Heart Surgery for Hope

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

You here. It's a wild card Wednesday, and we're going to do a little self-brain surgery.

But today, we're actually going to focus on our heart. We're going to do some heart surgery.

And I just want to teach you a couple of things to think about.

As we are always talking about, we want to become healthier and feel better and be happier.

And to do that, we need to learn how to get our mind and our body and our brain,

our heart, our gut, but all those things in conjunction and coherence with one another.

Try to live a life that looks like the life God designed for us to have an abundance,

even in the midst of the hard things we go through.

So today we're going to do a little heart surgery, and I think it's going to

be helpful. But before we get started, I 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 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 This is your place. This is your time, my friend. Let's get after it.

All right, you ready to get after it? Hey, before we get started,

please don't forget, we have a brand new podcast called Spiritual Brain Surgery.

It made its debut last week.

We had our first full-length episode yesterday with Elisa Childress and Tim Barnett.

I'll put a link in the show notes to the Spiritual Brain Surgery podcast.

It got off to a good start. It was in the top 200 of the Apple podcast charts

yesterday. and I would love for you to subscribe to and follow that show.

All of the Tuesdays with Tata episodes are going to be available in Spiritual

Brain Surgery going forward and not on the main Dr. Lee Warren podcast.

And all the directly 100% spiritual Bible study type podcasts are going to be

in that Spiritual Brain Surgery. But lots more good stuff, great interviews.

It's going to be a great place to look at what we believe, why we believe it,

and how to defend it to other people. And I think Spiritual Brain Surgery will help you.

Please check it out. Follow, like, and leave a rating or review if you will.

We got the first review on Apple, and somebody said, we love the podcast,

but we don't like the intro music.

So no matter what you think about it, please go and leave a review and tell

people about it, and it would be helpful to me.

Please sign up for following the Spiritual Brain Surgery Podcast.

Okay, let's get after it. So there's a thing called heart rate variability.

Heart rate variability is this ability that your heart has to increase or decrease its own rate.

Based on physiological or emotional or circumstantial events around you in the world.

So a bear jumps out of the tree behind you and scares you.

Your heart rate needs to go up. You need to trigger the fight,

flight, freeze response. You need to run away.

And your heart rate needs to respond to that by pumping more blood to your muscles

so you can get away and not get eaten by the bear, okay?

Also, if everything's cool and everything's calm, your

heart rate needs to be able to slow down to get you

into a relaxed state so you can prepare to relax to

fall asleep to rest to recover your heart

rate doesn't need to stay high all the time your heart rate needs to be able

to respond to times when it's appropriate to relax and so there's this measure

of heart rate variability that doctors can do where we can sort of predict whether

you you have a healthy life or a less healthy life,

a stressed life or a more relaxed life,

and how your heart is able to handle changes in your system between the sympathetic

nervous system, fight or flight type responses, and the parasympathetic nervous

system, rest, digest, and that sort of thing.

Your heart rate variability is an important predictor of your ability to switch

to a more appropriate state when you need to.

So heart rate variability is a little bit hard to figure out,

and there's not a perfect number that somebody's figured out this is what the number needs to be.

But basically, if you're in pretty good shape and pretty healthy,

your heart rate variability is going to be higher than if you're not.

So heart rate variability is important. Now bring that up to say this.

There's another thing called heart coherence, and this gets a little bit more mystical.

But heart coherence is this idea that you have a regulatory mechanism in your

body between your thinking, your brain, and your mind, and the performance of your heart.

Now, we know, we've talked a lot about it on this show, that your brain has

an electromagnetic field.

That's why we can hook you up to an EEG machine and read your brainwave activity.

That's why we can learn and understand about brainwave activity like beta when

you're stressed out and alpha when you're relaxed and when you're trying to sleep.

You need to get into that alpha state so you can move on to healthier states.

And when you're in a stressed or high-focus situation, you're in beta.

