Self-Brain Surgery and Self-Help Part 2 (Self-Brain Surgery Saturday)

Good morning, my friend. Dr. Lee Warren here with you on Self-Brain Surgery Saturday.

We're going to get after it in just a minute with part two of our conversation

from yesterday about the difference between self-help and self-brain surgery.

It sounds a little silly to try to parse this out, but we got a lot of email.

I had an hour of yesterday talking to Susie Larson about it on her radio show.

Get lots of emails saying, hey, help me understand what the difference is between

self-help and your program of self-brain surgery. What's the difference?

Well, it's important to understand there is some value in self-help.

There wouldn't be a $15 billion industry in the United States of personal development

and self-help if it wasn't helpful to some people.

There is help that can be found in learning how to make yourself function better,

to develop yourself, improve yourself, shave things away from yourself.

There's value in that. The whole point I'm trying to make with self-brain surgery

being different is that there is a path to operating your brain under the influence

of your mind connected to the guiding influence of your spirit,

your creator, the great physician.

That's the highest level of operating the human life that can be possible because

it's how you're designed to operate.

And so I just try to draw a discernment between the things that we can do to

make ourselves better in the endless number of programs and ideas and processes

that we can put ourselves through that can become completely exhausting.

Exhausting, that we've got to have this book and next month that book and next

month that program and next month we've got to sign up for this and keep working

on buying these things to make ourselves better.

And ultimately, the true process to get better is to become more like the one

who created you, to operate your mind like Christ's mind, to operate your brain like he operated his.

And to do that, you've got to learn some principles. Now, the question always

is, as I got the email I shared with you yesterday, is, hey,

I need some discernment here.

You try to make a clear distinction between self-brain surgery and self-help,

and it sounds like a lot of hope lies there.

However, when I hear some of the work that you encourage us to do,

it sounds like self-help, the idea of changing our minds, examining our thoughts,

choosing where to put our attention, sometimes make me feel like I have the

lion's share of the work.

That's what we're going going to talk about today is, are you actually being

burdened with a lot of work to get this done?

Or is this some sort of a process that results in rest and peace and healing

and wholeness and finally some laying down of the work for you, my friend?

Because if you're tired of being so tired, and if you're wondering why your

life always feels so hard, and you keep trying and it seems like you can't make

something change, then what you need is self-brain surgery.

But before we get to it today, I have a question for you.

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

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

neuroscience of how your mind works smashes together with faith and everything

starts to make sense. Are you ready to change your life?

Well, this is the place, Self-Brain Surgery School.

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

take control of our thinking, and find real hope.

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

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

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

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

Music.

All right, let's get after it. Hey, I want to take you to Philippians 2, verse 13.

This is English Standard Version. For it is God who works in you,

both to will and to work for His good pleasure.

In the NIV, it says it this way. For it is God who works in you to will and

to act in order to fulfill His good purpose.

New American Standard Bible says, It says, it is God who is at work in you,

both to desire and to work for his good pleasure.

Now, that's interesting because what the Bible is saying here is that God gives

you the desire to work, to do things, to make things better.

He gives you that desire, and then he's inside you doing the work to work out

those things in a way that pleases him because it pleases him to see you get better.

This is like when you watch your kids grow up. Like when you're a young person,

your life's kind of mostly about you and you're seeking what makes you happy

and all that. And then kids come along.

And if you're a good person, you start being more interested in their success

and their happiness than you are your own.

Like a mature, good person says, I really want to sacrifice and make things

right for my kids so they can grow up and experience a life that's better than the one that I had.

And they can be happier and they can be healthier and more connected to God.

And I just want what's best for my kids. And that's the posture that God has here.

God is pleased when we live our lives in ways that are good for us,

that are honoring of him.

And I want to unpack that Philippians chapter two a little bit in the message

translation, because I think it really gets to the heart of it and what this

is all about, why it's so good, why God wants so much for us to figure all this out.

Here's why. This is the message translation. So it's not, it's more of a paraphrase

than a translation is really, but Eugene Peterson did it. It's got some great value.

It's not a strict word-for-word translation of the Bible, so it's not the best

for study, but it's great for amplification of the text.

And here's the message Philippians 2, starting in verse 12.

What I'm getting at, friends, is that you should simply keep on doing what you've

done from the beginning.

When I was living among you, you lived in responsive obedience.

Now that I'm separated from you, keep it up. Better yet, redouble your efforts.

Be energetic in your life of salvation, reverent and sensitive before God.

That energy is God's energy, an energy deep within you.

God himself willing and working at what will give him the most pleasure.

