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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. It is the 31st day of August.
We have made it through all in August 2024.
We've had an episode every single day. That's a heavy lift, but we've done it.
Lisa and I and Tata have gathered together in prayer to give you these 31 episodes
as a handbook, a guiding post, a place to look for help as you go all in in your life.
And if you didn't start on August 1st, if you're just now coming to this,
if it's the first time you've ever heard my voice, I just want to encourage you.
If you're looking for the reason why you feel stuck, if you're looking for the
reason why you haven't been able to break through, if there's been something
that's holding you back,
if you've been through some type of trauma or tragedy or drama or massive thing
that has broken you in some way and you've begun to believe the idea that you're stuck,
that your brain can't change, that your heart can't change, that your genetics
or your background or your history or your circumstances have created a life
that you can't fix and you're stuck in it.
I'm just here to give you the good news. The neuroscience is clear.
Your brain wants to change and heal. It is wired to do that.
In fact, it is changing, rewiring, making new cells, breaking connections and
synapses between old ones and making new ones every second of every day of your life.
The problem is the default state is that you keep making the same connections
you've always made because one of the principles of neuroscience,
One of our 10 commandments of neuroscience is that what you're doing,
you're getting better at.
If you don't learn to recognize the fact that you actually have the power to
change, then you'll believe the lie that you're stuck with the brain that you
have, and you'll become laboring under the false belief.
Belief that you can't change when it's right there for your taking So if you
feel stuck the whole idea behind all in August is to say there are a set of
tools We call them self brain surgery operations around here There are a set
of tools that will reliably get you unstuck help you find momentum,
Develop some positive change in your life and you'll start gaining ground on
your own life And before you'll find some breakthrough you'll find some tailwind
instead of headwind You'll find some momentum instead of inertia,
and you'll begin to believe that change is possible, and you will change your
mind, and you will change your life, and it is possible.
We've been talking this week about the different approaches that people take
to changing their life, and there's five of them, basically.
The first one is people sometimes don't even realize that there is an approach that they're using.
They're just wandering through their lives, reacting to whatever comes along,
and that's a heavy lift, friend.
And it's a heavy burden to wake up every day and
wonder what's going to happen now that's going to mess me up and keep me
stuck and hurt my heart and how am I going to find a way to
process that and deal with it and we find ourselves drinking or watching Netflix
until we fall asleep or running the same old plays in our marriages and wondering
why we're not making any progress and finding our teenagers door locked and
they won't communicate with us and they're on their phone all the time and we
just don't know how to break through and that's an approach okay it's just not a very good approach.
And then sometimes that leads to cynicism and despair, and the approach becomes, nothing can help me.
I'm just stuck, and it's just going to always be this way, and I don't believe it can change.
And I'm telling you, Christians and atheists can both live in that approach.
The difference is, Christians believe that someday God will make it better so
they can just hold on long enough.
It doesn't matter how miserable I am now because I get to go to heaven,
and atheists believe I'm here by accident.
I'm going back to the dust of the cosmos that that accidentally created me and
it doesn't really matter anyway.
And both of those places can lead you to a life that is full of despair.
And the Bible says, Jesus said, the thief comes to steal and kill and destroy.
Somebody's stolen that life for you that you were designed to have.
But Jesus finishes that sentence by saying, but I've come that you might have
life and have it abundantly. He's talking about now.
And so how do we get to that abundant life? Because abundance is better than
steal, kill and destroy.
So the whole point of all in August is to say that there are at least four approaches
to changing your mind about that.
There's different ways to look at your life, different sets of tools or skills
or plays that you can run or whatever metaphor you want to put on it.
I use the surgical metaphor because changing your mind literally changes your brain structurally.
When you take top-down control and you understand that your mind generates what your brain does, does.
Your mind tells your brain what to focus on, what to pay attention to,
and if you choose to step into that role and take charge of your own life,
it's almost unlimited how much better things can get for you hormonally,
physiochemically, neurobiologically,
functionally, even epigenetically for your offspring and on an electromagnetic
field level for the people around you.
When you decide to take charge of your own mind, then you can break through
in ways that you can't even believe right now.
If you feel stuck, I'm telling you, it's possible. Go back and listen to these
30 episodes before this one. You'll get some tools for that.
Read my book, Hope is the First Dose, if you want a treatment plan for how to
deal with trauma and tragedy and other massive things.
