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Neurosurgeon and award-winning author Dr. W. Lee Warren, MD delivers daily prescriptions from neuroscience, faith, and common sense on how to lead a healthier, better, happier life. You can’t change your life until you change your mind, and Dr. Warren will teach you the art of self brain surgery to get it done. His new book, Hope Is the First Dose, is available everywhere books are sold.
Good morning, my friend. I hope you're doing well. I am Dr.
Lee Warren, and I'm so grateful to be with you today. We're going to do a little
self-brain surgery today, and we're going to talk about several things that
you can do to not violate the eighth commandment of self-brain surgery.
The eighth commandment of self-brain surgery, if you're keeping a list,
if you're remembering, let's run through them.
The first commandment, I must relentlessly refuse to participate in my own demise.
Number two, I must believe that feelings are not facts.
They are chemical events in my brain. Number three, I must believe that most
of my automatic thoughts are untrue.
Number four, I must believe that my brain is designed to heal.
Number five, I must love tomorrow more than I hate how I feel right now.
That's the tomorrow tax commandment.
Number six, I must stop making an operation out of everything.
Number seven, I must not I perpetuate generational thought or behavioral issues
in my family or start any new ones.
And number eight, the one we're going to cover today, I must love my brain and
live in such a way as to improve it.
That's the eighth commandment. Number nine, I must believe that I'm getting
better at what I'm doing.
Number 10, I must understand that thoughts become things.
Those are the 10 commandments of self-brain surgery. Today, we are going to
get after the eighth commandment. I must love my brain and live in such a way as to improve it.
So what are some things that you can do to protect your brain?
I'm talking about the physical organ, the structure of the three pounds of gray
and white matter, neurons and axons and neurotransmitters and synapses in your
brain that manage everything that happens in your body,
communicate with your mind and your spirit, and allow you to live your life.
You can't be a live, living human person without a working brain.
And as we're getting older, we want to make sure we're doing everything we can
to maintain its function and health. And I'm going to give you some things you can do today.
Before we get into it, I have a question for you.
Hey, are you ready to change your life? If the answer is yes, there's only one rule.
You have to change your mind first. And my friend, there's a place where the
neuroscience of how your mind works smashes together with faith and everything
starts to make sense. Are you ready Ready to change your life?
Well, this is the place, Self-Brain Surgery School.
I'm Dr. Lee Warren, and this is where we go deep into how we're wired,
take control of our thinking, and find real hope.
This is where we learn to become healthier, feel better, and be happier.
This is where we leave the past behind and transform our minds.
This is where we start today. Are you ready? This is your podcast.
This is your place. This is your time, my friend. Let's get after it.
Music.
All right, let's get after it. Hey, your brain is a three-pound structure in
between your ears that really is in charge of everything else that happens in your entire body.
And it's connected to your mind in a two-way street of your mind,
as we always talk about on this show.
And that's how you communicate with your creator.
And it's how you communicate with your spirit. It's how you communicate with,
with your entire existence is happening in the processor of your brain, okay?
So if your mind is the software, your brain is the hardware,
that's how everything about you happens on the physical structural level.
So it makes sense then, as we're going through our lives, to try to take care
of our brains. Remember Romans chapter 12.
We always talk about Romans 12.2 as a self-brain surgery text.
Don't conform to the world, but rather be transformed by the renewing of your
mind. And I want to point you to the voice translation.
If you go to BibleGateway.com and click on the Bible, read the Bible,
there's a translation available called The Voice.
And it's not the best one out there, but there's some great things about The
Voice translation that can give you some new ways to think about Scripture.
In Romans chapter 12, here's the first verse.
This is our context for the eighth commandment, okay?
Brothers and sisters, in light of all I have shared with you about God's mercy,
I urge you to offer your bodies as a living and holy sacrifice to God,
a sacred offering that brings Him pleasure.
This is your reasonable, essential worship.
If you want to know how can I reasonably and essentially worship God,
the Bible says it starts with presenting your body to Him as a living sacrifice.
Now, we always read that and we think about things like physical fitness and
not, you know, not doing bad things with our bodies and all that stuff and being
holy with our actions and all those things are true.
But I want you to remember that your brain is part of your body, too.
OK, so if then it's a reasonable and essential act of worship to present your
body as a living sacrifice to God is something he wants.
And that's the verse he put right before transforming your mind.
Then he's trying to remind us that your brain is important in this conversation
as well. And so what are some things we could do to worship God with our brains?
Okay. Well, I think protecting its physical health is one thing.
So you go out to Google or some search engine, you type in, how can I take good
care of my brain? One of the websites you'll find is from the CDC.
