Feeling Stuck? This will help.

Good morning, my friend. I hope you're doing well. It is Sunday and I'm going.

To give you today something that's going to help you get unstuck.

I got an email yesterday from a person who's just stuck in their life and as

we get into new thing November and we're trying to make big changes and get

ready for the year of the Lord's favor next year,

I just want to remind you that there is a neuroscience way to reliably get unstuck.

Anne Lamott's great book, Bird by Bird, is one that taught me a lot about writing

and She tells this great story about how her brother, when he was little,

was overwhelmed with the enormity of a book report that he needed to write about birds.

And he had all these books about birds in front of him, and he was frustrated

and didn't know how to get started.

And his dad said, it's okay, buddy. Just take it bird by bird.

Just take it bird by bird. And I wanna give you that encouragement today, friend.

When you're trying to make massive changes, there's big piles of our entire

life and the inertia of what's been holding us back.

And it's hard to get started. And sometimes you get started and you get stuck

again, but just take it bird by bird.

My dad always said, eat an elephant one bite at a time.

And so this episode is gonna give you some thoughts on the neuroscience of how

we get stuck and what to do about it, what scripture has to say about it.

And it's just a little music at the end. And I hope it's gonna help you on a

Sunday to get started. But before we do that, I just have one 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.

Here today to talk about how to go all in on getting unstuck.

It's about five, almost six o 'clock in the morning and I am sitting here in

the poorly lit room hoping that you can see my face because we're going to talk

about a couple of things today that I think would be helpful if you can see.

They're going to help you with this concept of how to get unstuck.

I found some research yesterday.

I was preparing for an interview that I'm going to be doing in an article that

I wrote for a website called The Christian Post,

and there's another interview that I'm going to be doing in regards to some

of the mental disorders that come out of concussion and head injuries for a

TV station in Connecticut that

led me down this rabbit hole of looking at functional brain imaging again.

And I found a fascinating article on this complex grief condition called complicated.

Complicated grief is where you get sort of stuck in this yearning,

this longing for the person that you lost and how things used to be and people

can get stuck in this place where their whole life is defined by and thinking

about the loss that they've had and how much they want things to be the way they used to be.

And that creates this whole complex neurochemical problem and your life can

really get stuck. And in my book, Hope is the First Dose, we talk about these

people we call crashers.

And I realized that this is the neuroscience of what a crasher really is.

And whatever your crash was about, it doesn't have to be grief.

It doesn't have to be grief.

It can be any kind of major, massive thing, trauma, tragedy,

loss, the death of a dream, you know, doesn't have to be the death of a child

or a spouse or something like that.

But most of the time, it is something

massive like that that happened that creates these

crashers who people who even if they survive the

problem they get stuck in this hole where

their hopelessness is high and their hopefulness and

joy and peace and but what they would call happiness are

gone and they just don't recover even if they survive the problem because they

don't take their own life they just become these empty shell people and I found

this research yesterday that shows some pictures of what's happening in the

brain of people with complex grief in this phase that they call yearning so

and you know what that is, like, I spent...

Months and years of my life since I

lost Mitch in this yearning phase where you just get down in this hole and in

your brain You you just so badly want them to be back and you learn and you

long for getting to see them again I used to pray that I would dream about Mitch

and see him because I was missing him so much I just I thought even having a dream.

Would make it better and unfortunately I still to this day.

I haven't had a sweet happy memory dream about

Mitch and I know that's based in neuroscience and

based in my brain's deep wound around

losing him but every dream I've ever had about Mitch

since I lost him was painful in some way sometimes really really graphic views

of what happened to him and sometimes conversations where I wish I had said

something different than I did or whatever and I just haven't had that sweet

dream that made me feel like he was you know happy and everything was okay, I haven't had that.

And so this article that I found yesterday led me down this rabbit hole of a

whole bunch of research and I found this neuroscience,

basically where they took pictures of what's happening chemically in the brain

in the yearning phase of complicated grief and there's a lesson to be learned in there for us.

And we're gonna get into that today in this self -brain surgery of how to go

all in on getting unstuck.

And the truth is, as I've been saying for years and as the Bible's been saying

for centuries, friend, You can't change your life until you change your mind.

Today, we're going to talk about science a little bit, OK?

Because we're talking about learning these operations that can kind of change

how your mind works, because we're always saying it sounds like a corny line,

but it's really not this.

You can't change your life until you change your mind. The fact is,

OK, from a science standpoint, you get you create synaptic connections.

You create these networks of cells that produce automated reactions.

