Your Ultimate Guide To Dealing With Stress with Dr. Mort Orman

Howard Brown: 00:00:07

Hello, everyone, welcome to Shining Brightly. It's Howard brown here again, so excited. This is amazing. We've got great guests, and we've got another one here for you today. So we're going to put the shining brightly spotlight on Dr. Mort Orman. Welcome Dr. Mort, how are you today?

Dr. Mort Orman: 00:00:25

Fine. Thanks for having me here. Howard.

Howard Brown: 00:00:27

I'm thrilled. I'm thrilled. I understand that you're vacationing a little bit away from Florida. Where are you?

Dr. Mort Orman: 00:00:33

Yeah, we are up in, up in the northwest corner of the United States. almost next to Canada. We're up in Anacortes, Washington.

Howard Brown: 00:00:41

Wow, that's pretty country up there. My daughter's in Missoula, Montana right now. So I just drove out there and made Boy, that's pretty country. Hopefully everything's well and safe out there. And I'm glad you're enjoying that little bit of travel after after all the country's going through and things like that. Well, let me let me give you a quick intro. And then you can add anything else that we want to know more maybe something, something we don't know about you. But Dr. Mort Orman is a internal medicine physician who specializes in helping professionals business owners, high performers eliminate stress from their lives without having to manage it. Oh, man, there's a lot of stress going on Dr. Mort, I think your your services are in well in need. We're going to title here called How to Become a low stress, basically, in a high stress world. So Dr. Mort, welcome to the show. And you want to share a little bit more something unusual about yourself or your passion, but you know,

Dr. Mort Orman: 00:01:37

like to play golf, that's a passion can be can be stressful at times. But there are ways to avoid that and eliminate the stress, you can actually practice a lot of stress mastery techniques on the golf course you get a lot of emotions come up all the time. You know, you're making bad shots here and there. And you can easily get frustrated and you're interacting with other people. And a lot of the things that happens on a golf course that are potentially stressful, and it's good. I always find it good to be out in nature. Number one, and it's good practice. Keep working on the skills that I've developed over the years, you know, you get to use them everywhere. And golf course is no different than any other place in life. You get to use it there too.

Howard Brown: 00:02:14

Yeah absolutely. And hitting that little white ball sometimes isn't an easy, right. So it

Dr. Mort Orman: 00:02:19

It should be it should be but it's not. I remember when I originally grew up in Baltimore, and Cal Ripken was, you know, on him actually live not far from me. And so he had fantastic Hall of Fame baseball player, he took up golf after he retired from baseball, and he struggled a lot. And the ball is just sitting there on the tee. It's not like it's, you know, a 90 mile an hour, you know, darting you know, slider that's coming at him that he's gonna hit. This is just sitting there. And he still had trouble with it. So it was frustrating for him. Because of, you know, his previous experience.

Howard Brown: 00:02:52

That's amazing. You get 100 mile an hour fastball

Dr. Mort Orman: 00:02:58

little thing, just a little thing, just sitting there on the ground, looking at you just staring at it straight.

Howard Brown: 00:03:03

Well, the reason I'm so glad you're here today. The reason is, is that there are so many causes of stress today. I mean, social media can be stressful, but family can be stressful health. business can be stressful. There's just i You probably know the list, right? The hundreds of stressors, maybe 1000s of stressors out there.

Dr. Mort Orman: 00:03:22

Yep.

Howard Brown: 00:03:23

So what we're here to talk about is that, you know, what, why is there so much stress in the world? Is that are we handling it wrong? Or are we just is it our upbringing? Is it nature nurture? Enlighten us, Doc?

Dr. Mort Orman: 00:03:34

Well, I think you're right. I mean, obviously, things are a little more hectic, little more fast paced, we got technology, we got stuff that wasn't around, you know, 50 100 years ago, of course, there was stress back then, you know, in those ages, too. So it's probably a little more stressful things around in our environment that we have to cope with these days. But the really the big reason I think why we there's so much stress today is because we really been let down by the stress management industry. I mean, for decades now, they've been filling our heads with a lot of false ideas about stress, and making us believe things that aren't true about stress, and that's keeping us stuck in being stressful. We don't have to be. I mean, I, I truly believe that almost any intelligent person can learn how to live in love and work stress free, if they just have the right insights and understandings about stress. And if they can get past all these myths and misconceptions that have been drilled into our heads.

