Self-Brain Surgery Saturday #2: The Gratitude Graft

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 Graft.

It can be a good opportunity to learn how to chop out fear, anxiety,

stress, depression, worry,

all of that and replace it with a much healthier emotion that will help build

your a more positive brain chemistry environment that'll 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 gonna 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

The science 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're kind of trying to give you some more predictable episodes on the podcast.

So Saturdays are going to be self brain surgery.

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.

Just 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.

And 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.

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 them there.

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 tell 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 happen.

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 that all these things that we saw in the news during the during the

war before I got deployed.

It was incredible to see all the monuments in 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 and then global political decisions to start a war

and all these And we were walking around and all of a sudden,

somebody started shooting at us.

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? if their 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 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 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 and 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 want

to stay home and watch whatever was on TV or Sleep in a little bit,

and I didn't want to go to church We always went Sunday morning Sunday night on 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 with our community

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

songs and we'll 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 that 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 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 an almost an infinite list I'll read you a few of them first Thessalonians

518 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 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,

but 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,

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'm going 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.

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 and 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, 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 and I think I'm a loser.

Do you go down that rabbit hole? And then when you do, does 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.

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

they did. Look at this picture I drew of 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. 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. 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 the greatest, 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 Tunn 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 Sand Hill 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 and 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, you will become more automatically positive,

you will over 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 an 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.

C.C. Winans is 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 crowns.

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. I 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 does not,

yeah, I'm tired, yeah, I've been operating nonstop, 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.

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.