Changing Approaches to Go All-In: All-In August #10

Good morning, my friend. Dr. Lee Warren here with you. I'm so excited to be

talking with you on Self-Brain Surgery Saturday.

If you're new around here, I'm a neurosurgeon. I also write books. I do podcasts.

I do all that stuff because I realized that I can take care of only a certain

number of people in the operating room and in my office every year.

Physical brain surgery, physical spine surgery, the stuff we do in the operating room.

There's But all of us are going through hard things in our lives.

All of us are dealing with trauma and tragedy and different places where we

get stuck and different limitations and frustrations in our work and our relationship

and our finances and our business and all these things, areas of life.

Where the big issue comes down to how we view things, how we think about things.

And as I started studying that over the last two or three years,

started realizing that the biggest problem that many of my patients have is

not necessarily their physical issue, you, but how they're approaching things on the mental side.

Not to say that it's all in their heads, but to say that how we decide to attack something mentally,

how we look at it, the perspective we bring to it, really turns out to be one

of the most effective and important ways and one of the most powerful predictors

of how people are going to do.

And so my job is not just to pick up a scalpel and cut out your brain tumor.

My job is also to teach you how you need to equip yourself and think about the

problems going forward, how you need to arm yourself for the life that you're

living, how you overcome,

how you become more resilient, how you find hope when things seem dark,

how you handle hard things, how you break through frustrations and limitations,

how you unlabel yourself when you're carrying limiting stories.

That's my real job here in the School of Self-Brain Surgery.

And right now, we're in the middle of all in August.

We're about a third of the way. It's August 10th. We're a a third of the way through all in August.

This is a time when we said, hey, what got me here won't get me there.

I have this place, this idea, this concept that my life is supposed to be one thing and it's not.

And I keep running into the same reasons why it turns out not to be the way

it should be. I'm held back by the things that have happened.

I can't stop grieving. I can't break out of this problem.

I keep having relationships fail in the same way. I keep reaching for the same

numbing behaviors and anesthetizing myself and waking up tomorrow and paying

a tomorrow tax and not being able to.

Love tomorrow more than I hate what I'm feeling now. And I keep treating bad

feelings with bad operations.

I keep doing all this stuff and I find myself in the same spot over and over.

And I just don't want to end another month and say, yep, here we go again.

It's just like it was before.

I'm ready to make a change. And to do that, we've got to go all in.

So we read Mark Batterson's book. We're reading Mark Batterson's book together, All In.

And Mark Batterson was on the show a couple of weeks ago. And you can go listen

to that episode and learn what it looks like to have an all-in life,

at least as it relates to your faith.

Yesterday, we talked about one of the approaches that people have to life,

and it's this approach of nothing can help me.

We sometimes get to this place where we think we've done everything that we can do.

We think God's given up on us. We think we've done everything.

We've maximized all the things we could try, and we're just out of options,

and nothing's going to help us. We've tried this. We've tried that.

We've tried self-help. We've tried therapy.

We've tried medicine. listen, we've tried support groups, we've tried all this

stuff, and we just find ourselves back in the same place over and over,

and we finally throw our hands up and say, nothing can help me.

And just as a moment of mentioning something that's going on in my life,

this past week was one of those weeks when the schedule just got out of hand.

Everything took longer than it was supposed to.

Nothing went the way it was supposed to. Just one of those weeks when things were difficult.

And so I ended up having to reschedule a bunch of stuff. we had some incredible

podcast guests yesterday that i had to reschedule but one you're not going to

believe a new york times best-selling author that's going to be on the show

we had just an incredible talk lined up going to be coming at you soon it's

going to help her all in august,

One of those weeks when I just felt frustrated and you're like,

man, nothing seems to be going the way it was planned. I don't know what to do.

Nothing can help me. Even I sometimes have those moments of feeling frustrated.

And that was why we talked yesterday about the approach of what to do when you

feel like nothing can help.

Yesterday, we did an episode about the frustration you feel when you think nothing can help you.

And today, I was going to bring you a brand new episode to talk about the other

approaches that you can use. And again, I got to go to the hospital.

So I remember that we talked about this a few weeks ago, okay?

A few weeks ago, I gave you a big overview of the four approaches.

The nothing can help me approach.

The maybe something can help me approach. The maybe science can help me approach.

And the maybe God can help me approach. These are four different approaches.

They're going to be featured heavily. In fact, I'm writing right now the handbook

of self-brain surgery, the new book that hopefully will be coming out late next year.

