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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. I hope you're doing well. I am excited to be with you today.
Dr. Lee Warren here with another episode of Self-Brain Surgery,
the Dr. Lee Warren podcast.
We're going to help you change your mind so you can change your life today through
the harnessing the power of neuroscience and faith smashed together to find
some real traction and how we can move forward when life gets hard, because it will.
And today what we're going to talk about is something super important when you
hit that massive thing, when you find yourself in the emotional emergency.
When I'm in the hospital and there's an emergency, somebody calls out overhead,
there's a code red, somebody's having a heart attack, a cardiac arrest,
a stroke, and the whole team goes running to take action to try to save that person's life.
And somebody is responsible for grabbing the crash cart. We have a cart that's
got everything we might need to handle an emergency.
All the drugs, the supplies to intubate someone, all the stuff we might need
to stop bleeding, to restore circulation.
We have a crash cart that's full of everything we might need in the case of
that code red emergency.
And today, I want to give you a sort of crash cart for an emotional emergency.
This is going to be a short episode. So we're going to get right into it in
just a second, because we're going to help you understand what to do when that massive thing happens.
There's going to be some significant early problems that you're going to have to face.
I'm going to give you some of my insight after losing a son.
And when you face them, you need a set of tools that you've rehearsed and practiced
just like we do when we do drills for codes, when we take training for trauma,
when we have advanced cardiac life support training.
We're ready. We drill it. We prep it. We rep it. And we make sure we're ready.
And I want you to be ready, too, because you're going to have some trouble in
your life. Jesus promised us that.
It's not to be morbid or negative. It's just to say, what are you going to do
when something happens so that you won't be wiped out by it,
so that you won't be a casualty of the massive thing,
but rather you'll be ready for it and able to proceed forward in your life to find hope,
find faith, find your footing and continue to move forward and make progress.
That's what we're after today, because you can't change your life until you
change your mind. I have one question for you, my friend.
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.
You 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.
Music.
We're hanging out in the hospital. We're doing our thing. I'm in the office.
We're seeing an elective patient. We're on a normal day.
Maybe you're in the cafeteria. Maybe you're on a break. You're just hanging
out. You're doing your thing. You're doing your job.
And all of a sudden, overhead, the operator says, code red, emergency room.
Code red, room 509. Code red, fourth floor.
And if you're on the code team, you drop what you're doing immediately,
and you run to the place where somebody else is in desperate need.
Somebody's in dire straits.
An artery's been blocked. A stroke is occurring.
Something's been cut open. There's bleeding. There's bowel obstruction.
There's cardiac arrest. There's trauma. There's something. And you've got to go.
It's your job to know what to do when the emergency happens.
And if you're on the code team, you might be responsible for grabbing the crash
cart. The crash cart has all the gear on it.
Everything we might need. The medicine. The intubation supplies.
The bandages. the stuff that we might need in an absolute emergency,
the epinephrine, right?
If you're on that code team, you are going to drop what you're doing,
and you're going to run to this point of the problem, and you're going to try
to save that person because that's your job, right?
Now, friend, I got to tell you, I'm shocked at how much in life we spend time preparing for.
If you think about 2020 and the COVID-19 pandemic, and all of a sudden you couldn't
get toilet paper and all that stuff, So that created a huge resurgence in what we often call prepping.
We used to hear about preppers and we thought they were nuts, right?
They're nutters. Like in the United States, are we really ever going to have
some kind of emergency where we need a warehouse full of toilet paper?
Really? We never thought that would happen, but it did happen.
When you found yourself unprepared, it was sort of terrifying, wasn't it?
I remember waiting in line at Target to get the one package of toilet paper we were allowed to buy.
It was kind of uncomfortable because in the United States, we're used to having
access to everything we need all the time.
We're not used to dealing with shortages and resource problems.
Now, I saw this in Iraq where there really were people who live every day of
their lives in a resource problem where they don't have everything they need.
And in the medical system in Iraq, we had shortages of blood and supplies and
instruments sometimes because we had more casualties than we could take care of.
And so it taught me the lesson that I've had to learn a few different times
in different contexts in my life, that it is incredibly wise to have a plan
and to be prepared for when something happens.
