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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 for some self-brain surgery
on Self-Brain Surgery Saturday, and we are on the 17th day of all in August.
I had two incredible conversations yesterday, one that will be on the podcast
for Mind Change Monday in a couple of days.
I had a tremendous talk with a lady who is a neurosurgeon in Mobile,
Alabama, who's gained quite a bit of fame for her social media channel,
Bama Brain Doc. doc, and she has an incredible story.
She's dealing with some big adversity, and she's going to help you go all in.
She's going to help you change your mind and change your life,
and I can't wait to bring that conversation to you on Monday.
I'll be dripping some content from that on my Instagram channel.
If you're not following me on Instagram, at DrLeeWarren on Instagram,
lots of encouraging content there, and you'll be seeing some highlights from
that upcoming talk with Amber Gordon,
the Bama Brain Doc, over the next couple of days, so look forward to that,
and go follow Follow me on Instagram at DrLeeWarren on Instagram.
Check that out. Hey, we're talking about all in August, okay?
And one way to go all in is to get your thinking under control.
I'm not talking about mindless positivity.
We've talked about how important it is to have a positivity bias to your thinking,
but we want realistic thinking.
And the research is clear. It's far more important to get rid of negative thinking
than it is to adopt a false positive thinking.
The idea is you need to get automatic negative thoughts thoughts,
deceptive brain messages, harmful feelings and thoughts that your brain throws up to you.
You need to get that under control if you want to begin to make progress in your life.
And the most powerful and best way to do that is with an operation called the thought biopsy.
This is our foundational principle of self-brain surgery.
The second conversation I had yesterday was for a podcast called Becoming Heart Strong.
A woman named Jess Lindbergh, she's been through a lot, has lost a child,
has another child that's special needs, and her husband has started some some
nonprofit work to really helping other families that have gone through difficult things.
And we had an incredible talk. And one of the things we talked about was how
important it is to learn the thought biopsy technique and get your mind working
on behalf of you instead of against you.
And so it reminded me that we need to get serious and all in August about learning this technique.
And rather than repeating the entire conversation that we had back in June,
I'm gonna give it back to you. And I've got a worksheet for you. You can download it.
It's in the show notes. And it's basically a worksheet to help you learn this
process of taking your thoughts captive, biopsying them before you respond to
them or react to them. And it is a superpower.
I guarantee you this procedure works.
It's going to help you change your mind more than just about anything else.
So I'm going to give that back to you today. We had a good long talk about the thought biopsy.
Share this with your friends and say, hey, I know it's already mid-month,
but let's go all in together.
Okay, send it to five or ten friends. Do a small group.
Use these episodes as a curriculum for how you can go all in on your life.
This will make a huge difference in your ability to become healthier,
feel better, and be happier.
Lisa and Tata and I are praying for you, and I want you to get this biopsy process
under your command. I want you to learn it, implement it, and make it a practice
in your life, and I want to hear from you about how it's helping you.
Send me an email, lee at drleewarren.com, or at voicemail, speakpipe.com slash
drleewarren, speakpipe.com slash drleewarren is the voicemail.
Leave that for us, and let's get after it with the Thought Biopsy today.
Good morning, my friend.
Dr. Lee Warren here with you, and we are going to do some self-brain surgery today.
I'm going to teach you and walk you through the foundational procedure of self-brain
surgery, the thought biopsy. This is the most important procedure.
It's the beginning of all the operations that we can do to change our minds
and change our lives. if you are not getting my newsletter, you are missing
out on some very important work and a very great community.
It's drleewarren.substack.com.
Drleewarren.substack.com is free. There are things you can pay for,
but the newsletter is always free.
We talked about learning to control your mind and how to work through this foundational procedure.
And I've created a free worksheet for you where you can go and work through
the steps of learning this discipline of biopsying your your thoughts,
challenging the ones that aren't true, attacking the ones that are true but
need to be refined or modified,
and getting rid of and transplanting unhealthy negative thoughts for healthy ones.
