Reassign Anxiety (Mind Change Monday)

Welcome to the School of Self-Brain Surgery. I'm your host, Dr.

Lee Warren. It is Season 11.

We're going to do some self-brain surgery right now. Let's get after it.

Music.

Good morning, my friend. Welcome back to the School of Self-Brain Surgery.

It is the first episode of Season 11. We are starting something new today.

Today, we are going to get extremely tactical on managing acute anxiety or panic, okay?

We're going to do some self-brain surgery operations to move you from victim of these feelings,

move you from patient experiencing them to being able to do something tactical

to understand the incredible creative power that your mind gives you over the

control of your brain and your body and your life.

And we're going to get real tactical and move from patient to physician because

you are already performing self-brain surgery. That's what you got to believe.

You're performing self-brain surgery. You're changing your brain structurally.

You're taking control of your own physiology.

You're not a victim. You are an operator. We're going to stop contemplating

it and start operating it. But before we do that, let me remind you about the newsletter.

Every Sunday now since 2014, I have written a self-brain surgery letter.

It goes out to people all over the world, 60 or more countries.

It's read in every state in the United States, and it's absolutely free.

And we deal with the real business of self-brain surgery.

We talk about what's really happening in your mind and in your brain.

And the fact that your mind and your brain are separate. We smash faith and

neuroscience together.

We go deep in understanding how fearfully and wonderfully we're made.

We move you from victim to operator, from patient to physician,

from computer to programmer.

We change your mind and help you change your life. And it's absolutely free,

and you can get it at drleewarren.substack.com.

Drleewarren.substack.com. All you need to do is put your email address in there,

and you will get the newsletter.

Like it's important because it's a community okay it's connected

to the prayer wall it's connected to people all over the world who want to

help each other do this business of becoming self-brain surgeons to become healthier

and feel better and be happier and all the stuff that we talk about the power

of starting today and the stuff that we talk about every week on the podcast

we go a little bit deeper on the newsletter drleewarren.substack.com as we get into season 11,

One thing I want you to notice about the podcast is that we're going to be moving

from theoretical mindset stuff into very tactical operations,

the things that we are going to do to make our lives become healthier,

feel better, and be happier.

We're going to start talking specifically about here's what you do.

We're doing this as I write the Handbook of Self-Brain Surgery,

the book that's going to be hopefully coming out sometime next year,

that is going to be your guide, your handbook, your field manual for what you

do when you feel certain things, when you experience certain things,

what do you do? So we're going to start operating. Okay.

If you just came to my office and this happens every week, somebody comes to

my office with back pain or neck pain or something going on,

they're having a hard time and they want me to write them a prescription.

They just want a medicine. They just want a pill to take to stop hurting so

they can go back to work. They don't have time to have surgery and take time off.

They They think all they need is a pill. And if that's what I did as a surgeon,

if I just wrote you a prescription and sent you on your merry way,

that would be bad practice.

What if I also, instead of writing you a prescription, what if I just gave you

a good pep talk and tried to inspire you and fill you with positivity and set your mindset right?

Would that be good practice? No, you've got a brain tumor or a ruptured disc

or a foot drop or something.

You need me to help you fix it. You need me to stop contemplating,

stop talking about it. Stop giving you ideas and stop trying to pump you up

with positivity and start doing something.

Pick up the scalpel and get after it. There's a time when it's time to take action, okay?

Today's that time for you. We're going to talk specifically today about anxiety

and even panic. Now, I want to always give you a disclaimer, okay?

If we are talking about something that you can't control, if you try these self-brain

surgery ideas and you can't get something under control if you're feeling depressed or suicidal,

especially, or you're feeling excessively anxious, if you can't get your job

done, you can't get your work done, it's interfering with your relationships, go see a doctor, okay?

First and foremost, mental things can sometimes and frequently are medical things.

Make sure your thyroid's okay. Make sure your hormonal status is okay.

Make sure your nutrition's good. Make sure you're sleeping okay.

Make sure you don't have something else in your way, like alcohol or a drug

addiction or something else happening.

Go see your doctor, okay? OK, and sometimes you need a mental health professional.

Sometimes you need a therapist to work through some things, some traumas or

tragedies or massive things that have happened. Sometimes it can be a pastor. It can be a chaplain.