And so we prepare for having flat tires. We have a spare.
We have a jack. We train ourselves. We know where the points are on the car,
where we can safely jack the car up, right?
Hopefully your dad or somebody taught you that and you know how to change a tire.
You at least know the number to call for roadside assistance or you carry fix a flat in your car.
You have some sort of plan for what you're going to do if you're stranded on
the side of the road. That's why you carry jumper cables in case you or somebody
else needs a jump, right?
In Wyoming, we always carried space blankets and water bottles because there
was a real chance that you might get stranded in a snow drift. It happened.
Snow blew over the highway sometimes And you'd be just on your way home and
all of a sudden you're going to be stuck on the road for a little while until
somebody clears it. And it's 30 below outside.
That really happens in some places. And so we had to be prepared.
So you're prepared for these kinds of vehicular emergencies. You're prepared.
You learn CPR oftentimes so that if somebody has a heart attack,
you're ready to help resuscitate them. Right.
So, you know, some basic life support. If you have children,
you know how to hopefully perform the Heimlich maneuver, clear an airway,
or do something to save your child if they're choking, right?
We have all these things that we prepare for.
We prepare for financial emergencies by having some savings,
hopefully, so that if there's some problem, we won't be in dire straits, right?
We keep extra batteries for the flashlight in case of a power outage. You see where I'm going.
But what do we do to prepare for emotional emergencies?
We don't. We often just don't. We go through our lives.
With this sense that everything's going to be okay and everything's going to work out.
And when it's not, sometimes it wrecks us. The subtitle of my second book I've
seen in the interview was Faith, Doubt, and the Things We Think We Know.
And what I figured out is sometimes the things that hurt us the most are when
something happens that challenges the things we thought we knew.
I thought my children would bury me someday.
When I got that call that my son Mitch had been stabbed to death, I was wrecked.
And in retrospect, it's kind of crazy that I was so naive to think that all
my children would be alive after I was dead because my own brother lost a child,
a young son, when he had a car wreck when he was about eight years old.
And in my career, I'm the guy that has to tell the parents that their son or
daughter didn't make it after they fell off their skateboard because they weren't wearing a helmet.
And by the way, please make your
kids wear helmets when they ride bikes or skateboards, and you do too.
Two, there was a chairman of a department of neurosurgery when I was training
that fell off his bicycle on his driveway teaching his grandchildren how to ride a bike.
And he wasn't wearing a helmet and he got tangled up in the pedals and fell
over and hit his head and had a subdural hematoma and died.
Friend, you need a helmet. That's an aside. But we wear helmets in case we hit our heads, right?
I'm the guy that has to be in the ER to tell the grandparents.
Parents, yeah, I know you say your child always wears a helmet,
or I know you say your kid always wears a seatbelt, but they weren't this time and they died.
Like I have to be the one. So the point is, I should not have ever had this
naive idea that my kids were somehow all going to be okay.
And the fact is, you just don't know. And so having a plan in place for what
you're going to do when you have these
emergencies occur, these emotional emergencies would be a wise thing.
And I talk in my new book, Hope is the First Dose. And if you haven't read it,
please get Hope is the First Dose. Please read it.
If you can't afford it, go to your library. Ask them to order it.
Public libraries around the country should have it or they certainly have access to it.
There's an interlibrary loan system. If your small town library doesn't have
a book, they can borrow it from another library.
I'm telling you, the book has a treatment plan that you need to help you get
through these massive things when they happen. And they will happen.
So please check it out. Hope is the First Dose.
Shameless plug for my book. It will help you.
Okay? Now, that being said, I want you to have a plan. Why?
Because having a plan helps you to prepare so that you don't fall into oblivion,
into the pit of despair when the pressure's on.
Remember Chris Voss, the FBI hostage negotiator that wrote the incredible book,
Never Split the Difference, says when the pressure's on, you don't rise to the occasion.
You fall to your highest level of preparation.
And that, my friend, is why we have fire drills. It's why we have tornado drills.
It's why we do mock codes and mock traumas in the hospital.
It's why we do practice for things.
Because when they happen, we want to fall. We're going to think differently.
We're going to be under stress. We're not going to make the best decisions.
