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When life gets hard, does what we think we believe hold us up, or does it crumble under the weight of doubt? I'm your host, Dr. Lee Warren- I'm a brain surgeon, author, and a person who's seen some stuff and wondered where God is in all this mess. This is The Spiritual Brain Surgery podcast, where we'll take a hard look at what we believe, why we believe it, and the neuroscience behind how our minds and our brains can smash together with faith to help us become healthier, feel better, and be happier so we can find the hope to withstand anything life throws at us. You've got questions, and we're going to do the hard work to find the answers, but you can't change your life until you change your mind, and it's gonna take some spiritual-brain surgery to get it done. So let's get after it.
Hey, Lisa. Hey, Leigh. It's good to see you today. It's good to see you too.
Speaker 2:Will you help me with something?
Speaker 1:Of course.
Speaker 3:I can't remember what day it is.
Speaker 1:It's frontal lobe Friday.
Speaker 2:Good morning, my friend. I'm so excited to be with you today. It is frontal lobe Friday, one of my favorite days of the week. It's where we talk about the different ways that our brains are organized and how we can use that incredible gift of sort of being able to decide what you're going to pay attention to. Selective attention, it's called.
Speaker 2:Humans are the only things that god created that have an ability to choose one thing to think about and not another. Nobody else can just decide that they're not gonna chase that rabbit, that we can decide what we're going to think about. We can choose to engage our incredible frontal lobes and direct our attention, which has the incredible power to change our minds and change our lives. It's frontal lobe Friday. We're gonna get after that in just a minute.
Speaker 2:Today, we're gonna talk a little bit about the book that I'm the new book that I'm writing, Self Brain Surgery Tools to Rewire Your Mind Tools to Rewire Your Brain, reorder your mind, and radically transform your life. We're gonna talk a little bit about how we see patients in the office, how you can learn in medical school to take care of people better. Before we do that, I have a question for you.
Speaker 3: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.
Speaker 3:Are you ready to change your life? Well, this is the place, Self Brain Surgery School. I'm doctor 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 form our minds.
Speaker 3:This is where we start today. Are you ready? This is your podcast. This is your place. This is your time, my friend.
Speaker 3:Let's get after it.
Speaker 2:Alright. You ready to get after it? Here we go. So when we go to medical school, we learn how to assess a patient, and we learn how to document that. And if you're a patient, you, most of the time these days, have access to your own chart electronically.
Speaker 2:In the old days, you'd have to go to the hospital and request your medical records and sign a form and sometimes pay a fee, and you'd eventually get a copy of your records. You could see what the doctors and the nurses wrote down about you. But now you can see that in real time if it's common nowadays. I spent a fair amount of time every week. Somebody calls the office and says, oh, doctor Warren said this, but I actually meant that.
Speaker 2:Or or he said it happened on Thursday. It actually happened on Wednesday or whatever. And we have to spend some time going back and correcting the record and trying to make sure it jives up with what actually happened and all that. So the the fact is now you have the to go and read your own chart, and that's important. Reading your chart and understanding the things that are happening to you and objectively assessing whether they're correct or not.
Speaker 2:It's important. So it's good. It's good to have access to your own record. But if you pay attention to the medical record, you'll notice that our notes are kind of organized in a specific way. And if you read my notes or some other doctor's notes or a nurse's notes or a medical student's notes or an ER nurse practitioner's notes, they're all gonna follow a similar type of format.
Speaker 2:And that format is called the SOAP note, s o a p, SOAP note. SOAP stands for subjective, objective, assessment, and plan, subjective, objective, assessment, and plan. But before we get to the SOAP note, we always have something called the chief complaint. And the chief complaint or CC, as I sometimes write it, is what the patient says they're there to see you for. So you come in to see me, and I say, why are you here?
Speaker 2:Or Kristen or Morgan or one of my nurses says, hey. What are you doing here to see doctor Warren? And you say, my back hurts. Then we'll write down your chief complaint is back pain. If you say I've got a headache, we'll write down your chief complaint is headache.
