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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.
Hello, my friend. I'm Dr. Lee Warren, and I'm so grateful to be back with you
for another episode of the Spiritual Brain Surgery Podcast.
And today I'm excited because we have a special guest.
If you remember last year, we had Leanne Ellington host two episodes of the
Spiritual Brain Surgery Podcast, and she did an amazing job.
And today we're going to get back into that. I have this vision for spiritual
brain surgery where frequently episodes will be hosted by others.
Because I want you to get to know some incredible people. And I want you not
to just hear a conversation between me and them that I'm directing,
but to give them a chance to tell a story of their lives or things that they've
been through in a way that will help you from a different perspective.
So today we have the first of two episodes coming from my friend, John Seidel.
John's an incredible writer. He's very popular on Substack. I'll put all the
links to his information in the show notes.
But he's written a couple of books, including the upcoming amazing book that
he gave me the great honor of being able to endorse called Confessions of a Christian Alcoholic.
John's story is way bigger than his alcoholism, though, as he'll tell you.
In fact, his first book deals with anxiety and obsessive compulsive disorder,
and his work over the years has been involved in a lot of projects that you've
heard of, like the I Am Second video series and a lot of other media-type projects.
He's an incredible person, a great warrior for the kingdom, and I think he's
going to help you get some spiritual brain surgery done. And the most important
thing to remember is you can't change your life until you change your mind.
John's going to help you get it done today on Spiritual Brain Surgery.
Hello, hello, and welcome to the Spiritual Brain Surgery podcast.
This is the podcast where we take a hard look at what we believe,
why we believe it, and how neuroscience and faith smash together to help us
find the hope to withstand anything life throws at us.
You've got questions. 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 going to take some spiritual brain surgery to do that and to get it done.
So let's get after it.
If you haven't realized by now, I am not Dr. Lee Warren.
I am your guest host for today's episode as well as the next episode.
My name is Jonathan M. Seidel, but my friends call me John.
I made this decision when I first started writing back in college that I was
going to write under my full name with a middle initial, and it was going to be really cool,
and I did so much writing under that, And now it can be kind of confusing to
people because my mom spells Jonathan differently than everyone else in the world.
Seidel is a hard German name. The first vowel does the walking.
The second vowel does the talking.
And so I have ended up with a lot of people misspelling my name.
And even when I say you can call me John, a lot of people do J-O-H-N,
but it's J-O-N because it's Jonathan.
Anyways, my name is John Seidel and you can call me that and you don't have
to go by the full Jonathan M.
Seidel. But I am excited to host the podcast today.
When Dr. Lee asked me to do this, I jumped at the opportunity because I think
what he's doing is so important.
I think you as his audience gets it so much more and so much better than a lot of other people.
And so the opportunity to connect with you is one I cherish.
And so today's episode is going to talk about my story as well as some of what
I've learned being diagnosed with clinical anxiety and OCD, obsessive compulsive disorder.
So I want to walk you through that and how I have learned to attack those diagnoses
in a three-pronged way, brain, body, and spirit.
And so I will start by telling you how I got to those diagnoses.
I think, you know, growing up, I grew up in a small town in Wisconsin,
just south of Green Bay, about 30 minutes on the shores of Lake Michigan.
And I always knew there was something different about me.
There were thoughts that I couldn't stop thinking.
There were cycles I would get into in my head where it felt like I was just
the proverbial dog chasing its tail.
And no matter what I did, I could not stop thinking about the things I didn't want to think about.
And that caused a lot of emotion. It caused a lot of frustration.
But really, it became my normal. You know, I think as Dr.
Lee has talked about, like our brain has the ability to create pathways and ways to cope.
And so, you know, if you know anything about obsessive compulsive disorder,
basically you create these ruminations that at least momentarily give you relief
to stop thinking or doing what you don't want to do or think about.
And so now when it gets really bad, the period of relief gets shorter and shorter and shorter.
So for me, I just developed these compulsions, if you will, that helped me stop
thinking or at least gave me temporary relief.
Now, those compulsions were not what I think a lot of people think of when they think of OCD.
I think a lot of people think about the Howie Mandels of the world,
the people who are washing their hands excessively, who are checking locks excessively.
And don't get me wrong, I did a little checking in my life, but that's never
really been the thing that has, that changed my life or became just exhausting.
And so all that to say is that,
Even though I knew there was something different about me growing up,
I just kind of thought it was normal because it was my normal.
