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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'm Dr. Lee Warren, and I am so excited to be with
you here on Mind Change Monday. We're going to do some self-brain surgery today.
Today I'm going to give you a few true things that you need to remember.
Yesterday in my newsletter, if you're not getting my newsletter,
please check it out, drleewarren.substack.com.
Every Sunday since 2014, we've been changing people's minds through the power
of faith and science, smashing together in a little self-brain surgery.
And it's helpful. It's a great community of people around the world.
So check it out. But in my newsletter yesterday, I gave my readers some true
things, some things that are true of you that you need to know.
And after I sent that letter, I thought, you know what? There's a few more of
those things that I need to communicate.
And so today I'm gonna give you five true things that you need to remember that
were not in the newsletter yesterday.
Please go check out the newsletter. I'll put a link in the show notes to that
post on Substack. And you can read it on Substack even without subscribing.
Subscribing really helps me out so I know who you are, able to communicate with you.
And it's great. It's a great community. So check it out. Today we're going to
talk about some true things that you need to remember in order to change your
mind because it's Mind Change Monday.
And 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.
All right, you ready to get after it? Here we go. Today is Mind Change Monday,
and there's five true things that you need to remember.
We're not going to spend a lot of time on this today. We've got family visiting
from out of town. My sister Michelle and her husband Jay are here,
and we're having a great time.
And I'm going to spend some time with them today. But I want to give you some
things to think about today, some things to pray through.
If you're doing our Abide practice with us, we've got about three more weeks
left leading up to Easter. We're learning how to meditate and pray in a different
way to get our brains as healthy as they can be, to get that mind of Christ
and the brain of Christ working together.
And if you're doing that, these are some things you could pray through.
Some ideas like, God, change my mind about these things.
And so here's the, we're also going to cover, by the way, the second commandment
of self-brain surgery, which is feelings are not facts.
Feelings are chemical events in my brain. I've got to believe that feelings
are not facts. We're going to get that today in number five.
So we'll talk about that in a moment.
But we're going to talk about these five things, and here's the first one.
Your baseline is not your fault, but what you do about it, what you do next, is your fault.
Your baseline is not your fault, but what you do next can be and is your responsibility.
Listen, we are all born into different circumstances, different families, different heritages.
You have no choice about those things. It is not your fault.
If you come from a long line of alcoholics or abusive people or poor people
or broken people or a family full of breast cancer, that's not your fault.
None of those things are your fault.
Past conditions and environments that you've been through that shape the epigenetics
of your family and your baseline.
Sometimes some of the things that you're afraid of or nervous about or anxious
over the baseline level of stress hormones that you have come from your parents
and your grandparents and your
great-grandparents and your great-great-grandparents. We know that now.
That when God said in the Old Testament that the sins of the father are visited
upon the third and fourth generation, he wasn't threatening people.
He wasn't being a terrible, mean, horrible God saying, I'm going to punish your
grandkids for the things that you do.
He was trying to give us a very kind warning that we need to take our lives
seriously because the things that we do and think and experience impact our
families for generations to come.
And the reason they do is because when something happens to you,
it changes the expression of your genome and it changes the baseline set of
switches of which genes are switched on and which genes are switched off that
your kids get and their kids and their kids and their kids.
And so your baseline is not your fault. But once you know.
Then it becomes your responsibility. We've talked about this before.
In fact, I recorded an entire self-brain surgery Saturday episode about this
idea that once you understand something, it becomes your responsibility.
And my computer had a glitch and I lost an entire episode.
So Saturday, you got a replay of an old episode because I spent two hours trying
to figure out how to get that file back and it was gone.
But I wonder if God didn't just have a bigger idea, like a more refined and
nuanced version of that same thought. it. So maybe he deleted that file.
I don't know if God really does
that, but something in the, in the ether caused that file to disappear.
And so you didn't get that episode. So today I'm telling you,
your baseline is not your fault. Okay.
And if you fall and hit your head and you have a brain hemorrhage,
I've told you this before, and you're lying there bleeding into your brain and you die.
That is not my fault. I'm a brain surgeon. I know how to fix that, but I'm not there.
