Stephanie: Hello, Mort. Welcome to the podcast.

Dr. Mort: Well, thank you for having me, Stephanie.

Stephanie: It is my pleasure. We are going to talk today about anger, and I am so interested to get into this conversation. It's a topic that has come up in the past and other conversations, but, you have a real interesting take on it. So I'm excited to jump in. Why don't we start where we normally do, which is tell me about the forces that shaped you into your early adulthood into, say, you know, late twenties, early thirties. How did you become the person you were then?

I'd get angry at other people easily. once I developed kind of the anger habit. You know, that I had back in my 20s and 30s. Yeah, so I had a fairly typical, childhood. I wasn't that great a student, until I reached high school, and then I kind of blossomed and found my academic skill set, did well in high school and then college.

My parents were, interested in me becoming a physician

Stephanie: And I had no interest at all in it. I didn't like anything about doctors. I didn't like going to doctors. I didn't like, hospitals. I didn't like old people. I didn't like sick people.

It made my parents happy, but I was sure that I wasn't going to medical school, but I got the best, you know, science education. I went to Duke. It's a chemistry major. So, I had all of those, Influences on me at the time, and again, to make my parents happy, I applied to medical school and I got in, but I wasn't going to go.

I was absolutely, absolutely certain I wasn't going to go. But I wanted to do biochemistry research. So I made an appointment one day, in my senior year of college. Early on in my senior year, I made an appointment with the head of the biochemistry department at Duke to apply for a post grad position.

Dr. Mort: Guy didn't know me from Adam. You know, I had an appointment. I walked in and, told him my story, told him I, applied to medical school, but I don't want to go. I want to be a biochemistry researcher and, you know, I spent like five minutes telling him the story. And when it was his turn to talk, he looked me right in the eye and he said, you know, Are you some kind of an idiot, which was not at all what I expected him to say.

Stephanie: Mm.

Dr. Mort: I really didn't know that. In my mind, the only reason you go to medical school is you want to become a doctor. And he said, don't you know that if you want to be a biochemist or biochemistry researcher, you're much better off with an MD degree than with a PhD degree like I have. You have so many more opportunities. I didn't know that either. Okay. So, so I guess I was some kind of idiot.

Stephanie: Right, right.

Dr. Mort: But he really, in that short conversation, which last probably was 20 minutes, the whole thing, he basically convinced me to go to medical school.

He said, what's the worst that can happen? So you go to medical school and let's say after the end of the first year, you don't like it. Come back here. I'll give you a position. And what do I have to lose?

Stephanie: Yeah.

Dr. Mort: He changed the trajectory of my life in that one conversation, in the senior year of college.

Stephanie: Mm.

Dr. Mort: You know, I took up tennis and I was like John McEnroe on the tennis court, not tennis wise, but,

Stephanie: Yeah. Behavior

Dr. Mort: know, in terms of yelling at myself and screaming at myself when I made a bad shot and smashing my rackets and annoying the people on either side of me. So that I was kind of a hothead and couldn't control it. You know, it was like everything I tried the anger management stuff, the stress management stuff, the relaxation, didn't really make a difference. And it was very frustrating and demoralizing because I had pretty much been successful at most things.

And I remember. you know, as I grew up, I remember how much I was influenced by him and his winning attitude because he just had this confidence about him that no matter what the circumstances were, whether the team was behind, he would figure out a way to win. He just had this winner attitude. And I realized as a young impressionable kid that kind of got transferred into me and I always have, for the rest of my life, I kind of had this Johnny Unitas winner spirit that no matter what obstacles I was facing, I was eventually going to overcome them. I was eventually going to, you know, to do well or succeed or find a solution, whatever. And, that helped me through medical school, through, my educational career, it helped me just about every problem I ran up against.

So I ran up against this anger problem and I just, no matter what I did, I couldn't win.

Stephanie: Interesting.

But again, that spirit of Johnny Unitas kind of kept me plugging away and it actually got me into personal development work where I learned some really cool things over a period of a couple years that I was never taught medical school about human beings and life.

Stephanie: Before we go into that, I'm very curious. You described your, I'll call it descent, your descent into anger as something that was self imposed. You were setting up your own marks that you had to reach and then beating yourself up for not reaching them.

Yeah.

I don't know.

Stephanie: You also, very tellingly used a very specific word to describe it. You said you developed the habit of anger. So it just became habitual for you to react

Dr. Mort: Absolutely.