Howard Brown: 00:04:31

That's that's why you're here. I can't say though, that I growing up in the 70s we didn't have cell phones. You know, we played we rode our bicycles. We have the neighborhood. My mom would scream down, Howard, it's time for dinner. The next mom came home for dinner, right? So we didn't have these devices. So listen, times change. We have to be adaptable, and we're learning on that.

Dr. Mort Orman: 00:04:57

So I think kids kids are more stressed Today than you know, they were in our, in our childhood, and the childhoods before us, because I My childhood was pretty much stress free. It wasn't until I got to high school and college and medical school that the stress started, you know, coming into play really big time. But, you know, the kids today, they have a lot, you know, with social media, with all the technology and demands and things like them a lot of things to cope with, we didn't have to

Howard Brown: 00:05:24

think that just life got more noisy, didn't get busy day, you know, is it just a blink of an eyelash? No things were simpler? What What's your thought on

Dr. Mort Orman: 00:05:34

social media changes in that dynamic a lot. I mean, there's a lot more opportunities to have your feelings hurt, to have people say nasty things about you that you have to deal with, you know, those people commit suicide, because they, you know, in response to what happens on social media, and it's hard, and it's a big distraction. So it's hard, you get addicted to it, literally. I mean, they're designed, the platform's are designed to make you addicted, so you spend as much time as possible on them. And to a certain degree, the people who created them have been successful at doing that. And then then it leaves us with a problem of how do we mat? How do we deal with that? You know, how do we live our lives without being totally dependent on social media or totally wrapped up in social media where we stop interacting with people in real life? You know, we stopped going out and doing things we stopped going out and playing, you know, when we when we could be you know what, so that puts a responsibility on us to overcome the negative aspects of social media, because there's obviously positive aspects to it when caught on. You know,

Howard Brown: 00:06:37

I mean, listen, we're connecting here today over George Jetson, right? I mean, we're absolutely, yeah. You're watching.

Dr. Mort Orman: 00:06:54

So you're breaking up a little bit for me, right here

Howard Brown: 00:06:56

in here in Michigan? It's, yeah, I saw that. It's, yeah, I got you. I got your back. popped out for a second. So we're not perfect. And maybe the internet inside as well. But I know I made the decision, you know, you know, everyone else was getting their child a cell phone. And this is now eight or nine years old. Now. I heard it's even earlier, you know, one for safety reasons, yes, it's nice.

Howard Brown: 00:07:27

Your child is going to be is supposed to, you know, work. And now gaming and life is going to be, you know, taking you into this VR world. So I have my concerns and my own opinions. But you're the expert. But I mean, we've had stress, right? I mean, you said stress as you grew up as a high schooler. There's there's bullying, there's not fitting in who's doing poor grade wise, athletically. There's all sorts of stressors. So who's who's supposed to teach these stressors? You know, how to deal with that? Is it your parents? Is it yourself? Where's where's that come from? You know, in growing up?

Dr. Mort Orman: 00:08:09

Well, it's it's not being the the important stuff is not being taught, there may be, there may be some movements now to bring stress management education into the school systems or into younger age groups. But that's part of the problem. We're just teaching more stuff to people, that isn't true. There are very few people out there like myself, who are trying to spread the truth about stress and have people understand what stress really is, where it really comes from, and what the best strategies are for dealing with it. Because stress management is not the best strategy. But that's what we're being, you know, conditioned to believe that the best way to deal with stress is to get really, really good at managing. And I say you cannot win against stress, if that's all you do is just manage it, because stress management mostly deals with symptoms. And if all you do is deal with symptoms, and you never get at the causes, then you're not going to win the game, you're not going to be able to get stress free, like people are capable of doing. They've just been given the wrong instruction manual for how to deal with stress.

