0:02

Good morning, my friend. I'm Dr. Lee Warren, and I'm so excited to be with you

0:05

today for some self-brain surgery. It is Wild Card Wednesday. It's the first part of Action April,

0:11

and we're going to get after another one of our Ten Commandments of Self-Brain

0:15

Surgery today. We've already covered the first five.

0:18

I must relentlessly refuse to participate in my own demise. That's about self-malpractice.

0:23

I must believe that feelings are not facts. They are chemical events in my brain.

0:27

That's about learning to understand that everything you feel isn't necessarily

0:31

true, and you don't actually have to take action on everything that you feel. We talked about that.

0:37

The third one is, I must believe that most of my thoughts are untrue.

0:40

It turns out that the thoughts that pop into your head are a terrible and unreliable way to live your life.

0:46

If you react to every thought that pops into your head, you'll spend a lot of

0:48

time fixing things because the thought wasn't actually true.

0:52

And the fourth one was, I must believe that my brain is designed to heal.

0:56

If you're one of the new listeners here, if you came from Joni Table Talk or

0:59

one of the other places where we found a whole lot of new listeners lately,

1:02

then I want to just encourage you that life can start to make you feel like

1:06

you were born to suffer, like you were here because you were supposed to go

1:10

through a life that's just full of hard things. And even Christians struggle with this thinking sometimes when we believe things,

1:15

lies, that we're not supposed to be happy, that we're just supposed to sort

1:19

of wait it out until God redeems us someday and that our life here doesn't matter

1:23

if we're happy or not. That's a lie. And we're actually designed to heal. Your brain is designed to heal.

1:30

Your body is designed to heal. God doesn't want you to suffer.

1:33

Now, that's not the same as saying that he's going to take away all your diseases. That's not true.

1:37

The Bible is very clear that we are going to have trouble in this world,

1:40

but you're not supposed to suffer under it.

1:42

You're supposed to learn how to be able to understand that you have a hope and

1:47

a future and a purpose and a meaning, even in the midst of the hard things that come along in life.

1:51

And your brain can actually get better. You're You're not stuck.

1:53

So that was the fourth commandment. And the fifth commandment was I must love

1:57

tomorrow more than I hate how I feel right now. That's the no tomorrow text.

2:03

The no tomorrow tax commandment. And the corollary to that one is I must not

2:07

treat bad feelings with bad operations.

2:10

So you don't take how you feel and do the wrong thing in response to it,

2:14

or guess what? You'll end up feeling worse. So we don't treat bad feelings with bad operations. That results in us having to pay tomorrow taxes.

2:20

And we don't do that because we love tomorrow more. So today we're going to

2:23

talk about the sixth commandment. I'm going to stop making an operation out of everything.

2:28

This is going to sound funny, but we're going to have to cover that pretty quickly

2:31

because I actually have to go and do an operation this morning.

2:34

It's one of my surgery days. So we're going to cover this pretty quick. It's a pretty almost self-explanatory.

2:40

Rule, almost self-explanatory commandment of self-brain surgery.

2:44

And I'm going to give you some context for it and some ways to think about it.

2:47

A little bit of scripture, a little bit of encouragement.

2:49

But before I do that, I have a question for you.

2:52

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

2:57

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

3:01

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

3:05

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

3:08

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

3:11

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

3:15

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

3:19

healthier, feel better, and be happier. This is where we leave the past behind and transform our minds.

3:25

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

3:30

place this is your time my friend let's get after it.

3:35

Music.

3:40

All right let's get after it hey we quickly covered the first five commandments

3:45

of self-brain surgery and please understand i'm not being sacrilegious when

3:48

i say that it's just a good handy way to say there are 10 really good principles

3:54

that if you follow them you'll become Become a very good practitioner of what

3:58

we call self-brain surgery. Of course, that incorporates all kinds of different ways to get your thinking

4:02

better because better thinking leads to better structural changes in your brain,

4:06

which leads to better brain chemistry, better hormone production,

4:09

better body function, and overall better life, even for your people around you

4:13

and the generations after you. So important to get your thinking right. That's Romans 12.2.

