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Neurosurgeon and award-winning author Dr. W. Lee Warren, MD delivers daily prescriptions from neuroscience, faith, and common sense on how to lead a healthier, better, happier life. You can’t change your life until you change your mind, and Dr. Warren will teach you the art of self brain surgery to get it done. His new book, Hope Is the First Dose, is available everywhere books are sold.
Good morning, my friend. Dr. Lee Warren here with you, and I am excited and
honored to be having a conversation with you.
And we're going to do some self-brain surgery today. Listen,
it's Theology Thursday.
This is the day of the week when we take a little bit deeper smashing together
of ideas from neuroscience and ideas from Scripture and how science and faith
can come together to unlock tremendous, enormous power in our lives.
Listen, if you're not a person of faith, just go with me here,
because I'm going to give you some principles and some ideas.
And even if you don't believe in God, or even if you don't think that there's
a God out there who cares about you, or it's not a personal God who loves you,
you can at least acknowledge that wise ideas or things that sound true can be
helpful in your life, whether or not you believe that they're inspired by God.
If you hear a quote from a Stoic philosopher or from William Shakespeare or
from some guy on Instagram, you can weigh those words and say,
yeah, that sounds like it's got some meat to it.
And you can apply that. And I'm just going to give you a challenge.
If you start applying some ideas from scripture and you start noticing,
hey, I think I feel better.
This feels like it's working. This feels like it's helping.
Then just press in. Don't get your brain all wrapped up in the things you've
heard on the news or some ideas is you've got from other people or the ways
that you've seen maybe Christians not live up to what they say they believe.
Don't get all wrapped up in that. Just test.
The Bible says, taste and see if the Lord is good. So here on Theology Thursday,
this is the time that we're going to go a little bit deeper.
We do this on the Spiritual Brain Surgery Podcast all the time,
by the way, if you want more of this pure spiritual deep dive into how science
and faith come together. That's what we're doing over there.
But here on the Dr. Lee Warren Podcast on Thursday, we're going to take a deeper
dive. Today, I'm going to help you learn how to make rounds.
When I operate on a patient or Damon and I have a consult in the hospital,
we go in the morning and we walk into the hospital and we make rounds on our
patients and we see them, examine them, figure out what's going on with them,
see how they're feeling.
And then we make an assessment of the situation and we make a plan for what
we're going to do that day to try to help that patient get better and go home
from the hospital, make a good recovery and have a better life.
So today we're going to take a At Theology Thursday, look at the process of
making rounds on our own lives.
Remember, we're self-brain surgeons, okay? You're part of the society of self-brain surgeons.
You are understanding that the way that you use your mind to influence your
brain turns into how your body works,
turns into how your relationships work, make epigenetic changes in your genes
that are passed on to your family, that how you think turns into how you live
because thoughts become things.
And so today, we're going to take a little bit of a tool. I'm going to teach
you a tool for how to make rounds on yourself.
To see how you're doing, write a progress note, and take a look at what happens
when you change your perceptions and change chairs to switch your perspective
from one way to look at your life to another.
I told you this week's going to be about perception and perspective,
because perception can immobilize us, but perspective can empower us to look
at our lives in a different way. So we're going to make rounds today.
We're going to get after it on Theology Thursday, but before we get started,
I have a question for you. Hey, are you ready to change your life?
If the answer is yes, there's only one rule. You have to change your mind first.
And my friend, there's a place where the neuroscience of how your mind works
smashes together with faith and everything starts to make sense.
Are you ready to change your life?
This is the place. Self-Branche Surgery Schooled. I'm Dr.
Lee Warren, and this is where we go deep into how we're wired,
take control of our thinking, and find the wheel of hope.
This is where we learn to become healthier, feel better, and be happier.
This is where we leave the past behind and transform our minds.
This is where we start today. Are you ready? This is your podcast.
This is your place. This is your time, my friend.
Let's get after it. All right, let's get after it. Hey, today I want to teach you a tool.
We talked about the soap note the other day. I did an episode for the paid subscribers
about this little tool that we use in medicine that we teach the medical students
how to write a note in the chart.