And in that book we're giving you all the tools, all the operations,

all the philosophy, all the theology, all the background on what cell brain

surgery is, how you can use it in your own life, and some extremely tactical

things that you can do in response to particular problems.

And if you're ready to go all in, that book is going to help you go all in because

you're going to have it in your hand when you say, I'm feeling anxious,

I'm feeling frustrated, I'm feeling stuck, what can I do?

Boom, boom, there's an operation for that. Here's how you do it.

But part of the setup for all those operations is to understand that there are

different approaches that you can use in different times in your life when things

are hard or when things are good and you just want to take it to another level.

You can find that extra gear by changing approaches sometimes.

And so I'm going to give you back this morning those four approaches.

We're going to recover some of the ground from yesterday and look at those previous

conversations around the four approaches.

And then I'm going to break them out for you later in individual episodes as

we go through the rest of all in August.

But today, I got to get after my day job, which I love. I'm so grateful to be

practicing neurosurgery.

I just realized along the way that I have two jobs and I'm equally called to them.

One of my jobs is to handle physical neurosurgical problems,

ruptured discs, brain tumors, brain aneurysms, all these things that happen

that cause pain and limitation in people's lives. And it's the highest honor

of my life other than to be a dad and a husband and a grandfather.

The highest honor of my life is to be able to come alongside you when you've

got a physical problem and help you as your doctor.

But as I studied people who are grieving, people who are going through hard

things and terminal illnesses like glioblastoma, and I ultimately turned that

into my second book, I've seen the end of you.

As I studied how to help people when they're facing that kind of thing that

I can't fix with surgery, over time I realized God was calling me to understand

that there's another part of my calling.

And I'm telling you this just to say that you have a specific and a general calling too.

And sometimes it takes a lot of time in your life to figure out what your calling

exactly is. So I thought my calling was the white coat that says Dr.

Lee Warren neurosurgeon on it. But it's bigger than that. Most things that Jesus

reveals to us over time are bigger than they seem to be on the surface.

And my calling is not just to pick up a scalpel and cut out your brain tumor.

My calling is to help you figure out what's hurting or limiting you and give

you a plan to deal with it.

And I'll be able to do that long after I'm too old to perform neurosurgery anymore. more.

My job on this earth is to help people see the light of hope that's possible

when they smash faith and neuroscience together, to understand what's hurting

or limiting them and what to do about it.

Understand what's hurting or limiting them and a plan to deal with it.

That's what we're here for. That's what self-brain surgery is.

And that's what we're going to get after in just a minute.

But before we start, hey, it's all in August and I want you to gather community around you, okay?

We're having tons of people join us on this journey.

We had downloads of the podcast in 160 countries in the last week, okay?

The world is getting on board with self-brain surgery, and I want you to arm

yourself with community.

So share this episode right now, before you even get into it.

Copy the link, text it to five or 10 friends, a small group of people that you

trust and care about, or people that you could benefit from this training,

and say, Say, hey, go all in with me.

It's time to stop covering the same ground every month.

It's time to stop repeating the same old patterns. What got us here won't get us there.

It's time to break free. It's time to get after it. Let's go all in. So share the episode.

Say, hey, let's do this together. Download it today. Listen today.

Let's try to get 10,000 downloads today, okay?

And it's not because I care about how many people are downloading.

I care about how many lives are changing because they're smashing faith and

neuroscience together, just like you and I are, because we're breaking free.

We are taking command of our mind and having top-down control of our brains.

We're believing that thoughts become things. We are believing that feelings aren't facts.

We are believing that not every thought that pops into our head is true.

We are relentlessly refusing to participate in our own demise.

We're not going to pay tomorrow taxes anymore because we love tomorrow more.

What am I doing? I'm going through the 10 commandments of self-brain surgery.

We're going to recap those again and all in August, us, okay?

Why am I doing that? Because I want you to break free, my friend.

I want you to recognize that you're not just a victim.

You're not just a patient. You're the doctor. You are a performer of self-brain

surgery, whether you like it or not.

And so we might as well have the training to do it right, to use your nervous

system in a way it's designed so that it helps you and doesn't hurt you.

That's why I want you to take a second right now and share this with your friend

because it's time to get after it.

We're going to change our minds and change our lives here on Self-Brain Surgery

Saturday for all in August.

And we're going to start that right now. Good morning, my friend.

I'm Dr. Lee Warren, and I'm your host for some self-brain surgery today.

