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Neurosurgeon and award-winning author Dr. W. Lee Warren, MD delivers daily prescriptions from neuroscience, faith, and common sense on how to lead a healthier, better, happier life. You can’t change your life until you change your mind, and Dr. Warren will teach you the art of self brain surgery to get it done. His new book, Hope Is the First Dose, is available everywhere books are sold.
Good morning, my friend. I hope you're doing well. I'm Dr. Lee Warren here with you.
It's Frontal Lobe Friday, but today's episode is going to sort of be a combo,
Frontal Lobe Friday and Theology Thursday.
I did not release an episode yesterday because I was invited to speak at the
mayor of North Platte, Brendan Kelleher, at his annual prayer breakfast.
They do a prayer breakfast for this community to kick off the Nebraska Land
Days Rodeo, and it was such a great honor.
Lisa and I got invited to attend, and I was asked to speak.
That started at 6 a.m. yesterday, so I didn't get up and make a new podcast for you.
But today, I want to talk a little bit about some of the things I discussed
at the prayer breakfast. It was amazing.
The governor of the state of Nebraska, Jim Pillum, was there.
He had about 250, it seemed like maybe 300 people there.
It was a great event, and we were so grateful to be there and just have a moment
to focus our whole community on the prayer.
And so today we're going to talk a little bit about how prayer is the operating
room in which we submit ourselves for the self-brain surgery that we need for
God to help us change our minds and change our lives.
So today we're going to talk about prayer in the context of self-brain surgery.
I'm going to give you some new ways to think about it. And before we do any
of that, I have a question for you.
Hey, are you ready to change your life? If the answer is yes,
there's only one rule you have to change your
mind first and my friend there's a place where the neuroscience of
how your mind works smashes together with faith and
everything starts to make sense are you ready 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, we're going to talk today about how prayer
is the place where you first go to submit your mind for the self-brain surgery
that you need to change your mind and change your life.
So we're going to talk some theological things, some scripture.
We're also going to talk about some frontal lobe stuff, selective attention,
and the ability that you have to choose to think about one thing or not another thing.
And that's why it's a perfect episode to smash together Theology Thursday and Frontal Lobe Friday.
So we're going to do that today. day. Shout out to my amazing wife, Lisa.
Today is her birthday and our
house is lots better today because we're celebrating my beautiful wife.
So send a message if you want to Lisa at lisawarren.com, let her know happy
birthday and the ways that she supports and creates really a lot of the ministry
that we do around the world.
She's the driving force behind everything that I do.
And I'm just so honored and amazed by her, stunned by the fact that she keeps
getting prettier and smarter every year and seems to be timeless as we go through this life together.
So shout out to Lisa. Love you and grateful to have you and have you as a listener
to the podcast too. So happy birthday.
Hey, okay, here we go. I got four points to give you today, friend.
Four points. We're not going to belabor the science. We do that all the time.
We talk about the science.
We go deep. I'm writing a whole new book about this self-brain surgery handbook
to give you the tools and the scientific background to apply the things and
understand them at a deeper level that we're gonna talk about here today.
But today I wanna give you in one place, four ideas basically to contrast, two lies and two truths.
Lies that you're hearing in culture, lies that you're hearing in school,
lies that you're hearing in media that just aren't true.
Two things that are true to combat them, one scripture to hold on to,
and we'll smash all that together. And that'll be our self brain surgery for today.
So we're going to get after that and put our minds in the place of prayer and
let prayer be the operating theater, the place we go to let God start being
that great physician on our behalf as we make these changes that we believe
have the inherent power to resurrect hope,
give us meaning and purpose in spite of hard things and find our way forward.
Even when life hurts and has trauma and tragedy and massive things and drama
and all that. So here we go.
Let's just break this down. Here's a lie that you've been told, okay?
And whether or not you acknowledge it, whether when I say it,
you may immediately say, I don't believe that.
But there's some elements of this lie that all of us, I believe, have absorbed.
And to the extent that you absorb it, you're gonna have a hard time finding
peace and happiness in your life. I'm just gonna call it out.
Here's the lie. Most of the scientific world for the past 400 years since Newton
and Galileo, has held on to the concept that you are simply the action of the
electrical activity of the cells inside your brain and your body,
that you accidentally developed millennia ago through undirected natural process
and which ultimately have no meaning or no purpose. You don't matter.
There's no real you. And even your concept of mind or consciousness is just
the activity of neurons in your head.
So if you can reduce you to the electrical events in your brains,
then scientists actually believe that eventually everything in your life is
thus determined biologically,
and you have no free will to change or even understand any of it.
It's just a process of cellular behavior.
Science, they believe, will eventually explain everything, reduce it down to
its component parts, and therefore
be able to determine what that particular cell, what you, will do.
You won't even be able to wonder why it happens eventually because they'll be
able to explain it all to you, and you really don't matter, and you really don't have a purpose.