That's funny to say these days because we don't actually have charts anymore we
used to have literal paper charts at the
bedside in the hospital and you could open it up and see what everybody thought
and did and what the other doctors and nurses and labs and results and all that
were in the chart and we had this whole departments of medical records people
who were shuffling papers around making sure everything got added to the chart
every day now it's all done in the computer so we still call it the chart but
it's really just an electronic medical record that we have.
And so every time we see a patient or every time we do something on behalf of
a patient, we put a note in the electronic medical record. And I still call
it putting a note in the chart.
And those notes are called progress notes.
And we teach the medical students this idea called a SOAP note, S-O-A-P.
And SOAP stands for Subjective Objective Assessment and Plan.
So when you teach a student how to write a note so they won't forget some of
the important things to put in there.
We teach them this little sort of abbreviation, soap note, if you will,
so that they don't forget what to put in the note.
Now, we always start with what we call a chief complaint. The chief complaint
is just what did the patient say about why they're here?
So in the setting of the hospital, it might be, I get a phone call that so-and-so
had an accident and they're up on the fourth floor in room 4410 or whatever.
And I need to go up and say, and see what's going on with them.
And I'll walk in and I'll say, hi, Mr. Jones, what's going on? Why are you here?
And whatever he says is his chief complaint. He might say, my back is killing
me because I fell off a ladder.
So then the chief complaint would be back pain after a fall.
It's just a short little summary of why the patient is here.
So in the self-brain surgery world, you might think about making rounds on yourself
in the morning and in the evening and And getting a habit,
developing a discipline of examining what your day is going to be about that
you think and how your day went.
So that you can make some progress in your mind and not just continue to wonder
why things don't seem to be changing or why things don't ever seem to feel different than they felt.
Start thinking about being a little bit more objective about what's going on
in your life. So the chief complaint is a quick summary.
What happened or why you're here, what the visit's about, and what you're doing
in the hospital in the first place or in your brain in the first place if you're
thinking about cell brain surgery.
The subjective is the things that aren't measurable, the things that people
feel, the things that we think.
These are important to get out because if you don't understand how you're thinking
and feeling, then you can't really know where to start in terms of addressing,
whatever it is that might be going on with you.
So even though we talk about all the time here or that the feelings aren't facts
and thoughts aren't always true and all that kind of stuff, you do need to acknowledge
what it is that you're thinking and feeling.
So write down the subjective things, the things that are going through your
mind, the things that are bouncing
around in your head. It's important to know where you're starting.
And we do that in the medical record because it's important for me to know if
you believe that your back pain is related to X, Y, or Z,
but it's really related to the fact that you weigh 700 pounds,
then you can't make very much progress if you think that your back pain is because
your boss is making you move those four bags of potatoes from the counter to the back shelf.
But your real problem is that your back pain is related to morbid obesity or
previous surgery or something else.
We've got to square up what you think versus what's real before we can really
make progress in fixing it. We have to deal with the reality of the situation.
And so subjective are the squishy things that people think and feel that we
need to know and we need to write them down and be honest with ourselves about
what we're feeling and thinking.
But here's where the power of this idea comes in, okay?
In the hospital setting or in the clinic setting, you need a compassionate and
wise and experienced healthcare provider.
I always used to say physician, but today a lot of care is delivered by nurse
practitioners and physician assistants and and physical and occupational therapists
and all kinds of other professionals are addressing and assessing patients as well.
So your particular provider might not be a physician, it might be somebody else.
So I want to say very carefully that at some point, you have to stop just treating
yourself in the hospital.
Stop saying, hey, there's something wrong with me, I need to go check myself
into the hospital, need to identify the chief complainant and at least admit
to myself the subjective parts of what's going on with me.
And then at that point, you need to be wise and compassionate external observer
to assess what's happening with you and objectively identify the things that are going on.
Objective here doesn't mean objective like when we have a goal or a plan and
there's an object of our pursuit.
Our objective is to win this race. That's not what that, this is not the definition
of objective I'm going with here.
Objective in this sense means that real things that can be measured and tested
and agreed upon by more than one independent assessor or more than one independent
observer so in other words.
You think something weighs 12 pounds, and we put it on a scale,
and it actually weighs 9 pounds.
And somebody else could pick up that same thing and take it to a different scale
and weigh it, and it weighed 9 pounds. That's an objective piece of data.
It does not, in fact, weigh what we thought it weighed. It weighs this.
