Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
When life gets hard, does what we think we believe hold us up, or does it crumble under the weight of doubt? I'm your host, Dr. Lee Warren- I'm a brain surgeon, author, and a person who's seen some stuff and wondered where God is in all this mess. This is The Spiritual Brain Surgery podcast, where we'll take a hard look at what we believe, why we believe it, and the neuroscience behind how our minds and our brains can smash together with faith to help us become healthier, feel better, and be happier so we can find the hope to withstand anything life throws at us. You've got questions, and we're going to do the hard work to find the answers, but you can't change your life until you change your mind, and it's gonna take some spiritual-brain surgery to get it done. So let's get after it.
Good morning, my friend. I hope you're doing well. I'm Dr. Lee Warren,
and we are here for some spiritual brain surgery this morning.
We're going to talk about one question. When you struggle with a thought issue,
is it devil or is it diagnosis?
Is it some kind of spiritual warfare? Is it something wrong in our brain? Is it a chemical issue?
Is it the devil after us in our heads? What is it? What do we do about it?
How do we change our perspective on it? and what are some tools we can use to
change our minds and change our lives.
That's what we're getting ready to get after right now.
When life gets hard, does what we think we believe hold us up,
or does it crumble under the weight of doubt? I'm your host, Dr. Lee Warren.
I'm a brain surgeon, author, and a person who's seen some stuff and wondered
where God is in all this mess.
This is the Spiritual Brain Surgery Podcast, where we'll take a hard look at
what we believe, why we believe it, and the neuroscience behind how our minds
and our brains can smash together with faith to help us become healthier,
feel better, and be happier, so we can find the hope to withstand anything life throws at us.
You've got questions, and we're going to do the hard work to find the answers.
But you can't change your life until you change your mind, and it's going to
take some spiritual brain surgery to get it done.
So let's get after it. All right, you ready to get after it?
So, I've been thinking a lot about the recurring issues that we struggle with in our life.
And my diagnosis after looking at my own life and thousands of other people
in my practice over the years and in all the people I've studied as I've written
my books and watching our family deal with the massive thing of losing our son, Mitch,
and our kids have all lost a sibling and then my parents have lost grandparents,
their grandchildren, and just watching this happen and watching how people react
and watching the ways that we struggle and reading thousands of emails from
you every year, I've come to a conclusion that a big part of.
Of our problem with our issues in our lives, a big part of the things that we
continue to struggle with comes down to disordered thinking.
Now, we talk a lot about spiritual warfare, about how the enemy comes to steal and kill and destroy.
And I believe that with all my heart. I believe that there is a physical enemy
of your soul who wants you to struggle.
He doesn't want you to find your way to heaven, to the peace that God offers.
And if you have managed to enter into a saving relationship with Jesus,
he still wants to steal and kill and destroy the abundance that Jesus says in
John 10, 10, that he came here to give us.
And the enemy wants you not to be happy, to not have an abundant life, to not have peace. Why?
Because even if he's lost the chance to cost you your soul, he could limit your impact.
He could help you pass on generational issues to your children to keep some
of them from achieving that relationship with Jesus. Remember,
God doesn't have grandchildren.
He only has children. and so that means that you can't save your kids.
Your faith won't save your child or your grandchild, right?
He might keep you from being a good influence on your coworker or your spouse
or being able to stop some disordered thinking in somebody else.
If you've got an issue that keeps recurring, maybe there is some devil in it,
okay? I don't doubt that at all.
But there's also diagnosis. We know that there are thought disorders,
that there's people that have serious anxiety, obsessive compulsive disorder, major depression.
There are some chemical issues in the brain that can sometimes cause thinking issues, right?
So we know there's devil and there's diagnosis. But what about the in-between?
Disordered thinking ruins life. It ruins relationships. It ruins businesses.
It ruins families. Disordered thinking is a problem.
And whether it's a devil or a diagnosis or somewhere in between,
we can learn to do something about it.
The good news is you're not stuck with the thought patterns that you have.
And if it's spiritual warfare, you can learn some tools to combat the enemy.