And read Mark Batterson's book, All In. If you haven't read it,
if you've been listening to All In August for four years and you haven't read
the book yet, my goodness, are you missing out?
There's so much there, my friend. Trust me, I'm a good doctor.
I'm not the great physician, but I'm a pretty good brain surgeon.
And I'm telling you, that book will change the arc of your life if you will
read it and believe it. And so will my book, Hope is the First Dose.
So there's two assignments for you. You got September, October,
November, and December. You've got four months left in this year.
And my goodness, don't have another year where you finish and say everything's
just like it was when I started. I don't want that for you.
And you don't want that for you either, or you wouldn't be listening to my voice right now, my friend.
So we're here on the 31st. And the question is, if you've gone all in, what happens next?
What happens when you're not having somebody bring you an episode every day
that says, hey, it's time to go all in.
Somebody's not reminding you every day. Hey, it's time to go all in.
Hey, you need to change your mind. You need to change your life.
What next? Next, what does it look like when you burn the ships and you land
on the beach and you've got to go forward? What happens next?
I want to tell you, there are 10 things that you can decide.
There are 10 decisions that you can make. I call them the 10 commandments of
self-brain surgery. They're based in neuroscience.
They smash together with faith. There's scripture to support each one of them.
And these 10 things will guide you. They'll be your guiding principles.
Now, of course, understand if you're a Christian, I'm not saying these replace scripture.
I'm saying these are the principles of neuroscience that are distilled into
a set of operational principles that you can use in addition to the things that
you've learned from your faith to just give you some guideposts to help you
think through your thinking and understand the ways that your thinking might
be hindering you or that you might use it to set yourself free.
Okay? The tools were given to you by your creator.
The ability to change your mind was given to you by your creator.
The call to change your mind was given to you by your creator.
And the neurochemical and physiological and anatomical structures in place to
help you do that work were given to you by your creator.
This is not self-brain surgery that you have to do all by yourself.
It's to generate the idea that I can't do it by myself.
And I have to make a decision to consent for the great physician to teach me
how to do this and operate my own life in a way that helps me and not hurts
me. So here's the 10 things.
The first one, I must relentlessly refuse to participate in my own demise. Say it out loud.
Stop committing self-malpractice. You already know the ways that you sabotage yourself.
You already know the ways that you make a decision and you don't follow through on it.
You already know there's a repeatable way that each of us shoot ourselves in
the foot when we're trying to make progress. So it's time to stop.
I must relentlessly refuse to participate in my own demise. First, no harm.
That's the oath that we take as good self-brain surgeons. The next,
I must believe that feelings are not facts.
They are chemical events in my brain. Friend, the things you feel are not always
true. They're not even usually true.
They're not to tell you that something's happening that's happened before and
you're supposed to react the way that you've always reacted.
They're to tell you that something's happening, that something's reminding you
of something and you need to investigate and develop a pattern,
develop a discipline of biopsying your thoughts and examining your feelings
and deciding how you're going to respond instead of reacting.
Because you can look back over the long stream of your life and you can see
that most of the time when you reacted in a way that you thought was instinctual
or that you thought was required by what you felt, it turned out that the thing
that you felt turned out not to be very accurate.
And you've made a mess of things because you reacted to a feeling instead of
thinking through it before you decided how to respond to it out of the power
of using your frontal lobes to make rational decisions, haven't you? All of us have.
Third, I must believe that most of my automatic thoughts are untrue.
You have by at least five to one, tens of thousands of thoughts that pop into
your head every day. And most of them are not true. And most of them are not helpful.
And none of them have to be reacted to without you biopsying them and taking
command of your thoughts. As 2 Corinthians 10 5 says, I must believe that I
am not just my brain. Friend, you're not just your brain.
Your brain is the end organ of your mind. Your mind can tell your brain who's the boss.
Your mind can tell your brain what to do. And when you do that,
your neurotransmitter balance will get better.
Your hormonal balance will get better. Your physiology will get better.
Your thinking will become clearer.
You'll become more resilient. This is backed up and proven with neuroscience
and modern neuroimaging.
It's proven in quantum physics. You are not just your brain.
And the Bible's been saying it all along.
Okay? So let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be pleasing.
And the things you think about change your life. You're not just your brain.
You must love tomorrow more than I hate how I feel right now.
Friends, stop paying that tomorrow tax.
