All-In: Positivity Bias Is a Superpower

Hey, Dr. Warren, it's Barb up in Canada. I'm all in.

Good morning, Dr. Warren. This is Lola from Danville, Kentucky.

As God continues to fill you, thank you so much for sharing the scriptures you've

shared on this particular podcast and for reminding us that we can have an abundant,

full life in the midst of any season. God bless.

Good morning. Many blessings to Dr. Lee Warren, Lisa, and Tata.

Thankful for your podcast. I am all in. My name is Kim from Marysville, Ohio. Thank 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.

That place is called self -brain surgery. You can learn it and it will help

you become healthier, feel better and be happier.

And the good news is you can start today.

Thanks, Lisa. Hey, so glad to have you listening today. I'm Dr.

Lee Warren and I live in Nebraska in the United States of America with my incredible

wife, Lisa. my father -in -law, Tata, and the super pups, Harvey and Louis.

I'm a neurosurgeon and an author, and I'm here to help you harness neuroscience,

the power of your brain, faith, the power of your spirit, and good old common

sense to help you lead a healthier, better, happier life.

Listen, friend, you can't change your life until you change your mind,

and I'm here to help you learn the art of self -brain surgery to get it done.

If you like the show, please subscribe so you never miss an episode,

and tell your friends about it.

If you tell two or three friends this podcast was helpful to you,

imagine how much good we can all do around the world together.

I'm Dr. Lee Warren and I'm here to help you change your mind so you can change

your life. Let's get after it.

Listen, there's a guy named Martin Seligman who was a psychologist and is a

psychologist and he wrote a breakthrough idea in psychology,

taught generations of psychologists to stop thinking about what most mental

health experts always think about, which is problems.

Don't think about your mental illness or your mental problem, your difficulty.

The insufficiency of how your brain is working, but rather he's now called the

father of positive psychology because he taught people to look at finding the

ways to look at what's good, finding the ways to look at what's hopeful,

finding the ways to look at what's positive.

For many years psychology worked within this idea of disease

to treating people with mental problems and psychopathological issues

instead of finding a way to help

people see the positive psychology to shift

the focus of interventions from problems to solutions and not why are you so

depressed why are you so anxious stop feeling that way stop doing that stop

thinking that instead they determine that positive psychology really has five

key aspects and And this is really well laid out in Daniel Amon's book, You Happier,

which is a fantastic look at the neuroscience of happiness and feeling good

and all those things that are really important.

It's just a tremendous book and Daniel has done a beautiful job,

but he lays out this sort of positive bias training in that chapter and he talks

about Martin Seligman's work and here's the summation of it that they determined,

Seligman and his colleagues determined that positive psychology helps you to

look at life with optimism.

Positive psychology allows us to appreciate the present.

Positive psychology lets us accept and make peace with the past.

Positive psychology helps us to be more grateful and forgiving.

And positive psychology helps us to look beyond the momentary pleasures and

pains of life. To look beyond the moment. Those are all great things, right?

We've learned that in what we call now trauma -informed care.

Like instead of looking at somebody's behavior and saying, What's wrong with

you, man? Why are you doing all these things?

Why do you take those drugs? Why do you behave that way? Why do you always cause

in trouble instead of what's wrong with you?

We look beyond their behavior and say what happened to you what has occurred in your life friend?

That's led you to thinking and behaving this way so consistently what happened

to you so the positive Bias when you're looking at a situation or you're looking

at yourself in your life.

This is not to say what's wrong with me What's the matter with me?

Why does it always feel this way?

Why does this always happen to me? Why is this always occurring to me?

Why does nobody behave appropriately around me the positive spin on that would be?

What has happened to lead?

Me into this situation where I feel this way what's

happened to look at it and most of the time I

would just challenge you as we're trying to go all in with their lives with

our brains But their spirits all in in our relationships all in with our behavior

I want you to understand that a lot of the times the problem is what what I've

jokingly called I trouble like we're wondering why everybody else is behaving

certain way and we never look inward,

to maybe some of the solutions to why things are happening or feeling the way

they are has to do with the way we're thinking and approaching them.

And so learning to have a positive bias towards your thinking is a crucial aspect

of learning how to break through all that clutter and the sameness and how's that working for you.

Ideally, like we talked about yesterday, having a positive bias to your thinking

helps you to unlock a couple of really important things.