And no one else in my life ever thought, hey, this is something different,
especially, you know, I grew up in the 90s.
And so I think, you know, during that time, the conversation around mental health,
the conversation around GAD, generalized anxiety disorder, and OCD was not really happening.
And let me just pause and say, you know, when it comes to GAD and OCD,
everyone who has OCD has GAD.
Not everyone who has GAD has OCD. So I'll say it again.
Everyone who has OCD has anxiety. Not everyone who has anxiety has OCD.
And so, in a sense, the OCD is a way, an extreme way, if you will, to cope with anxiety.
You develop you know compulsions the
ruminations give you anxiety you develop compulsions to
get rid of them or to give yourself some sort of
temporary relief um so i just wanted to draw that um draw that out a little
bit and so um you know the other thing i will say too is growing up is even
though this wasn't um diagnosed is that.
Anxiety in so many ways, I mean, anxiety in itself is a very natural thing.
Okay. It's a very, for a lot of people, it's a very healthy thing, right?
Anxiety is the mechanism that saves our lives, right?
It is your fight or flight response.
And, um, and, and really that, you know,
God created us so that in our brains that
triggers when we are confronted with something
potentially life-threatening you are standing
in the road and a car is coming
towards you you fight or flight now you're
not really gonna try to fight the car um but you're
gonna flight you're gonna run away from it right i i um
a bunch of years back took a trip
to alaska i love being outdoors and so some buddies in my some buddies and me
flew into the bush and like took a float plane landed on this lake it dropped
us off and like that was our last touch of civilization for seven or eight days.
And you know there was no running
water no electricity and there was an
outhouse and so if you wanted to go to the
outhouse you had to take we had weapons we
had guns with us that we had to take in case we encountered a bear right and
so there was anxiety there i was anxious that if on the path to the outhouse
while in the outhouse and not coming back from the outhouse I could run into a bear.
And so I took precautions. My anxiety about that was keeping me safe.
And so in a lot of ways, anxiety is good.
Now, the problem with people like me is our brain triggers our fight or flight
response in reaction to what would be considered normal and normal stimuli for other people. Right.
So, um, so for me, I was getting thrown into fight or flight mode for the simplest of things.
And, and for people with, with anxiety and OCD, um.
It manifests in different ways. And so, you know, for me, I would,
especially authority figures would say something to me and I would get fight
or flight, whereas it would be something said to someone else that would be
fairly innocuous. You know, that's just one example.
And so I grew up like this with this overactive fight or flight response.
And what I tell people as a sidebar is like, well, well, John,
when when do you know that this is a problem that needs to be addressed clinically, medically?
And I say when it starts affecting your day to day life and that bar is going
to be a little bit different for everyone.
But when it starts getting to the point where it's cutting into your day,
where you're not able to function,
where it's taking up so much of your time and your attention,
when it starts affecting your relationships, when it starts affecting your social
life, those are key indicators that your anxiety and your OCD has become unmanageable
and that you need to get help.
So I'll back up then a little bit, which is I went through most of my life like
this, and I went through high school.
I joke, I grew up in a Christian home, and my mom would say, be a light.
Live such that your people and your friends around you want what you have.
And I remember very distinctly saying to myself, especially in high school,
because as more responsibilities come, as stress increases, the anxiety and
the OCD increases as well.
And so I went to this this kind of hard high school, not hard as in behavior,
behaviorally hard, but hard in that it was it was had a college prep curriculum academically.
It was very rigorous and.
I remember distinctly saying to myself, why would anyone want what I have?
Because what I have right now is a lot of worry, is a lot of thoughts that I
can't get out of my head, is a lot of self-doubt, self-hatred for feeling those things.
And there's no way that I would ever want to give anyone this life that I have,
which I thought was, again, I thought was normal, right?
So I thought that was the normal part of being a person of faith is you had
these kind of doubts and these worries.
And I went through college that way as well.
I went to, again, a Christian college,
again, a very academically rigorous environment that I excelled at,
and I say this because I excelled despite, but a little bit because of my anxiety, my OCD.
And what I mean by that is those mental health issues propelled me to perform.
And I tell people, you know, I talked about the example of the going to the
outhouse in Alaska, but there are other good aspects of anxiety.
And for me, it was it propelled me to good grades.
It propelled me to to do well and and to to devote time to my studies. I wasn't a partier.
