Transcription
Your brain is never the same two days in a row. It's not even the same two minutes in a row. Problem is, most of us think the same things over and over. 80% of the things we think and feel every day are false.
"No way. 80%."
Some of you might say, "Well, I've always been this way. It's never going to change." What is your hope to that person?
"God built your brain to get better over time and not to get worse over time. There is an element of what we hear in our heads that is not just neurological activity, but spiritual warfare."
Wow. What do you think the percentage is of people that are held back by their thoughts versus their actual circumstances?
"All of them."
"What if you could actually do brain surgery on yourself? What if you could actually move away from those parts that kind of seem to linger and limit?"
Well, today we're going to be talking to Dr. Lee Warren. And Dr. Warren has been a friend to our family for quite a while and he's just written an amazing book called The Life-Changing Art of Self-Brain Surgery. We're not going to use knives, but we are going to use something actually way more powerful to pull things that are holding you back out of your life.
Dr. Warren, thank you so much for joining us. And I believe this book is so crucial. There is so much going out there right now that is about mind over matter manifesting new age and you are approaching this from a completely different frame of mind. You are going with scripture and you are going with the word of God and I cannot wait to unpack this book.
"Thank you for having me, Lisa. It's good to be here."
"Absolutely."
"It's a joy. Well, why, why did you write this book?"
Well, so I'm a practicing neurosurgeon, right, for 25 years now. Um, but I'm also a guy who's been through a lot. I've been to the Iraq war as a neurosurgeon and dealt with PTSD from some of the things I saw there. Um, and then we lost a son in 2013. Um, and so as a person who works in the space of helping people process and navigate through hard things, I became one of those people that was navigating hard things. And I found that my faith and my science that I taught and practiced um needed to unite and unify. And so I I started studying how science and faith are supposed to work together to help us flourish, which is what I think both of them are designed to do. And so for the last 12 years since Mitch died, I've been working on that. And um now I'm ready to help other people understand how how things have been does not have to be how they are.
"Yeah. You know, we were talking just very briefly beforehand and I said it's like people have lost their minds."
"Yeah."
"And and No. And I wasn't, you know, like you used to say, 'Oh, they've lost their mind.' And it was it seemed like it was a few people, but it feels like there is a collective..."
"...uh, people just they're not making sense."
"They're not processing things correctly. They're not processing other people's pain correctly. And um, what can we do about that? Because I feel like this is something and I'm I'm assuming that you're saying we start here."
"Yeah."
"And then we respond out. Can you kind of kind of frame what your greatest hope is for this book and why this is incredibly crucial? Because somebody might say, 'Well, I, you know, I've always been this way. It's never going to change. My past is is today is like yesterday. It's just going to keep going back.' I can what what is your hope to that person and what is your hope for this book?"
My greatest hope is that I can help people understand that there is a tremendous amount of agency and control and therefore hope in the fact that God built your brain to get better over time and not to get worse over time. And in our cultural moment right now, we're being taught that if the wrong stuff happens to you or you're raised by the wrong folks or you inherited the wrong genes or you go through something hard that it can break your brain in a way that you can't recover from. And then everybody needs to just huddle around you and pat you on the back and and feel sorry for you for how hard you've had it.
"And stop triggering you."
"And stop triggering you. And and we put we put these things that we we almost adopt them as identities. We put them in our Instagram profiles and say, 'Here's how I am. Here's my personality type, here's my enegram score, this is how you need to treat me.'"
"And the perception has been that our brains create who we are and therefore we're stuck with that. But the truth is from both scripture, what it's always said and from what neuroscience is discovering in the 21st century, your brain is never the same two days in a row. It changes constantly."
"So your brain, wait, hang on. Your brain is never the same two days in a row."
"That's right. It's not even the same two minutes in a row because your brain is constantly disconnecting and reconnecting itself from neurons and groups of neurons in your brain. And so that means that you're literally never have the same structural brain as you had a few moments ago. And what we've learned in the 21st century is that the primary thing that drives how neurons connect going forward is not how they've always been. It's about what you're thinking about. And so our thoughts actually literally structurally change what our brains become structurally. And that changes turns into what our bodies do hormonally, neurotransmitter-wise, and how our genes get turned on and off and passed on to our children. So, literally from thought to thought, you're building a brain that's different than the one before. The problem is most of us think the same things over and over. We begin to believe that how it's been is how it has to be. This is just who I am. I got the wrong set of stuff for my folks. I went through the wrong things. And so, we create the same brain over and over that we've always had. And that's why we feel so stuck."
