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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, and I am so excited to be doing
some self-brain surgery with you today.
I'm going to go to the hospital in a little bit, do some real surgery,
but I want to remind you that this is also real surgery.
It just doesn't involve incisions and bandages and pain medication and anesthesia.
In fact, we don't like anesthesia in self-brain surgery, remember,
because there's no regional anesthesia. If you numb your brain with alcohol
or with shopping or whatever else so you don't have to think about it,
then you pay tomorrow taxes tomorrow.
You didn't love tomorrow more, and you still have the original problem that you got to deal with.
So we don't like anesthesia. We want to feel our feelings and think our thoughts
and believe our beliefs and review our actions so that we know exactly what
we're getting into when we make a decision to change our minds and change our lives.
Today, I'm going to give you back an episode that's only from about four weeks
ago because I want to get this concept in your mind about the different surgical
approaches, the different approaches to self-brain surgery.
When we're learning how to do neurosurgery, when we're training to become surgeons,
we spend a lot of time understanding the sort of philosophical and practical
implications of different surgical approaches.
And what an approach is, is the combination of how you position the patient,
where you choose to make the incision, what type of retraction you use,
what the strategy for that operation is.
And every surgery has multiple potential approaches that could be used to accomplish it.
And so one of the things about training in a big medical center like I did in
Pittsburgh, we had multiple surgeons from different backgrounds trained in different places.
And you could learn literally five or six different ways to accomplish every type of surgery.
You learn how to do certain things in certain ways that might work in one case
and not in another. other.
And the best surgeons are the ones who can pull the trigger on changing approaches.
Sometimes even mid-case if you have to.
It takes a lot of courage to stop an operation, especially if you've got a day
full of scheduled surgery and you're super busy and all of that.
It's hard. If you stop an operation and reposition and redrape,
change up, it's going to take a lot longer.
So you're going to mess up the rest of your day. So I've seen surgeons,
I've seen patients who had an aborted surgery and then the surgeon just sort
of said, well, that's all I could do.
You got to go see somebody else because they didn't have the training or
background to know that there's more than one approach or they
didn't have the character or the ability to make the approach change
mid-surgery so one of the things about being a really really good surgeon that
kind of arrived and you've kind of arrived at that mastery of the procedure
or the technique or the the philosophy or the practice of your discipline is
to understand that there's more than one way to do something,
and sometimes one way is better than another way.
As I talk about in this episode that's about to come up, I think there's one
approach to self-brain surgery that's the best approach.
I think it's clearly better than all the other approaches.
But you have to decide that for yourself. And the only way you know is if you try them out.
One of the things about surgical training being so long is you have the luxury
of years and years of years of safely being able to apply an approach while
surrounded by surgeons who can get you out of trouble if you try something and
begin to muck it up or can't pull it off.
The attending surgeon is always there senior residents are always there chief
residents are always there to say oh let me show you where that went wrong let's
fix that let me show you what not to do in this case.
So having the luxury of long training period,
you can learn the value of multiple approaches unfortunately in self-brain surgery
you're already practicing and you come to this podcast you come to your life
you come to your situations having already been practicing a certain set of
approaches and the problem is,
Our pride and our history and the cost of investment over time and the way that
we've been doing things begins to make us believe that we don't have an ability to make a change.
We don't have a possibility of making a change. It is too hard to learn something
new at the age that we are.
And so we begin to believe that it's hopeless, that we can't really change.
But I'm just here to remind you every day that you already are changing.
You already are making new synapses and making new neurons.
And your brain is rewiring while you're listening to this podcast.
The thing is, if you don't actively direct that process, then what it does is
it just goes into automate mode and rewires the way it's always been.
So you don't get the luxury of not changing because you are changing.
What you get then is a penalty if you don't choose to change in a way that helps
you. That's why the first commandment is to relentlessly refuse to participate in our own demise.
And I got an incredible email about six hours ago from a woman named Kim.
Don't have Kim's permission to share her whole story yet. Don't know her last
name. I know her last name, but I'm not going to share it because I don't have her permission.
But she's wrote an incredible email, and the subject line got my attention.
Saved by the first commandment of self-brain surgery.
That's why I got up this morning and made this episode for you.
I'm writing the chapter right now about approaches in self-brain surgery.
But I wanted to get this to you because if you haven't heard that episode,
we had hundreds of new listeners lately.
Picking up traction on Instagram, getting a lot of new followers,
a lot of new listeners. and I want to make sure you hear this episode.
