Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
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. I am Dr.
Lee Warren, and you are listening to the Dr. Lee Warren Podcast,
where we talk about the importance of something I call self-brain surgery.
Self-brain surgery is this idea that you can harness the way God made your brain,
and you can capture your thoughts and learn how to change your mind so you can
change your life. It involves neuroscience.
It involves faith. It involves how to handle these massive things,
traumas, and tragedies that come along in life.
And it's about really learning how to capture the full design strategy of how
your brain is put together and how your mind and your brain work together with
God's Spirit to make your life work better.
And today, I'm going to give you back an episode that I released just before
my book came out on July 18th. I'm going to give you back this episode.
At the start of the episode, you're going to hear me talk about a playlist on
Spotify that I put together. we originally gave to the folks who pre-ordered
the book. And I think it's time to give it to you now.
If you read my book, Hope is the First Dose, and if you're spending some time,
your quiet time meditating and praying and doing Bible study,
and even I've got a five-day Bible study on YouVersion, by the way,
about the book. So you can go do a five-day,
Bible study to find biblical hope. If you're struggling with something,
go to YouVersion or the Bible app and type in Hope is the First Dose or my name,
Dr. Lee Warren, and you'll find that Bible study.
There's also one there from my previous book that over 25,000 people have completed.
So I'd love for Hope is the First Dose to create that many completions as well,
because I think it'll help you.
So five days of great Bible study around these biblical concepts of hope and
the scientific implications of how you can make your brain behave in a more
more hopeful way that will change your mind and change your life.
So I'm going to give you that playlist again. I'm going to put a link in the
show notes to the Spotify playlist that you can have for free and go check it out.
It's two and a half, almost three hours of music, songs that Mitch loved,
songs that were helpful to me and Lisa as we were grieving and recovering and
some just hopeful songs and even some fun stuff in there anchored and ended
by my man, Tommy Walker with his amazing song, I Have a Hope.
So I'm going to give you that episode, Happification, today.
You may hear me talk about it being Self-Brain Surgery Saturday because it originally
was launched on a Saturday.
And if you're new around here to the podcast, if you're new,
every Saturday we give you this Self-Brain Surgery Saturday episode.
And this is where we talk really about neuroscience and different self-brain
surgery operations you can learn how to do to take captive your thoughts and
change your mind and change your life.
And they're really helpful. So this episode was about how to find this verb
that I call hapification, which is how you can turn hopelessness into hope again
when you're facing something hard.
I pray that it will be a blessing to you. And here's this episode of hapification
because, my friend, you can't change your life until you change your mind.
And the good news is you can start today.
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.
The whole mission of this show is to help us understand one important thing.
You can't change your life until you change your mind. And the process of how
we change our minds is what I call self-brain surgery.
It sounds silly. It sounds like one of those motivational speaker things.
But the truth is your brain actually controls how your body works,
how your genes perform and duplicate, how your cells replicate.
Even if you're still having children or haven't had children yet,
your brain and your thoughts make changes to your DNA that are passed on to your kids.
And we know now clearly from animal research and human research and Holocaust
survivors and PTSD victims that some of the things that your parents,
grandparents, and great-grandparents experienced,
felt, were afraid of or harmed by changed the genetic molecules in their body,
the DNA and RNA and everything.
And those things are passed down to future generations, out to the fourth generation.
And we know now that some of the things that you're nervous about or scared
about or some of the baseline attitudes or feelings or thoughts or emotional
states that you have aren't because of things that happened to you.
They're not because of things that you're just inherently weak over or things
that you've been exposed to.
They're things that your parents or grandparents or great-grandparents were harmed or hurt by.
That's a fascinating thing. And the truth is, friend, you don't have to be harmed
by things that happened several generations ago in your family.
You can change it. And we'll teach you how to sell brain surgery.
That's just one little piece of the puzzle.
But the way our brains are put together are designed for God to be able to communicate
with us through the Holy Spirit.
And the mind is the software, if you will, that operates the hardware of the brain.
