Am I Just a Sack of Neurons?

Good morning my friend, I hope you're doing well.

Dr. Lee Warren here with you on Self Brain Surgery Saturday.

I am really excited to get after it today.

I've got kind of a jumbled up series of thoughts. We've been sick and my brain still isn't quite online so I may ramble just a little bit but

I've got an important message for you today that was prompted by a letter from a listener named Stephanie.

And Stephanie, I'm gonna protect your identity here a bit But I want to get to the heart of the question that Stephanie asked me because I have so much compassion for this concept,

Because we have been really sold a bill of goods over the last 90 years 80 years.

We've been convinced that our genes and our physical brain structure determine most of our lives,

we've been convinced by this by science by the media by,

Entertainment and by almost every other aspect of our society and culture We have been convinced that we have little to do with the outcome of our lives

And we're mostly just determined by genes that we inherit from our parents,

And I just want to tell you that isn't true, and there's something important a little,

Important thing I want you to know about your brain and your mind and your spirit today,

We're always talking about smashing neuroscience and faith together on this show,

And I think my mission my primary mission is to teach you that your creator,

Put your mind and your brain inside your body in order to help you become healthier and feel better and be happier

Not to be victims of them But to be able to use them the way they're designed so that you can break free,

because he knew that massive things were coming because he knew that you'll have trauma and tragedy and hardship and difficulty and

and relationship problems.

In this world, you will have trouble, and we know, we're not alone in that.

But if you are saddled and burdened with the wrong idea about your brain, it's an easy

off-ramp to despair and hopelessness.

If you don't think that those things can get better because that's just how I am or because

this thing happened and that broke my brain and now I can't be better, I want you to know

there is real hope. And the truth is that the bill of goods we've been sold isn't the case.

There is a path to real hope by understanding the mind-brain-spirit interfaces, smashing

together of neuroscience and faith. And that, my friend, is why we're here together today on Self-Brain Surgery Saturday.

But before we get to all of that, I have one question for you.

Hey, are you ready to change your life? If the answer is yes, there's only one rule.

You have to change your mind first. and my friend, there's a place for 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.

You ready to get after it? Here we go. Hey, I've got an email from a woman named Stephanie. Stephanie

I'm gonna reply to you personally because I'm gonna address I'm so grateful for your email,

But let me just give you the gist of this. Okay?

Stephanie says she's listens to the show every day And she wants to put into practice everything that we talked about here and she's been more aware of her thinking which is all good

Stuff, but here's what she said,

I haven't had a traumatic loss or event that I'm trying to move past but I was in a car accident when I was a teenager and I believe I sustained a brain injury and,

The doctor said I was fine, but looking back I can see.

What led now to my 26 year struggle with depression and other brain injuries brain brain issues?

I've been on medication and have not really felt better I think my question is am I just spinning my wheels trying to change my thinking if I have a chemical imbalance and,

Is a chemical imbalance a real thing? I pray every day for healing and help and joy to be restored

I don't want to use depression as an excuse and at the same time I feel like for me trying to change my thinking and get out of these ruts is as though I'm running a race,

With other athletes while I'm missing a leg I know you've mentioned depression in your episodes before so I apologize if I've missed you addressing this episode this issue already

Listen, this is a perfect example Stephanie, it's a perfect example of the kinds of things that I want to get to here and in my next book the self brain surgery

Book that we're gonna be working on that. I am working on. Okay, it's always funny

How you spend so long writing a book when it finally comes out hope is the first dose is out in the world

I'm promoting it and interviewing about it and talking about it, but I'm already working on what's next

It's like you constantly have the next thing ahead of you. Hope is the first dose is brand new

It's just a little baby out there in the world and I'm already working on the next thing,

But they flow together, okay?

But the next book is all about this issue, like what's going on between brain, mind,

spirit, and your life, and how do we smash those things together, okay?

So here's the root of the question.

Here's the root of it.

If we have a brain injury that creates a problem with our neurotransmitters or neurochemicals,

does that mean that we cannot influence that or get better from it by addressing it on

the thinking and how we, our thought life side.

Or are we just hopeless? If our brain isn't working properly,

then does any of this other stuff matter? And that's really what we've been taught, right?

If you don't feel good, you need a medicine. If you have a feeling, you have a diagnosis.

And if you have a diagnosis, then other people need to just empathize with you

and understand and avoid triggering you and do all these things that your culture is telling us right now.

We built this system around feelings.

We built the system around diagnoses. We pathologized everything.