And this can be thoughts or feelings or actions or physiological events or hormonal

changes, even DNA replication.

Now we know this is sort of the basis of how generations of people can kind

of be born feeling or being afraid of certain things because their parents were.

It's about the reason it happens is because of synapses that get made.

So it's really true that learning how, as Paul said in 2 Corinthians 10,

to take captive of every thought,

that's how you start to get over the hump of changing how your mind works in

the baseline, in the default state, so that you don't have to do the work again

every day of learning to heal and process and think differently.

You can start to make those changes happen more automatically.

That's what self -brain surgery is.

Now, I've been on a few podcasts since my book came out. Hope is the First Dose,

of course, released, shoot, almost three weeks ago now.

This is everywhere books are

sold. you can find and if you haven't read it yet, I hope that you will.

It's really my best attempt to give you a plan for what to do when life throws

these massive things at you, traumas and tragedies and loss and grief and pain

and even dreams that die and all those things.

It's the idea that we can get ahead of that devastation by learning how to change

the way we think about things and make some decisions about what we believe

and what we know to be true and preloading our brain with that prehab that we talk about,

putting thoughts and behavior loops in place for what we're going to do when something happens.

Which is just like drilling for something in spores or running a plan to evacuate

a building if it catches on fire, learning how to stop, drop,

and roll if you burst into flames, or learning how to do CPR,

learning how to put an EpiPen in your purse in case your child has an allergic reaction.

These are things that we do all the time. We prepare for things,

even if they're not very likely to occur, but we don't spend much time preparing

for these massive things. Well, today I want to talk specifically about a problem

called complex or complicated grief.

And these are people that get stuck when they crash after the massive thing happens.

They lose somebody, lose a child, lose a parent, lose a spouse, lose a best friend.

These are people who get stuck in that grief process and they can't move forward in their life.

They have a lot of rumination where they spend all their time thinking and yearning

and longing and wanting things to be the way they used to be and they just aren't.

And then they have so much physiological pain, they have so much emotional turmoil

that they often turn to harmful behaviors,

numbing behaviors, the ways to stop thinking about drinking or sex or shopping

or gambling or relationships or whatever that they do something to try to turn

their mind off of it so they won't think about it anymore, but it doesn't work.

You know what happens when you try to numb yourself. You can't selectively numb

the one thing that hurts.

So you numb everything and then the rest of your relationship starts to suffer

or you start to pay these tomorrow taxes as we talk about so then the next day

feels terrible and now you're medicating how you feel the next day because of

what you did the previous day.

And I was just on Annie Grace's podcast, the This Naked Mind podcast and we

had a really good talk about the science of numbing behaviors and alcohol use

and ways to cover up pain and what that does to your brain.

If you want to get into the weeds on understanding my perspective on how important

it is to let your brain feel what it feels so you can heal from what you feel

and then start moving forward,

that podcast, Annie Grace's podcast, is really,

really helpful and I'll put a link in the show notes there.

But there's another one. Jill and Brad Sullivan are a couple who lost a child,

a teenager who took glioblastoma a few years ago.

And they took that pain and they turned it into this ministry where they help

other grieving couples, other

grieving people who have lost children or lost somebody in their life.

And they had the podcast called While We're Waiting. And that was one of my

favorite conversations about grief that I've ever had. Jill and I had a long talk.

And I've been hearing from so many of her listeners who have connected to this

idea of changing your brain so you can change your life and changing the things

you think about so you can start to heal.

It was really a powerful conversation. Jill and Brad, thank you for having me

on your show and I'll link into that one too.

And just yesterday I got an email from a woman who heard me on the Jesus Calling

podcast and another one, the Jesus Calling podcast, we had a really good talk

again about grief and loss and the science of what your brain is doing when

you're hurting and all these things that we talk about in Hope is the first dose.

And while we need a treatment plan, this woman lost her fourth child shortly

after they were born three years ago.

And she just talked about the pain and how these ideas are starting to help

her kind of unlock that idea that she's stuck and how to move forward.

So I thought today might be a good day to just learn how to shift gears,

to talk about the process of taking ownership of the fact that you're stuck

And thinking about a new way to sort of shift into gear and start moving forward again.

You know, if your car is in neutral, it doesn't matter how long you press the

gas. You're not going to go anywhere, right?

And you can spend all your gasoline and all your energy and burn that engine

up, running that engine, and you're not going to go anywhere until you get it

in gear, right? Until you shift into gear.

Well, the good news is I found an article yesterday that led me down this rabbit

hole looking at functional brain imaging and there's a part of your brain that

Daniel Lehman calls it the gear shift.