Then I find this very fascinating. The government of the United States has put
up a website from the Centers of Disease Control, and they give seven things
you can do to maintain your brain health. Let me give them to you.
There's one glaring omission. There's two glaring omissions, by the way.
But one of them is, we're going to cover both of them in a second.
Here's the ones that they list. Quit smoking.
Smoking is incredibly bad for your brain. One of the things that happens as
we get older is our blood vessels get weaker.
We start to get chronically not enough blood flow to our brain,
and smoking kills blood vessels.
So if you're out there and you're listening to the Dr. Lee Warren podcast and
you're still smoking, please,
I implore you, not just for cancer, not just for lung health,
not just because it's expensive or it smells bad or it causes asthma in the
kids and grandkids around you, but because it is really,
really, really bad for your brain.
And one of the things that I talk to my patients about in the office that surprises
people is I see these folks with back and neck pain and they're smokers.
And I say, you know, one of the best things you can do to make your back not
hurt as much as to quit smoking, because when you smoke, you're robbing your
your discs of blood supply and you're advancing degenerative disc disease and
you're making back pain worse.
That seems to shock people. Nobody seems to know that smoking is bad for their back.
But I don't think a lot of people also know that smoking is really,
really, really terrible for your brain.
So one thing you can do, the CDC is right. Quit smoking.
And if you don't believe me, go do the research yourself.
Smoking is really super bad for your brain. So if you want to say,
God, how can I worship you with my body?
How can I help worship you with my brain? God would say, quit smoking.
It's bad for your brain. Hurts your brain. Makes you demented.
Not good for you. Okay. Number two, the CDC says maintain a healthy blood pressure.
That seems to be obvious, but if you don't control your blood pressure,
you're causing vascular damage to your brain every second of every day.
That'll make you more likely to be demented and have cognitive troubles when
you get older, more likely to have hemorrhages and strokes and all kinds of
reasons why you might have to see Dr.
Lee Warren in the ER as a patient because smokers have bad things that happen
to their brains that other people don't tend to have. So control your blood pressure. I'm not...
I said smokers, that's true, but also people with high and uncontrolled blood
pressure have bad things happen to their brain.
So I got stuck on the smoking soapbox there for a second.
Healthy blood pressure is critically important to protect your brain.
Number three, be physically active. We know now from numerous studies that activity,
physical activity, reduces depression, reduces anxiety, lowers cortisol,
helps you sleep better, and overall improves blood flow and And hormonal environment
and neurotransmitter environment in your brain.
Activity helps you to be happier and it helps your brain to work more appropriately.
So if you're finding yourself in brain fog and having trouble thinking, get up and take a walk.
Remember we did an episode not long ago about the guy that won the Nobel Prize
after he had a terrific insight into x-ray crystallography while he was taking a walk.
Because your brain gets more clear when you get out and move your body.
So if you want to say, hey, how can I reasonably essentially worship God and
how can I love my brain and protect it and not hurt it and not violate the eighth
commandment of self-brain surgery, move more. Get yourself more physically active.
Another one, the CDC says, maintain a healthy weight. Daniel Lehman's done some great research.
It is absolutely true. He calls them dinosaur brains.
If you are morbidly obese, then your brain gets smaller.
Smaller so the more you weigh the smaller your
brain gets physically the fat and cellular content structure of your brain shifts
around and your brain begins to shrink when your body weight is excessive so
not beating you up about being overweight i'm saying if you want to make your
brain better get your weight under control.
Do what you can. Talk to your doctor. Find a way to increase your activity.
Get your diet under control.
Work with your doctor. Find ways to lose weight because that will protect your
brain, will protect your cognitive function as you get older.
There's an old saying that there are old people and there are morbidly obese
people, but there really are very few old morbidly obese people. Why?
Their brains get sick. Their hearts get sick. Their bones get sick.
They just don't age well. So if you're significantly overweight and you want
to say, how can I worship God with my body? How can I protect my brain?
One of the ways is to get your weight under control. Please don't write in and
say, I'm beating up on you. I'm body shaming you. I'm not doing any of that.
I'm just saying this is data and it's real.
Get your weight under control is a good way to protect yourself as you age,
to protect your brain as you age, and to make your body healthier,
which is a good way of worshiping God and honoring him with your life.
That's from the CDC. DC. Also from Daniel Amen. Also from Dr. Lee Warren.
Another one, get enough sleep. When you don't sleep, you don't rest.
You don't restore your cells. You don't reset your neurotransmitters and your
body doesn't heal and maintain itself as well. And your brain doesn't either.
So getting enough sleep is critically important.
If you're having trouble sleeping, then you need to talk to your doctor, your therapist.
