Approaches Have Consequences, Part 2: All-In August #29

Good morning, my friend. Dr. Lee Warren here with you. It is Thursday,

and we are on the 29th day of all in August.

I can't believe it. I've been hearing from a lot of you. I got an incredible,

just incredible message from a woman named Erin in St.

Louis, who said she's been practicing the first commandment of self-brain surgery

for six months, just taking aggressive control of her thought life,

refusing to participate in her own demise.

Let me read you what Erin said. She said, Dr. Warren, I am relentlessly refusing

to participate in my own demise by taking my thoughts captive for Christ.

Before learning the first commandment of self-brain surgery,

I spent most of my time, day and night, drowning in despair because of my own thoughts.

Today, I am six months into practicing the first commandment and I'm so very

happy to report that I am no longer drowning.

I am perplexed, but driven to despair, but not driven to despair.

I am afflicted, but not crushed.

There is more to me than my TMT. Thank you for your words and insight that have

clicked with me. Aaron, that is exactly why we do this work.

That is exactly why the 10 commandments of self-brain surgery are so very important.

They will change your mind, friend, and they will change your life,

but only if you do what Aaron did.

Go all in. It's time to commit. Listen, if you haven't started all in August,

if you haven't made this commitment, if you haven't listened to Tata and say,

hey, Esther went all in, Elisha went all in, it's time to go all in.

If you haven't done that yet, by the end of August, you're going to have 31

episodes about getting the idea of going all in in your life under control. Take it into September.

Just start. I'm just encouraging you, friend. Start today. And one of the ways

that you start is by choosing an approach of how you're going to process your life.

How are you going to think about your life? How are you going to decide what's true and isn't true?

How are you going to decide what to commit to and not to commit to?

More importantly, how are you going to decide what resources and possibilities

and opportunities are available to you?

And to do that, you have to have some type of a worldview, some type of an approach,

some type of a set of techniques and ideologies and thought processes and behaviors

that you're going to bring to the fight as you try to make these radical changes in your life.

Or maybe they're not radical changes.

Maybe you just need a little performance boost. Maybe you've been bumping your

head up against the wall of something that isn't quite right,

and you just need to figure out the subtle changes that need to get made and

really commit Commit to that and make it happen at 1% per day to produce 37%

per year of real change. That's what you're after, maybe.

So it's time to get after it. Let's go all in. Today's day 29.

And we're going to finish the idea that we started on Monday. Mind Change Monday.

Go back and listen if you haven't to Approaches Have Consequences Part 1.

We talked about the fact that there are four basic, really five approaches that

people use to handle their lives.

Let me lay them out for you once again, and then we'll get into the last two

as we talk Talk about approaches have consequences for today.

And I really want you to get this and understand what happens when you finally

commit to an approach for managing your mind and managing your brain and managing

your life so that you can become healthier and feel better and be happier.

Before we get going today, I cannot encourage you highly enough to not choose

to go all in all by yourself. Build yourself a community.

One way you could do that would be to share these episodes with your friends.

Like right now, copy the link while you're thinking about it before you talk yourself out of it.

Think of one or two or three or five friends who you would like to commit to

going all in with, to have a community, an accountability group, somebody to help you.

Look, nobody goes to recovery alone, okay?

You build community. That's how you make it stick.

That's the reason we have churches, okay? It's the reason we have teams and

groups is people need to be in community.

So share this with some friends. Share this with some people.

Share it with your spouse and say, Say, let's do this together.

Let's go all in together.

Let's make it happen, okay? That's what I want for you. I want you to make it

happen in your own life. By the way, it's harvest time in Nebraska.

And that means the farmers have been out baling hay all night.

And that means that the pollen inside our house is incredibly high.

And that's why I'm so congested and having so much trouble with my voice.

I apologize for the sniffles and the sneezes and all the times I've had to pause

this to make that happen so you don't have to hear all of it.

But it's harvest time. That means good things are happening out there.

And there's always consequences to harvest time.

That resolve around allergies and allergens and pollens and all that kind of stuff in the air.

So everybody in Nebraska has a sniffle right now. And that's just a reality

we have to deal with because it's harvest time. And aren't we grateful that it's harvest time?