It's called the anterior cingulate cortex anterior cingulate gyrus some people

call it and the cingulate is this area in the in the middle of your brain down

to the corpus callosum that that basically is involved in shifting the gear

when it's time for you to make a decision.

Or think about something differently or decide to pursue this and not that,

that gear shift that you make that puts your brain into gear and moves in a

different direction is part of the brain's reward circuit, is part of this dopamine -serotonin axis,

this reward system that helps you identify certain behaviors that make you feel

better and start moving towards them, okay?

Now unfortunately, functional brain imaging studies have shown real clearly

now that that reward circuit is abnormal and doesn't behave properly in people with major depression,

people with post -traumatic stress, people with obsessive compulsive disorder.

And now I just found a paper yesterday that was published back in 2018.

That people who are stuck in complex grief, in this yearning phase of complex

grief, have similar abnormal activities in their subgenual anterior cingulate cortex.

That's a long word, S -G -A -C -C is easier. But that

subgenual anterior cingulate cortex turns out

to be highly abnormal in its behavior and blood flow and metabolic activity

in people who are dealing with major depression in that rumination phase of

major depression where they just can't stop mulling some things over and they

just can't do anything but think about this painful thing and they can't stop.

They can't move. They just get stuck and they sit and they don't shower and

they can't get out of bed and they just drink or they eat or they just sleep

all the time. They just can't get out of that phase.

And there's been a few studies now that have shown abnormal activity in that,

specifically in that tiny little area in the middle of your brain,

the subgenual anterior cingulate cortex.

Well, this paper that was published in 2018 that I found yesterday,

titled Yearning Predicts Subgenual Anterior Cingulate Activity in Bereaved Individuals,

that's a long title. Yearning predicts.

Subgenual anterior cingulate activity in bereaved individuals.

I thought, well, that's an interesting title. Let me read about this.

A paper that was published in the journal Helion in 2018 by McConnell, Kilgore, and O 'Connor.

Now, Mary Frances O 'Connor has published several papers in this sort of area

around major depression and complex grief and looking at what happens to the brain.

And she's published some interesting papers before about a little area called

the nucleus of humans that's abnormal in grief response.

So I thought this paper might be interesting. I'm gonna drink some coffee because

I'm having trouble clearing my throat, hang on.

My Yeti coffee cup with my Folgers black silk coffee, not a paid endorsement, I just love it.

If you work for Folgers or Yeti, reach out to me, we'll put a commercial for

you on the show. Just kidding.

Listen, this is a fascinating paper, okay?

Several things culminated yesterday in me thinking about all this.

I was writing an article, as I said earlier, about grief and turning grief into an idol.

And we have a whole chapter in the book about the way that you can get stuck

and grief can become bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger.

And this loss can get so big that it becomes the only thing you can see and

it becomes bigger than God.

And you start to believe that not even God can take it away.

That it's just something that you're just gonna have to suffer with forever

and you can begin to believe these lies that trauma puts into Your head that

you things are just never gonna

feel better and some people then will take that false idea and they will

pursue that and they end up becoming morbid, depressed, stuck,

suicidal, alcoholic, whatever.

So those are the people in the book that I call the crashers,

the people that take that path where they just crash and their whole life becomes

defined by this one thing.

And in a spiritual term, you would say that that's idolatry.

Now I understand I'm parsing out the difference between a real mental disorder

where you are You're psychiatrically damaged and you need professional help.

There are some people who need medical treatment.

Some of those people turn out to have hormonal problems, thyroid issues or something

that need medicine. They need a doctor involved in their care.

Some people need a psychiatrist. Some people need medication for short periods of time.

Some people actually need medical help. So I just say that to say this,

don't forget on this podcast that I am not talking about When I give you these

ideas, I'm not saying that there's no role for medicine.

I'm a doctor, for crying out loud, okay? I make my living delivering medicine and surgery to people.

So understand, if you are really stuck, and you are trying your best,

and it's not working, and you can't get out of bed, or you're drinking,

or you're doing some sort of behavior that's harmful to you,

or your relationships are crumbling, go get some help, okay?

Please, talk to a therapist, talk

to your doctor, talk to somebody you can trust, and get some help, okay?

I'm talking about here, we're having a conversation about understanding how

your brain works, understanding how trauma works, understanding how grief works,

so that you can make some changes yourself.

And some people can use this self -brain surgery concept and they can make it all the way back.

I never had to take an SSRI or an antidepressant. I never had to go to treatment.

