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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. I'm so grateful and excited
to be with you here on MindChange Monday. And I've got a special message for you today.
It's also available in video form on YouTube if you want to check out the YouTube
channel at Dr. Lee Warren on YouTube.
But I wanted to give a couple of things to talk about as a preamble before we get into the episode.
And by the way, you'll be getting a little bit more content on the podcast in
the next few weeks. So look forward to that. I'll let you know more about that soon.
However, I want to take a minute and address something very serious.
As everybody in the world has probably heard, and certainly everybody in the
United States, Saturday evening there was an assassination attempt on former
President Trump, and this is shocking. It's enraging.
It's terrifying. It's only by the grace of God that he turned his head,
and somehow the bullet only hit his ear.
But unfortunately, another man was killed, and some other people were wounded.
And political violence is just not acceptable.
It's not acceptable. And I just want to encourage you to be in prayer for our
country. We are at each other's throats.
The rhetoric has got to come down. It's got to come down from both sides,
but we've got to dial down the rhetoric.
We pray for people, even if we disagree with them, we need to be in prayer for
President Trump and his family.
And sadly for the people who lost a loved one that night, we are grateful for
the action of law enforcement and Secret Service agents that jumped in and did their jobs.
And just want to remind you to be in prayer.
We are kingdom people, okay? If you're a Christian, your allegiance is to the
kingdom of God first, not to a political party or to the left or to the right.
We're not supposed to go after each other based on our politics.
We're supposed to love one another, even love our enemies, Jesus said.
So pray, turn down the rhetoric, vote your conscious vote, who you feel like
you're supposed to vote for, but just be in prayer that our country will become
united again and not divided.
Remember, the last thing Jesus
prayed about before he went to the cross was that we would be united.
He was obviously talking about kingdom issues there, but we can't be united
in the kingdom if we're tearing each other's throats out on politics.
So we've got to dial down the rhetoric, we've got to stop the hate,
we've got to find the things that unite us rather than divide us.
And I just wanted to mention that. I felt like I needed to say something and...
I want to just tell you, we need to pray more. Pray first. Pray more.
Pray longer. Pray more diligently.
Pray for peace and healing of all the things that divide us.
Pray that people can see past their politics and look at each other as human
beings again to stop being so concerned about being right all the time or who's
hurt my feelings all the time. It's time for us to come together, okay?
And if you would apply, I think if everybody would apply the things that we
talk about out here on self-brain surgery all the time, like become more resilient,
become less offendable, become more emotionally stable, learn to respond with
our frontal lobes instead of reacting with our fear-based amygdala.
And if we can learn how to get our minds in control of our brains and our bodies,
then we're not going to be so enraged when somebody says the wrong thing or
wears the wrong thing or has the wrong color hair or votes the wrong way.
It's time to be united and it's It's definitely time to be in prayer for our
country, for the world, for President Trump and his family, for the victims,
for the people who lost a son who was the shooter.
Those people are hurting, too. So be in prayer and be prepared,
because I have a feeling that this is not the end of things.
We are going to pray that God will turn things around and this will be the moment
that things begin to be better. but you don't know what's coming in the coming days.
And what we are certain of is that there are forces of evil out there who want
to destroy our country and want to not have us come together.
And we can only combat that with prayer.
And so be in prayer. That's the message. Second thing, Wednesday of this week
is Glioblastoma Awareness Day.
The Brain Tumor Foundation and other groups that are doing groundbreaking research
for glioblastoma are raising money and trying to raise awareness for folks who
are dealing with this devastating disease of glioblastoma. If you haven't read
my book, I've seen the End of You
I shared a lot of the things that I've learned over the years in taking care of these people.
I've learned from them about hope and faith and resilience and how to hold on
to find your feet when you're going through something hard.
People with glioblastoma and their families have been an important and big part of my career.
My book, I've seen the End of You, tells a lot of those stories.
So if you haven't read it and you don't know much about this disorder,
it'd be a good place to start to learn more. But this week is glioblastoma awareness.
And I just want you to be aware of people like the National Brain Tumor Foundation
who are doing great things.
And if you have some discretionary money that you could consider donating to that research.
That'd be amazing. I'll put a link in the show notes. Brain Tumor Foundation
and people like my friend Craig Horbinski, the neuropathologist at Northwestern,
doing tremendous work because there is hope.
And someday that disease will come, hopefully, under the command of medical
science and will make a difference for people.
And there really is a reason to have hope. Good work is being done.