Howard Brown: 00:09:12

So we're gonna talk about that right instruction manual in a second. I just wanted to add that one of the things that you know, me coming out of have a very devastating stage four diagnosis. These last five years, I noticed with cancer patients that it can become isolating. It's complex. You're given, you know, any cancer diagnosis is horrible. But it really does change you and affects you emotionally, physically, financially with relationships, and the list can go on and on. And what I'm noticing though, is that the same thing with COVID. The same thing are the rules of the game all changed on us very recently. We're coming out of it even though COVID is not going away. There's strains and things like that, but more and more people believe COVID is over every day, but it's up what do you what do you attribute That too, is that when you're when you're kind of slammed out of your ordinary, like COVID did to most most many, many people.

Dr. Mort Orman: 00:10:07

Yeah, it to me. I mean watching going through that and watching people's reactions, both the experts and the general public, it really pointed out to me how ill prepared we were to deal with a catastrophe like that that comes out of the blue nobody was expecting and nobody had pre planned for, and then it hits you. And it turns your whole world topsy turvy. We were very poorly prepared mentally, psychologically, and with coping skills to deal with that there was a heck of a lot of uncertainty it with COVID. There's uncertainty with anytime you're sick. I mean, as a physician, we're well, physicians are well aware of the fact there's a lot of uncertainty in medicine. Now, people think that doctors have certain knowledge about health illness, we don't, we have some knowledge. But a lot we know that a lot of it's uncertain. And we don't. That's not how we project ourselves to our patients, because our patients want certainty. They go to a doctor, they want to know for sure, what's my diagnosis? What's the treatment, I should do what they want certainty. And they're and they're scared because they're sick. And they're scared, because there's so much uncertainty around the illness, what's going to happen to me? What's going to have my family, am I going to be disabled? Am I going to die? You know, they got all these questions. And it's hard to get definitive answers you kind of have to do whatever you do and see how it goes and adjust and stuff like that. Sometimes it works out. Sometimes it doesn't. So the uncertainty is something we're not prepared for. And I knew that right away when when COVID hit, I knew exactly that was going to be a huge issue and that people weren't going to deal with it well, because nobody's teaching us how to deal with it. Well, nobody's preparing us to do that. I mean, I I happen to have, at the time, I had a very good system that I developed 40 years ago, for coping with any kind of stress that might ever come out of the blue or mundane, everyday stuff, to be able to deal with that. So when COVID hit, I was prepared, you know, I had a system that was really good. And I had very little stress during those two years of COVID, even though I was a high risk person. At my age, even though you know, I had just as much uncertainty as everybody else. I was prepared for it psychologically, I had a system for believing the stress. And I didn't get caught up in it. But I could see so many people were devastated by the uncertainty by the conflicting advice they were getting and conflicting scientific beliefs, which is the way science is all the time. You know, but most people didn't see it until it started getting publicized. And, and they had to make decisions based on very uncertain knowledge.

Howard Brown: 00:12:44

Right, right. So so let's talk about different types of stress. And, you know, what do people believe, you know, is stress and what's not stress?

