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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'm Dr. Lee Warren, and I'm so grateful to be here talking with you today.
It's one of my favorite days of the week. It's Frontal Lobe Friday.
Today, we're going to cover the 10th commandment of self-brain surgery,
which is, I must believe that thoughts become things.
I must believe that thoughts become things. And we've talked about this in a
number of episodes. Even recently, in the last few days, we've talked about
different ways that thoughts it's become things, but I want to give you just one idea right now.
Everything that's ever been built by human hands started as a thought.
Every conversation, every errant word, every errant deed, every kindness,
every act of generosity,
every act of philanthropathy, every book that's ever been written,
every poem that's ever been written, everything that's ever been done in the
whole tide of human times started with a thought.
That sounds almost philosophical, right? But here's the truth.
Everything you do in your life started first with a thought.
Everything you say in your life started first with a thought.
Everything starts with a thought. Why? Because thoughts become things.
As we talked about yesterday, William James, 19th century psychologist,
was one of the first people to recognize that the things that we think turn
into physical structures in our brain.
And now we know quantum physics from imaging, from neuropathology.
We know now literally that the things that we think turn into structural changes in our brains.
That's the whole basis for this science of self-directed neuroplasticity.
The things you think about can be turned by mental force into real things in your brain.
And that means they up and down regulate gene expression. And that means they
up and down regulate the production of neurotransmitters in your brain and your
nervous system and in hormones and your peripheral body.
Everything you think has a physical effect on your life.
And not just that, but also we know now from heart math studies that the way
that you think changes the electromagnetic field that your body puts out,
changes the energy fields of your brain and your heart.
And that can affect other people who are not even close by to you.
Babies can perceive and react to emotional changes from even strangers nearby.
Why? Because thoughts become things. Thoughts turn the energy of your body into
something other than what it was.
And you know this is true already because somebody can enter a room who's obviously
in a really bad mood and who's obviously really worked up about something and
your heart rate will go up. Why?
Because you're reacting to their field. field their thoughts have changed their
magnet their magnetic field and that's changing your magnetic field which then
impacts your heart your structural heart which then physiologically feeds back
on your brain and you get chemical changes in your brain that produce a different feeling in you.
That's called limbic resonance, by the way, where you can relate to somebody
else based on how they feel.
And you can perceive that even if you're not really close to them emotionally or physically.
It's fascinating, right? Thoughts become things. I'm going to give you back
an old episode that we talked about how thoughts regulate gene expression.
I had a listener write in a few months ago that said, hey, is this all positive
thinking? Is it some kind of trick?
Is it some kind of self-help gimmick? And I want you to remember that what we
think about changes the genetic expression of our body.
It does a lot more than that. And that's why the 10th commandment of self-brain
surgery is that thoughts become things.
Friend, you have enormous power to change your life by changing your mind.
You have enormous influence on the people around you, even if you never say
a word to them, by the internal structure of how you're thinking,
Because that changes the way that your body interacts with theirs,
even without words being said.
You have enormous influence on the world around you.
You have enormous creative power to impact the world around you by deciding
how you're going to pay attention to and exert attention and observation on
the world and the people around you.
We've learned that the way we attend to things has the power to make them more or less true.
I'm not talking about some kind of weird metaphysical trick.
I'm talking about the way that your creator designed you to co-create with him,
to subdue the earth and master it as we were commanded to do in Genesis.
So you're not a powerless victim of the traumas and dramas and tragedies and
massive things that have happened in your life, friend.
You actually have a power, power and with that power comes responsibility to
positively impact the people in the world around you by changing how you think.
That's what Philippians 4 is all about. You want to be less anxious, pray more.
You want to feel better, think better thoughts.
That's what Romans 12, Romans chapter 12, verse 2 is about.
Not conforming to how the world and the circumstances of your life and the people
around you and the culture around
you want you to think, but rather to be transformed by renewing your mind.
That's what 2 Corinthians 10.5 is about, learning to capture your thoughts,
take control, take command of your thinking.
We call that the self-brain surgery biopsy.
Had an amazing opportunity yesterday to speak with Amy Brown,
who hosts a iHeartRadio podcast that has millions of listeners called Four Things with Amy Brown.
And she asked me what the most important thing that I've learned about neuroscience is.
And I told her, it's that we have the ability to biopsy our thinking and change
how we think, which then changes how our brains and our bodies work and changes
the way we live and changes the way we impact those around us for the glory
of God. We had an incredible conversation.
And I just want you to remember, friend, of all the Ten Commandments,
perhaps the most important is that thoughts become things.
So wield them carefully because they have the power to shape,
transform, improve, or destroy your quality of life.
The witness that you have, the power you have to influence others,
the legacy that you leave behind, the set of genes that are switched on or off by your offspring,
all have greatly come under the influence of the train of thought that you have
on your life on a particular day and every moment.
And so friend, the great news is you're not stuck reacting to the traumas,
dramas, tragedies, and massive things that happen in your life. You're not a victim.
You don't have to suffer under the, why is my life always so hard?
Because you, my friend, can change your life. And you, my friend, can change your mind.
And the good news is you can start today. Now, before we do any of that,
I just have one question for you.
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.
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'll make a difference in your
life to actually learning that 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.
Like, 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 gonna 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, five, 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 two two 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.
He'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, it's a 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 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.
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 a 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 of 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 could 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? Right?
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, okay?
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 gonna be hard and it can't be abundant
or it's gonna be abundant, so therefore it won't be hard.
Those two things are mutually exclusive.
No, they're not. Jesus says it's both. 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 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 gonna 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, 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.
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 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
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 It'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? 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.
OK, 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.
And fortunately we had the 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 point and we'd be 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 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 grapping 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 working that 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. understandable.
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 gonna 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.
It'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. 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 know what you should do?
You should send them a text message.
And you should really let them have it. 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, okay?
And just ask yourself, just think about the downstream consequences of continuing
down that muddy two-track road of thought, okay?
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? 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 gonna 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?
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 Go down that muddy road of thought as 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, okay?
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?
Now, I've already ranted for half an hour here. And I'm not ranting,
but I just really want you to understand.
And 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.
I'm never going to tell you not to use medicine or therapists or doctors. I want you to.
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 one.
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.
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? 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 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, 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 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 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, 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. Now, he didn't decide at the end.
He's in the middle of it. He's despairing of life itself. But he says, you know what?
God's delivered us from deadly peril before. Remember, 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 gonna 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 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 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 this 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, 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,
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.
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.