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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 it is Mind Change Monday.
I'm so excited and grateful to be with you. We're going to do some self-brain surgery today.
Today's going to be a little bit different. We talk a lot on this show about
trauma and tragedy and drama and massive things and these big hurt wounds that
we encounter in life and what to do next and how to find hope and how to move forward.
But we don't talk as often about the people who haven't been through something hard like that yet.
People who haven't really been bereaved or been through some massive thing.
And so how do we deal with our lives when we have not really encountered something
hard, but we have this sort of nagging sense that there's something more to be had in life?
There's a lot of us that maybe you haven't been bereaved. Maybe you haven't
found out the diagnosis.
Maybe some major thing hasn't happened.
I was just reading a book called Treasures in the Dark by Catherine Wolfe,
this woman who had a brainstem stroke at 26.
She had this massive stroke, 26 years old, and she wrote in her new book,
Treasures in the Dark, until that point, my life had been largely pain-free
in a way I had mistaken for blessed.
And I think that's right. I think a lot of us, most of us, probably all of us in some ways,
have this sense that if something bad hasn't happened, it's because God's on
our side, or or we somehow tie circumstances in God's favor or our happiness or our peace together.
And I've just discovered from years of research, I've written two books about
it now, I've seen the interview in Hope is the First Dose,
where the people who have the hardest time after something hard happens are
the people that fail to separate circumstance from hope, from faith,
and from peace of mind and what we perceive as happiness.
If you can learn how to be able to be sort of hopeful and happy and resilient
and maintain your sense that you have a purpose despite hard circumstances,
that's when you can become almost untouchable in this quantum way where you
can navigate the hard realities of life and see all of its beauty and meaning
and purpose and passion and all those things at the same time.
So today we're going to talk about when it hasn't happened yet.
Like when we find this sense that we want something more, what do we do then?
How do we avoid this sort of doldrums of life when we are comparing our life
to some imaginary standard and we just can't quite feel like we can break through
or move forward? We just sort of feel stuck.
Like what do we do to move forward out of a place like that?
I think you might find some surprising answers there.
From scripture, from neuroscience, maybe even from quantum physics,
there's some things to be said about those times in our lives when everything
seems to be going sort of okay,
and yet we still feel like there's something more to be had,
like we're missing something, like there's something that we're not getting
that's keeping us stuck. That's what we're going to talk about today.
I have a few announcements. We're going to talk a little bit about a format
change that's coming, and we're going to discuss the winners of the Josh Axe book in just a moment.
But before we do any of this stuff today, on the day that we're going to talk
about when we're wanting something more, I have a question for you.
Hey, are you ready to change your life? If the answer is yes, there's only one rule.
You have to change your mind first. And my friend, there's a place where the
neuroscience of how your mind
works smashes together with faith and everything starts to make sense.
Are you ready to change your life? Well, this is the place.
Self-Brain Surgery School. I'm Dr. Lee Warren, and this is where we go deep
into how we're wired, take control of our thinking, and find real hope.
This is where we learn to become healthier, feel better, and be happier.
This is where we leave the past behind and transform our minds.
This is where we start today. Are you ready? This is your podcast.
This is your place. This is your time, my friend. Let's get after it.
Music.
All right let's get after it hey we had an incredible
response to josh axes think this not that episode from friday just incredible
hundreds of you wrote in for the books and i'll just remind you if you ever
want to be considered for one of the free books that we give away make sure
you send me your mailing address and your zip code we got it's amazing we got
emails with only an email address.
We got emails with addresses with no zip code. We got one email with just a zip code.
Like, I can't send you a book if I don't have your address. So just remember that.
And also because of the volume of responses, I just don't have time to write
back to people and say, hey, I can't put you in the drawing unless you give me your address.
I don't have time for that. So if you want to be considered for one of the free
books in these episodes, please follow the one instruction, name,
mailing address, and zip code. Okay, that's it. Let's move on.
Anyway, thanks again for the incredible response to that episode.
Tremendous talk with Josh Axe. If you've missed it, go back and listen to it.
