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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
you on Self-Brain Surgery Saturday.
And I just have a quick little self-brain surgery operation for you today.
If you're feeling overwhelmed, if you're feeling buried, if you're feeling stressed,
if you're feeling stuck, if you're feeling overwhelmed with grief,
whatever it is that might be going on in your world, if you just feel like it's
too much, like why does everything feel so hard?
Everything Everything feels heavy. Everything feels dark. Everything feels impossible.
And you just feel overwhelmed. I'm going to give you a little operation you
can perform that says gratitude overwhelms overwhelm.
If you're overwhelmed, you can overwhelm overwhelm with learning gratitude.
And that sounds really weird, but I'm going to just give you a few random kind
of randomly connected thoughts that were focused and brought right into the
forefront of my mind by something that Ann Voskamp wrote in her weekly newsletter,
or her daily newsletter, actually,
and just kind of brought me back to this concept of what I've been kind of trying
to put together all week and what was really a tough week,
but it's going to help you overwhelm, overwhelm by learning to switch from overwhelm to gratitude.
But before you can do any of that, you got to answer 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.
All right, my friend, let's get after it. Hey, I told you it was kind of a tough week.
We had some family illness, and we were going to have a funeral to attend next week.
We lost somebody we love, and just it was one of those weeks where Lisa was
away, Tata was away, and I was here working, and it was just kind of a tough week for everybody.
And there was also a lot going on. We have a lot of things going on in our personal life.
There's some uncertainty about a few things, and we've been praying that God
will give us some clarity and some direction, and I'm trying to write a new
book, and there's just all this stuff swirling around.
So there was a day when it was kind of a difficult day in the hospital for a
couple of reasons, had some sad things going on over there.
And there was a day when I got home from work last week when I was just kind
of overwhelmed, a little bit grumpy.
I wasn't practicing what I preached to you all the time. I was allowing some
anxiety and some stress to kind of bug me in.
It really wasn't in a great mental space.
And Lisa and I were on the phone and I looked out the window and I saw that,
My favorite time of day out here on the river is just towards the evening when the sun starts to set.
The grass on the riverbank turns this incredible gold color.
We call it the golden hour, but in the wintertime, it only lasts about five minutes.
But then as the spring becomes the summer, it lasts longer and longer.
We get this incredible, vibrant contrast between the blue water of the river
and the green grass and then this gold river grass.
It's just this incredible beauty. And that particular day was cloudy and there
was some storming happening, some storms happening and some rain.
And right when Lisa said, hey, go outside and send me a picture of the riverbank
and let's get you in a better space. Let's talk about what's going on.
And right when I saw that, the golden river grass, I opened the door and stepped
out into the backyard and there was a rainbow on the riverbank.
And there was this incredible rainbow and the clouds and the beauty was all there.
And then the next morning I went outside around sunrise and there was a family.
There's a breeding pair of Canadian geese that stay here year round.
And they were swimming around right next to our house in the river with their three little goslings.
And then I looked downstream and for the first time ever in my whole life,
I saw an owl, a great horned owl, standing in the sandbar in the middle of the
river channel. Never seen an owl in the river before.
Saw deer eating out of our bird feeder. I saw earlier in the week,
the very last day the cranes were here, I saw a bunch of the cranes doing their
dance and saw the family of pheasant walking across the hayfield later that
evening with their babies.
And just all this beauty that God was just showing me over and over and over.
It's like, hey, take a second and look around and notice that the things you're
feeling and the things that your family are dealing with are not the only things.
This quantum physics world is just reminding me that there are multiple things
happening at the same time. You can be a bereaved parent.
Your husband can have a glioblastoma. You can find that your mother committed
suicide, as one of our readers just said.
You can have your terrible, massive things, but you can also notice that there's a rainbow.
And I remember the day we were on our way home from the funeral home after Minch's
service, from the church after Minch's service, there was a double rainbow over the highway. way.
God seems to show up and show us things at the time when we're hurting.
He tends to kind of remind us that he's still there.
And that reminded me as I was kind of trying to process how to sort of focus
and reframe my mind and to remember that gratitude overwhelms overwhelm.
I remembered that Abraham Lincoln wrote an incredible piece in the middle.
Well, let me read you the piece first, and then I'll tell you when he wrote it.
He said this, it's just kind of remarkable that he was able to write this and say this.
There was a day a while back when I got in the mail, my sister mailed me a bunch
of old pictures and one of them was a picture of Mitch when he was a little
boy was with his sisters and a bunch of cousins around and everybody was laughing
and smiling in the picture,
but Mitch was standing in the background and he looked really sad.