Speaker 2:Or if you say I'm hearing voices inside my head telling him telling me that I'm turning into Abraham Lincoln, then we'll write that down. Patient is delusional. Patient thinks they're Abraham Lincoln. Whatever your chief complaint is, that's what we're gonna write down. It's not a place to go into great detail.
Speaker 2:It's not a place to say it's right or wrong. It's not a place to say the patient is is mentally fit or not. It's a place to write down what the patient actually says about why they're coming to see you in the most digested simple form, the chief complaint. And why am I telling you that? Well, I'm telling you that because all of us have this constant voice in our head.
Speaker 2:We have this constant internal dialogue that's talking to us. And we hear that voice. We look in the mirror. We share that voice with our doctor, our therapist, our pastor, our hairstylist, our friend, or sometimes just ourselves, and and we we have something that we say about what we're feeling, about what we're thinking, about what we believe. And it comes out in us in the form of a chief complaint.
Speaker 2:I'm sad. I'm sick. I'm stressed. I'm stuck. I'm depressed.
Speaker 2:I'm anxious. I'm worried. I'm hurt. I'm broken. I'm lost.
Speaker 2:I'm addicted. Whatever. Right? That's your chief complaint. So in medicine, when we admit that thing that we're there to see the doctor about, that's the chief complaint.
Speaker 2:It's the essence of why we come to see the doctor. If you're in my office, the chief complaint is that in a nutshell version, if you were gonna send me a text and you only had a few characters that you could share, you're gonna tweet it and you had a limited number of things you could say, you're gonna distill the problem that you're facing into the shortest, most simple form. That's your chief complaint. Okay? And the reason that's so important the reason it's so important to state it clearly in the system in fact, the medical record system, it's a hard stop.
Speaker 2:It won't let me not put down a chief complaint for a visit. I have to put something down. So I'm telling you, friend, today, on frontal lobe Friday, you need to write down your chief complaint, either mentally or physically on paper. If you're taking notes, I got an email or a a long email from a woman last week that says, hey. I religiously take notes of your episodes.
Speaker 2:And the good news about that is I'm getting ready to introduce you to an AI tool that's gonna help you take notes in a much dramatically better way than you've ever been able to. So pretty soon, we're gonna talk about an email to sorry, an artificial intelligence tool that you can listen to podcasts on and dramatically improve your ability to sort out what's going on with different episodes. If you wanna come to my show and find everything I've ever said about anxiety, this tool will be able to help you do that in a very quick way, and it's gonna be amazing. So I'm I'm just getting to know the software, making sure it it does everything I think it's gonna do, but it's gonna be a game changer, I think, to help you draw the most out of this podcast and any other podcast that you might listen to. But so the the medical record says, hey.
Speaker 2:There's a hard stop on chief complaint. You've got to write this down. So I'm telling you, friend, right now, frontal lobe Friday, if you wanna change your mind today, if you wanna change your life today, if you wanna become healthier and feel better and be happier, it's time to write down your chief complaint. We're gonna distill this thing because once we have the chief complaint, once we name it, we can know it and we can start figuring out what's hurting and figuring out a strategy to make it better. K?
Speaker 2:That's what my new book's about, by the way, self brain surgery. The the book is about finding out what's hurting us and how to make it better. That's my that's my grand calling of my life, by the way, not just surgery, but helping people figure out what's hurting them and what to do about it. That's my specific calling. And you have a specific calling, too.
Speaker 2:We all have a general calling. We're here to honor God, glorify God, and enjoy him forever, as the Westminster Short Catechism says. We're here to honor God and enjoy him forever. But it's more specifically, we all have a specific calling. And mine is to figure out help people figure out what's hurting them and what to do about it.
Speaker 2:That's my specific call. I can do that as a neurosurgeon. I can do it with brain surgery and physical things that I do with my hands, with back surgery. I can relieve your carpal tunnel syndrome or take the pressure off your sciatic nerve. I can do all those things.
Speaker 2:I can also do that with these words, with writing books and with podcasts and with live workshops that we're gonna do and all those kinds of things, coaching and all of this sort of thing. I can help you figure out what's hurting. And you have a particular calling, too. Okay? But to get to that, we have to work through the things that are hurting us.
