Don't Make an Operation Out of It (The Sixth Commandment of Self-Brain Surgery)

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

today for some self-brain surgery.

It is Wild Card Wednesday. It's the first part of Action April,

and we're going to get after another one of our Ten Commandments of Self-Brain

Surgery today. We've already covered the first five.

I must relentlessly refuse to participate in my own demise. That's about self-malpractice.

I must believe that feelings are not facts. They are chemical events in my brain.

That's about learning to understand that everything you feel isn't necessarily

true, and you don't actually have to take action on everything that you feel. We talked about that.

The third one is, I must believe that most of my thoughts are untrue.

It turns out that the thoughts that

pop into your head are a terrible and unreliable way to live your life.

If you react to every thought that pops into your head, you'll spend a lot of

time fixing things because the thought wasn't actually true.

And the fourth one was, I must believe that my brain is designed to heal.

If you're one of the new listeners here, if you came from Joni Table Talk or

one of the other places where we found a whole lot of new listeners lately,

then I want to just encourage you that life can start to make you feel like

you were born to suffer, like you were here because you were supposed to go

through a life that's just full of hard things.

And even Christians struggle with this thinking sometimes when we believe things,

lies, that we're not supposed to be happy, that we're just supposed to sort

of wait it out until God redeems us someday and that our life here doesn't matter

if we're happy or not. That's a lie.

And we're actually designed to heal. Your brain is designed to heal.

Your body is designed to heal. God doesn't want you to suffer.

Now, that's not the same as saying that he's going to take away all your diseases. That's not true.

The Bible is very clear that we are going to have trouble in this world,

but you're not supposed to suffer under it.

You're supposed to learn how to be able to understand that you have a hope and

a future and a purpose and a meaning, even in the midst of the hard things that come along in life.

And your brain can actually get better. You're You're not stuck.

So that was the fourth commandment. And the fifth commandment was I must love

tomorrow more than I hate how I feel right now. That's the no tomorrow text.

The no tomorrow tax commandment. And the corollary to that one is I must not

treat bad feelings with bad operations.

So you don't take how you feel and do the wrong thing in response to it,

or guess what? You'll end up feeling worse.

So we don't treat bad feelings with bad operations. That results in us having to pay tomorrow taxes.

And we don't do that because we love tomorrow more. So today we're going to

talk about the sixth commandment.

I'm going to stop making an operation out of everything.

This is going to sound funny, but we're going to have to cover that pretty quickly

because I actually have to go and do an operation this morning.

It's one of my surgery days.

So we're going to cover this pretty quick. It's a pretty almost self-explanatory.

Rule, almost self-explanatory commandment of self-brain surgery.

And I'm going to give you some context for it and some ways to think about it.

A little bit of scripture, a little bit of encouragement.

But before I do that, I have a question for you.

Hey, are you ready to change your life? If the answer is yes, there's only one rule.

You have to change your mind first. And my My friend, there's a place where

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 let's get after it hey we quickly covered the first five commandments

of self-brain surgery and please understand i'm not being sacrilegious when

i say that it's just a good handy way to say there are 10 really good principles

that if you follow them you'll become Become a very good practitioner of what

we call self-brain surgery.

Of course, that incorporates all kinds of different ways to get your thinking

better because better thinking leads to better structural changes in your brain,

which leads to better brain chemistry, better hormone production,

better body function, and overall better life, even for your people around you

and the generations after you.

So important to get your thinking right. That's Romans 12.2.

Don't be conformed to how the world wants you to think and feel,

but transform your mind.

That's my translation. be transformed with the renewing of your mind changing

your mind changes your life friend 2 Corinthians 10 5 take every thought captive

that's the bad thought biopsy that's the cornerstone first operation of cell brain surgery.

And neuroscience is now solid around the idea that the mind is separate from the brain.

You are not just a bunch of electrical impulses in your brain.

You're not just the product of a whole bunch of chemical and electrical processes

occurring in your brain.

The thoughts that you have aren't under your control and all that nonsense that

the reductionist, materialist, neuroscientist wanted us to think for years.

