How to Manufacture Hope (Mind Change Monday)

Good morning, my friend. I hope you're doing well.

This is Dr. Lee Warren and I'm here with you on another Mind Change Monday episode.

We're going to get a little self-brain surgery done today and I just have a short thought.

I've got a cold.

I'm not going to expose you to my voice for very long, but I have a burning thought.

It's something I think somebody out there needs to hear and this is the punchline of the episode today.

Through hard things seems to be something that we would want to avoid,

but it turns out that going through hard things makes us better people. It makes

us stronger, and in the end actually ends up making us happier. There's some brain

science behind that. There's some great research behind it, and as always, we're

gonna smash that together with some scripture, and I'm gonna give you just one little mind change today that I think will be helpful to you, and I'm.

Gonna get after it in just a second, but before we get to that, 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 smashes together with faith,

and everything starts to make sense. Are you ready to change your life? Well, this,

is the place. Self Brain Surgery School. I'm Dr. Lee Warren and this is where we

go deep into how we're wired. Take control of our thinking and find real,

hope. This is where we learn to become healthier, feel better, and be happier.

This is where we leave the past behind and transform our minds. This is where we

start today. Are you ready? This is your podcast. This is your place. This is your

time, my friend. Let's get after it.

Music.

All right, let's get after it. You ready? Hey, so I found this interesting Really interesting research. We're looking at breast cancer survivors

Okay, and then we're talking about all the different health related quality of life things that can happen,

How basically what happens after you survive cancer and what things go into your quality of life, right? This is,

Published back in 2021 health related quality of life among cancer survivors depending on the occupational status

I was talking basically the point of this article was to look at whether or not going back to work,

Turned out to have a positive impact on your quality of life. I'm kind of almost buried in the midst of this study is a.

Conversation about prior studies that have looked at this and I remembered when I when I read this

I remembered something I had heard and just listen to this sentence in prior studies up to 70% of people who experienced traumatic events,

benefited from them and and some cancer survivors revealed that they were more grateful for their lives

and their ability to overcome adversities improved after their journey from diagnosis to treatment.

Post-traumatic growth in cancer survivors has been shown to have a positive impact,

in improving quality of life.

What in the world?

You think so? So people who have cancer and survive it, they turn out to be.

Not just glad that they survived, but they report 70% of the time, in at least

some studies, that they're grateful for having had the experience of going through the cancer. It made them look back at their previous life and realize

they weren't as grateful as they'd

Should have been they they weren't they didn't know how resilient or how strong that they were that they actually report that they grow and get

Stronger and become grateful for the event that led them to those changes in their lives,

Cancer survivors turn out to be grateful for the cancer. Isn't that crazy? Now nobody wants to have cancer

I'm not saying you should get it. So you'll be a better person I'm saying we all have this idea that trauma and tragedy and these massive

things are something that we should try to avoid and we should you don't want to

go driving off cliffs if you don't have to but I just want to give you this

this little toolkit today this little idea friend that the fact is when you go

through these hard things God says hey I can do something that you're not even

expecting I can turn that desert into a stream I can turn that wasteland into an

Oasis, I can turn this painful event into something that on the end is going to benefit you,

And how about that? That's pretty amazing, right? So it's cancer survivors almost routinely.

70% at least of the time Report that having had the experience of the cancer,

Helps them now Victor Frankl told us this a long time ago, by the way in his book man's search for meaning

which I highly recommend you read if you've never read it.

It's one of those books that everybody quotes and most people haven't read.

It's a tremendous, tremendous little book. It's not hard to read.

And it really, you know, Viktor Frankl was a Holocaust survivor,

like really went to Dachau and Auschwitz, I think, or the two camps, maybe.

There might be another one that he went to.

But he, so he goes through this experience of surviving the Holocaust,

and later in his life becomes a world-famous psychiatrist.

And later in his life, he writes Man's Search for Meaning. And here's what he said,

in some ways, suffering ceases to be suffering at the moment it finds a meaning.