So what are the five approaches that people take to life? And we talked about

the first three on Monday, but just to recap in case you haven't heard it,

one is that a huge percentage of people never even realize that they have an approach to life.

They just take whatever comes. They just think that life is what it is and there's

nothing they can do about it.

So they just don't even think about it. And I'm just here to tell you that's

not a very good approach.

We talked on Monday about the issues with not having an approach.

It's just like the people that don't have a financial plan for their life.

That is a financial plan. It's just a really bad one. You're going to end up

having trouble with your finances if you don't have a plan.

You got to have a plan. Okay, be good stewards. And the same thing with your all in life.

Have a plan for how you're going to live this. Have a plan for what you're going

to do when it gets hard. because guess what? It's going to get hard.

Have a plan for what you're going to do if your spouse doesn't come along with you.

When you see the vision and you know what you have to do and you're 100% convinced

that this is what God's calling you to and your spouse says,

hey, I didn't sign up for that, for what you're doing right now.

I didn't sign up for that. That's not what I agreed to.

You may have some trouble, okay?

So you have to be prepared for what am I going to do when it gets hard?

You have to have an approach. And there's four basic approaches that people

use to deal with their mindset and their life.

One of them is the nothing can help me approach. It's the cynicism of the I've

tried this before and it didn't work and this is just my genetics and my family upbringing,

my habits and my traumas and my issues and my personality type and my Enneagram

score and my neurodiversity and my ADHD and all the things and just blaming everything.

And this nothing can help me throw up my hands. I might as well just accept

the fact that I'm not going to

be able to get these things done and it's never going to work out for me.

And so I just numb myself with alcohol or shopping or sex or text messaging

or gambling or whatever.

So I don't have to think about it. And then I'm caught in this spiral of always

paying tomorrow taxes and always having the same issues to deal with tomorrow

and all of that. So nothing can help me.

It's not a very good approach. There are serious consequences to that.

And I pray my whole job here, friend, by the way, if you're an atheist.

And agnostic, a former believer, if you're not sure what you believe,

I'm not here to arm wrestle you into seeing things the way I see them.

I'm here to show you that science and faith are not enemies,

that there's a good and valid and scientific and thoughtful and rational way

that you can see science and faith as being things that play together.

I'm here to tell you that the neuroscience is clear that people who develop

a habit, a practice of meditating and praying,

their brains get bigger, their hippocampi get bigger, they get more robust and

more resilient and more able to handle stress and they're less anxious and they

have less cortisol and their bodies are healthier and they feel better.

So if you keep finding out that something the Bible said turns out to be consistent

with something neuroscience says and that when you practice that way,

your life gets better, your brain gets better, your thought life gets better,

your relationships gets better, you get healthier overall, then maybe it's not just a coincidence.

If it keeps happening, the Bible says something, neuroscience figures it out,

it turns out to be be true. It turns out to be the best way for you to flourish.

My premise is the more times as a good scientist, the more times you see that

happening, you'll eventually start wanting to know more and ask questions.

So my job here is not to tell you what approach to take, but just to say that

there are multiple approaches and a good scientific approach to your life would

be to be willing to stop digging your heels into one approach.

Even when the evidence is overwhelming, that approach is not working for you.

I have a suspicion that most of the people listening to my voice right now are

listening because something's not working.

Somebody's listening right now. It might be you. Somebody's listening because something happened.

They went through some kind of massive thing or they're frustrated or they're

stuck or their husband left or their wife got glioblastoma or they didn't get

that promotion that they finally got through flight school and they got promoted

to fly the fancy fighter jet.

And then they had a little mental issue and they couldn't handle the stress

and they got kicked out and their trajectory's off.

They finally made it to the college football and they hurt their knee and now

their future life is confused and what they thought was going to be true isn't true anymore.

They're in that place and somebody said, somebody came alongside them and said,

hey, this work, this self-brain surgery idea might help you.

And so somebody's looking at this, not because they were looking for a relationship

with God or they were trying to be convinced about Christianity or they were

interested in brain surgery or any of those things.

But somebody's listening because something isn't working. working, okay?

And if that's you, if you're here because you're trying to find a way forward

when something isn't working, then I'm just telling you that the maybe nothing

can help me approach isn't going to work.

It's time to change to a different approach. So there's three more past that.

We talked a little bit on Monday about maybe something can help me.