That's super hopeful, isn't it? It's terrible. But that's the reductionist,
materialist end result of that worldview,
is that you're just an electrical organ that created itself out of meaningless
processes that happened since an event billions of years ago somehow started
everything out of nothing.
And when you die, you just go back to the elemental particles of the universe
from which you are made accidentally, but there's no purpose or meaning or plan behind any of it.
And I'm just here to tell you, an honest look at the science from physics to
cosmology to evolutionary biology to modern neuroscience has begun in the last 20,
25 years to lay the ax to the root of that tree of materialism and deduction
and determinism and reductionism.
All those things are less and less scientifically valid
and more and more skeptically viewed by
honest scientists but you're not hearing it in
the media yet why because it's a challenge to the worldview if there is a meaning
and purpose to your life then maybe that also comes with some responsibility
that if there is a creator maybe you have some responsibility to him if there's
if there's a design maybe you have a responsibility to try to live up to it
and so that would be a a threat to this culture that says,
do what you want, live your truth, find your happiness.
Do you, do you, all those kinds of things that we hear in our culture today.
But here's the truth. Here's the truth. I apologize for my voice.
I am so congested this morning.
So if it sounds kind of creaky or funny, I apologize. I'm doing everything I can to clear it out.
Drinking my coffee, drank a bunch of water, but here we go. Here's the truth.
It's crystal clear. We've talked about this several times in several recent
episodes. 20th century quantum physics made it abundantly clear.
Okay, let me back up for a second. So even if you're an agnostic or an atheist
or a doubter, you don't know what you believe, this is important, okay?
Because as your friend, as your internet brain surgeon, as your teacher of self-brain surgery.
I want you to get this. Your life needs to have a purpose.
And even if you don't believe that there's a God who created you on purpose
for a purpose, you need to understand that quantum physics has shown us that
you really do have a purpose.
There's a meaning and a reason why you're here.
Your interaction with the universe affects the outcome of the people in the
situations around you in your life.
Your application of your own mental force is a creative force in the the universe.
Quantum physics has shown us that the effect of the observer changes the system,
it changes the outcome. You matter.
And I think that points us towards God to say, hey, I created you to have an
impact on the world around you.
And I think what'll happen is even if you're a doubter, if you're agnostic,
if you're atheist, if you start recognizing that operating your life from the
standpoint of seeing that you matter, that you have a purpose,
I think you'll start seeing bigger truths around you.
And I think it's a thread that you ought to pull on. I mean,
After all, if there is a creator...
It would be important for you to figure out what he's all about and what your
responsibility to him might be, right?
So rather than just saying, I don't believe in Christianity,
I don't believe in God, don't do that.
Take it from a more scientific perspective and say, okay, I recognize that humans need to have purpose.
I recognize that quantum physics shows me that my input into a system affects
the outcome of that system, including my whole life and the people around me.
So therefore, my life isn't purposeless. Like even if it's just an accident
that I'm here, I still have a purpose because I changed the world around me
with my mental force and my input changes things and people around me. So that's a purpose.
So you can see that it's okay for you to go through your life from this worldview
of believing that you matter because that will help you navigate the hard things.
When you go through something hard and there's no purpose to it, it's just suffering.
But when you go through something hard and you still have a sense that you have
a plan, a purpose, something that you're supposed to be about,
then the hard parts just become part of the story.
And you'll remember that most of the movies you've ever seen that you loved,
the hero had some trouble they had to navigate in order to accomplish their ultimate purpose.
That good stories always have some challenges, and so does life.
If you had a life that was pain-free, you wouldn't do well. Well,
remember in the eco lab, that dome that they built out in the middle of the
desert where they put people inside and they thought they could optimize the
environment and people could live.
And the idea was that they could build a base on the moon or on Mars someday.
And they had these people that lived inside this for a long time.
And they found that they couldn't grow trees very well, that trees would grow
to a certain height and then they would just fall over, that they couldn't make
trees grow. And they finally figured out what the problem was.
They had recreated everything except wind. wind
and trees apparently as they're growing if they don't have wind to
resist they don't develop good enough root systems and
they just fall over that we need stress we
need trouble we need hardship we need difficulty along the path to navigate
because that's how we develop resilience and become stronger so the truth is
you matter now i believe you matter because god made you that way and here's
the truth like i said 20th century quantum physics and 21st century neuroscience
science have conclusively shown,
at least to honest observers, that you are not your brain.
Brain and mind are not the same thing. You are not a computer.
The most important thing we've learned is that you can make structural changes
in real time in your brain. That's self-brain surgery.
That's what we're always doing here on this show. You're not stuck with the
brain you have. You're not stuck with the patterns of response that you've had.
You're not stuck reacting to trauma or triggers the same way.
You can change them by how you think.
Changing how how you think changes how your brain works.
And it's as real a type of surgery as anything I do in the operating room without
the haircut, without the painful incision, without the hospitalization.
Observation and attention matter.