It's actually very significantly shown in science now that the mind controls the brain.

It's not the other way around. Yes, brain is important. Yes, brain is necessary.

Mind is separate from brain and mind controls and improves or can harm brain.

And so we need to learn how to operate our minds connected to our spirit,

to the great physician who wants to help us, encourage us,

lift us up, guide us, help us to sharpen our thinking or remember what's true

and use our minds to handle and improve and process and perform with our brains

more efficiently so that we can become healthier, feel better and be happier.

That's the whole purpose behind self-brain surgery.

And the reason it's different from just self-directed neuroplasticity is that

we're going to add that spiritual element into it.

And we're going to submit that mind-brain connection to the influence and guidance of our creator.

And he's going to help us manage that in a way that's infinitely better than

just trying to do it on our own. That's why it's not self-help.

The only part of self-help that you do yourself is to admit to yourself that

you can't do it yourself.

That's the way I have you look at it. Okay. So the sixth commandment then is

I must stop making an operation out of everything.

In my book, Hope is the First Dose, I told the story about a guy who was making

everything harder than it had to be.

It's just making it too hard. Like some people just overcomplicate things.

And when you do that, you can become overwhelmingly frustrated and can become

sort of bound up so much in the way that you're trying to solve this problem

that it becomes impossible and you get frustrated and stressed out and it seems too hard.

Back in my training in the early 2000s, late 90s, early 2000s,

I was in Pittsburgh, and I was training under a world-famous neurosurgeon.

When I say world-famous, I mean literally like every neurosurgeon in the world

knew about Peter Gennetta.

Everybody heard of him. People came from all over the world to see him and have

facial, if he had a facial pain syndrome called trigeminal neuralgia or a facial

movement disorder called hemifacial spasm.

There was nobody in the world more sort of experienced or successful in treating

those conditions with brainstem surgery than Peter Ginetis.

I had the incredible honor to study under him and a bunch of other world-class

neurosurgeons, and I learned so much from Dr. Ginetis. And Dr.

Giannetta was so famous that one of his best friends was the late poet Maya Angelou.

When Lisa and I went to Dr. Giannetta's retirement ceremony birthday party in

Pittsburgh a few years ago, Maya Angelou spoke at his party.

That's how famous he was. Everybody knew Peter Giannetta.

And so Giannetta had this famous saying, and he would come into the operating

room. Of course, the residents, I was a senior resident when Janetta was there,

and we were responsible for getting the patient to the operating room and getting

them safely on the table and in the right position.

To do cranial nerve surgery, for example, you have to be in this lateral position

where you're lying on your side.

And to do that safely, there's all kinds of things we have to do to protect

you and make sure you're not going to fall, but also that you're not lying on

a nerve that could be crushed or injure your arm or something like that.

So we have all these positioning things. It takes forever.

It takes an hour sometimes to get the patient positioned safely and properly.

And then we cut the hair and prep the skin and do all the things to get ready for surgery.

Then we put the drapes on and we make the incision and we start to drill the

bone behind the ear and do all these things to prepare for the time when genetic

comes in and does the 10 or 15 minutes of work that he needs to do to move the

artery or vein that's pressing on the nerve that's causing the problem and teach us how to do that.

So we have like an hour and a half or two hours or sometimes longer of work

that we've done before genetic comes in to do his part that's the real delicate

piece and then to train us to do it so that we can become able to do those operations

on our own over time. It takes years to learn how to do that safely.

Talking about the nerve that moves your face is about the size of a bunch of

your hairs bound together.

So a tiny little nerve being compressed by a tiny little artery that's about

the same size, about the diameter of your ballpoint pen at the end of your ballpoint pen.

And if you break that artery or crush it or kink it, the patient will have a stroke and die.

So it's incredibly delicate work. So that's why it takes so long to learn how

to do this stuff. That's why we train for seven or eight or ten years sometimes.

And so, Janetta would come in after we've done all this work,

and we were working so hard to get things ready for him, and he would say,

he would look at one little thing that he didn't like, how you set up the retractor

that was not quite as efficient as he wanted, or how you were sitting,

or the light wasn't quite right, and you were craning your neck wrong.