I am excited to sit down with you this morning and do some self-brain surgery.

I need to get my own head in order. I need to get my thoughts together.

I'm writing a book that's going to help hopefully you and millions of other

people around the world learn how to rewire their brains, brains reorder their

minds and radically transform their lives through the power of self-brain surgery.

And today we're going to learn some ways to deal with difficult situations.

All right, my friend, I am so excited to get after this today with you.

Listen, when you are going through surgical training, they teach you not just

a bunch of different operations.

They don't just teach you how to take out a brain tumor or a ruptured disc or

release a carpal tunnel or resect somebody's bowel or replace a lung or whatever

the particular type of surgery that you're learning is, they don't just teach

you specific operations.

And here on Self-Brain Surgery Saturday, a lot of times I teach you operations

like the lousy attitude lobotomy or different ways to handle anxiety or different

ways to deal with doubt or depression and all those things.

We're going to give you in the new book that the handbook of self-brain surgery,

the whole middle section is a handbook.

And you're going to be able to open that up and say, okay, I'm dealing with

anxiety right now. I'm dealing with grief right now. I'm feeling stuck.

And you're going to be able to just flip to that book to that chapter and learn

an operation that you can do.

Backed by neuroscience, there'll be some references, but the middle part of

that book, the real meat of the book is going to be just, here's the operation.

It's time to stop contemplating this problem and start doing something about it.

And so I am giving you those on self-brain surgery Saturday.

In the coming months, it's going to be a lot of that. Like here's a particular

thing you can do when you're dealing with a particular problem.

But backing up from that, I just want you to remember that you're already a self-brain surgeon.

You are engaging in self-directed neuroplasticity every day,

regardless of whether you do it intentionally or not. Your brain is being formed.

Your mind is shaping and interacting with your brain, whether you do it intentionally or not.

So the question is, as William James said, do we get our nervous system to work

for us or against us? That's the question.

So since that's the question, I just want to make sure that i arm you with everything

that you need to answer that question you want it to work for you right.

So as I started to say a while ago, when you're doing surgical training,

and I'm feeling that my mission is to give you that training since you're already

doing this work, it'd be like if you woke up tomorrow and you were on the bomb

squad and you were actively trying to defuse a bomb that was about to go off,

but nobody had trained you.

Like you're in the middle of it. You're in media race.

You're starting in the middle of the story like a great novel,

and you don't have the training that you need to carry it out.

What's going to happen? The bomb's going to blow up, right? All of us are born

with this incredible quantum supercomputer in our head that connects with our

mind, that connects with God, that influences other people around us and manages

everything about our life.

And yet we're not trained to learn how to operate it properly.

We're in the middle of the action, but we don't have the training to actually

do the self-brain surgery that we're doing, whether we recognize it or not.

And so my job then is to come alongside you and say, hey, you're already doing this job.

Let's give you some tools to do it. And I want to back up.

A couple of days ago, I did an episode when we talked about how self-brain surgery

is not therapy. And today I want to circle back to that just to make sure you're

crystal clear on what I mean by that.

So it's possible that you might get through your life and never have to go see a cardiologist.

You might live your entire life and never require the services of a psychiatrist

or a brain surgeon or a neurologist or a gastroenterologist.

You may not have a particular problem that requires a particular type of physician

or therapist or person to get involved in your life.

You could potentially get through your whole life and not need that.

And in terms of therapy, like there are lots of people, most people probably,

that don't need the services of a professional therapist or counselor.

And so it's quite possible that some of you listening to my voice today never

will actually pay somebody to sit with you as a therapist.

But my contention is this. Self-brain surgery is something that you are doing.

You actively are doing it, as I said before, and therefore you need some training.

So self-brain surgery, this program, this podcast, the books that I write,

the newsletter on Sunday, by the way, if you don't get the newsletter,

please check the newsletter out.

Such a great community, people all over the world reading this newsletter,

communicating, leaving comments.

It's just, it's great. It's my favorite part of the week really is the Sunday

newsletter. So please check it out.

DrLeeWarren.substack.com. If you're not already subscribed, please share it with friends.

Get other people to sign up. We need to grow that and get ready for the next

book launch so more people will find out about the life-saving,

life-transforming power of self-brain surgery.

DrLeeWarren.substack.com. There's a commercial for that.

Check out the newsletter. later. Okay. But my point is this,

you may or may not ever need a therapist, but you are doing self-brain surgery.

And so I want to just make it crystal clear that I am not a therapist.

