You Did it Again: Now What?

Good morning my friend, I hope you're doing well, Dr. Lee Warren here, your host for some

self brain surgery today.

We're going to give you a tool today, it's throwback Thursday and on throwback Thursday,

I usually bring you back some old content that hasn't been available for a while and

give you some ideas that we've talked about in the past to make sure they're top of mind,

that you have a tool accessible to you to help you and today is one that we call an

an emergency dose, like when you've done something that is producing despair or trouble in your life,

you're paying what Lisa and I call a tomorrow tax, which is where you've done something today

that creates you a problem tomorrow and you still have the original problem

that you were dealing with.

A common time that tomorrow tax has happened is when you were feeling bad about something

and you use some sort of numbing behavior,

like drinking or overeating or shopping or gambling or something that tries to make you take your mind off of it

and you get some dopamine to make you feel better.

And then the next day, you feel bad about that, and you've created some problems for yourself

because of that, and you still have the original problem to deal with, that's called a tomorrow tax, right?

Does that make sense?

You're paying a tax tomorrow for a bad decision that you made yesterday, and now you got two problems today

instead of one, and that's never really helpful. So somebody wrote in a few months ago, a woman named Julie,

and she said, hey, would you give us an episode called like an emergency dose?

Like you wake up, you're paying the tomorrow tax, you're feeling bad about whatever happened

and now you got a problem, what do you do now?

Like what do you do now when you're paying the tomorrow tax?

It's fine to talk about not paying them and avoid them, but what if you did?

What if you woke up today and you're in the middle of that?

And yesterday we got an email on the prayer wall,

from a man who is paying a serious tomorrow tax right now.

He wrote very eloquently about a pornography addiction that has led him down a dark path

that's caused him trouble with his marriage, it's led to infidelity,

it's causing him problems with his children, and now it's causing him some significant legal trouble.

The addiction to pornography led to real world behavior that led to even some solicitation charges

that he's facing now. And this man has found himself in a real problem.

And the root cause of it, as he diagnoses, is inside himself a temptation addiction problem.

That led to behaviors that led to having to deal with something tomorrow, but he still has

the underlying problem that he was facing that he was trying to cover up with the numbing behavior

of using pornography.

And he said, this is ruining my life.

It's threatening my marriage. It's gotten me in legal trouble.

It's causing me possibly lost relationships with my wife and children, and it could lead to my ruin

and I need help and I need prayer.

And so go out on the prayer wall, w1md.com slash prayer and pray for this man.

And also put up things that you're concerned about there, that there's a community of people all over the world

willing to pray with you.

But that just reminded me that we need a strategy in place because we're going to have days

Okay All of us are gonna have days when we make a bad decision and we don't handle something properly and we end up with another

Problem tomorrow and what do we do then? How do we find hope?

How do we find our feet again and not just get wiped out?

There's a verse in James 1 14 through 16 temptation comes from our own desires which entice us and drag us away

way. These desires give birth to sinful actions and when sin is allowed to grow

it gives birth to death. That's the bargain that we face when we give in to temptation, when we use numbing behaviors or whatever. And we,

even know it when it's happening, right? You really know when it's happening that

this isn't gonna solve your problem. That the thing you're doing that's not the

appropriate behavior is not gonna fix anything. It's gonna make you feel better

right now, okay? So right now you can choose this behavior, this thing, this

numbing behavior, this pornography, this alcohol, this bad decision,

whatever it might be to take your mind off the thing that you really don't want

to deal with right now. And you can make that bargain. But what then tomorrow?

You wake up, you have a headache, you're in jail, you have failed at the thing that you said you weren't going to do again.

And you have shame and you have anxiety and guilt and all that stuff.

And none of that, I would just submit, none of that is going to help you move forward and deal with today. So, okay,

You're paying the tomorrow tax. Got it. You're in trouble with your boss. Your spouse is upset with you

You've got this real-world legal situation or financial situation to deal with now you're hungover. Whatever it is.

