Enough Trouble of Its Own (The Fifth Commandment of Self-Brain Surgery)

Good morning, my friend. Dr. Lee Warren here with you. It is a brand new week,

and it's Mind Change Monday.

Hope you're doing well. Hope you had a great weekend. We are having what I hope

will be our last big snowstorm blizzard of the year.

The wind is raging outside, and the central part of Nebraska is getting hammered

with a big, windy snowstorm.

So that's good for the farmers and good for the ground eventually when all that snow melts.

It's still dark, so I don't know how much we got. We were forecast to get six

or more inches last night, but the wind is a problem because that'll create snow drifts.

So pray for the folks out here in this part of the country, and I hope you're

warm and safe wherever you are.

Today, we're going to talk about the fifth commandment. I told you this weekend

that we're retooling the Ten Commandments of Self-Brain Surgery just a little

bit to create the book, Self-Brain Surgery Manuscript, that I'm working on.

This is going to be the handbook, the go-to guide.

It's going to give you a book that you can come back to and flip open to a particular

chapter and deal with a particular thing or read it like a book or use it like a 40-day devotional.

There's going to be lots of different ways to use this book,

and I hope it'll become a trusted guidebook, something you can reach for over

and over again as the years go by in your practice of self-brain surgery as

we try to develop this brain-mind life.

It's self-brain surgery, tools to rewire your brain, reorder your mind,

and radically transform your life.

In the course of that, we have the Ten Commandments. And I told you recently

that we're going to kind of reshape these as I put the manuscript together,

because once it's published, they're fixed. We can't change them anymore.

So trying to find the very best way and order in which to state these ten principles

that we've drawn from neuroscience and from Scripture to smash together to give

us the best tools we can to live this brain-mind life.

And since you are a self-brain surgeon, because you wouldn't be listening to

this podcast if you weren't, then today I want to talk about the fifth commandment.

This kind of was originally the fourth and fifth commandments,

but we realized that they were sort of corollaries of one another.

So we want to be efficient. We want to make sure we give you the most sort of

perfect list that we can to put in one place.

I know people are putting these on bathroom mirrors and putting them on index

cards in their pocket, putting them on their phone so they can rework them or

reuse them and remember them and memorize them and live them out as the days go by.

So today, the restated fifth commandment, here it is.

I must love tomorrow more than I hate how I feel right now.

I must love tomorrow more than I hate how I feel right now.

We're going to get after that in just a minute. The fifth commandment of self-brain

surgery for mind change Monday. day.

But before we 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 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, the fifth commandment. This is about loving tomorrow more.

It's about not being willing to pay the tomorrow tax anymore.

It's about stopping the idea that we can't stand how we're feeling after some

trauma or tragedy or massive thing or just the humdrum of a life that we think

should be different than it is.

We don't like it so we do something to stop

feeling it now self-brain surgery is

the only type of surgery that anesthesia makes

worse i rely on my colleagues from anesthesia the crnas and the mdns anesthesiologists

who i work with at my hospital are outstanding and they keep my patients asleep

and comfortable so we can perform these life-changing and sometimes life-saving

surgeries surgeries and without anesthesia, I wouldn't be able to do what I do.

It's absolutely critical to my work.

But in the self-brain surgery realm, it turns out anesthesia is bad.

Anesthesia never helps us. And here's why. When you numb yourself to what you're

feeling, you can't feel anything.

When you numb yourself to the bad stuff, you also can't feel the good stuff.

Because unlike Unlike local anesthesia that we do if I'm going to take a mole

off your finger or if I'm going to perform carpal tunnel surgery on your wrist,

I can give you a local anesthetic so that you only stop feeling that particular part of your body.

But unlike local anesthesia for those kinds of minor procedures,

self-brain surgery, when you

anesthetize yourself, you anesthetize your whole self, your entire mind.

You can't not anesthetize the good stuff when you're trying to anesthetize the bad stuff.

That's why verses like Ephesians 5.18 are so important.

