Prepare to Succeed (Self-Brain Surgery Saturday)

Good morning, my friend. I hope you're doing well. I'm Dr. Lee Warren,

and I am here with you on Self Brain Surgery Saturday, one of my favorite days of the week.

It's been kind of a tough week for us. We had urgent surgery with one of our

daughters, it's something that popped up and was kind of a threat to her health,

and so they had to move quickly.

Lisa and Tata flew down there yesterday, and down there taking care of her, everything went great.

And thank you for your prayers and all of that. but one of those weeks where

things just pop up and all of a sudden you're on a different trajectory than you thought, right?

And that's kind of the theme of a lot of the emails and contact that I get from

people is, hey, this happened and it threw my life off track and everything

that I thought isn't what I think anymore.

And that was actually the subtitle of my second book, I've Seen the End of You.

Faith, Doubt, and the Things We Think We Know, right?

So sometimes when you think you know something and all of a sudden you don't

know it, that can create a lot of trouble, can create doubt, it can create fear.

And so this week was just a little reminder that you never are 100% sure about

what's gonna happen in your life.

So that made me think that I wanted to have a conversation with you today about

the concept that we've talked about a number of times before,

and it's perfect for self-brain surgery Saturday,

but this idea of prehab and what you're doing, you're getting better at.

And so, these are two of the sort of elements of the treatment plan for what

to do when hope seems like it's hard to find or what to do when the massive

thing pops up and throws you off of your life and how do you find your feet again.

And we've talked about this concept from Chris Voss, the FBI hostage negotiator,

that said that when the pressure's on, you don't rise to the occasion.

We talked about that just yesterday on Frontal Lobe Friday.

You don't rise to the occasion, you fall to your highest level of preparation.

And I want to give you just a couple of examples about that today so that we

can work on that preparation part.

Not just talk about it, but actually work on it.

And I'm going to be a little vulnerable and give you a good example of something

in my life that I had to deal with even just this week in terms of preparing

for something that we know is going to happen and we don't want to let it wipe

us out and we're not going to rise up and somehow become,

somehow magically better equipped to handle it unless we prepare.

So we're going to talk about that today. We'll call it the preparation plan.

And it's a self-brain surgery Saturday operation that I think is going to be useful for us.

And all of that is for the idea that if we want to become healthier and feel

better and be happier, we have to remember the one truth that we can't change

our life until we change our minds.

And so in this idea of how we transform our minds to become more like what God

wants us to be, there is a reliable and repeatable process we can do using the

power of neuroplasticity.

I call it self-brain surgery because that's really what it is.

Literally changing your own brain.

But before we can get to it, 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 for 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.

All right, let's get after it. So I get several emails a week.

I got another one two days ago, a guy named William. And William,

thanks for writing in and giving me the concept here that we're going to talk about today.

William said, hey, I love the idea of taking every thought captive.

I see the scripture, I understand how it's important and why it's important

and I can do it. But then I find myself back in this old rut of reacting to

my thinking and going down a hole, and a day or two will go by,

and I realize I haven't taken any thoughts captive.

I've just been listening to my negative thinking, and I'm right back in the

same habits and patterns and problems of always.

And how do you actually manage to do it? Well, it's definitely a challenge,

and we know that the Bible says I can do all things through Him who gives me strength.

We know that the Bible says I didn't give you a spirit of fear,

but of love and of power and of a sound mind so we know it is possible to get

our minds optimized and working properly.

But it's really, really hard. Why is it hard? Because of synapses, right?

One of the self-brain surgery operations that we've talked about is severing six synapses.

So recognizing that you have a particular trigger,

that something happens that will trigger a stream of negative thinking and that

when you think this thought,

you then next think that thought and then you think that thought and

you do this thing and then you yell at somebody and then you do that

and they yell back and then you're in a fight and then you drink and if you

can start to zoom out of your actual experience and think about what happens

when you think certain things that's the beginning that's the diagnosis phase

i'm looking at that taking that biopsy and saying wait a minute whenever i feel

or think this particular thing.

