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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, and we're going to do
a little self-brain surgery today. It's Mind Change Monday.
We're going to this weekly format for the podcast, and you're getting some intermittent
stuff sprinkled in throughout the week, but I know that you're not used to me
not coming at you every day.
There's a purpose behind it. We're developing content for you.
We're working on the new book. We're going to to have some news about that soon.
And I just want to share with you that you're not hearing from me quite as often,
but on the newsletter side, you're getting more content.
So if you're not connected to the newsletter, drleewarren.substack.com,
drleewarren.substack.com.
We have a newsletter that's read everywhere around the world every Sunday since 2014.
We're calling it Self-Brain Surgery These Days, the School of Self-Brain Surgery.
We're teaching you the basics, going deep on what self-brain surgery is,
how it compares to other types of training and programs that you can go through
when you've been through hard things or when you're stuck or when you're just
trying to find a little higher level to go through in your life.
We're teaching these things at the newsletter, drleewarren.substack.com.
If you are not connected to the newsletter community, please get connected,
okay? It's a valuable resource.
There's hundreds of posts on there. You can check it out. Paid subscribers get
access to everything, The entire archive, anything over 60 days old, it's all out there.
All the old podcast archives, everything's available.
Drleewarren.substack.com, so check that out, okay?
Yesterday, I was standing on the riverbank. It was a beautiful day. It was pretty cool.
Here in central Nebraska, it's funny. We'll have some July days that are 90,
100 degrees, be super hot.
We'll have other days where you have to wear a jacket. It's like 60 and windy.
It's cool. It's chilly in the mornings.
It's amazing how the climate changes here. I don't mean climate change like
you hear on the news, but how the climate is so variable.
I love it. There's all kinds of difference in one day to the next, and it's really fun.
But I was standing on the riverbank, and it was just this beautiful day,
and the water was flowing by. We live right on the North Platte River.
Literally, our back door is like 40 steps to the riverbank.
We live above the 1,000-year floodplain, so we don't even have to have flood
insurance. We live right on the bank of the river.
Very unique place. Dale and Joe Margaret's built this place and it's just incredible.
We're so grateful. And every time I go outside, I have like a minute of just
kind of communicating with God and calming my spirit.
You can't stand on that riverbank and be in a bad mood. Like it just calms you down.
But every time I go out there, I'm filled with this metaphor that there's water
upstream and there's water downstream.
They have different sort of constituencies to them. They're different sort of configuration.
Upstream water and downstream water has all kinds of different metaphorical
sort of ideas that come to me. Every time I stand out there,
I can't stop thinking about it.
And so today we're going to talk about two ideas. We're going to talk about rivers.
We're going to talk about airplanes and what they have to do with self-brain
surgery and how we can smash faith and science together to understand that there's
a difference between what happens upstream and what happens downstream and the
fact that we are all born on autopilot, but we don't need to stay there.
And we're gonna do all that right after you answer a 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 This is your place. This is your time, my friend. Let's get after it.
Music.
All right, let's get after it. Hey, so I'm standing on the riverbank yesterday
thinking about neuroscience and thinking about you and thinking about quantum
physics and thinking about the passage from Jeremiah and a passage from Ezekiel.
Now, that sounds really weird, but if you haven't figured it out by now, I'm a weird guy.
I'm a brain surgeon, but I'm also a left-handed kid from Oklahoma who likes
Cheetos and Saturday morning cartoons that I used to watch, and a man who's
been through a lot of pain and gone through a lot, been to war,
experienced PTSD, been through a divorce, lost a child, found love,
and remarried, and all that stuff.
And so I'm a complex guy who's been through a lot of hard things.
But guess what? So are you.
You've been through a lot of things. And you might be going through something
hard right now. You might be a bereaved parent. You might have found out bad news from the doctor.
You might have lost somebody you love. You might be going through a difficult
time in your marriage or in your business.
You might be in the middle of a faith crisis. Or you might just be a person
whose things are going pretty well for, but you just have this nagging sense
that you're supposed to be up to something more, that your life is supposed
to mean something more or be about something more.
Maybe you don't know what you believe. You've gone through something that's
made you doubt and you're looking for answers. And wherever you are in your journey.
Today, we're going to talk about how things that are upstream and downstream
from you make a difference with what you're doing right now.
We're going to talk about that in just a second, but I want to tell you two things first.
One, over on the Spiritual Brain Surgery Podcast today, we have the second episode
of the takeover of that podcast by my friend Leanne Ellington.
Leanne Ellington has an incredible story.