Stop treating bad feelings with bad operations and make a decision for September
1st that you're gonna start treating bad feelings with good operations.
You're gonna make good decisions of which type of self-brain surgery procedure
will help you make progress so tomorrow feels better than today did.
You must stop making an operation out of everything. Don't overcomplicate everything.
Don't overanalyze everything. We got the email from a woman who bought one of
those physiological aura rings, and she was worried about her heart rate variability
because she recognized that heart rate variability is such an important physiological parameter.
So she got on the treadmill and she couldn't work herself out of focusing on
that heart rate variability.
And she got so stressed out about it that all of her physiological parameters
that she could measure got worse instead of better because she was so focused on the thing.
And what is that? that's quantum Zeno effect that's the
power of attention density when we focus on being anxious
we get more anxious when we focus on being sad we get more sad we focus on our
heart rate variability it gets worse when we focus on being in a panic state
and we can't breathe and we're worried about that meeting that something's wrong
and we're gonna die then what happens we get more anxious so it's time to stop
making an operation out of everything to trust the process.
To trust the design, to trust the great physician to help us and not overcomplicate everything.
I must not perpetuate generational thought or behavioral issues in my family or start new ones.
We must recognize that things that our parents did sometimes hurt us in ways.
Sometimes our great-grandparents went through the Holocaust or went through
something hard and that set a baseline cortisol level so that we're afraid of
stuff we've never even experienced and we have to start unwinding those generational
issues just because your grandfather and your
dad drank themselves to sleep every night and abused you doesn't mean you have to do it for your family.
You have to recognize that those things are not imprinted on you.
You're not stuck with them. They can be changed, and it's time to change them.
If you want your generation to be better off than you were, you've got to make
some changes because what got you here won't get you there.
And that's what day 32 is about, friend. It's time to make a change.
I must love my brain and believe that it is designed to change.
I want to make health decisions that take good care of my body.
The Romans 12 says it's an essential act of worship to take good care of your
body, and your body includes your brain.
Your brain is an organ that needs to be properly nourished and you need to have
the proper fitness environment and you need to do things to work on your emotional
health and your thought hygiene.
We're going to be covering a lot of that ground in the episode starting in October.
We're going to have some very health-specific episodes, some
very brain health-specific episodes and some world-class guests to help us make
sure that we're doing everything we can to make sure that essential act of worship
of taking care of our brains is done properly and that we can make our brain
organ as healthy as it can possibly be.
And I must believe that I'm getting better at what I'm doing.
What I'm doing, I'm getting better at.
When you change your mind and you force yourself to work through that paradigm
of a new way of thinking, it's going to become easier and easier to think that way.
And you're going to find progress instead of regress. You're going to find.
Movement and momentum instead of inertia and being stuck.
You can make it change because you get better at what you're doing.
And finally, you must understand that thoughts become things.
The things you think about turn into neurotransmitters. They turn into chemicals.
They turn into hormones. They turn into physiology.
They turn into things that you make in the real world. They turn into relationships.
They turn into inventions. They turn into careers. They turn into lives.
The things you you think about turn into real world things.
And so you need to wield that power carefully, friend, because what you think
turns into real stuff because thoughts become things.
I would invite you to get a piece of paper, open the notes app on your phone, download Evernote.
That's the note app I use every day. Do something to document your progress.
Like we do in medicine, we have a little soap note. We document every visit.
We write it down because what doesn't get documented doesn't happen.
So write down some notes about things that you're are making changes in ways
that you're going all in, decisions that you've made, places where you need to burn the boats, okay?
Make some decisions on here on day 31 of what my 32nd day is going to look like.
What is September 1st and beyond going to look like in my life?
Because I don't want to go backwards.
There's an old story about the preacher that got up and preached a sermon.
And he said, we're going to take all the drugs and throw them in the river.
We're going to take all the booze and throw it in the river.
We're going to take all the gambling and throw it in the river and take all
the sexual pornography and throw it in the river.
And then at the end of that sermon where the preacher taught them to take all
the things that are holding you back and hurting you and throw them in the river.
The song leader got up and led the invitation song, and the song was,
Shall We Gather at the River?
Too many times we make these decisions and we throw everything in the river,
and we say we're going to burn the boat, and we're going to make this change,
and the next day we're out there on the riverbank trying to reel that stuff
back in, or we're swimming back across the river trying to get back to where we came from.
