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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, and I am so excited to
be having an opportunity to do some self-brain surgery with you today.
I'm grateful to be here with you. It is Mind Change Monday.
I've got a brand new episode for you today. If you're not getting the free self-brain
surgery newsletter on Substack, I highly encourage you.
Take a second. Go to drleewarren.substack.com, drleewarren.substack.com.
And sign up for the free newsletter, Self-Brain Surgery, every Sunday.
And right now we're in the middle of a series. We just started last week with
the Thought Biopsy Procedure.
This week we covered a procedure called the Lousy Attitude Lobotomy.
We're going through the core operations that will form the new book I'm working
on, The Handbook of Self-Brain Surgery.
This is the center part of the book where you can go, and if you're anxious,
if you're depressed, if you're grieving, if you're stressed,
if you're stuck, if you're worried, if you're just dissatisfied,
there's gonna be an operation for everything that you can encounter just about in life.
How we think about the problem, what we can do to make it better,
to become healthier, feel better, and be happier.
So this week in the free self-brain surgery newsletter, we talked about the
lousy attitude lobotomy, and that's what we're going to talk about today on the podcast.
Sometimes you do a thought biopsy, like we talked about last week.
And if you missed last week's Mind Change Monday, go back, we talked in detail
about how to do the thought biopsy procedure.
If you missed that, go back and check it out. But once you've got this discipline
down of not accepting the idea that whatever pops into your head is a real thought
or feeling that requires your action or requires your reaction,
once you accept the idea that a lot of the things that pop into our head are
just programs that the brain is running and looking for your consent for,
and that you can actually turn that relationship around, you can start being
the surgeon instead of the patient, the programmer instead of the computer.
And once you get that discipline down of thinking about your thinking,
then what happens is when we do a biopsy, it's not just a procedure,
but it also gathers a piece of tissue that allows us to make a diagnosis.
And understanding what the diagnosis is, what you're actually thinking about,
allows you then to form a proper treatment plan so you can get after the business
of making things better or dealing with things appropriately.
Even if it's a difficult situation, even if there is bad news, even if it is desperate,
if you come at it from an executive frontal lobe sort of status,
you can be grateful that you have
that capability rather than just being physiologically obligated to run,
fight, flight, freeze, all that stuff.
You have the choice to switch into a different, more rational and reasonable
and more powerful problem-solving skill set that your frontal lobes give you.
So that's something to be grateful for. So, the idea then is to take the biopsy,
understand what you're dealing with, and then form a plan once you know the diagnosis, right?
That's what we're going to talk about today. There's one diagnosis in particular.
It's kind of surprising.
It's called LAS, Lousy Attitude Syndrome. And when you have that diagnosis,
you have a responsibility to get after it because that diagnosis,
no matter whatever else is going on, whatever comorbidities or other problems
or other issues you have, if you have LAS, lousy attitude syndrome,
nothing else will get better until you square that away.
And so that's what we're going to talk about today, right after you answer one question for me.
Hey, are you ready to change your life? If the answer is yes,
there's only one rule. You have to change your mind first.
And my friend, there's a place where the neuroscience of how your mind works
smashes together with faith and everything starts to make sense.
Are you ready to change your life? Well, this is the place. Self-Brain Surgery School.
I'm Dr. Lee Warren, and this is where we go deep into how we're wired.
Take control of our thinking and find real hope. This is where we learn to become
healthier, feel better, and be happier.
This is where we leave the past behind and transform our minds.
This is where we start today. Are you ready? This is your podcast.
This is your place. This is your time, my friend. Let's get after it.
Music.
All right, let's get after it. So we do the biopsy. We get the tissue back.
We examine it under the microscope.
And we see that, holy cow, I've got the dreaded LAS.
I've got lousy attitude syndrome. That's not how it usually happens, by the way.
Because for one thing, our brains are intensely self-focused.
It's really hard to look at the data objectively and say, why do I feel this
way? Why am I having such a hard time?
Why are all these things occurring? occurring it's really
really hard to look at the data objectively
and say you know what i might be the
problem here this could be me i told
a story and hope is the first dose if you haven't read my book my newest book
hope is the first dose by the way please check it out it's got the treatment
plan it's got the whole plan of what you do when life brings you trauma and
tragedy and other massive things if you haven't read it get it if you can't
afford it go to the library please read hope is the first dose it's kind of
the textbook for what we're doing here
on the podcast and forms the basis of the handbook of self brain surgery that
I'm writing now. Like you need to read hope is the first dose.