And we're likely to fall back to where we prepared. So I want you to have a floor.
For how far you fall. Yes, you're going to suffer. Yes, you're going to freak
out. Yes, you're going to be for a while unanchored and unsure.
But if you have repped and prepped and put that prehab time in,
then you're going to have a place to turn when things get hard.
And one thing I would suggest for you to put on your crash card,
and we're here every day on this podcast talking about the self brain surgery
and the ways to get your mind under control and what to do and how to find hope
again and all that stuff.
So today I'm specifically going to give you a little packet of scripture.
I want you to think of it like a first aid kit. And it's some reasons to say,
I'm going to open this up.
And I know if I'm really under pressure, I know if I'm really hurting,
that having this word in my heart is going to help me in some specific ways.
I woke up at one o'clock this morning and I couldn't sleep.
And God put this on my heart. And I'm just telling you, there's somebody out
there that's going to hear my words today or sometime soon. Maybe you know somebody
in the middle of it. Please share this. Find two friends.
Text the link to this podcast and say, you need this one. Put it in your pocket
for future reference. Or I know you're going through this thing.
This will help you. Share it with your friends. Subscribe to the podcast.
This will help you, okay?
We're going to go to Psalm 19. And in Psalm 19, strangely enough,
God put this on my heart in the middle of the night last night.
And he said, this is something for somebody that's going to be a crash cart
for emotional trauma that they need. It's part of the treatment plan that they're
going to be able to use to help them when they're really suffering. Go to Psalm 19.
And I did. And it starts with this famous verse, the heavens declare the glory
of God and the sky above proclaims his handiwork.
It starts off with nature, right? When you see stars and sunrise and sunsets
and rainbows and animals and beautiful things like that, then you're going to
recall that the heavens declare God's glory.
That you can look up even when you're hurting and you can see something that
reminds you that you're not alone in this universe.
It's not a cold, heartless place, but God's out there.
Day to day pours out speech and night to night reveals knowledge.
There is no speech, nor are there words whose voice is not heard.
Their voice goes out through all the earth and their words to the end of the world, okay?
That's not the point of today. That's not the trauma kit, but it starts there
because it's God is saying, I am always showing myself to you. I am always here.
But even more than just my revealed word through nature and creation,
let me give you some more.
Let me tell you what my actual words will do for you. And here it is.
When you open this crash cart, when you're in the middle of emotional trauma
or somebody else is, there is a
good reason I'm always telling you to have scripture tucked in your heart.
There's a good reason I'm always telling you to have some worship music or some
good, solid words to fall back on to start remembering that it's not the end.
It's not the end. You've got some things to hold on to. Lisa and I used to do a little rock climbing.
In rock climbing, if you're not a master climber or a moron,
depending on how you look at it, you're going to have a rope attached to a fixed
point and hopefully somebody below you doing something called belaying,
which basically that means you can climb and you're not using the rope to pull.
Yourself up, but if you fall,
you are attached to something that will save you.
The belay is another person down below,
or you can actually self-belay too, but another person, like Lisa,
would hold the rope down below, and she's got some leverage and some pulleys,
so that if I fall, she can tighten that rope up, and I'm not going to fall to my death.
It turns out that the Hebrew word that shows up throughout the Old Testament,
kavah and yakal, kavah is this word that really relates to cord or rope or tension,
and every time it shows up, it's translated as hope.
OK, so biblical hope is an optimism that the situation is going to work out
in a healthy way or situation is going to work out in the way you want it to.
It's the it's the hope. It's the knowledge. It's the truth. It's the it's the
idea that God is going to come alongside you in this.
He's going to tighten that rope up and belay you so that you don't fall.
And he's going to help you in this situation. And he is eventually going to
solve the issues of the pain and the problems of life.
And it may not look like you thought it was going to, it may not be the thing
that you thought you knew, but the belay is on.
When we climb somebody down below, when you start to move, they say on belay,
like I'm here, I've got you.
You can climb without fear because I'm going to take care of you if you fall.
And that's what this kavah, this word in the old Testament that's translated as hope really means.
So here, let me give you some hope. Let me give you some kavah right here.
You put this in your emotional crash card, my friend, and it's going to be okay.
