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Instant New York Times Bestseller
Unlock your potential by cultivating self-awareness and curating a fulfilling life full of self-improvement, emotional intelligence, and a growth mindset. Leadership expert and entrepreneur Dr. Josh Axe teaches 12 revolutionary mindshift transformations to beat the grind and reach the life you've always wanted. Redefine success and replace the limiting beliefs of yourself with the healthy mental toughness to think this, not that.
Perhaps you're busy but still feel empty. Maybe things haven't turned out how you'd hoped, and life seems stale and unfulfilling. What if you could wake up every morning excited about your purpose, knowing you're fulfilling your greatest potential?
A more meaningful life is within your reach, and it starts in one place: your mind.
Living with a mindset of false narratives will keep you stuck, locked in a prison of unpursued dreams and goals. But cultivating a new mindset based on what is actually true will set you free—free to start exploring and growing beyond the limits you thought you had.
In Think This, Not That, Dr. Josh Axe unpacks the top twelve mental barriers holding people back from realizing their potential and becoming the greatest version of themselves, and contrasts each one with a new empowering mindset, such as:Whether you want to improve your physical or financial health, raise the quality of your relationships, or take your career to new heights, these mindshifts will help transform your life.
- Don't simply drift; clarify your purpose.
- Don't define success based on what you accomplish; base it on who you become.
- Don't be the victim; be the hero.
- Don't be a slave to your vices; overpower them by building virtues.
- Don't live by popular opinion; follow enduring principles of wisdom.
- Don't allow unintentionality; visualize a strategy.
It's time to break through your limiting beliefs and find out who you can become, to build a meaningful life through new thoughts and actions, and to make the switch from what's stalled you toward a life of ultimate significance.3
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.
Hey, Lisa. Hey, Lee. It's good to see you today.
It's good to see you too. Will you help me with something? Of course.
I can't remember what day it is. It's Frontal Lobe Friday.
Good morning, my friend. Dr. Lee Warren here with you, and I am so excited and
grateful to have a chance to do some self-brain surgery with you today.
It is Frontal Lobe Friday.
That's the day of the week where we focus our episodes on the incredible ability
that God gave us to decide what we want to think about, to change our perspective,
to engage selective thinking, and take control of our minds,
to bring our brains under dominion, and improve the health of our bodies and
the lives of those around us,
and even epigenetically change
the future baseline and hope level of our offspring and our generations.
This is Frontal Lobe Friday, where we change our minds so we can change our
lives. And today I have the absolute perfect guest to present to you on Front
of Love Friday. It's really funny.
I have started to get pitches from other podcasts over the last couple of years
where people, publicists and publishing companies reach out to me with potential guests.
And without question, Josh Axe is the highest level platformed person that's
been pitched to me so far.
I got a pitch, I don't know, three or four months ago now from Brooke Hauser
over at Epic Publicity. and she said, hey, how would you feel about having Dr.
Josh Axe? And Lisa went crazy.
Lisa's been using Dr. Axe's supplements for years.
Josh Axe is a New York Times bestselling writer, a renowned natural physician,
an entrepreneur, founder of Ancient Nutrition.
And his whole platform is about revolutionizing how we look at collective health.
He's got a huge podcast and multiple social media channels that total over almost
4 million combined followers.
He has 2.2 million YouTube subscribers.
He specializes in functional medicine, regenerative medicine, and longevity.
He's got a master's degree from Johns Hopkins. Josh and I had the most incredible talk about what.
It does for you when you decide to think this and not that. That's the title of his new book.
It's all about mind shift and the stuff that we talk about here on this podcast every day.
Going back to our conversation that we had with Erwin Raphael McManus last year
about his book, Mind Shift, this conversation flows right in line with what
we do here every week on Frontal Lobe Friday. Josh is engaging.
He's brilliant. He loves the Lord, most importantly, and he'll He'll help you change your mind.
His new book, Think This, Not
That, is absolutely fantastic book about mindset. It's really practical.
It's got a lot of amazing diagrams and visual aids. And I think it's just one
of the most tremendous books that I've come across in this space about changing
your mind so you can change your life, which you love because you,
my friend, are a self-brain surgeon.
One of the things that's interesting about Josh's approach to the book is that
on the audio book, he added some value.
So if you bought the print copy or the digital copy and the audio copy,
you'll get some additional value out of the audio because he has a bunch of
interviews with thought leaders on different topics for each chapter.
So in the audio book, you get not only the text that was in the regular book,
but a whole conversation with somebody else and Dr.
Axe to talk about what you just read or just listen to. It's tremendous,
just a brilliant approach.
I'll probably incorporate that in my next book.
And so who knows, maybe Josh Axe will show up in one of my audio books someday.
Day. We had a wonderful talk. It's going to bless you and help you.
Excited to bring you this conversation.
It's going to be helpful. It's actually funny because we had several people
write in and said, hey, I think Josh Axe would be a great guest on your show.
And before I ever had a chance to take action on that, they reached out to me.
So it's meant to be, this is a tremendous conversation.
It's going to help you engage that gift of selective thinking and change your
mind so that you can think this and not that.
But before we do any of that stuff today, my friend, 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?
Well, this is the place, Self-Brain Surgery School.
I'm Dr. Lee Warren, and this is where we go deep into how we're wired,
take control of our thinking, and find real 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.
Music.
