Self-Brain Surgery is a Choose Your Own Adventure Approach to Life (Mind Change Monday)

Good morning, my friend. I'm Dr. Lee Warren here, and I am with you for some

self-brain surgery today.

It's Mind Change Monday, and we're going to go all the way back to the start

of Season 10 because I want to bring an idea back to you now that we've run

through the Ten Commandments that you have an ability to choose the own adventure of your life.

You can choose the steal, kill, and destroy part of John 10.10,

or you can choose the promise that Jesus made that I've come here that you may have an abundant life.

Nobody gets to tell you the way that your mind and your brain can operate except

you and your great physician, unless you let them. You can choose your own adventure.

And I want you to know that today and be filled with the encouragement that you're never stuck.

Nobody ever gets to put your mind in a box and control how you think or how

you choose to live your life.

The Lord has given you the ability to literally change your brain structurally.

That's what self-brain surgery is all about.

And he has a unique purpose and a design and a plan for you.

And no matter what happens, the trauma, drama, tragedy, massive things that

have occurred in your life, they don't get to choose for you how you think or

how you feel or how you live your life unless you let them. So let's choose your own adventure.

And I want to bring you back that episode today for Mind Change Monday,

because it's really going to help you take courage and know that you really

can change your life by changing your mind. And you can start today. So let's get after it.

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

back for some more self-brain surgery. We're in season 10 of the podcast.

I'm so grateful and honored that you've been with me now for close to a thousand episodes.

By the end of season 10, we will cross that 1,000 episode mark.

Barrier and we'll hit our two millionth download, Lord willing,

sometime in the next couple of months.

And it's just been such an honor to get to know you and to have a chance to talk to you.

Lisa and I and Tata are just so grateful for the opportunity to get to know

you. If you're new around here, we have a lot of new listeners.

And if you are new, I'd like to take a second to introduce myself.

I'm a brain surgeon, a neurosurgeon.

I practice still in the state of Nebraska in the United States and I perform

brain and spine surgeries, peripheral nerve surgeries.

But along the way, during my life and in my career, I also am a normal guy,

just a normal person like you. And I've had some things happen.

I went to the Iraq War as a combat surgeon in the United States Air Force back

in 2005 and saw some things that left a mark on me.

And I developed a period of time where I had PTSD and some difficulties that

led me ultimately to the act of writing.

My wife, Lisa, and my friend, David, suggested that I write as a way to unpack

some of the things that I brought home from the war with me and never processed.

And that taught me how to recover, to begin the process of recovering from trauma.

And my first book, No Place to Hide, was all about that.

Ten years ago, actually, May of 2014, my very first book came out.

So after I started writing, which No Place to Hide came out in 2014,

but it started as a self-published book that came out in 2010 called Called Out.

And over the next few years, I honed and worked on that book and learned how to write.

And ultimately, at the request of my friend Philip Yancey, that book called

out, was rewritten, and turned into what was ultimately my first real,

quote-unquote, real book that was published by Zondervan back in 2014.

But between the time that we sold that manuscript in 2012 and it came out in 2014...

Our son Mitch died. So after I finally started to recover from PTSD and we finally

started to try to apply some of those lessons to how to help other people who

were going through hard things like my patients with brain cancer and other things,

I began to start thinking that I had learned some things that could help other people.

And I was starting to write the book that ultimately became my second book.

I've seen The End of You, which is a book about faith and doubt and how hard

it is when the things we think we know turn out not to be true.

And right as I was doing that is when Mitch died.

And after Mitch died, I realized I didn't know as much as I thought I knew about

trauma and recovery and trying to find hope and faith.

And I wasn't sure of some of the things that I thought I knew and believed.

And so we went through a process, Lisa and I and our family,

several years of learning how to find hope again and ultimately have now,

through the process of podcasting and writing, we've now developed a way to communicate.

And every day or most every day, I talk to you about the treatment plan,

different ways that we can use our minds and our brains to overcome the hard

things, the traumas, the tragedies and massive things that happen in life.

And so here we are, 10 years later, a thousand podcast episodes later, three books later,

and I'm sitting in front of this microphone early in the morning on a cold Nebraska

day to talk to you about self-brain surgery and what in the world is self-brain surgery.

Well, it's just my way of saying that you are not stuck with the brain that you have.

You can actually change it by directing your mind to be better at choosing what

you think about. The sad truth is, friend, most people don't ever think about what they think about.

And here's the punchline for today. We're going to go through the basics of

self brain surgery this morning. It's kind of a reintroduction.

