Is Positivity Bias a Trick? All-In August #8

Good morning, my friend. Dr. Lee Warren here with you. It is time for some self-brain surgery.

We are all in August, and I'm so grateful that you're doing this with us.

I hope that you're enjoying it so far.

We're really digging in. We're at the end of the first week of August,

and we're making it happen.

What are some areas of your life that you've decided it's time to go all in?

What are some places where you've said the way it's been is not the way I want it to be anymore?

What got me here won't get me there? using cell brain surgery to make it happen,

send me a voicemail. Let me hear from you.

Speakpipe.com slash Dr. Lee Warren.

Speakpipe.com slash Dr. Lee Warren. Or you can send an email,

lee at drleewarren.com.

Today, I'm going to give you an episode we did last year for All in August about positivity bias.

It's about this ability to look at the world and try to put a positive spin on what you're seeing.

And the reason I'm bringing this back to you today is I got a message from a

listener named Jules yesterday through Instagram.

And she had a post that she saw, and she wrote in to ask me a question about

it. Here's what the post said. It was from a man named Ken Coleman.

I don't know Ken, but here's what Ken said.

We say 300 to 1,000 words to ourselves every minute. That's true,

by the way, from a neuroscience standpoint.

We say 300 to 1,000 words to ourselves every minute. That means the person we listen to the most is us.

There's a correlation between positive thinking and grit, and it will change

our trajectory. Pessimism kills grit.

Positivity fuels it. So here's what Jules said. I'd love your thoughts about this.

I'm not sure it's just about, quote, positive thinking, because we can't just

change our situation by thinking better of it.

When those bad things happen, we can overcome them with knowing that God has

this, and no matter what, He knows what we're going through.

He's He's always with us. I guess I'm struggling with those words to just think positive.

Such a great question, Jules. I always want to remind you, we talk about the

importance of managing your brain from a mind-down perspective,

of always trying to biopsy your thoughts, to take command of the high ground

of your thinking, to not give in to the excessive five-to-one negativity that our brains give us.

I'm always telling you that, and here's why.

Remember that your thoughts trigger the activity of your reticular activating system of your brain.

When you tell your brain that it's going to be a terrible day,

for example, or that this situation is hopeless or that you're completely hosed

or that the tumor is going to come back.

Well, what happens then is your reticular activating system begins to filter

out anything that doesn't support what you've told it to focus on.

And so in a very real sense, we can narrow the lens through which we see the

world by the types of thoughts and words that we give to our own brain.

So your mind turns on and off the filter of your reticular activating system.

Here's why that's important.

Negativity narrows your lens of what's possible, and positivity broadens your lens.

Now, that's not to say that I want you to be Pollyanna. By the way,

that's an inaccurate use.

We always say don't have Pollyanna thinking, but if you read the story,

Pollyanna was actually pretty realistic.

You should go read it. Read Pollyanna. That's an assignment for all in August.

Anyway if you have this sort of idea that

you're supposed to just always put a smile on and make everything positive that's

not going to work out very well for you and it's not biblical the

bible never tells us to always think positively about everything that everything's

going to be happy jesus was a man of sorrows jesus wept jesus cried out in fact

he lamented on the cross and with some inaccurate thinking my god my god why

have you forsaken me he knew god hadn't forsaken him but but he still let himself

express the emotion that he felt.

It's okay sometimes, but here's what happens.

The neuroscience works out to where if you look at a situation that you're in

and you've trained yourself to say, okay, this is a tough situation.

What am I going to do about it?

Then what you'll do is you'll start filtering for possible solutions.

You'll start filtering for possible opportunities.

And so spinning towards the positive, okay, boy, this is a really tough situation.

My back's against the wall. what am I going to do now?

Then you'll start to be able to look for opportunities, look for chances to

move forward, look for chances to overcome, look for chances to dodge the bullet,

look for chances to find a way out of the situation.

I use the prehab of putting God's word in my heart.

So I have some promises. Oh boy, this seems hopeless, but I can do all things

through Christ who gives me strength.

