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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. This is Dr.
Lee Warren, and I am excited to be with you on Mind Change Monday.
I hope Action April is going well for you and that you had a great weekend.
Listen, it has been the windiest, craziest, dust stormiest weekend of all time.
We are all sneezing, coughing, itching.
I don't know what's going on, but the air quality has been terrible.
The wind's been blowing like crazy, and I cannot stop sneezing this morning.
So I'm not going to subject you to 30 minutes of my voice.
We're having a period of time in the writing of my new book where I'm in this
section that's all about shifting our perceptions and perspectives and the way
that perception can immobilize us,
but perspective can sort of influence and empower us to change our minds and change our lives.
And so I'm going to give you back an episode from season nine to kind of set
that up for you as we get along in the week.
And hopefully I'll be able to stop sneezing and come at you with a full-length
episode in a couple of days.
Tomorrow, we have an important episode. There's a new book coming out tomorrow from Dr.
David Carrion. He's a psychiatrist trained at Stanford, and he is going to help
us understand the opposite of depression.
This is a life-changing and perhaps life-saving book. It's incredibly important
and beautifully written. and I'm excited to bring that to you.
I recorded it a few weeks ago and David Carrion and I are going to have a good
talk tomorrow about depression and it's going to be really helpful to you and
I cannot recommend his book The Opposite of Depression highly enough.
But today I want to give you back this idea of how to solve problems by changing your perspective.
This is a self-brain surgery Saturday episode that I did back in season nine
and I think it's going to be helpful to you and it'll kind of get this stuff
top of mind for you as you get into the later part of the week,
wildcard Wednesday, Thursday, Theology Thursday, Frontal Lobe Friday,
and Self-Brain Surgery Saturday.
All gonna have to do with perspective and perception and this switching back
and forth of the idea that you're a patient and a doctor in the self-brain surgery world.
And we're gonna get our minds reordered so that we can rewire our brains,
so that we can radically transform our lives. And we're gonna do all that,
by answering 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.
We're going to change our minds and change how we think about something by learning
a a new procedure to apply to our thinking today.
It's going to help you get unstuck. It's going to help you look at your life
in a new way. It's going to help you be less afraid.
It's going to help you start today to become healthier, feel better,
and be happier. I've got a little music for you.
Two quotes from old quantum physicists and PhD super smart people.
A couple of scriptures, one idea. It's going to be quick.
We've got family in town and I'm not going to hold you up all day here,
but we have one little cell brain surgery operation today that's going to help
you make an impact and move the needle, get you unstuck and move you forward
if you're dealing with trauma or tragedy or any kind of massive thing,
or if you just want to find some traction and get this year off to a good start.
Today, we're going to change our perspective a little bit with a new cell brain surgery operation.
There's a physicist named Lawrence Bragg. He died in 1971, born in 1890.
Sir William Lawrence Bragg, born in Australia, did most of his work in England.
And the interesting thing about Bragg is B-R-A-G-G, Lawrence Bragg.
He was knighted for his contributions to physics, by the way.
But Bragg, the interesting thing about him is that he is the youngest person
still to receive a Nobel Prize in physics.
He was 25 years old when he shared a Nobel Prize in physics for his important
work in the development of a science called X-ray crystallography.
What in the world is X-ray crystallography, you might ask?
Probably burning question you had on this Saturday morning. X-ray crystallography
basically is the study of how proteins are constructed,
using x-rays to try to determine how proteins are constructed and what their
three-dimensional structure is.
And it turns out to be really important in things like understanding how molecules are put together,
which led to a lot of development and advance in the study of pharmacology,
which has led to the development of drugs that you take when you need antibiotics or different drugs,
what they basically can do is they can get an image of how a protein is formed,
and it's three-dimensional shape,
and that can help them understand the receptors on the surface of these molecules,
and that might help them find targets for how they can design drugs based on
the structure of the protein that they're looking at.
So X-ray crystallography, way back in the late part of the 19th and early part
of the the 20th century was in its infancy.
And before they could really understand how to use x-ray to study protein crystals.
They had to understand the fundamentals of what x-rays were.
This is the work of Marie Curie and people like that.