We're going to get after that in a few minutes. But the punchline is this.

If you don't learn to think about what you think about.

Then your thoughts will be directed by your feelings and your life will be directed by your feelings.

And one of the Ten Commandments of self-brain surgery is something that you

need to know and you need to believe with all your heart. Feelings are not facts.

Feelings are chemical events in your brain. Sometimes they point towards things that are true.

Most often they do not. And if you let your life be dictated,

the content of your thoughts and your steps of your life be dictated by feelings,

You will never, ever be able to be resilient and hold on to hope,

and you will never find anything that looks like true happiness.

You'll always find that the target is moving. And so my job as a good surgeon

for you is to teach you some tools so that you can perform self-brain surgery

and learn to think about your thinking, change your mind, and change your life.

So that's where we're going. Season 10 is going to go deep into the science

of how our minds and our brains work and how science is not a threat to faith,

how faith actually can use science to see God more clearly.

And even some of the history of how science started as a way to try to honor

God with the things that we could discover about what he did.

We're going to learn a lot.

Along the way, we're going to ultimately learn to think about our thinking so

that our thoughts are not dictated by our feelings.

That's how you find hope. That's how you find resilience.

That's how you stand up and move forward again after you face trauma and tragedy

and other massive things.

I have one more announcement for you before we get going here with this episode today.

And that is this. We started a second podcast called Spiritual Brain Surgery.

The first episode is up yesterday.

Those episodes are going to go deep on the faith side. Why do we believe what

we think we believe? How do we put our faith together?

How do we articulate the things that we believe in? How do we approach studying

the Word of God? How do we We know this stuff is all true.

And how can we use it to help other people who might be looking for something

that seems real and seems like

it might actually help when everything else they've tried hasn't helped?

That's what spiritual brain surgery is about. The first episode's up tomorrow

on what normally would be Tuesdays with Tata.

We're going to release the second episode of Spiritual Brain Surgery,

which is an interview with two great authors, Alisa Childers and Tim Barnett,

about their incredible new book, The Deconstruction of Christianity.

Christianity, I'll put a link in the show notes to the Spiritual Brain Surgery podcast.

I would love it if you would go ahead and subscribe.

I'd love to see a bunch of downloads of that first episode today so that that

podcast gets off to a good start.

Please check it out. And if you're interested in the deeper dive on the spiritual

side of things, I think Spiritual Brain Surgery will be helpful to you.

Listen, today, we're going to learn to think about our thinking.

We're going to learn the basics of how we can perform self-brain surgery.

I've got some hard facts for you. And we're going to review the 10 commandments to self-brain surgery.

And before we do any of that, though, 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.

To get after it. Here we go. Hey, when I was a kid, I used to love those choose

your own adventure books and those Mad Libs magazines.

You know what those are? Do you remember those? Mad Libs was a book you could

get and it would have a story that had a lot of blanks in it.

And you basically got to fill out all the blanks yourself and ultimately write

this really hilarious story.

And everybody's story would be different because we all chose different words.

So it was really fun to read each other the story that started in the same place

and wound up in such a different place because we chose our own path through

the book. Mad Libs were fun.

And my mom, I remember my mom used to let me play with this little book that

it was choose your own adventure and had a, like a knight, a little kid dressed

up like a knight and he could ride a dragon or he could take off in a rocket

ship or he could get on a horse.

And there was all these, every, the pages were divided into threes and you could

flip one part of the page to a different story.

And you could basically ride a million different books out of this one book

and tell your own adventure.

And it was amazing to me. It was a lot of fun. And I remember playing with that

book and reading it and telling my mom all the different ways that that story played out for me.

And I just want to tell you that your ability that God gave you to engage your

frontal lobes is what separates you from all the other living things that he created.

Because unlike any other created thing, I was going to say animal,

but But when I say that, sometimes people think that I think humans are animals,

and I don't. Obviously, we're created separately in God's image.

We didn't evolve from animals. We'll talk about that at some point, too.

But the fact is, you are not an animal. You're created in God's image.

But God made all of us with things

that were similar and things that were different. And we all have brains.

At least higher creatures have brains.

And your brain is structurally, chemically, and physically different than that

of any other creature that God created. it.

And the most important thing that you can do that nothing else can do is you

can change your mind and you can choose to think about one thing and not another thing.

That's called selective attention. And it's unique to humans.

You can look at a set of things and you can say, okay, I'm going to think about

this thing and not that thing.