He would be doing something he didn't like, and he would say,

hey, don't make an operation out of it.

And he was basically saying, you're doing surgery, but there's a way to do it

where it won't feel so stressful or so complicated.

You're overcomplicating things. And he was all about efficiency and sort of

carefulness and setting up things in a way that would make a level path,

as the Bible would say, and make a smooth operation out of this big,

complicated, difficult procedure.

Procedure because the fact is sometimes you're doing something that's hard sometimes

you're doing something that's dangerous sometimes you're doing something where

the stakes are really high,

but there's always a way to do it where things are more efficient things are

less stressful things are just a little easier a little little more manageable

a little more navigable there's a set of things that we learn about in medical

school there are these principles to help us us not sort of make an operation out of everything.

One of them is called economy of motion.

And that's how, if you're watching two different surgeons operate,

there's always the surgeon who looks like they're in a frenzy.

They're going super fast. They're yelling at everybody.

They're throwing things. Their hands are flying all over the place and they

look like they're going really fast.

And so if you're watching on television and they're doing this operation,

the surgeon's flying around and all that stuff, you might think that the guy

going super fast is the better surgeon.

But there's another surgeon who's, they look almost effortless.

Their movements are slow.

They don't seem to be stressed out. They're not going as quickly.

And you would watch that person from afar and you might say,

gosh, that person has really taken their time. They're slow.

They're not as fast as that other one. They must not be as competent.

They must not be as talented.

But the truth is, as you watch surgeons, as you go through your training,

you begin to realize that there's some surgeons who they can get the job done

in 10 fewer steps than the other person.

And they can be much more sort of delicate and efficient and elegant with their movements.

And they can make a stitch and then use the forcep to grab the needle and reposition

the needle holder and never have to take their hands away from the patient.

You see people on television when they're sewing and they're making sutures

and they always really exaggerate the hand motion and they pull pull the stitch

way out of the patient's body and all of that, because that's good for television.

But a really good surgeon, you almost never, you almost can't perceive their

hands moving, their sewing, because they're keeping things really close to the patient.

They're being very efficient with their movement. And that's called the economy of motion.

The special forces soldiers used to say, or they still say probably,

slow is smooth and smooth is fast.

So when you do something, you do it very carefully, you do it diligently,

you do it with a plan, and it turns out to be more efficient and faster in the

end than going super fast and tearing a vein and having bleeding and having

to stop that and breaking a knot because you're tying too fast and you put too

much stress on the suture and it pops and all that stuff.

You end up costing yourself time when you go too fast. And that's what Gennetto

was trying to get at when he would say, hey, don't make an operation on it.

You set your retractor up this way once at the start, you won't have to move

it 10 times during the surgery.

You set your chair here and put the light in this spot, you won't have to adjust

the chair or the light, that's going to save you five minutes during a 60-minute

operation. If you do that 10 times during the day, then you've saved almost

an hour because you've been just a little bit more efficient.

Your economy of motion was something you had to think about and plan out and prepare for.

And so when you're in the middle of an operation, you need to sort of be aware

that there's a way to do that where it doesn't look like you're making an operation

out of everything. thing.

And so there's another set of principles, Halstead. William Stuart Halstead

was a famous general surgeon in Baltimore, Johns Hopkins, in the early part of the 20th century.

And he was one of the first people to figure out about surgical infections and

about how to do things in a way that would reduce complications and infections.

And he was the first person to use sterilized gloves in the operating room and things like that.

He really made a lot of advancements of sort of the academic side of how to

think about doing an operation in a way that that would result in fewer complications.

So Halstead set out these principles and wrote about the ideas behind how to

do surgery in a more successful way and set out this sort of first academic

sort of look at how we can proceed through an operation and expect to have a better outcome.

And Halstead's principles were things like, hey, they seem so simple now,

by the way, looking back in time, but back then it was sort of the idea of go

really fast and try to get your patient out of the operating room so they don't bleed to death.

But Halstead came along and said, wait, let's write some papers and let's set

out some ideas that everybody can follow.