And that's why I always say you can't change your life until you change your
mind. You're not a computer.
You're the programmer. You're not a patient. You're the surgeon,
my friend. So the lie is that you're an accident that doesn't matter and doesn't have a purpose.
The truth is you do have a purpose. You do matter.
You're not just a computer. Mind and brain are not the same thing. Here's another lie.
Most of us have absorbed, at least to some degree, the teaching that our lives
are basically determined by our genetics, by our upbringing,
by our past traumas and circumstances.
Even Christians often accept this idea.
Rich Valotis, in one of his books, The Good, Beautiful, and Kind,
he wrote, you may have Jesus in your heart, but grandpa lives in your bones.
And that's true to some extent.
But what we know now is that you can turn off and on genes that you've inherited from your parents.
You're not stuck with your past gene expression baseline that you started with.
There's dozens, hundreds probably, of genes that are switched on or off at your
birth from your parents' path path that you can control largely by how you think and how you live.
That's exciting news. The truth is, the lie is that you're stuck with your genes
and you're upbringing your traumas and your circumstances.
The truth is, yes, we inherit some things from our parents and even from our
great-great parents, but the truth is you can change those things by learning
how to think about them differently.
Here's an example. I've told you this story before, but there's amazing research
where they took these mice and they exposed them to the smell of cherry blossoms.
Apparently, it's a smell that's pretty powerful to mice. And when the mouse
would recognize the smell, their nose hairs would twitch, or they would acknowledge
that they're smelling something, they would shock their little brains and give
them a painful stimulus.
And over time, the mice learned to be afraid of the smell of cherry blossoms,
that they would have abnormal cortisol responses, they would exhibit stress
responses that physiologically would change.
And then they noticed that those stress responses became encoded in the sperm
of the male mice that had been shocked, and their offspring were born with an
abnormal stress response, both physiologically and hormonally and behaviorally.
They had an abnormal stress response to the smell of cherry blossoms,
even though they had never been shocked. And those persistent,
those changes persisted through four generations.
So great, great grandchildren of these mice were afraid, physiologically afraid,
had abnormal genetically determined genes.
Baseline cortisol and stress responses to stimuli they had never been hurt by
before, which means you can inherit things to be afraid of from your mom and
your dad and your grandpa and your grandma and their parents and their parents before them.
This has been validated in humans looking at Holocaust survivors who their great-great-grandchildren
have abnormal baseline stress responses and cortisol levels compared to normal
controls that hadn't gone gone through something like that.
They've shown it in people with PTSD from Vietnam and combat who their grandchildren
have elevated cortisol levels and responses to certain triggers at birth.
That's the bad news. You can be born afraid of something you've never been through.
This is probably, as our friend Gina Berkmaier talks about, this is probably
the basis of what the Bible is talking about when they talk about generational
curses, how God says He visits the sins of the father on the third and fourth
generation, he's not threatening us.
He's not saying, hey, if you sin, I'm gonna punish your great grandkids.
What he's saying is be careful how you live because the things you do change
your bodies in a way that will affect your kids and the way that they feel and
think when they're born.
And you can set them up for struggles if you're not careful with how you live. Here's the good news.
You can condition those mice and the people.
You can condition them not to be afraid anymore. where you can expose them to
the stimulus long enough without shocking them that they learn that the cherry
blossoms aren't dangerous anymore and their sperm cells stop expressing that gene,
that switch that was on or off, and their kids and their grandkids can be born
in the next generation and the generations to follow with normal stress responses.
It's been shown in humans that cognitive behavioral therapy and other types
of treatment can resolve those genetic predetermined stress responses that we've
inherited from our parents. that's within one generation that can go back to normal. Why?
Because how you think has a powerful influence on gene expression.
We talked about it before.
Changing how you think doesn't change the chromosomes that you pass on to your kids.
It changes the switches, whether a gene is turned on or turned off.
That's called epigenetics. The things outside of our genes, they have a controlling
influence in how those genes are transcribed and turned into proteins by RNA
and the way that your cellular gene transcription engine works.
Basically, you turn things on or off by adding proteins called methyl groups
or acetyl groups to turn on or off the expression of genes. And those things
seem to be profoundly influenced by thought patterns.
And so it's really true that when you change your mind, you change your brain,
you change your cells, you change the expression of your genes,
and you change your offspring.
So what the generational curse idea is about is that you can mess up the baseline. line.
You can muck up the way your kids and your grandkids and their kids feel and
the things that they sort of respond to innately, even though they haven't been
through those things, if you're not careful with how you live.
But the great hope is you can fix it by changing how you think.
So yes, it's true that you inherit some things from mom and dad,
but the more true thing is that you can undo those changes and make better ones
and pass those things along by changing how you You think that's the rest of the story.
T.D. Jakes said, you're born looking like your parents, but you die looking like your decisions.
So there's two lies and two things that are true. So if how we think can change
our brains, our gene expression, our physiology, then what should we do?
