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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. Dr. Lee Warren here with
a bonus episode for Sunday on the newsletter, which you can get for free.
Sign up for free for the newsletter, drleewarren.substack.com,
drleewarren.substack.com. Today, we're talking about how to annihilate anxiety.
And as a companion for that newsletter, I want to bring you back an episode
we did a while back in Season 9 called An Operation for Anxiety.
This will give you some practical tools to handle anxiety when it becomes a problem.
Not all anxiety is bad. Of course, you need some anxiety in your life to keep
you from doing crazy things or make sure you're aware of things that are going
on. But it's an operation to handle unnecessary and inappropriate anxiety or
anxiety that becomes a problem for you.
So here's an operation for anxiety
for you. Make sure you sign up for the newsletter. It's really helpful.
Operation for Anxiety episode coming at you right now and the newsletter today, Annihilate Anxiety.
Go sign up. I'll see you tomorrow for Mind Change Monday. Here we go.
It's frontal lobe Friday.
Good morning, my friend. I hope you're doing well. Well, Dr.
Lee Warren here, your favorite internet brain surgeon and your host for today's
episode of Self Brain Surgery. We're going to talk about anxiety today.
We're going to talk about that moment when the bottom drops out and the fear
rises up and the hair stands up in the back of your neck and your heart races
and you feel the acid coming up in your throat and something is happening,
or is it, and you feel something that says anxiety is back.
And maybe there's actually something happened. I got an email yesterday from
a woman who was on her way to the hospital to meet her daughter who had overdosed
again and was trying to get help for a drug addiction.
And that crisis was happening in real time. And yes, there is anxiety.
I remember standing outside on the street with Lisa and our family as our son
had died inside that house.
And we're standing there waiting for the police to tell us what happened. That's real anxiety.
The things you feel can point to something that's really happening.
Happening and sometimes they point to something that isn't really
happening it's you're anxious because of something that might
happen you're anxious for something that may happen or did happen
in the past and you're worried about it but nevertheless how do
we deal with anxiety and what do we do
when we don't know what to do that's what
we're going to talk about today because at the end of the day there's really
only one question 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.
Hey, sometimes I'm shocked and amazed and always grateful when we get emails
from people who are listening to the podcast.
And yesterday we got one. And this is amazing what God does sometimes,
how he puts something in front of you at exactly the time that you need it.
It's happened in my life millions of times.
It's happened in Lisa's life millions of times, millions, maybe not.
Lots of times it's happened to both of us.
So I'm sure it's happened to you. This woman, I'm going to leave her anonymous
for now because I didn't reach, I didn't have time to reach out and get her
permission to share her name or the details.
But the punchline is, she sends an email yesterday that said,
right when I needed it, a podcast episode of yours called What To Do When You
Don't Know What To Do started playing in my car.
Oddly enough, it wasn't on the list of recent episodes. It just started playing as I started driving.
So So imagine this, she's in the car, she starts to drive, she pulls up her
podcast app and the first episode that plays is one that I released several
weeks ago and somehow it shows up and here's what she says.
Let me tell you where I was driving to be by my homeless drug addicted daughter's
side who checked herself into the ER due to massive hallucinations and deteriorating mental health.
I placed her and myself on the prayer wall a few weeks ago.
I've been so incredibly encouraged each time I'm notified that someone is praying.
Thank you for that platform.
This journey is most likely far from over, but God is moving.
She's remembering him and wanting something different. I feel like I'm literally
on the front lines of a battle for her heart, mind, and soul.
A little bit lower, she says this. Anyway, I feel like I don't know what step
to take next most of the time right now, so I am worshiping.
Hear that again. Again, I feel like I don't know what step to take most of the
time right now, so I am worshiping.
Listen to that. That is the punchline to the episode, What to Do When You Don't
Know What to Do. It's gratitude.
It's worship. It's turning yourself from the problem to the problem solver.
That sounds so trite, but let me tell you today, in this next few minutes, why that is not trite.
I'm going to tell you about a book that I'm reading called Rest and War by a
pastor named Ben Stewart.
Ben Stewart's part of Louis Giglio's church. He's the campus pastor of their
church. I think it's called Passion City Church in D.C.