It's brain tumor. It's glioblastoma awareness day on Wednesday.
And I just wanted to make you aware of that in my book. I've seen the End of You.
It may be helpful to you if you'd like to know more.
Today, we're going to talk about some things I learned in the operating room
this week. And I think it's going to be helpful.
It's a good way to kind of get your mind on what to do when things seem hard.
And I'm going to get after that in just a minute. Go check it out on YouTube
at Dr. Lee Warren. If you're not subscribing on YouTube, click that subscribe button.
And here's the audio version of that podcast 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.
Hey, friend, I'm Dr. Lee Warren. I am hopefully your favorite internet and maybe
real life brain surgeon.
And today we're going to do a little self brain surgery here on the podcast.
We got three things to talk about today. First, don't make the easy thing the hard thing.
Execute a positive action to avoid a negative outcome.
And it all comes down to hope. Those are the three things we're going to talk about today.
We're going to change our minds and change our lives with a little bit of self-brain surgery.
Let's get after it right now.
Hey, yesterday in the operating room, I had an interesting experience.
I had a procedure that we do all the time. That's usually very straightforward and very simple.
And we had a hard time with one part of the setup for that operation,
the x-rays that we need to take to get the patient just lined up just right
so that I can do the procedures that I need to do without any difficulty. And what we found was.
This particular patient's anatomy made it extremely difficult to get the x-ray
right before I could go on to the procedure.
And we spent probably half an hour, but normally it takes about five minutes.
We spent probably half an hour getting the x-ray right before we could start.
And I was thinking the whole time about my old professor, Peter Gianetta,
who said, constantly was saying to us, don't make an operation out of it.
And that's a funny thing to say. It doesn't sound that profound.
But when you're talking about complex neurosurgical operations.
We literally spend 12 hours, 18 hours, 24 hours sometimes doing these big procedures
and we call them operations.
And Janetta would say, don't make an operation out of it. What did he mean?
We're literally doing surgery. We're literally doing operations.
What did Janetta mean? mean. What PJ meant was don't make the easy thing the hard thing.
That's the way I've liked to say I've come to over the years.
Don't make the easy thing the hard thing. The setup for this operation is the easy thing.
It's the actual surgery that's the hard thing. But we spent half an hour and
it's something that normally takes three to five minutes and a whole procedure
that usually only takes about half an hour.
And we doubled the length of the whole operation because the easy thing became
the hard thing. We made an operation out of it.
So what Peter Gennetto was saying to us is take the things that are the small
steps and make them so perfected that you're good enough at them that they don't
hinder you from the big mission of getting the whole thing done in an efficient way.
If you want to take an 18-hour surgery and turn it into a nine-hour surgery,
get those little things that can chew up five minutes and make them take two minutes instead. day.
Not because you're cutting corners, not because you're doing things in an inefficient
way, but because you've repped them and systematized them and planned them out
and perfected them so much that they don't hinder you and hold you back.
When I do surgery, my scrub techs, my amazing scrub techs, Bree and Megan and Jason.
Morgan and all of them, everybody who works for us, they come in there and they
set that tray up with the instruments that we are most likely to use in the
order that we're most likely to use them because they know what I'm going to need.
And if I say kerosene four or pen filled number three, if I call for an instrument
that it's time for me to use that instrument at that moment in the operation,
and they act like they've never heard of it before, and they have to go and
send somebody down the hall and find the instrument and go unwrap it and pull
it out and put it on the trade that adds three or four or five or 10 minutes to the operation.
Then we're making the easy thing the hard thing.
You see where I'm going with this? We avoid that by my scrub tax getting so
good at knowing what's coming next that they anticipate what I'm going to ask
for so they've got it ready so that the easy thing doesn't become the hard thing
and we're not waiting on something that we need every time,
we always do and every step that we always take and we can't do it now because
the easy thing has become the hard thing.
What parts of your life can you plan differently and lay out differently so
that you stop making an operation out of everything?
That's so important that I made it one of the 10 commandments of self-brain surgery.
Don't make an operation out of everything.
And a better, simpler way to say it maybe is don't make the easy thing the hard thing.
So that's a lesson that I learned from surgery this week.
One really good way, my friend, to stop making the easy thing the hard thing
is to take command of the first part of your day.
If you find yourself continually stuck, perpetually perplexed,
and running the same old plays over and over, and you find like you're always
behind the eight ball and your day never seems manageable, maybe,
and this sounds a little crazy, but maybe you need to take command,
30 minutes and get up earlier and spend some time in quiet reflection and planning
and prayer and meditation, thinking about your day in a different way and getting ahead of it.
