Finding Hope in the Hardest Moments (Frontal Lobe Friday)

Of course. I can't remember what day it is. It's frontal lobe Friday.

Good morning my friend. I'm Dr. Lee Warren, your host for today.

We're doing a little self brain surgery and I'm excited to be with you.

It's frontal lobe Friday, one of my favorite days of the week where we get to talk about

the incredible ability that you have of using your frontal lobes in a way to control the

other systems of your brain.

So let's get to it. I'm going to start with the frontal lobe.

I'm going to start with the frontal lobe. I'm going to start with the frontal lobe.

I'm going to start with the frontal lobe.

I'm going to start with the frontal lobe. little self brain surgery and I'm excited to be with you.

It's frontal lobe Friday, one of my favorite days of the week where we get to talk about

the incredible ability that you have of using your frontal lobes in a way to control the

other systems of your brain, have executive function and the ability to change what you

think about to change the way that your life plays out.

I got an email from a listener yesterday named Victoria. She asked a really important question and said basically what's the difference between

self-brain surgery and cognitive behavioral therapy and I think that's a

perfect thing to talk about on frontal lobe Friday. We're gonna get after that

in just a minute. I want to send a shout out to several readers that wrote in

yesterday with different questions and the first one I want to shout out to an

area that we don't talk about enough, a group that we don't talk about enough.

And this is law enforcement and the significant challenges that they face especially in the last few years where law enforcement's come under a little

of an attack in our society, but we are grateful for all those people, first responders, police

officers, firemen, EMTs, all those folks who run towards danger when everybody else is running away.

We got an email from Roy. Thank you, Roy, for reaching out.

He says, I'm a new listener to your podcast.

You talk about PTSD, and I want you to remember the law enforcement community.

Cops go from horror to horror. They end the shift and go home and start over.

He said, for example, I had three child deaths and a murder in the same shift, and the radio became my enemy.

But the next day it has to start all over. Police PTSD is overlooked because we are hired on the job.

He retired after 28 years and his faith in God gives him the strength that he needs. Thank you Roy for that email

He says there are too many alcoholics too many antisocial retirees too many broken marriages and suicides.

Thanks for self brain surgery. Listen, Roy. We are grateful for you. We're praying for you and you're right

We don't talk about that enough. We don't talk about the fact that we expect people to do this incredibly difficult job.

We expect them to do it perfectly We put them on TV and on social media if they have a day where they don't do it perfectly

And we forget that this job that you do so well,

Carries with it an incredible burden, so we're grateful We just want to send a shout out to you Roy for the incredible work that you do and thank you for that

And we're not forgetting you and you're right PTSD among the law enforcement community is an incredible problem

And we're gonna address some of that as we go forward in some of these episodes, so thank you Roy for that,

But we got additional emails yesterday from numerous people.

One of them from a woman named Victoria who wrote in and said, Hey, what's the difference

between cognitive behavioral therapy and self brain surgery?

That's what we're going to talk about today here on frontal lobe Friday.

It's going to be a great day.

We got two incredible interviews coming up on the show that I'm going to be able to release

to you in a few days.

And then I've got a three o'clock today, I'll be on Susie Larson live.

So if you're listening to Susie Larson out there, listen for Dr. Lee Warren to show up today.

With my friend Susie again and have a great conversation with her and that'll show up

on her podcast available to you in a few days as well.

So thank you for that Susie and looking forward to speaking with her again this afternoon.

Listen friend, it's frontal lobe Friday.

I'm always trying to remind you how important it is to take every thought captive and learn

how to take control of your thinking and that leaves us.

With just one question. 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.

All right. You're ready to get after it. Here we go. Okay. So I got an email from a woman in Victoria and she said this, Dr. Warren,

Thank you very much for your wonderful podcast and book. Hope is the First Dose.

The podcast in particular has been truly a blessing as I struggle with my own massive thing.

She goes on to discuss her life. She's a licensed professional counselor.

Thank you for that work that you do, Victoria. Important, important work.

Now here's the question. As a counselor, I have some comments and questions.

The reliance upon God that is stressed in your book was important.

Self-brain surgery, as I understand from your writing, seems to draw heavily from cognitive behavioral therapy.

I found CBT of some use, but honestly, the benefit was much more limited than I expected.

For a client who had no idea, for example, of how to dispute one's negative thoughts,

it's instructive and helpful.