Stephanie: circumstances that didn't meet your expectations with anger.

Dr. Mort: Yes. Or later on, it became, you know, like with my patients, for example, if they would do stupid things regarding their health or if they wouldn't follow my advice, you know, to me, that was something that would make me angry. And, I would keep it under wraps because you don't want to get too angry.

Stephanie: But then you started seeing in your practice what anger was doing to your patients. Is that right?

Dr. Mort: Yes, so I was experiencing my anger myself and feeling frustrated. But then the one thing that as a doctor that we get to do and see that other people don't, most of the time, we get to see people over time and see what happens to their health. And we usually can spot the angry people from the not so angry people.

So you get to see what happens to the whole group of people that you're taking care of. And you notice very early on, you start to notice that the angry people will get more health problems. They get more heart attacks and strokes and high blood pressure and other illnesses. And they come in, they tell you they just got divorced or their kids won't talk to them anymore. They just lost their job. You've got all these, you know, life, crises that come up and you just see they're happening more often in the angry people than the not so angry people.

Stephanie: Yeah.

Dr. Mort: you know, saying, Hey, this train is coming for me. You know, if I don't do something about it.

Stephanie: Yeah.

Dr. Mort: So that was part of the. it was sort of Johnny Unitas stay in it until you win it kind of attitude. Along with, hey, I better do something about this because I don't want to end up like a lot of these people have ended up that I'm taking care of. Because they were much older than me at the time.

But I didn't want that to be my future. So those two things got me into personal development. And then fortunately, I had the good fortune to, get some good input from a lot of different people, a lot of different programs that I eventually cobbled together into something that, to my surprise, allowed me to really get my hands on the controls of my anger, which if you'd asked me back then, I would have said, I don't believe it's possible.

Stephanie: Right? Right?

And it could really improve their health and their families, their happiness, kids down the line, future generations, all this kind of positive impact versus the negative impact that anger has. And I just felt like it was my part of my duty as a physician now to help people get rid of their anger and do really like true preventive medicine. You know, like a lot of what we call preventive medicine is like, early disease detection. Once you have the disease,

Stephanie: Right. But you're going further upstream.

Dr. Mort: Yeah, and keep it maybe from getting worse. But can you really prevent people from getting high blood pressure? Can you prevent them from getting, heart disease and stuff like that?

Well in medical school you learn about parts and lungs and livers and kidneys.

Stephanie: Yep.

Dr. Mort: They don't teach you much about the human being that has all those things. And then they throw you out and then you graduate and you're just supposed to figure it out.

So you have these people coming to you and yeah, they have hearts and lungs and kidneys and livers and things like that. But they also have families, they have jobs, they have fears, they have hopes and dreams and emotions and problems and all kinds of stuff.

And then I started practicing medicine and I'm like, yeah, Holy crap. Every patient is the philosopher. They all, every person is a philosopher. We all have our philosophies, our beliefs. People will come into me with ideas about health and illness, you know, insurance companies, the holistic this, and alternative that, and they all have their philosophies.And I'm thinking, I'm seeing, I'm taking care of philosophers. And I'm a philosopher too,

Stephanie: Right. As it turns out, you have your own philosophy.

Dr. Mort: And then that got me, then I started readingsome philosophy and then I start see somebody would come in and say something and go like wow that was like that's like came from Plato

Stephanie: Yeah,

Dr. Mort: 2, 500 years ago. Or you're just saying something that you know that Aristotle once. It's like well those philosophers actually are significant you know and they did shape to some degree how we currently think and feel and act and all that kind of stuff.

Dr. Mort: A lot of times anger boils down to some bad philosophies that we adopt. And it's useful to be able to help people see that because then they can realize that, oh, well, I've got this thought pattern or this belief system that I never really examined how good it is.

It just comes out. Somebody gave it to me or I, took it in from some multiple sources, friends or whatever, but I've never really examined it critically. And when you do, then you start to say, well, maybe it's not such a great philosopher. Maybe it's not really the way the world works.

Dr. Mort: yeah. And that,

Stephanie: yourself.

Dr. Mort: And that understanding keeps morphing.

Stephanie: Yep.

Dr. Mort: you know, as you get older, you keep getting deeper and deeper insights, and you may let go of something that you held onto for many years, and you realize, oh, wait a second, maybe it was partially correct, but here, I've got a better understanding now, and it allows me to do more things that I couldn't do before, and then that's just how it happens.

