In his medical training, Dr. Mort Orman was taught all about the human body, the heart, liver, stomach, etcetera. But not enough about the human being to help him avoid his own issues with stress.  It wasn’t until he realized that all his efforts to manage stress had him chasing the wrong goal that he was able to break free of the impact of stress on his health and relationships – In fact, once he discovered that by addressing the problems that were creating stress, he then had none left to “manage”!

Dr. Orman is an Internal Medicine physician, a former corporate health and wellness executive, and a 40-year stress elimination expert who now helps his clients resolve the root issues so they can avoid feeling the impact of stress.

In this episode we discuss:

• Ways that medical students are trained to experience stress
• The origin of “stress” as a concept by Hans Selye
• Why managing stress is the wrong goal
• The true sources of stress
• How COVID highlighted our society’s struggle with stress

Dr. Orman hosts a weekly talk, “3 Big Lies About Stress” to help you discover how it’s impacting your health, your business and your life. Learn more at http://3bigliesaboutstress.com

And find Dr.Orman’s resources at http://docorman.com/

Susi Vine: Thanks for joining me today on the show. I’m so happy to have you with us. For my conversation with Dr. Orman, Dr. Mort Orman has been a physician and coded the way to conquer stress for himself. When everything he tried had him coming up. In fact, he likes to flip the whole conversation on its head. We really dive into the power of the words and the definitions, a lot of which we take for granted.

So I think you’ll get some good food for thought in this conversation with Dr. Orman. So glad you are with us for the short and sweet conversation coming to you from the Pata Palooza event. Thanks for joining us and enjoy.

living in a stressful world. Doesn’t mean you have to give up on happiness instead. You can shift your perspective of stress and discover how to live your life in flow. Welcome to Happified. I’m your host Susi Vine. Join me for inspiration and interviews with folks we’re shining their light on. In the areas of positive mindset, health and wellness.

I’m so happy to have you here.

Let me ask you a question. How do you answer when stress calls? It comes in on lots of different channels these days, sometimes as white noise and sometimes with bells and whistles blaring, you may try to power through working harder and pushing yourself to the limit in the hopes that doing all you can, will be enough to get you through. Stress can feel heavy, ominous and maybe hiding inside of any new email or notification on your computer.

What if instead you see stress as an opportunity to rise and thrive. What if stress not only strengthens you, but fuels your success? It’s not a dream and it’s not a secret that’s exclusive to the power players. If you shift your perspective, you can empower yourself to enjoy a radical shift in how you show up to stress and how stress shows up in your life.

Want to learn more? I have a special report for you that shares some tools you can easily incorporate to start putting stress, to work for. It’s available for free at life.com. Click on the gift button to pick 

up your report 

Susi Vine: today. So happy to have you with us today on Happified, we are coming to you live recorded, but recorded live in the bottom.

Storium as a part of the pod, a Palooza event. And I am so excited to connect at last with Mort. Dr. Mort is internal medicine physician, a former corporate health and wellness executive, and a 40 year stress elimination expert. If your audience wants to know, and I think that you do my dear audience, how you’ve been lying to about stress for decades and how these lies are harming you every.

Dr. Orman is here to shine some light on the subject for us. And I was just sharing before we hit record that I am a nurse’s daughter. So I was raised with a familiarity of our Western medicine system. And now I enjoy a holistic approach. And I like to say I kind of had a front row seat to how stress shows up over time.

So I’m sure you can speak to that through the course of your experience in your career, as well as seeing the impact in your patients. So thanks for joining me, doctor. Yeah, 

Dr. Mort Orman: I’m glad to be here. Thank you for inviting me. I too had a front row seat distress. I went to medical school and they kind of teach you how to have stress in medical school.

So, and then they send you out to open a practice and they don’t teach you anything about running a business. So you have to figure that out on your own, and then you just run into all kinds of problems and difficulties. And so yeah, I had a lot as a young physician. 40 plus years ago, I had a lot of stress when I opened my practice.

I had a lot of anger, a lot of anxiety. I was petrified to speak in public. I could have never done this, you know, back then that would have been a basket case. And I had relationship problems all over the place. I had a, actually had a hundred percent failure rate in all of my relationships with women, every single one failed.