Learning how to gain control of that battlefield of your mind,
as the Bible calls it, taking every thought captive.
That's what we're after with the Thought Biopsy Procedure, and we're going to
get after it as soon as you answer one question.
And 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 this is the place self-brain
surgery schooled 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 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.
All right, let's get after it. Hey, in brain surgery school,
neurosurgery residency...
One of the first procedures that we learned how to perform is called a brain biopsy.
This is a very important foundational procedure for neurosurgeons. And here's why.
If you come to see me and you've got headaches or some problem,
and we do an MRI scan or a CT scan or something like that, and we see a spot
that shouldn't be there, something that we don't know what it is,
something that's unusual,
something that looks scary, we see a spot on the MRI.
We don't always know for sure what that spot is. There are some things that are obvious.
We know some things that we know exactly what they are.
But many times there's a spot that we're not sure about, and we're not even
sure if it's causing the symptoms that you're complaining about.
And so it would be completely nuts if you came in and said, hey,
I'm having headaches. I did an MRI. There's a little spot there.
And I wasn't sure what it was. If my next statement to you was,
okay, let's go to surgery.
Let's just go in there and remove this thing and do radical brain surgery,
give you some chemotherapy and radiation and put you on all these drugs.
You'd say, wait, time out.
Don't you want to know a little bit more about this spot before you start radically treating it?
Don't you want to know what this thing is and understand its nature to decide
the best plan before you decide to run off with a insanely invasive reaction
to the question of what this spot might be? that you would think that was a little nutty.
And if you didn't think so, you would be severely misinformed and I would be
committing malpractice if I just reacted to everything I see on a screen.
Whether or not I understood what it was, that that would be malpractice.
And so what we do then is we teach young neurosurgical trainees.
This procedure of how to go to surgery and in a very minimally invasive way,
sometimes under just local anesthesia,
we can drill a very tiny hole in the skull and we can pass a needle using computer
guidance very precisely and safely through the brain and get a piece of this
tissue and we can make sure that we know, we take that tissue,
send it down to the pathologist and they tell us exactly what it is.
We know exactly what we're dealing with before we perform major surgery,
before we go crazy and do radical brain surgery and radiation and chemotherapy
and all these harmful things.
We want to make sure it's not just a little infection or a little piece of scar
or a little piece of white matter.
You might have multiple sclerosis or something else. It might be normal.
We might have to do nothing. It might have absolutely nothing with your symptoms,
and we may not need to do any kind of treatment.
Or it might be something that you can just simply take a medicine for to get rid of.
So there's a million different things that we could learn from that biopsy,
and all of those would help us to refine our response and our strategy for dealing
with the issue and trying to help you get better, right? Right.
So the reason that we teach the trainees early in their training,
this simple procedure is that it's simple, but it's also important.
And that gives them confidence. We have this idea that there's something small,
a small step that they can take.
If they learn it and master it and learn all the steps and learn when and how
to apply it safely, that they'll begin to develop confidence that they can then
learn bigger things, harder things,
more important things, or more sort of elegant things as they go along.
They can add more and more complex procedures to the increasingly complex problems
that their patients have.
Then they can learn that they're capable of making sound, strategic,
and tactical decisions because they've got a plan. They got a way to attack
information and problems with a sound strategy going forward.
And in the same way, friend, I just want to communicate to you,
self-brain surgeons, that's all of us, that's you and me, we need to learn to
biopsy our thinking before we react mindlessly to it.
You got tens of thousands of automatic thoughts every day. They just pop into your head.
And the interesting thing is they sound like you, right? Right.
You've got this voice in your head that's always popping up.
Say, hey, why do you always do that? You'll never get this done.
Every time you try that, you fail. I don't even know why you're trying this new thing.
She's never going to forgive you. He's never going to come back.
This outcome of this procedure is going to fail and you're going to die.