I wasn't I didn't fall into those traps. I would later, as I'll eventually talk about on Dr.
Lee's other podcast when him and I sit down to chat.
And so you'll get that full story later.
But I really devoted time to my studies.
And that was because of the anxiety, you know, I had a visceral feel of failure
and letting people down. And so I strive, strive, strived.
And I wasn't the smartest person.
And I, you know, I'm going to say this and be like, oh, yeah, John.
But I got a 4.0 several semesters in college.
And that, but that wasn't because I was naturally smart. It's just because I
worked my butt off, much to my detriment at times.
And was striving and striving and striving because my anxiety propelled me that way, right?
So in some ways, I'm a very faithful person when it comes to meeting appointments
and showing up and getting there early and turning in assignments and doing everything I can.
But that is exhausting. And I got married right after college,
I met my wife in college, I got married right after I graduated,
literally the same month that I graduated college.
Went through the early part of my marriage and it was rough.
And part of the reason that it was rough is because I had all of this anxiety
and OCD that for so long I could, in a sense, hide or just have to deal with myself.
But if you're married and you're listening to this, you know that marriage is a mirror.
And so as I went through the early
parts of my marriage, I kept seeing my reflection and it wasn't good.
It was drawing – marriage was drawing out the fact that I had a problem and
I couldn't just white-knuckle it. And I couldn't also just white knuckle through
the problems that early marriage gives you, right?
And I would say about four or five years into my marriage, it just kept getting
progressively worse. Not just the marriage.
And when I say worse, I mean, it wasn't like my wife and I were estranged,
but it was she was getting really exhausted with my ruminations, with my thoughts.
You know, her and I would have a seemingly small argument or she would say something
seemingly innocuous and I would get so focused on it or she would make a mistake
and I couldn't stop thinking about the mistake that she made.
That wasn't just like, oh, John, you have to forgive.
Like, I literally couldn't stop thinking about how could you do this?
Why would you do this? I remember her getting in a little bit of a fender bender,
and I could not stop thinking about that.
One of the ways that my anxiety and OCD manifests is in car issues.
And if you're listening to this and you have anxiety and OCD,
that may make sense to you because for a lot of people, that is one of the ways
that it manifests. And so, for example, I remember early in our marriage,
we had gotten our first house.
I was going to Lowe's or Home Depot to get some stuff to patch a wall or something
in the yard or the garage,
and I remember driving and running over just something small.
I mean, I'm saying like, maybe it was a rock, maybe it was a squirrel.
And I remember almost immediately thinking...
Um, what if that was someone, what if I hit someone?
And I remember circling the block multiple times, looking for someone that I
may have hit, looking for blood, looking for people who are taking pictures.
That doesn't make sense, right?
I know in some ways that I didn't hit a person. I would know that.
And yet the doubts and the ruminations, well, what if I, what if they're running fast?
And again, to people who don't have OCD, that doesn't make sense.
But again, what I learned is that this type of rumination, specifically this
one about hitting someone or killing someone or doing something to someone is very common.
And so go back to what I said earlier about when you know you need to get help.
And part of that is when it starts interrupting your daily life.
Well, guess how much, you know, guess how much time I wasted doing that exercise,
doing that rumination, or excuse me, the compulsion.
The compulsion was driving in a circle, Right.
Driving around the block multiple times. If I just drive one more time,
one more time, one more time, I'll be able to stop thinking about this.
When I finally got home, my wife was like, where were you? And I said,
you know, and I try to explain this to her.
And of course, it doesn't make sense because it is nonsensical. um
and so things like that
were happening that were really driving a wedge
between my wife and i and understandably so you know if i if i can't get over
you know a lot of times even just perceived wrongs not that they were actual
wrongs but perceived wrongs um then it was really driving in a wedge in our marriage.
And that really came to a head at the time we were living in a loft in downtown Dallas.
We live in the Dallas-Fort Worth area still now. And.
It was a Saturday morning. We decided, hey, you know, it was kind of a nice day.
Let's just get up in the morning and let's walk the city and really just kind
of explore and have fun and, you know, no agenda. But if we see something we
want to do, we're just going to go.
And so we get down below us in these loft apartments.
It was like an old Sears warehouse that was turned into these incredible,
amazing, and yet affordable lofts.
And, um, and so we go down and there's this coffee shop and we're sitting there, we make our order.
And I say, Hey babe, I have to run to the bathroom.