If you take a blood sample, when you look at it and go, oh, that looks like
it's probably got plenty of hemoglobin in it. It's nice and red,
and I imagine the hemoglobin is normal.
But then you actually send it down to the lab, and the lab comes back and says,
hey, this person doesn't have enough hemoglobin.
The level is four and it should be 12.
Then you've made an objective assessment. You've actually looked at the data.
You've actually measured the thing. And now you have data and facts instead
of something that you thought or felt.
So that's an objective assessment.
So, objective section of the note, then, we have the chief complaint,
we've got the subjective stuff, and now we've got the objective stuff that an independent,
wise, and compassionate external observer, or within one external observer,
could identify what the real problem is.
Okay? Here's the shift that I want you to make today, friend, on Theology Thursday.
Whatever's going on in your life, I want you to get to this place where you
can say, okay, I'm a patient here.
Okay? I'm a person with feelings and thoughts and experiences and massive things
and traumas and tragedies.
And I've gotten to this place at this hour listening to this podcast or reading
a book or dealing with this thing or having this problem.
And I'm a person who's experiencing something in their life.
Think of yourself as the patient, okay? And go ahead and identify the reason
you're here, the chief complaint.
Go ahead and identify the subjective things that you're feeling and thinking and all of that.
But then I want you to make a mental shift. If you're in my office and you're
sitting on the exam table and I'm sitting on the stool next to you,
our knees are close together, I'm looking in your eyes, you're telling me what's going on with you.
Then it's my turn to measure your reflexes and see how strong you are and look
at the MRI and tell you what the problem is and try to help you develop a plan
for what's really going on.
Do about it, to identify the thing that's hurting you and how to fix it, okay?
So in your self-brain surgery practice today, I just want to give you this shift
to say, okay, I need at some point, I need to move from the exam table to that
stool that Dr. Warren would be sitting in.
I need to switch my position from being the patient to being the doctor.
Because here's the truth. All the things that are bouncing around in your ear,
between your ears, all the things that are bouncing around emotionally in your heart, your mind.
None of those things can be fixed by anybody else. I can help you identify them.
I can help you think about them. Your therapist, your counselor,
your pastor, your friend, your spouse, your child sometimes have wiser moments than we do.
Your friend might have the ability to point some things out to you,
but nobody can change how you think about something until you change it.
Nobody's coming and to help you, okay? Now, understand that from a Christian context.
I believe the Holy Spirit is inside you. I believe that the Lord wants to transform
your thinking and all of that, but at some point, and this is,
again, we're not talking about self-help here, but at some point, you have to decide.
That you want to allow Him to influence your thinking, that you want to allow
the Holy Spirit to change your mind.
Somehow you've got to make a decision. And even if all of it is like in the
hospital when somebody signs a consent form, they don't do their own surgery.
They still get hauled down on a stretcher by other people. They still get put
to sleep by an anesthetist. They still get operated on by a surgeon.
They still have other people operating on their behalf, but they had to make
a mental decision that they wanted to get well at some point and sign a consent
form to do it. They had to show up at the hospital on time.
They had to put themselves on the table. They had to stick their arm out to
get the IVs. So it is true that there are some things that you have to do if
you want to change your mind and change your life.
So right here in this moment, I'm asking you to switch in your mind,
mentally change positions.
If you see it in your mind, maybe even physically do it while you're listening to the podcast.
Like maybe when you're thinking about making rounds on yourself,
maybe switch from one side of the couch to the other.
Or if you're working out, Maybe change your speed on the treadmill or do something
physical to, in your mind, mentally shift your position from exam table to the
doctor's stool, the practitioner's chair, and change positions.
Look at your life and try to get outside of your perceptions and your beliefs
and your limiting stories and the labels you've been carrying around and all
the things that you believed about yourself and just change to the position.
If you could look at yourself through my eyes, through another doctor's eyes,
through the Holy Spirit's eyes.
If you look at yourself through God's eyes for a minute, wise and compassionate
external observer who can obsess the situation objectively and say,
here's what it is that you're dealing with.
And just switch that position because from that position of being objective
about the things going on in your own life,
then you can actually make an assessment that's reasonable and not just based
on fear or anxiety or the past or your previous memories or any of the times
you've tried and failed before.
You can actually shift and make an assessment that's objective and from the
position of a wise and compassionate person who cares about you outside of your
own experience. So just mentally make that shift for a minute.
