Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
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. Dr. Lee Warren here with you for some self-brain surgery.
It is Self-Brain Surgery Saturday,
and I am grateful and excited because it is the end of Season 10.
I have inexplicably had to rerecord this episode.
I recorded yesterday and released it, and all of a sudden, people started contacting
me to tell me that they were hearing a hum on the audio.
So if you happen to hear that, then I just got to tell you, I'm not sure what
happened, but it was fine when I recorded it.
And something must have happened in the mixing or in the uploading of the file.
Maybe it got corrupted. Maybe it was part of that worldwide internet business
yesterday. I don't know.
But nevertheless, I went and on the YouTube version and the podcast version,
there was a low-level hum that I initially couldn't hear through the speakers.
But when you put headphones on, it was very plain. and I did all kinds of my
digital editing magic and could not make that go away.
So fortunately, we have time because it's Saturday.
I am going to rerecord this episode for you and I'm grateful it wasn't live.
I'm grateful that there's an opportunity to do that. And if you heard part of
that episode and abandoned it because it was too noisy, then here's your episode
back. So let me know if this one sounds better.
I am really grateful that we have an opportunity to do this,
that we have the technology to do it and that we have the community who will
let me know when there's an issue and we'll get after it and we'll always try
to make you have the highest quality product. You know why?
Because we've covered a lot of ground in season 10. We've had an incredible season.
We had unbelievable guests and we got a lot of ideas of self-brain surgery.
We got a lot of the mindset stuff right and we did it all together.
We've grown so much. We've come so far.
We've learned to take charge of our amazing minds and how they interact with our brain.
And honestly, I'm glad that I had to rerecord this because I found a scripture
that didn't make it into that original episode, and it's Hosea 4.6.
And Hosea 4.6 says, without knowledge, the people perish.
Without knowledge, the people perish. Well, guess what?
No one's perishing for lack of knowledge around here in the School of Self-Brain
Surgery. We learn together.
There is knowledge. There is information about how God has created us,
how our neuroscience and faith can smash together, how our brains and our minds
and our bodies and and our epigenetics and our quantum field interact with one another.
And we are learning the knowledge that we need to change our minds and change our lives.
And over the course of season 10, as we've been getting this mindset stuff right,
the one thing I hope for you is that I have convinced you.
That you are not your brain. You're not just a bunch of neuronal activity and
cells in your brain that determine who you are and what you will be and the
traumas and tragedies and genetics and background and upbringing and all that
stuff cannot keep you, my friend,
from having the future that you were built to have, designed to have,
that your great physician,
your creator wants you to have. You're not limited by your past.
You're not limited by anything that's happened. You're not stuck.
You can change, my friend. And in fact, you're changing right now.
Before you started this podcast, since you started this podcast,
you have broken down and recreated hundreds of thousands of synapses in your
brain. You've made new connections.
You've established new things. You've turned on and off neurotransmitters.
You've switched genes on and off.
Ever since you started this podcast, you're not the same person that you were 15 minutes ago.
You're not the same person that you will be an hour from now.
You know why? Because you can change. You're not stuck.
Your brain is constantly changing and rewiring and making new cells and new
connections between them your entire life.
You are not stuck. You don't need to feel that way anymore.
That's the ground that we've covered in season 10. And in season 11,
we're going to move from the mindset, from the contemplating part,
and we're going to start operating. We're going to get very tactical.
It's time to get strategic and tactical, and it's time to get after it.
We're going to stop contemplating and start operating and start getting after
the idea becoming self-brain surgeons for real.
The School of Self-Brain Surgery is going to turn you from a victim,
from a person who has things happen to them, from a person who has been stuck,
from a person who doesn't know how to break through, to a person who can use
the tools and gifts that they've been given to operate on your own brain and
your own life and make things happen.
You're going to get after it with me right after you answer this one 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 where
the neuroscience of how your mind works smashes together
with faith and everything starts to make sense are you ready to change your
life well this is the place self-brain surgery school i'm dr lee warren and
this is where we go deep into how we're wired take control of our thinking and
find real hope this is where we learn to become healthier, feel better, and be happier.