I don't know about it. I'm not aware of your problem and I'm not legally or
morally or even possibly obligated to take care of that problem for you.
But if you fall and hit your head and your spouse hears it, and they call 911
and they take you to the emergency room, and my good friend Renee Engler,
the emergency room doctor at Great Plains Health in North Platte,
Nebraska, calls me on the phone and says, hey, your friend, your person who
listens to your podcast every day is in the ER and they've got a brain hemorrhage
and they're going to die if you don't come save them.
Now, once Renee makes that phone call to me, I'm now aware that you have a problem
and that I have the skillset and the tools and the responsibility to help you.
If I chose then not to go to the hospital and I let you suffer from that,
that would be called malpractice, right?
That'd be called malpractice. We talked about that the other day on our episode
about the first commandment that don't commit harm against yourself.
So that would be my fault at that point because I didn't have responsibility
for the problem that you have, but now I know about it and now it's my responsibility to take care of it.
The baseline that you have is not your fault.
But once you understand it, then you've got to bring that to God.
Because remember, he says, nothing is too hard for me.
His divine power has given you everything you need. He can work good out of everything.
There's nothing that you can't do through him who gives you strength.
You have a responsibility to bring your life to the Lord and let him help you change.
And even if you don't believe any of that stuff, even if you think this is all
just a bunch of electrical impulses in our brains that randomly evolved from
the nothing, from the primordial goo, from a universe that didn't even have
any purpose behind it. It was just all a big accident.
Even if you believe that, then at least you know, because of what we know about
neuroscience, that you have the power to change the way that your brain works.
And you can structurally make changes in your brain under the influence and
control of your thinking and the decisions you make about how you live your life.
And once you know that, then choosing not to, even if you don't think it's a spiritual issue, you.
Choosing not to is still committing malpractice against yourself.
And especially, I would say, especially if your life has no purpose beyond the
time when you take your last breath,
if this universe is just a cold and emotionless universe full of random events,
and your life really is over when you're done, then I would say it's even more
important to not commit self-malpractice.
Because if you're the only thing out there that has real value and meaning and
purpose and then the extent of your life is all there is, then wouldn't you
want it to be as good as it could be?
Then friend, doing self-brain surgery and changing things that you have the
capacity to change or at least trying hard to do so, that's your responsibility.
So your baseline is not your responsibility, but what you do next is.
Here's another one. They They seem unrelated, but they're not.
People are multidimensional, but your left hemisphere, the left hemisphere of
your brain, makes them seem two-dimensional.
We have a left hemisphere capacity and innate function of turning everything
we see into a thing, including other people,
because your left hemisphere is all about presenting these facts to you,
scanning the environment for threats and safety and identifying objects and people and situations,
and then turning them into a set of words that you can have a handle for so
that you know quickly how to interrelate with them.
And so that leads us to some things that are complicated. For example,
when somebody tells you a lie,
you are probably, like me, like most people, you probably have a very black
or white opinion of most people when they lie to you. That person's trustworthy.
That person's a dirty, rotten liar. I can't trust them. They lied to me.
They're dishonest. I can't ever be comfortable around them again.
And you have a very two-dimensional. It's an on-off switch. That person's a
liar or that person's not a liar because they lied to you in a specific situation.
But if you're honest, if you think about how you view yourself,
you actually let your right hemisphere take over when you think about yourself.
You don't turn yourself into a binary, I'm good or I'm bad, I'm a liar or I'm not a liar.
Because when you tell a lie, you have a complex and highly nuanced set of reasons
why you allow that in your brain, why you decided that that is the best thing
for you to do in this moment.
You're not a bad person. You're not a filthy, rotten liar.
It's just you're trying to protect them from the truth or you're trying to diffuse
the situation or you're trying to avoid some some consequence that you can later
go back and take care of in a different way.
And you have a story that you tell yourself that justifies why you told that lie.
And it's not because you're a dirty, rotten, filthy, horrible liar.
You're more than that, right? So people are multidimensional,
but the left hemisphere of your brain makes them two-dimensional.
We have a capacity and a tendency. It's almost innate, and we've got to be careful to pay attention for it.