You need to pray more, find some way to turn your brain off.
We've got all kinds of episodes about that.
We'll be doing more upcoming content about sleep in the the coming months as well.
So that's one of the ways you can protect your brain. Another one is to stay engaged.
Like if you're getting older, especially, or if your spouse has died,
or if you're finding yourself in a place in your life where you're alone a lot,
getting involved with other people, church, community, a group of people around you.
It's a great way to keep yourself cognitively sharp. You need to be having conversations.
You need to be talking to other people. You need to be engaging in things.
So if you're alone and you don't have any family around or you don't have a
group of people around you, go get involved with the church.
Go volunteer somewhere.
Go down to the community center. Go down to veterans organizations.
Find some place to get engaged with other people. And you know what you're going to find?
Some other people who are in the same situation as you, who want to be your
friend and want to be involved with you. So if you want your brain to get healthier,
you need to get re-engaged in your life if it's been a while, okay?
And finally, maintaining your blood sugar. This has to do with diet.
It also has to do with the metabolic things that we do.
And if you're diabetic especially, long exposure to elevated blood sugar is
really, really bad for your brain.
So don't be negligent of your blood sugar.
Be careful with it. And this is a thing for people who aren't diabetic too.
We were sold a real significant bill of goods in the 70s and 80s by lobbies
that talked to the government and got things recommended to us.
And we all know by now, hopefully you know by now, that the food pyramid that
our government has been recommending to us for generations now is complete garbage.
It's the opposite of what you should be doing and eating if you wanna be healthy.
You can do your own research about that. And I hope we'll have an episode about it eventually.
But the food pyramid is upside down. You're getting the wrong information from
the government about what you ought to be eating.
And things like orange juice, for example, fruit juice is not good for you.
You take oranges that have tons of natural sugar, but that sugar is bound to
a fiber source, and in and of itself, fruit's not so bad to eat.
But if you squeeze all that juice out of there and get the fiber out and you're
just extracting the sugar and you're drinking a cup of orange juice,
you might as well be just eating a teaspoon of sugar.
So we've been taught that certain things are healthy because they have vitamin
C in them or whatever, but you're actually just giving your brain a huge load
of sugar that's not good for your brain and not good for your body.
So learning how to get your blood sugar under control, make dietary choices
that don't add too much sugar, that's extremely, extremely good for brain health.
What's interesting to me is that the CDC put this list out, and there's two
things that are glaring omissions.
One of them is they don't mention alcohol at all. And honestly,
the only way, the only reason I could think that the government wouldn't put
alcohol on a list of things that you could do to maintain your brain health
is if there's a lobbyist somewhere out there that's telling the government they
don't want them mentioning alcohol on this list.
Because everybody knows, all the research shows, it's absolutely crystal clear
that alcohol is incredibly toxic to your brain and extreme exposure,
even moderate exposure.
And now we know even long-term low exposure to alcohol is directly toxic to
neural tissue and will promote loss of neurons in your brain.
So is there a healthy level of alcohol consumption?
No, there's probably not. Now, am I saying, please don't write in and say,
can I have a glass of wine at night? Yes, you can. Of course you can. God made it.
There's places and times when a small amount of alcohol may be justifiable.
I'm not talking about sin or any of that stuff. I'm just saying that on a dose-for-dose
level, alcohol is one of the most toxic things that you can put in your body. It is not good for you.
All of the studies that showed health benefits were all either underwritten
by alcohol companies or didn't look at the big picture and they found one purported
benefit but ignored other detriments and filtered them out of the study.
So basically, every study that's ever been done that's been used to promote
the idea that alcohol has some health benefit is false. And you can just take that to the bank.
Joe Maroon's talked about it. Daniel Lehman's talked about it.
Everybody knows now alcohol's not good for you.
That doesn't mean that you can't have a glass of orange juice with your breakfast
once in a while. It doesn't mean you can't have a glass of wine with your dinner.
It doesn't mean you're immediately going to have Alzheimer's if you drink alcohol.
I'm not saying any of that.
I'm just saying, if you want to maintain yourself in compliance with the Ten
Commandments of Self-Brain Surgery, don't use too much alcohol.
It's not good for your brain. And it's just fascinating to me that that's not
on the list that the CDC put out.
Again, if the government says it, you've got to be a little careful about who's
funding that, that why the information is there and what's not there is sometimes
just as important as what is there.
Another thing the government didn't mention, and I don't think this is because
of a lobby, but I think whoever put this website up just wasn't thinking about it.
But if you want to maintain brain health, it makes sense to say,
don't go hitting your head on things. Okay.