I tend to wind up in a situation that hasn't proven to be helpful to me or to

the people I love or to my mission of glorifying, magnifying God or my mission

of becoming healthier, feeling better, being happier. Any of that doesn't help.

And so, as Dr. Phil always says, how's that working for you?

If it's not working, then a smart person would say, I need to change my mind.

We talked about before how we all have smartphones.

I've got one in my hand right now. It's sitting on my desk, Apple phone.

I think it's an 11, I tend to have old phones and don't ever seem to upgrade them.

So my phone though is commonly called a smartphone, why? Because it connects

to the internet and it can do just about anything.

It's not just a phone, it's a calculator, it's a wireless communication device,

it's a massive powerful computer that can search the world's database of knowledge

and I can know just about anything.

I can know what the weather is in your town, I can look up your genealogy,

I can learn anything about anybody just about instant, almost instantly because I have a smartphone.

Well, what if I went to the store to buy a new phone and they had a bank of

smartphones on the wall and then they had another, another little cabinet over

there and that, that cabinet had a bunch of phones in it and they were labeled

like idiot phones or moron phones.

And I would say, well, what, what are those?

And the salesperson would say, well, those are phones that don't help you.

Those are phones that when you buy them, they don't connect to the internet,

they don't connect to the outside world. In fact, you can't even make a phone call.

You just hear your own voice when you talk into them. And once in a while, they ring.

And what happens when they ring, you'll answer and you'll say, hey, hello.

And they'll say, hey, you're nothing but a stupid piece of, and all you are

ever gonna, and you're never gonna do anything. You're just a.

What if your phone did that, like your phone like literally made you feel bad

about yourself all the time?

That you couldn't connect to the outside world, you couldn't learn anything

new, you couldn't talk to anyone, you couldn't send messages,

all you did was get a stream of negative input from it telling you that you're just worthless.

And that your whole life amounts to nothing. Well that wouldn't be very smart

to buy that phone, that's why they call it the moron phone.

You wouldn't want to spend money to buy a device that doesn't help you and actually

hinders you or hurts you, right?

And by the way, I love that trash talk button.

I can't stop. It's hilarious. Anyway, sorry, I just, I was making the point

that your brain says all kinds of things to you every day,

30,000, 40,000 times a day, you hear thoughts, most of which are negative.

Most of which are not true.

And if you're not careful to discern and put in place processes to interrupt

those streams of thought or prepare for the next time that a situation arises

in which you have them, then you might as well buy the moron.

I'm not calling you a moron.

I'm just saying, because I do it all the time too. I'm just saying that we know

how this works. We know that we have an enemy. We know there is spiritual warfare.

We know that our brains are wired for negativity. Even if you don't believe

in the heavenly realms and spirits and gods and demons and all that stuff and

God and demons and all those things.

Even if you don't believe in that, you at least can understand and acknowledge

to yourself that your brain is hardwired for negativity and if you don't train it otherwise,

you have these synapses that slip you right down a familiar stream of thought

that doesn't usually help you. Right? It's just true. All of us have it.

So, I'm going to give you an example, Chris Voss, the FBI hostage negotiator,

we talked about him earlier this week, I've talked about his book,

Never Split the Difference a bunch of times.

He says that when the pressure's on, we don't rise to the occasion,

we fall to our highest level of preparation.

And it's true, you don't suddenly become somebody that you're not when you're

under pressure, you fall back to what you've prepped and drilled for.

And if you haven't prepped and drilled for something, then you fall into whatever

instinctual or habitual mechanism you have when you're under some sort of stress

or under some sort of pressure.

And if it's not working well for you, but you keep falling into it,

that's when I say to myself, Lee, you moron, why aren't you deciding to change

it? It's not working for you.

