When the Bad Thought Turns Out to Be True (Self-Brain Surgery Saturday)

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

I'm bringing you back an old episode today because one of the foundational operations

that we do in self-brain surgery is something called the thought biopsy.

One of the 10 commandments is that not all your thoughts are true and not all

your feelings are facts.

And so if you want to change your minds and change our lives and use our mind

and our spirit to optimize our brain, our body, and our life,

and even our generations, we've

got to learn how to recognize harmful and incorrect feelings and thoughts.

So here's an episode about what you do when that biopsy turns out that the thought is true.

Sometimes incorrect thinking needs to be challenged, recognized, gotten rid of.

There's all kinds of operations that we teach to deal with false thinking.

But sometimes the bad thought, the thought that's troubling us,

the thing that's giving us a hard time is actually true. So what do we do then?

I'm going to tell you a story about some interviews that I did right after the

Hope is the First Dose book came out.

And the question kept coming up over and over and over about the thaw biopsy.

So I'm going to give you that back this morning.

We're going to get our minds on right about what to do when the bad thought turns out to be true.

And that's going to help us start today. So let's get after it.

Good morning, my friend. I hope you're doing well. It is Saturday morning, 5 a.m.

And the sun's not even up yet, and I'm here coming at you live this morning,

having some coffee and hoping that you are getting ready to have an amazing day.

I hope you're sleeping a little bit longer, actually, because it is the weekend.

I've got to go to the hospital soon and make rounds.

And if you're new around here, and you might be because there's a lot of new

folks coming on board, I'm Dr.

Lee Warren, and this is the Dr. Lee Warren Podcast, where we talk about self-brain

surgery, which is my way of discussing how the neuroscience of your brain and

things like faith and hope can smash together to produce real changes in your life.

When things are hard, when you're going through difficult things,

or when you just aren't making traction in your life, you need to think about it in a new way.

We always say you can't change your life until you change your mind.

And so that's what we're here to do is to learn how to change our minds so we

can think better, live better, and be more hopeful and more resilient because

massive things are coming.

Hope is the first dose in my new book. It's a treatment plan for recovering

from trauma, tragedy, and other massive things.

I spent all day yesterday, five hours

of recorded interviews for radio and podcasts all around the country.

Chris Fabry Live, I've been on his show two times before. war.

The Moody Radio Network is all over the country, and Chris Fabry's been rocking

the mic for years, decades, and it was just such a great time to reconnect and talk with him.

That episode will air on the Moody Network next Friday, and I'll make sure you

get a link to that if you want to listen to it.

Had a great talk about hope, and Chris is a tremendous guy and a great friend,

and just we had a wonderful talk that I think will bless you.

Also, Messiah Community Radio and two other podcasts while we're waiting,

and guys like us getting the message out to all their listeners, and we're grateful.

But over and over and over yesterday, friend, I was asked the one question,

what's up with the thought biopsy that you teach us as part of the treatment plan?

What's up with the thought biopsy, and can you give us examples of that?

And so we've always talked about that here on the podcast, so how to do this bad thought biopsy.

And so today we're going to go into one aspect of the bad thought biopsy,

and that is that sometimes the thought that you biopsy turns out to be true.

Sometimes our thoughts that happen after we have trauma and tragedy really are true,

and we need to understand what to do next, and it makes all the difference in

whether you're going to recover from your major trauma, your massive thing,

your major heartbreak, your loss, whatever it is that's happened to you or that will happen.

The thing that will separate whether you recover and find your feet again.

From the people that become hopeless and are doomed to live a life of being broken.

This thing that separates them is to understand what's going on with your thinking

and how to navigate it, especially when some of the negative thinking that you have is true.

What do you do next? Because you're in real danger if you identify a negative

thought after trauma and it turns out to be true.

You're in real danger if you don't understand what to do next.

So we're going to have a little more music from the Spotify playlist.

You've got three more days to download. Actually, the publishers agreed to extend

the pre-order bonuses for the book another week out to the original launch day.