And there's some value in some of those things, okay? But the bottom line is this.

From a Christian perspective, we believe that God says He can heal our diseases.

We believe that God says that He can make things better for us, right?

So that's one part of it.

The other part of it is the neuroscience, with a capital N as the academic neuroscience,

the media, the public, wants us to think that mind is a concept created by brain.

That you're not, you don't really have a thought life, you don't really even have free will.

You just have what your brain does.

And that's amazing to me to think that because the science actually over and over and over again

has shown us that is not the case.

But we're dealing with dogma, which becomes religion. So don't let anybody tell you that atheists

or materialists or hardcore scientists don't have their own religion.

They do, and they defend it to the death, okay?

And it goes all the way back, it goes way back, actually all the way back to Hippocrates.

But more recently, in 1962, Francis Crick, who was the co-discoverer with James Watson of DNA,

and won the Nobel Prize for Physiology and Medicine in 1962,

wrote a book called The Astonishing Hypothesis.

And here's what he said.

Get this, Francis Crick said this.

You, quote end quotes, you, your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions,

your sense of personal identity and free will,

are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules.

As Lewis Carroll might have phrased it, you are nothing but a pack of neurons.

This hypothesis is so alien to the ideas of most people alive today that it can truly be called astonishing,

Francis crick wants you to believe the guy who discovered dna wants you to believe that

Everything about your life even your choice to listen to this podcast is just a result of neuronal activity from nerve cells and the molecules

In your in your body and that you're basically nothing but a pack of skin cells and electrical impulses

As I said in my book i've seen the interviews I quoted that thought process,

Francis Crick and all of established academic neuroscience wants you to believe you don't have a choice in the matter, Stephanie, that you're just stuck.

If you've got brain damage, so be it. You're stuck with it. Take medicine, right?

I'm here to tell you something different because guess what the Bible said?

This little scripture, I think, is the key idea, and I've missed it so many times in my life. I read right past it.

Here's 2 Timothy 1.7, are you ready for some cognitive neuroscience from your creator?

Here it is, God has not given us a spirit of fear, but of power and of love.

Now I've stopped right there many times when I read this. God has not given us a spirit of fear, but of power and of love.

But keep reading, God has not given us a spirit of fear, but of power and of love and of a sound mind.

2 Timothy 1.7, God hasn't given us a spirit of fear but of power and of love and of a sound mind.

He didn't say He gave you a sack full of neurons and that determines everything else.

He says I gave you a spirit of a sound mind.

The Holy Spirit of God, if you're a believer, is inside you and He communicates with your

mind and that tells your brain who's boss.

You can change the way that your brain works by learning to change the way that you think now

There's some implications for people that have brain injuries. There's some implications here that we need to get Okay,

This is important and there are roles for therapy and there are roles for medicine and there are roles for surgery,

All those things are true. I make my living doing brain and spine surgery Okay,

So don't conflate the idea that I'm don't don't take away from this that I'm saying it's all just about how you think and the spirit

Changes how your brain works and everything's gonna be fine. I'm not always saying that it's God created medicine, too.

Okay, this is an incredibly crucial point that we're getting ready to make Before we make it though. We need to understand something,

I used a quote from EB white EB white was a writer,

He wrote some famous books Charlotte's Web Stuart Little the trumpet and the swan the trumpet of the swan,

He also was a writer and contributing editor to the New Yorker magazine and the co-author of a book that's required reading for anybody who?

Wants to learn how to write books called the elements of style with another guy named strunk that book strunk and whites elements of style

Basically, you have to read it if you're gonna learn how to write because all the publishers all the agents all the editors expect certain,

Stylistic things of your writing and if you don't comply with them, nobody buys your book

Nobody publishes your book So you got to match it up with strunk and white even to this day even though that books been around forever

in fact, I remember Kathy Helmer's my agent when,

Philip Yancey introduced me to her after I.

Decided I wasn't gonna really try to be a writer and my my self-published book and Phillips estimation wasn't good enough to be published Kathy said hey

I'm gonna give you a pile of books or recommendations and I want you to read them and use them to rewrite this manuscript and

We'll see if it's good enough to be published,

One of those books was Strunk and White's Elements of Style.

Another one was Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott.

And as an aside, a number of people recently have written in and said,

hey, you mentioned books in almost every episode, and there's so many of them we can't keep up,

but please do an episode or make a list somewhere about all the books that you want us to read.

I'm going to do that. I'm going to start a recurring.

Let me ask you if you think it would be valuable.

