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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.
Hey, Lisa. Hey, Lee. It's good to see you today.
It's good to see you too. Will you help me with something? Of course.
I can't remember what day it is. It's Frontal Lobe Friday.
Good morning, my friend. Dr. Lee Warren here with you. It is Frontal Lobe Friday.
I'm very excited because today I'm going to give you a little perspective shift operation.
That you can do anytime you're feeling overwhelmed by the situation you're in,
anytime you're feeling defeated by the trauma, drama, massive thing,
trouble, tragedy, anything that you're going through, anytime you feel sad,
sick, stuck, or stressed,
you can make this little operation happen because you're a self-brain surgeon.
That's what we're going to get after today. It's going to be very short.
I have a long day ahead of me here, but I'm going to give you this one little tool.
I've talked about it briefly before, but one little tool that came out of the
lesson that I learned in medical school, and I think it's going to help you.
But before I can help you. I have to ask you a question.
Hey, are you ready to change your life? If the answer is yes, there's only one rule.
You have to change your mind first. And my friend, there's a place where the
neuroscience of how your mind
works smashes together with faith and everything starts to make sense.
Are you ready to change your life? Well, this is the place, Self-Brain Surgery School.
I'm Dr. Lee Warren, and this is where we go deep into how we're wired,
take control of our thinking and find real hope.
This is where we learn to become healthier, feel better, and be happier.
This is where we leave the past behind and transform our minds.
This is where we start today. Are you ready? This is your podcast.
This is your place. This is your time, my friend. Let's get after it.
Music.
All right, my fourth year of medical school, I had to do a rotation in medicine
out in Western Oklahoma, this small clinic in a town called Weatherford, Oklahoma.
And I remember driving out there on the way, I was having some trouble staying
awake. I was tired from medical school and I was eating Jolly Ranchers candies.
Remember those hard candies? I don't ever eat those anymore because of what happened to me here.
But as I was eating them, I felt this sharp pain in my mouth and something go
down the back of my throat.
I didn't know what happened at the time, but one of those Jolly Rancher candies
stuck to a filling in my mouth.
And when I opened my mouth, it pulled the filling out, kind of broke the tooth underneath it.
And so I'm driving for my first day on this rotation to this little town in
Western Oklahoma to a clinic, and I'm in need of dental care all of a sudden.
So I pull up to the clinic in Weatherford, Oklahoma, and it turns out to be
one of these old school little hospitals where everything in the whole town
that's related to medicine is happening in one building. It's a waiting room that combines.
Family medicine, obstetrics, general surgery, emergency, and dentistry, all in one place.
There's a big sign up front that says all these things. There's one receptionist
in a waiting room full of people. It's early in the morning.
I'm hurting in my mouth, and I've got two things to do now.
I've got to go register and fill out paperwork to be the student for the month
to work with these doctors, and I've got to fill out paperwork to be a patient
because I need to see a dentist all of a sudden. I can't drive all the way back to Oklahoma City.
I'm in acute need of dental care. so I walk
up to the receptionist and I introduce myself probably the first
and maybe only person that's ever said hey I'm here
to register as a student as a doctor but also
as a patient I need to see the dentist I need to see him right now
and she informed me that the dentist wasn't there it would be a little while
so I could sit in the waiting room she handed me paperwork to register as a
new patient for the clinic and also the paperwork I had to use to register to
become credentialed as a student in the clinic to work that month so I'm sitting
there and I'm filling out two different types of paperwork.
One, to list all my credentials and all my demographic information and all the
things that I'm acknowledging that I need to be aware of and the privacy concerns
and the clinical responsibilities and the type of documentation I'll be expected
and the type of work that I'll be expected to do that month as a provider.
Also, all my information, my
insurance, all the things related to the fact that I'm now also a patient.
So I'm like in the same chair, care, I'm a doctor and a patient.
I'm a student and a recipient of care.
