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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. Dr. Lee Warren here with you.
It's Wild Card Wednesday, and I've got the flu. I canceled surgery today.
At least I had the flu last week, or I don't know if it's influenza, but some sort of virus.
I'm running a little fever and coughing and sneezing and sniffling,
and it's one of the very few times in my whole career that I've canceled surgery,
but I just can't bring my best to the OR today.
So, I'm not going to subject you to my voice for a full episode.
I'm going to bring you back today. Since it's Wild Card Wednesday,
I'm going to enact the privilege of bringing you back something that I've given
you before. Back in early part of season nine, I gave you an episode called
Thoughts Regulate Gene Expression.
The idea is this encouraging you to have a positivity bias to your thinking is not just a trick.
It actually changes the way your genes are expressed.
Thinking creates things. It creates hormones and cell surface expression changes
and genetic switches and epigenetic heritages in your family.
Like how we think changes how we live.
Now, I want to go back. I have a full episode planned out that I hope to be
able to record for you later this week to kind of bookend on Monday when we did Mind Change Monday.
And we talked about attention and the science of attention and how we pay attention
to something can change the reality of how that thing plays out in our life.
And we know from quantum physics and the quantum Zeno effect that the more sort
of mental snapshots we take of something, the more we can freeze it in place and make it true.
So if you're observing, for example, your grief or your diagnosis or your financial
hardship or your stuckness or your anxiety problems or your faith issues,
or if you're observing it from a certain lens and you keep taking a picture
of it to verify if it's still that way, it will always still be that way.
Just like an experiment designed to show that an electron behaves like a particle
and not a wave will always show that it behaves like a particle.
And if you change the experiment to make it test out the idea that it's a wave,
it'll always behave like a wave.
The fact is how we attend to something changes the result of our attention,
changes the result of how that system behaves.
That's a well-known fact in quantum physics, and it's a well-known fact in your life. life.
And today I want to bring you back this idea about positivity bias and gene
expression, which is I want to get that idea in your head that you need to be
very careful, as Paul said, be very careful then how you live.
The Bible says, Psalm 1914, let the words of my mouth and the meditation of
my heart be pleasing to you, God. Why? Because the things we think about.
Are just as important. They might be more important. In some ways,
they are more important than the words we actually speak because the things
you think about change how your brain works and they change the electromagnetic
field that you put out into the world.
They influence other people and they change the course of your life.
So thinking is an important part in Romans 12, 1 of our essential act of worship.
We transform our minds and allow ourselves to become more and more like the
mind of Christ that we already have.
Then we'll start finding some freedom and some breakthrough.
And we'll start seeing those realities shift, okay?
So the bookend to the episode about attention on Monday, I wanna give you is about knowledge.
And we talked about those two German words, kennen and wissen.
And there's a third word, konen, that I wanna talk about.
And the three different ways you can know something. And hopefully I can give you this full episode.
But the bottom line of this is this, the way that you see the world is a left brain function.
And it's not the whole picture.
There's always more to the story. Remember, 1 Corinthians 8 says that the person
who thinks they know something does not yet know as they ought to know.
And I'm going to give you a bunch of science and a bunch of scripture to prove
to you that how you're seeing the world, even in your worst moments,
even in the midst of your massive thing, is not the whole story.
There's always a reality that's bigger and God working on your behalf alongside
you right in the midst of the thing that you think is impossible to change.
So I just want to give you that, this idea that there's always so much more to the story.
And here's one little teaser, okay? One little teaser.
Even time is relative. Even the way we think about the things that we do isn't
the whole story. And here's what I mean.
I'm about to reach over and pick up my coffee cup. Yes, William,
I'm going back to my coffee cup.
William wrote in about my coffee cup, and thank you, William,
for that. I'm going to take a sip of coffee.
I apologize if you heard me swallow, but I needed to wet my whistle to say this.
I, in my brain, formed a thought that I wanted a sip of coffee.
And then I carried out a complex series of motor movements to make that happen.
My left arm, I'm left-handed, so I keep my coffee cup off to my left-hand side when I'm recording.
Someday I'll video an episode and show you what this all looks like if you want.
But I planned that action. I want to get a cup of coffee.
I want to take a sip of coffee. And then I have a whole series of motor movements
to move my left arm, my deltoid muscle to extend,
to abduct my arm away from my body, to my tricep muscle to extend my forearm
out, to my hand opening up and all the muscles in my hand working in concert,
to wrap my fingers around the handle of this cup and then flex my bicep muscle
to bring it up and my deltoid muscle relaxing to adduct or adduct my arm closer
to my body so that I can then flex my forearm muscles.
And open my mouth muscles to take that sip of coffee, which then triggers a
whole complex set of swallowing functions and a coordinated set of neurons that
are firing to bring that down my esophagus and into my stomach.
There's a lot of stuff that happened
in response to the thought that I had about taking a sip of coffee.
But here's the shocker, okay? That seems pretty straightforward, right?