Dr. Mort Orman: 00:12:54

Well, here's the thing. Most people don't understand that human beings never suffer from stress. You and I, we never have stress. Because stress is just a word. It's just a buzzword. It's a concept. Okay? It really is a word that we use to stand for problems in life. So whenever you say you're stressed, or I say I'm stressed, what's happening for real is we're having problems in our life that are bothering us. And those problems can stir up our physiology, you know, the stress free, so called stress response, it's well documented. But where does that stress response come from? Comes from different problems. Maybe we're getting angry all the time. Maybe we have anxiety, maybe our kids are misbehaving. We're having marital difficulties, financial difficulties, we're having a health crisis, we're worried about having a health crisis. A family member has a health crisis, you know, we're not sick, but they are and that's all these things are problems that can impact us in life can affect our health can affect our physiology, and our emotions and everything. And that's really what stress is, stress is a buzzword, Pete, we would be much better off if we just cut the word stress out of a vocabulary. So So you couldn't use it. You know, but obviously, that's not going to happen. But if you just make that little mental switch, if every time you hear the word stress, or you think stress yourself, where you hear yourself saying the word stress, just change it to problems, and you'll be on a more accurate path to say, Okay, now Alright, so I'm having problems now, what are the exact problems I'm having? Because until you can do that you can't get at the causes. If you take all your problems, which is what we're being told to do, by the way, by the by the experts, if you take all your problems, you lump them together in a basket and you label that basket stress. And then you ask yourself, Okay, how can I deal with my stress? The only thing you can do is deal with symptoms, because you're not addressing the actual problems, you just cramming them all together, and you're not focused on the individual problems that are in that basket. In order to really get to the causes. You have to take each problem out one by one and say, Okay, I'm getting angry. What What's causing me to get angry? I'm feeling anxious, what's causing me to feel anxious? I've got a health problem, what caused that health problem? You know, did stress play a role in the health problem? Maybe, maybe not. You have to sort all that stuff out? Did something else play a role in that outcome? How am I the reaction to having the health problem? What's causing the way I'm reacting to what it is? am I reacting in the best way I could? Or is my reaction actually making things worse, you know, and maybe causing me more stress that now I'm going to feed back and could possibly make my physical problem worse if I don't handle it? Well. So I mean, there's all these complicated issues and uncertainties that we get affected by. And that's, that's what we mean when we say we're having stress. So we never suffer from stress it for you to think that you can deal with stress is like the craziest thing in the world. When you stop and think about it. It's nonsense, really, it's like chasing a unicorn, you know, you'll never, you'll never catch it. Because it didn't exist in the first place. What you want to do is focus on the problems, forget the word stress, focus on the problems, and then learn how to identify the causes. And that's what I recommend. That's my preferred strategy. Instead of stress management, which is mainly symptoms, get into causes understand the causes better than most people normally do. And then you can, you'll be surprised at how much influence and power you have over those problems. When you get all the causes out on the table, not just the external ones, which are easy to see, you got to look at the internal causes as well, there's always those going on. And we don't see those very easily. Nobody's training us how to identify those causes. And that's what I do in my work with people, I help them not just identify the external causes of their stress, which they're pretty well aware of, but what's called what's going on within you internally, that's driving your anger that's driving your anxiety that's driving your marital difficulty that's driving your conflict with your kids, you know, or the fact that kids don't want to be around you anymore. They don't enjoy being around you. What's what's, what are you doing that's driving that? And can you see it? And then once you see it, can you do something about it? Most of the time, in my experience, the most difficult part is people to see what they're not what's already there, but they're not seeing it accurately. Once they see it. They go, Oh, I didn't realize I was doing that. Oh, now that I see that I can do something about it, you know, but before I saw before they could see it, they weren't able to do anything about it. You don't I mean,

Howard Brown: 00:17:20

those are those are blind spots. That's quite elegant, documented, because you take this big sack of, of problems together. And it seems, you know, really an addressable. But if you do take them out and you unpack them into smaller bites, maybe not so small, but into individual bites, they can be addressed. And so I think that's a great takeaway. I didn't see that. But I mean, you're the expert here. So I appreciate it.

Dr. Mort Orman: 00:17:48

It's not that they're unaddressed. When you lump them together. It's not there and addressable. But you can only you can only address them with things like alcohol or drugs, or relaxation exercises, or taking deep breaths, things that don't get any specific problem. They're just generally trying to tone down your physiology. But what's driving the physiology is going to keep happening, you know, until you until you fix that, you know,

Howard Brown: 00:18:12

so so so people ask me, Dr. Mort, you know, I always say listen, I've survived to stage four cancer diagnosis with a ton of treatment. Cancer, one was a bone marrow transplant, my twin sister. And then cancer number two, lots of chemo, lots of surgeries. And they're like, you know, you're an inspiration. How did you do this, and I kind of made up my own rules, not knowing you now know in applying your methods, Dr. Mark, but I did try to weed out negativity. That helped quite a bit. Exercise helped me and I what I call find my happy place. And my happy place happens to be on the basketball court. Okay, that is kind of my trouble free zone. I get there out on the basketball court and during treatment and after surgeries, and it was safe to do so. I wasn't very good. But I've now worked very hard. Now, I'm not the youngest guy in the court. But I'm now playing two, three times a week, and I'm back contributing and feeling great. But for some reason, when I get on the basketball court, life goes into a different place. I'm not worried. I don't have a worry. Just trash talking. I'm there with my buddies I've played with for a long time. And so, you know, I've kind of found that spot for me where, you know, I don't have a care in the world. And I find that to be quite helpful. Yeah.

