Solve, not Succumb: Self-Brain Surgery Saturday

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

And it's self brain surgery Saturday.

Listen, we're almost to Thanksgiving which is my favorite time of the year,

Lisa and I both. I think it's our favorite holiday.

Just a day to kind of get your brain on gratitude.

Gratitude is a well-known neuroscience hack to help you feel better and be better

able to manage and be resilient in any situation.

Today, I want to give you back the very second episode almost said very first

But it was episode number two of self brain surgery Saturday from last year

This episode has been offline for a while and it's a self brain surgery operation.

I teach you called the gratitude graph This is how to chop out places where

you're stressed you're anxious you're hurting you're ungrateful and replace

them or transplant them with.

Gratitude and in a way to get your brain working better to help you solve problems.

Now I want you to solve problems and not succumb to them since we're gonna definitely

all face traumas and tragedies and massive things and we're gonna have to try

to keep going in our lives then we need to learn how to solve and not succumb

and this gratitude graft operation will help you get that done.

It's a great episode from last year ends with a little music from CC Winans

and as we're approaching Thanksgiving I just want you to remember how important

gratitude is and why it's important in this episode to help you get your head around that.

We're gonna do some more work in the coming days around the idea of gratitude and thankfulness.

And we're excited for Thanksgiving. I hope you have some opportunity to spend

some time with your family.

But you need to get your brain ready for that. Holidays are sometimes stressful.

And sometimes they bring up our old losses and massive things.

And so be prepared for that and one way you can handle it is by learning this

operation called the gratitude graph Let's get after it Good morning friend.

We're here in the or for self-brain surgery. Saturday.

This is dr Lee warren here to help you change your mind and change your life today.

We're going to learn a new self-brain surgery operation Called

the gratitude graph can be a good opportunity to learn how to chop out fear

anxiety stress depression worry and all of that and replace it with a much healthier

emotion that will help build your more positive brain chemistry environment

that will help you take charge of any situation and find your way back to hope,

joy, peace, happiness, and a path forward out of whatever you're facing starting today.

Listen, you can't change your life until you change your mind.

And here on Self Brain Surgery Saturday, we're going to learn mechanics of how to get that done.

Hey, are you ready to change your life? If the answer is yes,

there's only one rule. You have to change your mind first.

And my friend, there's a place for the neuroscience of how your mind works,

smashes together with faith and everything starts to make sense.

Are you ready to change your life?

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

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

take control of our thinking and find real hope.

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

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

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

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

Music.

I know that was silly playing those OR sounds, but I just want to give you kind of get you started here.

We've kind of trying to give you some more predictable episodes on the podcast.

So Saturdays are going to be We're going to specifically talk about how you

mechanically can use the power of neuroscience and how you can smash it into

faith and turn your life around and not be a victim of your neurochemistry anymore.

It's incredible how important it is to understand that you're wired.

You are hardwired for negativity.

You have a negative bias that's designed to help you stay safe in the world

and not burn your hand all the time or get eaten by the lion.

You're designed to have these baseline negative instincts and negative emotions

and that produces a negative thought pattern that's about five times more powerful than positive ones.

In surgery, in neurosurgery especially and also in vascular surgery and some

other areas of medicine,

when we have a diseased or damaged nerve or blood vessel, if it gets crushed

or burned or diseased or clotted or twisted or neuropathy sets in and destroys a part of a nerve,

then sometimes we don't have a choice and we want that function that the nerve

provided that movement or that thing that that nerve did if we need that to

be restored then sometimes we can't fix the nerve we have to just cut it out

and sew in something else.

My friend Jay Wellens is a pediatric neurosurgeon. We're actually going to have him on the podcast.

He and I are going to sit down and have a conversation next Friday.

He's the chief of pediatrics at Vanderbilt and he wrote a beautiful book called All That Moves Us.

It's kind of a memoir of pediatric neurosurgery and he tells

some stories about peripheral nerve surgery and how amazing it is when you have

a damaged nerve and you can chop it out and graft in another nerve and recreate

function when a kid has lost the ability to move a hand or use their leg and

it's incredible how you can restore a function.

We used to do that in Auburn once in a while we'd have a trauma or in Wyoming

even too we have a patient with a trauma with a crush injury to some nerve and

we would go and grab the cerebral nerve or some sensory nerve that's not as

important and move it and graft it in and over time those functions would return

and it's incredible how you can see that.

