing. And then I said, Well, God, this is so important. As a doctor, this is so important to people's health, I've got to teach this, you know, I've got to share what I discovered. And so I started putting on seminars, and workshops, and I've done hundreds of them over the last 40 years, with all kinds of people, and just trying to get the word out there. Because what my what I discovered about stress is almost the opposite of what's being taught by stress management experts. And it's very hard to get the message out because that that message is so strong, and everybody's being encouraged to manage their stress. And it's really not not the best strategy.

Well, and I completely, you know, I understand that I think this whole idea of managing stress and managing anger, it's sort of like, you know, if you've got, you know, if you just got hit on the head with a baseball bat in a game, and somebody tells you, Oh, just take a Tylenol, don't worry about it, every time the pain comes up, just keep taking Tylenol, that's not going to cure the issue. So I really, that message that you've got is getting to the you know, and I've always, in my work, I've always kind of suggested and I don't know if I'm right, So correct me. But anger is really a secondary emotion, there's always something else that goes on before that.

Well, secondary anger is secondary to a lot of things. But one of the things it's secondary to is our automatic thought processes, and our automatic behavior. So whether there's emotions behind them, or it's still primarily, you got to be thinking in certain ways, you've got to be looking at the world in certain ways to get angry. And if you're not looking in those ways, you're not going to have the emotion of anger, you may have some other emotion, you know, he may have the emotion of guilt, or anxiety or frustration or something else. But and each emotion has a very specific cognitive behavioral program behind it that we don't normally see. It's like, just like, we don't see the programs in our computers, right, you know, we're processing program, the operating system, we don't see those programs. But if they weren't there, we wouldn't be able to do anything with our computers in the same way, we don't see the oxygen in the air. But if it's not there, you know, we were in big trouble, you know, so. So there's this, there are these automatic thoughts. They're not conscious thoughts so much, although they can be but usually it just knee jerk, you know, something happens, you see something, and it just your anger just emerges knee jerk reflex. And then what's happened is what's got triggered in your body has certain specific ways of thinking and behaving that most people have never been taught to identify. So we're all at a loss on what to do better anger, because all we can do is rearrange the external circumstances of our life if we can, you know, to try and reduce those triggers. And nobody's taught us how to deal with anger on the inside.

You know, and I love that thing that you just said. And that's going to tie right in with, with what a lot of the people I work with, or people going through a divorce, whether they're men or women are dealing with is the anger is the partner or the the trigger they in their heads, if they could just get rid of the parts. Not Not, not literally get rid of the partner, but get out of the relationship. All of a sudden their anger is gonna go away. And that's not true. I find people you know, that can actually get more angry, more hostile. They be they in they typically engage the partner even if the other part even if the partner wants to walk away and go, Okay, I'm just going to be the best co parent I can be. Go live your life and be happy. People will keep trying to get back into that anger situation. So is that do you see that as kind of what you're addressing when you teach people about how to manage this?

Well, getting on how to manage it. I teach people how to treat it. Yeah, but you see how ingrained you see how ingrained the mentality is in our society that everybody thinks in terms of managing. No, but you know, when By the time you get to divorce, there's obviously things that led up to the divorce. And there are big blind spots that both people have in the relationship about what happened, what went down, then they're angry feelings and their upsets and all that kind of stuff. So there's already a ground of a soil of anger, which contributed to the divorce in the first place. And then you go through the divorce, and the anger gets worse, maybe, or even after the divorce, you can have bitter feelings about how it resolved, who got what, how people are behaving. Now, if you have kids involved, throws and all that dynamic. So it's anger, anger, anger, okay. And nobody's nobody's teaching people how to deal with the anger in any one of those stages. I prefer to teach people how to deal with their anger before they get to divorce. If I can get to them early, and say, Here, look, you're in a relationship, you're in a marriage, anger is going to come up, here's what you need to know, here's, here's some skill set you need to have. So it doesn't ruin your relationship. But then if you if, if I don't get people until they get into the divorce, then I certainly want to help them go through the divorce with as little anger as possible. And even more importantly, so that they can, on the other side is worse, they're not still bitter and angry at their ex. And they don't ruin their next relationship. You know, whatever they get into, because they haven't learned where the anger came from in the first place. Through the pre divorce, the divorce and the post divorce, it's all the same place. It's coming from those same thoughts, those same trigger triggered automatic ways of looking and thinking that I think it's criminal that we aren't taught this by the time we graduate high school. And certainly college, every college graduate, should understand what the thought patterns are, and the behavior patterns are that cause the most common negative emotions that we experience in life. And if we're not teaching them that, and we're doing them a big disservice.