She'll help you change your mind about several things, especially if you struggle
with body issues or you struggle with food or weight.
Leanne's story will be helpful to you. Go check out the Spiritual Brain Surgery
podcast Leanne hosted last week, and she's hosting again this week.
It's worth your time. Go check out Leanne Ellington.
Secondly, check out a podcast called Theology in the Raw from my friend Preston
Sprinkle. Preston will challenge you.
Preston's got one of those shows where he looks at hard things around the ideas
of what we believe, around theology, specifically spiritual things.
But Preston's a guy who's going to take things that you assume.
And when you're talking to another Christian, there's a lot of things that we assume.
We assume that we agree on a lot of things, that we believe the same things,
that we look at things the same way. And I'm just telling you,
it ain't necessarily so.
And one of the problems that we have in our society today is that we put ourselves
in these camps. My people believe this and your people believe that.
And if you don't believe what I believe, then you must be bad and you can't
be a Christian or you can't really be a good person.
You're not a patriot or you're not a noble person with good beliefs if you don't
think the way that I think.
Preston breaks that all down. He's going to have some people on his show that
don't think the way that you think, that don't agree that a scripture means
what you think it means. Preston's got some different ideas.
He brings on an interesting guest. He doesn't tell you what to think or what
to believe, but every time you listen to his show, you will be challenged in something.
And whether you walk away with a different idea that you now Now agree with
or more convicted of your own beliefs.
That's what the Bible means when it says work out your own salvation.
We're supposed to listen, challenge, think about different things,
think about what we believe and examine it, prove it out, be able to test it,
defend it, live it, share it. That's what spiritual brain surgery is about, by the way.
But Preston Sprinkle Show, Theology in the Raw does that for me.
It's worth your time. Check it out, Preston Sprinkle, Theology in the Raw.
After you listen to this podcast, go check out one of his episodes,
okay? Okay, Preston Sprinkle, Theology in the Raw.
Okay, so I'm standing on the riverbank and have this strong mental picture every time I'm out there.
That the water in front of my house is made up of the water that used to go
past our house in Casper, Wyoming. We live on the North Platte River.
And in Casper, there's a stretch of North, the North Platte River runs right
around the city of Casper, Wyoming.
And it's one of the most famous trout fisheries in the world.
They call it the Miracle Mile. It's the stretch of water close to Casper.
Some of the best trout fishing in the world. And in between Casper and North
Platte, that river goes through several reservoirs. There's a bunch of dams
and the trout are mostly filtered out by the time they get here.
And there's really bass and carp and walleye and all kinds of other things in the river here.
But there's not any trout, at least not one that I've ever seen down here.
But the water is the same. And so every time I'm standing out here,
I always think about that.
Like when we used to play in the water in Casper, somebody downstream was affected
by whatever we put in the water.
However we stirred the water up, those ripples were going downstream in North
Platte, Nebraska. and now they flow past my backyard.
I'm thinking about that in the context of life and it becomes apparent that
you're born into a river, so to speak.
Just stay with me on the metaphor. I know it's stretched a little bit here,
but you're born into a bunch of water that's flowing and it's stirred up and
contains all kinds of things that you didn't have anything to do with.
You're born swimming in water, Like the fish that we see, the little minnows
swimming around out there that we see.
You're born swimming in water that you didn't create. It's not your fault.
You didn't have any control over the conditions into which you were born.
So you think about that water and you stretch it out to the way your life is.
You were born in a home, okay, with or without two parents who had belief systems
that you're not responsible for.
You had cultures and religions or lack of religion.
They had behaviors. they had habits, they had addictions, they had challenges,
they had gone through traumas, they had a good or a bad relationship,
they had certain spiritual ideas or not, they had a cultural history of thinking
and behaving in their families in certain ways. You didn't create that.
They had epigenetic generational wounds and traumas and switches that expressed
genes and stress hormone levels and baseline responses to certain things that you didn't create.
But you were born swimming in that water. And from the first moment that you took a breath,
you had to navigate the cultural landscape, the environmental challenge,
the societal influences, the belief systems, thoughts,
feelings, actions, and realities of your family.
Not your fault. Not your responsibility. And if it's great, it's also not great
because of anything you did.
You were just born in that situation. We used to have a saying in baseball,
like there's a player who got a lucky break.
His dad was the coach or whatever, and he got to play when he wasn't maybe as good.
There was a kid in my high school baseball team. In fact, it wasn't a very good
ball player, but his dad paid for the stadium and the scoreboard and had his
name on everything in that town.
