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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. We're going to do some
self-brain surgery today.
It is Monday, and we are at the end, almost, of All In August.
I'd love to hear from you about how it's going.
Speakpipe.com slash Dr. Lee Warren. Speakpipe.com slash Dr. Lee Warren.
Let me know if you went All In with us. If not, if you're going to use September
to go All In, you can use these 31 episodes that we've given you during the
month of August as your guide. You can use the all-in book by Mark Batterson.
You can read my book, Hope is the First Dose, to give yourself a treatment plan
for recovering from trauma and tragedy and other massive things.
There's a way for you to go all-in, friend, even if you haven't started yet.
Now, if you just are hearing my voice for the first time, if you heard me on
Suzy Larson last week or you just knew around the podcast, if this happens to
be the first time you've ever listened, what am I talking about with going all-in
and what am I talking about with self-brain surgery?
What are you talking about, Dr. Warren? As a means of introduction,
I am a brain surgeon, a neurosurgeon. I do a lot of spine surgery,
brain surgery, peripheral nerve surgery.
But I realized a long time ago that since we know that your brain makes new
cells every day and that your brain makes new connections between those cells
every second of every day,
and that the number one inciting factor for how the brain chooses how to wire
new cells together or wire cells into old networks together or create new networks is how you think.
Literally, when you change what you think about, your brain makes immediate.
Structural, real changes, and it makes different levels of neurotransmitters,
different networks get involved, different hormones get produced,
different genes get turned on and off.
Literally, when you think something different, you choose to think about one
thing and not another thing.
Structural, physical things happen inside your brain, which means that thinking
differently produces surgical change in your brain just if I take you to surgery
and perform an operation on your brain to make structural change happen.
There is no difference in real brain surgery, if you will, quote unquote,
and self-brain surgery, except that self-brain surgery doesn't require a haircut
or me sawing into your skull.
You can structurally change your brain. And that means that you can change your
life by changing how you think.
It turns out that the Bible already told us that a long time ago.
Romans 12, 2, don't conform to how the world wants you to think.
Be transformed by the renewing of your mind.
Take every thought captive. If you want to be less anxious.
Be more grateful. We know that's true from neuroscience. Now,
Philippians 4 is your handbook of self-brain surgery in the Bible.
Romans 12, 2, 2 Corinthians 10, 5, Ephesians chapter 4, all these scriptures,
and even all throughout the Old Testament, tell us that as a man thinketh, so he is.
The things you think about turn into real things in the world.
Jesus said, out of the heart, the mouth speaks. David prayed,
let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart.
Be pleasing to you, God. What we think about is important because it controls what our brains do.
It controls what our bodies do. It controls our electromagnetic field.
It records, it controls the way we interact with other people.
It changes epigenetic realities for our family and the generations after us.
It can break or cause generational curses or problems.
Listen, how you think turns in to how you live.
That is what self-brain surgery is. We're giving you tools and operations so
you can stop thinking about making big changes in your life and you can start operating.
You can decide you're not a helpless patient. You're not a victim of your brain.
You're not a victim of your genetics.
You're not a victim of the mean things that your dad said to you or the bad
thing that your husband or wife did or the trauma that you went through.
You are not stuck with the brain that you have.
You're not determined by your genes. You're not determined by your neuronal activity.
You are determined by the quality of your thinking and how you let the great
physician help you change your mind and change your life. That's what self-brain surgery is.
All in August is the time of year when we say, hey, what got us here won't get
us there. We all feel some call in our life.
We all have this vision in our mind of the place that God has called our life
to be or that we're supposed to be trying to reach for.
There's some level of performance we haven't achieved yet.
And we know that we can't get to that level by doing the same things we've been doing.
Because if we keep doing what we've been doing, we'll keep getting what we've
been getting what got me here won't get me there and hope is defined as the
belief that you can get there from here so what gives if what got me here won't get me there.
And if hope is the belief that I can get there from here, then I've got to make
some change if I'm going to get there from here.
I can't keep doing the same old things or I will keep getting the same results.
I can't stay the same if I want to change. And what I'm not willing to change,
it means I'm making a decision.
I'm making a deal with myself that I'm willing to keep this thing in my life
if I'm not willing to change it. Okay?
All in August is the time when we say, hey, today's the day.
We're going to burn the boats. We're going all in. We're giving this idea full attention.
We're going to get after it. We're going to make the changes.
So this month's been full of ideas, thoughts.
How do you do that? How do you make it happen? What can we do to go all in?
Mark Batterson's book, All In, is the textbook for the month.