You're a disaster. You're a loser. You remember you hear these thoughts, you hear these voices.
They always sound like you. They're always accusing. They're mostly negative.
And you just hear them all day long. And the problem is, they sound like us,
and so we think that we're thinking those things.
And I need to remind you, you're not your brain, okay?
Your mind and your brain are separate things. I hope that in the course of doing
this podcast, I've convinced you of that.
I've shown you the science, the physics, the physiology, the neuroscience research and brain imaging.
It is very clear to an honest observer that the brain does not create this illusion of mind.
You're not just a bunch of neurons in your head, but mind and brain are separate.
And mind actually is in charge.
Mind has top-down control over brain.
But the brain's job is to constantly automate things so you don't have to spend
as much mental energy thinking about them and executing them.
So you can use your mental energy for other things. A good example is breathing.
The brain wires together a bunch of different neurons in your brain that all
subserve the function of breathing so that you can breathe anytime your mind
tells you to take a breath.
Like I can tell you, hey, take a breath and your mind hears me say that and
your mind tells your brain to tell your body to take a breath.
That's fine. You can do that from mind down. But then your brain says,
hey, you know what? I need to breathe in order to survive.
But if I had to think about every breath I would take, that would take a lot of mental energy.
And when I fall asleep, I would stop breathing. So I need to automate that process
so you don't have to think about it as much.
So then brain wires together through what we call Hebb's law,
neurons that fire together, wire together, they create synapses to generate
programs, to run things automatically that don't require your mental energy.
And so you breathe automatically, right?
That's a good example of what brain does. Brain wires things together to automate
as many things as possible to reduce the mental energy and directed mental input
that you need to have to run your life in a safe way.
So your brain's always out there saying, what do I need to do to survive?
What do I need to do to make things easier for the boss, the mind?
And so brain does all that. The problem is, Because brain also is constantly
assessing your environment for threats.
And so brain looks out and says, oh, I see this thing happening.
I need to decide if it's a threat or not.
And then that's when hippocampus gets involved. The hippocampus begins to retrieve
memories and infuse those memories with information from the current environment
and emotional inputs that relate to situations that are similar or that you've been through before.
And the memory gets confused with this current information, the status that
you're in now, and a bunch of emotional information. And that's presented to
your mind in something that sounds like a thought to you.
And it says, oh boy, every time this happens, I get hurt. I need to be scared
here. I need to be anxious.
And you'll get all these physiological clues that you feel anxious.
And if you're not careful, if you're not discerning to understand that brain
is just presenting a program of information,
a packet to you, you'll think you're having a thought that you're in some kind
of danger or that person's going to hurt you or that this situation is just
like the last situation and you need to react in the same way.
And before you know it, you'll send the consent down to brain to run the program
the way you've been running it. And remember what you're doing,
you're getting better at.
So if you've automated a bunch of responses that turn out not to be very helpful
to you in response to every time you think you're thinking a particular thought,
then you'll run that program without even thinking about it.
And that will further wire in that response to become easier and easier to have the same response.
And you'll be running plays that the quarterback didn't call.
The brain is running plays that the mind didn't give anything but a little consent to.
And before you know it, your life looks like every day is the same.
Every thought is the same.
It's impossible to make any progress or change. It feels like it's just absolutely
insurmountable for you to think that you could change your mind.
And the problem is you think that your mind is in charge of all these things,
and you think that you're actually hearing these thoughts and running them out.
But what you've actually done is you've ceded the throne to brain and programs,
and you're not mentally in charge anymore.
Because you think that those voices in your head are actually your own thoughts
when they're really just programs that your brain is running.
And so that's what the value and the power of the thought biopsy process is.
And I'm going to teach it to you right now. Now, just a quick word,
though, before we go any further, I want to remind you about my friend Preston
Sprinkles' incredible podcast, Theology in the Raw.
Preston is a writer, a podcaster, a theologian, sought-after public speaker,
New York Times bestselling author.