Friend, we're back, and I'm so excited to be introducing you to a new friend today.
I've got Josh Axe with us today, New York Times bestselling writer,
world-renowned doctor of natural medicine, podcast host in his own right,
coming at us from Puerto Rico today. Welcome to the show, Josh.
Hey, Lee. Thanks for having me. Honor to be here.
It's exciting to me. I've read your book. You did a beautiful job with the book
that we're going to talk about today, Think This, Not That.
The listeners of this show are going to be all over it. We're going to give
away five copies of the book.
So I'll tell you instructions on how to be one of the recipients of those five
free copies at the end of the day.
But, Josh, give us a 30,000-foot view in case there's somebody who doesn't know
who you are. I will have already told them the official bio.
But let's hear from you what you're all about.
Yeah, you know, I am a person that really wants to honor God in all that I do.
I want to help people heal.
And so I really think we're all called to do three things and more,
but specifically love God, love people, make earth a heavenly place.
And so I'm doing my best to do that.
And so I'm about faith. I'm about
family. I'm about health and fitness and helping people heal naturally.
I've spent a big part of my career teaching people how to use food as a form of medicine.
Also, I've spent a lot of time teaching people how to use lifestyle as medicine
and mindset as medicine to help them heal.
And primarily, I think that Jesus is the great physician.
And so I think that ultimately, when we're dealing with health issues,
first and foremost, we should look to him.
But I, um, that's, uh, you know, that's why I've got two daughters.
I've got a five month old and a four year old.
Um, and I've got an amazing wife and, uh, you, we live between Puerto Rico and Nashville, Tennessee.
And, um, yeah, and just really on a mission to help people heal body, mind, and spirit.
Love it. That's right what we're about here on this show. And before we get
started with this conversation, I think we're going to get into some really
deep stuff and talk all about how we can change our minds and improve our lives.
And before we do that, why don't we take a second and pray? Would you mind?
Yeah, we'd love to. Thanks so much.
Dear Heavenly Father, we just love you and praise you. There's none like you, Lord.
We know that you are for us, not against us. We know that you work all things
out for our good. We know that you have a plan and purpose for our life.
We know that you do exceedingly abundantly more than we could think or imagine.
And so we We just, Lord, just bring up those promises that you bring to us,
Lord, and just call you to remembrance and just say, Lord, we just want to honor you with our lives.
Lord, I pray for everyone listening today. I pray for breakthroughs.
I pray for emotional and mental breakthroughs. I pray for spiritual breakthroughs.
I pray for physical breakthroughs, Lord.
And we just pray that you'll use us to honor you, Lord.
Again, I pray for healing and body, mind, and spirit today. In Jesus' name, amen. Amen.
Amen. Thank you, Josh. And you, with all the other things that you're doing,
busy guy, raising a family, running a very successful online business and coaching
people, helping people to live better lives, you decided to sit down and write a book.
You've written books before, but this book particularly, Think This,
Not That, 12 Mind Shifts to Break Through Limiting Beliefs and Become Who You Were Born to Be.
What in the world led you to take on a book like that, Josh?
Well, you know, one of the things I realized in operating a functional medicine
clinic for years, and, you know, in my clinic, I used to have a brick and mortar office in Nashville.
And now I see people via the practitioners I work with online.
But, you know, I would have people coming in with, you know,
a lot of autoimmune disease, hypothyroidism, depression, anxiety,
just a lot of cancer, a lot of major illnesses.
And we would like to support them nutritionally.
Here's the thing that really surprised me after a few years of practicing functional medicine.
The hardest part of helping people heal was not getting them to necessarily change their diet.
The most important factor in healing, one of the things I discovered was having
people change their mindset.
You know, there's a statistic that 80% of doctors visits today are stress related.
Yeah. A majority of heart issues, a majority of, and you've seen this.
I remember when I first opened practice, uh, the major conditions growing were
heart disease, diabetes, childhood obesity.
Well, today, the past seven years, it's mental health issues.
It's loneliness, it's identity issues, it's depression, anxiety,
it's those sorts of issues.
And so, you know, I, I found early on in clinic that there were so many people suffering
from loss in their lives, from lack of motivation, for not having a purpose,
for just and dealing with a lot of worry, anxiety, fear, grief,
and that it was really affecting their recovery and healing.
And it was just very glaring to me. And partly it was probably because I love
studying psychology and I've spent a lot of time doing that.
And also I've always believed that, again, in order to be healthy,
we've also got to look at the spiritual and mental side of things with everybody.
And so I started realizing that, you know, a lot of people, if they weren't
fully healing, a big reason was due to they were having emotions that were really
or mindsets that were keeping them from fully healing.
And I'll give you an example, just a few examples of this.
I've spent a lot of my career studying ancient Asian medicine.
When you look at those forms of medicine, one of the things that they're very
aware of and they talk about, which we should in the Western world,
we very rarely do, though, is how different emotions affect different organ systems.
Just to give you an example, if somebody has, and this one's obvious and people
know this one, if you have a lot of fear, it could be fear of failure,
fear of disappointing others, you're sort of on all the time,
that increases your body's fire.
Or flight response, your sympathetic nerve system.
What happens then is your adrenal glands start releasing a lot of cortisol,
adrenaline, and those stress hormones.
And if that happens a lot over time, you start to really wear out your adrenal
glands and tax that organ system.