4:18

Don't be conformed to how the world wants you to think and feel,

4:21

but transform your mind. That's my translation. be transformed with the renewing of your mind changing

4:26

your mind changes your life friend 2 Corinthians 10 5 take every thought captive

4:31

that's the bad thought biopsy that's the cornerstone first operation of cell brain surgery.

4:36

And neuroscience is now solid around the idea that the mind is separate from the brain.

4:43

You are not just a bunch of electrical impulses in your brain.

4:46

You're not just the product of a whole bunch of chemical and electrical processes

4:50

occurring in your brain. The thoughts that you have aren't under your control and all that nonsense that

4:54

the reductionist, materialist, neuroscientist wanted us to think for years.

4:58

It's actually very significantly shown in science now that the mind controls the brain.

5:04

It's not the other way around. Yes, brain is important. Yes, brain is necessary.

5:08

Mind is separate from brain and mind controls and improves or can harm brain.

5:14

And so we need to learn how to operate our minds connected to our spirit,

5:19

to the great physician who wants to help us, encourage us,

5:22

lift us up, guide us, help us to sharpen our thinking or remember what's true

5:26

and use our minds to handle and improve and process and perform with our brains

5:33

more efficiently so that we can become healthier, feel better and be happier.

5:37

That's the whole purpose behind self-brain surgery.

5:39

And the reason it's different from just self-directed neuroplasticity is that

5:42

we're going to add that spiritual element into it.

5:45

And we're going to submit that mind-brain connection to the influence and guidance of our creator.

5:51

And he's going to help us manage that in a way that's infinitely better than

5:55

just trying to do it on our own. That's why it's not self-help.

5:57

The only part of self-help that you do yourself is to admit to yourself that

6:01

you can't do it yourself. That's the way I have you look at it. Okay. So the sixth commandment then is

6:06

I must stop making an operation out of everything.

6:09

In my book, Hope is the First Dose, I told the story about a guy who was making

6:13

everything harder than it had to be. It's just making it too hard. Like some people just overcomplicate things.

6:19

And when you do that, you can become overwhelmingly frustrated and can become

6:23

sort of bound up so much in the way that you're trying to solve this problem

6:26

that it becomes impossible and you get frustrated and stressed out and it seems too hard.

6:32

Back in my training in the early 2000s, late 90s, early 2000s,

6:38

I was in Pittsburgh, and I was training under a world-famous neurosurgeon.

6:42

When I say world-famous, I mean literally like every neurosurgeon in the world

6:45

knew about Peter Gennetta. Everybody heard of him. People came from all over the world to see him and have

6:51

facial, if he had a facial pain syndrome called trigeminal neuralgia or a facial

6:56

movement disorder called hemifacial spasm. There was nobody in the world more sort of experienced or successful in treating

7:02

those conditions with brainstem surgery than Peter Ginetis.

7:06

I had the incredible honor to study under him and a bunch of other world-class

7:10

neurosurgeons, and I learned so much from Dr. Ginetis. And Dr.

7:13

Giannetta was so famous that one of his best friends was the late poet Maya Angelou.

7:18

When Lisa and I went to Dr. Giannetta's retirement ceremony birthday party in

7:23

Pittsburgh a few years ago, Maya Angelou spoke at his party.

7:27

That's how famous he was. Everybody knew Peter Giannetta.

7:31

And so Giannetta had this famous saying, and he would come into the operating

7:35

room. Of course, the residents, I was a senior resident when Janetta was there,

7:39

and we were responsible for getting the patient to the operating room and getting

7:43

them safely on the table and in the right position.

7:45

To do cranial nerve surgery, for example, you have to be in this lateral position

7:49

where you're lying on your side. And to do that safely, there's all kinds of things we have to do to protect

7:54

you and make sure you're not going to fall, but also that you're not lying on

7:57

a nerve that could be crushed or injure your arm or something like that.

8:00

So we have all these positioning things. It takes forever.

8:02

It takes an hour sometimes to get the patient positioned safely and properly.

8:07

And then we cut the hair and prep the skin and do all the things to get ready for surgery.