It's been out about four weeks.
I'm bringing it back to you today because you have to understand that you can
change the approach that you're bringing to your life.
There's a way to do it and there's multiple possible approaches and what got
you here won't get you there.
If you're stuck, if you feel frustrated, then the way that you've been operating
your self-brain surgery practice isn't going to get you to that new place that
you feel like you need to get to.
You've got to change. And the good news is you're already changing,
so you might as well change in a way that helps you instead of a way that perpetuates
what you've already been doing because what got you here won't get you there.
And the key is to remember that what you're doing, you're getting better at.
And if what you're doing is just passively living your life and letting it pass
by without you sort of implementing a new change, then you're going to get better
at automating those things and you're going to feel progressively more stuck and hopeless.
So let's change the approach and let's do something that actually helps us make
progress. Okay, here's the email from Kim.
I wanted to share, Dr. Warren, how much your teachings are impacting me.
I've written out your 10 commandments of self-brain surgery,
and I listened to your podcast on all of them.
However, my style of learning is to give my attention to one thing at a time.
That's a really good practice, by the way.
Give my attention to one thing at a time until I know it so well that it becomes part of me.
I've been focusing on the first
commandment of relentlessly refusing to participate in my own demise.
And then she says a little sidebar. I texted it to my friend once and I accidentally
typed, I reluctantly refuse to participate in my own demise.
We do that sometimes. We're willing to change, but only reluctantly.
Seriously though, she said, I had a fight with a loved one tonight.
I found myself curled up in a ball sobbing a little while ago.
And your first commandment broke through and hit me like a strike of lightning.
I stopped crying dead in my.
So here's the deal.
Kim is exactly on it here. Choosing to make a change should never bring you shame.
If God is prompting you to pick up the knife and begin a new kind of operation,
he's telling you, hey, the way it's been working isn't working.
So let's change it. Let's move it. So what you should feel bad about is if you don't change,
if something's failing to serve you in your life, if it's helping you to perpetuate
something that's not good for you,
that you're participating in your own demise, if you're
living this life of washing your feelings and thoughts and
you can't differentiate the programs that are running
from your brain that are presenting themselves to your mind you think they're
your your real thoughts and you're reacting to them all the time and
you're stuck in this loop of having a feeling that
you immediately react to and then realize later that it wasn't accurate
and you shouldn't have reacted to it and you're stuck in that pattern then that
would start to be something that you could feel bad about if you
know that there's a different way and you choose not to
accept it and not to pursue it right but you should never feel shame or any
sort of negative emotion about deciding to make a change because that's a prompting
i believe from the holy spirit and if you don't believe that way at least you
can acknowledge that your your mind sometimes has an insight where you realize there's a better way,
and the beautiful thing about quantum physics is every decision and every thought
you make changes the universe around you.
What we know now from neuroscience is that every thought you think makes a structural change in your brain.
Every thought you think makes a structural change in your brain.
You are literally performing self-brain surgery all the time.
And so it helps you, it behooves you, it implores you then to choose the wisest approach.
Now, this may seem overwhelming. We talk about 2 Corinthians 10.5.
We say, take every thought captive.
And I get emails all the of time. How in the world am I supposed to take every
thought captive? It's overwhelming.
I find myself three hours have gone by and I haven't taken a single thought
captive and I'm doing the same old things. I'm hurting myself.
How do I do it? I'm frustrated. Listen, don't be frustrated.
Here's a statistic that you might not realize. If you make a 1% change in something,
1% every day, if you said, okay, I'm going to take 1% of my thoughts captive, okay?
I'm going to focus for one minute of every hour on thinking a different way.
I'm gonna just approach and try to make 1% of my time where I'm actively thinking
about my thinking and practicing these things that Dr. Warren is teaching me.
I'm gonna just be 1%. That doesn't sound like very much. That means 99% of your
thoughts are unchallenged, right?
But if you could do that every day, 1% change every day produces a 37.7% change in a year.
1% per day, so just a little bit of effort here, and you'll start to feel like
the snowball is going down the hill and picking up momentum and speed and inertia before long.
It's this massive avalanche of positive change in your life.
If you could imagine yourself 37.7% more clear in your thinking,
more in charge of your wayward thoughts,
more able to discern brain programs, thoughts, and feelings from actual real-time
thoughts, more able to hear that still small voice of the Lord directing you
and guiding you, 37.7% better in a year. Wouldn't that be amazing?
And if you could continue that type of change, then it wouldn't be very long
before you were a master self-brain surgeon. Why?