Boy, this seems like I'm really in trouble and nobody cares about me and nobody

believes in me, and God says, wait, I've got a plan for you, a purpose for you.

I knew all the days in your life before one of them came to pass,

and I knew the exact time and place when I would put you, and I did that so

that you would seek me and perhaps find me.

When I feel like my future is limited, I remember that God says,

hey, pray that I'll expand your territory.

Pray that I will give you hope in the future, that I have a plan for you and

it's to prosper you and not to harm you.

So if you remind yourself of those truths, then what happens is you start seeing

opportunities to make progress or to just have the faith and the hope to hold

on or to say, okay, well, the end really is going to happen in this way.

Well, I've got this tumor and it's recurred and this is how it's going to happen

for me. So what does my life mean anyway?

What am I here for? What's the thing I'm supposed to do in this shorter time than I thought I had?

And you'll start seeing a way to find purpose and meaning in the story that

you're living to help your children have better epigenetic switches and turn

on some of those opportunities for the future instead of the genetic third generation

of being afraid all the time that you're passing them, right? Right.

So pessimism kills.

It kills grit. It kills opportunity. It kills hope.

It kills traction and action and positivity fuels those things.

And it's not a trick. It's not neuro linguistic programming.

It's not Pollyanna thinking. It's not unrealism. It's this idea that positivity

bias gives us an opportunity to see hope instead of darkness.

It's biblical it's consistent with neuroscience and we're

going to do a whole episode now about the science behind positivity

bias training and why it's important and what

it does for you i hope that kind of answers your question jules this is not

a fake yourself out and paste a smile on it's if you're on the beach you've

just landed and it's d-day and the the defense from the germans is overwhelming

and the machine guns and mortars and rockets are coming and everybody's getting mowed down on the beach,

you don't have the opportunity to go backward because the ocean's there.

You can't just swim back to England, okay?

You've got to get up through that beach and into some safety and find a place

to build your defense on and then move forward in the attack.

You got to get off that beach or you're going to get killed.

Remember the first 30 minutes of Saving Private Ryan?

There were guys who just were so afraid that they just hunkered down on the

sand and And eventually the German machine guns found them and took them out.

And the captain had to say, go, you've got to move forward.

You got to look ahead and see the opportunity. Look at the field and find the

places where there's a little bit of cover here.

And then you can run over here and then you can run up to that.

Beachhead and then you can run up to that pillbox and then you can

find your way forward you've got to be able to say if i

stay still if i stay here and

bury my head in the sand and just give in to the negativity i'm going to die

i'm going to be stuck i'm not going to make progress in other words if you don't

look for opportunity you will never find it and so having a positivity bias

gives us hope it gives us options it gives us the ability to tell our reticular activating system,

who's boss, and what to look out for.

That's what this episode's about. Don't forget to share All In August with your

friends. Send the episode to 10 people and say, hey, listen to this with me. Go All In with me.

Let's start together. Let's get after it. My book, Hope is the First Dose,

is the textbook for this month, along with All In by Mark Batterson.

I hope that it's helpful to you, my friend. I hope that you enjoy this episode

that we got coming up from last year.

I think it's gonna help you. Let me know if you've found a way to include more

positivity bias in your life, or if you've been dealing with negativity.

How's it working out for you?

Let me hear from you. Speakpipe.com slash Dr. Lee Warren.

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

Hope this helps. God bless you.

Good morning, my friend. Hope you're doing well. How's it going out there?

It is going to be a great day here on the river in Nebraska.

We had a really good day in the OR yesterday and did some good things for people.

But it was one of those days that just a lot of little nagging things happened.

You know what I mean? like 10 minute delay here and

a five minute delay here and a three minute delay here and by

the time it stacked up we had a day that finished at five and

it could have finished at two and it's not bad to work till five obviously everybody

works nine to five right we start at 6 30 on surgery days damon and i usually

get to the hospital six or six thirty the team is there usually by six or five

thirty getting things ready for surgery we don't just roll in at seven and do

surgery And so our days start earlier,

so it's nice when they end a little bit earlier, right?

