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When life gets hard, does what we think we believe hold us up, or does it crumble under the weight of doubt? I'm your host, Dr. Lee Warren- I'm a brain surgeon, author, and a person who's seen some stuff and wondered where God is in all this mess. This is The Spiritual Brain Surgery podcast, where we'll take a hard look at what we believe, why we believe it, and the neuroscience behind how our minds and our brains can smash together with faith to help us become healthier, feel better, and be happier so we can find the hope to withstand anything life throws at us. You've got questions, and we're going to do the hard work to find the answers, but you can't change your life until you change your mind, and it's gonna take some spiritual-brain surgery to get it done. So let's get after it.
Good morning, my friend. Doctor Lee Warren here with you. It is a brand new week, and it's mind change Monday. Hope you're doing well. Hope you had a great weekend.
Dr. Lee Warren:We are having what I hope will be our last big snowstorm blizzard of the year. The wind is raging outside, and the central part of Nebraska is getting hammered with a big windy snowstorm. So that's good for the farmers and good for the ground eventually when all that snow melts. It's still dark, so I don't know how much we got. We were forecast to get 6 or more inches last night, but the wind is a problem because that'll create snow drifts.
Speaker 1:So pray for the folks out here in this part of the country, and I hope you're warm and safe wherever you are. Today, we're gonna talk about the 5th commandment. I told you this weekend that we're retooling the 10 commandments of self brain surgery just a little bit to create the book self brain surgery manuscript that I'm working on. This is gonna be the handbook, the the go to guide. It's gonna give you a book that you can come back to and flip open to a particular chapter and and deal with a particular thing or read it like a book or use it like a 40 day devotional.
Speaker 1:There's gonna be lots of different ways to use this book, and I hope it'll become a trusted guide book. Something you can reach for over and over again as the years go by in your practice of self brain surgery as we try to develop this brain mind life. It's self brain surgery, tools to rewire your brain, reorder your mind, and radically transform your life. In the course of that, we have the Ten Commandments, and I told you recently that we're gonna kinda reshape these as I put the manuscript together. Because once it's published, they're fixed.
Speaker 1:We can't change them anymore. So trying to find the very best way and order in which to state these ten principles that we've drawn from neuroscience and from scripture to smash together to give us the best tools we can to live this brain mind life. And since you are a self brain surgeon, because you wouldn't be listening to this podcast if you weren't, then today I wanna talk about the 5th commandment. This kind of was originally the 4th 5th commandments, but we realized that they were sort of corollaries of one another. So we wanna be efficient.
Speaker 1:We wanna make sure we give you the most sort of perfect list that we can to put in one place. I know people are putting these on bathroom mirrors and putting them on index cards in their pocket, putting them on their phones so they can rework them or reuse them and remember them and memorize them and live them out as the days go by. So today, the restated 5th commandment, here it is. I must love tomorrow more than I hate how I feel right now. I must love tomorrow more than I hate how I feel right now.
Speaker 1:We're gonna get after that in just a minute. The 5th commandment of self brain surgery for mind change Monday. But before we do that, I have a question for you. Hey. Are you ready to change your life?
Speaker 1: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.
Speaker 1:I'm doctor 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?
Speaker 1:This is your podcast. This is your place. This is your time, my friend. Let's get after it. Alright.
Speaker 1:Let's get after it. Hey. The 5th commandment. This is about loving tomorrow more. It's about not being willing to pay the tomorrow tax anymore.
Speaker 1:It's about stopping the idea that we can't stand how we're feeling after some trauma or tragedy or massive thing or just the home drum of a life that we think should be different than it is. We don't like it, so we do something to stop feeling it. Now self brain surgery is the only type of surgery that anesthesia makes worse. I rely on my colleagues from anesthesia, the CRNAs and the MD and the anesthesiologists who I work with at my hospital are outstanding, and they keep my patients asleep and comfortable so we can perform these life changing and sometimes lifesaving surgeries. And without anesthesia, I wouldn't be able to do what I do.
Speaker 1:It's it's absolutely critical to my work. But in the self brain surgery realm, it turns out anesthesia is bad. Anesthesia never helps us, and here's why. When you numb yourself to what you're feeling, you can't feel anything. When you numb yourself to the bad stuff, you also can't feel the good stuff.
