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Hey Lisa. Hey Lee. It's good to see you today. It's good to see you too. We helped
me with something. Of course. I can't remember what day it is. It's Friday,
Friday. Hey, it's your friend Dr. Lee Warren and I am bringing you a throwback
episode. This is from way back in 2024. It's right around the time we were
starting to put my new book together and it was the first time we talked
about in public what we now call the patient doctor shift. What people all
over the world are calling the patient to doctor switch because in the book,
the new book, the life changing art of self brain surgery, I give you this
powerful tool for how you can stop being a passive participant in your own
life and start being an empowered compassionate self brain surgeon to help
yourself use God's processes to manage becoming healthier, feeling better,
being happier, achieving healing, hope, and higher performance. All that stuff we
talk about all the time now. This is the first episode I ever talked about
that in. We are taking a few days to just recover. Book launch has been incredibly
busy. We've traveled all over the place with my four trips to Nashville and
Los Angeles and Minneapolis and all over the place and we're just taking a
little break. So I'm going to give you a couple of throwback episodes here and
this one's important because it was the first time we ever talked about the
patient to doctor switch. I know you're going to get a lot out of it. Before we
go though, like I've been doing a lot lately, I just want to tell you I'm proud
of you for showing up to do this hard and holy work. I love it now because
people are riding in and they're saying, hey, I'm doing the hard and holy work.
And I want you to just pat yourself on the back. Give me a little bro hug. Give me
a little fist bump and just know that we're proud of you. We're grateful for
you and we are praying for you and I know that this work is going to produce some
results in your life because that's how you're designed. You're designed to
heal, to grow, to change, to recover. You're not designed to be stuck, to be
sick, sad, stressed, all that stuff we talk about. You're not designed to be
easily broken. You're designed to heal. So today we're going to give you the
first little taste of that. So this is from way back in 2024, the patient to
doctor switch for frontal lobe Friday. I'm your friend Dr. Lee Warren. Let's
get after it. It is frontal lobe Friday. I'm very excited because today I'm
going to give you a little perspective shift operation that you can do. Any time
you're feeling overwhelmed by the situation you're in, any time you're
feeling defeated by the trauma, trauma, massive thing, trouble, tragedy,
anything that you're going through, any time you feel sad, sick, stuck, or
stressed, you can make this little operation happen because you're a self-brain
surgeon. That's what we're going to get after today. It's going to be very short.
I have a long day ahead of me here, but I'm going to give you this one little
tool. Talked about it briefly before, but one little tool that came out of
the lesson that I learned in medical school and I think it's going to help you.
But before I can help you, I have to ask you a question. Hey, are you ready to
change your life? If the answer is yes, there's only one rule. You have to change
your mind first and my friend. There's a place for the neuroscience 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.
All right, my fourth year of medical school, I had to do a rotation in medicine out in
Western Oklahoma. This small clinic in a town called Weatherford, Oklahoma, and I
remember driving out there on the way. I was having some trouble staying awake. I was tired
from medical school and I was eating jolly ranchers candies. Remember those hard
candies? I don't ever eat those anymore because of what happened to me here. But as I
was eating them, I felt this sharp pain in my mouth and something go down the
back of my throat. I didn't know what happened at the time, but one of those
jolly ranchers candy stuck to a filling in my mouth and when I opened my mouth,
it pulled the filling out. It kind of broke the tooth underneath it. And so I'm
driving for my first day on this rotation to this little town in Western
Oklahoma to a clinic. And I'm in need of dental care all of a sudden. So I pull
up to the clinic in Weatherford, Oklahoma and it turns out to be one of these
old-school little hospitals where everything in the whole town that's
related to medicine is happening in one building. It's a waiting room that
combines family medicine, obstetrics, general surgery, emergency, and
dentistry all in one place. There's a big sign up front that says all these
things are one receptionist in a waiting room full of people. It's early in
the morning. I'm hurting them in my mouth and I've got two things to do now. I've
got to go register and fill out paperwork to be the student for the month to
work with these doctors. And I've got to fill out paperwork to be a patient
because I need to see a dentist all of a sudden. I can't drive all the way back
to Oklahoma City. I'm in acute need of dental care. So I'll walk up to the
receptionist and I introduce myself probably the first and maybe only person
that's ever said, Hey, I'm here to register as a student as a doctor, but also
as a patient. I need to see the dentist. I need to see him right now. And she
informed me that the dentist wasn't there. It would be a little wild. So I