Okay, you're not gonna hit that target weight that you wanted to whatever whatever it is big or small sin or not sin,

you now have to deal with the reality that you have the original problem and,

And you're paying some sort of tax today to deal with the thing that you used to numb it or cover it up instead of just

Dealing with it yesterday. So what do you do now?

That's what this episode is about Juliettles had this great idea of give us an EpiPen give us something to put in our pocket to use as an emergency dose

When we have a problem, I deal with kind of two sorts of patients in my practice of the elective stuff,

You come into my office, your back's been hurting, we make a plan, we schedule a surgery,

we have plenty of time to get all the testing done, get all the approvals, and everything

can be handled in a very organized and controlled way.

That's wonderful.

But sometimes we have to deal with trauma, with emergencies.

Slip and fall hit your head break your back You're in the ER and we all have to jump and drop what we're doing and run down there and deal with something right now

And there's no time to stop the blood thinners There's no time to make sure the cardiac status is okay, because we're in the middle of the problem right now today.

It's go time and we have to deal with it. What do we do then? That's emergency surgery

Okay, and that's when you need a trauma team,

That's when you need a strategy for what you're going to do when you're in the thick of it

And that's what happens when you find yourself my friend paying a tomorrow tax. So throwback Thursday. We're in it today,

We're gonna get after it. I'm gonna give you back this episode from a while back,

I think it was season 8 episode 10,

Julie Eddells inspired this emergency dose idea and we'll do this once in a while

Like what do you do when this specific thing happens and you have to deal with it right now today? It's the tomorrow tax,

Let's go. I got an email a couple of days ago from a reader named Julie Eddells and Julie

I don't know where you live, but I really appreciate this email that you sent me.

And I'm gonna shout out Julie for saying this. Let me get back to Julie's email.

Here's what Julie said.

Julie said, I was having a low day, feeling guilty for another sugar binge,

and I was thinking how nice it would be if you had a tomorrow tax episode,

easily available right there at the top for when you're right in the middle of paying that tax.

Let's get you cleaned up and moving forward again type of episode.

You did just X, Y, Z and it's over.

It's time to forgive yourself and move on, but of course with your caring nature

and gift of words to encourage and lead us back.

That led me to what I thought was an even better idea, an emergency dose, EpiPen,

a massive thing has just happened episode. What do you do right now when the massive thing happens?

What do you do first?

And today we're gonna talk about that tomorrow tax idea. Lisa and I have a concept we call the tomorrow tax,

and it's when you today are paying for something you did yesterday.

You drank too much, you ate the wrong stuff, you don't feel good, you made a bad decision,

you spent too much money and today you're like, holy cow, now I have to deal with all the stuff

I was trying not to feel yesterday

and the situation is still there that I was trying not to feel and I'm paying that tax all day long.

And you know exactly what I'm saying. If you ever had too much to drink,

you've had a night where you were gluttonous and you ate too much and you feel horrible the next day

or you sent a rash of text messages

when you were too tired and you shouldn't have and now today you gotta go clean that up

with your friend, or your spouse, or your boss, or whoever.

And that's a tomorrow tax, that you're paying something tomorrow for something you did today.

And I've come up with this phrase, and we actually have a t-shirt you're gonna be able

to get pretty soon, that says, love tomorrow more.

Like, I want you to love the promise and the hope of tomorrow more than you need to satisfy something,

or not feel something, or to turn something off, or to scratch some sort of itch today.

I want you to love tomorrow more.

Okay, love tomorrow more than this transient temporary feeling that you have right now.

That if you if you deal with it in the wrong way, you're gonna pay that tomorrow tax

So we're gonna talk about that today because of Julie's email and long preamble 15 minutes. I'm sorry

I'm kind of rambling this morning, but I'm just have so much I want to tell you and we're gonna get after it in just a minute because I want you to have a plan

I want you to have,

something to put in your heart and in your head when you're paying that tomorrow tax,

when you forgot that you need to love tomorrow more.

I want you to have an idea of what to do, and we're gonna get after it because you can't change your life

until you change your mind.

And the good news is 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. 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.

Like you wake up and you realize that you didn't do the right stuff yesterday.