But it just so often failed to make lasting and meaningful changes for my clients.

I became very discouraged and frustrated with the results. Am I missing some nuances or differences

in the way you interpret self-brain surgery versus cognitive behavioral therapy,

perhaps I just hope for something more effective and longer lasting healing.

Again, as a therapist and as a human struggling with a number of traumas myself, I am investigating

both healing prayer as practiced by Dr. Carl Lehman and internal family systems as models

of healing and growth.

I wondered if you have any experience with these modalities.

Thank you Victoria for that important question. I'm really grateful that you brought it up because self brain surgery is not cognitive

behavioral therapy. Now let me make something clear.

Let me make something very clear to you friend. This is really important.

I am a licensed neurosurgeon.

I am board certified in the practice of brain and spine surgery.

I am not a trained therapist.

Our daughter, Kaylin, has a master's degree in marriage and family therapy.

She's probably going to get her doctorate. She's in practice as a therapist, works with veterans.

She's a therapist.

I'm a surgeon. So the first thing I need you to understand is I am not ever going to take the role as

your therapist here on this podcast.

I'm going to give you some tools and some ideas that you can use to improve your thought

life, take control of your thinking, change your mind and change your life.

And I'll give you some strategies and some self-brain surgery operations that you can

use that will help you.

But what's the difference between that and a therapist? A therapist will interact with you specifically about your life and your issues.

So for example, we get emails frequently and people ask me very specific questions.

Do I X? How do I Y? I'm feeling suicidal, what do I do? And I'll tell you the

response to those emails every time is going to be talk to your doctor, talk to

your therapist, talk to your counselor, get some help, make a phone call. I can't,

tell you how to handle your specific issue with your specific life because I

lack the context of the ability to do that and I like the training, okay? So if

you tell me that you're suicidal, for example, first of all please don't write

in if you're in some kind of emotional crisis because we might not see that email for two

or three days.

Okay, we might not so if you're having significant trouble as I always say as I've written in all my books as I always say here

If you're having significant trouble managing your life with depression anxiety,

Obsessive-compulsive behavior, whatever it is If you're having significant trouble with addiction or a relationship issue, you need some help some personal help in your life,

whether that takes the form of,

Doing things for yourself reading and studying and listening to podcasts and all that or in a deeper level mental health professional counselor therapist You know priest.

Pastor chaplain, whoever it is, but you need some help and it can't be Waiting for a reply from an email from a neurosurgeon in Nebraska if you've got a real serious immediate

Emergency and we'll pray for you will help you will point you towards resources

And if you've done that before if you've written in you probably received in a reply

Sometimes we tell people about books or other podcasts or give you phone numbers to call.

But as the as the group grows of people out there listening, right?

One hundred and twenty thousand downloads last month.

As that group grows, it will become more and more impossible for us to reply personally to everybody.

So don't expect me to be in the role of therapist for you.

I can't. OK, you've got to have a therapist or a helper, a professional, a physician,

Somebody in your space in your life who can help you. So first thing is I'm not a therapist. So that's a long preamble to say,

Here's the difference between cognitive behavioral therapy and self brain surgery

Okay, cognitive behavioral therapy is a common type of talk therapy Basically psychotherapy you go and you sit and you work with the mental health counselor of psychotherapist therapist.

Psychiatrist somebody Psychologist in a very structured and organized way and you have a limited number of sessions with them

And it helps you become aware of inaccurate or negative thinking so that you can view challenging situations

More clearly you can respond to these things that come up in life in a better way in a more effective and efficient way,

this is Information that's widely available The website I'm reading right now is from Mayo Clinic and their description of cognitive behavioral therapy,

and they very honestly say it can be a useful tool either in alone or in combination with other therapies and how you treat these issues in your life

mental health disorders depression anxiety PTSD eating disorders addictions

but not everyone who benefits from cognitive behavioral therapy has to have

a mental health condition you don't have to have a diagnosis to benefit from

learning to think more appropriately okay it can be an effective tool to help

anybody learn how to better manage stressful life situations.

That's a pretty good overview from Mayo Clinic on what Cognitive Behavioral Therapy is.

But let me just give you a nuance here, okay?

My work as a neurosurgeon is about helping to change people's life, improve their quality

of life by relieving pain, dealing with cancers, treating injuries, managing things, and teaching

them how to better and more effectively use their bodies and protect them in a healthy

way to try to improve their quality of life.

