Final Prescription for 2023

Good morning, my friend. I am so excited and grateful to be with you today.

It is New Year's Eve, 2023.

It's the last day of the year. I'm Dr. Lee Warren, and I'm here with you to

do a little bit of self-brain surgery

this morning as we get our heads on straight to head into next year.

Remember, we've been talking since November about the fact that what got you

here won't get you there.

If there is someplace that you really need to be, if you know that the way that

your life has has been playing out isn't what it needs to be,

if you've been struggling to overcome some trauma or tragedy or massive thing,

if you're dealing with anxiety or distress or depression or loss or pain,

or if you just feel like you're supposed to break through to some new place

and you haven't been able to do it, then what got you here to this place on

this day, or you're listening to this podcast with your friend,

the left-handed brain surgeon,

and you know that next year needs to look different.

For goodness sakes, you're praying, you're desperate for next year to look different

than this year did, then we're not about a whole bunch of New Year's resolutions

that we all know we're not going to keep.

We need to change our minds because you can't change your life until you change

your mind. And that's what we're going to cover in just a minute today.

I'm going to do a couple of reader shout outs. We're going to talk a little

bit about the biochemistry of stress and what stress and anxiety does to your body.

And we're going to learn a little bit about a particular type of scan that you

can get and you can give yourself that will help you understand and give you

insight into what's happening in in your body, and in your mind.

And we're going to just cover a little bit of ground about the best prescription

for how you can change your mind and how you can change your life.

Understanding how the neuroscience of how your mind and your brain work together

and understanding the spiritual implications of what happens when you connect

your mind to the Creator who wants to help you turn your thoughts into things

that will give you a better path forward.

And we're going to do all that in just a few minutes. We're going to do a couple

of listener shout-outs. We're going to cover a lot of ground in just a few minutes

as we finish up this year, because I want to give you one gift that I think

is the most important prescription I can give you that will help you change your mind.

Before we do any of that, one last time for 2023, 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 mindworks, 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.

All right, let's get after it. Listen, a couple shout-outs.

Yesterday, I released the interview I did with Lee Strobel, and we had an incredible

conversation about his amazing book, Is God Real?

And Lee Strobel, of course, incredible writer. I've been reading him since the

late 1990s when he wrote The Case for Christ.

And if you haven't heard that episode yet, please go to yesterday's Self-Praying Surgery Saturday.

Listen to the Lee Strobel interview. review. That'll be up on YouTube later

today for if you want to watch the video.

But I highly encourage you to listen to that. And we had a few giveaway copies.

They're already accounted for.

But we talked about the fact that we're going to give away a few books.

And I said that, and we've had almost 100 people write in looking for those five books.

So the publisher gave us five. We have about 100 that have written in.

So we're going to be selecting those winners later today.

It's too late. Please don't send me an email. The list is already full.

But I'm just so incredibly moved at how many people wanted to read that book.

And I just encourage you, if you haven't read it and you're not one of the people

that get notified today that you've received one of the free copies,

go to your library, buy it on Amazon, go to your local bookseller.

But that's a book you need to read, Is God Real?

Because I think it's going to help clear up any kind of of cognitive dissonance.

We hear so much from the media and so much from mainstream sources that implies

that we're kind of silly for believing in this God, this fairy tale in the sky, they say.

And so there's this cognitive dissonance when you send your kids to school and

they come home with all these ideas and we tell them to have faith and their

teacher tells them it's just a big evolutionary accident.

There's all this cognitive dissonance. But the truth is, the science is It's

having a real problem explaining away God as we learn more and more and more.

And quantum physics is what's getting us there. Quantum physics has created

a huge problem for the evolutionary biologists.

Quantum physics has created a huge problem for the cosmologists.

Quantum physics has created a huge problem for everybody who's really honestly

studying the idea of how in the world did we get here.

And so I'm just telling you, that book covers a lot of ground.

It's incredible. It covers theology, philosophy, history, science,

cosmology, biochemistry, all these different ways to look at the big question, is God real?

And we're so grateful for everybody who wrote in and requested a book.

We're going to be notifying five winners later today.

So hang in there. Listen, that being said, I want to share with you one email

that I got from a woman named Vicki in Florida.