It can be a trusted friend or a colleague. But don't do this practice alone.

OK. And if you're having trouble, if these ideas that I give you on this podcast

aren't enough, you need professional help. Go see a doctor.

So remember that this idea, the self brain surgery idea doesn't ever is never intended.

To replace the professional advice of a doctor, counselor, psychiatrist, therapist, any of that.

My point with cell brain surgery, it's not therapy. It's a set of tools that

you can use in your own life.

Because the truth is, as Anne Lamott says, there's almost nothing outside of

you that can help in any meaningful way unless you're waiting for a donor organ, okay?

You've got to make the changes yourself.

Nobody else can do it for you. So whatever you learn from your therapist, your doctor,

whatever vitamin you're deficient in or your thyroid's out of control and you've

got to fix that, that you still won't change or get better in between your ears

and on the ground in your life until you decide to make some changes.

Okay, I can perform the perfect operation.

I can give you the perfect plan. But if you don't come and actually have the

surgery, you're not going to get better. I can write you the prescription that

will get rid of your infection.

But if you don't take the pills, you won't get better. So self-brain surgery

is your side of the equation to learn that you have tremendous power to do something

about what's happening in your own life.

You're not purposeless. you are not powerless you're not

a failure you're not stuck you can do

something about it so today is about that thing that we

need to do specifically when we're dealing with

anxiety okay now let's talk about quantum physics for a second i am not a quantum

physicist okay i'm a nerdy left-handed kid from oklahoma and i'm not trained

in quantum physics but i have been for the last two years extensively reading

on the difference between the mind and the brain and And everything comes back to physics, okay?

Like all roads in neuroscience, all roads in every science really lead to physics.

It turns out that physics is the ground level explanatory system for what is

happening in the universe, including in between your ears, including in the

mechanics of your brain.

We talked a lot about quantum physics in season 10, so you can go back and hear all those episodes.

We don't need to cover that ground again here. But here's the thing that I want

you to keep top of mind as we get into the tactics of what to do when you're

feeling anxious, when you're feeling panic, when you're having trouble controlling

your train of thought. Here's what I want you to know.

Attention matters. This is what all the psychology studies are finally starting

to show. We raised a generation of young people.

In the West especially, to think about their feelings all the time.

Often the first question we ask, how are you feeling? We take them to therapists

for checkups, for preventative therapy, all focused on the idea of thinking about their feelings.

And then what we've learned is nobody's getting happier. Everybody's getting more anxious.

Everybody's taking more medication. The demand for therapy is going up. Why?

Well, I would suggest it goes back to physics. The way that quantum physics

works is that attention matters. It matters when you're paying attention to

symptoms and it matters when you're observing experiments.

What the quantum physicists of the 20th century, Heisenberg and his crew figured

out is that your mental force, the energy that you apply with your mind affects

the real world outcome of experiments you perform. form, okay?

That's the lesson from 20th century quantum physics.

When you look at something in a certain way, you affect the outcome,

you affect the reality of that system, okay?

So when you take that into the mental health world, what we learned is the more

you pay attention to a feeling or a symptom, the more enlarged,

the more real, the more unchangeable that symptom becomes in your your life.

So you should read a book called Bad Therapy, by the way.

Abigail Schreier wrote this book about the mental health crisis in our young

people, why the kids aren't growing up, why they're not launching,

why a lot of them don't get their driver's licenses when they turn 18 or 16 anymore.

They don't go to college on time. They don't go to job interviews without taking a parent frequently.

And it's because they don't know how to get out of thinking about their symptoms.

They because they're stuck thinking all the time about how they feel.

And we learn that from quantum physics. There's something that we've talked

about before called the quantum Zeno effect. It's very clear, very well documented.

Numerous studies have reproduced it, and it's definitely true that the more

you observe a system, like if you say, I'm going to measure the quantum state of this particle,

the more you measure it, it collapses and stays in the state that you're measuring.

In other words, the system will not evolve and change when you continue to take pictures of it.

And the best analogy I can think of is one of those photographers that has a

really high speed shutter that can take pictures of hummingbirds flying by.

And it looks like they're in slow motion. And it's not a it's not a magic trick.

They're not really in slow motion.

But what's happening is that the shutter is snapping so fast that the difference

between one picture and the next is infinitesimally small.