He was kind of the Mr. Potter from It's a Wonderful Life that this kid's dad
was the rich guy and his name was on everything.
And that kid got to start every game, even though he wasn't the best player.
And we used to say he was born on third base and he thought he hit a triple.
You know, he didn't hit a triple.
He didn't earn that spot. He just was born on third base because of his dad.
So we have sometimes situations like that too. Born into a situation that's
good or bad, but we didn't create it.
Unfortunately, though, something happens in life as we go along and we start
to think, especially in this culture where everybody's got a therapist or everybody
has a diagnosis or everybody has a label for their behavior.
Or I'm ADHD or I have anxiety disorder or I'm on the spectrum or I'm neurodivergent
or whatever, we've diagnosed and pathologized everything.
In fact, I saw some recent data that suggests that the symptoms that we call,
a cluster of things that we call ADHD now.
Are so prevalent in our society. Statistics-wise, that group of symptoms,
if you don't label it as a disorder, you recognize that people are just this way.
Most people have multiple elements of what we call attention deficit disorder.
There's so much prevalence of that cluster of behavioral things that you really
couldn't call it a disorder if you looked at it according to typical epidemiology
language because it's so common.
Like if everybody has a set of behaviors, it's not a disorder, it's the norm.
And therefore it would be abnormal not to have it, right?
So my point is we've pathologized everything.
So we look at the way our lives are playing out and we label ourselves as having
this or being that or feeling this
or unable to change that because of the water we were born into, okay?
Or I'm smarter than everybody else. I'm better than everybody else.
I'm more talented than everybody else. I handle things better,
and therefore I'm judging other people because they're not handling things as well as I am,
but I don't recognize that I don't get to own the pride for the way that I am
because I was born into water that I had nothing to do with.
Does that make sense? So this humility then of understanding that if you got
a particular break, And I'm not talking about privilege and all the things that
these intersectional folks are talking about.
I'm just saying there are some realities that if you have a particular blessing
of being born in the United States and having some affluence in your life or
having some loving parents who taught you well and were careful with you and
raised you up to be resilient and strong and be a good problem solver and all these things,
you shouldn't be prideful about that. You should be grateful for it.
And then you should try to help other people find elements of how they can modify
their lives to have those advantages too for the next generation, right?
So not boastful, but humble. Not prideful, but grateful.
On the flip side, if you're born into water that was difficult for you and you're
recognizing that, then don't be ashamed of that.
Be challenged by it. Be resolved to overcome it. Be resolved to acknowledge
and understand where you are.
Assess your state. Be honest about it. And then find the help that you need
to change it. There's a scripture, two scriptures actually. It shows up in two different places.
And Tata and I did an episode of Tuesdays with Tata about this.
It's Jeremiah 31, 29 and Ezekiel 18, 2 and 3 say basically the same thing.
The parents have eaten sour grapes and the children's teeth are set on edge.
There was a proverb back in those days that people used as an excuse for their bad behavior.
They would say, well, my father ate sour grapes and I have my teeth set on edge.
The idea is that something happened to my parents. My parents committed a sin.
My parents weren't very noble.
My parents didn't have good habits and therefore my life is what it is.
They were blaming their parents for what they were doing in their lives.
And the prophets came along.
God said, no, no, no, no, no, no. Don't say that anymore.
Don't say there will come a time. And it's now when you don't anymore blame
your dad for what you're doing.
You don't anymore blame your grandfather for you being an alcoholic.
You, once you understand that you've inherited a set of a a system,
a bunch of water that you're swimming in, then you have a responsibility to
make a difference. Because guess what?
You don't just live in upstream water. You're also swimming in current environment
that's going to affect what happens downstream from you.
And if you're a parent or if you're a young adult and you don't have children
yet, you need to think carefully about this.
The decisions you make are going to create the water that your kids swim in.
And are you going to pass that along? Your teeth were set on edge by something that your father did.
Are you going to pass that along to the next generation? We know now that these
epigenetics, which is that we inherit our cortisol responses and the way that
we feel or things that we're afraid of or things we're uncomfortable around,
those things can be changed by changing how we think.
Why? Because thoughts become things. If you learn nothing else from self-brain
surgery, understand this.
I want you to really understand and embody this, okay? You are not your brain.
You're not your brain. Your mind has top-down control over the way that your
brain behaves and makes structural changes. That's why we call it self-brain surgery.
This is not motivational speaking. This is not metaphor.
It's not self-help. It's neuroscience. You change the structure of your brain
when you decide to think about different things.