Speaker 2:And that starts with the chief complaint because you have to name it to know it. And I'm just here to tell you on front of Lope Friday, that could save your life. Okay? We're getting emails from people that say my husband killed himself. My mom committed suicide.
Speaker 2:My son committed suicide. I've lost this. I've lost that person. I'm going through this. I'm struggling with depression.
Speaker 2:I'm struggling with addiction. I'm telling you, the thing that can save your life is to be honest about what's really going on and put it before God, put it before your doctor, put it before your therapist, share it with your friends, share it with your spouse, share it with your loved one, share it even if it's just with yourself. Be honest and objective about what's going on so that you can begin then to unravel it and start to make it better. Okay? You identify the chief complaint, then it's time then to stop contemplating and start operating.
Speaker 2:That's what our abide practice has been, by the way. This abide practice, we're almost down done with the end of 8 weeks of learning how to spend a few minutes, 10 or 12 minutes a day, and just just meditating, thinking, calming our brains down, getting that left side of our brain less active so the right side of our brain can be more active. And if you haven't been listening lately, the left side of your brain we spent in Western society for the last couple of 100 years. We spent way too much attention paid way too much attention to what the left brain does. The left brain makes everything a thing.
Speaker 2:It makes everybody a thing. It makes every experience a thing. It even makes you and the way you see yourself in your mind a thing. And the problem with things is things quickly become objects to be manipulated. Okay?
Speaker 2:And what I mean by that is if I as I said the other day, if I look at my coffee cup and it's just a coffee cup, then it's to be filled with a beverage that I'm using to to drink and wake up, and and that's what it's for. That's all it is. But if I think about coffee with my right brain, I start to think about the the farm it came from and the family that grew it and the heritage and the history and the lives and the and the business and all the people that are supported when I drink a cup of coffee and all the the memories I have of sharing a cup of coffee with my dad or having a conversation over coffee with Lisa when we were dating. Like, coffee becomes not just a thing, but a deep, nuanced experience if I think about it with my right brain. And similarly, when you think about the struggles you have in your life and you think about yourself with a left brain perspective, then I'm I'm a guy who lost his son and, therefore, maybe I'm not a very good dad.
Speaker 2:And, you know, my whole life is about that loss, and I'll never be okay again. I'll never feel better than I do now. And I don't know how I can ever get over this because I'm a bereaved father. I'm grieving. I'm stuck with that.
Speaker 2:You're anxious, and and you've got anxiety, and, therefore, you have an anxiety disorder, and, therefore, you're never gonna be able to to have a real relationship because you're so nervous all the time when you try to meet a new person, and your whole life is about that thing, that anxiety thing that you have. But the right brain says, wait a minute. No. That's not true. I've got a whole life.
Speaker 2:I've got a beautiful wife and an incredible family and 4, almost 5 now, grandchildren who love me. And I've and I've had 10 years of learning how to communicate with other people, and I've helped other people grow. And I've learned how to grow, and I'm a much more balanced and nuanced person than I was 10 years ago when I lost my son. And and and, yeah, that's a devastating thing that I'll never really get over, but I've got a whole life outside that. And and there's way more to my story than just a guy who went through a divorce and went to the Iraq war and had PTSD and lost a son and has been through a lot of hard things.
Speaker 2:There's way more to Lee Warren's story than that. And there's way more to your story than that too, my friend. Because you have 2 brains. They're both necessary. They're both important.
Speaker 2:They integrate. And that makes you the whole person that you are when you connect them to your spirit And when you put them in submission to your great physician, that's when you can really become infinitely alive and have that quantum physics dual thing where you can be more than one thing at a time. And so we start with the chief complaint because that's when it's you're able to begin operating and dealing with the things in your head that are hurting you because it turns out that you can. You'd be in fact, I would say you must become your own brain surgeon if you really wanna learn how to get well. You might say, wait a minute, doc.
Speaker 2:You're the brain surgeon. I didn't sign up for that. Well, here's the bad news. Okay? The bad news is that your brain is constantly changing.