Um, you're, if you could grab the coffee and remember, once you get it,
I would like, um, I would like half and half and sweet and low the pink packets.
And she said okay i got it i said not splenda make sure there's no splendid see i hate,
splenda i think splenda or stevia is
from the devil i just think it tastes awful and
if some i actually actually last weekend i was at an event and they had a free
coffee i go i get the coffee and they only have stevia and i'm like i gotta
have something so i put it in there and i literally I literally dumped and threw
out the coffee because I couldn't I could not drink it,
and so I go to the bathroom I come back my wife hands me the coffee,
I take a drink of it and I almost spit it out right then and there.
It had Splenda in it.
And I was like, I got so angry. I got so, I felt so slighted.
I felt so frustrated.
And even though in that moment I'm telling myself, don't think about this. It's not a big deal.
I made it a big deal. I couldn't not, I couldn't not stop thinking about it.
And I make this big scene, and for the rest of the day, I can't stop thinking
about my wife putting the wrong sweetener in my coffee, which,
by the way, she didn't, right?
She actually told the people, hey, can you put Splenda in there – or excuse
me, Sweet and Low in there, and they got it wrong.
They put Splenda in there, right? So it wasn't even my wife's fault, but I took it out on her.
And for most of the weekend we did not talk and my wife um finally towards the end said like.
John i can't live like this we can't live like this i'm not going anywhere but
we have to get this figured out and you know when you see the person you love
just crying and weeping in front of you and at the end of their rope,
even though, like, I knew, again, that, or I should say, I started to realize,
okay, this isn't normal.
And so when you see that person in front of you at the end of their rope,
you're like, okay, yeah, I do need to get help. And so...
That day or the next, I had known that my sister struggled with anxiety and OCD.
And so I called her up and just told her what was happening.
And she just very nonchalantly in the best way was like, oh,
and they call me Johnny because that's what everyone called me growing up.
She goes, oh, Johnny, you don't know this runs in our family.
And I'm like, what? And she goes on to detail how this runs in our family and
who has it and the examples.
And I just was like, oh my gosh, you're right.
And so immediately after getting off the phone with her, I find a psychiatrist
and I book – that's accepting new patients. And I book an appointment.
And yet I could not get into this guy's office for like a month.
And uh you know if you want to figure out
if you have clinical anxiety and ocd um
just have to wait a month before you book your appointment
to when you can see uh the psychiatrist and the
feelings that you go through uh and the thoughts you go through
during that time and uh it's pretty much a self-diagnosis
there um and that was my case i mean it
was just like i couldn't stop thinking about this so i finally show
up i show up to my uh psychiatrist who looks
like who really looks like out
of central casting for back to the future um he
looked like doc brown and uh his hair was disheveled you know like he he was
all disheveled um and and white hair and just was like okay but i'm in some
ways i'm like i maybe i kind of want my psychiatrist to look like this because
there's a little Albert Einstein-ness here.
And so I show up, I tell him what's going on, and pretty quickly,
it didn't take long for him to say, Mr.
Seidel, you have what's called GAD, Generalized Anxiety Disorder,
and OCD, Obsessed Compulsive Disorder.
And I will tell you, that moment was one of the most important.
Freeing moments of my life.
I, for so long, I felt like I was in a dark room and I knew something was in
there that was beating me up,
but I couldn't see what it was or where it was.
And every time I would try to fight back or do something, I just,
I would just be punching air.
And when I got my diagnosis, when I got that diagnosis, it's like the lights came on.
I could see where I was. I could see what was around me.
And I could then know how to fight back. I could know where to land my punches.
And I could land them, right?
And so that started a journey of healing, of hope, of – I got on medication.
I started going to therapy, and I found tools to fight back.
And I wrote my first book on this.
It's called Finding Rest, A Survivor's Guide to Navigating Anxiety, Faith, and Life.
And I'll tell you what, it was a really eye-opening, I would say,
few years, especially early on.
And what I will tell you is...
There is a three-pronged approach that I have found to treating my anxiety and my OCD.
And I call it, and I talk about this in the book, which by the way,
I don't know why I messed up the subtitle in my brain, but it's Navigating the Valk. Oh my gosh.
A Survivor's Guide to Navigating the Valleys of Anxiety, Faith, and Life.