That's what I do as a neurosurgeon, okay?

A lot of my work has nothing to do with surgery, but teaching people how to use posture and

and rehab and alternative ways to lift and doing things that will prevent injury

and help them promote healing,

to learn about the importance of not smoking, to prevent degenerative disease

and all kinds of other things, to learn lifestyle choices

and how the importance of lower BMI plays into having a healthier cognitive function

and preventing dementia and all those things and how to protect your back by moving more

and weighing less and all those things.

We do all that kind of work that's not related directly to surgery, okay?

But I'm also a human being who's been through war and had PTSD and been through a divorce and lost a child and found my way back to hope and health and

happiness and faith again. So the first thing you need to understand is this

podcast is not aimed at being therapy for a specific issue for you. It's aimed

at how we can together change our minds and engage our frontal lobes and say

wait a minute, life is trying to tell me that all is lost and life is trying to

throw this set of problems at me and it becomes too much and I'm tired of everything being so hard.

I'm tired of being so tired and I want some strategies to how I can start to gain ground

and make traction and moving forward in my life instead of ruminating or being stuck in the past.

How I can change that massive thing from being the thing that defines my life to being a thing

that happens in my life or a series of things that happen in my life. But how can I move from

the heart of John 16 33 to the hope and abundance of John 10 10 and how can I live in a space where

where both of those things are true at the same time.

That's what I'm aiming at with cell brain surgery here on the podcast.

So let me just give you this very simple definition, Victoria.

I would say cognitive behavioral therapy is a tool that therapists use to help people understand

that your thinking is negative at a baseline and how to challenge some of those negative thoughts

and look at them more positively and try to have a more accurate worldview

on what you're dealing with so that you can be more efficient and effective

at managing your life, okay?

That's a pretty good summary of cognitive behavioral therapy.

But let me tell you what the difference is with cell brain surgery.

I want you to literally understand that when you choose to think about one thing

and not another, that you are making structural, real-time, epigenetic changes in your brain,

your neurochemistry, your DNA expression, your hormonal state, and the way that the organs

and systems in your body work, the way the electromagnetic field of your body works,

the way that you interact with other people, the way that you change your offspring,

if you haven't, if you're having children, the way that your future generations

relate to you and to the world.

And you are literally changing the structure and course of your life when you learn how

to have a 2 Corinthians 10 5 worldview, which is take captive every thought

and put it in submission to Christ.

If you understand that your brain is a hardware and your mind is the software that operates your life

and that the Holy Spirit interacts with you on the software level,

and He will help you to manage the hardware of your life.

In a more effective way then you can begin to understand that yes, there are many challenges in this life. And yes, it is very hard,

But yes, I have a set of tools including an internal good physician who is with me all the time

He wants to help me then I can begin to take every thought captive,

And make my life better.

It doesn't mean every problem is solved. It doesn't mean I don't still need a therapist

Sometimes it doesn't mean there might not be a role for medications if I have some serious problem

It doesn't mean that I won't lose my son.

It means that I'm going to arm myself with a set of things that I'm preparing for these hard situations.

I'm learning how to think about them in a healthier way, and I'm preparing myself to

gain resilience and to be better able to handle whatever comes along in my life so that I

am not wrecked when it does happen.

Now, there's an interesting passage in Deuteronomy chapter 6, okay?

So self-brain surgery then, in summary, is a set of tools, I'll give you operations

we call them because I'm a surgeon, biopsy your thought, critically examine it.

If it's not a true thought, eradicate it and replace it with one that is true.

If it is a true thought, is it helpful?

Are the follow-on thoughts true? Understand that you have 40,000 negative thoughts a day and that five to one they're not true

and they're not helpful.

So learning how to discern and be careful only to give mental attention and energy to

the thoughts that are true and then to direct yourself to take steps towards managing the

ones that are true in a way that resolves them or moves them towards a positive outcome.

That's important. So self brain surgery then is a lifestyle.

It's not a therapy session.

Every thought captive so that we can begin to overcome the hardships that we have and learn how to move forward,

I talk all the time about putting books and

Scripture and in good words and good music in your heart as prehab so that we build that resilience and build that floor of

Preparing our minds. Here's a treatment plan. Here's what we're gonna do. Here's how I use this EpiPen of self brain surgery

Here's what I'm gonna do with that packet of scripture. I gave you in a neurobiology conversation two days ago

of how we're gonna have stuff in our hearts ready to go when it's time for that code, that trauma,

that massive thing that's happening, okay?