Shout out to you, Vicki. Vicki, and she said something just incredible,

and I want to give you something to pray about, okay? Two things to pray about.

Here's what Vicki said. First of all, I want to thank you, Dr.

Warren, for the wonderful ministry of your podcast.

I have a good friend who was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in the last six months.

Her diagnosis went from stage one to stage four when they realized the cancer

had moved to her bones, her spine.

Your podcast has made such a huge difference in her life and her husband's life.

They are finding purpose through their devastation, and in doing so,

they are blessing many others with courage and positivity.

So thank you, Dr. Warren, for giving Cindy and Kevin encouragement to find purpose

in their suffering and be uplifted by God's word each day. Thank you so much, Vicki, for that email.

And friend, I want you right now, whatever you're doing, to say a prayer for Cindy and for Kevin.

That they would have courage and strength, that somehow they would have a miraculous

cure, but that they would have the power to find purpose in their suffering

and to use that for God's glory no matter what happens with Cindy's cancer.

Cindy, we're praying for you, and we just want to give you some encouragement.

If you're listening, we are with you. Friend, I want you to just take a second, please.

Dr. Warren is asking you a favor. Pray for Cindy right now and for Kevin,

okay? We got another email yesterday, a woman named Rhonda.

And this is amazing. I love when I hear stories like this. She walked into a

YMCA in Omaha, Nebraska, and the person at the desk at the YMCA was reading

my book, Hope is the First Dose. Rhonda's a listener, listens almost every day.

And she said, hey, I listen to Dr. Warren's podcast. I read the book.

They had a conversation about it. And it turns out that this woman who is reading the book has cancer.

She had bone cancer, and she's trying to fight it because she has an 11-year-old

daughter. And Rhonda didn't share the woman's name with me.

But I want you to take a second again, friend, and pray for that woman,

that God will give her strength and endurance and that you may find purpose

in her suffering and that she could beat this cancer so she can be there for

her 11-year-old daughter.

People are dealing with very real things, and I know you are too,

and whatever you're going through, Lisa and I are praying for you,

and we want you to use the prayer wall.

That's why it's there, wle1md.com slash prayer.

And you can join us and join people all over the world praying with and for you.

I just get choked up a little bit when I hear that people are connecting,

and that there's a group of people all around the world right now who are putting

their struggles before God, using this podcast and my books and other good resources

like Lee Strobel's book. And we're all in this together.

So let's just take a second to pray for Cindy and Kevin, for the woman in Omaha

dealing with bone cancer.

Let's just take a minute to pray for them. Father God, as we finish this year,

we want to leave some things behind.

We want to cast off some things that are hindering us and some sins that are entangling us.

We know that what got us here won't get us there to the place that you're calling

to deliver us, to set us free, and to help us change our minds and change our

lives. We have some real things that are happening.

Some of the things that we're dealing with are relational. Some trouble with

marriages and trouble with kids and trouble with parents and trouble with aging

parents and trouble with just issues that there are these problems in our lives

that we don't even have words for sometimes.

We need your help. We're dealing with psychological distress from traumas and

tragedies and massive things that have come along before.

And some of us are grieving and we can't move forward and we don't know how to get unstuck.

But you do, Father. And we have people like Cindy who's dealing with cancer

and the woman in Omaha and so many other people that are riding into the prayer

wall that are struggling and desperately struggling with physical illness.

God, you know all of these things. We put them before you, and we ask you as

we step into this new year that you would either give us miraculous breakthroughs

or you would give us the strength and endurance to walk through these troubles,

to know that you have a plan to deliver us either in this life or in the next,

to know that you're with us, that you're close to us when we're brokenhearted,

and that you do care and you love us very much.

We give you these things. Father, help us change our minds and help us change

our lives. Be our great physician. In Jesus' name we pray, amen.

I spent a lot of time thinking about what I should say to you on our last episode

of this year. It's been an incredible year for the podcast.

We've grown listeners across the world. We've almost doubled our listenership.

It's just been incredible how you've responded to this idea of taking what we're

looking for in hope and how we find it in Scripture and how we find it in neuroscience

and how we can use our brains to our advantage and let God show us how to operate

our minds the way He intended for them to be operated.

And I'm just so grateful to be in this journey with you and to be able to talk

to people like Lee Strobel and Max Lucado and we have some guests coming up in January.