And is there safety for people to actually perpetuate the stuck? Because I do feel I do feel like my okay, I'm a boomer. I think you might be a boomer. I don't know. But I was born in 1960 and we did have the mindset that, hey, you go through some hard stuff, it makes you stronger. You you you go through these hard things. It doesn't mean they're doesn't mean they're easy. It doesn't mean, you know, you losing a son. I I cannot even imagine that. But I've talked to every single person that's ever been in that situation and they don't deny the grief, but they redeem it.
"That's right."
"And it sounds like you've taken this and said, 'I I'm I'm not going to make excuses for you to remain in captivity when God is offering you freedom.'"
"That's right."
"And um I I do find there's sometimes people would rather be prisoner of war than warriors."
Well, I think we we develop a comfort level with what we know, right? And so, psychologically speaking, it seems safer sometimes to stay even in an uncomfortable position or if you find validation and identity in that place and other people are, in fact, you'll have no shortage of people who will come along and pat you on the back and say, "I feel so sorry for you." Right? It's easy to find those folks.
"Sure."
"What's hard is to start changing the dynamics of the family you grew up in or the people that you're around or the people who have gone through something hard with you and you say, 'I want my future to be different than this. I don't want to think these same things again.' Sometimes that challenges power structures and other relationships. And so it can be hard and scary to change. But what's interesting is we've learned from neuroscience in the 21st century that it's actually true that when you go through something hard, your brain gets stronger and more robust and more able to deal with hard things. But we're being told it breaks down."
"That's right. But we're seeing with what we call functional imaging now, we can put you in a scanner and we can look at what your brain is doing when you think certain things. And we can actually see people get more robust and more resilient and develop more willpower because they've gone through hard things, which is what Romans 5 says all along, right? The suffering produces endurance. Endurance produces character. Character produces hope. So neuroscience is coming around to the idea that if you want to be a hopeful, resilient person, you need to have gone through some hard things. And then that backs up to how do we raise our kids? We're seeing this generation that are we got to protect them. Can't let them can't let them go through anything hard. If they're sitting behind a mean kid, we need to write a letter to the teacher and make sure they move my kid, put them on their team with the coach that they like. And what we're teaching, what we're seeing is that kids are growing up and they they can't launch. They can't go through hard things. Life is hard and they don't know how to deal with it because we didn't let them go through hard things when they were younger and their brains were looking for proof that they could survive hard things. And so one of the things I'm most passionate about now is having gone through the loss of a son and I've seen God keep that Romans 8:28 promise on the back end that he's going to work good out of this. Not that it will become a good thing, but that he can work something good and beautiful out of it. He can he can show us what meaning and purpose look like on the backside of trauma. And I can just tell you 12 years after losing my son, it is it became the thing that showed me what my life was for."
"Wow. Because I lost such a went through such a great loss and me and my family went through that and we found that God's promises were true. You do get stronger, you do get more resilient and then you find other people who don't have the same gifts that you do, who need you to show them that it's possible to find hope again. And that's this whole self-brain surgery idea is applying what neuroscience and scripture have said all along in a way that you can see a future that doesn't look like the past did."
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Going back to what you said, you go through something and there is there always a more robust possibility, but some people don't choose that.
"There is."
"So there's always a robust possibility, but sometimes people are like, 'No, I'm going to I'm going to stay with the victim mentality.' And then your brain would reprogram accordingly."
"That's right. So the the thing is a lot of us and I think most of us at least on some level we equate..."
"...quality of life with ease of circumstance."
"Wow. Okay."
"So if I as long as nothing bad happens I can have a good life."
"And then and then society will validate that. Right. If you're if you're a good person, you work hard and you do right, God will protect you and nothing bad's going to happen to you. And then when something does, it can throw your faith into a tailspin. Or if you're not a believer, you can wonder, you know, why would would a good God allow this kind of thing to happen? Or maybe there's not a God if something like this evil can exist. And what we find out is you can either choose to wallow in the circumstance and allow it to define what your future looks like."