They started off fine, but they just. And so there was a lot of stuff going on. And then, like you say, you’re sitting when you practice medicine every day, you’re seeing patients that are coming in and you’re seeing the results of years and years and years of stress. And then they finally people have heart attacks or strokes, or some have developed some other horrendous illness or something like that.

And you’re just seeing, you know, every day, you’re just seeing it parading in front of you and you’re going, and you know, your stress and you’re going like, is that coming from. You know, and so that got me really motivated to try and do something about my own stress. And I tried all the stress management stuff at the time and it just didn’t do anything for me.

Like I couldn’t control my emotions. I couldn’t control my relationships and improve them. And I, I was just eating my head against the wall and feeling really frustrated and feeling really, really demoralized because I had always been a winner, you know, I can win and just spend anything I put my mind to.

And I just, couldn’t not. Get anywhere with these stress problems I was happening. I just kept banging my head against the wall. But again, you, you see all the. Damage trading in front of your eyes every day. And you still, that keeps you moving forward. And so I started doing personal development courses. I learned a lot about myself that I never learned in medical school.

I learned a lot about human beings. I didn’t, you know, they don’t teach you how to take care of human beings and medicals. They take teach you how to take care of hearts and livers and lungs and stuff like that. But they forget the part about the human being attached to them. So I was learning that stuff.

I was expanding my mind, expanding my horizons and I was. Learning from some people who were willing to just sort of question the, you know, the dog man, whatever area they were ex had their expertise in. So I was in that. I was just in that environment. And so it got me to start questioning the dog around stress and it really opened the door for me to start saying, well, there’s all this stuff that we’re being taught and that I was taught.

Is it true? And once I start asking those kinds of questions that I have. Good fortune to follow through and pursue them. I discovered almost everything we’re taught to believe about stresses and true. And that’s what made that’s ultimately what made a difference for me. And as a result of that one sort of door opening up and me walking through it and exploring it took me a couple of years to figure out a lot of stuff, but I wouldn’t have discovered had I not gone down that path.

I would say in the last 40 years of my life had been almost completely stress-free and most people don’t believe that that’s one of the lies we’re told about stress, that it’s not possible to live stress free in this crazy world today. You would think if that’s the case, because most people’s experience experiences that, but it’s not really true if you really understand stress clearly and deeply, and you know, and you understand life in a very effective ways, then you can get rid of a lot of stress that most people feel stuck with and they can’t do anything about, you know, it’s not because they don’t have the ability it’s because they just don’t have the right approach or the right training or the right principles.

Insights and stuff like that, which I was fortunate to have collected back 40 years ago. And it’s been serving me very, very well ever since I’ve written a whole bunch of books on how to get rid of stress without managing. And I’ve done over 105 workshops for all kinds of people. I mean, doctors, nurses.

My wife’s a veterinarian, so I’ve done them for veterinarians business owners, corporate executives. I even did a workshop for psychologist. I did a workshop for the clergy years ago, and I did one for the FBI in Baltimore where I, where I had my practice. So, I mean I have worked with all kinds of different people.

My focus right now is on professionals and business owners and other really success driven people because what people who are really successful in life, but it just hadn’t figured out how to, how to beat stress. And if you’re a successful person and you haven’t figured out how to beat stress, I can teach you how to beat it.

So that’s the kind of person I like to work with. Cause that’s where I was. And that’s what I finally figured out how. 

Susi Vine: I love it. And I think there’s so much in, in what you just shared. And. When I came into this space, as, as you said, you know, when you have the opportunity, the gift to see where you don’t want to go, you can see the progression as people move through phases and stages of chronic disease, because they’ve never addressed it when it was small, they didn’t want to.

Until it was really broken. Right. It’s all right, doc, you know, my, my blood pressure’s high or, you know, I’m, pre-diabetic all of these little things that now we find even more things are tied to stress chronic stress and the way that it impacts us. And when I got super clear, that’s not the future I wanted for myself.

And I wanted to learn more. I thought like everyone else does. The secret is turning down. We’re just going to address it. We’ll remove what it is and it’ll be fine. And, and I really fell into the field of positive psychology and fell in love with changing the whole perspective and the way that we look at it.