It seems like reality that that all happened because I had a thought that I
wanted to take a cup of coffee, take a sip of coffee from my coffee cup,
right? Well, this is where it gets interesting.
EEG studies and functional brain imaging studies show very clearly that there
is about a 500 millisecond,
a half a second of time before a person has a thought of what they intend to do.
So if you were wiring up my brain right now and looking at an EEG or if you
had me in a functional scanner and you could look at the blood flow activity
of the neurons in my brain,
before I formed the thought that I wanted to take a cup, a sip of coffee from my cup,
about 500 milliseconds before that thought is formed, before I say to myself
in my mind that I want to engage that action.
The neurons that are going to be responsible for the
motor movement begin to light up the sensory neurons
on my fingertips that are going to need to be delicately assessing where
that cup is in space the proprioception neurons
that are going to be able to guide my hand smoothly from my cerebellum to make
sure i don't knock a cup of coffee off when i'm reaching for it instead of picking
it up you know safely all of that is happening in my brain to plan out and and
execute that movement about 500 milliseconds before I have the conscious thought that I want to do it.
So you think, friend, that you're thinking, your left brain function,
that your conscious thought is the reality of what triggers the things that
happen in your life when the truth is all those events are planned in your brain
before they come to pass.
Now, that doesn't mean you're not thinking of it. You're just thinking of it
with different parts of your brain than you're aware of.
And the reality of you thinking that the things you think about are all that
there is that that are driving your reality is incorrect on a neuroscience level, okay?
And that sounds a little stunning, and you may have to listen to that three
or four times to figure out what I'm talking about. We're going to unpack this in a whole episode.
I'm not going to make you listen to my voice that long today, okay?
But there's a bunch of scripture that drives home the point that we don't know
as much as we think we know, even about God,
even about our lives, that there's always a veil veil over our eyes,
that there's coming a time when our knowledge and our language and our speech
and our prophecy and all our spiritual gifts are going to come to an end,
and God's going to take the veil away,
and we're going to see things for how they actually are.
I'm telling you is that there's a reality, and if you can learn,
even when you're hurting so badly, even when you're so stuck,
even when you're so tired, even when you're so frustrated,
even when you're so anxious, If you can just learn to acknowledge to yourself
that there are things in this moment that are happening, God promises that they're
for my good, that there's another
perspective that maybe I can't see right now, but it is equally true,
then you can get yourself unstuck from that quantum Zeno effect and you can
start acknowledging that maybe I can't see that light right now,
but there is still light there. there.
Maybe I can't hear that frequency right now, God calling to me in my dark,
hurt place, but that sound is still there.
And maybe I can't feel that reality right now, but it's still there.
And learning to be able to shift that attention, to understand that there's
things happening even in what seems like real time that have already happened
or are about to happen that are going to interplay with this moment.
And I can learn to trust that quantum physics reality that even time is relative,
even perception is relative, even what I think I see and the way that I think
I see it is relative to God's overarching power and goodness and mercy and His plan in my life.
And if I can keep that perspective in mind all the time, then I can start to
understand that there is no moment and no place where I'm out of His reach.
That's what Romans 8 is all about. there's no place deep enough high enough
far enough wide enough that you're away from him that he's not able to reach
into your heart and help you or come alongside you.
A long time ago, Plato talked about the process of trying to inspire other people with our ideas.
He said there's this process of a spark that crosses a gap.
And he said suddenly a light, as it were, is kindled in one soul by a flame
that leaps to it from another. And friend, that's what I want to give you today.
Even if I can't convince you that there's another reality that's good for you,
even if I can't convince you to believe that hope can be found,
even in this darkest moment, I just want to maybe show you a little bit of light,
and maybe that light will jump across the gap and spark something in your heart,
and you'll start to just feel a little tingle of something that tells you that
this day and this situation and this moment isn't all of the story.
And that maybe that'll give you just enough hope to stick around for another
day so that maybe somehow later today, God can show you something else that'll
begin to open your eyes and you'll start to see, like Paul said.
When he said, I pray that the eyes of your heart might be enlightened,
that they might be opened so that you could see that there's more to the story.
Friend, I hope that you have an incredible day. I'm gonna give you back this
episode. So thoughts regulate gene expression.
And there's so much coming. I can't wait to go down this rabbit hole of neuroscience with you.
We love you. We're praying for you. Don't forget the prayer wall.
And don't forget, you can't change your life until you change your mind.
And before you can do that, I have one 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 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 This is your place.
This is your time, my friend. Let's get after it.
Music.
Good morning, my friend. Dr. Lee Warren here with you. It's time for some self-brain surgery.
Today, I wanna give you a little conversation that I told you about two days ago.
On Thursday, I threw back an episode from a while back called Positivity Bias is a Superpower.
This idea that just getting a bias towards positivity is a tool that you can
use to help yourself navigate when life gets hard, that's true.