And he's written this incredible book. I'm working to get him on the podcast at some point.
But this book, Rest and War, we're created for two states, basically rest and
war. We're always having to be in the middle of a fight or we're in a moment
where we're in between those battles. And sometimes that's wonderful.
What do we do when we're in the battle, right?
So Ben Stewart talks about this idea that you can learn to relinquish anxiety
and pursue intimacy with God. Now, let me tell you something I do sometimes. Okay.
I don't know how you spend your quiet time in the morning. I hope you spend
some quiet time in the morning. We've talked about that before.
One of the first things, if you want to get a superpower for getting your days under control,
getting your mind under control and starting to win this battle between your
ears where you're not always a slave to the limbic things that fire up in the
feelings that you have and you're always bouncing around reacting to one thing or another,
I feel this way, so I am that way and I got it from my parents and I can't change it.
If you want to get control over that, then I would suggest get yourself up a
few minutes earlier in the morning.
Don't check email. Email is a powerful tool to let someone else set your agenda
for the day. So don't start with email.
Don't start with social media. Social media is a great way to make yourself
feel worse about your own life in comparison to other people.
So don't start with email. Don't start with social media.
Get a cup of coffee or a cup of tea or whatever you drink in the morning, some water.
Make sure you're hydrated and get up and get yourself to a place that's quiet.
I've got this office that Lisa's created. And right from where I'm sitting,
I can see four pictures that mean a lot to me. There's a picture of Mitch and
our family off to my left, our son that passed away in 2013.
You've heard me talk about him many times before.
There's a picture of Mitch playing his blue Rickenbacker guitar, bass guitar.
And then there's a picture of Jesus smiling and laughing. This incredible photograph.
Somebody did pencil and ink, I think, or maybe pen and ink. Pen and ink.
He's drawing, is what I'm trying to say, of Jesus smiling and laughing.
And Jeff Nelson, our old worship pastor and good friend of mine and Lisa's for
many years, gave me that years ago.
Just love it. Smiling Jesus. Then in front of me on the wall,
there's a painting of Lisa that Darren Legallo, our good friend that Lisa grew
up with, who's married to Amy Adams, who's an actor.
Darren painted this beautiful picture of Lisa that sits right across from my eye level, I can see.
And to my right, there's a five by four big painting of Jesus.
And he's walking down the road. He's wearing a white robe, and he's looking
off into the distance, and you can see the back of his right hand in the nail hole.
And it just reminds me that Jesus rose from the dead, and he was healed and
restored and resurrected, but he still had his scars and his wounds, and that's important.
He lives a life in front of us, and he's wounded, and he says,
if you want to know me, know my wounds.
I'm not presenting this picture of a person who's never had anything bad happen
to him. I'm presenting a person who's overcome those things.
And scars, as my friend Jarrett Stevens says, scars tell better stories than trophies do.
Okay. And then immediately to my right is the picture of...
Prince of Peace, it's a picture of Jesus that was drawn by a young girl named
Akiani who had a dream of what Jesus looked like and painted this picture.
And he's just looking right at me. And I often pray with Jesus looking into
my eyes and me looking into his because you can't really hide.
When you look somebody in the eyes, you can't really hide.
And so those are the things that I see. So get yourself some quiet time in a
quiet place where you can get your head together.
And the first thing I do is turn on my Bible app, Bible.com.
I'm doing this one-year Bible study called One Story That Leads to Jesus.
I put the audio book of it on, and I listen to somebody reading me the word.
And then I send an email, one email. I don't check email.
I send one email every morning after I've done my Bible study,
my quiet time, worship music, usually something Tommy Walker or Paul Belash
or somebody that ministers to me.
I send one email, my daily email that I've been sending every day to Lisa for many years now.
And I just want her to know when she wakes up and when she finally gets around
to checking email that she has a message from her husband that I was thinking
of her and praying for her and encouraging her.
I want her to start her day after she's spent some time with the Lord,
just knowing that of all the things that I have to do today,
she's top of mind for me and she's out there.
So I do those things. I have quiet time. I spend some time with the Lord.