I never saw a professional therapist or counselor after we lost Mitch,

because I had Lisa and I had Pastor John, and I had Dennis and Patty,

I had family, mom and dad and other people, my children to help me.

And I'm a mental health expert, okay?

So I understood what was happening. Even when I was hurting so bad that I couldn't

fix it myself, I understood what was happening.

So I made it through without having to seek that professional help,

but it's there for you, friend.

And if you need it, go get it. It's part of the healing process, okay?

Don't be afraid to ask for help. Be afraid of not asking for help, okay?

That's a long disclaimer, but I just want to make sure that you don't ever make

a mistake of thinking that I'm saying you can do all this on your own.

You can't. Sometimes you need help, okay? And don't be afraid to ask for it. So, that being said.

This paper stopped me in my tracks as I was preparing yesterday for these interviews

that have coming up in this article on us writing and the paper says yearning

predicts subgenual anterior cingulate activity in bereaved individuals.

Remember, this is self brain surgery Saturday.

This is the day of the week that we go a little deeper on the science.

So forgive me for some of the big words and some of the things,

but I'm going to make a point. The other thing that happened yesterday was I

received an email from Mark Rogap, who I just was blown away that I got this email.

Mark Rogap wrote the book Dark Clouds, Deep Mercy.

It's about lament and learning how to pray through lament. He

uses the book of Lamentations as a template for learning how to voice our concerns

and our complaints and our frustrations to God when we're hurting and how the

Bible authorizes that and gives us numerous examples in Psalms and in Lamentations

and other places of what this powerful prayer language does,

of how lament helps us to articulate what we're feeling and put it before God

and it helps us to move forward.

But another thing that Mark Roggeps said in that book is gonna come back to

the end of this episode and help us.

But when I saw that email from him yesterday, it was incredible,

and I'm gonna share more about that with you later, but the email basically

said his son and he had read the book and it was helpful and he gave me some

really nice things to think about.

When I saw his name, it triggered something I remembered about this paper that

I had read earlier in the day.

Yearning predicts subgenual anterior cingulate activity in bereaved individuals.

Let me just break this down for you, okay?

I'm going to read you the first part of this paper that O 'Connor,

McConnell, and Kilgore wrote. It's incredible.

So there's a little science in here, but just listen to this.

Complicated grief or persistent complex bereavement disorder is a condition

that affects approximately 10 % of bereaved individuals.

Okay, there's crashers or a small group, but they are real.

And there's about 10 % of people that crash after they go through the massive thing, okay?

This is correlating with what I wrote in Hope is the First Dose.

A condition that affects approximately 10 % of bereaved individuals and is marked

by intense longing and yearning for the deceased. I know you're resonating with

me if you've lost somebody.

You spend time just begging God to make it all be a dream, to bring him back.

I've a million times I've said, God, can I just wake up tomorrow and Mitch is

gonna be in his room and everything's gonna be back to normal and the last 10

years have just been this terrible nightmare and he's gonna be alive again.

I've yearned for him, longed for him.

And I know Dennis lost his wife, Patty, my mother -in -law, five years ago now.

I know he longs for her, yearns for her.

I know that woman that wrote me yesterday about losing her son.

I know she's yearning for him, okay? So it's not wrong to yearn,

but what happens is some people get stuck in that intense yearning phase and they can't move past it.

The writers again, little is known about the neurocognitive mechanisms contributing

to this syndrome, but previous research suggests that reward pathways in the

brain, reward pathways in the brain may play a role.

Listen, there's a whole set of systems in your brain. There are circuits,

there are networks we call them.

There's one called the default mode and that's what happens when you're not

actively thinking about anything.

When you just relax and close your eyes and kind of turn your mind off and make it quiet in your room.

There's a set of mental processes that are happening and when the default mode

isn't working properly, when the default mode is excessively negative or harmful,

that can get you in a lot of trouble.

But there's other networks too and there's this whole dopamine reward circuit

that's complex and it involves what happens when you anticipate a reward.

This is the neuroscience of addiction.

I anticipate if I get to a certain time of day and I put myself in a certain

place that there's going to be a glass of wine and that's going to help me relax

and I'm going to feel better and stop thinking about this thing that happened and then I'll be okay.

And you start building. It's not the actual substance. It's not the alcohol

or the gambling or the sex or the online shopping or whatever.

It's not that thing that produces.

The feeling that you want, it's the anticipation of the reward that's related

to the neurotransmitter release.

And so understanding that basically addiction is a reward -chasing behavior

and not that you actually need the substance to feel better,

that's the beginning of learning how to heal from addiction.