All and you and it looks basically like the bird is stuck

in midair right the airplane's not flying because the

the shutter speed is so fast that's kind of like what quantum zeno

effect is the more you look at something the more

you ask the system is this thing true the answer always comes back that it is

stuck in that state and that's what happens when you focus on your symptoms

if you think about i feel anxious do i still feel anxious am i why am i feeling

anxious and is there something wrong with me i must be about to have a heart

attack why am i why do i feel this way what's going on, now my heart's racing,

now I'm sweating, now my stomach hurts, and you start to sort of live out this

observation of the system, and the symptoms magnify and become more and more

real, because you're playing quantum physics on your own mind, okay?

So there's three things that we have to do to understand the power of directed

mental force in our life, for our ill or for our good.

Quantum Zeno, the more you look at something, the more stuck it stays.

The attention density, so the more...

Of your own mental force that you apply to focusing on a thing,

the more likely that thing is to stay the way it is or to become larger, okay?

In the newsletter yesterday, we talked about the reticular activating system,

and in the podcast the other day, we talked about the reticular activating system,

this system of neurons in your brain, in your brainstem particularly.

That serve as kind of a filter, okay?

If you tell your brain that you're anxious, I have anxiety disorder.

I am anxious. I'm going to be anxious. My anxiety makes me have to do this.

My anxiety controls me in this way.

Then your brainstem will start saying, okay, well, I better look out for all

the things that make me anxious then.

I'm going to see every clown on the street if you're scared of clowns.

I'm going to see every door that I have my back to that makes me nervous that

somebody's going to come through and hurt me in some way.

I'm going to have to get up and check the locks a hundred times because I might

have left a lock unlocked. locked.

Like all that stuff is because reticular activating system is just doing what you're telling it to.

You're giving attention density to the idea that something out there is going

to hurt you or harm you or that there's something wrong with you because you're feeling a certain way.

Okay. And then Hebb's law is the third piece of it.

Hebb's law is this famous maximum that everybody, every neuroscientist who's

really a chiropractor on Instagram says neurons that fire together, wire together.

Yes, that's true. What does that mean? It means what you're doing,

you're getting better at. That's the 10th commandment of self-brain surgery.

When you focus on something, when you tell your brain to think about something,

when you focus your mental force on something, you give it attention density

and bring in the power of quantum Zeno,

then you lash that thing together and you automate it so that it becomes more

automated and more automatic and less effort is required to reproduce it.

So then basically you'll start Start finding yourself thinking about or feeling

that all the time because you

have taught your brain that that's what it's supposed to pay attention to.

OK, so instead, the alternative is let's let's use the power of quantum Zeno.

Let's use the power of attention density.

Let's use the reality of Hebb's law to say, remember who's in charge here.

My mind is a top-down operator with controlling power over my brain that will

direct structural changes in my brain when I tell it to.

And I don't have to listen to these deceptive brain messages,

these little programs that pop into my head and sound like my own thoughts,

but they're really just programs that are being run by the brain,

trying to do its job of automating things so I don't have to spend as much energy

to get them accomplished.

So if you teach your brain that its job is to feel anxious all the time,

you're going to automate that, And those thoughts are going to pop into your

head that says, oh, I'm supposed to feel anxious right now.

And you're going to give consent to that and run that program.

And you think it's your own thought that's happening.

So let's flip it on its head. Remember, if you're stuck, use this operation

in real time to handle anxiety or panic, okay?

You're going to show your brain who's boss because we're going to harness the

power of the 10th commandment of self-brain surgery.

What you're doing, you're getting better at. We're going to harness the reality

of the second commandment of self-brain surgery.

Feelings aren't facts. They are chemical events in my brain.

So I'm going to give you one tool. Here's one little operation.

Therapists teach this thing called 5-4-3-2-1, okay? 5-4-3-2-1.

There's several variants of this, 555 and 333 and all these things.

But 54321 I think is a good one.

When you feel anxious and you can't stop thinking about it, you can't seem to

shake it when you're having a panic attack.

And I've had a couple of those after I got bombed in the war a bunch of times.

I've had a couple of flashbacks that involve panic. And there's a way to work

yourself out of it, okay?

And it doesn't have to involve opening a bottle and taking a pill or opening

a bottle and drinking alcohol.

