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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. I hope you're doing well. I'm Dr.
Lee Warren, hopefully your favorite internet and real-life brain surgeon.
I'm excited because today is Self-Brain Surgery Saturday, and we're going to
take a look today at the third commandment of self-brain surgery.
I must believe that my thoughts are not always true.
I must believe that my thoughts are not always true. You have tens of thousands
of automatic thoughts that pop into your head every day. And the research is clear.
The vast majority of them are not true.
The thought that pops into your head is based on something from your past that's
mixed with some emotion that's reminding you of something that's happened before
or projecting a fear or something you're concerned about in the future. And it's just not true.
And the problem is most of us, I would say the vast majority of humans on the
planet, it, react to every thought as if it were true.
And we spend a tremendous amount of time with disordered thinking.
I'm not saying a disorder of thinking. I'm saying thoughts that are out of order
or improperly valued or just frankly not true.
And so then if we're reacting to things that aren't true, we get ourselves into all kinds of trouble.
Simon Sinek in his incredible book said if we start with the wrong questions,
then even the right answers will get us into trouble.
Will not lead us to the right place.
If you start with the wrong thought then, then even good thinking or good actions
to the wrong thought will produce bad results, right? That makes sense.
But today we're going to just remind ourselves that most of the things we think
are not true. So what then?
What do we do next? If we're going to be good self-brain surgeons,
if we want to become healthier and feel better and be happier,
what do we do next when we identify the idea that most of our thoughts aren't true?
What do we do about that? How do we build a system in our life to prehab ourselves?
Cells, to prepare ourselves for the fact that we have thinking that's unreliable. What do we do then?
Do we give up? Do we drink ourselves into a coma? Do we react to every thought as if it's true?
Or do we create a system where we can be good, compassionate,
caring, and wise self-brain surgeons on behalf of our most commonly treated patient, ourselves?
And what does the Lord have to do with that? What does faith have to do with it?
How does science and faith smash together together to help us manage those ideas
around the fact that thoughts are not always true. Well, we're going to find out today.
But before we do, I have a question for you.
Hey, are you ready to change your life? If the answer is yes, there's only one rule.
You have to change your mind first. And my friend, there's a place where the
neuroscience of how your mind works smashes together with faith and everything
starts to make sense. Are you ready to change your life?
Well, this is the place, Self-Brain Surgery School.
I'm Dr. Lee Warren, and this is where we go deep into how we're wired,
take control of our thinking, and find real hope.
This is where we learn to become healthier, feel better, and be happier.
This is where we leave the past behind and transform our minds.
This is where we start today. Are you ready?
This is your podcast. This is your place. This is your time,
my friend. Let's get after it.
Music.
All right, let's get after it. Hey, Self-Brain Surgery Saturday.
This is the day of the week.
We try to do an operation to change how we think, change how we feel,
change the arc and the direction of our lives in some way that kind of moves
the needle and helps us make progress.
It's going to be quick, but I want to cover a little bit of ground before we
get to the third commandment.
One is this. Remember what you're doing, you're getting better at.
That's one of the commandments too, but I just want you to remember that because
the fact is you're not the same person. Your brain is not even structurally
the same as it was when you made a decision to click on the link to listen to
this podcast or open up your app and listen to this podcast.
You've already made some new connections, hundreds of thousands of them,
between different neurons in your brain.
And so you're not the same person that you were just a few minutes ago.
So the idea that you could be hopelessly stuck because of something else that
happened is a powerful and compelling idea that can keep you stuck.
But my friend, it's not true.
You're not stuck. You don't have to stay the same. You can't stay the same.
The question is, do you want to change in a way that helps you,
or do you want to just keep changing back into the same rewired,
stuck version of yourself that you were when you first thought, hey, I'm stuck?
What about that? Do you want to stay the same or do you want to change?
The truth is you're going to change anyway.
You'll just keep changing back into the same problem. And that problem,
that way of looking at the world, that feeling that you have will get deeper
and deeper and deeper and more hardwired into your brain,
like the ruts on wagon trail that you can still see in Wyoming and Utah hundreds
of years after those wagons went through because they kept following the same
path and the ruts got deeper and deeper and deeper and harder and harder to break out of.
And that's kind of what happens. You make these new connections,
but you just keep recreating the same direction, the same issues,
if you don't change them.
The good news is you can change them. You can change them almost immediately
by starting to think differently.
