Self-Brain Surgery Saturday: Think About It

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

and I am here with you on Self Brain Surgery Saturday.

Today, we are going to change our minds, and we're going to change how we think

about the things we think about.

We're going to change how we think about the things we think about,

and I'm going to do that for the purpose, the express intent of helping you

to become healthier and feel better and be happier.

Of all the things God created, friend, of all the things He created,

you, the human, are the only one that had the gift of selective attention. What does that mean?

You have, unlike animals, you have been given an incredible gift of the ability

to select what you think about and to tell your brain from your mind,

to tell your brain, to tell your body,

to respond under your control to the things that you choose to think about. That's the good news.

The bad news is if you don't direct that process it will be directed for you.

What does that mean? If you don't take your thoughts captive,

as Paul says in 2 Corinthians 10, then life will take them captive and you will

respond and react to the things that you think about without thinking about them.

And over time your brain will create synapses to

automate the way that you respond to a particular thing

and the thing is this your brain is not a

fixed entity even your genetics we know now are not fixed entities how your

genes behave and perform and do the things that they are potentially programmed

to do are not fixed they are in fact under the influence of your environment

and your thinking and your experience and your memories and the events of your life.

Your genes turn on and off in response to the things that you think about the

the things you feel, the people you're around, the events and circumstances of your life.

And if you don't direct that show, it will be directed for you.

As my friend Susie Larson says, what happens in your soul happens in your cells.

And we know that to be true now, scientifically, without any doubt.

You have a gift, an ability, my friend, to choose how you live your life,

to choose how you think, to choose how your brain responds to its environment.

And today, as we get close to the end of the year, we just finished New Thing November.

I want you to remember that our goal in November was to cast off anything that's been holding us back.

Because if you believe that there is more to your life than you've been living,

if you feel called, if you know this is not how it's supposed to feel,

if you've been through some trauma or some tragedy or some other massive thing,

like we did when we lost our son, like I did when I went to Iraq and got bombed

and blown up and saw horrible things and came home with PTSD.

And I knew after a while when my brain was going crazy, I knew it had to be

possible for it to be better than that.

I knew there had to be a path forward after we lost Mitch. I didn't want to

live a life, Lisa and I and our children, we didn't want to live a life that

was defined by that one massive thing.

We wanted God to come true with

his promise that he could redeem even the worst pain that we could feel.

We wanted to change our minds so we could change our life and that's what I want for you too.

So November was about casting off the things that have hindered us,

the things that so easily entangle us so that we can run a race towards this

goal of becoming healthier and feeling better and being happier without the

restraints put on us by life, even though those things will always be true.

Remember, trauma is not what happens to you, it's your response to it,

because the thing that has happened will always have happened.

That's the bad news. The good news is you can change your mind and you can change your life.

So today we're just gonna look a little bit at how we think about how we think

and what thinking about our thinking in a different way can do for us.

And before we do any of that, my friend, I just have one question for you.

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

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

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

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

Well, this is the place, Self-Brain Surgery School. I'm Dr. Lee Warren and this

is where we go deep into how we're wired.

Take control of our thinking and find real hope. This is where we learn to become

healthier, feel better, and be happier.

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

This is where we start today. Are you ready?

This is your podcast. This is your place. This is your time,

my friend. Let's get after it.

Music.

All right, let's get after it. Hey, it's Self-Brain Surgery Saturday.

Today we are going to think differently about how we think, okay?

I want you to be honest with yourself. When something bad happens,

when somebody's mean to you, when you encounter some difficulty,

when you have something that reminds you of something in the past that hurt

you, what do you find yourself thinking about?

And what percentage of those thoughts revolve around how this is affecting you?

Remember, your default mode, we did two episodes, or three actually last week

about the default mode network and how that network is all about me.

It's me. It's the me show. It's how does this affect me? What am I gonna do

now? Why did they do that to me? What am I supposed to do now?

Why does this always happen to me? The default mode in your brain,

if you don't actively control it, is all about you.

And the problem with that is when massive things happen, and they will,

you can easily become defined by them and start to believe that that's just

what your life is. Like, oh, well, of course that happened.

That's just how my life is. I'm supposed to hurt and suffer and people are always gonna overlook me.

And that will become a defining characteristic of your life if you're not incredibly careful.

That's why Paul said, be very careful then how you live, not as unwise, but as wise.

You gotta be careful with your thinking. You've been given an incredible gift

and you can choose to direct that show or you can choose to have it be directed for you.