That's what Philippians 4 is about in the Bible, by the way.
If you want to stop being anxious, be more grateful because that changes your brain structurally.
Healthier ways. It helps you get your cerebral executive network and your frontal
lobes involved in making better decisions and responding rather than reacting to things.
You change the water you're swimming in when you change the things you think about, okay?
Now pivot for a second. I want you to imagine the cockpit of an airplane.
If you've ever seen a jet airliner, when you get on the plane,
you look up into the cockpit and there's a million dials and switches, it seems like.
There's all these controls, these things that the pilots have to know what they
are, are these dials and instruments and switches and all kinds of levers and
gears and things that they pull and control surfaces and dials and gauges and
touchscreens and all kinds of stuff.
And it's overwhelming to think, man, how do they know how to use all that stuff?
But I just want you to recognize those controls are not the airplane,
and they don't independently get to decide what happens to that airplane,
because a person has to decide how to operate those switches and pull those
yokes and push on those rudder pedals.
A person, a pilot, has to get in there and take command of those instruments
in order for the machine to do what it's supposed to do.
Now, there is a thing called autopilot, okay? So pilots can engage the autopilot,
and it will run a computer program that will keep the airplane flying at a certain
altitude on a certain heading and respond to changes in the wind and all that stuff,
and basically can pilot the plane.
But the autopilot isn't the pilot.
The autopilot behaves according to programs that the pilot engages. engages, okay?
The autopilot flies the plane only if the pilot engages it and programs it correctly.
And it can only do so safely if the pilot has overseen it in a proper way.
I want you to pivot now and think about your mind and your brain, okay?
You were born, my friend, on autopilot.
But long before you had language, long before you had the cognitive ability
to to process what was happening.
Your body was performing a set of automated tasks that your creator built into your brain.
You're breathing without having to think about it. You had a swallowing reflex.
You were able to eat and drink and push yourself away from threats.
You have a spinal reflex that allows you to kind of flinch and jerk away from a threat.
Babies do that jerking thing when you threat, when you stimulate their feet or their palms, right?
Those are all things that were programmed in a baseline. You start your life on autopilot.
You're born on autopilot and all those switches and gears and dials were dialed
in a particular way to keep you alive long enough for you to start developing
your frontal lobes and begin to have consciousness and be aware that you're
an individual with your own thoughts and feelings and desires.
And all of that water you were swimming in from upstream,
all those presets on the autopilot, they were set by a combination of genetics
and experiences and environment and the people you were around and the systems
into which you were born and the way in which your parents and grandparents
believed and felt and lived out their lives.
Or you were born on autopilot, but at some point you start to realize that you've
got some top-down control.
And you don't have to let your life be played out on autopilot.
You can choose how you're going to flip those switches and dials because your
mind has top down control over your brain. You're not stuck with the brain you have.
That's the whole point of self-brain surgery, okay? It's the entire point of
what I'm trying to communicate to you because you are not stuck with the brain you have.
You're not stuck with the traumas you've encountered. You're not the trauma.
Your life is not the trauma that you've encountered. No matter what you've been
through, what kind of massive thing you've encountered, what kind of difficulty,
what kind of thing that other people have done to you or loss that you've suffered,
that has not broken your brain in an irreparable way because thoughts become
things because you can choose to learn a new response to that trauma.
There's an equation that I got from a guy named Brendan Burchard.
Brendan Burchard is a leader in the influencer industry.
They used to call them self-help gurus, but he's really not that.
He trains people how to use the information that they have to help other people.
And he has an equation that he shared that really made a difference for me.
Pain plus reflection equals progress.
Pain plus reflection equals progress. That sounds an awful lot like Romans 5, 3 through 5, doesn't it?
Don't you know that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character,
and character produces hope?
Pain plus reflection equals progress. The point of that is if you go through
something hard, you can either let it just be a hard thing.
You can let it be a defining thing.
You can let it spoil the waters that you're swimming in and affect all the things that happen after you.
You can let it change the dials on your cockpit in a way that the autopilot
is going to fly that plane into a mountain or not get you to the destination
that you were supposed to get to.
Because the pilot conceded control to the environment, to the system.
Conceded control. Set the dials aloud. Let's say you're flying along and you
hit a bunch of turbulence and the turbulence bounces your hand up onto the cockpit
and you flip a whole bunch of switches because you hit that bump.
Let's say that you decide not to switch them back.
