Code Red for Emotional Emergencies

Good morning my friend, I hope you're doing well. I am excited to be with you today, Dr. Lee Warren here with another episode of Self Brain

Surgery, the Dr. Lee Warren Podcast.

We're going to help you change your mind so you can change your life today through the

harnessing the power of neuroscience and faith smashed together to find some real traction

and how we can move forward when life gets hard because it will.

Today is wildcard Wednesday. It's one of my favorite days of the week because we can talk about anything we want.

And today what we're going to talk about is something super important.

When you hit that massive thing, when you find yourself in the emotional emergency.

When I'm in the hospital and there's an emergency, somebody calls out overhead, there's a code

red, somebody's having a heart attack, a cardiac arrest, a stroke, and the whole team goes

running to take action to try to save that person's life.

And somebody is responsible for grabbing the crash cart. We have a cart that's got everything we might need to handle an emergency.

All the drugs, the supplies to intubate someone, all the stuff we might need to stop bleeding,

to restore circulation.

We have a crash cart that's full of everything we might need in the case of that code red

emergency. And today, I want to give you a sort of crash cart for an emotional emergency.

This is going to be a short episode.

We're going to get right into it in just a second because we're going to help you understand

of what to do when that massive thing happens. There's gonna be some significant early problems

that you're gonna have to face. I'm gonna give you some of my insight after losing a son.

And when you face them, you need a set of tools that you've rehearsed and practiced,

just like we do when we do drills for codes, when we take training for trauma,

when we have the advanced cardiac life support training, we're ready.

We drill it, we prep it, we rep it, and we make sure we're ready.

And I want you to be ready, too, because you're going to have some trouble in your life. Jesus promises that.

It's not to be morbid or negative. It's just to say, what are you going to do when something happens

so that you won't be wiped out by it,

so that you won't be a casualty of the massive thing, but rather, you'll be ready for it

and able to proceed forward in your life to find hope, find faith, find your footing,

and continue to move forward and make progress.

That's what we're after today, because you can't change your life until you change your mind.

I have one question for you, my friend.

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 for the neuroscience of how your mind works, smashes together with faith,

and everything starts to make sense. Are you ready to change your life?

Well, this is the place, Self-Brain Surgery School.

I'm Dr. Lee Warren, and this is where we go deep into how we're wired, take control of our thinking, and find real hope.

This is where we learn to become healthier, feel better, and be happier.

This is where we leave the past behind and transform our minds.

This is where we start today.

Are you ready? This is your podcast. This is your place. This is your time my friend. Let's get after it.

Music.

We're hanging out in the hospital. We're doing our thing. I'm in the office.

We're seeing an elective patient. We're on a normal day.

Maybe you're in the cafeteria. Maybe you're on a break. You're just hanging out.

You're doing your thing. You're doing your job.

And all of a sudden, overhead, the operator says, code red, emergency room.

Code red, room 509. Code red, fourth floor.

And if you're on the code team, you drop what you're doing immediately and you run to the place

where somebody else is in desperate need.

Somebody's in dire straits an artery's been blocked a stroke is occurring Something's been cut open. There's bleeding. There's bowel obstruction. There's there's cardiac arrest. There's trauma

There's something and you've got to go. It's your job to know what to do,

When the emergency happens and if you're on the code team You might be responsible for grabbing the crash card the crash card has all the gear on it,

Everything we might need the medicine the intubation supplies the bandages the stuff that we might need in an absolute emergency the epinephrine.

Right, if you're on that code team You are gonna drop what you're doing and you're gonna run to this point of the problem and you're gonna try to save that person,

Because that's your job, right?

Now friend I Got to tell you I'm shocked at how much in life we spend time preparing for

If you think about 2020 and the COVID-19 pandemic, and all of a sudden you couldn't get toilet

paper and all that stuff, that created a huge resurgence in what we often call prepping.

We used to hear about preppers and we thought they were nuts, right? They're nutters.

Like, in the United States, are we really ever going to have some kind of emergency

where we need a warehouse full of toilet paper, really? I never thought that would happen, but it did happen.

When you found yourself unprepared, it was sort of terrifying, wasn't it?

I remember waiting in line at Target to get the one package of toilet paper we were allowed to buy.

