First No Harm (The First Commandment of Self-Brain Surgery)

Hey, Lisa. Hey, Lee. It's good to see you today.

It's good to see you too. Will you help me with something? Of course.

I can't remember what day it is. It's Frontal Lobe Friday. Good morning, my friend.

I hope you're doing well. I'm Dr. Lee Warren, and it is Frontal Lobe Friday.

We're going to have a little self-brain surgery today, and I hope you're ready

because today we're going to start the first in a series.

It's not going to be 10 episodes in a row, but it's going to be 10 episodes

in total of breaking down the 10 commandments of self-brain surgery.

Today, we're going to cover the first commandment, which is primum non nocere, first no harm.

The first day of medical school, the thing they teach you is don't make things worse for your patient.

And as self-brain surgeons, of course, we say it in a little bit different way.

We say that I will relentlessly refuse to participate in my own demise.

Too much of our own time, of our own life, of our own thinking involves doing

things that are shooting ourselves in the foot, harming ourselves,

keeping ourselves stuck and unable to make progress in our lives.

Today, we're going to start to unlock that process by making a commitment to

each other, to our families, to our future generations, and to God that we are

going to relentlessly refuse to participate in our own demise.

But before we can do any of that, I have a question for you.

Hey, are you ready to change your life? If the answer is yes,

there's only one rule you have to change your

mind first and my friend there's a place where the neuroscience of

how your mind works smashes together with faith and

everything starts to make sense are you ready to change

your life well this is the place self-brain surgery school i'm dr lee warren

and this is where we go deep into how we're wired take control of our thinking

and find real hope this is where we learn to become healthier feel better and

be happier this is where we leave the past behind and transform our minds.

This is where we start today. Are you ready?

This is your podcast. This is your place. This is your time,

my friend. Let's get after it.

Music.

All right, are you ready to get after it? We're going to talk today,

my friend, about the first of the Ten Commandments of self-brain surgery.

Now, we did an episode earlier this week, and I gave you the whole list in one

place, but I told you there was a caveat.

As I'm writing the manuscript, inevitably, there's going to be some shuffling

of these Ten Commandments and some reframing of a couple of them,

and maybe even restating a couple of them as I try to put these ideas into book

form and try to put the best version of my concepts out there that are gonna

be, once you put it in a book,

it's out there, so you can't modify it or change it anymore.

You gotta tell, you gotta put it out there and stick with it.

So I'm evolving these ideas as I get them ready to make sure they hit the reader,

you, in the best possible way to make the biggest possible impact in your life.

And so I've reframed them already a couple of times and the last two,

which I think are gonna be the way they show up in the book.

But the last two have changed a little bit, even from earlier this week.

So let me just run the list with you real quick in list form with no further ado.

And then we're going to get deeper into the first commandment today.

So the 10 commandments of self-brain surgery updated on today,

3-8-20-24, for today's purposes are going to be stated this way.

And each of them are going to have some corollaries and some ways to think broadly

about them and to unpack them.

And those will be coming soon. We're going to do an episode on each one of these these 10 commandments.

And then as I flush out the book and write the book, I'm sure we'll have more

to say about them as time goes on. But these are the basic 10 ideas.

And again, don't confuse the Ten Commandments of the Bible of God for this.

It's a common thing to do to say here's Ten Commandments about this or that

or how to do plumbing or Ten Commandments of finance or whatever.

So I'm just giving you ten ideas that if you follow them, you will be able to

change your mind and change your life.

You'll be able to apply the lessons of self-brain surgery, faith smashing into

cognitive neuroscience and applied neuroplasticity, and we're going to change

our minds and change our brains structurally literally performing self-brain surgery,

okay? It's not cognitive behavioral therapy.

It's actual structural change in your brain, not just changing your behavior,

changing the way you think, changing the way your brain is wired,

changing the way your genes turn on and off, changing the way you influence other people,

changing the epigenetics around the things you pass on to your family,

and literally changing your whole life.

So here we go. The Ten Commandments. I must relentlessly refuse to participate in my own demise.

We're not going to commit self-malpractice.

Number two, I must recognize that feelings are not facts.