Well, Lawrence Bragg was one of the guys when he was very young that discovered
the science behind how x-ray crystallography works. Okay. That's not the topic of today.
The topic of today is something he said that I want to tell you,
But I just thought it was interesting to think about Bragg as a young man.
He was 16 years old when he took his entrance exam to Cambridge University.
He was in bed with pneumonia and took a paper exam in mathematics and received
a full scholarship to Cambridge.
He was a pretty smart guy. His dad, also a pretty smart guy.
He and his father, like I said, co-developed this idea behind how X-ray crystallography might work.
And they won the Nobel Prize together, which is pretty cool.
I never won a Nobel Prize with my dad.
My dad's a really smart guy, but we didn't win a Nobel Prize together.
So that's kind of a noteworthy thing about Bragg's family. His son went on to
become the chief scientist for Rolls-Royce and was one of the guys that developed
jet engine technology. They have quite a brilliant family, right?
Here's the little story about Bragg that I wanted to tell you today.
Bragg was dealing with this problem.
He kept struggling to figure out the problem of how to understand the math and
science behind x-ray crystallography.
He was 23, 24 years old, and he couldn't figure it out. He was struggling with
the math and the science.
He couldn't solve the problem, and he was taking a walk by the river one day at Cambridge.
He was a first-year research student taking a walk by the river.
And relaxing his mind, and he had an insight that led to the equation.
He went home and wrote it down. He saw the equation in his mind,
went home and wrote it down,
and that equation became the basis for the work that resulted in a Nobel Prize
and resulted in a career where he later became the director of the laboratory
at Cambridge where Watson and Crick described and discovered the molecular structure of DNA.
Okay, so the reason that lab was there for Watson and Crick to do their work
together in was because Bragg developed the whole protocol for how research
labs were to be developed and how teams were to be developed.
He fought for their funding, developed the idea that laboratories should have
secretaries and telephones and office support, and created the whole system
at Cambridge in the Cavendish Laboratory that produced the environment where
great scientific work could be done.
And that's why Watson and Crick were able to be there in the first place to discover DNA.
So Bragg's insight when he was 23, 24 years old that happened while he was taking
a break because he was stuck, took a break, changed his environment,
went for a walk, came up with the idea, won the Nobel Prize,
had a career, developed the academic structure of how laboratories should be
run and produced an environment that many years later.
In 1951 resulted in, I'm sorry, 1953 resulted in a Nobel Prize for Watson and
Crick in discovering DNA's sequence and structure, or DNA's molecular structure.
Now that's fascinating, right? All that to say, Lawrence Bragg had his greatest
insight when he was stuck because he changed his environment,
looked at the problem in a different way, got his mind on something else,
went for a walk, and came up with a good idea.
And I said all that because I saw a quote from Bragg This is a big rabbit hole.
This is what I do, by the way.
I see a quote. I can't stop thinking about it.
I wake up in the middle of the night, and God gives me some way to tie that
quote to something else that I saw. And it just comes out, and I get to talk to you about it.
Thousands of my best friends across the world, Lisa gets to hear this stuff all the time.
But Bragg made a quote that I saw in the book, The Mind and the Brain,
by Jeffrey Schwartz that we've been talking about lately in Chapter 2 about
obsessive compulsive disorder and brain lock.
And he quoted Bragg, and Bragg said, this is the whole point of this day's episode,
is this quote and another quote that I'm going to give you right after it.
Bragg said, the important thing in science is not so much to obtain new facts
as to discover new ways of thinking about them.
The important thing in science is not so much to obtain new facts as to discover
new ways of thinking about them. That was Sir William Lawrence Bragg.
Bragg already had the tools. They had the x-rays. They had the basic math.
They understood the phenomenon that x-rays could give you insight into protein structure.
They just couldn't figure out how to perfect the technique and understand the math behind it.
He had to find a new way to think about the facts that he already had.
And to do that, he had to change his mind. He had to get out of the environment,
stop running the same play. Remember one of our principles.
One of our prime directives in self-brain surgery is if you keep doing what
you're doing, you'll keep getting what you're getting. What got you here won't get you there.
Sometimes you have to change your environment, your thought process,
sometimes your physical situation.