I don't even want to spoil it for you but some incredible, incredible guests

coming up and you're just going to love it.

So anyway, I've been thinking about what to say in our last episode of the year,

and what can I leave you with?

If I was going to give you one prescription, how can I help you the most?

What can I do that would be the most helpful for you?

And I guess since we talk about trauma and tragedy

and other massive things so often and the

big kind of defining thing is grief loss hopelessness anxiety depression these

are all things that affect our mental state and how those things can be become

chains that hold us back and help and keep us from breaking through and what

do we do about those things I just want to spend a second.

First of all, I'll tell you how important it is to learn to get anxiety and

depression under control. I get emails all the time.

How do I do it? I understand you tell me to change my mind and change my life.

I understand you tell me that I need to use memory and movement to find hope.

I understand all that, but how do I actually do it? Somebody wrote yesterday

and said that anxiety just keeps popping up, and I feel like I've learned some

techniques to help, and then it just becomes overwhelming again. in.

The first thing is I want you to understand how very important it is to get

these psychological symptoms under your control,

whether that requires therapy or sometimes medication or whether you can do

it through self-brain surgery and through the study of scripture and reading

and getting around other people or getting rid of alcohol or anything else that

might be aggravating or exacerbating your trouble,

whatever it might be. Let me tell you why it's so important.

There's a paper from the the British Medical Journal back in 2012.

There's been tons of other research, but there's just one example.

The paper's called Association Between Psychological Distress and Mortality,

Individual Participant Pooled Analysis of 10 Prospective Cohort Studies.

The author is a guy named Tom Russ, Emmanuel Stamaticus, and Mark Hamer and

others that contributed to this study that was It was done in the UK,

British Medical Journal, 2012.

And here's the punchline. They looked at a common health survey that's done,

General Health Questionnaire 12, that they use in Great Britain.

When they do medical intake forms, they basically take this data that looks

at different kinds of psychological symptoms that people might have so that

they have some connection in the medical record between symptoms and illness

and what association mental stuff might have to physical illness.

So they looked at all these different studies, and it's profound what they discovered.

A series of studies, they said, have shown an association between symptoms of

depression and anxiety, psychological distress, and an elevated risk of premature

death from cardiovascular disease and potentially all cancers.

Okay? The long story short is this. your cardiovascular disease death is 29%

higher if you're dealing with significant anxiety or depression than if you're not.

So people with cardiovascular disease that aren't stressed out and anxious and

depressed have a 29% lower chance of dying from their cardiovascular disease

than those who are dealing with significant psychological stress.

People with cancer had a.

41% increased risk of dying from their cancer if they also had significant anxiety and depression.

Anxiety or depression or other types of psychological distress,

41%, which means if you're sick, if you've got a bad heart, if you've got cardiovascular disease,

if you've got cancer, you have a significantly greater chance of surviving that

if you can get your mind right,

if you can get your mental status better. Why?

Because thoughts become things. Because when When your brain is birthing new

neurons in an environment that's full of cortisol and stress and anxiety and depression,

those new neurons have little chance of getting wired into something that's

going to help you and a higher chance of getting wired in to something that's going to hurt you.

Remember, we talked about Hebb's Law, the neurons that fire together wire together.

So if your neurons are constantly being exposed to thoughts that are anxious

and scared and and you're worried, and you're fretting, then they're going to

get wired into pathways that produce harmful neurotransmitters and end up hurting

you more than helping you.

Deaths from external causes, so other types of deaths besides cardiovascular

disease and cancer, 29% increased risk.

So the bottom line is that people who are suffering with anxiety and depression

literally have a greatly increased chance of not surviving their illness,

whatever it might be, than those is who learn to process their emotions and

handle those things in a healthier way. That makes it an emergency, okay?

If you're dealing with something, severe grief, if you're stuck,

if you're dealing with this trauma and it's creating anxiety and stress.

Whatever it might be, then one of the things you need to focus on the most for 2024,

is learning how to clean up your thought life and get yourself in a cleaner,

healthier state that's lower stress and less depressed, whatever that takes.

Whether it's reading, whether it's changing your thought processes,

learning the thought biopsy, and learning how to do all these self-brain surgery

techniques that I teach you, or getting a therapist, or getting medication from

your doctor if you need it, all those things.