We were going to launch on 25 July, and it got moved up a week because of the

possible UPS strike, and they were worried that people wouldn't be able to get books.

So we're launching on Tuesday, July 18th. We're going to extend the pre-order

bonuses to the 25th. So if you buy the book ahead of time, it really helps us

in terms of gathering pre-order sales and all that stuff.

It helps us a lot. So as a reward for

that, we're going to give you this two-and-a-half-hour Spotify playlist.

It's got all these hopeful songs, songs about heartbreak and pain,

but also songs leading us back to hope, ending with my friend Tommy Walker's song, I Have a Hope.

And by the way, congratulations to Tommy. His daughter Eileen got married yesterday. Congratulations.

And congratulations to Damon and Sarah Green, my amazing PA,

and his wonderful wife. If they had their first grandchild, night before last,

a grandson, more to come on that.

So congratulations, Damon and Sarah and your family. We're glad that baby's here safely.

So we're going to talk today about thought biopsies, a couple of scriptures around that idea.

And we're going to get that thought under control, even when it's a true thought.

And we're going to learn what to do next because, my friend,

you can't change your life.

Until you change your mind. Lisa's getting ready to tell us.

She's going to drop it on us. Some truth bombs that you can start today.

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.

That place is called self-brain surgery. You can learn it and it will help you

become healthier, feel better, and be happier. And the good news is you can start today.

Thanks, Lisa. Hey, so glad to have you listening today. I'm Dr.

Lee Warren, and I live in Nebraska in the United States of America with my incredible

wife, Lisa, my father-in-law, Tata, and the super pups, Harvey and Lewis.

I'm a neurosurgeon and an author, and I'm here to help you harness neuroscience,

the power of your brain, faith, the power of your spirit, and good old common

sense to help you lead a healthier, better, happier life.

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

and I'm here to help you learn the art of self-brain surgery to get it done.

If you like the show, please subscribe so you never miss an episode and tell your friends about it.

If you tell two or three friends this podcast was helpful to you,

imagine how much good we can all do around the world together.

I'm Dr. Lee Warren, and I'm here to help you change your mind so you can change

your life. Let's get after it.

All right, let's get right into it. So I got asked the same question four different

times in four different ways yesterday.

What's up with this thing that you call the bad thought biopsy?

So in the book, in the new book, Hope is the First Dose, it's coming out,

I talk about how to understand one major thing that's going to happen to you

after you experience trauma or tragedy or these massive things that come along.

One thing that's going to happen is your brain is going to start flooding you

with negative thinking.

And it's true. Look back on your life when something bad happens.

Don't you hear a voice in your head that says all kinds of things like,

oh, you're really hosed now.

Oh, you'll never get over that. Oh, that was the dumbest thing you ever could

have done. and nobody's ever going to respect you again, or she's never going

to come back, or you're never going to be able to make it, you'll never be in

love again, you'll never find a friend again. All that stuff pops into your head.

And what we know from trauma, from the research, is that negative thinking is

a natural part of the trauma response, and it's based on previous experiences

and feelings and thoughts that we've had that have kind of wired into our brains

over time and over the course of our life.

And all that stuff that you've experienced before comes roaring back out of

your limbic system I mean, I have restored memories to remind you that you're

a moron when you'd make a mistake or to remind you that you're really screwed now,

right, that you're never going to be OK again. All that stuff pops in.

And it's crucial to learn how to push the pause button for just a second.

If you came to my office on Monday, OK, you came to North Platte,

Nebraska and saw me in the office as a patient and you said,

Doc, I've been having these headaches.

In fact, if the next thing out of my mouth was, well, if you're having headaches,

you probably have a brain tumor. Let's just go to the OR, and I'll do a craniotomy.

I'll cut your scalp open and saw your skull open, and I'll go dig around in

there and see if I can find the tumor.

You would say, time out. Are you crazy? Like, you haven't even done a CAT scan yet or an MRI.

Don't you need to do some tests? Don't you need to investigate these symptoms

before you decide how to treat them?