8:12

Then we put the drapes on and we make the incision and we start to drill the

8:16

bone behind the ear and do all these things to prepare for the time when genetic

8:20

comes in and does the 10 or 15 minutes of work that he needs to do to move the

8:25

artery or vein that's pressing on the nerve that's causing the problem and teach us how to do that.

8:29

So we have like an hour and a half or two hours or sometimes longer of work

8:34

that we've done before genetic comes in to do his part that's the real delicate

8:39

piece and then to train us to do it so that we can become able to do those operations

8:43

on our own over time. It takes years to learn how to do that safely.

8:47

Talking about the nerve that moves your face is about the size of a bunch of

8:51

your hairs bound together. So a tiny little nerve being compressed by a tiny little artery that's about

8:56

the same size, about the diameter of your ballpoint pen at the end of your ballpoint pen.

9:01

And if you break that artery or crush it or kink it, the patient will have a stroke and die.

9:06

So it's incredibly delicate work. So that's why it takes so long to learn how

9:09

to do this stuff. That's why we train for seven or eight or ten years sometimes.

9:13

And so, Janetta would come in after we've done all this work,

9:16

and we were working so hard to get things ready for him, and he would say,

9:20

he would look at one little thing that he didn't like, how you set up the retractor

9:24

that was not quite as efficient as he wanted, or how you were sitting,

9:27

or the light wasn't quite right, and you were craning your neck wrong.

9:30

He would be doing something he didn't like, and he would say,

9:32

hey, don't make an operation out of it. And he was basically saying, you're doing surgery, but there's a way to do it

9:39

where it won't feel so stressful or so complicated.

9:42

You're overcomplicating things. And he was all about efficiency and sort of

9:48

carefulness and setting up things in a way that would make a level path,

9:52

as the Bible would say, and make a smooth operation out of this big,

9:56

complicated, difficult procedure. Procedure because the fact is sometimes you're doing something that's hard sometimes

10:02

you're doing something that's dangerous sometimes you're doing something where

10:05

the stakes are really high, but there's always a way to do it where things are more efficient things are

10:12

less stressful things are just a little easier a little little more manageable

10:16

a little more navigable there's a set of things that we learn about in medical

10:20

school there are these principles to help us us not sort of make an operation out of everything.

10:25

One of them is called economy of motion.

10:29

And that's how, if you're watching two different surgeons operate,

10:32

there's always the surgeon who looks like they're in a frenzy.

10:35

They're going super fast. They're yelling at everybody.

10:38

They're throwing things. Their hands are flying all over the place and they

10:41

look like they're going really fast. And so if you're watching on television and they're doing this operation,

10:46

the surgeon's flying around and all that stuff, you might think that the guy

10:49

going super fast is the better surgeon.

10:52

But there's another surgeon who's, they look almost effortless.

10:56

Their movements are slow. They don't seem to be stressed out. They're not going as quickly.

11:02

And you would watch that person from afar and you might say,

11:05

gosh, that person has really taken their time. They're slow.

11:07

They're not as fast as that other one. They must not be as competent.

11:10

They must not be as talented. But the truth is, as you watch surgeons, as you go through your training,

11:15

you begin to realize that there's some surgeons who they can get the job done

11:20

in 10 fewer steps than the other person.

11:23

And they can be much more sort of delicate and efficient and elegant with their movements.

11:28

And they can make a stitch and then use the forcep to grab the needle and reposition

11:34

the needle holder and never have to take their hands away from the patient.

11:38

You see people on television when they're sewing and they're making sutures

11:42

and they always really exaggerate the hand motion and they pull pull the stitch

11:46

way out of the patient's body and all of that, because that's good for television.

11:49

But a really good surgeon, you almost never, you almost can't perceive their

11:53

hands moving, their sewing, because they're keeping things really close to the patient.

11:57

They're being very efficient with their movement. And that's called the economy of motion.

12:01

The special forces soldiers used to say, or they still say probably,

12:05

slow is smooth and smooth is fast.

12:09

So when you do something, you do it very carefully, you do it diligently,

12:12

you do it with a plan, and it turns out to be more efficient and faster in the

12:16

end than going super fast and tearing a vein and having bleeding and having

12:20

to stop that and breaking a knot because you're tying too fast and you put too

12:24

much stress on the suture and it pops and all that stuff.