If it's diagnosis, you can learn some tools to make that better.
And if it's just habit, if it's just perspective, if it's just a long series
of giving in to the same problems or a long series of having received some generational
set points from our parents and we had never understood that these were things
that could be influenced or changed and we just assumed that that that's how it was,
we can learn to deal with those things. We can.
The good news is you can change your mind and you can change your life and you're
not stuck with these things.
And I just wanna tell you, there's some good, valid tools that can be used to
help challenge your automatic negative thinking.
We have thousands and thousands and thousands of automatic thoughts that pop
into our heads every day.
Every day, every moment, you have thoughts that pop into your head.
And what we know from neuroscience is that the vast majority of those thoughts are not true.
Daniel Lehman calls them automatic negative thoughts.
There are things that pop into your head, that just pop in there.
You're not responsible for those things.
But what we have to do is to recognize that we are responsible for the follow-on
thoughts and the decisions and the habits and the actions that we create in
our lives after those automatic thoughts. Because here's the truth, my friend.
You are making new synapses in your brain all the time.
The machinery, the incredible quantum machinery in your brain of microtubules
and electron tunneling and all the things that are happening,
structurally changing the way that your brain works in response to the things
that you think about and the decisions mentally that you make to direct your
brain to do certain things.
Those thoughts become things and they turn into habits and patterns and hormones
and and neurotransmitters, and genetic switches, and acetylation and methylation
of genes that turn on and off, and that's how we pass on epigenetic switches
to our children. Thoughts become things.
And those synapses are happening whether you direct them or not.
You are directing them, whether you do so with conscious thought or with inattention and habit.
That's the scary part. But it's also the empowering part.
Because if you've had a life up to this point where you haven't thought much
about your thinking, and you've just allowed circumstance or feeling to drive
what you decide to think about and what you decide to do, then you can learn to change that.
And it starts with changing your perspective on the things that you think about.
That's where it starts. Jeffrey Schwartz has written an incredible book, You Are Not Your Brain,
that he basically told the story of how he learned the ideas behind what everybody
now calls self-directed neuroplasticity that really came from him,
that came out of his research in obsessive-compulsive disorder.
And he recognized that obsessive-compulsive disorder really is the extreme form
of people just listening to these deceptive, negative, lying brain messages that they get.
You know, there's a bacteria inside your sink that if you don't scrub it 16
times with a right-hand twist on your sponge, that that bacteria is going to
grow and contaminate all the food in your house and you're all going to get food poisoning and die.
Those kinds of thought messages come into the brains of people with obsessive
compulsive disorder and they can't stop reacting to the message as if it were true.
And so they have this progressive anxiety building up until they take action
on the thing that they think will address the issue that the brain message is
popping in there to tell them.
Schwartz was one of the first ones to use brain imaging and neuroscience together
to start figuring out what was happening in the brains of these obsessive compulsive
patients and developing some techniques that really did help them manage it.
And he came up with four steps. And it turns out that these four steps that
were so helpful in Schwartz's obsessive compulsive patients actually can help
all of us in learning a strategy to manage recurring thinking and getting on
top of it from another perspective.
And we talked yesterday on the Dr. Lee Warren podcast about this idea that you
can make quantum changes in your brain,
you can make real changes in your brain by learning to change your perspective
and how you observe and the expectations that you bring to the observations of your own life.
Let me give you an example of that. What if I was super poor, okay?
I was struggling for every meal, for every dollar's worth of gas, I was struggling.
And all of us, most of us have been there at different points in our lives.
But what if I was living my life in this chronically poor state,
struggling, barely making ends meet, scrounging around trying to find food,
really having a hard time and in my desperation.
I find a dollar and I decide I'm gonna take a Hail Mary and I'm gonna buy a
lottery ticket with that dollar and I buy a lottery ticket and I stick it in
my pocket and I go on my way.
I continue to live in this poor state. I'm scrounging around.
I'm finding cans on the side of the road to redeem and sell and make a little
bit of money to eat something.