Suffering ceases to be suffering at the moment it finds a meaning.

There's some mind change for you right there, my friend.

So you're in the midst of your cancer, you're in the midst of your trauma, your husband has left you, your wife has glioblastoma, your son is stabbed to death, and you find...

Please, let me just make an aside, okay?

I'm not saying that it's a good thing that any of these things happen, okay? I'm not saying that.

I will never say that. My son dying is not a good thing.

But when something happens in your life, and you're still alive, you have to say, what next?

What can I find in this?

How can God use this to refine me? Because remember, the choice is always to be defined

by the thing, or to be refined by it, right?

Isaiah talks about the furnace of suffering. He says, see, I have refined you,

not in the way that silver is refined. I've refined you in this furnace of suffering.

And I said, in the midst of that, I don't feel like you're refining me.

I feel like you're burning me up.

That Victor Frankl says, okay, I'm in the gas chamber, like I'm in the concentration camp and I'm suffering,

but maybe there's meaning to it.

Maybe God needed to chip away some things that I needed to get rid of and I need to come out of this

and help people all over the world for the next 100 years, 1,000 years,

change the way they think about suffering. Maybe that's why I'm in this concentration camp.

I mean, Frankl basically put the nail on the head, hit the nail on the head.

In some way, suffering ceases to be suffering at the moment it finds a meaning.

Let me tell you about my world.

My son was stabbed to death on August the 20th, 2013.

And my world was shattered friend. I'm not I'm talking about broken like like the world the crumbled under our feet But what happened?

Like a few months later i'm realizing that my kids need some encouragement and i'm nobody's,

Lining up to be in charge. I'm gonna have to help my family Like i'm everybody's looking at me like what are we gonna do?

I start sending emails and sending messages and trying to encourage everybody and find some way every day to send out a little word of

of hope and before long people are reading that and it's kind of turning into, just like my letters home

from Iraq did, kind of turning into some encouragement and I said, well, Lisa, I think actually said,

you should blog about that, you should put this stuff on the website, you should send out an email,

let people sign up and then spread this around a little bit because it's helpful.

We start finding other bereaved parents, okay, a few months after Mitch died, who seem to find

a little bit of hope in the fact that we're just going back work like we're not signing up to be leaders in the bereavement space at that

point okay like Jill and Brad Sullivan by the way while we're waiting podcast

go find them on Facebook if you're hurting if you've lost a child if you're

going through something hard they actually have done this thing they built this system support groups and events worldwide that they got a Facebook group

that where people that need that kind of help can get it well Lisa and I didn't

do that we didn't have that calling like like Jill and Brad did incredible people

have just said, we're going to be the leaders in this space and we're going to help people find,

we're going to plant a flag and say, come here if you need help after you've lost a child.

That's incredible. Lisa and I didn't do that. Our journey was we went back to work.

We had 10 employees. We didn't want to lose our business. We didn't want to let those people have to suffer.

And, you know, we knew that our work wasn't done. We had another child in high school still,

and we just couldn't not go back to work.

And God, we sowed those seeds in sadness, as the psalm says.

We sowed our fields in tears. And later, you know, a couple of years later,

we just kind of woke up one day and we're like, hey, wow, God got us through that season.

Our business never failed. We never missed payroll. Somehow, we're now reaping a crop of joy because we worked through that hard time, that suffering.

And so for us, it was like we started just blogging and writing.

Actually, the very first episode of this podcast was just, hey, life is serious, man. You can't wait anymore.

You got to start today. You might lose a child. You take every opportunity that you can to make sure things are squared away in your life

and your family's life and you start today. That was the first message of the first podcast.

I'll bring it back to you sometime.

It was terrible. When I made a mistake, Lisa was with me down in this little studio in our home in Auburn

and every time I would make a mistake, I would start back over at the start.

I was so nervous and it's terrible. You hear my quality of recording wasn't very good

and I was so nervous.

But the point was I was trying to move the needle a little bit on helping people get the message

that you have to start today.