12:27

You end up costing yourself time when you go too fast. And that's what Gennetto

12:30

was trying to get at when he would say, hey, don't make an operation on it.

12:34

You set your retractor up this way once at the start, you won't have to move

12:37

it 10 times during the surgery. You set your chair here and put the light in this spot, you won't have to adjust

12:42

the chair or the light, that's going to save you five minutes during a 60-minute

12:45

operation. If you do that 10 times during the day, then you've saved almost

12:49

an hour because you've been just a little bit more efficient.

12:52

Your economy of motion was something you had to think about and plan out and prepare for.

12:57

And so when you're in the middle of an operation, you need to sort of be aware

13:02

that there's a way to do that where it doesn't look like you're making an operation

13:06

out of everything. thing.

13:08

And so there's another set of principles, Halstead. William Stuart Halstead

13:12

was a famous general surgeon in Baltimore, Johns Hopkins, in the early part of the 20th century.

13:17

And he was one of the first people to figure out about surgical infections and

13:21

about how to do things in a way that would reduce complications and infections.

13:26

And he was the first person to use sterilized gloves in the operating room and things like that.

13:30

He really made a lot of advancements of sort of the academic side of how to

13:34

think about doing an operation in a way that that would result in fewer complications.

13:39

So Halstead set out these principles and wrote about the ideas behind how to

13:44

do surgery in a more successful way and set out this sort of first academic

13:48

sort of look at how we can proceed through an operation and expect to have a better outcome.

13:54

And Halstead's principles were things like, hey, they seem so simple now,

13:58

by the way, looking back in time, but back then it was sort of the idea of go

14:02

really fast and try to get your patient out of the operating room so they don't bleed to death.

14:06

But Halstead came along and said, wait, let's write some papers and let's set

14:09

out some ideas that everybody can follow. And if we all do things in this particular way, then we'll have better outcomes.

14:16

And so Halstead's principles were simple things like handle tissue gently.

14:20

Like don't grab the skin with your forcep and crush it so it doesn't get good

14:23

blood supply because then it won't heal properly after you sew the wound up.

14:27

So handle tissue gently and don't leave a bunch of empty space in the wound

14:31

that's going to fill up with blood and get infected and turn into a hematoma.

14:34

Like get rid of dead space in your incisions and and

14:37

respect the anatomy that's already there

14:40

don't go creating a whole bunch of craziness in your closure that's not supposed

14:44

to be there or it won't heal properly things like that so halstead put all these

14:48

ideas down to say hey when you're planning an operation and when you're carrying

14:52

out an operation follow some particular steps and the operation will be more

14:57

efficient it'll also have a better outcome.

15:00

Now, why am I talking about surgery so much? I'm just saying that in our lives,

15:05

we're all performing operations all the time, not only in our head with neuroplasticity

15:09

and all of that, but we're also just doing stuff all day long.

15:13

Many times that we find ourselves beating our heads against the wall because

15:16

it feels like we're not making progress. We want to find somebody to blame or we want to find some reason why things

15:22

aren't going our way and we always look for excuses and all of that.

15:24

But I would just encourage you today, if you're going to say,

15:28

what's one little shift that I can make in my life that will make things better for me?

15:33

One of them is stop making an operation out of everything.

15:36

And to do that, you have to back up a step and zoom out of your perspective

15:42

of how this particular thing has been going on.

15:44

And you say, what perspective shift could I make here

15:48

that would allow me to view this process in a little bit more from a different

15:53

angle that would allow me to look at it in a different way that would make it

15:56

more efficient for me to think through it ahead of time so that when I get back

15:59

into this situation that I will inevitably get into later today,

16:02

that I can have a different outcome than the one I've always had.

16:06

Because remember, one of our other rules is what got me here won't get me there.

16:10

If I keep doing the same thing over and over and I get to this place where I

16:13

say, this just isn't working. And then I do the same thing over again and it doesn't work.

16:18

And I have to say, wait a minute, what got me here won't get me there.

