Dr. Mort Orman here, and today I want to talk with you about how stress and truth are related.
Actually, I’m going to talk with you about how stress and telling the truth, or not telling the truth, are related.
Why Should You Care?
Why should you care whether stress and telling the truth are related?
This discussion will only be of interest to you if you occasionally or frequently suffer from stress and wonder where this is coming from.
If you never suffer from stress, or if you don’t really care what is causing it to occur, there’s no need for you to read any further.
But if you do want to understand where much of your stress is really coming from, then I encourage you to read on.
Inverse Relationship
There is something very profound that I didn’t understand about stress for the first thirty years of my life.
During those early three decades of my life, I had tons and tons of stress.
Angry feelings, frustration, serious anxiety problems, relationship conflicts, frequent relationship failures, lots of professional stress in my role as a practicing physician, etc.
However, for the last 38 years of my life, most of my stress problems have almost completely gone away.
What made the difference?
It was finally understanding, at a very deep level, that stress and telling the truth are inversely related.
What this means is that the more stress you have, the more likely it is that you are not very skilled at recognizing and telling the truth—to yourself and also to others.
And if you have a good bit of stress and you want to get rid of it, you’re going to have to improve your truth telling skills considerably.
Telling The Truth About What?
Yes, this is always the sticky question.
It’s basically telling the truth about anything in life that causes you stress, disappointment, failure or emotional discomfort.
Do you have financial stress, for example? If so, what’s the truth about you and money, or about you and your current financial situation?
Are you having painful or worrisome marital conflicts? If so, what is the truth about you and your spouse? What is the truth about your spouse as a relator, and what is the truth about you as a co-creator of your relationship?
And at an even deeper level, what is the truth about relationships in general, and what is the truth about what makes them either succeed or fail?
Or are you feeling anxious or angry or sad very frequently? If so, what is the truth about you and your emotions? And what is the truth about where your emotions really come from?
Having trouble with work/life balance issues? What is the truth about where these issues are coming from, and why you are experiencing them while other people, in similar situations, do not?
There Are Basic Truths…And You’ll Know When You Tell Them
The problem most people have with embracing this inverse relationship between stress, and our understanding of how life and human beings actually operate, is that rather than facing up to the fact that we aren’t very good at telling the truth, we dodge the issue by arguing that it’s not really possible to know “the truth” about anything.
Or that one person’s “truth” can be very different from another person’s.
In other words, we make the mistake of thinking that truth is relative and subjective and therefore there is not a single standard upon which to judge our performance.
I suggest there is a standard and here’s what it is—you can always know if you’re telling the truth, because if you are feeling stressed, you probably are not.
And if you are calm, relaxed and living a fulfilling, productive, and happy life, you are probably much closer to the truth than those who don’t experience living in this way.
For example, if you are having frequent relationship problems and you tend to blame other people as being the main source of this problem, when you finally tell the truth that you also played a big role in generating this pattern of repeated negative outcomes, you will have hit upon a “truth”—if you are honest and sincere—that will strike you as being genuine and as hitting the mark dead on.
You won’t have to guess whether you have told the truth or not.
You won’t have to worry that maybe you got it wrong.
No, the lightbulb will go on, and you will know that the insight you finally arrived at (especially after wandering in the darkness for quite a long time) is actually pretty darn true.
The Lost Art Of Telling The Truth
In our society today, there are active campaigns to “dumb us down” and to keep us from telling the truth and from sharing it publicly.
There are people who have strong agendas, and when you have a strong agenda, very often you see telling the truth as one of your greatest enemies.
Thus, in order to achieve your agenda-driven goals, you have to discourage as many people as possible from actually telling the truth (or from even believing this is possible), and this is costing us all because it makes it harder for us to lower our stress levels.
So as you grow up in America today, and as you rise through the educational system (which no longer values telling the truth) and then go out into the world and get bombarded daily by all the distortions fed to us by the media and other sources, it’s not hard to understand that our ability to even know what the truth is, much less have the courage to tell it consistently, has come under attack.
It is truly becoming a lost art, and we all are suffering daily from losing touch with this foundational ability.
To your health, happiness and success,
Dr. Mort Orman, M.D., International Speaker, Author And Founder Of The Stress Mastery Academy | http://DocOrman.com
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