I'm so sorry. You'd think I would know my own book. um uh
it's sitting right behind me anyways but it's
a i call it my mental health stool and
i actually have this um this graphic
in the book that um that i tried to
draw initially and the publisher said you need to get a professional and
i'm like how bad am i that i can't even draw a mental health stool a stool graphic
and they're like you need to get professional help for this okay well i did
uh i hired my my sister-in-law who's a graphic designer and so the the mental
health stool in the book is much easier to read than if I would have just done it myself.
But on the top sits your mental health, and the three legs of the stool are
brain, body, and spirit.
And what I found is that I have to be treating all of those.
I have to be focusing on all of those legs of the stool in order to support my mental health.
Any one of those legs of the stool falls off or gets shorter and the stool becomes wobbly, right?
And so I want to go through each of those three things. The first one, brain.
How do I do that? Well, I think one of the most important things that I have
found is I take medication for my anxiety and my OCD.
I'm a Christian and I still take medication. And I think, by the way, that was one of early on,
The biggest issues that I needed and wanted to confront, because I grew up,
and I'm going to get a little bit more into this in the next episode,
but I grew up in a faith tradition that treated God like a genie, right?
And said that if you do X, Y, and Z, he will do A, B, and C.
If you just have enough faith, if you just pray hard enough,
if you're just consistently repentant.
Then God will do what you want, he'll give you what you want,
he'll give you health, everything will be fine.
And if you're not doing any of those things, well, that's why you're struggling.
And so what I came to realize, though, is especially in this aspect of mental
health, that mental health is a scientific thing, right?
It's, you know, I think here's the problem.
The world wants to tell you that it is all a physical issue.
Traditionally, Christians in the church have said it's all a spiritual issue,
and it's really in between. It is both and it is not an either or.
So taking medication for my mental health is treating the physical aspect of
the chemical imbalance in my brain. I'm on SSRIs, which deal with the serotonin levels.
And so what I know to be true is that there are neurons and there are things
misfiring in my brain the medication helps me.
I get to a point where I can actually treat the spiritual.
So what I tell people is if my normal everyday anxiety without medication because
of the way that my brain is wired,
which is a result, by the way, of living in a fallen and sinful world,
not because of my sin, not that I did something to deserve this,
but because we live in a sinful world just like why cancer is here.
If my normal level of anxiety is at an eight without medication,
my medication brings that normal anxiety level down to a four.
And at a four, I can do the spiritual work. I can go to counseling and not be
just ruminating about things. I can actually read the word.
I can sit and listen to the Holy Spirit, right? I can't do that if I'm not consistently
taking my medication because my brain just goes so many places. It goes to so much worry.
It goes to so much ruminations, right?
And my OCD, by the way, is intrusive thought OCD if that wasn't made clear.
It's not, like I said, it's not the hand washing. It's not those things.
It's intrusive thought OCD. I can't – it is literally physically impossible
for me to sit and listen to the Holy Spirit if I am not treating the brain imbalance in my head.
So I take medication. I tell people, I think historically Christians have had a hard time with this.
And so I like to compare it to this little allegory. I use this allegory,
I should say, to explain the importance of taking my medication.
So there was a there was a guy let's just say Houston I'm in the Dallas Fort
Worth area it rains a lot in Houston and floods okay so there was a guy now I'm in Houston and um.
The rains came and came and came and came and, um, he's sitting there and,
and, and it starts, the water start to rise.
And, uh, he's kind of out on his porch watching everything.
This police cruiser comes up and the, and the police, the policeman says,
uh, sir, um, you might want to, you might want to, uh, get in the, get in the cruiser here.
Uh, the water's coming up. and uh and
he says no no i'm good i'm i'm
praying i'm a man of faith and um the
lord is gonna is gonna save me i just
know that he will all right the police officer the cruiser drives away sheriff's
department comes in a boat later as though as the waters continue to rise and
now they're they're up at this man's window right and it's probably it's put
the water is probably up to his chest.
And the boat comes by and they say, sir, sorry, you really should get him a boat.
It's only getting worse. And he says, no, I'm good. I'm good.
I have faith. I'm a man of faith. The Lord is going to save me. I just know it.
Okay. The boat goes away. The waters continue to rise.
And eventually the man is on the roof and and the water is all the way up to the peak.
And this helicopter, this helicopter hovers over him, comes by.
Sir, we're throwing the rope down. Here's the rope.
Climb up and we'll take you to safety. And he yells back, no, I'm good.
I'm a man of faith. The Lord is going to provide a way for me to escape.
He's going to keep me safe.