I'm not trained to sit with you and I'm not trained in psychoanalysis.

I'm not trained in psychotherapy.

I don't have the training and the

skillset of somebody amazing like Gina Berkmeyer or somebody like that.

This information that I'm giving you is not to replace the need for a therapist

if you You need one, and sometimes you do.

There's clearly some circumstances and some situations where you really need

another person to come alongside you who's got some training and some tools

to help you work through some things. That's necessary sometimes.

But at the same time, there are some people that just need to think differently,

need to change their mind about some things, need to learn how to operate the

mind-brain interface more effectively.

All of us are doing that already, so let's get better at it because what got

us here won't get us there.

We've got to change the things that we are doing because what we're doing,

we're getting better at. Those are two of the Ten Commandments.

So I talked a little bit about it in more detail on Thursday.

And I just said, hey, self-brain surgery is not therapy. And so I don't want

you to think that I'm saying that you can replace your therapist with this.

Maybe you can in some ways, but this is not therapy.

This is a set of tools that you can use to enhance your ability to use your

mind to combat negative thinking, feelings that are out of order or out of whack

or improperly valued in your life, habits,

places where you're stuck, things like that.

Learning how to navigate, biopsy your thinking, put some space in between your

thought and your reaction.

Those kinds of things are helpful and they're necessary and you're already doing

this work, so you might as well learn how to do it more effectively. right?

That's the idea. I just wanted to say that. Now, if you are a therapist,

and I'm hearing from many of them, 30 or 40, we're going to develop a certified

coaching program soon that I think will be helpful just to put all this information in one place.

But if you're a therapist and you're using these techniques,

I'd love to hear from you.

I'd love to hear from you and how it's working. I've had lots of people write

in and say, hey, my therapist told me about your book.

We've talked about your podcast. My therapist pointed me towards your show.

That's incredible. And I would love to to know who you are. We'd love to build

a network of like-minded people who can learn from each other.

The point is that self-brain surgery is a technique, a set of tools to practice

what you're already doing in a more effective way.

And therapy is a relationship that you have with another person to help you

understand things that you're thinking, feeling, experiencing,

and doing, and finding better ways to do those things that are going to be helpful in your life.

Now, if you're a therapist using these techniques, you're a therapist taking care of patients.

The only thing I would comment on, because again, I'm not a therapist,

but I would suggest if we agree that the Christian worldview.

Or even if you're not a Christian, the modern 21st century worldview as enabled

by quantum physics is to say that there is a purpose to your life and that you

do have a choice in the things that happen to you.

Your attention and ability to look at the world and make decisions about how

you're going to behave and how you're going to think and how you're going to

feel does impact your reality and it does impact your generations and it does

impact the people around you.

The alternative to that is the reductionist determinist worldview that says

you're just a bunch of neurons and everything about you is determined by the

electrical state of the activity of the cells in your brain and you don't really

have a choice or a will or a purpose anyway.

So your only job then is to just try to figure out what makes you happy and

try to pursue that and find your truth and do your thing, because in the end,

it doesn't really matter.

We're just a bunch of neurons. So my only comment to therapists would be that

if you trained in a place that is not a Christ-centered,

Christian worldview type training place,

then I would say scour your worldview and scour your training and your techniques

and your modalities that you use and look for places where you were taught to

think about people's problems from a reductionist or materialist worldview.

Even if nobody ever said it out loud, if the aim of your therapy is to point

people to the past, to rip the scabs off, look at trauma, sit with their pain,

blame somebody for the issue, that kind of stuff, then I would suggest that

you'll have a better success with your therapy if you can direct people towards

the future because the path to a healthy and happy future does not often deter.

Back to things that make us sad. Yes, we need insight. Yes, we need understanding.

But we don't need blame or bitterness.

We need to get better. And how do we get better? What's interesting, 21st century science,

all of the good research says people are happier when they don't focus on their

problems as much, when they focus on the things about the future,

the community and building relationships and forgiveness and thanksgiving and

gratitude and all that stuff actually is what makes you happy.

Not resolving some trauma from the past, not blaming your parents and cutting

them out of your life and all that stuff that we see happening now.

The secular worldview says that other people are responsible for accommodating your feelings.

And the Christian worldview says we are to submit our feelings.

We are to submit our thinking. We are to submit our will to him.

We'll delight ourselves in him and he'll give us the desires of our heart that he will forgive.

He will heal. He will restore. He will redeem.