Dr. Mort Orman: 00:19:29

So I I applaud you for doing that. And you're demonstrate, you're demonstrating what I preach, which is we've got we've got so much potential within us to deal with difficult problems that we don't give ourselves credit for that we can be very creative, very inventive. We can do things like you said, you were gonna identify, well, negativity, could be making this worse. I think I want to have less of that. And I'm going to come up with a strategy to figure out how to do that and then you can get creative about that strategy. We've got This enormous reservoir of creative potential, and other potential, you know, to, to surmount problems and adversity and difficulties in life. And a lot of times people sit around and they just throw in the towel, they go like, Well, what was me, you know, you know, I've been victimized by this illness, and there's not much I can do. Well, that's not true. Same thing with stress, I've been victimized by stress, and there's very little I can do. That's not true either. But, but that's the mindset that people have today that life is just stressful. You can't avoid it, you can't live stress free, that's a pipe dream, that's false. It's a fool's errand. Forget it, you know, just manage as best you can. And, you know, do some relaxation here and some breathing here. And that's the best you can hope for. Well, that's, that's all fake news. You know, I like to say fake news didn't start when Trump got in office, it was here. It's been here for a long time, about a lot of things.

Howard Brown: 00:20:55

So I'm about to become, you know, a preordered published author. And then in September going for full release, tell me about your book. And give me Give, give some folks the highlight reel, I'm on your book.

Dr. Mort Orman: 00:21:08

Well, I've actually written I've authored 21 books on and eliminate stress without managing it. And it's all the same basic system of forget about stress, identify the problem. Okay, here's the problem. Now, what are the causes? Now, when you look at the causes, there's external ones you can see, and the internal ones that you're gonna have blind spots about? So how are you going to figure out what those are, because those are really important, you got much more control over those internal ones, once you see them, like you demonstrated, you can take control over some of these things, once you once you understand what you're going for, and that's the methodology and you can apply it to many different kinds of problems. So I've written books about, you know, how to deal with test anxiety, how to deal with panic attacks, how to deal with negative thinking, you know, how to forgive when you don't think you can forgive how to deal with anger and irritability, where I take that same approach and say, okay, problem X has causes. Here are the internal causes of this particular problem, so you can see them now. And here's how you would deal with them now that you know what they are. And then I have a bunch of general books that are more philosophical books about what's the truth about stress? Why are so many people confused about it? Why of how have we been misled? You know, and the things that we've been taught to believe that we're talking about today. So I've got some general books like that. I have a book called The Ultimate method for dealing with stress, which is a short book on Amazon that people can buy if they want to. But it gives a good overview of my philosophy, and it gives a good introduction to an alternative way of thinking about stress and dealing with it that isn't stress management and actually makes stress management look to be the kind of ineffective strategy than it actually is. Because again, if if you have a choice between dealing with a problems, causes rather than just dealing with its symptoms, most people would say, I'd rather deal with causes. It's just that we've been trained to believe you can't get at the causes of stress. You know, we all there. It's all the external stuff that's around that you can't change. You know, but that's only half the story. Yeah, that stuff is there. Yeah. COVID happened. Yeah, yeah, the internet happened. Social media happened. Distractions are more common today than ever before. Yeah, that's all true. But do we have to be impacted negatively by that stuff? Well, all depends on how you understand the problem you're facing, and how well you creatively cope with it.