We talk about alcohol as an example of numbing behavior a lot because it's probably

the one that most people reach for the most.

When you don't like how you're feeling, you like to consume something that you

think is going to relax you and calm you down and make you not have to think

about it. The problem is there's always a flip side to that.

And in the setting of alcohol, we could talk about pornography or internet shopping

or gambling or relationships or sex or lots of other things that people use to numb themselves.

We could talk about those things. But specifically with alcohol,

you always rob Peter to pay Paul, so to speak.

Because yes, you stop thinking about or feeling the thing that you don't want to feel right now.

But you also harm your brain structurally. We know that alcohol is a direct

neurotoxin. So you're doing structural damage to your brain.

So ultimately, you're making your brain less able to help you cope with the

life that you have, enjoy the life that you have, relate to the people around

you, make decisions that are going to be good for you, and all of that.

You're covering up all that ability and actually structurally harming it and

making it harder for you to do those things as efficiently in the future.

And yes, this occurs sort of on a microscopic scale, but there comes a tipping point.

We all know the person, or at least in healthcare, we all know the person who

handles chronic alcoholism pretty well. We call them high-functioning alcoholics.

And then all of a sudden, they finally lose enough brain cells that they become

consistently, clearly, obviously demented and disabled and dysfunctional to everybody.

So they pushed it too far and they finally got past their limit.

And now they've irreparably harmed their brain with alcohol.

And what does everybody do? We kind of shrug our shoulders and say,

oh, poor guy, he just couldn't get off the bottle.

Well, I would say it's a terrible tragedy to destroy your own brain that much.

But all of us, if we use alcohol or some substance like that,

all of us are doing harm to the structure of our brain.

And when I say you rob Peter to pay Paul...

I don't just mean the structural damage to your brain.

I also mean that you disconnect yourself from the Wi-Fi network,

if you will, that's connecting your mind to the Spirit of God,

to your great physician, the one who actually wants to help you solve these

problems and deal with them in a healthy way.

That's why Ephesians 5.18 is not about debauchery, by the way.

It says, do not get drunk on wine, which leads to debauchery.

Instead, be filled with the Spirit, the New Living Translation.

Don't be drunk with wine because that will ruin your life.

Instead, be filled with the Holy Spirit.

I like that translation better because I was, so the church that I was raised

in, it was always don't drink or you'll go to hell.

Don't drink or you'll do this. Don't drink or you'll do that.

It was all about behavior.

But the verse isn't about behavior. And that's why that kind of teaching,

Paul even says it later in the New Testament, don't give people all these rules,

don't handle, don't taste, don't touch because they seem team-wise,

but they lack value in restraining indulgence because people figure out that

something else they get from it will help them more than abstaining from it.

They at least think that, which is incorrect thinking, but that's the trade-off that people get.

If you teach them the right thing for the wrong reason, then when that wrong

reason doesn't play out to be helpful to them, they'll do it anyway.

But this verse has never been about the botchery. It's never been about things

that you do when you're drunk. Yes, they're bad things.

That you can do when you're drunk. There are lots of them. And lives can be

ruined, as the New Living Translation says.

You can ruin your life with alcohol or with drugs or with other kinds of numbing behaviors.

But the reason why is because you can't be filled with the Spirit while you're

drunk with alcohol. What does that mean?

If we accept the proposition that our mind is the interface between the great

physician, the Spirit of God that lives inside us and wants to communicate with

us and guide us and help us as the gospel of John's all about.

The Holy Spirit wants to remind you of truth, help you, teach you things,

help you, sustain you, guide you, counsel you, heal you.

And when you turn your mind off with alcohol, he can't communicate with you.

And so if you want to be filled with the Spirit, if you want to have the guidance

and the help of the great and wise physician who's there to help you,

the wise advocate, as Jeffrey Schwartz calls him, you can't turn your brain off.

You can't disconnect your mind from the Spirit.