This is where we leave the past behind and transform our minds.
This is where we start today. Are you ready? This is your podcast.
This is your place. This is your time, my friend. Let's get after it.
Music.
All right, let's get after it. Hey, season 11 is going to look a lot different than season 10.
Literally going to look different because it's going to be hopefully all or essentially all video.
It's going to be fewer episodes, but they're going to be deeper, longer, more video.
I want you to subscribe to the YouTube channel, okay? Even if you don't watch
YouTube, it would really, really help me if you would take a second to go to YouTube.com, type Dr.
Lee Warren or at Dr. Lee Warren in the search engine, in the little search bar
on Google, and find my channel. I'll put a link in the show note too,
so all you have to do is click on it.
Subscribe to the YouTube channel. The more subscribers, the more it ranks in
the algorithm, the more people are going to find out about it.
And if you think self-brain surgery is valuable, it's made a difference in your life, then two things.
It'll help me if you click and subscribe on YouTube.
It'll help if you subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts.
That way, for sure, you won't miss any episodes, but also other people are more
likely to find out about it if you subscribe.
Same thing is true about liking, clicking the little thumbs up or the heart,
and also leaving comments because the more reviews or comments the show gets,
the more likely it is to rank up in the algorithm and people will find out about it.
So if you think it's helpful, that's one thing you can do besides becoming a paid subscriber.
You can, for free, without any real effort, you can help me have other people
find out about the show by liking and subscribing on YouTube or wherever you listen to podcasts.
But please go to YouTube, at Dr. Lee Warren on YouTube, and subscribe to the
show. I think you'll like it. The videos are going to be helpful.
Coming up in Season 11, we have a lot of incredible guests. We have kind of a new format. Matt.
We're going to go really deep, several episodes about each topic,
and many of them will have an interview with an expert or an author or somebody
in the field that we're talking about that'll help us take it home and really
make it practical, tactical, strategic,
move from contemplating to operating.
The other thing I need you to do is if you're only listening to the podcast
and you're not getting my newsletter,
and you're missing out on the community side, and you're missing out on some
very powerful information that I give you every week, some some specific tactical
strategies for how you can change your mind and change your life using neuroscience.
Neuroplasticity, faith, ancient wisdom, and self-brain surgery all in one place,
drleewarren.substack.com, drleewarren.substack.com.
A few of those people,
who subscribe to the newsletter, also make a decision to become paid subscribers of the newsletter.
And they get an extra video or audio podcast every week coming very soon.
We're going to start the frequent, probably monthly to start out with Q&A live
Zoom sessions with the paid subscribers.
So you'll have an opportunity to interact with me in real life, in real time.
And they have access to the entire archive of my writing and podcasts on Substack,
the stuff that's It's not available after 30 days anywhere else.
So once I release an episode, 30 days later, it goes locked behind the paywall
and only the paid subscribers can get to it.
So old stuff, archive, extra newsletters, extra videos, extra podcasts.
And frequent coming soon Q&A live sessions.
That's what the paid subscribers get. So that's all the stuff you can do if
you want to help spread the word and go deeper in self-brain surgery.
So today, we're going to wrap up season 10, the final episode of Contemplating
and Get get ready to start operating pretty soon.
And we're going to do that by talking about three things today.
We're going to talk about brain filters, self-talk, and what I call the two-patient rule.
The two-patient rule. Those are the things we're going to cover today.
Okay. You always hear me talk about how the mind and the brain are separate things.
I don't want you to think of yourself as being reducible to the parts of your
brain or the things that happen to your brain or the way that your brain works.
Okay. We're all kind of lured into this thing. Society's made it really strong,
especially since DNA got so popular and everybody got this idea that the genes
you inherit determine most of your life and all that stuff that we know now,
not to be true, but a lot of people still live that way.