And the fact is you're wired friend, you are hardwired for negativity.

But negativity doesn't serve you well when you're in a situation where negativity isn't helpful.

I was in Baghdad one time, I was in the military, I was deployed to Iraq and

Jeff Poffenbarger, the army neurosurgeon, and I had a meeting and I had to fly

in a Blackhawk helicopter down to Baghdad.

I told that whole story in my book No Place to Hide, how we had to land on a

highway and intervene when a terrorist blew himself up and we had to carry him

back to the hospital and all these things happened.

But during one of the quieter moments of my time in Baghdad,

Jeff said, hey, let's go walk around the green zone.

And you can see Baghdad, the old historical city. We walked around and saw the

shock and awe and all the buildings that had been blown up, all these things

that we saw in the news during the war before it got deployed.

It was incredible to see all the monuments and the history and just this incredible

old city that had been ravaged by war and the effects of terrorism and mania

really of its leaders and then global political decisions to start a war and all these things.

And we were walking around and all of a sudden somebody started shooting at us,

a bunch of bullets zipped right past us and we hit the ground and before long

the guards at the gate returned fire and I don't know if they killed somebody

or if they just ran them off or what happened but basically a sniper shot at us and we hit the ground.

And I remember very specifically when I hit the dirt behind this little concrete

barrier the first thought I had was Thank you.

God that I'm still alive Thank you that that bullet didn't hit me and then my

second thought was What am I need to do to be safe? Okay, I'm behind a wall.

I've got a handgun I'm looking around like where can I run if I need to go where

did those bullets come from like immediately?

Instead of panicking and having my hands over my head and curling up into a

ball and waiting for the bullet to hit me, I just instinctively was thankful

that I didn't get hit and began immediately planning, what am I going to do?

And then I realized later as I reflected on that moment that that's not a natural thing.

Your natural response is not to give thanks and be grateful.

Your natural response generally, your physiological natural response is to be

afraid and run away or hide or let that fear take you into a dismal spiral that

leads down to inactivity and peril.

Right? Because if I just laid down and not moved and not tried to find my way

out, I could have gotten shot.

Right? third sniper had been in a position to see where I was and I wasn't trying

to get away I could have been injured but the reason why am I so naturally biased

towards positive positivity well I'm not when I thought about that and reflected

on it in later years I realized it's my father my father Wayne Warren a.

Brilliant man great businessman by the way has a kind heart loves the Lord I

have great parents and my parents taught me to seek the Lord in all circumstances And so...

But I remember my dad, he was a great public speaker and part of his job was

to travel around the country and teach insurance agents how to be better at their jobs.

And he had found the works of Norman Vincent Peale and Zig Ziglar and these

early kind of influencers and

positive thinkers, motivational speakers we used to call them of the day.

And my dad was notoriously just as a child from my perspective he was frustratingly

focused on positivity. If you're having a bad day and you're grumpy,

he would say, turn that frown upside down.

He would tell you how many muscles it takes to smile versus how many it takes to frown.

Just constantly, you don't have to be in a bad mood. You can decide to feel differently than that.

And I remember very clearly some Sunday mornings, I'd be tired or some Wednesday

nights after school, I'd wanna stay home and watch whatever was on TV or sleep

in a little bit. And I didn't wanna go to church.

We always went Sunday morning, Sunday night and Wednesday night.

And I would say, Dad, do we have to go to church today? And without fail he

would say no we get to go to church today We're glad that we get to go we're

grateful that we get to go to church today

Because we have an opportunity to go be with God's people and and with our community

and somebody will encourage us and we'll hear a good Word and we'll sing some

songs and feel better and he'll give us some fuel for the rest of the week He was just notorious.

Relentless in his decision to be grateful,

And that over time, even though it irritated me as a kid, because I was like,

I want to be grumpy, I want to be in a bad mood, I want to sleep in,

I don't want to go to church.

It would just, over and over and over, he taught me.

But then as time went on and I got a little older and more mature,

he kept pointing me toward the Word and all the things that the Word of God

says about gratitude and thankfulness.

And there's just almost an infinite list.

I'll read you a few of them. 1 Thessalonians 5.18, Give thanks in all circumstances

for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus. Psalm 118 24 this is the day that

the Lord has made let us rejoice and be glad in it.

Colossians 3 17 whatever you do in word or deed do everything in the name of

the Lord Jesus giving thanks to God the Father through him.