He had a sad look on his face. I don't know what had happened,
but everybody else in the picture looked happy and he looked sad and that picture
just kind of caught me off guard and kind of broke me open.
And on the very same day, we got a text message with a picture from our daughter-in-law,
Amber, of the ultrasound of Riker.
Our grandson, who's now three, but he was in her at the time.
And she sent this picture of the ultrasound.
It was the first time we'd seen what little Riker was gonna look like.
And so on the same day, I saw this picture of Mitch looking sad and it took
me right back to losing him and the pain and the anguish and the grief.
And at the same day, Today, Amber sends us this new life that's budding and
growing and brewing inside of her.
And we saw little Racker's form. It was fearfully and wonderfully made and all
that kind of swirled together.
And then I remember this 1863, Abraham Lincoln said this.
There's something he wrote. And he said, This year that is drawing towards its
close has been filled with the blessings of fruitful fields and healthful skies to these bounties,
which are so constantly enjoyed that we are prone to forget the source from which they come.
Others have been added, which are of so extraordinary a nature that they cannot
fail to penetrate and soften even the heart, which is habitually insensible
to the ever watchful providence of mighty, almighty God.
Do you get that? He was saying that the year is full of all kinds of stuff,
but it's also full of fruitful fields and healthful skies and incredible bounties.
And we have so much to enjoy that we forget where the joy came from.
We forget where it comes from.
And he wrote that, my friend, in the middle of the Civil War.
And he was the guy in charge.
He was the one having to make the tough decisions to take the country to war,
to try to fight for the freedom of all Americans.
And in the middle of that difficult time, he was able to remember that the secret
Secret to overwhelming overwhelm is gratitude.
And so this week, God, it felt like God was just showing me over and over.
Hey, look at that rainbow.
Look at those baby pheasants. Look at those geese. Look at that owl standing
in the river. Look at those deer eating out of your bird feeder.
And remember, don't be overwhelmed.
This stuff's going to work out. I've got a plan for you.
I have a plan to prosper you and not to harm you. The uncertainty and lack of
clarity that you're feeling right now is me working in the background.
And the pain of the people that are sick.
I'm going to take care of them, okay? I'm going to take care of them.
I have a plan for you too, for them too. And even if it's drawing near to the
end of their life, I've got them. Don't worry.
And even if you're sad that your relative's dealing with losing a parent and
he's struggling and they're struggling and you're praying for them,
even when you're sad, don't forget, I've got them too.
God says, hey, the secret to being overwhelmed overwhelmed, this gratitude.
I'm always telling you that, but I needed to practice it too.
And then this morning, in the middle of all this, Lisa's home, I'm so grateful.
I had two incredible podcast episode interviews yesterday, Jay Warner Wallace
about his upcoming new book and Tara Lee Cobble, the Bible Recap Lady,
had two just incredible conversations and getting my head kind of wrapped around
the fact that I need to shift my perspective away from, remember from the neuroscience,
what you pay attention to and the way in which you pay attention to it makes
it bigger, makes it more true.
And so if I'm focusing on my overwhelm, I'm focusing on the things that I'm
stressed out about, I'm focusing on the thing I feel unable to help with because
I'm here and the people that are hurting are there.
And I'm stressed and worried that the thing about attention is the more attention
you pay to something in a particular way, the more real it becomes.
And this morning I got up and I read Ann Voskamp's daily email.
It was It's actually from yesterday, but I didn't read it yesterday.
I just read it this morning, and she talked about the password for.
The password that she and her husband have when they feel stuck in the dark,
when they feel like everything's overwhelming, they feel in tremendous pain
or difficulty or overwhelmed or whatever, they have a password.
One of them will remind the other one.
That's what community is for, by the way. That's what family is for.
That's what marriage is for, to help each other through these hard times.
And her word is Eucharistio, which is the Greek word for giving thanks.
Jesus took the bread and gave thanks.
That's Eucharistio. That's why the Catholics call it the Eucharist.
The high church people call it the Eucharist.
When you take the Lord's Supper, because it's reminding you to be grateful in
the midst of the fact that the body is being broken and the blood's being shed
and life is hard. Be grateful.
Don't forget to be grateful. Ann Voskamp in her newsletter, it's this incredible
newsletter about gratitude.
Like right when I needed it, it came exactly what I needed to be thinking about.
Have a password when you're stuck, when you remember, okay, I'm not overwhelmed.
I need to be grateful because my hippocampus is gonna either push me towards
rational thought lot in my frontal lobe and help me work through this with God's
help to sort of figure out a good strategy to deal with it, or I'm going to
flip down towards amygdala and I'm going to fall right into that physiological
thing, fight, flight, freeze,
and I'm going to give in to fear and I'm going to become more and more anxious.