Even if I came up with my beliefs and my values and my goals and, you know, when I was 40, by the time I'm 50 or 55, they've evolved a little and it's not quite so concrete as it was when we were younger. I think there's probably a quote out there somewhere. I'll have to go and find it.

Dr. Mort: So my awakening came like in my mid thirties.

Stephanie: Yeah.

That just sticks out like a sore thumb. But to appreciate what's going on inside you in response to that, and in your brain and everything, is hard. You know, and it's invisible, it's partly hard because it's invisible to us most of the time.

Stephanie: Yeah.

Dr. Mort: And I didn't realize, all the years I was struggling with my anger, I only saw two pieces of the puzzle. I saw the external event and my feeling of anger,

Stephanie: Mm hmm.

Dr. Mort: and it looked like that was all there was. It was one caused the other. And I didn't realize there were causes in the middle that were invisible that were going on inside me. I had no awareness that that was happening and I had no specific awareness of, well, what the hell are those causes? You know, they're not just amorphous, you know, what are they?

Stephanie: Well, and again, that's a, that's accountability, right? You go from blame to accountability, right? From external to internal. You go from blaming again, all you saw were those external. Somebody pissed you off, so it's

Stephanie: Yeah.

Dr. Mort: And eventually like 40 years ago, I figured out what that formula was for how I was internally generating my own anger.

And I don't think you can be accountable or responsible until you know the, it's one thing if you go to people and say, hey, do you know you're creating your anger? Yeah. You should stop that. It doesn't help them.

Stephanie: Right.

Dr. Mort: Actually, it may make them worse. Because, unless you can say to them, You're creating your anger and here's how you're doing it. A, B, and C.

Stephanie: Yeah.

Dr. Mort: And then they can look at A, B and C and say, Yeah, you're right. You know, I am thinking about it that way. I am looking at it that way. And yeah, that is what's causing my anger. Now you've done something for them.

And a lot of times, just like when I walked into that meeting with that head of the biochemistry department, what changed my life was him telling me how wrong I was and me not knowing it.

Stephanie: Right.

Dr. Mort: I thought I was right. I thought the only reason to go to medical school is to be a doctor. I thought if you want to be a biochemistry researcher, you need to go to biochemistry grad school and get a Ph. D.

Stephanie: Mm hmm.

Dr. Mort: That's all I know. And he rightly pointed out, he said you're, fellow, you're wrong. You don't understand how the real world works A, you don't have to go to medical school and you can do many other things other than being a practicing physician. And B, you'd be better off in the biochemistry world with an MD degree.

Stephanie: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Dr. Mort: And every breakthrough I've had in my life since then, which anger is one of them, the thing that allowed me to have the breakthrough with anger was realize how wrong I was about my understanding of where anger came from.

And the truth was I was generating myself. I didn't know how. It's true for all emotions, not just anger. It's just the filters are different for different emotions. So if you have anxiety, you have one set of filters. If you have anger, you have another set of filters. Everything in life, our brain filters everything because there's just too much information coming in

Stephanie: Right.

Dr. Mort: from the world. It can't handle it all. So it chunks it down.

And it,it decides what's important and what's not important, and it leaves out some stuff, and it, presents other features to you, as if that's the whole reality that's going on, when actually it never is. It's always, they've lopped off certain pieces to make it smaller and more digestible so you can work with it. So our brains doing that constantly.

So if you get angry at your computer one day, why'd you get angry? Well, it's doing something wrong. It shouldn't be doing. It should be functioning. It should be working. All right.

And then the second filter is you're being negatively impact you or somebody you care about is being negatively impacted by the wrong behavior. So, if you're angry at your computer because it stops working one day, well, you're being negatively impacted. You can't get your work done, you might lose your work, whatever.

And then the third filter is that the wrongdoer is 100 percent responsible or to blame. So, it's this very narrow filter of blame where you only see what that person or thing did. Like, you only see what the computer's doing.

And I want to punch the computer now. So those are the three and people should write that down, by the way. People listening to this, you should write this down.

And, you'll find that every time you're angry, that's how you're looking at things. We could take any episode in your life where you ever got angry, and you'd be able to see that. Well, you were thinking that whoever you were angry at did something bad or wrong they shouldn't have done. They hurt or harmed you or somebody else, and they were responsible. So that's the filter, mechanism that causes anger. The real issue is how true are those things?

Stephanie: Mm.

