Four Approaches to Life (S14E3)

Introduction to Self-Brain Surgery

0:00Hey my friend, welcome back to another episode of the podcast. We're going to do some self-brain surgery today. I'm your friend Dr. Lee Warren, hopefully your favorite internet brain surgeon, maybe real-life brain surgeon too. But today we're going to do part three of our series, the Start Here series. For the mini season, season 14 of the podcast, we're doing four episodes that you can use to get a fresh start with self-brain surgery. Or if you're new around here, to get some of the big ideas and some of the sort of worldview and strategic things that we need to know if we're

0:32going to be successful in the practice of getting our minds to be in charge of our brains to achieve healing, hope, and higher performance. All the things we do around here all the time, these four episodes will serve as things you can share to point people to. In all the midst of the over 1,000 episodes of the podcast that we have, people often write in and say, hey doc, where should I start? Here's where you start. Go back to part one, the season 14, episode one, and get your grounding your baseline understanding of what self-brain surgery is and what it does. Last week, we talked

1:02about the big concepts of mind versus brain and the worldview stuff that we need to have. Today,

Approaches to Self-Brain Surgery

1:08we're talking about something called approaches. If you haven't read my new book yet, The Life-Changing Art of Self-Brain Surgery, we start that book in the waiting room, and then we work from the waiting room to understand the nature of what we call the soap note, the chief complaint, the reasons we're here, the difference between subjective and objective things, and get our minds around what it means to be a doctor and a patient, taking care of ourselves, and make that patient-to-doctor switch that allows us to begin operating our minds and our brains in the way they were designed to help us

1:39really get some traction in our lives. And then we move from the waiting room to the office. And in the office, we're not operating yet. We're just learning what we call approaches. I tell a story in the book about my mentor, one of my professors, the late Takenori Fukushima. Dr. Fukushima was a world famous neurosurgeon, and he taught me a lot about brain surgery, and a lot about life too. But Dr. Fukushima frequently would have guests who were neurosurgeons from all over the world who would fly to Pittsburgh to watch him operate. And the most important thing about that is that they weren't

2:13coming there because they were bad surgeons. And they weren't coming there to learn because they weren't smart or good at their jobs. It wasn't because they needed better training or a better refresher course on the basics of neurosurgery. No, they were there to watch Dr. Fukushima because he was having world-class outcomes with his practice. And other good surgeons from all over the world, famous people who had written textbooks and had their names on the wall of department chairman, would come to Pittsburgh and watch him work to learn a new approach. Not because they were

2:44not good at what they did, but because they recognized that some other people were getting better results than they were, and they wanted to know what the difference was. So I tell you that story just to tell you, there's a lot more information in the book about it. But approaches are these ideas that include not only technical things, but philosophical things about how do we do and why do we do and what do we do, the things that we do as practicing self-brain surgeons. And I want to make one point before we start with this episode, and that is this.

3:15Good surgeons are willing to change approaches when they recognize that the approach they're using is not achieving the results that they need. Good surgeons change approaches not as a lack of intelligence, but as a sign of wisdom and compassion. It's not a failure. It's a character trait of good surgeons. When I'm operating and I recognize that I'm not having a good angle of attack on the tumor or the disc herniation, I need to back up and change my approach so I get a better outcome. Now there's something called the sunk cost fallacy. This is a cognitive bias where we can

3:51generate kind of an irrational tendency to continue something like a project or a relationship or an investment, even when it starts to behave or perform poorly because we feel like we've gone too far and committed too much to that approach. We've spent time, we've spent money, we've spent effort. And even though we're clear that we're not getting the results that we want, it's too hard for us to change mid-course or mid-stream. This sunk cost fallacy is driven by emotional and not rational decision-making. And if we're going to be good surgeons, we don't want to be emotional. We want

4:25to be rational when we choose the kinds of approaches, the kinds of techniques, the kinds of things that we do when they're not working. We need to be willing to change. We don't want to be afraid of wasting resources or time because we've already done so much using a particular approach. We would rather have greater future success than to be embarrassed by having made a bad choice when we started with a particular approach. So a good surgeon will say, hey, this isn't working. I need to do whatever I can to make sure my patient has the best outcome. And since self-brain surgeons are the surgeon, but

4:56we're also the patient, we want to make sure that we don't fall prey to the sunk cost or any other sort of cognitive bias that would keep us from being willing to have the kind of character and wisdom and grit and determination to be willing to say, hey, you know what? I didn't choose the best approach. I'm going to change so I have the best outcome. Because I'd rather you have a better outcome than to be able to say that you chose a good approach in the first place. Outcome is what matters here. By the way, you're trying to have a life where you're always healing and hoping more and having higher performance, right? You can't do that if you stick with a bad approach. So approaches are these big