Yeah. Well, and especially like, do you think that the this is going back to your your initial conversation or your initial information you shared? Do you think the medical field and I'm not just picking on the medical field? Because I don't think counselors do a lot of this work? I mean, I think they're doing it, but they're doing it from the management side, rather than the proactive side? Do you think that that's being addressed at all in?

No, I mean, I when I was in that role, for 23 years, in my practice, know, we put band aids on things, you know, we give people medications, we teach them Stress management techniques, or whatever, we just teach them how to deal with the symptoms, right. And when most of us don't know how to deal with the causes, so we can teach our patients that No, I through at some point, in my practice, I became aware of all that stuff, but I didn't have time, you know, to do that, because, you know, because I'm taking care of 2030 patients every day, right, and I'm one of the hospitals and take care of patients. So even though I had the knowledge, I couldn't really do much in my practice, but then I did start to do seminars and workshops. And and so my patients attended them and, you know, to try and convey that those skill sets. And I realized it was a failing of the medical profession, it's a failing of the education system. And it's a failing of the stress management industry is not teaching people how to identify the internal causes of their various stressful situations in life.

Yeah. So how would you if you were to have somebody come to talk to you about this stress management? No, I'm so what do you want to call it? Stress elimination? Elimination. Yes, people want to come and talk to you bought that they're gonna come and say stress management, though, until you strike and

they're gonna come and say, Doc, I'm stressed. Can I help you? Okay,

so how did oh, sorry, go ahead.

The first thing I'm gonna do, okay, the first thing I know, okay, when a stranger sits down in front of me, and says, Doc, I'm stressed, okay. The first thing I know is their problem is not stress. I know that 100% Without even knowing anything about them, okay. So the first thing I will do is I will encourage them, I would say, let's take this word stress and put it aside for a minute, okay? Are you having any problems in your life? Because that's really what stress is just a word we use for problems. And then they'll start telling me the specific problems or having, you know, I got, I got promoted, and I don't know what I'm doing. And I'm, I have all this pressure, or my kid started using drugs, or somebody's family died, or I'm having trouble with my marriage, or I'm financial, you know, or COVID came, and now my business is shut down. Who knows? You know, there's all different kinds of problems we can pour. I'm angry all the time. I'm fearful all the time. I'm worried all the time. You know, it can be emotional things, too. So there's this whole gamut of human problems that we put under this banner called stress. And then people have taught us to think in terms of deal with your stress, which is a buzzword, it's a unicorn. You can't you can't get at it. Okay, well, they should be teaching you to stop trying to deal with your stress and focus on the problems that you're having when you feel stress, because there is a stress response. I mean, there is all that physiology that gets stirred up that people study. So I'm not saying that doesn't exist. But what's driving that are the problems that we have the unresolved problems we have in life, or the recurring problems we have in life that are stimulating our bodies, more than should be keeping us from being calm and relaxed, causing us tight muscles and headaches and indigestion and all kinds of other symptoms, you know, and the whole thing is, you need to focus on your problems, and then you can get at the causes of each problem. So if anger is one of the problems, which is what I focus on with people, I say, Okay, if you're having anger, and that's a big part of your issue with stress, then let's look at the let's look at how you understand anger. Tell me what you think is causing your anger? And they'll say, Well, it's my spouse, or it's my kids, or it's, and I would say, Great, that's true. Now, what about the other 50% of the puzzle pieces? And they'll go, what, what are you talking about? I'm talking about the causes within you, you know, what's, what's being triggered within you. So what are you talking about? Right? Because that's the blind spot. Okay. So then I have to help them understand what's in that blind spot. So I say, here's how you're thinking when you're angry. Here's how you're probably behaving when you're angry. And, and you nobody ever told you that before, right? And then we go, yeah, that's new information. But it's, I can see that it's true. I am thinking that by responding that way. And I said, Okay, good. Now let's look at those specific thoughts and behaviors. Is this thought actually true? They'd never looked at it before, because they didn't know what it is to look at. And is this one true? And is this one true is this one true and usually you'll find in a string, you'll find one or two that are not totally true. You misperceive something, you misunderstood something, you were taught to believe something that isn't accurate. Or you have a behavior that, you know, that is making the anger Hang on, I mean, most Anger should go in 30 seconds. You know, but it doesn't, because we we do things that make, you know, we ruminate over the situation, we bring the anger back, we, we, we focus on how justified we are to be angry,