Dr. Mort: And when you really start digging in, you find out, well, wait a second, they're not, yeah, they seemed like they were true. They felt like they were true. But if I really honestly examine them, maybe they're not as true as I thought.

Stephanie: Yeah.

Dr. Mort: And that's when you can break up your anger, because once you realize that something that you thought was true, it's driving your anger, isn't really true, then it's hard to stay angry.

Dr. Mort: Yeah,

Stephanie: you've got to,

Dr. Mort: it's like a three legged stool. If you knock out any one of the legs,

Stephanie: Yeah.

Dr. Mort: it collapses.

Stephanie: Yeah.

Dr. Mort: Okay, so the two of them can be true and one of them can be false, but the false one will blow up the whole anger episode if you realize that it's based on falsehood.

So

What's interesting, it's even more interesting because we walk around all day long getting angry, and the reason we're getting angry, as I just explained, is because we're misperceiving the reality, the truth about what's really going on. So we're actually wrong when we're angry most of the time. Or we have a bad philosophy, which is another way of being wrong, But the anger makes us feel right.

Stephanie: Mm. Interesting.

So it actually blocks us from doing the one thing that will release the anger, which is to investigate the rightness and wrongness of the things that are driving the anger in the first place. So it's really a nasty system, which is why it's so prevalent and so widespread and so easily provoked in people, because those are our tendencies to want to be right about our feelings and right about our judgments and things like that.

Stephanie: Yeah. Yeah.

Dr. Mort: The media knows this formula backwards and forwards. I mean, they just play into it all day long. They know how to make us angry. They just tell us stories. Somebody did something they shouldn't have done. They hurt and harmed somebody and they were 100 percent responsible to blame.

Stephanie: It's interesting. You told me I want to go a little bit on a tangent because before you broke your habit of anger, during years you were pursuing personal development, you tried to prove personal development wrong, and I think this is what set you sort of down this path to unravelling this mystery.

Dr. Mort: Well, what happened was I was learning all this cool stuff. You know, I was in it about a year, year and a half or something like that. And I was learning a lot of stuff that I thought was really cool. But I wasn't changing any. Nothing earth shattering had changed for me.

Stephanie: right,

Dr. Mort: I said, well, and like, why, why am I telling myself I can't run? I know I, I hate, I hate running.

Stephanie: right,

Dr. Mort: I think marathon runners are insane. I would never run a marathon in a million years.

Stephanie: right, And,

right, little voice,

you're right. I

Dr. Mort: why would this little boy be saying, you can't run a marathon? I said, it was totally out of context, had nothing to do with anything that was happening, but, it was in the context of personal development.

So I was, hearing this stuff about how we have these potentials within us that we don't know we have. And, you know, we have these strengths and abilities that are kind of dormant. And so I started saying, I know I can't run a marathon. The only reason my little brain would be trying to tell me I can't, what if I can?

Now, I think it's going to fail. I think I'm going to prove that this whole stuff is malarkey and it doesn't really work, but I want to give it a try. I'm going to give it an honest try. It was literally, like a scientist. I was conducting an experiment. And so I set up the experiment, and fortunately, I made some good decisions just right off the bat because I took all the pain and suffering out of running, which was really a great idea. I didn't

Stephanie: you do that.

Stephanie: So, for example, what were some of the internal habits or

Dr. Mort: Well, for example, you start, if you're running along on a flat terrain and you see this big hill coming up, down the road and you start approaching that hill, you start to tense up.

So I discovered these things that I never knew existed, that I never knew were part of reality, that had been hidden from me, including my own internal thought patterns, behavior patterns. But for example, another thing I noticed is that when I start running my attention, my awareness, would like go way down the road, you know, like blocks and blocks down the road to some object down there.

Like, Oh, I can't wait till I get there. and I noticed I was getting out way away from my body mentally. And that what I was trying to work on was when I was running, I wanted to be more in touch with my body being be here now kind of stuff, you know, being where your body is. I actually came up with this like a fantasy of casting a fishing rod, my awareness, casting it out in front of me, and then reeling it back in.

Stephanie: To do with feet pounding on the,

Dr. Mort: Yeah. and so it made the running and plus my body's getting in shape. I'm changing metabolically. all this stuff was coming together. But long and short of it was I, successfully ran the marathon in under four hours, very comfortably.

We even had a party, a celebration that night. And I was dancing until like midnight. These things that you wouldn't believe are possible, so it was really, again, it was a miraculous, surprise the hell out of me, cause like I said, I thought it would fail.