You'd say, I was crazy, right? Well, by the same token, if I did do an MRI and

I saw a tumor or saw a spot that might be a tumor and I took you to the OR and

I just removed half of your brain to make sure I got all of that tumor out of there,

I would really be committing malpractice because I might create all kinds of problems for you.

And we might find out later after the surgery when the pathologist looked at

that tissue, we might find out that it wasn't cancer after all.

It was just an artifact on the MRI because you had a filling in your tooth that

caused some metal artifact or you bumped your head when you were nine and there

was a little scar tissue in your brain.

Maybe if I did this aggressive radical surgery because there was something on

the screen that I saw, that would be inappropriate, excessive intervention in

something that didn't need to happen, right?

So what you do then, instead of that massive radical surgery,

is when we see a spot on the brain,

we put a little tiny needle in it and take a teeny tiny piece of it,

and we put it under the microscope with the pathologist, and we look at it critically,

and we decide what it is that you're dealing with before we decide how to treat it.

Okay so i i examine the

tissue and determine if it's a cancer that needs to

be radically resected or if it's a benign lesion

that can be left alone or if it's some an infection that

i can cure with antibiotics or if it's a type of cancer

that we could cure with with radiation or chemotherapy and we

don't have to take that huge piece of your brain out the biopsy reveals the

truth about what we're looking at and what we're dealing with and therefore

it's malpractice to proceed with radical surgery before we have done a biopsy

to determine the nature of the thing that we're treating.

And here's the point, the punchline of why I wrote this book.

Negative thinking floods your mind after trauma and tragedy and massive things occur.

And you know it does already experientially in your life, the things that you've

gone through before. You are flooded with thoughts. Yes.

And our natural inclination is to think that the things that pop into our head

are true and that we react to them.

And generally speaking, over the course of your life, when you feel something

negative and you react to it, how has that worked out for you?

Do the Dr. Phil thing. How's that working for you? Go back and think about it.

And that's why Psalm 37 says, fret not yourself, it tends to evil.

Don't worry about yourself so much. Don't compare yourself to others.

Don't get stressed out. don't fret yourself because it usually turns out badly, right?

When you react to thinking, it typically reacts, it typically results in something

more negative happening, and the spiral continues down.

And I'm just here to tell you, friend, 5 o'clock in the morning on a Saturday,

I'm here recording this so that you, wherever you are, in one of the 116 countries

that downloaded this show last week, wherever you are, I'm here this morning

drinking coffee and talking to you to tell you this, when you have trauma,

when you experience tragedy.

When you go through some sort of massive thing in your life,

your brain is going to be flooded with thoughts that are almost all negative.

And you've got to learn the thought biopsy to understand what those thoughts are.

And if they're not true, you need to transplant them for things that are true.

The prehab part of the treatment plan is for those of us who are fortunate enough

to not be in our TMT yet, to not be in the midst of our massive thing yet.

And so we prehab to say we're going to read good books, fill our minds with

scripture, listen to great music, surround ourselves with people who guide and

advise us properly and give us good advice and mentor us properly.

We're going to build our lives up so that we know what we believe and we are

prepared for the fact that these major things are going to happen.

And so we're ready, right?

We're ready. And then when they do happen, we're more likely then to have a

plan in place to implement and take action that will help us instead of hurt us. Okay?

Remember the FBI hostage negotiator Chris Voss wrote that incredible book called

Never Split the Difference.

He said when the pressure's on, you don't rise to the occasion.

You don't become some super version of yourself and all of a sudden you can

accomplish things and deal with stuff that you never could before.

No, you don't do that. You fall to your highest level of preparation.

And that's why you need the prehab part of the treatment plan.

Sometimes, though, we don't get to ease into it like that. We don't get to prepare

because sometimes it's a trauma code.

Like I get called to the ER and somebody's had a wreck and we don't get to undergo

all the prehab and all the planning and all the testing that we normally do for elective surgery.

We got to go right now because the situation is emergent. It's life threatening.

It's urgent. And sometimes your traumas happen that way. They catch you off

guard and they surprise you and you got to react to them.