5:31picture things. What philosophical things? What technical things? How do we position the patient? Where does the incision go? All that kind of stuff, all wrapped up into one thing. And there's really five approaches. In the book, I talked about four primarily, but there's really five. We're going to get into them in just a minute. And before we do, I want to remind you to smash that subscribe button or hit the follow button wherever you're listening. Share this with a friend if it's helpful. Be sure you check out the book, The Life-Changing Art of Self-Brain Surgery, because it's got all this information and a lot more. And it's really going to help you. But these four foundational start here episodes

6:04are short, ideological kind of episodes that are going to help you get your head around what self-brain surgery is. So you can start your practice and maybe a friend will do it with you. Right now, we're going to dive into the four approaches. I'm patting you on the back, giving you a high five for being here, doing this hard and holy work. Let's get after it. Okay, I told you there's five approaches. We really wrote about four of them in the book. But the fifth one, I mentioned tangentially in the book. But the fact is, there's a lot of people that never

6:39think about the fact that they can change what they do with their brains. They're never aware in their whole life. They're never aware that they actually have metacognition, that they can think about their thinking, or think about what they're feeling, or think about their circumstances without just being washed up in it and overwhelmed by it. The vast majority of people don't even think about the possibility that they could do something different than they're doing. They just feel like, this is how I am. This is how it's going to be. And so I don't want you to be in that group. And I really separated the four approaches the way that I did. And I should have probably included

7:13that first approach, like, hey, I don't have an approach. I'm just living my life. But it really ends up with the same result as the first approach we're going to talk about. So really, they're similar. They don't have different outcomes. It's just that one person is blissfully unaware that they even had an approach in the first place. And not having an approach, it's kind of like not having a financial plan. It is a plan. It is an approach. It's just not a very good one. So we're not going to use that approach, okay? You're here because you recognize that there is something that can be done about how you

7:43think and feel and behave and act in this world. There is something that can be done to achieve positive change. And it's called self-brain surgery. So let's talk about the four approaches.

Four Approaches Explained

7:53Okay. The first one is called nothing can help me. There's a lot of people that just come to this place in their life where they're frustrated, they're sad, sick, stressed, stuck, or settling. And they just have given up hope that can ever be different. And they don't really believe that anything can really change because they bought into an idea that something outside of them has to change. They have an external locus of control that somebody needs to change something. Somebody else needs to do something different. They need to have more money, a promotion, something else needs to

8:24occur or they can't be okay. And as long as you have an external locus of control, you really can't ever be in control because you're always waiting on something else or somebody else to do something different or change in some way. And as soon as they do, you're going to feel the same because you didn't change. So the nothing can help me approach is the one that produces the worst results. And so if you're stuck and you're feeling stressed and you just haven't been able to make any traction, I would implore you just consider trying a different approach. And there's three other ones. One of them, the next approach is called the maybe something

8:59can help me approach. I read a book by a guy named Dan Harris a long time ago. Dan Harris was a famous TV news anchor for ABC News and he had a panic attack on the air. It kind of went crazy in the middle of his broadcast. And he ended up kind of becoming a drug addict and treating that anxiety and panic all the wrong ways and ultimately discovered that people who meditate and pray seem to be happier than people who don't. And he was interested in studying why that was. So like a good journalist, he went around and interviewed a bunch of people and practiced things and tried

9:32things and ultimately figured out that when he meditated and prayed, he doesn't call it prayer, but when he engaged in Eastern forms of meditation, he felt better. He said a little bit happier, maybe 10% happier. And that was enough for him. And he didn't believe in God, but he believed that what he was experiencing was making him feel better. And it was good enough for him. So he said, well, maybe I'll just practice this and I don't really care why it works. It's certainly not because I think God's doing it. But, but I have recognized that doing this thing with my brain

10:05and my mind makes me feel a little bit better. And so he said, maybe something can help me. And he found meditation and it worked for him. My problem with the something can help me approach though, is that it might be fine if you're just a little bit stressed out or if things are just a difficult for you, or if you're going through some minor inconveniences in your life. But if you really have a major trauma or a massive tragedy, like we did when we lost our son, or if you really go through something overwhelming, some kind of massive thing, like I wrote about in hope is the

10:38first dose. If you really go through something devastating like that, 10% happier is not going to be enough for you, friend. So this idea that you can just hack something or figure out a trick or some kind of self-help mantra or something that can help you a little bit. And that'll be enough. You may come to a point in your life where that's not enough and you're not moving as far forward as you need to, to overcome the problem, or you you're doing the thing and it's not working this time. And it did work before that may be something approach has some limitations and it's really

