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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, and I am so grateful
and excited to be bringing you some self-brain surgery today here on Mind Change Monday.
We're going to go back all the way back to season five in 2021.
I'm going to bring you an episode that I think will be helpful.
It's called First Aid Kit from the Future.
It's a time when I was going through, Lisa and I were going through some challenges
and some difficulties, and I just started wondering what I would say to myself
if I could look look back at previous times that have been hard and give myself
some advice for going forward.
So this is some good, helpful information.
You can think of what you're going through now as a way to prepare you for what
you might go through in the future.
And if you could look back in time and tell your past self some of the things
that you learned and experienced and maybe grew through and maybe accepted some
challenges you didn't think you were going to be strong enough to deal with,
what would you say then based on what you know now? That's what what this episode is about.
It's going to be helpful. We have a brand new Tuesdays with Tata on the Spiritual
Brain Surgery Podcast tomorrow that I'm very excited about.
We have, I'll announce on Wednesday, the winner of the first quarter for the
nominee for the 2024 Podcast Award.
We had a little battle between Maddie Jackson Smith and Jenny Allen.
We'll be announcing the winner of that. Then I'll move on to the semifinals,
which will be at the end of this month.
And then we have We have a brand new Theology Thursday episode and a Frontal
Lobe Friday episode coming at you this week later as well.
And remember, this week is the last week that we're going to have more than one new episode.
We have, starting next week, we're going to be full on in the writing sessions
for the Cell Brain Surgery Handbook.
So we're going to have one new episode of each of the podcasts a week and then
a lot of good stuff from the past for you.
And one episode just for the paid subscribers every week coming,
starting next Monday. So look forward to that.
This is First Aid Kit from the future. I think it's going to be helpful and
help you kind of change your mind about what you can think about the future and the past.
But before we get started, I have a question for you.
Hey, are you ready to change your life? If the answer is yes, there's only one rule.
You have to change your mind first. And my friend, there's a place where the
neuroscience of how your mind works smashes together with faith and everything
starts to make sense. Are you ready to change your life?
Well, this is the place, Self-Brain Surgery School. I'm Dr.
Lee Warren, and this is where we go deep into how we're wired,
take control of our thinking, and find real hope.
This is where we learn to become healthier, feel better, and be happier.
This is where we leave the past behind and transform our minds.
This is where we start today. Are you ready? This is your podcast.
This is your place. This is your time, my friend. Let's get after it.
Music.
You know what i need to do i need to go back and i need to give you my friend
i need to give you what i would say to you in retrospect now if i could look
back several years later and tell you what i wish i had said or something that
you need to know if it was way back in 2020 when we were on season one of the podcast.
What would I say to you now if I could look back into March or so of 2020 and
give you some thoughts that would be helpful to you for all the things that
were going to come in the next two years?
For us, for example, we didn't know.
We were moving from Wyoming and a house we had just built to Nebraska to this
crazy, wild, beautiful place with these amazing people to build this practice and do this thing.
We've been through two years of constant practice
working and building and setting things up and making relationships.
And it's just, it's been hard, but it's been amazing. So we built something
from the ground up with the help of Ivan and all the folks at the hospital and
the board and just a great support of this community.
We've created a valuable and viable neurosurgery service out of whole cloth from the ground up.
And we just this week opened the office that was part of that plan from two
years ago. It took us two years.
We used Lisa's plan from our old office. We used her design skills and Dana
Daller and all the folks at the hospital helped to create this space that's
very reminiscent of our old office in Alabama.
It's so efficient. Lisa designed it to be on the top of the game technologically
and for the patient flow experience and patient psychology.
This office space is calming and healing and designed efficiently.
It's just perfect. And we've done it here and the hospital has been so great.
And so it's taken two years, but during all that time, there was so much stress
and so much difficulty and so many little barriers we had to overcome.
And so what would I say to myself even if I was going to go back two years ago
and say, hey, here's some things you need to keep in mind when life is hard.
Over the next couple of years, you're going to go through the COVID-19 pandemic,
a presidential election that may or may not go the way you want it to,
all kinds of stress in the country.
There's going to be financial stress. There's going to be all kinds of things.
So here's some advice from season one that would be helpful to you if you could
hear it in real time now. So I'm going to give you that today.
And I'm just going to remind you, friend, that no matter what's happening,
you can always find a way.
To start today.
Of them now, and we're so blessed and honored to do it. We have a passion to
declare the gospel through worship in a powerful way, so we're so careful to
fill up our songs and our videos with God's Word.