Tremendous discussion about his book, Think This, Not That. Okay,
congratulations to the winners.
Sarah Araya, you're getting a free book. Diane, you're getting a free book.
Jean, getting a free book.
Deanne, getting a free book. And the person we're going to talk about for a
minute today, a woman named Maggie. So congratulations, Maggie.
You are getting the book out there in California. California but Maggie said
something in her email to me asking
for the book that inspired this conversation that we're about to have.
Let me give you some background. I'm writing the book, the handbook of self-brain
surgery right now. And before we get into that, let me just make an announcement.
I'm really in crunch time as far as writing and selling this manuscript.
So I've got to, you sort of have to make decisions when you're doing a job that's
not your full-time job, right?
So I can't take time from my real job, brain surgery, neurosurgery.
I've got to write a book, do a podcast, be a husband, be a father,
be a grandfather, do all of the other things that I need to do.
And so I've got to make some decisions at some point here and there about where
we're going to spend time.
And in the moment, in the process of book writing season, then I have to put more time on that.
So I'm going to make a short shift in the podcast.
We did this back when Hope is the First Dose was coming alive.
And here's what's going to happen. Going forward from now until the book is
ready to be published, we're going to dial back the number of episodes of the Dr.
Lee Warren podcast. We're going to have one real episode a week.
We're going to have a paid subscriber bonus episode every week.
And then we're going to have some throwback episodes that are for a purpose
with the new intro and a new outro and some like throwback Thursdays that are
just represented episodes that have been unavailable to the free subscribers
for a while. So we're going to give you a lot of content.
It's all going to be relevant, but we're only one new episode a week for the
most part for the next few months. There may be some exceptions to that if we
have a really compelling interview or something really critical that's coming
up that we need to talk about, but there's really going to be one episode a
week. It might be a Mind Change Monday.
It might be a Frontal Lobe Friday. It might be Self-Brain Surgery Saturday,
but I'll make it clear to you when the new content's there.
We'll also continue to have a new or one repurposed Spiritual Brain Surgery episode.
We got some really cool guests coming up on that show with some co-hosting and
some cool things happening over on Spiritual Brain Surgery. And that show has
been on a little bit of a hiatus because May was just a disaster for us.
And we've talked about that before. We had three deaths in the family. We had multiple trips.
I went to Texas three times during May and did 30 surgeries in my practice. It was incredibly busy.
Lisa and Tata made five trips to Texas in May.
And Tata's still there. Tata had to have eye surgery recently.
So pray for him. He's doing great. But has another little eye procedure coming up soon.
So it's just been an incredibly busy last six to eight weeks.
And so spiritual brain surgery sort of got put on a hiatus. We've been giving
you the Ten Commandments back, but we haven't had new episodes for a bit.
Tata's coming back to the show soon.
This week, we're going to try to record three new episodes of spiritual brain surgery.
So that's coming. But the point is moving forward here for a little while while
I'm writing the book, I need you to pray for me.
We get this book done and we get it sold to the right publisher.
It gets in your hands sometime in late 2025, hopefully.
And so the robbing Peter to pay Paul is going to come out of new podcast episodes for a little bit.
So we'll give you deep value, big, powerful episode, hopefully once a week,
starting next week and not every day for a little while.
So just bear with me. It'll be worth it. I promise.
So in the setting of that, one of the things that I'm writing about is that
I have this sense that we all have a mental image of what life should look like.
And it's always different than what our actual life looks like.
I think most of us have this sort of concept that there's somebody out there
whose life is idealized, that their life is sort of mostly happy,
that everything goes well for them, that they have enough money and that people
love them and nobody lets them down and they don't have the bad things happen.
I think we all have this idea that there's a life out there that could be had, but we're not having it.
And so even if the people haven't been through a massive thing,
Even if you haven't lost somebody or gotten cancer or lost your job or gone
bankrupt or whatever happens, had your heart broken, if you haven't had those
things happen to you and things have mostly been okay, like N.T.
Wright, the theologian, wrote in one of his books that I read that he was the
least bereaved person he'd ever met. Nobody died unexpectedly.