Because what you're doing, you're getting better at because you don't want to
participate in your own demise anymore.
You're choosing to change or you're choosing to accept the way it's been.
And what got you here won't get you there. If you feel like there is some place
that you need to go, you got to make a change. And that's what the approaches are about. Okay.
So here's another reminder of the four approaches to self-brain surgery.
I'm going to give you this episode back. Thank you, Kim, so much for that email. It was very helpful.
Really appreciate you dialing in. I appreciate the positive feedback,
but also appreciate how you broke it down and say, hey, this isn't about shame.
It's about future joy. It's about becoming infinitely happier.
It's about breaking chains and changing epigenetic switches and breaking generational
curses. It's about making the future better than the past has been.
Listen, friend, you can't change your life until you change your mind.
Learning a new approach will help you get it done. Before we get started,
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, my friend, I am so excited to get after this today with you.
Listen, when you are going through surgical training, they teach you not just
a bunch of different operations.
They don't just teach you how to take out a brain tumor or move a ruptured disc
or release a carpal tunnel or resect somebody's bowel or replace a lung or whatever
the particular type of surgery that you're learning is.
They don't just teach you specific operations. Here on Self-Brain Surgery Saturday,
a lot of times I teach you operations like the lousy attitude lobotomy or different
ways to handle anxiety or different ways to deal with doubt or depression and all those things.
We're going to give you in the new book, the handbook of self-brain surgery,
the whole middle section is a handbook.
And you're going to be able to open that up and say, okay, I'm dealing with
anxiety right now. I'm dealing with grief right now. I'm feeling stuck.
And you're going to be able to just flip to that book, to that chapter and learn
an operation that you can do. Backed by neuroscience, there'll be some references.
But the middle part of that book, the real meat of the book is going to be just, here's the operation.
It's time to stop contemplating this problem and start doing something about it.
And so I am giving you those on self-brain surgery Saturday.
In the coming months, it's going to be a lot of that. Here's a particular thing
you can do when you're dealing with a particular problem.
But backing up from that, I just want you to remember that you're already a
self-brain surgeon. You are engaging in self-directed neuroplasticity every
day, regardless of whether you do it intentionally or not. Your brain is being formed.
Your mind is shaping and interacting with your brain, whether you do it intentionally or not.
So the question is, as William James said, do we get our nervous system to work
for us or against us? That's the question.
So since that's the question, I just want to make sure that I arm you with everything
that you need to answer that question.
You want it to work for you, right?
So as I started to say a while ago, when you're doing surgical training,
and I'm feeling that my mission is to give you that training since you're already doing this work.
It'd be like if you woke up tomorrow and you were on the bomb squad and you
were actively trying to defuse a bomb that was about to go off,
but nobody had trained you.
Like you're in the middle of it. You're in media race.
You're starting in the middle of the story, like a great novel,
and you don't have the training that you need to carry it out.
What's going to happen? Well, the bomb's going to blow up, right?
Well, all of us are born with this incredible quantum supercomputer in our head
that connects with our mind, that connects with God, that influences other people
around us and manages everything about our life.
And yet we're not trained to learn how to operate it properly.
We're in the middle of the action, but we don't have the training to actually
do the self-brain surgery that we're doing, whether we recognize it or not.
And so my job then is to come alongside you and say, hey, you're already doing
this job. Let's give you some tools to do it well.
And I want to back up. A couple of days ago, I did an episode where we talked
about how self-brain surgery is not therapy.
Today, I want to circle back to that just to make sure you're crystal clear on what I mean by that.
So it's possible that you might get through your life and never have to go see a cardiologist.
You might live your entire life and never require the services of a psychiatrist
or a brain surgeon or a neurologist or a gastroenterologist.
You may not have a particular problem that requires a particular type of physician
or therapist or person to get involved in your life.
You can potentially get through your whole life and not need that.
And in terms of therapy, there are lots of people, most people probably,
that don't need the services of a professional therapist or counselor.
And so it's quite possible that some of you listening to my voice today never
will actually pay somebody to sit with you as a therapist.
But my contention is this. Self-brain surgery is something that you are doing.
You actively are doing it, as I said before, and therefore you need some training.
So self-brain surgery, this program, this podcast, the books that I write,
the newsletter on Sunday, by the way, if you don't get the newsletter,
please check the newsletter out. It's such a great community.
People all over the world reading this newsletter, communicating, leaving comments.