Speaker 1:Because unlike local anesthesia that we do if I'm gonna take a mole off your finger or if I'm gonna perform carpal tunnel surgery on your wrist. I can give you a local anesthetic so that you only stop feeling that particular part of your body. But unlike local anesthesia for those kinds of minor procedures, self brain surgery, when you anesthetize yourself, you anesthetize your whole self, your entire mind. You can't not anesthetize the good stuff when you're trying to anesthetize the bad stuff. That's why verses like Ephesians 518 are so important.
Speaker 1:We we talk about alcohol as an as an example of numbing behavior a lot because it's the most probably the one that most people reach for the most. And when you don't like how you're feeling, you like to consume something that you think is going to relax you and calm you down and make you not have to think about it. The problem is there's always a flip side to that. And in the setting of alcohol, we could talk about pornography or Internet shopping or gambling or relationships or sex or lots of other things that people use to numb themselves. We could talk about those things.
Speaker 1:But, specifically, with alcohol, you always rob Peter to pay Paul, so to speak. Because, yes, you stop thinking about or feeling the thing that you don't wanna feel right now. But you also arm your brain structurally. We know that alcohol is a direct neurotoxin, so you're doing structural damage to your brain. So, ultimately, you're making your brain less able to help you cope with the life that you have, enjoy the life that you have, relate to the people around you, make decisions that are gonna be good for you, and all of that.
Speaker 1:You're covering up all that ability and actually structurally harming it and making it harder for you to do those things as efficiently in the future. And, yes, this occurs sort of on a microscopic scale, but there comes a tipping point. We all know the person, or at least in health care, we all know the person who handles chronic alcoholism pretty well. We call them high functioning alcoholics. And then all of a sudden, they finally lose enough brain cells that they become consistently, clearly, obviously, demented and disabled and dysfunctional to everybody.
Speaker 1:So they pushed it too far, and they finally got past their limit. And now they've irreparably harmed their brain with alcohol. And what does everybody do? We kinda shrug our shoulders and say, oh, poor guy. He just couldn't get off the bottle.
Speaker 1:Well, I would say it's a terrible tragedy to destroy your own brain that much. But all of us, if we use alcohol or some substance like that, all of us are doing harm to the structure of our brain. And when I say you rob Peter to pay Paul, I don't just mean the structural damage to your brain. I also mean that you disconnect yourself from the Wi Fi network, if you will, that's connecting your mind to the spirit of God, to your great physician, the one who actually wants to help you solve these problems and deal with them in a healthy way. That's why Ephesians 518 is not about debauchery, by the way.
Speaker 1:It says, do not get drunk on wine, which leads to debauchery. Instead, be filled with the spirit. The New Living Translation, don't be drunk with wine because that will ruin your life. Instead, be filled with the holy spirit. I like that translation better because I was so the church that I was raised in, it was always don't drink or you'll go to hell.
Speaker 1:Don't drink or you'll do this. Don't drink or you'll do that. It was all about behavior. But the verse isn't about behavior. And that's why that kind of teaching Paul even says it later in the New Testament.
Speaker 1:Don't give people all these rules. Don't handle, don't taste, don't touch, because they seem wise, but they lack value in restraining indulgence. Because people figure out that something else they get from it will help them more than abstaining from it. But they at least think that, which is incorrect thinking, but that's the trade off that people get. If you teach them the right thing for the wrong reason, then when that wrong reason doesn't play out to be helpful to them, they'll do it anyway.
Speaker 1:But this verse is never has never been about debauchery. It's never been about things that you do when you're drunk. Yes. They're bad things that you can do when you're drunk. There are lots of them, and lives can be ruined as the New Living Translation says.
Speaker 1:You can ruin your life with alcohol or with drugs or with other kinds of numbing behaviors. But the reason why is because you can't be filled with the spirit while you're drunk with alcohol. What does that mean? If we if we accept the proposition that our mind is the interface between the great physician, the the spirit of God that lives inside us and wants to communicate with us and guide us and help us as the gospel of John is all about. The Holy Spirit wants to remind you of truth, help you, teach you things, help you, sustain you, guide you, counsel you, heal you.