And what they are is that positivity in a situation creates a better brain environment,

a better brain chemical environment than negativity do. That's just true.

It's been proven without any doubt from neuroscience that positive thinking

produces a better chemical environment in your brain and what that does is allows

you to re -engage, or re -create rather,

new synaptic connections that will

lead you to a more natural or automated positive thought in the future.

Now, when I'm talking about positive thinking, don't ever mistake.

Don't ever think that I'm saying that you should just put a smile on your face

and move on I was Exposed to some of that thinking as a child and it can be

really harmful especially if you attach it to a religious connotation and say.

Christians aren't sad christians are happy christians are always supposed to

have a smile on their face christians shrug off troubles The problem with that

is it doesn't line up with the real world because it's not reasonable,

To lose your son and still be happy about it the same day

That's not reasonable and if you tell people they have to if

you tell people that they should always be happy no matter what happens Then

that they're gonna realize that's not realistic It's not

possible And then you're gonna start feeling guilt and shame over not living

up to what you are being taught That you're supposed to feel right so when I

say I want you to feel positive I'm not saying that you should always just paste

a smile on and act like it doesn't matter to you That's not what I'm talking

about What I'm talking about is, like I said the other day,

when you're on the beach and the bullets are coming at you,

and you know what your purpose is, then you can put the shield up and you can

say, wait a minute, I've got to find a way through this.

There is a path forward here that will allow me to succeed.

I'm going to stop just thinking about the bullets coming at me,

and I'm going to start looking for the opportunity to move forward safely.

I'm going to start believing that there's a way to get from point A where I'm

at to point B, where there's safety, where there's peace, there's hope,

there's future, there's reconnection, there's resolution of problems or whatever,

there's a way for me to get from here to there.

And I'm telling you, friend, the way to get from here to there in your brain

is to look at the situation with a positive bias, to say, okay,

this is happening, but I can find a way through it.

Because the alternative, the negative bias is the cortisol and the adrenaline,

the stress hormones are gonna fire up and you're gonna say I need to just run

away or I need to suck in and get dig deeper down in this hole and just hide

or I need to kill myself or I need to divorce this person or do whatever you

go down this negative path and you your problems don't generally get better do they.

If you dig in on the beach, you're going to eventually have a shell land on you and get blown up.

You've got to have an ability to move forward. And the only way to do that is

to find some way to positively look at this situation.

Again, really careful to discern what I'm talking about.

Not saying that you say, oh, yeah, I went bankrupt. Great. That's wonderful.

No, that's not what I'm talking about. That's insanity.

What I'm saying is the money's not there.

What can I do? Is it impossible? Is it never going to be OK?

Am I gonna fail am I gonna go bankrupt? Are they gonna take my house?

No you say wait a minute I've got some skills I can add some hours at work I

can find a way to get my boss to advance my pay I can do this I can do that

There's a way to solve this problem,

Starts with prayer There's a way to clear the situation and look through it

and find an answer and look through it and find the possibility Look through it and find a path.

That's what I mean by positivity not oh Oh, it's all gonna be okay.

Just say that all the time, but I don't mean it in a silly way a fantasy way

to say that based on my track record of memory of the past of how God has.

Behaved and responded when I've had trouble in the past somehow I got through

all those previous situations Somehow I didn't go bankrupt somehow.

I didn't die in Iraq somehow I didn't kill myself after I went through a divorce

or had all those issues Somehow, I found love when I met Lisa.

Somehow, I believed in myself again because Lisa said I was okay.

Somehow, God got me through losing my son.

Somehow, we managed to survive, moving our practice from Alabama to Wyoming,

and somehow, we wound up in Nebraska. Somehow, God did all those things.

And so, since he did all those things in the past, I've got memory.

I can say, maybe there is hope for the future, and then I can move,

can flex that muscle of hope, and start moving towards that possibility instead

of just hunkering down on the beach and waiting to get blown up.

That's what I mean by having a positive bias.

I'm going to look at this situation and find the path because there is a path,

there's a crack in the door filled with light in this dark room and I just need

to find the path forward there.

Okay, so when I tell you to have a positive bias, please don't ever think I'm

telling you to be unrealistically positive Okay, there's lots of psychology to this.

But the thing you don't know the thing that most people don't know is how much

positive and negative thoughts affect your brain chemistry Said it while ago,

but when you have a happy thought even a simple one like a bright idea a loving

feeling your brain releases The chemicals of happiness dopamine serotonin endorphins oxytocin.