It's just, it's great. It's my favorite part of the week, really,
is the Sunday newsletter.
So please check it out, drleewarren.substack.com. If you're not already subscribed,
please share it with friends, get other people to sign up.
We need to grow that and get ready for the next book launch so more people will
find out about the life-saving, life-transforming power of self-brain surgery,
drleewarren.substack.com.
There's a commercial for that.
Check out the newsletter, okay? But my point is this, you may or may not ever
need a therapist, but you are doing self-brain surgery.
And so I want to just make it crystal clear that I am not a therapist.
I'm not trained to sit with you and I'm not trained in psychoanalysis.
I'm not trained in psychotherapy. I don't have the training and the skill set
of somebody amazing like Gina Berkmeyer or somebody like that.
So this information that I'm giving you is not to replace the need for a therapist
if you need one. And sometimes you do.
There's clearly some circumstances and some situations where you really need
another person to come alongside you who's got some training and some tools
to help you work through some things. That's necessary sometimes. Yeah.
But at the same time, there are some people that just need to think differently.
They need to change their mind about some things. They need to learn how to
operate the mind-brain interface more effectively.
All of us are doing that already, so let's get better at it because what got
us here won't get us there.
We got to change the things that we are doing because what we're doing,
we're getting better at. Those are two of the Ten Commandments.
So I talked a little bit about it in more detail on Thursday,
and I just said, hey, self-brain surgery is not therapy.
And so I don't want you to think that I'm saying that you can replace your therapist with this.
Maybe you can in some ways, but this is not therapy.
This is a set of tools that you can use to enhance your ability to use your
mind to combat negative thinking,
feelings that are out of order or out of whack or improperly valued in your
life, habits, places where you're stuck, things like that, learning how to navigate,
biopsy your thinking, put some space in between your thought and your reaction.
Those kinds of things are helpful and they're necessary and you're already doing this work.
So you might as well learn how to do it more effectively, right?
That's the idea. I just wanted to say that now, if you are a therapist and I'm
hearing from many of them, 30 or 40, we're going to develop a certified coaching
program soon that I think will be helpful just to put all this information in one place.
But if you're a therapist and you're using these techniques,
I'd love to hear from you. I'd love to hear from you and how it's working.
I've had lots of people write in and say, hey, my therapist told me about your
book. We've talked about your podcast.
My therapist pointed me towards your show. That's incredible.
And I would love to know who you are.
I would love to build a network of like-minded people who can learn from each
other. I've learned a lot from Gina Berkmeyer.
And I think she's learned a lot from me. And we write back and forth.
And I love her book, Generations Deep, which is about the epigenetics of generational trauma.
Tremendous work. Maybe have her on the podcast someday, hopefully. So my point is this.
The point is that self-brain surgery is a technique, a set of tools to practice
what you're already doing in a more effective way.
And therapy is a relationship that you have with another person to help you
understand things that you're thinking, feeling, experiencing,
and doing, and finding better ways to do those things that are going to be helpful in your life.
Now, if you're a therapist using these techniques, or you're a therapist taking
care of patients, The only thing I would comment on, because again,
I'm not a therapist, but I would suggest if we agree that the Christian worldview,
or even if you're not a Christian, the modern 21st century worldview as enabled
by quantum physics is to say that there is a purpose to your life and that you
do have a choice in the things that happen to you.
Your attention and ability to look at the world and make decisions about how
you're going to behave and how you're going to think and how you're going to
feel does impact your reality and it does impact your generations and it does
impact the people around you.
The alternative to that is the reductionist determinist worldview that says
you're just a bunch of neurons and everything about you is determined by the
electrical state of the activity of the cells in your brain and you don't really
have a choice or a will or a purpose anyway.
So your only job then is to just try to figure out what makes you happy and
try to pursue that and find your truth and do your thing.
Because in the end, it doesn't really matter. We're just a bunch of neurons.
So my only comment to therapists would be that if you trained in a place that
is not a Christ-centered,
Christian worldview type training place,
then I would say, scour your worldview and scour your training and your techniques
and your modalities that you use and look for places where you were taught to
think about people's problems.
From a reductionist or materialist worldview, even if nobody ever said it out
loud, if the aim of your therapy is to point people to the past,
to rip the scabs off, look at trauma, sit with their pain,
blame somebody for the issue, that kind of stuff, then I would suggest that
you'll have a better success with your therapy if you can direct people towards
the future because the path to a healthy and happy future does not often deter you.
Back to things that make us sad. Yes, we need insight.