So that's why we're not supposed to be choosing to inebriate ourselves with

drugs or alcohol or anything else that disconnects us from our ability to communicate

with the one place that can really help us.

It's the one person who can really understand us, the one person who really

knows how that trauma or tragedy or massive thing has affected us.

But it does take some bravery to face into this.

So the fifth commandment then is really about choosing to accept the feelings

that we have right now, the pain and the difficulty of what we're going through,

choosing to accept that so that on the backside,

we can get all the other good stuff in exchange for it, because you can't feel good things.

If you're anesthetized against the bad things.

My patients are asleep for surgery for the hour or two hours or three hours

or 30 minutes or five hours or however long it is that I have to do that procedure.

While they're asleep, yes, they're not feeling the pain from the surgery,

but they're also not talking to their grandkids.

They're also not enjoying their life. They're also not doing anything else with

their spouse or their loved one or catching up or doing work or going for a walk.

They're anesthetized on the table, and the only thing they're going through

is the procedure that they're having right then.

And that's okay because that's for a purpose.

But when you choose to numb yourself because you don't like how you're feeling

right now, you're missing out on everything else in your life.

And remember, we're in this quantum physics world where two things can be true

at the same time. and the reason that we're not devastated and overwhelmed and

completely ruined by our traumas and tragedies and massive things is because

we can have that abundance at the same time.

When Jesus says, your life's going to be hard, but I've overcome it.

This world I've overcome, John 16, 33.

The thief comes to steal and kill and destroy, but take heart.

I've come. I'm sorry, I misquoted that. The thief comes to steal and kill and destroy, but I've come.

That you might have life and have it abundantly. That's John 10, 10. Always a dual edge.

There's something difficult, there's something positive, and they can both be true at the same time.

So when we numb ourselves, we only cover up the bad, but we also stop feeling

the good and we take ourselves out of the quantum physics reality and we just don't feel anything.

My friend Annie Grace, who wrote the incredible book, This Naked Mind,

which is all about alcohol and getting yourself set free from alcohol,

she talked about how you can achieve Relaxation by removing the source of discontent.

She says, alcohol by definition cannot relax you.

Now you may wonder about the numbing effects of alcohol. Surely alcohol will help numb the pain.

And she says, yes, alcohol will numb your brain and your senses.

It will numb you in such a fashion that if you drink enough,

it will render you unconscious.

And unconsciousness will relieve your pain. But saying this is a good idea is

like saying it's a good idea to go under the guillotine because you have a migraine.

There are better solutions. Listen, if your head hurts, you don't have to chop

your head off to make it stop hurting. There are other ways to achieve that pain control.

And so the idea of numbing your brain to the point of unconsciousness as a way

to stop feeling something that's hurting you is not the best path to getting that done.

Annie Grace Further says, if you're truly happy and relaxed,

you have no need or desire to change your state of mind.

Looking back, I see that my constant need to drink, to relax myself was really

proof that alcohol wasn't relaxing me.

If alcohol helped me achieve relaxation, wouldn't it follow that I wouldn't need as much of it?

If alcohol cured my stress, wouldn't I need less, not more of it over time?

No, alcohol does not relax you. It does not fix the stress in your life.

Rather, it inebriates you, which covers the pain for a short moment of time.

As soon as it wears off, your stress returns turns and over time it multiplies.

And here's the important part. Annie Grace says, being happy and stress-free,

dealing with the root cause of stress rather than numbing the symptoms is the

only sure way to find relief.

Then you no longer need to cover the symptom with poison.

I'm heartbroken to know more than one person who has taken their own life.

It's tragic that we deal with our unhappiness in this way by rendering ourselves

forever unconscious, believing the only cure to to our depression or unhappiness

is to erase ourselves altogether.

Alcohol erases a bit of you every time you drink it.

It can even erase entire nights when you're on a binge. Alcohol does not relieve stress.

It erases your senses and your ability to think. Alcohol ultimately erases yourself.