That's how it's put together. together and we'll talk about that
kind of stuff neurogenetics neurobiology neurophysiology neuroscience
epigenetics and all that stuff we'll also
talk a lot about faith and doubt and what happens when
hard things happen in your life what do you do next that's what my new book
is about the treatment plan for recovering from trauma and tragedy and other
massive things and to understand the treatment plan and really engage in it
and learn how to do cell brain surgery for you and your life to make things
better so that you can change your mind and change your life you got to understand
some things about the science of how your mind works.
So we're going to do all that stuff in this show. So if you're new,
go back and check out some of the old episodes and I think you'll enjoy it.
It's going to be helpful.
The book is Hope is the First Dose. And we've been talking for the last week
or two about things related to the book and topics and ideas and characters
and different things you're going to get if you read the book.
And I just want to tell you that the book is available now.
You can download a Spotify playlist that's two and a a half hours of music.
These are songs that helped me while I was writing it, helped me while I was grieving.
Mitch and I loved some music that Mitch really loved and just a whole bunch of different music.
That'll be helpful to you as you spend quiet time and thinking about the ideas in this book.
One of those songs was a song from a guitar player named Joe Satriani,
an album that I first discovered when I was in college.
I remember clearly I was listening to a cassette tape on a bus while we were
on our way for a tour for the jazz band in which I played electric guitar.
And I heard this album, Surfing with the Alien, by Joe Satriani.
And this song, Always With Me, Always With You, came on, and it blew me away
because it's so beautiful and so mysterious, and the music just captivated me.
And I use it now when I'm writing as a quiet time, a way to get my brain together
and think about things, and it gets a little hard in the middle.
Some of the songs on the album really rock really hard, so if you're not into
heavier music, this is the sort of lightest song on the album.
And Mitch loved it. We used to listen to it together when we were in the car.
And so this song is just a reminder to me of some music that Mitch and I love.
And I'm playing it now in the background, Always With Me, Always With You by
Joe Sartreani from the album Surfing With The Alien from 1987.
I'm playing it now because I want to give you just a moment to think about one
thing that we're going to talk about in today's episode. It's Self-Brain Surgery Saturday, okay?
And on Self-Brain Surgery Saturday, we like to learn a new technique or think
about something that can help us change our minds about something.
Music.
We'll be right back.
Music.
The thing that you thought was solid and you lost it? What did you do next?
Today, I want to give you a strategy, a set of tools for what you do and how
you can change your mind.
And it involves something called hapification, which is a word that's made up.
I didn't really make it up. I ran across it somewhere, but it's a word that
refers to the fact that you have to do something to find hope and happiness.
You can't just hope that it shows up. Hope and happiness come through a repeatable
process that I call a verb. It's an action word. It's several components.
Memory and movement are the two most important ones. And today we're going to talk about that.
We're going to talk about the science of haplification and how we can make hope
happen when the ground underneath our feet seems to be shaky and not solid.
So what do we do next? Let's listen to Joe start surrounding for a minute,
and then Lisa's going to tell us that you can't change your life until you change your mind.
The good news is, friend, you can start today.
Music.
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 that place is called self brain surgery.
You can learn it and it will help you become healthier, feel better, and be happier.
And the good news is you can start today.
Thanks, Lisa. Hey, so glad to have you listening today. I'm Dr.
Lee Warren and I live in Nebraska in the United States of America with my incredible
wife, Lisa, my father-in-law, Tata, and the super pups, Harvey and Lewis.
I'm a neurosurgeon and an author and I'm here to help you harness neuroscience,
the power of your brain, faith, the power of your spirit and good old common
sense to help you lead a healthier, better, happier life.
Listen, friend, you can't change your life until you change your mind.
And I'm here to help you learn the art of self brain surgery to get it done.
If you'd like to show, please subscribe so you never miss an episode and tell
your friends about it. If you tell two or three friends this podcast was helpful to you.
Imagine how much good we can all do around the world together.
I'm Dr. Lee Warren, and I'm here to help you change your mind so you can change
your life. Let's get after it.
Okay, here we go. I hope you enjoyed that Joe Satriani music.