It's understanding that you can replace that reward with something healthier

and you can find that dopamine elsewhere.

That's the beginning of understanding how to unlock your brain and move forward in addiction, okay?

But it turns out that those same circuits, look at my eyes, this is,

I'm smiling right now because when I read this yesterday, I actually started weeping.

I had so much compassion for people who are stuck in grief because I've been there.

And I think, I already know what my next book is, I'm already writing it,

it's about self -brain surgery.

And one of the chapters is gonna be like, don't be so hard on yourself,

friend, if you're stuck in grief, because we're gonna teach you how to shift

the gear. And we're going to teach you how to drive out of that hole, okay?

Because the brain science is so clear and the spirituality is so clear that

God wants you to move forward and the path is to change how your brain works.

And that's what this paper did for me yesterday. It had Mark Rogetz thought

in my mind and I had this neuroscience article that I was writing and I had

this little bit of research and all these emails and all this stuff coalesced

And I found this picture of the functional magnetic resonance imaging scans that these folks did.

I'm going to put it up on the screen now for the paid subscribers.

And it'll be in the show notes. Picture of the brain that shows increased metabolic

activity in the subgenual anterior cingulate cortex.

And people are focused on the yearning phase of their grief of the person they lost.

They showed them pictures, a bunch of pictures of their loved ones.

And they asked them to think about the thoughts that they think when they're missing them.

And they did a countdown timer, five, four, three, the images,

the numbers were flashing in their mind.

And they would learn that at the end of that countdown they were going to see

a picture of their loved one and they saw that anticipation,

that yearning phase before the reward of seeing the picture,

they were seeing increased activity in the subgenual anterior cingulate cortex.

And this is the exact same area that lights up in the rumination phase of major

depressive disorder, okay?

So what they showed for the first time is that the problem is the area of your

brain that's involved in shifting the gear and driving, making a decision to

think about this and not that,

to make a decision to feel this and not that, to make a decision to get up out

of bed or not, that those decisions, the gear shifting that the cingulate does is abnormally behaving,

in people with yearning.

Abnormal grief response, just as it does in people with major depression disorder.

Why is that so important?

It's important because understanding what parts of your brain aren't working

properly is the key to beginning to get them to work properly.

And we know from self -brain surgery and we know from the Bible that learning

to think differently is the secret to starting to change some of these things

because you can direct these mental processes.

Jeffrey Schwartz calls it mental force.

You can direct mental force. You can engage in directed neuroplasticity and

you can begin to heal. I had a friend.

After we lost Mitch, who's another doctor who said, Lee, I don't know what to

say to you, but I know that Mitch wouldn't want his death to cause a 200 % mortality

rate. He wouldn't want you to die too.

He wouldn't want you to be a crasher. He wouldn't want your life to become just about his loss.

He would want you to take that pain and turn it into something good,

and that, my friend, is why I'm talking to you at five o 'clock in the morning,

in the dark, in my room, looking like I do, looking in the camera,

not concerned about the lighting,

drinking coffee with you, because I want Mitch's life to be about something more than his death.

We're almost 10 years in, in fact, today's the 5th of August,

so 15 days from now is the 10th anniversary of us losing our son, okay?

And I want his life to mean more to me than his death did.

And I wanna use the power of that to move me into a place where I can be helpful

to you as an honor to him, and I hope my book has done that.

I hope this podcast does that. I hope you find a way to redeem your pain and

use it for something powerful.

Use it for something meaningful, so that your life, that their life doesn't

have, their death doesn't have a 200 % mortality rate. Does that make sense?

So here's the thing. Mark Rogetz's book, there's a line, our natural bias is

to individualize suffering.

Our natural bias is to individualize suffering. When I read that,

I thought, yeah, that's right, man. People always make everything about themselves.

And I read Lamentations chapter three, and the guy, we've talked about this

before, Lamentations, if you're new around here, Lamentations is the textbook

for how you learn how to process grief and how you learn to find hope in the

midst of the hardest things in your life.

It's where I figured out that hope is the first dose, and it's where I figured out that hope is a verb.

It's an action word. You can't sit around and wait for hope.

You have to make it because it's always available and there's two parts of it

and one part is memory and the other part is movement Okay,

scientifically they say hope is about agency and pathways So hope is about having

the possibility of doing something to try to move forward in your life and a

pathway a realistic opportunity to do that

Those two things, and hope is defined by some researchers as the ability to

think a way to see that you can get there from here.

So, get there from here through agency and pathways.