That's your frontal lobe that allows you to do that.

The scientists would say you have a highly evolved frontal lobe.

No, you don't. It was created that way in God's image.

You were given the ability to choose to think about one thing and not another thing.

The sad thing is, though, most people, not once in their life,

do they ever fully take advantage of this gift.

Most people don't ever stop to think about the fact that most of the thoughts

you have haven't turned out to be true.

Most of the thoughts that pop into your head, some researchers say up to 60,000

thoughts Some say 40,000 or 20,000, but the bottom line is you have a lot of

thoughts that automatically pop into your mind every day.

Every moment. And when those thoughts happen, if you pay attention to them,

you would realize that lots of them are not true.

Sometimes a thought will pop into your head like, I'm such a loser,

or nobody loves me, or this always happens to me. My life is always so hard. Sometimes that is true.

But the vast majority of the things that pop into your head just aren't true.

And if you stop to think about them instead of reacting to them,

then you'll begin to take the high ground and begin to be able to discern and

decide what you're going to think about and how you're going to respond to the

feelings and the thoughts that you have.

If you could just do that, basically, you would already be ahead of most people

in their ability to navigate life.

We've talked a lot before about this idea that Dan Harris published a book called

10% Happier. And he basically said, hey, I've got racing thoughts.

I've got this voice in my head that's a jerk that's always telling me negative things

and it makes me anxious and then when

I feel anxious I have to learn how to control my

thinking so he learned how to meditate he took all

the Deepak Chopra and and all those guys and learned how to take the ideas behind

eastern meditation without any sort of spiritual context buddhist meditation

and hindu meditation and strip out all the spiritual stuff because he doesn't

believe in any of that and just learn Learn how to calm his mind down so that

he stopped hearing the racing thoughts.

And that's a good example of the fact that Eastern meditation is about quieting

the noise and then choosing what you're going to respond to and how you're going to respond.

Eastern meditation is about not hearing anything.

And I would just tell you, Christian meditation is a very different thing. Christian

meditation is the idea that you turn down your own voice and turn up God's voice

and learn how to listen to the still small voice of your creator who's going

to guide you then into how to use your mind and use your brain and use your

body and use your life in a way that's good for you, honors him,

and helps other people. That's the big difference.

And I've told you before, you can be 10% happier. It works by just learning how to calm the noise.

And you can be significantly happier, significantly more resilient,

significantly more peaceful, and have ability to handle hard things and find hope anyway.

If you learn how to use neuroscience to your advantage,

if you understand what happens when you choose to think about your thinking,

you understand how to direct your brain to form healthier synapses and get rid

of bad mental habits and form stronger ones, you can become significantly happier.

But there's another level past that, and I call it infinitely happier.

Because I'll tell you, if you lose a child, your spouse develops a glioblastoma,

or your son drowns in the lakes, Like I said, you're going to be more than 10% sadder than you were.

And you're going to be significantly less hopeful and significantly less able

to see yourself having a positive future than you were before.

And finding some mental hack that'll make you a little happier isn't enough

to get you off the highway of trauma, as one of my listeners,

Dana Gage, said recently.

We're going to get Dana on the podcast before long, by the way.

Lisa had a great idea of inviting her and she's got a great story of losing

her son and how long it took her to start putting the pieces back together, her and her family.

And it's an inspiring story. We're going to get on the podcast soon, Lord willing.

But she used this phrase, getting off the trauma superhighway,

like this idea that once something bad happens to you, you get stuck and you're

just on this endless loop of this road that never seems to go anywhere and you can't get off of it.

But I'm telling you, friend, if you learn how to operate your mind You can choose

your own adventure and you can let the Lord lead you into a better place with

your thinking and that will change your life and it will become almost infinitely better.

Because if you're infinitely sad, it would take an infinite amount of peace

to help you find your way back, right?

Let me share with you a scripture, Ephesians chapter 4. This is one of the long

self-brain surgery passages in the Bible, but the punchline is this.

He talks about how if you get your life in Christ right, get your unity and

faith and knowledge, Paul says in Ephesians 4.13, then you start to become more like Christ.

And he says in verse 14, Then you will no longer be infants tossed back and

forth by the waves and blown here and there by every wind of teaching and cunning

and craftiness of people and their deceitful scheming.

Let me tell you what happens to you. When you go through a major trauma.

Everybody has ideas for you. The world has ideas for you. The Instagram has

ideas for you. Here's how you can be happy again.

And there's all these ideas and you chase after this and chase after that and

nothing seems to last and nothing seems to help and you keep getting blown around.