Speaker 2:You're not even the same person cellularly as you were when you started listening to this podcast. Your brain is constantly making, breaking down microtubules and chopping up synapses and reconnecting neurons that have been connected before, constantly evolving and changing every day, making new neurons and new connections between them, and your brain is structurally changing every second of every day of your entire life. So the idea that you're just how you are, are you just stuck with the way it's always been or because your dad was a worthless alcoholic, you're gonna be too? If all those kinds of things that you think, carefully notice that I didn't say that alcoholics are worthless. I said you might have a thought that your dad was a whatever, worthless, whatever.
Speaker 2:That doesn't make it true. Okay? Because you feel that you're stuck with the past, you can believe that. And if you begin to observe your life from that perspective, guess what's gonna happen? It will become more and more and more true over the course of your life.
Speaker 2:And so the fact is you are a brain surgeon because that's happening, that process of rewiring and reconnecting neurons old and new with synapses old and new is automated and will happen even if you don't direct it with intention. Your brain is being formed and shaped by your past, your genetics, your experiences, your circumstances, and your thoughts, whether you direct it or not. Your brain shape is being shaped, and you better do it yourself or it's gonna happen despite you. And think about most things that you don't purposely and carefully steward and direct. Imagine if you planted a garden.
Speaker 2:At least a plant or a garden in a few weeks. She goes out and puts tomatoes and squash and asparagus and and rhubarb and then maybe some avocados or I don't know what else she's gonna plant, probably not avocados. That was a silly thing to say. But let's say she plants all this stuff in her garden, and then she just walks away and leaves it be. Doesn't water it, doesn't fertilize it, doesn't spray it for bugs, doesn't do any of those things, doesn't harvest it.
Speaker 2:And she says to herself, oh, it's gonna be okay. It'll be alright. I don't need to go out there. The the garden will take care of itself. But you would say, well, that's crazy.
Speaker 2:The garden's not gonna take care of itself. It's gonna the rosemary is gonna go to seed, The tomatoes are gonna fall off. The birds are gonna eat everything. The flies and the bugs are gonna eat everything up. It's gonna get too much sun.
Speaker 2:It's not gonna get enough water. It's gonna cook and bake and not grow and you're not gonna have a harvest at all. You're just gonna have a bunch of rotten plants out there. It's gonna be a mess. The rabbits will love it, The lettuce will grow, and they'll eat it all up.
Speaker 2:But if you're not there to take care of it, if you're not careful with it, Lisa, then it's gonna be a disaster. Right? Or you would say that about a garden, but at the same time, we don't we don't apply that same principle to our brain. Your brain is making new neurons and cutting and making new synapse connections between them all the time. That self brain surgery is happening, and you can direct it or not.
Speaker 2:And if you don't direct it, guess what? It's gonna go crazy like that garden. And if you don't like what you've been living and you don't directly actively direct it yourself, you're gonna keep getting what you've been getting because choosing not to change is actually choosing to stay the same or worse. It's not gonna be okay unless you get involved in it. That's the bad news.
Speaker 2:The good news is you can change it. You can actually learn how to be a good self brain surgeon. There's principles. We call them the 10 commandments that will help you get that done in a healthier way, and there's a whole bunch of operations that starts with the with the thought biopsy and learning how to take your thoughts captive and learning how to change your mind like Romans 12:2 says. Don't conform to how the world and the pressures of everything you're going through wants you to feel and think, but rather be transformed by the renewing of your mind.
Speaker 2:You can choose to take hope. You can choose to flex the engine of hope and remember and move towards God's promises. You can choose to change your mind radically, and it'll change your life. It's time to stop contemplating and start operating. Okay?
Speaker 2:And that being said, it's time to talk about the second commandment of self brain surgery. It's time the second commandment is I must actually believe that feelings are not facts. Feelings are chemical events in my brain. I must recognize that feelings are not facts. They are chemical events in my brain.
Speaker 2:Why is that so important? It's important because let me tell you a story. K? I'm a tell you a story. 1st day of medical school interviews.