You cannot wait. You gotta get after it. Tata and I are gonna talk about that a little bit tomorrow

on Tuesdays with Tata, by the way.

As a further aside remind you in case you didn't hear me say it last week You're gonna see a bunch of extra episodes popping up in your podcast app. They're not new

These are older episodes that I've gone back and realized that when I switched over to transistor

They didn't get released and since I can now add transcripts every time I update an episode with a transcript

It really releases as if it's a new episode. So that's gonna work in our favor this week because on November 1st

and later in the day you're gonna get the new thing November episode from last

year so you'll get two doses of a new thing November on November 1st and so

there's gonna be some good stuff that comes out of that but you'll see a whole

bunch of extra episodes and I'm already getting emails from people saying man

I'm so glad you re-released that it made a huge difference for me today it showed

up just at the right time and that's how the Holy Spirit works okay so that's an

aside but just be looking for those extra episodes they're not new episodes

They're powerful that they've got transcripts now, and they're gonna help you

And maybe one will show up just at the right time for you, and I love when you email and say hey Lee that episode

Thank you that that was exactly right right then I love those little God winks like that,

We just released something from a long time ago, and it hits somebody else right when they needed it. That's awesome

So thank you for letting us know when that happens to you. Okay, so I started emailing. I started you know.

Blogging and podcasting and all that stuff and all of a sudden a few years later,

I've got this worldwide group of people who email me and say,

you know what, I wasn't equipped to be able to put words around,

how I could move forward again after I lost my mom or after my mother killed herself or after my daughter drowned in our backyard pool.

We hear from people, and they say, but you wrote this book.

I've seen the interviewer. Hope is the first dose. Or you released this podcast called When I Don't Know What to Do.

Know what to do. What to do when you don't know what to do. And it gave me the

words and I started finding some hope and now I understand I've got some

purpose and some meaning to these difficult situations. And all of a sudden

we've got this worldwide community, right?

100,000 downloads a month all of a sudden there people are saying this stuff is helping me and what what is doing in Lee Warren's heart here friend is,

My suffering over losing my son has this great big purpose to it now where it's still terrible and,

It's still horrible and I would trade it. Honestly, I'm sorry to say it out loud

I would trade all of it to have Mitch back if I could just wake up tomorrow morning

and he was in his bedroom down the hall, which would be weird because he's 30 years old now almost.

But if he was, it would be worth it. Like I would take him back over helping you.

I'm sorry to say that.

I really, that sounds so selfish. But I'm not trying to say that one thing can supplant the other,

but we've been talking a lot about quantum physics lately and about how two things can be true at the same time.

And it is absolutely true that I would do anything to have my son back.

I value the work that I'm doing right now speaking into this microphone trying to change your mind on Monday,

Equally as much that that value has added such a flavor to my life that I never imagined,

I'm a doctor. I'm a surgeon. I make my living helping people, but I think it's equally valuable,

That I can use my words and my experience and Lisa and I and our families suffering to help you when you're suffering

I think that's that's of equal value or maybe more in some ways,

That it's powerful and it's helpful and suffering ceases to be suffering at the moment

It finds a meaning and cancer patients look back and they say you know what?

I'm glad I had cancer because I'm a better person now than I was before. I've got more resilience now.

Let me tell you about the neuroscience of it. Okay. This is really interesting. We've learned

I think we talked about it the other day the parts of your brain that are involved in willpower and

resilience and grit and perseverance and things like that that's singular the

medial cingulate cortex that stuff that those parts of your brain get bigger

when you purposefully do hard things especially things that don't seem pleasing to you when you make yourself go through something that's that's

challenging when you do the workout even when you don't feel like it that's why

the cold plunge works by the way you make yourself do something that is unpleasant, so you get stronger and it becomes easier to persevere through

those hard things. And I'm not saying make yourself get cancer. I'm not saying

that. I'm saying that when you go through something hard, it rewires your brain to

be more able to go through the next hard thing.