They think, well, if I had a different brain, if I was a little bit smarter,
if I had different parents, if I was raised in a different place,
if I hadn't had this massive thing or this trauma or this tragedy occurred,
it just kind of broke me in a certain way or I'm neurodivergent or I'm anxious
or I have ADHD or whatever.
All of us have accepted this idea that if your brain works in a particular way
or doesn't work in a particular way, or if your vagus nerve is overactive or
your hippocampus is underactive or your amygdala is too sensitive, then you're just hosed.
And the fact is, that's not the truth. It's not the truth from neuroscience.
It's not the truth from scripture. It's not the truth from psychology.
It's just become really popular. But it isn't true. We're not after a truth.
We're not after your truth. We're
not after my truth here in the School of Self-Brain Surgery, my friend.
We're after the truth. Why? Because we're good scientists.
Okay? Scientists don't decide on a position and then defend it despite what
the data shows, even though that's kind of what a lot of popular scientists
do and the media does. Real scientists don't.
Test the hypothesis, and based on the results of the test, they revise the hypothesis
until they come to a hypothesis that is proven to be true, despite how many
experiments you run on it.
That's what, that's the scientific method, and that's how good scientists operate, okay?
We find the truth by continually asking questions, running experiments.
Revising the hypothesis until we come down to the thing that's undeniably true,
at least for the way that we can operate things now.
Now, obviously science changes over time as our ability to ask better questions
and invent better instruments to look deeper into the universe gets more and
more sophisticated, then so does our science.
That's why Newton, his numbers and math worked really well for 400 years until Einstein came along.
And now we know quantum physics is more accurate and more real and a better
explanation and a better set of tools to explain the things we see in the universe
than Newtonian physics were.
That's why quantum physics has
supplanted Newtonian physics all across science, if you're honest, okay?
So we're after the truth, and the truth is you're not stuck.
The truth is nothing can happen to your brain outside of major structural trauma,
and nothing circumstantial can happen in your life that you can't overcome or
improve or better by learning how to think differently.
We know that directed mental force is the most powerful thing that can structurally
change your brain, improve the brain chemistry, improve the interaction with
mind, brain, body, genetics, hormones, cell surface markers.
Everything is better if you think better. So thoughts become things and you
can change based on how you think. That's the point of self-brain surgery.
You are not a victim. You're not a patient. You are the doctor.
You're not the computer.
You're the programmer. Okay. It's so important.
And that's what we're going to do in season 11. It's so important to believe
that, internalize it, know that your creator has endowed you with incredible
abilities to change things by changing how you think.
That's why Philippians 4 says, change your thinking, you'll change your life.
You want to be less anxious, be more grateful.
The neuroscience backs it up. That's why Romans chapter 12 says,
don't be conformed to the way the world tells you to think, to the way the therapist
tells you to think, to the way your Your trauma tells you to think.
Be transformed by renewing your mind.
Change your mind, you'll change your life. We say it all the time.
Well, let me tell you one part of that.
If we believe that your mind has controlling influence over your brain,
then at the feet on the street level, we call it in medical terms, we call it the end organ.
The end organ of how you change your mind by changing your thoughts is in your brainstem.
It's a set of neurons and synapses called the reticular activating system.
The reticular activating system is this interconnected system.
In your brainstem that does a bunch of stuff, but the one we're interested in
here today is that it serves as kind of a filter.
And you literally, with reticular activating system, is always listening.
Daniel Lehman says your brain is always listening. Your brain listens.
Your reticular activating system listens to your thoughts and to your words,
and you tell it what to pay attention to.
This is fascinating and it's terrifying at the same time, because here's what'll
happen. if you wake up first thing in the morning and you say to yourself,
I'm going to have a terrible day because all my days are terrible.
Yesterday was terrible.
Today's going to be terrible. My life sucks. Everything's hard. And guess what?
You just told your reticular activating system to start filtering out anything
that doesn't support your focus on things being tough and hard and stinky.