Yes, we need understanding, but we don't need blame or bitterness.
We need to get better. And how do we get better? What's interesting, 21st century science,
all of the good research says people are happier when they don't focus on their
problems as much, when they focus on the things about the future,
the community and building relationships and forgiveness and thanksgiving and
gratitude and all that stuff actually is what makes you happy.
Not resolving some trauma from the past, not blaming your parents and cutting them out of your life.
And all that stuff that we see happening now, the secular worldview says that
other people are responsible for accommodating your feelings.
And the Christian worldview says we are to submit our feelings.
We are to submit our thinking. We are to submit our will to Him.
We'll delight ourselves in Him and He'll give us the desires of our heart,
that He will forgive, He will heal, He will restore, He will redeem, He will repair.
Not us making other people be accountable. We talk about justice a lot in the
21st century, and the Bible says in Micah 6, 8, that our job related to justice
is to do it in regards to other people.
Micah 6, 8 says, what does the Lord require of you? To do justice,
to love mercy, and to walk humbly before God and man.
What does that mean? It doesn't mean that you go around looking for ways to
apply your idea of justice to
other people and their situations to make people behave in certain ways.
That's not what biblical justice is. Biblical justice is about your behavior.
It's do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly.
So when it's up to you, then, you do it right.
You behave properly. You act fairly. You behave justly. But when it's done to
you, you don't demand justice. You love mercy.
Why? Because the biblical worldview says much has been done on your behalf.
You've been forgiven of much. Christ died for you, even though you didn't deserve
it. He's given you eternal life, even though we don't deserve it.
And so we must therefore then be lenient and gracious and compassionate to those who do things to us.
The 21st century says, no, you better extract all the justice and payback that
you can get from other people because you deserve it.
You need reparation. You need people to acknowledge your feelings and all of that stuff.
And that's fine. You can believe that and think that if you want to.
My only point about this is, what does the data actually say?
We're good scientists, remember?
We're scientists here. And so on Self-Brain Surgery Saturday,
I want to remind you that science doesn't say, decide what you believe and then make the data fit it.
The science says, we come up with an idea, we test it, we constantly revise
the idea based on the data.
And ultimately, we come down to what we call scientific laws,
where we know because we have studied and we're honest with the results,
what the truth is. We pursue truth.
My contention is that whatever truth you're pursuing, if you're looking for
truth in science, if you're looking for truth in psychology,
if you're looking for truth in your life, if you're looking for truth in relationships,
that that pursuit of truth, an honest pursuit of truth, won't lead you to your truth.
It will lead you to the truth.
And that truth has a name. It's not a thing. It's a person. And the person is Jesus.
That's what's going to help you become healthier and feel better and be
happier so if you're a therapist scour your worldview scour
your therapeutic techniques and find ways that you may
have allowed some secular worldview or reductionist determinist
ideology to creep into your therapy and i think you'll start thinking more clearly
about how do i get my patient to really become healthier and feel better and
be happier and it's not going to be by using a worldview that's inconsistent
with my christian worldview by morphing my not Christianity to the world,
but rather make the world submit their knee to the therapy that you learned from the king,
from the good physician, the great physician. Does that make sense?
Okay. Again, self-brain surgery, not therapy.
Today, we're going to talk about what we call approaches. In surgical training.
We learn a variety of different ways to get the same job When I was in Pittsburgh as a resident,
we had 17 to 20 or more different neurosurgeons who brought their cases to Allegheny General.
And so I had the great blessing of getting to operate with a tremendous number
of people who had trained at different programs all over the world,
from Japan to Germany to all over the United States.
I had professors that had trained in different places.
And with each of those different places, they had different ways of doing things
and approaches and ways of looking at and thinking about neurosurgical problems.
And so I learned four or five or six different ways to solve almost every issue.
And when we talk about surgery, one of the important things is not just,
do you know how to use the saw and do you know how to retract the brain and take the tumor out?
It's not just that. It's do you know how you can take a particular approach
to do the least amount of damage to be the least invasive way that you can to
position the patient safely so that you know you'll be able to see what you need to see,
but not hurt the patient or have them in an awkward position that's going to
produce some problem for them.
That you're basically designing an approach to get to the problem and treat
it and leave the fewest traces of your presence as possible.
And so sometimes, for example, a tumor close to your brainstem,
you might be able to approach it by making an incision above the ear and retracting
the temporal lobe up and going that direction.
You might be able to approach it by making an incision below and behind the
ear and going through the mastoid bone and getting to the tumor from the underside
side of the access point.