Maybe you need to stop checking your email.
Maybe you need to stop checking your Instagram first thing in the morning and
set your own agenda. Did you know?
So even if you're not a believer, if you don't believe in God or you're not
a Christian or you haven't thought about these kinds of things,
let me tell you something that's true from neuroscience that might shock you.
It's been shown conclusively in Christians who were studied,
in Buddhist monks who were studied, in meditators who aren't spiritual at all,
that the practice of learning to meditate and quiet your mind and spend a few
minutes up to about 10 minutes a day for six weeks is how it's been really well studied,
that you can expand the actual physical size of the hippocampus of your brain
by about 22% by spending 10 minutes or so a day meditating. What does that mean?
The hippocampus is the area of your brain that's responsible for emotional resilience,
for the ability to switch from one thought process to another,
to move away from that limbic fight-flight-freeze response of catastrophe and,
oh my goodness, and why is this happening?
I got to run away, to, hey, wait, I've dealt with this before.
I can think differently about that. Getting those frontal lobes involved,
that cerebral executive network, that switch happens in the hippocampus.
That's why we always say, it's become almost a cliche now, but we always say
you can't be anxious and grateful at the same time.
It's true because in neuroscience, it's like one of those switches that they
pull to change the train track from one to the other.
Like you literally can't go down the track of anxiety and down the track of
gratitude and thankfulness and thoughtfulness at the same time. Why?
Because hippocampus switches one direction for the other and your hippocampus
gets more robust and stronger and more resilient and more wired towards the frontal lobe,
non-reaction but response mode when you meditate and pray.
So what does that mean? It means if you take command of the morning of your
day, the first part of your day.
And you spend some time in quiet reflection, thinking, listening to classical
music has been shown, by the way, to really help you get into that alpha state
of your brain and away from that stressed out, hyper-focused beta state that we all wake up in,
that your brain will calm down when you listen to some good music. I like worship music.
I like to spend some time reading my Bible and praying in the morning.
You can do it however you want.
And whether you even want to completely de-spiritualize it, that's fine.
And the research shows that your brain becomes more resilient when you take
command of your time and spend some time focusing and meditating.
And whether you want to call it prayer or not, we'll talk more about that later.
And I've got a whole podcast, by the way, the Spiritual Brain Surgery Podcast.
We talk about that kind of stuff, the spiritual side of it all the time.
But just from this pure neuroscience standpoint, your brain gets more robust
and more resilient and more able to make good decisions under pressure when
you spend some time meditating and praying.
And that's how you can stop making the easy thing the hard thing.
That's how you do it. Now let's pivot. I'm going to talk about something else
for a minute, and they're related.
But I'm thinking about a moment in surgery yesterday when I was about to do something dangerous.
Okay? There was a nerve exposed, and there was a bone spur pressing,
and I needed to use a drill.
The bone was too hard for a biting instrument, and I needed to use a drill.
The drill's scary if you're not really talented using it, and it's scarier if
you really are talented using it because you know exactly what can happen if you're not careful.
We have a 1.5-millimeter titanium drill bit that's spinning at 150,000 RPMs
next to a nerve that's controlling somebody's leg or somebody's arm or the ability to do a certain thing.
And I've got to use that drill right next to that nerve to drill that bone spur
away. How do I do that safely?
First, I have to plan to take a positive action to avoid a negative outcome.
I have to make some decisions. I have to put some things in place.
I tell Damon, my amazing PA, to hold an instrument between me and the nerve.
So I'm drilling against his instrument and not against the nerve.
So if my hand slips a little bit, it's going to hit Damon's retractor and not the nerve underneath.
I'm going to put some cotton padding between me and the nerve.
I'm going to brace my hand with my other hand up against the patient so that
I cannot slip and I can't accidentally move forward or back towards the nerve.
Or I'm going to make some decisions ahead of time to make sure that I can execute that maneuver safely.
Now, apply this to your life. When you hear a funny noise, or a sound,
or I get a text message from somebody that sets you off, your first thought
is to go to catastrophization.
Oh no, this is going to happen, this is going to happen, and that's going to
happen, and she's going to leave, and he's going to fire me,
or they always overlook me, or this is never going going to work out and you
immediately find yourself way down the path of this worst case scenario outcome.