They calm your body to help clear your thinking They help you find possibility and hope in the moment.

And when you have negative thoughts, the brain releases or decreases certain

chemicals and you feel angrier, more stressed, more sad.

The release of these stress hormones like cortisol and adrenaline and you deplete

the positive neurotransmitters and your brain predictably gets worse and worse

and worse when you focus on those negative thoughts.

So your choice then, as I've told you many times, the only animals in the whole

animal kingdom if you want to think about yourself in terms of zoology is that

has the gift of selective attention.

Our human beings, we're the only ones who have the ability to say,

I am not going to think about that for a second.

I'm going to think about this instead. You can change trains.

You can change your train of thought. You can change what you're thinking about,

friend, and you can decide to think about something that's going to make you

feel better instead of worse.

You can set that train of thought and you can change the direction of how you're

thinking and feeling and that

Deciding that you're going to live more positively is the key to do that.

You have to do that ahead of time You have to do it ahead of time I said it

a million times you got to prehab your brain to believe that you are going to

handle whatever you encounter in a more positive way and you will,

You absolutely will. One sort of surgery, one self -brain surgery technique

that we've talked about a lot is what I call the bad thought biopsy.

It's been covered many times in many ways. Lots of people have written about this idea.

Byron Katie and Daniel Lehman and lots of people have looked at it as a way

of just examining your thinking and not believing every thought that pops into your head.

I call it the bad thought biopsy because when I do brain surgery,

if I look at a scan and I see a round spot in your brain and I just tell you,

I put my hand on your knee and say, hey, you've got a brain tumor.

We need to go put you in radiation and chemotherapy.

You would say, wait a minute, how do you know for sure it's a brain tumor?

And I would say, I've seen it before.

That's probably what it is. We ought to just radiate your brain.

We ought to put nuclear radiation on your skull.

And you would say, that's crazy. You don't know for sure that it's a tumor.

That'd be malpractice, right? Instead, I have to

take you to the operating room and I have to put a needle in that thing and

I have to biopsy it so the pathologist can tell us

what it is for sure before we decide how to

treat it and it's the same thing with your thinking when

the thought pops into your head you've got to say wait a second is that

thought true is it absolutely true is it

certain to be true and how do I feel about that if it is true and what would

I feel if it wasn't true what would I do differently if it's cancer as opposed.

To if it's just a little scar tissue in the brain if it's cancer I've got to

do radical surgery chemotherapy radiation all that stuff hospice all those things

if it's a little scar tissue,

I just don't have to do anything.

I'm well. I'm fine. I get to move on with my life, right?

If it's a bad thought and I look at it, is it absolutely true?

Maybe not. Maybe there's some way to think about it as it's not true.

Is it 100 % true? Maybe it's partially true.

Daniel Lehman gives a great example in the book of you have this thought that

pops into your head. Nobody likes me.

And then you put yourself through this process. Is it true? Yes, I think it's true.

Is it absolutely true with 100 % certainty? And you would say,

maybe my mom likes me, maybe my wife likes me. So the first thought was nobody likes me.

You say, is it true? Yeah, I think that's true. But then you say,

wait, is it 100 % absolutely true?

Then you make yourself admit, no, there's a couple of people who like me.

The third step then was how do you feel when you believe that thought?

If nobody liked me, I'd be pretty sad. I'd be depressed and I would spend the

rest of my life alone with no friends. I'd be a loser, I'd be a loner,

I'd die alone, and nobody would care.

As the guy in the Bible that said he died to no one's regret, right?

Then the fourth step, how would you feel if you didn't have that thought?

If I didn't have the thought that nobody liked me, I would feel happier and

more open to meeting other people and connecting with them.

And then the last step, turn the thought around to its opposite and ask if the opposite is true.

So instead of nobody likes me, maybe the thought is some people do like me,

and is there any evidence that this is true? My wife seems to like me. She sticks around.

We've been married for a long time and she doesn't leave me,

so maybe she does like me.

Maybe my co -workers invite me to lunch from time to time or somebody sends

me a funny meme on Instagram, so somebody's out there thinking about me, right?

I can pretty much guarantee that when I open my phone this morning,

I'm going to have a couple of funny videos to watch from my friend Al almost

every day. So he's out there thinking about me. He likes me.