Listen, this is important, okay? Now, this podcast isn't about alcohol.

I'm using that as an example because it's such a common way that we choose to

numb ourselves, but it erases yourself as well. Because guess what?

In order to have a self, you have to be willing to accept that good things and

bad things happen in your life, that a normal, healthy, balanced person.

Encounters hard things and learns to overcome them and learns resilience.

We talked about that on Friday, on Saturday rather, when we talked about how

trees raised in a windless environment don't develop any root systems and they're

not strong enough to handle even minor challenges. They just fall over.

And we want to be people who stop falling over every time we encounter a challenge.

Same thing is true about pornography, by the way. It radically changes your brain.

So if you're a man or a woman who uses pornography sometimes,

that's a devastating thing to do to your own brain.

It changes the balance of the neurochemicals in your brain.

It rewires your reward circuit. It makes it almost impossible for you to find

pleasure and sort of relationship in normal ways.

And for men, actually, it's been shown that constant and chronic pornography

exposure can lead to erectile dysfunction.

So the sort of one thing that they're after becomes the thing they they can't have.

So again, not a podcast about alcohol or pornography or any of those things.

There's much deeper resources available.

Annie Grace's show about alcohol is tremendous. If you're struggling with that,

there's much deeper resources here.

I'm just saying anything that you use to turn your brain off,

to stop thinking or feeling is actually going

to end up harming you in the end because you're

meant to be an embodied whole person who

learns to experience difficult things and turns

them around to become part of your story to help you show the world that transformation

is possible and that God's story of rewiring and retraining you to think differently

and handle the stresses and strains of your life is a way to honor him and to

provide hope and extend it to other people.

We got a tremendous email from Gina Berkmeyer, who's a therapist,

who's written a great book called Generations Deep.

And she talked about how she's been using the abide practice and she loves it.

And she made a great suggestion.

We're actually this This week on Theology Thursday on the Spiritual Brain Surgery Podcast,

we're going to talk about how the whole purpose of this transformation that

we're going through and learning how to communicate with our Father and with

our two sides of our brains is really all about finding our way forward and

being able to lend a hand to those behind us so that they can reach forward as well. And so...

Gina suggested that we add an R to the end of abide, to become abiders,

and the R for relationship, that learning the abide practice will help us relate

to God, to each other, to ourselves, and to other people more effectively.

And we become not just people who practice something, but people who live something

out to abide in him and become abiders with him and with each other to help

move forward together to extend hope and healing and peace and maybe even happiness

and purpose and meaning and all those good things to other people behind us,

to the generations behind us, because we're abiders.

That's the same idea as saying that we're self-brain surgeons,

but also we train people in self-brain surgery.

In Theology Thursday this week, we're going to talk about multiplying miracles

and how the whole purpose is.

Chris Cook said last week, the purpose of you being transformed is to show other

people that God can transform and redeem, and your story becomes a healing story

for other people, an inspiration for other people.

And that is how you find meaning and purpose in these hard things,

because you can use them to help other people find their way.

So the fifth commandment comes down to this. Stop paying the tomorrow tax.

When you indulge yourself in something to turn your brain off,

to numb yourself so you don't feel it anymore, when you don't love tomorrow

more than you hate what you're feeling right now, then tomorrow you have a double problem.

You have the same problems that

you had before, and now you've got a new problem. You don't feel good.

You've blown your your brain up. Things aren't right for you.

And now you've got the original stress that you had, the original pain that

you felt, the original issue, and a whole set of new problems,

the things you did while you were turned off, the text messages you sent, the money you spent, the,

alcohol you consumed that makes you feel bad and less effective today.

And now your day is being affected by the choices you made last night because

you didn't love tomorrow more than you you hate what you're feeling right now.

And the corollary to bring it into self-brain surgery terms is this.

Don't treat a bad feeling with a bad operation.

So if you say to me, hey, my back hurts, and I say, well, let's go to the operating

room, you'd say, wait, aren't there some other ways to do this?