Speaker 2:Okay? I grew up in a small town in Oklahoma that most people have never heard of called Broken Bow. People in Nebraska get a kick out of that because I live in Nebraska now close to a town in Nebraska called Broken Bow. And people from Broken Bow, Nebraska, way back in the day, went to Oklahoma to start a lumber mill and they called the town Broken Bow because they were from Broken Bow, Nebraska. So they started a town in Oklahoma called Broken Bow.
Speaker 2:And so I grew up in Broken Bow, Oklahoma, never knowing that I was gonna live just down the road from Broken Bow, Nebraska. So shout out to Broken Bow, Nebraska and Broken Bow, Oklahoma if you're there listening. That's where I'm from, Broken Bow, Oklahoma. So I grew up in a small town that most people never heard of, went to a small Christian college that you probably never heard of called Oklahoma Christian University. It was Christian college back in those days, changed to university while I was there, actually.
Speaker 2:I was one of the I think the 2nd graduating class when it was a university. And then I went to a state medical school. They're called my my colleagues in residency who had trained at Harvard and Yale and USC and other places like that called me state school because they were from bigger, more prestigious medical schools than I was. And I was from the sticks. They call me Forrest because I got to Pittsburgh for residency the same year that Forrest Gump came out.
Speaker 2:And I had kind of an accent when I would run off. The beeper would go off and I'd run off to the telephone because back then we didn't have cell phones. You had to run over to the wall and make a phone call. They would all yell, run, Forrest, run. So they constantly made fun of me about where I was from.
Speaker 2:So imagine me being that blonde headed kid from Oklahoma, from a small town nobody ever heard of and a small college nobody ever heard of, interviewing for medical school at places like Vanderbilt and Emory and Stanford and all over the country at these interviews, I had a story in my head about who I was and where I was from, and I had a set of feelings that I felt about who I was and what I'd been through and whether or not I was qualified to be there. Okay? And my story was, who am I? Nobody. I'm from a nowhere town and a nowhere college in a small state place that nobody ever heard of.
Speaker 2:And who would want to have to bring me into medical school? Who's gonna give me a shot? I have no business being here. I actually remember having a thought in my first interview. I had a thought that maybe there was some mix up and somebody lost a bunch of applicants applications from more qualified candidates, and that's why I'd gotten an interview at Vanderbilt.
Speaker 2:I remember sitting at Vanderbilt in this prestigious medical school actually looking around the room and looking at those other kids and saying, gosh, I hope nobody asked me where I'm from because I'm from a small town. I'm from a tiny high school and a tiny college, and, surely, I don't deserve to be here with these guys. All around me, there were people who went to med school at Yale and Princeton or went to college rather. Yale and Princeton and Duke and Vanderbilt and Stanford and UCLA and all these big schools. And here I'm sitting from little tiny Oklahoma Christian College nobody ever heard of.
Speaker 2:And so I had a story in my head that I was not qualified, didn't deserve to be there, was somehow an imposter, that somebody was gonna figure out that they had made a mistake and shouldn't have even invited me. That that was the story. I had a set of feelings. I felt unqualified. I felt ashamed of where I was from.
Speaker 2:I didn't feel like I matched up with the other people there. But you know what there was, too? There was not just a story and a set of feelings. There were a set of objective facts. There were a set of facts about me that were true even though I couldn't feel them and even though I didn't acknowledge them.
Speaker 2:Here's what the facts were: I finished top of my class in high school. I finished top of my class in college. I was I was a biochemistry major, so I had done a little bit more. Most kids that go to med school major in what they call premed, which is sort of the basic, most entry level degree that you can get to go into medical school. It's biology.
Speaker 2:It's a little bit of chemistry. It's a little bit of math. Nothing too challenging. It's it's the basics to get you qualified to submit your application to medical school. Well, truth is, I was kinda scared that maybe I wouldn't get into medical school, and then what would I be able to do with a pre med degree?