And one of the reasons that we have so much trouble sleeping sometimes is because

we're worried and we're stressed and we're over doom scrolling and looking at

Instagram right before we try to go to sleep.

And that keeps us in this high-intensity focused beta state and our brains aren't relaxed, right?

Well, the heart is the same thing. Your heart has this baseline level.

Cortisol is flowing through your blood that keeps your heart rate higher and

keeps your heart rate variability lower and the more sort of stressed or attentive

or tuned in or focused you are, the harder time your heart has in relaxing.

So this cardiac coherence idea, the HeartMath Institute has written a lot about

this, by the way. But if you want to really learn a lot about the heart,

go check out the Heart Math Institute.

And there's some stuff from a Christian perspective that'll seem kind of weird

and Eastern and meditative and stuff out there.

But it's really, there's a lot of science behind it. So take what you can learn from it.

And trust me that there's some good things to be learned from this idea of learning

to get your heart under your control.

And I don't mean just the physical organ that's in your chest,

but on a level of physical stuff,

let's talk about the heart and the heart's electromagnetic field is

dramatically stronger than that of the brain and

you can read it with the ekg you can read it with

your apple watch i just took my ekg with my apple watch

you can put your finger on the crown of your watch and it

can read your eeg your ekg rather it's

not magic it's a it's able to sense the

electromagnetic field in your pulse and turn that

into information to read the activity of

your heart and tell if you're in an arrhythmia or if your heart's beating

normally mine was in sinus rhythm a heart rate of 58 sitting

here just a minute ago after my bible study so i'm pretty relaxed and my heart

seems to be behaving pretty well but you can do this yourself you can hold your

finger on your pulse reader you can take your pulse and you can take a deep

breath and get your mind in a more relaxed state and and you can feel your heart rate come down.

We've been teaching this for years. When somebody's anxious or stressed,

we do these vagal maneuvers where you massage your carotid and you take a deep

breath and you hold your breath for a bit and you try to get your arrhythmia

under control. You try to get your heart rate under control.

Because we have come to understand, and you already know this,

that your brain has the ability to send signals and neurotransmitters and chemicals

to your heart to tell your heart to slow down, to tell your heart to relax.

So you already know this, that there's a connection between your brain,

your mind, and your heart.

There's a connection, and that connection is chemical, but it's also electrical, okay?

So this idea of cardiac coherence is the ability to shift your internal baseline

focus to get yourself back under control physiologically when you're stressed, okay?

This ability to be paying attention to the state of your body.

Sort of scanning your internal state and recognizing when something's out of

balance and taking control of it.

Now I want you to look at it this way. God has given you this incredible body.

And he says in Romans 12.1 that presenting your body to him as a holy sacrifice

is an essential act of worship.

It's a reasonable and essential thing to do to give God your body.

And I think it's interesting that the very next verse, Romans 12,

2 says, don't conform to the world, transform your mind, transform your thinking, renew your mind.

That's going to help you be able to test and approve what God wants for your life.

So in the same passage where he's saying, get your body presented to me,

let me have your body, let me have your heart, let me have your mind,

let me have your thoughts.

And the next verse is, because that's worship, okay, let me have your thoughts

and your mind and your heart and your brain because it's an essential and reasonable type of worship.

And I want you to stop conforming how you use your body, your mind,

your brain, your heart, your arms, your legs, your face, your eyes.

I want you to stop conforming to what the world tells you will make you happy,

what the world tells you you ought to do.

And I want you to transform it and let me give you a new mind.

Remember, he's already given you the mind of Christ.

We read that the other day. if you're saved, if you have accepted Jesus' sacrifice

and you have the Holy Spirit inside you, you already have the mind of Christ.

So the cognitive dissonance in which we live in a world where we think we have

to figure out our own thinking, we have to figure out our own ways to manage our lives.

And yeah, I don't really want to give that one to God because I got to handle this one myself.