That's a special album to this day. I have so much memory and emotion around when I first heard it.
And then all the times I listened to it with Mitch, and he loved it too.
And the song Satch Boogie and Surfing with the Alien, those two songs.
If you like to rock a little bit, those are some rocking songs.
Tommy Walker, I'm talking to you. Check it out if you don't know. Surfing with the Alien.
Yesterday, I had a long day yesterday. I had to make rounds. at 6, 6 a.m.
I had a meeting at 7 that I had to be at, committee meeting.
I had clinic at 8. And after clinic, I got home. I had five consecutive hours of interviews.
Five hours I was talking. So all day long from 6 a.m.
So I got up at 3.30, did a podcast for you, went to the hospital,
rounded, went to a meeting, did clinic, saw a bunch of patients,
came home, and did five hours of interviews before I was finally done at about
6 o'clock last night, 6.30.
And I was worn out and my voice, you can hear the fatigue in it this morning.
I hope it's not driving you nuts, but I spent a lot of time talking about Hope
is the First Dose yesterday, my new book.
Spent a lot of time talking about grief and loss and pain and some things kind
of rattled around and I remembered and I wanna make sure I give this to you
because one of the questions that people are asking me in all these interviews
over and over again, so what do you do when the bottom drops out? What do you do?
You talk about a treatment plan. How do we get there where when the bottom drops
out, of our world, we know how to stand up again and try to find hope and happiness
and all that stuff again. Well, how do you do it?
And the way you do it is something called hapification. That sounds silly.
Hapification. I, for me, when I lost that sense that I'd always had of positivity
and it's going to be okay.
And this kind of undying spirit, I never lost it when I went to war.
I never lost it when I had PTSD.
I never lost it when I went through a divorce. I always had this sense that
that somehow God was going to work it out. It was going to be okay.
They were going to find a way back to being okay again.
But for a while after we lost Mitch, after my son died.
I didn't really think it was going to be okay anymore. I had this sense that
something had happened that was going to change everything forever.
And that turns out to be true, by the way.
But I had a sense that it was going to produce an inability to get back to an okay type state.
And for me, that was devastating because happiness had always been so important to me.
And I'd always understood that you need to have a positive attitude and you
need to have a belief and a faith that things can be okay and that God's going to take care of you.
And for a little while, I didn't have that. that, and it's unanchored me.
It's like I was drifting and I didn't know, Lisa and I talked about it a lot,
like didn't really know.
We kept going to church and we kept talking about the things we believed in
and we had other kids and we had to try to encourage them.
And really that's why I started writing and ultimately the writing to my kids
and all that turned into a newsletter that turned into a podcast and turned
into books and all that stuff.
So ultimately I I wrote my way out of that and found my way again.
But what happened originally was that I needed to find my way back to happiness again.
And it became pretty clear that it wasn't just going to happen randomly.
It wasn't just going to happen. I was going to have to do something to make it happen.
And as it turned out, my friend, Pastor John, the chaplain, in a devastating
and pivotal conversation for me, gave me the thing that I needed to get back
to that place where I could start figuring it out again.
And it happened in the chapel at our hospital in Alabama after I did my first surgery.
After Mitch died, I had to save a little boy's life and had this conundrum of
being, it was really hard for me.
I was able to do what I know how to do and save a little kid's life and give
him back to his parents, but I couldn't save my own son.
It was hard for me to know know that I could give another family a chance to
not go through what I was going through, but I couldn't give it to myself.
I couldn't do it for my family. I couldn't save my son. I wasn't there.
I didn't have an opportunity. I couldn't prevent what happened to him.
And it was hard. It was a devastating thing.
And Pastor John, in this conversation that we had in the chapel,
I wrote about in the book, and I'm not going to give it to you now.
We've talked about it before, but he basically told me that you've got to go
to the book of Lamentations in the Bible, and you've got to see what that guy
did when he was at the lowest moment.
And if you can see what he did, then you'll be able to find your path forward.