Psalm 136 1 give thanks to the Lord for he is good for his steadfast love endures forever.

Colossians 3 15 the peace of Christ rule in your hearts to which indeed you recalled in one body.

But all of these, there's millions of them, I can put up, there's just almost

no end to all the scripture around gratitude and thankfulness.

And so the idea is the Bible forever has been telling us God wants you to be thankful.

And why in the world would God care about that? I mean obviously he wants us

to be thankful for the gift of our life and and all the things that he's given

us and all of that, but why?

What's the purpose of him wanting us to be grateful? I'm always telling you

if you've been around this podcast for a while.

I'm always telling you that whatever science discovers almost always Eventually,

I think it'll be always Almost everything science discovers the Bible's been

saying all along God gave us all this information Even though our brains 2,000 years ago weren't,

we hadn't discovered enough or understood enough to know why he was telling

us some of these Things but the reason is it's good for us when God gives you

an instruction or a guardrail It's because it's good for you.

And even our theme verse, our decision about changing our minds and changing

our lives, we're 30 good decisions for September, Romans 12, verse 2, do not conform.

To the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind,

then you will be able to test and approve what God's will is.

His good, pleasing, and perfect will.

Changing your mind away from ingratitude and towards gratitude is the way that

you find happiness, and peace, and faithfulness, and hope, and an opportunity

to move forward whenever you're in any situation.

You got to change your mind before you can change your life.

Now the science backs this up, believe it or not.

The science backs it up tremendously. It's been proven in many, many studies.

I want to put a link in the show notes to a great little review article about

all the studies that look at neuroscience of gratitude.

And it's just incredible how your limbic system fires negatively.

It tells you to be afraid, to run away, to hide, to sit, to stop,

to cover up, to run away and not get engaged, and to be afraid.

Be nervous, be scared, be afraid.

Your frontal lobe can say, time out, I'm going to engage gratitude,

because when I engage gratitude, what it does is it kicks on dopamine and serotonin,

the two transmitters of hope and happiness.

And when you see dopamine and serotonin levels rise, you begin to see hope.

You begin to see, hey, wait a minute, that bullet didn't hit me.

Yes, it's true, I'm getting shot at. Holy cow, I'm in this foreign land across

the world from my family. I'm getting shot at, I'm going to die.

And instead of going down that path and just curling up into a ball like those

soldiers that they got killed on the beach at D-Day

in Saving Private Ryan, and in real life, by the way, but that scene in the

first of Saving Private Ryan, some of the soldiers were so scared that they

just sat down and hid, and they all got killed, right?

The ones that said, wow, we made it off the boat. Wow, we made it through the water.

Wow, we made it to the beach. Wow, we survived that barrage.

Hey, look, there's a sand dune up there. If we can just get to that, we'll have some chance.

Hey, look at that. We cleared the bunker. Hey, look at that, we made it, right?

They keep finding a way to go forward and be happy, and not happy in the battle,

but happy that they're alive.

Find an opportunity to look at what's happening. Find an opportunity to see

that you're still going, and as long as you're still going, you have a chance

to make it through, right?

But gratitude is the reason that you can start there.

Gratitude is the reason that you can find yourself there, No matter what you're

happy what's happening around you right friend, so here's the point,

The neuroscience is crystal clear that when you're grateful,

you see possibility, you see opportunity, your mood rises and your clutter clears

away and you have a better chance to drive forward and solve the problem instead

of succumbing to the problem.

Gratitude allows you to solve instead of succumb.

And so when you have a diseased brain that's been sort of bred on negativity

and the baseline negativity has been wired into your synapses and it becomes almost automatic.

And you can think, you can be honest with yourself about this.

Something bad happens, do you go down the rabbit hole and say,

now my whole day is ruined, I slept in, I overslept, now I don't have time for

breakfast, I'm going to get to work late, I'm going to be hungry,

my stomach is going to growl in the meeting, the boss is going to yell at me

for being late, I'm not going to get that promotion, I'm not going to make that

extra money that I was counting on,

just everything is going to fall apart, my wife's going to think I'm a loser.

Do you go down that rabbit hole and when you do there's your mood and your interaction

with other people help you or hurt you?

Do you have more influence for the kingdom a better influence on others or not

when you're going down the rabbit hole?

Everything's terrible. I'm having a bad day I'm not gonna make it blah blah

blah now your kid comes in and you're stressed and they want you to look at

what they Did look at this picture?