Speaker 2:So I went into biochemistry. Biochemistry was a degree that was supposed to be the hardest undergraduate degree you could get at that college other than engineering, and it was supposed to be able to prepare you for graduate school or for a practice in a a career in chemistry or something if you wanted to go into industry and get a job with DuPont or someplace like that or or go to graduate school and get a PhD and teach college in biochemistry or something like that, then a degree in biochemistry would set you up well for that. So that's what I did. I got a degree in biochemistry. So it turned out at the end of college, that was number 1 in my class with a biochemistry degree, and I'd taken chemistry and analytical chemistry and 2 semesters of college physics and a bunch of calculus and trigonometry and some differential equations and some bigger things.
Speaker 2:And on paper, I actually was more qualified from that small school with a straight a almost straight a resume than some kid who had finished in the middle of their class at Harvard with a basic degree in premed. And so from the objective interviewer's perspective, I had a pretty strong piece of paper. Right? Not only that, but I've worked for 2 years in a research lab at the very prestigious Oklahoma Medical Research Foundation in the Alexander Fleming lab, where people were working on groundbreaking things that ultimately had a lot to do with figuring out some of the the really important immunological aspects of diseases like lupus and Sjogren's syndrome and ulcerative colitis and things like that, ankylosing spondylitis. And I ended up having contributed to and published a couple of papers that ended up in very prestigious journals, like the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and The Lancet.
Speaker 2:And so on paper, I had an incredibly strong resume. I'd done well on my MCAS, the medical college admission test. I had an excellent grade point average. I had very strong letters of recommendation from professors and research assistants and including people like John Harley, who was an MD PhD and was one of the world's leading experts in lupus. So I had a very strong application.
Speaker 2:And so, objectively, when somebody was looking at me as a candidate, it would have looked like a pretty good candidate. Right? So I just wanna I'm telling you that story just to say this. You can have a set of feelings, and you can have a set of facts, and they don't necessarily line up. And from a brain science standpoint, your brain makes you feel all kinds of things.
Speaker 2:And feelings are designed in your brain to point you towards something that's going on. They don't tell you what's going on. They just tell you that something may be going on. So in in other words, chemically, fear, as we've talked about before, fear feels like fear regardless of the source of the fear. Okay?
Speaker 2:So a good example of that is if you are walking through the woods and you look down and you're about to step on a giant rattlesnake, your brain is gonna trigger a chemical event and electrical events that make you feel afraid, and you're going to jump backwards and run away because you're about to step on a snake. Right? Well, if you also are walking across your kitchen floor and your peripheral vision catches something sort of long and tubular on the ground, your brain may tell you there's a snake down there, and you may trigger the very same set of fears and physiological reactions as you did if there was a real snake. Only the difference is it's a paper towel that somebody dropped a towel holder that somebody dropped on the floor. And in the dark, your peripheral vision caught it, and you thought it was a snake, but it's not a snake.
Speaker 2:So you had the same reaction, the same feeling that one time there was really something going on that was dangerous and another time, there wasn't something going on that was dangerous, and you couldn't tell the difference. Why? Because feelings aren't facts. Feelings are chemical events. So what's the job then?
Speaker 2:The job is to get your frontal lobe involved and objectively assess the situation before you respond to it. Now that doesn't work if there's a giant rattlesnake under your foot. Okay? You need to you need to run away. But if there's just a paper towel down there, paper towel holder, you don't need to run away.
Speaker 2:So you've got to build a system then where you can appropriately react to the things that are in fact dangerous or harmful, but you can also appropriately respond to the things that are not. And so that's the reason that we say feelings aren't facts. Okay? So here I am interviewing for medical school. It's huge case of impostor syndrome, convincing myself that I shouldn't even be there.
Speaker 2:Almost didn't go to the interview at Vanderbilt. I thought no way in the world should I be there. No way am I going to Vanderbilt. I'm not going to Emory. I'm not gonna go to Stanford.
Speaker 2:I'm not going to these big interviews. I'm just going to go to o u. I ended up going to medical school at o u, by the way, University of Oklahoma, because some wise person, John Harley, convinced me that medical school is just the beginning of your education and that all medical schools, because they have to have the same assessments of their students at the end, they all have the same standards. And everybody that goes to medical school and graduates well gets the same training, basically. And this residency training where you become who you're gonna be and your specialty.