Deuteronomy chapter six gives us this concept. Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God is one.

That's the Shema Israel, that's the prayer, okay?

Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. Verse five, love the Lord your God with all your heart

and with all your soul and with all your strength.

These commandments that I give you today are to be on your hearts.

And remember, in Bible times, heart and mind are similar.

Put this stuff in your head, he's saying. Impress them on your children.

Talk about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road,

when you lie down and when you get up.

Tie them as symbols on your hands and bind them on your foreheads.

Write them on the doorframes of your houses and on your gates.

Why in the world would he say all that stuff?

About writing it down and putting up signs and writing it on your forehead and putting it on your hands for other people to see

Why write it on your doorframe? Why because he wants you to remind yourself over and over and over and over that you have some?

Help you are not alone. There's a set of principles that will help you Survive and be resilient and loving the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength is

The foundation of all of that, but why if it's all about how you think why then bother to write it down and impress it on?

Your children and talk about it all the time and write it on your doorstep and put it on your forehead. Why because,

He wants us to remember,

That we are connected and we know now from science We're connected on a quantum level to other people, you know this we've been talking about how we influence each other's electromagnetic fields, right?

Debbie Downer comes in the room and she's in a bad mood and all of a sudden you're in a bad mood, too

It's not just because you see her face and you decide to be in a bad mood It's because her electromagnetic field is influencing yours negatively

Your electrons are entangled with other people and you are literally tied to the emotional state of everybody around you

Okay, so the way we act together.

Influences and affects our ultimate total emotional state in the group,

This is this is important. Okay, so if you're supposed to Talk about these principles, talk about these patterns,

talk about these ideas that are good for you to remember what God's done,

to have the muscle of hope flexing

about memory and movement in the past and in the future.

Then that's because, as Dan Siegel says, the founder of interpersonal neurobiology,

we were supposed to inspire each other to rewire ourselves. Neurons that fire together, wire together, Donald Hebb said,

the famous Hebb's Law.

When you continue to make things happen over and over by triggering the same memory, thinking the same thought.

Engaging the thought engine, you will then synaptically create an easier time

having that same happen over and over, same thing happen over and over because remember one of our principles,

what you're doing, you're getting better at.

So if you're in despair, if you're giving into anxiety, if you're giving into worst case scenario,

if you're letting your thoughts spiral out of control, then you are getting better at that

and making it easier for yourself to continue to be

awash in hopelessness and negativity.

But inspiring other people to rewire themselves helps you remember that there is a process

that you can engage in to get better.

There is a process that you can engage in to be more resilient.

And teaching other people to do that will help you too because when they're better, you're better

because you're entangled with them.

That's why God says, write it down, put it on your forehead,

Inspire each other to rewire each other.

This is incredibly Important. Okay. So what's the difference? So brain surgery is a lifestyle,

It's not a therapy session. It's not a Technique that I use as a therapist because i'm not a therapist. I'm a dad who misses his little boy,

With every beat of my heart,

I'm a guy who wakes up in the middle of the night when I hear a noise and I think it's a rocket that's landed

And i'm getting ready to have to do a bunch of emergency brain surgery or i'm wondering if we just got blown up Okay, i'm that guy,

But i'm also the neurosurgeon that says gosh i watch people just suffer their whole lives because they can't change their behaviors

They're stuck in these patterns and they think that they're stuck with certain,

Diagnoses or labels that somebody's put on them. I can't help it. It's just the way I am. My parents were this way, too,

And so I want you as a fellow self-brain surgeon and a fellow human who's dealing with this hard life to remember that you have

an incredible gift of a frontal lobe that can switch from one thought process to another.

If you've been listening lately, you've heard us talk about labels a lot, and life

puts labels on you. This is what cognitive behavioral therapy is about.

Somebody says, I've got anxiety, and the therapist says, okay, you're anxious, let's

give you some tools to be less anxious.

I want you to reject the label. I want you to say, no, I don't have anxiety.

I'm feeling symptoms of anxiety, but feelings aren't facts. One of the rules, one of the 10 commandments of cell brain surgery is feelings aren't facts.