And I hope you go back and listen to that. It was helpful. Yesterday on Friday
Conversations, We had the incomparable Tish Harrison Warren.
I'm just geeking out still that podcasting has given me such a blessing,
an opportunity to talk to so many great writers and remarkable people.
And I'm just so thankful that Tish Harrison Warren took the time to be with us.
She wrote that book, Prayer in the Night, that really helped me crystallize
a lot of my thinking and healing.
After we lost Mitch, just learning how to pray the lament prayer.
And that really, even though it was years after we lost our son,
that finally coming across Mark Roggepp's book and Tish Harrison Warren's book
kind of put some spiritual guardrails up for me and gave me this toolkit of
how I can pray in a way that really helps me to voice what I'm feeling,
but also understand that God wants me to do that. He wants you to do that, too.
So that conversation with Tish, if you haven't heard it yet, really powerful.
And I'm just so grateful that you're listening, that the podcast is out there,
that people have come alongside and that we're getting to have these conversations
that really move the needle on how to find hope again after trauma and tragedy
and these other massive things.
But today, it's Self-Brain Surgery Saturday, which is really why we're here, right?
We're here to have an opportunity to take neuroscience and understand how our
mind and our brain and our spirits work and smash them together with faith and
learn that their creator, the great physician,
gave us these incredible brains with the gift of selective attention and the
ability to use applied neuroscience to really make a difference in how our lives play out.
And Self-Brain Surgery Saturday is the day that I give you some operations.
To make that happen. And today we're going to do another one.
I don't have a catchy name for it, but we're talking about an email that I got
from a reader and listener of the podcast.
And again, I don't have his permission to share his name or the whole content
of what he shared with me, but here's the question he asked me. And here it is.
I wish I had a more technical way of describing this, but if I'm honest,
the process of changing my mind is just really, really hard.
Quite honestly, I'm pretty discouraged because I seem to have a lot of trouble doing it.
One thing I'm struggling with is that line between healthy thought reorientation
and being disingenuous.
For example, when I'm feeling sad or lonely or ashamed, what's the difference
between genuinely changing my mind and repressing the negative emotions?
This is the real question, right? Lisa and I had a long talk.
We were walking through the store the other day, and we had a long talk about
this. And she said, you know, sometimes it feels like almost like a self-help
trick when we talk about just changing your mind. Just be more positive. Just be happier.
And how do you go from that sort of cognitive dissonance of not really believing
that you can just change your mind and that it will make a difference in your
life to actually learning or believing,
rather, that self-brain surgery is literally changing how your brain works,
which then changes how your mind and your body and your life play out.
How do we know that we're not just tricking ourselves and convincing ourselves
to feel a little happier when nothing's really actually going to get better?
And how do we get rid of the dissonance of that so that we can actually grab onto it?
If God says, hey, I'm capable of making a way in the wilderness.
I'm capable of making streams in the desert.
I'm capable of parting the waters for you. I'm capable of helping you clear
out all that old trauma and learning a new set of tools to deal with it.
I'm capable of that. You just have to let me. How do we believe that?
And how do we do it? How do we move from this idea that we are reacting to our thinking?
We have 40,000 negative thoughts a day, and we're going to believe them all
and react to them all and believe that our feelings are facts.
How do we move from that to 2 Corinthians 10, 5? Take every thought captive. Make it your slave.
Make your brain work on your behalf. How do we do that? How do we do what Peter said?
Gird up the loins of our mind. Get your mind prepared for action because you are in a fight.
It's a spiritual fight for your soul. It's a spiritual fight for your health
and happiness and for your family. How do you get ready for that?
And is it just silly optimism or is it actually self-brain surgery?
That's the question. We're going to deal with some real stuff today,
my friend. We're going to get into it. And it might take a long time, but we're going to do it.
So, hey, here's the deal. There's a guy on Instagram.
This is totally random, by the way. There's a guy on Instagram,
Don Hewley, H-U-E-L-Y, Don Hewley.
And he does this thing called The Daily Word. And every day at around noon,
I think it's noon Pacific time, so 2 o'clock Central Time for us,
he does a video, Instagram, TikTok, Facebook called The Daily Word.
And it's just a short little thing with a word, what part of speech it is and what the definition is.
And then he tells a little like 30 to 60-second story using that word so you
get the idea of what the word is. And he uses really weird words.
And anyway, every day at the end of that video, he says, I'm Don Hewley,
and that's The Daily Word. She's got a great radio voice. I'll play it for you.
I'm Don Hewley, and that's The Daily Word.
But anyway, I was thinking, what's The Daily Word for today?
The Daily Word for today, my friend, is gene methylation.
Gene methylation. What in the world is that? We'll get there.
Okay. That's the daily word for today though.
And the reason it's the daily word is it's the answer to the question that the
listener wrote in. It's the answer to the question that Lisa asked me about.
My friend, Chris Cook, I was on his podcast. When today's great podcast,
you should listen to, by the way, he's got a book coming out next year and he's
been through a lot of, a lot of issues.