Now, we're familiar with that one, but a lot of people don't realize that this
works with a lot of other organ systems.
If somebody experiences a lot of worry, for instance, that upsets their upper
digestive system specifically.
So think about somebody could be worrying and they could say,
oh, my stomach feels like it's tied in knots.
And so we know that worry affects the pancreas and the stomach in that area.
Another example of this is anger. If somebody deals with a lot of anger,
it's actually toxic to the liver and gallbladder and lymphatic system.
If somebody has a lot of anxiety, we know their blood pressure will go up. It affects their heart.
And then if somebody has grief where something has happened in the past and
they haven't been able to fully let go.
That impacts the lungs and the colon, which is 90% of your immune system.
And so what you say, and I remember seeing this years ago, Lee,
is that I had a patient and she developed autoimmune disease and she started
finding out her health really started to deteriorate when her daughter,
who was her best friend, moved off to college really far away.
I mean, they just weren't as close anymore as her only child.
And then she was divorced. And so she really felt like she was by herself.
And then she developed autoimmune disease, was getting sick all the time.
And one of the things I really discovered with her, and we came to this together,
is that she was heart sick.
I mean, she was sick because she missed her daughter. She felt like she lost her best friend.
And that was causing her autoimmune issues.
And so, you know, I am very aware of this connection.
And so that's an example of how our emotions affect our physiology,
this mind-body connection.
And the other thing is this, is that I oftentimes would be able to tell pretty quickly.
Maybe, and by the way, I'm not acting like this is 100% accurate,
but I could with a good amount of certainty be able to tell if somebody was
going to be able to see good results or not,
after the first visit of seeing them.
And I'll give you an example of this. I would sit down with people oftentimes the first visit.
One of the things I had people do is write down sort of their daily eating plan,
what they were typically eating for breakfast, lunch, and dinner,
what medications they were on, if they're taking supplements, those sort of things.
And I would sit down even the first visit and I'd say, hey, listen,
your next visit, I'm gonna go through a whole protocol, but I do wanna challenge
you to do one thing starting tomorrow morning.
Just change breakfast, okay? So I see now, and I would pick something out,
hey, you're eating Fruit Loops or a bagel and cream cheese or a bacon,
egg, and cheese biscuit, whatever it was.
And I would tend to say something like, and I'd give them a few options,
but I'd say, one thing I think that would be really fantastic for you is to
start doing a superfood smoothie for breakfast. Let's get some collagen in.
Let's do some fruits like blueberries.
Let's maybe get some healthy fats like coconut milk. Let's do something that's
really nutritious for you first thing.
And I would tend to get one to two reactions. One is people were kind of like...
Moping around, oh, can I not have this? Can I not have this?
Can I not have this? And they really felt like that their life was being,
they were being robbed of something.
And there's another group of people that were more really embracive saying,
that's great. Okay, I can't wait to start. I'm excited. Like I'm ready. Like I'm hungry.
I'm willing to do whatever it takes.
And, you know, we can all guess and know which group of people tended to see
the better results, but our mindset and perspective about our health, you know, I had a pastor.
I had a lot of pastors, actually. I took care of.
But one pastor, he was in his mid-70s. His name was John.
And he was my best patient from the standpoint of... My practice,
again, was more wellness-based.
We did regular nutrition workshops and fitness classes and physical therapy
and all kinds of things out of the office.
And he would come to everything I ever did. And I asked him once,
I said, John, you're my best patient ever. I said, why is that?
He said, because I want to be preaching preaching the gospel,
doing mission trips when I'm in my nineties.
And I thought, wow, that's, you know, that's probably any of that sort of mindset.
And so I think our mindset and
our emotions play a really, really big role in, in our ability to heal.
I think it's exactly right. I can see it in my surgical patients.
I can almost predict who's going to have a bad outcome sometimes or a really
good outcome based on their attitudes and their, and their mindset.
So So it's definitely, it's definitely true.
And then just on a personal level, after probably a week after our son died,
I had a huge shingles outbreak on my right scapula.
First time I'd ever had shingles and a big patch of my hair turned gray, like overnight.
Like, so that physiological response to stress that you talked about,
just how your mind is working and what it's dealing with turns into real stuff
in your body. There's no doubt about it.
And you did a great job, I think, kind of taking this idea that we have barriers,
like mental barriers to break through in our life.
So talk maybe about one or two of your favorite mental barriers that you addressed
in the book. Let's go through, let's go through a couple of them. Yeah.
Yeah. And the first one I'll share here, and I think there are so many people
that have had this, I shouldn't say so many, everyone has had some,
some level of this in their life.
So my first really mental barrier started when I was in high school,
freshman in high school, I was not a very good student, and I had a teacher,
I was in freshman English class, I remember,
and I had a teacher, the bell rang, and she said, Josh, can you stay after class?
And I walked up to her, and she asked me something. She said,
Josh, what do you want to do after high school?
I said, well, Ms. Noble, I want to be a doctor. And the reason I said that,
Lee, was the year before, my mom was diagnosed with breast cancer.
And my mom went through chemotherapy.
She had a mastectomy. I remember my mom, I still have this mental picture of
her taking a comb through her hair and all of her hair coming out in a comb
and just going to the other room and just crying and saying, why, God?
And also thinking, I want to help
people like my mom. And I also thought there's got to be a better way.
And so I shared with her, I want to be a doctor.
Well, she laughed out loud at me, literally laughed out loud.