Nothing bad has really happened. His life's just been pretty good,
and he's never been really super sad, but still there's this yearning.
There's this notion that we're missing something, that there's something that
we're not getting. And Maggie from California, who won one of Josh Axe's free
books, wrote this to me. I'm so grateful for what you do, Dr. Warren.
Sometimes I think people who haven't gone through a big thing,
at least yet, are as much in need of brain surgery as those who have.
We just aren't crying out in pain.
We're just moaning in deep frustration, wondering why we are so hindered from going forward.
That's the best way I could have possibly put it. I mean, I'm writing about
it, but Maggie put it exactly right. Right. You put it exactly right.
We're groaning in frustration, wondering why we're so hindered from going forward. People feel stuck.
People feel sort of compared to this idealized life that they can see.
They measure their own life and they see the frustrations and the issues and
the things that are holding them back.
And they wonder what's more and what's going on with all.
Well, interestingly, there's some stuff in the Bible about that, believe it or not.
Right. It's amazing how we always seem to find some scriptural correlate to
the things we're dealing with, isn't it?
There's this interesting verse, Ecclesiastes 3.11.
He has made everything appropriate in its time.
He has also set eternity in their heart without the possibility that mankind
will find out the work which God has done from the beginning to the end. What in the world?
Let me read it in a different translation. Here's New Century Version.
God has given them a desire to know the future. He does everything just right
and on time, but people can never completely understand what he's doing.
Here's New International Version.
He has made everything beautiful in this time. He has also set eternity in the
human heart, yet no one can fathom what God has done from beginning to end.
Here's New Living Translation.
Yet God has made everything beautiful for its own time. He has planted eternity
in the human heart, but even so, people cannot see the whole scope of God's
work from beginning to end. What's he talking about?
Well, let me tell you, I believe that every person has this awareness.
This sort of programmed inside us, this awareness that there's something more
than this life we're living,
that there's There's something out there that's bigger or better or truer or
tastier or happier or healthier or more filled with purpose than what we're living now.
I think all of us have this sense inside us that what we're here for is more
than what we're experiencing.
Frankly, I think that's why people that don't have faith, that don't have a
worldview that shows them that there's an eternity beyond this temporary life,
that there's a meaning and a purpose for the things that they're going through
and the pain that they're suffering, the diseases they're facing and all that stuff,
that there's going to be a time, a hope in the future where all of that stuff is set right.
I think the people that don't have that worldview, they try to fill that longing
with things, with people, with sex, with numbing behaviors, with money,
with power, with whatever, and with fame or with occupation or with whatever.
And I think what happens then is everybody searches and finds out that the thing
they thought would make them happy doesn't make them happy, so then they got
to switch to something else.
Yesterday on the paid subscribers bonus episode, we talked about the four components
of your mental life, things we think, feel, believe, and do,
that those things together have to work in a way that's coherent or we get this cognitive dissonance.
And that's what I'm getting at here. We get this sense that we say we believe
something, but it doesn't really work when we try to apply it.
We say that we think something, but we live out a way that doesn't seem to reflect
the fact that we really think and feel and believe that. There's always this
gap between what we feel like or think or believe and what we actually do,
what actually happens around us.
And when the data doesn't seem to support what we thought we believed,
then we get frustrated or we get our hearts broken or we decide to just cover
it all up with something.
And we feel this sort of angst that Maggie talked about in her email because
there's this notion built inside us.
I try to curve it out. I tried to graph it out in the book and I'm working,
I'm not a very good illustrator, so I'm working on getting someone,
Lisa and I, to help us illustrate some of these ideas.
But if you imagine this sort of ideal line, if you had an XY graph and there's
this ideal line at the top, like perfectly happy,
everything goes your way, like you've got meaning and purpose and your life
matters and all this stuff that all of us had this idea that there's a line
up there and that maybe somebody out there has found it and they've got the
secret and they're living it.
But when we actually plot out our life, it doesn't get to that line.
Like if you've been through something really hard, maybe it stays low and it
just arcs low and you never get even close to that ideal line.