Then you're acting as if you don't have the mind of Christ.

You're acting as if you're stuck with the brain that you have and you've got

to manage it and all the circumstances and massive things and traumas and tragedies

that you've gone through and all the ways that people let you down and all the

ways that you fail over and over.

You've got to manage that yourself and clean everything up before God will accept you.

That's cognitive dissonance because you already have the mind of Christ.

Okay? So I wanted to show you today that you can learn to get this cardiac coherence,

this self-regulation, this ability to sort of stabilize your internal state

and get your thinking back in control.

This starts with the self-brain surgery idea, the 2 Corinthians 10,

5 idea of taking your thoughts captive.

Because I guarantee you that you have something that's happening in your life

or has happened in your life that can quickly get you into a state of panic.

It might be your finances. It might be when you finally stop being so busy and

the day's almost over and you're starting to relax that you remember that this

big bill is coming due and you don't have the money.

Or they're going to turn off that electricity if you don't make that payment.

Or you've got that tuition bill for your grandchild that you didn't know you

were going to have to take care of and you don't know where the money's going

to come from and you've got to make sure you get it squared away or you're not

sure that he's going to make that child support payment and your car payment's

come in due and you're not sure that it's going to be okay. You're pretty sure it's not.

And before long, you're completely overwhelmed.

Your heart's racing. You're sweating and you're stressed.

What am I going to do? Oh, my gosh. I don't know what's going to happen.

I'm going to end up on the street. I'm going to lose my phone.

They're going to shut off my power.

My kid's not going to be able to go to school. and you go down this path,

you know it, you've done it, right?

So there's this stress that can happen around the area of finances.

The same thing can happen. My situation is getting worse instead of better.

My future doesn't look so great.

Nobody's going to love me. I'm going to end up alone. My children aren't going

to allow me to be part of their life anymore because they've gone through this

deconstruction and I'm never going to have a relationship with my grandkids.

You can go down this path, right?

And the fact is that most of those things that we spend time and give into and

allow this physiological waterfall to happen where our heart's racing and our

cortisol's flowing and our brains are stressed out and we're sweating and we're

stuck in grief or we're overwhelmed or we're completely falling into the pit of despair,

most of the time, if you really are honest about it, if you go back and look

at the times in your life when that's happened to you,

most of the time those things have not turned out to be true.

Most of the time, you figured it out.

Most of the time, the money showed up. Most of the time, God came in and took care of it.

Most of the time, you were able to get the relationship kind of back on some

sort of ground where it starts to feel like it's going to work again,

right? Most of the time, things kind of work out.

And when they haven't, sometimes the thing that didn't work out,

that you thought you really needed it to work out, turned out to be something that was good for you.

Because I'll give you my dad as an example. We talked to my mom and dad again

this weekend when we were in Dallas last weekend.

Dad reminded me when I was a little boy, my father was in the five and dime store business.

He had three little stores that were like little miniature Walmarts.

You could go and there was a candy counter. You could buy underwear. You could buy toys.

You could buy, I think he sold bullets and everything.

Like you could buy a hammer. You could buy groceries. You could buy just about

everything in my dad's store.

I'm not sure he sold groceries. I remember there was a candy counter,

but you could pretty much buy anything you needed in there, right?

There was such a general store Clothes and socks and toys and all that kind

of stuff but then in the mid 70s Walmart came to town and All over America at

about the same time Sam Walton put a store in that was attached to a vast distribution

Network that was attached to vast.

Contracts with distributors to buy products far cheaper than small stores could

sell them. And Walton put everybody out of business in the same year.

So Walmart could sell a pair of socks for 25 cents that cost my dad a dollar

to buy. So he had to charge you a dollar and 10 cents for him to make a profit.

Walmart could sell five pairs of socks for that to you.

So it wasn't a fair fight. So within a year, my dad was deeply in debt and going

out of business and didn't know what was was going to happen.

