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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, hopefully your favorite
internet and real-life brain surgeon.
We are going to do some self-brain surgery today.
It is self-brain surgery Saturday, and I have a brand new operation for you,
and we're going to cover the fourth commandment of self-brain surgery.
Listen, I told you recently, we did an episode where we recapped the 10 commandments
of self-brain surgery, and I told you that they're tweaking a little bit as I write the book,
the Self-Brain Surgery Manuscript that hopefully will be ready and I hope coming out sometime in 2025.
Getting close to that.
Self-Brain Surgery Tools to Rewire Your Brain, Reorder Your Mind,
and Radically Transform Your Life.
This is going to be a handbook, not a memoir, not a long exposition of science
and theology and philosophy and all that stuff.
Maybe I'll write that book. I hope to write that book someday,
but this is is going to be a practical guide, a toolkit, a handbook for you
to grab, look up an operation, get after it and change your mind and change your life.
So I told you that I'm open to, I want you to be open to the 10 commandments
changing a little bit as we get ready to put them in book form.
Once they're in the book, we're stuck with them, right?
So I'm trying to find the best way to formulate them, the best way to put them in order.
And so as I've been working Working on that, I came to realize that the previous
iteration of Commandments 4 and 5 were sort of saying the same thing in two different ways.
It's almost like 5 was a corollary of 4.
And so I've tweaked that just a little bit because I've also come to realize
there's something that you desperately need to know and believe and internalize
to the level that it has to be one of the Ten Commandments.
And so today we're going to reorder the commandments just a little bit.
It. I'm going to give you the list, the 10 commandments as they currently are formulated.
And I think this is going to end up how they are published in the book.
But again, we're tweaking this. We're teaching it. You're on the forefront of
learning and developing the curriculum of self-brain surgery with me.
And so we are open to the idea that we are going to reformulate this list a
few times before the book finally comes out with the goal of having it ready
to help Help everyone forever once we finally publish it, right?
So just hang with me on that. Be willing to let these things evolve and change a little bit.
I heard from an incredible, brilliant person the other day, sent me an email
and said that she writes out the Ten Commandments, puts them on her bathroom
mirror and reads them and gets them in her mind every day. And I love that.
And I want you to have them. But I also want you to be aware that we are trying
to formulate them just right so that they'll hit you and serve you in your life
as a way to point you towards your creator,
to the great physician to distill some of the things that we learned from science
and scripture as we smash them together and just getting ready to get after
it and the goal of becoming healthier and feeling better and being happier.
So today we're going to give you the new fourth commandment.
I'll give you the whole list, just run through real quickly,
but the new fourth commandment and what we're going to do with that.
And I'm going to teach you a brand new self-brain surgery operation that may
seem like a weird way to get to the fourth commandment, but we're going to talk
about an operation that we'll call the blame ablation. Ablation.
Ablation in science and medicine is when we burn something or cut something
with the intention of getting rid of it so that it can't hurt you anymore.
And today we need to learn how to ablate blame.
Because I wonder, would you rather have someone to blame for your troubles or
would you rather get better from your troubles?
Because from the neuroscience standpoint, you can't have both.
You can have blame or you can get better.
And today, before we get into that and the new fourth commandment,
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 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, it's Saturday. And on Saturday,
we do self-brain surgery.
And today I have a new operation for you, the blame ablation.
I do ablated procedures in the operating room all the time where we intentionally
burn a sensory nerve to reduce people's ability to perceive pain from something
that's chronically painful or to cook a tumor so that it can't grow anymore.
And it goes away and we cure the cancer in that way.
Ablation means to get rid of something, to burn or cut or do something to interrupt
the function of something that's not helpful.
And so today I want to give you an operation called the blame ablation.
When I was a resident, one of my professors used to say, hey,
the secret to being a good surgeon is to establish blame, distance yourself
from it when something goes wrong.
And he always said that as a joke. You know, there's always a joke that in surgery,
if something's happening, you blame anesthesia for it.
You find a way to blame the anesthesiologist if there's something delaying your
case or causing trouble.
That's always a longstanding joke. And of course, we don't actually blame anesthesia for things.