But that’s fairly quote, unquote, new science really come out of a really extraordinary breadth of research. But even that I would say is maybe 30 years old. So I’d love to hear how you with your, the way that you. Meat and address challenges, you know, a little bit of competitive spirit, definitely looking to rise and overcome, like tell me what to do and I’ll do it.

I’ll knock it off the list. You know, definitely an achiever. What was, if you can sum it down, I mean, it’s taken you books through the course of your work and exploration, so there’s probably not one corner. About dealing with stress. You talked about managing it and that’s part of what we’re doing wrong, but I love to hear, you know, what, where do you tell people to start?

Or, or what do you see everyone doing wrong when it comes to again, air quotes, managing stress? 

Dr. Mort Orman: Well, you know, stress management is not just a set of techniques. I mean, it is a set of techniques and that’s what people understand about it, but what’s underneath it is a whole set of assumptions and philosophies and understandings that prop it up in order to, if you have to have certain beliefs about stress, you have to set up certain beliefs about human beings in order to buy into the whole stress management mentality that tells you what I need to do is go out and learn how to do biofeedback and relaxation and meditation and all that.

And I have 

Susi Vine: nothing it’s list and then I’ll be calm and 

Dr. Mort Orman: I have nothing against those things. They’re all, actually, they’re all good. They’re all, they all give you health benefits. They all have positive benefits and they’re certainly better than using drugs or alcohol or cigarettes or overeating or things that sometimes people do to deal with their stress.

So there they have benefits. Again, they just really get at the symptom level most of the time. And so your, your problems never go away. They, you keep having to use the stress management techniques every day, because if you stopped doing it and stress, it’s just going to resurface and you’re going to be in trouble.

But the first thing that I do, the first thing that I discovered that 40 years ago that I was doing wrong. And it’s the first thing that I teach people I work with now to stop doing is you got to get rid of the worst. It’s 

Susi Vine: really a lot to that word. 

Dr. Mort Orman: Haven’t weighed. It is a problem. And that’s because stress is really just a buzzword.

It’s just a, it’s a concept. It’s an abstraction. It’s a word that was invented like in the 1940s by Han Salia is the father of modern stress research. And do you know the prior, 1940, no one ever suffered from.

We went through world war one. We went through the great depression. We went through world war II, not a single person during any of those periods of our history ever said that they were stressed now they’ve there probably was a hell of a lot of suffering going on and people had a lot of issues going on, but they didn’t have this word stress to label it with.

Okay. So that just started in the 1940s and we’ve latched on to this even Selia himself wrote in his first. That we should not think of stress as something that actually exists. That it’s just a term that he made up. Cause he was doing this new research and he had to communicate with it. He actually says, it’s an abstraction.

Don’t, don’t take it as a real thing, but nobody listened to it. And, but then there’s all that science on all the physiology, you know, the hormonal, the cortisol and the epidemic, all the chemical and neurological. And so that’s real, you know, that stuff happens. But the second mistake we’ve made as we’ve defined stress in terms of those physical reactions, And it’s really only half the story, really, because it’s not that, that stuff isn’t true, but she stresses a word that we use basically to stand for problems in our life.

So w when you, and I say, we’re stressed, what we mean is we’re having. Yep. And if we’re talking and you say you’re stressed and I say, I’m stressed, you have no idea what problems I’m dealing with in my life. And I have no idea what problems you’re dealing with only because we just use this, this wastebasket term to just talk about any problem that we can imagine that we have.

So if you’re angry that stress, if you’re anxious that stress, if you’re having relationship problems, that stress, if you’re, you know, overwhelmed, that stress, whatever problem it is, including health problems, you have, you have high blood pressure or you have headaches or you have tight up. They’re all under this umbrella called stress.

And we use the same word to talk about hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of different. And, and that’s, that’s a problem because I realized that I was, you know, everybody’s being taught today is take all your problems that you’re having dumped them into one big basket, labeled that basket stress, and then ask yourself, how can I deal with my stress?