And we all talk about making our kids, toddlers and young kids put helmets on
when they ride bikes or skateboards.
We often don't think that that should apply to us when we're older.
Now, I'm the guy, unfortunately, that has to be in the ER,
and I'm the guy that gets called down when a kid falls off a skateboard and
hits their head or falls off a bicycle or falls off a horse or skis down a hill
and runs into a tree and they've got a head injury, and almost without exception.
This happened recently with one of our hospital employees. A kid fell and hit
their head, and the Facebook post about it was, they always wear their helmet,
but they didn't this time.
And that's what I always hear. Oh, gosh, we always make her wear a helmet.
Much. She just didn't this one time. And now she's going to die because she's got a big head injury.
Now she's going to have a concussion and have to deal with missing school because
she wasn't wearing a helmet.
Listen, you're something like 20 times more likely to die if you're not wearing
a helmet and you hit your head on anything that moves faster than you can walk.
And that doesn't stop just because you turn 18 or just because you become an adult. felt.
There was a famous story of when I was a resident of a chairman of a department
of neurosurgery in the United States that was teaching his grandchildren how
to ride a bike in his own driveway.
And they all had helmets on, but he didn't. And he got tangled up in the pedals
and fell and hit his head and got a subdural hematoma and died.
And how ironic is that, that a brain surgeon falls and hits his head,
not wearing a helmet and dies from it.
But that's what happens. If you hit your head, you are significantly at risk
for significant significant brain injury and even death if you're not wearing a helmet.
And just because you're an adult doesn't mean that you get to stop protecting your head.
So if you want to not violate the eighth commandment, my friend,
I'm saying this in love, you need to wear a helmet.
If you're skiing, if you're riding a horse, if you're riding a bull,
I say that because I'm in Nebraska, people ride bulls sometimes in Nebraska.
If you're skateboarding, inline skating, roller skating, anything that you could
do that moves faster than you can walk, you ought to have a helmet on your head.
And the correlation to that is you also want to have a seatbelt on if you're
driving a vehicle because hitting your head on the dashboard is a devastating
way to destroy your brain.
I've had way too many of those injuries in my career that I've seen.
The passenger not wearing a seatbelt smashes their head into the windshield.
That is not a pretty picture. Please wear your seatbelt.
Okay. We're talking about protecting our brain. We're talking about using our
brain to manage our life well and to use it as an essential and reasonable act
of worship. How do we protect our brain?
So here's some lifestyle kinds of things. Here's some protective kinds of things.
Here's some nutrition kinds of things, not smoking, not drinking alcohol,
not hitting your head, maintain your blood weight, your body weight and your
blood pressure and physical activity and community and sleep and all those things.
But here's just one more thing.
I want you to manage the mental side of your brain health as well,
because remember, there's always a physical correlation to what you're doing mentally, okay?
If you think and you feel something and that turns into a physiological reaction,
then that should convince you that thoughts become things, okay?
We're going to talk about that more again in upcoming episodes.
But when you think of something,
your brain does something and releases a neurotransmitter or releases a hormone,
and that has an impact on a gland or an organ in your body, and that turns into
blood pressure changes or physiologic changes in some way, and that turns into a thing, okay?
When you make synapses in your brain to maintain a high stress state,
when you make a mental decision to focus on this thing that you can't control right now,
that's going to get you all worked up, that's going to raise your cortisol level,
that is going to shorten your life, it's going to hurt your blood pressure,
it's going to hurt your heart, it's going going to change the way you behave to other people.
So thinking about the wrong things, as we always talk about on this show,
you can't change your life until you change your mind.
Thinking about the wrong things is bad for your brain because it creates harmful
synapses that alter the neurochemistry environment in your brain and automate
it to make it easier for you to think of that harmful thing the next time.
So you need to be willing then, if you say, how am I going to love my brain
and protect it, make sure it's doing the right things, is make sure it's healthy,
make sure I'm worshiping God with my brain, making sure that I'm doing everything
I can to make my brain as healthy as it can because I've got to live with it for the rest of my life.
One of them is to be radical about taking every thought captive,
about biopsying your thinking, about trying hard to maintain a healthy thought environment.
Here's just one good example. Let's say, this is a proof that thoughts become
things, by the way, in case you didn't think it was a real thing. Here's the proof.
You can have a physical event that's stressful. Let's say you have an altercation
with one of your kids at a wedding six months ago.
And they say some things, you bring up some old trauma, some old thing that
happened a long time ago.
And you have an argument with them and they say, don't call me, don't come see the kids.
I want your cut off. I don't, you know, you hurt me when I was a kid and I don't
want to have, you're not safe for me.