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12:49realize that the maybe something approach is not enough, the next approach is called maybe science can help me. There's billions of people in the world that have found that if they learn best practices for how to operate your brain, that they really are happier, that things do really work better for them. And Christians will push back here, and some Christians will say, hey, you know, these things don't really work unless you believe in God and all that stuff. And it's just not true. I mean, God gave everybody lungs, and breathing works for everybody, right, whether

13:19you believe in them or not. That's called general grace. God makes, as the Bible says, the sun shine on the just and the unjust, and the rain falls on the just and the unjust. There are certain things that God did that work for everybody. Your muscles and bones and joints and your heart and your liver and your spleen work for everybody, whether you believe in God or not. That's general grace. And operating your brain from a mind-down perspective will make you feel better. It will give you better results in your life. It definitely helps. And so this idea that you have to be a Christian for your brain to work better, it just isn't true. And so I want to tell you that

13:53for two reasons. One, if you're a Christian, I want you to be accurate when you say things. It's just not true. This process of taking mind-down control will help people. It does. It makes people better. If you're not a believer, though, I want you to be encouraged that how you are now doesn't have to stay that way. Like, if you've been stuck, if you've been sad and unable to move forward, you can learn to operate your mind and your brain. The principles that we lay out here in self-brain surgery will help you. And if you learn to operate your mind and your brain in the way

14:24that I believe they were designed, you may believe they just evolved that way. I believe they were intentionally designed by our creator God that way. But if you operate in that mode, it will help you. There's no doubt about it. It does help. It's been proven. It's not controversial anymore in neuroscience. We can image the brain. We can prove it. I can show it to you. The results of all the studies are clear that a mind-down approach is more beneficial than kind of a belief in just brain alone or giving up and not trying anything. It definitely helps. So learning the scientific

14:57principles behind how the mind and the brain operate is a very good idea, and it makes you a better self-brain surgeon. That's why in the book, I give you so much information about what the current science is saying, what we've learned in the 21st century from functional imaging and psychological studies. We're learning a lot about operating your mind as if it's in charge of your brain because it is. It turns out to be true. It works that way. And so it's really helpful. So don't be afraid of science. Dig into it. Learn as much as you can. Understand the why behind everything and press in. That's a good practice. A good scientific method will lead you to some truth,

15:34and you can operate your life out of that truth, and it'll help you. Now, here's where we're going to make a pivot, though, because I want you to understand that there's a difference between things that scientists say and scientific things that can be said. So sometimes you'll hear scientists say things that come out of a worldview called materialism, as we talked about a couple of weeks ago. And scientists will say something like, oh, we know that the brain is all there is. We know that there's no God. We know that everything about you, including your mind, comes from brain activity. They can say that. And just because a scientist says it doesn't make it scientific. There is no science

16:09that has ever proven that mental activity comes from brain function. It's just not true. It's not scientifically provable. And so I just want to point out that there are some limits to what science can do. Science cannot discover everything, especially first causes to unique events like the creation of the universe or how life sprang from non-life. Science will never be able to show that. It just isn't able scientifically to show that sort of thing. You need other disciplines of scholarly pursuit

16:40in order to find those kinds of things out, to ponder them because they're not inherently scientific. We're going to have Dr. J.P. Moreland on the show later this week. He's one of the world's preeminent philosophers and also a legit scientist. And he's going to help us kind of break down this difference between science and what I call scientism, the things that are said by scientists that aren't really science, but get a lot of credibility to hear people say things like, hey, your brain is all you are and brain generates mind and all that kind of thing. That's not scientific. It's scientism.

17:12And J.P. Moreland is going to help us break that down. So I said all that to say this. There are some

Science and Scientism

17:16times in your life and some situations in your life where you may operate your brain in a very good scientific way. You may pursue the knowledge that you can learn everything about it, but you may get to a place where you still feel kind of empty, where you still have some big questions. You still have some things that you wonder about and maybe you're hurting in a particular way and science just isn't, it's cold comfort. It's not able to solve those things for you. Science can answer the sort of the how questions and some of the what happened and how they happened kind of questions, but it can never

17:48answer the why and the what next kind of questions that big things in your life generate. If you lose a child, if you lose a spouse, if somebody cheats on you or somebody betrays you in some way, science isn't going to tell you how to feel better about that. You can operate your brain more efficiently, but it's not going to move the needle on what to do next. Why did this happen? Where do I go now? Those questions really require spiritual life and God. And that's why we have the fourth approach. Maybe God can help me. I believe if you follow a good scientific method, even if you're not a