16:21

I've got to swap chairs. And as a self-brain surgeon, at some point you have

16:25

to say, wait a minute, I'm the patient here. This is my life and my mind and my brain I'm talking about.

16:31

But I'm also the doctor because I can apply these principles of self-brain surgery.

16:36

I can take every thought captive. I can learn to let Jesus transform my mind and I can change my mind.

16:41

But if I do that, I have to change the chair chair that I'm sitting in.

16:45

If you come to my office tomorrow and I'm sitting in the doctor's chair and

16:49

you're sitting on the exam table, at some point you've got to say,

16:52

wait, I've got to get up off this exam table and I've got to sit over there where Dr. Warren is.

16:56

And I've got to look at my life from the perspective of how do I apply these

16:59

principles so that I can operate my life in a different way so that I can doctor

17:04

myself to get things better. And I'm not saying you do it all yourself.

17:08

Of course, you know that I don't think that.

17:10

I'm saying you've got to get get your mind in their position where you can apply

17:13

these principles and let God do the things that he wants to do.

17:16

And if it all feels too hard, and if it all feels too difficult,

17:20

maybe you need some economy of motion.

17:23

Maybe you need to stop making an operation out of it.

17:27

Maybe you need to just say, wait a minute, the way I'm thinking about this problem,

17:31

the frustration that I'm feeling,

17:33

the way that I keep getting myself into the same area of this issue.

17:37

I need to think differently about what steps I took to get to this place.

17:42

And I need to just look at that operation a little bit differently.

17:45

And maybe there's some steps I can take that will not get me back to the exact same impacts.

17:52

Does that make sense? So there's a scripture in Isaiah chapter 30,

17:57

15, where he says, in returning to me and rest, you shall be saved in quietness

18:05

and confident trust is your strength. When you get to this place where you're beating your head against the wall and

18:10

it seems so hard and you're like, God, why can't this feel different?

18:13

Why does my life always feel this way? Why is everything so hard?

18:16

He says, wait, stop. Come back to me for a minute.

18:18

Go back to your professor and say, say, hey, help me here.

18:23

So when I was in the OR with Dr. Janetta and I would get into a bind and everything

18:26

seemed hard and the retractor wasn't working and things were bleeding,

18:29

he would be patient with me. He would watch me for a while. He would give me a hard time,

18:32

tell me I was making an operation out of it, but he would leave his hands away and let me do the work.

18:37

And then finally, I would say, Dr. Janetta, I need some help here.

18:39

I can't quite get this figured out. And he would very gently just kind of put his hands on mine or reach around

18:46

and change the angle just a little bit or turn my body just a tiny bit or adjust

18:50

the microscope just a little bit. And all of a sudden, everything was right before me because I returned to my

18:57

professor and I said, professor, I need some help here.

19:00

And he would say, just relax, take a breath, don't make an operation out of

19:03

it. Let me show you what to do here. And then before long, I could do that step of it myself. It would be a little

19:08

farther into the problem before I got stuck again because Because I went back

19:13

to my professor and he helped me navigate that issue.

19:16

And I learned a better way to perform that part of the operation.

19:19

I didn't operate myself back into the same hole that I had been in before. Does that make sense?

19:25

Because we're learning how not to make an operation out of everything.

19:29

And the Bible says in repentance and rest is your salvation and quietness.

19:33

Trust is your strength. So the idea is if you get yourself worn out and you

19:39

keep trying over and over and over and over and you find yourself in the same

19:42

spot, in the same operation, looking at the problem from the same way, maybe it's not that the problem is unsolvable.

19:49

Maybe it's not that you need to fire off an angry email and blast everybody

19:53

and tell everybody why it's their fault and all that.

19:55

Maybe you need to just relax and call on the professor and reevaluate the operation

20:02

and look at the steps that you took to get to this particular place again.

20:06

And why does this always happen to me over and over and maybe just shift your

20:10

perspective just a little bit. I'm writing right now, I just wrote a chapter in my new book about the difference

20:16

between perception and perspective.

20:19

And that's what I'm going to leave you with today because I got to go to the

20:21

operating room and literally make an operation out of some stuff.