You got a headache. You don't feel good.

Now, and you know, you're paying this tomorrow tax and it can be anything.

It doesn't have to be a sin. It doesn't have to be that you drank 25 bottles of gin.

And you're passed out and you're in acute liver failure and you're in the ICU, it doesn't have to be that.

It can just be that you made a decision or failed to make a decision or did or didn't

do something that's going to cost you some issues today.

Okay, in the work environment, for example, it can be you didn't respond to an email that

your boss expected you to respond to, and today you're going to be in his office or

her office getting yelled at and having to file a report and being behind on today's

work because you didn't get something done yesterday.

That's a tomorrow tax, okay?

It's also a tomorrow tax if you spend the night with the wrong person and you wreck

your marriage and now the next day you are dealing with that and you're having to try,

to save your relationship and you're paying a tax for the rest of your life because you

didn't do the right thing in regards to your fidelity.

It's a tomorrow tax if you have a couple of drinks and you get a DUI, and now you've got

a possible felony conviction that you're going to have to carry around for the rest of your

life because you made a bad decision.

Tomorrow tags. Okay?

But it's also a tomorrow tax. If you spent too much money, you were feeling bad about the fact that you lost your child

a few years ago and you were just kind of assuaging your grief by shopping and clicking

and ordering and buying too many things and you wake up the next day and you say, holy

cow, I bought all this junk that I don't need and I may have a little trouble paying my

car payment next month.

That's a tomorrow tax, okay?

It doesn't have to be the massive thing, the DUI, the affair, that you murdered somebody.

It doesn't have to be that you sent off an angry email and got fired, and now you're

out of a job. It can be these simple little things, okay?

I'll give you an example from my life.

I yesterday did that long interview, and I've been experimenting with fasting and praying

and trying to spend more time in a fasting and prayerful mindset.

And I did a 36-hour fast the other day, and then I did yesterday a 24-hour fast, and my

24 hours was up around 7 p.m., and I'd spent all afternoon on this interview.

And again, I'm not saying that about fasting to say, look at me, I'm fasting.

I'm telling you that I'm experimenting with it.

Lisa and I both are experimenting with it as a way to test out the promises that the

Bible makes about fasting and also to test out the biochemistry and the food relationships

that we have related to fasting, so it's partly spiritual and it's partly experiential, experimental

about what it's going to do for our brains.

Our listener, our cousin Will McDonald asked me if I would consider doing an episode on

the neuroscience of fasting and what it does to your brain, and I thought, in order to

do that, I need to do some experiments with my own body chemistry and my own spiritual

life and see how that works.

And so that's just a work in progress, and pray for me and pray for Lisa as we gather,

that data by studying ourselves. So here's a good example.

I did that fast, I was coming off 24 hours of fasting and I was hungry.

And I did all this interview all afternoon and Lisa's been out of town for almost a week,

her and Tatar and San Antonio.

And when she's out of town, my life gets very small. I talk to you, I create, I try to write and get way ahead,

I take care of the dogs, I go to work, operate, go to clinic, come home,

write, work, maybe slip out and catch a fish after the dogs go to bed.

And pretty much a small world. And sometimes I forget to do things like go to the grocery store.

Now fortunately, I have an incredible wife and she cooked way ahead and had all kinds of good things

for me to eat and I ate them all.

So yesterday, the day before yesterday actually, I'd done a 36-hour fast, I had a bunch of interviews

and different things to do in the afternoon,

a bunch of writing, I'm writing some articles for Crossway and Psychology Today

and all this stuff to support the book launch.

So I get to the evening of a 36-hour fast and I'm hungry and the dogs are tying me up

and it's just kind of hectic. And so what did I do? I ordered a pizza.

So I had a couple pieces of pizza, I think it was Sunday night, yeah, Sunday night.

And the next day I just felt awful. I didn't feel good because all that garbage that's in the pizza, right?

Well, then how soon you forget. So I did this other 24-hour fast.

Two days later now, I spent all afternoon on the computer.