Why are you willing to accept it? Remember the whole premise that we had with

New Thing November was cast off anything that hinders and the sin that so easily

entangles, that's Hebrews 12, by the way.

And just to make the point that not everything that hinders you and not everything

that holds you back is a sin.

So even if you don't want to talk about things in spiritual terms,

even if you don't want to discuss them in terms of heaven or hell or God or

Satan or any of that, even if you just want to talk about,

physics and neurochemistry and electrical activity in your brain,

then at least understand that there are some things in your life that hinder you.

And sometimes it's habits, it's alcohol, it's pornography, it's a relationship

you ought not to be in, it's something.

Sometimes it's inactivity, sometimes it's a dietary thing, sometimes it's a

substance, sometimes it's just a habit.

But there are certainly things that hinder you. And so for New Thing November,

we said, let's throw off everything that hinders, let's get ready to say, hey, I'm not happy,

I'm not comfortable with where my life has been, or I feel like it could be

more, or I'm tired of being stuck, or I just can't stop grieving,

or I can't stop ruminating, or I'm yearning for something that I can't have,

and God has clearly said, or my life has clearly shut a door and said, you cannot have that.

So I need to switch my mind and move forward.

So if we can release things that are hindering us and the things that are so

easily entangling us, and we can say, hey, if what got me here hasn't helped

me break through, then obviously I need to acknowledge to myself that what got

me here won't get me there,

if there is the place that I really want to be.

And so if I say, hey, I really would like for 2024 to be a different year than I've had before.

And is it gonna contain some hard things? Yes. Is it gonna contain some massive

things? Possibly, I hope not for you, but it probably will contain something, okay?

Somebody gets a diagnosis, you lose a child, the economy gets worse,

your person didn't win the election.

Whatever it is that you put your hope in or you tied your peace to,

that may not happen for you, okay?

So how can you have a great year?

How can you have a year where you maintain homeostasis with your own self,

where you find peace, where you find purpose and meaning, and you're able to

hold on to hope and not get dashed against the rocks every time circumstances change?

How can you do that in the coming year? Well, it's time to prepare, okay?

It's time to say, hey, there are certain things that keep coming along in my

life and triggering me, and every time they do, I behave the same way.

And then I find myself in the same spot, and I end up in the same set of thoughts

and circumstances and troubles that I've always had, and what got me here won't

get me there if there is a place that I want to feel different.

That's why we say Psalm 37 is so important.

Stop fretting yourself, stop worrying yourself to death.

Stop fretting yourself, it only tends to evil. do something different.

The Lord says, Isaiah 43, like, behold, I'm doing a new thing.

Can you not perceive it? Like the old is gone, the new has come.

I'm gonna make a stream in the desert for you.

I'm gonna make an oasis in the middle of the desert for you.

I'm gonna take you out of this valley of trouble through the door of hope.

I'm going to do this thing for you. You've gotta be ready, okay?

So if we want that, then we have to change our minds about a few things.

And let me give you an example.

I have an almost pathological inability to close my mouth when Lisa is hurting

or having some kind of stress.

It just I guess it goes back to my I guess my dad was always telling me how

to here's how you solve that problem and here's how you do this thing and here's

what you do when you're feeling this and and there was always just a plan there's

always a plan here's what you do let's solve this problem and maybe that's why

I'm a doctor right it's like okay there's bleeding, I know what to do.

There's trouble, I know what to do. There's trauma, I know what to do.

But sometimes, Lisa just needs me to put my arms around her and give her a big

hug and say, hey, it's gonna be okay.

And just close my mouth and just let her feel whatever she's feeling, right?

So again, I'm not trying to get too intimate or too personal here,

but I'm just saying that here's a situation where something happens and Lisa

needs me to comfort her and instead of comforting her,

I talk and I say, well here's what we can do about that, here's what we can,

don't think that, think this.

And I go into doctor mode, right?