And friend, I'm just saying, take Mark Batterson's metaphor of going to your
destination and pack your stuff in your casket because you're not going back.
Take Tuesday's with Tata this week and think about Elisha and when the prophet
Elijah called him to be his understudy, that you're going to be the next great man of God.
Elisha responded by burning his plow and burning his oxen and he cooked his
business to the the point that there was no going back, and he had to go all in, okay?
When God said to Abraham, I need you to sacrifice your son, he made an altar,
and he put the son up there, and he had the knife in his hand,
and he was ready to obey God, even though he didn't understand it.
And we know how that story turned out. God didn't let that happen.
He was testing Abraham's heart. Do you love your child?
Do you love your business? Do you love your sexual life? Do you love your.
Numbing behavior more than you love me? Do you love your money more than you love me?
Do you love your grief more than you love me? Is there something that's become
an idol that you're not willing to pick up the knife and sacrifice to me?
And if so, friend, that's the thing.
That's the thing. We talked about the idol that provokes to jealousy.
God's not jealous of you.
He's jealous for you because he created you.
He redeemed you. He gave you a purpose. us. He gave you a hope and a future.
And here on 31 August, my parents' wedding anniversary, by the way,
happy anniversary, mom and dad.
Here on this day, God is calling you to go all in.
It's time to go all in. Your nervous system is built for it, okay?
You're going to come fully alive in ways you can't even understand.
And if you need another book to read besides All In by Mark Batterson and my
book, Hope is the First Dose, Susie Larson's amazing book, Fully Alive,
will be another one to read before the end of the year. It's time to come fully alive.
It's time to go all in in your own life. It's time to be the main character in your own story.
And again, don't write me an email and say, Jesus is the main character.
Of course he is. I'm talking about the role that he built you to play in your life.
It's time to stop giving that role to alcohol, to brokenness,
to the grief that you feel.
It's time to stop giving that role to somebody else, to letting somebody else
tell you what your life is supposed to be about.
It's time to stop giving it to Instagram to try to model the culture around you.
If you're a student, if you're a young person, if you're Joy or May Lynn out
there listening because you're in medical school or in college,
it's time to stop letting your friends tell you who you are.
It's time to stop letting your sorority tell you what you're supposed to be.
It's time to start letting God, your great physician, show you the types of
self-brain surgery you need to be engaging in so that you can come fully alive
life and be the main character in the story he wrote that only you can live out.
It's time to go all in, my friend. It's time to change our minds.
It's time to change our lives. Remember, in September, there's going to be four old episodes.
I'm bringing you very carefully to guide you from here to there,
from all in to where we're going to start in October with some deep dives.
These are going to be hour-long or maybe longer episodes once a week,
but you can unpack them over the course of the week.
They're going to be themed where every episode for a whole month is going to
be about the same topic, and we're going to go deeper than we've ever gone. on.
I'm going to be your professor as we get into the deep dive of self-brain surgery
to understand the nervous system,
how you're built, how you're fearfully and wonderfully made,
and how that relates to your body and your future and your family and your generations
and the work that you're called to in your whole life. And we're going to come fully alive.
We're going to go all in on a deeper level than we ever have before.
We're going to have world-class guests, amazing amazing stories,
best-selling authors, pastors, and world leaders, and thought leaders,
and people you can't even believe will be on the podcast in coming months.
And we are going to get after it.
But today, the question is, you've gone all in with us for 31 days. What about day 32?
What's it going to look like? Are you going to give in to resistance?
Are you going to let the steel kill and destroy pull you back into the old patterns?
Or are you fully committed to go all in? I would I would love to hear from you.
Speakpipe.com slash Dr. Lee Warren. Speakpipe.com slash Dr. Lee Warren.
Let me hear your voice, okay?
Let me hear you say, I'm going all in in this area of my life,
and here's what I'm going to do to make sure it sticks.
That's what I want for you, friend. Lisa and I and Tata are praying for you.
We're going to change our minds. We're going to change our lives.
We're going to remember that we're fearfully and wonderfully made.
We're going to remember that abundance is greater than steal, kill, and destroy.
We're going to remember that we're designed to heal. We're designed to grow
and you have everything you need inside your nervous system to make it happen
And you've got a great physician alongside you to help and a pretty good brain
surgeon here rooting you on There's a great cloud of witnesses that wants you
to make it happen in your own life So let's get after it and the good news is
my friend Is you can start today.