I do drew mom and instead of spending a moment encouraging your child You're

like, I don't have time for that right now.

Don't hit me with that right now, right? So ingratitude, that giving in to the

synaptic hardwired negativity leads to difficulties with relationships,

it leads to poor performance at work,

it leads to more stress and more strain and more dependence on alcohol and more bad habits, right?

But if you can break that cycle, remember the neuroscience facts,

synapses that fire together,

wire together, if you can break the cycle and you can say timeout,

I'm going to teach my brain how to see hope and see something to be thankful for in every situation.

If you can do that, then you have an opportunity to train your brain to make

new synapses to be more grateful in the future and that will lead to new possibilities.

Yeah, I overslept, okay, I can grab a banana and eat it on the way to work and

I can take this little shortcut and get there on time and maybe I can make it

instead of being late and maybe my boss will see that I'm hustling today and

I seem like I'm really on fire and I'm gonna try to contribute to that meeting

instead of just being worried about running late for work. And then what happens?

Then you're a little bit ahead on the emotional curve. You're thinking further

down the path of what do I need to do to make sure this day goes the way I need it to go.

And boy, I sure am thankful that I managed to wake up at 8.20 instead of 8.45,

because then I really would have been hosed.

Thank you, Lord, for nudging me even though I forgot to set my alarm,

right? And by the way, I've never slept till 820 or 845 in my whole life.

I'm not sure why I said that.

My point, if you can interrupt the diseased, anxious, nervous,

negative, harmful, automatic thought and you can chop that thing out,

you can't coexist with it.

You can't. It's like when I have a damaged nerve, I need to restore somebody's

wrist drop or something.

I can't do that by just sewing in a new nerve next to the diseased one and hoping

that they somehow get along.

You got to cut it out. You got to chop that dead, horrible, lifeless,

hurtful artery, vein, nerve,

ingratitude, anger, anxiety, you got to chop it out and graft in something better

that will lead you to better decision making, that will lead you to solving

the problem instead of succumbing to the issue, right?

You solve instead of succumb and you do that by learning to be grateful. G.K.

Chesterton, I can't talk today, was a great writer in the last century.

And he said, gratitude being nearly the greatest of human duties is also nearly

the most difficult. Listen to that again.

Gratitude being nearly the greatest of human duties is also nearly the most difficult.

He's saying it's hard. You have to train your brain to be grateful.

Listen to this one, 1909, Chester Tone said this, the world will never starve

for want of wonders, but only for want of wonder.

You see the difference? You can have a sunrise every day. You do have a sunrise every day.

You have a moon rise, you have a sunset every day.

There are beautiful stars in the sky right now, outside wherever you are.

There's amazing flowers and bees and monarch butterflies and birds and migrating

geese and snow geese and sandhill cranes in Nebraska.

They're out there every day around you. There are wonders.

But you can never see them unless you open your eyes to say,

I am so thankful that I got to see that bird right there.

I am so thankful, God, that in the midst of this hectic day as I'm getting home

from a terrible day at work that you let me see that full moon.

If you can learn to wonder and to be in awe at the things around you,

then you'll start to feel better.

Say, wait, you know, this problem I have in the context of all the other things

that are going on, it's just a problem, it's a problem to be solved.

It's a problem to be worked. and I'm gonna figure it out, thanks to God.

He's gonna give me the juice and the tools and the people around me to help me figure it out.

You know, I feel alone today and I had a rough time, but this prayer wall's

out there at wlemd.com slash prayer.

I've got community in my church. I've got people around me. I'm gonna be thankful for that.

Thank you for that flight of geese that flew overhead that just took me out

of my stress for a moment.

You can graft in gratitude, and that'll take you out of that negative neurochemical

downhill spiral and into a more positive and hopeful frame of mind and you'll

have an idea that it might be okay but there's a chance for it to be okay.

GK Chesterton said the chief idea of my life is the idea of taking things with

gratitude and not taking things for granted.

Friend, if you can graft in gratitude in any situation you will become more

resilient, you will become more hopeful.

He will become more automatically positive. You will, over time,

learn to overcome the downhill spiral that's so hardwired and ingrained.

If you can learn to graft in gratitude, that little operation, you chop out the moment.

You just have to sometimes say it, wait a minute, this is a bad situation,

but it doesn't have to be the end of me.

I can figure it out. God can give me the insight and opportunity.