Biblically, it's about memory and movement. In every example of the Bible where

somebody says they're hopeless, they start to remember that this isn't the first

time that people they or other people they know have been through hard things.

They start to look back in time and say, wait a minute, we were enslaved in

Egypt for 400 years and God got us out.

We were wandering around the desert for 40 years and God got us out.

We ran up against the Red Sea and God parted it.

We ran up against the Jordan River and God parted it. We couldn't win against

Jericho and the walls fell down.

We couldn't make it through the desert because we were starving and he provided

manna. We were thirsty and he put water out of the rock.

We were hungry and he gave us quail.

They started remembering all the times before that God did something impossible

to make a way, as he says in Isaiah, where there is no way, where he'll make

a stream in the wasteland where there wasn't one.

So remembering starts to create this burning ember of hope starts to come alive,

and then they have to do something.

They have to move. And from a neuroscience perspective, we know that since you

can't really multitask like we talked about a few days ago, we know that beginning

to move will take your brain off the thing that you're stuck on and make you

think about something else.

And you'll start to feel some dopamine release, some reward for

movement and you'll start to make a mental bridge in your brain that

says if I move I feel better I don't have to

drink to feel better I can exercise instead I can

do this instead of that I can find that reward somewhere else

and you'll start to move and when you move you'll start

to feel hopeful because it's possible you

just prove to yourself that it's possible for you to get out of bed

today it's possible for you to walk down the

driveway and check the mail again it's possible for you to call

your other children and talk to them after you lost one

you don't have to be dead inside anymore it's

possible you can move so that

all that stuff coalesce and the third chapter of lamentations are

all these bad things were happening to the city and the king and people were

being murdered and women and children were starving to death and he says I am

the man who has tasted affliction and sin the wrath from the Lord like he's

the man who's been suffering he's making it about himself we've rogue upset

it our natural bias is to individualize suffering. Well listen to what these researchers said.

This is fascinating, fascinating.

What they found when they looked at the comparison between major depressive

disorder and complex grief and the activity that they're seeing in the subgenual

anterior cingulate cortex,

they said symptoms of depressive rumination and abnormal yearning and complex

grief share three qualities.

For one, both rumination and yearning, in the context of grief,

are experienced as uncontrollable.

In other words, we don't think we can stop it. We're just grieving,

and we're sad, and we're broken, and we're hurting, and it can't ever be better. Those are trauma lies.

Those are the automatic negative thoughts that trauma puts into your head.

I think it's the devil sometimes, the enemy, and there's not much difference

between devil and diagnosis when your brain isn't working right.

He can use that to your disadvantage as well.

But the devil and the enemy and your basic trauma response fills your head with

this idea that the rumination,

that the stuckness, that the pain, the grief, the loss, the pit is uncontrollable and unavoidable.

So both rumination and yearning in the context of grief are experienced as uncontrollable.

They have a negative valence. What does that mean? A negative valence means

this idea of the feeling that you're feeling has to always be negative.

That it can't ever be positive.

That's important because if you can switch, what we just talked about a while

ago when I said I want Mitch's life to have meant more than his death.

I want to learn to put a positive valence on the experience of losing Mitch where I can say yes,

I've lost my son and it's devastating and

it's terrible and it'll never be good but his life was

so good there was so much

light in his life and I'm so grateful that I got to experience and I'm so proud

that I was his dad and that some of those good parts of him were because of

me and my relationship with him I'm so glad that he got to know Lisa and and

that he was a good brother and he would have been in such a good uncle and you start switching,

from an automatic negative, every time you think about that person,

it puts you back in the hole of the grief, of the yearning, of the missing,

of the longing, of the suffering.

If you can switch to where you put a positive spin, and you say,

oh man, what a great kid he was, and I really miss him, and I can't wait for

the resurrection when I get to see him again.

And he's in this place now that he was created to be in, and God.

Mitch doesn't have to feel uncomfortable in his own skin anymore,

he's happy now. Like if you start spinning that, okay?

So the three things, they're uncontrollable, they have a negative valence,

and this is the most important thing, this is a self brain surgery.

I brought you here today to say, they have a self focus.

That stopped me in my track. They're doing brain imaging here,

okay? This isn't Bible, I'm not teaching you a Bible lesson right now.

I'm reading you a paper that was published in secular scientific

literature or looking at what parts of the brain are active or

overactive when you have complex grief in which you're stuck and you're stuck

in that yearning phase and you're one of the crashers or you have major depressive

disorder and you're ruminating and you're down in that pit with the crashers

who can't seem to find their way back up towards hope. This is what they found.