Then you can make an assessment and a plan in the last two parts of the soap note.
Okay? So the power of today is we're going to switch our perspective.
We're going to change chairs. Even if you physically do that with your body,
like move from one chair to another to make this assessment.
So we're making rounds on ourselves.
We're changing chairs. And one of the ways you do that is you radically attempt
to eliminate any sort of relativism in your thinking.
One of the problems that keeps us stuck and keeps us from making progress is
that we constantly want to compare ourselves to other people.
Positively or negatively. I can't ever do that. Look at that guy.
He's always successful. Everything he does turns to gold. Everything I do doesn't
turn to gold and it's just nothing works out for me.
And we start to feel jealous and insecure and hopelessly, hopelessly unable to succeed.
I heard about a guy who went to a psychiatrist and he was telling him all his
troubles and all his problems and all his anxieties and all his depression and
all the things he was dealing with. And the psychiatrist finally said,
I've made the diagnosis.
You have an inferiority complex, But it's not a very good one.
We think that we are inferior to other people, even to the point that our inferiority
complexes aren't good enough. That's funny. That's a joke. Come on, it's funny.
I'm just kidding. So we have this relativism of looking at ourselves negatively towards other people.
But sometimes we also need to acknowledge that sometimes we look at ourselves
overly positively and we compare ourselves and we take pride or arrogance.
At least I'm not as bad as that guy or at least I've never gotten a DUI.
At least I've never gotten fired for showing up drunk.
At least I haven't done that like that guy did. And then we don't make progress
or change because we think we're pretty good relative to somebody else.
So there's a great power in eliminating relativism
so look at romans 12 3 for example for by
the grace given to me i say to everyone among you
not to think of yourself more highly than you ought don't think of yourself
more highly than you ought to think but think with sober judgment according
to the measure of faith that god has assigned so he's saying hey don't think
too highly of yourselves judge yourselves objectively and that means you look
at yourself through God's eyes.
And you see where you're having trouble, where you're falling short,
where you need to try harder, where you need to have some assistance or where
you need to change your thinking about certain things.
But at the same time, while you're not judging yourself too hard,
while you're not thinking of yourself too highly, look at 1 Peter 5,
7, cast all your anxiety on him because he cares for you.
So if you want to look at yourself objectively, instead of beating yourself
up and saying, gosh, I'm such a loser.
God could never love me. I keep trying this. It It never works out for me.
Nobody loves me. Nobody respects me. I'm never going to be okay.
Whatever it is that the narrative is bouncing around in your head,
that this thing happened, I lost my son, and I'm never going to be a good dad
again, and my wife's going to leave me, and all these things are going to happen.
You start catastrophizing your life, and God says, hey, time out.
Stop for a second, friend. Cast your cares on me. I care about you.
And then your assessment of yourself would be, hey, the God of the universe cares about me.
He's got a plan for me. You start reminding yourself what scripture really says.
Yes, I need to objectively assess my shortcomings and my failures and my problems
and my issues and all that. But I also need to remember, I need to hold in balance.
I need to hold in tension the fact that the Holy Spirit of the living God died,
that Jesus died for me, has the power to be resurrected to give me a living hope.
The Holy Spirit indwells me to remind me and teach me and correct me and assess
me and help me and remember me.
God loves me. He cares about me.
So hold those two things in tension, objectively assessing where you are and
remembering how greatly you are loved.
The thing about emotion, we always talk about emotions as if they're binaries,
like I've got sadness or I've got happiness.
I've got anxiety or I've got peace. But the truth is we can have mixtures of both at the same time.
And that's why, because we have this God who's a quantum physics God who created
and invented quantum physics, as we talked about yesterday. we have this God
who says, hey, you can have a hard life and an abundant life at the same time.
You can have joy mixed in with your sorrow, and that's how you can keep going.
I'm never going to stop being sorrowful about losing my son Mitch 11 years ago.
That's never going to stop hurting me.
But at the same time, I've learned that my life can also contain joy,
gladness, and even happiness.
Again, my life can continue to have meaning and purpose in spite of the fact
that I've been through these hard things, in spite of the fact that I lost my son.
In fact, sometimes Sometimes I can recognize that I've learned and grown and
become stronger and more resilient.