And he's written a bunch of really challenging books.
His newest one is called Exiles. It's tremendous.
But Preston's podcast is a place where he has amazing and diverse guests,
and they talk about things in the theological space.
And the reason I love Preston so much is every episode challenges me.
He's not going to bring a bunch of guests that are all in the same lane and
all with the same thought processes and all with the same experiences.
And he's going to have some guests on that you disagree with.
He's going to bring some information that challenges you and stretches you and
makes you think about things from a new way.
One of the things I think is wrong with our society right now is that we're
all huddling up with groups that look the same, think the same,
and that pretty soon leads to this idea that everybody on the other side of the aisle is your enemy,
or that they're all a bunch of whack jobs, or they're all lost,
or they're all crazy, or whatever.
And we forget that the kingdom of God is all nations, tribes, and tongues.
And that sort of implies that there's going to be some Christians,
some brothers and sisters of yours who are going to be in heaven that don't
think politically or ideologically in the same way that you do.
And so Preston's work is really powerful and important. And I always come away
from an episode, not necessarily agreeing with everything I've heard,
but having grown and learned from understanding somebody else's perspective,
that these are people to be loved.
They're my brothers and sisters, and they have a different idea than I do sometimes.
And sometimes I find myself saying, you know what? That was right.
I looked at that maybe in a different way that I needed to refine my thinking
a little bit. So Theology in the Raw, really helpful, powerful podcast.
I think you'll enjoy it. Check it out from my friend Preston Sprinkle anywhere
you listen to podcasts, Theology in the Raw.
Okay, I'm going to teach you how to do the brain biopsy. Now,
if you get the newsletter, there's a link yesterday to a worksheet that I made,
a free little PDF worksheet where you can understand how the biopsy works, work through it.
Okay, these are some tools to help you develop this as a strategy, as a practice.
Remember, medicine is a practice. us. We don't ever say we've arrived at being
the perfect neurosurgeon.
We're practicing neurosurgery all through our lives.
And so you have to get this idea that you develop a technique and you get better at it.
And what you're doing, you're getting better at, that you get better at it by
doing it. So don't be overwhelmed with the idea.
When I tell you, you got to take every thought captive, like 2 Corinthians 10,
5 says, and that sounds impossible because you have thousands and thousands of thoughts.
But what you do then is you begin to try to just get a little bit,
like take a minute every hour and see if I can control every thought that I
think for the next hour, for the next minute of that hour.
Remember the rule, if you improve something 1% per day, you can get 37% better in one year.
It's not overwhelming. If you take small steps, my dad always used to say,
how do you eat an elephant?
One bite at a time. It seems like an impossible task, but if you just keep eating
one bite at a time, you'll eventually eat the elephant.
That's how it's going to be with becoming really talented self-brain surgeons,
to get control over our thinking instead of being out of control.
Instead of reacting, we're going to learn how to respond with a good tactical
and strategic plan, just like those beginning baby neurosurgeons do when we
let them start to do needle biopsies, okay?
But remember the first three commandments. This is important.
The first three commandments of self-brain surgery, you must not commit self-malpractice.
So that means it's important to learn this because if you're reacting to every
thought that you have, that's self-malpractice. and you can look back over the
course of your life and you can remember the times that you responded angrily
to a text message without thinking through it only to find out that you were wrong.
You yelled at somebody, you did something you didn't want to have done or you
woke up the next morning with the tomorrow tax and you did that thing again
that you swore you were never going to do again because you didn't learn to
respond to a negative thought, you just reacted to it.
You just gave in to the same old. Remember, feelings aren't facts,
they're chemical events in your brain.
Thoughts aren't always true. There are programs that your brain is running.
Remember, your brain is not in charge of you. It's not the boss of you.
Your mind is the programmer. Your brain is the computer.
Your mind is the surgeon. Your brain is the patient, okay?