And he basically just challenged me. When I was ready, he said,
you need to grieve, and you need to be sorry, and you need to be sad,
and you need to hurt, and you need to let this start to heal.
But when you're ready to understand how you can move forward,
you'll find it in Lamentations. Now that sounds crazy, right?
But I had a track record of trusting Pastor John and the things that he says.
And so I eventually found my way to the book of Lamentations to try to find
this solid ground that had been taken from me.
Because as I discovered in the writing of my book, I've seen the interview, you.
The thing that bothers most people the most when they go through hard things
is not actually that they lose all their faith or that they'd struggle with
doubt or any of those things. Those things we usually work through.
What kills people the most in terms of hopelessness and quality of life and
peace of mind and happiness and value and purpose and meaning and all that stuff that we can lose.
What bothers people the most is when they lose something that they thought they
knew, when they lose something they thought they were sure of,
when something that they they believed turns out not to be true.
And so we learn like when you think that your kids are going to outlive you
and one of them doesn't, it's devastating.
When you think that person's always going to be faithful to you and they're not, it's devastating.
When you're a great athlete and you define yourself by your performance on the
field and you hurt your knee and you can't go anymore, it can be devastating.
When you believe that you've trained and worked hard and done everything right
and you're going to get that promotion that's going to change your financial
future and you don't get it or you get passed over for it, it's not right.
So those things that you think you know when you lose them can be the hardest things to deal with.
And so I was struggling with that, with this idea that I thought I was always
going to be able to find my way back to okay.
I thought my son would outlive me and bury me someday. I thought all these things.
And when I lost that, when I lost Mitch, it called into question everything
else that I thought I believed. We struggled with that for a while.
And so we get to Lamentations, and I start reading.
Reading and I find this interesting thing we've talked
about it numerous times before if you haven't been listening to
the podcast you can go back and listen to episodes like hope is a verb
and you'll hear this but but that what happens in
limitations is the guy is in the middle of a
five chapter story right the first two chapters tell
the story of the fall and siege of Jerusalem how the Babylonians have come and
captive captured everybody and killed everybody and dragged the king off and
plundered the palace and burned everything down and the women have been pillaged
and the children are starving to death in the streets and all these horrible
things are happening in the first two chapters of the Lamentations.
And you get to chapter three and the guy who's writing it,
who's obviously not been pillaged and captured and burned up because he's sitting
somewhere safe enough to write by hand on a scroll after the fact that he's
in a relatively safe place.
So he's writing this story and he says, I am the man who has tasted affliction.
I am the man he says i'm the guy that all these terrible things have happened to really,
you just described how all these other
people have gone through all this stuff that everything's burned down and the
king's been murdered and you say i am the man who has seen affliction by the
wrath of the lord's wrath so he's individualizing it mark vrogep who's been
on the show twice before wrote the best book i've ever read about the lament
prayer and learning how to pray through your pain and learning how to put God's,
put the words that you're feeling and the hurt that you're feeling in God's
hands and really trust him with your complaints.
And, and that's a third of the Psalms, by the way, are lament prayers.
So we just don't learn that in church growing up, but it's okay.
And it's encouraged and it's biblical to pray when you're hurt and tell God
that you're hurt and that you're mad and you don't understand that it's a lament.
And when I read that book by Mark Brogab, Dark Clouds, Deep Mercy,
and by the way, he endorsed my book and his words were so so encouraging to me.
And it's incredible that he took the time to read Hope is the First Dose and
he thinks it's valuable. So maybe you will too.
But Mark wrote this book, Dark Clouds, Deep Mercy.
Which was the Christian book of the year in 2020. And he wrote it in 2019.
But if he had written it earlier, it would have helped me. And I might not have
had to even write Hope is the First Dose because he helped me learn some things about grief.
But he said our natural bias is to individualize suffering.
And that's exactly true. I realized I even felt guilty about it after I lost Mitch.
I would see somebody else go through something hard, like hear about a family
who lost a child to cancer, for example.
And in my mind, I would say, at least you got to know that it was coming.
At least you got to prepare for it. That's not as bad as what I went through.