But it's one of those things that sometimes the days of your life just don't

play out exactly like you want.

And when they do, when things like that occur, especially when really bad things happen,

you lose somebody or something stressful is happening in your life or in your

marriage, there's always a moment where you can decide that you're going to

let that moment, that time, that situation,

that circumstance engulf you and take you down the abyss, the staircase,

I used to call it, the pit of despair, as Isaiah describes it.

Actually, let me rephrase that. The pit of despair is a phrase that came from

the princess bride. The furnace of suffering is what Isaiah said.

I seem to conflate those things sometimes. The furnace of suffering.

You can get into this situation where you allow circumstance to just put you

down into a hole, right? Right.

And then what happens sometimes is you start obsessing over the problem and

you can't see your way out of it.

And it becomes its own self-defeating situation where you just get miserable, right?

And so on a day like yesterday, even though nothing really bad happened and

great surgeries happened, I could either get irritated by the delays and the

frustrations and the monitor that won't work or whatever's happening.

And I can just let myself get in a really foul mood and get grumpy and get snippy

with people. And then what's going to happen is the day is going to get worse.

When the leader gets irritated, then other people start getting agitated and

they start performing worse, right?

I saw this in Iraq a lot. We were having a mortar attack while we were having

a big mass casualty event.

We were really busy but also stressed out and in danger and all that.

If the leaders, if the surgeons started acting grumpy or scared or frustrated,

then the followers did too and their performance suffered and it got harder

to do the job. And so today I just want to, we're halfway through all in August.

Today's the 17th. We're in the back half of all in August.

And if you find you're just not making the kind of progress that you want,

one thing you might want to do is look at your mindset.

Look at how you're looking at things as they play out.

And even if you're pressing in to try and make it a big change about something,

if you're looking at it from the negative bias, it may be that you're just,

your own brain chemistry is keeping you from achieving the kind of progress that you want.

And so today, I just want to talk for a minute about something that psychologists

call positivity bias training.

And I'm going to give you a little bit of information about what the Bible has

to say about that. We're just going to chat for a couple of minutes.

But first, let's let Lisa tell us how the good news is that we can start today.

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,

That place is called Self-Brain Surgery. You can learn it, and it will help

you become healthier, feel better, and be happier.

And the good news is you can start today.

Thanks, Lisa. Hey, so glad to have you listening today. I'm Dr.

Lee Warren, and I live in Nebraska in the United States of America with my incredible

wife, Lisa, my father-in-law, Tata, and the super pups, Harvey and Lewis.

I'm a neurosurgeon and an author, and I'm here to help you harness neuroscience,

the power of your brain, faith the power of your spirit and

good old common sense to help you lead a healthier better happier

life listen friend you can't change your life until you change

your mind and i'm here to help you learn the art of self-brain surgery

to get it done you can get the show notes and more at drleewarren.podbean.com

that's drleewarren.podbean.com and if you like the show please subscribe so

you never miss an episode and tell your friends about it if you tell two or

three friends this podcast was helpful to you imagine how much good we can all

do around the world together.

I'm Dr. Lee Warren, and I'm here to help you change your mind so you can change

your life. Let's get after it.

Okay. Hey, thanks, Lisa.

Listen, there's a guy named Martin Seligman who was a psychologist and is a psychologist.

And he wrote a breakthrough idea in psychology, taught generations of psychologists

to stop thinking about what most mental health experts always think about, which is problems.

Don't think about your mental illness or your mental problem,

your difficulty, the insufficiency of how your brain is working.

But rather, he's now called the father of positive psychology because he taught

people to look at finding the ways to look at what's good, finding the ways

to look at what's hopeful, finding the ways to look at what's positive.

For many years, psychology worked within this idea of disease,

treating people with mental problems and psychopathological issues instead of

finding a way to help people see the positive psychology,

to shift the focus of interventions from problems to solutions.

So not, why are you so depressed?

Why are you so anxious? Stop feeling that way. Stop doing that. Stop thinking that.

Instead, they determine that positive psychology really has five key aspects.