And sure enough, the waters continue to rise and rise and the man dies.
And he goes to heaven and he's up there and he meets Jesus.
He says, Lord, I don't understand. I was really believing in faith that you were going to save me.
And the Lord looks at him and says, I offered you a car, a boat, and a helicopter.
What more did you want?
And I just that to me is one of the most powerful allegories that I've ever
heard about why I take medication it's a common grace it is something that the
Lord has offered me it's a lifeline to help me,
and let me just pause and give this caveat I am not out here saying that everyone
who has issues needs to be on medication,
I have found that I need to be but I'm not out here.
Trying to disparage the common grace that the Lord has given.
And so I just want you to be open to it if you're struggling like me.
That's what I tell people is just don't write it off. I think sometimes,
it takes more faith to use something like Prozac, which is what I'm on,
than to do it a different way.
Like, think about that for a second. Sometimes we want to limit God.
We want to say, God, you can help me in any way that I want,
or you can help me in any way you want, except for this one thing.
And I've heard so many people say, God, you can heal me, you can help me,
you can do whatever you want with me, especially when it comes to my mental
health except tell me to go on medication, except I won't go on medication.
And I say, like, why are you limiting God? That is limiting God,
right? He can work through.
I mean, if I go to the doctor for a broken bone, why would I not go to the doctor for a broken brain?
That's what it is. And it's not weird to say that, right?
So that is how I treat the brain aspect of my three-legged stool body is the next one.
And so I tell people that I run away from my problems and they're like, oh, that's not good.
And I'm like, no, no, no. I physically run.
What I have found is that when my feet hit the pavement, there's something that happens in my brain.
And this is scientifically proven that regular exercise and then and especially
running, by the way, is a great way to do that, that it helps your mental health.
And so the second thing I tell people is you have to be treating this through
your body physically, right?
And so you have to be careful what you're eating.
You have to be careful to have a regular regimen of activity in your life.
If you are sedentary, it is going to affect your mental health.
If you are drinking too much alcohol and the studies on alcohol even recently
have gotten worse and worse for the alcohol industry, right,
that no level of alcohol is safe or healthy.
It is a depressant. I would come to learn this the very, very,
very hard way, which is part of what I'm going to be talking to Dr.
Lee about on his other podcast.
So a little plug there and stay tuned for that.
You have to be getting regular sunshine, right?
So being outdoors as well. So all of those things I talk about is that I need
to treat my body, the physical aspects.
I have to be getting exercise. I have to be increasing the dopamine in my brain naturally.
And so I think what I said earlier really rings true is that,
again, the church and Christians historically have wanted to make this all a
spiritual issue, and yet it is a both-and. There is a physical aspect to this.
And then the final one is spirit.
And so this is that other aspect where I say where the world has wanted to make
it all a physical issue, it is also a spiritual issue.
And I think some people, by the way, they get a little squirrely.
They say, John, are you saying that my anxiety, my OCD are like sin issues?
And what I say is, kind of, but not in the way I think that the church has and
Christians have historically said this.
It is not, you know, and I'll get into this more on the next episode.
It's not that God is up there saying, I'm doling out, you know,
you had sex before marriage.
You cursed at your wife this weekend. You were mean to your kids.
So here's a little anxiety for that. No.
But I know that in my sinful heart, I have a tendency to trust myself and not God.
And so at the heart of the spiritual issues related to my anxiety and OCD,
is a pride. It says that I can control everything.
I, I can make things all right.
I, um, uh, I can, if I just think about this enough, I can control it.
Right. And so I think my pride is a constant issue that I need to be keeping in check.
And I think when I say pride, I think a People think, well, like a haughtiness.
No, it's not just that, right?
Pride can take on many forms. And the pride in my life is a lack of humility
to turn things over to God, to turn things over to him and say,
God, I don't know how this is going to end.
I can't just reason my way out of this.
I can't just think my way out of this. I have to turn this over to you.
My pride wants to tell me that I can, that I can just think about it,
that I can figure this out with enough thoughts.
I can do this. And God is saying, no, you can't. No, you can't.
It's physically impossible. It's spiritually impossible.
You need to turn it over to me and have faith and trust. And so I think at the
heart of a lot of our anxieties is that pride, is that lack of trust.
And I know, like, listen, please hear me.
I have a whole section on this in my book, Finding Rest.