And that's what we got to get. So I want you to remember those three commandments.
Remember that bad thoughts, negative thoughts, automatic thoughts are programs
that your brain is running.
Daniel Amos talked about these, and he actually has broken out sort of nine
types of negative thoughts that you have. And if you understand that you can
start to biopsy these, you take a piece of a thought, look at it critically,
and decide what its nature is.
Then you can begin to see these programs and go, I use sneaky devil. I see what you're doing.
And also sometimes it is the devil. Remember, you have a spiritual enemy who
wants to steal and kill and destroy your life. So sometimes those thoughts that
you think aren't so innocent, sometimes they're trying to tempt you or drag
you away or hurt you or limit you or hinder you or trip you up.
And learning to biopsy your thoughts before you react to them is an incredible
tool to not only develop some spiritual discernment with the Holy Spirit's help,
but also to develop some practical discernment of just learning how to recognize
a program for what it is and deciding to change a program before you run with it.
Okay, so Daniel Amen has given us these nine types of negative thinking you
can start to identify if you think about them.
In his tremendous book, Your Brain Is Always Listening, it's one of my favorite
books, Your Brain Is Always Listening by Daniel Amen.
He says there's these all or nothing ants. These are the ones that attack me the most.
It's like, oh, this guy's always doing this. I'm never going to,
I will never be able, I could try that for the rest of my life and it's never going to be okay.
I'm always going to be this way. The all or nothing ants, it's just programs, okay?
Nothing's all or nothing. Nothing's all or nothing, always, ever,
never. Nothing is in life, okay?
There's also these less than ands. If I was just as pretty as she was,
I would have a better life.
If I just had as much money, if I just was as lucky as that guy,
it's these sort of less than. I'm not as good as you, therefore I shouldn't even try.
I can't pull this off because I'm not as smart as you. I don't have the right
genes. I don't have the right background. Or this thing happened to me that hurt me.
And I'm always going to be less than you. Not true. It's a program. It's a program.
Just the bad answer. You look at a situation and you always see the negative.
You run the worst case. You always see the downside.
If your brain is always telling you, that's not going to work out for me.
That doesn't ever work out for me. I'm not going to be able to do that.
That's going to be bad for me. I'm not going to be able to pull that off.
That's just the bad answer. It's a program. Learn how to recognize it for what it is.
There's these guilty automatic negative thoughts.
Thinking like, I should do this. I must do this. I have to do this.
I need to do that. I ought to do that.
Those are often programs. If you start to hear those qualifiers,
they produce shame and regret.
You get stuck because you feel
guilty or obligated to run a particular program and you don't have to.
There's these labeling ones. You're attaching these negative labels.
I'm such a loser. I'm such a disaster. I'm never going to be. I'm a nightmare.
These are these labeling ants and they're not true. There's fortune telling
automatic negative thoughts.
These sort of, oh, if this happens, then that's going to happen.
And this always ends up in this situation. I'm going to go down this rabbit
trail of what's the worst thing that could happen.
And I'll just challenge you, if you start to hear that program,
Lisa and I talk about this one a lot.
If you hear that worst case scenario program, just take a second and run a different
program called the best case scenario.
What's the best thing that could happen? What's a good thing that could result from this situation?
Like instead of, if I'm going to run the worst case scenario,
It's at least fair to also run the best case scenario and then decide what I
could do to nudge the outcome towards the best case, right?
And then there's these mind reading ones, these negative thoughts that tell
you that you can read somebody else's mind. This happens a lot with text messaging.
I get a text message that says, I love you without an exclamation mark.
And you say, wait a minute, are they trying to send me a message?
They don't love me as much as they did before.
Like you get you reading into somebody else's intention or emotion,
even though the actual words didn't say what you're saying that they said.
You know what I'm saying here?
You get this sort of ability that you think you have to understand somebody's
motives that they look at you a certain way in a room and you decide you build
this whole case in your mind for how that look meant that they don't like you
or that they are disgusted by you or that they don't love you anymore or they
are mad at you or whatever.