But don't forget, we talked about it the other day, don't use medication if

you're also, on the other hand, using something else like alcohol or cigarettes

or something else that's harmful to try to overcome the stress and anxiety.

On one hand with a substance by numbing yourself and then giving yourself a

chemical to try and nudge your neurochemistry back to a normal state,

don't rob Peter to pay Paul, okay?

So before you go on an antidepressant or before you go on an anti-anxiety medicine,

get rid of anything that is already known to cause or exacerbate those symptoms, okay?

Don't drink alcohol and take Prozac, okay?

Just don't. Get something out of your life that you know is hurting you.

Be a good self-brain surgeon, and remember that your number one priority is first no harm.

Relentlessly refuse to participate in your own demise. Just try it.

If you don't know if it's going to work or not, try it for a few days.

Give it a chance to see if good practices will actually help you.

One of the problems we have is we have all these things that we know.

We know what the best practices are, but we give ourselves excuses for why we

won't try them for our own lives. lives. We just continue to feel the things

we feel and do the things we do.

And we wonder why we're not getting better when we haven't actually tried the

thing that's known to help.

So I'm just saying for 2024, give yourself a gift of trying the best practices.

And the best practice is to learn some healthier way to manage anxiety,

depression, stress, grief, whatever it is you're dealing with.

There's a paper from the Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease.

From Dawson Church, from back in 2012 also. 2012, apparently a good year for this kind of research.

The effect of emotional freedom techniques on stress biochemistry.

Emotional freedom techniques is tapping, which we've talked about just a little

bit, tapping and learning different kinds of therapeutic techniques for your mind.

And they looked at some stress biochemistry markers, particularly cortisol in

the bloodstream, which is the molecule that's associated with stress.

And here's what they found. Now, the study examined the changes in cortisol

levels and psychological distress symptoms of 83 subjects receiving a single

hour-long intervention. You get that one hour of intervention.

Subjects were randomly assigned to either an emotional freedom technique group,

a psychotherapy group that received a supportive interview, or a no-treatment group.

Then they measured salivary cortisol levels. So they measured how much cortisol

was in their body immediately before and 30 minutes after the intervention.

So get this, okay, we have patients who are distressed and they have one hour of intervention,

either with emotional freedom techniques like learning to process your thoughts

properly and doing tapping and that sort of thing, or just getting some supportive

interview from a psychotherapist or not getting any treatment at all.

And here's what they found, and it's stunning. The EFT,

Emotional Freedom Technique group, showed statistically significant improvements in anxiety by 58%,

depression by 49%, and the overall severity of symptoms by 50.5%,

and the breadth of their symptoms by 42%.

So they reported 42% fewer symptoms after one hour of treatment.

The group that only had psychological intervention.

Decreased by 14% across the board, as opposed to, I'm sorry,

the cortisol levels in the group that had EFT, 25% reduction in one hour.

The psychotherapy group alone, only 14%. And the no treatment group,

14.44%. So that means the people that didn't get any treatment at all actually

improved more than the people that only got a supportive interview. interview.

Which is interesting. It's probably not statistically significant.

But basically what they found is if you learn how to control your symptoms using

tapping, using meditation,

using mindset change, you can get your symptoms under way better control than

just talking to somebody else about it or not doing anything at all.

And we're not just talking about symptoms.

We're talking about stress biochemistry, the actual physical levels of cortisol in your body.

So put these two things together being significantly

anxious or stressed or depressed significantly increases

your risk of dying from cardiovascular disease cancer all

other causes okay it's hard on your body it is bad for your body to constantly

be bathed in stress related biochemical changes it's bad for you to live in

an anxious state and you can significantly improve Prove that just by changing your mind,

just by doing things that get your mind in a better place.

This is science. This isn't self-help guru stuff, okay? This is legitimate,

peer-reviewed, blinded science.

Now, let me give you one more layer to this, okay?

There was a study we talked about a few weeks ago, published back in 2021,

yeah, 2021, from Baylor University researchers that looked at incarcerated individuals

who were dealing with stress, anxiety, depression, ingratitude,

anger, all these kinds of psychological issues.

And they put them through a program where they divided them into groups where

they either got no treatment, they got only therapy, or they got therapy tied

to a Bible study program.