And the thing I'm focusing on is going to become more real because what you
focus on is what you're being formed into, my friend.
So focus on gratitude. You'll be formed into this person who can be resilient,
who can handle things, who can stop Stop in the midst of the pain and notice
the rainbow because the rainbow is always there.
Okay. The baby geese are always swimming by. We just usually are so wrapped
up in our overwhelm. We don't notice that God is screaming out in the midst
of this civil war, in the midst of this hardship, in the midst of this difficulty.
Don't forget you have all these blessings and your heart's still beating and
there's opportunity for you to use your brain in a way that will help you and
hurt you in this because gratitude overwhelms overwhelm.
Ann Voskamp said it just beautifully. The neuroscience, the faith smashes together
perfectly in her newsletter today.
And I'll put a link to it in the show notes. You should read it.
She says, I find it interesting. One of her sons sent her a message that said,
I find it interesting that in the face of real trauma, instead of holding onto
bitterness or refusing to forgive, you've chosen gratitude and trying to live open-handed.
Because here's the thing, my friend, your soul is a compass and you get to choose
the direction that you're going to go. you get to choose.
So out of a life of choices, choose gratitude.
Have a password to tell yourself, to tell your spouse, to tell your children
when they seem like they're slipping into it. Have a password.
Hey, when I say this word, you snap out of it.
When I say Eucharistio or whatever your word is, that's going to remind you to notice the rainbow.
Notice the goslings swimming by. Notice the owl in the river.
What if I had not looked out the window? What if Lisa hadn't encouraged me?
Step outside. Just ground yourself for a minute. Take a minute.
Take a breath, look around, let this river speak to you of your creator's love
and compassion and ongoing plan for you.
That's it, my friend. You have to remember that what you focus on,
you're being formed into, and gratitude overwhelms overwhelm.
The good news is we're going to live this life. God's going to redeem all this. The rescue's underway.
As I told the paid subscribers last week, we're going to live in a new heaven
and a new earth with new bodies, and all this stuff's going to pass away,
and we're going to be grateful every day for eternity.
So practicing gratitude now, Ann Voskamp said, to practice gratitude is to learn
now what you will do forever.
So practice the song you're going to be singing for all eternity, my friend.
What you choose to tune into tunes your heart to sing his praises or to murmur your disdain.
So you get to choose. She says, heaven and hell are not far off realities.
They surround us here and now. So you get to choose is what you focus on because
the neuroscience says it clear.
What you focus on, what you pay attention to is going to be what you're stuck
in, what you're formed into.
Jesus said in Matthew 26, 52, for all who take up the sword will perish by the sword.
And it's just as true as Ann said. If you take up bitterness,
if you take up anxiety, if you take up depression, if you take up rumination,
guess what's going to happen to your heart?
Guess what's going to form your character? it's going to form in what you're
focusing on okay but if you take up gratitude if you take up blessing because blessing beats bitter.
Better beats bitter, better beats blame, better beats all of that.
And it happens by blessing, by gratitude, by thankfulness, by deciding to notice
that there's an owl standing even in the midst of your hard day.
Don't forget, Nietzsche said, beware that when fighting monsters,
you yourself do not become a monster for when you gaze long into the abyss,
the abyss gazes also into you.
I talked about that in Hope is the First Dose. but the more
you look into that pit of despair the more you're drawn
into it the more you sit at the foot of the
thing that's hurting you the more it will be you'll be
chained to it tethered to it and it will become an idol it will
become bigger and bigger and bigger and kick you until you can't look at anything
else and will burn its image into your retina and that's all you can think about
and you'll become that person that's stuck in that place but it doesn't have
to be that way because what you focus on is what you're being formed into and
if you realize that there's still a rainbow out there, the river's still flowing by,
that the deer are still eating out of your bird feeder, that the owl is out there somewhere,
that there are many things.
You're going to see that picture that breaks your heart and you're going to
get another picture that reminds you that new life is being formed.
And my friend, you can change your mind.
And if you do, it'll change your life. And the good news here on Self-Brain
Surgery Saturday is that you can change your mind and change your life. And you can start today.
Music.
Hey, thanks for listening. The Dr. Lee Warren Podcast is brought to you by my
brand new book, Hope is the First Dose. It's a treatment plan for recovering
from trauma, tragedy, and other massive things.
It's available everywhere books are sold. And I narrated the audio books.
Hey, the theme music for the show is Get Up by my friend Tommy Walker,
available for free at TommyWalkerMinistries.org. They are supplying worship
resources for worshipers all over the world to worship the Most High God.
And if you're interested in learning more, check out TommyWalkerMinistries.org.
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.