We take Take multidimensional people made in God's image who are image bearers
of the king of the universe,
who are nuanced and complex people with a whole situation and story and belief
system and life experience that led them to this moment to behave in the way that they're behaving,
and perhaps trauma that has changed the wiring of their brain that is producing
the behaviors that we're seeing.
And we need to learn to be trauma-informed about other people and not say,
why are you doing the things that you're doing, but rather, what happened to you?
That led you to this place that's producing this behavior that it's much more nuanced and complex.
And I'm saying that to you, because if we live a life.
In the left hemisphere where everything becomes a thing that can be manipulated
or needs to be identified and controlled and understood and known about in that
canon, that German sort of fact-based knowledge situation,
then we lose the beauty and the depth and the full experience of interacting
with other people in the world and even ourselves and even the way that we view
God because how you treat other people really says a lot about how you view
God and how you view you yourself ultimately because you're supposed to love
your neighbor as yourself, as we talked about the other day.
So I'm just saying, people are multidimensional and learning how to let the
right half of your brain get involved and add some context and add some nuance is super important.
If you want to have a really healthy emotional life and healthy interpersonal
relationship life and healthy relationship with yourself and even with God,
you've got to be able to see things things in a more three-dimensional or four-dimensional framework.
Attention, the way that you pay attention to things. Go back and listen to last
week's Mind Change Monday episode.
The way in which you bring attention to things affects the reality of those
things, at least as far as you're concerned.
And so understanding that you need to be willing to change.
In fact, you need to not just be willing, but intentional about changing your
perspective before you make make decisions helps you to make those decisions
in a more reasoned and nuanced way so you're not so one or two-dimensional all the time.
Okay, so people are multidimensional, but the left hemisphere of your brain
makes them two-dimensional. That's something you need to know. It's true of you.
You have a biological and neurochemical rational basis for why you do that,
but the story's bigger and you need to learn to use your right hemisphere and not just your left.
That's way. You're getting that right hemisphere more in tuned and more in charge
and stronger and more readily available to you instead of just reacting out
of that left side all the time. Okay.
Three, God is a quantum physics God.
What in the world does that mean? We've talked a lot about how in the world
of quantum physics, it's clear that two things can be true at the same time.
It depends on how they're observed.
It depends on how the experiments are designed. But an electron,
electron, for example, can actually sort of be in two places at one time.
And two things can be true at the same time. And that's why a big breakthrough
for me and healing after we lost our son, Mitch.
Quantum physics allowed me to see that God can be two things at the same time.
They're never contradictory, okay?
They're never one good and one bad. They're always good. He's always good.
But two things that seem incompatible can also be true at the same time.
And John 10.10 and John 16.33 showed me that.
John 10.10 says, the thief comes to steal and kill and destroy,
but I came that you might have life and have it abundantly.
So Jesus is saying in this same breath, you're going to be in this life where
things are are stolen, and you're killed, and you're destroyed,
and your heart is broken, and bad things happen, and you suffer,
but at the same time, I'm here telling you, you can have an abundant life.
And John 16, 33 says, the world, you're going to have trouble, my friend.
There is trouble in this world, but the second half, take heart,
because I've overcome the world.
But Jesus is telling you in the same breath, you're in this life that's going
to hurt, that I'm here, that you can overcome at the same time.
That's quantum physics in action, okay? Okay.
God says, it's not a problem for me that you got difficult circumstances.
I can give you abundance at the same time.
A reader named John Christensen. Thanks, John, by the way, shout out to you.
Always sends me encouraging things on Instagram.
By the way, as a tiny little aside, I'll say it again. Please don't send me
things through Facebook messenger.
I feel so bad. I never get on Facebook. When you see me post on Facebook,
it comes from an automated software that shoots it out from a different piece
of software. I'd never get on Facebook and check anything.
Hardly ever do I check Facebook Messenger.
So I'll have a hundred messages in there when I randomly see it once in a while.
So don't put something out there. You really need me to pray about something.
Put it on the prayer wall. You need to get a hold of me. Send me an email or
comment on Substack or someplace, but Facebook is not where you're going to get a hold of me. Okay.
So that being said, Instagram is a place where I check. I check check it more frequently.
And John Christensen sends me these encouraging things. And yesterday he sent Jeremiah 23, 23.