He will repair. pair, not us making other people be accountable.

We talk about justice a lot in the 21st century, and the Bible says in Micah

6.8 that our job related to justice is to do it in regards to other people.

Micah 6.8 says, what does the Lord require of you? To do justice,

to love mercy, and to walk humbly before God and man.

What does that mean? It doesn't mean that you go around looking for ways to

apply your idea of justice to other people in their situations to make people

behave in certain ways. That's not what biblical justice is.

Biblical justice is about your behavior.

It's do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly.

So when it's up to you then, you do it right. You behave properly.

You act fairly. You behave justly. But when it's done to you,

You don't demand justice. You love mercy.

Why? Because the biblical worldview says much has been done on your behalf.

You've been forgiven of much. Christ died for you, even though you didn't deserve

it. He's given you eternal life, even though we don't deserve it.

And so we must therefore then be lenient and gracious and compassionate to those who do things to us.

The 21st century says, no, you better extract all the justice and payback that

you can get from other people because you deserve it.

You need reparation. You need people to acknowledge your feelings and all of that stuff.

And that's fine. You can believe that and think that if you want to.

My only point about this is, what does the data actually say?

We're good scientists, remember?

We're scientists here. And so on Self-Brain Surgery Saturday,

I want to remind you that science doesn't say, decide what you believe and then make the data fit it.

The science says, we come up with an idea, we test it, we constantly revise

the idea based on the data, and ultimately we come down to what we call scientific laws,

where we know because we have studied and we're honest with the results,

what the truth is. We pursue truth.

My contention is that whatever truth you're pursuing, if you're looking for

truth in science, if you're looking for truth in psychology,

if you're looking for truth in your life, if you're looking for truth in relationships,

that pursuit of truth, an honest pursuit of truth, won't lead you to your truth.

It will lead you to the truth.

And that truth has a name. It's not a thing. It's a person. And the person is Jesus. us.

That's what's going to help you become healthier and feel better and be happier.

So if you're a therapist, scour your worldview, scour your therapeutic techniques,

and find ways that you may have allowed some secular worldview or reductionist

determinist ideology to creep into your therapy.

And I think you'll start thinking more clearly about how do I get my patient

to really become healthier and feel better and be happier.

And it's not going to be by using a worldview that's inconsistent with my Christian worldview,

by morphing my not Christianity to the world, but rather make the world submit

their knee to the therapy that you learned from the king, from the good physician,

the great physician. Does that make sense?

Okay. Again, self-brain surgery, not therapy. Today we're going to talk about

what we call approaches. In surgical training.

We learn a variety of different ways to get the same job done.

When I was in Pittsburgh as a resident, we had 17 to 20 or more different neurosurgeons

who brought their cases to Allegheny General.

And so I had the great blessing of getting to operate with a tremendous number

of people who had trained at different programs all over the world,

from Japan to Germany to all over the United States.

I had professors that had trained in different places and with each of those

different places, they had different ways of doing things and approaches and

ways of looking at and thinking about neurosurgical problems.

And so I learned four or five or six different ways to solve almost every issue.

You. And when we talk about surgery, one of the important things is not just

do you know how to use the saw and do you know how to retract the brain and take the tumor out?

It's not just that. It's do you know how you can take a particular approach

to do the least amount of damage to be the least invasive way that you can to

position the patient safely so that you know you'll be able to see what you

need to see but not hurt the patient or have them in an awkward position that's

going to produce some problem for them.

That you're basically designing an approach to get to the problem and treat

it and leave the fewest traces of your presence as possible.

And so sometimes, for example, a tumor close to your brainstem,

you might be able to approach it by making an incision above the ear and retracting

the temporal lobe up and going that direction.

You might be able to approach it by making an incision below and behind the

ear and going through the mastoid

bone and getting to the tumor from the underside of the access point.

So, there may be three or four different ways that you can go,

all of which would require a different sort of thought process about how you

position the patient and the things that you're going to encounter,

arteries and veins and nerves and different parts of the brain that you may have to encounter.

The approach matters, okay?

And I remember, here's a good example.

We had three of our professors, Dr. Maroon, Dr. Abla, no, I'm sorry, Dr.

Maroon, Dr. Oliver Smith, and Dr. Begay, that did their simple spine procedures,

so ruptured discs or small laminectomies, things like that.

They did them with the patient in the lateral position, so the patient lying

on their side, and we would sit and hold your arms out in front of you and work

on the patient's back in front of you, and that was the way they preferred to do that procedure.