I'm, you know, finding a way to find some tape to tape up my shoes because they're falling off my feet.
And I'm living in this poor state and I go on my way and I live out the rest
of my life homeless and desperate and poor and hungry and cold.
And I forget that I had that lottery ticket in my pocket.
Now, what if I've lived my whole life in that state of being poor and suffering
and penniless, and it turns out that that lottery ticket was the big winner.
It was worth $300 million, and I never checked it because I continued to observe
my life from the position of having been broken and poor and homeless and hopeless,
and I never even bothered.
I assumed that I was such a loser that I couldn't possibly win,
and I never even bothered to to check the lottery ticket in my pocket that in
fact would have changed my entire situation.
Now, please don't misunderstand. I'm not advocating that you use the lottery
to solve your financial problems.
I'm saying, what if there was something in your life that if you just changed
your perspective on it, if you just checked it from a different point of view,
might give you a whole different look at the way your life is playing out?
What if you actually checked the ticket in your pocket and you found out,
hey, I'm not as bad off as I thought I was. There's actually hope here.
There's actually another way to look at this. When people make movies,
when filmmakers make films, they don't just sit in the director's chair and
watch the whole thing play out in front of them. They move around.
They get up on a boom, on a crane. They move around. They change their perspective.
They stand behind different actors. They move all around the set to see how
the shot would look from different perspectives.
And sometimes that leads to them rewriting the script. It doesn't look good from this perspective.
So we're going to change the camera angle and decide to use this camera and
not that camera. We're going to change this script here because the body language doesn't look right.
And they get a better story by changing their perspective on the movie that's
playing out in front of them.
And I'm just going to tell you, if we use quantum physics like we talked about
yesterday to this quantum Zeno effect to our advantage,
we can begin to use the brain's wiring and the way that the brain's wiring is
responsive to directed mental force and the things that we choose to think about.
We can choose to begin to nudge that story in a different direction, okay?
Schwartz has four steps that he calls relabeling. So you have this deceptive
thought that commonly pops into your head. I'm such a loser.
I'll never be able to overcome this thing. Or since that happened,
I'm always going to be stuck.
And whatever these messages are, God doesn't love me. Nobody loves me.
This is how it always is. My life is always going to be so hard.
Whatever your recurring thought problem is, Schwartz says, relabel it, okay?
Relabel it and understand that this repetitive thought that keeps popping into
your head, this urge, impulse, desire, sensation, whatever it is that pops into
to your head is deceptive.
So first you start with saying, wait, this might be devil here.
This might be devil trying to tempt me to continue thinking that way.
This might be diagnosis.
This might just be disordered thinking, but it's deceptive. The first thought
that pops into my head, I do not, I am not obligated to take action on that.
I am not obligated to believe it or do anything about it other than note that it's there.
That's why I always tell you, you need to learn this self-brain surgery technique
of biopsying your thoughts.
That thought pops into your head before you respond to it, before you even give
it any emotional credence.
Like the thought pops in, my life is always so hard. And your next thought is,
yeah, that's why I'm so sad.
That's why I'm so depressed. That's why I need alcohol. That's why blah, blah, blah.
Because you give credence to the thought instead of challenging the thought.
So the first step is is relabel. Take a mental note of this recurring thought
that's popping into your head and decide that you're going to label it instead
of true or inevitable or obligatory to take response to.
You're going to relabel it as what it is. It's deceptive. This thought is not true.
I'm going to relabel it. I'm going to take command of it. And I'm not going
to take action on it anymore. The second one is reframe it.
Short says, change your perception of how important this message is.
It's not a part of me. This isn't just how I am. This isn't just the way it's always going to be.
This isn't just, oh, that's how my life plays out. You say, no,
wait, this is just my brain.
It's just my enemy. It's just my habit. It's just my background.
It's just my thinking, disordered thinking that's making me hear that in my head.
And I don't have to deal with it. I can relabel it as deceptive,
and I can reframe it as this is coming from my brain or maybe from my enemy,
but it's not coming from me, and I don't have to take action on it.