I made it through the barrage somehow. That sniper's bullet didn't hit me,

and so even though it's true that I'm in a dangerous position here, there's still a way out.

There's still a way forward, and I'm so thankful that I'm on my feet and still going, right?

So learn to have gratitude, friend. It's a game changer.

It's cell brain surgery Saturday. It's a game changer. Let me tell you one example.

My friend Daniel Amen talks about the day his father died in 2020.

It was a terrible day. It was unexpected, sudden death.

Dad just, he just died. And Daniel was shocked and in awe and devastated and

his mom was sad and it was just a tough day and they didn't see it coming and

it happened and that night at the end of the day when Daniel went to bed,

he talked about it on our podcast recently,

he's got a habit that he does every night before he goes to sleep,

he and his wife have a conversation and they say, what went well today?

And they make themselves go through this process of just acknowledging that

even though it was a bad day, my father died today, some things went well.

You remember some sweet moments, some people that were kind,

some funny story with his mom and the police officer that happened.

He made himself go through the process. Why? Because every day is a day of your life.

It's a day that the Lord has made and you can rejoice and be glad in it,

or you can succumb to the sadness and just wallow in your own anxiety,

because there's plenty of that to be had, friend. there's plenty of trouble to be had out there.

You get to decide, this is the day that the Lord has made what went well today.

Thank you, Jesus, for those moments. Thank you for the opportunities to be grateful.

Thank you that we made it through.

Thank you for another chance to see the stars tonight. Thank you.

Or you can go to sleep wondering why it all feels so heavy and hard and meaningless

and problematic and why does it all have to be this difficult all the time?

And if you do that, if you go to sleep in that state, guess how you're going

to wake up the next morning?

More worried, more concerned, more anxious, more stressed.

G.K. Chesterton, one more quote from him.

He talked about how every time, every Christmas, when we're little kids,

we're grateful to those who filled our stockings at Christmas time.

But why are we not grateful to God for filling our stockings with legs, he said.

You see, we lose that wonder when we're children. and we're so grateful to Santa

Claus and our parents for giving us gifts.

And it's easy for us to say thank you, but when we get older,

we start wondering, why is everything so hard?

Why don't I have this? Why didn't I get that? Why didn't she say this?

Why didn't he come back? Why did I have to have this happen, blah, blah, blah?

And instead, he says, hey, just take a breath, zoom out a little bit,

and say, wait a minute, yeah, maybe I did have that happen, but I've got legs to walk on.

Maybe I did this, but I've got breath in my lungs. Maybe that happened,

but my heart is still beating.

Maybe zoom in and find something to be grateful for.

Take command of the little space and graft in gratitude, and that'll allow you

to take a next step of being grateful about something else, and that'll allow

you to take the next step of starting to look at the problem and solving it

instead of succumbing to it.

Grafton gratitude friend cc1 and sang a song called the goodness of God her voice is,

Unbelievable, and I just want you to have this little song in your head as you go through today,

They're talking about grafting and gratitude develop that habit of going to

bed at night and doing what Daniel Lehman does Well well today Remember all

those scriptures that talk about how important it is to be grateful and the

fact that your neurochemistry Reliably responds and improves when you force

yourself to think about things that you're thankful for.

This is a superpower You don't have to you get to as my dad would say you don't

have to you get to there's opportunity There's possibility.

There's hope there's always hope but you can't change your life until you change

your mind and to do that You have to start today The gratitude graft is a self

brain surgery operation that will give you the superpower of being able to navigate

any hard situation and find the hope in it and the possibility and opportunity in it.

CC1 is just gonna sing to us the goodness of God and then we're gonna be done.

Hope you have a great Saturday. Watch some college football.

Maybe I gotta go to the hospital on my grounds.

I've had somebody in the hospital every single day for the last nine weeks.

I'm going back in today. It's gonna be another busy weekend.

But you know what? I'm thankful. They have a great job. I get to help people

when they're in their hour of greatest needs.

I get to see the incredible nervous system that God designed.

Yeah, I'm tired, yeah, I've been operating non-stop.

Yes, it's been a stressful time, but you know what? I'm so thankful to be here

in Nebraska, to be helping people. Lisa and I are on this great mission.

We got an incredible team of people around us, and we can just graft in that gratitude.

Anytime we're stressed, anytime we're worried, there's a way to solve the problem

instead of giving into it.

Gratitude, my friend, grafting it in gives you that superpower,

but only if you start today. I love you, Lord.

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.