The symptoms are experienced as uncontrollable.

They have a negative valence and they are self -focused. You remember,

Mark Rogoff said our natural bias is to individualize suffering.

The lamenter in chapter three said, I am the man who has tasted affliction and

seen the wrath of the Lord. I'm the man.

All these other people are suffering, but he's the man who's hurting.

And friend, that is the secret. Now again, with the caveat that sometimes you

need professional help, understand this, and this is not, I'm not taking a shot at you.

If you're stuck here, I'm with you. I've been there, okay?

The thoughts that you think when you are ruminating, the thoughts that you think

when you are stuck in the yearning phase,

the thoughts that you think when you've lost everything and you're down in that

hole and you can't stop thinking about it and you can't move forward in your

life, the thoughts that you're thinking are about you.

I'm sorry. They are. They're about what you feel. They're about what you've lost.

They're about what you need. They're about what you want.

There's a story I told in my book, Hope is the First Dose, about a guy who the

CEO of the hospital had made some changes and it negatively impacted this one practice.

It saved the hospital, saved hundreds of jobs, made everything better for the

patients, kept the place afloat and in business,

but it made this one guy's practice a little bit less money and made it a little

bit harder on him, and he was furious, and we were at this meeting,

and he was pounding the table,

and he was yelling and cussing and screaming and throwing a big tantrum about

how bad this decision was for him and his purposes,

and couldn't see that if they didn't make the change, the hospital would eventually

go out of business, and he would lose all of his practice.

He just couldn't see that. Like, he couldn't see that there was a bigger picture

here, And the hospital CEO said, look, I really want to help you.

What can I do to help you? And he said, unwind it all, put it all back.

Give me back everything before you made the change, put it exactly back the

way it was, and then I'll be happy. And she said, that's impossible.

We've torn buildings down, we've built new buildings, we've let some people

go, we've hired hundreds of new people, we've changed business practices,

we've built new corporations.

It's impossible to go back to exactly the way it was. It's not possible, you can't have that.

And he left the meeting basically saying I'm not happy unless I can have that,

I have to have that one thing.

Well I'm just telling you friend,

his problem was that he was stuck on how the situation affected him.

And he couldn't make himself think about the patients and the overall business

and the health of the community and all the other millions of positive things

that came out of that change.

Okay, he couldn't he was stuck on the fact that he had lost this particular

thing that he thought he had to have Okay,

and that's where we get stuck in grief and major depression and loss and yearning

We get stuck in the ways in which this affects us.

I can promise you now I did have a lot of thoughts about Mitch's future and

how it was so sad that he would never get married and have kids and I would

never get to see What his kids look like and what he did for a living and how

he grew up and got through all these things I did have some thoughts like that,

but the most thoughts that I had,

the most common thought was how bad it hurt me to lose my little boy.

It was self -focused. I was focused on what I felt, on how sad I was,

on how hard it was going to be for me to go through my life knowing my son wouldn't

be there to eulogize me or bury me someday.

I worried about how I lost my last living relative that has my last name.

I thought those things. I'm not proud of it, but I'm just, I'm trying to be honest.

The rumination that I had was about me, about what I felt, about what I lost,

and not so much about Mitch.

It's hard to say it out loud, but that's really true.

And that's what they see in the research in the fMRI scanner,

that the symptoms, the activation, the feelings that these people are feeling

are uncontrollable, they have a negative balance, and they're self -focused.

And so what's the lesson for us here? The lesson is that we have to shift gears.

We have to learn how to say, wait a minute, Mitch wouldn't want me to be stuck in that hole.

And if he were with me right now, if he could come and sit down,

have a cup of coffee with me, and say, hey dad, let's have a cup of coffee and talk for a minute.

What he would say is, hey dad, I'm okay.

I'm with Jesus, I'm happy, I'm where I'm supposed to be. And I want you to use my life.

Even the end of it to help other people and I want you to find purpose and meaning

in your days I don't want you to be Dead like I am I don't want you your life to be meaningless.

I don't want you to be stuck That's what he would say and that's what your loved

one would say to friend your loved one would say hey go find something to do,

To give meaning and purpose to your life again move a little bit and you'll

start feeling hope Take hope and fly, hope returns, okay?

I'm gonna play that song in a few minutes, Matthew West's song, Hope Returns.

Hold on, that's when hope returns, when your heart is breaking,

when your knees hit the ground, that's when hope returns, okay?