I get the dogs to bed and deal with some phone calls and some stuff from the hospital.

And I just realized I'm kind of hungry and I opened the fridge and literally I've eaten everything Lisa left, everything Lisa made.

It's all gone. And the only thing in the refrigerator that's easy access is that leftover pizza.

And so what did I do? I ate it again. And this morning, guess what? My wedding ring is tight. Why?

Because there's all kinds of sodium and chemicals and garbage in that food.

And my wedding ring is tight and I had a headache that I know is because of some of the junk that's in that food.

One thing that happens when you start stripping away stuff and you stop eating all the garbage that you've been eating

and you start trying to lean down on sugar and all that stuff that we'll talk about in detail on the biochemistry side later.

But when you start doing that, you can start actually realizing what your food choices make you feel like.

One of the things is, if we always do everything a certain way,

we always have a glass of wine, we always have a piece of pizza,

we always have dessert after we eat something, we always add a snack, if we always do those things,

then over time you start to think that that's how your body is supposed to feel

and you don't think that it's bad anymore.

You don't realize that your thinking is a little bit cloudy and you don't realize that you feel kind of sluggish

and you think it's normal to feel tired after you eat and you think it's normal that a big meal

will make you sort of want dessert.

And you think that's supposed to be the way it is.

And we'll talk about why those things all not true later on.

But basically once you spend even just a couple of days not doing that stuff,

then all of a sudden if you add one thing back in, you can then study the effect of that one thing on how you feel and how you think and how you move.

And I can tell you from that experience of two different fasts now of more than 24 hours or more

and then just having—and I'm not talking about a whole giant pizza.

I'm talking about like two slices of pepperoni pizza, thin crust pepperoni pizza from Pizza Hut.

I have trouble taking my wedding ring off this morning because my hand is a little bit swollen

and it's a little bit swollen because whatever was in that pizza,

sodium, chemicals, bread, whatever it is,

affected my body chemistry to the point that my hands are swollen.

I didn't have anything else bad. I didn't have any sugar. I didn't have dessert.

I didn't have extra bread. I didn't have dipping sauce. I didn't have alcohol, I didn't have anything

except water and two slices of pizza.

And that's what the effect is on my hand.

And so I'm paying a tomorrow tax today, Julie, for the food choice that I made yesterday.

I hear this is a long story, but here's why I'm saying this to you.

If you're in that today, if you're waking up today and you're saying, holy cow, I did it again.

I've got this XYZ and I'm gonna have to deal with it today. Here's what you need to do.

First, if you did something that hurt another person, you need to get, apply pressure on that wound

and stop the bleeding.

You need to make the phone call, send the email, go visit the person in person and say,

hey, I really screwed up yesterday and I am really sorry. I said something to you I shouldn't have said.

I didn't say something I should have said. You need to go and try to make it right

because if you address a wound when it's fresh, you have the best chance of cleaning it up,

preventing it from getting infected, and helping it to heal.

But if you let it fester and you just try to ignore it or you hope it'll go away, it's not gonna go away.

If you try to, if you hope that it'll stop on its own, it won't.

I've learned, my friend Mike Leonard is a tremendous neurosurgeon in San Antonio, we

were partners in the Air Force, and he had this thing that he called Leonard's Law, and

it was when you're on call, do the thing that's, he would say, sucks the most.

Do the thing that's the hardest. Do the thing that's least convenient first, and it'll save you time every time in the

end.

And his point was when the ER calls you or somebody consults you to go up and see a patient,

If you grouse about it and decide not to do it and you put it off until tomorrow, inevitably

tomorrow there's going to be an emergency case and it'll delay and you won't get that consult done.

You'll get in trouble. You'll, you'll, you'll have a patient that's mad at you or a referring doctor that's upset

with you or you'll end up in the ER all day long because the problem you could have solved

easily yesterday is now much harder to solve. And so Leonard's law turns out to be true.

You do the thing that seems the hardest or seems the most distasteful in the short term

it almost always turns out to be better for you in the end.

Does that make sense? It's true. So if you're dealing with that tomorrow tax,

the first thing is take care of business as soon as you can.