The maybe something can help me approach is the people, when I was in college,

I worked for a while in a work-study job in the computer lab.

I was pretty good with word processing programs and Microsoft Word.

And back then there was one called WordPerfect.com.

And everybody had, nobody had personal computers yet. This is the late 80s.

Nobody could afford them and they weren't in everybody's homes yet.

So you'd go to the computer lab at school and type your term papers and your

research projects and all that, print them out.

And there was always somebody that couldn't figure the software out.

And so we had a work-study job.

I was the guy that would load the printers and change the cartridges and then walk around.

And if somebody had trouble with the software, they deleted their project somehow

or they couldn't figure out why the bold font wouldn't turn off or whatever.

I was the guy that would go around and help you figure out what was happening

and get your paper working better so you could get your work done.

And there was always the person who just, they didn't want to know how to operate

the software. They just wanted to get the work done.

They just wanted the hack that like, do the quick thing, just show me which

command to hit, control alt four or whatever, and just get this thing done. I don't care.

I don't want, I don't want to learn more. I don't want to go deeper.

I just want the hack. I want to get this job done.

Okay. And that's what the maybe something can help me approach does.

It's that Dan Harris, 10% happier idea. Like, I don't want to know the science.

I don't want to ask deep questions. I just want to figure out how to get through

this day and get to tomorrow.

I just want to figure out how to get my wife a little bit happier.

I just want to figure out how to not be struggling quite so much with anxiety.

I just want a little help, okay? And that's fine. That's a reasonable approach

if you're typing a term paper.

You don't have to know all the keyboard shortcuts to operate Microsoft Word.

You don't have to. You don't have to understand how to format something perfectly

or how to make your document justified or any of those things.

You could just get somebody to come and lean over your shoulder and hit the

right button and get you on your way. That's fine.

But I just I'm here to tell you that there's going to come a problem in your life.

There's going to come a moment in your life when that approach isn't enough.

If you do what we did, if you lose a child.

10% happier, friend, is not enough. Like a little hack to your neuroscience

to make yourself feel a little bit better is not enough.

If your husband has a glioblastoma and you're losing him at 35, it's not enough.

10% happier is not enough. So the consequence to that life of looking for the

shortcut, looking for the hack, trying to just make it a little bit better is

not going to hold up if things get really hard.

And therefore, there's a need for at least one more approach.

And I think two more approaches. is. So let's talk about those now.

We talk about science a lot on the show because I'm a nerd, okay?

I'm a brain surgeon, neuroscientist, worked in the research lab at the Oklahoma

Medical Research Foundation for work that ultimately led to significant advances

in lupus and Sjogren's disease and ulcerative colitis.

A couple of papers that I got to contribute to are still being cited in the

gut health and microbiome world.

Papers about the epidemiology and the the immunology of the bacteria in your

gut and how they contribute to autoimmune diseases like ankylosing spondylitis.

And it turns out that stuff is still being cited, that work is still being used.

So when I say science, it means multiple different things, okay?

And you always hear on the news, like, trust the science has settled and all

that silly stuff that we hear.

Science has never settled, okay? For 400 years, the world thought that Newton

had figured out gravity.

For 400 years, the physicists thought they had it all sorted out.

But then all of a sudden Einstein came along and said, wait a minute,

not just Einstein, but a lot of people said, wait a minute, we can't figure

out the orbits of the planets based on Newton's equations.

They don't quite work. So they were having to make all these mathematical constants

and fudge factors and the numbers to try to make Newton's work match up to what they could measure.

It was fine for apples and baseballs and arrows and calculating how far a cannonball

would fly and all that stuff.

That type of math works for gravity on the surface of the Earth.

But when you got out to stars, or in the 20th century when you started going

down to atoms and electrons and protons, the math didn't work.

And so it took guys like Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg and Albert Einstein

to say, wait, Newton got it right, but his math is really just a model, an imprecise model.

And it works for big things that are close to Earth, but it doesn't work for

really huge things that are millions and billions of miles apart.

And it doesn't work for tiny little things, little atoms.

And so it's not enough. It's not quite a good enough approach.

So when I say science is settled, when you hear on the news that somebody says

that climate science is settled or vaccine science is settled or this science

or that science is settled,

you should always be aware that always means that somebody is trying to convince

you of something for political or business purposes.