So now I've worked myself from this thought that nobody likes me all the way

out to, hey, there are a few really connected people who actually do like me and I am not alone.

And so then instead of reacting to the negative thought automatically.

Meditate on thought that's actually true and you'll find a way to feel a little

more hopeful and a little more optimistic about what's going to happen that day.

So the question at the end of the day is, are the thoughts that I'm routinely

allowing myself to think, as Dr. Phil said, how's it working for you?

Are these thoughts helping me or are they hurting me?

Is my bias negative towards the harm of my own brain chemistry or is it positive

towards helping my brain chemistry and therefore my automated thinking,

my synaptic connections in my behavior going forward that's easier and easier

to accomplish because I've trained my brain with prehab,

brain surgery and now rehab to go forward in a more positive way.

That's the treatment plan.

Do your thoughts bring you more safety, peace, joy, hope, happiness or are they

bringing you regret, anger, frustration, sadness, depression?

Learn how to keep the thoughts that are serving you and question or discard

or better react to the ones that are dragging you down and that will change

your life and that's how you go all in with your brain.

You know what cracks me up is that we've done all the psychological research

and written tens of thousands of books and articles and papers and blogs and

there's all this stuff out there about positivity bias training.

And 2 ,000 years ago, the Apostle Paul wrote this in Philippians 4, six through eight.

Do not be anxious about anything, but in every situation, by prayer and petition

with thanksgiving, present your request to God.

You hear that? Prayer, meditation, gratitude.

Verse seven, and the peace of God which transcends all understanding will guard

your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.

He's telling you, you need to guard your mind. You need to be careful what you

let your brain think about.

Then verse eight, finally, brothers and sisters, whatever is true,

whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely,

whatever is admirable, if anything is excellent or praiseworthy,

think about such things. What is that?

Positivity, bias, training. He's telling you, you're going to have a hard life.

Remember this guy, Paul, was in prison, shipwrecked, snake bit,

stoned, ultimately martyred.

This guy is not saying that you'll have a happy life full of great things and

never have anything bad happen to you. He's saying in the midst of those hard things.

Be positive anyway and you'll find a better path forward. That's the answer.

So you see positivity bias training is not teaching you how to be ridiculously

optimistic in the face of overwhelming evidence that you ought not to be.

That's not it. Let me give you an example of something that you can do based

on something I did that was.

Almost life -saving in the moment. So when you have something really bad happen,

when you go through a really hard circumstance And I want to say to take a time

out here and just say thank you we've received,

Written cards and emails and several text messages from many people who are listeners.

Noticing and being aware of the fact that three days from now August 20th is

the anniversary the ninth anniversary

of the worst day of our lives the day we lost our son Mitch and,

And many of you are just very kindly loving on and doctoring us and reminding

us That you're thinking about us in that moment,

and I just want to tell you how grateful We are for that just to know that people

are out there that are aware As time goes on after a big event like that happens

you wonder if people know if they care especially the people who?

Knew About it when it happened and who knew that person that you lost or knew

that situation that you went through If they forgotten like I spent a little

time sometimes was going down this rabbit hole worrying that people have forgotten

Mitch or don't remember how funny he was or how smart he was and those kinds of things.

And to know that the people who didn't even ever know him are just giving us

a little thought, a little mental energy, sending out a word of encouragement

and even taking the time to write. That's amazing.

And so it's a good example of how we can love on and be community for each other

even if we're only connected digitally to each other in the world.

It's amazing what the Internet has allowed us to do. So we're grateful about

that. But let me tell you something that happened.

So if we lose our son on the 20th, on the 23rd, we have his funeral.

And we were driving back from Prattville, Alabama to Auburn,

which is about an hour, hour and a half, something like that,

probably an hour and 15 minutes in the car that day.

Got my parents in the back seat, Lisa and I are in the front.

We're in a little caravan of cars going from Prattville down the interstate

to Montgomery and then over to Auburn to the east.

And we're devastated, right?

We're crying and we're just numb and we don't really

know what we're gonna do and we're in that situation of

just being emotionally stunted and muted by the

whole thing and all of a sudden it's a

cloudy day it's a cloudy day and all of a sudden we see this intense incredible

just unbelievably vivid double rainbow over the highway and it was in front

of us far enough that we could see both ends of it like we're driving under this double rainbow,

And just in that moment, I can't tell you, I can't really describe it, it sounds kind of silly.