He lost his mom. He's got multiple sclerosis. He's been through a lot and he's
written this incredible book that'll be coming out, and he'll be on the show
in a month or so to talk about it.
And his premise is self-help is bogus, that you shouldn't talk about self-help,
that there's a real pathway to change, to making your life better, but it's not self-help.
And his point is that there's all these self-help gurus out there that talk
about all these things you can do to change your life, right?
And most of them are just gimmicks. They're just hacks. hacks.
And you and I both know that to be true.
And so the problem I have in this personal development space,
the problem I have writing books about how to change things is that there's
a huge credibility gap between the people that are purely guru types,
like the 10% happier, like they don't even try to tell you that they can change your whole life.
They just try to tell you, here's a neuroscience hack.
Here's the thing you can do to make your life a little better. and it does work.
But it doesn't produce this sort of massive change. If you've gone through some
massive thing like a loss of a child or something tremendous like that,
it doesn't really move the needle enough. 10% happier isn't enough.
So those little meditation hacks or neuroscience hacks, they're not enough.
And then there's these sort of pure guru types that have the seminars and teach
you how to get your mind under control so you can walk across coals and all that kind of stuff.
It gets you pumped up. But the problem with that is you know that one self-help
book after another isn't enough, and that's why it's an $11 to $15 billion industry,
and that's why you can't just read one book and have your whole life be better.
That's why every one of those guys writes another book every year or two because it doesn't last. past.
And then on the spiritual side, there's all kinds of preachers that say,
just live your best life now and have an abundant life and all that stuff that goes along with you.
Believe and you have enough faith that God will take care of you and you won't
have any problems and he'll give you lots of money.
And that prosperity gospel doesn't ring very true either because each of us,
all of us know that life really is hard and things do happen to good people.
Bad things do happen to good people and the whole problem with theodicy of suffering
is real and you can't just have more faith and expect all your problems to go
away and then we discover if you really start reading the bible that the bible
never actually says any of that stuff so so we have this whole chasm between.
Spiritualism on one side that says you can be happy if you do certain set of
things or have enough faith or give enough money to the all the way the other
end of the spectrum which says spirituality didn't have anything to do with
it but you get your neuroscience under control or or you learn how to meditate,
or you do this thing, or take this supplement,
or go to my seminar, or buy my book, you'll be happy.
But in between, we have our lives where it doesn't work, and certain things
can wreck you, and you don't know what to do.
Or something that happened when you were a little kid can change your brain,
or something that happened when you got deployed to Iraq can change your brain,
and you don't feel comfortable in your own skin anymore.
And after 20 years, you're drinking, or you're doing something else to try to
control that feeling so you can just try to live your life, right? It's hard.
And so how do we actually change things for the better? How do we do that? Is it even possible?
And so when I say, when you turn on my podcast for the first time,
if you're new around here, and this is the first time you've ever heard me say
it, I say, you can't change your life until you change your mind.
Am I just being one of those gurus? Is it silly?
Is it disingenuous? As my listener said, as Lisa and I talked about,
let me say what he said again.
I have a lot of trouble doing it, the mind change thing. I'm discouraged.
I'm struggling with the line between healthy thought reorientation and being disingenuous.
For example, when I'm feeling sad or lonely or ashamed, what's the difference
between genuinely changing my mind and repressing the negative emotions?
That's the question for the day. Let me tell you why you can really change your mind, my friend.
Here's the reason. The word of the day. I'm Don Healy. I'm not Don Healy.
But that's the daily word. The daily word is gene methylation.
What are you talking about, Dr. Warren? Remember, this show is about learning
the neuroscience of how your brain works and learning what the Bible has to
say about it, how faith works,
and what the Lord has done in your mind to create the opportunity for you to
live in abundance in the face of a hard world.
Jesus promised, John 16, 33, in this world you will have trouble.
He also said in John 10.10, I have come that you might have an abundant life.
So either Jesus is tricking us, it's going to be hard and it can't be abundant,
or it's going to be abundant, therefore it won't be hard.
Those two things are mutually exclusive.
No, they're not. Jesus says it's both. And that's because he's the God of quantum
physics, and two things can be true at the same time, as you heard me and Michael
Gillen discuss a few days ago. And if you missed that episode,
by the way, go listen to it. It's amazing.
One of my favorite conversations ever. And we did get into the quantum physics
of why two things can be true at the same time.
Okay. Jesus says both. It's hard and it can be abundant. How?
I'm going to tell you how right now. Gene methylation.
One of the 10 commandments of self-brain surgery. And if you haven't heard that,
go back and listen to the episode called the 10 commandments of self-brain surgery.
But one of them is this little phrase that I give you that we need to believe
that thoughts become things.
What does that mean? Thoughts become things. Let me tell you,
when I put you in a a functional MRI scanner and I tell you to think about your
grandma's kitchen and what the cookie smelled like, I can watch the neurotransmitters
in your brain change and blood flow patterns change in your brain.