Major, and their thought process about it was that the blood would run away

and wouldn't cloud the field, and you'd be able to see better,

and the patient was more comfortable, and it was easier to position,

all that stuff was their idea.

And most of the residents that I trained with, and most of the other professors

thought that the lateral position for spine surgery was outdated.

It was overly taxing because you had to hold your arms up in the air for a long

time. It was very physically demanding, couldn't see as well. It was awkward.

And most of us hated that lateral position. We absolutely hated it. But guess what?

I learned it. I learned the nuances of it.

I learned from those three masters of the technique how to get the patient safely

there and when it was appropriate and how it was appropriate and what to do.

And I thought I would never use it. I remember saying to my colleague,

Max Medaria, co-resident, I hate that position. I will never use that position.

I am never going to do that in my practice. I can't stand it.

And I remember Mac saying something similar. Well.

Ten years later, I found myself in Alabama and I had a patient who unfortunately

had a huge ruptured disc, but he weighed 600 pounds.

He was morbidly obese and there was no way we could safely get him in the prone

position, the face down position where we typically do spine surgery.

We just couldn't safely do it. We couldn't move him.

We would hurt each other trying to get him in the position and it would be too

hard on his body. but he had to have surgery because he couldn't move his legs

and he couldn't control his bladder.

And he was a young guy. We had to take care of him, but we couldn't do it in

the standard prone position.

Guess what? I remembered that I had extensive training in the lateral position for spine surgery.

And that turned out to be the only way we could safely get this guy operated,

was to use that lateral position. It was hard. It was inconvenient.

It was challenging, But it was the only approach to that particular patient's

problem that would have safely worked for him.

And I was able to do it because even though I didn't like that approach,

even though I failed to see the appropriateness of it and the nuance of it and

the potential value of it back when I was a resident and learning it, I did learn it.

So I learned an approach, even though I didn't recognize its value at the time,

and I've only used it once in my entire practice, and it was helpful to me.

And so my point about telling you that story is this, there are multiple approaches

to how you can manage your mind and your brain and your life, multiple approaches.

If you go to a therapist, there's multiple schools of thought,

multiple different types of psychoanalysis, multiple different types of tools

that you can learn from them.

If you go to a pastor, there's multiple different strategies,

how they might point you towards finding a way to feel better.

And if you come to self-brain surgery, I want you to know that there are multiple

approaches to how we can do this work to help ourselves manage our minds,

because you can't change your life until you change your mind.

So I just want to say that if you're not a Christian or not a believer,

I want you to understand that.

Modern neuroscience has absolutely validated von Neumann and Heisenberg and Bohr,

their ideas that quantum physics has shown us that man has a purpose because

part of your role as a person is that you get to change the reality of everything

that you observe and interact with.

You have a choice that determines your destiny, and things change when you choose

to think about this thing or interact with that thing or do this or say that.

Thoughts become things. Recently, we did an episode about the commandment of

how thoughts become things, and we talked about the fact that thoughts do become

things, and I proved that to you with some examples.

But now we're going to talk about the physics of how thoughts become things.

It's fascinating. fascinating 21st century research into light and matter and how they interact.

And we actually now start to think, a lot of scientists are thinking that we

now start to understand how the mind interacts with the brain on a quantum actual physics level.

So we are going to learn that there are multiple approaches and you don't have

to believe in God or be a Christian to understand and learn how to use some of these approaches.

All you need to do is to know that the approaches do work and that there's a

time and a place for using each of them.

There's basically four approaches.

I've talked about this a little bit before. There's basically four approaches

for how people think about their mind and the way that it impacts their life.

One of them is the sort of pessimistic view that nothing can help me.

I'm sad. I'm sick. I'm stressed. I'm stuck.

Nothing's going to help me. I've tried and tried and tried. I get this email every week.

Dr. Warren, I've done this. I've done that. I've been to therapy.

I've taken the medicine. I've done everything and nothing helps. I can't stop. I'm stuck.

I can't get over this thing that happened. This massive thing has just wiped

me out. It's never going to be okay. And nothing's going to help me.

And so I would just submit to you today, that is an approach that you can take

to your life. You can take this approach from a Christian standpoint or from

an atheist standpoint, by the way.

If you're a skeptic, an atheist, total nonbeliever, or a Christian,

you can come to a point in your life where you say, I've tried everything.

It doesn't work. I'm this way because my dad was that way. I got this genetically.