Okay. It's a treatment plan. Anyway, I tell a story in there about this week
in Wyoming where I was just having a rough time and I was struggling. I didn't understand.
I had a meeting to go to. And in my mind, I was like, I hate these stupid meetings.
I had a, I had a Bible study that I went to and I got stopped and got a speeding
ticket on the way to the Bible study.
And I was like, these guys are not making progress, and they're not listening,
and nobody really wants to be there, and we're all sort of doing this out of obligation.
I'm late. I don't have time for this anyway. Now I'm getting a stupid ticket,
and I'm going to Bible study, of all things, with a terrible attitude.
I have surgery to do, and I'm mad about it, and I'm just tired,
and I'm tired of being on call, and every time the phone rings,
I was like, oh, stupid hospital calling me again, and I was just.
Grumpy, and football season was starting, and Lisa was trying to encourage me.
Hey, Auburn's, you know, got a game on Saturday.
And I was like, well, they'll probably lose. They're going to be terrible this
year. And she just had enough.
And there was a moment when Lisa kind of snapped me back in the line and she
said, Hey, grumpy McGrumperson, snap out of it. I was like, what are you talking about?
And she said, all the things that you're doing, you're complaining about are
no different than any other week.
You just have a lousy attitude. Like you're just in a bad mood and it's coloring
everything that you're dealing with and thinking And your friend, Mr.
Positive Self-Brain Surgery Guy, had to look himself in the mirror and say,
you know what, you're right.
And I went and unwound what was going on. Why did I have a lousy attitude?
Well, it had been kind of a tough week. I had two different encounters with
fathers who had lost children.
One of them, his son had committed suicide. The other one, little girl had fallen
off a horse in front of him.
And I had conversations with both of them. And without realizing it,
we were getting close to the anniversary of Mitch's death.
And without realizing it, I had sort of absorbed those two guys' grief.
And I kind of morphed myself back into a more fresh reimagining of what happened to my son.
I was kind of grieving again, but I wasn't really thinking about it.
Instead, I was just letting everything else feel bad. And I got mad.
I got myself in a bad mood. And all of a sudden, everything I encountered was
colored and filtered through this LAS, this lousy attitude syndrome.
It took Lisa kind of snapping me out of it for me to then start really critically
looking at my thoughts and realize what was happening.
So once you have a moment to think about your thinking, if you start to realize
that your Your thinking is all sort of self-focused, which is what your default mode network does.
Remember, we talked about that a few weeks ago on Mind Change Monday.
The default mode network is this resting state of your brain.
When your thoughts are quiet, when you're not actively engaged in something,
your brain's metabolic energy does not go down.
Your brain starts looking for other stuff to think about and process.
And most of it is negative and most of it's turned inward.
This sort of incurvitus in se, as Augustine called it, this curved in on itself,
this It's self-referential thinking.
And unfortunately, unless you train your brain differently, unless you take
your mind and discipline your brain to think about things that are,
as Philippians 4 says, good and noble and kind and loving and godly and all that stuff.
Unless you train your mind, then what happens is you get this incurvitus and
say this curved inward on itself.
And those thoughts always tend to be about the past or the future.
My painful past, my problems in the past or the difficulties I'm inevitably
going to face in the future. You never stop thinking about the stuff that could
have gone differently or will probably get hosed on in the future.
And so then what happens is you start running this circle of thought and your
attitude gets progressively and progressively more lousy and you don't realize
it because it's a subconscious thing.
But you basically start filtering everything else that happens through that toxic environment.
That's LAS. That's lousy attitude syndrome. And when I recognize it in myself,
it tends to have this all or nothing flair.
Nobody ever listens to me. This guy's always such a jerk.
Nothing ever seems to work out the way I want it to. Why is my life so hard?
Why is everything so easy for her?
Why is everything work out for everybody but me?
That sort of thinking. And I'm just telling you, when you have that kind of
thinking, you are crowding out the working of the Holy Spirit because the Holy
Spirit is going to be sitting there with his gentlemanly, still small voice.
And he's going to be saying, wait a minute, you need to compare yourself not
to these imaginary people you're seeing on Instagram, but to the fact that you
are highly favored. Compare your life to somebody in sub-Saharan Africa.
Tell me that you're really struggling so much.
Compare your life to the guy in the ICU fighting for his life and tell me you're
really struggling in such a terrible way.
Compare your life to the person desperately in poverty and tell me that you're
struggling in such a terrible way.
You'll have a different kind of standard to compare your thoughts against if
you can break that cycle of self-referential thinking.
And here's the path, okay? Once you have the diagnosis, once you understand
that you're dealing with lousy attitude syndrome, it requires dramatic and decisive action.