Does that make sense and so in training you can prepare yourself. That's why Paul's always talking about

I don't train like a boxer beating the air like I buff it my body. I make it my slave

I try to get my body under control so that I can know that when it's time to go to the to the games

I'm gonna prevail.

So you you then knowing that the massive thing is coming that traumas and tragedies and trials and perseverance and all those

that are suffering happen knowing that you prepare yourself by doing hard

things, making hard choices, and then when you are in the midst of the uncontrollable massive thing, the cancer, the loss, the loss of a child, the.

Diagnosis, the betrayals, whatever it is that happens in your life, when you are

in the midst of them, guess what happens? You're more able to stand up. You don't

Fail you you have this do you fall back on this preparation that you've done?

Here's an interesting verse Romans chapter 5 3 through 5 not only so but we also glory in our sufferings,

What in the world Paul you glory in your suffering why?

Because we know Paul says this is Romans 5 3 through 5 we glory in our sufferings because,

We know that suffering produces perseverance I just told you your cingulate gyrus.

Gets bigger and stronger and makes more robust synaptic connections to the rest of your brain,

When you suffer when you do hard things you become more able to persevere the next time you have to go through something hard

So there's neuroscience actually works here. So Paul says we know it. He knew it 2,000 years ago,

We know that suffering produces perseverance and perseverance produces character. What's character?

Well, character is this set of moral attributes that you have.

Character is the combination of qualities or features that distinguishes you from somebody else,

This the nature of who you really are or a group of you really are and we Christians

We should have some character things in common, right?

It's not like a just a moral code But it's actually the trait that you have inside that's going to determine your outward behavior. It's different than integrity

Integrity is the steadfast adherence to that moral code, even when nobody else is looking.

So characters like who you really are, integrity is how you really behave when nobody's paying attention.

So Paul here, 2,000 years ago, before we knew about functional MRI, before we knew about synapses,

and before we knew what neurons were, before we knew that we could inspire each other to rewire each other,

before we knew that we could change our mind and change our life, Paul says suffering produces perseverance.

That's true on the neuroscience side. It's true in the cancer research suffering produces perseverance perseverance produces character

How do you develop that moral code that internal state of characteristics that determine who you are?

Because you go through suffering and you learn how to persevere and that writes your character in a stronger way

And then here's the punchline character produces hope.

What is hope hopes the belief that you can get there from here?

Why do you believe that you can get there from here? Because you've suffered before, because you've persevered before,

because you developed a character that says, I know I can do this. I know who I am.

I know what I call on. I know the promises of God that I call to mind when I'm under pressure.

And I know he's gonna come through for me again, because hope, my friend, is a verb.

And it's a verb because it contains component parts of memory and movement. And when you're under pressure, you remember.

God's done this before he's done it in my life before and he's done it in other people's lives before,

That's why lamentations is so important to read

Lamentations 3 gives you this map of a guy who's in during extreme suffering in his whole community

His whole country is in the middle of extreme suffering and he says I'm all is lost

I've forgotten what it's like to feel hope my teeth are ground down. My bones are breaking. I'm giving up then he says but

This I call to mind, and therefore I have hope.

So he does something to his mind. He changes his mind in the middle of the situation.

He doesn't wait for it to resolve and then decide if he's gonna trust God or not.

Did God do what I wanted him to do here? Is he trustworthy or not?

That's not what he does. He decides in the middle of the problem to change his mind.

But this I call to mind, Lamentations 3, and therefore I have hope.

What's hope? He remembers the steadfast love of the Lord never ceases.

His mercies never come to an end.

They are new every morning. Great is your faithfulness. The Lord is my portion, says my soul.

Therefore, I will hope in him.

And then what does he do? He gets up and gets back in the fight and carries on.

He doesn't give up. He doesn't despair. He doesn't gnash his teeth anymore.

He gets after it, okay?

You see it in David in Psalm 143. You see it with Asaph in Psalm 77.

You see it all through the Bible and you can see it in your own life.

Viktor Frankl said it, suffering ceases to be suffering when you give it meaning.