And for Bragg, he had to go for a walk by the river. He had to get outside and
change his mind. and he found a new way to think about the problem he was trying to deal with.
And that resulted in all kinds of good things in his life and in your life because
you have medicine in your cabinet that came about because of the science of
x-ray crystallography that came about because William Bragg took a walk when he was stuck.
Isn't that fascinating? So the important thing in science, Bragg said,
is not so much to obtain new facts as to discover new ways of thinking about them.
When I saw that quote, it triggered a memory of another quote I saw recently
from Erwin Schrodinger, who was the father of quantum physics,
and we're always talking about quantum physics here.
Erwin Schrodinger was born in 1887, so three years before Bragg was born,
died in 1961, 10 years before Bragg died.
And Schrodinger said this, the task is not so much to see what no one else has
seen yet, but to think what nobody has yet thought about which everybody sees.
Let me say it again. The task is not so much to see what no one else has seen,
but to think what nobody else has thought about which everybody sees.
Okay. Let me just break that down for you for a second, because there's some
power in this, in this concept right here.
You've been looking at your life for a long time in the same way.
And everybody around you has been looking at your life and seeing what you see
and agreeing with you that what you say is what is happening.
And you were wondering why you can't make this change when you can't get unstuck,
when you can't move forward after that massive thing happened,
when you can't find hope again.
You're wondering why you can't find your feet. You're wondering why you're so anxious.
You're wondering why you're so stressed. And the reason is, perhaps.
You keep looking at your life the same way. Like Bragg said,
you keep looking at things in the same way, and you keep thinking about them
in the same way, and then you keep wondering why you're getting the same results.
And Schrodinger says the problem is not to have some big, massive insight and
not to see some new thing that's never been there. Oh, wow, I had it all along.
This whole different process was available to me. That's not what usually happens, right? Right.
You don't usually wake up tomorrow and all the things that were keeping you
stuck in your life are different.
You had a different car, a different job, a different amount of money in your
bank account, a different group of people around you. You don't wake up and
find your whole world is different.
But what you can wake up and find is that you can change how you think about
what you are actually living out.
The thing that you see and everybody else sees, this quantum physics idea of
the more you observe something, the more real it becomes, the more you reinforce how it's always been.
And to fix that, you've got to zoom out and change the perspective from which you look at your life.
And that's how you can start thinking new thoughts. That's what Schrodinger said.
You've got to be able to see what everybody sees, to see what you've been seeing
for a long time, but yet be able to think of something new in relation to it.
And I think that's where the Holy Spirit comes in, when you can get the noise calmed down.
As we talked about a few days ago, you turn that dial down, get yourself in
an alpha state, and get those anxious beta brainwaves calmed down,
and get yourself into a prayerful, meditative state where you can turn the noise down.
That's when you'll start hearing that voice. Hey, no, no, no,
don't turn left this time, turn right. You've been doing that for a long time.
See something different here. I'm giving you a different start.
Let's have a different idea.
So those two concepts, not necessarily that you've got to do some magic trick
and have a whole new life, not to obtain a whole bunch of new facts about your
life, because they're probably not going to change, at least not in the short term.
The trick is, so not what Bragg said, don't come up with a whole new thing.
Just think about the things you already have in a different way.
And Schrodinger comes along and says, look at the situation that everybody sees
and think new thoughts about it. Okay?
That's interesting. And it's consistent with scriptures we're going to get to in a second.
My wife, Lisa, the brilliant, beautiful, incredible Lisa Warren,
yesterday dropped a bomb on me of something I never thought about before from
the book of Job. We're doing this Bible recap reading plan this year from Tara Lee Cobble.
It's great. Chronological look at the Bible.
And she said, hey, I saw something in Job I've never thought about before.
This is quantum physics, right?
She's doing what Schrodinger said. Everybody can see Job chapter 3.
Lisa had a new idea about it yesterday. Job 3, 25 and 26.
Job says this. He's just, if you don't know the story, Job gets the news that
all of his kids have been killed. He's lost all his crops.
He's lost all his animals. His wealth has been taken away by raiders and marauders,
and he's now been afflicted by boils and painful sores, and he's lost everything,
and he's physically suffering, and he's just miserable.