What you'll do is you'll walk past your kid who drew a picture for you and and
holds it up and says, hey, mommy, hey, daddy, look at this picture I drew for you.
And it's a puppy and a rainbow and a smile and you holding the kid and y'all
playing together and all this happy stuff that your kid wants you to see from their heart.
And you'll walk right past them. You'll say, I don't have time right now,
honey. I've got to go to work.
I'm too busy for that. I can't see it. Your brain will literally filter out.
The nudge from your heart that your child is telling you that you can have a
good day because you're so greatly loved because you matter to them.
You'll filter that out because you've told your brainstem to pay attention to the things that are bad.
So you'll notice the bad news on the headline of the newspaper.
You'll notice the guy that cuts you off in traffic.
You'll notice the fact that somebody took your parking place.
You'll notice the fact that they were out of your sugar-free vanilla creamer for your coffee.
You'll notice all that stuff and you won't notice the beautiful sunrise and
the incredible red-headed woodpecker on the driveway.
And you won't notice the deer in the field on your drive to work.
You won't notice the note on your desk from a patient who was grateful for your care.
You won't notice all that stuff because you filtered it out because you told
your brain to pay attention to the hard stuff today.
That's what the reticular activating system does. That's a curse,
but it's also a blessing because you can switch it with the power of your mental thought.
That's why Philippians 4 says, think about things that are good and noble and
noteworthy and generous and loving and kind and all that stuff,
praiseworthy. because if you tell your brain, I'm about to have a good day up in here.
There's a song recently that came out, I'm about to have a good day.
If you tell your brainstem that you want to filter for things that support the
idea that you are loved, you are noticed, you matter, you make a difference,
people love you, people are paying attention to you, you have purpose,
you have opportunity to see beauty in the world, guess what's gonna happen?
Your reticular activating system is gonna start showing you,
that that's true, that there are good things around. The evolutionary biologists
think it's about survival, okay?
They think that if a bird has two berries that grow in its area,
and one's red and one's yellow, and the red one will kill them,
and the yellow one will give them nutrition and they can live on it,
then they'll filter out the red berries.
They'll literally only see the ones they're supposed to eat,
and they'll start eating the ones and stay alive.
They won't eat the bad ones. That's reticular kind of stuff,
filtering, okay? But it's not about evolution.
It's about creation. It's about you having an equipment, a set of equipment,
a set of surgical instruments, a set of tools in your brain that respond to
your words and your thoughts.
That's why, another reason why, the Bible says, let the words of my mouth and
the meditation of my heart be pleasing to you, God.
God isn't asking us to say good words to him because he wants us to flatter him.
He's telling us, you want to operate your brain and your life more effectively?
Use better thoughts. use better intention
be careful what you say to yourself okay be careful what you say to yourself
because you're turning filters on and off with them my friend it's important
it matters it's critical you
want to be a good self-brain surgeon you want to be a really really good.
Surgeon to take care of your life and the people around you and guess what start
being diligent intelligent to use your reticular activating system the way it's designed.
Give it good instructions about what to filter because it's going to filter something.
It'll default to the negative, but make it default to the positive.
Give it good things to look for. Give it good evidence to search for.
Tell it to filter out all the negative, and you'll start coming alive.
You'll start moving the needle on becoming healthier and feeling better and being happy.
Reticular activating system responds to thoughts and words. That's why we need
to be very, very careful with our self-talk, okay? Self-talk matters.
It matters because you are believing, your brain is believing and listening
to what you say, and your life will become about what you think about.
So if you're, and be careful here, I'm not saying you can manifest,
like turn your life into millions of dollars because you think different thoughts.
That's a misappropriation of what the brain can do, but it is true.
But if you start looking for opportunities to be be more successful in your
work, you'll start seeing them.
If you start looking for opportunities to improve your relationship,
you'll start finding them.
Why? Because your reticular activating system will help you.
It's not manifesting. It's not magic.
It's a miracle. God created us that way.
But you can literally improve the quality of your life and reduce the number
of negative events, not necessarily circumstances.