could sit in the waiting room. She handed me paperwork to register as a new
patient for the clinic. And also the paperwork I had to use to register to
become credentialed as a student in the clinic to work that month. So I'm
sitting there and I'm filling out two different types of paperwork. One, to
list all my credentials and all my demographic information and all the
things that I'm acknowledging that I need to be aware of and the privacy
concerns and the clinical responsibilities and the type of documentation I'll
be expected in the type of work that I'll be expected to do that month as a
provider. But also all my information, my insurance, all the things related to
the fact that I'm now also a patient. So I'm like in the same chair. I'm a doctor
and a patient. I'm a student and a recipient of care. And as the patients began
to fill in and fill up the waiting room that morning waiting on the doctors to
arrive, I had this thought that I'm here as a fellow patient, a fellow sufferer,
a mouth hurts, a broken tooth. But I'm also going to be taking care of some of
these people. Like as the month plays out, these are just small town. I'm almost
certainly going to be involved in the care of some of these people. So I was
acknowledging that I had two roles to play in this situation. And I'm just
here to tell you now, 30 years later, way down the road, I've come to
realize, as we talk about on this show all the time, is we're self brain
surgeons that all of us have two roles to play in our own lives. Yes, we go
through our lives. We experience hard things. We encounter traumas and dramas
and tragedies and massive things and joys and trials and the enemy steels and
kills and and destroys. But we also try to find abundance and we have hardship
in the world. But we also try to overcome the world like Jesus did. We have
all these things. And what we're learning is that modern neuroscience, backing
up quantum physics from the 20th century has proven out what the Bible said
all along. You're not a hapless victim of the circumstances of your life. You
have a role to play the decisions you make that thoughts you think have an
impact on the way the situation works out the way that you pay attention, the
way that you attend to and think about and interact with the situations in
your life have inherent creative power to either make them more real and
well-me or to begin to understand how to solve them. God works alongside you to
give you the tools, the procedures, the opportunities to interact with and
make something out of these situations. This is where the quote from Niels
Bohr, the 20th century quantum or the 20th century quantum physicist who's
one of the founders of quantum physics, Neil Bohr said, every human being is
both an actor and a spectator in the great drama of existence. He's referring
to the fact that when you interact with a system, you change the system, the
power of your observation, the power of your direct mental force changes the
outcome of the experiments and observations you make in the world and in the
universe. That's what the physicist taught us. Well, it turns out you're not just
a spectator, you're an actor, you're not just a patient, you're a doctor. And so
therefore, if we're going through something hard and it seems to be overwhelming,
then we can come to this idea that here on Frontal Load Friday, we can engage
that gift of selective attention, selective thinking, and we can make this
decision together. Stay with me. I am no longer going to operate out of the things
I'm afraid of or that hurt me, but I will begin to operate on those things to
make changes in my life. I'm no longer going to operate out of the things I'm
afraid of or that hurt me, but I will begin to operate on those things to
make changes in my life. Look, it's clear from all the good psychological
research recently, despite what you hear on the news, just about what you hear on
the media, just about what people are wearing t-shirts around now that say just
take a Xanax, like everybody's advertising this idea that everybody needs a
therapist and everybody needs to be on medicine and everybody needs to be
focusing on the things that are hurting them. But the research is clear, you
don't get better by focusing on the pain or the problem for very long. You get
better by focusing on the path forward. In other words, you get better when you
decide you're going to be the doctor, you're going to be involved in getting
better instead of being involved in feeling worse all the time. That's what
that's what the research is very clear on. You get better by focusing on the
path forward. The past is not for understanding what happened. J. O. Pecker had
this famous quote where he said, if we ask why did this happen, we hardly ever
get answers. If we ask what am I to do now, got how am I to glorify you now, got
how am I to move forward now, got we always get answers. So when we stop saying why
and start saying what, then we start to find traction to go forward. The truth is
when you've gone through something really devastating, I read a book by this
guy who his two-year-old daughter was sitting with his mom, her grandmother, on a
park bench in New York City, and a piece of a building, a little brick from a
building way up above them fell off and it landed on this little girl's head
and she died. How could you understand why that happened? There's no way. You
can understand why a piece of your city fell and killed your child. You can