And every time something hard happens again, you're right back to square one

and you're wounded and you're woundedness and you're sorrow and you can get

stuck in grief and you can get stuck in self-help and you can get stuck in support

groups and you can get stuck in alcohol and you can get stuck and not know how to move forward.

And Paul gives us the answer here.

He tells us that down in verse 17, Ephesians 4, 17, don't live anymore.

He says, I tell you this and I insist on it in the Lord. Paul's basically saying

what my dad used to say, snapping his fingers and saying, hey, look at my eyes.

I'm insisting that you get this right. I want you not to live like the Gentiles do.

To understand in Jewish culture, when Paul's writing in the first century,

Jews were chosen people of God in their worldview, and Gentiles were not Jews.

They were the lost people, the people that didn't have the promise of God,

the people that didn't have the true things of God on their side.

So his idea is when you see that in the New Testament, it basically means that

the way you can think of it now is the saved people and unsaved people who don't

have the Holy Spirit helping them.

So basically what he's saying here in 417 Ephesians 417, I tell you this and

insist on it in the Lord. Listen, look in my eyes.

Don't live anymore like the Gentiles do. And what's different about the Gentiles?

He's just told you to stop. If you get your mind right, if you learn how to

think like Christ, you stop being tossed around and blown around by everything

that happens in your life.

And he tells us what's wrong with the Gentile thinking here.

Don't live anymore like the Gentiles do in the futility of their thinking.

They think incorrectly. If you think incorrectly, if you don't learn to think

about your thinking correctly,

You're going to be vulnerable to this blowing around in the wind problem,

and you won't be able to put your feet down on something solid.

And so with that being said, I want you to remember that book,

that Mad Libs, Choose Your Own Adventure kind of thing.

And I want you to just today, as we get started on season 10,

to acknowledge that you're not stuck with the brain you have and you're not

stuck with the synapses that were built by experiences and past traumas and

losses and epigenetic and inheritances that you got from your parents and all

those things that you think are you and all the labels that you've accepted.

I'm hopelessly broken. I'm always wrong.

I'm never going to be able to change this. I'm stuck in this pattern. I can't stop drinking.

I can't stop overeating. I can't this. this, I can't that, I'm always this, I'm only that.

If you have all those labels, you're stuck in the futility of your thinking

because you can choose a different path.

When you choose to think about different things, the neuroscience is clear.

Within seconds, you begin to wire new synapses.

Lamentations 3 says God's mercies are new every morning. And guess what?

So are your neurons and so are your ability to make synaptic connections between

them. And the thing that makes it happen is you change how you think and what you think about.

And you start to invite the voice of your creator into your thought process.

And if you don't believe that stuff, okay, then just trust me on the neuroscience side.

If you just take command of your thinking, there's a scripture,

2 Corinthians 10, 5, that says take every thought captive.

If you can learn to do that, whether or not you think it's a spiritual thing,

you can become significantly happier.

I would invite you to the next level, which is that infinite level.

And to do that, you've got to know your creator because it takes a little external

power to get to that level.

But I'm telling you, friend, you can change your mind and you can change your life.

You can choose your own adventure and operate your brain in a better way.

Now, here's the bottom line. This is a hard truth, okay?

No one is coming to rescue you from the futility of your own thinking.

I can't change your mind for you.

God will not barge in and change your mind for you.

You've got to ask him to. Remember, when I talk about self-brain surgery,

just like when I talk about self-help, the only part of self-brain surgery that

you do yourself is to recognize yourself, that you lack the power by yourself to change yourself.

So you're inviting the better surgeon in than you are, but it starts with consent.

It starts with hope. Hope is the first dose to believe that he can do it,

to believe that you can change, to believe that your life tomorrow doesn't have

to look like the one today and all the days before.

But nobody's coming to do that for you. You have to have an operating system.

You have to have a way, a structure that you build around how you choose to

think about what you think about and what you do with those thoughts because

nobody else can do it for you.

Now, I'm a great, I think, great surgeon, good doctor. My patients would think

I'm a good doctor for the most part, I believe.

But I can't write a prescription that will make your life better if you don't apply it yourself.

You have to do the procedure. I can't write a prescription that will make you

better, but I can give you the instruments and the training that you need to make your life better.

And what you do with it is up to you. I pray that you'll take this training,

that you'll apply it in a way that helps you move forward in your life.

And that's what we're here on the podcast to do as we all move forward.

