An Operation for Fear and Restlessness

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

you, and we're gonna do some self-brain surgery today.

It's Tuesday, 2nd of January, 2024, and we're trying to get this year off to a good start.

We spent November and December learning how to throw off things that were holding us back,

learning how to prepare ourselves for the year of the Lord's favor that he wants

to give us to get our minds and our hearts connected in a way that will help

us to be less reactive and more resilient to the traumas and tragedies and massive

things that come along in life.

And whatever you've been through, friend, I know that this year can be a better

year for you if you can learn to place those circumstances in their proper place

and to learn how to manage your mind and change your mind so you can change your life.

That's what this podcast is all about, how we take the neuroscience and how

we take faith and scripture and good ideas from science and smash them together

in a way that helps us to find our feet on solid ground, to plant our feet firmly

in faith and move forward in hope no matter what we're facing.

And today I wanna just talk for a minute. I'm gonna give you a little self brain

surgery operation, something new that we've never talked about before because

I know there's a lot of anxiety and stress.

There's a lot of people who are dealing with hard things.

And as we go into a new year, if I can give you a strategy, an operation that

you can perform to reliably become less anxious and help your brain connect

with your creator in a way that allows him to carry some of the load for you.

Then that'll help you on the neuroscience front and on the faith front.

And I think it'll be valuable.

And we're going to just talk about a new operation for what to do when you're

so afraid and learn how to put that fear in a cage where it belongs.

And we're going to do all that in just a minute. But before we start,

I have one question for you.

Hey, are you ready to change your life? If the answer is yes, there's only one rule.

You have to change your mind first. And my friend, there's a place where the

neuroscience of how your mind works

works smashes together with faith and everything starts to make sense.

Are you ready to change your life? Well, this is the place, Self-Brain Surgery School.

I'm Dr. Lee Warren, and this is where we go deep into how we're wired,

take control of our thinking, and find real hope.

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

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

This is where we start today. Are you ready? This is your podcast.

This This is your place. This is your time, my friend. Let's get after it.

Music.

All right, let's get after it. Just gonna dive right into this quickly.

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That's the five ways you can support the podcast. All right,

let's get after it. I was on Instagram

the other day and I saw an ad for something called a Faraday bag.

Michael Faraday was a scientist in the 1830s. And he invented this idea of a

Faraday cage that you could basically shield a room from.

From external electromagnetic interference and you

can put sensitive things inside the

room people or equipment and outside radiation

won't affect it and that technology's been around for a long time they use it

in forensic science to put a computer in a room so it can't be affected by outside

computers or wi-fi networks or any of that and now they have these little little

bags that are made with this special shielding and you can put your cell phone in there and it can't be,

connected to by an outside device.

So special forces operators and people that need to get off the grid for a while

sometimes use these things so that the cell phone basically disappears from the grid.

Now, you can't use it while it's in a Faraday bag, but nobody else can track

you with it or find it on a network if it's in a Faraday bag because the Faraday

bag makes whatever's in it invisible and inaccessible to the outside world.

There's lots of different ways that's applied in science and technology and

forensics, and now in personal products, that people that wanna be off the grid

for a while can put their phone in a Faraday bag.

And this is also used by these people who are concerned about radiation and

they don't want their cell phones putting out radiation next to their beds.

They put the phone in a Faraday bag.

They know they're not gonna get any radiation in the room that night.

They're also not gonna get any text messages or any kind of contact.

They wanna make sure they get a quiet night's sleep. They're using these Faraday bags, okay?

Now, the idea is, and what I'm gonna bring it to you in a minute,

is that whatever you put in the Faraday bag becomes impossible for you to access

or anybody else to access, and it becomes impossible for it to access you or

send you any information while it's in the Faraday bag.

Okay, now put that aside. We're gonna talk about that in a little bit.

Everybody is dealing with stress.

The end of the year always brings a lot of holiday stress. If you've been through

something hard, there's a lot of grief and memories, and stress and anxiety

is just a part of the deal.

In our society right now, our culture, we're all constantly burned

out it seems like we're more anxious than ever we're dealing

with stress and anxiety and i tell you all the time on this

show that being in a high stress state is bad

for you chemically it creates cortisol which

hurts your body keeps you in a fight or flight state makes your

brain more sort of as if

you were demented so there's all these studies that look at people who have

a high stress state beta activity beta wave activity on their eegs and basically

their cognitive ability goes down when they're in a high anxiety state and they

start to look like similar to people on testing who have certain forms of dementia

and memory loss and cognitive impairment.