And as the patients began to fill in and fill up the waiting room that morning,
waiting on the doctors to arrive, I had this thought that I'm here as a fellow
patient, a fellow sufferer. My mouth hurts because I broke a tooth,
but I'm also going to be taking care of some of these people.
Like as the month plays out, it's a small town. I'm almost certainly going to
be involved in the care of some of these people.
So I was acknowledging that I had two roles to play. in this situation.
And I'm just here to tell you now, 30 years later, way down the road,
I've come to realize, as we talk about on this show all the time,
is we're self-brain surgeons, that all of us have two roles to play in our own lives.
Yes, we go through our lives, we experience hard things, we encounter traumas
and dramas and tragedies and massive things and joys and trials and the enemy
steals and kills and destroys,
but we also try to find abundance and we have hardship in the world,
but we also try to overcome the world like Jesus did. We have all these things.
And what we're learning is that modern neuroscience, backing up quantum physics
from the 20th century, has proven out what the Bible said all along.
You're not a hapless victim of the circumstances of your life. You have a role to play.
The decisions you make, the thoughts you think, have an impact on the way the
situation works out, the way that you pay attention,
the way that you attend to and think about and interact with the situations
in your life, Have inherent creative power to either make them more real and
more overwhelming or to begin to understand how to solve them.
God works alongside you to give you the tools, the procedures,
the opportunities to interact with and make something out of these situations.
This is where the quote from Niels Bohr, the 20th century quantum physicist,
who's one of the founders of quantum physics, Niels Bohr said,
every human being is both an actor and a spectator in the great drama of existence.
He's referring to the fact that when you interact with a system, you change the system.
The power of your observation, the power of your directed mental force changes
the outcome of the experiments and observations you make in the world and in
the universe. That's what the physicist taught us.
Well, it turns out you're not just a spectator, you're an actor.
You're not just a patient, you're a doctor.
And so therefore, if we're going through something hard and it seems to be overwhelming,
then we can come to this idea that here on Frontal Lobe Friday,
we can engage that gift of selective attention, selective thinking,
and we can make this decision together.
Say it with me. I am no longer going to operate out of the things I'm afraid
of or that hurt me, but I will begin to operate on those things to make changes in my life.
I'm no longer going to operate out of the things I'm afraid of or that hurt
me, but I will begin to operate on those things to make changes in my life.
Look, it's clear from all the good psychological research recently,
despite what you hear on the news, despite what you hear on the media,
despite what people are wearing t-shirts around now that say, just take a Xanax.
Everybody's advertising this idea that everybody needs a therapist and everybody
needs to be on medicine and everybody needs to be focusing on the things that
are hurting them. But the research is clear.
You don't get better by focusing on the pain or the problem for very long.
You get better by focusing on the path forward.
In other words, you get better when you decide you're going to be the doctor.
You're going to be involved in getting better instead of being involved in feeling worse all the time.
That's what the research is very clear on.
You get better by focusing on the path forward.
The past is not for understanding what happened. J.I. Packer had this famous
quote where he said, if we ask, why did this happen? We hardly ever get answers.
But if we ask, what am I to do now, God? How am I to glorify you now,
God? How am I to move forward now, God?
We always get answers. So when we stop saying why and start saying what,
then we start to find traction to go forward.
And the truth is, when you've gone through something really devastating,
I mean, I read a book by this guy who his two-year-old daughter was sitting
with his mom, her grandmother, on a park bench in New York City.
And a piece of a building, a little brick from a building way up above them
fell off and it landed on this little girl's head and she died.
How could you understand why that happened?
There's no way you can understand why a piece of your city fell and killed your child.
You could understand that the building wasn't maintained properly or whatever,
but you can never really understand why that happened.
And so ultimately, you would just have to decide you're going to be permanently
devastated by that event or you're going to find some way to move forward in
your life after it's happened.
And of course, the truth is, as all of us who are bereaved and all of us who
have lost parents or lost children or have gone through something devastating,
the truth is you don't really ever heal.