And I want you to have this plan, this understanding that you can engage in self brain surgery.

But the first piece of it is to be aware that when you experience these hard

things, you're going to have some automatic and negative thinking,

some ants, as my friend Daniel Amen calls them.

You're going to have some ants that pop into your head, and they are usually negative.

You're going to have a bunch of feelings that flood your emotional state,

and most of those feelings are not, in fact, real.

They're not facts. Feelings aren't facts. They're just chemical events that

your brain produces out of stress responses based on prior experiences, not this experience.

So you can't necessarily feel the difference between fear of something real

and fear of something that's just imaginary. And you know that's true already.

If you open your garage and there's a grizzly bear in there,

that's going to scare you and you're going to feel all these emotional responses,

fight or flight, are going to happen.

But if you just hear a noise in the middle of the night and your brain tells

you that there's an intruder who's about to murder your family,

you're going to feel the exact same response physiologically,

the same types of feelings that make you feel afraid because there's a limited

number of ways that your brain can make you feel certain things.

So when fear feels like fear, whether it's real or imaginary,

okay, and after trauma, you're going to feel those things.

So be aware of that. All right, be aware that you're going to feel and think

all kinds of negative things, most of which aren't true.

So knowing that, here's the thing I want to talk to you about today.

We talked about it all day yesterday, over and over and over,

and it just is critically important.

Some of the thoughts, and this is so much like the devil, okay?

You have an enemy, and if you don't believe in God or believe in spiritual things

or believe that there's a devil, just understand, and you already know,

you have an enemy in your brain.

And it might just be your electricity and your chemicals and the way that you've

evolved or however you want to think about it. But you do agree with me that

there is an enemy in your brain that tells you lies when you're going through

hard things. It makes it harder for you.

And sometimes those lies are sort of based on things that are partially true.

And that's when you have to get some wisdom and some discernment.

Because some of the things that your brain will tell you after trauma and tragedy

and massive things, those things are really true.

They are true. And here's a good example. Okay.

I learned how to biopsy my thinking. And one of the common thoughts that I have

that will pop into my head, especially like August 20th coming up,

my son, the 10th anniversary of our son dying, it's going to happen.

I'm going to have a thought, your son died, and you're always going to be broken and sad.

And you know what? That's true. If you if you could say that you weren't sad

about losing someone or losing your spouse or your parent or your child or your best friend,

if you even 10, 15, 20, 30, 40, 50 years later, if you're still not sad about

that, then you're probably a sociopath because Christianity and spiritual hope

doesn't remove sadness over losing someone. one, you'll still be sad. Okay.

So it is true that I have sadness that will never go away.

But what happens next is super important. And it's when I talk about the devil

while I go, here's what he does.

Okay. And if you, again, if you don't believe in the devil, you can think that

it's just electricity or your neurochemistry or the way that you've evolved

or whatever. But, but agree with me on this.

You're going to hear a voice that says this, your son died,

your massive thing happened, that person cheated on you, that person hit you,

that person came into your bedroom and did unspeakable things to you when they

were supposed to be your babysitter, okay, whatever that thing was,

it happened, and you're always going to be sad and hurt and broken by that,

and that's true, okay, it is true, you're going to, but what happens next is

that sneaky Sneaky devil,

that sneaky neurotransmitter, however you want to look at it,

says next, you're going to be sad.

So you might as well stop feeling that by having a drink.

You might as well cover, you need, you deserve to not feel that.

So you should shop online.

You should eat this bag of Cheetos. You should, you know, call that person that

makes you feel good with their body that you ought not to call because you're

not married to them and they're married to somebody else.

You could cover that feeling up with something else. You deserve it.

You shouldn't have to feel that.

So numb yourself to that. Well, that's a harmful response.

That next step past the true thought that you biopsied, if you're not careful,

that next thought can spiral you down.

And this is where crashers are formed. This is where those people happen when

they don't learn to critically think about their thinking, especially when they

have a thought that's true and they don't decide to take command of it and turn

it into something better.