And she doesn't need me to be Dr. Lee Warren for her, she needs me to be her husband, right?

So I, because I haven't prepared my mind for that event.

Then I trigger into the old way that I always handle it, which is to try to fix it, right?

But if I wanna be smart, I'll put down the moron phone and I'll use the smartphone,

I'll Google, how do you be there for your wife instead of trying to fix the problem, right?

So here's what you do. You spend time when you're not under stress.

You spend time when you're not in the situation, thinking

and praying and reading and studying and journaling

and planning of what you're going to do the next time you encounter that and

you're gonna rep it and drill it and prep it and practice it in your mind and

you're gonna give that to God and say let's build a treatment plan for what

I'm going to do the next time I am in this stressful situation because the way

I typically handle it isn't very productive.

It's not working well for me. It's not working well for my wife,

it's not working well for my family, it's not working well for my environment.

And so what you do then is because we know that what you're doing you're getting

better at, that you're severing a synapse that has not helped you in the past

and you're building new ones.

We know that new synapses begin to triple and form and triple within an hour

or two of trying a new thing.

The problem is if you don't continue that new thing, they atrophy and go away

and even and some of the ones that you had before drop out because your brain's really efficient.

If it says, well, obviously you're not gonna use that pathway,

so I'm gonna cut it out and give you tools to build a different pathway somewhere

else, and you'll fall back to the old way that you've always done it if you

don't carefully steward those newly developing neuronal connections, okay?

That's the beautiful thing about self-brain surgery, about directed neuroplasticity,

is you can tell your brain what to automate, but you've got to keep it up for

a while before it becomes a rut in that highway that's hard to get back out of, okay?

Because what you're doing, you're getting better at. And when the pressure's

on, you don't rise to the occasion.

The next time that happens with Lisa, I'm not gonna suddenly become really good

at just closing my mouth and listening to her unless I spend some time willfully

thinking through that process, praying about the places where I have brokenness,

where I think I need to fix everything,

praying about what she needs and asking God to give me eyes to see and ears

to hear what she needs and to be what she needs and not to try to solve my own

problem in that context.

To just be there for her, right? I'm telling you this, not because I wanna share

intimate details of my marriage.

This is not a big problem for us anyway, by the way, anymore.

I'm using the example of something I've learned and become better at because

she's helped me to see and I've given this to God and I've learned how to not

try to be a doctor all the time. I can sometimes just be a husband.

And by the way, that was a great lesson for me to learn with my children as they were growing up.

Stop trying to fix everything. let them feel some stuff, let them work through

some things and just be there for them and close your mouth and just put your

arms around them and say, hey, let me know if I can help you figure this out.

But in the meantime, I love you, I'm here for you.

Praying for you. That's a great tool. So I've learned because I didn't like

the result of what my baseline was, I've learned to rewire it and develop a

new pattern. Am I perfect at it? No.

Do you sometimes still fall back into the old pattern? And of course you do.

That's why William wrote me the letter. How do I take every thought captive?

I keep trying, and then I find myself going days or weeks or months,

and I realize I haven't done any of that stuff.

I've just let the old pathways take back over. Well, that happens.

That's what's going to happen if you don't continue to steward your mind and

renew it day by day. That's why Paul said that.

Our minds are being renewed day by day.

Because every day, you have to start today. That's why, if you pay attention,

if you go back and listen to all 900 and some odd episodes of this podcast since

way back in 2014 when I first started every single episode almost without fail

ends with the good news is you can start today.

Because guess what? You only have today. You don't have yesterday.

You're not sure you're gonna have tomorrow. You've got today.

So whatever it is that you need to get squared away, when you're ready to cast

off the things that are hindering and throw out the things that are stumbling and making you stumble,

it's time to start today to make this change, to sever the six synapse,

to do the self-brain surgery, to change the thing.

Now, let me give you one example with some scriptures around it.