And she said, Josh, listen.
She said, with your GPA, you'll never get into med school.
She said, my own daughter had a 3.8 GPA and barely got in. She said,
you're not even hardly passing this class.
She said, you've got an F on this paper. That's why I wanted you to stay after.
You're getting a D minus in my class. She said, you need to start trying harder.
And I walked out of there. The thing that I took away was, well, I can't be a doctor now.
And because I'll never get in. And then a couple of weeks later,
my mom brings me to see a physician.
He talks about me like I'm not in the room, even though I'm sitting right there.
And he tells my mom, I still remember this. He said, your son has a severe learning
disability. He has ADHD.
She said, I'm going to prescribe Ritalin. I recommend he stay on it.
He may still have trouble learning, but he said this should be able to help him focus better.
So then I walked out of there thinking, well, gosh, not only can I not be a
doctor, I'm like, I'm not smart. I've got a learning disability.
So there's something wrong with me. So I really stopped trying all completely in high school.
I did graduate barely with a C minus GPA.
The only reason I graduated was I just knew my dad would be irate if I didn't
finish high school. I had a great dad, by the way, but I knew he'd be mad if
I didn't finish high school.
And so I finished and I did want to go to college. I applied to colleges,
but all the ones I wanted to go to, most of them I got denied from.
I did. However, there's one college I wanted to go to is actually the University
of Kentucky. and they sent me a letter back.
And the gist of it was this, you're not in, but if you come and take summer
school and you average above a 3.0, we'll let you in.
And so I thought, okay, you know what? I'm going to go, I'm going to try.
And so I went, the first class I had to take was English 101.
So I went in, first big assignment was a paper, wrote the paper,
felt good about it, turned it in well a few days later the teacher there miss
williams she says josh can you stay after class.
And my stomach sank. I thought, this is deja vu. She's going to tell me I failed.
And she said, hey, what's your major?
And I said, I haven't chosen one, Ms. Williams. She said, well,
I want to let you know that I think you're a really talented writer.
She said, I think you should consider being an English major or journalism major.
She said, you got the highest grade in the class.
And I think you could be, you know, you're a really great writer.
Great job. And I walked out of there and I'll call it like, you know,
let me call it a mental or mindset transplant.
I mean, I went from having this memory, this belief, almost like a sick organ
of believing I wasn't smart, I had a disability, I wasn't capable,
to having one person tell me you're good at this.
It radically changed everything. I then averaged above a 3.0 throughout college and grad school.
Much later on, when I went to Johns Hopkins University, I graduated with a 3.9 GPA from there.
And I don't say any of these things to boast. I just tell them to say.
And then I became a doctor. I've written books. I started a supplement company.
None of that would have happened if I would have held on to that limiting belief.
And there's so many people today that have a limiting belief.
They might be believing I'm not worthy. I'm not valuable. I'm not smart.
I can never be happy again after this loss I've experienced.
There are these beliefs that we have that are limiting our lives.
And I saw this in practice. this, and I know you probably saw it as well.
I mean, I used to have patients come in. Here's the two most common things I
would hear from patients.
And after they would see their, their, another physician or eventually come
and see me, they would say, well,
my doctor told me that I have to be on this drug the rest of my life.
Or they would say, my doctor told me my condition was irreversible.
Now, listen, I do believe sometimes there are conditions that are nearly impossible
hospital reverse, okay, outside of a supernatural miracle.
However, the conditions they were coming to see me for were things like type 2 diabetes.
And I helped hundreds of people, if not thousands, reverse type 2 diabetes by
changing their diet, getting them on the right supplements, getting them moving.
But they would have this limiting belief in their mind that,
oh, I can't heal, I can't overcome this, I can't do this.
And so, overcoming limiting beliefs is one of the most powerful things people
can do. I recommend people write down, what are your top three limiting beliefs?
Now, there's a method by a Yale professor that's pretty powerful,
but I basically want to sum it up like this.
Well, let me say this. So, let me go through the process. It's actually called
ABCDE. Number one is you want to activate the memory.
Almost always this happens where somebody said something to us one time and then we believe them.
That's right. So when did this belief you have that's negative and untrue start?
B is what's the exact belief? What do you believe? You're not worthy.
You're too old. You're too young. What's the belief?
C is consequences. You need to really think about what are the actual consequences
if you continue to believe this lie.
Again, for me, I look at that. I would not have been a doctor.
You and I wouldn't be having this conversation right now. D is dispute.
Dispute. Dispute why that's a lie, why it's not true.
Like if I think back, I thought, well, I did get an A a few times in high school.
It didn't never happen. It was when I tried or I actually was interested in the topic.
And so you want to dispute an E as exchange.
What is that thing that's true, that belief that you know is biblically true,
that's true about you in terms of what you should believe for the best outcome in your life?
And really, the Bible verse that comes to mind is take every thought captive.
Yeah, 2 Corinthians 10.5, yeah.
Exactly. Take that thought captive and really make sure that the truth aligns with the Word of God.
And when you can do that and replace those limiting beliefs, it's powerful.
Yeah, we call it self-brain surgery on this show. There you go. I like that.
Yeah, I mean, you're literally taking your mind and making structural changes
in your brain with different thinking. And that's what the Bible says about
renewing your mind in Romans chapter 12 is exactly right.