That's why it's so important to get your right brain involved.
Get that abide practice going.
Start to think differently and get connected with both halves of your brain
so that you're You're not turning everything into an object,
a two-dimensional, simple, easily manipulated version of what's actually real.
Now, I'm going to give you a couple things to think about. If you're not a spiritual
person, then you may hear me say some things from time to time about Scripture
or about God or about the Holy Spirit or about the Great Physician or about Jesus.
And you may say, oh, I don't know about all that stuff. I don't really believe
in any of that stuff. And I'll just ask you this.
Remember, what you're doing, you're getting better at.
And Dr. Phil, the famous psychiatrist or psychologist, always says,
how's it working for you?
So my premise is that you wouldn't be here listening to a podcast that's about
changing your mind and about trying to find different ways to move forward if
you didn't have some place in your life that wasn't working the way you wanted it to work.
And so I'll throw the question out again. How's it working for you?
And you know me, I'm a pretty smart guy. I'm an objective person.
I've studied the science. I've studied the word.
I've smashed those two together in my own life and have fortunately through
God's grace have been able to continue moving forward. I've seen some really
massive things that have occurred.
So if you can say, well, yeah, I'm skeptical, but I can look at other people
who seem to not be morons, but they are managing to smash faith and science
together. other, maybe there's a reason for that.
So my question would be this, since what you're doing, you're getting better
at, and if what you've been doing and getting better at hasn't produced the
kind of change that you're wanting, and that has led you to a podcast where
people are talking about changing their minds and changing their lives,
then if you're a skeptical person and the faith element hasn't been part of your story,
then I'll just remind you and invite you to know know what Psalm 34, 8 says.
Psalm 34, 8 says this, taste and see that the Lord is good.
Taste and see that the Lord is good.
Blessed is the one who takes refuge in him. That word blessed in the Old Testament
in the Hebrew is asher, and it actually more appropriately would be translated happy.
So he's just saying, hey, if you're struggling, if you're stuck,
if you're worried, if you're concerned, if things aren't helping,
if you're grieved, if you're bereaved, if you don't know what to do,
you're hopelessly anxious, if you're addicted, you're unhappy,
and you don't know what to do, try something different.
What you're doing, you're getting better at. And if what you're getting better
at isn't producing the kind of change that you want to see, try something different.
Change your mind about it and taste and see.
And I'm just telling you as a compassionate and hopefully wise physician on your behalf,
there's a path that leads to real life change that connects you on the highest
level to the ways that you can be almost infinitely untouchable and resilient
against the things that happen in life.
And it happens when you smash science and faith together and you let your creator,
the great physician, help you.
Now, if that sounds a little too much, again, taste and see. Give it a chance.
Try it. You don't have to buy the whole thing hook, line, and sinker.
In fact, I think one of God's favorite prayers is probably when somebody comes
and says, you know, I'm not sure if I believe in you.
But if you're real, I'd love to see it. I'd love to know about you.
I think God honors that prayer. friend.
I think he'll show up in your life in surprising ways, maybe through a podcast
book, or maybe through somebody sharing something with you that encourages you,
but just taste and see, okay?
Now, that's a long preamble to say this. My friend, the third commandment of
self-brain surgery is I must believe that thoughts are not always true.
It's been well-researched. You have thousands and thousands and thousands of
thoughts that pop into your head, and friend, it is not a a sin.
It is not a character flaw. It is not a sign of weakness for you to have a negative thought.
It's a fact of how you're wired and of basic neuroscience and the way memories
are re-triggered and the way thoughts are produced.
It's a fact that you're going to have some thoughts pop into your head that are not true.
What the problem is, is when you start to act as if those thoughts are true.
I'm a loser. I'm hopeless. She doesn't love me. That guy took a look at me and
that means He hates me. I'm going to get fired tomorrow. All that stuff that pops into your head.
I'll never be able to change. I'll never get over this. My whole life is going
to be sad now because this thing occurred that those thoughts pop into your
head and that's not your fault.
What is your fault, though, is if you act on that thought as if it's true without
even taking the most basic biopsy of it to try to take a look and see if it's a true thought.
I get an email from a marketing expert named Seth Godin.
I'm not recommending it because it's not a Christian content at all.
But Seth Godin writes little short emails every day, and sometimes he has this
little nugget of wisdom that sticks with me. And one of them was a few months
ago when he said there's a writer named Ursula Le Guin.