From something like that. You don't really ever get to a place where it's gone, right?
You don't get to a place where it's completely over. Of course not.
That's not normal. That's not possible because that thing will always have been true.
And that's why it's so important to remember that trauma is not what happened.
Because if it was, it would be hopeless. You can't go and undo the thing.
That brick's not going to unfall and that little girl's not going to come back.
And your situation is not going to unwind itself either.
So trauma is not the thing that happened. Trauma trauma is our response to it.
And that's why I say we're no longer going to operate out of the things we're
afraid of, but we'll begin to operate on those things to make changes in my life.
If I had been as a student, when that filling came out of my mouth and my tooth broke in half,
if I went and tried to work that whole month with my mouth on fire,
unable to talk and bleeding in
my gums and all that, I would begin to operate my life out of that pain.
I'd begin to have to navigate my day and trying to take care of patients in
coordination with what was happening in my mouth. And I wouldn't be very effective.
I'd be spending a lot of my energy dealing with the situation instead of being
able to bring my attention and my energy to what I was trying to accomplish. So I had to deal.
Yes, I had to deal with that urgent situation in my mouth and to take care of it.
I couldn't operate around it, and I couldn't operate out of it.
I had to operate on it. I had to get it taken care of so that I could then move forward.
And the same thing is true with us. Yes, you need to grieve.
You need to go through the process of dealing with what's happened to you.
You need to properly allow yourself the space and time to heal.
And so when I say don't spend too much time in the past, I'm not saying,
please understand. Please understand what I'm saying here, okay?
I'm saying you'd go to the past.
Not to explain or justify your behavior,
not to find your identity in the things you've been through,
not to build a system of having other people accommodate you for the things you've been through,
but rather to go back and make sure that you went through an appropriate process
of coming to understand that you've been through something hard and it's changed you in certain ways.
And you've come to have to accept this dual nature of life now that you can
be bereaved and abundant at the same time, that there's space for both to be true.
That your God is big enough and quantum God enough to separate the fact that
you can go through a hard thing and it doesn't have to become everything about who you are.
So that's what I mean when I say you no longer operate out of those things as
if they define you, as if they predict your future anymore.
Now you operate on those things. You go back and say, hey, I'm going to switch
my chair here, and I'm going to look at my life instead of this victim of this
thing that's happened to me, this victim of these circumstances,
and therefore that's going to color all my future choices and decisions and
abilities and capabilities and all that. Rather, I'm going to switch chairs.
I'm going to now, I'm going to decide that I'm not just a spectator,
I'm an actor, I'm not just a patient, I'm a doctor.
And I'm going to say, God, give me some tools to see how this event or set of
events or set of histories or set of circumstances can be part of the story
that you're writing that defines my future.
How can I incorporate this event, this problem, this pain into a future that
you say can coexist between steal, kill, and destroy, and abundance.
That you're telling us that you have a plan to redeem us, to restore the years
of the locust state, to turn the valley of trouble into a door of hope.
How can I then operate on this situation with your help to allow myself to believe
that the path going forward cannot just look like the painful past?
So that's what I'm talking about today. We're going to change chairs.
We're not going to operate out of these things.
We're going to operate on these things now. And it's clear from the research
that the path forward is not just for understanding the past,
not just for sort of sitting with the problem by focusing on the problem.
The path forward is for operating on the situation so that we can see a new
role for ourselves in the future that includes those things,
but doesn't be defined by those things. Does that make sense?
J.I. Packer, again, another great quote from him. God uses chronic pain and
weakness along with other afflictions as his chisel for sculpting our lives.
Felt weakness deepens our dependence on Christ for strength each day.
The weaker we feel, the harder we lean, and the harder we lean,
the stronger we grow spiritually, even while our bodies waste away.
To live with the thorn in the flesh uncomplainingly is sweet,
patient, and free in heart to love and help others, even though every day you
feel weak. That's true sanctification.