Do everything readily and cheerfully. No bickering, no second guessing.

Go out into the world uncorrupted, a breath of fresh air in this squalid and

polluted society. society.

Provide people with a glimpse of good living and of the living God.

Carry the light giving message into the night.

Remember our general calling, like, why are you here? If you ever lay awake

at night wondering, why am I here on this planet?

Well, the first answer is you're here to glorify God and enjoy him forever.

That's the basic calling that all of us have.

And if you're not at that point in your life, if you're not a believer,

you're not sure what you believe, and you think this all sounds kind of crazy,

just understand that there's good research to suggest that the happiest,

most fulfilled people are the

ones who serve others and live their lives out of a place of gratitude.

They're not the ones who are seeking their own pleasure, who are always aiming

to be number one, to finish first, to trample on everybody else to get to the

top. Those people don't turn out to be the happiest.

And that's why you've heard of so many rock stars and athletes and movie stars,

people who seem like they have everything, but they're miserable, addicted, suicidal,

serially divorced, those kinds of

people that just don't ever seem to find something that makes them happy.

And it's because they never figured out that serving others makes you happier than serving yourself.

And that's what Philippians chapter 2 here is all about. This is a little self-brain

surgery to say, hey, God already wants this for you.

He's calling you to want it for yourself.

And he's providing the tools and doing the work to make it happen inside of

you. All you have to do is consent.

Now, here's the tie back to this email that we got.

When it sounds like I'm telling you you have to do all these things,

biopsy your thoughts, put some space in between stimulus and response,

learn these operations to lobotomize lousy attitudes and drain doubt and all

those things that we talk about all the time, severing six synapses.

I'm teaching you that there are some processes you can go through to operate

your brain under the influence of your mind,

under the influence of your creator in a way that's

more efficient and more helpful and more hopeful for you and

ultimately produces a sense of less stress and less work and less disruption

and less frustration and more of this energy of God working deep within you

so that you can be ready and cheerful and uncorrupted and a breath of fresh air.

And people look at you and they say, why do you seem to have such a more hopeful, peaceful life?

What's going on with you that you can handle these things that are so hard and

you're still resilient and strong and you're not blown about by every wind that

comes along. What's the deal with you?

And so the deal is this, my friend. I want you to recognize something today.

Every second of every day, you are already working to change your brain structurally.

You're already doing that.

You're either doing it neglectfully by not paying attention to the fact that

you make new neurons and you connect them to other neurons every second of every day.

And if you don't steward and direct that process, process, then it will happen

in a way that recreates the same old, same old and deepens the ruts on that

wagon trail of how your life is going.

And it becomes more and more unchangeable and stuck and fixed.

And the inertia of how your life has been going will continue to worsen and

deepen and reinforce itself.

And it will become impossible for you to change over time, at least in your

perception, if you choose not to steward that process.

So the process is already happening of neuroplasticity and neurogenesis and

recreation of the synapses, whether you do something about it or not.

And then you could follow one of the three paths. If you say,

I don't want to be neglectful of that, and I don't want to just allow my brain

to run my body and run my life and keep things the way they've always been.

I don't want that. I want things to change.

I want to become healthier and feel better and be happier. Well,

then there's three paths to do that.

The baseline one is this hack, this quick fix, this idea that we can just learn

to sort of calm our minds down and learn to put a little space in between stimulus

and response and learn to get our racing thoughts under control.

Remember John Locke said 300 years ago, go, how do we separate imagination from madness, right?

You're already spending time imagining your life, thinking about the things

that are bouncing around in your head, feeling things and reacting to them.

You're already spending a lot of emotional time and energy dealing with your

internal thought life and the things that come out of it because thoughts become

things, right? So you're already doing that.

So I'm not asking you to do more work. I'm not asking you to do anything other than, as Dr.

Josh Axe said in his recent book that just came out, he's going to be on the

podcast pretty soon. His new book is called Think This, Not That.

So the bottom line is you're already thinking, you're already feeling,

you're already reacting, you're already creating neurons and wiring them and

synapsing and creating new synapses and reinforcing things.

You're already doing that. So God says, if you're so tired of being so tired

and it feels like the way you're living is wearing you out.

Then you need to change your mind and think this and not that.

You need to learn a different set of tools to operate your mind.

Imagine if you're riding in a car and you're driving down the road and the instructor

says, okay, now I want you to get into the driver's seat here and I want you to drive for a while.

And then he starts to give you some instruction on how to operate that vehicle.

Well, you could let your foot off the gas and you could steer it into the ditch

if you wanted to, or you could slam on the brakes and stop going anywhere.