It doesn't have to involve doing some type of numbing behavior Because remember,

in self-brain surgery, it's the only type of surgery where anesthesia is a bad

thing. We don't want anesthesia anymore.

We want to feel it so we can heal it, right? So if you trust me that the physics

is on your side, if you trust me that self-brain surgery is real,

it's not a motivational technique,

it's not a positive thinking technique, it's actually directing the structural

changes that are already happening in your brain to instead,

just instead of happening in an automated way.

Instead happen in a directed way, a purposeful way.

The best-selling Christian book of all time, The Purpose-Filled Life,

Rick Warren wrote, I want you to have purpose in the way that you operate your

mind and your brain and your body because that will affect your quantum state.

It'll affect your epigenetics. It'll affect your offspring.

It'll affect the people around you. It'll affect the whole world because you're not,

remember the two-patient rule we talked about two days ago, you're never operating

alone and you always have more than one patient when you're doing self-brain

surgery because how you change your state is going to affect the state of those

around you okay so here's this little operation five four three two one.

It's known as a 5-4-3-2-1 method. Some therapists teach it, and it's kind of a grounding exercise.

You can take a set of symptoms that you're feeling, the sweaty palms,

the racing heart, the chill running up your spine, the indigestion,

the discomfort that you're feeling, the panic, the anxiety,

and you can say, wait, I can operate on this set of symptoms,

and I can change them by taking command of my own physiology.

I can take command of my own brain by directing my mental force in a way that helps me.

It doesn't hurt me. Here's how we do it. Let's take 5, 4, 3, 2, 1. It's a coping tool.

We're going to get your senses involved. Because remember, your brain is connected to your body.

Your body is connected to your brain and your mind. They all feed back one another.

That's why Lisa and I have started a new company.

By the way, this is going to be the kind of brand that all my products and books

and all that stuff come under. It's called Brain Mind Life.

I just want to remind you that your brain and your mind and your whole life

are connected. They feed back on each other.

And you add the spirit in there. You add your creator in there and you get a

whole purpose-filled, powerful life.

So here it is. We're going to get this brain-mind-life operating for us instead

of against us. Let's say you're having racing thoughts.

You're having a panic attack. You're having anxiety. You're having trouble getting

under control. Let's do five things.

First is let's get your vision involved. This is going to get out of that limbic

amygdala fight-flight-freeze thing that you're feeling.

It's going to get your optic nerves, your retina,

your optic tracts, your occipital lobes to do something to try to shift some

of that mental energy away from those more terror related responses to something

visual that you can start to take control of.

I can decide in the moment when I'm feeling stressed, I can decide I want to

look at something intentionally.

So what are five things you can see?

What are five things you can see? Right here where I'm sitting in my office,

I'm looking at the wall, and I can see there's a framed picture that Lisa made

of some Tommy Walker lyrics.

One of my favorite songs is, these things are true of you.

In the frame I'm looking at, unshakable, immovable, faithful,

and true, full of wisdom, strength, and beauty.

These things are true of you. That's something I can see.

Now what am I doing? I'm not focusing so much on my symptoms.

I'm reading, and I'm thinking about a song, a worship song, that gets me in

a different state. I'm using my eyes to decide to think about this and not that.

I can also see a picture of Jesus. I've got this picture of a pencil drawing of Jesus laughing.

My friend Jeff Nelson, Lisa and I's old worship leader, dear friend, gave me a long time ago.

And I love that picture of Jesus. It's like he's with the little children and

he's just got his head back and he's laughing.

And he's a happy creator God.

And I can see a picture of Mitch with his bass guitar. And I can see a picture

of Jesus on the wall over there walking away with the wounds in his hand.

And I can see a picture of Lisa on the wall of my friend Darren Legallo,

whose birthday was yesterday, by the way. Shout out to Darren if you're listening.

A picture that he painted years ago of Lisa that's one of my favorites.

So there's five things I can see. I can see the camera and the microphone that

I'm going to use in a little while to record a video for the paid subscribers.

Now what am I doing? I'm not thinking so much about the symptoms that I'm feeling

because I'm thinking about the things that I can see.

I'm choosing to use my mental force to look around the room and see some things

that make me feel grateful, that make me feel happy, that remind me that there's

good things in my life besides this set of feelings that I'm feeling.