And I've got a better story now. And I'm able to help other people.
And I'm able to help other people find hope in the midst of their hard times
because of, not in spite of, but because of the hard things I've been through.
Those nightmares and dreams that I still have about the things that I went through
in Iraq, they help me to help other people when they're going through PTSD or
struggling with hard things that they've seen or witnessed. I can say,
hey, there's joy and hope on the other side of this.
Yeah, you're not going to ever forget the thing that you've been through,
but there's peace and there's purpose and there's meaning beyond it.
And you can learn to live with that.
So hold these two things in tension, eliminate relativism and accept duality.
So I just want you to think about that today. We're going to round on ourselves,
get this discipline of making rounds and holding more
more than one thing intention and switching your chair from the subjective and
complaints of your own life to the position of a wise and compassionate provider
who's objectively looking at the situation and helping you work through it and
making a proper assessment and finding a plan to move forward.
If you can make that mental shift, okay, here on Theology Thirsty,
make that mental shift from being, seeing yourself in your own eyes with your
own problems and your own issues and feeling
responsible for your own care to knowing that the great physician is on your
side is helping you to make these decisions.
Make that mental shift, and I think you'll find that you're able to make progress going forward.
So in this discipline of making rounds, like thinking about,
okay, I'm going to stop and check in on myself.
I'm going to find out what's going on. I'm going to see how this day progressed,
and I'm going to check it out and try to be objective about it so that I can
make an assessment and a plan. And then we're going to make evening rounds.
We're going to go back and do the same thing again and say, how'd this day go?
Did I get the thing done? What was the result of the objective test that I put on myself?
How'd that work out? Did I make any progress? What should I do tomorrow to move
this forward a little bit farther?
So if you can develop this discipline of making rounds on yourself and then
mentally shifting in between the subjective and the objective section of your
progress note, of that soap note that I want you to start writing, make that mental shift.
Don't look at it all from your perspective as the patient, as this is my life,
this is my thing, I'm the person here, I'm all by myself in this deal.
Make that shift and say, hey, I'm going to also remember that I am practicing self-brain surgery.
I'm applying my mental force and directing the processes that God put in place
of self-directed neuroplasticity.
These brain cells are regenerating. They're new every morning.
We are going to make synapses and reconnect neurons in ways that are more helpful to us.
Then harmful. And that process is going to happen passively if we don't direct
it. So let's not be victims of the process.
Let's be good physicians and direct the process. Okay.
If I walk out in my backyard, it's about 40 steps from our back door to the
riverbank of the North Platte River.
And if you just can put yourself on the riverbank for a second,
just think about the sunrise that's getting ready to happen and the birds,
and you'll see a bald eagle fly by, and you can look at that river, and it's flowing by.
Okay, it's flowing. There's one
more mental shift I want to give you for today, just this mental image.
If you don't think about doctors and hospitals and all that medical and scientific
analogy that I'm giving you, just think about this.
You can imagine standing on the banks of this beautiful river.
Now I want you to scoop up a handful of water, okay, and look at that water
in your hand and recognize that there are trillions and trillions of water molecules
in that handful of water that you're holding.
More molecules of water in that handful of liquid than there are stars in the universe, okay?
And all of those molecules came from somewhere upstream from where you're standing right now,
from the raindrops, from the snow melt from the
river stream from the tall mountains and it trickled down
and became a stream and became a creek and became a river
of tributary and all that water came together
from who knows how many thousands of miles upstream from where you're standing
and that entire pre session of water flowing and mixing together is now part
of what you're holding in your hand and you couldn't separate one of those molecules
from another in a way that you could say okay okay, this one right here,
this one came from the top of a mountain in Wyoming, and this one here came
from a raindrop in Montana.
You couldn't possibly separate that out.
And so I want you to stop thinking, if you're prone to it, stop thinking that
there's some way you can go back in your past and put your finger on the thing
that's really hurting you now,
put your finger on the thing that's really creating the situation that you have
now, and that if you could just change that, or if you could just have not done
that, or just have not said that, or if he hadn't been in that place at that
time, or if my uncle hadn't done that thing, that this water wouldn't be what it is right now.
Because not only is that drop of water in your hand, all the other ones are too, okay?
The idea that you can go back in time and unmix something from your life and
make it different than what it is now, it's not possible.