I've never read any of her writing. I'm not recommending. I don't know anything
about her. So it may be great, may be terrible.
Don't know. But Seth's quote about her stuck with me.
And what he said is that this writer, Ursula Le Guin, had a little placard on her desk.
And when she sat down to write, she would ask herself these three questions
about what she was getting ready to write.
And I think they apply perfectly to biopsy results when we look at our thinking.
Say, hey, I want to take this thought, I want to examine it carefully before
I decide how to weight it or decide to discard it or decide to react to it or
decide to believe it or decide to own it or decide to let it change the arc of my day.
I'm going to use these ideas to biopsy that thought and respond with my frontal
lobe rather than react with my amygdala and run away from it,
crush it, be afraid of it, let it define me, put a label on me, all that stuff.
So the three things Ursula Le Guin said about writing.
Is it true? So the very first question we should ask of our thoughts,
because you know the neuroscience is clear.
You have lots of thoughts every day that pop into your head that are not true.
And Daniel Lehman talks about these automatic negative thoughts.
If you want to know more about Daniel Lehman's work, he talks about this in
the book, You Happier, in the book, Your Brain Is Always Listening.
He talks about these automatic negative thoughts. He calls them ants.
And they fall into multiple different categories, like all or nothing thinking,
like I'm always or I'm never, or fortune-telling like, well,
the future is going to be terrible because this thing happened and I'm never
going to be able to overcome this and that sort of thing.
There's all these different categories of ants that pop into your head,
these negative thoughts.
And so the first question, the basic one that should determine just about everything
about how you look at your thinking and what you do with it is, is it true?
And friend, I would just say this. If you would just develop a discipline,
if all of us would develop a discipline of biopsy and thought,
2 Corinthians 10.5 says, take captive every thought.
You get in this habit of grabbing a thought before you react to it and asking
yourself a basic question. Is it true?
And if it's not true, don't react to it.
Don't respond to it. Delete it. Get rid of it.
Don't spend any mental energy working on the premise that some thought that's
untrue still matters to you.
Get rid of it. If you would just do that one thing, I would suggest that you
would become a very successful self-brain surgeon.
You would begin to feel some more hope in your life if you would stop wasting
your precious and limited mental resources on thoughts that aren't true.
The second one that she asked is, is it necessary or at least useful?
So there's some thoughts that pop into your head. For me, it happens mostly
in the middle of the night when I'm struggling to sleep. I'll have a thought
that'll pop into my head.
This meeting tomorrow is gonna be horrible. It's just gonna mess my day up.
I've got this meeting with all these administrators. It's gonna be miserable.
It's gonna waste my time. And then I start worrying about what if this new policy
that they're gonna announce affects my ability to run my practice or this thing
happens or that thing happens.
And I start running my brain down this rabbit trail in response to my thinking
about what something might be, okay?
So when you can't answer the question, is it true?
So the biopsy result comes back and I say, well, I do have a meeting tomorrow
and it might be horrible.
It might be a boring, long, terrible meeting.
And if it is, they might announce a policy that affects my ability to take care
of my patients. And if they do that, then it might affect my blah, blah, blah.
And I start running down this rabbit trail. So the question is not necessarily, is it true?
Because sometimes the answer is, I'm not sure if it's true or not. It might be true.
And sometimes the answer is, yeah, it is true.
When I was in the Air Force, we had
these eternal, boring administrative meetings, and I just dreaded them.
I just couldn't stand it, but I had to go to them. And I would lay awake at
night being angry or upset about this meeting that I was going to have to go to. And that was true.
I'm going to have to go to this meeting, and I've been to 100 of them,
and they're always super boring.
And they're a terrible waste of my time and all of that. So the biopsy result was, yes, it's true.
But then the next question, is it necessary for me to think about this right now?
That's a game changer because the truth is there are some things that are true
that you can't do anything about right now, that your mental energy and your
time is not going to affect that situation in any way.
You cannot do anything about it. And if that's the case, that's when you need to pray.
That's when you need to listen to some music. That's when you need to meditate
and get into your right hemisphere.
That's when you need to say, God, I'm doing this hands up, hands down thing
where I'm turning my palms over and letting that thing fall to the ground. See that in your mind.
God, I can't do anything about this situation right now. I can't change that diagnosis.
I can't avoid that meeting. I can't fix this problem that's happening until
sometime tomorrow or the next day when I've got an opportunity to interact with
it. So right now I need to sleep.