I'm not out here advocating trite phrases or scriptures to be thrown at people
who have anxiety that say, you know, don't be anxious about anything.
You know, I think those have been used in a very harmful way against people
like me because they're just said – they're said not as a way to press in,
but they're said as a way to pull the ripcord and get out.
I don't know what to say. I don't
know what to do. I'm going to throw this verse at you, and then I'm out.
I've done. I've done my job, right? Where a lot of what people like me need
is we need you to sit with us.
We need you to talk with us. We need you to tell us that does suck.
You can't figure that out. We have to trust, right? There's a big difference
between that type of communication and community versus the kind that says,
don't be anxious about anything.
So I think that's really an important distinction.
So just to recap, brain, body, spirit.
We have to have all three of those things in existence in our life and be pursuing
them to have a stable mental health. Now, people ask me, John,
okay, which one is most important, brain, body, or spirit?
And I say, where are you most deficient in the moment?
It's always going to be a struggle, friends. Like you're always going to be
deficient in one of those areas and you're always going to have to be.
And it's going to feel a little bit sometimes like a game of whack-a-mole. And guess what?
That is a result of the curse. This side of glory, we're not going to be able
to perfectly do all this stuff. It's the sanctification process, right?
But in the moment, I say, where are you deficient right now?
And so sometimes – and by the way, I guess it can also be you can be deficient in more than one area.
So maybe, hey, you're faithfully taking your medication, but your physical exercise is nonexistent.
Your spiritual life is hanging on by a thread. Well, you need to invest in both of those.
Or maybe you're taking your medication and you're treating your – I should say
treating your brain, right? Some people, that's therapy.
They don't have – again, you don't have to be on medication.
But let's say you're going to therapy regularly.
You're seeing a counselor. You're, quote-unquote, doing the work. But –.
But you're just not in the word. And maybe you're even running.
And maybe you're even exercising regular. But you are not abiding in Christ.
You are not going to him with your issues. And you will and do feel spiritually
empty and spiritually lost.
Well, that's what you need to focus on, right?
Or maybe you're spiritually nailing it and you're physically nailing it.
But you are doing nothing to treat the brain aspect of it.
And you don't know why you're stuck. You've got to treat the brain.
And so those are the three things that I want to encourage you to do.
You can pick up my book, Finding Rest, A Survivor's Guide to Navigating the
Valleys of Anxiety, Faith, and Life.
I go into way more depth on each of these issues.
There's actually also a chapter for family members, for people who love people like me.
That was a chapter that was birthed out of a conversation with my wife where I said,
babe what do you want people to know who are like you
who are in a relationship or love someone
like me and she said go to counseling and i said oh yeah i know i put that in
there that i need to go to counseling she goes no no no no i we the loved ones
need to go to counseling and i said oh tell me more and she did and so there's
a whole chapter in there about how you um.
How you can support people like me, what you need to do for yourself as well.
And so if you want to pick up the book, if you want to know more about me.
Um, you can go to johnseidel.com, J-O-N-S-E-I-D-L.com.
I also write a daily devotional at theveritasdaily.com, theveritasdaily.com.
I send out every morning, every weekday morning, and then on the weekends I
send out a recap, and on Sunday I do a video where I just, I faithfully,
I get up early in the morning, I pray, I spend time with God.
And I just write what he tells me to write and that might seem like so uber
spiritual and I'm not trying to or pretending to be but that's just what he's
called me to do so almost every day for the last year that's what I've done and it's been really.
It's been a blessing to me and it's been a blessing to others and to see the
comments and the people that have said how helpful that is has meant the world
to me and really it's like thank you God taking my mess and turning it into
a message So go to theveritasdaily.com.
So that has been spiritual brain surgery for this episode. Again,
I am your guest host, John Seidel.
I really, really look forward to seeing you next episode.
Be sure to subscribe to the show so that you never miss an episode.
And remember that our friend, Dr.
Warren, always says you can't change your life until you change your mind.
And the good news is you can start today.
I'll see you on next week's episode or next episode. Maybe you're going to listen to it right away.
And we're going to talk about a proper theology of suffering. That's going to be fun.
Talk to you soon. That was outstanding from John. I'm so grateful that he did that for us.
And I can't wait for next week's episode when John takes us through a proper theology of suffering.
That's it for spiritual brain surgery
this week, friend. I hope you got something out of it. I always do.
It's always worth it to remember. You can't change your life until you change
your mind. And the good news is you can start today.