understand that the building wasn't maintained properly or whatever, but you
can never really understand why that happened. So ultimately, you would just have
to decide you're going to be permanently devastated by that event, or you're
going to find some way to move forward in your life after it's happened. And of
course, the truth is, as all of us who are bereaved and all of us who have lost
parents or lost children or have gone through something devastating, the truth is
you don't really ever heal from something like that. You don't really ever get to a
place where it's gone. You don't get to a place where it's completely over. Of
course, not. That's not normal. That's not possible. Because that thing will
always have been true. And that's why it's so important to remember that
trauma's not what happened. If it was, it would be hopeless. You can't go and
undo the thing. That brick's not going to unfold and that little girl's not
going to come back. In your situation, it's not going to unwind itself either. So
trauma's not the thing that happened. Trauma is our response to it. And that's
why I say we're no longer going to operate out of the things we're afraid of,
but we'll begin to operate on those things to make changes in my life. If I had
been as a student, but when that feeling came out of my mouth and my tooth broke
in half, if I went and tried to work that whole month with my mouth on fire,
unable to talk and bleeding in my gums and all that, I would begin to operate
my life out of that pain. I begin to have to navigate my day trying to take
care of patients in coordination with what was happening in my mouth. And I wouldn't
be very effective. I'd be spending a lot of my energy dealing with the
situation instead of being able to bring my attention and my energy to what I
was trying to accomplish. So I had to deal. Yes, I had to deal with that urgent
situation in my mouth and to take care of it. I couldn't, I couldn't operate
around it and I couldn't operate out of it. I had to operate on it. I had to
get it taken care of so that I could then move forward. And the same thing is
true with us. Like, yes, you need to grieve. You need to go through the
process of dealing with what's happened to you. You need to properly allow
yourself the space and time to heal. And so when I say, don't spend too much time
in the past, I'm not saying, please understand, please understand what I'm
saying here, okay? I'm saying, you'd go to the past, not to explain or
justify your behavior, not to find your identity in the things you've been
through, not to build a system of having other people accommodate you for
things you've been through. But rather, to go back and make sure that you
went through an appropriate process of coming to understand that you've been
through something hard and it's changed you in certain ways and you've come to
have to accept this dual nature of life now that you can be bereaved and
abundant at the same time that there's space for both to be true. That your
God is big enough and quantum God enough to to separate the fact that you can
go through a hard thing. It doesn't have to become everything about who you
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you no longer operate out of those things as if they define you, as if they
predict your future anymore. Now you operate on those things. You go back and say,
hey, I'm going to switch my chair here and I'm going to look at my life instead
of this victim of this thing that's happened to me, this victim of these
circumstances. And therefore that's going to color all my future choices and
decisions and abilities and capabilities and all that rather.
I'm going to switch chairs. I'm going to now decide that I'm not just a spectator
I'm an actor. I'm not just a patient. I'm a doctor and I'm going to say,
God, give me some tools to see how this event or set of events or set of
histories or set of circumstances can be part of the story that you're
writing that defines my future. How can I incorporate
this event, this problem, this pain into a future that you say can
coexist between steel, kill, and destroy and abundance that you're telling us
that you have a plan to redeem us to restore the years of Locacy to turn the
valley of trouble into a door of hope. How can I then operate on this situation
with your help to allow myself to believe that the path going forward
cannot just look like the the painful past. So that's what I'm talking about
today. We're going to change chairs. We're not going to operate out of these
things. We're going to operate on these things now.
And it's clear from the research that the path forward is not just for understanding
the past, not just not just for sort of sitting with the problem by focusing on
the problem. The path forward is for operating on
the situation so that we can see a new role for ourselves in the future that
includes those things but doesn't be defined by those things. Does that make
sense? J. O. Packer again, another great quote from him,
God uses chronic pain and weakness along with other
afflictions as his chisel for sculpting our lives.
Felt weakness deepens our dependence on Christ for
strength each day. The weaker we feel, the harder we lean,
and the harder we lean, the stronger we grow spiritually, even while our bodies
waste away to live with the thorn in the flesh,
uncomplainingly as sweet, patient and free and heart to love and help others,
even though every day you feel weak, that's true sanctification.