It's going to help you get through this trauma. It's going to help you run the
code red when you're really hurting.
The law of the Lord, this is Psalm 19, 7. The law of the Lord is perfect, reviving the soul.
When you're suffering, when you're hurting, when the emotional trauma is on,
What do you need? You need your soul revived.
You need your soul revived. You need the CPR of somebody to pump some circulation
and some life back into you.
And the word says the law of the Lord is perfect and it will revive your soul.
You know what happened after we lost Mitch?
In the first few hours, people started showing up and I started feeling this presence of.
And I remember this little verse, Psalm 34, 18, the Lord is close to the brokenhearted.
So the law of the Lord is perfect. It will revive your soul.
It's the thing that will give you restoration of circulation.
Okay. The testimony of the Lord is sure, making wise the simple.
Let me tell you something that's going to happen to you in the acute phase of
your trauma. You're not going to make very good decisions.
For a little bit, your brain isn't going to work right. And if you can fall
back on some truth to help you make better decisions, making wise the simple,
that's a time when you're going to be less agile mentally than you normally are.
So have some word in you to help you calm down and recall some things that are
true. Find your feet. Remember who you are.
That'll help you start moving through. Now, again, every time I tell you these
things, remember, there's some acute phase after emotional trauma where you're
not going to be able to do all these things.
And it's not even appropriate. Sometimes you just need to sit and rest and let
other people minister to you.
But when it's time to start thinking and making decisions, make wise the simple.
The testimony of the Lord is sure. The precepts of the Lord are right,
rejoicing the heart. Let me tell you something strange that happened.
All these people start showing up after Mitch dies and they're gathering around us.
And there were weird little moments when somebody would say something or just
the enormity of the outpouring of compassion and love would actually feel a
little bit joyful in our heart for just a minute, just a little spark here and there.
In the midst of the grief and the pain, the kindness and compassion of other
people felt good and you could feel it.
And it made you rejoice a little bit that, hey, I'm in the middle of the worst
suffering in my life, but I'm not alone.
And even if you are alone, even if nobody else comes alongside you, God will.
He will show up. He will rise to show you compassion.
So the precepts of the Lord are right. They make you rejoice even in the middle of the hard thing.
The commandment of the Lord is pure, enlightening the eyes. Your eyes get really dim.
World feels really dark. And he says, hey, there's some things in my word that
will help you start to see again.
You'll start to remember that your joy and your hope are not dependent on the
circumstances of your life.
You'll start to remember that John 16, 33 is coming true in your house right
now. The world is hard, but John 10, 10 is always true too.
I've come to give you abundance and there will be abundance again in your life.
The fear of the Lord is clean, enduring forever.
This holy fear, this idea that I may not know what I think about God right now,
But I know if I don't have him, everything else is so terrifying that I wouldn't know what to do.
Oswald Chambers said that the man who fears the Lord feels nothing else.
But he who does not fear the Lord fears everything else.
And that's why the fear of the Lord is clean. It is sterile. It's perfect.
It's not ever going to hurt you and it will endure forever.
And you start to think in those moments after your acute trauma,
this will be the end of me.
And he says, no, it won't because I'm at your side.
I am with you. This is a trauma kit, friend. This is a package of scripture
that will help you survive the massive thing and help you belay and not fall
to your doom emotionally when you're in the midst of this stressful time.
The rules of the Lord are true and righteous altogether. You're going to wonder what's true.
You're going to think everything you thought you knew has been called into question.
And you need some things that are actually true.
And when you start recalling the promises of God, recalling the history,
remember I told you, hope is a verb.
It's memory and movement. You start looking back like the Israelites always did.
Hey, we put this monument up because when we put those rocks together,
it was right after God did this thing and saved us from the Egyptians.
This is where we crossed the Jordan. This is where he parted the sea.
If the Lord hadn't been on our side, then we really would have been hosed.
That's the kind of memory that helps produce hope. And then you say movement.
Okay, God says that he will rise to show me compassions. All I have to do is
hold my arms out and he's gonna come and embrace me and help me through this.
He's gonna send some people. He says in the Old Testament, I can whistle and make bees come.
I can call a bird of prey from the East or a man of wisdom from the West.
I can solve your problem in ways you can't. even imagine.