There are some things that require radical self-brain surgery.
And this is it because the problem with lousy attitude syndrome is everything
else gets affected by it. It's poison.
It spreads out into your life and will mess up everything else.
You've got to deal with it aggressively. aggressively, okay?
And here's the way you do it. Here's how you perform the lousy attitude lobotomy,
okay? And that's the operation for today.
First thing is you have to recognize and be willing to admit, because it's hard.
It's hard to admit that I might be the problem. I mean, I'm the guy who's telling you what to do, right?
I'm the guy who's giving you advice. I'm the guy who's dispensing this mind-changing,
life-changing, attitude-adjusting stuff to you all the time.
So So how could it possibly be me?
That's the problem. It's really, really hard to fess up to yourself and to God
that you have a lousy attitude sometimes.
So I've got to be willing to say I might be the problem.
And that leads to the second thing. I've got to then take responsibility for
my own thoughts, feelings, beliefs, and actions. Here's what we all think.
And it's true. All of us think that somebody else can change in some way and
that will finally make us happy. that the reason we think and feel the way we
do is because somebody else is doing a certain thing.
I'm just here to tell you, I'm here to make a promise to you.
Nobody else can change enough to make you happy.
There's no other place you can move to. There's no other situation you can get
in that will make you learn the principles of being happy and content until
you decide to do that in your own mind. That's what Paul's talking about.
Learning how to be content in every situation has to do with learning to rejoice,
to find something for which to be grateful.
But it starts with being responsible for your own behavior. The book of Jeremiah
in the Old Testament, the theme of that book is if you're not happy be here,
you won't be happy anywhere.
If you're not happy where you are, you won't be happy where you are anywhere.
And that's the truth. God said to those people that were in exile,
that were in a foreign land, they'd lost their homes.
And he said, hey, build houses, get married, plant vineyards,
live in this land until it's time to live somewhere else.
Because you can't move enough and nobody else can change enough for you to learn
how to be happy and fulfilled until you decide to to do that in between your own ears.
Until you take command with your mind that is different than your brain and
take charge with your mind of your brain, you won't ever learn how to be happy.
So take responsibility of your own thoughts, beliefs, feelings, and actions.
You have to realize you're not in control of anybody else's behavior.
You're not in control of anybody else's circumstance, but you can always be
in control of your own responses.
And that moves you from this internal state of all or nothing victimhood to
an empowered, responsible position as the surgeon who can make a difference
in the situation instead of just hoping it gets better.
And then the third part of the lousy attitude, lobotomy. I then realized that
my self-talk determines my actions because thoughts become things.
The things I say to myself inside my head, if I don't remember that I'm fearfully,
wonderfully made, that the Lord of the universe, the creator of the universe
died for me, that the Holy Spirit of the universe is empowered and embodied in my heart.
And he is right there to counsel and guide me. If I don't remember that I'm
a precious, beloved child of God, and so is the person I'm dealing with,
that the person who I think is my enemy, God died for them too.
If I don't remember that other people's lives are as valuable as mine,
that other people's hearts and minds and souls are as valuable as mine,
then I start to have this self-referential thinking.
So I've got to get this understanding that my self-talk and the internal thoughts,
not just the words of my mouth, but the meditation of my heart,
determines my actions because thoughts become things.
Then I'm going to have a hard time. So once I make that switch and I say,
hey, my self-talk really matters.
And that's what 2 Corinthians 10.5 is about. Take your thoughts captive.
Biopsy them. Develop a discipline of thinking about your thinking before you react to it.
That is how you radically lobotomize your thoughts, words, and deeds. And then you.
Having regulated my internal voice, I also must eliminate complaining.
Complaining is the enemy of a
good attitude. Complaining is the enemy of a positive neurochemical state.
God talks about it in the Bible, how much he hated it when the people murmured and complained.
Why? Because as I've said before, hippocampus goes two directions,
but it can't go both directions at once.
Murmuring and complaining lead you quickly into an amygdala sort of limbic state
where you're worried about your own stuff.
You're grumpy. you're fearful, you're anxious, you're depressed,
you're stressed, you're just in a bad mood, you have a lousy attitude.
And gratitude and thanksgiving point you back up towards cerebral executive
control, where you can start actually doing something about the situation.
So the question is, do you want to be bitter or do you want to be better?
Because you can't be both.
There's this verse in Numbers 11, Numbers 11, verse 1, that says,
Now the people became like those who complain of adversity in the hearing of the Lord.
And when the Lord heard it, his anger was kindled.