Negative interactions with other people because you are filtering for your side of that equation.
And when you get yourself squared away, many times other people will too, right?
So we want to be very careful with our self-talk because we don't want to set
up these reverberating circuits where we're just reacting to default defective thinking.
Negative thinking, casual careless thinking, because we set up these synapses
and our reticular activating system is filtering out everything that doesn't support that.
And we find ourselves living this self-fulfilling prophecy all the time of,
I said that it was going to be a bad day, and guess what? I was right.
So I'm going to believe it even more tomorrow, because what you're doing,
you're getting better at.
And then we go to bed at the end of another frustrating day,
and we tell ourselves all these horrible things right before we go to sleep,
and we wake up, and we remind ourselves of all the horrible things,
and all of a sudden, that's all we can see.
We've programmed our reticular activating system to see all of that bad stuff.
Of. So let's switch that around.
Let's start filtering for the good. Let's start looking for the positive.
Let's start interacting more positively because we've reminded our brains to
set the filter, to prove to us that God is good.
He is on our side. Other people love us and notice us and care for us.
And the world's not all bad. And the sun is still shining and the woodpecker
is still in the tree and all that good stuff.
You don't have to live in this negative state. You can filter.
And please understand, I'm not saying at all, in any way am I saying that you
just ignore all the bad stuff.
I'm not saying that. What I'm saying is it's always out there.
There's the world full of beauty and pain.
There's hope and there's harm.
There's love and there's death and there's sad and there's happy.
There's all this stuff happening at the same time.
And the problem with suffering, as we've talked about many times,
is that suffering can become the defining thing of our life if we're not careful.
Negativity can overwhelm us. It can keep us stuck.
And we forget that we can tune our eyes and tune our minds to see the fact that
there's other stuff around at the same time.
It's not always ever one or the other.
Hope and hurt run on parallel tracks, remember?
So if we can then learn to filter so we can still see the good stuff in the
midst of hard circumstances, that's when we become refined by trauma and tragedy
and other massive things and not defined by them.
That's how we do it. The last thing I want to tell you about today as we finish
up season 10 is something called the two patient rule. Okay.
I want you to remember this.
When you're doing self brain surgery, there are always more than one patient
involved. It's It's not just you. Why?
Because when you do self-brain surgery and you change the way you think,
it will automatically influence and affect everybody else you encounter in your life.
Remember, I did a, well, I don't know if you heard it or not,
but I did an episode for the paid subscribers a couple of weeks ago.
And I mentioned that old Johnny Depp movie from the 80s or 90s called Edward
Scissorhands. I don't know if you remember that guy.
This crazy guy that had scissors for hands and had to be really careful with
how he lived because he would try to hug somebody and he would stab them.
He would try to interact with somebody and he would cut them with his scissor
hands. It was crazy, right?
But if we're not careful with our brains, we can live our lives as if we have
scissor hands, because if you get yourself in the wrong state and you're not
paying attention to your state,
then you will injure other people with your words or your attitudes and you'll
snap at them or you'll hurt them because you were caught up in how you felt
and you forgot that the way that you are thinking in your mind will affect other
people when you interact with them. You'll blow up on them.
You'll say harmful things to them. You'll ignore them. You'll miss them.
You'll be so caught up in your own thinking that you don't even see them.
And now all of a sudden, you've set off a circuit of interaction with another
person that affects their state and their life and their ability to feel loved and noticed and seen.
And if you're a Christian, then you just had an opportunity to shine light on
somebody, and instead you shone darkness on them.
You had an opportunity to help heal someone, and instead you hurt them.
Remember our first commandment of self-brain surgery is, I will relentlessly
refuse to to participate in my own demise.
I will not commit self-malpractice. Well, we need to extend that to,
I won't hurt anybody else because I didn't check myself before I wrecked myself.
I won't go around with my scissor hands cutting other people that I didn't mean
to cut because I wasn't aware of my own state.