Speaker 1:And when you turn your mind off with alcohol, he can't communicate with you. And so if you want to be filled with the spirit, if you wanna have the guidance and the help of the great and wise physician who's there to help you, the wise advocate as Jeffrey Schwartz calls him, you can't turn your brain off. You can't disconnect your mind from the spirit. So that's why we're not supposed to be choosing to inebriate ourselves with drugs or alcohol or anything else that disconnects us from our ability to communicate with the one place that can really help us, the one person who can really understand us, the one person who really knows how that trauma or tragedy or massive thing has affected us. But it does take some bravery to face into this.
Speaker 1:So the 5th commandment then is really about choosing to accept the feelings that we have right now, that the pain and the difficulty of what we're going through, choosing to accept that so that on the backside, we can get all the other good stuff in exchange for it. Because you can't feel good things if you're anesthetized against the bad things. My patients are asleep for surgery for the hour or 2 hours or 3 hours or 30 minutes or 5 hours or however long it is that I have to do that procedure. While they're asleep, yes, they're not feeling the pain from the surgery, but they're also not talking to their grandkids. They're also not enjoying their life.
Speaker 1:They're also not doing anything else with their spouse or their loved one or or catching up or doing work or going for a walk. They're anesthetized on the table, and the only thing they're going through is the procedure that they're having right then. And that's okay because that's for a purpose. But when you choose to numb yourself because you don't like how you're feeling right now, you're missing out on everything else in your life. And remember, we're in this quantum physics world where two things can be true at the same time.
Speaker 1:And the reason that we're not devastated and overwhelmed and completely ruined by our traumas and tragedies and massive things is because we can have that abundance at the same time. When Jesus says your life's gonna be hard, but I've overcome it. This world, I've overcome. John 1633. This the thief comes to steal and kill and destroy, but take heart.
Speaker 1:I've come. I'm sorry. I misquoted that. The thief comes to steal and kill and destroy, but I've come that you might have life and have it abundantly. That's John 10:10.
Speaker 1:Always a dual edge. There's something difficult. There's something positive, and they can both be true at the same time. So when we numb ourselves, we only cover up the bad, but we also stop feeling the good. And we take ourselves out of the quantum physics reality, and we just don't feel anything.
Speaker 1:My friend, Annie Grace, who wrote the incredible book, This Naked Mind, which is all about alcohol and getting yourself set free from alcohol, she talked about how you can achieve relaxation by removing the source of discontent. She says alcohol, by definition, cannot relax you. Now you may wonder about the numbing effects of alcohol. Surely, alcohol will help numb the pain. And she says, yes.
Speaker 1:Alcohol will numb your brain and your senses. It will numb you in such a fashion that if you drink enough, it will render you unconscious, and unconsciousness will relieve your pain. But saying this is a good idea is like saying it's a good idea to go under the guillotine because you have a migraine. There are better solutions. Listen.
Speaker 1:If your head hurts, you don't have to chop your head off to make it stop hurting. There are other ways to achieve that pain control. And so the idea of numbing your brain to the point of unconsciousness as a way to stop feeling something that's hurting you is not the best path to getting that done. Annie Grace further says, if you're truly happy and relaxed, you have no need or desire to change your state of mind. Looking back, I see that my constant need to drink to relax myself was really proof that alcohol wasn't relaxing me.
Speaker 1:If alcohol helped me achieve relaxation, wouldn't it follow that I wouldn't need as much of it? If alcohol cured my stress, wouldn't I need less, not more of it over time? No. Alcohol does not relax you. It does not fix the stress in your life.
Speaker 1:Rather, it inebriates you, which covers the pain for a short moment of time. As soon as it wears off, your stress returns, and over time, it multiplies. And here's the important part. Annie Grace says being happy and stress free, dealing with the root cause of stress rather than numbing the symptoms is the only sure way to find relief. Then you no longer need to cover the symptom with poison.
Speaker 1:I'm heartbroken to know more than one person who has taken their own life. It's tragic that we deal with our unhappiness in this way. By rendering ourselves forever unconscious, believing the only cure to our depression or unhappiness is to erase ourselves altogether. Alcohol erases a bit of you every time you drink it. It can even erase entire nights when you're on a bench.