And you might be asking, what does this have to do with prayer?
You said you were going to talk about prayer this morning, Dr.
Warren. And I said before, I want to convince you, friend, that prayer is the
operating room in which we learn the self-brain surgery we need to change our
minds about the things that hurt and hinder us in our lives and our role in
our life and our relationships with God and others.
So here's three true things. Let me just reiterate.
You're not stuck with the brain or the genetic starting point that you inherited from your parents.
All of those things are under the control of your directed mental force,
your thinking, and they can be changed by changing how you think and the way
that you apply your attention.
To the traumas and tragedies and other massive things that happen in your life
lack the inherent power.
Listen to me. They lack the inherent power to define your emotional health or
your future happiness As long as you acknowledge that trauma is not what happens to you.
The trauma is your response to what happens to you. And you can change the response
by changing your thinking.
You can change your life by changing your mind. And three, the amount of and
the type of attention that we pay to any situation, like anxiety,
for example, has tremendous creative power to either enlarge and make the thing
more real or reduce and heal that situation.
This is what we've learned from quantum physics. The way that you attend to
something, we call it attention density,
the amount of attention that you put on something and the perspective you bring
to it, the type of attention you bring to it, has the power to lock that thing
in place. It's called the quantum Zeno effect.
And in quantum physics, it's this idea that the more you observe something,
you literally can stick that system in a state of being perpetually where it is.
The system can't change until you observe it in a different way or stop observing it.
And that sounds really weird, but the math has been proven and it's being used.
That fact is being used in the creation of quantum computers and in unbreakable
cryptography codes that the government spy agencies like the CIA are using.
The science of how attention affects reality is the basis of quantum computing.
So it's real. And whether it's hard to understand or whether you believe it
or you think it's crazy, Einstein, Rosen, and Podolsky wrote a whole paper about it back in the 1920s.
Heisenberg discussed it, that the idea is very true that the way you pay attention
to something changes the outcome of that thing.
That's why, whether you believe in God or not, you can clearly see that your
life is not, in fact, purposeless.
And so, the way that you pay attention to something, let's say that you have
anxious symptoms from time to time, you think you have an anxiety disorder,
you start to think about the fact that certain things are going to make you
feel anxious, which then starts to affect the choices you make,
the places you go, the people you talk to, the experiences you're willing to
go through, because you might feel anxious if you go through those things.
And so you begin to modify your behavior in order to try not to feel something
because you're so afraid that if you do this, you'll feel that.
And then all of a sudden, your life is focusing more and more clearly on symptoms
of something that makes you feel anxious or a thing that you think is a disorder.
And now all of a sudden, all your attention is beginning to revolve around that one thing.
Perhaps you have a relative who's,
that you have a somewhat strained relationship with, okay?
You got a cousin or a son-in-law or a daughter or a friend who you have had
a little trouble with and you're not sure how they feel about you and you're
afraid that they don't love you like you want them to.
And so you're gonna be in a restaurant and see them in a couple of hours and
you start thinking about the fact that you have felt distance from them.
You felt the cold shoulder from them.
You felt that this argument that you had hasn't been forgiven and you feel like
you were in the right and they were in the wrong and they should have been the
one to apologize and you start to focus on this problem with the relationship
and whether or not they really love you.
And then when you finally get to the same place at the same time and they walk
in, normally you would go and give them a hug and be the one to initiate the contact.
But this time you've been focusing on thinking about the hurt and the wound
and you're afraid that they don't love you.
So you hold back and they come in and see your face and on your face,
they see something that looks like you don't appreciate the fact that they've
walked in or you're not really grateful to see them, or maybe you're still mad at them.
And from their perspective, they're afraid to go and speak to you because they
perceive that there's a problem.
And both of you are focusing attention on the issue instead of the fact that
you're in the same room with each other.
And so they don't initiate the hug and you don't initiate the hug.
And the attention that you pay
to that problem is now creating the very thing that you were afraid of.
Does that make sense? The perspective and the attention that we place on something,
it affects the outcome of that situation.
This is not just a metaphor. This is a real thing. Your quantum state,
the way that your body and your physiology and your energy is being applied
in your mind changes the body language and the electromagnetic field and the
heart math of everything about your body and your sphere around you.
This is not metaphysics. It's real physics.
And that affects other people. And you know this already. There's people that
walk in a room and you feel different.
Your heart races, you get stressed because their mood is sending out this limbic resonance.
You're quantumly entangled with them and your heart rate and your physiology
begins to respond to them, even if they haven't said a word.
A complete stranger, you can see a look on their face and you begin to feel
an emotion because you're connecting with their brain that's putting out signals
that your body's picking up on a subconscious level.
That's a real thing. Attention matters.
And so the true thing you need to understand is the amount of and type of attention
that we pay to any situation has immense creative power to either make that
thing bigger and more real or make that thing smaller and healable and manageable.