But the point is, he would say that if you're having trouble,
you don't want to take responsibility for it. You want to blame somebody else for it.
You want to find a way to lay the blame for the problem at the feet of someone
else so you don't have to be responsible for it. And it's a joke, obviously.
But in life, we do sort of do that, don't we? Sometimes we want to find a way
to blame a situation, a circumstance, an event.
If only this hadn't happened, if only this, if only that, if I only had this,
if, if, if, if, if, and when I have this, then I'll be able to do that.
And if I only could stop being held back by these people or my boss,
or if that thing hadn't happened when I was nine, then I wouldn't feel this way.
And our whole society right now, it feels like, is suffering because instead
of trying to solve problems and move forward,
we're looking back to find places to blame our behavior and our current situation and circumstance.
And I think one of the symptoms of that, if we look around, is the fact that
we've kind of adopted a secular postmodern worldview in place of a Christian worldview.
And what I mean by that is if you have a postmodern worldview and you believe
that your mind is just a sack of neurons and electrical impulses in your brain
and that everything can be explained by some kind of a physical process.
And there must be a root cause to all your troubles, some reason why your brain
broke in a particular way, and some reason why you think and feel the things that you do.
And rather than trying to change them or heal them,
you believe you're stuck with them and you believe that you will only be able
to move forward if you can blame someone for them, get someone to apologize,
get someone to give you justice, get someone to recreate your entire environment
to to accommodate your problems.
And I'm not being harsh if you've got those things. I'm not,
all of us have them. I'm saying.
What is it doing for us? Is it helping us? We're the most suicidal,
addicted, depressed, medicated generation in the history of the world.
And what I'm coming to realize is maybe that's happening because we keep trying
to explain away the problems that we have, medicate away the problems that we have,
numb or anesthetize the problems that we have, or make excuses for the problems
that we have instead of actually healing them.
And the reason that we're not healing them is because we need a brain transplant.
And the reason we need a brain transplant is we're living as if our brains are
stuck or given to us by our genetics or foisted upon us by the traumas or tragedies
or massive things that we suffer.
Rather than realizing what the Bible said all along, we can transform our minds.
We have the mind of Christ.
We can use our minds to change our brains structurally and literally perform
self-brain surgery and recreate a new mind and a new, healthier brain that will
then drive a new, healthier life.
But to do that, we can't be looking backwards and contemplating and attending
to and paying too much attention to our past.
Yes, we can learn from our past. Yes, we can gain insight into our current situations
by looking at the past, as we talked about yesterday on Frontal Lobe Friday,
and you need to do those things. But the path to healing is not backwards,
my friend. It's forward.
So the question for today is, would you rather find someone to blame or would you rather get better?
Let me give you some insight, some information.
There's a thing called the biosphere. I don't know if you heard about this. This is a long time ago.
They tried to create this sort of artificial environment, the biodome,
they called it, out in the desert, where they would create an artificial environment,
put people in there, and have this glass dome where people could live.
And they were trying to find the perfect condition for growing people and plants
and fruits and vegetables.
And the idea was maybe we could put these things on other planets or on the
moon. And if human population got too much for this planet, then maybe we could
spread humanity to other places and we would have to recreate gravity in a perfect
environment and all this stuff.
And what they found out is they could actually grow trees very well, very quickly.
Trees would grow faster in the biosphere than they did in the regular Earth. But here's the problem.
When trees got to a certain height, they would just fall over.
So they would grow fast, and we optimized the environment. We did everything right.
We gave them all the opportunities to succeed with no detriments.
We removed all the harmful things and tried to create a perfect environment,
but we found out that the trees fell over.
And what they figured out when they did a post-analysis on the biosphere is
they figured out that the reason the trees fall over is because the one thing
they forgot to include in the design of the biosphere was wind.
And it turns out that trees that grow in the absence of wind don't get strong enough.
Their roots don't go deep enough to protect them against gravity and normal
threats and challenges, and they don't get strong, and they fall over.
And obviously, the metaphor there is we need some adversity in order to help us grow.
We need some challenges. And one of the problems we've had for the last few
generations is we've tried to raise a generation of kids where all the challenges were removed.