It was kind of uncomfortable, because in the United States, we're used to having access to

everything we need all the time. We're not used to dealing with shortages and resource problems.

Now, I saw this in Iraq, where there really were people who live every day of their lives in a

resource problem, where they don't have everything they need. And in the medical system in Iraq,

We had shortages of blood and supplies and instruments sometimes because we had more casualties than we could take care of,

And so it taught me the lesson that I've had to learn a few different times in different contexts in my life,

That it is incredibly wise to have a plan and to be prepared for when something happens.

And so we prepare for having flat tires. We have a spare. We have a jack we train ourselves

We know where the points are on the car where we can safely jack the car up, right?

Hopefully your dad or somebody taught you that, you know how to change a tire,

you at least know the number to call for roadside assistance,

or you carry fix-a-flat in your car, you have some sort of plan for what you're gonna do

if you're stranded on the side of the road.

That's why you carry jumper cables in case you or somebody else needs a jump, right?

In Wyoming, we always carried space blankets and water bottles because there's a real chance

that you might get stranded in a snow drift.

It happened. Snow blew over the highway sometimes and you'd be just on your way home

and all of a sudden you're gonna be stuck on the road for a little while until somebody clears it

and it's 30 below outside.

That really happens in some places.

And so we had to be prepared.

So you're prepared for these kinds of vehicular emergencies.

You're prepared, you learn CPR oftentimes, so that if somebody has a heart attack,

you're ready to help resuscitate them, right?

So you know some basic life support. If you have children, you know how to hopefully

perform the Heimlich maneuver, clear an airway, or do something to save your child if they're choking, right?

We have all these things that we prepare for.

We prepare for financial emergencies by having some savings, hopefully,

so that if there's some problem, we won't be in dire straits, right?

We keep extra batteries for the flashlight in case of a power outage.

You see where I'm going.

But what do we do to prepare for emotional emergencies?

We don't. We often just don't. We go through our lives with this sense that everything's gonna be okay,

and everything's gonna work out, And when it's not, sometimes it wrecks us.

The subtitle of my second book, I've seen the interview, was Faith, Doubt, and the Things We Think We Know.

And what I figured out is sometimes the things that hurt us the most are when something happens

that challenges the things we thought we knew. I thought my children would bury me someday.

When I got that call that my son Mitch been stabbed to death. I was wrecked.

It's in retrospect. It's kind of crazy that I was so naive to think that all my children would be alive.

After I was dead Because my own brother lost a child a young son when he was had a car wreck when he was about eight years old,

And I was in my career I'm the guy that has to tell the parents that their son or daughter didn't make it after they fell off their skateboard

Because they weren't wearing a helmet and by the way Please make your kids work out more helmets when they ride bikes or skateboards and you do too,

There was a chairman of a department of neurosurgery when I was training that fell off his bicycle

on his driveway teaching his grandchildren how to ride a bike and he wasn't wearing a

helmet and he got tangled up in the pedals and fell over and hit his head and had a subdural hematoma and died.

Friend, you need a helmet. That's an aside. But we wear helmets in case we hit our heads, right?

I'm the guy that has to be in the ER to tell the grandparents, yeah, I know you say your

Your child always wears a helmet, or I know you say your kid always wears a seatbelt,

but they weren't this time and they died.

I have to be the one. So the point is, I should not have ever had this naive idea that my kids were somehow

all going to be okay.

And the fact is, you just don't know. And so having a plan in place for what you're going to do when you have these emergencies

occur, these emotional emergencies, would be a wise thing.

Now I talk in my new book hope is the first dose and you have it if you haven't read it

Please get hope is the first dose Please read it if you can't afford it go to your library ask them to order it put public libraries

Around the country should have it or they certainly have access to it,

There's an interlibrary loan system if your small-town library doesn't have a book that can borrow it from another library,

I'm telling you the book has a treatment plan that you need to help you get through these massive things when they happen and they

It will happen, so please check it out.

Hope is the first, shameless plug for my book.

It will help you, okay? Now, that being said, I want you to have a plan. Why?

Because having a plan helps you to prepare so that you don't fall into oblivion,

into the pit of despair when the pressure's on. Remember Chris Voss, the FBI hostage negotiator

that wrote the incredible book, Never Split the Difference, says when the pressure's on, you don't rise to the occasion.