I just knew that somehow God was going to get us through this.

And I had this weird thought, it's just this strange thought,

I wonder what that looks like from Mitch's perspective in heaven.

I wonder if he can see that rainbow, I wonder if he's smiling because he knows

it's giving us a little bit of a boost, a little bit of a lift right now.

Like I just had this moment where I stepped out of the pain that I was in and

allowed myself to think about something that was happier and I felt better.

And that sounds like a trick, but it's not a trick. From a chemical standpoint,

even in the midst of a hard time, you can notice something good in that moment.

There was a day in Iraq I wrote about in my last book where I was just miserable

and everything was bloody red and everybody getting blown up.

We did all this trauma surgery that day and it had been just brown everywhere on the outside.

There's dirt everywhere, it's a dark sky and there's a sandstorm and my whole

world was red and brown, just red and brown.

I was just focused on these negative thoughts as I was walking down the sidewalk

and I just encountered this little tiny plant that was growing up,

bright green plant growing up out of a crack in the sidewalk.

And it just was, wow, this whole world, my brain is saying everything is red,

everything is brown, everything is bloody or dirty or filthy or decaying or

dying or screaming or bleeding. Everything is negative.

And all of a sudden my brain said, but that's not, there's a little blade of

grass right there that's popped up somehow and probably in the middle of this

desert, there's a little green plant growing up out of the ground in the hardest

place possible growing up out of concrete.

And just for a moment, I said, well, if that plant can grow and thrive in this

difficult environment, maybe I can too.

And so I just stepped out of the problem and into something a little bit more

positive for a second And it made a huge difference in my heart that day Just

it just made a huge difference and I've heard from so many people that little story in that book,

resonated with them and The reason it resonates friend is because we need to

be able to find and it's something you can reliably do you can train yourself?

To find something positive in the midst of any situation that you're in and

that doesn't mean that what's happening isn't happening It just means that you

allow yourself to say we're on parallel tracks here.

This is happening there's still some good and some light and some hope in the

world and because of that means it's Possible for you to get through what you're

going through and move forward.

That's why the Bible says think on these things That's why the Bible says fret not yourself.

I don't go down these rabbit holes of negativity Because that's how you get

lost in these heavy circumstances Don't allow yourself to believe every stupid

thought that you have because most of them are negative.

Most of them are wired to be negative, but you can train your brain to bias towards positivity.

You can and it'll make all the difference And I'm just telling you,

friend, if you can learn to think on these things, these better things,

you're going to be happier.

And not to be happier just for the sake of acting like things are going to be

okay, but to be happier because happier people have better brain chemistry and

they make better synapses and they make better decisions and they find better

possibilities and they solve problems better.

And this has been proven unequivocally through all kinds of scientific research.

It is absolutely true that if you look at the world negatively,

you don't perform as well.

You don't marry as well. You don't sustain relationships as well.

You don't avoid bad habits as well. You don't live as long.

In fact, there's been really good research that says happier people have lower

blood pressure and lower risk of coronary artery disease and lower numbers of

strokes and lower numbers of cancer, like happier people live longer and feel better.

And that's why I always say I want you to become healthier, feel better, and be happier.

I want you to change your mind so you can change your life. So I'm always telling

you to find a way to look for the hope and the light.

And the only reason I care about that for you so much is because if we can all

find a way to be a little more positive, our society will change,

the world will change, but people will start seeing that the Lord loves them

and there's opportunity and purpose and power and passion and promise for you.

Because when God says something, friend, He says it for everybody.

And when He tells you that He's got good plans for you, it's true.

And you can't get to Him if you're just mired down in your negativity and your impossibility.

If you can't see the light and move towards it, you'll never find the light.

It's time to go all in. It's time to go all in and decide that we will relentlessly

refuse to participate in our own demise.

And I'm just telling you, friend, running with your negative thoughts is participating

in your own demise. is playing Russian roulette with your own brain.

So quit it, okay? Let's go with positivity bias, not irrationally positive,

but a way to find consistently the ability to find something in a moment that's

positive and hopeful and move towards it and latch onto it and refuse to give

it up because that's the good news.

You can't change your life until you change your mind and you can start today.

Music.

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TommyWalkerMinistries .org. Remember, you can't change your life until you change

your mind, and the good news is you can start today.

I'm Dr. Lee Warren. I'll talk to you soon. God bless you, friend. Have a great day.