I can watch things happen in your brain in real time in response to what you're thinking about.
And then I can say, hey, remember that you told me that your uncle did that
thing to you when you were nine and that has changed your feeling of security and safety.
And what does that feel like? Go back in your mind and remember that event and
what it did to your life and then I can watch your brain morph into that negative
dark time in your life and the blood flow change and memories get activated
and I can watch the colors change in response to what the neurotransmitters in your brain are doing.
Well, let me just break that down for you. When you see that happen on the picture
of an MRI scan, you're watching gene methylation happen. What does that mean?
Dawson Church in his incredible book, Genie in Your Genes.
Genie in your jeans this is one of those books we'll talk about
one of these days and i wish he had done i think he
did himself a little disservice because he does a great job
talking about the biochemical realities of neuroscience
and all kinds of amazing things that are true but he sort of put all of it in
the same book with energy psychology and field theory and quantum realities
and all these things that seem a little so almost so unbelievable that it It
feels like one of those metaphysics books that some people would discount because they don't believe it.
If you don't actually read it and get into it and understand what he's saying,
it's very scientifically validated and verifiable.
So there's a chapter, chapter 11 in Genie in Your Genes, where he talks about
biochemistry and how biochemistry affects happiness. And it's real.
It's true. And I'm going to just give you this information, okay,
because I'm a biochemist.
This is my undergraduate degree, summa cum laude from Oklahoma Christian in biochemistry.
And then I went to medical school where we studied biochemistry and medicine
and physiology and anatomy and pharmacology and all that stuff.
And now I've been practicing neurosurgery and neuroscience for 22 years since
I finished my residency, okay?
And I can legit say I'm sort of an expert in this space. We're going to talk
about biochemistry today, okay?
So the difference between silly optimism or just telling yourself,
hey, don't think about that.
Just let me just be grateful for a few things and feel a little bit better and,
you know, drink a cup of coffee and go for a walk and I'll feel a little better
and I don't have to feel sad. and I'm just going to put a smile on my face and go on.
That's okay. You can do that and you will feel somewhat better.
But I want you to understand that you don't have to live in response to those
feelings of what happened when you were nine or what your dad said to you when
you were eight or what your wife did to you when she left or what your husband
did to you when he cheated or what the doctor told you the diagnosis was and
that wrecked your future.
You lost your husband or your child died and it's wrecked your future and you
don't think you can be ever okay again.
I'm telling you, you can learn how to live in a world where those things happened,
but you can change your response to them and you can learn to be hopeful and
happy and have purpose and meaning in your life again.
Because if you are still alive, then you have a purpose, friend.
There's a reason why you're still here, and you can be happy again.
Why do I care if you're happy?
Well, because happy people drink less alcohol, exercise more,
live longer, take less medicine, spend less time in the hospital,
have better relationships, pass on better stories and better financial situations
to their family members.
Happier people have better lives than more hopeless people do. do.
Okay. And then Christians get all into this weeds of arguing about the difference
between joy and happiness and all that stuff.
And I'm not saying happy, like whistle a tune and pretend like everything's okay type happiness.
I'm talking about that deep sense that you're going to figure out a way to go
forward in your life and you can still have purpose and maybe even smile and
laugh and find a new way forward again.
That's what I call happiness. And you can call it Christian joy way if you want to.
We can argue about that. The word the Bible uses, makarios, literally is best translated happiness.
And the enemy, by the way, remember we're in a spiritual fight,
the enemy wants you to think that you're supposed to be happy.
And that's what he sells to the world. And happiness is being pursued as,
what can I do to make myself feel what I want to feel, right
and they set that up as being an enemy of
christianity where they say well if you really want to be
happy you should be able to you should be free to do whatever you want
to and pursue whatever you want and sleep with whoever
you want and buy whatever you want and watch whatever you
want and think whatever you want and take whatever you want that if that's the
definition of happiness then yes i'm not arguing for that i would suggest that
it's a a cheap trick of your spiritual enemy to think that things or circumstances
are what makes you happy. They're not.
What makes you happy is having purpose and having a future and a hope.
That's what happiness is. Okay. So call it Christian joy if you want to.
I don't want to get too far in the weeds of that. So just call it whatever you
want, but I'm going to use the term happiness. Why does it matter?
Because you have a set of genes that are coded for the biochemicals that create
your your feelings of happiness and wholeness and reward and purpose.
And that biochemical system is there for you. You were created with a brain
that wants to feel happy.
Okay? And what happens is we respond to life events and we start with a baseline
of a set of genes that are either switched on or switched off based on our parents
and the things that happen to them. That's called epigenetics.
Right? The genes that we inherit aren't the whole story.
It's how those genes are programmed to be switched on or switched off that tells more of the story.
And the good news about that is you can control most of that switching on and
switching off through the process of gene methylation or acetylation.
And you can do most of that by changing how you think.