And this is where we get into challenging these thinking areas.
Daniel Lehman's written a lot about this, and Schwartz writes about it too.
There's all these categories of thinking that we tend to respond to a thought
with all or nothing thinking like, oh, this is just how it's always gonna be.
My whole life is like this. It's always this way. way, that's all or nothing thinking, right?
There's also catastrophizing, like, oh boy, if this happens,
then everything's going to fall apart.
Man, if he doesn't return my text in the next hour,
then that means that I'm going to miss the flight and we're not going to make
the money and she's going to leave me and the doctor didn't call because the
news must be really bad and they don't know what to say, so they're not calling
and that means I've got cancers coming back.
You catastrophize the situation. Instead of waiting for data,
you run in your mind with a a string of thinking that keeps you up all night
and makes your stomach hurt and causes you to send a bunch of messages you ought
not to send and all that stuff. That's catastrophizing.
Then there's discounting the positive. Like you have a negative thought and
something happens and then all of a sudden you get some other information.
That pops into your head or an email that shows up that actually counteracts
the negative thought or the negative thing with something positive that's more
real, but you discount it.
Well, yeah, that looks to be positive, but I don't really believe it because
those things don't usually work out for me.
Like that lottery ticket, yeah, those numbers might be real, but it's probably not.
I'm not going to bother checking. I'll be really embarrassed if I take that
ticket in and it turns out not to be real.
Nothing ever works out like that for me, so why would I bother checking?
So again, I'm not telling you to play the lottery. I'm saying if there's something
positive that's showing up, pay attention to the positive because what's the
worst that could happen?
It could turn out that it wasn't as positive as you thought.
Big deal, right? But at least you're moving towards a different perspective
that has some potential instead of staying stuck and where you've been.
And then there's this emotional reasoning where you can talk yourself out of
feeling better than you're trying to feel.
And you convince yourself that you deserve to feel bad. You deserve to stay
stuck, that maybe that's just your lot in life, right?
And then there's mind reading, like you see a look on somebody's face and you
decide what they're thinking based on how they're looking.
And you don't tell yourself a different story like, well, maybe they just got
bad news or maybe their mom just died or maybe they just got fired.
Maybe that look they gave me was actually over my shoulder at somebody else.
You can just change your story. You can do the filmmaker thing and change the perspective.
And you don't have to let your automatic negative thinking drive the show of
what you think other people think.
Because most of the time you're wrong. And if you think that you're right most
of the time, just think about how many times other people have told you what
they think you're thinking and how often that's been incorrect.
And so don't give yourself this incredible position of being the one person
in the world who's 100% accurate at reading someone else's mind when you know
that nobody else can read yours.
Give yourself a break, right? Take yourself off that
throne own of having the insight of omniscience because
only one person has that and it's not you it's God
right so all these things are
ways that our brains can mess us up
whether it's devil or diagnosis or bad
habit or inattention to thinking or just disordered thinking
so we're going to relabel them as negative and false
and we're going to reframe our perspective to something
more positive because that's the only place we can begin
to get traction and then after we do
do that the third step short says is to refocus so now
we're going to take our attention because we know that
directed mental attention the things we decide to
think about actually begins to make structural changes in our brain okay so
we're going to direct if we know that and we don't want to commit malpractice
against ourself because that's one of our 10 commandments of self-brain surgery
i will relentlessly refuse to participate in my own demise i will not commit self-malpractice.
That means if we know that our directed mental force creates synapses in our
brain that automates the ease with which we can fall into that particular type of thinking,
then we have to choose to direct our mental force into things that are healthier.
Into things that are positive, into things that are productive.
Because synapses will form, whether we direct them positively or negatively
or actively or passively, we will make synapses in our brain.
Because you're shaping your brain every moment of your life,
or it will be shaped for you by your inattention and your bad thought hygiene
and your negligence of your own thought patterns or your willingness to let
these negative automatic thoughts go unchallenged.
You're shaping your brain, whether you do it actively or passively.