If you don't like something, you don't have to do it. If this doesn't feel right,
you don't have to engage in it.
If this is a threat to you, we'll ask the teacher to re-engineer it.
If you feel stress because you only have an hour to take the test,
then we'll go to the a school counselor and get you an opportunity not to take a timed test.
And what we've done then is raise a generation of kids who have never faced
adversity, and they don't know how to live in the real world because they don't
have any roots, because you learn how to be strong against the wind by going
through some hard things when you're growing.
And so I'm just suggesting that there's now good research to suggest that if
you want to raise well-adjusted, happy, and healthy kids, You need to let them struggle a little bit.
You need to let them go through some hard things.
And this is not a podcast about parenting. I'm just saying that to say this. Look at your own life.
Look at your own life and go back in time and ask yourself, what was the most
intense period of personal growth that I've ever been through?
And I don't know you necessarily. There's thousands and thousands of podcast
listeners around the world that I don't know.
I know a bunch of you because you write in and we talk and we converse and I
get to know you. And I love to hear from you, by the way. Lee at drleewarren.com.
You can email me. You can send a voicemail to speakpipe.com slash drleewarren.
You can tell me who you are and where you're from and how you found the podcast
and tell me what's going on. I'd love to hear from you. Lisa and I love it. Tata loves it.
But I don't know you. But I can almost guarantee you that if you look back over
the long course of your life or the short course of your life if you're younger,
you would say that the times that you grew the most, the times that you found
out the most about who you are, the times that you found that you could trust
and rely on God's promises the most were not the easy times.
They were the hard times.
And so you would look back over your life with some perspective and you would
say, gosh, those things that I went through, they actually turned out to be
for my benefit in some ways.
Not to say that losing a child or having a husband die or going through some
bankruptcy or some difficulty is a good thing.
It's not. This is one of those quantum physics, dual reality things that we
talk about all the time on this podcast.
But the fact is, going through hard things ends up helping you grow and change.
Change and if you don't have some adversity, then you really don't know who
you are and you really don't know if you'll hold up when something hard happens.
That's why I tell you, hope is memory and movement.
Hope says you look back and you recognize that God's gotten you through some
really difficult things before.
You've seen him rescue and redeem other people when they were going through hard times before.
And then you turn and you say, because I know that he's done it before I can
trust that he'll do it again, and you begin to move forward.
And so rather than trying to find someone to blame, perhaps we should start
looking at our problems and say, you know what? This is an opportunity for me.
This is some wind that I need to learn how to resist so that my roots will get deeper and stronger.
James 1, 2 through 4 says, consider it pure joy, my brothers and sisters,
whenever you you face trials of many kinds, because you know that the testing
of your faith produces perseverance.
Let perseverance finish its work so that you may be mature and complete,
not lacking anything. Listen, I'm starting to pull on some threads here.
I love it when this always happens when I start to write a book.
It's like a big ball of yarn, a problem that I can't solve. And I start pulling
on one thread and I start finding that the whole thing is tied together.
All these crazy ideas that are bouncing around, all these notes that I've made
for the last couple of years in between books, all start to fall together in
a way that produces something that there's power and importance to it. And this is one of them.
When God does something, when God has a style of creating or constructing something,
the way he puts things together,
his creation always follows consistent principles and laws, and that tracks
across everything he does.
So when he says, for example, hey, if you want to grow a tree,
that tree needs to go through some adversity on its way up.
That law that things get stronger when they're tested and tried,
it applies also in your regular life.
When God says, hey, consider it pure joy when you go through trials because
that's when you get strong.
When the wind blows is when your roots are getting deeper, when you're getting
more resilient, when you're getting more powerful.
When you're getting more confident that, yeah, this was a devastating thing
that I went through, but look what we did. Our marriage stayed together.
We managed to keep our business going. We didn't fall apart.
We didn't die. We didn't completely get consumed in the furnace of suffering.
And that means the next time something hard happens, we're going to be okay
because now we know we've been tested and our roots got deeper.
Instead of us falling over, we managed. Remember the proverb that says,
if you falter in times of trouble, how small is your strength.