I can't do much about it. This event happened, and it changed my life,

and I can't ever be happy again, and I'm just waiting until the day I die,

and then it'll all be over. or if you're a Christian, thank God in the future,

there's going to be an opportunity for me to have a different life.

But right now it really sucks. And I'm stuck with this misery and pain and it's

never going to get better. So one approach is nothing can help me.

And remember the lesson from quantum physics that how we attend to things and

the way that we think about things fixes them in time. That's the quantum Zeno effect.

The more we look at something from a particular point of view,

the more true it becomes and the more hardwired it becomes through Hebb's law

that neurons that fire together wire together.

The more attention density we pay to it, the more real it becomes.

So if you believe, my friend, if your approach to this matter of how you can

live your life is that nothing can help you, that's going to come true.

You're going to find out that what got you here won't get you there and you just can't change it.

You're going to find out that you've gotten really good at not having a very good life.

And so if that's your approach, you're going to be stuck. You feel stuck and

you're going to be stuck. And so one approach is nothing can help me.

I hope that's not the approach you choose. I hope that you wouldn't be listening

to a self-brain surgery podcast if that was your approach. I really hope so. Pray for you.

Another approach is, hey, maybe something can help me.

Maybe there's something out there that can help me. Those people,

a little bit more hopeful, and they find themselves sometimes in the 10% happier

mode that Dan Harris talks about.

Now, if you haven't heard me talk about the 10% happier book before,

I talk about it a little bit in my book, Hope is the First Dose.

But Dan Harris was an ABC news anchor, famous guy, and he had a mental breakdown

on air, went through a significant nervous breakdown, went crazy in the middle

of a broadcast and realized that his mind was completely out of control.

He was anxious. He was worried. He was using drugs to try to cope. He was numbing himself.

And he just, his life was messed up because of that. And he wasn't doing well.

And he didn't turn to God.

He didn't become a Christian. He didn't find this perfect worldview that led him out of darkness.

What he found was that he could take elements of Eastern meditation,

and he noticed that had been shown with functional MRI to change people's brains

enough to get a little bit more resilient and calm their thinking.

And he learned everything.

De-spiritualized form of meditation where you just develop this little pause

between stimulus and response.

When something hurts, when you have an anxious thought, when you have a negative

thought pop into your head, you can biopsy it is the term that I would use.

He didn't use that term, but you can grab that thought and say,

wait a second, is this really true?

Do I really have to react to this right now? Can I choose a different response

instead of my reactionary one?

And he learned that just learning to put that little gap in there was enough

to feel a little little bit better.

And that was enough for him. He was able to overcome his panic and anxiety by

becoming, as he called it, 10% happier.

And I would just submit to you, that's a great approach. If your problem is

just intermittent struggling with anxiety or runaway thoughts or a little bit

of panic or something like that,

then that 10% happier mode of just putting that little discipline of space between

your stimulus and response and your thought is reasonable and it works.

So maybe something can help me. Maybe this spiritual, de-spiritualized meditation thing can help me.

That's a valid approach for some problem. But here's the issue.

If you go through something truly massive, if you go through a real massive

thing, 10% is not enough.

You need to become significantly happier. And that's why science can help.

The third approach is, hey, maybe science can help me.

And there are some people that aren't ever going to attribute to God anything.

They don't believe in God. They don't know for sure what they think or feel

about And they just want to know what the science has to say.

And that's where this podcast is safe for you, friend.

Even if you're a skeptic, even if you don't agree with me that God created you

for a purpose and all of that, you can come here and find out what the science is saying.

And the good news is 21st century neuroscience is matching up with 20th and

21st century quantum physics to say that, guess what?

Heisenberg was onto something when he said that how we pay attention to the

world and how we interact with it changes the reality of it.

Which means that our intention and our effort and our attention to the problems

and issues in our lives and the people around us makes a difference. We have a purpose.

We have some control over some

of the things that happen. We're not just products of our neurons firing.

We're not just built from the ground up of determined steps of evolutionary

accidents that are going to lead us to inevitability in our behavior.

We have a chance to interact with it. And the truth is, science is showing that.

So even if you don't ascribe it to the work of God, you can decide,

even from a purely atheistic standpoint, you can decide that quantum physics

tells you that you do have some say in your life and that there is a purpose for your life.

And the purpose of it is to empower some of the choices that you make to improve

things for yourself and those around you.

That's purpose. Okay. Viktor Frankl said, suffering stops being suffering when

you give it purpose. And so you are a co-creator of your own destiny.