He's been through the most massive thing you could imagine, and he says this. This is interesting.
Everything I feared and dreaded has happened to me.
I have no peace or quietness. I have no rest, only trouble.
Listen to it again. Again, everything I feared and dreaded has happened to me.
Job was a righteous man. Lisa said, it never dawned on me before when I read this.
She said, he was a righteous man. He wasn't trapped in sin.
He wasn't doing bad things. But his mind was filled with fear and dread.
He was looking at his life with all these blessings that God had given him,
all these tons of kids and probably grandkids and tons of wealth and thousands
of cattle and camels and sheep as the richest man in the East.
And he was a good guy and he was healthy and had a great wife and all this.
But what was he doing with his mind?
Fearing and dreading the loss of all those people and things and animals and
wealth and circumstance.
He was living afraid of loss.
And so I'm not giving you some big theological thing here.
I'm not saying that what happened to Job was because of his mindset.
Said he was focused on negative things and he manifested that.
I'm not saying any of that stuff. I don't believe it.
So don't make more of this than it is. What I'm saying is this.
What if when the devil decided to test Job and got God's permission to do so,
what if he chose the way in which he attacked him based on what he knew Job was afraid of?
That's the bomb today. What if the devil looked at Job and said, you know what?
That guy is faithful to God, but he's terrified of losing his money.
He's terrified of losing his kids. He's terrified of losing his house.
He's terrified of losing his health. And if I attack him there,
maybe I can get him. Maybe I can get him to denounce God.
Maybe I can get him to lose his faith. If I hit him in the things that he spends
his mental energy fearing and dreading, He's spending his quantum efforts at
observing the possibility of losing his good circumstance.
Maybe that's where I should hit him. Remember Jesus said in John 10,
10, the thief, the enemy, the devil, comes to steal and kill and destroy.
But I have come that you might have life and have it abundantly. So here's the deal.
You're going to have massive things. You probably already have.
You're going to have traumas and tragedies and there's going to be trouble. Okay.
But do you have to live in a place where you dread those things happening?
My whole purpose in writing Hope is the First Dose was to give you a treatment
plan, to give you a plan, to prehab your brain, to put scripture and promises
and music and thoughts and a plan for what you're going to do if something bad happens.
And the reason I want you to have a plan is because when the pressure's on,
as Chris Voss always says, you don't rise to some superhuman human ability to
solve problems and think better than you ever thought, you fall back to where you're prepared for.
If your fire alarm goes off while you're hearing this podcast and your house
is on fire and you've got just a few seconds to grab what you can grab and get out,
you might be terrified once you're out because you're going to realize,
oh no, I left my wallet and my keys and my prescriptions and my eyeglasses and
I'm going to lose all my passport and my documents and my family photos and
everything. I didn't have time to get all that stuff out.
And your house burns down and you are in a lurch because you didn't have a plan
for what you were gonna do if that fire alarm went off, right?
But what if instead, what if you and your family had had a little preparation plan?
Like, okay, we have a safe deposit box where we have backup copies of all our
big documents or documents are in a fireproof safe, or I've got a bag in my
garage or in my trunk of my car that's got a set of car keys.
And I'm not saying keep your car keys in your car. Just go with me for a second
here, okay? It's not well thought out.
But let's just have a plan. I've got a bag that's got a change of clothes.
It's got a few days of my most important prescriptions. It's got a backup copy
of my eyeglasses or my contact lenses.
It's got a set of car keys. It's got some cash. And if the fire alarm ever goes
off, all we have to do is grab that bag and get out with our lives.
Grab the dog. Grab the bag. Get out. Make sure you got your kids and get out of the house.
And we're not going to worry about what we lose because we got what we need
to get the next few days going.
Okay? We have insurance policy. Everything's going to be okay.
And if you have that plan, then you don't have to live in dread of the fire alarm going off.
Right? You don't have to fear what you're going to lose if you have a fire because
you're going to have a plan. You're going to survive.
You're going to have what you need to get through the next few days.
Yes, it'll be inconvenient. Yes, it'll be devastating, but you're going to be
okay because you had a plan.
So the plan drives out fear. You can't be afraid and planning at the same time.