20:24

So the difference between perception and perspective. Perception is the way

20:28

that you are seeing the situation in front of you.

20:32

And perception comes with all kinds of baggage. It comes with your worldview,

20:37

your past, your previous experience, your expectations of of the moment,

20:42

your genetics, your heritage, your traumas, your tragedies, your massive things.

20:46

All of that leads to the way that you're seeing the situation.

20:49

That's why we talk about on the Spiritual Brain Surgery Podcast,

20:52

the difference between exegesis and eisegesis.

20:55

Exegesis is a diligent reading of something, particularly scripture,

20:59

with an open mind to see what the text actually says in different ways that

21:03

you can apply it to your life. Eisegesis is the reading of something, particularly scripture,

21:08

with your own set of lenses and filters in front of you to try to make the text

21:13

say what you want it to say. And the problem with reading the Bible or anything else with that idea is that

21:18

you're only going to get out of it what you expect to get out of it.

21:21

We know that from quantum physics. When you look at something with a particular

21:25

viewpoint, that's what you're going to get out of it.

21:27

It just turns out to be true that what you think you're going to get from an

21:31

experiment often turns out to be what you get.

21:33

If you come to it with an an open mind, and you allow it to show you what's

21:37

there, then it can teach you something, okay?

21:41

So, when we get to looking at a problem and having the same experience and having

21:46

the same result every time and working ourselves into a tizzy and wearing ourselves

21:50

out and being completely frustrated and stressed out all the time,

21:54

we have to say, wait a minute, am I operating out of perception here?

21:57

Or maybe this is a time when I need to change my perspective.

22:00

That's when the professor would say, wait a second, tilt the table a little bit. Fukushima, Dr.

22:04

Takanori Fukushima, my other world famous, one of my other world famous professors

22:08

was always saying, don't turn your neck, turn the table.

22:12

The surgery table can bend and change and change the angle and tilt and twist

22:18

and do all kinds of things to move the patient so that you can stay in a comfortable

22:22

position without craning your neck or stressing your body.

22:25

You can make the patient move to you, and all of a sudden, you'll see things

22:29

in a more easily handled way.

22:32

You'll have a different perspective. So you don't have to operate out of perception anymore.

22:39

You can change your perspective. Like, you start to think that this particular

22:43

way I'm looking at this patient is just, I'm just hosed. I can't get this operation done. I need to close.

22:48

I'm just going to have to go out. Maybe I'll send her to the university.

22:50

Something like that. And instead, you turn the table and all of a sudden you

22:54

can see exactly what you needed to see. All of a sudden you have exactly the right perspective.

22:58

You've moved from one chair to the other. You've moved from one idea to another.

23:03

You've moved from one worldview to another. You've changed your perspective

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and that has allowed you to accomplish this in a less stressful way.

23:10

You've now stopped making an operation out of everything because you remembered

23:15

about economy of motion and you remembered Halstead's principles and you remembered

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that slow is smooth and smooth is fast and you remembered that in repentance

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and rest is your salvation.

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And you're finally able to stop making an operation out of everything.

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That's why it's not just a good idea. It's the sixth commandment of self brain surgery. And the good news about all

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that, my friend, is that you can start today.

23:37

Music.

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

23:47

brand new book, Hope is the First Dose. It's a treatment plan for recovering

23:51

from trauma, tragedy, and other massive things.

23:54

It's available everywhere books are sold, and I narrated the audiobooks.

23:58

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

24:02

available for free at TommyWalkerMinistries.org.

24:05

They are supplying worship resources for worshipers all over the world to worship

24:11

the Most High God. And if you're interested in learning more,

24:14

check out TommyWalkerMinistries.org.

24:16

If you need prayer, go to the prayer wall at WLeeWarrenMD.com slash prayer,

24:20

WLeeWarrenMD.com slash prayer.

24:23

And go to my website and sign up for the newsletter, Self-Brain Surgery,

24:28

every Sunday since 2014, helping people in all 50 states and 60-plus countries around the world.

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I'm Dr. Lee Warren, and I'll talk to you soon. Remember, friend,

24:37

you can't change your life until you change your mind. And the good news is you can start today.