And if you're interested in becoming a partner with us, just visit TommyWalkerMinistries.org
and become a one-time or monthly partner.
We'd be so grateful, and let me just say God's richest blessings on you all.
If you aren't already, become a passionate worshiper of the Most High God. Amen.
Thank you, Tommy. Hey, here's the thing.
I'm looking back over the last two years of my life, and the whole world's kind
of felt like it was on fire at different times, right? There's been some crazy stuff.
We've been through a global pandemic and a very contested presidential election
and economic disruption and inflation and all kinds of stuff,
and it's just been crazy.
Crazy so since there's not an episode 29 of season one that means there's a
hole in there where i could actually go back in time as your time traveling
friend and i could slip some advice into your head that if you had held on to
this advice and if i'd held on to it myself,
it would have made it easier for me to process those hard things that are coming
along and understand that when i talk about in my new book hope is the first
dose we talk about the massive things that happen like losing a child going
through a divorce losing a spouse.
Something like that. But it's also very apparent to anybody who's paying attention
in life that everybody goes through some sort of massive thing or many massive
thing or a series of irritating things.
There's hard things in life that come along. If you don't believe that,
you're not paying attention.
Attention and so pay attention to the fact that even
if you don't have that super massive thing there's still
some things that come along and they knock you off your feet a little bit
or they they derail you or stress you or add some trouble and you just need
to have a strategy which i call a treatment plan you have a strategy for what
to do when life isn't planned the way you think it ought to play out so if i
could go back in time and give you season one episode 29 and just give you some advice.
I would give you a little mental first aid kit and it would consist of five things.
Here's five things, quick little bullets, like a first aid kit that you keep
in your glove box or in the garage or in your kitchen drawer for when your kids scrape their knees.
You need to have a quick, easily accessible little first aid kit.
And here's five things for you.
Number one, relentlessly, my friend, my dear friend, listen to me.
Look at my eyes, as my dad would I would say relentlessly refuse to participate in your own demise.
Okay, find the things that you continue to trip up over. Is it drinking? Is it shopping?
Is it sending an angry text message that you have to go unwind later?
Is it not having a good system in place for making sure you get out the door
in an efficient way? Whatever it is that trips you up over and over, relentlessly refuse.
Draw a line in the sand and say, this far and no further. I'm going to change
that thing. I'm going to stop shooting myself in the foot.
Put warning labels on certain parts of your life. You know, we bought an auger
the other day for the tractor a few months ago because we need to plant some
trees around this place and you can put an auger on the back of your tractor
and you can dig holes really efficiently.
But guess what? The auger is super dangerous. My dad,
I sent him a picture of it and he sent me a text message back and he said,
hey, my friend got his arm ripped off and bled to death and died because he
touched the shaft of that auger while it was spinning and it grabbed his coat
sleeve and pulled him in.
And there's a big warning label right there on the auger that shows that.
It shows a little cartoon of a man getting his arm ripped off because he got
too close to the auger while it was spinning.
You need to have some warning labels on your life, friend.
There's some places and some things that you know by your own experience keep
sucking you in and ripping your arm off and bleeding you out or keep causing
you trouble or stress or getting you in trouble at work or causing you trouble
with your relationships or overspending or drinking too much or eating too many
Cheetos or whatever it is.
Put some warning labels on your life. Number five, find some systems to help
you relentlessly refuse to participate in your own demise.
Number two, remember and commit to these two truths.
Friend, the next two years that are coming, I don't know what they're going
to entail, but there's going to be some days when you need to remember this. Okay, it might be today.
Remember these two things and commit to these two truths and it will make a
huge impact. Here they are.
Not every thought that you think is true and feelings are not facts. Okay?
We covered that ground a couple of days ago. I'm not going to go back into it
right now. But not everything that pops into your head is true.
It's just not. You're wired for negativity.
You're wired for self-defense and negativity. And the thoughts that you automatically
have programmed in your head are generally negative. And they're usually not true.
When it comes to how other people are thinking or behaving around us,
we have a tendency to think negatively.
And it's usually not true. And feelings, my friend, are not facts.
Just because you feel like nobody loves you, just because you feel like you're
going to have a bad day, just because you feel sad doesn't mean that you have to have a sad day.
It just doesn't. You can change those feelings reliably with self-brain surgery.
We've covered that ground a lot lately. I'm just reminding you,
in your first aid kit, make a little note card that says, not every thought
I will think today is true, and every feeling I have today won't necessarily be a fact.
That is good advice, my friend. Three, prehab your life.
Since you know hard times are going to come, do some prehab.