As soon as you asked that question, you’ve lost the game. You’re really going down a path. That’s not going to give you a wind. It’s not going to give you what the best outcome possible. Now it doesn’t mean you won’t feel better, but you’re still going to be mainly focused on symptoms. The way to win against.

Is to stop trying to deal with stress, realize that’s like trying to chase a unicorn because you can chase it all you want, but you’re never going to be able to grab onto it. It just is. It’s going to disappear as soon as you think you can catch it. So the idea that we can deal with our stress or that we suffer from stress.

Okay. We’re suffering from problems and it’s those problems that are driving all those physiologic changes. You know, that’s, what’s doing now when I do a workshop with slides and stuff, I’ll frequently demonstrate this. I’ll take a picture of a horse and I’ll cut it in half. And I’ll just so that show the back end of the horse on a slide and I’ll ask the audience, is this.

And of course, everybody will say, no, that’s not a worst. That’s just half of wars. And I said, yes, that’s the point. It’s half of a horse. You gotta, you know, you got to take into account the front half of the worst, that back halves doesn’t go anywhere without the front end, you know, and the front half is driving the backhand.

So that’s what we do with stress. We, we look at all these physiologic changes in the body and we, and we define stress that way. Okay. And we forget the front end of the war. Which is what’s driving all that stuff. That stuff doesn’t happen on its own. You’re all those hormonal and neurological stuff and blood pressure stuff and heart rate stuff.

It doesn’t just happen for no reason, you know, there’s something going on and the what’s going on is all these problems we’re having with. You know, they’re kids with our, you know, it could be health, it could be the economy. It could be Democrats, it could be, Republicans could be Congress. It could be kinda meeting 

Susi Vine: right.

And fill in word. I mean, if we’re running short, there’s always just look around and you can choose a problem to put it in the, yeah, you can use 

Dr. Mort Orman: this little, little work. COVID this COVID comes into the. From nowhere, you know, and now we’ve got another problem that’s causing all kinds of other downstream problems.

So we’re not just having problems with problems and problems. And that’s what we mean when we say we have stress. So the real way to win against stress is not to manage the symptoms. It’s to stop, trying to deal with. Figuring out what your problems are and then get down to the causes of those problems.

So for me, I was dealing with anger and anxiety and public speaking, fear and relationship failures. Those were very specific problems and it wasn’t until I started focusing on them and asking myself, why am I getting angry so often, w what’s causing that? Why am I afraid to speak in public? What’s causing that.

Why all, all my relationships, you know, I used to, I used to diagnose or do a post-mortem on every relationship and it always turned out. It was something about the woman that was the reason why it didn’t work out, you know? And so I, I picked the wrong woman, so I have to can’t pick somebody with those characteristics.

So I would pick a different kind of woman the next time. And the same thing would happen. Enough of those, it finally gets through your skull. That may be there’s another other factors in play. So then I started, when I finally got to that point and I cried uncle and I said, wait, I gotta be generating this somehow.

I didn’t know how, I didn’t know how, but I. Felt like, Hmm, I got go look in here. I started looking in here and then I started again, I was doing a lot of personal development stuff, so I was getting some input and getting some help in the process. I started identifying what are things that I was doing that I thought were good strategies for succeeding in relationships.

They were, they were home. And I really had, no, it was just a blind spot, a big blind spot. I was, they were driving my behavior, but I just didn’t know what they were, that they were even strategies that I had. But once I could see them, I could say, that’s awful. I wouldn’t want to be with somebody if they did that.

Or they treated me like that. And then I realized that, okay, Suppose it’s success system. That’s really a failure system. I better figure it out how to get a success system. You know, so I, I learned some things about what, what works in relationships I’ve been, and I’ve been married to my wife for 37 years.

Now. Most of my relationships for the last 40 years have been much smoother because I stopped doing all these crazy things that I didn’t realize I was doing that. Damaging my relationships and the same thing about anger. I’m up. I have hardly been anger, hardly ever get angry in the last 40 years. And if I do get angry, I know how to get rid of it like instantly or within hours.

You know, I never sit around with anger for days or weeks or hold grudges against people. I can diffuse that anger very, very quickly because I know where it’s coming from because I did that. To find that out, you know, just like I did the work to find out where my relationship failures are coming. So that’s how I, that’s how I like to work with people.