So basically that's there for a reason.

God knows when you need to run away from the bear.

Your body needs to put a chemical environment and a trigger environment in your

brain that makes you run away without having to sit there and process whether

or not you need to run away. You just run away. You see a snake, you jump back.

You see a bear, you run away, right?

So what happens is the blood flow from your frontal lobes, your executive function,

the parts of your brain that you use to think critically and make rational decisions

and the slower things that you do to.

Decisions about a lot of information the blood flow

and the frontal lobes goes down when you're in a high anxiety

straight state if more beta activity more hyper

attention and focus goes up and your

frontal lobes get disconnected your right frontal lobe takes over a little bit

more and then you start to short circuit and go down into that hypothalamus

i'm sorry hippocampus to amygdala fight flight freeze state more easily when

you're in a chronic stress state and then Then you rewire that because of Hebb's law,

the neurons that fire together wire together and you become better at more easily

slipping into that anxiety state and it becomes this feedback loop where you

observe that phenomenon enough through the power of the quantum Zeno effect and you start saying,

yeah, I'm anxious and you start identifying as an anxious person.

Then you start believing that your future is all about anxiety and that that's

what your life just looks like.

I'm just always anxious because my life is so hard and woe is me.

And you start becoming the person that you're observing as an anxious person

instead of realizing it's just a state that you've developed and that state

can become something you can control.

If you've been away for the holidays, if you haven't been listening to the podcast

recently, these ideas about quantum Zeno effect and beta brainwaves and all

that may sound a little funny. You may not understand what I'm talking about.

So just go back over the last few weeks. It's really common towards the

end of the year for people to be away and not listening and the downloads are

always way down in December and whatnot because of that and that's a good thing

but if you don't know what i'm talking about here go back and catch up there's

several recent episodes that cover all this ground so you won't be lost as we

have this conversation but i just want to remind you that there is a.

Brainwave state that you can get into called beta or basically beta waves or

the pattern that we see on electroencephalograms eegs when people are in a stressed

or super hyper focused state and now Now,

you want your brain surgeon to be in a beta state when he's operating on you.

You want your pilot to be in a beta state when he's landing the plane.

But you don't want to live your life, especially when you're trying to sleep,

in this high beta state where you're just hyper-focused on something that pops

into your mind and you can't stop thinking about it and you can't stop worrying

about it and beta brainwaves are associated with cortisol and stress and it

harms your body and it feeds back and you become super good at knowing as soon

as you lie down to try to sleep at night,

you're going to worry the worry machine is going to turn on and that's

all you're going to think or hear or feel and then

every night you sit there and stress and worry and worry so

that's what beta brain state is this hyper focused vigilant i'm worried about

this thing i'm thinking about that thing i'm paying attention to that thing

and then you become better and better at becoming more and more attuned to easily

slipping into that hyper vigilant worried state right.

And that's not good for you. So what I want you to do today on this short little

episode on January 2nd is I want to give you an operation that you can perform,

a quick little self-brain surgery operation. It's going to sound kind of weird.

Now, you know me, okay? I'm a Christian.

I'm not a new age mysticist or anything.

I'm not a mystic, okay? There are some reliable methods that we learn from the Eastern meditators.

And it's been validated with EEG and functional brain imaging scans that those

people can put their brains in a state that's more relaxed by changing how they think.

It's been shown in people who are really good at praying too that over just

a few days of focusing, meditating, praying.

You can actually improve the circuitry in your brain that's related to resilience

and relaxation and ability to handle streams of thought without getting washed away by them.

Okay? Okay, and that, my friend, is getting us closer to this idea where Paul

said in 1 Thessalonians, pray without ceasing and everything give thanks.

Like constantly be making your mind connect to God to say, hey,

what's going on with this situation?

How can I connect that? Thank you, Lord, for that. Oh boy, that was a close call. Thank you, Jesus.

Getting this idea that instead of constantly being in the waiting for the other

shoe to drop state, that we can learn rather to actively be able to switch our

minds into a more relaxed alpha state.

Now, alpha is the brainwaves associated with open-mindedness,

relaxation, connectivity, and then even deeper than that, theta and delta are

the brainwaves associated with deep relaxation, meditative states,

prayer, and sleep, okay?

But you got to get into alpha before you can get into theta and delta.