That's a responsibility that you have as a co-creator with God of your own life
to carry out the mission that He's given you, to impact people for Him,
to give people hope, find your purpose, move forward in your life with a plan.
All of that is under your own control
to the extent that you're willing to change how you think about it.
So what it teaches us is that we need to be careful.
That's what we think about. And the good news is the Bible said that 2,000 years ago.
It diagnosed the issue and gave us the science and the surgery we need to operate on it.
And that's why I love that smashing faith and science together.
And that happens in the space of prayer.
So then what is prayer for? Prayer shifts our posture from self-focus to dependence on God.
Unfortunately, my friend, your brain is immensely self-focused.
All of ours are. The vast majority of our mental lives are self-referential.
We think about ourselves.
We think about our problems. We think about the way people are going to affect
us, the way things are going to let us down, the way things are always so hard,
the trauma that we went through, the massive loss that we had.
Most of our private thought lives are about us. St. Augustine called this incurvatus in se.
It's a Latin phrase, incurvatus in se, which means the life that is curved in on itself.
We think about our feelings. We think about our anxiety. We begin to think about
the things that make us feel anxious.
We think about how other people are doing things that make us anxious.
We think about who we can blame or what happened to create the feeling of anxiety
and how we need medicine or alcohol or something else to stop us from feeling anxious.
And then the quantum physicists are over in the corner shouting,
hey, the more you pay attention to something, the bigger it gets, friend.
And we find ourselves more anxious. The research is
now becoming crystal clear that all of this therapy and all of this focus on
our symptoms and all of this scream therapy and primal rage therapy and shouting
into the pillow therapy and punching things therapy and going out into the woods
and beating our chest therapy and going back and talking about how our parents
have let us down therapy.
All of that stuff is creating people who are more anxious and more stressed
and more in need of medication and more in need of therapy and are not getting better.
There's a whole generation of people who have had so much focus on their problems
that they've lost the ability to move towards promise of improvement.
And why? Because the more attention you pay to something keeps you stuck in
that thing being real in your life.
That's powerful and it's true.
You don't want that kind of bad therapy focusing on your past.
Great therapy acknowledges the past and points you towards the future.
If your therapist is keeping you stuck trying to figure out who to blame,
you need a new therapist.
And maybe you just need to get some scripture and you need to understand this
science and you need to decide that you're gonna think differently about your
own life and you're gonna focus on your future and not on your past.
Maybe that's all you need.
I'm not saying that. I'm saying some people need a therapist.
Some people need a medical doctor. Some people need medication.
But all of us need to change how we think. Because if you just medicate it or
numb it and you don't actually fix the underlying thought issue,
then you may have fewer symptoms, but you're still going to have the same problems.
You've got to change how you think about all this, my friend.
And that's the beautiful thing about prayer. Prayer turns this on its head.
James 4, 6 said, God opposes the proud, but gives grace to the humble.
That's an important lesson for a month like this, where everybody's out there
talking about how proud they are of certain things. God says, pride's not the thing.
Humility is the thing. You bow yourself down to me. I'll change your mind.
You'll think differently.
You'll feel differently. You'll live differently. I can do surgery on your heart
and make you want what I want.
That's why Isaiah 30, 15 says, in repentance and rest is your salvation,
in quietness and trust is your strength, not in boastful pride and humility and repentance.
That's a good lesson for surgeons. I mean, we need to come to our work with
humility and awe and reverence, not with pride and power and arrogance.
And sure, you can approach prayer as a place to just ask God for what you want
and give Him a list of boxes to check, things to do for you.
But in so doing, you will rob yourself of the power and the relationship that
He wants to have with you. That's why Isaiah says in 30, 18,
the Lord longs, friend, to be gracious to you.
Therefore, he will rise up to show you compassion. God is waiting for you to
humble yourself in prayer and relationship with him so that he can speak into your life,
so that he can remind you who he is, so he can show you a new plan and a new
path for your life. It's not your truth.
It's his truth. It's not your happiness. It's his happiness that will produce
real happiness in yours.
You won't be thirsty anymore. You won't be hungry anymore because you're eating
and drinking the right stuff. God wants us to pray.
Even though he already knows what you think. That's kind of strange, isn't it?
And it's because he wants your affection and your time, and he knows that he
made your mind, your brain, and your body to function most effectively and healthily
when you're less focused on yourself,
you're less in curvitus and say, you're less curved in on yourself and more focused on him.
And that's why Philippians 4, 6 through 7 says, don't be anxious about anything.
Don't sit around and think about what you're anxious about, but in every situation
by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your request to God and the peace of God,
which transcends all understanding will guard your heart and your mind in Christ Jesus. You see that?
Bring your anxiety to the operating room and let him guard your heart and mind.
Change anxiety for thanksgiving and gratitude.
And if you don't feel like you've got anything to be thankful for,
okay, your husband been left. The disease came back. The money's not there.
Your kid's dead and in the cemetery, you're broken.
You don't think there's anything that you could reasonably be grateful for.