And Paul right here in Romans 5, we glory in our sufferings

because we know that suffering produces perseverance,

perseverance produces character, and character produces hope.

Okay, friend, hope is a verb.

It doesn't just show up. You can make it show up. It's not Belief in a certain outcome. That's not hope that's optimism. It's just deciding. Oh, it's gonna be okay

God it's gonna work out that's optimism and that's silly sometimes sometimes it's not gonna work out the way you want it to,

Hope is in someone hope is I know that my jesus is gonna come in the midst of this story

He's gonna help me bear this burden. He's gonna help me reframe this experience

He's gonna help me even if I have to suffer. He's gonna help me make that turn me into a person who's can persevere

There's something hard because guess what something else hearts gonna come if you survived your cancer.

That doesn't mean you're gonna live eternally in that body, right?

You're still gonna your physical body's gonna die unless the Lord comes back. So even if you're a cancer survivor, guess what more massive?

Things are on the way. Dr. Warren's full of good news today, right?

No, there's other massive things, and you're going to get through them because you got

through that one. Right?

You say, gosh, why can't we just have easy lives? Well, what I learned when I wrote I've Seen the End of You, I looked at all those people

who'd been through glioblastoma and all the hard things and all the different things that

people go through in my practice, and I've seen all that stuff before we even lost our

son. I was already writing that book.

And what I figured out is that the difference in people who can go through hard things and

hold on to their faith and hope and happiness, and the people who go through hard things

and crash into despair, the difference is how tightly they couple circumstance from happiness.

If you think that you have to have a certain set of circumstances,

the right spouse, the right job, the right address, the right size house, the right bank account,

the right number of followers on social media, or whatever, if you think you have to have

some thing or some person or some circumstance in order to be happy, and guess what?

You are hosed, because that circumstance, that thing, that person can be taken from you.

And if your state of mind and your hope, peace, happiness, all that stuff is built on circumstance,

built on something you think you know or think you can earn or think you can get or think,

that you deserve, if you think that and you lose it, you will never be okay again.

Okay? So the people who manage to thread that needle and have a life that includes suffering but

also turns out to be full of hope and character and perseverance and happiness even.

Those people are the ones who do not couple their circumstance from their peace of mind.

They couple their peace of mind to the presence of the great physician in their life.

They have a treatment plan that involves prehabbing their mind so they know what they're going

to fall back on when they face difficulties.

They do self-branchers. They take every thought captive, 2 Corinthians 10, 5.

They transform their mind instead of letting the world conform them, Romans 12, 2.

They learn to be less anxious by changing the things that they think about,

Philippians 4, right?

They don't become awash and thrown to and fro by everything that happens in their life

like the Gentiles do, Paul says, in Ephesians 4, but rather they transform their thinking.

They change the way they think. In 1 Peter 1, verse 13, he said,

gird up the loins of your mind and be ready for the things that are coming.

Your brain needs to be ready, friend.

That's the mind change Monday, is that knowing that no matter what happens,

even if you get cancer, you can look back on the experience of having it.

And like 70% of the people in that study did.

They said, you know what? I actually grew through that.

And it shouldn't surprise you, because every good movie that you've ever watched,

every one, the main character has gone through something hard.

It'd be a really boring movie. Imagine saving Private Ryan.

If they got to the beach and nobody shot at them

and they just strolled up and they enjoyed the beautiful beach and the sunshine

and it was a lovely day and they just wandered in

and then the Germans shook their hands and said, hey, we're gonna surrender and you can have the,

everything's gonna be okay.

And Private Ryan didn't get lost and his brothers didn't die.

None of that stuff happened. It was just easy.

That wouldn't have been a very exciting movie, right?

Because you need conflict and you need struggle and you need to overcome something in order to tell a good story.

Otherwise it's boring, right?

You might think that that's how you want your life to play out you everything to be easy,

But that's just not the fact because guess what suffering,

produces perseverance and Perseverance produces character and character produces hope so my friend if you want to be a hope-filled,

Person you got to be able to look back at the sufferings that you've been through and say you know what?