I would see a person being wheeled out of the hospital after they passed away
and I would tell myself, well, it's probably an old person. At least they got
to live more than 19 years.
At least their family had them more than 19 years. I would minimize their suffering
and maximize mine in my mind.
And I realized that when I read Mark Rogab's book and when I read Lamentations
and he said, I am the man who's tasted affliction, I realized Mark's exactly right.
We individualize suffering. We make it about us.
And the fact is, in that conversation that we had in the chapel that day,
Pastor John pointed out to me that my suffering was extraordinary,
but it was an ordinary part of the human experience.
That all of us go through these massive things, and all of us suffer in different ways.
And the fact is, your grief, friend, your pain, whatever it is that you've been
through, your story is individual to you.
But it's a part of a larger story of this long narrative arc since the fall
of man and before the redemption of how people suffer in this broken world.
And that's why Jesus told us plainly in John 16, 33, in this world,
you're going to have trouble.
But he also told us plainly in John 10, 10, in John 10, 10, he says,
plainly, I have come that you might have life and have it abundantly.
I have come that you might have life and have it abundantly. You can have both.
And so I learned this, what I call Warren's Law of Suffering in the book,
it's a joke that grief isn't a competition.
It's a condition of being human. It's not a competition. It's a condition.
Everybody grieves. And so there's no sense in ratioing somebody else's grief
to make yours feel worse.
Yours is already going to feel as bad as it can feel to you.
And making it relative to someone else's doesn't help the healing process. So don't try to do that.
So back to the story. I get to Lamentations and these first two chapters are
devastating and all these bad things are happening.
And then in Lamentations 3, he makes it about himself.
And don't beat him up too bad because you do it too. And so do I.
All of us do. Our natural bias is to individualize suffering.
And he says these things...
That I started resonating with. I realized what grief does to your body.
And here's some things he says in Lamentations 3.
God, he says, he has made my skin and my flesh grow old. He has broken my bones.
He has buried me in a dark place like those long dead. Though I cry and shout,
he has shut out my prayers.
He is hidden like a bear or a lion waiting to attack me. He has made me chew on gravel.
And I read those things and I realized my bones weren't broken,
but I had shingles and and my shoulder hurts every day since I lost my son.
My hair turned gray. I was in a dark place.
It felt like the lights had gone out on the entire world, like those who are
long dead, he says in Lamentations 3.6.
And I felt, the lamenter says, though I cry and shout, he has shut out my prayers.
I felt like God wasn't hearing me. I couldn't even talk sometimes to him.
I couldn't even verbalize the prayers that I wanted to pray.
He's hidden like a bear or a lion waiting to attack me. This is what you feel.
Why, God, are you doing this to me? you want to know, right?
Why do you, why are you allowing these things to happen? And it feels like God
is attacking you or punishing you.
And that's what it feels like to remember the cell brain surgery rule. Feelings are not facts.
Feelings are chemical events in your brain. So you will feel some things,
but don't make yourself believe that they're true.
But that's what I felt right after we lost Mitch. He's made me chew on gravel.
I literally woke up one morning, I had a filling in my mouth and I'd ground
one of my molars so bad that the filling popped out and the tooth cracked.
I ended up breaking two molars in the time after I lost my son.
So your body will break and hurt and ache, and it's terrible.
And so I saw what the lamenter was doing, and I attached it to myself because
I could feel exactly what he was feeling.
I saw the bodily ailments that I had, the bitter taste of acid reflux,
and my broken molar, and my lost feeling, and the pain in my shoulder from my
shingles, and the pain that still causes me 10 years later.
I felt so isolated. Nobody else could understand how much it hurts.
I was afraid of everything.
I couldn't protect my kids or my grandkids. What can I be solid about?
And the world had seemed so dark. So here was the ground that I thought I could
stand on, that everything was always going to work out for me and everything
was going to be okay. It turned out to be shaky.
It turned out not to be solid. So then the question becomes, what do you do next?
And John said, Pastor John said, the answer is in lamentation.
So dig into it. So when I was ready, it took me years, but I finally got to
where I could go through it and look for it. And look what we found, okay?