If they say the science is settled, that usually means they're trying to get

you to do what they say or buy what they're selling.

By using science with a capital S as a synecdoche to say, hey,

all these smart people have figured this out and you need to just accept it, okay?

But that's not what I'm talking about when I say I want you to develop an approach

that says maybe science can help me.

That's not the way I'm using the word. When I talk about science in the context

of this show, unless I make it clear that I'm talking about something else,

I'm talking about developing a practice and a discipline of using the scientific method,

the scientific approach to your life. Well, what's the scientific method?

You probably, I'm sure you learned it in school at some point.

The scientific method says you observe something. You see an apple falling out of a tree.

You see that thing happen and with your own eyes, you see it and what happens.

There is a phenomenon at play. So understand, you didn't create the phenomenon.

You just discovered it. You just noticed it, okay? You saw this thing happening.

In your life, you see yourself struggling in a certain way. You see yourself

needing to perform differently.

You see yourself having the same old habits over and over.

You see your relationship failing the same way. You see yourself having been

stuck in grief or not able to overcome this addiction.

You see that happening. You observe that phenomenon.

You didn't necessarily create it. Maybe it just came along in your life,

but you're observing it now.

And you can watch it and you can study it and you can see that thing is real.

So Newton notices the apple fall.

And then the next question is, you begin to formulate a hypothesis about how that thing works.

You study it, you observe it first, and then you study it.

You develop a hypothesis and you say, hey, maybe this is happening because X, Y, or Z.

Maybe this is occurring. Maybe I can't break out of this. Maybe I can't seem

to change this because, cause.

But then a lot of times we get stuck there and we decide, okay,

I can't deal with this because I'm ADHD.

I can't deal with this because I'm born into this family and everybody in my family has this habit.

And I can't deal with this because I got raped when I was nine.

And people that go through that kind of trauma just can't get better.

So we abort the process and we become incredibly incurious about finding a path

forward because we settle for the blame or the understanding of what happened to us.

Please hear me, friend. I'm not saying that you need to accept responsibility

for something that happened to you.

I'm just saying that once you understand what happened and you see it clearly,

then the branch point comes in.

Do I want to make this better or do I want to find a place to lay the blame?

Do I want to make this better or do I want to find a place to build community

of people around me telling me that it's okay and it's not my fault and they

understand why I'm staying the the way that I'm staying.

A good scientist doesn't stop at the observation and the formulation of hypothesis states.

A good scientist says, okay, let's test this out.

Let's run some experiments to see if I'm right that this is happening because

of a certain thing, or I can fix it by doing this certain thing. Let's run some tests.

Let's run some experiments and try to sort this out.

And so the scientific method says, okay, we observe, we form a hypothesis,

we run experiments, And what do we do then?

We review and critically evaluate our data, our results.

We don't just run the experiment, and then if the experiment doesn't bear out

what we thought, we just dig our heels in further to the hypothesis and discard the data.

And that's what's happening a lot here. Here, I'll just give you an example.

Evolutionary biology and climate science are two good examples of this.

This is not a political podcast. I'm just telling you, I've looked at the numbers.

I've looked at the data, not just what the media says, and you should do the same thing.

If you're interested in knowing what the truth is, because the media is not

going to tell you what the truth is because they have an agenda, okay?

But if you look at the data of what evolutionary biology has produced,

you look at the data of what climate science has produced, it's not what you're being told.

The truth is not what you're being told. And so what happens then is these scientists

who have an agenda, they've got grant money, they've got promotions,

they've got a political environment that says, if you don't agree with this

theory that you're going to be out and not in, you're not going to get promoted,

you're not going to get on TV, you're not going to get to write the books,

you're not going to get to be famous, you're not going to get elected,

you're not going to get to hold on to power if you don't hold this line,

this ideology, this belief system, because we have an agenda.

If you have a life where your science stops and gets laid at the feet of the

agenda, then here's what happens.

And I'm talking not now about climate, I'm not now talking about evolution.

I'm talking about your life, friend.

If you say, I think I'm the way that I am because of my parents,

my trauma, my past, my ADHD, my neurodiversity, my whatever,

my anxiety disorder, my Enneagram score.