And they did that for one month. They used the Gospel of Mark as their plan,

called it the prisoner's journey, and they found statistically significant improvements

in anxiety, depression,

drug use, fighting, and anger in the group that had the Bible study as compared.

To the group that only had psychological intervention and the group that had nothing.

It was remarkable, statistically significant improvements in all areas compared

from the people that used therapy associated with Bible study compared to those who did not.

It's incredible, and it persisted. They followed these people for 40 months after,

and they found that the people that had had exposure to the Word of God along

with good standard therapeutic techniques had persistent improvement in anxiety, depression,

stress, fighting, anger, forgiveness, all these other markers. Incredible outcome.

What is the purpose of me telling you this? The purpose is this.

There is no prescription, plan, procedure, protocol, or pathway that will help

you more in your life than spending time in the Word of God.

So if I have to give you one gift for 2023 heading into 2024,

it's this. Pay attention.

The gift is this. Add Bible study to your life.

Think about it like a prescription, like a plan, like a pathway,

like a part of your armamentarium to deal with whatever you're dealing with.

Add Bible study to your life.

Now, there's a story in the New Testament in the book of Acts where the Ethiopian

eunuch is reading the scroll and Philip is sent to talk to him,

I'm one of the disciples, and the guy says, how am I supposed to understand

what I'm reading unless somebody can help me?

So I'm not saying that you need to just read the Bible all by yourself and all

your problems will go away. I'm not saying that. It's not true.

You do need help. You need a pastor, a friend. You need a Bible study group.

You need to read broadly good books that help you understand and unpack things.

You need to listen to podcasts.

But you need to add Bible study to your life as one of the medications that

you take to help you get through your life.

And I would just submit to you, if you're spending an hour a week in therapy

and you're not spending an hour a week in the Word of God, you got the ratio wrong.

As a neurosurgeon, sometimes I write prescriptions, and somebody needs 10 milligrams

of dexamethasone, and they need a gram of Ansef.

But if I give them instead a

gram of dexamethasone and 10 milligrams of Ansef, I'm going to hurt them.

They're both necessary. They need both of those medicines.

They're good things. Neither one of them is a bad thing. But if I give them

in the wrong ratio, if I give them the wrong dose, then I can hurt my patient

by just not giving them enough or giving them too much of one thing and not enough of the other.

So don't hear me saying that if you need a therapist that you shouldn't go to the therapist.

Don't hear me saying that. I'm not saying that. My daughter's at therapists,

okay? You need therapy. There are therapists using this program to help their patients. You need it.

If you need it, it's necessary, okay?

The Word of God is the best therapy you'll ever get, and you need to add it

to your armamentarium if you're not taking it.

You need to take it. Prescribe it. There's no plan or pathway or protocol or

prescription or procedure that can help you as much as adding Bible study. Why?

Because remember our little theme from Chris Voss that we talk about all the time.

When the pressure's on, you don't rise to the occasion. You fall to your highest

level of of preparation.

That's what the prehab part of the treatment plan in my book,

Hope, is the first dose is about.

You need to have some promises and some things in your heart and in your head

and in your life that you will fall back to and remember and recall when you're stressed, okay?

Remember, stress is deadly, so you need some way to deal with it.

And one of the best ways to deal with stress is to switch from anxiety into

gratitude and thanksgiving and all that stuff because we We learned the other day,

we talked about how in your hippocampus, you either switch it to connect to

your frontal lobes and calm things down and get the executive function and control

and start planning better and proceeding down a better, healthier path,

or you can short circuit and go right from hippocampus to amygdala and down into reaction.

Fight, flight, freeze, and all that stress stuff.

But you can't have both. So your hippocampus can go one direction.

It can connect to your frontal lobe and help you. It can connect to your amygdala

and hurt you. but you can't have both and you can't have anxiety and gratitude

at the same time. So let's just give you an example.

Let's just say you go to your doctor and you get the diagnosis and it's bad news.

It's stage four and you can freak out and you probably will transiently,

but eventually when you start slowing down, you have a choice.

You can say, I am completely hosed.

I'm going to die. The doctor said the prognosis is terminal and I'm just going

to give up and I'm going to.