After we've gone through traumas and tragedies and massive things,

we're trying to find a set of tools to help us get it done.

Because nobody's coming to rescue you from your own thoughts.

You've got to do it. So what will you do with it? What adventure will you choose?

Season 10 hopefully will tell a story of you moving from a place where it hurts

more to a place where it hurts less,

where it's less hopeful to a place where it's more hopeful, to a place where

you can't hear God clearly,

to a place where you can't, a place where you don't really believe there's anything

out there but the cold, careless universe, to a place where maybe there's some

light and maybe I should investigate that. Let me tell you something.

You may not think you're very special, but in the history of humans,

of the billions and billions of people that God has created on this planet,

in the past and in the current and in the future, nobody,

not even your identical twin if you have one, nobody has a brain exactly like yours. You are unique.

You're fearfully and wonderfully made. You were created on purpose for a purpose.

No one has ever been or ever will be exactly like you are. How do I know that?

Because nobody's had exactly the same thoughts that you have.

Even if you have an identical twin, you've had some different experiences.

You banged your knee and she didn't, or he broke up with her and not with you.

And you've had different thoughts about your own life. And when you have a thought,

You create a synapse that changes the structure of your brain that changes your

hormonal and chemical environment.

It changes your heart coherence. It changes your electromagnetic field.

No two people are identical.

Your brain, friend, is unique and nobody has ever had or will have the brain

that you have, the mind that you have.

You are one of a kind. And therefore, this is where it gets important.

I hope you're sitting down or taking notes or listening here.

You have a responsibility to make the most of your brain mind interface so that

you can become healthier,

feel better and be happier and help other people find hope.

OK, there's two things Jesus said. John 16, 33, he said, in this world, you will have trouble.

In John 10, 10, he said, I came that you might have abundance.

You might have life and have it to the full, have it abundantly.

Those two things have to be true at the same time.

If the Bible is true that God never breaks a promise, that he can't tell a lie,

that he never changes, then it has to be true that you can have a hard life

and an abundant life at the same time.

And the way you do that is to learn to think differently about your life.

The aim of this podcast is to help you become healthier and feel better and

be happier by changing your mind so you can change your life.

It's scary to be your own patient because that makes you responsible for making these changes.

Again, though, I'm not saying that you have to do it. The work that gets done is done by the Lord.

It's done by your great physician, okay? But you have to give consent.

You have to make a decision that I want to change my mind and I want to change

my life. Nobody can change your mind but you.

Nobody can change your life until you decide to change the way you think about it.

And in that context, we have 10 commandments. And we say, and when I say that,

please, I'm not, it's not blasphemy. I'm not saying these are from God.

They are spiritual principles based in neuroscience, but consider them core

values, good ideas, whatever.

The 10 commandments idea is just a good way to think about it,

okay? Okay, so I'm not replacing the Ten Commandments from the Bible,

but these are the Ten Commandments if you want to be a self-brain surgeon.

Here they are. Number one, relentlessly refuse to participate in your own demise.

Stop treating things you feel with alcohol or drugs or sex or TV or shopping

or anything that takes your mind off getting better and just pushes the ball down the field.

Don't do things to harm your own brain or your own mind or your own life.

That's called malpractice. And self-malpractice is the worst kind of malpractice.

You're hurting your own life.

So relentlessly refuse to participate in your own demise. Number two,

you must believe that feelings are not facts.

I'll prove that to you in coming episodes. Feelings are chemical events in your

brain designed to make you aware of a potential threat or a potential good thing.

And then you can use your frontal lobe to decide if that feeling is true or helpful or not.

But you don't have to live your life in reaction to your feelings.

And you shouldn't because it's not helpful. Most of your feelings do not point towards true things.

Number three, thoughts are not always true.

Five to one, at least, the thoughts that pop into your head are untrue and they're usually negative.

And the negative ones are almost always harmful. So learning to understand that

your thinking isn't automatically true,

to learn the discipline of challenging those thoughts and getting better at

identifying the harmful and negative ones and not reacting to them anymore is

a superpower that will help you have a better life.

Thoughts become things. Everything you've ever experienced started with a thought.

Every roller coaster, every car, every telephone, every computer,

every podcast started with a thought somewhere.

Every skyscraper you see, every bridge across a river started with a thought in someone's mind.

Every encounter you've ever had with another person, every word you've ever

spoken started with a thought because thoughts become things.

Thoughts turn into real things.

And if you get your thinking under control, you'll have better outcomes.

The things in your life will become better. That is a true thing from neuroscience.