You want to know what makes God mad besides all
the other things makes God mad when we're
grumpy when we're complaining we have a lousy attitude why because he made our
minds to function best when we're in a positive psychological state when we're
in a grateful state then everything starts to work better we're grumpy when
we're complaining we have a lousy attitude all we can think about out. It's ourselves.
So I realized then, number five, part of the lousy attitude lobotomy is I realized
that when I listened to my lousy attitude syndrome voice,
that internal voice from LAS, then my default mode network revs up and focuses
about me and my painful past and my problematic future instead of the present.
And the present, my friend, is the only place where you ever actually exist.
We can talk about quantum physics all day long. We can talk about relativity.
We can talk about how the time arrow in quantum space-time seems to move both directions.
But the fact is, in practical terms for your life, the only place that you ever
actually exist is this moment right now.
And that is the only place that you can control to the extent that you can.
So lousy attitude syndrome points you towards the past and the future,
the pain and the problem, and you've got to get back in control of that and
realize that the present is the opportunity zone.
The present is the place where you can heal. The present is the place where you can help.
The present is the place where you can grab onto promises and move towards hope.
The present is where you are now and murmuring and complaining takes you out of it.
Wishing for something different, looking for some other place,
hoping that somebody changes their behavior. your murmuring and complaining
create and fuel and fire up lousy attitude syndrome. And we want to lobotomize it instead.
That realization that I need to be in the present helps me to remember that
this shift out of lousy attitude syndrome always passes through gratitude.
There's no way to get out of a lousy attitude. Why is everything so hard?
Why is everybody so terrible? Why is my life so difficult?
Why does this never work out for me? The only way out of that is to say, time out. You know what?
I've got a frontal lobe and I can switch towards it and it'll help me solve these problems.
I'm so thankful for that. God, thank you for the way that you made my mind be
able to take control of my brain.
I'm not a slave to the path of thought that I'm on. I have selective attention.
I can make that decision to change from lousy attitude towards gratitude.
I can do that. I'm grateful for that. The path out of LAS always involves gratitude in some way.
So wait a minute. Not everything is so hard. Just yesterday,
I had 30 minutes where I took a walk and it was so beautiful and the weather
was great and not everything is horrible and not everybody's so awful.
I got an email yesterday and somebody said, hey, good job on that thing or happy birthday or whatever.
Somebody liked my post on Facebook and that made me feel good.
There are things in your life to be grateful for. I have a smartphone.
I can download an app and I can learn a new language or I can change my behavior.
I can download an app and learn how to lose some weight. I can download a new fitness program.
I can go to a virtual library and check out a book and help me to overcome this
attitude problem. I can read my Bible in whatever translation I want.
At no other time in history have people been able to so easily access.
The world's knowledge base. I'm grateful for that. You see what I mean? You can find something.
Even if you're in the hospital and you're dying of cancer, you can find something
in this moment to shift your mind out of misery and into mastery,
out of problem and into promise because you have the gift of selective attention.
And that allows you to start overcoming this lousy attitude syndrome because
the path out of it involves gratitude.
Okay? shifting to a thought stream that invokes things for which you're grateful
or happy about, clears up the negative neurotransmitter storm in your brain,
and allows your executive network to take control.
And that, my friend, is the self-brain surgery that's described perfectly 2,000
years ago in Philippians 4, 6 through 8.
Be anxious for nothing, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving,
make your requests be made known to God,
and the peace of God which passes all understanding will guard your hearts and
minds in Christ Jesus Jesus, and whatever's good and lovely and noble and praiseworthy,
think about these things. That's a thought transplant.
It's a self-brain surgery biopsy that recognizes lousy attitude,
recognizes the lousy attitude syndrome, and replaces it with gratitude,
that recognizes the self-referential thinking,
and places it with better thoughts, with transplants, better thoughts in there.
That is the path out of lousy attitude syndrome.
And then, you don't just think better you do better you stop contemplating and
start and start operating reinforce better thinking with better actions because
i remember that physical movement releases positive neurotransmitters as much
or more than medications and therapy do okay so.
If you've got your brain trained to eat Cheetos and drink wine as a reward system
for yourself at the end of a hard day,
then your brain will start to look forward to that and your day will become
about what time of day you can tear that bag of red cheesy deliciousness open
or open that bottle of wine or turn on Price is Right or whatever it is that
you do to shut your brain off and numb yourself.
If you've trained your brain for that, then you can recognize from a neuroscience
standpoint that you're not really interested in the Cheetos or in the TV show.
You're really interested in the reward chemical cascade that comes from the
dopamine that's released in your brain when you reward yourself.
