Healing with the Patient-to-Doctor Switch (S13E48)

0:00Hey 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

1:00busy. 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

2:02get 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.

3:02Are 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

4:05back 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

5:06to 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

6:10and 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

7:14up 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

8:14power 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

9:18therapist 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

10:19guy 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

11:19course, 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

12:23was 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

13:24abundant 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 are. Did you know three out of four U.S. homes have toxic chemicals in their tap water? Even though contaminated water looks clear, it could put you at risk for devastating health concerns including fatigue, hormone disruption, cognitive decline, even cancer. Surprisingly, standard fridge and picture filters do very little to remove most contaminants and bottle water contains microplastics. So what's the solution? Introducing aquatry, the countertop water purifier tested and certified to remove 84 contaminants, including chlorine, lead, forever chemicals and microplastics. It's got a patented four-stage reverse osmosis system that goes way beyond ordinary filters. For pure healthy water, you can trust. There's no plumbing, no installation. Aquatry has been featured in business insider, popular science, and it's named the best countertop water filter by good housekeeping.

14:26You can join 98% of customers who say their drinking water is cleaner, safer and healthier. And three of those customers are me and Lisa and Tata. We drink aquatry water every day. It's been on our counter for over a year. We've blind taste tested it with each other and you can tell the difference in how your water tastes and you know it's good for you. Go to aquatry.com now for 20% off your aquatry water purifier using promo code Dr. Lee Warren. And aquatry even comes with a 30-day best tasting water guarantee that's aquatru AQU-T-R-U.com and use the promo code Dr. Lee Warren, D-R-L-E-E-W-A-R-R-E-N for your aquatru water purifier. So that that's what I mean when I say 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

15:27circumstances. 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

16:28things. 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

17:28victory 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

18:32perseverance 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

19:33there'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

20:37events 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

21:41always 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

22:44grateful 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.

23:46It'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

24:48more 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,

25:50please 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

26:54content 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 self-brains surgery with smash neuroscience and faith together there every Sunday. And you need the newsletter. It's a great part of this community. It's always free and it's really going to help you. 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.