One of the things that many of us do, Many people do, when we're stressed and

we don't want to feel what we're feeling,

is we forget the rule of self-brain surgery that says, I will relentlessly refuse

to participate in my own demise, the first commandment.

And we do something to numb our brain or numb our body, so we stop feeling what

is happening and we don't have to think about it.

And we forget to love tomorrow more. I talked about that with Dave Metzner yesterday

on his amazing show. you should check it out.

I'll put a link in the show note to Dave Metzner's show. We had a great talk yesterday.

Forget that you're supposed to love tomorrow more. You're paying a tomorrow

tax because you numbed yourself.

And the problem with numbing behaviors is you can't selectively numb the one

thing you don't want to feel. You numb everything.

That's the problem, by the way, with alcohol, okay?

We talk a lot about alcohol and substances and numbing behaviors and using shopping

or gambling or pornography or sex or whatever else to numb yourself so you don't

feel, and the thing about alcohol particularly,

is alcohol does one thing that, and alcohol and substances in general.

Does one thing that other numbing behaviors don't really do,

and that is, alcohol turns your brain off in a way that you can't connect to the outside world.

That's why I brought up the moron phone earlier, was to get to this point.

There's a verse in Ephesians chapter 518, And by the way, let me just make this clear.

The use of alcohol is not a sin. Sometimes Christians do a bad thing.

This was my experience growing up.

We get to the right thing for the wrong reason. Like we say,

don't use alcohol, you'll go burn in hell.

Don't dance with somebody, you're gonna burn in hell forever, right?

We used to joke in our church growing up, why is the church against premarital

sex? Because it leads to dancing.

Dancing is the worst thing you could do. You're gonna go straight to hell if

you dance, straight to hell if you divorce, straight to hell if you use alcohol,

straight to hell if you have premarital sex. All that stuff is gonna,

you're just gonna burn in hell forever.

That's pretty much the message of my entire youth group growing up every Sunday,

every Wednesday. That's what I heard. You do this, you're going to hell.

So you live your whole life in fear of going to hell. Well, let me tell you,

that's not the reason that you ought not to use alcohol.

Okay? Alcohol inherently is not a sin. How do I know that? Well, Psalm 104, 14 and 15.

"'You caused the grass to grow for the livestock "'and plants for man to cultivate,

"'that he may bring forth food from the earth "'and wine to gladden the heart

of man, "'oil to make his face shine,

"'and bread to strengthen man's heart.' "'God said he created wine to gladden

the heart of man.'" There is a time and a place when it's okay to use alcohol

if your heart needs it. There's other verses too.

How about this one in Proverbs 31, six and seven, "'Give strong drink to him

who is perishing and wine to those who are bitter of heart.

Let him drink and forget his poverty and remember his misery no more.

That sounds pretty bad, but there are times in life when somebody is so distressed

and so hurt and so broken that maybe they have a glass of wine and it doesn't

hurt quite so bad. I'm not advocating for that, okay?

I'm just saying there is a time and a place when everything has a place and a purpose, okay?

But if you are using alcohol to numb yourself, here's what the effect of it is.

Here's what the result of it is. Ephesians 5.18 says this, do not get drunk

with wine for that is debauchery. It leads to debauchery. And you know it does.

And almost every sexual assault involves alcohol in some way.

Almost every rape involves alcohol in some way.

Almost every assault with a deadly weapon involves alcohol in some way.

Almost every deadly car accident involves alcohol in some way.

Alcohol is the cause, the root cause of a lot of trouble. it does lead to debauchery, okay?

Maybe there's a time and a place in a certain situation where you need your

heart gladdened and you just are so crushed that you can have a glass of wine

and not think about it. Maybe it doesn't lead to debauchery in that moment.

Maybe. It's not inherently sinful or God wouldn't have created it, okay?

So just hear me say this.

What alcohol does is the rest of Ephesians 5.18, do not get drunk with wine

for that is debauchery, but be filled with the spirit.