But if people come in and say, they’re stressed, I know they’re not okay. The first thing I know, I know that can’t be their problem. Okay. So they’ve got other problems. So then we find out what the problems are. And then I know that they don’t really understand, firstly, they hadn’t been focused on. So it focusing for the first time, and then they probably don’t know how to identify the causes within them that are contributing.

Cause we’re not taught how to do that. I wasn’t taught how to do that in all my education, including seven years of medical training, nobody taught me how to do that. I don’t learn that on my own after I got out of medical school and try medical training. So you just know that people. They don’t really see everything that’s going on.

So no wonder they can’t get rid of their stress and no wonder they draw the conclusion as well. Stress is just inevitable. You can’t, you can’t do anything about it, you know 

Susi Vine: as well as long as your kids, as 

Dr. Mort Orman: long as you think about it that way and, and, and react to it that way. Go where the action actually is.

You’re not going to get rid of it and you’re going to conclude that that’s just a life. It’s it. I that’s how I thought when I was struggling and didn’t see a way out. I really didn’t think I was ever going to find a way out, but I, I just kept pushing. And then when I found a way out, I looked back and I said, whoa, no, I, there was a lot that I didn’t see back then that I see now.

That’s made a huge difference and now I’m on a different, completely different path and I’m approaching it a completely different way. And now all of these things were opening up for all these other problems that I’ve had in life that I found difficult to deal with. And now I can deal with them better because now I know it’s not just the stuff outside of me that.

At at cause it’s, I’m playing a role in some way, even if I don’t know what it is. And a lot of times you go into a problem and you don’t know exactly how you’re contributing to it or how you somehow brought it about, but it’s good to know that you probably did. And then you can try to investigate and see, and usually you’ll find various specific things that you were doing to create that problem or to keep it stuck.

So it doesn’t resolve. And it could be something as simple as not asking. Yeah, that’s an internal, that’s an internal cause of a lot of suffering that people have. They have a problem it’s solvable, but they they’re too proud or they won’t ask for help, but they want to do it themselves. Or that they’ve been indoctrinated by the culture that you have to do it yourself.

Otherwise you’re weak, you know, and we’ve got all these crazy ideas and it keeps us from just going to somebody and saying, Hey, could you help me with this? Or we’re hiring somebody to help you solve it. And then we remain stuck and we don’t realize we could’ve solved that problem. You know, it’s like not asking for directions, you know, fix that real easy.

Susi Vine: Well, and I think that’s definitely the case. Feeling shame or, you know, not wanting to feel less than, and certainly not wanting to feel like a failure if anyone else is watching. And so it can be hard and we can’t underestimate the value of having that external perspective because when we’re in the weeds, it’s really hard to see we’re in the thick of.

And so, you know, to, to the point of your story, you know, as long as you were totally applying yourself to these different individual situations, They influence each other, they overlap. And some 

Dr. Mort Orman: of the internal causes, some of the internal causes were similar. They crossed multiple different types of problems.

Yeah. Yeah. 

Susi Vine: And, and I see our reaction to the problems in our lives. I have to think about my words. Words are we tend to paint with a really broad brush and I love how you’ve broken it down and stepped back and said, it’s not a problem of stress. It’s a problem of. How we address our problems. 

Dr. Mort Orman: It’s a problem with problems.

We want to 

Susi Vine: lump it into one big old bucket and say, it’s bigger than me. The 

Dr. Mort Orman: really one of the examples I give is I ask people I’ve ever been on vacation at a nice tropical place. Did they, have you ever seen a print? Seen a pretty sunrise or a pretty sunset? And then everybody says show, yeah, you hear me?

I said, no, you didn’t, you never saw the sun rise with the sunset. The sun doesn’t rise. It doesn’t see it. It’s the earth rotating. You know, that the sun just stays still in one place and the earth rotates and it looks like it’s rising. So the sunrise and sunset are these two little stories that we made up that we, that we agreed that we’ll all pretend they’re real things happening in the world when they’re.