My book, Hope is the First Dose, is your guide to the self-brain surgery piece,
the treatment plan piece. How do we do this?
That's what All In August is for, friends. So if you're new,
that's what we're all about.
And today we're going to talk about the fact that the The approach you choose
with which to live your life, the manner in which you attack this thing has a consequence.
There are consequences to the approaches that we choose. And we're going to talk about that today.
But first, I want to encourage you, share this with a friend right now.
Grab the link, copy the link, wherever you're listening, text it to a few friends
and say, hey, let's do this together.
Let's go all in together. I want this idea, this all-in idea, I want it to build steam.
I want it to grow through our culture. I want it to infiltrate our schools.
I want people to decide that they're ready to change their minds and change
their life, to stop chasing after what they think will make them happy and instead
to change their mind and transform.
Because we, especially if you're a Christian, the Bible tells you,
you can have a mind like Christ's mind.
And the Bible says Jesus never sinned, not even in his thinking.
And therefore, if we know that how we think changes how our brain functions
positively, our brain gets better, it gets more resilient, it gets more hopeful,
it gets more powerful when we think better.
That means Jesus's brain was making positive improvement throughout the course of his life.
And if you have the mind of Christ, that means your brain can become more like him.
And so let's do brain surgery to make our brains healthier, stronger, better, more like his.
If there is an ideal human brain out there, it's not Albert Einstein's,
it's Jesus's. And so let's get better brains.
That's what we're going to do. And there's approaches to get there.
And that's what we're going to talk about this morning.
My next book is at least tentatively titled The Self-Brain Surgery Handbook.
How to rewire your brain, reorder
your mind, and radically transform your life. The handbook is coming.
And in the handbook, I'm giving you four approaches to help people live their lives.
There's actually five, though. One that I haven't mentioned before is that some
people don't ever really think about it, okay?
Some people don't ever really spend a second thinking about how do I want to attack this day?
How do I want to attack my life? How do I want to go after the things that I
think God is calling me to?
How do I want to try to become a better person? How do I want to steward my relationship?
Many people, I think most people, just wake up and they drink a cup of coffee
and get in the shower and go to work and see what happens.
And they spend their whole life kind of reacting.
Am I going to be in a good mood today? It depends. If somebody wakes me up or
if somebody makes a loud noise, if somebody chews a chip the wrong way,
if somebody doesn't let me listen to the music I want to listen to,
if the boss is mean to me, then I'm going to have a bad day and there's nothing
I can do about it because all these people are jerks and he never does what he says he's going to do.
And she's putting too much pressure on me or whatever, or the wrong guy got
elected or the bad thing happen and that means I can't be happy.
And most people think that their life is just reacting.
But they're just dealing with something. It's like Super Mario Brothers.
You're just running through this maze, and you're jumping over the turtles,
and you're banging your head against the thing to get the coin,
and you're just endlessly after whatever the maze throws at you next.
I would say that is an approach that I don't even think about. It is an approach.
And surprisingly, some incredibly successful, wealthy, seemingly okay people follow this approach.
I've got a good friend, and this friend doesn't, he wouldn't say that he doesn't believe in God.
He just doesn't think about it. He's not worried about it. He just thinks everything's
going to work out okay, and he's incredibly successful.
He makes a lot of money, way more money than I've ever made in my life.
He's incredibly successful, but he's just a, we'll see what happens tomorrow kind of guy.
Doesn't spend much time thinking about it. You talk about God with him,
and he's, I don't know, maybe there's a God, maybe there's not. I don't know.
If he is, then he loves me and it'll all be okay.
And if there's not one, it doesn't matter anyway. So why would I worry about that?
Doesn't read widely, reads the newspaper, does his thing, reads professionally.
He just lives his life and reacts to what comes along.
That's an approach. But I'm just telling you, I don't think it's a very good approach. Okay.
First of all, if there are big realities in the universe, if there is a God
who expects things of us, then it would really behoove you to know what that
says, what that God wants.
It would behoove you to investigate that for yourself and make a decision about
what you believe and live your life intentionally going forward from that decision
or reject that ideology and find some other one.
But this idea of, I don't really care, I don't really think about it,
I don't think that's a very wise approach because it has consequences, okay?
What's one of the consequences? One is, if you're wrong, you have a big problem at the end of your life.
Secondly, you can't influence the people in your family, in your life,
in the zones around you that you encounter and interact with.
You can't influence them to have any real meaning or purpose to their life other
than whatever they happen to react to because you're not showing them that there's
more to the story than that.