Here's what the spirit is, okay? We talk about the three levels of self-brain surgery.

You can be a little happier if you learn to calm your mind and stop thinking

so much and learn how to meditate and just be quiet and get your anxious thoughts under control.

That's the Dan Harris 10% happier model.

You don't have to invoke anything spiritual to do that.

You don't even have to understand how your brain works. You can just learn to

put some pause in between stimulus and response, and you can become a little

happier. You can. It's a well-known phenomenon.

Somebody wrote me the other day and said, you can't really be happy unless you have Jesus.

Well, you can be happier. You can make your life work a little better without

invoking anything spiritual.

And it's just silly for us to say that there aren't any atheists who are relatively happy.

Now, do they have happiness and joy that we do that's going to persist beyond our death?

No, they don't. but they're relatively happy, affable people.

I have a good friend who's agnostic

and probably an atheist who's the most cheerful person you've ever met.

It's not true that you can't be cheerful and joyful and happy if you don't believe in God.

And it's also not true that you can't calm your mind and learn to use how your

brain is designed for your own benefit if you don't believe in God.

You can't, and it's silly to say otherwise, but you can't get all the way there.

You can't get all the way to the way that our brains are designed to work without

invoking something spiritual.

Because we're not just physical beings, we're spiritual beings. Okay?

You can also become significantly happier. This is where I bring in people like

Jeffrey Newberg and Dawson Church who write books like Bliss Brain.

And again, I got an email the other day about quoting Dawson Church and somebody

said, I'm not sure you even read that.

You quote Bliss Brain and he's not even a Christian.

Well, no, he's not a Christian, and I go into great detail in the episode when

I quoted Bliss Brain to say,

it surprises me that somebody is insightful and somebody is bright to be able

to make all these connections and understand how the mind works in all these

different ways can then in the next sentence turn around and say,

wow, it's just amazing that we evolved that way.

I think that's stunning that somebody could see how organized and well-designed

and amazing the mind is and be able to make all these connections and insights

and pull together neuroimaging, neuroanatomy, neurophysiology, neurobiology,

electromagnetic field theory, quantum mechanics, and all this stuff and be able

to unify all that and write an amazing book and not be able to see how plain

as day it is that we're designed.

It's not an accident, but you can, in fact,

become significantly happier, feel much better,

operate your life in a much better and healthier way by just understanding how

your brain works and understanding the mind-brain connection you can become

significantly happier. But as I've said many times.

The infinite level, the way that you can be bulletproof to whatever happens

in your life, the way that you can become resilient to any kind of trouble or

trauma or tragedy or massive thing,

the way that you can really get your mind under your control is to connect it

through the Wi-Fi network of your mind to the spirit that lives inside you,

to the God of the universe who created you.

That's how you can become infinitely happier. Sorry, I banged my hand on the desk.

I got so passionate, I was preaching. Listen, you can become almost infinitely

happier if you learn how to operate your mind.

This is why I brought up the whole point about the moron phone and the whole

thing about alcohol is this.

When you use alcohol, you shut down your mind.

You shut down your ability to communicate with the spirit. You shut down your ability to think.

Your frontal lobes have decreased activity and that's why you will think to

yourself, You know, I probably ought not to drive my car right now.

I've had a little bit to drink, but your next thought will be,

no, it's okay, I can do it.

It's because your frontal lobe gives you that executive ability to say,

wait a minute, I am not safe to operate this vehicle right now, I need to call for help.

Your frontal lobe gets de-involved, becomes deactivated, and you don't think very clearly.

Your frontal lobe says, I ought not to advance myself on that woman because

I'm drunk, and she doesn't give consent, and she's drunk too.

Your frontal lobe will say, yeah, I shouldn't, but I'm going to do it anyway.

Your lower levels will do it anyway because alcohol makes the frontal lobe not operate effectively.

And the Bible says plainly that when you are drunk on wine, you can't be filled with the Spirit.