I'm kind of glad I went through that now again. Please please be careful to discern what I'm saying,

I'm not saying you should go back and say I'm really glad that my aunt you know did that neglected me

I'm really glad that my uncle did that to me. I'm really glad that my child died no

I'm not saying that not saying that so it's quantum physics. Okay, two things can be true at the same time,

You can say I'm really sad that that happened I'm still devastated that I lost my son, and I am I am what would give anything for it to be different,

But I can tell you without any question. I am a better person than I was,

When my son was alive There's so much more depth

There's so much more resilience to me in my in my marriage and my my family than there ever was before,

I'm reading a book by Granger Smith. He's a country singer It's gonna be on the podcast soon as little boy River drowned in their backyard pool when he was three years old.

Devastating, right? I mean, you're right there and you can't save your son. It has to be horrifying.

Granger said, he was talking about trees and how the roots of a tree are what give it its strength, right?

But an individual root isn't any stronger than an individual branch.

What gives it the strength is that it digs down into the soil and it intertwines with other roots from other trees

trees and it becomes this living ecosystem of shared support, okay. That's,

the rehab part of the treatment plan by the way, this community. That's why you

need the church. That's why you need this community. That's why you need the prayer

wall. You need to dig those roots down and intertwine them with other people.

When you go through suffering, okay, and you develop perseverance and your perseverance morphs into character and your character morphs into hope, well

guess what happens then? You start to be able to reach out to other people and

and hold on tight and you know that the suffering that you went through is terrible and devastating and you would do anything for it not to have happened

but somehow God works this quantum physics magic and it turns out to still be a good thing that Romans 8 28

that promise that we hate so much when people say it to us at the funeral that God works everything for good we hate that but 10 years later

you look back and say man

I am so much better. I am so much stronger. I know here's what something I know right now

I know that nothing will ever hurt my marriage to lisa warren,

There is nobody that can turn her eye from me and i'm not much to look at There is nobody that can turn my eye from her. She is a lot to look at by the way. She's beautiful.

And she's brilliant But my point there is nothing that's going to happen in this life that will ever turn my eye away from my wife

Why because I know who she is when we were under the deepest hardest pressure of all time losing our child the strongest most,

Irresistible force of a hurricane of devastation that blew through our house. She was rock-solid.

And we put roots down in the midst of that storm and we entertain intertwined them together

And now they're intertwined with people like you all over the world that have gone through hard suffering hard difficulties

and there is nothing that's ever going to blow the tree of this marriage down.

And that came about because of the extreme suffering that we went through together because

it produced perseverance, and our medial cingulate cortices got stronger because we went through

those hard things together.

And because of that, we developed character, and that character for me is I know exactly

who I am, I know exactly who my wife is, I know exactly who my God is, and I know He's

He's going to show up again the next time the massive thing happens, okay?

It did happen in 2018. We lost Lisa's mom.

It's a devastating, really rapid neurological disease that she developed.

And we saw Tata put his roots down deep in this family and stand up to that loss.

After he'd already lost two children, he lost his wife of 56 years, and he stood up.

And guess what he does now? Every Tuesday, he does a podcast around the whole world to talk about how to change your

mind and change your life. That's who I'm married into. That's the family I'm part of, okay?

And character produces hope. And my friend, hope is not an accident.

Hope is not for something, it's in someone.

And that's the mind change that I want you to have today. You can change your mind and you can change your life.

And my friend, there's really good news here on Mind Change Monday, and that is, you ready

for it? You can start today.

Music.

Hey, thanks for listening. The Dr. Lee Warren podcast is brought to you

by my brand new book, Hope is the First Dose.

It's a treatment plan for recovering from trauma, tragedy, and other massive things.

It's available everywhere books are sold, and I narrated the audio books.

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

available for free at TommyWalkerMinistries.org.

They are supplying worship resources for worshipers all over the world to worship the most high God.

And if you're interested in learning more, check out TommyWalkerMinistries.org.

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.