It's true from scripture. It's true from your experience. You just have to stop

and think about it for a second. No pun intended.

Number five, don't treat a bad feeling with a bad operation too often.

We're sad. We're hurting. We're scared. We're lonely.

And we don't want to feel it. We don't want to process it. We don't want to

deal with it and we think we deserve to turn our brains off.

So we open a bottle, open a pill, turn on Netflix, get on Amazon and one-click our way to happiness.

We send a text message to somebody. We go to that place again we said we weren't going to go to again.

We treat a bad feeling with a bad operation and that leaves us paying what we call a tomorrow tax.

We've made a bad decision. We

committed self-malpractice. We treated a bad feeling with a bad operation.

And tomorrow we're having to deal with today's problems and the fallout from

yesterday's bad operations because we didn't, the next one, we didn't love tomorrow more.

I want you to love tomorrow and the promise it holds more than the stop,

more than you want to stop feeling and dealing with what's happening today. Love tomorrow more.

The next one, don't make an operation out of everything, okay?

You don't have to overcomplicate it.

You don't have to say, well, I never get this right or I'm never gonna be able

to change this. Just change this one thought right now in this moment.

Change how you're thinking about what you're feeling right now.

Change one decision for one moment instead of I can't stop drinking.

I'll never be able to not drink for a whole year. Don't worry about that.

I'll never be able to stop drinking for a whole month. Don't worry about that.

I'll never be able to stop drinking for a whole week. Don't worry about that.

Think about, I cannot drink for the next five minutes.

I cannot drink for the next one hour. I cannot drink for the next 30 seconds.

Whatever it takes, make a good decision and don't make an operation out of everything.

Just decide that you can take command of this one moment in between your ears.

You don't have to overcomplicate it. It doesn't have to feel impossible.

You don't have to apply the whole rest of your life to this moment.

Don't overcomplicate. Just make a decision.

To make one decision and choose your own adventure. Flip that little page like

I did when I was a little boy and get on the rocket ship instead of the dragon for just one time.

Don't make an operation out of it. And don't perpetuate generational troubles,

okay, in your life or in your thoughts.

Your dad drank and was abusive. And you think, oh, I get mad,

I get angry, and I just inherited that from my dad. Dad, I'm prone to drinking

because I got that from my dad.

No, genetic curses do not have to perpetuate into your life.

Just because your father ate sour grapes doesn't mean your teeth have to hurt, the Bible says.

You can learn to change your mind about where you came from and pass on different

things to the people after you.

You can choose not to have to be defined by the things that came before you

and don't perpetuate those into the next generation, even disordered thinking.

The next one, don't hurt your brain. Your brain is the organ of your mind and

the organ of what comes out of your life.

And so you need to learn healthy brain habits. We'll talk on this show sometimes

about supplements and about substances that harm your brain and things that

help your brain and about lifestyle choices like wearing helmets and being careful

with hitting your head repetitively and whether or not using Bluetooth headphones

are bad for you and all that stuff.

We'll talk about some of those things as time goes on because we want to protect

our brains. OK, your brain is the organ of your mind.

Your brain is the physical structure that turns into everything else about your whole life.

So it makes sense to love your brain and want to take good care of it.

And the last one is learn how to practice mental first aid for others.

In addition to having a treatment plan for how you're going to respond to trauma

and tragedy and massive things, how you're going to respond to disordered thinking,

how you're going to learn to think about your own thinking and apply mental

first aid and relentlessly refuse to participate in your own demise,

you're also going to develop this idea that we have a responsibility to each

other to be good caretakers and learn how to provide some mental first aid to say,

hey, I perceive that you're thinking really negatively about yourself.

Let me give you a couple of tools.

Let me point you to this podcast. Let me show you some ideas that'll help you.

And remember, friend, what you're doing, you're getting better at.

If you choose to think differently, you get better at thinking differently.

If you choose to put things to rest that have been hurting you for a long time,

you get better at doing that.

And what got you here to this place on this day, listening to my voice won't get you there.

If there is some place that you know you're supposed to go and the habits and

experiences and thought patterns that you've always had are hindering you and keeping you stuck.

What got you here won't get you there. That's where we're going in season 10.

And it's a big overview of self-brain surgery, what it's all about and what it's for.

And basically, friend, I just use it all to remind you that you can't change

your life until you change your mind.

Don't forget about spiritual brain surgery. Please go check it out.

And the good news about changing your mind and changing your life is that you can start today.

Music.

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.