Or maybe if you're a Christian and things are working pretty well and you're
trying really hard, and even though you've been through something hard,
you've got this balance between understanding that the world's hard,
but Jesus came to give you an abundant life anyway.
And your life kind of approaches that ideal line almost like an asymptote back
in math class where the line's getting up there, but it's never going to quite get to the ideal.
You understand that the redemption and resurrection and all those things have
to happen in transformation before we'll actually get that redeemed, idealized state.
We can see that, but when you chart it out, it's a little frustrating that you
can't seem to nudge your line a little bit closer over time.
And then there's people in between that, yeah, things go pretty well and then
something bad happens and their line falls, they dip a little bit,
they crash a little bit, and it just never quite seems to get there.
And I think that's the third approach that we talked about before of sort of
using science and neuroscience and all these things to improve your thought
life, improve your quality of life, make your brain as structurally as good as it can.
But you hit this ceiling that I think can only be sort of opened up and expanded
by adding God in. Like a God and the Holy Spirit can make your mind and your
life work better than they can work with just science alone or just effort alone
or just meditation alone.
That there's multiple lines short of this ideal line if you don't have God involved.
And I think that's sort of a visualized way to think about it because the Bible says it plainly.
God set eternity in your heart, my friend. Amen.
God put this notion, if you don't believe in God, just agree with me at least that there is a tug.
There's something in your heart that says there's got to be more than this.
There's got to be more than this. What I'm doing is just not satisfying.
It's not helping me. Even if I'm not going through something really hard,
I just can't quite seem to break through.
So what's that all about? Well, I think the idea is that God placed this eternal
longing, this sense of more in our heart.
And he put this idea in there so that we would continually seek him,
as Acts 17 says, we would search for him and perhaps find him.
He set us in the place where we are in our lives, and he says it very clearly in Acts.
Paul says that he put you, friend, in the place and in the time that he intended
for you to be for the purpose of seeking him and perhaps finding him.
That's why you're there. Okay. You actually do have a purpose.
Lisa's birthday is this Friday. Send her happy birthday message if you want
to. Lisa at lisawarren.com.
Anyway, Lisa has a birthday coming up. And sometimes when we approach birthdays
and milestones and things like that, we have these conversations where we look
at our life and think about things.
And once in a while, Lisa or I will say something like, gosh,
I wish I had been, you know, I wish I was younger or I wish I had met you earlier.
We're a blended family, right? So we met in our mid-30s, early 40s,
and we met at a later time in our life.
And sometimes we have a little sorrow around that. Like we found our perfect
person, but we found them later in life, after we'd done a lot of things and
been a lot of places and lived a lot of years.
And we sort of have a sorrow sometimes over that.
Like one of us will say, gosh, I really wish I had met you when I was a teenager.
I wish I met you when I was a kid. I would have fallen in love with you then.
We wouldn't have gone through all these things that we went through.
But the truth is, if we believe what we say we believe, and remember,
go back to that idea of the four components of your mental life,
thoughts, feelings, beliefs, and actions.
If you really believe what you say you believe, then you have to recognize what God said in Acts 17.
I set you in this world at the exact place and at the exact time that I intended for you to be,
which then means if you're a blended family, if you found your love late in
life, for example, like I did, like Lisa and I did, that means that the moment
that we met was the moment that God intended for us to meet.
And so then we have to say, well, if that was God's plan, then that has to be
the way it was supposed to be.
And I should be rejoicing that it was supposed to be that way,
right? So that's just a small example.
But we have this notion in our hearts that we're meant for something more,
we're called to something bigger, that there is a purpose that's greater than
the one that we're working out, and we can't seem to shake it.
And so the question for us is then, when we feel such things,
what is it that God is trying to tell us? Tata always says that,
God, what do you want me to know now?
So I would say that our human tendency is, and you look at the evidence of the
world, a human tendency is when you feel this nudge that something more has
to be out there and you can't seem to get it,
that you turn to something to make you not feel that, to make you stop thinking about it.