And therefore, even if I see evidence that I could change it by taking responsibility

and doing something different with my life,

I would rather go back and dig my heels into understanding where I came from

and making everybody else be responsible for that.

That's not a scientific approach. We have slurped back down.

We've let gravity pull us back down to maybe something or maybe nothing can help me.

And this is where the scientific approach is gonna set you free, okay?

Good scientist has a hypothesis of how to explain or how to fix the issue that they've observed.

They run the experiments and when the data suggests that they need to revise

the hypothesis, wait a minute, maybe I'm not stuck because of this,

that, or them, or those, or then.

Maybe I'm stuck because I haven't chosen to take a step forward.

Maybe I'm stuck because I need to change my hypothesis. The idea was wrong.

The data don't bear it out.

So one of the consequences to the scientific approach then, friend,

might be that you have to change.

It might be that the data, when you really investigate what's going on,

the answer to why you're stuck might be that you keep doing what you've been

doing, so you keep getting what you've been getting.

That what got you here, you keep saying, I want to keep doing what got me here,

but I want a different result. That's crazy.

You would say the same thing for anybody. You've got to make some changes if

you want to see some changes.

So the scientist, the good scientist who's practicing a good scientific method

is going to say, I've investigated, I've observed this phenomenon,

I've developed a hypothesis for why it's so, or what could potentially make

it different. I've run the experiments.

I've needed to revise my hypothesis because the data didn't bear out what I

thought they would. I thought I could blame it all on mom.

It turns out some of it's my fault. I'll tell you a personal story real quick.

I've told this before on the podcast, but a few years ago, Lisa and I were deeply wounded.

I'm talking about a deep existential emotional wound that happened.

We were in a sort of a business transaction with a close family member.

That's not a good idea sometimes, by the way. We were in a situation where there

was some financial stuff going

on between a very close family member and this person, my entire life,

had been the one person that I thought, I really thought, always told the truth,

always did the right thing.

Never in a second of my entire life had I ever seen this person not be the one

to hold the standard and do the hard thing and tell the truth and be willing

to take a lump if they deserved it and just always be willing to be responsible

for what was the truth. In fact, they had been famous for.

In our heritage and some previous dealings that people would do things for this

person because they knew the level of integrity and honesty.

If that person said, this is how it's going to go, that's how it went.

So we were in this financial transaction with that person.

And we realized one day as we investigated that why it didn't seem to be working

out the way we wanted, we realized that person told us something that wasn't

true, that they misled us, that they said one thing and And the truth was another thing.

And it cost us not only a couple of hundred thousand dollars,

but it cost us this deep wound because it was kind of like the subtitle of my

second book. I've seen the interview.

The subtitle is Faith, Doubt, and the Things We Think We Know.

And what I figured out is when something that you thought you knew turns out

to be untrue, that's really almost harder than something that you saw coming.

Like it's a harder thing to grapple with when you thought one thing and something

else turned out to be true.

And so we had this scientific approach here where we said, okay,

we have a hypothesis that this business deal is going to go this particular

way because this person can be counted on. This person always tells the truth.

And that ain't necessarily so. That person lied to me. And I was really,

for months after that, I was struggling.

I was almost unmoored a little bit. Like this person, the one I always put my

faith in, he called themselves a strong believer in the Lord,

always did the right thing.

I'd seen them take huge hits before because of standing on truth and their word,

even when it didn't work out the way they wanted.

And so they took responsibility and got hurt by it because they had to do the

right thing. And in this case, they had not done the right thing by us. They told us a lie.

And it just devastated me. And I'll tell you, I don't go around saying that

God speaks to me in audible voices very often. I am not a charismatic person.

But that night, in my bed, as clear as you're hearing my voice,

I heard the Lord say to me, Lee, that thing that happened, that thing that hurt

you, that was their fault.

It was not your fault that they lied to you. You didn't deserve that.

You didn't ask for it. You did everything right in this transaction.

You followed the agreement. You did exactly what you said you would do. And they told you a lie.

They treated you unfairly. They were not honest with you.

It's not your fault. But if you wake up tomorrow and you let that mess up how

you move forward, if you let that make you bitter, if you let that make you disrespectful,

if you let that make you become an untrusting person, that will be your fault.

What they did, not your fault. What happened yesterday was not your fault.

But now the truth truth, and what you do tomorrow is up to you.