I look at those pictures to kind of ground and center me. And then I look at...
I read my Bible, I listen to the Word, I send one email, and then I get after
whatever my tasks are for the day.
And that includes checking some emails from people that need to hear from me,
some emails that I know from the day before I need to respond to,
preparing my thoughts for a podcast or something I'm writing,
preparing for my work day to take care of patients.
Yesterday I was blessed to be able, Damon and I and Alan, Kristen,
the team, be able to minister to somebody who needed brain surgery.
And so I spend some time reading articles and studying and preparing for my
job, my job as a neurosurgeon, to minister and bring about God's healing in that person's life.
So those are the things I do in the morning. And I'm starting all that just
by saying, if you are struggling with anxiety,
if you're struggling with stress, part of that might be that your brain is overloaded
and you're letting other people or other circumstances set your agenda for you.
OK, if you can get your your head around the idea that you can control your
thought life, that second Corinthians 10, five thing, take captive every thought.
If you can get yourself and your thought life under control,
then you can say to yourself ahead of time, something is going to happen today
that's going to threaten to throw me off course.
And I need to be mentally prepared for that, because remember Chris Voss's book,
the FBI hostage negotiator I've told you about before, never split the difference.
His quote that I've stolen, I've borrowed, and I've used in dozens of talks
to football teams and other people have said it on the podcast.
I quoted it in my book. His quote changed the way I think about this.
When the pressure's on, you don't rise to the occasion. Okay, Karen.
Brian, Lola, Lisa, Tata, Jeff, whoever's listening to this today, Charles,
whoever you are, wherever you are, Juliana, okay,
whoever you are and wherever you are in the world, you don't become some superhero
version of a person who is able to solve problems and handle things perfectly
when you're under pressure. Sure, you don't.
You fall to the things that you have prepared for. You don't rise to the occasion.
You fall, Chris Voss says, to your highest level of preparation.
That's why chair flying is so important. That's why repping things in your mind
ahead of time, engaging those mirror neurons.
It's so important. What am I going to do when I get that phone call?
Like Lucky Chuck in my recent book, Hope is the First Dose said,
if you haven't read it, please read Hope is the First Dose.
It's a treatment plan for recovering from trauma, tragedy, and other massive
things It will give you some tools to help you maintain resilience when the
bottom falls out of your world. And what will you do then?
And there is some wisdom in preparing your mind for having a plan in place for
what you're going to do when you are falling apart, when things are hard.
What do you do when you don't know what to do?
The email we got yesterday said, I don't know what to do. I'm stressed.
I'm anxious. Your episode came on. I'm driving to the ER and I'm going to worship
for a minute to get my brain ready. to handle whatever it is.
Now, let me tell you something else I do in that quiet time in the morning.
This is very relevant to today.
One thing I do is sometimes when I read a scripture, and by the way,
let me just take a short aside.
You've heard me say on this show a few times that I have some baggage in my
past related to my upbringing around the church and the, I want to say denomination,
but they don't say they're a denomination, around the group that I grew up in,
worshiping and going to church, this group that was pretty fundamental and had
some ideas about how we live the Christian life that I no longer particularly ascribe to.
And I got some baggage around some things that happened as a child that made
it hard for me to deal with real life when things got hard for me later.
And I went through divorce and a lot of hard things.
And it was Philip Yancey's writing really that rescued me from that fundamentalist idea.
But even though I've said those things, and even though there's some truth to
them, I want to make a really strong point right now, because if you're a parent
or a grandparent, you need to hear me with this.
Although the group that I was raised in, in the way that we thought about the
Bible and Christianity, had some issues that I had to recover from.
My parents taught me this.
That the answers to the problems that you have in your life come from the Word
of God, that to find those answers, you need to be in the Word of God.
And my dad taught me a method of deeply studying the Word.
And I remember he had a book called Strong's Concordance way before the Internet.
He had a book called Vine's Expository Dictionary of Old and New Testament Words.
He had a book called Strong's Concordance. And you could use those books to
take a verse and look up a word that you might not fully understand.
Like when Paul says in Philippians 4, verse 6, do not be anxious about anything.