I need to rest. I need to let my brain recover.
I need to let my body heal so that I'll be in a better position to manage that
tomorrow. I'm turning my palms down. I want you to let that fall away from me, Lord.
And then I'm going to turn my palms up and you fill me with the things I do need. Peace.
Remind me who you are. Remind me that you love me. Give me some promises to
think about that are true. It'll help me rest.
Remind me that you grant sleep to those who love you. So those kinds of things,
you see that mental switch that you can make. It is true, but it's not necessary
for you to think about right now.
And then the second half of that is, is it necessary or at least useful?
So there might be some things that are necessary for you to think about,
but they're not useful to you right now.
Like you may need to spend an hour tomorrow thinking about the solution to a
problem, but you might need to be at your desk when you've got the book that's
on your desk or the notes from your last meeting that you need to work through
to be able to make a good decision about that.
Or you might need to have a quick meeting with your associate before you can
make a good decision about that. So it's not necessary for you to think about
it right now, and it's not useful for you to think about it right now, okay?
It's not necessary or useful. And the last one is, is it compassionate or at least unharmful?
Okay, so let's say there are some things that pop into your head that are true
that you need to deal with at some point. You can't do anything about it now.
It's not useful to you to deal with it right now. And therefore,
it's not compassionate.
It's not helpful. It's actually harmful for you to stew on it or chew on it
right now. It's not the right time.
It's not the right situation. It's not the right place. It's not compassionate.
Compassionate. You're committing malpractice.
You're violating the first commandment of first no harm by continuing to think
about this thing that you can't do anything about. It's not helpful.
It's not compassionate.
It's not unharmful. It is harmful for you.
And so putting yourself in a mental state where you're committing self-malpractice,
you're violating the first commandment, you're not sleeping,
you're not resting, you're not preparing,
you're not getting better, or you convince yourself that thinking about this
thing is somehow helping you manage it tomorrow when in fact it's making it worse.
So those are some useful tools, right, that stuck with me.
Again, I don't know anything about Ursula Le Guin, but those are three really
good self-brain surgery principles of how you can look at a thought biopsy and
make a decision about whether it's worth your time to respond to it right now
or to continue to think about it.
Because thinking can quickly devolve into rumination.
Rumination can quickly devolve into anxiety or shame or something else.
And you can get into this position where you say, I've got to turn my brain off.
And for addicts, for people who are in recovery, that kind of thinking can sometimes
lead to the building of pressure until you have to numb your brain to stop thinking about that.
And I would suggest to you, my friend, that a better option is to learn how
to switch to use your frontal lobe, use your selective attention,
and learn how to switch to something that is useful, that is necessary,
that is compassionate, that is unharmful.
And that will help you not only sleep like a baby, but be more effective when
it is time to switch and think about that thing or deal with that thing. Does that make sense?
So I'm just giving you a little tool for what you can do with thinking.
And remind you, if you don't believe in the spiritual realm,
if you don't believe or you've been hurt by the church or you've been wounded
by a Christian and you think a compassionate God must not be real because he
wouldn't let something like that happen,
go back and listen to some of the episodes about suffering and get a different perspective on that.
Change your mind about who God is and what the role of God is and when we're suffering.
Because there's some hope there. There's some help there. Read my book,
Hope is the First Dose, if you haven't read it yet, and it'll help you.
But I'm just inviting you to get to Psalm 34 and taste and see that He is good.
Taste and see. Give Him a chance because happy are those who find their trust in Him.
Happy are those who find their help in Him. It makes you happy to taste and see that He is good.
That's a biblical promise. us. And I'm just telling you, your friend who's a
trustworthy physician, who's your guide, who's helping you learn self-brain
surgery to help you change your mind and change your life, I'm telling you,
there's multiple paths to using neuroscience to help you.
There's the immediate hack type path.
You know, there's always a guy who knows a keyboard shortcut for something.
There's always a guy, if you're trying to save a file, he can reach over and
hit command S or something and knows a little hack.
There's always a guy who knows how to do something quick to make make the car
start, but doesn't know the science behind it, doesn't know the depth of it,
doesn't know all the nuance and all the detail. We talked about that the other day.
So those people that enjoy having a little trick, a little hack,
and there's a 10% hack for your brain.
The guy, Dan Harris, the writer, has written a book called 10% Happier.