Okay. That's That's the short summary of what it means when I say thoughts become
things, okay? Here's the deal.
Neuroscientist Richard Davison. Based on what we know of the plasticity of the
brain, we can think of things like happiness and compassion as skills that are
no different from learning to play a musical instrument or tennis.
It is possible to train our brains to be happy. My friend who wrote the letter
to me, the email, it's not disingenuous to say, I feel sad and I want to change
my mind so I won't feel so sad anymore.
Am I just tricking myself?
No, you're not. You're learning to take advantage of something your creator gave you,
selective attention and neuroplasticity to be able to change the chemical environment
of your brain in a way that affects the transmission of impulses in your brain
to create neurotransmitter changes through gene expression that then create hormonal changes,
that then create cell surface receptor changes, that then create cell division triggers.
And ultimately produce a whole set of physiological and anatomical and neurobiological
realities in your life based on what you're thinking about.
And that makes it really clear. It brings into sharp relief why Paul told you
in 2 Corinthians 10.5 to take every thought captive.
Why? Why? Because every thought that you have, my friend, switches something
on or switches something off in your brain that either helps you to navigate
your life better or hurts you and harms you and keeps you stuck. Okay?
That's the reason. And that ought to sink in for you, my friend.
When I was a little boy, my dad once in a while would take me out in the woods in the Jeep.
Or we'd be deer hunting, and we'd be out in the woods somewhere on some two-track
road, and we'd get to a place where there was mud.
And you could see the tracks of the road going down into this mud hole.
And you'd start driving forward, and it would start to be pretty clear that
if we kept going forward, we were going to get stuck.
The mud was getting higher and higher on the wheels, and it just become clear
that that road wasn't going to allow us to get any farther forward.
And if we wanted to not get stuck, we better back up out of there. there.
And fortunately, we had the ability, the vehicle had a reverse gear in it,
and we were able to switch gears, and my dad could back us up out of there,
and then go find another path to where we needed to go.
But if he kept just going forward in the face of the evidence that the situation
was getting muddier and muddier, we were going to get stuck.
And then we'd be out in the woods in the middle of nowhere in a big mud hole,
and unable to move forward or backward at that that point and we'd be hosed, right?
It's a scientific term, hosed, by the way. That's the daily word,
not really. So think about that for a second in regards to your thought life.
You have a thought that pops into your head. I feel really sad today.
I'm really anxious today. I'm really upset about this.
And I guarantee you, so if you do a thought biopsy, it might be true that you're feeling that.
It probably is. Yeah, I feel sad. Why do I feel sad? Well, I lost my son 10 years ago.
I'm feeling sad about that. Okay. That's reasonable.
That thought is true. I lost my son and it makes me sad. That's true.
What happens next? And let's make it even more, let's say you haven't lost a child.
Let's say it's something more consistent with all of us.
You feel sad because somebody talked about you at work yesterday.
You overheard somebody crapping about something that you did at work,
one of your employees, or you're feeling sad because your coworkers went out
for a drink after work and they didn't invite you.
So the next day, you're just kind of sad. You're not quite, you don't really
have an awareness of why it feels sad.
But then you kind of biopsy your thought and say, you know, maybe I feel sad
because they kind of, they ignored me. They didn't invite me.
They were talking about me. They did whatever behind my back.
This thing happened, and it makes me feel sad. So what happens next?
If you biopsy the thought, and it is true that that thing happened, right? It's true.
And that's reasonable then, you say to yourself, to feel sad about that. It's reasonable.
What happens next, if you pay attention, is if you zoom out a little bit,
you'll recognize that you are in a spiritual war for your state of mind, my friend.
And if you're not a believer, okay, if you don't believe in heaven and hell
and God and Satan and all that, at least recognize that your brain will do this to you, okay?
If you want to just look at it in neuroscience terms, your brain has a negative
voice inside it that biases you towards negativity.
And it does. It's like a tractor beam. that's going to pull you down this pathway.
I think it's spiritual warfare. And I think the enemy of your soul,
Satan, wants you to go down this pathway because when you do,
you can't do anything productive or good or help anybody or make any progress
in your life towards being whole or honoring God with your life.
Now think about this path for a second, okay?
You feel sad. You biopsy the thought. You recognize that it's because something
real happened and somebody did mistreat you, okay, what happens next?
Almost every time. The devil doesn't show up in a red trench coat with horns
and a pitchfork and say, hey, I'm going to tempt you right now and drag you
off into something bad. He doesn't do that.
What happens is somebody sidles up in your mind and puts their arm around you
and says, oh, you poor thing.
They really did hurt your feelings. That's terrible. You're such a good person.
They shouldn't treat you like that. And it's not fair.
Let's just sit here on this bench. Tata calls that the bench of ain't it awful, by the way.
This bench that we sit on in our minds that says ain't everything awful. Isn't it terrible?
Just think about it and admit to yourself that this happens.
You're hearing the voice inside your head. You feel the comforting arm of somebody
with their arm around you.