This is what 2 Corinthians 10.5 is about. We demolish arguments and every pretension

that sets itself up against the knowledge of God, and we take captive every

thought to make it obedient to Christ.

We take captive every thought, okay?

This verse is talking about what you do next when you have a thought,

even if that thought is true, okay?

I'm going to be sad about losing my son, But that does not mean that I ought

to numb that sadness with alcohol or Cheetos or pornography or something else. It doesn't mean that.

It means that I should take captive that sadness and I should submit it to the

Lordship of Jesus Christ and allow him to help me move forward and heal from

that or redeem it or manage it in a healthy way.

Thought that's true should be next then joined by another thought that will turn that story around.

Okay, friend, this is really important. Okay, I'm here this morning to tell

you this, you have a choice.

The staircase after trauma and tragedy and massive thing leads down into the pit of despair.

And by the way, I love funny sayings and things that make me chuckle.

I love to say things in weird ways.

But the pit of despair did not come from the Princess Bride movie,

even though it's in there.

They talk about the pit of despair. The pit of despair came from the Bible, okay?

It came from Psalm 40. It literally talks about the pit of despair.

The pit of despair is a place that you go, you feel emotionally like you're

down in the depth of the bottom of the hole in the world that will never get

better. That's the pit of despair.

And the thing that will lead you out of the pit of despair is managing and taking

captive your thoughts and submitting them to something healthier,

I believe that thing is Jesus. He will help you turn that around.

And you can find that kavah, that cord, that rope that you can grab onto that

we've been talking about all week. Why do we talk about the same thing over and over?

Because I want you to ruminate on something that's true.

I want you to prehab your brain so you've got something that will pop in there

when you can grab onto and climb out of that pit before you die in there, okay?

So when the thought turns out to be true, the next step is to not let it then destroy you.

Because you are going to be sad that these traumas happened to you.

Remember what Gabor Mate said.

Trauma is not what happened to you. Trauma is your response to what happened

to you. And that is so life-giving. It's so true.

Because you can't get unbereaved. You can't stop being a person who lost a child.

You can't stop being a person whose uncle did that horrible thing to you.

The camp counselor did that terrible thing to you. My friend Jared talks openly

about his little league baseball coach that abused him sexually for years.

That won't ever stop being true.

But he's decided not to let that be the thing that defines his life.

He's decided to use that story of brokenness and pain and victimization to help

other people break free of that, those chains.

Because you can't stop having the trauma being a thing that happened in your

life. But you can define what you do with that.

And how it defines what happens next in your life. You can change that narrative.

You can change that brain chemistry.

You can make new synapses. You can make generational curses. Stop.

Somebody wrote in the other day when I talked about generational curses and how that's not a curse.

God's not putting his thumb on you. It's just a neuroscience fact that when

your parents experienced or did certain things, you're born with predilections,

and you're born with nature and nurture, and you're more likely to have those

same things happen in your life.

And that goes on for generation after generation until somebody finally marries

the right person or has the right pastor or finds the right friend.

And somebody says, I don't want to live like that anymore.

I'm not going to be the one that perpetuates this alcoholism or this child abuse

or this whatever in my future, in my family anymore.

I'm going to break it. And the beautiful thing about that is that God says,

yeah, the generations for three or four generations suffer from the sins of the fathers.

They do. do, but God's love will go for thousands of generations.

So once somebody in your family gets that right, for thousands of generations

after, they'll follow along, as long as you raise them properly, right? They usually do.

They usually do. Not always, but they usually do. It's a principle.

So demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge

of God, because you can't stop having had the trauma occur, but you can change

how you respond to it. And here's the beautiful thing, friend.

I'm looking at the big five foot tall painting of Jesus that Lisa got me.

It's Jesus walking and he's turned to the side and you can see the hole in his

hand and you can see his face and you, and the purpose of that picture is he's

risen from the dead here, but he still has his wounds. Okay.

And it turns out, Jared, I talked about Jared Stevens while ago. He said.

Scars tell better stories than trophies do. And that's such a good line, such a good thought.