We hear this from people all the time that for some reason, there's a lot of
sort of strife in families right now.
We're going to talk about that with Ben Carson coming up soon.
But let's say you had this big blow up at a wedding six months ago and you and
your kid had been cut off and she doesn't take your calls and she's not messaging you.
And she said some really hurtful things to you and blamed you for a lot of things that happened.
And whether or not any of that's true, it really hurt.
And you can remember how your heart raced and you felt sweaty and your hands
got clammy and your heart was breaking and you were crying and you were really
upset and it really hurt you. And that was six months ago. Okay.
That was a real event that happened that was stressful, obviously released a
lot of cortisol, really, really messed your mind and your brain and your body
up for a while. But now it's six months later. Okay.
Right now you're home, you're safe. You're listening to this podcast. Everything's fine.
And I'm talking about this event that happened six months ago,
and you start thinking about that event, okay?
You start thinking about it, and you start to feel all of the same things that
you felt when it actually was happening, don't you?
You can put yourself in that space where you can remember that conversation.
You can remember the look on your child's face.
You can remember the words and the tone and the things that they accused you
of and the memories they brought up and the way that they blamed you for the
way they feel now and all the things that were happening, and you can start
to a feel in your body, your heart racing again, you're clammy, your hands are sweaty,
your heart is aching, your gut's churning, and you can make yourself,
if you follow that train of thought, you can make yourself get right back in
to the same physiological state that you were in when that event was really happening.
Why? Because thoughts become things.
Because the way you're thinking right now is taking your body down a synaptic
trail that's going to activate neurotransmitter release.
It's going to turn into stimulation of hormones, glands, organs,
and change physiological variables.
It's going to put your body in a harmful cortisol state, even though that event
is not currently happening.
Why? Thoughts become things. So I would just suggest to you.
That it is bad for your brain for you to rehearse, to drag up and ruminate on,
or to otherwise replay harmful memories in a scenario when they're not currently
able to be handled by you or changed by you or managed by you,
or when it's not a situation where you currently need to be involved in that thought process.
So what I would say a healthier way to protect your brain would be you start
to remember that and it starts to feel bad again. And you say, you know what?
I need to work to repair this relationship.
So maybe you spend some time in prayer about it. Maybe you write a letter.
Maybe you make a phone call. You try to breach that gap again.
You try to reach out. You say, hey, I know that we had this altercation and
I know you feel this way and feel that way.
And I know that I had some responsibility for some of these things,
but I want us to have a healthy relationship now.
What can we do to make it better going forward? You can reach out or maybe they've
made it clear that they're not going to take your call and maybe you have to make peace with that.
So maybe you need to talk to a therapist or a pastor or maybe you need to write
it down and journal it and give it to God and find some way to move past that event.
Because having it in your mind as a fresh trauma now is harming your brain and
you can't make good decisions out of that place where you're physiologically
in fight, flight, freeze, hurt, scared, anxiety, depressed, stuck. You can't.
So I would say love your brain, help your brain get healthy,
and find a way to snap out of that past and into something present where you
can actually manipulate the situation towards healing, towards restoration,
or towards at least release and acceptance if you can't do anything about it.
That makes sense? Let's love our brains. Let's live in such a way as to protect them.
By the way, your brain is given to you as a gift from God, and it is your way
to manage your body and the rest of your life,
and interact with your mind and interact with your creator and interact with the people around you.
Your brain is incredibly important, and if you want to live the longest,
healthiest life you can, you need to protect your brain and live in such a way
as to not harm it, either physically, emotionally, spiritually,
chemically, or any other way.
Let's change our minds. Let's change our lives. Let's keep the Ten Commandments.
And the good news is, my friend, you can start today.
Music.
Hey, thanks for listening. The Dr. Lee Warren Podcast is brought to you by my
brand new book, Hope is the First Dose. It's a treatment plan for recovering
from trauma, tragedy, and other massive things.
It's available everywhere books are sold. And I narrated the audio books.
Hey, the theme music for the show is Get Up by my friend Tommy Walker,
available for free at TommyWalkerMinistries.org.
They are supplying worship resources for worshipers all over the world to worship the Most High God.
And if you're interested in learning more, check out TommyWalkerMinistries.org.
Or if you need prayer, go to the prayer wall at wleewarrenmd.com slash prayer,
wleewarrenmd.com slash prayer, and go to my website and sign up for the newsletter,
Self-Brain Surgery, every Sunday since 2014,
helping people in all 50 states and 60-plus countries around the world. I'm Dr.
Lee Warren, and I'll talk to you soon. Remember, friend, you can't change your
life until you change your mind. And the good news is you can start today.
Music.