Howard Brown: 00:23:41

Absolutely. And so you're more than answered my question. So a simple search on Amazon brings you up, and you have lots of resources out there to help viewers out there to to really start. And you also you teach classes or how to how to someone get in touch with you? Yeah,

Dr. Mort Orman: 00:23:59

well, firstly, to get in touch with me, you can just go to my website, dot doc orman.com docrmn.com. And there's a, there's a report there, it's a short three page thing called the high cost of zero. And it's about stress, it's not about zero. And you can download that, read it in a couple minutes. But that'll get you on my email list. So I send emails out every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, where I take a topic each week, and I break it into three pieces. And I talk about it in three parts. I talk about part one, part two, part three. Every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, we're joined there for like 12 years now. So that's they can get on that list. And then the book that I mentioned, it's the short book on Amazon that you can go by, you know, we can give to your audience for free if you want to. I can give you the give you a link for that and you can let them get that download that for free. And it's called The Ultimate method for dealing with stress, which is what I basically described to you. You know, the focus on the problem is like a great

Howard Brown: 00:24:58

starter resource. Yes,

Dr. Mort Orman: 00:25:01

it's a quick read. It's a short short book a quick read, it's fun. A lot of people have good, good comments about it.

Howard Brown: 00:25:08

I think that's a wonderful offer. And yes, we'll spread the word on, we'll share on social media, we'll share on this podcast, we'll make sure that the link is covered there for that free offering. So give me some final thoughts. So

Dr. Mort Orman: 00:25:24

you mentioned that you mentioned the health issue, I mean, health, one set of problems that we use this term stress, to refer to as and things related to health. So when you get sick, or you're afraid of being getting sick, or a family member gets sick, or pet gets sick, and you know, anything like that, it can be stressful in the sense of a problem, and a worry and a source of a lot of anxiety and stuff. So, you know, as a physician, I practice for 23 years, and every day, I saw streams of people come through my office, and you get to see them over time, and you get to see the what stress does to people over time, because a lot of people will will confide in their doctor, and they'll tell you about the stress they're having. And you know, as a doctor, you're sitting there, you listen to it, but you hear I can't do much about it, I was not trained, do anything about that, but you listen, you're sympathetic, they'll don't pour out, they'll tell you what's going on in their lives, you know, and you see what's happening to their health over time. And most people don't get that perspective. You know, when when most people go into their office every day, they don't see the damage, that stress does little by little every day accumulate over a person's lifetime, to when they finally ended up with a stroke, or a heart attack or something else some you know, autoimmune disease, or some other bad illness where stress probably played a role to some degree in affecting the health of their body, and their, their immune system and all that kind of stuff. So we get, we get that very unique perspective, that that unless you're a doctor, and you unless you're seeing people over time, and watching them change and watching what happens to them, you don't really appreciate how dangerous stress is, you know, we tend to live in denial, you know, you feel stressed a little bit each day. And it's like, it's no big deal. It's just stress Well, little by little. It's doing stuff to you. And I really, you know, it's a shame that people don't wake up early enough in that process to say, I gotta really do something about my stress. They, when they get the heart attack or the stroke, they go, Oh, my God, I wish I had done something about it. Now, I really will. But sometimes that's too late. And so I just think it's a shame that we're not preparing people better. We're not they're not as more people like me out there telling spreading the word about what's true and not true about stress. This should be in this should be in high school education. You shouldn't be allowed to graduate college without learning these truths about stress. professional schools, I didn't learn any of this stuff in medical school, you know, they just sent me out to take care of stress human beings, instead, what you figured out. So

Howard Brown: 00:28:07

first of all, this is really important, because, you know, I talked about releasing a resilient life. Leading the life with some kindness and positivity, I always say I'd like to hang out on positive street without putting blinders on what's happening in the real world. We all have to deal with that. And I think you're going to help quite a bit of my audience and my listeners, because we need you right now, Dr. Moore, we need you more than ever. And I am grateful that you've been able to come on the show today. And we're gonna spread the word far and wide. And the ultimate method for dealing with stress, which is actually not stress its problems and separating those problems. I heard the message and we're thrilled you're here and enjoy Washington state. And we'll I'm sure we'll talk very soon. But I just again, want to thank you for being on the show. And you're Shining Brightly today. Thank you.