Here's one thing you can be grateful for. You have frontal lobes.
You have frontal lobes that connect to your hippocampus. And when you connect
them to your hippocampus, then all of a sudden, the threat and anxiety that
your hippocampus reminds you of can be brought up into your frontal lobes and
you can change what you think about.
You have the gift of selective attention. You can give God thanks for that,
to say, hey, thank you that you told me that I can change my mind.
And so I don't know how to do that, God, but in this moment,
in this prayer, I'm asking you to make stronger connections between my hippocampus
and my frontal lobe and reduce the connection between my hippocampus and my
amygdala, because I'm tired of fight, flight, and freeze.
I'm tired of running away. I'm tired of the automatic fear response.
I'm tired of being triggered all the time. I'm tired of feeling this anxiety.
I'm tired of the trepidation and fear in which I have lived,
and I want the hope of something better.
And my friend, here's what the science says.
Andrew Newberg and his group at Penn have shown it with functional brain imaging.
People who meditate and pray for as little as 10 minutes a day for six weeks,
their hippocampus gets 22% bigger on average and becomes more resilient.
The connection between the hippocampus and the frontal lobes grows.
Grows, the hippocampus connection to amygdala decreases,
and you become more resilient and better at not freaking out anymore,
better at bringing those executive centers online, better at changing from one
stream of thought, I'm so scared, I'm so anxious, I'm so afraid, to another.
Thank God I've got this brain that he gave me that can produce better neurochemical
environment for my brain and my body.
It can improve my state. It can help me not freak out anymore.
God can help me change my mind. And that, my friend, is real brain science.
It's real. The connection between hippocampus and frontal lobe is unidirectional.
It can't go towards anxiety and towards thankfulness at the same time.
That's why Paul says, be anxious for nothing, but rather be grateful and pray
because you can't be anxious and grateful at the same time.
And so if there's nothing else you can be grateful for, at least be grateful
that you have the ability to think about one thing and not another thing.
And if it sounds overwhelming, I'll get an email today. Somebody's going to
say, I keep trying it. And before I know it, I'm lost in that scary thought
again. It's okay. Try 30 seconds.
And for the next 30 seconds, I'm going to think about how glad I am that God
gave me frontal lobes and the ability to switch from one train of thought to the other.
I'm just going to give God thanks for that for a minute and just do it for a few seconds.
And what will you find? A few deep breaths, a few moments, and all of a sudden
you'll realize, hey, for the last minute, for the last three minutes,
for the last five minutes, I didn't think about one thing that I was scared of.
I thought about the fact that I was really grateful and amazed at how fearfully
and wonderfully God made my mind and my brain.
I was really grateful that Dr. Warren taught me about quantum physics and how
the way I observe something changes the reality of it.
I'm really grateful that I can choose to think about one thing or another instead of another.
And God gave me that ability. And then maybe, yeah, you'll have another minute
where you freak out about something, but you had a minute where you weren't.
And if you can do that for one minute, you can do it for two minutes.
And if you If you can do it for 30 minutes, you can begin to have a life of
this type of in-and-out relationship prayer with God.
That's why 1 Thessalonians 5 says, pray without ceasing.
Because if you keep that kind of back-and-forth dialogue with your Creator,
going as much as you can, you'll find you can't be grateful and anxious at the
same time. You will get that under control.
If you need to add therapy, if you need to add medication, if you need to add
a medical doctor, or you need to make sure your thyroid's working properly.
You need to stop doing things that
rob your neurochemistry like alcohol or numbing behaviors or whatever.
Whatever the package of things that you have to do to get this better, get it better.
Stop suffering. Stop being your own producer of demise.
Remember the first commandment, I will relentlessly refuse to participate in my own demise.
So choose, friend, today to bring that stuff that you're so afraid of to the
operating room of prayer and let your great physician teach you these procedures
to engage the mind and the brain
that he made for you in a way that will optimally manage your own life,
that will reduce generational issues,
that will produce better relationships and conversations with your family,
that will produce more time when you're not stressed and anxious.
Psalm 34 says, I brought to the
Lord my fears and he rescued me from everything that made me so afraid.
I cried out to him and he rescued me from everything that made me so afraid.
Isn't that amazing? So bring this idea. Psalm 139.23 says, Search me, God, and know my heart.
Test me and know my anxious thoughts. See if there's any offensive way in me
and lead me in the way everlasting. Remember, you're not a computer.
But what happens is your brain throws thoughts into your head,
40,000 or so of them a day.
And remember, one of our rules, feelings aren't facts and thoughts aren't always true.
Your brain presents thoughts to you that come in the sound of your own voice,
and you think you're thinking something, but what you're really doing is running
a program from your brain that says, hey, in this situation,
I'm supposed to feel anxious. In this situation, I'm supposed to be mad.
That person hurt me before. I'm supposed to be upset about that.