"Isaiah called that the furnace of suffering, right? You can you can be burned up and defined by the suffering. And we all know that person. The person who 20 years ago something hard happened and if you bump into them on the street today, you'll say, 'How's it going?' And they'll say, 'Well, I'm having a rough day because I went through this hard thing 20 years ago.' Right? They're staying in that and it has become the thing that defines them. And now that we understand that your thoughts turn your brain into what it is, which means that's how you feel. Those are the emotions that you feel. Those are the neurotransmitters that you make. Your your repetitive thoughts create the brain that creates the life that you have. If you decide instead, I'm going to allow God to show me what my future could look like, how I could find meaning and purpose again, then you'll begin to develop a brain that supports you in trying to learn how to find hope and move forward again. And so, it's a choice. It doesn't always seem like an easy choice, but it is always an available choice to to each of us if we're willing to do the work."
Dr. Lee, how much of our thinking processes are just inherited from our parents or it's just like woven into our environment? What what are your thoughts on that?
That's a really important point because most well all of us are raised in an environment with a certain set of genetics that we inherited in a culture and a worldview before we ever have language or understand the rules of engagement for the world are sort of imposed upon us. And so the baseline ways in which we think, feel, believe, and act are imprinted upon us before we ever have an opportunity to get cognitive about it and think about it.
"Wow."
"And so that's why so many of us feel like this is just how I am. This is how my dad was. This is how my grandfather was. There's another thing called epigenetics that that sort of programs a lot of your baseline stress responses and cortisol levels and all those things based on hard things that your parents and grandparents went through that you never experienced yourself."
"Wow. Wow. And so understanding those two things that that you react a lot of the ways that you do because of the rules of engagement that were imprinted upon you before you were aware of it and that a lot of the things about how your genes are expressed came from things that happened to generations before you. Then if you understand that and that you begin to remodel your brain as soon as you change the the way that you think about things, then you can say it's not my fault how I got here, but I have responsibility for where I go next. And the process of neuroplasticity and renewing your mind changes as soon as you start thinking one thing and not another thing."
"Wow. That is amazing. I love that. That is so that is so empowering. You know, because the Bible says that the sins of the parents are not to be visited on the children. Okay. Anymore it says, you know, it's used to be for three to four generations. But you're saying the thought patterns..."
"...can still be there with the epigenetics."
"That's right. And not only the thought patterns, but we know that certain things do run in families. Alcoholism abuse, um, abnormal stress responses have been studied really well in Holocaust survivors down to four generations that those kids are born with abnormally high cortisol levels. Wow."
"So that means what you do, so the generational curse mentioned wasn't a threat from God. I'm going to punish your kids. It was a warning because if you don't get this right in your lifetime, your kids are going to struggle with things they've never actually encountered. And so the the freedom there is that if we get it right, our kids can improve it in their lifetimes and future generations can be born better off than we were because we learned how to renew our minds in our in our generations."
"Wow. So if we don't, what's at risk is our children are going to struggle with things..."
"...perpetuating things that..."
"...that we are..."
"...they never even faced, but they're going to still..."
"...wrestle with those things that were in previous generations. Wow. That's right."
"Wow. Wow. That is sobering and empowering at the same time."
"It is."
"So, Dr. Lee, let's say there's a mother and maybe a a mother and a father and they're sitting home and they have bought into the lie that avoidance of every problem is the best situation for our son or for our daughter and now they're realizing, wow, I did not position them to develop strengths that they needed. Um, where do they start now? What do they do? they let's say their their child is is 10 or their child is a teenager and they're like, 'Oh, no. Is there is there hope? Is there a way to to flip some of this?' What what what would some of that uh catalyst look like for them?"
I think the the the first thing is that that because we know the science is on your side that the brain begins to remodel and change as soon as you start thinking different thoughts. Then the first thing is to understand this. The research also indicates Lisa that about 80% of the things we think and feel every day are false.
"No way. 80%."
"About five to one most of the thoughts that pop into your head are not true."
"I'm pretty sure 80% before I drink coffee is definitely wrong. I know that."
"It is. And so so here's here's the interesting thing. If your thoughts create the brain that you have and about 80% of your thoughts are untrue, if you don't know that and you react to them as if they are true, then you're building a brain to support you in making decisions based on information that was never true."
"So, I'm making a brain that lives uh supported by falsehoods."