And if we all do things in this particular way, then we'll have better outcomes.

And so Halstead's principles were simple things like handle tissue gently.

Like don't grab the skin with your forcep and crush it so it doesn't get good

blood supply because then it won't heal properly after you sew the wound up.

So handle tissue gently and don't leave a bunch of empty space in the wound

that's going to fill up with blood and get infected and turn into a hematoma.

Like get rid of dead space in your incisions and and

respect the anatomy that's already there

don't go creating a whole bunch of craziness in your closure that's not supposed

to be there or it won't heal properly things like that so halstead put all these

ideas down to say hey when you're planning an operation and when you're carrying

out an operation follow some particular steps and the operation will be more

efficient it'll also have a better outcome.

Now, why am I talking about surgery so much? I'm just saying that in our lives,

we're all performing operations all the time, not only in our head with neuroplasticity

and all of that, but we're also just doing stuff all day long.

Many times that we find ourselves beating our heads against the wall because

it feels like we're not making progress.

We want to find somebody to blame or we want to find some reason why things

aren't going our way and we always look for excuses and all of that.

But I would just encourage you today, if you're going to say,

what's one little shift that I can make in my life that will make things better for me?

One of them is stop making an operation out of everything.

And to do that, you have to back up a step and zoom out of your perspective

of how this particular thing has been going on.

And you say, what perspective shift could I make here

that would allow me to view this process in a little bit more from a different

angle that would allow me to look at it in a different way that would make it

more efficient for me to think through it ahead of time so that when I get back

into this situation that I will inevitably get into later today,

that I can have a different outcome than the one I've always had.

Because remember, one of our other rules is what got me here won't get me there.

If I keep doing the same thing over and over and I get to this place where I

say, this just isn't working.

And then I do the same thing over again and it doesn't work.

And I have to say, wait a minute, what got me here won't get me there.

I've got to swap chairs. And as a self-brain surgeon, at some point you have

to say, wait a minute, I'm the patient here.

This is my life and my mind and my brain I'm talking about.

But I'm also the doctor because I can apply these principles of self-brain surgery.

I can take every thought captive. I can learn to let Jesus transform my mind and I can change my mind.

But if I do that, I have to change the chair chair that I'm sitting in.

If you come to my office tomorrow and I'm sitting in the doctor's chair and

you're sitting on the exam table, at some point you've got to say,

wait, I've got to get up off this exam table and I've got to sit over there where Dr. Warren is.

And I've got to look at my life from the perspective of how do I apply these

principles so that I can operate my life in a different way so that I can doctor

myself to get things better. And I'm not saying you do it all yourself.

Of course, you know that I don't think that.

I'm saying you've got to get get your mind in their position where you can apply

these principles and let God do the things that he wants to do.

And if it all feels too hard, and if it all feels too difficult,

maybe you need some economy of motion.

Maybe you need to stop making an operation out of it.

Maybe you need to just say, wait a minute, the way I'm thinking about this problem,

the frustration that I'm feeling,

the way that I keep getting myself into the same area of this issue.

I need to think differently about what steps I took to get to this place.

And I need to just look at that operation a little bit differently.

And maybe there's some steps I can take that will not get me back to the exact same impacts.

Does that make sense? So there's a scripture in Isaiah chapter 30,

15, where he says, in returning to me and rest, you shall be saved in quietness

and confident trust is your strength.

When you get to this place where you're beating your head against the wall and

it seems so hard and you're like, God, why can't this feel different?

Why does my life always feel this way? Why is everything so hard?

He says, wait, stop. Come back to me for a minute.

Go back to your professor and say, say, hey, help me here.

So when I was in the OR with Dr. Janetta and I would get into a bind and everything

seemed hard and the retractor wasn't working and things were bleeding,

he would be patient with me.

He would watch me for a while. He would give me a hard time,

tell me I was making an operation out of it, but he would leave his hands away and let me do the work.

And then finally, I would say, Dr. Janetta, I need some help here.

I can't quite get this figured out.

And he would very gently just kind of put his hands on mine or reach around

and change the angle just a little bit or turn my body just a tiny bit or adjust

the microscope just a little bit.