What happened? What happened is you didn't prepare ahead of time to take positive
action to avoid a negative outcome.
If you tell your mind, hey, here's what's going to happen today.
And you spend that quiet time in the morning and you tell yourself,
hey, here's what's going to happen.
I'm going to get in a situation at some point today and this meeting is going
to to try to push my buttons or I'm going to get that phone call and this thing
I've been dreading is going to come to pass.
And when it does, here's how I'm going to respond to it.
Here's what I'm going to say. Now, that's not the same as what you do in the
shower or when you're driving to work and you're letting so-and-so have the
business and you're telling them exactly what you would say and all that running
down that path of I'm going to blow this person up and all that that we all do sometimes.
It's not the same as that. It's saying, I'm going to get ahead of this operation.
I'm going to think through the steps of the procedure. I'm going to think through
the calendar events on my day, and I'm going to make some decisions about how
I'm going to handle them with my amazing executive control frontal lobes and not with my emotion.
I'm not going to let somebody lure me into an emotional decision-making mode
or reaction mode because I'm going to make the easy thing work better for me.
I'm not going to to trip and fall into the ditch of making the easy thing the
hard thing, because I'm going to prepare.
And the way you do that is you take positive actions to avoid a negative outcome.
If you're worried that your kids aren't going to be there when you get older,
they're not going to take care of you, and they're not going to love you,
and they're not going to show up for you, then you need to show up for them now.
If you're concerned that people aren't sending you the birthday card,
or people aren't calling you, or nobody's noticing you, you need to notice them.
Become the person who writes the card, who makes the phone call,
who sends the flowers, who shows up for the birthday, become the person who
shows up at the baseball game. And guess what?
Your grandkids will show up when you're sick.
Because you showed up for them. So instead of sitting in your house alone,
wondering why nobody's calling you, get out and engage.
If you feel lonely and you don't have any family, literally go volunteer somewhere,
go to a church, sign up for a group, go down and volunteer for Meals on Wheels.
Do something positive to avoid the negative interaction. Become the person who
will be missed if you're not there.
And then when you aren't there because you're sick, Somebody's going to call and check on you.
Somebody's going to come see you because you invested the time and you took
the positive action to avoid the negative result. That's what I have to do in surgery.
That's what I have to do in the operating room. And that's what you can do if
you take control of your morning.
Another thing you can do that will really help you clear your mind and prepare
yourself for the day is to avoid email and social media first thing in the morning.
Because if you do get into email or social media first thing in the morning,
you are going to get sucked into someone else's agenda for your day.
Somebody else wants you thinking about this product that they want you to buy
or this meeting that they want you to attend or this thing that they need from you.
Somebody else wants you to spend money, spend time, look at them in a certain
way, accomplish something on their behalf, do something for their agenda.
Somebody else wants you, my friend, to obey their agenda for your day,
and you want to obey your agenda for your day.
You wanna set your intention and follow through as my Peloton instructor used to say.
This is how you win the day. You win the morning first, okay?
Take positive actions to avoid a negative outcome and don't make the easy thing the hard thing.
And the last thing for this day, for this episode, is it all comes down to hope.
There's this incredible story in the Bible. It's told in Romans chapter 4,
I think in verse 16, where Paul, the apostle who's writing the book of Romans,
talks about the old guy Abraham from the Old Testament. Father Abraham, right?
Father of the whole nation. Okay?
Abraham was an old man, and God told him, came to him and said,
you're going to be the father of a great nation.
And he really said, wait, hold on a second. I'm almost 100 years old,
and I don't have any children. and how can I be the father of a great nation?
He said, your wife's going to have a baby.
And she laughed, Sarah laughed, because they were 100 years old almost.
Who has a baby when they're 100 years old?
They didn't believe the news that they were receiving because it was impossible.
But what the Bible says is Abraham did believe it.
It says, Against all hope, Abraham in hope believed.
Against all hope, Abraham in hope believed.
I drew some graphs in my book. My last book, Hope is the First Dose,
I drew some graphs about this.
The difference between what happens when you lose hope and what happens when
you gain hope, Hope, the gap is called faith.
It's the gap between against all hope and hope. And that's what Abraham did.
So sometimes you can't see a way forward. The situation seems impossible.
It doesn't seem manageable. You've gotten the phone call. You've lost the child.
Your husband has left. You've developed the tumor, whatever it is. It seems impossible.
But you've got to remember that hope and hardship run on parallel tracks.
I talked about this in my video from yesterday.