He said, when I read this verse, I thought about you and I thought about quantum
physics and I was so encouraged about how God acts.
This is a verse I never, I've read it, but I never saw it like this.
Here's what Jeremiah 23, 23 says.
God is a quantum physics God. Here's what it says. Am I a God who is only close at hand?
Says the Lord. No, I am far away at the same time.
So you think God is here next to you, helping you in this situation,
and therefore he can't be out somewhere else solving this bigger problem that
you have or taking care of some bigger issue.
But God says, I can do that at the same time. Nothing's too hard for me.
I'm close by. I'm far away. The world is broken. You can have abundance.
Everything's hard, but I've overcome it all at the same time.
You have a quantum physics God. He made it up. He's created it.
When he said, let there be light, Jesus did it with his hands.
John tells us, the Gospel of John, everything that was made, he made.
So the rules that govern quantum physics, guess who made them? Jesus did.
So you're not stuck with any situation. There is ways that God can handle that
in space and time that are more complicated than you think they are.
But they're not for God. He's a quantum physics guy.
Number four, you are never stuck. Literally, friend, understand the truth of
the neuroscience. science.
Every second of every day of your life, you are creating new neurons and making
new synapses and connections between them.
Your skin is turning over. Every organ in your body, every cell in your bones
is changing and growing and being replaced every second, every day.
So when you think you're stuck, you're not.
When you look in the mirror, you're not even the same organism that you were five seconds ago.
There are billions of cells in your body that are different than than they were an hour ago, okay?
So that truth is that you were designed to heal.
You were designed to change and grow and become more and more like your creator all the time.
You are not stuck, no matter how you feel, no matter what life has made you
feel, no matter what other people have told you, no matter how many times you've
tried before with your finances or your health or your relationship or whatever it is, you're not stuck.
If you feel stuck, you need help. There's ways to get help. Your brain is literally
changing its physical structure every second, and the most important driver
and influencer of that change is your thinking. That's what Philippians 4 is all about.
You want to be less anxious, pray more, and think about better things.
That's a simple formula, but it works better than Prozac because that's how
you structurally change your mind.
All you have to do to start seeing real progress is to be purposeful about taking
control of that change process because you can,
or more properly stated, let the great physician help you change your mind because
that'll help you change your brain and that'll help you change your life. You're not stuck.
You're literally different than you were when you started listening to this podcast.
The only thing that's stuck is the way you think about it. So change it.
It's doable. That's why we're here, by the way. Number five.
The way our brains see the world is affected by many factors,
okay? Again, this is that baseline is not your fault idea from number one.
This is the way that you see the world, the lens through which you view things
is something that you inherited from your family,
your culture, your genetics, your faith, and also has been evolved and influenced
by your experiences, your relationships, the things that have happened in your
life, and the way that people have responded to you in your life.
All of that is how the switches and the filters get put in place for how you see things, okay?
Here's the important part, though. The way you see something,
this is so important, the way you see something doesn't make it more or less
true in and of itself than the way somebody else sees something.
And what does that mean? Because we all have this belief, okay,
especially in this culture. Currently, our kids are being taught,
what you feel is true. Follow your heart, baby.
You do you. You know, your feelings are your feelings and they're important
and people need to pay attention to them and everybody needs to bow down to
how you feel so they don't trigger you and all that stuff.
And I'm just telling you there's a better way because you can't ever land on
something that feels happy in that context because every time you get people
to do what you think you needed to do,
it won't feel like you thought it was going to feel and you'll think they need
to do something different to make you feel even better than that.
And it's just an endless cycle of never feeling better than you thought you were going to.
The fact is, the way your brain sees the world is what makes you think all that stuff.
But it's not more or less true than the way somebody else sees it in and of
itself. Here's a good example.
Let's say that you have, like Tata, you've got a weather app on your phone.
He's got a couple of them.
Tata's a weather guy. He always knows the temperature and every city that people
that he loves live in, he knows what the weather's like.
He'll send you a text and say, it's going to rain today where you live over
there in Texas or down there in Alabama.
Make sure you're ready over in Virginia where our daughter Kimber is.
Make sure you know it's going to get cold tonight. Tata's on top of that stuff.