So if you program your reticular activating system properly,
you're filtering good things.
So you see the positive, you see the hope, you see the purpose,
you see the meaning, and you're less likely to focus and ruminate and descend
down into the abyss, the pit of despair, and becoming defined by your circumstances
instead of refined by them, then you are more likely to...
To help other people with your interactions, to be a good self-brain surgeon
and help them in their practice of self-brain surgery.
If I was a good professor, I wouldn't walk into somebody's operating room and
have a junior resident with me and teach them the wrong way to do an operation.
I wouldn't do that because I want to keep the good stuff to myself.
So I'm going to teach this student the wrong way to do something so that when
he has his own practice, he's always having trouble because I taught him the wrong operation.
But when we are around our kids and our spouses and our coworkers and our colleagues
and the people that see us in our lives, we are teaching them self-brain surgery operations.
And if they look at us and model their lives after us, and they are influenced
by us, and we are not performing these operations properly, we are teaching them bad surgery.
And we don't want to train other people to hurt themselves or their lives or
their generations because we taught them bad surgery, right?
We don't want to treat bad feelings of bad operations. We don't want to treat
other people that way either because we don't want to help them be worse off
than they were before they encountered us.
We want our lives to make a difference, to inspire people, to rewire people.
As Dan Siegel says, inspire to rewire.
We help other people change their minds and change their lives too.
And now all of a sudden we're realizing that we really do have a purpose.
Maybe I'm in humble circumstances. Maybe my job is not so fancy or famous.
Maybe my only opportunity in this life to make a difference is to inspire my
children and to uplift people around me and to help other people see that there's hope.
Maybe point people to asking questions about God.
Maybe I don't have the gifts to teach and preach and baptize and save people and lead people to God.
Maybe I'm not that person, but I certainly can show people that I practice what
I preach and that I believe what I say I believe and that my life is pointed
towards something good,
that I have a purpose and a passion and a meaning and hope in my life. Thank you.
That that stuff is real and it's not just words, right? Maybe I can inspire
other self-brain surgeons.
What if we all did that as we finished season 10? What if we went from contemplating
to operating and we recognize that we're also, we're not just self-brain surgeons,
we're also professors of self-brain surgery.
So at the same time, we're in the school of self-brain surgery,
we're also professors who are teaching it to others.
That's what I want you to get as we finish up season 10. We're heading in to season 11.
We got a brand new season coming. I mean, starting soon, we've got all kinds
of exciting things. I can't even tell you about all of them yet.
It's going to be so fun, and we're going to get super tactical,
and we're going to go deep into the neuroscience and how neuroscience and faith
smash together to help us all find hope, meaning, purpose.
And I want you to be flourishing in your life. I want you to have fun.
I want you to be fulfilled.
I want you to be filled with faith, and I want you to flourish and not just survive.
I want you to come alive as we become tactical self-brain surgeons.
Don't forget that you're always filtering something so be
careful how you set your filters don't forget that self-talk
is always a powerful influence on
your brain stem your reticular activating system your frontal lobe and the way
that you interact with others so no negative self-talk let's commit to that
okay root it out get really tactical with it and try to get rid of it all together
and let's remember that we're always dealing with a two-patient rule it's not just about me.
I'm also programming other people and hindering or helping them with every decision
I make, with every interaction.
If you want to become healthier and feel better and be happier,
the good news is, friend, you can do it, but you got to change your mind.
Thank you for your time and your attention in season 10. It's been an incredible
honor to be with you for all of this progress that we've made.
And I'm excited to dive into season 11 coming at you in a few days.
Please go subscribe on YouTube.
Please like, share, follow, sign up, leave reviews, do all that stuff and consider
signing up for the newsletter.
And if you want to go deeper, sign up to become a paid subscriber.
And season 11, we are going to go incredibly tactical. You're not even going
to believe the tools I give you.
Backed by neuroscience, rooted in faith, and ready to go to help you change
your mind and change your life.
And the good news, my friend, is that 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.