Other translations says be anxious for nothing. I remember my mom would have two different Bibles.
She had like a New American Standard and a New International or two different
versions or translations of the Bible.
My parents taught me about the importance of going deep into Bible study,
not just reading a sentence, but saying, what does that sentence mean?
What does it mean in the context in which it's written? What does it mean in
the historical and cultural context? They taught me to think deeply and not
just listen to what some preacher said.
So even though we were with this group, my parents gave me some tools that you
can use in your life and you can teach to your children and grandchildren and
great-grandchildren and other people that you have opportunity to influence.
Because that has turned out to be part of the, when the pressure's on,
I don't rise to the occasion. I fall to my preparation.
And it's amazing how many times in my life something hard has happened and I've
fallen back on that idea.
I need to go to the word of God and find a tool for this moment. Okay.
This morning, I found myself doing that again. I was reading that woman's email.
I had another long email from a man about some struggles he's having in his life.
We got the prayer request yesterday about the guy who's trapped in a pornography
addiction that's now led him to suicide.
Almost destroying his marriage and getting in trouble with the law and all kinds of things.
I've got all this stuff bouncing around in my head on what do we do when we don't know what to do.
And I find myself back in Philippians chapter four and Ben Stewart's book,
Rest and War, talking about how to relinquish anxiety and pursue intimacy with God.
And here's what Philippians four says, four, six, don't be anxious about anything.
And it sounds so ridiculous kill us on the surface.
In fact, I've had an argument with somebody I love about this one time when
I made the mistake of sounding like I was preaching.
I didn't mean to sound like that, but they're struggling with something hard.
And I said, hey, be anxious for nothing.
The Bible says be anxious for nothing. Don't worry about this.
You can't control this. Stop worrying.
And they get offended because it sounds like I'm preaching when they want me to be listening.
Okay. You got to be careful with that, right? Don't preach.
Don't do that. Don't preach when somebody's hurting. Listen.
But so here's the bottom line. It does say it.
Don't be anxious about anything. And we say, based on our world and our experience, that's impossible.
How do we not be anxious about anything? Well, the answer to something that
doesn't seem understandable or doesn't seem possible is to go deeper.
And so when I was growing up, my dad would have gotten out Strong's Concordance,
which will take you to other places in the Bible that deal with similar things or have keywords.
And you can go to other places where that word shows up and what it looked like
in Greek or Hebrew and what the word actually means and all that sort of thing.
And then vines would have definitions of the word in multiple translations,
and you could really figure out what a word was supposed to get at.
And there's some danger in picking one verse and trying to pick it apart too
much. You have to stay in context.
But in Philippians chapter 4, if you go to an interlinear translation,
this is one of my new favorite Bible study tools, okay?
This is something the internet made possible.
Because before the Internet, if you were doing Bible study and you didn't have
a library of books, if you were not blessed enough like I was to have parents
that had gone out and purchased books and valued reading and all those things,
if you don't have that tool before,
you just basically had to trust somebody else to tell you what it meant or go
talk to a preacher or find somebody to help you understand something or just
read it and take it at face value and not even think that there might be another way to look at it.
But now with the internet, the phone that you're holding in your hand that you're
listening to my voice on or the computer that you're using or the iPad or whatever
it is that you're using to access this content,
you have the ability to go to Google or go to Safari or go to some search engine
and type in interlinear, one word, I-N-T-E-R-L-I-N-E-A-R, interlinear.com.
Hebrew, or I'm sorry, Interlinear Translation of Philippians chapter 4.
You type that in and you'll find multiple websites where they list the English
next to the Greek or Hebrew, depending on if it's Old or New Testament.
And then there often will be articles or links you can use to read stuff about those words.
And my favorite one is one called ABERIM.
It's A-B-A-R-I-M-publications.com. Abarum-publications.com.
Abarum Publications is an organization.
I have no affiliation with them, by the way. This is not a commercial.
But they have translated the entire New Testament in an interlinear fashion.
And you can read about almost every word in every scripture of the entire New Testament.
And they've written long articles about what these words would have meant in
culture and context and in other places where they show up in the Bible and
other places sometimes where they show up in literature from the period.