So there may be three or four different ways that you can go,
all of which would require a different sort of thought process about how you
position the patient and the things that you're going to encounter,
arteries and veins and nerves and different parts of the brain that you may have to encounter.
The approach matters.
And I remember, here's a good example. We had three of our professors, Dr. Maroon, Dr.
Abla, no, I'm sorry, Dr. Maroon, Dr. Oliver Smith and Dr. Begay,
they did their simple spine procedures.
So ruptured discs or small laminectomies, things like that. They did them with
the patient in the lateral position.
So the patient lying on their side and we would sit and hold your arms out in
front of you and work on the patient's back in front of you.
And that was the way they preferred to do that procedure.
And their thought process about it was that the blood would run away and wouldn't
cloud the field and you'd be able to see better. and the patient was more comfortable
and it was easier to position, all that stuff was their idea.
And most of the residents that I trained with and most of the other professors
thought that the lateral position for spine surgery was outdated.
It was overly taxing because you had to hold your arms up in the air for a long
time. It was very physically demanding.
Couldn't see as well. It was awkward. And most of us hated that lateral position.
We absolutely hated it. But guess what?
I learned it. I learned the nuances of it.
I learned from those three masters Masters of the technique,
how to get the patient safely there and when it was appropriate and how it was
appropriate and what to do.
And I thought I would never use it. I remember saying to my colleague,
Max Medaria, co-resident, I hate that position. I will never use that position.
I'm never going to do that in my practice. I can't stand it.
And I remember Max saying something similar. Well, 10 years later,
I found myself in Alabama and I had a patient who unfortunately had a huge ruptured
disc, but he weighed 600 pounds.
He was morbidly obese and there was no way we could safely get him in the prone
position, the face down position where we typically do spine surgery.
We just couldn't safely do it. We couldn't move him.
We would hurt each other trying to get him in the position and it would be too
hard on his body, but he had to have surgery because he couldn't move his legs
and he couldn't control his bladder.
And he was a young guy. We had to take care of him, but we couldn't do it in
the standard prone position.
Well, guess what? I remembered that I had extensive training in the lateral
position for spine surgery.
And that turned out to be the only way we could safely get this guy operated
was to use that lateral position. It was hard. It was inconvenient.
It was challenging, but it was the only approach to that particular patient's
problem that would have safely worked for him.
And I was able to do it because even though I didn't like that approach,
even though I failed to see the appropriateness of it and the nuance of it and
the potential value of it back when I was a resident and learning it, I did learn it.
So I learned an approach, even though I didn't recognize its value at the time.
And I've only used it once in my entire practice and it was helpful to me.
And so my point about telling you that story is this, there are multiple approaches
to how you can manage your mind and your brain and your life. Multiple approaches.
If you go to a therapist, there's multiple schools of thought,
multiple different types of psychoanalysis, multiple different types of tools
that you can learn from them.
If you go to a pastor, there's multiple different strategies how they might
point you towards finding a way to feel better.
And if you come to self-brain surgery, I want you to know that there are multiple
approaches to how we can do this work to help ourselves manage our minds because
you can't change your life until you change your mind, right?
So I just want to say that if you're not a Christian or you're not a believer, I want you to understand.
Modern neuroscience has absolutely validated von Neumann and Heisenberg and Bohr,
their ideas that quantum physics has shown us that man has a purpose because
part of your role as a person is that you get to change the reality of everything
that you observe and interact with.
You have a choice that determines your destiny and things change when you choose
to think about this thing or interact with that thing or do this or say that.
Thoughts become things. We're going to do an episode on Monday about how those
thoughts actually become things.
Recently, we did an episode about the commandment of how thoughts become things.
And we talked about the fact that thoughts do become things.
And I proved that to you with some examples.
But now we're going to talk about the physics of how thoughts become things. It's fascinating.
21st century research into light and matter and how they interact.
And we actually now start to think, a lot of scientists are thinking,
that we now start to understand how the mind interacts with the brain on a quantum actual physics level.
And we're going to have an interesting conversation about that for Mind Change Monday.
So my point about that is this. I keep saying that today. I'm not sure why.
Here's the point. The point is, we're going to learn that there are multiple
approaches and you don't have to believe in God or be a Christian to understand
and learn how to use some of these approaches.
All you need to do is to know that the approaches do work and that there's a
time and a place for using each of them.
Okay, so let's talk about what those four approaches are. This is a chapter
in my new book, by the way, The Handbook of Self-Brain Surgery.