The New Testament says the Lord can do exceedingly abundantly more than you can ask or even imagine.
So imagine, my friend, that the Lord says, my rules are true.
They're righteous altogether.
My fear of me is clean. It will endure forever.
The commandments I give you are pure. They will open your eyes again when things
are dark. My precepts are right.
They will help you rejoice again, even in the midst of your pain.
My testimonies are sure. They will help you be wise, even when your brain feels
simple because of the profundity of the thing you're going through.
And my laws are perfect and they will do emotional CPR and help you revive your
soul in the midst of this thing.
And down in verse 10, Psalm 19, 10, more to be desired are my words than gold,
even more than fine gold, sweeter than honey and the drippings of the honeycomb.
By them is your servant warned and in keeping them, there is great reward.
My friend, this will help you in the midst of your great emotional stress.
This little packet of resuscitation gear that's on the emotional crash cart.
We'll put more stuff on it as weeks go by.
We'll do more of these episodes and I'll give you some brain science.
I'll give you some practical things. I'll give you some things that helped us.
But this is a packet of spiritual epinephrine that will help revive your soul. Psalm 19.
And it ends with this. Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart
be acceptable in your sight, O Lord, my rock and my redeemer.
It's not just what you say.
He wants your brain. He wants your mind. He wants you to take captive every thought.
And especially when the pressure's on, you need to discern carefully the things that you think about.
Because you are going to be challenged by your enemy.
Or if you're not a believer, you're going to be challenged by negative thinking.
It's going to make you think that all is lost, that you can't possibly survive this.
Your wife is going to leave you. Your husband's never going to love you again.
Your kids are going to abandon you. You'll never make it. The money's not going to come.
It's going to wipe you out. Those are the kinds of thoughts you will think.
And the meditation of your heart, if you go down those paths,
you're going to change the way your brain works negatively.
Because remember, one of the precepts that we follow with self-brain surgery
is that what you're actively doing, you're getting better at.
On the brain science side, if you don't take captive those thoughts in the acute
phase of your trauma, they are going to create synapses that will make it easier
and easier and easier for you to despair.
Okay? And we don't want despair. We want hope.
And I'm giving you a power packed packet of medicine for the acute phase of your trauma.
When you're facing an emotional crisis, my friend, and you will,
when you have a code red for your emotional emergency, I want you to have some power in there.
And Psalm 19 is the one, the fear of the Lord is clean. It will revive your soul.
It will help you. Okay. It will endure do it forever.
Even when you feel like you're not going to make it, you can remember that God
has promised you that he will never abandon you or forsake you.
I'm going to give you Tommy Walker, my good friend's song.
The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. I just want you to have some
music and some words to go along with this little code red for emotional emergencies
that I've given you today.
Don't forget, my friend, you can't change your life until you change your mind.
Even in the midst of a code red, even in the midst of an emergency,
you need to have some good things to help belay you so you don't fall.
You need to have some medicine to help restart your heart again.
And this is it. Psalm 19 is a good little packet of it. I'll give you more of
it later. But for today, I just want you to remember you are never alone.
You always have a team of people and your father will come running to you when
you have a code red. You are not alone. And the good news is.
Music.
Hey, thanks for listening. The Dr. Lee Warren Podcast is brought to you by my
brand new book, Hope is the First Dose. It's a treatment plan for recovering
from trauma, tragedy, and other massive things. It's available everywhere books are sold.
And I narrated the audio book, if you're not already tired of hearing my voice.
Hey, the theme music for the show is Get Up by my friend Tommy Walker,
available for free at TommyWalkerMinistries.org.
They are supplying worship resources for worshipers all over the world.
To worship the Most High God. And if you're interested in learning more,
check out TommyWalkerMinistries.org.
If you need prayer, go to the prayer wall at WLeeWarrenMD.com slash prayer,
WLeeWarrenMD.com slash prayer, and go to my website and sign up for the newsletter,
Self-Brain Surgery, every Sunday since 2014, helping people in all 50 states
and 60-plus countries around the world.
I'm Dr. Lee Warren, and I'll talk to you soon. Remember, friend,
you can't change your life until you change your mind. And the good news is you can start today.
Music.