And it's an incredible resource.
And I often find that in reading that, I'll go down these rabbit holes and I'll
end up spending an hour of 30 minutes or 45 minutes reading about one word that
shows up in the New Testament or Old Testament.
And it's incredible. And so this morning I went there to say,
what does it really mean when he says be anxious for nothing?
And here's the thing that I was shocked about. The word anxious or anxiety that's
translated here, the word that's translated as anxious, some translations say,
do not be concerned about anything.
Don't be anxious for anything. Don't be worried about anything.
That word turns out to be meros, M-E-R-O-S. And I'm not going to give a long
exposition about this because I want to just get right to the point here.
But the bottom line is that word refers to this feeling that we have where we
are pulled apart or we are distracted in multiple different directions.
The word translates out to this idea that we're being pulled in multiple directions,
that our brains are being divided.
That our thought processes are being distracted. And so it's not really anxiety
in a clinical sense that Paul is talking about here.
We've put a diagnosis on something we call anxiety, and it's this cluster of
physical symptoms that we feel when we're under some sort of stress or when
our brain tells us that there's something to be worried about.
We have this physiological reaction that we call anxiety, and now we treat it
with medication, right? Well, Paul's saying it's something quite different here.
This word is basically this idea that all things are connected and that we somehow
subconsciously in our mind think that the things that we think about can control
or influence the outcome of things that we aren't directly aware of.
In front of or directly have our hands on. Like we're somehow plugged into this
computer system that we're on the way to the ER and our daughter's overdosing
or our daughter's in some kind of mental health crisis and we can worry about
it and somehow influence the outcome.
That's the lie that the devil gives us, that we can control something outside
of ourself by thinking about it.
Now, we talk a lot about on this show about how important your thinking is and
what you actually can and can't do with your thinking.
But this idea about anxiety Anxiety is that we get this feeling that if we chew
on something hard enough, we can influence it in some way.
Or that if we think about it, it's going to create a reality of all these negative
things that are going to happen.
And we start spinning into this thing where all we can see is the problem and
not any of the solutions.
So that's a very tip of the iceberg kind of thing.
There's a whole article about this word miros. And ultimately,
it means that God says, I want you to be so focused on me.
I want you to be so convinced that I can handle whatever comes along in your
life, that you can't have room to worry about anything else.
That you can learn literally to worry about giving me your problems and letting
me help you and not worry about anything else.
So back to Ben Stewart, he says this, think of for a moment about this concept
that Paul says, don't be anxious about anything. That's a command.
It's not a suggestion. Hey, it would be better for you if you weren't worried
about anything. He's saying command.
It's saying literally anxiety is never godly. It's never from the Holy Spirit.
It is never given to you as something that you are responsible for.
There is never a circumstance in your life in which you are obligated to worry.
Ben Stewart says this, the Bible says no to that. There is no value in anxiety.
That's why Paul commands, do not be anxious about anything.
And then Ben Stewart said this, which is what led me back to the interlinear
translation of why I went down that rabbit hole this morning.
This is a quote from Ben Stewart.
The root of the word translated as anxiety in this verse means to draw in different
directions or to distract.
And I don't know about you, Ben Stewart's saying, but this is where my mind
often goes Moses, I lie in bed at night and when I wake up in the morning,
focus is an ever more rare commodity in our world today.
Our minds naturally pinball among multiple issues with the inability to lock
onto any one issue for a significant period of time.
See, what he's saying there is exactly what the Iberian Interlinear Translation
is talking about, how this idea that God wants you focused on one thing,
Him. And if you're not focused on one thing, you will focus on everything.
You will be distracted and torn into many, many different areas of thought at
the same time. What if this happens?
What if that happens? What if she overdoses? What if the medicine isn't effective?
What if the cancer comes back? What if I run out of money? What if my wife leaves me?
What if, what if, what if? That's anxiety, okay? The root of it is not having
your mind focused on the one person who can actually help you with this impossible situation.
So, Ben Stewart again, Paul followed up, do not be anxious about anything with
this, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving,
let your requests be made known to God.
Philippians 4, 6, note the parallel, be anxious for no thing,
but in everything, let your requests be made known.