There's going to be a whole lesson on surgical approaches.
Approaches. So here's the deal. There's basically four approaches.
I've talked about this a little bit before. There's basically four approaches
for how people think about their mind and the way that it impacts their life.
One of them is the sort of pessimistic view that nothing can help me.
I'm sad. I'm sick. I'm stressed. I'm stuck.
Nothing's going to help me. I've tried and and tried, and tried,
and tried. I get this email every week.
Dr. Warren, I've done this. I've done that. I've been to therapy.
I've taken the medicine. I've done everything and nothing helps. I can't stop. I'm stuck.
I can't get over this thing that happened, this massive thing.
It's just wiped me out. It's never going to be okay. And nothing's going to help me.
And so I would just submit to you today that that is an approach that you can take to your life.
You can take this approach from a Christian standpoint or from an atheist standpoint, by the way.
If you're a skeptic, an atheist, total nonbeliever, or a Christian,
you can come to a point in your life where you say, I've tried everything.
It doesn't work. I'm this way because my dad was that way. I got this genetically.
I can't do much about it. This event happened and it changed my life and I can't
ever be happy again. and I'm just waiting till the day I die and then it'll all be over.
Or if you're a Christian, thank God in the future, there's going to be an opportunity
for me to have a different life.
But right now it really sucks and I'm stuck with this misery and pain and it's
never going to get better. So one approach is nothing can help me.
And remember the lesson from quantum physics that how we attend to things and
the way that we think about things fixes them in time. That's the quantum Zeno effect.
The more we look at something from a particular point of view,
the more true it becomes And the more hardwired it becomes through Hebb's law,
the neurons that fire together wire together, the more attention density we
pay to it, the more real it becomes.
So if you believe, my friend, if your approach to this matter of how you can
live your life is that nothing can help you, that's going to come true.
You're going to find out that what got you here won't get you there and you just can't change it.
You're going to find out that you've gotten really, really good at not having a very good life.
And so if that's your approach, you're going to be stuck. You feel stuck and
you're going to be stuck. And so one approach is nothing can help me.
I hope that's not the approach you choose. I hope that you wouldn't be listening
to a self-brain surgery podcast if that was your approach. I really hope so. Pray for you.
Another approach is, hey, maybe something can help me, but maybe there's something
out there that can help me. Those people.
A little bit more hopeful. And they find themselves sometimes in the 10% happier
mode that Dan Harris talks about.
Now, if you haven't heard me talk about the 10% happier book before,
I talk about it a little bit in my book, Hope is the First Dose.
But Dan Harris was an ABC news anchor, famous guy, and he had a mental breakdown
on air, went through a significant nervous breakdown, kind of went crazy in
the middle of a broadcast and realized that his mind was completely out of control. He was anxious.
He was worried. He was using drugs to try to cope. He was numbing himself.
And he just, his life was messed up because of that. And he wasn't doing well.
And he didn't turn to God.
He didn't become a Christian. He didn't find this perfect worldview that led him out of darkness.
What he found was that he could take elements of Eastern meditation.
And he noticed that that had been shown with functional MRI to change people's
brains enough to get a little bit more resilient and calm their thinking.
And he learned sort of a de-spiritualized form of meditation where you just
develop this little pause between stimulus and response.
When something hurts, when you have an anxious thought, when you have a negative
thought pop into your head, you can biose it is the term that I would use.
He didn't use that term, but you can sort of grab that thought and say,
wait a second, is this really true?
Do I really have to react to this right now? Can I choose a different response
instead of my reactionary one? And he learned that just learning to put that
little gap in there was enough to feel a little bit better and that that was enough for him.
He was able to overcome his panic and anxiety by becoming, as he called it, 10% happier.
And I would just submit to you, that's a great approach. If your problem is
just intermittent struggling with anxiety or runaway thoughts or a little bit
of panic or something like that,
then that 10% happier mode of just putting that little discipline of space between
your stimulus and response and your thought is reasonable. And it works.
So maybe something can help me. Maybe this spiritual, de-spiritualized meditation thing can help me.
That's a valid approach for some problem. But here's the issue.
If you go through something truly massive, if you go through a real massive
thing, 10% is not enough.
You need to become significantly happier. And that's why science can help.
The third approach is, hey, maybe science can help me.
And you know, there are some people that aren't ever going to attribute to God anything.
They don't believe in God. They don't know for sure what they think or feel
about him. And they just want to know what the science has to say.