You fall to your highest level of preparation, And that, my friend, is why we have fire drills.

It's why we have tornado drills. It's why we do mock codes and mock traumas in the hospital.

It's why we do practice for things.

Because when they happen, we want to fall. We're gonna think differently.

We're gonna be under stress. We're not gonna make the best decisions

and we're likely to fall back to where we prepared.

I want you to have a floor.

For how far you fall. Yes, you're going to suffer. Yes, you're going to freak out. Yes,

you're going to be for a while unanchored and unsure. But if you have repped and prepped and

put that prehab time in, then you're going to have a place to turn when things get hard.

And one thing I would suggest for you to put on your crash card, and we're here every day on this

podcast talking about the self-brain surgery and the ways to get your mind under control and what

to do and how to find hope again and all that stuff. So today I'm specifically going to give

you a little packet of scripture. I want you to think of it like a first-aid kit.

And it's some some reasons to say, I'm gonna open this up and I know if I'm

really under pressure, I know if I'm really hurting, that having this word in

my heart is gonna help me in some specific ways. I woke up at one o'clock this morning and I couldn't sleep and God put this on my heart and I'm just

telling you there's somebody out there that's gonna hear my words today or sometime soon and maybe you know somebody in the middle of it. Please

share this, find two friends, text the link to this podcast and say, you need this one,

put it in your pocket for future reference, or I know you're going through this thing.

This will help you share it with your friends, subscribe to the podcast. This will help you.

Okay. We're going to go to Psalm 19 and in Psalm 19, strangely enough, God put this on my heart

in the middle of the night last night.

And he said, this is something for somebody that's going to be a crash cart for emotional

trauma that they need as part of the treatment plan that they're going to be able to use

to help them when they're really suffering go to Psalm 19, and I did.

And it starts with this famous verse, the heavens declare the glory of God and the sky

above proclaims his handiwork.

So it starts off with nature, right, when you see stars and sunrise and sunsets and

rainbows and animals and beautiful things like that, then you're going to recall that

the heavens declare God's glory, that you can look up even when you're hurting, and

you can see something that reminds you that you're not alone in this universe.

It's not a cold, heartless place, but God's out there.

Day to day pours out speech, and night to night reveals knowledge.

There is no speech, nor are there words whose voice is not heard.

Their voice goes out through all the earth and their words to the end of the world.

That's not the point of today, that's not the trauma kit, but it starts there.

Because God is saying, I am always showing myself to you.

I am always here.

But even more than just my revealed word through nature and creation, let me give you some

more. Let me tell you what my actual words will do for you.

And here it is.

When you open this crash cart, when you're in the middle of emotional trauma or somebody

else is. There is a good reason, I'm always telling you, to have Scripture,

tucked in your heart. There's a good reason, I'm always telling you, to have

some worship music or some good solid words to fall back on to start

remembering that it's not the end. It's not the end. You've got some things to

hold on to. Lisa and I used to do a little rock climbing. And in rock climbing, if

you're not a master climber or a moron, depending on how you look at it, you're

You're going to have a rope attached to a fixed point and hopefully somebody below you

doing something called belaying, which basically that means you can climb and you're not using

the rope to pull yourself up, but if you fall, you are attached to something that will save.

You.

The belay is another person down below. Well, you can actually self-belay too,

but another person, like Lisa would hold a rope down below, and she's got some leverage and some pulleys

so that if I fall, she can tighten that rope up, and I'm not gonna fall to my death.

It turns out that the Hebrew word that shows up throughout the Old Testament, kava and yakal,

kava is this word that really relates to cord or rope or tension,

and every time it shows up, it's translated as hope, okay?

So biblical hope isn't optimism that the situation is going to work out in a healthy way or situation

is going to work out in the way you want it to.

It's the hope, it's the knowledge, it's the truth, it's the idea that God is going to

come alongside you in this.

He's going to tighten that rope up and belay you so that you don't fall, and He's going

to help you in this situation, and He is eventually going to solve the issues of the pain and

the problems of life.

And it may not look like you thought it was going to, it may not be the thing that you thought you knew, but the belay is on.

When we climb, somebody down below, when you start to move, they say,

on belay, like I'm here, I've got you.

You can climb without fear because I'm gonna take care of you if you fall.

And that's what this kavah, this word in the Old Testament that's translated as hope really means.