It is true healing for the spirit. It is a supreme
victory of grace. That's from J. O. Packer's book,
weakness is the way. Okay. So the idea then is that God will give you the tools
to redefine the traumas and dramas and tragedies and massive things and problems
that you've been through, not as the things that you
are now, but things that have influenced and informed and shaped you
into you, who you are becoming in the service of what your purpose is
here on earth. And sometimes that's to help other people see
that they can survive something really hard too.
And sometimes it's to see that, you know what, I've been through this hard thing and it has
refined me. It has prepared me because I know it's not going to be the last thing.
I go through it. That's why James 1, 2, 3, 4 says, consider it pure joy
whenever you face trials and many kinds because you know that the testing of your faith
produces perseverance and let perseverance finish its work so that you
may be mature and complete not lacking anything. So even if you're not a
Bible person, you can see that that difficulties can produce perseverance and
perseverance can give you character and character can give you the ability to
handle future hard things in a way that makes a difference in the world instead
of you being crushed by them. So when you decide to not be a spectator
anymore, but to be an actor, to not be a patient, but to be a doctor,
that's self-brain circuit. That's changing this perspective that moving from one
chair to the other. And the neuroscience backs it up. We know the mid-
anterior singular cortex is part of your brain that helps with
regulating emotions and making decisions, kind of switching from one
behavior to another when you're going through something hard.
That mid- anterior singular cortex is part of the system
that involves willpower and resilience and all of that stuff and what we've
learned in the last 20 years from functional imaging is
when you make yourself do something hard that doesn't feel good,
your mid- anterior singular actually gets stronger. And so pushing through something hard
actually prepares you and enables you to push to something else that's hard.
And so your brain becomes then more efficient at handling difficulties and
there's less inertia in switching into that. Okay, I got to do this. It's going to
be hard when I get after it, rather than avoiding it for weeks and weeks and weeks and it
becomes an unimaginably difficult thing. Like a lot of us want to do with
sort of procrastination and all that. When you push through something hard,
the next time you need to do something else that's hard, even if it's a different thing,
your mid- anterior singular is more easily engaged. So the neuroscience then says,
hey, when you go through something hard and you push through it and you do it anyway,
you're going to get stronger and more able to do that in the future.
And that's what this refining process is. Isaiah 4810 says,
I refine you, not as silver as you refine, but I've tested you in the furnace of affliction.
He's refining you rather than allowing you to be defined by the thing. Does that make sense?
So the whole idea here is we're not going to be victims of our experiences or victims of
our circumstances anymore. We are going to rather than learn to use them to help us be prepared
for future difficulties and put ourselves in the context of the fact that it's not the individual
events that define our lives. It is our responses to them. Trauma is not the thing that happened.
It's the response to what happened. That's why it's so important to go back. We do go back in time.
We do go back and look at those events, but not to say how in the world could this have happened?
Oh, look at all the different ways I'm broken because this happened. Look at how I need to
retool my life now to accommodate what happened. Not that. That's not where healing lies.
Healing lies and saying, I learned some responses from that hard thing and now they're not serving me
well. Now I'm not moving forward in my life. Now I'm stuck because of the way that I responded to
these things. So I need to go back and examine my operations, examine my prescriptions that I gave
myself at that time to examine the medicine I allow myself to take to examine the numbing behaviors
I absorbed to examine the attitudes I developed and to say what operations can I do now to begin to
shift some of those responses. I can't stop the thing that happened from having happened. It's
always going to have happened, but that's not what the trauma is. The trauma is how is my life now
being affected by the decisions and habits and attitudes and behaviors and numbing issues and all
those things that I've accepted or adopted or developed or adapted in response to that event.
Now I'm going to go back. I'm not going to operate out of those things anymore. I'm going to operate
on those things and begin to develop a new strategy, a new plan, a new approach as we talked about
yesterday. That's the whole idea. The neuroscience is very clear. When you engage in hard things,
you get stronger and more able to do hard things. When you switch from anxiety to gratitude,
your hippocampus gets bigger and it becomes easier for you to switch from anxiety to gratitude next
time. You might say, how in the world, why is it reasonable for you to say that I should be grateful?