Which one sounds better to you? So if you get to the end of New Thing November

and you say, you know what, I want more for my life.

I don't wanna be defined by these massive things. I don't want to feel like

everything, my whole life is stacked up against me.

I wanna feel like I'm here for a purpose because Viktor Frankl in the concentration

camps of Germany he said, suffering ceases to be suffering once it finds purpose.

There is a way to redefine how you look at the events of your life.

And put them in the proper context and understand. If you're a Christian,

and if you're not, I hope that you'll at least consider the fact that science

and faith don't have to be enemies, as I'm trying desperately to show in this podcast.

And I hope you'll consider that perhaps you have wondered why your life feels

purposeless or why you feel like you could do more or you're called to more.

And I just want you to understand that the purpose of the human life has been

well-defined and described by Christians throughout the centuries.

And it's, I think, best put by the Westminster Shorter Catechism,

which was stated in 1648.

Okay? In 1648, somebody said, what is the chief end of man? Why is man here?

What are people doing here in the first place? And the answer,

from a Christian perspective, is man's chief end is to glorify God and to enjoy Him forever.

That's why you're here, okay? That's the general call on your life.

And I would just submit to you, if you're not a believer, I would submit to

you that when you get in your calm headspace and you listen,

you learn how to calm your thinking down, and you just listen to the voices that are there,

and you understand that there's a negative voice that's always playing,

and if you learn how to quiet that and then go deeper and listen and just listen,

you'll hear some echoes that tell you, Hey, I made you for more than this.

The Lord is a gentleman, okay? He doesn't come barging into your brain and take

over you like a puppet and tell you what to do.

He doesn't do that. He shows you a better way, knocks gently.

He knocks, okay? You have to open the door.

You have to let him in the boat. You have to notice that he's there and you have to pay attention.

And when you do, he will call you, he will make you aware that there's a calling

on your life that's more than just all this meaningless suffering.

It's not just a black hole in the universe and once the light of your life goes

out, you're just dust, okay? There's more, okay?

So that chief aim of man from the shorter catechism, what is the chief end of man?

Man's chief end is to glorify God and to enjoy Him forever.

That starts to open up your ability to answer questions, to ask and answer better

questions when things happen in your life.

J.I. Packer said it this way, if you ask, why is this And we always do, right?

We always say, why, God, why do these children die? Why do I lose,

why did my wife leave me? Why did this happen? Or why is there so much suffering?

And sometimes you just don't get an answer.

And you start to feel like the answer is because that's just how life is.

And I'm just supposed to be miserable and I'm just trying to gut it out.

And even if you're a Christian, you might say, well, that's why we don't place our hope in this world.

And we just had to suffer for a while and then we get to go to heaven and then

everything will be okay.

And that's just not a very happy way to live because Jesus said in John 10,

10, the thief comes to steal and kill and destroy.

The thief wants you to live that way. The thief wants you to be miserable.

Why, because that's not a very effective way to witness to other people if you're

just miserable all the time. Nobody wants that. Nobody signs up for that, right?

Jesus said, I have come that you might have life and have it abundantly.

So let me finish that J.I. Packer quote.

He said, if you ask, why is this happening?

No light may come. You might not get an answer, and you probably won't.

And I'll tell you, if you're screaming into the void, shaking your fist at the

universe after your 19-year-old son is stabbed to death, no answer will come

if the question is, why does this happen?

No answer will come because there's no answer that will satisfy you.

If your husband dies of glioblastoma, if your child drowns in the lake.

No answer will come if you shake your fist and say, why?

And even if you can diagnose it and say, well, no, he drowned because there

was no life vest, or he got glial by stoma because he got Agent Orange exposure

in Vietnam or something.

If you find that sort of an answer, then the next question will be,

well, why did that happen?

And then the question after that will be, why did that happen?

And then it'll start to be like, well, why can't we bring those people to justice?

And why can't we change these laws and make all this happen?

But at the end of the day, None of that stuff, none of the answers and none

of your solutions will reverse the process and give you back your child or give

you back your spouse or undo the brain tumor.

And you'll still find yourself saying, why does this happen?

Why is the number one question that everybody says that they don't,

they used to not believe in God is that because of the problem of suffering,

the theodicy problem, why would a good God allow bad things to happen to good people?

And we learn that the answer is because there aren't any good people.

We're in a broken world and everybody has sinned and we have to find a way to

live in that world and have peace and joy and purpose and meaning anyway, right?