These people put these folks who were grieving and who were stuck in the fMRI

scanner, and they said, hey, think about your loved one, yearn for them,

and they saw activity light up in the same places that light up with major depressive

disorder, in the rumination phase.

And the same places that light up in PTSD and all these other places,

major depression, where you're stuck and you just can't shift and move forward, okay?

There's a place called the dorsal attention network and it's part of this reward

pathway and it's part of the same circuit here that we're talking about.

The dorsal attention network is like the aperture on the lens of a camera where

if you take a camera and you turn that aperture,

it takes the whole big background and focuses it down where you can focus on

that one flower or that one bird or on the hand that you're trying to photograph.

It zooms in so everything else becomes blurred and all you can see is the thing you're focusing on.

That's what the dorsal attention network in your brain does. Okay?

And after you're stuck, when you're stuck in grief, it becomes self -focused

and the dorsal attention network becomes lit up when you're thinking about all

the ways in which this major loss is affecting you.

And what we learned from the science is if you can learn how to zoom back out

and start thinking about others,

start thinking about your life in a new context, start thinking about what your

loved one would want you to feel instead of what you are feeling,

you'll start to feel some different things and you'll start to feel some bubbles

of dopamine in that reward pathway.

And you'll start to sniff out and it starts to feel true. I'm telling you,

I went through this, it started to feel true to me after my friend and said,

hey, Mitch, wouldn't want you to have a 200 % mortality rate here.

That had a ring to it that felt kind of true.

And I think probably there was a little a little bit of dopamine firing in me anticipating.

Beginning to write or beginning to podcast or beginning to try to help other

bereaved parents like Jill and Brad Sullivan have done with the while we're

waiting pockets, they're helping people all over the world, they just got back

from Uganda where they're helping grieving parents over there,

like they're taking this loss of their child and they're not just ruminating on it.

But they're shifting into gear to drive towards something that has meaning and purpose.

And that, my friend, is how you find hope again. That, my friend,

is how you get out of the pit of despair.

That, my friend, is how you find yourself, as God said to Isaiah,

I have refined you in the furnace of suffering.

Because you will either do one of two things in the furnace.

You will burn up and die yourself, or you will become refined and you'll burn

away all the stuff that's not helpful,

all those coping mechanisms that aren't helpful, all the rumination and all

the yearning and all the things that are making you stuck.

And the ways in which you're using substances or shopping or anything else to

numb yourself, you'll burn that away and you'll come out refined on the other side.

You're not ready to hear this in the acute phase. You're not ready to hear that Romans 8 .28's true.

You're not ready to hear that God will work that for good somehow.

You can't hear it early on, but it turns out 10 years later to be true.

And it starts to bubble up and you start to hear things like this when somebody

says, hey, your cingulate is designed to put you in gear. It's not designed

to sit there and be stuck.

Your dorsal attention network is designed to allow you to focus on the good

things and not be stuck on focusing on the negative things.

All these parts of your brain that God made in this incredible research paper

pointed it out. Mark Rogup's words came back to me.

And I'm just here on self -brain surgery Saturday, friend. I don't have a catchy

phrase for this operation yet, but I'm gonna come up with it before I write that book.

There's a way that you can start thinking differently about your loss and you

can start turning your attention to focus on something positive,

not about the loss, but on something positive about the person that you've lost

or about the situation that you're in now that you have lost or the dream that died,

something about the opportunity that you had or

that you've learned or that you've grown through or remembering

with gratitude the things that you used to have or

some other way to pivot away from

the negativity related with that loss and

you'll begin to feel that reward circuit bubbling and

lighting up and you'll know there's some truth to it and if you can just get

after it and pursue that you'll start to find the way forward and that's what

we're coming here every day on this podcast to try to help you do is to find

that way forward so you can use your brain the way it's designed so you can

come alive again after these hard things happen. There's a treatment plan, okay?

There's prehab and there's self -brain surgery and there's rehab and there's

community and there's all these things, but all of them depend first on you

being willing to believe that it's possible to get better, that you can get there from here.

And we call that, what do we call it? We call it hope, because there's a treatment

plan and hope is the first dose and you can't change your life until you change your mind.

And the good news is, Matthew West is gonna tell us Hope returns when it seems

all hopeless, when it seems like everything's lost. There's a way to find hope.

You can show you pictures of somebody's brain when it's happening.

That's what's so cool about this. It's not just scripture.

It's not just motivational speaking. It's not just me trying to encourage you.

It's pictures of your brain when you change the things you think about,

and you can literally find hope when you change your mind.

And that, my friend, is how you change your life.

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.

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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.