18:24believer, the scientific method gives us an ability to look at a situation and try to determine what's true about it. The scientific method was developed to understand and explore and explain the universe. And it was actually developed by Christians, by the way, Isaac Newton and people like that. The idea is you make a hypothesis, you observe something and you make a hypothesis about how that thing might operate. And then you devise experiments or tests to see if you can prove that that's that your hypothesis is correct about how it operates. And here's the thing. If your hypothesis isn't proven

19:01out by the experiments, then you're supposed to revise your hypothesis. So you're supposed to say, OK, well, I guess what I thought isn't true. I need to think of a different possibility and then test that. The problem is this with big things like materialism, like Darwinian evolution, things like that. All the mainstream scientists have been unwilling to revise their hypotheses, even though the evidence hasn't borne them out. And so once you do that, once you hold on to a belief in spite of

19:34contradicting evidence, it's no longer science. Now it's called faith. So now we have faith on the worldview of materialism and Darwinian evolution and things like that. We don't have science proving these things out. We have deeply held beliefs holding on to them in spite of science, not verifying or validating. Right. So instead of believing everything that scientists say, a smart person, a wise person, a rational person would say, show me the evidence, show me the results, show me the

20:05experiments. Let me decide for myself. And so when we get to the maybe God can help me approach, that's what I want you to do. I want you to look at things that God says when he writes a prescription for human flourishing, for example, like Philippians 4 about don't be anxious, be grateful, or Ephesians 4.23 about renewing your mind, or 2 Corinthians 10.5 about taking every thought captive, Romans 12.2 about transforming your life by the renewal of your mind. The scriptures like that, when they make a promise that this will lead to you feeling better, having less anxiety

20:36or whatever, test those out scientifically. Say, what if it is true? Let me test it in my life. And if you actually feel better when you do that thing, then a good scientist would say, maybe it's true. Maybe the thing that God said is actually true. So maybe I should keep trying them and proving them out over time. Test him. God invites you. Test me. Taste and see, he says, that I am good. Test him and see if the promises aren't true. So the maybe God approach is actually a scientific approach. It just gets you to the place where when science

21:10stops being able to provide all the answers, you let God take you the rest of the way. When he says this is how it's going to be, you trust that if you live that way and practice that way, it turns out to be true. And eventually, every few years, science figures something else out that validates what scripture has said. But what science never does is invalidate something scripture has said. There are no places where science has invalidated scripture. There's been lots of times when they thought they were going to, and later they revised themselves

21:42and said, nope, you know what? It's actually true. It's actually right. We can see that with anxiety and gratitude and all kinds of social things that have been proven out that if you do this, you'll be happier. And that's what the Bible said all along. So I want you to just understand that there are multiple approaches to how you can live your life. You can choose from among them. But a good surgeon is unwilling to harm his patient or her patient by persisting with an approach that is not providing the results that get them to a good outcome. And

22:15so if you're a good surgeon, if you want to be a good, wise, compassionate self-brain surgeon, since you're the doctor and the patient, be willing to consider alternative approaches. Each of these approaches has their own expanded chapter in the book. We go way deeper than we did here in this short video. And there are other podcasts about each of the approaches too, if you want to go back and look at all of those. But today I wanted to just give you a quick high-level overview of the four approaches, five approaches, really four, and just remind you that a wise surgeon is willing to change approaches, even when there's a heavy sunk cost,

22:49even when you've been doing it for a long time, even if it might be somewhat embarrassing to say, hey, you know what? I didn't have it right. I'm switching to this. Because ultimately,

Changing Approaches for Better Outcomes

22:56the outcome is better than where we started. We want to have good outcomes, right? I want you to become healthier and feel better and be happier. I want you to have healing and hope and higher performance. And I want that to be true for you. And if it's going to be true for you, there are going to be times when you need to change approaches. I would just encourage you to be scientific about it, be rational, be reasonable, follow a good method, and apply it across the board in your life. And when something proves to be true, adopt it, use it, practice it, because that's how

23:28you can change your life. And remember, you can't change your life until you change your mind. The good news is you can start today. Next time on the podcast, we're going to look at the 10 commandments of self-brain surgery, and we're going to apply each of them to the five areas of our lives, our physical, emotional, spiritual, mental, and financial, professional type areas of our lives. We're going to apply the 10 commandments to each of those five areas, and just give you little examples of the way you can use the 10 commandments across your whole life. And then that'll encourage

24:00you to start thinking of how you can use these principles to make every part of your life come more alive, to start feeling like you're making progress, you're gaining traction, you're no longer as sad or sick or stressed or stuck or settling as you always have been. That's what I want for you, friend. That's why we come here and do this hard and holy work together every week. I'm so grateful to be on this journey with you. I'm proud of you. God bless you, friend. Please don't forget to share this with a friend if it was helpful. We'll talk to you next time. God bless.