So J.I. Packer hits the nail on the head here.

If you ask why is this happening, no light may come, but if you ask how am I

to glorify God now, there will always be an answer.

If you go back to the Catechism, what's the chief end of man?

Man's chief end is to glorify God and enjoy Him forever.

If that's your end, friend, then guess what?

You can start seeing that Hosea 2.15, the Lord will make the valley of trouble a door of hope.

And you always have hope because you know how the story ends, right?

I want to just bring this down into trauma terms for a second and tell you this.

I saw a post, it was anonymous, nobody took credit for the quote,

so I can't unfortunately know where it came from.

It was posted by Katherine Singer, who's a blogger and a writer that I really

love on Instagram and her Instagram page is open to grace Alaska.

She lives in Alaska, open to grace Alaska. She's been on my podcast,

I've been on hers. and Catherine posted this unknown quote, an unhealed person

can find offense in pretty much anything someone does.

An unhealed person can find offense in pretty much anything someone does.

A healed person understands that the actions of others have nothing to do with them.

Each day, you get to decide which one you will be.

Listen, if you can find healing, If you can find the way to think about your

thinking in a way to say, okay, when life happens and I say, why does this happen?

I never get answers and I'm tired of not having answers. So I want a different answer.

If you understand then, how am I to glorify God now?

That, okay, this happened. This massive thing happened, okay?

It did. These people were mean to me.

They never, I didn't get the promotion I deserved. I got overlooked.

I tore my ACL and didn't make it to the NFL. I got hurt and lost my career as

a surgeon. I can't do the thing I used to do.

My wife got glioblastoma and died. My son drowned. My son was stabbed to death.

My daughter was stillborn. Why is this happening? No answers come, okay? No answers come.

If you're unhealed, then you will turn into a cynical person and your life will

start to look like all the things that hurt.

And you'll be offended and you'll constantly be hurt and you'll never be okay.

And that, my friend, is not what I want for you. New Thing November was about

getting rid of anything that hinders, and I'm just here to submit to you that

it hinders you to allow the events of your life to tell you what you're gonna think about.

It hinders you. There is sin that easily entangles.

Now, there's a difference between just something that gets in your way a little

bit and something that's sinful, okay?

And I would also submit to you, James says, if you know you ought not to do

something and you do it anyway, that's sin.

And if you know you ought to do something and you don't do it,

that's sin. That's a pretty good working definition.

It doesn't have to be, you know, that you're into child pornography or something to call it sin.

It can be that you know you've learned through a podcast or a book or through

revelation or through study or through a friend, you've learned that you don't

have to let your thinking become out of your own control.

And you choose not to pay attention to that and you choose to let your brain.

React to your thinking instead of being in charge of it, that might become sin for you, okay?

Because God, once he reveals something to you, he expects you to take that revelation

and do something with it in your life to help you become healthier and feel

better and be happier and to avoid hurting other people by being one of those.

Unhealed people that is offended by the entire thing that happens around you in your life. Okay?

Now, it gets way more complex on the brain side, right?

Your brain operates in context of everything else that happens in your life

and every system and every network and every organ system in your body is integrated

in a tight way that's far more complex than we ever thought.

We used to think that we were just a collection of parts and that eventually

science would be able to say,

okay this part does that and that part does that and we can

chop this part out because it's not important and we can cut your gut

open and rewire all your bowels and make things

work differently and and that does work there's there's there's a

way that you can use science in that way to

understand how the parts work and navigate around them and that's pretty

much how the whole Western health care system is built right but

as we've learned more we learn wait a

minute we shouldn't necessarily just bypass the stomach

because the gut turns out to be in control of

a lot of how the brain operates and if we bypass

it then we lose that input and all of a sudden the brain doesn't work

as well and we have a gut brain problem and all

of that so there's a there's a rational basis to understand

that you are far more fearfully and

wonderfully made than we ever thought and there's

a good reason to believe that you are built in a holy and reverent way as a

fearful and wonderfully created integrated whole embodied person with a mind

and a brain that you can control and you can use to glorify God and enjoy Him forever.

Now before we go any further I want to remind you,

about our sponsors for this episode Peak PIQUE and Armra ARMRA.

These are two products that Lisa and I use every day.

I mix them up in my athletic greens. It's a nutrient probiotic prebiotic vitamin

mineral substance that I drink every day.

I'm not a paid affiliate of athletic greens but I do drink it every day and

I'll just remind you if you're going to add a supplement to your diet or any

kind of major change in your health especially if you have chronic health issues

or take medications or if you're older, talk to your doctor before you add something.