And this is really well laid out in Daniel Amen's book, You Happier,

which is a fantastic look at the neuroscience of happiness and feeling good

and all those things. It's really important.

It's just a tremendous book. And Daniel has done a beautiful job.

But he lays out this sort of positive bias training in that chapter,

and he talks about Martin Seligman's work.

And here's the summation of it, that they determine, Seligman and his colleagues,

determine that positive psychology helps you to look at life with optimism.

Positive psychology allows us to appreciate the present.

Positive psychology lets us accept and make peace with the past.

Positive psychology helps us to be more grateful and forgiving.

Giving and positive psychology helps us to look beyond

the momentary pleasures and pains of life to look

beyond the moment those are all great things right we've

learned that in what we call now trauma-informed care like instead of saying

looking at somebody's behavior and saying what's wrong with you man why are

you doing all these things why do you take those drugs why do you behave that

way why are you always causing trouble instead of what's wrong with you we look

beyond their behavior and say, what happened to you?

What has occurred in your life, friend, that's led you to thinking and behaving

this way so consistently?

What happened? What happened to you? So the positive bias when you're looking

at a situation or you're looking at yourself in your life is not to say, what's wrong with me?

What's the matter with me? Why does it always feel this way?

Why does this always happen to me?

Why is this always occurring to me? Why does nobody behave appropriately around

me, the positive spin on that would be what has happened to lead to.

Me into this situation where I feel this way? What's happened?

To look at it. And most of the time, I would just challenge you,

as we're trying to go all in with our lives, with our brains,

with our spirits, all in in our relationships, all in with our behavior, I want you to understand,

that a lot of the times, the problem is what I've jokingly called eye trouble.

We're wondering why everybody else is behaving a certain way,

and we never look inward to maybe some of the solutions to why things are happening

or feeling the way they are has to do with the way we're thinking and approaching them.

And so learning to have a positive bias towards your thinking is a crucial aspect

of learning how to break through all that clutter and the sameness and how's

that working for you. I did like we talked about yesterday.

Having a positive bias to your thinking helps you to unlock a couple of really important things.

And what they are is that positivity in a situation creates a better brain environment,

A better brain chemical environment than negativity do.

That's just true. It's been proven without any doubt from neuroscience that

positive thinking produces a better chemical environment in your brain.

And what that does is allows you to re-engage, or recreate rather,

new synaptic connections that will

lead you to a more natural or automated positive thought in the future.

Now, when I'm talking about positive thinking, don't ever mistake,

don't ever think that I'm saying that you should just put a smile on your face and move on.

I was exposed to some of that thinking as a child, and it can be really harmful,

especially if you attach it to a religious connotation and say.

Christians aren't sad. Christians are happy. Christians are always supposed

to have a smile on their face. Christians shrug off troubles.

The problem with that is it doesn't line up with the real world because it's

not reasonable to lose your son and still be happy about it the same day. That's not reasonable.

And if you tell people they have to, if you tell people that they should always

be happy no matter what happens, then they're going to realize that's not realistic and it's not possible.

And then you're going to start feeling guilt and shame over not living up to

what you are being taught, that you're supposed to feel, right?

So when I say I want you to feel positive, I'm not saying that you should always

just paste a smile on and act like it doesn't matter to you.

That's not what I'm talking about.

What I'm talking about is, like I said the other day, when you're on the beach

and the bullets are coming at you and you know what your purpose is,

then you can put the shield up and you can say, wait a minute,

I've got to find a way through this.

There is a path forward here that will allow me to succeed. I'm going to stop

just thinking about the bullets coming at me, and I'm going to start looking

for the opportunity to move forward safely.

I'm going to start believing that there's a way to get from point A where I'm

at to point B where there's safety, where there's peace, there's hope,

there's future, there's reconnection, there's resolution of problems or whatever.

There's a way for me to get from here to there.

And I'm telling you, friend, the way to get from here to there in your brain

is to look at the situation with a positive bias to say, okay,

this is happening, but I can find a way through it.