"In falsehood. That's right. So if you've got a child and you recognize, hey, I've taught my kid to be over sensitive to risk, to be risk averse, and now I'm seeing that they're a a child who can't engage with anything that feels scary or dangerous, and it creates anxiety and panic in them. The first step is to say, well, the first I need to teach my child that not everything they think and feel is true. And that's what the Bible said all along, right? Right. Take your thoughts captive. 2 Corinthians 10:5, reform your thinking. Don't conform your thinking. But research is showing very clearly now that not only are 80% of the things we think false, but about 90% of the things we think about every day are the same set of things that we thought about the previous day. And so that means if you take those two things in context, that most of what..."
"...right..."
"...most of what pops into my head isn't true. And most days I wake up and think about the same bunch of stuff I thought about the previous day. And now that I know that my thoughts turn my brain into what it is, I'm continuing to feed my brain the same generally untrue thoughts and and tell my brain that the generally untrue things I feel are true. And then my society says I need to validate my feelings. I need to follow my heart. I need to live my truth. All those things. Then what I'm doing is I'm creating a brain that's looking at the world and seeing falsehood and not having a mechanism by which to determine that it's false. And so your your your job as a parent is to say, 'Hey, I know this feels big and I know it feels powerful, but it might not be true.' And so let's develop a mechanism for discerning whether the things I feel and think are true or not before we react to them because if it's not true, you don't need to react to it. You don't need to live in it if it isn't true."
"Wow. Well, I mean, that explains what I said at the the very beginning, like people have lost their minds. They're they're actually living in a stronghold of lies."
"That's right."
"It sounds like everything's being processed through faulty reasoning. Um, okay. So, going back to that parent, because I I know I've got lots of moms and they're like, 'Oh my gosh, Dr. Lee, what do I do?' So, I love that you can say, 'Hey, that's big.' Would it be beneficial for the parents to maybe sit their son or daughter down and say, 'Listen, we love you so much that we thought the best situation for you was to keep you and shelter you from any type of hardship or confrontation or, you know, conflict.' And we realize now that that was a mistake. And we realize now because it sounds like you're actually saying that the parents are trying to protect them from anxious situations is actually creating anxiety. A generation of anxious children because they've never developed the skill set to realize, oh, I went through that and I I I lived. I survived. I I'm still friends with that person. I had a hard conversation, but it's okay. Um, I lost that game, but I can doesn't mean I'm a loser. I mean, those kind of things. So, can there be a turning point where the parents can say that to the child and then the family as a whole says this is the new way of we're looking at things."
"Because if it really feels like if the parents don't see it, they're going to by accident perpetuate that."
"That's right."
"Um I'll just speak for myself personally. my mother and my father. My mom had a very traumatic upbringing and I would hear her retell incidents of things that happened 20 30 you know 40 50 years ago and some of those I was part of and I didn't even recognize what she was saying because she repeated it so many times but it got layered with emotion and her present day context or or whatever where it was I was like wait and and I it was like there was a situation where there was no ability to move forward because we were working with a bunch of non-truths over here."
"Right."
"And and almost like I remember there was a day I I said to her mom, 'That's just not true.' and her her little eyes, she just looked at me like, 'Oh my gosh, have I built all this time on something that was false?'"
"M."
"And um and I I do believe there's a lot of people right now that are waking up and realizing that there's been a constant messaging of you're a victim, you're a victim, people are after you, you know, divi division, uh, you know, whatever's going on. You choose sides instead of renew your mind. Uh, as a woman who is 65 and went through menopause in the last decade, I'm going to tell you there's a crazy woman in your brain if you don't renew it. I mean, it is it is a it is a real thing, right?"
"And 80% of probably the things I was thinking or reacting to emotionally and wanted to spend emotional true."
"Would have gotten me arrested, you know, or thrown off of airplanes or out of public speaking or edited in my books. And so, um,"
"It sounds like there needs to be a a turning point."
"An adjustment. Yeah."
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So, as a brain surgeon, um, one of the hardest things to do is to recognize in the middle of an operation that I made a choice that isn't going to help me complete that operation in the way that I wanted to. And it's hard as a surgeon. We call it we call it approach in surgery. the the the the set of things that we're thinking about, the the way that we put the patient on the table, the the location of the incision, the technologies and tools we're going to use for the operation. All those things we go into what we call approach.