They are chemical events in my brain. Number three, I must recognize that most

of my thoughts are untrue.

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

Number five, I must not treat bad feelings with bad operations.

Number six, I must must stop making an operation out of everything.

Number seven, I must not perpetuate generational thought or behavioral issues

in my family or start any new ones.

Number eight, I must love my brain and live in such a way as to improve it.

Number nine, I must believe that what I'm doing, I'm getting better at.

Number 10, I must understand that thoughts become things.

There's the list. This is going to become the core values of how we build a

life of being better and better at self-brain surgery,

because what we're doing, we're getting better at, and we want to get better

and better at living in the way that God has created us so we can use our minds

to communicate with our creator and our great physician,

and we can work with him to engage in the process of self-brain surgery to make

our brains structurally better so that we can live live more functionally well,

become healthier, feel better, and be happier, and make a bigger impact on the

world around us, to break chains,

be free, cast off things that are hindering and holding us back,

and finally live in the way that we're designed to live, okay?

We want that blessed, abundant life that Jesus promises is available to us in

spite of the fact that we have a lot of hard things in this life.

So we want the both. We want the quantum dual reality and not just to be able

able to only see one or the other, right?

That's the idea. So today we're going to talk about first, no harm.

The first day of medical school, literally the first thing they teach you is the oath.

It used to be called the Hippocratic Oath. It's generally been revised a little

bit now, but it's an oath that we take as medical students that we are not going

to harm our patients intentionally.

We try with all of our might not to do anything to make the patient worse.

First, no harm. In Latin, it's primum non no serius. The first thing,

the prime thing, is not to harm your patient.

So if we come into self-brain surgery and we're recognizing that the way that

we think literally changes our brain, and that happens either passively or actively.

Then we have a choice to make.

Now we know. We know the truth. Jesus said the truth will set you free.

James said if you know what to do and you don't do it, it's sin.

And the corollary to to that is if you know what not to do and you do it anyway, it's sin. And so...

Sin being defined as anything that separates you from God, anything that harms

you, takes you off of His plan for your life, would be harmful to you,

separate you from Him, or hurt other people.

We don't want to do that. We want to find ways to honor the design of our minds,

the design of our brains,

and sort of maximize that for the benefit of our own lives and the people around

us, right? And the people we're responsible for.

So once you know, then you're responsible for it. It's no longer accidental if something happens.

I've told you this story before. If I get a phone call from the hospital and

they tell me that you're in the ER and you've got a brain hemorrhage and I know

how to fix that and I choose not to go, that's malpractice, okay?

Because I know how to help you.

I'm aware of your problem. And if I choose not to take care of it, that's on me.

But if you fall at home and hit your head and you have a brain hemorrhage and

nobody knows about it and nobody calls 911 and I'm never aware of it and you

die from that brain hemorrhage, it's not my responsibility because I didn't

have any knowledge or awareness of the problem.

And so I couldn't help you and I wasn't responsible for helping you.

So I just want you to frame that in the context of self-brain surgery,

that once you know, now you have a responsibility.

Now you have to apply the commandment to yourself.

Once you know that something that you're doing or or a thought pattern,

or a habit, or a behavioral issue is harming you, then you're harming your patient.

If you're a compassionate physician and you understand that the treatment that

you've defined and you've decided to apply is actually going to harm your patient,

then you change your strategy.

Then you decide, hey, I took an oath not to harm my patient.

Now, from a scriptural standpoint, Mark 12, 30, and 31, what did Jesus say?

The great commandment is to love the Lord your God with all your heart,

soul, mind, and strength, but the next commandment is to love your neighbor as yourself.

This is the one that we miss often. We're all about loving our neighbor and

loving the Lord our God, but we don't love ourselves enough sometimes.

And Jesus said, love your neighbor as yourself, which implies that you can't

really love your neighbor if you don't love yourself first.

You, my friend, need to remember something.

You're fearfully and wonderfully made. You're made in the image of the Creator,

and when When he made you, he said, it is very good.

He has a plan for you, a plan to prosper you, not to harm you,

a plan to give you hope and a future.

You have the power, his divine power to give you everything you need for life and godliness.

And you're not stuck. You don't have to be. You don't have to live that way anymore.