Right off into the sunset and you can

start being anxious and stress what's going to happen to my kids what's

going to happen to my spouse what's going to happen to my family all

these things or you can say my goodness yes I have metastatic cancer but thank

goodness we made the diagnosis now it hasn't gone to my brain yet thank goodness

I have a good oncologist thank goodness there are people who have survived this

before yeah there's only 5% but that means that 5% do survive.

Right? You start looking at the things that you can be grateful for.

You start saying, thank you, God, that somebody invented gamma radiation.

Thank you, God, that somebody invented this proton beam that I can get.

Thank you, God, that somebody came up with this chemotherapy protocol,

and I'm going to give it my all.

Do you see what I mean? You get the same news, and you can react to it either

in a way that's going to lower your stress biochemical markers, right?

Find some way to get your fear and your anxiety, your depression,

your terror under under control, or you're going to let those stressful things

rise up and you're going to be self-defeating.

You're going to make it more likely that you give in.

Remember that we talked about the quantum Zeno effect. The more you observe

a particular thing, the more you say, is this going to be the outcome?

Am I going to die? Am I going to die? Am I going to die? Am I going to die?

Then the more real that outcome becomes and the more inevitable it becomes.

That's quantum physics. It's true that the more you observe something with a

particular expectation, the more

likely it is that that thing is going to come to pass. It's just true.

So knowing that you can't be anxious and thankful at the same time,

knowing that anxiety is harmful to you, then it would behoove you if you say,

okay, I've got a tough diagnosis here, but I want to try to do my best and follow

the best practice to get better instead of worse, or to have the best outcome here.

Then you know you need to get those anxiety symptoms under control.

Then you know you need to move towards gratitude or something that's going to

help you lower your cortisol,

lower the stress biochemistry, improve your outcome, and have a better chance

of making good decisions and maintaining your family and keeping everything

connected in the way that you want than if you give in to fear.

Okay? Does that make sense?

Let's remember that in the quantum physics world, time is not linear,

okay? We talked about this a few weeks ago.

Even Einstein figured out that time sometimes in the quantum world is an arrow

that points both directions.

This is why Jesus said in Luke 18, 1, always pray and never give up.

Never stop praying about your troubles.

Never stop praying. And there was a study in the British Medical Journal back

in 2001 that looked at retroactive prayer and showed, surprisingly,

statistically significant improvement in outcome in people who were prayed for

after the outcome had already been determined in the medical record.

It was a crazy study, and it was actually done as kind of a joke,

but we talked about the fact that God sometimes winks and smiles and shows us

things that He wants us to know.

And what he wants us to know is in luke 18 1 he reminds

us that no outcome is outside of

his control and always pray and never give up okay so my point is this i want

you to remember eugene peterson said in his book run with the horses which was

a study of the book of jeremiah he said hope connects us to actions that com.

Let me rephrase that. Hope commits us to actions that connect us to God's promises.

Hope connects us to God's promises by committing us to action.

What does that mean? I always tell you, hope is a decision.

It's not an accident. And it's a verb. It's an action word. It's not passive.

And it doesn't just show up.

You can create it. And you create it through memory and movement.

You remember God's promises. You remember the good things that you put in your

heart. You get the dose of God's word that you need.

So it's in there when the stress happens so you can recall true things that are good.

Recall things that give you some place to land and some ground under your feet that's solid.

And you're not going to fall. Hope commits us to actions because the second part is movement.

Hope commits us to actions that connect us to God's promises. You see that?

Hope goes both directions just like time does in quantum physics.

And hope says, I'm going to go back and remember, I'm not the first person that's

ever gone through something like this.

People have survived this before. God's been faithful before.

I've even gone through hard things before, and He's been there for me.

And hope connects us to God's promises in that way.

And hope commits us to actions. So I'm going to turn now from my fear,

from my anxiety, and I'm going to take the strongest path forward that I can in this situation.

And I'm gonna fight for meaning and purpose in this no matter what the outcome.

And I'm gonna be grateful that God is with me and he is going to deliver me.

Now, deliver doesn't necessarily mean cure, right?

It means he's gonna hold my hand and walk through this with me and there's going

to come a time in the future at some point, whether it's in this life or the

next, when he's gonna wipe away those tears and he's gonna redeem this situation

and he's gonna show me what it was about.