I was thinking about doing a series of episodes once in a while called,

Three things I've learned from three books I love and so each episode would have a,

conversation about three books and one

Take home from each of those books and then I would put in the show notes links to where you can buy them and all

That stuff as I always do by the way And if you hear me say something about a book if you go to the notes of that episode,

It's always gonna be in there. I always put a link to the book So so I do always tell you where that came from

But if you think that would be fun to do episodes about books from time to time, I'd love to do that

I think it would be great. Let me know if that sounds fun to you.

Okay, so Strunk and White wrote the Elements of Style that's still used and E.B. White

was this famous author.

He died in 1985, born in 1899, and he wrote Charlotte's Web and all these other great books.

But he had a letter, he was famous almost for writing back to fans that wrote to him.

And this one guy named Mr. Nadeau wrote him a letter that basically said he was feeling

hopeless. It was in 1973.

This guy lost his hope, he lost his spirit, he lost his faith in humanity. And here's what E.B.

White said to him, Dear Mr. Nadeau, as long as there is one upright man, as long as there

is one compassionate woman, the contagion may spread and the scene is not desolate.

Hope is the thing that is left to us in a bad time. I shall get up Sunday morning and wind the clock as a contribution to order and steadfastness.

On to your hat, hang on to your hope, and wind the clock, for tomorrow is another day.

Now obviously, we don't have to wind clocks very often anymore.

Apple watches keep on running, our batteries in our watches keep us from having to wind

the clock, so that phrase is old.

But his point is, I'm going to get up tomorrow morning, I'm going to wind the clock, and

I'm going to get after it, no matter how I feel, because there's always a reason to hope.

If you read, I've seen the interview, if you had an opportunity to go to a book signing,

and if I signed a copy, I almost certainly signed Romans 12.12 when I signed copies of

I've Seen the Interview.

Romans 12.12 in the voice translation says, don't forget to rejoice because hope is always

just around the corner.

That's why you wind the clock. Okay, there's always hope now today stephanie and everybody else listening to this

I'm going to give you a reason to hope okay. I brought up that quote about eb white.

Which was only amazing because he talks about hope but I brought it up because in my ep in my epigraph to chapter 28

Of i've seen the interview. I quoted eb white when he said this and it makes the point about,

How often famous scientists are elevated to some position that's almost godlike and i'll get back to francis crick in a moment,

But I just want you to recognize this thing that we do in society Somebody comes up with a smart idea or writes an important paper that turns out to be important in our understanding of some things some scientific

Concept and then we make this switch to where they have a voice of a celebrity in society,

That gives them the ability to speak into things as if they're true and everybody just believes them because they're so smart

Here's what he be white said,

Einstein is loved because he is gentle respected because he is wise,

relativity being not for most of us,

we elevate its author to a position somewhere between Edison, who gave us a tangible gleam,

and God, who gave us the difficult dark and the hope of penetrating it.

E.B. White said that, he's exactly right.

He's saying people can't really even understand what Einstein wrote about in relativity,

but they know he's super smart, and so they elevate him to this celebrity position

where he's almost like God. So if Einstein says it, it must be true.

Now, let me come back to Francis Crick.

Crick and Hippocrates and lots of other scientists did something smart, right?

He discovered the identity of what? The nature and characteristics of DNA.

Amazing, so now we understand how we inherit our hair color and eye color and bone structure

and all those other things that come along with genetics.

But we turned it into this religion, right?

Where this thing called genetic determinism came along. out of this teaching that you're all about your DNA.

Genetic determinism is basically, I can't help it, I'm made that way.

My mom and dad were that way, I'm just stuck with how I am.

I inherited it, I'm big boned, I'm gonna have diabetes,

I'm gonna be overweight, everybody in my family is.

And we know now, that's just not true, right?

The vast majority of how our life plays out comes down to our decisions.

Remember T.D. Jake said, we're born looking like our parents,

we die looking like our decisions.

And here's some stunning things. You can have Francis Crick say,

hey, guess what? You're just a sack of neurons, right?

You're all stuck with how you're made. You can't change it. This idea that you have a mind, it's independent.

You're just, you're wrong. You're just a pack of neurons. There's no hope in that, right?

And years and years later, we still think that's true in some way.

We still buy into it, at least subconsciously.

And we've bought so much of our teaching that we begin to feel hopeless if we're diagnosed

with something. I'm sorry you're depressed. You're just stuck with it.

You better take Wellbutrin.