It is your responsibility to do it right going forward. If you're still hurt

by that, if you're still buried under it tomorrow, that's your fault.

If you let yourself make bad decisions because of a bad feeling,

if you do a bad operation from a bad feeling, it's your fault at that point.

Listen, friend, that doesn't sound like a very compassionate teaching, but it is.

It's the best doctoring I can give you. If somebody did something to you in the past that hurt you.

If you went through something, you lost somebody, somebody was unfair to you,

somebody was unkind to you, somebody was abusive to you, and you just have to

come to this place where you hear me say, and a proxy for God's voice, I'm not him,

but he'll say this to you because he loves you. He'll say, that wasn't your fault.

What happened to you when you were nine or what happened to you last week?

That person did that thing to you, that situation that that you didn't want,

you didn't ask for happen, it wasn't your fault.

And it's right that you're feeling bad. It's right that you're suffering under it a little bit.

But guess what? Now there's a set of tools that you can use to change your mind,

that you can change your arc, that you can revise your hypothesis.

Say, wait a minute, maybe that person isn't as truthful as I always thought.

Maybe sometimes I have to be a little bit more careful, especially in dealing

with people who are close to me, because maybe I just, I had my blinders on.

I thought they were always going to to tell me the truth.

So I didn't even walk into this business deal like I normally would and do my

due diligence because I just assumed that they would tell me the truth.

Maybe I need to be a little bit more careful, not cynical, but more fiduciarily responsible.

Almost made up a new word there, fiduciary.

Maybe I just need to be a little more careful. And then maybe I change my hypothesis

a little bit, run the set of experiments differently, and now I can find something

that's true and a place to put my feet down and a place to move forward.

And so maybe you too, friend, need to hear that.

Maybe it will be your fault if you continue to suffer under this because there

is a world of resource available to you to get better. And better beats blame.

Better beats bitter. Better beats broken.

Okay? Using a scientific approach will help you change the arc of your future life.

And there are consequences to it. Because one of the consequences is you can't

hide under the excuse anymore.

You can't let gravity pull you back down into another approach anymore.

Because if you do so, you're violating multiple of the Ten Commandments.

First of which is refuse to participate in your own demise.

It's time to stop committing self-malpractice. I intended to get through both

of these approaches in one episode, but guess what? It's too long.

We've got to move forward. So we're going to break the third part of this episode

out and do the final approach tomorrow.

Okay. I think it's important enough to have its own episode.

So today we're going to stop with maybe science can help me.

And the whole point of these three now episodes, this three-part episode,

as we finish all in August, is

to say there are multiple approaches approaches to how you run your life.

And there are consequences to them. There are good things that come out of them.

There are challenges that come out of them. And this is a challenge for you.

If you decide to become a real scientist, a real self-brain surgeon,

if you decide to really go all in on this lifestyle of changing your mind so

that you can operate your mind and your brain and your life from a top-down perspective,

using the help and the guidance of your professor, the Holy Spirit,

the great physician, and your friend, Dr.

Lee Warren, the self-brain surgery professor here, then you are going to have

to deal with some consequences of that.

And one of them is you can't stick on your original hypothesis if the data doesn't bear it out.

You've got to be willing to go back and say, maybe I looked at that the wrong

way. Maybe I had the wrong idea.

And maybe I need to revise that to get closer to the truth because we're after

the truth of our own lives.

Please don't live your own life laboring under a set of beliefs that aren't true.

Jesus said, I'm the way and the truth and the life. And I believe that all these

paths forward, if we're honestly seeking truth, that we will find our way towards

opening the door to conversing with him and letting the great physicians show us the path forward.

Okay. But whether or not you believe that, at least say there is something that

is true out there and you're not going to get there by covering your brain up with alcohol,

by numbing yourself to the things that don't feel good, by digging your heels

in on the past is the way I am. I'm stuck that way.

My brain is what it is and I can't change because the truth is you're making

new neurons, you're making new connections between them every second of every

day. You are not stuck with the brain that you have.

You have a purpose and a meaning for your life. Quantum physics makes that very clear.

You're here for a reason, friend. You can change your mind, and you can change

your life, and the approach that you choose has consequences for your good if

you will make that decision to go all in with self-brain surgery.

It's time to get after it, and the good news is you can start today.