"And one of the hardest things to do, Lisa, is to be in the middle of an operation and start to see that this is going to be harder than it should be. I'm going to lose more blood. I might hurt my patient in some way. I might not be able to get this whole tumor out. One of the hardest things is to stop an operation and change approaches and recognize and admit to my team, hey guys, we need to close this up. I need to move the patient. I need to change the approach. It's hard. And a lot of surgeons don't have the juice to do that. And they'll just..."
"Would that be humility?"
"It's humility. It's integrity. It's it's willingness to introspect on your own decision-making. And so sometimes surgeons just finish an operation and they tell the family, 'We did all we could do.' When they really just chose the wrong approach. And I think going back to your question about parents, like one of the one of the hardest things to do is to say to your children,"
"We've been saying some things to you that we recognize aren't the best advice to have given you. We chose a wrong approach. We need to rethink how we discuss feelings and thoughts in this house. We need to rethink how we make decisions in this house because a lot of the things we've been reacting to were never true. And so now we need to change approaches. And I can tell you though that if you're a patient, you want a surgeon who is willing to say, you know what,"
"Yes, I do."
"I'm going to switch approaches here because I want this tumor out. I want my patient to survive. I want the best outcome here. It takes it takes a lot of courage. And so when I talk about self-brain surgery, it it's this idea that you're a patient. You're dealing with your own life, your own brain, your own mind, all these things going on, your own family, but you also have some agency and control as if you're a surgeon because you can decide to interact with your things, with your thoughts and feelings in a different way than you had before. I think especially when it comes down to parenting, like love your kids enough to acknowledge when you chose the wrong approach and show them that that good people can make mistakes and that they can pull the trigger and change when they need to to get the best outcome."
"Wow. Wow. I love that. And again, you know, we we've had to change approaches so many times with our own children. Yeah."
"And um and I know for us that has always been an opportunity to learn."
"That's right."
"It's always been an opportunity to learn. And it's not just us that learn in that moment, but our children learn."
"Yeah."
"Oh, it's okay to own a mistake."
"That's right."
"It's okay to to say you made a mistake. You know, John and I were even just talking about something yesterday and I thought, could it be that we need to change our approach on some of this? And he was like, you know what? I think that needs to be a conversation. And so, I just want people to be empowered that it almost sounds and and it sounds like you're saying you can step away and you can look at this in the light of God's word."
"That's right."
"And the approach you're doing right now, it's not working."
"That's right. So maybe we need to flip this and maybe we need to look at it from a different angle. Maybe we need to approach it from a different way. Maybe, you know, this is a a a way that we've never walked before, but we know that scripture will give us light and give us truth and and let's just be curious enough to to say, let's let's do this. You know, I um I am half Sicilian, which I'm very proud of. And I always say to the women when we're t when I'm doing certain messages, I say, 'You think you're a victim, >> but because I'm Sicilian, if I get attacked, >> I think I'm a threat.'"
"And they said, 'You need to see yourself as a threat rather than a victim. And the attacks against your life have more to do with who you might be in the future than who you have been in the past.' But most people live in the limitations of their brains past and then it sounds like here's the past where there's pain and then you're saying the enemy comes and layers false information. God doesn't care about you. Uh people don't care about you. You'll never be enough. You'll never be loved. You'll never change. All men leave. all women, you know, whatever that that false narrative is that keeps people from actually going to the root of getting like that tumor out."
"That's right. We need to understand that there is an element of what we hear in our heads that is not just neurological activity but spiritual warfare."
"Yes."
"And it's not always diagnosis sometimes as devil too, right? I mean, so I think we do need to be aware that we have an enemy. Jesus said in John 10:10, 'The thief comes to steal and kill and destroy. I came that you might have life and have it abundantly.' And Jesus isn't talking about material circumstances, possessions, wealth. He's talking about our peace of mind, our ability to be resilient and to navigate hardship in a way that still shows us that there's meaning and purpose, right? So, you have an enemy that doesn't want you to live in abundance, doesn't want other people to find their way towards that abundance. and he gets in your head and everything he says to you is a lie or at least is a truth wrapped in lies."
"And so that's why it's so important to discern and be aware that not everything you think and feel is true, but also not everything you think and feel is from you or from the Lord. And so sometimes we have a we have an enemy spirit operating who wants us to focus on our feelings, who wants us to focus on the past, wants us to separate from our parents if they were mean to us when we were nine. you know that we see this whole spirit right now of people downing their families. Yes."