Stephanie: Right. You

Dr. Mort: spectacularly.

Stephanie: Right.

Dr. Mort: And I've got other,internal, unconscious things that are causing mischief in my life that I've never even known were there.

And so I went on a hunt, and one of the first areas I hunted in was anger. And that's where I came up, eventually got to the three filters, as the internal mechanism. I had a fear of public speaking that was gigantic. I would have never done this back then because I was too petrified. But I figured out how I was creating that fear of public speaking when I didn't need to.

Stephanie: Yeah.

Dr. Mort: Turns out public speaking is not anxiety producing, if you have the right attitude and the right understanding of what it's about. And it's very, it's actually relaxing. It, which shocked again, shocked the hell out of me.

Stephanie: Well, that's the piece that I feel like is so challenging, I know for myself, and I'm sure for others, is I can know consciously that there are unconscious beliefs that are holding me back or that are hampering me in some way, but uncovering them and making the unconscious, becoming conscious of the unconscious, whether it's belief patterns or, wiring or habits or what have you. I'm very curioushow you made the unconscious conscious, how you, you said you went hunting, like, how did you do that? How do you uncover those things in a, from a practical standpoint?

Stephanie: Mm.

Dr. Mort: Again, I fell into that because I was out there and then I noticed some stuff and it's like, oh, that's interesting. I'd never noticed that before. And then I said, well, if that's there, maybe there's other stuff. So then I became more attuned to noticing. And then more tuned to noticing, paying attention to what my body was doing, what positions were in and how the running felt.

And so I started connecting dots and things like that. And eventually came up with like these 30 or 40 things that each time I discovered one, I said, oh, okay. If my awareness is jumping out ahead of me, I need to do some things to bring it back in. Okay. So I would invent some things and try them and see if they work. You know, I had a laboratory to figure this stuff out.

Stephanie: Yeah.

Stephanie: Mm hmm.

Dr. Mort: And then eventually verified it working with other people.

Stephanie: Yeah.

Dr. Mort: Then it seemed to hold true for them as well. So that's how you kind of get the certainty around what they are.

It's very, it is difficult. And the other thing that you really were pointing to, which is really important, is once you become aware that your brain and your body have been programmed to do certain things unconsciously, automatically, being aware of it doesn't change it. It doesn't stop it. You're stillyou're still going to do it.

You're, you're still that's going to be your tendency.

Yeah.

You can take that in unconscious world. and bring it into your conscious awareness with a simple tool of a sticky note or a piece of paper or something on your cell phone, you know, where you put those three things on your cell phone, or. So you can now make it, make yourself aware of it. Again, that's not going to stop it from happening over and over again, but now you have the ability to challenge it, to investigate it, to, see where it's true or not. You have to keep doing that over and over again. When I'm coaching people, I usually tell them, It's like playing whack a mole.

Stephanie: Yeah.

Dr. Mort: You know, they don't go away. Every time, anger comes up, you go through this process. Okay. Here's why I'm angry. Okay. Let's see if I can figure out what's true or not true. And if you find something untrue and good, you, then you sort of won that round.

Stephanie: Well, you created a new habit on top of the old

Dr. Mort: Yes, a new habit of thought, a new habit of perception that doesn't happen quickly, it takes months and sometimes years to ingrain a new habit of perception or thinking when you have a strong old one that's been dominating you for a long time, but it's doable.

You just have to be patient. You can't expect it to happen like overnight just because, and that's often what happens. Sometimes people get frustrated because, well, I have the awareness. I know what's going on now, but. I can't stop it. It keeps happening. It's like this is worthless. No, it takes time. It takes time to change your brain.

You know,

Dr. Mort: the beginning, you have to check it. But after a while, it's like training wheels on a bicycle. You just throw them away and you ride.

Stephanie: And what ultimately can happen down the road is once this becomes the new habit is that you can create space between the stimulus and the reaction.

Dr. Mort: Absolutely.

Stephanie: Right. So you don't automatically react instantaneously in the old pattern. If you can create space to go through that mental checklist and have a quick conversation with yourself, you can slow down that reaction.

You know, and then you do it a little bit more. After a while, you know, when you get to like, you know, the 300th time and it's 301 now. Okay. And you're getting angry. You start to get suspicious. That there's some wrongness in there somewhere. You don't know exactly what it is, but you just, if you had to bet, you'd bet there was some wrongness underneath your anger.