He's made a whole career out of this idea that you can just borrow some principles
from Eastern meditation and learn how to calm your overactive thinking down,
and you can become a little happier.
And for most people, that's enough. If you're just a little stressed or you've
got a little anxiety, 10% happier, 10% more in control of your thinking might be enough.
So there's that immediate hack. You can try that. It does work. It'll help you.
But then some people need more than that. If you've been through something big,
something hard, you lost a child, you're in the middle of a cancer diagnosis,
you're going through something really hard, you might need more than that.
So then there's this sort of immersive help, immersive approach where you go
down deep and you learn the science and you understand how your brain is wired
and you start to understand what your amygdala and your cingulate gyrus and
your basal ganglia and your frontal lobes do and all the stuff that we talk
about on this show all the time.
And you start to understand how cognitive neuroscience has proven conclusively
that thinking controls brain activity and changes brain circuits and that brain
circuits control neurochemical balance and hormonal production and that brain
activity through the mechanism of hormone production and gene switching on and
off controls what happens in the rest of your body.
And then you start to learn exciting things about electromagnetic fields and
how we affect each other and limbic resonance and all that kind of cool stuff.
And there's all kinds of help that you can bring to your life by learning more
about how neuroscience and the rest of your life can work together to help you
overcome some thinking, some disordered thinking, and some things that you struggle with.
And that's very helpful. It's significantly helpful.
But I would submit to you that if you've been through some sort of massive thing.
Some sort of major trauma or tragedy, and your life just isn't what it should
be, and you're missing a big something,
and you can't find it, and you've tried all the help, you've read all the self-help
books, you've done all the things, you've learned all about the neuroscience,
and the significantly helpful stuff that you've learned is still leaving you
wondering why this is what your life feels like,
why everything feels so hard all the time, Why you just can't quite seem to
unlock the thing that would actually make you feel happier and be healthier and just get better.
If you're missing that thing, I would suggest that adding that infinitely happier
level, that infinite hope, that infinite healing that you can get when you get
your brain and your mind connected to your creator.
I'm telling you, that's where the magic is. That's where the secret sauce is.
When you smash faith and science together, it's like two electrons in a super collider.
When they smash, it releases unimaginable power in your life.
1 Peter says, Peter says in 1 Peter, God has given you everything you need for life.
He's given you everything you need.
Science was created by God to help us seek Him and perhaps find Him.
And Paul says in 1 Corinthians that God put you in the exact time and place
in your life, in the world, at the place you were born, at the time in which
you were born in history,
so that you would seek him and perhaps find him, though he is not far from any one of us.
Reader wrote in the other day, there's a verse in Jeremiah, God says,
do you think I'm only close at hand?
No, I'm also far away at the same time.
You have a God, you have a creator, you have a great physician who can be in
the middle of your problem, right next to you in your suffering,
walking alongside you, holding your hand, showing you his scars and reminding
you that yes, life hurts, but it's also really beautiful.
Yes, you can be stolen from and killed and destroyed by the enemy,
but you can also have an abundant life.
Yes, you can be in a hard life and still overcome it at the same time because
he's a quantum physics type of God.
He created the possibility that he can be in two two places at once.
He's close. He's far away. He's in the middle of your situation and he's working
on it somewhere else at the same time.
I'm a good physician, but I can only be in one OR at a time.
I can only solve or work on one issue at a time.
But the great physician can be helping you to heal up and stitch up your heart
and also be working on your marriage and also be working out something so your finances get better,
also be working on bringing that kid home who's been estranged from you,
also be working on repairing and restoring a relationship or providing for you
in some way at the same time.
And you have to attach yourself to that type of thinking to understand that
your brain was created for the purpose of being submitted to the power of your
mind and under the power of your Holy Spirit creator, compassionate, great physician.
Jeffrey Schwartz calls him the wise advocate, and I call him the great physician.
My friend, not every thought that you have is true. It's the third commandment of self-brain surgery.
I said, today on self-brain surgery Saturday, I just want you to add that little
filter in there. Is it true?
Is it necessary or at least useful?
Is it compassionate or at least unharmful?
If you add those three little filters and that thought biopsy before you decide
how to respond, you'll see some game-changing shifts in your life.
You want to become happier? you're going to become healthier and feel better
and be happier, then you got to change your mind.
You can't do that, friend, unless you're willing to 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 wleewarrantmd.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.