we tell ourselves those stories about

when we seek revenge, or we seek revenge, or we want to hurt the other person, right? None of that gets, okay, how am I creating my How am I contributing to my anger, right, and what parts of it are true, what parts of it are not true. And that's the analysis you really have to do if you want to eliminate anger. Now, if you want to manage it, you don't have to worry about

any of that stuff. You just count to 10 and take some deep breaths or get pumped

up punching bag. And every time we get angry, just the punching bag, rough. I know people every time they get angry, they run five miles, they felt a little better, but their marriage didn't get better. Right?

Yeah. Because they're the same person. What's What's that saying? No matter where you go, there you are. What you do. So this is really this is really refreshing. And you know, honestly, a lot of the divorce coaching I do is when clients come in to me, they've got they're like, that's the first thing they say, I can't take any more stress. And then we start looking at the piece by piece things. And at the end of the call, they go, Well, I just feel I feel I got a clearer picture. I feel great on you know, I ask them what's, you know, what's your stress level? Now? It's one or two out of 10?

Yeah, because their problem wasn't stressed in the first place. It was whatever it was, whatever the things are, that you help them look at, get some sense that they can do something about you know,

yeah, so that that is really amazing. Um, what, what I was going to what I wanted to ask you is, are people pretty good at identifying when, when they have anger and stress problems? Or does it typically take like a health issue or something else?

Well, it may take a health issue to get them to motivated to do something about it. But they've known all along that they were feeling stress and they're feeling anger. That's, that's those things are fairly obvious to most of us. We just, we just just push it aside, or we've been taught to believe it's a natural part of life, you just have to suffer through it put up with it. It some people have even taught us that it's necessary to be successful, and productive, which is all hogwash. You know, well, we but we have these cultural beliefs, that life is just stressful. You can't eliminate stress. So why bother? The best you can do is manage it. And none of that's true. You can absolutely eliminate most of your stress, I eliminated almost, I suffered from stress to in my 20s and 30s for two decades, daily, and couldn't do anything to get rid of it. And the last 40 years, it's almost all gone. Yeah. And people say that's fantastic. They will say that's not possible. I'm saying, well, if somebody did it, it's probably possible. And I've taught other people to do it too. So it's not impossible. It's just you have to take a completely different way of thinking, a completely different approach to you know, you stop focusing on symptoms, and start focusing on causes. And we all have the innate ability to do that. It's just we don't know how to If we don't have anybody to support us, or coaches and how to do that, and we've never seen the benefits, you know, so it looks impossible, it looks outer worldly, you know, but it's actually very real, very possible. And lots of people have learned how to do it, it's just a question of when you want. And so you say, you know, so a health problem may motivate pupils, okay, now I've got to do something. But they could have done that, you know, years before.

And so what I'm, if I'm hearing you correctly, it doesn't matter, you don't have to be living, you know, a stress free life, doing your 30 minutes of meditation every morning, and just being totally Zen with the world, to be able to take advantage of your your coaching and your training, you could actually somebody could come to you in, in a state of being really stressed dealing with a lot of anger, and you could still teach them the techniques to eliminate that stress and anger from their life, even in something like really stressful, like the divorce or a loss of a loss of a partner or a business failure, you can still work