Okay. It’s like Santa Claus and the Easter bunny and all that kind of stuff. These are these stories we made up in language. And so we talk and stresses the same thing. It’s like, I’m suffering from stress. Oh, I’m very stressed. No, you’re not. You’re just having problems, but the earth, the equivalent of the earth rotating is whenever I think I’m stressed, I’m actually having problems and it’s right.

It’s not the story of somebody made up in 1940, you know, that we’ve carried on, you know, that. It’s just a story. And it’s different. There are things in medicine, you know, like appendicitis is a word, but it’s not a story. You got appendicitis, you say, oh, that’s just a story. Don’t worry about it. It’s not going to be, 

Susi Vine: you could have a bad ending, 

Dr. Mort Orman: but that’s exactly what you should do when you say I’m stressed.

I’m thinking I’m stressed. You know, that’s a story. Forget that story. You know, what are you actually dealing with? What’s going on in your life? That you’re actually. 

Susi Vine: Yeah. And the, and the power of questions. And I think that’s really should give people a lot of hope if, if we feel like we’ve been banging our head against the wall, trying to answer the same question.

Okay. What question can we answer? Ask them? Yeah. 

Dr. Mort Orman: And that question is often, how can I deal with my stress? And it’s like the worst question you can ask. 

Susi Vine: Yeah. If you want to feel overwhelmed, think about how to live a less stressful life, big air quotes. If you’re listening to that, one could be endless. If that’s what you’re chasing, 

Dr. Mort Orman: it’s such an overwhelm.

It’s not like stress overwhelm is a specific problem that comes under the stress umbrella. It’s one of the types of stress, just like anger and anxiety and fear of public speaking overwhelm as a specific feeling and a specific set of circumstances in one’s life. And that’s a, that’s a problem that you can actually hone in on.

So you can say, okay, I’m not stressed. I’m overwhelmed, which is good. Okay. Now the next question is, okay, why am I feeling overwhelmed? Or why am I overwhelmed? Why do I have more to do that? Physically or mentally can handle. How did that come about? What were the external causes and other people making demands and what were the internal causes?

Where was I in the, in the equation? And did I, was I not saying no, was, do I not know how to use time effective with my time effectively? Am I easily distracted? Do I, do I not have enough help with the house or the home or whatever, you know, got all these pressures of, did I not negotiate? Well, in terms of what my job responsibilities would be.

Did I go to somebody and say, look, this is too much for me to handle. You need to take some of this off Michael. There are all these things that go into the problem of overwhelm that and including others, that where we play a role. And we have to look at that. And it’s not that the problem is insolvable.

If you don’t take effective action, that will feel unsolvable and it will be insolvable, but. Some somebody else couldn’t help you solve it, or you don’t have the ability. Most people have tremendous, tremendous ability to get rid of stress. And if you’d asked me back 40 years ago, when I was suffering with all this stuff and I couldn’t get out of it, if you said to me, you know, You have this tremendous potential to get rid of almost all the stress in your life.

I would have said you’re full of crap. You know, there’s no possible way that I have that inside me. It’s just not possible in my experience. It’s not true. And then fast forward five or six years later, and it’s, I look back and I go, wow, that was in me. It was there all along. And I had no idea that I had that power that I had that ability, you know, I thought I was.

Incompetent. When it came to dealing with stress, I thought I have lacked the power. Maybe other people can do it, but I can, you know, and that’s not the truth about almost everybody I’ve ever worked with in the last four years and said tremendous, tremendous power that, that they’re not utilizing. And they don’t know that they have inside them.

And when we work together and they, all of a sudden, they see these problems that they struggled with for years suddenly clear up or get much, much better. They go like, well, I can’t believe I did that. I can’t believe I had that in me, you know, but it’s a common reaction and it tells you that it’s there in all of us.

I just, we’re not, we’re not our society. Doesn’t teach us that our schools don’t teach us. We don’t have role models, media doesn’t help us realize that’s a possibility. It’s just all craziness around us that keeps us stressed and that keeps these lives going. And that’s what we’re up against, you know?

You really need to penetrate through all the BS and get clear about what’s really true when I say I’m stressed, what is it? What am I what’s actually going on? What, what are the steps I need to take? Even if you don’t know how to answer the questions, you gotta ask the right questions and then you can get help if you, if you can’t answer them on your own.