Go check it out. hope and hardship run on parallel tracks.
You can't live, you can't survive hardship without hope because if a train only
has one track, it's going to run off into the ditch.
It's going to crash. You got to have both tracks.
So hope allows you to drive forward through your life with resilience and purpose
and meaning and maybe even happiness because you can get there from here.
You're not going to fall off the track because hope is keeping you anchored.
So hope makes the a difference in everything.
Hope is everything.
Hopelessness is deadlier than cancer. I've studied that for years now.
I've seen it in my own life.
Hopelessness is the deadliest thing that can happen to somebody.
If you lose your hope, my friend, you lose everything. So hold on to hope.
Abraham, against all hope, in hope, believed. He said, I don't even know this situation.
God's telling me I can have a kid almost 100 years old, but I'm going to hope
he's telling the truth because I have faith in him. He's come through for me before.
He'll come through for me again. That's the way I look at it from a scriptural standpoint.
You can look at it however you want, but just remember if you could go back
in time and talk to yourself before some prior massive thing happened,
that you could give yourself some compassionate advice with what you know now.
One thing that you would say for sure to that former version of yourself before
they went through that hard thing is you would look them in the eyes.
Like my dad says, hey, look in my eyes.
If you're not watching this on video, by the way, this is on YouTube.
And I put it there because I want you to see my eyes. I don't like to see myself on video.
I don't like how I look on video. I make weird expressions with my face.
I'm putting it up. I'm going to start putting the podcast on video every time
because I want you to look in my eyes when I say this right here.
If you could go back in time, one thing you would tell yourself is,
hey, guess what? This feels impossible, but you made it through that.
There's going to come a time down the road when you're going to say, I made it through that.
God got me through that. Faith got me through that. Hope got me through that.
My family helped me get through that.
My resilience helped me get through that. I learned how not to make an operation out of everything.
I learned not to make the easy thing, the hard thing. I learned to take positive
actions to avoid a negative outcome.
And I did all that because I was able to hold on to hope.
Hope is a verb. It's not an accident. It's not a passive process.
It comes from memory. Remember you made it through before.
Remember you got through that hard thing before. Remember other people have survived this cancer.
Remember other people have made it through a divorce. Other people have come
through when they lost a child. So you can too.
And then you move towards the promise of a future that includes you having survived that thing.
You move towards the promises that God made. You move towards the fact that
neuroscience says you can develop resilience by learning to meditate,
by taking command of your morning, by not making the easy thing the hard thing.
And you gain hope and hope creates momentum and momentum breaks inertia and
overcoming inertia allows you to start moving and no longer will you find yourself
feeling sad or sick or stressed or stuck anymore because you changed your mind
and you changed your life.
Friend, there's three things. Don't make the easy thing the hard thing.
Take positive actions to avoid negative outcomes and remember that everything
comes down to hope because you can't change your life until you change your mind.
And it's Mind Change Monday. And that's what we're all about today.
Before you go, take a minute and think about one thing that should be easy in
your life that you commonly turn into a hard thing.
We talk about today in this episode, don't make the easy thing the hard thing.
So what's something that turns into hard stuff that you can rethink and take
mind top-down control over and turn into the easy thing again like it should be?
And what's some place where you can take positive action in your life to avoid a negative outcome?
Is there some place that over and over and over it just feels way harder than it should be?
Or that you're having outcomes that aren't optimal because you didn't take some
positive action to avoid that catastrophization or that negative outcome?
Outcome that now seems so inevitable?
And is there someplace in your life where hope could be helpful,
where you've forgotten that you can get there from here, where you've forgotten
that other people have made it before?
Is there someplace where hope could rise again?
Think about those things, write them down, maybe journal about it a little bit,
because in medical science, we say what doesn't get documented didn't happen.
If you don't write it down, you don't chart it, you don't put it in the record, then it never happens.
So you got to make progress by being and willing to put yourself out there,
write down the things that you think about and that make a difference in your life.
Thanks for your time today. Subscribe to the channel, hit that like button,
share it with your friends, and don't forget that hope is the first dose.
It's not just a great book.
It is a good book. You should go read it. But hope is the first dose to any
kind of plan that gets you moving forward in your life again.
That's the news for today, my friend. The good news is you can start today.
I say it at the end of every podcast episode.
You can start today because no matter how much time you've spent wishing it
could be different, you can't get there from here because what got you here
won't get you there unless you change your mind.
You gotta change your mind and you can do it starting 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.