And if you're in beta you're just

focused you're fixated you're concentrating you're hypervigilant

you can't rest okay so if we

can then learn some procedure to

switch our brains from that hypervigilant focused state where we're worrying

and stressed and and overcome by whatever it is that we're thinking about that

what's going to happen when i get to work tomorrow that guy's going to be there

and we're going to get in a fight again i'm going to go to hr again or i'm I'm

not going to get that raise or I'm not going to be able to make that payment.

If I lose my job, I'm really hosed.

If she doesn't come back or if the tumor comes back, I'm getting the test results tomorrow.

And you just focus and spin out of control.

Sometimes it's not even something real.

Sometimes it's, I don't think so-and-so had a good look when she darted her eyes at me at work today.

And I wonder if that's because she has been gossiping about me or I wonder if

this person said something about me to that person and maybe that's why nobody

said hi to me when I walked in this morning and you start going down that rabbit

hole of what if and maybe and all that stuff, right?

That's beta. And that's what's happening at night to a lot of us.

And as we get into this new year, I want to give you a new tool. Okay. Now let's.

Also understand that it's been shown clearly that one technique that good meditators

and people who are good at praying and getting their brains into healthier states

have learned is this idea of having a mental image of something.

And if you can make yourself focus on a mental image,

then you can switch your active conscious stream of thought to thinking about

this mental image and the beta activity will start to come down because you're

making yourself see a different picture in your mind.

So one of the secrets then of switching out of this anxiety state is to say,

wait a second, I'm going to stop thinking about that for a second.

Use that frontal lobe ability that you have of selective attention that we've

talked about a lot of times before and say, for just a minute,

I want to see a picture in my mind.

And one of the pictures that's been helpful to lots of people is to just envision

darkness and emptiness for a moment in your head. Now, if you're driving,

obviously don't do this, but if you can, if you're in a safe place,

even if you're at work, you can do this for two seconds.

Just close your eyes for a second and make yourself switch the stream of thought

to, I want to see a dark space.

Like if I'm sleeping, I'm relaxed, I'm comfortable in my bed,

and there's this dark space in front of me, and I can't see all these thoughts that are coming at me.

And I'm going to just, this is going to be a little weird, but I'm going to

play a little music. I'm going to play some music behind our voices here,

my voice here for a second.

And that's designed this is just a soundtrack that I got on a website called

Tune Tank and it's royalty free so I can play it on the podcast,

and the purpose of this is it's music that doesn't have lyrics so it doesn't

engage your language your left side of your brain it gets right into that right

side that's going to allow you to relax okay and.

And so for just a minute, friend, I want you to see that black space in front of you.

Whatever it is that you're worrying about, just for a moment,

just pause and say, okay, I want to put myself in this room.

Just relax and I'm safe.

Nothing can hurt me here. And I'm just going to relax. I want to see this blank space.

Now I want to notice, as I divert my eyes down into this darkness,

I'm going to notice a volume knob.

There's a knob on the left side in front

of me and that knob is

labeled internal voice that's the voice that

i hear in my head that's telling me all the things i need to be afraid of

the telling me all the things i'm anxious about that voice is controlled by

this volume knob and i can see my hand reaching out and i can turn it down and

i can just turn down that knob and as i turn I turn it down,

the darkness, the quietness, the calm,

the relaxation is getting even deeper.

And I can feel it enveloping me like a warm blanket and it's relaxing me.

And as I turn that volume knob down, the inner voice that's telling me all these

things I need to be worried about and concerned about is going down and down and down.

It's less and less able to penetrate into my consciousness.

And I'm seeing and feeling that dark, enveloping, safe space more.

And then as I get that all the way to zero, and I can't hear that anymore,

there's another knob on the right-hand side, and that's God's voice.

It's labeled God's voice, and I can turn it up. And as I turn it up,

I'm just going to invite God to speak into this situation.

And then I'm going to notice in front of me, there's a Faraday bag.

There's one of these little bags that if I put something in it,

I can't get to it anymore. And it can't get to me anymore.

I'm going to say, God, take this anxious thought.

Take this stream of thought that's had me in this stressed out beta state in

my brain that you created.

And put it into that Faraday bag. I don't want to be able to feel it.

I don't want to be able to notice it anymore I want you to put it in that bag

and I want you to keep one of your promises to me remember we prehab our minds

with this promise from Isaiah 22 that says when God closes a door no one can open it,

and I want to say God put this anxious thought into this Faraday bag and zip

it up and seal it and close it in such a way that I can't even get to it.