And part of why it's not possible is that thing already did happen,
okay? Remember, trauma's not what you went through.
It's how you responded to what you went through, okay? So part of the problem
is that you can't unmix it.
But also, I want you to recognize that if you could climb out in the middle
of that river channel, hold out your arms and as strong as you are,
could you stop that river from flowing?
No, you couldn't possibly. You would have to at some point acknowledge that
you are not strong enough to stop that river from flowing downstream anymore.
So if you have this idea that if you could just undo something in the past that
the river would stop flowing and your life would stop feeling like it feels
and all that stuff, you can't.
So at some point you have to recognize that you're going to have to yield to
the fact that this river of your life is continuing,
And then I want you to turn your attention from the water that's in your hand
to the water that's upstream that created that handful of molecules that you're
holding and look downstream and recognize that your life is going to go forward.
Okay. And you can't stop that river and you can't by yourself redirect the channel.
You're going to have to yield to the fact that it's going to flow downstream,
but you don't have to be a victim of it because you can learn to navigate that
river in a different way.
You can learn to direct your response to whatever's happened in the past to
where you can now direct that process and navigate that in a better way.
And God comes along and says, hey, cast your anxiety on me. I care for you.
I'm going to help show you the way. I'm going to transform your thinking.
I'm going to restore your life. We're going to show you a way forward.
God's going to make a way where there has been no way. He promises you that.
Okay? If you can learn, frame your thoughts about the situation that you're
in, make a mental shift from upstream causes and labels and problems and issues to downstream.
Okay, this is where I am. How do I navigate here going forward?
How do I let God redeem and restore and change my thinking? That's the assessment
and plan part of this. We've done the objective assessment.
We've switched chairs from subjective to objective. And now we're making an
assessment of where we are and how we can make a plan to navigate going forward.
That's the value and the power of making morning and evening rounds on yourself
as a self-brain surgeon,
learning how to write these soap notes and learning how to stop being relativistic
relative to other people because you actually want to change what's happening
with you, not just compare yourself favorably or negatively to somebody else.
And you actually want to learn to navigate going forward in a better way.
When you pull a memory out of the past, it's never a fair fight, okay?
You're actually not just looking at what happened in the past.
You actually tag that memory, modify it based on your current experience,
education, lifestyle, thinking, what you're dealing with right now.
The memory gets modified, and before you even can consciously process it,
You've already transformed what you think you're remembering through a whole
set of filters about how you are now.
And so it's never actually the thing that you remember is not exactly a perfect
representation of what really happened.
So the punchline of that is to say this, don't think that you can just objectively
assess what happened in your past and judge it correctly and then change it
because you're going to modify it based on how you are now.
And so going back in time is not the way to heal yourself forward.
That just sounds harsh because you think I could just go back and deal with
that and live back there and think about it.
But that produces pretty quickly idolatry of worshiping or being stuck in something
other than in the present and in the future because you can't really go back there.
Remember, we talked about the no old beaches analogy the other day.
There's no truth in the idea that you can go back and either avoid or correct
or heal or move forward from something because you're not actually back there.
You're right here right now. Now, so I want you to make a mental shift.
Start looking downstream and figuring out how we're going to navigate going forward.
Okay? We're going to learn a better response to the massive things that have
happened. We're going to learn how to pause.
As Pete Gregg says, pause and reflect and ask and yield. That's a great acronym for prayer.
Pause for a moment. God's into the moment. Reflect on what's happening and ask
him to show you with new eyes how to move forward.
And yield to the current as your life is going to move forward,
but navigate it in a way that's in better, you're in better shape to direct
some of that or yield to his direction.
Because my friend, if you can learn how to do that, then you really are on the
path of becoming a really good, compassionate and wise self-brain surgeon.
You can help yourself become healthier and feel better and be happier.
And the good news is, if you can make that perspective shift and round on yourself
twice a day and begin to document your progress properly, is that you can start today.
I hope that was helpful to you, my friend. I am all in. Lisa's all in.
Tata's all in. People all over the world are all in with us.
Self-brain surgeons all over the world getting together to press through,
to remember that we've never once been alone.
You have all the tools, everything you need.
All you need to do is change your mind and you'll change your life.
Let's go all in. Share this with your friend. Let's get after it.