And you find out later after you've built this whole thing and you spend all
this time feeling bad, you find out that they were actually looking past you
to somebody else across the room that they just had a fight with or something
like situations happen all the time, right?
Where you run with this situation in your brain, you react to it,
you cause all kinds of trouble, and they say, what are you talking about?
I never looked at you. I was looking at Joe over across the room.
I never meant that. I didn't mean that. I just sent it before I was finished with it.
You find out that you wasted all this time and mental energy and emotional energy,
because you listened to a negative program that was never true in the first place.
Then there's these if-only and if-when statements like, if only I could get
this job, then I'll be happy.
If only I had more money, I'd be happy. If she would say yes,
then I would be happy. If I married this person, then I'll be happy.
Those are negative thoughts that aren't true because they keep you stuck with
this fantasy that you can't move forward until something else happens or somebody else does something.
And you can't be happy because somebody else changes. You've got to change.
And then there's these, in the same vein, these blaming ants.
They say, everything that's wrong with me is somebody else's fault.
Or boy, I was fine until this happened, or so-and-so did that,
or she left, or he quit, or whatever, then I would have been okay if they hadn't
done that, and I won't be okay again unless they undo that.
That's just not true. You can't build your life, your mental life,
on somebody else's behavior. You just can't.
So understanding that there are a whole lot of different types of programs that
your brain runs that are negative and not inherently true is a key strategy,
a key character trait for you to start looking at these things critically.
So how do you run the biopsy? Let's go to the worksheet. Let's just talk through
the worksheet for a minute.
Because remember, you have these tens of thousands of thoughts every day,
most of which aren't true.
Most of them are negative. And you believe that they're authentic because they sound like your voice.
And learning how to gain control of them is the first step towards becoming
healthier and feeling better and being happier.
And just like in real neurosurgery and physical neurosurgery practice,
Once you master the biopsy,
we can go on and I can teach you more and more complex operations for things
like lousy attitudes and anxiety and depression and guilt and shame and trauma
and grief and all these things.
I can teach you all these procedures for how you handle specific things,
but not until you get the discipline down of biopsying your thinking,
recognizing automatic little programs that your brain is running,
recognizing automatic negative thinking, and deciding it's time to respond instead of react.
Okay. So here's the procedure. The first one is identify a thought that pops
into your head. Now, it would be helpful if you print this worksheet out and
start to write these things down.
Identify a thought that pops into your head often. Nobody loves me.
I'm not a good parent because I lost a child.
I have that one all the time. Who are you to talk to your kids about anything?
You lost one. Your son didn't make it all the way to adulthood.
So you must be a bad father.
Like I had that kind of negative thought that pops in my head.
And then what do you do when you respond to it, that thought, when you react to it?
And so think about if I have this particular thought, I tend to find myself
reacting this way. I drink alcohol.
I send an angry text message. I gamble online. I shop. I watch pornography.
I do whatever. I call somebody I shouldn't call. When this thought happens,
I tend to do that. Whatever it is, just identify that. Just find one, okay?
One thought that you frequently have and how you typically react to it. Write it down.
And then step two is, Let's do some interrogation. So just like the pathologist,
when I take that piece of tissue, I walk it down to the pathology lab,
and they put it under the microscope and look at it and begin to describe what
they see and ultimately can build a diagnosis.
We're going to do the same thing with our thoughts. The first question,
is it true? Is this thought true?
And sometimes it seems true or feels true or it's true, and that's in the spiritual warfare realm.
That's the way the devil loves to operate. is to tell you something that's mostly true.
And so you have a hard time recognizing it as a lie because it's wrapped in some truth.
So if it feels true, then ask some further discerning questions about it.
And Daniel Amon's been helpful here to me in this as well. He's got a tool that
he says, is it absolutely 100% true all the time? Is it always true?