You can't communicate with the leadership and the guidance and the overlay of

support and help that the Spirit wants to give you when you're drunk on wine.

Okay, when you're using and you're under the influence of alcohol,

that's the whole reason why it's not wise.

There's many other reasons from the physiological standpoint,

alcohol is not good for you.

Okay, we've talked a lot before, go back and listen to my interview with Annie

Grace on her show and on my show.

And we talk about the physiology and the health reality that alcohol hurts your

brain, it hurts your body, it hurts every organ system, it's a class one carcinogen

for at least seven human cancers.

Alcohol is not good for you. So, there's a lot of reasons not to drink alcohol

besides this point, but in terms of how we prepare our minds and to try to operate

them on the highest level possible, alcohol doesn't help you.

And so, to wrap this whole thing up, when we're talking about how do we prepare,

how do we take captive every thought, how do we get better at this,

how do we make synapses so we don't keep having the same problems arise?

What you do is in the off times, like I talked about a minute ago,

when you're not under stress, when you're not imperiled, when you're not struggling,

when you're not in that moment where you typically reach for a bottle or text

that person or click on that website or do that thing, you think about the process,

You bring light into the process. What things tend to trigger me?

What things tend to set off this behavior?

What thoughts am I thinking when I end up in this place? What tends to happen

that leads me to react the way I've always reacted and that is not working for me.

So how can I do something different next time?

And that's when you start making better decisions.

So you know what, the reason I reach for alcohol is because it's in my cabinet.

So maybe if I get it out of my cabinet, then I won't reach for it.

Maybe that'll put a little pause in there, of that stimulus and response pause that we need.

Like I'm probably not gonna get in my truck and go drive somewhere to get some.

Maybe that'll give me just enough space to, hey, maybe instead I should make

a phone call. I should read, I should pray, I should get my Bible out,

should do something else.

You build some systems to make sure that there is adequate space for pause and reflect before react.

Does that make sense? If we want to change the outcome of our lives,

we have to change the inputs that we're giving them.

We have to, if we want to change the outcome of our streams of thought,

we have to think ahead of time about what those streams of thought are,

where they come from, what we're feeling when they happen, and what we typically do when they occur.

And we have to be willing to say, let's go in advance of that,

and let's rep, let's run some fire drills, let's do some planning,

let's stop, drop, and roll, let's train ourselves up to have some prehab,

to have some things that we call on,

to remember that God has promised us some things, to say, hey,

I'll rise to show you compassion.

I will provide a way of escape when you're feeling that temptation.

That's 1 Corinthians 10, 13.

I will give you a way out, but you've got to rep it and practice it and remember

it and plan for it and think differently about it.

That, my friend, is how you learn to take every thought captive.

That, my friend, is how you stop having the same outcome. That's how you stop

buying the moron phone. And when it rings and says, hey, you're just a.

Then you say, no, I'm not. I'm a beloved child of King Jesus,

and he has a plan for me, a purpose for me.

I'm gonna, just like we talked about yesterday, I'm gonna grab that sword of the Spirit,

and I'm going to start swinging it with the promises of God,

and I'm gonna start chopping at these threats and these things that keep happening

to me and keep hurting me and keep hindering me, and I'm going to stop fretting

myself, and I'm going to remember that God is doing a new thing,

and I'm going to remember that what got me here won't get me there,

and I'm going to step into 2024,

and I'm going to embrace it as the

year of the Lord's favor that He has promised that He wants to give me,

and I'm gonna do all that because I want to change my mind, and I want to change

my life, and I want to become healthier, and feel better, and be happier, and for goodness sakes,

I want to start today. it.

Music.

Hey, thanks for listening. The Dr. Lee Warren podcast is brought to you by my brand new book.

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I'm Dr. Lee Warren and I'll talk to you soon. Remember, frame,

you can't change your life until you change your mind. And the good news is you can start today.

Music.