And if you're not careful, you'll start running those thought programs as if
they're your own active thoughts, and you'll think you're thinking something
that you're not really thinking, you're just reacting to.
So Psalm 139 then shows us the path here.
Test me, God. Know my anxious thoughts. See if there's any offensive way in
me. Lead me in the way of everlasting.
What's he doing? He's saying, God, I recognize that my thoughts aren't particularly reliable.
The things that I feel don't always produce good results when I react to them.
So test me, God, run a scan on my heart and tell me if I'm having an anxious
thought because there's something really scary happening, or if I'm just having
an anxious thought because I programmed my mind to react in certain ways.
See, put your thinking in front of the scanner of the Holy Spirit, friend.
Let the word of God be the functional brain imaging and heart imaging that you
need. That's why Philippians 4 says that the peace of God will guard your heart and your mind.
Remember, the Bible conflates heart and mind.
They're the same thing in Bible writers' times. They don't understand that mind
and heart refer to the same idea that you've got this spirit inside you.
You've got this mental life that's separate from your brain.
And what the Bible says clearly is you need to guard your thoughts.
You need to be careful what you put in. 2 Corinthians 10 says,
take every thought captive. Why?
That's the bad thought biopsy. You need to be careful to make sure you're not
just a computer that mindlessly runs programs.
You're not just a meat computer that's running every thought or feeling that pops into your head.
You're going to let God say, no, this is a real thought.
And this is the one that you should respond to. This is the way you should think.
This is the way you should reframe that emotion.
This is the way you should proceed when you feel a certain set of things.
Develop a discipline of examining our thoughts before acting on them.
And here's the sequence of the operation, okay?
Stop running these programs. Think your thoughts before deciding they're reliable and really yours.
So a thought pops into your head and you say, wait, is that my thought or is
that just some program that's running?
I'm in charge of my brain. It's not the boss of me.
My mind and my connection between my mind and the Holy Spirit and the Holy Spirit to the Lord,
That's quantum entanglement of instantaneous communication with the Father back
to me to heal me and mend me and change my thoughts and help me to decide not
to think everything that pops into my head is real.
Feel my feelings. Think about them. Feel them. That feels like anxiety.
Why do I feel anxiety here? Oh, because that happened 10 years ago,
but it's not actually happening now.
I don't have to feel that right now. I don't have to run that program.
Thank God I've got a frontal lobe that can decide to think this and not that.
To bring your feelings and your thoughts before him and let him scan them and
show you what's really real. Believe your beliefs.
Take something that you say you think you believe, like God can heal me,
but then you're living like you don't think he can.
And look at that belief and say, do I really believe this or not?
Maybe you need to go back to the word and find what the word really says.
Maybe you've got some brokenness around church in your life and some preacher
made you think some things that God never actually said.
Or maybe you've got some bad theology in there somewhere. And you believed something
like God won't put anything in my life that I can't handle, but he has.
And you've experienced some things that you can't handle and you're broken by them.
And you don't understand why people say, God's not supposed to give me something
I can't handle, but I can't handle this. Well, the truth is that's bad theology.
God never said that. It's out of context. There's a verse in 1 Corinthians 10
where it says that God won't tempt you beyond your ability to handle it,
but he'll provide a way of escape.
He's talking about he won't allow you to be tempted, lured into adultery,
lured into a problem that you can't get out of.
There will always be a window or a door of opportunity for you to escape temptation.
That's where that misplaced theology came from.
People took that verse that's very specifically about temptation and God making
a promise that there will always be an option to get out of there.
And there will, if you think about it.
Every problem you've ever had, every sin, every serious a situation where you
got yourself into there was a moment.
When you got a text message that reminded you you should be somewhere else,
when you had a thought that popped into your head, I really ought not to be here right now.
I really shouldn't send this message. I really shouldn't go through that door.
There's always a moment when you have a chance to make it different,
isn't there? That's what that scripture is about.
Nowhere in the Bible does it say that God won't give you more than you can handle.
What it says is, I can give you the strength to do this with my power.
I can do all things through Christ who gives me strength.
We rely on Him. We depend on Him. The strength and the power comes from Him.
So if you have a belief, you need to believe it. So examine what you believe.
Examine what you feel and contemplate it. Make sure it's consistent with your
beliefs. Make sure it's consistent with Scripture.
Make sure it's consistent with good theology and not just something somebody
told you or something that you morphed out of things that you absorbed from
the environment or the culture. Make sure the word actually says what you think it says.
That's what Paul's talking about in Philippians 2.12, by the way,
when he says, work out your own salvation with fear and trembling.
He's not saying earn your salvation, work yourself into heaven.
He's saying, hey, you've got a responsibility to know what you believe and be
able to live it, teach it, pass it on, defend it, understand it,
and have it be workable and manageable and helpful in your own life.
You've got to work that out. There's no second generation Christians.
Okay. The old saying, God doesn't have grandkids. It's true.
You've got to make a decision for your own life, friend.