So remember the verse for today, the first verse, we gave you Job 3,
25, and 26 already. already Job was full of fear and dread and that's what came to pass right,
Paul says to Timothy in 2 Timothy 1, 6 through 8, this is a little self-brain surgery for you here.
Therefore, I remind you to stir up the gift of God which is in you through the laying on of my hands.
For God has not given us a spirit of fear, but of power and of love and of a sound mind.
Friend, God didn't give you a spirit of fear. He doesn't want you to live in
fear of the massive thing, to be dreadful of the massive thing.
He wants you to remember that you have power and you have love and perfect love drives out fear.
But you also have a sound mind, okay? So remember Schrodinger again.
The task before us is not to see things nobody else has seen,
not to be the most insightful or the wisest person that anybody's ever been.
The task before us is to look at the situation that we all can see and think
different thoughts about it.
Change your mind. Stop thinking about the situation in the same way.
If you can't get unstuck after grief, then say, wait a minute,
I know there's good neuroscience It can teach me how to switch my cingulate
gyrus out of that and move forward. I can read some good books.
I can get Mary Frances O'Connor's book about the grieving brain.
I can learn to understand what's happening in my brain and why I'm stuck,
and I can learn to think new thoughts about it and move forward.
I can get into a support group. I can find some Christian friends and a pastor
or a therapist or somebody who can help me look at the situation in a different
way and start to zoom out from it, and it doesn't become the only thing I can see anymore.
I can change my mind about what I've been through. Does it change the fact that
it happened? No, because your trauma happened.
Okay. And it's never going to unhappen.
So the idea that we have to constantly be in this state of stuckness or grief
or yearning or loss or pain because of something that happened.
It's true. If you define your trauma as being the thing that occurred.
But what we know from science now, my friend, is that trauma is not what happened.
Trauma is your response to what happened.
Trauma is how you process it and what you decide about it and what you decide
to do next about it. That's what trauma is.
And you can learn a new pattern. You can learn to see something nobody else has seen.
You can learn a new way to think about the problem.
Lawrence Bragg did it, and he did it by changing his environment.
He got out of the house and took a walk and went down to the river,
got his brain thinking a different way about the problem. and the problem revealed
itself. The solution revealed itself to him.
He changed his mind by moving his body in a different way.
He got out of the place where he was stuck and he found a new way to think about it.
And you can do that too. In fact, science says that your brain gives you all
kinds of positive neurochemistry, brain-derived neurotrophic factor and dopamine
and all kinds of things when you move your physical body.
So that's one of the reasons, I think, why Jesus was always on the move.
He was walking up to the mountain to pray. He was drawing in the dirt.
He was always doing something tactile.
There's all these scriptures that show Jesus on the move, thinking and praying
and meditating and drawing in the dirt and climbing the mountain and doing stuff physically.
And when you move your body, your brain chemistry gets better.
And when your brain chemistry gets better, you can clear away the cloud and
you can think differently about the same problem.
But if you keep doing what you've been doing, friend, on self-brain surgery
Saturday, you're going to keep getting what you've been getting.
And if you remember that what got you
here won't get you there if there is this place that
you're longing to be where you feel better and you're happier and you're
healthier and you're finally able to put that trauma in
a in a situation where it's not all you can see but it's a thing in your life
instead of the thing and you can learn to smile again like my character in my
book hope is the first dose i wrote about he had a paralyzed face but he learned
how to smile again because because he had an operation that helped him reconnect
those nerves in a different way. And you can do that too.
But you have to keep thinking, and you have to learn how to think and observe
the problem in a different way.
And you have to remember and believe with all your heart that God didn't abandon
you to this problem with a weak mind.
He gave you a sound mind, and the Holy Spirit can help that mind work to its
fullest advantage, to its fullest capability, and the way it's designed.
But sometimes you need to take a walk.
Sometimes you need to change your environment. Sometimes you need to think differently.
So stop fearing and dreading so much. Make a plan. And run the play,
have a plan, prep it and rep it and be prepared for it.
And you'll stand firm then when the pressure's on because you changed your mind
and you changed your life, friend. Change your mind.
Stop thinking about everything in the same way. And for goodness sakes, 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.