There's a good friend who's just helping you think through this problem.
And it's so bad that they did that to you. And I am so sorry.
You don't deserve that. that. You're such a good person and nobody should ever
treat you that way. And it's a shame. And how dare they?
And you should be really upset about this. You ought to, you ought to,
you know what you should do? You
should send them a text message and you should really let them have it.
That'll, that's what you need to do. Now let's just recognize for a second,
friend, that that thought process that you're in right now is a muddy two track road.
And just ask yourself, just think about the downstream consequences of continuing
down that muddy two-track road of thought.
And just zoom out enough to say at other times in my life when I have gone down
that particular type of thought process, did it help me or did it actually hinder
me? I mean, did I have a good day?
Did I make positive change in my life and help others and influence people and
get my work done and be efficient and do all the things I wanted to do for that day?
Or did I tend to have it affect me negatively and be late for work and take
extra time getting ready and have a hard time deciding I don't even look good
in the mirror and I don't feel good in my skin today and I don't think I look
pretty or I don't think I sound smart or I don't think I'll be able to go to this meeting.
And I'm going to cancel that because I don't feel good and they hurt my feelings
and I don't trust the people that I work with.
And did it lead down that sort of thing?
Or did somehow that negative thinking that you're that muddy two-track road
of thought that you're on result in you having the best day of your whole life
and improving all your relationships and getting promoted and accomplishing 100 things?
Did it help you or did it hinder you the last 20 times you went down that stream of thought?
Did it trigger a fight with your spouse because you were in a bad mood so you
displaced it onto them and you nitpicked something and before you knew it, you were in a big fight?
Or did it help you have the best day of your entire marriage?
Just think about it for a second, okay? And be honest with yourself about what
happens when you go down that muddy road of negative thinking. Now, the good news is.
You can do self-brain surgery, and it's not silly optimism. Because what happens
when you go down that muddy road of thought is thoughts become things, okay?
It's crystal clear from the biochemistry that the way genes get expressed.
So if you back up and understand that good feelings come from neurotransmitters
like dopamine and serotonin, okay?
And when you have increased levels of them, you feel better.
And when you feel better, you make better decisions, and you do better things,
and you have a better life.
That's clear, okay? That's why people give you antidepressant medicine when
you feel certain symptoms, because you're trying to give you more dopamine and serotonin.
So if it's crystal clear from the biochemistry that feeling better is the result
of having increased levels of neurotransmitters like dopamine and serotonin, And if you understand,
because you're a super-duper trainee biochemist now,
if you understand that those chemicals come from genes that get switched on
and off by the process of methylation or acetylation,
and the genes that code for the production of those neurotransmitters change
in real time in response to our thoughts, because that's true,
okay, then you would say to yourself, Gosh,
if it helps me to have higher levels of neurotransmitters that create positive feelings,
and it hurts me to have lower levels of them, and I know that thinking down
a negative train of thought, even if something really did happen,
if I know that that triggers the expression of genes that code for less of those
chemicals that I need to feel good,
then why would I choose to go down that road and create a biochemical event
in my brain that is harmful to me why would I do that.
When I can, instead, put my brain in reverse and back up out of that mud hole
and go a different direction with my thinking.
That, my friend, is what Paul's talking about in 2 Corinthians 10.5.
He says, take every thought captive. Quit driving forward into the mud hole
when you don't have to, okay?
I've already ranted for half an hour here, and I'm not ranting,
but I just really want you to understand,
when I say these silly things, like you can't change your life until you change
your mind or thoughts become things or feelings aren't facts,
they're chemical events in your brains.
That's really true. That's real biochemistry, okay?
It's real methylation of genes
and whether they get expressed or not that makes you feel happy or sad.
The whole world's looking to feel better and they're using pills to do it and
they're using alcohol to do it and they're using sex to do it And you can do
it by changing your mind,
by deciding, I don't want to spend a whole day in that hole.
Now, if you're really stuck, if you have a chemical issue, a brain injury or
something that you can't make those chemical changes in your brain, you need help, okay?
You need a therapist, you need medication, you need a doctor.
Sure, there's roles for those things, okay?
I'm never, remember, if you are having some significant medical problem,
go see your doctor, okay? You might have a thyroid problem.
You might need medication, okay? Okay, I'm never gonna tell you not to use medicine
or therapists or doctors, I want you to, okay?
But there is a huge amount.
Of life change that you can make with your own decisions about what you're going
to think about, my friend.
That's a superpower. It's incredibly important.
It's self-brain surgery. It is not silly optimism. It's not disingenuous.
You are changing the methylation and acetylation of genes in your brain that
code for the production of neurotransmitters like serotonin and dopamine.
And those neurotransmitter levels are what triggers the entire neurobiological
cascade of things that turn into how you feel and how you move and how you speak
and what you think and how good your memory is and all those things that turn
into how good your life is, my friend.