Stephanie: But

Dr. Mort: Sometimes you get help from other people in figuring out where they're wrong.

Stephanie: I'm guessing once you get to 300, 500, you might find some patterns in your wrongness,

Dr. Mort: Absolutely.

Stephanie: Right? So you can now start relying on the fact that, well, I always take this personally, or I always, do in 285 of 300, I have done this. And so the next time you go for that instant anger, you can deprogram yourself.

Dr. Mort: There's, there's a funny story. My, fortunately, my wife and I just celebrated our 40th wedding anniversary. Okay. And prior to that relationship, all my other relationships had failed. A lot of it due to anger, but other things too. But so fortunately, I had figured this anger thing out and got rid of a lot of my anger before I met her.

Stephanie: Yeah,

Dr. Mort: And it would only happen when we went on a car trip somewhere. And interestingly, it would never happen on the drive to our destination. We would not fight when we were at our destination. It was only when we drove home that it happened, which made it even weirder.

Stephanie: Yeah,

Dr. Mort: So, and usually what would happen is I would be driving and my wife would be sitting in the passenger seat and we'd be on our way home. And at some point she would say, Oh, there's something over here that I've never seen that I wanted to go see.

right, right. And then she would have a response, you know, like, what do you mean? And what about that? We'd start going back and forth. And so I said, there's something fishy going on here. And I need to look at this. And what it turned out to be is, in my family, the way we drove home from car trips was we go directly home. We stop for gas, food, bathroom breaks. That's it. We never would deviate from our path.

My wife's family was completely different. She was an only child and her mother and father would take car trips and they would always go off the path to investigate different things when they're on their way home. They would zigzag around all that kind of stuff. So, when I said to myself, okay, you have the three filters.

So was she, do I think she's doing something bad and wrong? She shouldn't be doing by asking to go off the path. I said, yes,

Stephanie: Yeah, you thought she was wrong.

Dr. Mort: She was wrong. That's not the way you drive.

Stephanie: Yeah

It's just, I have my preference and she has her preference. And it's not like I'm right and she's wrong. We're both equally right. We can have just different preferences, so that was the reality. My filter was telling, my brain was telling me she's doing something bad and wrong.

Stephanie: Yeah.

Dr. Mort: When I was able to tell the truth, the truth is, no, she's not. You know, it's just different than how I would do it. Okay, and it's not like we had to be home at any particular time, you know, like, it made a difference whether we deviated a little bit or not. So, as soon as I saw that, I realized that that's crazy. For me to have judged her as doing something bad wrong was me being wrong, you know, in that situation and stirring this up for no reason whatsoever. From that moment on, from the moment I realized that that's never been a problem again.

Stephanie: Yeah,

So it's, but I stopped seeing it as a crime. I stopped seeing it as a, an infraction that, you know, deserves an angry response. So I might, the way I perceived it changed. And it's never gone back to that old way, or if it does, it's very quick. Now that I correct it, I go, no, it's not wrong. Sure. Let's go do it.

Okay. So that's just a simple example of how you can make these little shifts and how you perceive the world and it totally eliminated the anchor problem.

Stephanie: Yeah. I had something similar with my husband when we, after we got married. My family, my mother was very much about, you know, clean kitchen, clean everything clean and very clean, like, actually, to a level that's probably not really achievable for most people.

And his mother would say, no, I'll do them in the morning. It's fine. And that finally, you know, because my husband will leave pots and pans in the, you know, we'll get the dishwasher going, but he'll leave pots and pans in the sink. And for a long time, man, was I pissed off about it because I was like, you're doing it wrong, except that his family culture was a different way.

So, whatever way we're creating together has got to be something that we can both, live with. And in fact, I was adhering too much to my mother's and the struggle with him was he was saying, it's not sustainable Steph. It's not achievable. Most people don't live that way. And so, once we sort of right sized our expectations, it's been, much smoother sailing.

Dr. Mort: Yeah, great example.

Stephanie: Yeah. Well, Mort, I appreciate you sharing, your story and, these three filters. I think they're so interesting and, useful, practical. They're easy for people to just apply them and use. So I sincerely appreciate you sharing those with me and with my listeners.

Stephanie: Perfect. And I'll put the link to that in the show notes, so if anybody out there is resonating with this topic today, they'll have an easy link to go and get your book. Thanks so much.

Dr. Mort: You're welcome.