Getting rid of those beliefs that you've conformed to and rather transform your
mind with the truth of the gospel and the truth of what's real. That's beautiful.
That's so good. It's so good. You know, one other interesting thing,
and this is why I was excited to talk to you today with your history of,
uh, as, as a surgeon, you know, I was, one of the things I talk a little bit
in the book is the power of the placebo effect. You know, I, uh.
Yeah. Well, well, let me, let me give one other thing that I've been through
recently. You said a little bit earlier, you said, um, you know,
what caused me to sit down and write this book?
Here's one of the crazy things about this book is I didn't sit and write the book.
I was bedridden for the entire year that I wrote it.
So this, this, so this time of year last year that we're doing this interview,
I was just, I was on a Walker.
So I wasn't quite walking fully on my own yet. So I went in for a really,
I had injured my back a few years ago, lifting weights.
And I tried a lot of things to get it better. I mean, I did chiropractic,
I did physical therapy, I did nutrition, I did all kinds of things.
And it got somewhat better, but not all the way. Well, eventually I turned on
to something called stem cell.
They took my bone marrow, concentrated it, injected it in the area.
I had blown out two discs, my L4, L5, and L5-S1.
And after getting it done, it helped tremendously. I probably got about,
I was it was probably back up to like 85%, 90%.
And then for a couple of years, I still had this little bit of a nagging issue
in my low back. And I thought, okay, if I go and get stem cell done one more
time, I bet it'll go 100% away.
I went and got it done. This is about a year and 10 months ago.
And afterwards, something didn't feel right. And over the next few months,
it got worse and worse and worse.
So finally I had to wear a back brace and then everything I did hurt.
And finally I woke up early one morning and I, the pain was so bad. I could not move. Wow.
I had to call, we were living in
Puerto Rico at the time. I had to call an ambulance, come and pick me up.
You know, I've got my two year old daughter. She's crying at the house.
Like, where's daddy going?
Go and get an MRI. I get the report back and it says I have a spinal infection. Yeah.
Well, that's very serious. And so I had to take a private flight from Puerto Rico to Florida.
I met with an infectious disease specialist. And here's what he told me.
I mean, it was a bit shocking, all of it, because it all happened within like a short time.
He said, Josh, listen, I want to share with you my prognosis here.
He said, one, you have an infection, and it's not only in your disc.
It's in your L5 vertebra. and you also have an abscess in your spinal canal.
That's where the infection is as well.
He said, this is incredibly serious. He says, I want to let you know your best
case scenario is you'll have chronic pain the rest of your life and you'll be
the first person to know when bad weather comes through.
And he said, the worst case scenario is he said, of course, I mean,
you can die from this if we don't take care of it right away.
But he said, there's a chance that you have have some form of a permanent disability from this.
He said, because where the infection's at and how bad it is,
he said, it might be where you need to, we need to do a surgery and stabilize the area.
I said, there's all kinds of things. I said, and I'll tell you,
Lee, I was for 48 hours, there were emotions I'd never experienced before.
I don't know how else to say that. Wow.
I had never experienced, and I'm a very positive person, you know,
but I'd never experienced feeling despair or hopelessness.
Sort of like no matter what I did, there wasn't a good outcome.
And I felt so down and so depressed for a few days.
And finally after a few days, and by the way, here's the other thing,
I went and looked online then and thought, okay, well, you know,
maybe people have seen great results with this and this doctor was just negative.
Well, I really didn't find that good of news online either. I mean,
it didn't make me feel any better. And so I,
Finally, after a few days, I just realized, you know what, this mindset I have
right now, this sense of despair and hopelessness, this is not serving me.
This is not going to lead to my best outcome.
And I also realized, I thought, you know what, my God is bigger than my diagnosis. That's right.
And so I decided to fix my eyes on Jesus and just do the best that I could to
heal and pray for supernatural healing from God.
And I thought, you know what? I'm going to suffer nobly. Even if I don't get
back to 100%, I will do everything in my power too, but I will also have a great attitude along the way.
And, um, and so I decided I was just going to do everything I could to heal.
And so I started doing that. Now, I, now he told me, he said,
what we typically do with this sort of this infection, this severe,
is we do six weeks of IV antibiotics.
Yeah. And then we do six weeks of oral antibiotics.
That's three months of antibiotics. And one, I'm not stupid.
I knew I have to do antibiotics when I need to prioritize here this area of my body.
But I also knew three months on antibiotics.
I was concerned of what that would do to my gut and my immune system and the rest of my body.
And so I started doing a lot of research, and I came across this amazing study
done on people with spinal infections and how they were able to greatly reduce
their antibiotic time if they got in every day during their course of treatment.
And what hyperbaric chamber is, it's where you get in this chamber,
and basically you have oxygen that you're breathing in, and then it's a pressurized,
so it drives oxygen deeper into the disc and the tissues in your body,
and oxygen has this antibiotic antibacterial effect and also can drive the antibiotics deeper.
And so I started doing that and the study said you could actually do four weeks in there rather than.
Than 12 weeks. So I did that. And while doing that, I also ate perfectly.
I got IVs of things like silver and ozone and vitamins and minerals and just did everything I could.
Also, I realized that not only physically I needed to focus on healing,
I needed to do it spiritually and mentally.
And I spent time having friends and family pour over me and pray over me.
I spent so much time listening to praise and worship music, just thanking God
in advance for what he was doing in my body.