Now, remember, this episode is about hapification, how to find happiness and
hope and peace and purpose and all those things again after you lose the thing
that you thought was solid enough for you to stand your life upon it.
And I was at the low point, okay?
But listen to what the writer says. Listen to what the writer says.
Right after he tells us that his body's breaking down and God is attacking him
and all these things, it gets even worse. Okay. Here's what he says.
Peace has been stripped away and I have forgotten what prosperity is.
I cry out. My splendor is gone. Everything I had hoped for from the Lord is lost.
The thought of my suffering and homelessness is bitter beyond words.
Words, I will never forget this awful time as I grieve over my loss.
So he goes from describing what's happening to his city and his people to describing
what it's doing to his body and his mind.
And then he tells you how it feels.
It's making him feel like he's lost all of his peace and he's never going to
be prosperous and he's lost his splendor and all of his hopes have been dashed
and his suffering and homelessness is so bitter that he can't even find adequate words for it.
And he knows he's never going to forget this time and that he is grieving.
He has stated what he's feeling very well. And you should too.
Articulate it, what it is that you're feeling after you lose that solid ground.
And it summed up my situation, really everybody's situation after the massive thing, the TMT happens.
No peace, no prosperity to be had, and earthly accomplishments are well.
I could have cared less that I was an accomplished brain surgeon,
a two-time author, a U.S. patent holder, and all this. I could care less. I lost my son.
I would trade everything I had to have my family attacked.
I would. I'd do it right now. I'd give up this podcast. I'd give up everything
that's happened, the Christian Book Award, everything.
If I could have my whole family back, you'd never hear from Lee Warren again.
That's how I felt. It's true. I just felt like I had lost everything that mattered.
For a while. And here's the thing.
John said the answer was going to be in Lamentations. And after three and a
half chapters, I was finding it harder and harder to believe that there was
going to be anything good in there.
And then I stumbled hard upon this verse.
So he's just finished saying, I will never forget this awful time as I grieve over my loss.
And look what happens right here. This guy changes his mind and it changes his life.
And he says, but this I call to mind. and therefore I have hope.
That he did something, call is a verb.
He decided to call to mind, to remember something that he knew to be true.
He's in the middle of this terrible thing. It's breaking his body.
It's devastated his city. His people are lost and plundered.
His temple has been pillaged.
He thinks God has attacked him.
He thinks that his hope is all gone.
And then he does something remarkable. remarkable. He chooses to take action.
But this I call to mind, and therefore I have hope.
He's faced with bitterness, physical affliction, utter despair,
and he's sitting on this bench of misery, crying out his problems,
but he does not give up, friend.
He does not give up. He uses a verb, an action word, and he calls hope to mind.
There's other translations besides the NIV that I just I just read,
he says, all of these translations use active verbs.
Recall New American Standard Bible. Think of New Century Version.
Turn to Young's Living. All of these are saying, I have got to do something
to call, to find hope, to take hope, to choose hope, to go for hope, to fight for hope.
It's not going to just show up on its own.
There it was. The first time I'd noticed self-brain surgery in the Bible,
this guy changed his mind. And here's the most important thing.
The most important thing I'm going to tell you this morning is that he changed
his mind in chapter three of a five chapter story.
And the last two chapters are terrible and awful, and they don't even end well.
The book of limitations ends with a question, have you just left us,
God? Are you gone forever?
Are you never coming back? That's where it ends. But he changed his mind and
decided to be hopeful in the middle of that story.
And that turns out to be the key element of finding solid ground again when
the bottom drops out, is that you decide you're going to do something to take
action to find hope, and that's how you become hapified.
That's the science of hapification, is engaging the muscle of memory and movement
to find hope again, whatever your TMT is, whatever your massive thing is.
And look what he happens. So he says, look what happens next.
But this I call to mind and therefore I have hope. And here's what he does.
I'm calling to mind the faithful love, the steadfast love of the Lord never
ends. His mercies never end.
Great is his faithfulness. His mercies begin fresh every morning.