And out of nowhere, somebody came and said, hey, I'm going to retire.

I'm getting out of the insurance business.

And if you'd like to buy my insurance agency, we can work out a deal.

My dad found himself in the insurance business and turned out to be in the middle

of his life's calling and didn't know it.

He turned out to be a gifted financial planner, estate planner,

helping people figure out their financial futures.

And he went on to be one of the top rated New York life agents in

the country and has had a tremendous career now over

the last 40 plus years of being a financial

planner life insurance guy and that came out

of nowhere but it happened because god was with him

but it started with the situation where he

was stressed out and failing and looking at

potential bankruptcy and and debt and fear and

stress and he had no idea that that

situation was going to turn out for his good but he

he ended up on the other side of it in in a good situation

so i'm just saying that to say this if you can

learn to do some surgery on yourself in

the midst of those times when you start to spin out okay this

is particularly relevant after you've lost a child or after something

devastating has happened to you because you can start to spin out into this

place where you feel like your whole life is going to be defined by this thing

and it's never going to be okay again and you're never going to be happy again

and and you're never going to be able to relate to your other kids again because

you lost one, and so now you're not sure you can protect them,

and you're not sure that your spouse is going to love you because they seem

to be fine, and they seem to be moving on, and you seem to be stuck.

And you're starting to spin out.

You're going to end up alone, and it's always going to be this brokenness,

and maybe you should have a drink to help you relax, and it starts to turn into this thing, okay?

It doesn't have to.

Heart rate variability is a physiological measure of your heart's ability to

transmit or to transform itself from a stress state to a relaxed state or into

a stress state when it needs to be in one, when it's appropriate to be in one.

Heart rate or heart coherence is your ability to recognize that your body systems

are connected and that you have some input into it with how you think, okay,

and the things that you think about and that you can biopsy your thinking and

you can take control of it and you can decide to call into the situation,

the Holy Spirit, the great physician, and say, hey, my heart needs a surgeon here.

I need some help here, Lord. Help me get this moment under control.

There's a whole bunch of scripture about this. The Bible uses interchangeable

terms for what we would call mind now, your inner self, your internal self.

The Bible uses terms, sometimes it sounds like guts, but it sounds like organs, like bowels.

Like Psalm 103, praise the Lord my soul, all my inmost being, praise his holy name.

He's talking about his whole person, his guts, his life.

When you get into that place where you feel something so deep in your body that

it feels like it's in your stomach, right?

That you want to get all of that stuff praising the Lord, he's saying.

Then there's scriptures that talk about bless the Lord with all your heart and

all your soul and all your mind and all your strength.

He's trying to say, hey, that jump in your chest when you think about somebody

you love, I want that part of you, okay?

That cold, gripping fear that knots your bowels into a twist,

I want that part of you, friend.

I want you to reach down and bless me, praise me from that place where your

heart is in my hand, where I can help you calm your heart rate down.

I can help you untwist your gut.

I want that part of you that's wrapped up, this thinking that you can't get under control.

I want that part to all your mind. I want you not to have a spirit of fear,

but a spirit of a sound mind.

I want you to give me all of that because I'm a good physician.

He says, taste and see that I'm good. Cease striving, Psalm 46.10.

Stop, friend. Stop for a minute. Get that under my control.

Relinquish that highway that you're on that's going to lead you down into this

terror that's going to speed up until you feel like it's going to fall off the

rails and you're going to go crazy and you can't even get it under control.

That's what coherence is about. Getting all of that stuff onto the same page

page, get that Psalm 103 prayer going.

Praise the Lord, O my soul, all my inmost being.

Praise His holy name. Praise the Lord, my soul, and forget not His benefits.

This is where you get in the midst of the craziness, when everything's spinning

out, your heart's racing, you're sweating, you're afraid, you can't get your

thoughts under control.

You say, bless the Lord, all my soul, all my inmost being, and don't forget His benefits.