So what am I not doing? I'm not ruminating on the anxious feelings anymore.

Now I'm looking around the room, taking charge with my eyes.

Now what are four things I can touch?

Now I'm going to get my sensory system involved, right? I'm feeling panic.

My physiology is out of control. And I'm going to reclaim some of that by saying,

okay, I'm going to make my sensory nerves and my fingertips feel something that's

going to engage the spinothalamic tracts of my spinal cord.

It's going to engage a bunch of different parts of my brain that have to process

this this tactile information that I'm giving it.

I'm feeling the cold metal edge or the underside of my desk.

I'm feeling the coffee cup in my hand. I'm going to take a sip of coffee and

I'm going to feel that warm black silk coffee from Folgers.

That's not a paid advertisement. It's just a brand that I drink every morning because I'm boring.

Black silk from Folgers. If you're listening, Folgers, you could do a commercial on my podcast.

It's okay. I'm taking charge of things I can touch.

Okay. I got my fingers on the mouse now, making sure that the cursor is on the

position of the screen that I need it to be in.

I'm setting my coffee cup down and I'm looking at a coaster that's on the desk

and I can feel that concrete edge of the coaster and the rough texture that

my fingers have to process.

I didn't think about it. And I'm feeling the zipper on my hoodie that I'm wearing

and I can feel that metal edge there and the zipper goes up and down.

I can feel the vibration there. There's four things I can touch.

Now what have I done? I've gotten multiple parts of my brain and my spinal cord,

my peripheral nerves involved in doing something.

Because one of the maxims of neuroscience that started with the first time I

ever heard it was Tony Robbins. If you want to feel better, do better.

If you want to feel something, move.

You can't keep doing what you're doing if you want to feel something different than you're feeling.

If you keep doing what you're doing, you'll keep getting what you're getting.

So if you're in a panic attack, if you're feeling anxiety and you keep thinking

about how you feel, that's going to get bigger and bigger because why?

Because of quantum physics, because of attention density, quantum Zeno effect, and Hebb's law.

You're getting better at what you're doing, right? So now I've done five things

I can see and four things I can touch. I'm going to do three things I can hear.

The first thing I hear is the sound of my own voice coming into my ear from

the headphones that I'm wearing.

I'm processing my voice. Does it sound right? Do I have a terrible hum?

Like the other day I released an episode and people started writing in that

there was a terrible background hum.

I didn't hear it because I didn't preview that file with headphones on and it

was a frequency I couldn't hear through the headphone speakers unless they were

on my ear. So now I'm hearing.

I'm engaging my auditory cortex and my cochlea and the bones in my middle ear

and the cochlear nerve and all that neuroanatomy going through my brainstem.

It's making me engage that mental force of using hearing and the temporal lobe

and the auditory cortex and all that stuff is engaging a different part of my

brain and shifting some mental energy away from that amygdala,

fight, flight, freeze, panic, fear response.

And now I'm doing something with my brain that involves hearing.

So I can hear the sound of my own voice. I can hear the air conditioner humming over.

I can hear myself tap on the desk. I can hear myself clear my throat like that.

Normally, I would edit that out, but I did it on purpose that time.

I'm engaging a different part of my brain. Now, what's another thing I can do?

I can engage my olfactory system, and I can think of two things that I can smell, okay?

Why smell is so important because the olfactory nerves are the only ones that

don't synapse anywhere.

They're first-order neurons in your nose that go straight to your brain,

straight to olfactory cortex, which is in the basal forebrain,

the undersurface of your frontal lobe, okay?

Basal forebrain has a bunch of nuclei that are all related to acetylcholine

and the chemicals of memory, and they have direct connections to the limbic system.

So basically, you're hijacking this panic attack, which is using neuronal activity

of limbic system, amygdala, hippocampus, all that stuff.

And you're saying, hey, instead of panicking, I want you to do something else.

I want you to smell this thing because I got to use the same neurons,

the same territory to process the smell that I'm also using to process this

panic attack. So I'm going to hold my coffee cup up.

Take a big, deep breath, and I'm going to remember that coffee.

That's going to immediately start to trigger some memories, and I'm intentionally

hijacking my system here, okay?

And neurons in the olfactory cortex have direct connections to retrieve memory.

That's why oftentimes when you smell something, you start remembering something

else even before you identify what the smell is, okay?