Now I recognize you might say that

some of the things I'm concerned about bills to pay and marriages

to steward and biopsy results to get checked some of

those things do need to be attended to they do but they don't need to be attended

to right now right now I know that getting my brain in an alpha state is going

to allow me to then slip into that delta state and sleep or relax or hyper-focus

or communicate or pray with you,

hyper-focus on you and not the worry and anxiety that I've been feeling.

And so I need to get my mind into a better state.

And to do that, I've got this situation that might be real, but I can't do anything about it right now.

And so I just need you to take it and put it in that bag and close it up until

it's time It's time for me to deal with it.

And you open it back up and give it back to me when I'm in a better brain state

and I can handle it and actually do something about it.

See, prayer is different than worry.

Because worry, as someone said, is focusing on things that I can't do anything about.

And prayer is talking to God about things that he can do something about.

So it's a difference. It's two sides of a coin. and you can't really do both

at the same time. So I want you to see this dark space.

I want you to turn that knob up and say, God, I want you to speak into this

situation with your promises.

I want you to reach into this situation and take these anxious thoughts and

put them into this Faraday bag and close them up like you'd close doors that

can't be opened until it's time to deal with them.

I want you to keep the promise of Psalm 34, 4 that said, I called to you and

you answered me and rescued me from everything that made me so afraid.

Keep that promise, Lord.

Put that stuff in that Faraday bag.

Now, friend, I want you to notice as you're in this dark space,

and as you're allowing God to take those worries from you and put them in that

cage where they can't get to you and you can't get to them, that you're going

to start feeling relaxation.

Your brain is going to start to be able to process and handle things in a different

way and connect into those deeper states of relaxation.

This is where Paul says we can get into this state where we can pray without ceasing.

And if you can learn to do that, where you can switch your brain from that anxiety

state into, wait, quickly just turn this off, turn that volume knob down,

turn up God's voice and his ability to enter into this situation and speak into it.

That's when we can get to what David did in Psalm 23 when he said, the Lord is my shepherd.

I shall not want, he makes me lie down in green pastures. He leads me beside

still waters. He restores my soul.

He leads me in paths of righteousness for his name's sake.

And even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death,

sometimes there are real things that we have to deal with.

I will fear no evil, for you're with me. Your rod and your staff, they comfort me.

You prepare a table for me in the presence of my enemies. Where is he?

He's not home in a safe place. He's in the presence of his enemies.

He's in a real situation.

But he knows that God prepares a table for him. God comes onto the battlefield with him.

He anoints my head with oil. oil, my cup overflows, and surely goodness and

mercy will follow me all the days of my life.

Listen, if your thought isn't that goodness and mercy will follow you,

then you're not thinking the thoughts that God wants you to think.

You need to put some stuff in that Faraday bag.

And so we've got this quiet, safe place where we can get our brain quickly from that stressed out,

cortisol inducing harmful rewiring beta position that keeps us hyper focused

on things we can't do anything about right now we're not actually needing to

land a plane or do brain surgery right now we're trying to sleep we're trying

to rest we're trying to enjoy time with our family and we got to turn that sound knob down.

So today, I just want to give you that. Put your fear in the Faraday bag.

And this is a method you can use to do it, to see that dark space that's safe for you.

Turn that volume knob down where the voice has to go away for a while.

Let God open up, raise his volume up, invite him in where he can speak into

this moment and in this time.

And he can remind you that he'll rescue you from everything that makes you so afraid.

And he'll help you. And he'll do all this, my friend.

If you're willing to change your mind and change your life, this is a pathway.

It's an operation that you can perform, that you can learn.

And remember one of the tenets of self-brain surgery is what you're doing,

you're getting better at.

And I want you to get better at turning that knob down on those voices of things

you can't control and inviting the one in who can control them and asking him

to take them from you and make them unavailable for you to feel or think about

or for them to reach into your consciousness us anymore until it's time to deal with them.

And if there's something that really doesn't even exist or need to be dealt

with and you're just worrying about it, then he'll put it in that bag and make

it unavailable and you'll stop worrying about it.

You can learn how to do that and you can become one of these people that can

rapidly switch your train of thought and engage your frontal lobes to switch

your train of thought and use that gift of selective attention and the way you're

designed to live this life that's not overwhelmed by your emotions,

that's not overwhelmed by racing thoughts, that's not out of your control.

And you'll get better at being better at controlling your thinking and responding

instead of reacting to the traumas and tragedies and massive things of your life.

This is a little operation. If you can employ this in 2024, my friend,

you will change your mind and you will change your life.

And I pray that you'll be willing to start today.

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.