And I also really practice visualization in what I believe is a biblical manner.
You know, I read this great article by, I think it was a PhD on,
I believe he called it amplifying the placebo effect.
And by the way, going back, I know some of your listeners might be aware of
the placebo effect, but it truly is amazing.
I think it was World War I, there was a practicing physician who was taking
care of the fallen soldiers.
And you can imagine, I mean, These soldiers were losing limbs and the drug they
gave them was morphine, which is an incredibly strong painkiller.
Well, they ran out of morphine. And this doctor said, well, I need to give these patients something.
And so he literally gave them sugar pills. He gave them essentially nothing.
But here's the crazy part.
Around 30 to 40% of them experienced around the same level of pain relief from
taking a sugar pill as they did morphine.
Now, even saying that still, every time I say it, it blows my mind to think
that our bodies could create that same pain-relieving effect as morphine. It's really crazy.
And I started really diving more into things that you talk about on the show,
like neuroplasticity and how your, your nervous system can start creating new
neural pathways and sending more growth factors and stem cells to an area to heal.
And so one of the things he said in this article is he said,
you know, you really want to be able to know very precisely what it is you want,
what sort of healing you want to experience in your body, and it will help your
nervous system better heal.
So he said, be really certain. And he said, you want to picture yourself doing
what, like, for instance, I pictured myself throwing my two-year-old daughter
in the air in the pool because I was doing that just before that,
you know, I was squatting. I was dead lifting.
I was swimming. That was what was so hard about this. Like I didn't have to
go get this done and I did. And so, and I had lost my health.
And so I thought, okay, I want to get it back to a hundred percent.
And so I picture that the other thing he says is you want to experience emotionally that future state.
So live in that state of joy now, like, you know, you're already going to be there.
Like you are throwing your daughter in the air in the pool. Like you are out
there, you know, running and walking through Europe or whatever it is.
And then he said, here's the third thing.
He said, have a very detailed plan of how that will become your reality.
Because in a nutshell, he said, you need your nervous system,
you need it to believe you.
He said, because sometimes it's like this kind of thing, it's related like toxic
positivity. Like you just telling yourself everything's going to be great.
Everything's perfect, but you don't really believe it.
He said, you need to make yourself believe it in that way. And I did all that.
And then after two weeks, I didn't feel any better.
In fact, I felt worse. Finally, though, two weeks later, all of a sudden I felt
1% better and then a little bit better and a little bit better.
And then finally, after two months, I didn't, I couldn't even sit in a wheelchair,
Lee, because the pain was so excruciating. I could not move.
After two months, though, I was able to crawl, we had a pool,
crawl to a pool, and start getting in a pool.
And that went on and on for about 10 months. So I didn't walk for 10 months.
And then I got on a walker for two months. And then I had the honor of,
I really wanted to be able to walk because my sister-in-law had asked me the
year before to marry her and her husband at the wedding, officiate the wedding.
And I was able to do that the end of June. And this happened like around July 1st.
And so that was really the first time I walked. So I didn't walk for nearly
a year. and I will say it's a year now since then almost, and I'm probably 85% better.
I'm lifting weights. I'm carrying my four-year-old around.
I, and by the way, I don't have chronic pain every day.
I'm much better than the, than, than, than what the infectious disease specialist
said, the best I could possibly be.
I don't notice when the weather comes through. I don't, I don't notice it.
And so I, and I believe I'll be a hundred percent by the end of this year.
And so, you know, I, I learned so much through that process of what it takes to heal.
And I think mindset and our beliefs play the biggest role.
Wow. That's an incredible story, Josh. I'm glad you're doing so much better.
And something you said, I think the listeners of this show will be familiar,
like this idea of visualizing something.
And I like how you said it carefully. We're not talking about this sort of manifestation
where you can make millions of dollars show up in your bank account and all that.
But from a quantum physics standpoint, like we learned from quantum physics
and from applied neuroscience that the way in which we pay attention to something
and the density of how we pay attention to it affects our choices and it affects
really the quantum state of our reality and can make things more likely to become true.
And then we'll start changing our behavior in ways that enable that thing to become more true.
So that's exactly right what you said. It's consistent with scriptures,
consistent with science, and it's exactly what you're living out.
So I appreciate you bringing that up.
Yeah, you know, I'm glad to be on the other, mostly on the other side of it, Lee.
And I think that it's, you know, of course, when you go through,
one of the things I want to mention too, because I know that there's a lot of
people who, listen, life can be hard.
I mean, we lost my father-in-law last month. I'm sorry.
Yeah, he was 60 years old, no medications. We thought he was going to live to
be in his 90s. And he was living with us, our best friend, and him and my mother-in-law.
So we just, our family has been going through that the past little bit.
And, you know, it's been, you know, it's been a hard, it's been a hard couple years.
Here's the thing I know, though, through all of it is God is good.
He's a God of redemption. He's a God that doesn't waste anything.
And, you know, one of the things I was aware of when I was going through what
I was going through was I wanted to honor God with my suffering.
I wanted to learn and go through. I prayed to God. I said, God,
would you just not only help me get back to 100% physically,
but help me go beyond where I am at now spiritually and mentally.
Like, let me become a better husband, a better father, a more compassionate friend and person.
And I really believe I am because of it.
And so even when I was, I tried to not complain a single time.
Now, on occasion, I had to, you know, vent to my wife and say,
hey, can I just vent to you for a minute?