Now you've allowed that bump in the air to
set dials on the airplane plane that's going to affect the performance and maybe
the path and maybe the survival even of the airplane and its crew and its passengers
because you allowed the trauma to change the dials without exerting that top-down
control and saying, wait a minute, no, no, no.
I'm going to switch those back to something that's correct. I'm going to be
in charge of what happens.
That trauma occurred, yes, but I still get to choose how these dials get set, okay?
Because we know that pain plus reflection equals progress, but progress without
reflection just leaves you with pain, okay?
If you subtract, if you switch that equation around and you subtract the reflection
of the idea, thinking about it, understanding what happened,
breaking it down, learning from it, if you don't go through that process,
then you just have pain, okay?
And you might share that with others and get empathy from them or sympathy from
them, but you won't inspire them or help them or be useful to them along the path.
And the whole point where I've done, what I've realized is that God put this
incredible burden, what seemed like an unsurvivable burden of being bereaved
parents into me, mine and Lisa's lives, into the lives of our children when we lost our son, Mitch.
And that was either going to be a defining thing that was going to crush us.
And I could share that story and people would feel sorry for me.
And, you know, don't blame him for
being this or doing that or drinking or whatever, because he lost his kid.
You know, you know, somebody like that already. Everybody kind of coddles them
and pats them on the back and, you know, don't be too hard on her.
She went through something really hard 20 years ago and it's just kind of messed
her up. We know people like that.
I don't want you to be that person. I want you to be the person that goes through
something hard and reflects on it and tries to understand it and prays through
it and ask God to show you how you can use that to become more resilient,
to develop endurance, to develop character, and maybe even find hope.
Because you have been through the refining fire. Isaiah said,
I've refined you, not like silver.
I've refined you in the furnace of suffering. Suffering produces endurance and character and hope.
If we let it, pain plus reflection equals progress.
Okay? So I've given you a lot of different metaphors.
Your dad ate sour grapes and your teeth were set on edge.
You were born into water that you're not responsible for because things happened
upstream from your life that are affecting the environment that you're born
in. But what are you going to do about the water that you leave behind, the environment?
How are you going to change it so that your kids inherit something different
than you, that your life tells a story that looks different,
where the water downstream from you is not polluted by all the toxicity of your life,
but rather it's enhanced by the sweetness that you've allowed God to create
in your life because you changed your mind.
You're not going to let turbulence in the air make changes in the controls of
your airplane plane that's going to crash that or lead it to the wrong course
or produce a velocity and trajectory of your life that's not helpful to you
or to those who come after you.
Take any of these metaphors you want, and the take-home message is this.
Trauma is not what happened to you.
Trauma is your response to what happened to you. You're not responsible for
the house that you're born in, the family that you're born in.
Even if you were born on third base, you didn't hit that triple, okay?
You have to recognize that you were given a set of circumstances,
and you've been through some things.
And some of those things, sure, maybe you're living under shame because the
bad thing that happened in your life was your fault. You're the one that cheated,
or you're the one that chose to drink and then drive, and you had that accident
and somebody died. You're the one who did that thing.
You're the one with the pornography addiction that ruined your marriage.
You're the one with the issue that your family said no to, your job said no to.
Maybe that's true for you, okay? But if it is, the question is, what now?
Do you keep going and just let your teeth be perpetually set on edge,
to let those dials and switches be changed because you hit that bump and your
hand knocked all that stuff and you don't decide to take control of it and change
it to something more positive?
Pain plus reflection equals progress. And here on Mind Change Monday,
the question is, are you going to let your life be defined by things that happened
before you were born or since you were born that weren't in your control or
things that you did or didn't do that you should have,
but now you have a chance to recognize and reflect on them and change them in
a way that can be helpful to you and your spouse and your family and your generations
after you in the world around you who needs your help.
Listen, the world can be a very dark place.
And I guarantee you that whatever you've been through or whatever you've done
could be used to show the redeeming power of what God can do in a submitted and humbled life.
What hope can do when somebody models it after they've been through something hard.
You can change the world. You can save a life.
You can help somebody around you see that it doesn't have to stay the way it
is, that it doesn't have to always hurt this way.
It doesn't have to be meaningless suffering because the water downstream from
where you are right now can be better because you chose to change and swim in it differently,
to fly the plane differently, differently to decide that you weren't going to
have your teeth set on edge or something that didn't happen in your time.
That you're going to understand that you have an incredible ability to change
what you think about and thoughts become things and what got you here won't get you there.
And it's time to change your life by changing your mind.
And the good news about all this, my friend, is that 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 audiobooks.
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.