Make amends, try to unwind the problem.

You know, if you're dealing with a hangover because you drank something you shouldn't have drank,

do something to make that feel better and make sure you don't put yourself in a position

where that decision you made yesterday is gonna mess today up even more.

Like, if you're not ready to deal with it, you need to take some time and get better

before you go to work and underperform and get in trouble, then take a sick day.

And I'm not advocating that, but I'm just saying, do something to make sure that you limit the damage

from today forward based on what happened yesterday, okay?

The second thing is to make sure that you learn from this experience,

to try to help you not experience it again.

One thing Kevin Miller said in this book that what drives you that I'm going to talk to you about on Friday,

that I thought was really innovative and I hadn't heard anybody say it like that before.

He said when he studies people who have undergone some kind of big life change,

that they had a bad childhood and they turned themselves into really productive adults

or they had a bad relationship and they saved it or they turned it around or found a new life, all those things.

Things. One thing that happens is he said that it's kind of a consistent thing

that he hears from people that they stop saying, gosh I would be so much happier if I could do X, Y, or Z. If I had this much money, if I had married that

certain person, if I had this job, or if I finally make it to the NFL, or if I if

I can do X, Y, or Z. And then over time those aspirations become demotivating

because we don't see a path.

Forward to getting them and that's the the research and science behind hope

there's been tons of articles and tons of good scientific research looking at

what makes people hopeful and the two things that are consistent are agency

and pathway so do you have the potential ability within you or in your world to

make that type of change happen are you able to do it that's agency is there a

possibility that you can do it and then is there a pathway where you actually

actually will do it. Is there a viable path that you can take? So not is it just your

body able enough or your mind is strong enough or you have enough finances or resources or

whatever to go after it, but that you can actually plot a chart, plot and chart a path

forward to have a pathway to get there. Those two things create hope, agency and pathways.

And I've told you memory and movement are the key elements in terms of biblical hope

and spiritual hope, and that's true, and we'll talk about that much more in terms of my book

coming out soon. But what Kevin said is people who focus on all this stuff that

they feel like they have to get or want to get or need to get or must get in

order to be happier almost never get that because it becomes demotivating

over time and they drink or they do something else to numb themselves to the

fact that they're not achieving their goals. But what happens is when he sees

people that actually pull it off they often say the negative that the flip side of that. Here's what I don't want anymore. I don't want to feel this way

anymore. I don't want to be unable to take my wedding ring off when I wake up.

I don't want to have my spouse leave me because I was unfaithful again and when

I promised I would not be. I don't want to, you know, develop alcoholic cirrhosis

so I need to stop drinking today so 20 years from now I don't have that. I don't

want X, Y, or Z to occur and so I'm gonna look for ways to make that not happen.

And that turns out to be more motivating.

And it's not a negative thing. It's to say, like Job said, like God said in Job 38, 11,

when he said to Job, do you know how to tell the ocean where to stop?

Like, are you the one that says this far and no farther? This is where your proud waves stop.

That's what we have to get to. When we look at this thing in our life

that keeps causing us to have to pay the tomorrow tax,

and we say this far and no farther.

I am done paying the tomorrow tax for this thing. And so you wake up today and you've done it again, Julie, or whoever's listening that

needs to hear this, you first say, I need to do what I can to fix this.

I need to do what I can to put pressure on this wound and limit the damage that I'm having

to deal with. And number three, I need to make a decision this far and no farther.

Now will you slip up again? And probably.

But you can start making some decisions around the flip side of instead of gosh I would love

to wake up every day and feel great and go for a 20 mile run and do a thousand pushups

and lose weight and become an Instagram influencer and win the lottery and get promoted and you

know all that stuff I'd love that.

But the fact is most of those things aren't really going to happen.

What you really want is incremental change towards your goal of transforming your life.

That's what you really want and the way to do that is to stop creating unforced errors

and to stop shooting yourself in the foot and to make some decisions that you do not want to feel particular things anymore.