Because the alternative, the negative bias is the cortisol and the adrenaline,

the stress hormones are going to fire up and you're going to say,

I need to run away or I need to suck in and get deeper down in this hole and

just hide, or I need to kill myself or I need to divorce this person or do whatever.

You go down this negative path and your problems don't generally get better, do they?

If you dig in on the beach, you're going to eventually have a shell land on you and get blown up.

You've got to have an ability to move forward.

And the only way to do that is to find some way to positively look at the situation.

Again, really careful to discern what I'm talking about.

Not saying that you say, oh, yeah, I went bankrupt. Great, that's wonderful.

No, that's not what I'm talking about. That's insanity.

What I'm saying is the money's not there.

What can I do? Is it impossible? Is it never going to be okay?

Am I going to fail? am I going to go bankrupt? Are they going to take my house?

No. You say, wait a minute, I've got some skills.

I can add some hours at work. I can find a way to get my boss to advance my pay.

I can do this. I can do that. There's a way to solve this problem.

Starts with prayer. There's a way to clear the situation and look through it

and find an answer and look through it and find the possibility,

look through it and find a path.

That's what I mean by positivity, Not, oh, it's all going to be okay,

which I say that all the time, but I don't mean it in a silly way, a fantasy way.

I say that based on my track record of memory of the past, of how God has behaved

and responded when I've had trouble in the past, somehow I got through all those previous situations.

Somehow I didn't go bankrupt. Somehow I didn't die in Iraq.

Somehow I didn't kill myself after I went through a divorce or had all those issues.

Somehow I found love when I

met Lisa somehow I believed in myself again because Lisa

said I was okay somehow God got me through losing my son somehow we managed

to survive or moving our practice from Alabama to Wyoming and somehow we wound

up in the practice somehow God did all those things and so since he did all

those things in the past I've got memory.

I can say, maybe there is hope for the future. And then I can move,

can flex that muscle of hope and start moving towards that possibility instead

of just hunkering down on the beach and waiting to get blown up, right?

That's what I mean by having a positive bias.

You just say, I'm going to look at this situation and find the path because there is a path.

There's a crack in the door filled with light in this dark room and I just need

to find the path forward there, okay?

So when I tell you to have a positive bias, please don't ever think I'm telling

you to be unrealistically positive, okay? There's lots of psychology to this.

But the thing you don't know, the thing that most people don't know,

is how much positive and negative thoughts affect your brain chemistry.

I said it a while ago, but when you have a happy thought, even a simple one,

like a bright idea, a loving feeling, your brain releases the chemicals of happiness,

dopamine, serotonin, endorphins, oxytocin.

They calm your body. They help clear your thinking.

They help you find possibility and hope in the moment. And when you have negative

thoughts, The brain releases or decreases certain chemicals and you feel angrier,

more stressed, more sad.

The release of these stress hormones like cortisol and adrenaline and you deplete

the positive neurotransmitters and your brain predictably gets worse and worse

and worse when you focus on those negative thoughts.

So your choice then, as I've told you many times, the only part of God's creation

that has the gift of selective attention are human beings.

We're the only ones who have the ability to say, I am not going to think about that for a second.

I'm going to think about this instead. You can change trains.

You can change your train of thought. You can change what you're thinking about, friend.

And you can decide to think about something that's going to make you feel better instead of worse.

You can. You can set that train of thought and you can change the direction

of how you're thinking and feeling and that deciding that you're going to live

more positively is the key to do that. You have to do that ahead of time.

You have to do it ahead of time. I said it a million times. You got to prehab

your brain to believe that you are going to handle whatever you encounter in

a more positive way. And you will.

You absolutely will. One sort of surgery, one self-brain surgery technique that

we've talked about a lot is what I call the bad thought biopsy.

It's been covered many times in many ways. Lots of people have written about this idea.

Byron Katie and Daniel Lehman and lots of people have looked at it as a way

of just examining your thinking and not believing every thought that pops into your head.

I call it the bad thought biopsy because when I do brain surgery,

if I look at a scan and I see a round spot in your brain, and I just tell you,

I put my hand on your knee and say, hey, you've got a brain tumor.