And so, relentlessly refuse to participate in your own demise.

If God is on your side, Paul says, who can be against us? If God is for you,

who can be against you? Well, it's a rhetorical question because you can be against yourself.

And if you're against yourself, if you're not making decisions,

treatment plans, and implementing proper procedures, you will not have good

outcomes in your own life.

And we talk about this abide practice of getting our minds and our hearts sort

of in resonance and in coherence with one another and learning how to listen

and hear and experience God with that right half of our brain so we can really

know Him in that knowledge,

that deep knowledge sense, and not just fact-based lists of things that we think

we know about Him. That's no way to have a relationship, right?

And we need to know ourselves. And if you begin to try to understand who you

are and how you think and what your baseline proclivities are and what your

habits and experiences have led you to,

then you can start critically examining the decisions that you make about what

you're going to do, what you're going to think, how you're going to react,

how you're going to respond.

Respond the kinds of habits and patterns that you're going to build around your life.

You're going to decide that starting your day with

some quiet time and some abide practice and some self brain surgery and getting

a discipline of biopsying your thoughts and getting a discipline of not reacting

anymore out of feelings or out of fear or out of anxiety or out of being stuck

from your massive thing or the trauma that you've been through is not helping you.

Once you decide that, then you can start putting together a treatment plan that

will no longer result in harm to yourself, to the most important patient that you have.

There's a reason why when the oxygen masks drop in the airplane,

they tell you to put it on you first because if you can't breathe,

you can't help anybody else.

So it's not selfish to take care of yourself. It's not selfish to apply these

principles to yourself first before you start trying to help anybody else.

Make sure you're not bleeding to death on your own surgery table.

With the things that you feel and think. Remember what you're doing,

you're getting better at.

So think about it for a second. What are three ways that you commonly harm yourself with your thinking?

And before you say, wait a minute, I don't ever harm myself with my thinking. I would say,

take careful attention and recognize how many nights have you spent awake all

night because you were obsessed with worrying about something that might happen the next day.

And you didn't get any sleep and you were grumpy or you were short with your

kids or you were irritable with your spouse or you jumped on somebody at work

because you spent all night worrying and not sleeping and something that never

even actually came to pass, how many times has that happened to you?

How many times have you been stuck and ruminating about this massive thing that

you went through and you can't bear to feel it anymore?

So tonight, even though you said you weren't going to, tonight,

one more time, you open that bottle, you numb yourself, you turn the television

on, you do the thing, you make the online purchase that you shouldn't make,

or you visit that website that helps you not think about it for a little while.

And how many times have you done that? And the next day you find yourself paying a tomorrow tax.

You find that you didn't love tomorrow more and you treated a bad feeling with a bad operation.

And now you've got the same problem that you had yesterday and some new trouble

because your spouse saw that website you went to and now you have a trust issue.

Or your kids saw that bottle in the trash can after you You promised them not

one more time. I won't do this one more time.

And now you got another issue to deal with because you didn't love tomorrow more.

That's harming yourself. All these things flow downhill from relentlessly refusing

to participate in our own demise.

So ask yourself honest questions, friend, today on Frontal Lobe Friday.

What are the top three ways that you harm yourself?

Be honest with yourself. You can't make progress if you're not willing to look

under the hood, ask yourself tough questions, ask God to reveal to you the answers.

Remember Psalm 1914 tells us that it's not just about the things we say,

it's about the things we think.

He says, may the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart.

Meditation of my heart, what is that? That's what you're thinking about. about.

That's the stuff that you spend time ruminating about.

He's saying, David is saying here, God, help me not just control my tongue. Help me control my mind.

Help me meditate on the right stuff. Help me think about the right things.

This is an active decision that we get to make.

What we choose to think about is frontal lobe Friday. And the first commandment

of self-brain surgery is to use your frontal lobes to not harm yourself with

how you think or synapses that you make or hormonal or neurotransmitter worsenings

that you create with bad thinking.

And bad thinking can be passive because you're not taking the discipline to

control it, to not do that second Corinthians 10, five thing of taking every thought captive.

That can be a passive type of negligence where you don't pay attention.