So call to mind. Remember hope. I told you in hope is the first dose

hope is memory and it's moving it's remembering who

he is so psalm 103 2 forget not all his benefits he forgives your sins he heals

your diseases he redeems your life from the pit he crowns you with love and

compassion he satisfies your desires with good things so that your youth is

renewed does he always heal every disease in real time no but he has already promised us.

He's preparing a hospital where when we check into it we leave healed.

The rest of our eternal destiny is no pain, no arthritis,

no gout, no osteoporotic compression fractures, no traumatic head injuries,

no tears anymore, no cancer, no glioblastoma, no phone calls in the middle of

the night when your son's been found dead.

No more. So that part is healed. We're in the middle of a long story that ends

in our healing, that ends in our redemption.

And right now in the midst of it, he's saying, I will stand with you in the

midst of this, and I will help you.

My yoke is easy. My burden is light. Let me help you. Cast your cares on me, he says.

So God wants us to get our systems under control so that we can allow him to

put us into this coherent state where we can say, yeah, okay,

this is a tough situation. This is a potentially difficult thing.

I'm going to sleep now, and God's going to give me some answers.

I'm going to address it tomorrow when I'm ready and my body's better able to handle it.

My physiology, my psychology, everything's submitted to his will.

Everything's lined up. And I'm going to, if I need to go see a therapist and

talk about this and figure out a better strategy, if I need to talk to my pastor,

I need to have a conversation with my sibling that I've been in strife with.

I need to call my boss. I need to call my landlord and work this thing out.

There's going to be a way.

I'm giving this to you, Lord. I know right now you want me to get into this

state where I'm calm and you're going to help me sleep.

And the answer's going to come, and we're going to figure it out.

Because I trust you, we're going to move towards that promise that leads us to hope.

And I know that in the middle of this suffering, that you're going to help it

produce character for me.

I got an email a couple of days ago from a guy who asked me.

About the idea that doing hard things makes our brains better able to do hard

things. We talked about that in a couple of episodes recently. You can do hard things.

Referenced Andrew Huberman's conversation with Andrew Goggins about the anterior mid-singulate.

And the truth is that scripture about suffering produces perseverance,

and perseverance produces character, and character produces hope.

That's all about your anterior mid-singulate in your brain.

Okay because we know now that doing

hard things that we don't want to do makes our

brains more able to do other hard things

in the future more automatically so the the

idea that i'm always telling you that what you're doing you're getting better

at is you're making synapses you're grooving in those wagon wheels so it's harder

for your brain to get off track if you force yourself to go through hard things

knowing that god's going to use his ability to help you he's going to come alongside you.

He's going to strengthen you, encourage you, make things easier for you in the future.

Not that the situations will become easier, but that your ability to handle

them will be reinforced and you'll get stronger and stronger and better able

to handle those hard things.

And that, my friend, is what the abundance Jesus is talking about in John 10,

10, that not that he takes everything

away, but that he comes alongside us and helps us to handle them.

And our our life becomes more abundant as we line our will up with his,

he starts to give us the desires of our heart because our heart looks like his

does. I told you the other day.

You can commit sins with your thinking, and Jesus never committed a sin.

That means Jesus learned how to get his heart in control. Jesus learned how

to get his heart coherence optimized.

That's why he had such a powerful effect on other people, by the way.

Jesus could walk into a room, and people were drawn to him. Why?

I'm sure because his heart coherence was high. People felt his field,

and it felt different than theirs.

He had the same stresses that they did. They didn't know, but he had more because

he was actually worried about all of our sins.

But he handled it because he learned how to get his physiology under the control

of a great physician. He had a good heart surgeon.

And he learned how to connect his heart and his brain and his gut and his mind

to his body and to his creator.

And he was plugged in to the network with the Lord so he was always in control

of his heart rate variability. ability.

That's what was so unusual about Jesus is he was coherent.