It is true healing for the spirit. It is a supreme victory of grace.
That's from J.I. Packer's book, Weakness is the Way.
So the idea then is that God will give you the tools to redefine the traumas
and dramas and tragedies and massive things and problems that you've been through.
Not as the things that you are now, but things that have influenced and informed
and shaped you into who you are becoming in the service of what your purpose is here on earth.
And sometimes that's to help other people see that they can survive something really hard too.
And sometimes it's to see that,
you know what, I've been through this hard thing and it has refined me.
It has prepared me because I know it's not gonna be the last thing I go through.
That's why James 1, 2, 3, 4 says, It says, consider it pure joy whenever you
face trials of many kinds, because you know that the testing of your faith produces perseverance.
And let perseverance finish its work so that you may be mature and complete, not lacking anything.
So even if you're not a Bible person, you can see that difficulties can produce
perseverance, and perseverance can give you character,
and character can give you the ability to handle future hard things in a way
that makes a difference in the world instead of you being crushed by them.
So when you decide to not be a spectator anymore, but to be an actor,
to not be a patient, but to be a doctor, that's self-brain surgery.
That's changing this perspective, moving from one chair to the other.
And the neuroscience backs it up. We know the mid-anterior cingulate cortex
is part of your brain that helps with regulating emotions and making decisions
and kind of switching from one behavior to another when you're going through something hard.
That mid-anterior cingulate cortex is part of the system that involves willpower
and resilience and all of that stuff.
And what we've learned in the last 20 years from functional imaging is when
you make yourself do something hard that doesn't feel good, your mid-anterior
cingulate actually gets stronger.
And so pushing through something hard actually prepares you and enables you
to push to something else that's hard.
And so your brain becomes then more efficient at handling difficulties and there's
less inertia in switching into that, okay, I got to do this.
It's going to be hard, but I'm going to get after it rather than avoiding it
for weeks and weeks and weeks. and it becomes this unimaginably difficult thing
like a lot of us want to do with sort of procrastination and all that.
When you push through something hard, the next time you need to do something
else that's hard, even if it's
a different thing, your mid-anterior cingulate is more easily engaged.
So the neuroscience then says, hey, when you go through something hard and you
push through it and you do it anyway, you're going to get stronger and more
able to do that in the future.
And that's what this refining process is. Isaiah 48.10 says,
I've refined you, not as silver as refined, but I've tested you in the furnace of affliction.
He's refining you rather than allowing you to be defined by the thing. Does that make sense?
So the whole idea here is we're not going to be victims of our experiences or
victims of our circumstances anymore.
We are going to rather than learn to use them to help us be prepared for future
difficulties and put ourselves in the context of the fact that it's not the
individual events that define our lives.
It is our responses to them.
Trauma is not the thing that happened. It's the response to what happened. happen.
That's why it's so important to go back. We do go back in time.
We do go back and look at those events, but not to say, how in the world could this have happened?
Oh, look at all the different ways I'm broken because this happened.
Look at how I need to retool my life now to accommodate what happened.
Not that. That's not where healing lies.
Healing lies in saying, I learned some responses from that hard thing,
and now they're not serving me well. Now I'm not moving forward in my life.
Now I'm stuck because of the way that I responded to these things.
So I need to go back and examine my operations,
examine my prescriptions that I gave myself at that time, to examine the medicine
I allowed myself to take, to examine the numbing behaviors I absorbed,
to examine the attitudes I developed.
And to say, what operations can I do now to begin to shift some of those responses?
I can't stop the thing that happened from having happened.
It's always going to have happened, but that's not what the trauma is.
The trauma is, how is my life now being affected by the decisions and habits
and attitudes and behaviors and numbing issues and all those things that I accepted
or adopted or developed or adapted in response to that event?
And now I'm going to go back. I'm not going to operate out of those things anymore.