And you can get that at a higher level in a cleaner way by moving your body,
taking a walk. You'll get dopamine released.
You'll get all kinds of brain-derived neurotrophic factor and other types of
endocannabinoids happening.
And you're going to feel better because you move more.
And you're going to start overcoming lousy attitude syndrome because you did
something different than you've done in the past and you're going to snap out of it.
And then you won't need those numbing behaviors and those coping mechanisms
because you'll find that same reward circuit in a way that doesn't also create
problems for you and violate the Ten Commandments piece of loving tomorrow more
and not paying the tomorrow tax and not treating a bad feeling with a bad operation.
Lousy Attitude Syndrome is a thought cancer that will hurt you both internally
and in your relationships with God and others.
And it has a high recurrence rate. Unfortunately, it's like a melanoma.
It just keeps coming back.
And you've got to be vigilant and scan for it and do PET scans and watch out
for it and pay attention and do your checkups and make sure that lousy attitude
syndrome isn't showing back up and treat it aggressively and quickly with this
lobotomy procedure whenever it shows back up.
And also remember, this is critically important.
This is devastatingly important because you're not just a self-brain surgeon.
With every thought, feeling, action, belief, and behavior that you have in your
life, you are also operating on the brains and the minds of the people around
you and the epigenetics of the people to follow you.
You are making a difference in the universe. And here's the devastating rough edge of neuroscience.
Negative words that you say from your mouth have five times more impact on somebody
else than positive words do.
You tell your kid one time when they're eight, you call them dummy,
they're going to remember that when they're 68.
Even though you tell them a hundred times after that, that you didn't mean it
and you were just joking, or you didn't mean it to sound that way,
and you believe in them and you know they're smart and all that stuff,
they can be a brain surgeon who's 55 years old, and they're still going to remember
what you said to them when you were eight,
when you did something silly and you said, hey dummy, why'd you do that? that.
They'll remember that and it will color their psyche.
And it takes a lot of positive reinforcement to overcome that.
You be careful with the words that you speak because those negative words are
five times more powerful.
And there's coming from you who is a trusted person in their life.
They believe you, they trust you, they think you're supposed to love them.
And when you say something negative to them, like I was better off before I
met you, or I wish I had never seen you or why do you always fail in that way
or whatever it is that comes out of your mouth when you have a lousy attitude
so you're allowing that to color the words that you speak.
I'm preaching, friend, here. I'm giving you some hard advice as your friend,
the surgeon, because you need to understand this. Your life is not just about you.
Make sure that your decisions, your words, your actions affect other people positively.
And when you need to deal with something, deal with it truthfully,
okay? But be kind in the word choices.
Be careful with how you speak. Improve them with your constructive criticism.
Don't decimate them with it, okay?
Make sure that your decisions, words, and actions are based on what's actually
happening and what needs to happen, and not just an overflow of your lousy attitude syndrome.
When I go to the operating room, when I see patients, I've got to take a second, calm myself,
get in my head, and examine Examine my inner state to make sure that I'm about
to deal with them in accordance with what's going on and not out of my own frustration or lousy attitude,
because I have to make sure that I don't filter my behavior through my own lousy
attitude and harm somebody else unintentionally.
Intentionally because I wasn't careful with my words.
It takes a lot of positive work to overcome one little mess up that happens
because you have a lousy attitude. So be careful.
You will leave a synaptic trail in somebody's life that never fully heals if you're not careful.
So that's the bad news. The good news is if you clear that lousy attitude filter,
you start seeing things the way they really are.
You start operating out of that executive state in your frontal lobe and you
have an opportunity to make a positive impact on everybody around you and the
future generations behind you because you're a self-pray surgeon,
but you're also always operating on others with your words.
So friend, learning and mastering the lousy attitude lobotomy procedure will
help you change your mind.
It'll help you become healthier and feel better and be happier.
It will improve your impact on others.
It will help you navigate challenging circumstances more resiliently.
It will improve every area of your life.
Remember, we're here in the School of Self-Brain Surgery, and we're all about
understanding and implementing the good news that you're not stuck with the
brain that you have. You can change. You can learn. You can grow.
You can break unhealthy habits. You can overcome trauma and dramedy.
Dramedy? I made up a word. You can overcome trauma and drama and tragedy and
any kind of massive thing because you're not just your brain.
You're in charge of your brain. Your mind will take control of it.
And your partner, the great physician, is right there to help you switch from
contemplating to operating on your life, to change your mind and change your life.
And the good news, my friend, is you can start today.
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 books.
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.
Or 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.