Here's a brain surgery tool for you, a self brain surgery tool.
When you're feeling anxious for something, do a quick transplant and give thanks for everything.
The woman that wrote in, I don't know what to do, so I'm going to worship the
rest of the way to the hospital.
I'm going to let God have this problem, and I'm going to say,
you are worthy of my worship because you're the one who can help me with this situation.
You are worthy of my praise. You are worthy of my gratitude.
I can't handle this, but I know that you can. See, that's the aberrant translation idea.
Is that this word miros means our minds are fragmented into everything we can't
actually control with the lie that maybe thinking about it some more will help
us control it in some way. That's the lie.
And instead, we give thanks because in giving thanks, we focus ourselves and
hone our mind in, my mind's in on one thing, and that's the problem solver who can actually help us.
Anxiety, Ben Stewart says, should be applied to no thing, But prayer should
be applied to everything.
This is incredible superpower. And Paul turns out to give us three steps in
handling this goal of getting rid of anxiety and replacing it with intimacy with God.
Number one is to release your worry. First, we release our worries to the Lord.
And Ben Stewart points out that in the Greek, this is a passive voice.
It's just opening your hands. Like Richard Foster said, just open your hands
and turn your palms down.
And in your mind, see yourself just letting go of that problem and then turning
your palms up and asking God to fill your hands with something that will actually
help you in that situation.
Paul says, release your worries to the Lord. Let your requests be made known and be thankful.
You just let him know what it is that you need and be grateful. Now, why gratitude?
It sounds funny. I never thought about it this way until Ben Stewart said it.
Why do we have to be grateful? Why do we, why does gratitude help us here?
Well, it's not just a general sense of being thankful for the things you have in your life.
It's a gratitude that you've been invited to give your requests to the God of
the universe that he said, Hey, Angie, Hey, Lisa, Hey, Brian,
listen, listen up. Look in my eyes.
As my dad would say, I'm inviting you to give me the things you're concerned
about and let me help you. You stop worrying so much and just come to me and
say, hey, can you help me, God?
Let me tell you what it is that I need.
And he's saying we should be thankful for that. What if you had a free pass
to walk into the governor of your state's office anytime you wanted to?
And he promised you or she, depending on where you live, promised you that whenever
you walked into their office, that whatever you put on their desk,
they would take action on it and do something to help you.
One way or the other, help you think about it differently, solve it directly,
fix it, eliminate it, put that person in jail, you know, forgive your pardon,
your commit your your crime, whatever.
If the governor said, I promise you, you can show this card to the gate guard
and they will walk you right into my office anytime. Wouldn't you be grateful for that access?
Wouldn't you revere it a little bit like, holy cow, I need to be careful.
I don't want to I don't want to, you know, blow it up and I don't want to do
something wrong and have them revoke this access.
Well, the nice thing about God is he said, hey, friend, hey,
Karen, hey, Mitch, anytime you have a problem for the rest of your life,
you can come directly to me.
You don't have to go through an intermediary. You don't have to ask for permission.
You can come right then and I will drop what I'm doing and I will help you with
your problem in real time.
I will answer your prayer. I will communicate with you. I will help you and
I will help you solve this issue for the rest of your life.
I promise I will never revoke your access.
Wouldn't it be something that you would be grateful for? Wouldn't that be something
that you would be filled with awe?
Like, holy smokes, I can walk right into God's throne room and I can say,
God, I'm on my way to the ER right now.
And my daughter is in serious trouble and I don't know what to do.
So instead, since I can't control that, I'm just going to walk into your office
and say, hey, God, can you help me with this?
And that would produce gratitude. So what Paul is saying is not that we ought
to just not worry about anything.
We ought to just be thankful that we have breath and all those things,
that we ought to just be somehow sort of joyous.
Christians talk about don't worry about being happy, just have joy,
right? That doesn't help you when you're on your way to the ER, okay?
What helps you, what you can be grateful for, is that you can walk into God's
office in your mind, and He promises that He will be on the case,
and He will help you in some way.
Does that mean everything goes away? No. Does it mean the cancer always gets
cured? No. But what does he do? He'll help you.