I'm going to operate on those things and begin to develop a new strategy,
a new plan, a new approach as we talked about yesterday.
Okay. That's the whole idea. The neuroscience is very clear.
When you engage in hard things, you get stronger and more able to do hard things.
When you switch from anxiety to gratitude, your hippocampus gets bigger and
it becomes easier for you to switch from anxiety to gratitude next time.
And you might say, how in the world, why is it reasonable for you to say that I should be grateful?
Well, you shouldn't be grateful for For the event that you're in right now,
I mean, it doesn't make sense on a human level to say, I'm so grateful that
my son died. No, it's not that.
What you're grateful for is that you have a switch that you can make,
that your brain is wired so that you can say, I can actually engage my frontal
lobes here and think through my response to this thing.
I try to find a way to survive it, try to find a way to navigate through it,
knowing that I can actually improve my overall function if I can find a way
to act on these things that moves me forward instead of moves me backwards.
So I can be grateful for that, that ability, that human ability that God gave
us to engage our frontal lobes and switch from anxiety, gratitude.
We can be thankful for that and our hippocampus will reliably make the switch
more easily next time because what you're doing, you're getting better at.
So when you go through something hard and you navigate it well,
or if you didn't navigate it well and now you're stuck in some behavior or ruminating
or having a problem or drinking too much or you're dealing with it,
and you say, wait a minute, okay, now I need to go back and I need to operate
on that experience again.
I need to find some new ways to deal with it. That's where therapy could actually
be really helpful is to say, hey, I've adopted some maladaptive behaviors out of this event,
and I need to redefine what my life should look like in response to the thing
that happened so that I can become healthier and feel better and be happier going forward.
That's the switch we want to make today. That's the frontal lobe Friday lesson
for today. I no longer want to operate out of the things I'm afraid of or that
hurt me, but I will rather begin to operate on those things to make changes in my life.
I was sitting there in that chair in Oklahoma having pain in my mouth and a job to do.
Two things were true at the same time. I was a doctor and I was a patient,
and so were you, my friend.
Every second of your life, you are making neuroplastic changes to your brain
willfully or passively. And the truth is, as you very well know,
you can look at your sock drawer and find that out.
Passive things become disordered and chaotic over time.
If you're not actively directing things to stay in order, to stay in process
that's helpful, they will become more chaotic and more difficult to manage over
time. And so will your attitudes.
So will your habits. So will your behaviors. So will your trauma responses if
you don't actively manage them. So let's change chairs.
Let's stop being spectators. Let's start being actors. Let's stop being patients.
Let's start being doctors.
And the good news is you have an attending physician with you all the time,
and he's a great physician, and he wants to help you.
And that's the highest level, the best approach to self-brain surgery.
They all work in different ways, as we talked about yesterday.
But the best one is when you connect your mind to your creator,
and he gives you this constant guidance that you make these operations,
not of your own volition, not having to do it all yourself,
but you're doing self-brain surgery alongside the guy who made the whole system
and he's going to help you.
And the good news is you can start today.
Music.
Hey, thanks for listening. The Dr. Lee Warren podcast is brought to you by my brand new book.
Hope is the first dose. It's a treatment plan for recovering from trauma,
tragedy and other massive things.
It's available everywhere books are sold. And I narrated the audio books.
Hey, the theme music for the show is Get Up by my friend Tommy Walker,
available for free at TommyWalkerMinistries.org.
They are supplying worship resources for worshipers all over the world to worship the most high God.
And if you're interested in learning more, check out tommywalkerministries.org.
If you need prayer, go to the prayer wall at wleewarrenmd.com slash prayer,
wleewarrenmd.com slash prayer, and go to my website and sign up for the newsletter,
Self-Brain Surgery, every Sunday since 2014, helping people in all 50 states
and 60 plus countries around the world. I'm Dr. Lee Warren, and I'll talk to you soon.
Remember, friend, and you can't change your life until you change your mind.
And the good news is you can start today.
Music.