James is telling you, consider it joy.
Not the thing that's happening, but this internal sense of we're going to get
through this, and then we're going to get a little stronger,
and the next time something happens, we're going to get through that too.
I don't know if you've ever played chess before.
Chess is one of those games, I think like all sports really,
and all games, and all life really, but chess is one of those games where you can't get better.
You really cannot get better until you play somebody better than you.
You can't really improve at chess if you keep playing the easy level on the computer chess.
You'll beat it. You'll get to where you can beat it every time.
And as soon as you go up to the next difficulty level, you'll start losing all your games. Why?
Because if you spend all your time not challenging yourself,
you will not grow and develop new strategies for facing increasing levels of challenge.
And so you see people who lose a game and they toss the board and they throw
the pieces and they shove themselves away from the table and they stomp off
because they can't stand losing.
And you see other people who, when they lose, they get a little smile on their
face and they say, hmm, I just learned something right there.
I saw the way you solved that problem and defeated me and I just learned something from you.
I'm going to take that and the next time we play, I'm going to take that lesson
and I'm going to build a different strategy and I'm going to grow from having
been challenged by you. and they say, I'm going to consider it joy that I lost
this game because I can now see how I could win the next game.
You see what I mean? So when has blaming someone or when has blaming something.
Ever made you feel better?
As we were talking earlier and I was talking about the children that we've raised
and this generation that's struggling right now and they're getting out into
the real world and they're struggling
because they've never had to face challenges is an adversity before,
or they've been taught that everything in their life is a challenge and an adversity
and they observe their problems.
And we spend so much time focusing on our issues and our diagnosis and our problems
and our adversities and all that, that that's all we can see.
But the quantum Zeno effect kicks in and keeps us stuck there because we're
focused on the problem all the time instead of the promises or the provider.
Either way, either we never were isolated and we're grown up in a biosphere
and we don't have any power and resilience, or we spend so much time identifying
with and focusing on our troubles and blaming other people for them that we
can't ever get strong and move forward.
Either way is trouble. So just like I always say, Dr. Phil says,
how's it working for you?
So if you think that's the right path, then I would just ask you very humbly
as your friend, as your colleague, as your position, maybe, how's it working?
And if it's not working, then you have to remember what got me here to this
place where something's not working and I'm struggling won't get me to the next place.
So rather than continuing to rage at the machine and scream and yell into the
void, about why life continues to hurt, maybe we need to change our minds.
Maybe it's time to change our perspective. Maybe it's time to ablate the blame
and start embracing the challenge.
Maybe. So with all that in mind, let's talk about the Ten Commandments again.
I gave them to you before. Number one, I must relentlessly refuse to participate in my own demise.
The corollary to that is don't commit self-malpractice.
The oath that doctors take, primum non nocere, first no harm.
Don't hurt yourself with your thinking, with your behavior, with numbing behaviors,
any of that stuff. Don't hurt yourself.
Don't participate in your own demise. Number two, I must believe that feelings
are not facts. They are chemical events in my brain. We just did an episode about that last week.
Number three, I must believe that most of my thoughts are untrue.
Thoughts are just not very reliable and you have to challenge them,
biopsy them, think about them, Investigate them.
Decide if they line up with God's truth or not before you react to them.
If you want to become healthier, feel better, and be happier.
And previously, I had number four, I must love tomorrow more than I hate what
I feel right now. That's the tomorrow text.
Don't hate right now so much that you do something that harms tomorrow.
Don't pay the tomorrow text. You need to love tomorrow more.
But then I had number five as I must not treat a bad feeling with a bad operation.
Like don't do things tonight that are going to harm me the next day.
Don't perform the wrong surgery on a bad feeling.
And I realized those are really a corollary of each other. Those are two ways to say the same thing.
So we're going to combine those into the fifth commandment because the fourth
commandment needs to be this. This is something I've realized as I've begun to write the book.
You need to hear this. You need to believe it. You need to know it.
You need to internalize it.
You need to truly ingest and taste and see if this isn't true.
You must, my friend, believe that your brain is designed to heal.
Your brain is designed to heal.