Put some good words in there, some good podcasts, some good Bible readings,
some good scriptures, some good books, some good ideas cultivated from reading
and choosing good music and good TV shows and good things to put in your head.
That are not harmful to your thought process.
Find some friends who aren't constantly negative.
Find a church where the word is preached strongly.
Put some stuff in your head and your heart and your brain and talk kindly to
yourself because your brain is always listening.
That's prehab. That'll help you when the pressure's on.
Number four, love tomorrow more than you hate whatever you're feeling today.
Think about that for a second. Love tomorrow more. If you're having a terrible
day and you just wanna go home and put your feet up and drink a glass of wine
and turn your brain off with 12 episodes of Walker, Texas Ranger.
I don't know where that came from. I haven't seen that show in 20 years.
Love tomorrow more. Decide, ask your wife to go for a walk.
Ask your kids to go play Legos for a few minutes instead of doing that thing.
And tomorrow you'll wake up and you said, man, I'm sure glad I did this and not that.
There's a thing Lisa and I call the tomorrow tax. It's when you do something
tonight that you have have to pay for tomorrow.
When you get mad and you fire off that text message or you open up that bottle
or you turn on that television or you get onto Amazon and do that thing and
you're trying to just numb your brain by diverting it to give yourself a surrogate.
And I've told you before, surrogates are for suckers.
Then tomorrow you're cleaning up the mess you've made of a relationship or of
a financial situation or you're canceling something you ordered while you weren't thinking clearly.
You're having to clean it up and we call that the tomorrow tax.
That's paying for something tomorrow that you shouldn't have done yesterday
or shouldn't have said or shouldn't have thought about or shouldn't have spent time on.
Don't pay the tomorrow tax. Tomorrow tax is for losers and suckers.
It's not for us. We're not for good self-brain surgeons like us.
Love tomorrow more than you hate what you're feeling today.
Number five, friend, stop being
offended all the time. The secret to not being offended all the time.
And remember, if you haven't read John Bevere's book, The Bait of Satan,
that's a book about the problem of being easily offended.
Being easily offended keeps you in a self-indulgent circle of thinking of all
the ways that you are the victim in whatever situation is happening.
Nobody ever does this or everything's always so hard. They always overlook me.
Nobody pays attention to me. Nobody does what I say.
I don't have any power. I don't have any friends. My life used to be so much
better. That guy shouldn't have said that. How dare she say that to me?
Oh, my word. No, you're not going to get away with that. Those kinds of thoughts
fill up your head and your heart.
And before you know it, the whole world is in some way hurting you.
And you alone are the victim on top of this horrible pedestal of bad treatment, right?
You know what I'm talking about. When you let yourself go down that rabbit hole
of being offended, you can't think about anything but yourself and what other
people are doing to you and how bad you have it.
But the truth is, most of the time, all those things that you're thinking aren't
even true. They're not even accurate.
And even if they are, the way to get better with them is not to wallow in it,
but to take some sort of action.
And the truth is that the way to get out of the offense trap is to focus Focus
on gratitude to create some new gratitude synapses.
There's a new operation I'm going to teach you soon called the gratitude graft is how you,
how you plant transplant gratitude into offense and get rid of the trap of being
easily offended and replace it with the benefit of being great,
having gratitude grafted into your life.
Go find five things that you can be grateful for and force yourself to think
about them for five or six minutes instead of the thing you're offended by and
you'll find all of a sudden your brain chemistry feels better.
You're more grateful. And then guess what happens?
The things you were offended by, they don't just magically go away,
but when you're grateful, you find yourself thinking more creatively about how
to solve those problems.
You find yourself giving those people a little bit more of a benefit of the
doubt and you start remembering, hey, you know what?
Yeah, that's not a great thing that he did to me, but I did the same thing to
him last week And I had reasons for it and I justified it and I made it okay.
And he probably felt just as offended as I did.
Or, you know, I've done that to somebody before, so I can see how that could
happen. Or when I did it, I wasn't actually trying to hurt them.
I was trying to accomplish a mission.
You can start thinking more clearly about what's happening instead of just offensive,
offensive, offensive circle of doom leading you down into the abyss, right?
Gratitude is the answer. The gratitude graft is the operation,
and that will help you to stop being offended all the time.
Those are five things in your first aid kit you need to have.
If I could go back and give you season one, episode 29, I would also give you
two Bible verses, Psalm 1914.
Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable in your
sight, O Lord, my rock and my redeemer. So there's two things here.
We want the words that we speak to be pleasing to God, and we want the things
that we think about, the thoughts that we think.