with the principles are the same, no matter how bad the external situation is, you still have to be able to look at the internal side of it. And those principles are similar. And a lot of those internal causes are similar, that get triggered by those different situations. So once you learn how to identify them in a couple of situations, and you see how you can relieve your, quote, stress in those situations, then you start seeing them in other situations where you didn't see them before, but now you know what they are, you've had experience working with them and dealing with them and recognizing them within yourself. You know, it's kind of like those, remember those little hidden picture games in the highlights magazine. And, you know, they're all these images buried in a tree lay in the trees, and then the other times, and they give you a list at the bottom of the picnic, find the pitch for find the find a cow, you know, and having that list is very, if you didn't have that list, it would make it much harder, but you know what you're looking for. So then you turn the thing around, and you stare at it a little bit and you know, the cow pops out of the tree, or, or something, you know. And so that's what it's like, that's it's very similar, when you're trying to identify the internal causes of your stress, you kind of have to know what they are, before you go searching for them. And then when you know what they are, you can say, well, is that one in play here? Is that causing my problem here? For example? The the need to be right, is a very common internal cause of problems, stress, relationship, failures, anger, all kinds of stuff. Okay? We don't see that. Cause, okay, we don't see that that's operating in us as a driving force, that we really, really want to be right and need to be right. And we'll do what we need to do to be right. And it'll cause problems for other people in our lives, not in addition to ourselves. So we don't see that that's an example of an internal cause. We don't say, Well, if you know that needing to be right is an internal causes, it's likely to come up when you're stressed. Then you when you're checking off your list of what are the things I can't see them because they're invisible. But what could they be? You get your list of usual suspects after a while. Yeah, well, am I trying to be right here? Oh, yeah, I think I am. Am I trying to control something that I have no business trying to control? Oh, yeah, I think I am I trying to make other people do things I want them to do? Oh, yeah. Yeah, I think that slipped in there, you know. So when you have the when you have the, again, the matrix of your, what's making up your internal things have been conditioned within you. These are all conditioned into us into our brains and our bodies, that we just automatically react that way or see things that way, then you start to understand why you're feeling the way you're feeling and the problems you're having. And until you've got that roadmap. So you understand yourself and your internal causes better, you don't have a chance of dealing with the root causes of distress, the best you can do is just manage the manage.

Yeah. So yeah. So that's, that's, I think that that's phenomenal. And thank you for giving that example, I think that makes it really clear. The kind of the kind of detail that you have to get down to to really understand this. So Dr. Moore, you have shared a ton of information. And it's been fascinating. I could go for another half an hour. By the way. I don't think people want to sit and listen for that long. So what do you think is the most important thing that people should remember from our conversation, kind of that golden nugget that you want them to remember when they shut off the podcast and go about their day?

Well, I mean, I have a ton of stuff that I could share with people that are really important principles that I've learned over the last four years. But we just the one that we talked about is it to me is the most important. If you can just retrain yourself that every time you hear the word stress or you use the word stress, you switch it to problems. You don't have to get rid of it because we're not going to get rid of it. Okay, just like we're not going to get rid of the management idea. It's just ingrained it but whenever you hear your Tough thinking I got stress or I'm stressed, say, No, I'm not stressed, I have problems. And that will force you to go to the next question, which is okay, what are the problems I'm having? And then the next question is Well, okay, for each of those problems, what are the causes of each of those individual problems? And that'll get you on the right track? Now? It's not, it's not gonna magically happen, that you're gonna get the answers, but at least you'll be asking the right questions, right. The worst question you can ask is, how can I deal with my stress? Right? That's a definite failure question. Yeah. Add stress. You can, yeah, it'll frustrate you. Because then you'll go out and you'll try to as best you can, you'll try to deal with stress and you won't succeed. And then you'll have more stress, because now you've got the failure and the frustration, and the guilt or the shame, or whatever you think, because you think you should have been able to, because nobody's told you that was a stupid thing to try to do in the first place. You know, don't try and go after stress, go after problems, specific about the problems and get specific about the causes. And you'll, and then you can ask people, if you can't figure out the answers yourself, you can say, hey, I'm getting angry all the time. I'm trying to understand why I'm getting angry all the time. I can't figure it out. Do you have some answers for why me and other human beings get angry all the time? And you'll run into some people that might have some answers that are. If you run into me, I have a lot of answers.

And helpful answers to by the way. That's the one if people want to reach out to you learn more about what you do connect with you, what's the best way for them to do that?

Yeah, well, I have a free gift for everyone listening. And it's probably it'll be in the show notes if they want to get it there. But it's, I've got a free report, short PDF report called The Best anger elimination method, you can find that it's kind of what we've been talking about. But it gives more details about that method. And people can get it by going to the, the anger solution.org, the anger solution.org. And that'll be in the show notes. They forget that

it sure will be and thank you so much for that gift, because, and I'm gonna encourage everybody go to it, I think I'm gonna go get one just because hey, I think we can all work on it.

It also gets you on my email list. And I send out emails every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, about anger and stress. And I pick a topic each week, and I break it into three pieces. And then I share those Monday, Wednesday, Friday discussions of that topic. And so people have really commented that they got a lot of value out of that, and I've been doing it for like 12 years now. So