Is it completely true? So then you can start to unwrap that onion of that thought
lot and say, I have underperformed in this area, but I don't always.
I can feel like nobody loves me, but the truth is I have a family that does
love me and they're good people who care about me.
There are some people who care about me.
So it's not true that nobody respects me or nobody loves me.
You can start to unwrap that. It's not 100% always completely true. And then what if I.
What would I think about it if I heard my loved one or somebody I cared about,
if I was a compassionate observer and somebody else was describing this thought
to me that they were having, would I think it was true in their case?
If they said to me, if your friend who you love says, I have this thought that
nobody loves me and then I get depressed and then I start drinking and then
I do this and I do that, you would say, wait, I love you.
Like, I love you. God loves you. I can name 10 people right now who love you.
So if you have a thought and it feels true, then ask further refining questions. Is it always true?
Would I think it was true if somebody else was describing it to me? That sort of thing.
And then if it is true, is it necessary for me to think about it?
Like I have this thought, oh, the world's really in trouble and there's billions
of people starving to death and all that.
And it's in the middle of the night, it's 2 a.m. and you're trying to sleep
and you're running down that rabbit hole of all these overwhelming things that are true in the world.
But you can't fix it right now. You can't do anything about it right now.
So you don't need to react to it by spending the entire night with your gut
churning, worrying about it.
What you can do is pray about it and say, God, if it's in your will,
give me some ability to do something about this situation.
When I wake up rested, I'll make a better decision about it.
Put something in my path to help me know if this is the work you're calling
me to or a place I can donate some money to or some way I can help.
But now I need to sleep. So please help me change my mind and get this thing
that is true, but isn't necessary for me to think about right now.
It's not directly in my control.
Help me change that so I can think about something more helpful in the moment.
That's not to say ignore it or don't do anything about it. It's to say, is it true?
And is it necessary right now? Is it in your wheelhouse? Is it in your ability
to do anything about right now? And if it's not, you need to change your mind right now.
There's something better you can do with your mental energy in this moment with
that true, but unnecessary thing at this moment, okay? A value statement.
It's a, is it the most appropriate thing for you to be thinking about or reacting to right now?
If you don't have control over it and you're not responsible for it,
then right now, maybe you need to change your mind.
And so then if it is true, this is another one that happens.
Sometimes you'll have a true statement that's even necessary for you to think about sometimes.
Okay, I lost a son and I'm always going to be sad about that.
A husband died or Glee will bless someone always going to be sad about
that that's true and it is necessary for you to
think about that to grieve and to work through all that and
to recognize the thing that's happened in your life and not ignore it and not
deny it but here's what happens it's sneaky you have these follow-on thoughts
this is another way the devil works too I think sometimes in spiritual warfare
if the devil will give you a thought that is true and it's necessary and it's relevant and it's true.
And you'll say, okay, that is true. So then you're disarmed a little bit. You let your guard down.
And then the second thought comes in. Oh, I'm always going to be sad because I lost my son.
And that means I don't have hope for a bright future. It means I can't ever be happy again.
I'm always going to be depressed. I'm always going to be stuck because that's
never going to stop being true.
Guess what? You just slipped into a stream of
follow-on thoughts that continue to need to be biopsied because most of the
follow-on thoughts are untrue and they're progressively darker and progressively
more harmful to you and will lead you into a place of being stuck or ruminating
or guilt or shame or despair or finding yourself feeling like you need to anesthetize your brain.
So be very careful in discerning with those follow-on thoughts,
okay? That's a place where you can really get in trouble.
So you continue to take captive those thoughts, continue to biopsy them,
continue to look critically at
every follow-on thought, especially if you started with a true one, okay?
And then if it is true, is it compassionate or helpful or sometimes even and
harmful to me or others to think about it. Like sometimes there's something true.
You screwed something up really bad. You lost your family. You went through
a bankruptcy, whatever happened.