He impacted people because his field was right.

And you know what I mean by that? You walk into a room and somebody's got their

arms folded and they got a grumpy look on their face like they just ate something

bad and they're steamed up.

Your heart starts to be affected by them, right?

Debbie Downer phenomenon is a real thing.

My wife, Lisa, has this thing. I don't

know how to explain it except to say magnetism she walks into

a room everybody notices her doesn't

matter how she's dressed or what she has on everybody's affected

by her she changes people's directions

her her body and her

mind and her her just general nature makes people

pay attention like she commands the room she's got this charisma this magnetism

people notice her and they they are affected by her if she's sad they get sad

too if she's happy they get happier that's coherence okay some people have a

more powerful field than others do.

And you can get your coherence under control, and you can make yourself more

reflective, as Paul says, adorning the gospel.

You can make your life make the truth that people so desperately need more attractive

by being a more coherent person,

by learning how to get your thoughts and your minds and your body and your heart

and your guts and your brain and all of that stuff lined up and under the control

of a better plan than you've had before.

And it starts with gratitude. We've talked about gratitude and anxiety can't

coexist because they're two directions in the same circuit out of the hippocampus.

That's why he says in Ephesians 5.20, give thanks in everything.

Always find a way to say, okay, I'm gonna be thankful right now.

Not that the situation's already resolved, but that you're going to resolve

it. You're gonna show me how to get through this. I'm gonna sleep and you're

gonna help me rest, Lord.

And tomorrow you're gonna give me the answer because you're gonna work this out somehow. somehow.

And whatever's going to happen, even if it seems bad, eventually it's going

to work out like my dad's insurance thing.

When he was down and out, God gave him another plan.

He had no idea that it was going to turn out to be the work of his life that

he loves. It's helped so many people now. Okay?

Faith and love, gratitude and loving kindness and thankfulness protect your heart.

They help your heart rate variability get better.

Okay? That's why 1 Thessalonians 5, The other place where he talks about the

full armor of God calls the breastplate, the chest armor that you put on is faith and love.

So thankfulness, loving attitudes, thinking about healthy and happy and whole

things is like putting body armor over your heart. It's going to help your heart.

And it's a helmet, the hope of salvation. So when you put hope on your head

that God is going to take care of this, God is going to deliver me,

there's coming a time when all this stuff is going to work out.

And that hope protects your mind.

So he's giving you a literal metaphor to see in your mind's eye and putting

body armor on the two things that you need to get in control if you want to

become healthier and feel better and be happier, your mind and your heart.

They all work together because they're one.

There's a connection between your heart and your brain and you already know

it because you can take a deep breath and slow your heart rate down, right?

So HeartMath Institute, we talked about, it's not weird metaphysical stuff.

It's actually just a non-spiritualized way to look at the fact that you need

to learn to get your heart and your mind and your soul and your strength.

On a better plane and lined up with each other, okay? Check out Psalm 103.

We're gonna finish today with a song, my favorite version of the song,

Run to the Father by Cody Carnes was live at the motion conference that he did

several years ago from Church of the Highlands Motion Conference that they do every year for the kids.

And this song, Run to the Father, has this line, my heart needs a surgeon,

my soul needs a friend, and it's perfect.

So just spend a few minutes meditating now. If you're driving,

don't close your eyes, be careful.

But spend a few minutes asking God God, to help you learn to get your heart

rate variability, your heart coherence under some better control.

We're self-brain surgeons, but you know what? You need to be a little heart

surgeon too. So let's run to the Father and let's start today.

Music.

Hey, thanks for listening. The Dr. Lee Warren Podcast is brought to you by my

brand new book, Hope is the First Dose. It's a treatment plan for recovering

from trauma, tragedy, and other massive things.

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Hey, the theme music for the show is Get Up by my friend Tommy Walker,

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They are supplying worship resources for worshipers all over the world to worship

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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.