Now, I read an article about obesity. I'm preparing this concept, this idea of what happens biochemically in our brains

and our bodies when we fast and when we get food choices better.

And in the obesity literature, there's something called— that they're teaching people now to re-engineer the food environment.

Re-engineer the food environment. And that's the problem I ran into yesterday

when I opened the fridge and there was only pizza in there.

I needed to re-engineer my food environment. A better choice would have been,

for me on the way home from the hospital, would have been to stop at Super Gary's.

We have a grocery store here called Gary's Super Foods. And Lisa and I, when we first moved here,

she called it Super Gary's once.

And that's, we now call it Super Gary's. So if you are at Super Gary's, if you work there,

if you own it, shout out to you. We love your store and we shop at Super Gary's

and we're proud that we've got two Super Gary's locations here in North Platte, Nebraska.

So it's Gary's Super Foods, but we call it Super Gary's. And so anyway, I should have stopped at Super Gary's

and I should have bought something healthy. I should have bought a bag of salad

or something I can put on the grill or something. And I should have re-engineered my food environment.

That pizza should have been in the garbage.

No negativity towards Pizza Hut, I love it, but it's not good for me.

And as I've gotten a little older, I realize it's not good for my body, it makes my hands

swell up. And as a surgeon, like I need my hands to be like super, you know, ready to go.

And I'm not saying it's this horrible swelling you can see, I'm just telling you my wedding ring feels tighter.

And the only change was I added that piece of pizza that had salt all over it and you

know inside it and all that pepperoni and all that chemical and all that whatever's in there.

Who knows what's in it, right? So I should have made a better choice.

I should have re-engineered my food environment. And that would have helped me to eliminate or avoid

the tomorrow tax of feeling bad for what I ate the night before.

Re-engineer the food environment. A few days ago we did an episode

where we talked about the horse trainer that said,

make the wrong thing hard and make the right thing easy. Make the bad thing hard, make the good thing easy.

And the old comedian Flip Wilson used to say, the devil made me do it.

Something would happen and he would say, oh, the devil made me do it.

Well, listen, the devil did not make me eat that pepperoni pizza.

The devil didn't make me place the order and have it delivered.

The devil didn't make me do those things.

I did those things and the reason I ate that pizza yesterday was because I was too lazy

to go to the store and buy something healthier and prepare it and it was in my refrigerator.

One thing that is true and it's probably true for you too is it's not likely that you're

going to get in the car at seven o'clock at night and drive somewhere to purchase something that's bad for you.

But if it's in your refrigerator right in front of you, you may very well grab it and

eat it to satisfy that short-term hunger or short-term thing that you're feeling.

You might.

But if you re-engineer your food environment and you spend a little bit of work putting

something in front of you that's going to be healthy, then it will be easier to make

a healthy choice, right? Make the wrong thing hard and the right thing easy.

That's the third step is getting this tomorrow tax under control.

You said this far and no farther and making decisions and then building systems and habits.

To help yourself achieve the goal of not having to pay the tomorrow tax anymore.

So instead of saying, gosh, I'd really love to wake up tomorrow morning and be the perfect example of myself

in Philippians 4.13, I'm gonna do all things through Christ who gives me strength, that's great,

but it's not likely to happen unless you do some work.

To prepare your life and build your environment so that it's more easy, it's easier for you

to be successful in those goals.

Here's one more example.

I told you the other day that I'm getting in this habit where I put my workout clothes on

the first thing I do in the morning so that I have one more barrier removed

for me to go work out.

It's like, when it's time for me to go, like there's a go time with my day job.

I've gotta be there at a certain time.

On surgery days especially, my surgery starts at seven. I've gotta be there by 6.30 to see the patient,

and mark the site and do the history and physical update in the computer

and all that paperwork and scrub my hands

and all that stuff so we can start surgery on time.

So I have an absolute drop dead go time. If I'm gonna work out for an hour,

I gotta be out to the shop by 5 a.m.

And if I'm not, then I've got either not enough time to get the workout in that I wanna get in.