God doesn't always give us answers. He didn't even give Job answers.

He just told him where to turn. He said, I'm not going to tell you why,

but I'm going to tell you who, and it's me. I'm going to help you.

Remember that. God doesn't always give us the why. He usually doesn't.

J.I. Packer said, if you say, why did this happen, God, you usually don't get an answer.

But if you say, how can I glorify you in this moment? How can I be with you in this moment?

How can I line up with your pathway? Then you almost always get an answer.

In fact, you always get an answer to that.

So, my gift to you, my friend, knowing how harmful stress is,

knowing how our outcomes are better,

knowing that our outcomes are better when we have less stress and less anxiety

and less depression, and knowing that a good pathway to do that is using emotional

freedom techniques, learning good mental health procedures,

self-brain surgery, if you will, and adding the Word of God makes it even better

than that, then I want to give you Psalm 34.

Psalm 34, 22 verses.

But there's some doozies in here. And it starts with this. David is in trouble

in this psalm when he wrote it. Somebody's trying to kill him.

And he starts with this. I will bless the Lord at all times.

His praise will always be on my lips. So you get the diagnosis.

It's stage four. You say, praise God that you are with me in this,

that there's doctors, that there's radiation, that there's chemotherapy,

that there's surgery, that there's a plan. man, praise God that you are not

leaving me alone in this.

Verse two, I will glory in the Lord.

Let the afflicted hear and rejoice.

Glorify the Lord with me. Let us exalt his name together. So you get the diagnosis.

You turn to Thanksgiving. You call your family and say, hey, let's pray about this.

Get on my team. We're going to fight this together. Let's exalt. God is with us here.

I sought the Lord, verse four, and he answered me. He delivered me from all my fears.

Now notice this. He didn't necessarily deliver him from the situation because

he's in the middle of the situation while he's writing the psalm.

What God delivered him from was the fear.

It's just crucial, friend. God doesn't always zoom us out, just transport us

out of the trouble, but he always comes alongside us and helps us in the trouble.

Okay? I sought the Lord and he answered me. He delivered me from all my fears.

Those who look to him are radiant. Their faces are never covered with shame.

This poor man called, and the Lord heard him and saved him out of all his troubles.

Again, it didn't necessarily rescue him from the situation at hand,

but he saved him from the fear and he saved him from the trouble.

He gave him a new way to see it.

The angel of the Lord encamps around those who fear him and he delivers them.

Taste and see that the Lord is good. Blessed is the one who takes refuge in him.

Friend, I'm giving you Psalm 34.

Go read it. Go study it. Memorize it. It's 22 verses. It ends with this, my favorite.

It doesn't end, but down in verse 18. This is the one that helped me the most

after we lost Mitch. The Lord is close to the brokenhearted.

He saves those who are crushed in spirit.

You see that? He's close to the brokenhearted. Taste and see, friend.

As we finish 2023, take all those things that are making you anxious.

Take all those things that are making you afraid.

And add to your palette of treatment plans.

Add the Word of God. The Word of God is the only book that you don't just read.

It reads you back. It's the best scan that you can put yourself in. It's better than an MRI.

It's better than a functional spec scan. It's better than a PET scan.

It's better than my ability to measure the blood flow in different areas of

your brain and tell you what neurotransmitters are happening.

The Word of God will tell you what's in your heart.

It'll give you a plan. It'll put you up against the right way.

And it'll say, hey, cast off everything that's hindering you.

Throw off everything that's entangling you. you.

I've got a plan for you. Forget the former things.

I've got something new for you. I'm going to make a stream in the desert for

you. If it seems impossible, I'm going to part the waters.

Okay. He's saying, I have a plan. I have a purpose. I have a pathway for you.

And listen, this is the last thing I'm going to say to you in 2023.

There's going to be a last assignment for you. So sometimes you get a diagnosis

or she's not coming back or he's not going to come back.

Sometimes this is the end of a particular situation or time or maybe even the

end of your life that's going to happen because of this situation.

There's going to be a last assignment. When I was in the Air Force,

I spent 14 years associated with the Air Force.

I went to medical school on scholarship from the Air Force. The taxpayers,

you, sent me to medical school.

And right at the end of that, my four years on active duty, I got notified that

I was going to be sent to the war in Iraq. rack.