Speaker 2:And for me, it turned out to be staying closer to home and getting the scholarship from the Air Force that turned out to be a much better financial decision for me, and it turned out to be an outstanding outstanding education for me. So I stayed home and went to o u. But at that time when I was interviewing, I had this impostor syndrome. I didn't think I belonged anywhere else. But the truth is, feelings aren't facts, and you got to learn how to biopsy your feelings.
Speaker 2:K? So the point of today, the frontal lobe Friday point of today, is this. You can't fix something until you name it, and you can't name it until you formulate the chief complaint. You've got to sit with your symptoms, sit with your life, sit with your trauma and tragedy and massive things, and you got to distill what's going on into something that you can hold up before yourself or your doctor or your therapist or hopefully before god. And you can say, hey.
Speaker 2:I'm a bruised read here. I'm hurting, and this is what's going on. This is what's happening. And, you know, there's some people, honestly, that haven't been through a lot of trauma or tragedy or massive things. NT Wright is a theologian that I read a lot.
Speaker 2:He's one of the most well respected theologians in the world, and he writes in one of his books that he's the least bereaved person that he knows. He said, I haven't lost anybody except parents that were supposed to go up before me, haven't lost a child, haven't been through a divorce, haven't had a bankruptcy, haven't, you know, had really ever had any health issues. I'm just the least bereaved person I know. And he's honest about that, and you might be that person too. But I guarantee you that even if you haven't been through some kind of massive thing, there's some issues in your life that you deal with when you think of yourself in the quiet of the night or when you look in the mirror.
Speaker 2:You've got a story. You got a set of feelings. You got a set of things you've been through. And even if you have a really healthy self esteem, maybe you feel stuck in some way. Maybe you feel like you aren't quite performing as well as you should.
Speaker 2:Maybe you feel like you haven't managed your finances as well as you should have. Maybe you are frustrated because you can't break through with some health issues because you can't quite get yourself in a habit of working out or losing some weight or handling your diet in a different way. But there's something in your life, if you're honest, that you need to to sort of present to the lord and try to square away, to try to achieve some higher level of performance if you haven't or to overcome some problem if you haven't. So regardless of whether you've lost a child or been through something hard or you're dealing with something hard or you're in the middle of something that's just devastating or you just feel like you're kinda stuck or you need to perform a little bit better or you're not quite where you thought you would be at this point in your life or whatever it is, you've got to formulate that chief complaint, my friend. You gotta be able to name it to know it.
Speaker 2:You have to be able to put it on paper. It's a hard stop. You can't go through the rest of the visit, the rest of the charting, the rest of the diagnostic work, the formulation of the assessment and the plan of what we're gonna do next until you name it and know it and formulate it as a chief complaint. You can't do that until you start recognizing that feelings aren't facts, and there's some things that you need to actually biopsy and identify so we can get to the root of the real issue so that we can start making progress with it. And you know what the good news about all that is, my friend?
Speaker 2:You can change your life, and you can change your mind. If you get the cheap complaint out there, then we can really get after it. We can stop contemplating and start operating. And even here on frontal lobe Friday, we can start today.
Speaker 3:Hey. Thanks for listening. The doctor Lee Warren podcast is brought to you by my brand new book, Hope is the First Dose. It's a treatment plan for recovering from trauma, tragedy, and other massive things. It's available everywhere books are sold, and I narrated the audiobooks.
Speaker 3:Hey. The theme music for the show is get up by my friend Tommy Walker, available for free at tommywalkerministries.org. They are supplying worship resources for worshipers all over the world to worship the most high god. And if you're interested in learning more, check out tommywalkerministries.org. If you need prayer, go to the prayer wall at wleewarrenmd.com/ prayer.
Speaker 3:Wleewarnmd.com/ prayer. And go to my website and sign up for the newsletter, self brain surgery, every Sunday since 2014, helping people in all 50 states and 60 plus countries around the world. I'm doctor Lee Warren, and I'll talk to you soon. Remember, frame, you can't change your life until you change your mind. And the good news is you can start today.