Speaker 1:Alcohol does not relieve stress. It erases your senses and your ability to think. Alcohol ultimately erases yourself. Listen. This is important.
Speaker 1:Okay? Now we're not this podcast isn't about alcohol. I'm using that as an example because it's such a common way that we choose to numb ourselves, but it erases yourself as well. Because guess what? In order to have a self, you have to be willing to accept that good things and bad things happen in your life, that a normal, healthy, balanced person encounters hard things and learns to overcome them and learns resilience.
Speaker 1:We talked about that on Friday on Saturday, rather, when we talked about how trees raised in a windless environment don't develop any root systems, and they're not strong enough to handle even minor challenges. They just fall over. And we wanna be people who stop falling over every time we encounter a challenge. Same thing is true about pornography, by the way. It radically changes your brain.
Speaker 1:So if you're a man or a woman who uses pornography sometimes, that's a a devastating thing to do to your own brain. It changes the the balance of the neurochemicals in your brain. It rewires your reward circuit. It makes it almost impossible for you to find pleasure and and sort of relationship in normal ways. And for men, actually, it's been shown that constant and chronic pornography exposure can lead to erectile dysfunction.
Speaker 1:So the sort of one thing that they're after becomes the thing they can't have. So, again, not a podcast about alcohol or pornography or any of those things. There's much deeper resources available. Annie Grace's show about alcohol is tremendous. If you're struggling with that, that's a there's much deeper resources here.
Speaker 1:I'm just saying anything that you use to turn your brain off, to stop thinking or feeling, is actually going to end up harming you in the end, because you're meant to be an embodied whole person who learns to experience difficult things and turns them around to become part of your story to help you show the world that transformation is possible and that God's story of rewiring and retraining you to think differently and handle the stresses and strains of your life is a way to honor him and to provide hope and extend it to other people. We got a tremendous email from Gina Berkmeyer, who's a therapist, who's written a great book called Generations Deep. And she talked about how she's been using the abide practice, and she loves it. And she made a great suggestion. We're actually this week on Theology Thursday, on the spiritual brain surgery podcast.
Speaker 1:We're gonna talk about how that the whole purpose of this transformation that we're going through and learning how to communicate with our father and with our two sides of our brains is really all about finding our way forward and being able to lend a hand to those behind us so that they can reach forward as well. And so Gina suggested that we add an r to the end of abide to become abiders and the r for relationship, that learning the abide practice will help us relate to God, to each other, to ourselves, and to other people more effectively. And we become not just people who practice something, but people who live something out to abide in him and become abiders with him and with each other to help move forward together to extend hope and healing and peace and maybe even happiness and purpose and meaning and all those good things to other people behind us, to the generations behind us because we're a buyer. That's the same idea as saying that we're self brain surgeons, but, also, we train people in self brain surgery. In theology, Thursday this week, we're gonna talk about multiplying miracles and how the whole purpose is.
Speaker 1:Chris Cook said last week, the purpose of you being transformed is to show other people that God can transform and redeem. And your story becomes a healing story for other people, an inspiration for other people. And that is how you find meaning and purpose in these hard things because you can use them to help other people find their way. So the 5th commandment comes down to this. Stop paying the tomorrow tax.
Speaker 1:When you when you indulge yourself in something to turn your brain off, to numb yourself so you don't feel it anymore, when you don't love tomorrow more than you hate what you're feeling right now, then tomorrow, you have a a double problem. You have the same problems that you had before, and now you've got a new problem. You don't feel good. You've blown your brain up. You're just not you you things aren't right for you.
Speaker 1:And now you've got the original stress that you had, the original pain that you felt, the original issue, and a whole set of new problems, the things you did while you were turned off, the text messages you sent, the money you spent, the alcohol you consumed that makes you feel bad and less effective today. And now your day is being affected by the choices you made last night because you didn't love tomorrow more then you hate what you're feeling right now. And the corollary to bring it into self brain surgery terms is this. Don't treat a bad feeling with a bad operation. So if you say to me, hey.
Speaker 1:My back hurts. And I say, well, let's go to the operating room. It's a way. Aren't there some other ways to to do this? You don't you wanna try something nonsurgical?