You do. You smell peanut butter cookie in the kitchen, and your mind takes you

back to when you were 8 years old and your grandmother was baking in the kitchen.

Before you even think about what the smell is, is you're thinking about your

grandma and the fun times you had in her house or whatever that is.

Smell triggers something at a deep level because the first order neurons,

the neurons in the cells in your nose are connected with axons that have their

cell bodies in the olfactory cortex of your brain without any synapses.

So immediate connection to your brain with powerful connections to the limbic

system So that you are hijacking the territory that's driving your panic attack,

and now you're making it think about something else.

Two things you can smell. What are two things you can smell?

What are you doing here with 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, by the way? It's not a hack.

It's not a trick. It's not a magic trick. You are taking command.

You are performing self-brain surgery.

You are taking a position of power back from a position of weakness.

You're not the victim of these panic attacks.

They are happening automatically, but you don't have to give them attention density.

You don't have to let them play quantum Xeno commando on your brain.

You don't have to let them rewire you in accordance to Hebb's law because you

can choose to take over. You can engage the selective attention.

You can do five things you can see and four things you can touch and three things

you can hear and two things you can smell. And now one thing you can taste.

I'm going to use the coffee as one more example because that's all I got on my desk here.

I take a sip of coffee. It's going to sound gross if you're triggered by sounds.

I'm sorry, but I'm going to take a sip of coffee.

Roll that around in my tongue, and I start to taste different parts of my taste

buds on my tongue that are directly connected to different parts of my brain,

start to tell me things about what that coffee tastes like.

It starts to remind me of having a cup of coffee with my dad and having a conversation,

having a cup of coffee in a rack, sitting on the roof of a building and looking

out into the city and seeing people who wanted to kill me.

And I'm thinking things about my deployment, and I'm remembering things about my childhood,

and I'm remembering a cup of coffee at the bagel shop with Lisa when we were

dating and the morning that I really realized I was falling in love with her

was sitting having an everything bagel and a cup of coffee at a place.

And I remember that, okay?

So now what am I doing? I am taking charge of my own physiology.

I'm taking command of this situation. I'm not a victim anymore.

I'm not a patient. I'm not being ravaged by this disease of anxiety or panic. I am now the operator.

I've stopped contemplating my symptoms. I've started operating on them.

I've picked up the scalpel, and I'm doing something positive on my own behalf.

Friend, you don't have to be a victim anymore.

You can deploy a tactical solution when you feel panic or anxiety.

Now, again, disclaimer, sometimes that's not enough. Sometimes you need help.

Sometimes you need somebody to unpack this and go through it with you and all that.

But if the therapist continues to focus you on your feelings,

they're not the right therapist for you. Okay.

A good therapist is going to say, okay, let's get some strategies, some tactics.

I'm not so concerned about why you're feeling anxious. I'm more concerned about

what to do when you feel anxious, because that'll start to unlock cerebral cortex,

bigger parts of your brain that can actually do something about the situation

that can actually objectively assess why you might be feeling anxious.

Instead of just focusing on the feelings, you're not going to say,

hey, here's a strategy for what I'm going to do when I feel this way.

Here's what I'm going to do. If I want to feel better, I'm going to do better.

Here's five, four, three, two, one. Here's some tactical things I can do.

And now I'm going to recognize that feelings aren't facts. Like here's something

from the newsletter yesterday.

Talked about the fact that let's imagine that you're holding a letter in your

hand. Okay. This is so important to realize this.

You're holding a letter in your hand, and you're reading the letter,

and while you're reading the

letter, you start to have symptoms that you frequently ascribe to anxiety.

What are those symptoms? Well, your heart starts racing.

You start sweating a little bit. You start to feel a tingling sensation on the

back of your neck. Your hair cells on your arms stand up.

You start to get goose pimples, goose flesh.

The breathing shallows and speeds up, and your mouth kind of feels dry.

You notice a tightness in your chest. Your stomach feels kind of knotted.

Your hands begin to shake a little bit. But that's a set of physiological reactions

that you've identified with anxiety in the past, haven't you?

It kind of feels like a panic attack. But I want you to recognize something.

That letter that you just read, maybe it's a certified letter from the IRS that

you're getting audited.

And you're really anxious about that. And that makes sense.