Guard your hearts and minds, Paul says. He will help you get your thinking under control.
He'll help you get your brain state under control. He'll help you turn thoughts
into things. He'll help you restore relationships and repair.
He'll help you hold on to hope and purpose and meaning in the midst of whatever
it is that you're going through.
Jesus said it plain. You're going to have trouble in this world. You are.
But he also said you can have abundance. And this is the secret, my friend.
Is learning how to utilize the tool and the access that we have to God and being
grateful for it rather than being swallowed up and being divided in our minds
in the 10,000 things we have to think about.
You have two choices.
You can think about everything or you can focus on God, be grateful for the
access, and He promises you.
He will guard your heart and your mind, and He will relieve anxiety and restore
your mental state so that you can make better decisions and rise to the occasion
by falling on your preparation.
And by the way, that promise that we have access to Him.
God actually longs for you, Isaiah says in Isaiah 30, 18.
God of the universe who created you longs to be gracious to you.
He rises to show you compassion.
For the Lord is a God of justice. Blessed are all who wait for him. That's Isaiah 30, 18.
And that word wait, by the way, that's the same word that's often translated as hope.
Rope, this idea that you can hold on tight to the rope that God is going to
use to pull you up out of this situation,
that kavah, that tension, that holding on, that waiting for him will help you
have the strength to rise up because he's going to help you rise up.
And what a power to recognize, what an incredible blessing to recognize that
God is just waiting for you to give him an opportunity to get up out of his chair and come help you.
So if you need a life verse, if you need a verse to hang on to right now,
my friend, Isaiah 30, 18 and Philippians 4, 6 would be two good choices.
So I'm highly recommending this book, Rest in War by Ben Stewart,
because I think it'll help you.
And I told you he gave us three things that Paul gives us to use to turn our minds around.
And I want to just give you one real quick. So he says, Scripture can guide
us towards our twin goals of relinquishing anxiety and pursuing intimacy with God.
Scripture can guide us toward our twin goals of relinquishing anxiety and pursuing
intimacy with God. And Paul gives us three steps.
The first one, release our worries. So he says, let your requests be made known
to God. Tell God what you need.
He already knows, of course. But he says, and Jesus did this in the New Testament.
He walked right up to the man and said, what do you want me to do for you? He already knew that.
He wants you to say it. He wants you to tell him, just like you want your spouse
to say, I love you, even though you know they love you. You want to hear it, right?
So Paul says, release these worries. Tell me what you want me to do.
Tell me what you need. Tell me what you're going through.
Okay. That's the first thing. Release your worries.
There's some examples in the Old Testament that Ben Stewart lays out really nice.
And he says, intimacy requires honesty. So if God longs to be gracious for you,
gracious to you, he wants you to release and tell him what you're going through,
what you're dealing with. He needs you to be honest about it, okay?
That's not the time. When you're on the way to the ER, that's not the time to
be trying to make it better than it is, trying to pull the shade over God's
eyes and not really telling what's really going on.
David got real with God in the cave and watched his worry become worship, Psalm 57 and 142.
Abraham vented his pain to God in prayer and walked away gripping God's promises,
Genesis 15, I'm quoting Ben Stewart here, by the way, Elijah lamented his loneliness
and God fed him, cared for him and showed him his protege.
First Kings 19, Jesus poured out his soul in the garden of Gethsemane and found
the strength to say, not my will, but yours be done.
Luke 22, 42, intimacy requires honesty.
So if you really want to learn how to not be anxious for anything,
but to instead with Thanksgiving, present your request to God.
God, this is the first step, being honest, being intimate by being honest.
The second one is embrace God's word.
Like Lucky Chuck said in my book, decide before the TMT happens.
That you're going to make some decisions about who you know God to be.
That's not the time to be trying to figure who He is out. You need that prehab,
that time ahead of the massive thing.
But the problem is if you're already in the massive thing, like we talked about
yesterday, sometimes it's a trauma situation.
The massive thing happens and you weren't ready for it.
Remember at least that there are answers. Like my parents taught me,
and I'm so grateful, whatever you face, the answers are in the Word.