Speaker 1:Don't you wanna try to find a less invasive way to do it? Or if you had a a simple problem, like Annie Grace said, you have a headache. And I suggest chopping your head off. You would say, wait. That's that's a bad operation for that set of symptoms.
Speaker 1:That that's not the right procedure. It's overly aggressive. There's gotta be less invasive ways to dealing with that. And that's the 5th commandment. Don't treat a bad feeling with a bad operation.
Speaker 1:You just create more trouble for yourself. And Jesus said it this way, Matthew 634. Don't worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own. And so if we flip that around and say tomorrow love tomorrow.
Speaker 1:Don't worry about tomorrow, and don't be overly concerned about how you're feeling right now. Because if you can learn to sit with those feelings and let them be part of life and let them be, yes, this is true, but it's also true that I have other things that are good and beneficial and helpful and still happy and purposeful. There are other people in my life. I did lose a person. I did go through something hard.
Speaker 1:It is true. And my trauma response may need to be refined in some way so that it stops becoming all there is. And if I can't bear it, then I need to find a more healthy way to deal with it than to numb it, to cover it up because tomorrow's got some trouble too. And so if I if I cover up today and drag some of today's troubles into tomorrow, then I'm not loving tomorrow more. I'm not leaving space for tomorrow's troubles to to be managed and helped and and let God deal with them in a way that's efficient because I'm now adding additional trouble to them.
Speaker 1:I'm making tomorrow harder. I'm not making a level path for my feet. So that is what the 5th commandment's all about. Love tomorrow more. Don't pay the tomorrow tax.
Speaker 1:Don't treat a bad feeling with a bad operation. That's the 5th commandment of self brain surgery. Listen. We're trying to do this together. Okay?
Speaker 1:Self brain surgery is is the process of understanding that God has given you a mind that is designed to be used to communicate with him and designed to be used as a operating theater for your brain to structurally change your brain, to help it become the most idealized version of itself that can therefore help your life to be the most idealized version of itself that it can be in the context of a fallen world where there are traumas and tragedies and massive things and difficulties that we must go through. So if we're going to have to go through hard things, don't we wanna put ourselves in the best position in which to manage them, to inspire others, to heal and become healthier and feel better and be happier and all those things. Don't we wanna do that? If we want to, then we have to stop using anesthesia because anesthesia is not helpful in self brain surgery. We gotta be able to bite down on the bullet, go through the process, feel the pain, and learn how to heal from it, and learn how to operate on our own brains as we're doing it anyway.
Speaker 1:Remember, you're making those synapses and you're connecting those neurons every second of every day. So as my dad always said, if you're gonna do something, do it right. And since it's happening anyway and you have to undergo the process of self brain surgery, you might as well self direct it in a way that's helpful to you and not harmful to you. And that's why we must relentlessly refuse to participate in our own demise. We must believe that feelings are not facts but chemical events in our brains.
Speaker 1:We must believe that most of our thoughts are untrue. We must believe that our brains are designed to heal. We must love tomorrow more than we hate how we feel right now and stop paying the tomorrow taxes. Stop treating bad feelings with bad operations. We must stop making operation out of everything.
Speaker 1:Let things be simple sometimes. We must not perpetuate generational thought or behavioral issues in our family or start new ones, and we must love our brain and live in such a way as to improve it and not harm it. We must believe that what we're doing, we're getting better at. So let's get better at getting better instead of getting better at getting worse. And let's understand that thoughts become things.
Speaker 1:The things we think about turn into the real things of our lives and the real things in our children's lives and the real things in our generation. And so let's think about better things because thoughts become things. Today, I wanted to remind you about the 5th commandment. You must love tomorrow more. And you hate what you're feeling right now.
Speaker 1:You must stop making a bad operation for bad feelings, and you must stop paying the tomorrow tax if you want to become healthier and feel better and be happier. And, my friend, the good news here on mind change Monday is that you can do all these things. You can start today. Hey. Thanks for listening.
Speaker 1:The Hey. Thanks for listening. The doctor 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.
Speaker 1: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/ prayer.
Speaker 1:Wleewarnmd.com/ 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 doctor Lee Warren, and I'll talk to you soon. Remember, frame, you can't change your life until you change your mind. And the good news is you can start today.