We need to go put you in radiation and chemotherapy.

You would say, wait a minute, how do you know for sure it's a brain tumor?

And I would say, well, I've seen it before.

That's probably what it is. We ought to just radiate your brain.

We ought to put nuclear radiation on your skull.

And you would say, that's crazy. You don't know for sure that it's a tumor.

That'd be malpractice, right? Instead, I have to take you to the operating room

and I have to put a needle in that thing and I have to biopsy it so the pathologist

can tell us what it is for sure before we decide how to treat it.

And it's the same thing with your thinking. When the thought pops into your

head, you've got to say, wait a second, is that thought true?

Is it absolutely true? Is it certain to be true? And how do I feel about that if it is true?

And what would I feel if it wasn't true? What would I do differently if it's

cancer as opposed to if it's just a little scar tissue in the brain?

If it's cancer, I've got to do radical surgery, chemotherapy,

radiation, all that stuff, hospice, all those things. If it's just a little

scar tissue, I just don't have to do anything.

I'm well. I'm fine. I get to move on with my life, right?

If it's a bad thought and I look at it, is it absolutely true?

Maybe not. Maybe there's some way to think about it as it's not true. Is it 100% true?

Maybe it's partially true. Daniel Lemmon gives a great example in the book of

you have this thought that pops into your head. Nobody likes me.

And then you put yourself through this process. Is it true? Yes, I think it's true.

Is it absolutely true with 100% certainty? And you would say,

maybe my mom likes me. Maybe my wife likes me. So the first thought was, nobody likes me.

You say, is it true? Yeah, I think that's true. But then you say,

wait, is it 100% absolutely true?

Then you make yourself admit, no, there's a couple of people who like me.

The third step then was, how do you feel when you believe that thought?

If nobody liked me, I'd be pretty sad. I'd be depressed and I would spend the

rest of my life alone with no friends.

I'd be a loser, I'd be a loner, I'd die alone.

And nobody would care as the guy in the Bible that said he died to no one's regret, right?

Then the fourth step, how would you feel if you didn't have that thought?

If I didn't have the thought that nobody liked me, I would feel happier and

more open to meeting other people and connecting with them.

And then the last step, turn the thought around to its opposite and ask if the opposite is true.

So instead of nobody likes me, maybe the thought is some people do like me.

And is there any evidence that this is true? My wife seems to like me.

She sticks around. We've been married for a long time and she doesn't leave

me. So maybe she does like me.

Maybe my coworkers invite me to lunch from time to time or somebody sends me

a funny meme on Instagram. So somebody's out there thinking about me, right?

I can pretty much guarantee that when I open my phone this morning,

I'm going to have a couple of funny videos to watch from my friend Al almost

every day. So he's out there thinking about me. He likes me.

So now I've worked myself from this thought that nobody likes me all the way

out to, hey, there are a few really connected people who actually do like me, and I am not alone.

And so then instead of reacting to the negative thought automatically.

Meditate on the thought that's actually true, and you'll find a way to feel

a little more hopeful and a little more optimistic about what's going to happen that day.

So the question at the end of the day is, are the thoughts that I'm routinely

allowing myself to think, as Dr.

Phil said, how's it working for you? Are these thoughts helping me or are they hurting me?

Is my bias negative towards the harm of my own brain chemistry or is it positive

towards helping my brain chemistry and therefore my automated thinking,

my synaptic connections, and my behavior going forward that's easier and easier

to accomplish because I've trained my brain with prehab,

brain surgery, and now rehab to go forward in a more positive way.

That's the treatment plan. Do your thoughts bring you more safety,

peace, joy, hope, happiness, or are they bringing you regret,

anger, frustration, sadness, depression?

Learn how to keep the thoughts that are serving you and question or discard

or better react to the ones that are dragging you down.

And that will change your life. And that's how you go all in with your brain.

You know what cracks me up is that we've done all the psychological research

and written tens of thousands of books and articles and papers and blogs,

and there's all this stuff out there about positivity bias training.