We have bought in, as a whole society, we've bought into this idea that our
genetics predispose us to certain things and we're stuck with them.
That our past, our traumas, our tragedies, our massive things,
other people, our experiences, our families, that they can break us in ways that can't be fixed.
And we bought into that. And the only solution to that is more therapy, more medication,
other people accommodating us, and all that sort of thing that leads to this
endless circle of observing and attending to the problem so much that it becomes
inescapable, like the tractor beam on the Death Star.
And I'm just here to tell you that your brain is not fixed.
You are not stuck with the brain you have. In fact, your brain is already structurally
different than it was when you started listening to this podcast 21 minutes and 57 seconds ago. go.
Because every second of every day of the entirety of your life,
you are breaking down synapses and making new ones.
The difference is you're not stuck.
You're making new synapses all the time, but the default position is that they
will just recreate the old ones and reinforce them unless you choose to intervene.
And that's why we need to become self-brain surgeons, because you're already
having brain surgery all the time.
Your brain is structurally changing changing all the time.
So do you want to drive that process or do you want to be a victim of it? That's the question.
And so if you really truly believe what's now going to be the fourth commandment,
this one's going to stay, I must believe that my brain is designed to heal.
Let me tell you a quick story about my grandson, Riker. He's three.
Brilliant little guy. They came to visit recently and Riker wanted Pop,
that's me, to take him for a ride on the tractor.
He loves Pop's tractor. Every time we FaceTime, he wants to go out to the shop,
wants me to show him the tractor.
We go through all the different things I can attach to my tractor and I tell
him the story of all the different stuff.
So when he came, he wanted to go on the tractor.
We have a big pile of dirt out behind our shop.
And I'm not sure how it got there. Just over the years, we've accumulated a
big dirt pile. Sometimes you need dirt to fill up a hole or something.
But we got this big pile of dirt and Riker wanted to move that dirt around.
So I taught him how to operate the bucket. And we would drive over and pick
up a bucket full of dirt and go over and dump it.
And then we'd move the whole pile and make a new pile.
And then we'd move that pile back to where the old pile was.
And we did it over and over.
And the next day, Riker got up and said, Pop, we need to go move some dirt around.
So we got back on the tractor and moved dirt around again.
And now every time he FaceTimes, he wants to know if I've been moving dirt.
And I tell him, no, I got to wait for you. You're my partner.
You got to help me move that dirt.
And the other day, I said to Riker, hey, Riker, when you get a little bit bigger,
I'll teach you how to drive the tractor.
You can put your feet on the pedals and you can actually learn how to drive
the tractor, but you got to get a little bit bigger first.
And he said, well, I can't right now because I need regular legs.
He needs regular legs. What he means is his little three-year-old legs aren't
long enough to reach the pedals.
So he wants to have regular legs like Pop and like his dad and like Missy and
his mom have. Regular legs like you have.
And it just dawned on me that we all think that we need a different brain than
we have. We need a regular brain.
We all think that our brain isn't right.
There's something wrong with it, that we've got ADHD or we're depressed or we're
anxious or we're stuck or we're broken or we're hopeless or whatever.
Other people seem to have have it figured out. And they've got a regular brain,
but there's something wrong with mine.
And I'm just here to tell you, you have a regular brain.
You have the mind of Christ and you have a brain that's generated and created by the great physician.
And it is designed to heal. And I'm going to teach you about that.
There's a great book, by the way, called Design to Heal. Bim Couliot and Jenny
McLaren wrote it. They were on the podcast a while back. I'll re-release that episode sometime.
Their book, Designed to Heal, is just about this. It's about how your body is
actually not designed to break and fail. It's designed to heal and repair.
And that's what our brains are designed for too.
They're designed to heal. Your brain is designed to function under the direction
and under the control of your mind.
And your mind is designed to be directed and controlled by the Holy Spirit.
And if you get all those things lined up and do them in the right way and in
the right order, then you're going to heal.
Then you're going to get better. Your thinking will become more clear.
And that principle I mentioned a while ago of how everything God does,
He does it consistently across all aspects of His creation.