Okay. He's got a weather app on his phone. Let's say that you had a phone that
has the weather app as the home screen, and it's always on. You disabled the screensaver.
You turned the brightness up as high as it could go, and your phone literally
24-7 shows you the temperature. Now, let's just say that.
You've got the temperature front and center all the time. It's all you can see
unless you choose to change it, okay?
Now, let's say another person like me. I'm not a weather guy.
I've literally, Lisa and I walked into hurricanes before because we didn't check
the forecast before we were traveling.
We didn't know there was a hurricane. We're walking around in Rhode Island. There's a nor'easter.
We had no idea. It was on television, but we didn't know. We're walking around
wondering why the wind was blowing so hard. I don't check the weather. It's crazy.
Okay. Let's say that my phone, instead of having the weather screen on,
brightness full, locked on the screen, all I can ever see is the temperature.
Let's say that for me, I've got the screen, the light turned way down. It's dim.
I've got one of those plastic glare covers on my phone.
So I don't really have one, but let's say I did where the screen's kind of dark.
So people can't read over your shoulder and that kind of stuff.
And let's say that I have a weather app, but it's buried in a folder on the 25th page of my apps.
And in order for me to find out the temperature, I've got to do some work.
I've got to open the phone, unlock it, raise the brightness,
switch through all those pages of apps, find the folder, find the app and turn
it on. And then I find the temperature. Okay.
It took some work for me to get in touch with what what the real temperature
was because I had to go hunt for it because I didn't have it front and center
on my phone. Now, let me just submit to you.
The temperature that Tata's phone says when it's bright and on the screen and
right there all the time visible and the temperature that my phone says are both true, okay?
Mine just was harder to sort of noodle out and figure out and wasn't as obvious.
It wasn't as on the surface, but it's equally true.
That's a good example of what I mean when I say some people's brains are wired
in to how they feel. They're really in tune with emotion.
They get really angry. They get really sad. They get powerful emotions pop up.
They feel things really hard.
Other people, not so much. They don't feel it quite the same way.
Things don't seem so black and white to them.
Things don't seem so burning or powerful or passionate to them.
But that doesn't mean that how they see the world is less or more true.
Okay? So what I'm saying is this.
The way that we each see the world, especially in a relationship,
It's a nuanced and complex right brain, left brain dance that comes from the
way that we were raised, our genetics, our history, our culture, our faith,
our experiences, and all these other things.
But it doesn't make it more or less correct, and here's why.
The second commandment of self-brain surgery, feelings are not facts, my friend.
Feelings are chemical events in your brain. Some people feel them more powerfully. Other people don't.
Sometimes people feel them, and they seem so true. It's got to be true that
this thing is real because I feel it so passionately.
But the fact is, feelings are never compasses. They should not drive your decision-making.
They shouldn't point you in a direction. Feelings are barometers.
God put them there for you to be aware that something's going on and then get
your whole brain and your prayer life even involved in what is it that I'm feeling?
Why do I feel this way? And what's happening? And put some context around that.
And get your rational frontal lobe involved before you react.
Because reacting instead of responding gets us in all kinds of trouble.
God says in Jeremiah 23, 23, Am I a God who is only close at hand?
No, I'm far away at the same time.
We need to stop living in that place where God's either here or there.
And right now I can't feel him, so he must not be here.
God says, no, I'm bigger than that. It's more nuanced than that.
He's a quantum physics God. God, your baseline's not your fault,
but what you do with it is. People are multidimensional.
Your left hemisphere wants you to make them 2D, but they're really more complicated than that.
God is a quantum physics God who can make multiple things true at the same time, and you're not stuck.
Your brain is literally changing its structure every second of every day,
and the way you see the world is affected by a lot of things,
and it's going to be different than how somebody else sees the world.
That doesn't make either one of them inherently more or less true.
You just have to do some work. to put yourself in touch with what it is that
you're feeling and give them some three-dimensional context to understand what
they're feeling too so that you can both change your minds and you can both
change your life. It's Mind Change Monday.
There's some things that are true, my friend. You need to know them and you
need to believe them because they're 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, you can't change your
life until you change your mind. And the good news is you can start today.
Music.