And 2,000 years ago, the Apostle Paul wrote this in Philippians 4, 6 through 8.

Do not be anxious about anything, but in every situation, by prayer and petition,

with thanksgiving, present your request to God. Do you hear that?

Prayer, meditation, gratitude.

Verse 7, and the peace of God which transcends your understanding,

all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.

He's telling you, you need to guard your mind. You need to be careful what you

let your brain think about.

Then verse 8, finally, brothers and sisters, whatever is true,

whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely,

whatever is admirable, if anything is excellent or praiseworthy.

Think about such things. What is that?

Positivity, bias training. He's telling you you're going to have a hard life.

Remember this guy, Paul was in prison, shipwrecked, snake bit,

stoned, ultimately martyred. Like this guy is not saying that you'll have a

happy life full of great things and never have anything bad happen to you.

He's saying in the midst of those hard things.

Be positive anyway, and you'll find a better path forward. That's the answer.

So you see, positivity bias training is not teaching you how to be ridiculously

optimistic in the face of overwhelming evidence that you ought not to be.

That's not it. Let me give you an example of something that you can do based

on something I did that was almost life-saving in the moment.

So when you have something really bad happen, when you go through a really hard

circumstance, August 20th is the anniversary of the worst day of our lives,

the day we lost our son Mitch.

And many of you are just very kindly loving on and doctoring us and reminding

us that you're thinking about us in that moment.

And I just want to tell you how grateful we are for that, just to know that

people are out there that are aware.

As time goes on after a big event like that happens,

you wonder if people know, if they care,

especially the people who knew about it

when it happened and who knew that person that you lost or knew that

situation that you went through have they forgotten like i spent a little time

sometimes going down this rabbit hole worrying that people have forgotten mitch

or don't remember how funny he was or how smart he was and those kinds of things

and to know that the people who didn't even ever know him are just giving us

a little thought a little mental energy sending out not a word of encouragement,

and even taking the time to write. That's amazing.

And so it's a good example of how we can love on and be community for each other,

even if we're only connected digitally to each other in the world.

It's amazing what the Internet has allowed us to do. So we're grateful about that.

But let me tell you something that happened. So we lose our son on the 20th.

On the 23rd, we have his funeral.

And we were driving back from Prattville, Alabama to Auburn.

It was about an hour, hour and a half, something like that. Probably an hour

and 15 minutes in the car that day.

Got my parents in the back seat. Lisa and I were in the front.

We're in a little caravan of cars going from Prattville down the interstate

to Montgomery and then over to Auburn to the east.

And we're devastated, right? We're crying and we're just numb.

And we don't really know what we're going to do. And we're in that situation

of just being emotionally stunted and muted by the whole thing.

And all of a sudden, it's a cloudy day. It's a cloudy day.

And all of a sudden, we see this intense, incredible, just unbelievably vivid

double rainbow over the highway.

And it was in front of us far enough that we could see both ends of it,

like we're driving under this double rainbow.

And just in that moment, I can't tell you, I can't really describe it. It sounds silly.

I just knew that somehow God was going to get us through this.

And I had this weird thought. It's just a strange thought. I wonder what that

looks like from Mitch's perspective in heaven.

I wonder if he can see that rainbow. I wonder if he's smiling because he knows

it's giving us a little bit of a boost, a little bit of a lift right now.

Like I just had this moment where I stepped out of the pain that I was in and

allowed myself to think about something that was happier.

And I felt better. And that sounds like a trick, but it's not a trick.

From a chemical standpoint, even in the midst of a hard time,

you can notice something good in that moment.

There was a day in Iraq I wrote about in my last book where I was just miserable

and everything was bloody red and everybody getting blown up.

And we did all this trauma surgery that day.

And it had been just brown everywhere on the outside. There's dirt everywhere,

and it's dark sky, and there's a sandstorm.

And my whole world was red and brown, just red and brown. I was just focused

on these negative thoughts as I was walking down the sidewalk.

And I just encountered this little tiny plant that was growing up,

bright green plant growing up out of a crack in the sidewalk.