And just like that tree that can't grow in the biosphere without falling over
because it hasn't faced the wind and adversity, you can't grow and change and
become the person that you're designed to be unless you've gone through some adversity.
So rather than blaming and rather than spending your whole life looking backwards
and focusing and intending to the things that hurt you, I want you to acknowledge
them like we talked about yesterday.
I want you to get that abide vibe practice where you're trying to get some balance
back between your left and right halves of your brain.
The left side, we've allowed it to take over and we need the left side.
The left side's analytical.
The left side can acknowledge truth. The left side can see things as they are
in a way that says, yes, this is true and that's not true.
But the right side adds context and nuance and depth and perspective. And we need that too.
And so when I tell you you about meditating.
I'm not talking about turning your left side off and only letting the right
side of your brain engage.
That's an Eastern practice, and that's not how God designed you.
God designed you to have two sides of your brain doing the same job in two different
ways, and they're designed to work together.
And so I'm trying to encourage you to learn how to listen to that right side.
That's where you're going to hear God's voice.
I'm trying to encourage you to let Let that right side calm down the left side
and allow some truth to come in there, not just empty space,
not just oneness with the universe, but actually learning to communicate and
hear the voice of your creator in that quiet space where you can be still and know that he is God.
And that's why yesterday I told you that you need to contemplate sometimes,
and then sometimes you need to operate, you need to get after it and actually
start making these changes and letting him help you. but then sometimes you also need to recover.
And so you've been through traumas and tragedies and massive things and you've
spent too much time perhaps looking backwards and trying to find a place to lay the blame.
And today I want to just give you this blame ablation operation.
And that is to stop seeing the troubles that you've had in your past as things
that have irreparably harmed or broken you. Yes, they're bad.
Yes, they're harmful. No, you don't want to repeat them.
No, that wasn't right for what they did to you or what happened or when you
lost that person. It wasn't right. It wasn't good.
It's not okay that I lost my son. It's not.
It's not a good thing. I still wish I didn't have to see all the things that
I saw in Iraq and I still dream about.
But in the quantum physics world of a God who says in John 16, 33,
that you can have trouble in this world, and in John 10, 10,
the thief comes to steal and kill and destroy,
but I've come that you might have life and have it abundantly,
in that same quantum truth that God can say two things can be true at the same
time. You can have hardship and you can have abundance.
It is also true that difficult things that you go through make you stronger
and give give you opportunity to handle and to know that you can handle hard things in the future.
And so the new fourth commandment, I must believe that my brain is designed
to heal, that I have regular brain like Racker has someday will have regular
legs and that you can have a regular brain.
You do have a brain that's designed to heal.
And that's better than designing your life around blaming or laying excuses
on the feet of why you are unable to change.
Because my friend, friend, you are changing. You're changing every minute of every day.
The question is, are you going to direct that process for your good?
Are you going to allow it to passively continue to keep you stuck?
That's not how you become healthier, feel better, be happier.
You do that by changing your mind.
You do that by changing your life. You can take the scalpel and you can begin
to apply this operation, the blame ablation, and you can begin to believe with
all your heart that your brain is designed to heal.
And the good news about all this, my friend, here on Self-Brain Surgery Saturday,
is that you can start today.
Music.
Hey, thanks for listening. The Dr. Lee Warren Podcast is brought to you by my
brand new book, Hope is the First Dose. It's a treatment plan for recovering
from trauma, tragedy, and other massive things.
It's available everywhere books are sold, and I narrated the audiobooks.
Hey, the theme music for the show is Get Up by my friend Tommy Walker,
available for free at TommyWalkerMinistries.org.
They are supplying worship resources for worshipers all over the world to worship
the Most High God. And if you're interested in learning more,
check out TommyWalkerMinistries.org.
If you need prayer, go to the prayer wall at WLeeWarrenMD.com slash prayer,
WLeeWarrenMD.com slash prayer.
And go to my website and sign up for the newsletter, Self-Brain Surgery,
every Sunday since 2014, helping people in all 50 states and 60-plus countries
around the world. I'm Dr.
Lee Warren, and I'll talk to you soon. Remember, friend, you can't change your
life until you change your mind. And the good news is you can start today.
Music.