You scroll more, you click more, you compare your life to Instagram more,
you drink more, you eat more, you shop more, you gamble more,
you have more relationships. You do something to fill that void,
and you just keep seeing that it isn't working.
And so even though you may not have gone through some massive thing,
Maggie, there's this sense, as you perfectly put it, that you're groaning for something more.
And the reason you're doing that, the Bible says plainly, is that God set eternity in your hearts.
If you're a pantheist, if you're this person that thinks that the universe is—everything
is connected and God is the universe and all that stuff.
If you're that person, then you would recognize then that the universe has been
constructed in a way or has evolved in such a way, if you want to think about
it that way, that people are connected and there's a purpose for their connection.
And we're not connected in the way that our purpose was designed for or developed accidentally for,
if you want to think about it that way, then you'll feel this yearning that
there's something more that you're missing out on because you're not engaging
in the universe around you in the way that you should be.
Let me make it very clear. What I'm saying is, I think there's this general revelation.
The Bible says it clearly. God made seed for the sower and bread for the eater.
He makes the sun shine on the just and the unjust. He makes the rain fall on the good and the evil.
God gave us all this general grace and a world that operates in a particular
way and a set of things that are true for every human, whether or not they acknowledge
the Creator or they don't acknowledge the Creator.
That God set this in motion, and you can have a meaningful life.
You can have a life, and you can feel pretty happy, and you can do good things,
and you can accomplish great things without acknowledging your Creator.
I would just contend that no matter how well you do that life and how well you
operate the system that He built, you will still have a sense that there's something
you're leaving on the field, that there's something that you have left on the table.
There's a level you haven't quite reached, and that's because God is doing what
He's doing. He puts you in the place and the time with eternity in your heart
because He wants you to seek Him and perhaps find Him and then help others find Him too.
That's why you're here. That's the specific, general, specific calling that all of us have.
Westminster Confession, we're supposed to honor God and enjoy Him forever,
love God and enjoy Him forever, serve God and enjoy Him forever.
That's our general calling. Everybody has that calling.
But you have a specific calling too. That's the time and the place that he placed
you, the gifts and skills that he gave you.
And if you use them for his glory, that line will nudge ever closer and closer
to the line that's going to be the line that you have in the redeemed, transformed state.
Remember Psalm 103, the promise of Psalm 103.
Is it, bless the Lord, all my soul, let all that is within me,
bless his holy name, bless the Lord, all my soul, and forget not all his benefits.
And I'm saying this out of memory, so I may not get it exactly right.
He forgives all our sins.
He heals all my diseases. He redeems my life from the pit. He crowns me with love and compassion.
He satisfies my desires with good things so that my youth is restored like the eagles.
We look at that list of things that God promises that are benefits of loving
Him, and we say, wait a minute, you haven't healed all my diseases.
I still have this chronic cancer. Andrea Hertzler on the show the other day
said, you know, I've got chronic non-Hodgkin's lymphoma.
I've had 100 surgeries in 10 years. I've got chronic pain syndrome.
God, you said you would heal all my diseases.
What's up with that? Why haven't you? How do we reset our mind when God doesn't
seem to be keeping his promise? Well, here's the answer.
He said eternity in your hearts. And you have to remember that you're in the
middle of a long story, a long story that results in your redemption and healing.
That's what the verse means at the end when it says, he said eternity in our
heart, made made everything appropriate in its time without the possibility
that mankind will find out the work which God has done from beginning to end. So here's the deal.
Quantum physics teaches us that time has arrows pointing both directions.
Quantum physics teaches us that everything we do and everything we encounter
and interact with in our lives affects the state of the universe around us,
that everything we do has an effect on the outcome.
So our lives matter, but it also It also tells us that our lives are a very
small part of an interconnected picture that is a very big story that stretches
out in both directions of time all the way back to the beginning when God lit the candle,
okay, and all the way forward until he ends it, until he redeems it and turns
it back into the eternal purpose that he intended for it to be.
So what we learn from quantum physics then is that we are in the middle of something
so vastly connected and so vastly important and the scale of which we can't
even begin to imagine with our finite minds.