So here, let me give you some hope. Let me give you some kavah right here.

You put this in your emotional crash cart, my friend, and it's gonna be okay.

It's gonna help you get through this trauma. It's gonna help you run the code red

when you're really hurting.

The law of the Lord, this is Psalm 19, seven. The law of the Lord is perfect, reviving the soul.

When you're suffering, when you're hurting, when the emotional trauma is on, what do you need?

You need your soul revived.

You need your soul revived. You need the CPR of somebody to pump some circulation

some life back into you. And the Word says the law of the Lord is perfect and it will revive your soul.

You know what happened after we lost Mitch?

In the first few hours people started showing up and I started feeling this presence.

And I remember this little verse Psalm 34 18. The Lord is close to the brokenhearted

So the law of the Lord is perfect. It will revive your soul. It's the thing that will give you,

restoration of circulation Okay, the testimony of the Lord is sure making wise the simple

Let me tell you something that's going to happen to you in the acute phase of your trauma. You're not going to make very good decisions.

For a little bit, your brain isn't going to work right.

And if you can fall back on some truth to help you make better decisions, making wise

the simple, that's a time when you're going to be less agile mentally than you normally are.

So have some word in you to help you calm down and recall some things that are true.

Find your feet, remember who you are, that'll help you start moving through.

Now again, every time I tell you these things, remember there's some acute phase after emotional

trauma where you're not going to be able to do all these things and it's not even

appropriate. Sometimes you just need to sit and rest and let other people minister to you.

But when it's time to start thinking and making decisions, make wise the simple.

The testimony of the Lord is sure. The precepts of the Lord are right, rejoicing the heart.

Let me tell you something strange that happened.

All these people start showing up after Mitch dies and they're gathering around us and

there were weird little moments when somebody would say something or just the enormity of

the outpouring of compassion and love,

would actually feel a little bit joyful in our heart for just a minute, just a little spark here and there.

In the midst of the grief and the pain, the kindness and compassion of other people felt good.

And you could feel it. And it made you rejoice a little bit that,

hey, I'm in the middle of the worst suffering in my life, that I'm not alone.

And even if you are alone, even if nobody else comes alongside you, God will.

He will show up. He will rise to show you compassion. So the precepts of the Lord are right.

They make you rejoice even in the middle of the hard thing. The commandment of the Lord is pure, enlightening the eyes.

Your eyes get really dim. World feels really dark.

And he says, hey, there's some things in my word that will help you start to see again.

You'll start to remember that your joy and your hope are not dependent on the circumstances of your life.

You'll start to remember that John 16, 33 is coming true in your house right now.

The world is hard, but John 10, 10 is always true too. I've come to give you abundance

and there will be abundance again in your life.

The fear of the Lord is clean, enduring forever. This holy fear, this idea that I may not know

what I think about God right now,

But I know if I don't have Him, everything else is so terrifying that I wouldn't know what to do.

Oswald Chambers said that, "'The man who fears the Lord feels nothing else,

"'but he who does not fear the Lord fears everything else.'" And that's why the fear of the Lord is clean.

It is sterile, it's perfect, it's not ever going to hurt you and it will endure forever.

And you start to think in those moments after your acute trauma, this will be the end of me.

And he says, no, it won't because I'm at your side.

I am with you.

This is a trauma kit, friend. This is a package of scripture that will help you survive

the massive thing and help you belay and not fall to your doom emotionally,

when you're in the midst of this stressful time. The rule.

The rules of the Lord are true and righteous altogether. You're gonna wonder what's true.

You're gonna think everything you thought you knew has been called into question,

and you need some things that are actually true.

And when you start recalling the promises of God, recalling the history, remember I told you,

hope is a verb, it's memory and movement.

You start looking back like the Israelites always did. Hey, we put this monument up

because when we put those rocks together, it was right after God did this thing

and saved us from the Egyptians.

This is where we crossed the Jordan. This is where he parted the sea.

If the Lord hadn't been on our side, then we really would have been hosed.

That's the kind of memory that helps produce hope.

And then you say movement. Okay, God says that he will rise to show me compassion.

So all I have to do is hold my arms out and he's gonna come and embrace me and help me through this.

He's gonna send some people. He says in the Old Testament, I can whistle and make bees come.