The Peak and Armour help with immune system support. They support gut and the

gut-brain interface, which is so important.

As I've told you before, that your gut is like a USB port. You stick a thumb

drive in there and your brain gets everything that goes into your gut.

If you're gonna build new synapses and change the way you think and become more

resilient, you gotta have good building blocks.

Because if you build a house out of terrible materials, and you're going to

have a terrible house. It's not very strong.

And the same thing happens. Nutrients that you put into your gut become antigens

that you create disease around, or they become building blocks for the things,

the proteins and the molecules in your brain that you need.

And so put good stuff in there. Peak and Armor help us. If you buy them through

our links that you'll see in

the show notes, then it helps us to grow the podcast and all that stuff.

So check out the links in the show notes for Peak and Armor,

especially this time of year when we're gathering people who have viruses and

we're sneezing and coughing and all that stuff.

So Peak and Armor, helping us get the podcast out there even farther and then

help you become healthier and feel better and be happier.

Okay, all right. So we get our mind and our gut and our whole body system and

all that stuff going for us, then that's gonna help us to have better building

blocks and to think better thoughts because we're building better proteins in

our brain, right? All that stuff is important.

So if our chief aim of our life is to glorify God and enjoy him forever,

and if one of the ways that we trip ourselves up with that is by not thinking

carefully about our thinking.

Then it would behoove us then to put some good strategies in place,

a treatment plan in place for what happens when we hurt, right?

That's why I wrote, Hope is the First Dose, by the way, if you haven't read

that, please check out my book, Hope is the First Dose.

It's got the treatment plan, it's got all the information about how to build

hope out of memory and movement.

We'll teach you that hope doesn't just show up, you've gotta go get it,

you gotta create it, and that there's a whole plan for what to do when massive

things happen to hurt your life and what to do then.

To think about your thinking and do self-brain surgery and all that stuff.

It's all there in Hope is the First Test, okay?

So get the treatment plan. But it would behoove you on a practical level on

this self-brain surgery Saturday.

To have a little plan in place. And I would just say that the first plan needs

to be to radically refuse to worry about yourself.

I don't mean that in the way of don't put your seatbelt on because you don't

need to worry about yourself. No, obviously, wear your seatbelt.

Obviously, take your vitamins.

Obviously, go to the gym. All those things that you're supposed to do.

But in terms of thinking about your thinking, let's go back for just a second

to Psalm 37 And let's remember this wisdom from 3,000 or 4,000 years ago.

Sorry, I didn't take the time to look up when this was written.

Several thousand years ago, David said this, fret not yourself because of evildoers.

When bad people do bad things, don't put it on you to be responsible for how

those people are affecting you. Don't worry about it, he says.

Fret not yourself because of evildoers. Don't be envious of wrongdoers.

So when you see somebody who's not a good person, not following God's way,

not living up to the standard that God said, and they're seeming to be prosperous

and successful, and you get on Instagram and you see the house they're building

and all that stuff, don't fret that, he says,

for they will soon fade like the grass and wither like the green herb.

Psalm 37.3, trust in the Lord and do good. Dwell in the land and befriend faithfulness.

Delight yourself in the Lord, and he will give you the desires of your heart.

Why will he, is that saying that he'll give you every little thing,

every shiny bauble and every mansion on the hilltop that you want?

It's not what he's saying.

You start with the first part of the verse. Delight yourself in the Lord.

If you delight yourself in him, your heart will become attuned to him and he

will give you the things that will really make you happy, okay?

And yes, there are some people who do that and they do get all those worldly things,

but they get there because they delighted themselves in the Lord first and that

was part of his plan for their life as some of Us most of us don't have worldly

wealth and success like that But does that mean we can't delight ourselves in

the Lord and we can't have the desires of our heart?

No He will give you the desires of your heart when you align your heart with

him verse 5 commit your way to the Lord trust in him and he will act he will

bring forth your righteousness as the light and your justice as the noonday."

Now verse 7, check this out,

Be still before the Lord and wait patiently for him.

Fret not yourself. This is the third time he said it already, fret not yourself.

Fret not yourself over the one who prospers

in his way over the man who carries out evil devices refrain

from anger and forsake wrath don't

get mad don't be stressed don't worry

this is verse eight listen to this fret not yourself it tends only to evil i

just want to ask you how many times in your life when you've blown up or you

spent a whole night worrying about what somebody was doing or what somebody

was saying or what somebody was getting that you weren't getting how many times

has that ended in a blessing for you?