You did actually do that thing 20 years ago. And it was really true and it was
harmful and it caused all kinds of trouble. But guess what?
It's not compassionate for you to sit there and ruminate and think about that.
What's compassionate is for you to say, okay, God got me through that.
And now I have an opportunity to not be that person anymore,
more, to change my mind, to make some decisions that if I've been given a new
family, I'm going to love them and lead them, and I'm going to be faithful,
and I'm going to do the right things going forward.
I'm going to be on the right side of this thought process.
If I've been financially unwise in the past, somehow I managed to reconstruct
God put me back together, and I'm going to be wise in the future.
So rather than sitting there ruminating and stuck,
and that's when you lead, you find yourself repeating the same old mistakes again,
repeating the same old things because you think it's inevitable you think you
can't change and all of that so this it is
true but it's not compassionate or helpful and it actually is harmful to think
about it it's time to change your mind and think about something more productive
like how can i avoid that happening again what strategies can i implement to
make sure i live out a better story than the one i started with so i'm refined
by it instead of defined by it right.
And then if it's not true, if the thought is untrue, then you just immediately
cut it out and transplant it for something better.
We're going to have a resource for you soon.
I'm going to give you like 20 or 25 scriptures that you can use as the basis
for thought transplants and some switches you can make. This thought is untrue.
I'm going to cut it out and replace it with something that is true in this situation
for anxiety, depression, fear, sadness, grief, whatever.
I'm going to give you that tool soon, but you can find them now.
You can go all through the word. You can use whatever you want.
If you're not a believer, you can use stoic philosophy.
You can read widely. You can see how other people have responded to situations,
and you can find some better ideas to transplant in your thoughts.
I love scripture because I think it's true.
I think it's helpful, and I think it's how we engage the Holy Spirit to get
that power and juice that we need to move through our lives successfully.
I use scripture to transplant for negative thoughts, and it's incredibly helpful.
O.S. Hawkins wrote a book called The Promise Code. It's got all these promises
in it you can use to grab onto something you need when you have a thought that
needs to be emergently transplanted.
It's just this idea. Rehab your mind with things that are true.
That gives you the tools and resource, a first aid kit to stick better thoughts
in when you're struggling.
And that's a powerful way to biopsy your thoughts and begin to move from reaction to response.
So once I've identified a thought that's true, it's necessary,
and it needs a response, or I've identified one that's false and needs to be
removed and treated with a transplant, then it's time for a more specific self
brain surgery operation.
We're going to be teaching those so that we're operating our life only out of
what is true and necessary and helpful.
And that kind of thinking is.
It's a superpower for helping you become healthier and feel better and be happier
in all areas of your life.
Listen, friend, you can't change your life until you change your mind.
If you want to get that 2 Corinthians 10 5 power, that taking captive every
thought, if you want to stop conforming to how your brain and the world wants
you to think and react and feel, instead transform yourself by the renewing of your mind.
If you want to be less anxious and engage that
switch in your hippocampus that takes you away from the anxiety and
fear and fight flight freeze of the amygdala and up towards
your cerebral executive networking and the power of
thanksgiving and gratitude and better thinking clearer more
executive thinking then you can start that learning
how to buy so you're thinking and this little tool there's a
free link there's a link in the show notes how you can download it and use it
it's going to be part of our handbook of self-brain surgery that'll be coming
out hopefully next year early in 25 late in 25 early in 26 my next book the
handbook of self-brain surgery is going to be full of these operations that
you can use to change your mind and change your life.
But the most important thing that I want you to remember is that you always
have the ability to start today.
I hope that was helpful to you, my friend. I am all in. Lisa's all in.
Tata's all in. People all over the world are all in with us.
Self-brain surgeons all over the world getting together to press through to
remember that we've never once been alone.
You have all the tools, everything you need. all you need to do is change your
mind and you'll change your life.
Let's go all in. Share this with your friend. Let's get after it.