I can call a bird of prey from the east or a man of wisdom from the west.

I can solve your problem in ways you can't even imagine.

The New Testament says the Lord can do exceedingly, abundantly more than you can ask or even imagine.

So imagine, my friend, that the Lord says, my rules are true, they are righteous altogether,

my fear of me is clean, it will endure forever, the commandments I give you are pure.

They will open your eyes again when things are dark, my precepts are right, they will help you rejoice again,

even in the midst of your pain, My testimonies are sure that will help you be wise,

even when your brain feels simple because of the profundity of the thing you're going through.

And my laws are perfect and they will do emotional CPR and help you revive your soul in the midst of this thing.

And down in verse 10, Psalm 19, 10, more to be desired are my words than gold,

even more than fine gold, sweeter than honey,

and the drippings of the honeycomb by them is your servant warned, and in keeping them,

There is great reward.

My friend this will help you in the midst of your great emotional stress this little packet of.

Resuscitation gear that's on the emotional crash cart. We'll put more stuff on it as weeks go by,

We'll do more of these episodes and i'll give you some brain science. I'll give you some practical things,

I'll give you some things that helped us, but this is a packet of,

Spiritual epinephrine that will help revive your soul psalm 19 And it ends with this,

Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable in your sight, oh Lord,

my rock and my redeemer." It's not just what you say. He wants your brain. He wants your mind.

He wants you to take captive every thought. And especially when the pressure's on,

you need to discern carefully the things that you think about, because you are going to be

challenged by your enemy. Or if you're not a believer, you're going to be challenged by

negative thinking. It's going to make you think that all is lost, that you can't possibly

survive this, your wife is going to leave you, your husband is never going to love you

again, your kids are going to abandon you, you'll never make it, the money's not going

to come, it's going to wipe you out.

Those are the kinds of thoughts you will think. And the meditation of your heart, if you go down those paths, you're going to change the

way your brain works negatively because remember, one of the precepts that we follow with self-brain

surgery is that what you're actively doing, you're getting better at.

On the brain science side, if you don't take captive those thoughts in the acute phase

of your trauma, they are going to create synapses that will make it easier and easier and easier

for you to despair, okay?

And we don't want despair, we want hope.

And I'm giving you a power-packed packet of medicine for the acute phase of your trauma

when you're facing an emotional crisis, my friend, and you will, when you have a code

Code Red for your emotional emergency.

I want you to have some power in there.

And Psalm 19 is the one. The fear of the Lord is clean. It will revive your soul.

It will help you. It will endure forever. Even when you feel like you're not going to make it, you can remember that God has promised

you that He will never abandon you or forsake you.

I'm going to give you Tommy Walker, my good friend's song, The Fear of the Lord is the

Beginning of Wisdom. I just want you to have some music and some words to go along with this little code red,

for emotional emergencies that I've given you today.

Don't forget, my friend, you can't change your life until you change your mind.

Even in the midst of a code red, even in the midst of an emergency,

you need to have some good things to help belay you so you don't fall.

You need to have some medicine to help restart your heart again.

And this is it, Psalm 19 is a good little packet of it. I'll give you more of it later.

But for today, I just want you to remember, you are never alone.

You always have a team of people and your father will come running to you when you have

a code red. You are not alone.

And the good news is, you can start today.

Music.

Hey, thanks for listening. The Dr. Lee Warren podcast is brought to you

by my brand new book, Hope is the First Dose.

It's a treatment plan for recovering from trauma, tragedy, and other massive things.

It's available everywhere books are sold, and I narrated the audio book,

if you're not already tired of hearing my voice.

Hey, the theme music for the show is Get Up by my friend Tommy Walker,

available for free at TommyWalkerMinistries.org.

They are supplying worship resources for worshipers all over the world to worship the Most High God.

And if you're interested in learning more, check out TommyWalkerMinistries.org.

If you need prayer, go to the prayer wall at WLeeWarrenMD.com slash prayer,

WLeeWarrenMD.com slash prayer,

and go to my website and sign up for the newsletter, Self Brain Surgery, every Sunday since 2014,

helping people in all 50 states and 60 plus countries around the world.

I'm Dr. Lee Warren, and I'll talk to you soon. Remember, friend, you can't change your life,

until you change your mind.

And the good news is you can start today.

Music.