Feelings are chemical events in your brain, and if you're having one set of chemical events

make you feel one thing over and over, you need to deal with what's underneath that that's

triggering that, and you need to reframe it, biopsy it, challenge it, learn to think differently

about it, and start to deal with the anxiety by rejecting the idea that you're just an

anxious person and you're just an anxious person because your mom was anxious and you inherited that from her because we know now that you can change

those epigenetic triggers of gene expression you don't have to live in the same fears and anxieties that your parents did and if something happened to

you if you experience some kind of major trauma or some kind of big problem in

the past you can learn that trauma is not what happened to you that you're not

stuck feeling that all the time and living in the reality of the shadow of that event because trauma is what happens inside you in response to those things and

you can understand that and deal with it and unwind it.

And so what is self brain surgery and how does it differ from cognitive behavioral therapy?

This is not a therapy session technique That you can go and engage in with your therapist and talk through some things and walk away from there's a value in that and it's important,

But I want you to grab second corinthians 10-5 by the handles and say I want to challenge,

Every thought because what i'm doing i'm getting better at,

Okay, so I don't want to have five minutes of my day where I freak out about something

I want to get that five minutes back under control I want to inspire the people around me to rewire their brains because neurons that fire together wire together

Okay.

I want to have the ten commandments of self brain surgery readily available and in my heart and in my head all the time

What are they I want to number one relentlessly refuse to participate in my own demise

I'm gonna stop giving in to the labels that people have put on me the,

Diagnoses that somebody's given me and say I'm going to challenge that I'm gonna let God help me change that okay over time

Okay. Now, can you change the fact that you have a glial blastoma? No, not without help and usually not,

But can you live in abundance even if you have a glial blastoma? Yes, you can how?

Self brain surgery taking captive the thought Inspiring others to rewire. Being reminded constantly that you can change

your destiny of your thought and emotional life by taking thoughts

captive. Every one of them. Number two, you have to believe that feelings aren't

facts. Three, you have to believe that thoughts aren't always true. You have to

love tomorrow more than you hate what you're feeling right now. And that's when

we stop using numbing behaviors. That's when we stop using alcohol. That's when

we stop making bad decisions tonight so we can quit thinking for a minute.

And then we have to pay a tomorrow tax tomorrow and deal with the same problems

and the new problems that we made because we didn't love tomorrow more.

We have to learn not to treat bad feelings with bad operations, right?

We have to stop making an operation out of everything. We have to stop thinking that everything's a big disaster

and a nightmare and we're spinning off into worst case scenarios and trying to perform all these gyrations

get back to some kind of baseline after we blow ourselves up again because we made an

operation out of it again.

Remember, sometimes you can let something slide. You don't have to swing it every pitch.

We can get ourselves back under control by thinking about our thinking, deciding that

our frontal lobes can direct us to take this action and not that action, and put that space

in between stimulus and response and we will start paying much less trouble for those decisions that we make.

And we're going to not perpetuate generational curses or cause them, we're going to grab

that fact that epigenetics can be changed and we're not going to let our past, our ancestors,

experiences direct our futures to the same extent anymore. We're going to refuse

to hurt our brains. We're going to care and love about the organ of the hardware

side of our mind-brain interface and we're going to have better nutritional

decisions and better lifestyle decisions and we're going to wear helmets and we're

not going to smoke and we're not going to drink excessive amounts of alcohol or

take drugs that might harm our brains because we love our brains and we want

them to function and serve us well for our whole life. We're going to learn how

how to perform mental first aid.

That's why I give you this whole toolkit of operations and we package it in the treatment plan

in my new book, Hope is the First Dose. I want you to have some tools available to you when life gets hard.

And finally, I want you to remember that thoughts become things.

Thoughts really literally trigger chemical and genetic changes in your brain.

Thoughts change your chemical environment, your hormonal environment, your cell switching environment,

your gene expression environment.

Your thoughts literally change the reality of the physical world around you.

And that's why, my friend, self-brain surgery is different than cognitive behavioral therapy.

This is a self-brain surgery lifestyle.

Take captive every thought. You do that with your frontal lobes, which is why Victoria's question was a perfect one,

for Frontal Lobe Friday. Because my friend, you can't change your life until you change your mind.

And sometimes that takes self-brain surgery.

But the good news is you can always start today.

Hey, thanks for listening. The Dr. Lee Warren podcast is brought to you by my brand new book, Hope is the First Dose.

Music.

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 frame, you can't change your

life until you change your mind. And the good news is you can start today.

Music.