So my question for you, my friend, my friend who I love dearly,
is do you want to have a brain that is carefully and purposefully and lovingly
crafted by you and under the submission that you give to the Holy Spirit to
direct your brain in a way that honors Him and helps you find the abundant life
that Jesus promised that he came here for?
Or do you want to allow it to be shaped by inattention or an enemy who wants
to steal and kill and destroy or thought disorders that you could learn to reframe
and relabel and refocus towards something more positive?
And the final one is that Jeffrey Schwartz talks about is revaluing.
When these things pop into your head, these thoughts and urges and impulses
and desires, you begin to revalue them and say, you know what?
The things I've thought about that I've protected so carefully,
these thought patterns and these biases and these losses and these massive things
that I've held on to and that I've allowed myself to be identified by, they're not helping me.
They're not as valuable as I thought they were. I don't want to be identified
anymore as this broken person who always takes it on the chin and life is always,
people are always overlooking me and I'm always the last and not the first.
I don't want to be that anymore.
That's not true. My God says that He died for me, that He loves me,
that I am valuable, that He has a purpose and a plan for me,
and that I'm able to influence and help other people and I'm not worthless and
I'm not stuck and I don't have to live that way.
Well, I can change my perspective in that quantum Zeno effect that we talked about yesterday.
When you change your perspective and begin to view your life with a different
expectation, you will begin then to make decisions and changes that will start
to move the needle and you'll start to make some real momentum.
That's true. And so look at these ideas from scripture about when we talk about
is it devil or diagnosis and we know there is an enemy who's out there challenging us,
who's out there reading our mind, not necessarily reading our minds,
but watching our lives and seeing the things that we reciprocate on,
seeing the things that we're stuck on,
seeing the things that we seem to be afraid of, seeing vulnerabilities in our behavior.
And look at Job in 3.25, when all this calamity happened in Job's life.
There's this interesting verse that Lisa pointed out to me the other day.
Job said in chapter 3.25, what I feared has come upon me. What I dreaded has happened to me.
So when the devil was looking for a place to attack Job to see if he could make
Job stumble, What did he do?
He listened to what Job said. Job was out there saying, gosh,
you know, the only thing I'd really be afraid of is losing my kids.
The only thing that would really tear me up is if I lost my family or this calamity
came upon me. I'm really scared of that.
So maybe sometimes the enemy hits us where we spend our mental energy thinking
and dreading and being afraid of or ruminating on or hanging out in.
Maybe the enemy hits us in some places where we haven't been careful to give
our thoughts to the Lord, to trust Him,
to believe and hope and hang on to Him and to be those people who have built
and prehabbed a life where we know that whatever comes along,
we're going to hold on to what we believe.
We're going to land on our feet on the things that are solid,
that we know what we believe in, that even if something happens,
we're going to hold on tight.
Maybe the enemy will have fewer opportunities to attack us in our thinking in that state. state.
So here's something I want you to know. This enemy that we have,
this devil that does attack us, that does hit our thinking and all of that, he's already lost.
Okay. There's a chapter Isaiah 14 that talks about the fact that God's,
he's basically talking to the devil in this about how arrogant and how,
how stuck the devil is and thinking that he wants to be God.
And God comes along in 14 and says, Hey, by the way, just so you know how this is going to end.
I will ascend to the tops of the clouds. I will make myself like the most high.
But you are brought down to the realm of the dead, to the depths of the pit.
Those who see you stare at you. They ponder your fate. Is this the man who shook
the earth and made kingdoms tremble?
The man who made the world a wilderness and overthrew its cities?
Basically, at the end of this story, this long negative story,
this long narrative arc of a story that we're living,
friend, The end of the story is that the devil that's messing with your mind,
that's throwing obstacles at your way, that's making you think you can't change,
that's making you think that because your dad did something or your uncle did
something or your mom did something or your sister did something,
that you can't ever be okay again.
That devil has already lost.
And someday, people are gonna shake their heads and say, really,
you're the one that caused me all that trouble? you already lost. You're in the pit.
I'm redeemed. I had the lottery ticket in my pocket, and I lived like I was
lost, like you had some power over me.