And that's where this podcast is safe for you, friend.
Even if you're a skeptic, even if you don't agree with me that God created you
for a purpose and all of that, you can come here and find out what the science is saying.
And the good news is 21st century neuroscience is matching up with 20th and
21st century quantum physics to say that, guess what?
Heisenberg was onto something when he said that how we pay attention to the
world and how we interact with it changes the reality of it.
Which means that our intention and our effort and our attention to the problems
and issues in our lives and the people around us makes a difference. We have a purpose.
We have some control over some
of the things that happen. We're not just products of our neurons firing.
We're not just built from the ground up of determined steps of evolutionary
accidents that are going to lead us to inevitability in our behavior.
We have a chance to interact with it. And the truth is, science is showing that.
So even if you don't ascribe it to the work of God, you can decide,
even from a purely atheistic standpoint, you can decide that quantum physics
tells you that you do have some say in your life and that there is a purpose for your life.
And the purpose of it is to empower some of the choices that you make to improve
things for yourself and those around you.
That's purpose. Okay. Viktor Frankl said, suffering stops being suffering when
you give it purpose. And so you are a co-creator of your own destiny.
That's true from physics.
It's true from modern psychological research. It's true from functional imaging research.
And the fact is, an approach to your life that involves maybe science can help
me will produce significant improvements in your quality of life if you allow it to.
You're not stuck. You don't have to be sad or stressed or stuck forever because
of something that happened because you can change it by changing how you pay
attention to it because your trauma isn't the thing that happened.
It's your response to it.
And that's the good news for all of us who have been through trauma or tragedy
or massive things or just drama after drama.
Science can help you learn how to pay attention to it in a different way and
change the reality of your response, which will then change the reality of your
life. That's significantly happier.
But the last approach I think is the best one. The infinitely happier approach
is when you recognize that you were made on purpose for a purpose by a great
physician who is the guy who invented quantum physics and neurons and synapses and all those things.
And God gave you meaning and purpose and he gave you an ability to use your
mental force to communicate with Him and to submit to Him and using your mental
force to control and renew your mind.
And you're not stuck with the brain you have because it's changing constantly
and you have a say in how that happens.
And it works best when you submit that will to your creator,
who's your counselor, your wise professor,
your person in your mind who's helping you, reminding you, teaching you, growing you,
wants to spend time with you, a God who likes you, a God who loves you,
a God who designed you for a purpose to glorify Him and enjoy Him forever and
help other people find Him.
And whatever you've been through, that thing can become the inciting event.
And changing the arc of your life for good. And that's hard to see.
And it's hard to say in the early days after the massive thing.
But remember, the other lesson from quantum physics is that time isn't the whole story.
And that you can know that if you continue to attend to this as if it's the
holy gift of something new in your life that really hurts and it's ripped off
the topsoil and something deep has been planted in you.
And you know now that your life has a purpose of carrying that new wound and
the growing thing that's inside of it that eventually will turn into something
that is helpful to you and helpful to other people at the very same time that
it's devastating and will never go away.
Because if it were just devastating and would never go away,
then the pains and difficulties and traumas that we go through in our lives
would truly be overwhelming to us.
But the message of John 10.10 is that the thief comes to steal and kill and
destroy, and life does that to us, and it hurts us.
But Jesus said that I came that you might have abundant life.
And so we have a God who has given us the ability, the necessity of going through
suffering and also being able to walk and live in abundance.
And that, my friend, can produce the infinite balance to that infinitely hard
thing that can produce some equipoise or even happiness again in your life.
If you learn to change your mind and change your life through the best approach,
I think the fourth approach is the best approach.
And we're going to learn specific operations in coming weeks.
This is a conversation today about approaches. coaches. My question for you
is, do you want to give up at the outset and say, nothing can help me?
Or do you want to settle for 10% and say, maybe something can help me and I'll
just learn some techniques to breathe differently or think differently and I'll get a little happier?
Or do you want to be significantly happier? And if you want to be significantly
happier, you got to get science on your side. You got to know what the data is.
You got to learn how to study and revise your hypothesis and change your mind
when the evidence shows you that you haven't been following the truth.
And if you want to be infinitely happier, you've got to be able to get to that
quantum reality that you can have suffering and abundance at the same time.
And that's what we're after today. My friend, we're here to change our minds
and we're here to change our lives and science is on your side.
God is on your side. Dr. Lee Warren is on your side.
I want you to become healthier and feel better and be happier.
And the good news is 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 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.