That's if I order a CAT scan on you because I'm worried about some symptom and

then I don't bother to look at it.

And so I don't find out that you have a brain tumor and I don't call you and

months go by before you find out that you have cancer that we could have done something about.

That's an act of negligence because I didn't pursue something.

And you can do the same thing in your thought life where you can just not pay

attention to what you're thinking about.

And before you know it, you spend a whole day mad about something.

Are you worried about the tone that somebody had in a text message instead of

clearing it up and calling them and hearing their tone of voice?

You just spend all day angry about it.

I remember this story of the two monks that were traveling, an older one and

a younger one, and they got to a riverbank and there was a woman who was unable to cross the river.

She was too short and it was going to be overwhelming for her and she didn't

know how to swim and she was stuck.

She needed to get to the other side, but she didn't know what to do.

And the old monk said, well, okay, climb onto my back and I'll carry you across the river.

And they got across the river and she went on her way and the two monks continued on their journey.

And the younger monk didn't say a word all day. He was just fuming.

And they finally got back to the monastery, and the old monk said,

Hey, by the way, you've been acting all day like something was wrong.

What's going on with you?

And the young monk said, Well, you broke our vow.

You carried that woman. You're not supposed to touch a woman.

You carried that woman across the river, and you're not supposed to do that.

And the old monk said, Son, I put her down hours ago, but you've been carrying her all day.

And you see that? Like the monk did an act of service that he made a decision

that the spirit of the law wasn't as important, that the letter of the law wasn't

as important as the spirit there. And he did a good deed for another person.

And then he went on his way. He put the burden down, put the woman down and went on his way.

But the younger monk let that get in his mind and he spent all day dealing with it.

And we do that too, right? Sometimes we spend a whole day or a whole night or

a whole week or a whole month or a whole year or a whole lifetime committing

self-malpractice because we're beating ourselves up with thoughts that we haven't

taken the initiative to do self-brain surgery on and get rid of.

We haven't taken that brain surgery course of Philippians 4 of thinking about

better things if we want to have a better life and learning how to be anxious

for nothing by prayer and gratitude instead of worry.

And my friend, I'm just telling you, if you want to have a healthier,

better, happier life, if you want to change your mind and change your life,

it starts with cell brain surgery.

It starts with a thought biopsy, and it starts with a commitment to relentlessly

refuse to participate in your own demise.

Primum non nocere means first, no harm. And you can't make any progress until

you commit in front of God and everybody else that you're going to try your

best to be a good surgeon to your most important patient,

to be kind and compassionate and attentive and careful to never participate

in your own demise so that you're not committing malpractice against yourself

so that you can then begin to move the needle on real life change for you and

your family and your generations and for the people around you.

You wanna live the abundant life

and stop feeling like everything's being stolen or killed or destroyed.

You wanna live in the overcome the world, half of John 16, 33,

instead of this life is gonna be so hard that Jesus told us?

Do you wanna live in the abundance that Jesus promised that he came here?

Then it starts by resisting the urge to harm yourself with your own thinking.

Stop committing self-malpractice. So think about those three ways that you most

commonly harm yourself. Write them down. Put them in your phone.

Write down three common issues that you have with your thinking.

You can email them to me, lee at drleewarren.com, or leave a voicemail and say,

hey, these are the three things I struggle with.

And then we'll start to unpack how we can overcome those three things.

In fact, that might be some good episodes.

If you send me some different ways that you harm yourself, maybe we can start

to unpack some of these things and get better together by relentlessly refusing

to participate in their own demise. It's Frontal Lobe Friday.

We're unpacking the Ten Commandments, and the very first one is no self-malpractice.

Friend, do you want to change your mind and change your life?

Do you want to get better instead of getting worse?

You've got to stop committing self-malpractice. And the good news is you can

start today. We'll be right back.

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If you need prayer, go to the prayer wall at WLeeWarrenMD.com slash prayer,

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And go to my website and sign up for the newsletter, Self-Brain Surgery,

every Sunday since 2014, helping people in all 50 states and 60 plus countries

around the world. I'm Dr.

Lee Warren, and I'll talk to you soon. Remember, friend, you can't change your

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

Music.