That's true from physics.

It's true from modern psychological research. It's true from functional imaging research.

And the fact is, an approach to your life that involves maybe science can help

me will produce significant improvements in your quality of life if you allow it to.

You're not stuck. You don't have to be sad or stressed or stuck forever because

of something that happened because you can change it by changing how you pay

attention to it because your trauma isn't the thing that happened.

It's your response to it.

And that's the good news for all of us who have been through trauma or tragedy

or massive things or just drama after drama.

Science can help you learn how to pay attention to it in a different way and

change the reality of your response, which will then change the reality of your

life. That's significantly happier.

But the last approach I think is the best one. The infinitely happier approach

is when you recognize that you were made on purpose for a purpose by a great

physician who is the guy who invented quantum physics and neurons and synapses and all those things.

And God gave you meaning and purpose, and he gave you an ability to use your

mental force to communicate with him and to submit to him and using your mental

force to control and renew your mind.

And you're not stuck with the brain you have because it's changing constantly

and you have a say in how that happens.

And it works best when you submit that will to your creator,

who's your counselor, your wise professor,

your person in your mind, who's helping you, reminding you, teaching you, growing you,

wants to spend time with you, a God who likes you, a God who loves you,

a God who designed you for a purpose to glorify him and enjoy him forever and

help other people find him.

And whatever you've been through, that thing can become the inciting event.

And changing the arc of your life for good. And that's hard to see.

And it's hard to say in the early days after the massive thing.

But remember, the other lesson from quantum physics is that time isn't the whole story.

And that you can know that if you continue to attend to this as if it's a holy

gift of something new in your life that really hurts and it's ripped off the

topsoil and something deep has been planted in you.

And you know now that your life has a purpose of carrying that new wound and

the growing thing that's inside of it that eventually will turn into something

that is helpful to you and helpful to other people at the very same time that

it's devastating and will never go away.

Because if it were just devastating and would never go away,

then the pains and difficulties and traumas that we go through in our lives

would truly be overwhelming to us.

But the message of John 10 10 is that the thief comes to steal and kill and

destroy and life does that to us and it hurts us.

But Jesus said, but I came that you might have abundant life.

And so we have a God who has given us the ability, the necessity of going through

suffering and also being able to walk and live in abundance.

And that, my friend, can produce the infinite balance to that infinitely hard

thing that can produce some equipoise or even happiness again in your life.

If you learn to change your mind and change your life through the best approach,

I think the fourth approach is the best approach.

And we're going to learn specific operations in coming weeks.

This is a conversation today about approaches. coaches.

My question for you is, do you want to give up at the outset and say, nothing can help me?

Or do you want to settle for 10% and say, maybe something can help me and I'll

just learn some techniques to breathe differently or think differently and I'll get a little happier?

Or do you want to be significantly happier? And if you want to be significantly

happier, you got to get science on your side. You got to know what the data is.

You got to learn how to study and revise your hypothesis and change your mind

when the evidence shows you that you haven't been following the truth.

And if you want to be infinitely happier, you've got to be able to get to that

quantum reality that you can have suffering and abundance at the same time.

And that's what we're after today, my friend.

We're here to change our minds and we're here to change our lives.

And science is on your side.

God is on your side. Dr. Lee Warren is on your side.

I want you to become healthier and feel better and be happier.

And the good news is you can start today.

I hope that was helpful to you. I hope you'll share it with your friend.

If you haven't read All In by Mark Batterson yet, please, it's the textbook

for this month. You'll get so much out of it, I promise you.

It will help you change your mind. And my book, Hope is the First Dose,

is the second textbook of this month. It gives you the basics of self-brain

surgery, where we started.

It helps you understand what to do when the worst things happen,

when the massive things happen, like when we lost our son.

It gives you a treatment plan for being ready for those events and how you're

going to handle them, because unfortunately, it's not just one massive thing

that most of us face in our lives. It's multiples.

But it's also a treatment plan for how you put your life together in a way that

creates resilience and always helps you land on hope so you can move forward

no matter what's going on.

And Hope is the First of Us will help you. Please read it and share it with your friends.

Read All In by Mark Batterson and get ready for tomorrow. We're going to have

a little bit of Theology Sunday tomorrow as we move into the new week.

So we get ready to go all in for the rest of the month. We're going to touch

on the faith a little bit tomorrow, and I want you to be ready to change your

mind and change your life, and be ready with me to start today.