So go to the Word. Find you somebody or some resource that will get you in the
Word because scripture, Ben Stewart says, leaves no questions about where we
need to turn our focus. And Paul says, don't worry about anything.
Fix your thoughts on what is true, honorable, right, pure, lovely,
and admirable. This, my friend, is self-brain surgery, by the way.
Paul says, think about things that are excellent and worthy of praise.
We know without any doubt with 21st century neuroscience that when you think
about better things, you make better synapses, you turn You turn those into better proteins.
You turn those into better signaling proteins to turn genes on and off and make
your body better when you think better.
Changing how you think changes how you live.
My friend Susie Larson says, what happens in your soul happens in your cells.
Psychiatry or psychology becomes biology, Kurt Thompson said.
The things you think about turn into your life.
That's why Paul says, if you're anxious, change how you think.
He said in 2 Corinthians 10, 5, take every thought captive. Learn how to be a self-brain surgeon.
And we saw Jesus say the same thing.
Don't worry, saying, what do you eat? What will we eat or what will we drink?
But rather seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, Matthew 6, 31 through 33.
The word has the answers. And if you embrace that when you're in trouble, you'll find some power.
And the last one is live out what you've learned. Start actually doing something.
Remember we talked about how hope is memory and movement, that those two things.
So not just remembering that there are answers in the word, not just remembering
that the Lord longs to be gracious to you, not just thinking about it,
but actually do something.
Live out what you've learned. If he says, don't be anxious and give your request
to God, then on the way to the ER, start saying it, start living it.
God, you said you long to be gracious to me. Get up out of your chair.
I need you to meet me in the ER, God. I need you to get there ahead of me and help my daughter.
I need you to be there, Father. I need you.
Paul says, what you've learned and received and heard and seen in me,
practice these things and the God of peace will be with you in Philippians 4.9.
This is important, okay?
We call it practicing medicine because we don't ever become perfect doctors.
We don't ever become perfect nurses or perfect EMTs or perfect emergency room nurse practitioners.
We practice because in practicing, we get better.
And in practicing, we learn things that we can teach to students.
And in practicing, we learn lessons from the last time when something didn't
go as well as we wanted it to.
We practice. We go back and we review.
I've got a meeting this morning at seven o'clock. It's called peer review.
And we look at things that happen in the hospital and we dissect them to figure
out how we could do them better next time. What can we learn from this case?
What can we learn from this situation so that we can teach other physicians
how to do it better next time so we can have better outcomes for our patients?
That's the process of practicing, remembering, rehearsing. Now notice what we're not doing.
It's not a meeting where we go beat each other up and yell at each other and
shame people for outcomes that weren't perfect.
It's a meeting designed to make next time better by understanding the past in
such a way that we can learn from it and move forward.
And that's the secret to not having shame, but rather having learning.
Paul says, what you learned and received and heard and saw in me,
practice these things and the God of peace will be with you.
When we release our anxiety, God's peace will guard us.
And when we walk in his steps, Ben Stewart says, the God of peace will be with us.
Friend, you have an opportunity to choose peace over anxiety.
You have an opportunity to flex the muscles of hope in whatever situation you're
in. It's frontal lobe Friday, okay?
And this is the part of your brain that you use to engage this type of thinking.
Is when you feel something, and I'm telling you, when you're on the way to the ER,
when you get the phone call, when the massive thing happens,
when you clutch your chest and you're having a heart attack,
you're going to feel neurotransmitter events and limbic events that feel like anxiety.
But the power is you get to attach the meaning to those feelings.
And you get to say, wait, my physiology is telling me to be anxious,
but my faith tells me to be grateful and present that case.
I'm going to use my all access card and I'm going to walk into the office of
the God who longs to be gracious to me, who promises he will get up out of his chair to help me.
And I'm going to take that access and use it right now and replace fear with
faith, replace anxiety with gratitude, replace not knowing what to do with worship.
Because focusing, remember that word, Miros, I'm going to focus my mind not
on the million things I could worry about in this moment, but on the one person
who can actually help me.
Because if I do that, I can change my mind.
And if I do that, I can change my life. And I only have to remember one thing.
I just have to 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 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.