"But who hasn't made mistakes raising their children, right? Like um so I heard you talk to Henry Cloud about that about boundaries and how about we're not supposed to be using boundaries to break up families. We're supposed to be using them to heal families. So so remember that there's an enemy and remember that neurological activity explains part of what's going on in your head, but spiritual activity explains most of it or a lot of it."
"You know, I I know I just did something with Dr. Axe and we talked about how everything is spiritual and it doesn't mean um it's always the devil but there usually is a spiritual element whether it's whether you want to acknowledge it or not like even what you said those high things that would exalt themselves against this knowing God there is thoughts there is you know those constantly messaging and right now with what is going on in our world with social media and all the irresponsibility of the media And you know, uh, everything going around feels like chaos, chaos, chaos, chaos. And and yet God is is saying, 'People, I need you to renew your mind.' And we can't renew our mind by looking at yesterday's news. That's right."
"You know, we have to renew our mind with the word of God because the word of God is alive and it's active and it's sharper than any two-edged sword. So, Dr. What do you think the percentage is of people that are held back by their thoughts versus their actual circumstances?"
"All of them."
"All of them."
"I would say if you think about this this sequence, I call it thoughts become things sequence that we just referenced in Ephesians 4 a moment ago. When you choose, let's say you you think of yourself as as a person carrying a bow and arrow and you got all these arrows in a quiver on your back, right? Your thoughts exist in that quiver before you decide which one to think and turn into a real thing in the world. They're all equally possible, but until you choose an arrow and put it in the bow and energize it and release it, it's potential. But once you choose a thought and react to it, a series of things happens. And here's what they are. That immaterial thought in your mind turns into an electrical event in your brain."
"So now you turned a thought into an electrical event in your brain. That neuron fires and goes to release a neurotransmitter in your hypothalamus. And now that thought event has become an electrical event and now it's become a biological event."
"Wow."
"And that neurotransmitter releases a hormone in your pituitary gland that goes to your adrenal gland and releases cortisol."
"And now you have a physiological response that raises your blood pressure or switches on epigenetics. And you can take a thought to an electrical event to a biological one to a historical one by changing how your kids are born. And so everything you think about literally turns into something real in the world. So long before your circumstances have a chance to change how things turn out for you, the way you think about circumstances in general is already riding how you're tending to respond to those things. And so I would say a 100% of people have more trouble with the subset of things that they think about than they do with what actually happens. And that explains how two people can go through the exact same circumstance and have vastly different outcomes."
You know, so many so many women are now wrestling with a number of autoimmune diseases. Is this something that can be addressed with changing their thinking?
Yes and no. And there there are there are physical diseases that we can't change with the things that we think about. However, there is really good research to show that just about every physiological process in your body will respond to changing the milieu of things that you think about. And so that's why cognitive behavioral therapy, for example, has been so effective in chronic pain syndromes. And so we can't ameliorate or eliminate every physical ailment that comes along. If we could by changing our thoughts, then we'd live forever. And we know that we don't. But we certainly can man we can make our thought environment serve our physiological environment at a holier level if you want to submit your thinking to God. And then you can optimize the physiological environment of your body, which we know now that that reducing inflammation and changing the way that your body responds to things affects and reduces the symptoms of many autoimmune diseases. And so I think although we can't eliminate everything, we can certainly improve our experience of it by changing the things that we think about.
"I love that. I um I didn't ask for this test to be done, but somebody did a genetic test on me, and I guess I have a a janky uh DNA strand or chromosome or something. And it they printed out this list of all these horrible things that are supposed to happen to me. And I read him and I I just like I threw it away. I tore it up. I threw it away. And a couple of them I'd already I'd already had cancer at five. There was a couple of things that already had happened. But I remember calling another friend who would think very much like we were thinking and he said Lisa pretty much everybody has these things dormant in their body. And he said stress is what he said these kind of things is like a gun held to your head but stress is what pulls the trigger."
"And he said so we're we're like we weren't made to live forever. We all have these kind of uh things that are like part of the fall or part of whatever. and he said, 'But you just you just have to manage your stress and your thoughts thoughts so you don't pull that that trigger.'"