How many times have you woken up after a whole night where you stressed and

chewed and worried and fretted yourself and got mad about how all these people

were getting away with this and why they treated you that way that you woke

up and the next day you had the best day of your life?

How many times? So I'm just saying from a treatment plan perspective,

look at how that type of behavior benefits you or hurts you and then just decide

to think about your thinking and take control of it.

Instead, because those stresses and those prompts to go down that path where

you fret yourself, well, they will never stop. Why?

Because most people don't live this way.

So if you want to become healthier and feel better and be happier,

you've got to say smartly to yourself, how am I to glorify God in this situation?

Because that's how you enjoy Him forever. You stop fretting yourself and you

put yourself in the place of what am I to learn from this?

How am I to glorify God in this? What do I do next when these things happen?

And that's how you stay above the fray. That's how you think about your thinking.

That's how you get your mind under control. Now, one way to do that is to put

some processes in place in your life that are inviolable for you.

For me, that starts with what I do first thing in the morning.

I do not get on my smartphone and look at my email app and let other people set my agenda for me.

I do not get on Instagram and let other people show me how I should be making more money.

I do not get on Facebook and compare my life to other people's first thing in the morning.

No, the first thing I do is read my Bible and I let God tell me the things I'm

supposed to think about for that morning. And then I listen to some worship music.

And there's two different ways to listen to worship music or even just music in general.

And you can spend time meditating and pondering on the word of God,

praying and communicating with him and getting your mind under control.

And if you use music to do that, there's two ways in which that can help you.

One is to use instrumental music, okay?

Instrumental music that doesn't have any words, that can be really,

really helpful because it bypasses the left side of your brain so you don't

have to get language involved.

So you can actually just meditate on something, think about something and let

God communicate to you and let the music be kind of a baseline to cut through some thinking,

but you don't have to have lyrics over there getting your left temporal and

posterior frontal lobe involved to make you chew on and process language and

understand what the words are saying and all of that. You can use instrumental music like this.

Here's a guitar piece from Carl Minor.

He is a guitar player who posts videos for a guitar store called the North American Guitar Company.

And just spend about a minute here thinking about Psalm 37.

Go to Psalm 37, read the first eight verses, and spend a minute listening to

Carl Minor play and just see what God tells you.

Music.

Isn't that beautiful? I love that piece. And the point of playing that for you, friend,

was just to give you a few seconds to read the word and have some music behind

it to cut out some of the background neural activity in your brain so you can

really focus on what God might want to say to you in that moment.

Okay, that's a that's a self brain surgery tool.

Use instrumental music so that you can hear words without having to process

somebody else's words, okay?

There's another way to do it and that's to actually use a song that's

got lyrics we're gonna play let's think about our God in

a minute from Tommy Walker and he's gonna give you some directed neuroplasticity

he's gonna say hey don't think about all these things that are stressing you or

all these people that are hurting you let's think about our God let's just

think about him for a minute and see what happens so if you can

build some stuff like that into your mornings okay it's gonna

help you to become better at thinking about what

you're thinking about because what happens is

like I said earlier if you don't direct the show

then your default mode network will come in and

get involved and it's all gonna be about you and you're gonna start reacting

to what the world does and you're gonna filter that

into your baseline set of thinking that

you're the victim or you're the everybody's a problem and why is this always

happening and become more and more cynical and more and more scared and more

and more afraid and more and more hurt and more and more offended because you're

unhealed over that trauma that you went through and the alternative to that

is to get yourself in the director's seat. Now, don't hear me wrong.

God's the director, right? But you've got to put your mind open to his direction

and you got to say, yes, I'm going to stop reacting.

I'm going to stop responding out of a baseline place.

I'm going to start directing where my neuroplasticity is going to go in a way

that will help me to think about

what I'm thinking about and get in charge of it and get on top of it.

And to do that, Let's think about our God. Tommy Walker sings that song.

Today, I just wanted to give you, this is 30 minutes of thinking about what you're thinking about.

That's a powerful and useful type of self-brain surgery.

My friend, you can change your mind and you can change your life,

but to do that, you've gotta get on top of this.

You've gotta get your default mode under your control. You've gotta fret not

yourself and start letting God give you the desires of your heart.

That's the way to do it, is self-brain surgery. It's consistent with neuroscience.

It's consistent with scripture. It will help you.

But to do all that, you got to 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.