And another consequence would be that you don't have any real power or resilience
if something really bad happens or the massive thing comes along.
You haven't built a system, a treatment plan for what you're going to to do
if you encounter something like that.
Okay, so I would just say that not having an approach is an approach.
It's just not a very good approach.
So let's just move past that one. I hope that's not your approach.
If it is, maybe you think about some of the other approaches we've talked about all this month.
Second one, I think a really common one, is that some of us get so beat up by
life or we never even started in a hopeful place.
We had a bad beginning or something really devastating has happened or we just
have been through a lot of irritating things and we start to feel like nothing can ever change.
And we develop this cynicism that says nothing can help me. Like basically,
my dad and my grandfather and my great-grandfather, they were all worthless
alcoholics. And that means I got to be too. So I'm going to start drinking.
And that's just how I'm going to be. I'm genetically stuck with this.
I'm diabetic and I'm overweight and I'm stuck because my whole family's overweight
and there's nothing I can do about it.
So why would I get stressed out about it? There's just nothing I can do.
I went through that thing and my uncle abused me when I was little or my brother
did this bad thing to me and I got broken at an early age and that's just how
I am and I can't fix it. and I'm stuck with my trauma and nothing can help me.
Or I've got ADHD and that means I can't succeed in school and that means I can't
have certain kinds of jobs because my brain is just different than your brain
and that means I just can't fix that and there's nothing I can do about it.
I have OCD or I'm Enneagram 6 and that means you have to treat me a certain
way and there's nothing I can do about it because that's just how I am and you better respect that.
And I'm just telling you, that is a valid approach that many people live under.
And it's not a very good approach approach because if you
believe that nothing can help you and to
the extent that you believe that your brain is fixed
that you can't change it that it's that you are the way that you are because
of genetics or circumstances or past history or upbringing or any of those things
that's the extent to which you can have the abundant life that jesus said he
came here to give you okay and christians have this too there are christians
who believe they're going to heaven who believe.
That Jesus died for them, who believe that their sins have been forgiven,
but they believe that their life on earth is going to be bad,
that bad things have happened, that they're stuck with certain kinds of traumas,
that they're wired in a certain way, and that nothing can change until the day
that they finally get to go to heaven. And they live their lives in that hopeless place.
And guess what happens then? What's one of the consequences?
Your ability to, as the Bible says, adorn the gospel, to make the gospel attractive
to others is zero if you believe that your life is supposed to be bad and there's
nothing you can do about it.
If you don't believe that God can redeem your time now, that Jesus says the
thief comes to steal and kill and destroy, but I've come that you may have life
and have it abundantly, that Jesus said, in this world you'll have trouble,
but I have overcome the world.
If you don't believe that there's transforming power available to you that starts
when you accept his truth,
that you are fearfully and wonderfully made and that you can change and you
can be transformed and your life can mean something, even if you went through
something hard, that your life can be different, even if your genetic starting point wasn't good.
If you don't believe that, that limits your ability to have an abundant life.
It's not a very good approach.
And if you're not a believer at all, okay, if you just believe that your genes
determine who you are, that your brain structure,
that your whole concept of you and everything about you is determined by the
neuronal activity inside your head, if you really believe that,
then your life doesn't have purpose because it's accidental.
It wasn't designed. It wasn't created. It's just accidental.
And only your brain determines everything, then that's not very hopeful.
Because if you don't have purpose, then suffering is really suffering.
Viktor Frankl said that, the Holocaust survivor.
He said people can go through almost anything, any type of suffering,
because it stops being suffering once you have purpose, once you understand
that there's a purpose and a meaning to your life.
And if that's your approach, then nothing can help me.
Even if you're an atheist or an agnostic and you don't believe there's anything
spiritual to it, let me just tell you the good news,
21st century quantum 20th and 21st century quantum physics have clearly taught
us that you have a role to play in what happens in your own life and in the
lives of the universe and the people around you.
Because the amount of attention and the type of attention you pay to something
and the way that you look and interact with the system affects the outcome of
the system and the people around you.
So quantum physics is very clear, like how you choose to live,
the decisions you make change the outcome of the reality of the world around you.
So even if you don't believe that you're designed for a purpose by a creator,
even if you just believe you evolved this way, it's clear that you have a quantum
brain and that your choices that you make change the way that the universe responds around you.
So you have an impact on the world, and that means your life has a purpose.
So the way that you choose to live your life, then...
Has to be about making sure that you make a positive impact on those around
you, that you make decisions that help other people and don't hurt them.
That's your purpose, okay? That gives you purpose.