It might be divorce papers that you didn't want to have to sign.

But now they're here and you've got to deal with it. It might be,

on the other hand, a love letter from that person that you were hoping would

say yes when you wrote that note that told them how you felt about them.

And they said, I love you too, and now you're going to have a relationship.

So maybe the letter was a good thing.

And what you're feeling is the same set of physiological things that previously

you thought were anxiety.

Maybe it's a notice that you just won the lottery, and now you've got a multimillionaire,

and you can become a paid subscriber to the Dr. Lee Warren Podcast now because you can afford it.

It's a letter that you've been

accepted to law school or medical school or graduate school or whatever.

It's a letter from your kids saying they finally want to come home.

It's a letter from your estranged daughter that says, hey, I'm sorry.

I want you to come meet your granddaughter. I'm sorry we've had this issue. Maybe it's a good thing.

But recognize this, okay? OK, symptoms, physiological things that you felt are

the same when you're excited and anticipating something as they are when you're

anxious and panicking about something.

So what's different if the symptoms are the same? What's different?

It's how you decide to attach meaning.

So the difference between anxiety and anticipation and excitement is not that

you have a different set of feelings.

It's that you have a context in which to put them.

It's that you've got a learned behavior in response to a certain set of symptoms.

But what I want you to realize is that feelings are not facts.

They're chemical events in your brain.

What's a fact is how you respond to those feelings.

And what happens is we get tricked over time, and we start to think that when

we feel a certain thing, it means that a certain thing is happening,

and we need to respond to it in a certain way.

And we'll either capitulate and give in to that thing, or we will choose the

anesthesia route and numb ourselves to it so we don't feel it anymore and then

we fall into the being victims of the 10th commandment instead of victors with

the 10th commandment and we start recognizing that what I'm doing I'm getting better at,

and I'm getting better at being anxious all the time.

We feel a set of things that we've learned to associate with anxiety,

and we begin to think about those feelings or symptoms, and we subconsciously

associate those with other times that we felt similar things,

and that sets up a reverberating and ruminating circuit that reinforces the

feelings, and we get better at feeling anxious in similar environments in the future.

And then we tend to behave in ways that we've taught ourselves to as we react to those feelings.

So we say, well, I can't go there. I'm going to feel anxious if If I go there,

I can't go to that meeting.

I'm going to feel stressed if I do that. I can't attend this event because I'm

going to feel stressed there.

Or we choose numbing behaviors. So we stop feeling them altogether.

And then we pay tomorrow taxes because we didn't love tomorrow more.

We're treating a bad feeling with a bad operation.

We're just violating commandments all over the place. Okay?

We reassign. If you want to do this properly with the 5-4-3-2-1 or whatever

method you want to use, this is what we've done.

We've reassigned anxiety from hey something's wrong with me to the truth which

is my body is sending me signals but i am in charge of how i respond to those signals,

That's the starting place, okay? We've moved from contemplating to operating.

We're going to go a little bit deeper next week on anxiety, okay?

Next week on Mind Change Monday, we'll take it another level deeper.

But today I wanted you to get this idea from physics that attention matters

and that there is a way to shift that attention on your own behalf to take command

of the high ground of your nervous system so that it works for you and not against you.

That's how you hijack anxiety and panic when it starts. I hope this has been helpful.

I want you not to live at the mercy of your own neurotransmitters.

I want you to recognize that what you're doing, you're getting better at and

that you can get better at getting better.

Okay. Instead of getting better at reacting to how bad you feel,

you can reassign anxiety.

You can take charge. You can remember that you have top-down control because you are not a victim.

You're a victor because you've been promised that you can have the mind of Christ.

You can recreate your brain. You can transform your mind and your life by taking

command of your thinking.

You can learn to biopsy your thoughts and respond to them instead of reacting

to them, including feelings of panic or anxiety.

That's how, my friend, you change your mind, and that's how you change your

life. That's how you become healthier and feel better and be happier.

That's how you develop a sense of purpose because you have power. You're not a victim.

You're in charge now. You're not a patient. You're a self-brain surgeon,

And the good news is, you can start today.

Hope you enjoyed this episode. Hope it was helpful. I hope it will help you

change your mind and change your life starting today. I'll see you next week.

I'm Dr. Lee Warren. Have a great day.