And all of a sudden, everything was right before me because I returned to my

professor and I said, professor, I need some help here.

And he would say, just relax, take a breath, don't make an operation out of

it. Let me show you what to do here.

And then before long, I could do that step of it myself. It would be a little

farther into the problem before I got stuck again because Because I went back

to my professor and he helped me navigate that issue.

And I learned a better way to perform that part of the operation.

I didn't operate myself back into the same hole that I had been in before. Does that make sense?

Because we're learning how not to make an operation out of everything.

And the Bible says in repentance and rest is your salvation and quietness.

Trust is your strength. So the idea is if you get yourself worn out and you

keep trying over and over and over and over and you find yourself in the same

spot, in the same operation,

looking at the problem from the same way, maybe it's not that the problem is unsolvable.

Maybe it's not that you need to fire off an angry email and blast everybody

and tell everybody why it's their fault and all that.

Maybe you need to just relax and call on the professor and reevaluate the operation

and look at the steps that you took to get to this particular place again.

And why does this always happen to me over and over and maybe just shift your

perspective just a little bit.

I'm writing right now, I just wrote a chapter in my new book about the difference

between perception and perspective.

And that's what I'm going to leave you with today because I got to go to the

operating room and literally make an operation out of some stuff.

So the difference between perception and perspective. Perception is the way

that you are seeing the situation in front of you.

And perception comes with all kinds of baggage. It comes with your worldview,

your past, your previous experience, your expectations of of the moment,

your genetics, your heritage, your traumas, your tragedies, your massive things.

All of that leads to the way that you're seeing the situation.

That's why we talk about on the Spiritual Brain Surgery Podcast,

the difference between exegesis and eisegesis.

Exegesis is a diligent reading of something, particularly scripture,

with an open mind to see what the text actually says in different ways that

you can apply it to your life.

Eisegesis is the reading of something, particularly scripture,

with your own set of lenses and filters in front of you to try to make the text

say what you want it to say.

And the problem with reading the Bible or anything else with that idea is that

you're only going to get out of it what you expect to get out of it.

We know that from quantum physics. When you look at something with a particular

viewpoint, that's what you're going to get out of it.

It just turns out to be true that what you think you're going to get from an

experiment often turns out to be what you get.

If you come to it with an an open mind, and you allow it to show you what's

there, then it can teach you something, okay?

So, when we get to looking at a problem and having the same experience and having

the same result every time and working ourselves into a tizzy and wearing ourselves

out and being completely frustrated and stressed out all the time,

we have to say, wait a minute, am I operating out of perception here?

Or maybe this is a time when I need to change my perspective.

That's when the professor would say, wait a second, tilt the table a little bit. Fukushima, Dr.

Takanori Fukushima, my other world famous, one of my other world famous professors

was always saying, don't turn your neck, turn the table.

The surgery table can bend and change and change the angle and tilt and twist

and do all kinds of things to move the patient so that you can stay in a comfortable

position without craning your neck or stressing your body.

You can make the patient move to you, and all of a sudden, you'll see things

in a more easily handled way.

You'll have a different perspective.

So you don't have to operate out of perception anymore.

You can change your perspective. Like, you start to think that this particular

way I'm looking at this patient is just, I'm just hosed. I can't get this operation done. I need to close.

I'm just going to have to go out. Maybe I'll send her to the university.

Something like that. And instead, you turn the table and all of a sudden you

can see exactly what you needed to see. All of a sudden you have exactly the right perspective.

You've moved from one chair to the other. You've moved from one idea to another.

You've moved from one worldview to another. You've changed your perspective

and that has allowed you to accomplish this in a less stressful way.

You've now stopped making an operation out of everything because you remembered

about economy of motion and you remembered Halstead's principles and you remembered

that slow is smooth and smooth is fast and you remembered that in repentance

and rest is your salvation.

And you're finally able to stop making an operation out of everything.

That's why it's not just a good idea.

It's the sixth commandment of self brain surgery. And the good news about all

that, my friend, is that 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 audiobooks.

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,

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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.