I only had six months left, and I was going to spend five of them in combat.

I was scared. It was a bad time for me. I was going through a divorce.

It was the most stressful time of my whole life, and now my brother nearly died.

He had a stroke in August of 2004, and we're going through all this.

My marriage is crumbling.

My brother's potentially dying, and I get this set of orders that I'm going

to Iraq, and it was going to be my last assignment in the Air Force because

basically the day I got home, I had just a couple weeks left, and I was out.

I wrote a whole book about that. No Place to Hide. You should check it out if you're interested.

And I realized, this is not an assignment I would have chosen.

It's not the right time for me to go off to war. I need to be with my kids.

It's not safe. I'm going to get mortared and bombed. At that time,

they were mortaring the base at Balad Air Base every day.

I survived over 120 mortar attacks.

Okay? I saw horrible things. I saw a lot of loss and death and burned up babies

and bleeding soldiers. And it was terrifying.

But it was my last assignment.

And I had a choice. I'm either going to stand and walk through this last assignment

with honor and try to do my best and try to leave a mark and try to make a difference

and trust God that He's calling me to it so He'll get me through it and trust

God that He has a plan and a reason for why I'm going to this place to do these things.

Or I can freak out and become depressed and stressed and anxious.

And I saw people there like that, that they were there every day,

diving under the desk and terrified and crying and not engaging with anybody

and spending all their time in the bunkers and just being terrified.

And they weren't making any progress in their own life and they weren't learning

or growing through that experience.

They were just suffering and trying to make it through every day.

And those people, I would suspect, have more trouble with PTSD after the war

than even I did. And it was tough for me.

But I recognized it as my last assignment and I wanted to try to make good on

that last assignment so I could say someday hear God say well done my good and faithful servant.

And somehow I got the mindset right. One of the chaplains helped me kind of turn that around.

And I saw it as my last assignment. And my friend, if you get a diagnosis,

if you get some news, if you get another person leaving you,

whatever it is, it's going to be the last assignment in that marriage.

It's going to be the last assignment medically for you in your life.

Switch the mindset from, oh my gosh, this is going to be the end of me,

to what can I do now to glorify you?

How can I find an opportunity for gratitude here?

What can I do to get my affairs in order, to make sure my family knows who I

am, to know who they are, to get them on the right path?

What can I do to make sure that the people around me know and have heard me

tell them about Jesus? What can I do?

You switch that mindset away from anxiety and fear and towards gratitude,

then you'll start gaining traction on being able to move forward in your life,

even if the length of your life is now clarified.

In fact, it can turn out to be a gift that we've talked about before.

Where lots of research says that cancer patients often report that they are

grateful for their diagnosis because they feel like they've become better people

or they've improved their situation in life.

They've improved their relationships because they found out they were dying.

And so, friend, whatever it is that you've been through, whatever the trauma

or tragedy or massive thing is that you've been suffering under,

I just want to remind you that you can add the best prescription plan on top of it.

Add some word of God. Add some association with people who will help point you

towards the best prescription to change your mind and change your life.

Understand that your stress biochemistry is hurting you if you don't get it in better control.

And if you need to learn meditation, if you need therapy, if you need medication,

if you need to learn tapping, if you need to learn to go see an acupuncturist,

if you need a new doctor, if you You need whatever it is, but don't forget to

add in the great physician into that treatment plan.

Don't forget that hope commits you to actions that connect you to God's promises,

that hope is memory and movement, not just remembering, but also moving,

doing something to connect to God's promises with your feet and with your life.

That will change the arc of your outcome, no matter how long you have left on this planet.

If it's your last assignment, finish it well.

And if you're going into 2024 and you're saying, saying, hey,

what got me here won't get me there. I need to be in a different place during this coming year.

Then it's time to cast off whatever's been holding you back.

It's time to cast off whatever's been hindering you.

It's time to change your mind. And it's time to change your life, friend.

And for one more time in 2023, I'm going to give you my good friend Tommy Walker's

song, Lord, I Run to You, because it's going to help you know what you can do when it's time.

And your mind is saying, hey, something's got to change here.

It's time to get after it, friend. You can't change your life until you change your mind.

And the good news is you can start today. Oh, how faithful he's been.

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,

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.