Don't you want to try something non-surgical? Don't you want to try to find

a less invasive way to do it?

Or if you had a simple problem, like Annie Grace said, you have a headache,

and I suggest chopping your head off, you would say, wait, that's a bad operation

for that set of symptoms.

That's not the right procedure. It's overly aggressive. There's got to be less

invasive ways to dealing with that.

And that's the fifth commandment. Don't treat a bad feeling with a bad operation.

You just create more trouble for yourself. And Jesus said it this way,

Matthew 6, 34, don't worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself.

Each day has enough trouble of its own.

And so if we flip that around and say, tomorrow,

love tomorrow, don't worry about tomorrow, and don't be overly concerned about

how you're feeling right now, because if you can learn to sit with those feelings

and let them be part of life and let them be, yes, this is true,

but it's also true that I have other things that are good and beneficial and

helpful and still happy and purposeful.

There are other people in my life. I did lose a person. I did go through something hard. It is true.

And my trauma response may need to be refined in some way so that it stops becoming all there is.

And if I can't bear it, it, then I need to find a more healthy way to deal with

it than to numb it, to cover it up, because tomorrow's got some trouble too.

And so if I cover up today and drag some of today's troubles into tomorrow,

then I'm not loving tomorrow more.

I'm not leaving space for tomorrow's troubles to be managed and helped and let

God deal with them in a way that's efficient, because I'm now adding additional trouble to them.

I'm making tomorrow harder. I'm not making a level path for my feet.

So that is what the fifth commandment is all about. Love tomorrow more.

Don't pay the tomorrow tax.

Don't treat a bad feeling with a bad operation. That's the fifth commandment of self-brain surgery.

Listen, we're trying to do this together, okay? Self-brain surgery is the process

of understanding that God has given you a mind that is designed to be used to

communicate with him and designed to be used as an operating theater.

For your brain, to structurally change your brain, to help it become the most

idealized version of itself that can therefore help your life to be the most

idealized version of itself that it can be in the context of a fallen world

where there are traumas and tragedies and massive things and difficulties that we must go through.

So if we're going to have to go through hard things, don't we want to put ourselves

in the best position in which to manage them, to inspire others,

to heal and become healthier and

feel better and be happier and all those things? Don't we want to do that?

If we want to, then we have to stop using anesthesia because anesthesia is not

helpful in self-brain surgery.

We got to be able to bite down on the bullet, go through the process,

feel the pain and and learn how to heal from it, and learn how to operate on

our own brains, since we're doing it anyway.

Remember, you're making those synapses, and you're connecting those neurons

every second of every day.

So as my dad always said, if you're going to do something, do it right.

And since it's happening anyway, and you have to undergo the process of self-brain

surgery, you might as well self-direct it in a way that's helpful to you and not harmful to you.

And that's why we must relentlessly refuse to participate in our own demise. eyes.

We must believe that feelings are not facts, but chemical events in our brains.

We must believe that most of our thoughts are untrue. We must believe that our

brains are designed to heal.

We must love tomorrow more than we hate how we feel right now and stop paying

the tomorrow tax and stop treating bad feelings with bad operations.

We must stop making an operation out of everything. Let things be simple sometimes.

We must not perpetuate generational thought or behavioral issues in our family or start new ones.

And we must love our brain and live in such a way as to improve it and not harm it.

We must believe that what we're doing, we're getting better at.

So let's get better at getting better instead of getting better at getting worse.

And let's understand that thoughts become things. The things we think about

turn into the real things of our lives and the real things in our children's

lives and the real things in our generation.

And so let's think about better things because thoughts become things.

Today, I wanted to remind you about the fifth commandment. You must love tomorrow

more than you hate what you're feeling right now.

You must stop making a bad operation for bad feelings. And you must stop paying

the tomorrow tax if you want to become healthier and feel better and be happier.

And my friend, the good news here on Mind Change Monday is that you can do all

these things. 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 books.

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.

Or 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.