Well, you shouldn't be grateful for the event that you're in right now. I mean, it doesn't make
sense on a human level to say, I'm so grateful that my son died. No, it's not that. What you're
grateful for is that you have a switch that you can make, that your brain is wired so that
you can say, I can actually engage my frontal lobes here and think through my response to this thing.
I try to find a way to survive it, try to find a way to navigate through it knowing that I can
actually improve my overall function if I can find a way to act on these things that moves me
forward instead of moves me backwards. So I can be grateful for that, that ability, that human
ability, that God gave us to engage our frontal lobes and switch from anxiety, gratitude. We can
be thankful for that and our hippocampus will reliably make the switch more easily next time
because what you're doing, you're getting better at. So when you go through something hard
and you navigate it well or if you didn't navigate it well and now you're stuck in some behavior
or ruminating or having a problem or drinking too much or you're dealing with it and you say,
wait a minute. Okay, now I need to go back and I need to operate on that experience again. I need
to find some new ways to deal with it. That's where therapy could actually be really helpful.
It's just I have adopted some maladaptive behaviors out of this event and I need to redefine
what my life should look like in response to the thing that happened so that I can become healthier
and feel better and be happier going forward. That's the switch we want to make today. That's the
frontal lobe Friday to listen for today. I no longer want to operate out of the things I'm afraid
of where that hurt me but I will rather begin to operate on those things to make changes in my life.
I was sitting there in that chair in Oklahoma having pain in my mouth and a job to do.
Two things were true at the same time. I was a doctor and I was a patient and so were you my
friend. Every second of your life, you're making neuroplastic changes to your brain willfully
or passively and the truth is, as you very well know, you can look at your sock drawer and find
that out. Passive things become disordered and chaotic over time. If you're not actively directing
things to stay in order to stay in process that's helpful, they will become more chaotic and
more difficult to manage over time and so will your attitudes, so will your habits, so will your
behaviors, so will your trauma responses. If you don't actively manage them, so let's change
chairs, let's stop being spectators, let's start being actors, let's stop being patients,
let's start being doctors. The good news is you have an attending physician with you all the time
and he's a great physician and he wants to help you and that's the highest level of the best
approach to self-brain surgery. They all work in different ways as we talked about yesterday,
but the best one is when you connect your mind to your creator and he gives you this constant
guidance that you make these operations. It's not of your own volition, not having to do it all
yourself, but you're doing self-brain surgery alongside the guy who made the whole system.
And he's going to help you. There you have it, friend. That was the patient to doctor switch from
early in 2024. It was the early part of that development of that concept. I know you got something
out of that. If you've read the new book, the life-changing art of self-brain surgery,
you know a lot more about the patient to doctor switch now. If you haven't read the book yet,
please check it out everywhere, books are sold. You can get it from the website, doctorlyone.com.
This book is going to be a game changer for your friend and if you have read the book and you
want to go a level deeper, check out school.wlwornmd.com. We have two courses there that'll help you
take the lessons in the book and go a little deeper. There's an expansion pack of all the things that
were available for the pre-order bonuses that are now available for you there. And then all of our
free resources, the thought biopsie, the 10 commandments, there'll be a lot more new stuff coming soon.
But anytime you wonder if there's a resource that we have for you before you send us an email,
go check school.wlwornmd.com. That's where everything is. You can always download it whenever you
want for free. You don't have to wait for us. To send it to you anymore, you can get it at school.wlwornmd.com.
Please smash that subscribe button, share this episode if it was helpful. We'll be back from
Spring Break pretty soon with brand new content. We're going to recharge our batteries,
Lisa and I are gearing up for a whole bunch of new good stuff for you and I'm excited to share
that stuff with you soon. Make sure that you subscribe on YouTube. Also, we have video only
content that's out there that you won't get if you're just listening to the audio player.
So check out that, Dr. Lee Warren on YouTube. And if you're not getting the newsletter,
please go to Dr. Lee Warren.com and make sure you're signed up for the newsletter that's every week.
Since 2014, I've given you my best prescriptions for healing, hope, and higher performance using
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Listen, we'll be back next week. I hope you have a great weekend. We are praying for you.
God bless you, my friend. And don't forget you can't change your life until you change your mind
and the good news is you can start today.
The Dr. Lee Warren Podcast