You know, and I would, and she would listen and pray for me.
And so I think it's healthy and we need to do that. We need to share,
you know, our sufferings is, you know, it makes me think of King David in the
Psalms that I was reading about this morning, just him, you know,
pouring out his heart to the Lord.
But also I was really aware that I had a three-year-old, you know,
she was two and then three, and then now she's four, but she was going to see
how I was going to go through this, my wife, my in-laws, my parents, my friends, all of that.
And so I was grateful throughout the whole thing. I was praising God.
I showed my daughter that even when you're in a terrible situation,
that you know what, God is good and we're going to praise him through the storm the entire time.
And I think for a lot lot of people, I would encourage them to recognize that
as that. And this is the hardest thing.
I think when, when, when there are certain conditions and certain things that
people had when I was in practice that, um, I think are harder than others to
maybe take your mind off of.
But when somebody focuses fully on themselves and their condition,
one, it's understandable, but two, it's not the best for you.
When somebody obsesses about their condition, I saw this with a lot of my Lyme
disease patients, a lot with fibromyalgia, a lot of people with chronic pain,
certain types of autoimmune disease, those conditions that really kind of keep
you from living out parts of your life.
I saw the tendency with a lot of them to make it their entire life,
become the biggest part of their identity.
And I think when you're focusing on it like that or thinking about it like that,
it's very damaging to your health.
And so honestly, I tried not to think about it. As hard as it was, I couldn't walk.
But I tried not to think about it at all outside of just knowing,
hey, I'm gonna be running here soon.
I'm gonna be, you know, so I, that's one thing I would mention to people is
that, listen, you wanna do the work of, if you've had a loss,
if you've been suffering, if you're suffering now.
You want to grieve properly. You want to care for yourself properly.
But you don't want to make that after a period of time your entire life because
it will keep you in that same state.
It will impact your healing negatively.
And so you've really got to be able to find purpose.
You know, I had somebody stop by, Lee, and you'll like this.
He stopped by, and I was in bed, and he said, hey, what have you been doing?
And I said, well, I've been spending a great quality time with my daughter.
You know, we've been, you know, I can't run around with her,
but we've been watching Paw Patrol and VeggieTales, you know, in bed together.
And I said, I went back, I took some courses in psychology and leadership.
And I said, I'm writing this book. And he goes, gosh, if I were you,
I would just be eating Cheetos and drinking Mountain Dew all day.
And I said, well, you know, I've just got a lot of purpose. I said,
you know, I feel as purpose-driven now as I've ever been in my life.
And I think that was another big part that really, I think, you know,
really helped drive me, you know, forward in healing.
I love it. And what you said is exactly right. We've talked on this show a lot
of times about that passage in Isaiah that says, you've refined me in the furnace of suffering.
And you can be refined by your suffering or you can be defined by it.
And it all depends on how you look at it. It all depends on how you see yourself
in this narrative arc of the story that your life is going to tell.
And, you know, do you want dad to be the guy that's sitting around defined by his back pain?
Or do you want him to be the guy in the pool throwing you up in the air?
Like you're going to be one of those two stories.
And you get mostly get to decide which of those two stories you're going to tell with your life.
That's so good. By the way, I'd never heard that like that, you know,
refined or defined. That's wow.
Beautiful. Thank you. Hey, listen, I'm going to land this plane.
Lane, your book is tremendous, Josh.
You threaded the needle between self-help and faith and science.
You brought all these things together. There's incredible diagrams and a lot
of visual stuff that you can really see.
You did a great job with the book. I highly encourage you, listener,
to check out Think This, Not That by Dr.
Josh Axe. We've got five copies to give away. The publicist was so kind to give us five books.
Send me an email, lee at drleewarren.com.
Send me your mailing address and your zip code along with your name.
First five, we're going to draw in 48 hours after the episode goes up,
we're going to draw five names to receive that book.
Everybody else that doesn't get a free copy needs to buy it.
And I would say this, probably the only time I've made this recommendation,
Josh, you need to get the physical book and the audio book.
Because the audio book, you gave us this incredible extra bonus of some live
conversations with people that related to the topic of that chapter.
Erwin McManus is in there.
Donald Miller's in there. That was just a brilliant movie made with the audio book. Good job.
Thanks so much. I appreciate it, Lee. Again, this book for me,
I think they're the principles that have most transformed my life.
And I think for people, it's going to help their health, but also their personal
growth, their mindset, their relationships, so much more.
And so I think it's the best book I've ever written. And I was excited the first
week I had a New York Times bestseller list. We've got really good reviews.
And yeah, people can find on Amazon, bookstores nationwide.
And by the way, if you get the book and buy it, if you then go to joshax.com,
we've got a lot of bonuses that we'll give you for free to go with it.
Everything from a workbook to a video series that you can get there for free online.
And Lee, thanks so much for sharing about that because it's been a real passion of mine.
Absolutely. Before we go, Josh, just give us a little maybe pastoral,
doctorly moment here for somebody who's in the middle of that hard thing,
like an early onset, right?
They just got the news or they're right in the middle of the difficult time
that they're going through. What do you have to say for that person today, Josh?
Yeah, I would say, do your best to create healthy habits that allow you to thrive
through the suffering, allow you to grow through the suffering.
I think, you know, I had a pastor tell me this, Lee, and it was really powerful.