We want to take them captive, spin them around, look at them carefully,
biopsy them, take action on them when appropriate and modify and edit them if
they are lying to us and let them be part of our worship is to have the thoughts
and the meditations of our inner hearts and our minds be pleasing to God.
If you can do that, friend, you will have a better life than you've had before.
If you can make your words come under your control and make your thoughts come
under control, you will be a lot happier.
I promise. The second verse, Proverbs 17, 27 in the passion translation.
Can you bridle your tongue when your heart is under pressure?
That's how you show that you're wise and understanding heart keeps you cool,
calm, and collected no matter what you're facing.
Can you bridle your heart? We're going to change that a little bit.
Can you bridle your brain?
When things feel hard, can you get yourself under control so that you can respond
and not react out of your deep limbic system?
Can you learn how to respond with those big, beautiful frontal lobes to help
you make better decisions, to help you think more clearly, to help you make
better responses to the things that come along in life.
Can you bridle your brain when your heart's under pressure? That's how you show
that you're wise. That's what self-brain surgery is all about, friend.
Learning how to bridle your brain and get it under your own control.
It will produce more happiness. It will produce better relationships.
It will produce better decisions and you'll have better days.
I promise if you learn how to bridle your brain. Those are two scriptures I'd
give you. Psalm 1914 and Psalm 1727.
Tuck those in your first aid kit, friend.
Here's the thing I've been kind of toying with in my newsletter lately, a little format.
I did it a couple of years ago and it seemed to be pretty popular and I don't
know why I stopped, but I'm kind of trying to get my newsletter to where it's
a little bit more popular.
Just jam-packed with some good things to think about and not so much storytelling.
I'm going to save the stories for maybe monthly or something like that,
but I want my newsletter to be a little bit more chunks of information you can rapidly digest.
So I'm playing with this idea of kind of a six-point newsletter,
something I'm pondering, just something that I'm dealing with or going through,
something quick, a neuroscience nugget, some little fact about how your brain
works and and how it applies to your life.
A faith fact, something from scripture or something related to faith and doubt
and hope and all those things. A book recommendation that will help you.
Maybe a song that I'm singing that's helpful will give you a suggestion.
And then the takeaway, like a little summation of how all those things tie together
into one little palatable unit, a pill you can take to help you get through
your weakest prescription for how you can change your mind and change your life.
So check that out, drleewarn.substack.com.
The newsletter every Sunday. It's gonna start looking a little bit more like that for a while.
And if you seem to like it, then I'll keep doing it, okay? And then we're going
to finish every newsletter like we always have with ways that you can start today.
And why I always say you should start today is because life doesn't always give you another chance.
Life doesn't always present you with an opportunity to have a do-over or a mulligan.
And so when you know something's got to go, something's got to change,
something's got to start, you've got to get after it because you're not guaranteed
an endless amount of time.
There's an expiration date. And so you can't mess around and wait anymore.
You got to get after it. So that's why we always say you start today.
And here's the core values, friend.
If I could give you five core values of the start today lifestyle,
of the self-brain surgery lifestyle, here they are.
Past losses can teach us, but they can't define us.
So whatever's happened in your past, you refuse to let it be the label that you wear today.
You can learn from it. You can mine it. You can go back and make it better if
you need to, but it can't define you. Number two, massive change requires massive action.
If you know you got to change it, you better get after it. Number three,
if you want to feel better, do better.
The way to feel better is to take some kind of positive action.
Number four, peace is achievable in spite of your circumstances.
If you can divorce your peace of mind from the circumstances that you're living,
no matter what, marry the idea that you get to decide how you feel,
then you'll be happier, friend. And the time to start is today.
You start today. You can't change yesterday. You can't control tomorrow.
But the good news is you can start today.
I hope this has been helpful. This is a going back in time and giving you something
because who knows what the next two years is going to look like.
Just remember, my friend, you can always start today.
Music.
Hey, thanks for listening. The Dr. Lee Warren podcast is brought to you by my brand new book.
Hope is the first dose. It's a treatment plan for recovering from trauma,
tragedy and other massive things.
It's available everywhere books are sold. and I narrated the audio books.
Hey, the theme music for the show is Get Up by my friend Tommy Walker,
available for free at tommywalkerministries.org.
They are supplying worship resources for worshipers all over the world to worship the most high God.
And if you're interested in learning more, check out tommywalkerministries.org.
If you need prayer, go to the prayer wall at wleewarrenmd.com slash prayer,
wleewarrenmd.com slash prayer, and go to my website and sign up for the newsletter.
Letters, 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.