Really? You're going to shake your head someday, friend, and you're going to
say, I can't believe I spent so many years letting that particular thought problem
hold me back because it was already redeemed.
It was already handled, and I just didn't understand it.
I didn't check the ticket in my pocket and recognize that that God had already fixed that problem.
God had already redeemed that. Remember Psalm 103 doesn't say it possibly.
He says, bless the Lord on my soul, let all that is within me bless his holy
name. Bless the Lord on my soul and forget not all his benefits.
He forgives my sins. He heals my illnesses.
He redeems my life from the pit. He crowns me with love and compassion.
He restores my youth like the eagles and gives me good things to satisfy me.
The Lord has already written the end of this story, okay?
And so our job now is to say,
how do we think differently during the days that we have here so that we can
spend our time chasing that abundance that Jesus promised us instead of the
result of the being stolen and killed and destroyed that the enemy wants?
And if we have diagnosis, yes, we need help. If you've got recurring thoughts,
you can't get under control that are harming you and you can't get traction
by just practicing self-brain surgery, you need help. Go see a therapist, go see a doctor.
Do something to get on top of this, okay?
Medication is a last resort, okay? Thinking, changing your thinking is much
more powerful than using medication.
But you need to be seeing a professional if you're having trouble,
especially if you're having suicidal thoughts or having any kind of recurring
mental issue that you can't seem to overcome with good thought hygiene and good best practices here.
Go see a doctor, talk to a therapist. You might have hypothyroidism.
You might have some medical issue that's affecting your brain.
So don't ever forget that all these words that we talk about,
all these things that we discuss are never meant to replace a doctor or a therapist if you need one.
You go get it checked out if you're having trouble, okay?
But in the meantime, in the midst of the middle between devil and diagnosis,
A lot of it has to do with failure to challenge automatic negative thinking.
And you can begin, my friend. You can. It works for people with severe obsessive compulsive disorder.
It will certainly work for those of us that are just stuck with some bad thought
hygiene or bad thought habits or negligence or inattention to our thinking.
We can challenge these deceptive brain messages. We can challenge these automatic negative thoughts.
We can relabel them and reframe them and refocus them. And we can revalue them.
And we can begin to gain some ground and change our minds and change our lives.
And we can do all that. Friend, it's self-brain surgery.
Get into this abide practice and start to assess the situation honestly and
believe that change is possible.
Believe that God, in Hosea 2.15, says, I can return your vineyards to you.
I can turn the valley of trouble into a door of hope.
He says in Isaiah 61, I will give you a crown of beauty instead of ashes,
is an oil of joy instead of mourning, a garment of praise instead of a spirit
of despair, and you will be called an oak of righteousness.
Listen, you don't have to be blown around by the circumstances of your life anymore.
You don't have to be ruined by your repetitive negative thinking.
You can change it. You can relabel and revalue and reshape it. You can turn it around.
You can get a new pattern of how you think.
Relabel, reframe, refocus, revalue. you. Change your mind and change your life.
And my goodness, my friend, start today.
Music.
Hey, thanks for listening. The Dr. Lee Warren Podcast is brought to you by my
brand new book, Hope is the First Dose. It's a treatment plan for recovering
from trauma, tragedy, and other massive things.
It's available everywhere books are sold. And I narrated the audio books.
Hey, the theme music for the show is Get Up by my friend Tommy Walker,
available for free at tommywalkerministries.org.
They are supplying worship resources for worshipers all over the world to worship
the most high God. And if you're interested in learning more,
check out TommyWalkerMinistries.org.
If you need prayer, go to the prayer wall at WLeeWarrenMD.com slash prayer,
WLeeWarrenMD.com slash prayer, and go to my website and sign up for the newsletter,
Self-Brain Surgery, every Sunday since 2014,
helping people in all 50 states and 60 plus countries around the world.
I'm Dr. Lee Warren, and I'll talk to you soon.
Remember friend, you can't change your life until you change your mind.
And the good news is you can start today.
Music.