And in the beginning, most people won’t be very good. ’cause, they’re not trying, they’re not experienced, they’re not trained to not experience, you know, but at least they’re on the right path, you know? Right. And, 

Susi Vine: and can’t, can’t blame ourselves for not knowing where to begin when all of the popular literature.

So start here. But having, having that curiosity, I think is super powerful, starting to ask questions, starting to ask why this isn’t working. Why do I feel this way? What can I change? And always working with someone who has that experience and the hour to reflect is so helpful in cutting a lot of the frustration out of that path, back towards.

Dr. Mort Orman: I just wish more stress experts were teaching people to do that. You know, I’ve been kind of like this, one of these lone voices out here for 40 years saying we’re going the wrong way. And it’s like you, the other, the other, you know, opinion is just so strong and it’s coming from so many different sources.

It’s just like, you’re, you know, you’re trying to hold back an ocean and it’s, it’s, it’s massive, you know, and it’s damaging people. 

Susi Vine: Yeah, yeah. Helping them, helping making them feel helpless or incapable or, you know, overwhelmed again by, by what all they feel is against them. And, you know, 

Dr. Mort Orman: COVID, COVID I saw a lot from COVID COVID really told me, which I knew anyway, but it really highlighted it for me is COVID should tell us that we were very poorly prepared to deal with a major stress event.

Before COVID hit people. Didn’t take the time to get themselves prepared, to deal with stress. They didn’t learn how to do this. What we’re talking about today and says COVID hits and everybody is discombobulated by all the changes in. Dynamics and stuff that is really negatively impacting a lot of people.

And then relationships, people are thrown together where they are stuck together. And then it creates all content. You shows that don’t have a lot of relationship skills that they thought they had and all kinds of things came out from COVID. And also about science, how we think about science, interpret science, all this stuff about how our thinking has been really poor prior to COVID.

And our emotional ability to handle emotions and stress. It was really poor prior to COVID and COVID just showed it to us, you know, like, wow. So the problem is most people didn’t use the time off during COVID to build that, you know, to build those ability. To deal with stress again, when the next thing comes, cause whatever the next thing is, we’re going to be in the same boat and there’ll be some people like me.

I have very little stress and then COVID cause I had this neat system that I could go to. And I had some experience in the area that, you know, nothing really phase me that much. I kind of knew what was going to happen before it happened. And I knew how to deal with the stuff that most people were finding it difficult to deal with.

And because I had that system in place. You know that I built years ago, and then I’ve worked on for the last 40 years. And I know most people didn’t have that kind of thing in place and we really should. We shouldn’t be complacent with, oh, well it’s things aren’t too stressful right now. So I don’t have to do any work, you know, to learn how to deal with stress.

Well, something’s going to hit, somebody is going to get sick. Someone’s going to die. You’re, you’ll lose your business. You can lose your job. You know, some horrible thing’s going to happen and you’re going to need those skills and it’s going to come on suddenly. 

Susi Vine: And and, and so, so it’s on us to learn from our lessons and learn the better path forward.

Thank you, Dr. Orman for jumping in with me, I will have your contact information in the show notes so people can connect with you, check out those books that you have been sharing with the world into a more 

Dr. Mort Orman: empowered approach. I tell you, I do a, I do a free one hour talk every Thursday, 8:00 PM. Eastern.

It’s called three big lies about. Okay. And that are impacting your health, your business and your life. And so I go over some of these points and some other ones, then it’s totally free. I don’t sell anything to anybody. It’s just a public service that I’m doing. And all you have to do is go to three big lies about stress.com and you can sign up for 10, one of them.

And it’s the same presentation I do every Thursday. So you only have to go once. Ongoing series, but I would definitely recommend that people experience that once and get that education to get them on the 

Susi Vine: right path and have an evening. Well-spent empowerment is knowledge is power. And once we have that, then we can make the choices and start to move the needle.

Yes. Wonderful. Thank you so much. It’s been such a treat to finally get to connect with you. Yes. And I wish you a great rest of your day. Take care. 

Dr. Mort Orman: Okay.