We were in the midst of COVID and he had said, you know, I hear a lot of people
complaining about all of the state of where we're in right now.
And he said, you know what? He said, in a way, I'm grateful because it allows.
Us to really step up as leaders. He says, crisis reveals character.
It really gives us, he said, He said, you know, if there wasn't a civil war,
then we probably wouldn't be talking about Abraham Lincoln.
So I think that I've tried to instead look at suffering and while I don't enjoy
it, I do try and have the perspective that, you know what?
I'm going to grow through this, you know, and knowing God uses all things for good.
You know, when my mom had cancer, that was the hardest thing as a kid to see
my mom suffering and sick constantly, even after that.
But I look at her life now in years later, I walked her through how to,
she, she beat cancer naturally because she was diagnosed a second time.
And my mom, because of that, like, if you ask her today, are you glad she, you had cancer?
She would actually say yes, which is crazy. but she said, I am now so much more,
my priorities are the best they've ever been because of it.
She said, I've got, I have a greater faith in God.
I have a closer relationship to her husband, my dad, to my kids.
I'm more grateful for life.
She said, now we're doing the things like her, or my dad, like bought home in
Florida. They're going to take an RV all around the country.
She's bringing her grandkids to Disney. We're like, my mom really maximizes
her days because of that. She helps other women who've had breast cancer.
She has them over, teaches them how
to to make green smoothies and juice vegetables and that sort of thing.
So, you know, I think having that experience and knowing that,
that, you know what, God is going to give you a testimony.
He is going to do something so incredible. And when you're in the midst of it,
it's almost always impossible to see, but he will use it for your good.
And so I would say one of the most powerful things I did as I wrote down the
promises of God, I went online and just searched promises of God.
I sort of type those out myself and I would read through those daily and just,
just, just clinging to those, those promises of God is so powerful.
I'd also say, get a great inner circle, you know, invite people over those people
that are encouragers that are inspired, you know, those people that,
that are speak life into you.
And I think that's helpful as well, but really fix your eyes on Jesus,
fix your eyes on, you know, it's that,
uh, I'm trying to, I believe believe it's in Romans, but I'm going to,
you could feel free to finish it, Lee, if you know, but it's basically,
you know, whatever is good, whatever is noble, whatever is honorable,
whatever is, you know, think upon those things. It's that.
Like, by the way, again, I, I.
TV today, music today, there's such a darkness to things. I remember when I
was a kid and that's what we'd watch.
Like we'd have, thank God it's Friday TGIF. And it was like Full House and Family
Matters. And, you know, these shows that had these moral stories. Today it's dark.
Well, like I only watch things that were uplifting and inspirational.
Like, so make sure that you're doing that with your music, having praise and
worship music on praise God through the storm.
And I think that'll help you get through it.
Amen. What a great talk, Josh. Josh, you've done a great job with the book.
I pray continued healing and success for you, my friend, and for your family.
And thank you for your time today.
Well, Lee, thanks so much. And can I also mention just, A, if people want to
listen, I also have a podcast. It's called The Dr. Josh Axe Show.
And if people are dealing with anything specific that's health-related possibly.
Could be autoimmune disease or hypothyroidism, you could look me up on YouTube
or Apple and just look up Dr.
Josh Axe thyroid thyroid or Dr. Josh Axe, uh, emotional health or mental health.
And I've done a lot of episodes and things like that, that people could learn about.
And on social media, I'm at Dr. Josh Axe, but, um, Lee, thanks so much for having me. It was an honor.
I, uh, I love what you do. I love your ministry.
And, um, and actually I'm going to, I'm going to share, uh, your ministry with,
with some of my family who's going through kind of loss of, you know, family member now.
So again, thanks so much for, for all that you do.
Absolutely. God bless you, my friend. God bless you.
Wow. I told you. What a great talk. Josh has a powerful story,
not just telling us what to do in our lives, but also he's lived it.
He's gone through a really series of very hard things, and he's used this concept
of thinking this and not that, which is selective attention,
which is something that only humans have.
Of all the things that God created, we're the only ones that can change our minds on purpose.
We can decide to stop toxic thinking and shift into to a more helpful mindset.
And Josh's book, Think This, Not That, has some very practical ways that you
can do that. Tremendous book. I hope this conversation was helpful to you.
Maybe you can find something from Dr. Axe to be helpful.
Lisa and I use some of his products and just a tremendous thought leader and
an example of the way that you can literally change people's lives by helping
them change the way they think and that thinking leads to better doing.
And so So it's kind of belief, thought, action, and all that wrapped up together
is how we manage to take control of the space between our ears and get our minds
working for us and not against us. Josh Axe is helping us get it done.
Hope it was helpful to you. Don't forget we have five free copies to give away.
Send me an email, lee at drleewarren.com with your name, mailing address, and zip code.
Please don't forget those details or you can't be one of the winners of the
book if I don't have your details. So send it.
Hope this is helpful. Have a great day. We're praying for you,
and we will be back tomorrow with some self-brain surgery Saturday.
God bless you, my friend. And don't forget, you can't change your life until
you change your mind. And the very good news is you can start today.
Music.
Hey, thanks for listening. The Dr. Lee Warren Podcast is brought to you by my
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Hey, the theme music for the show is Get Up by my friend Tommy Walker,
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Remember, friend, you can't change your life until you change your mind.
And the good news is you can start today.
Music.