Now, let me give you one example, 2 Corinthians chapter 1.
This is one example of how you can drive further into the mud hole or you can
back up out of it and change your life. life. Paul, who's an apostle.
And remember the backstory. If you read the book of Acts, this guy's been shipwrecked,
snake bit, flogged, jailed. I mean, this guy's been through it. Okay.
He's been through really severe
things, major traumas in his life of trying to be a Christ follower.
Okay. So none of us have been, at least none of us in the United States that
I'm, I'm certain of some places in the world where you're listening,
you may have actually been arrested or flogged or those kinds of things for your faith.
And if you are, we, we are praying praying for you and we love you and we're
grateful that you're so faithful.
But for most of us, we've been made fun of, maybe scoffed at a little bit for
our faith sometimes, but most
of us haven't really been scathed for our faith. But listen to Paul here.
Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of compassion
and the God of all comfort,
who comforts us in all our troubles so that we can comfort those in any trouble
with the comfort we we ourselves receive from God.
Okay, go down to verse 8.
We were under great pressure in Asia, far beyond our ability to endure so that
we despaired of life itself.
Indeed, we felt we had received the death sentence. Okay. That's a,
that's a lot of pressure, right? They're in real trouble here.
They're despairing of life itself. They think they've received a death sentence.
And then here's the, here's the, this blows my mind, what he says right here.
But this happened that we might not rely on ourselves, but on God, who raises the dead.
He has delivered us from such a deadly peril, and he will deliver us again.
On him, we have set our hope that he will continue to deliver us.
You see what he does here?
He's in the middle of a serious problem.
It's not over. He's not looking back and saying, yeah, God did that so I can
have faith in him now. He didn't decide at the end.
He's in the the middle of it. He's despairing of life itself.
But he says, you know what?
God's delivered us from deadly peril before. He's been in jail.
He's been flogged. He's been shipwrecked. He's been whipped.
He's been abandoned and abused and condemned and all that stuff before.
And God delivered. He lived through it. So he says, wait a minute.
God who can raise the dead, I've seen him do it.
He's delivered us from deadly peril before and he will deliver us again.
And so I'm going to set my hope on him that he will continue to deliver us as
you help by your prayers.
You see what he did? He changed his mind.
He was despairing of life itself. He was driving down the two-track road and
getting deeper and deeper in the mud, even though the real problem was still there.
Okay. He didn't, he didn't say I changed my mind and God took the problem away
and God made everything work out and he gave me millions of dollars and,
you know, made me in charge of everything. He didn't do that.
He didn't even eliminate the situation. He just decided that God had proven
himself worthy of trust in the past, and therefore, he wasn't going to give
up hope, and he was going to change his mind.
And just a few chapters later, in the same book, in 2 Corinthians,
he reminds us, 2 Corinthians 10.5, you better learn the secret of dealing with
hard things, and the secret is take your thoughts captive.
Change your mind. When you're despairing of life itself, even in the middle
of the problem, my friend, you can change your mind about it.
You can decide to have hope.
Even, remember, in Acts 4, he tells us about what Abraham did.
Against all hope, Abraham in hope believed.
Even in the worst moments, you can still just believe in hope,
and you can decide to change your mind.
And when you do, it's not silly optimism. It's gene methylation.
It's the regulation of the expression of proteins by the transcription and turning
on and off of genes by how you think about the things in your life that puts
you in charge of your own biochemistry that determines how you feel and how
you live and how you impact others and the story you tell with your life.
And if that's not self-brain surgery, my friend, I don't know what is.
This is good news. It's good news because we can change our lives by changing
our mind. and it's not silly optimism.
It's not some magic trick. It's not self-help. The only part of self-help that
you do yourself is admitting to yourself that yourself needs help.
And your Lord has created your brain with all the tools to manage your biochemistry
and manage your neurobiology so that you can take the high ground of your thinking
and not be victimized by it anymore.
And that old friend that comes alongside and starts to put his arm around you
and says, He says, oh, you poor thing. You say, wait a minute, time out.
People were mean to me yesterday, but my God is bigger than that.
And they were mean to him, so why would I be surprised when they're mean to me?
But I don't have to let that determine how I feel. I get to be in charge of that.
And I'm going to change my mind. I'm backing up out of this mud hole,
and I'm going to go a different direction, one that's good for me,
so that I can then help other people.
And the God of all comfort comforts me in my troubles so that I can comfort other people in theirs.
That's why I'm here I'm not here to spend
a whole day ruminating on something negative somebody said to
me yesterday or what my uncle did or what my dad said
or what happened when the doctor gave me that diagnosis I'm here to say if I'm
drawing breath there's a reason why I'm alive and that's why I can choose joy
and that's why I can decide I still have purpose and that's because I changed
my mind because I wanted to change my life and that is why I started 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,
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They are supplying worship resources for worshipers all over the world to worship
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If you need prayer, go to the prayer wall at WLeeWarrenMD.com slash prayer,
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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.