They are new every morning.
And I say to myself, the Lord is my inheritance. Therefore, I will hope in him.
He is good to those who depend on him, to those who search for him.
It is good to wait quietly for salvation from the Lord.
Remember the last two days we talked about the Hebrew word kavah.
This idea that we are waiting and wait produces hope and hope produces the ability to wait.
And the tension between the now and the not yet is this thing that can pull
us out of the pit and into hope.
And that's what he uses here. That's the word. It is good to wait,
to hope quietly for salvation from the Lord.
He is daring to hope in the middle of his problem, not after he gets to see
how it works out and he decides to be hopeful because it worked out okay he
decides that he's going to do it now.
I have something I call gap theory. If I looked at all these people and how
they responded to trauma, and I realized that some people can go through the
hardest things and find their way back to hope, and some people can't.
And the difference between those people is what I call the gap.
And it's this idea that Paul talked about Abraham, who against all hope, he in hope believed.
Abraham said, it's hopeless. I'm gonna believe in hope anyway,
because God's always been faithful in the past.
And that's where faith lies. It's in this gap between against and hope.
Hope. So the lamenter here, he had no reason to be hopeful because the situation was hopeless.
They were objectively terrible things that were happening, but he chose to hope anyway.
And that is the path back towards happiness is saying, God's done this before.
He's delivered other people. He's delivered me before. I've been through hard things before.
I'm going to remember those things. I'm going to call on those promises.
I'm going to hold onto them desperately.
I'm going to remember that I am not in a one act play here.
This is a God that is writing a long story of the fall of man that ends in the
redemption of man in the afterlife where I get to see my son Mitch again.
And I'm gonna take hope that this piece of this puzzle is beyond my ability
to understand, but my God is still good and he's still God.
And he's got the power to get me through this and help me to find my way back
to okay and maybe even happiness again.
My God is not out of business.
He is a hopeful, helpful, loving God.
And my current situation and my current circumstance circumstance cannot define
my happiness and my hope and my meaning and purpose in my life.
And that my friend is how you find solid ground. Again, that my friend is how
you engage the hapification verb so that you can find your way back.
And it turns out that shows up over and over again in the Bible,
that same process of people in the middle of their problem who decide to remember.
What God can do and has done.
And chapter 19 of my book is called Memory, Movement, and the Science of Happification.
It tells two more stories, David and Asaph in Psalms, who change their mind
in the middle of their problem and find hope because they decide to pursue it,
not because they gave up waiting for it.
That's the story for today. Memory and movement and the science of hapification
can produce hope and happiness again.
I'm going to play a song in a minute by Leanna Crawford called The Truth I'm Standing On.
Because sometimes the world is going to shake the ground under your feet.
It's going to crumble the things that you thought you knew.
And you better have some things in your heart that prehab.
You better put some stuff in there that you can stand on when life hurts.
Because friend, it's going to hurt.
There is coming a time. There may have already been. you might be in the middle
of it now or there may be more than one thing for you but there's going to be
a massive thing and you need to prepare yourself we're going to do prehab to
put that stuff in there so we know what to stand on when the things that we
thought we knew fall away,
we're going to do self brain surgery to learn a strategy to produce hope and
happiness again and healing again no matter what we go through because we're going to remember.
That feelings aren't facts that not every thought we have is true and that we
have to relentlessly refuse to participate in our own demise.
We're going to remember that self-brain surgery tactics.
And then we're going to get rehab for strengthening and resilience to carry
on and get better by community,
by work, by repeating the process, by
automating it and making new synapses and learning to use our brains the way
God designed them to operate that software hardware interface between mind and
brain to maximize our recovery and improve our neurotransmitter environment
and and make our feelings better by acting on them instead of reacting to them.
And my friend, we are gonna change our minds and we're gonna change our lives.
And hope is the first dose.
It's gonna help you. And I'd love for you to order it because it's gonna help
you change your mind and change your life.
And it's gonna help you find the truth that you can stand on when everything
hurts. And it's gonna help you most importantly to start a new life.
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.