Or I'm going to be late to work, which is unacceptable. So in order for me to remove barriers to help me achieve the goal of being in the gym by

a certain time, I need to have those workout clothes on when I first wake up.

Does that make sense?

So I put success in my way, as my old friend Rob Hatch used to say.

Well a couple of days ago I got a plastic bin, one of those bins out, that I intended

to go through my drawers and downgrade some stuff and give some stuff away to Goodwill

and try to go through some clothes that I don't wear anymore.

One of the things I was going to try to do while Lisa was out of town was to sort of

downsize my possessions around clothes that I don't need anymore.

And so we've been moving around for a few years and we just collected a whole bunch

of stuff that I don't ever wear and don't need.

So I had this stuff in a bin and I had it in front of our bed on the floor, which is

close to our dresser.

And I remember I said to myself, hey, you need to move that because tomorrow morning

when you get up it's going to be dark and you're going to walk right into it because,

it's on the path from my bed where I get up to the bathroom where I go and then into the

kitchen and sure enough I'm walking out of the bathroom and back towards the kitchen

and I ran right smack into that bin and struck my shin on it and so the first thing this

morning like I've been awake for three and a half minutes I'm dealing with almost falling

down and banging my shin against this box that is my fault because I didn't re-engineer

my floor environment.

I left something in my way, right?

I left something in my way that impeded me and made it harder for me to get from point

A to point B than I needed to get to, and that's a good example of what the Hebrew writer

was talking about in Hebrews 12 when he says, cast off everything that hinders and the sin

that so easily entangles.

He says, get rid of stuff that is holding you down and slowing you down.

That box wasn't sinful.

It wasn't a sin for that box to be there. It was harmful to me.

Nevertheless, it was an impediment.

It was entangling me. It was disenabling me. Is that a word disenabling?

It was holding me back from getting where I needed to be.

It was a stumbling stone. It was a block in my way.

And that's the example for us today. Get stuff out of your way.

Re-engineer your environment to limit the possibility that you'll have to pay a tomorrow tax tomorrow.

Does that make sense? If you have Pizza Hut app on your phone, take your credit card out of it so that you have

to manually enter it. So that'll be one little thing to remind you that, hey, this is a decision I'm making right

now. Is it really the best one for me?

And maybe that'll put a little stop in there for you. Maybe that, you know, instead of keeping a wine refrigerator with a hundred bottles of

wine in your house? Maybe don't. Maybe make a decision not to become a collector of wine if you drink it too much. And maybe say, okay, we're out at

dinner once in a while, we can have a glass of wine, but do I really need to

have a hundred bottles of wine in my house? Because what's gonna happen is

when you make a decision that you don't want to drink alcohol anymore, there's

gonna come a day that you have a rough time at work or a fight with your spouse

or you're grieving over something and you're gonna say, gosh, a glass of wine

would really help me right now relax so I can sleep better. It'll make my stomach feel better. It'll make me not as not as feeling as bad about this thing.

And you're gonna make a decision to engage in that behavior because it's in

your refrigerator. If it's not in your refrigerator, most normal people are not

gonna drive to the store and buy something they don't already have in order to satisfy that thing. They'll just do something different. They'll go for a

walk or do some push-ups or watch TV or pray or read or something and that.

Drive to have the thing will pass eventually. So just re-engineer your environment and that I think that makes sense. Does that help you? So say it with

me. Fix what you broke. Put some pressure on the wound and limit the damage. Make a,

decision this far and no farther. Re-engineer your environment and make a decision to change your mind and change your life and stop paying the tomorrow

attack because you love tomorrow more. You love tomorrow more and you want tomorrow to be full of every promise that God has for you and you want to

stop taking yourself out of the game and you want to make sure that since it's

not coming for you and it's not gonna happen to you you're gonna happen to it

and you're gonna make these changes because you want to change your mind and

and change your life and you want to start today.

Music.

Hey, thanks for listening. The Dr. Lee Warren Podcast is brought to you

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It's a treatment plan for recovering from trauma, tragedy, and other massive things.

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Hey, the theme music for the show is Get Up by my friend Tommy Walker,

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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.