What God is saying here in Ecclesiastes is that he is doing and has done and
will be doing things that are about and for our improvement.
And they are going on for eternity past and into eternity future, as far as we can imagine.
And we can't understand it because right
now our brains are not capable of understanding the things that he does.
That's what Psalm 103 is about.
Greater the works of the Lord. They are pondered by all those who delight in him.
And so I would say, if you're feeling that sort of stuck, that sort of frustrated
thing, wondering why you can't get to this place that you're called to.
Here's the reason why you can't. Because right now, the part of the story that
you're in has a limited, you have a limited capacity to understand and see.
We don't have the tools to see that eternity out there where everything's gonna
be set right. But that's what hope is, okay?
He's called us, he says, suffering produces character and character produces
godliness and godliness produces hope.
Hope is that idea that we can get there from here, that the distance between
those two lines, the gap between where we are in this idealized life that we
all have, we all know it's out there.
We all feel it. We all struggle trying to achieve it.
And God says the gap between those two is where I'm taking you.
You just have to hold on. And that hold on, remember the word hope,
those who wait on the Lord, that's not a passive thing.
You're just twiddling your thumbs waiting for God to show up.
It's a very active thing. The word hope is kavah in the Hebrew,
and it has this connotation of being entwined, like wrapping your hands around
a rope like the bull riders do.
You know, they wrap their hands in really tightly onto the bull so they won't fall off.
And that kavah is this idea of entwining and tangling yourself tightly into
this rope that's under tension.
And you are gonna hang on for dear life because you know that that tension is
the only thing that's going to pull you out of this hole that you're in.
That's what biblical hope is. It's not waiting passively.
It's not struggling in the doldrums of wondering why this life isn't what it seems like it should be.
It's not endlessly worrying that you're missing something and maybe God will
come and make it right someday. It's not that.
It's I'm going to hold on for dear life because I know that God promised me
that he set me in this place at this time for this reason, that he has a plan
for me and a purpose for my life.
He has a redemption story with my name on it. All of these pains are going to be wiped away.
And even if I haven't suffered some great thing and I'm just kind of stuck and
just kind of wondering why there doesn't seem to be more for me,
God says there is more for me.
And He is going to help me change my mind about that.
The problem is we get stuck in the ways of thinking that we've always thought.
And remember one of the rules, one of the Ten Commandments, what got you here won't get you there.
What you're doing, you're getting better at. If you keep thinking the same thoughts,
you'll keep getting the same results.
And so if you feel stuck, it's time to change chairs.
I'm gonna go to my office in a little while.
I'm going to sit on a rolling stool in an exam room. My patient's going to be
up on an exam table and I'm going to be the doctor and they're going to be the patient.
But guess what? In your life, you have to do both.
You have to get off the exam table and onto the stool where I sit and be the
doctor and look at your life,
make that subject object shift and get that default mode to give way to your
cerebral executive network and start looking at your life from the perspective
of a compassionate physician who says, you know what? Here's the prescription you need.
You just need to stop yearning for something and wondering why it's not what it could be.
And you need to start asking God to show you the places where your thinking
needs to be evolved so that you start pursuing the plan that he has for your life.
You delight yourself in him and he'll give you the desires of your heart.
And don't worry, I'm not saying you have to do all the work yourself.
Remember, we make it clear.
The Bible says it plainly. God puts the desire to will.
God is working so that you will will and act in accordance with his good purposes.
He gives you the desire. He gives you the tools. He gives you the nudge.
And all you have to do is consent.
And all you have to do is allow him to enable you to do that work that will
move you from here to there.
Because hope is the belief that you can get there from here.
And here on MindChange Monday, friend, with eternity in your heart, you know there's more.
Even if you haven't been through the trauma or the drama or the massive thing
yet or the tragedy, you know there's more that your life could look like.
You know there's a line out there that you want your life to be more closely
approximated to, and you can do it.
You just have to change your mind. Then you can change your life.
Even Maggie, the good news for you and me and everybody else listening to all
this information today is just dramatically good news that we can change our
mind and we can change our life. And we 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.