And Jesus modeled that for us because he came back, but he bore his wounds, and you will too.

You can come back from the trauma or the tragedy, the massive thing that happens

in your life. You can come back. You're still going to have those wounds.

But the thing is, you need those wounds because that's what gives you the credibility

to help somebody else. People aren't looking.

Remember those old Renaissance-era paintings of Jesus and the saints,

and they're always like beautified and they're like shining and they've got

halos on them and they have perfect clean clothes on and all that stuff.

That's not reality. Jesus didn't come back and walk around and have this like

halo around him and this glow around him.

He came back with still the bruised tissue and the hole in his arm,

the hole in his hands and the rip in his side was not healed yet.

He came back because Thomas needed to see those wounds in order to be able to

believe that somebody could actually rise and somebody could live again,

that that was actually him because he knew that guy would have those wounds that he suffered.

And so if you want to know me, if you want to know who Lee Warren is,

you put your hand in my side because I got a big wound there from losing my son.

And so if you want to, if you want to take some courage and some hope from my

example, that you can still be alive and doing good things 10 years after you

lose your son, done, I'll lift up my shirt and you can see the big scar where

I had shingles on my right shoulder,

but you could see my teeth ground to gravel and all the ways that I cracked my molars.

And you can look at my gray hair that happened as a result of that stress response.

And you can say, yeah, okay, that guy got wounded by this thing,

but he's still going, right?

He's still trucking and you can too, but it starts with learning to demolish

arguments and take captive every thought. And even when those thoughts are somewhat

true, you don't say, well, if that's a true thing, then I just need to give

up. I'm just going to quit. Don't.

Use the story that the scars allow you to tell. Listen, sometimes the thoughts are true.

I have lost a son, and I'm going to be sad for the rest of my life.

But I don't need to cover that sadness up and stop feeling it. I need to live with it.

I need to let that scar tell a story that will help somebody else.

I need to be the guy that's holding on to that rope, that kavah of hope that's

going to pull me out of the pit of despair.

And I need to be holding on to it tightly enough that I can reach behind me

and grab your hand, too, and help you find your way to the rope so you can hold

on, too. And then you can help somebody else.

That's what I need to do. Get that thinking under control and make it be my

captive so that I can determine what happens next with the help of my healer,

with my great physician.

They can help me manage and heal from and move forward.

So that I don't always have to have a fragile heart. And you don't either,

friend. You can overcome those wounds.

You won't ever stop having the scars.

But they will help you to tell a better story. And it starts with learning the

thought biopsy. So you can do that self-brain surgery to get your brain under control.

So you can move forward in a healthy way and find hope.

Friend, don't ever stop looking for hope. Psalm 71, 14, as for me,

I'll always have hope. The Latin phrase, dum spiro spero.

While I breathe, I hope. That's how I'm going to sign the book.

When you meet me someday and ask me to sign your copy of Hope is the First Dose

or I send you a signed book plate, it's going to say, Doom Sparrow,

Sparrow, Psalm 71, 14, with hope, you're friendly.

That's what it's going to say, some version of that. I guarantee you.

Take hope, my friend. Learn the thought biopsy.

It will change your mind, and it will change your life, even when you have a

fragile heart as long as you're willing to start today.

Hey, thanks for listening. Please subscribe to the show so you automatically get every episode.

And if you like the show, you'll love my weekly letter. Check out my writing

at drleewarren.substack.com, drleewarren.substack.com.

Get the free newsletter every week for my best prescriptions for becoming healthier,

feeling better, and being happier through the power of faith and neuroscience

smashing together via self-brain surgery, drleewarren.substack.com.

And if you need prayer, go to the prayer wall at wleewarrenmb.com slash prayer.

The theme music for the show is Make Us One by Tommy Walker,

graciously provided for free by the great folks over at TommyWalkerMinistries.org.

Check it out and consider supporting them, TommyWalkerMinistries.org.

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

And the good news is you can start today. I'm Dr.

Lee Warren. I'll talk to you soon. God bless you, friend. Have a great day.