You could operate it where you wanted, and you might not get very far,

or you might have an accident, or you might go too fast and get a ticket. it.

But if the instructor's there and the instructor says, hey, you're already driving,

the car's moving down the highway, let me just give you some principles and

some ideas and some tools that you can do this a little more efficiently.

Put your seatbelt on, use your blinker when you change lanes, obey the speed limit,

don't change lanes inappropriately, don't slam on your brakes if somebody's right behind you,

giving you some operating instructions so that you can operate the car that

you're already driving more efficiently and safely, And you'll get to your destination

less stressfully and without as many tickets or accidents or problems,

right? And your passengers will be safer.

So that's kind of this general idea that there is a process that's already underway.

You're already doing it. And so let's learn some principles to do it more efficiently.

Does that make sense? I want you to remember Ephesians chapter 4 is the self-brain

surgery chapter. chapter.

And Paul says this, he's worried about us being like infants tossed back and

forth by the waves, this first 14, blown here and there by every wind of teaching

and by the cunning and craftiness of people and their deceitful scheming.

So that's sort of the self-help industry right there. There's a lot of garbage

out there. There's some good stuff. There's some really good stuff.

There's also some garbage. And there's all these programs that come along.

They promise you five steps to a better life and 10 ways to do this and 60 ways

to do that or 40 days to freedom.

And sometimes those programs are just every wind of teaching and the cunning

and craftiness of people who are making their living selling this year's program.

And you try it and you learn it and you work at it and it doesn't feel better

and maybe you make a little progress, but then maybe you slip back.

That's the idea of self-directed, human-directed ideas to try to make ourselves better humans.

And God says, no, I don't want you to try to be a better human.

I want you to try to be more like me because you've got the mind of Christ because you've been renewed.

You can renew your mind and change your life and then you'll look different

to the world and you will be more attractive to them because they're gonna see

that what you have is helping you become healthier and feel better and be happier

and less stressed and less worn out and less overwhelmed.

And he goes on to say in Ephesians chapter four, I tell you this and insist

on it in the Lord that you must no longer live as the Gentiles do in the futility of their thinking.

So the problem with the unrenewed mind, the problem with the world and people

trying to make themselves better and doing everything they can to figure out

a way to make things happen is that their thinking is wrong.

And you get your thinking right, your life will be right. So you're already doing it, okay?

You're already doing it. You need to learn to do it in a better way,

the way that you were designed to do it.

Because your brain wasn't designed to be frustrated and stuck.

Your brain is designed to heal.

And you just have to learn how to allow the Holy Spirit to sort of be like my professor,

put his hands on your hands and operate that thing the way it John Locke said

300 years ago that in some ways there's a difference between idiots and madmen.

Madmen put wrong ideas together and so make wrong propositions,

but argue and reason right from them.

But idiots make very few or no propositions and reason scarce at all.

He's saying basically that there's a sort of madness where you can ask the wrong

questions and decide on the wrong things, but then operate from there in the

right way based on that set of information, and you just won't get very far.

Truth says you ask the right questions, you operate out of the right place,

and then the principles will be true and valid for you, and you will make progress in your life.

As you use the mind of Christ to operate your brain like Jesus would have operated

his, then you're not doing more work. You're actually becoming more efficient.

You're operating this system like it was designed to operate,

and you're going to get to your destination in a healthier and safer way. That's the bottom line.

That's the difference. is I want you to separate this endless striving to make

yourself a better person using all these different ideas and techniques and technologies.

And just go back to the way he said it in the beginning, take every thought

captive, transform your mind, renew your mind, get out of the futile thinking

that's held you back, change your mind and you'll change your life.

And by the way, you don't have to do it by yourself because he's already calling

you to do the work that he wants you to do, that he is doing in you for his own good purposes.

And his purpose and good pleasure is that you, my friend, become healthier and

feel better and be happier.

And his greatest good pleasure is that you follow him into a life that helps

others see the light and the footprints that you're leaving on the trail to

this renewed mind and this improved life and this eternal perspective that gives

you the resilience to handle the traumas and tragedies and massive things.

It's not a monument on the roadside that said, this is as far as I got and then I gave up.

It's a footprint, a trail going forward.

Where you can become healthier and feel better and be happier.

That's the difference between self-help and self-brain surgery.

And the only thing you have to realize is that there is very good news,

my friend. And the good news is you can start today.

Music.

Hey, thanks for listening. The Dr. Lee Warren Podcast is brought to you by my

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from trauma, tragedy, and other massive things.

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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.