And that arming yourself with the word of God is the way that you guard your heart and your mind.
Okay. So think your thoughts before you actually act on them.
Feel your feelings, test them out, bring them before God, scan them,
make sure they're real and that they're not just related to some prior experience.
Okay. If there's a snake, be scared, run away. But if it's just that you're
kind of feeling afraid because this situation reminds you of something that
you used to have to be afraid of, maybe you don't need to be afraid anymore. Change your mind.
Believe your beliefs, rethink them, rethink your actions instead of just running
with what your brain says you're supposed to do in this situation.
Stop thinking you're a computer.
You're not your brain. Your mind is in charge.
So we come to prayer then as a way to ask God to change our minds, to examine our hearts.
And this best practice is this continual conversation.
Like I said before, pray without ceasing. That's what he's talking about.
Not that you're on your knees in the closet 24 hours a day, but this is constant
conversation saying, hey, God, what should I do here?
Hey, is that feeling really valid?
Is that memory that I'm having, is that really true? Did I really go through that?
Or am I kind of remembering something that my therapist kind of triggered to
make me think that didn't really even happen?
Like bring that stuff before God, converse with Him, okay?
And that's how we get this connected life that Isaiah 30 was talking about, Isaiah 30, 21.
You'll hear a voice, whether you turn to the right or the left,
your ears will hear a voice behind you saying, this is the way, walk in it.
See, the Holy Spirit it comes alongside you in your mind and says,
hey, you've been pursuing your truth.
You've been doing your thing. You've been trying to fight it out your own way.
I've got a better way for you. Let me teach you.
And like a good professor, he'll put his hands on your hands and show you how
to operate this mind and this brain and this life that he's given you.
He'll help you. Frequent prayer enlarges the brain areas related to resilience
and emotional regulation that we talked about before.
It makes your hippocampus bigger. It connects it more robustly to your frontal
lobes and decreases the connection to your amygdala, you get better at praying by praying more.
You get better at handling emotional stressors by handling them with his guidance more frequently.
You get better at understanding whether you're having a real thought or feeling,
or you're just running a program by learning to examine them and think about
your thinking before you react to it.
There's all kinds of physiological and psychological benefits of prayer.
It's been shown to reduce stress, enhance brainwave states, lower blood pressure,
improve immune function, help you sleep more, improve your pain management skills,
increase your resilience, reduce anxiety, improve emotional regulation.
Enhance positive emotions, increase social connections.
Prayer and meditation are good for you.
It integrates mindfulness, gratitude, and sense of connection and contributes
to wide ranging benefits as we just listed.
And all of these things, by the way, if you're a doubter, even if you don't
believe there's really a God, all of these things have been proven in numerous
psychological and physiological studies.
So even if you think it's just some sort of artifact of the way the universe
created you, that's okay.
God gives us general grace. He makes the sun shine on the just and the unjust.
He gives us the ability to learn how to use our bodies.
Even if you don't think He did it and you just think it's the way it is,
this is a better way to live than being bound up in your anxiety and believing
that your life has no purpose and believing that your genes determine your whole
life. This is a better operating system.
And I believe if you'll shift into this operating system, that you'll start
to see maybe some evidence that there's more to the story.
And maybe you'll find a path that starts to feel more hopeful.
That's what I believe. Prayer smashes together with life in the operating room
where God comes and says, hey, this is how you can change your mind.
This is how you can change your life. That you're not stuck with the brain you're having.
You're not stuck with the bodily responses you've always had.
You're not stuck with the way you've learned to respond to the things you've been through.
God has created your mind and he inhabits it with his spirit to present a constant
opportunity for you to allow him to change you from the inside out.
And that's what Romans 12, 2 is about. Don't conform to this world.
The world wants you to think this way, feel this way, pursue your own truth,
be proud, fly the flag, do the things that make you feel happy in the moment.
But the truth is it progressively gets harder and
harder to find anything that seems to make sense and you
move the target and you keep trying to expect other people to change
enough to make you happy and the truth is you can't
be happy until you finish that verse don't conform to this world but rather
be transformed by the renewing of your mind friend prayer is the operating room
in which we learn the self-brain surgery to change our minds our bodies our
generations and our lives for the purpose of living out our purpose,
the one for which he created us.
And he's there with us performing that surgery that we consent to through the
medium of prayer, confession, and thanksgiving.
Psalm 34, four, as I mentioned before, promises us that he will help relieve
our anxieties and everything that's making us afraid.
Modern neuroscience has proven it.
He's not just a good doctor. He's a great physician.
And he's made our minds have dominion over our brains so that we really can,
as I always say to you, change our minds and change our lives.
And that's why we can end our meeting today, our podcast today,
this conversation with the hope that springs eternal.
Doom, spear, or sparrow is my motto. While I breathe, I hope.
Psalm 71, 14 is my power verse.
As for me, I will always have hope. Why? Because I can change my mind.
Because I can change my life. And the good news is you can too. And 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.
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.