And it just was, wow, this whole world. My brain is saying everything is red

and everything is brown. Everything is bloody or dirty or filthy or decaying

or dying or screaming or bleeding. Everything is negative.

And all of a sudden, my brain said, but that's not. There's a little blade of

grass right there that's popped up somehow and probably in the middle of this desert.

There's a little green plant growing up out of the ground in the hardest place

possible, growing up out of concrete.

And just for a moment, I said, well, that plant can grow and thrive in this

difficult environment. Maybe I can too.

And so I just stepped out of the problem and into something a little bit more positive for a second.

And it made a huge difference in my heart that day.

It just made a huge difference. And I've heard from so many people,

that little story in that book resonated with them.

And the reason it resonates, friend, is because we need to be able to find,

and it's something you can reliably do.

You can train yourself to find something positive in the midst of any situation that you're in.

And that doesn't mean that what's happening isn't happening.

It just means that you allow yourself to say, we're on parallel tracks here. This is happening.

There's still some good and some light and some hope in the world.

And because of that means it's possible for you to get through what you're going

through and move forward.

That's why the Bible says, think on these things. That's why the Bible says, fret not yourself.

Don't go down these rabbit holes of negativity because that's how you get lost

in these heavy circumstances.

Don't allow yourself to believe every stupid thought that you have because most of them are negative.

Most of them are wired to be negative, but you can train your brain to bias towards positivity.

You can, and it'll make all the difference. And I'm just telling you,

friend, if you can learn to think on these things, these better things,

you're going to be happier.

And not to be happier just for the sake of acting like things are going to be

okay, but to be happier because happier people have better brain chemistry,

and they make better synapses, and they make better decisions,

and they find better possibilities,

and they solve problems better, And this has been proven unequivocally through

all kinds of scientific research.

It is absolutely true that if you look at the world negatively,

you don't perform as well.

You don't marry as well. You don't sustain relationships as well.

You don't avoid bad habits as well. You don't live as long.

In fact, there's been really good research that says happier people have lower

blood pressure and lower risk of coronary artery disease and lower numbers of

strokes and lower numbers of cancer. or like happier people live longer and feel better.

And that's why I always say, I want you to become healthier,

feel better and be happier.

I want you to change your mind so you can change your life. That's why I'm always

telling you to find a way to look for the hope and the light.

And the only reason I care about that for you so much is because if we can all

find a way to be a little more positive,

our society will change, the world will change, but people will start seeing

that the Lord loves them and there's opportunity and purpose and power and passion and promise for you.

Because when God says something, friend, he says it for everybody.

And when he tells you that he's got good plans for you, it's true.

And you can't get to him if you're just mired down in your negativity and your impossibility.

If you can't see the light and move towards it, you'll never find the light.

It's time to go all in. It's time to go all in and decide that we will relentlessly

refuse to participate in our own demise.

And I'm just telling you, friend, running with your negative thoughts is participating

in your own demise. is playing Russian roulette with your own brain. So quit it, okay?

Let's go with positivity bias, not irrationally positive,

but a way to find consistently the ability to find something in a moment that's

positive and hopeful and move towards it and latch onto it and refuse to give

it up because that's the good news.

You can't change your life until you change your mind and you can start today.

Hope that was helpful to you, my friend. We have a brand new Frontal Lobe Friday

episode coming tomorrow for the eighth day of All in August.

I'm going to the office now. I'm going to interact with a bunch of patients.

I'm going to hopefully teach them something about real-life brain surgery and

maybe self-brain surgery too.

And I hope that whatever you do today, whatever you find your hand on the plow

or whatever you find yourself doing, that the Lord is with you,

that you can go all in, that you can finally break free of that limitation that's

been holding you back, the limiting ending story, the negativity,

the massive thing, whatever it's been that's holding you back, it's time to go all in.

Share it with your friend. Sign up for the newsletter, drleewarren.substack.com.

Send me a voicemail, speakpipe.com slash drleewarren. We're all in this together,

and it's time to go all in.

We'll get after it. Have a good day. God bless you.