So even if you don't believe that there's a creator or there's anything after
this life and you just go back to the cosmic dust that you came from,
then you can at least believe that the decisions and choices you make in your
life now have a purpose and make a difference.
And then I would hope that once you realize that, hey, this system is designed
so that people interact with it and there's a purpose behind it,
and there's all this symmetry and organization and all of that,
maybe that'll start getting you to ask some questions, and maybe then you'll start saying, hey, Dr.
Warren, I think maybe there's more to this story now.
What can we learn? Where can we go? What can I think about now?
Maybe it'll open the door for you to ask some deeper questions,
and I think all that kind of honest searching for truth, honest pursuit of truth,
I think that leads to questions about God at some point.
Maybe it doesn't for you. It certainly does for me. It certainly did for Maxwell.
It certainly did for Newton. It certainly did for Copernicus.
It certainly did for Galileo. Those guys, when they looked at science,
when they used science to look at the world and try to find truth, they found God.
Heisenberg let quantum physics lead him.
Closer to God. Wilder Penfield let the human brain and neuroanatomy and the
difference between mind and brain that he discovered in his experiments with
epilepsy surgery, he let that lead him to a closer relationship with God.
I just believe that the nothing can help me approach is not going to be very
helpful in believing that you have meaning and purpose.
And so I think it's not a great approach for you. And I would encourage you
to at least try a different approach.
The something can help me, maybe something can help me approach.
Is this just general idea that maybe there's an idea out there that could be helpful to me?
And that's the approach to Kathy, the email that I read the other day to you a couple of days ago.
Kathy wrote in and said, hey, I've been curious about religion my whole life.
I'm not sure. I don't really see how one system could be more true than another system.
You know, I try to read about Jesus and he seems like a really good guy,
but I don't believe that he would exclude all these other people that don't
see things the way he does and all of that.
And we read this, we had this good conversation about that incredible email
that she wrote in this quest for this truth that's out there somewhere.
And that's the maybe something can help me approach.
Okay. And I think it's a good approach because it moves you from this hopelessness
of nothing can help to at least be open to the idea that there might be something
out there that could be helpful.
One of the consequences though, is that sometimes if we have that approach,
we find something that seems to work a little bit and we let it be a hack for
success and we settle for it.
And I can't find a better example than Dan Harris's book, 10% Happier.
He's made millions of dollars by getting interested in this idea that his anxiety
would be improved by meditation.
And he studied about meditation. He found out that really people who spend time
meditating, their hippocampuses get bigger, hippocampi get bigger.
The hippocampus is the part of the brain that's involved in emotional regulation
and resilience Resilience and all that kind of stuff, memory processing and
resilience and hopefulness and all that stuff.
And people who meditate get better at connecting their hippocampus to their frontal lobes.
And they get better at turning off the connection between hippocampus and amygdala.
And they stop being as anxious.
They get more hopeful. They get more grateful. So people that pray and meditate,
guess what? The Bible said that too.
Hey, in Philippians 4, if you don't be anxious for anything,
but instead be thankful and pray and things will get better for you.
You'll find peace that way. And the neuroscience turns out to be true.
So these people that have this maybe something can help me approach have a danger
of finding out that they can try something and borrow the concept from more deeper ideas.
Like Dan Harris took meditation and stripped it of any spirituality and just
turned it into a practice.
How do I close my mind down, stop the voices, and find a way to stop being so
anxious by meditating and letting my brain have a little space between being
stimulated and responding all the time?
And he hacked that system, and it made him a little happier.
And for him, that was enough. The 10% was enough.
And I just, I want to tell you that one of the potential consequences of having
this maybe something can help me idea is that you might settle for something
that's less than you could have if you went a little bit deeper.
You might settle for a hack instead of really knowing the underpinnings of how
that hack works and why it works and what's underneath it.
And to do that, you need to have a more scientific approach.
And that's where I think the maybe science can help me approach is helpful.
And we're going to talk about maybe science can help me and maybe God can help
me in another episode on Thursday of this week, because we're going to get into
some deeper, more theological ideas.
But I just want you to recognize for today that approaches have consequences.
The way you choose to view how you're going to proceed through your life has a consequence.
There's some good consequences from it, and there's some negative ones.
And what I want for all in August is for you to just decide,
just make this one decision with me today here on Mind Change Monday,
okay? Make this one decision with me today.
Choose an approach that will help you move forward in your life.
Choose to go all in with it. Choose to not be stuck anymore.
Choose to realize that how you think turns into how you live,
and change your mind, and change your life.
And the good news is you can start today.