"So, it sounds like you're saying you you don't deny that those things are uh evidentially there or a possibility, but you don't allow stress to cause you to have those things be your focus."
"That's right. Look at identical twins. So, they they don't live the same lifespans. They don't develop the same disease profiles. They don't have the same kind of health problems. And the reason is they they have different lives and they have different thought lives. And so we know that it's not the genes you inherit that tell the story of what you're going to have in your life. It's the epigenetic switches that come on and off in your life life lifespan. And so that means it's it's your environment, your thought environment, the decisions you make. Fact, TD Jakes said in one of his books that we are born looking like our parents, but we die looking like our decisions."
"And that that line stuck with me because it speaks to epigenetics. speaks to the things that become real in your life. You have a lot of control over them."
"So, in this book, I love first of all that you're merging. I love that you said at the very beginning that science is catching up to what the word of God has always said. Like science is, oh wait, wait, maybe God knew what he was talking. Maybe Solomon knew. Maybe maybe all of this kind of stuff was already in play. So, it's catching up. Is this book is it user friendly? Is it practical?"
"Yep. So, I give you um what I call the ten commandments of self-brain surgery, which are my right. Why did I choose 10? The the 10 most important things I've learned as I've tried to apply science and faith to each other in a way that honors God. Um and as a believing father, how I've done that. So, there's 10 lessons that are insanely practical about how people can flourish in their lives using science and faith together. And then I give you 15 very specific, we call them self-brain surgery operations that particular things you can do if you're feeling panic or anxiety or grief or chronic pain or all kinds of things. Um, and so there's a lot of practical stuff in the book as well. And then I just try to teach you a process of how you can practice this in your life going forward because the one of the most important things is to understand that that operating your brain the way God designed it to be operated isn't something you do when you're feeling bad or or when you're having a bad day. It's how we're supposed to live our lives all the time. Because if you look at Ephesians chapter 4, for example, Paul talks about what he calls the Gentiles and and the problems that they're having. And he lists all these sinful things that people are doing, the adultery, the murder, all that. And then he says they're lost in the futility of their thinking, >> in their reasoning. Yeah. >> So thinking turns into your life. What you think about isn't a problem in your life. It's the root problem in your life."
"And he says in 4:23, 'You need to be renewed in the attitudes of your mind.' Right? So the prescription for human flourishing is to change the things you're thinking about. That'll turn into better things coming out of your life. And so I tried to write a book that was prescriptive and also descriptive of a life what a life looks like if you want to pursue that flourishing and abundance that Jesus gave us."
"Well, I love that and I want to thank you for writing that book. Thank you."
"And I am believing that there has been never uh well there's never been a more desperate need for a book like this. And I'm just going to say this to you out there. This is a book that is going to not only give you practicalities, but it's going to hold you accountable. And a lot of people are afraid of being accountable. But I just want to remind you, you don't want to give away your power to everybody else. You want to actually be accountable. You want to own your mistakes so that you can walk free and go forward. And this is a time where deception is abounding. Fear is just radically compromising people's ability to love, people's ability to connect, people's ability to learn. And so I believe this book is going to be a tool. It's going to be a sword in your hand to slice through the enemy's lies and actually recover. I also believe it can be a restorative restorative tool. I believe it would be a restorative tool for you to have conversations with your family. So many people out there, they thought they were doing the right thing with their children and then found out that maybe they didn't position them for strength or maybe you made a lot of mistakes. I feel like John and I made a lot of mistakes with our children, but this can be a new beginning for all of you. And so this is such a key important book. Imagine imagine thinking you can build a God-honoring life with 80% of your thoughts being untrue, being false, and therefore the conclusions being completely corrupted. I believe that we need to renew our mind, that we need to get into God's word. We need to allow that word of God to have its way in our life like never before. And Dr. Lee Warren, you have always been a pioneer for this. So, thank you so much for joining me today."
"Thank you, Lisa. It's an honor to be with you."
"And they can get this book wherever books are sold, I'm assuming."
"The book is called The Life-Changing Art of Self-Brain Surgery: Connecting Neuroscience and Faith to Radically Transform Your Life. It's releasing February 3rd everywhere books are sold all around the world on Audible, too."
"All right. Grab a copy for yourself. Grab one for your friends. Grab one for your kids that maybe you messed up with. I believe this is the beginning and a catalyst for a new life for your."