Okay? Let me just give you some other ideas, okay? This idea, the reason it's so important to drill into this is because we've accepted

a lot of beliefs without critically examining them.

We could say that about a lot of our society right now, by the way.

And it's our job as discerning, smart people who God gave us a sound mind, okay?

We have a job to relentlessly refuse to participate in our own demise.

That's one of the commandments of self-brain surgery, right?

And part of that is to pay attention to places where culture is putting ideas into us that

are going to harm us if we don't root them out.

Is this idea that we don't have free will, that we're just stuck with our genetics

and with our neurons that are built into our head and we don't even really have a mind.

In fact, the strict materialists will fight you if you say the word mind because they have this belief

that mind is just a concept, but it's all about brain.

There's actually a neuroscience term called reductive physicalism,

which is the view that the mind is reducible to physical processes in the brain.

Everything about what you think is mind is just some physical process in your brain.

Therefore, there's really no such thing as the mind. The mind is the brain.

The flip side of that is that substance dualism where there are two distinct substances that characterize a mind and brain a

Physical brain and a non-physical mind and the mind can exist without the brain but in humans they interact now

Let me ask you a question,

If you listen to yesterday's episode with John Burke about near-death experiences, and I hope you did,

How could someone whose mind was created by their brain and whose brain is dead and has no discernible electrical activity?

How could they then come back and report on things in a near-death experience?

There was one woman. We didn't talk about it yesterday. I wanted to try to avoid some of the,

More sensationalistic things that some of these folks have described But there was there were more than one study more than one person who had a near-death experience

Had described things that could not have been described if they didn't really see them

One was a woman came back and reported having been observing her surgery,

from above the room and she reported on a sticker that she could see on the

blade of a ceiling fan in the room and she said the color of it and some

numbers that were written on it and several witnesses in the room got a ladder and checked that and the sticker was there and it said what she said that

it said. Okay so that could not have happened accidentally and it couldn't have happened if she wasn't actually having this experience and if her mind

was creating her brain, I'm sorry, if her brain was creating her mind and her brain

was dead clinically, there was no heartbeat, no electrical activity, no

pulse, no brainwave activity during that time, then that mind couldn't have been

there to observe the thing that she said that she observed.

So this reductive physicalism idea, I'm just telling you, it's a doctrine that's been taught. It's not a scientific reality.

It's a doctrine that's been taught and your job as a discerning person with a mind of.

Power, a sound mind that God has given you, is to look for those places where you've been

hoodwinked, where we've all been sort of hoodwinked, and get them out of our thought processes because that's the path to freedom, okay?

So this reductive physicalism idea came from Francis and people like that and the whole idea is that,

We just aren't anything but our brain We're just stuck with our brain.

And I'm just here to tell you on self-brain surgery Saturday my friend that that just isn't the case,

So now let's go to this idea of Francis Crick saying you're just a big sack of neurons and let's think about some of the

Implications of that. Okay. There's a woman named Sharon Durkick's who's written several really incredible books

She has a PhD from Cambridge and functional brain imaging and she wrote this book called. Am I just my brain?

Am I just my brain and I hope to get her on the podcast sometime But she talks about the implications of Francis Crick's worldview here

If you're just a sack of neurons, then there's some implications There certainly are implications for free will if you're driven by your brain

then you're not really free to make decisions.

You are simply driven by the chemical reactions within the processes of your body.

And therefore, how could you hold anybody responsible for their actions, evil or good, right?

If it's not your fault, you don't have free will, why is it a problem if you stab somebody?

You just, your brain made you do that. It's not your fault.

There are implications for robotics. She says robots occupy more and more of the workforce.

They're all over the house.

Every time you say somebody's name, a speaker talks back to you and ask you what you need, right?

I'm not going to say her name because she'll speak up on the podcast right here next to me.

And eventually those will be able possibly to have sort of consciousness and artificial intelligence will become able to start to assume things

and make decisions for you.

There's implications in that there are implications for ethics.

If you're if you're defined by your brain,

then who's a person is a person every human from the moment of conception on or only those people whose brains are

Developed enough to be fully functioning because if you're really only,

Dependent on what your brain does and your brain isn't working You've got Alzheimer's or vascular dementia or you've had a stroke or you're a baby and therefore your brain isn't working in full capacity

Then maybe you shouldn't have rights maybe in order to protect the planet and reduce carbon,

and maybe we should kill everybody that doesn't have a fully functioning brain.

I mean, that sounds crazy, but these things are being discussed, friend.

If you don't have free will because your brain is just an organ that creates this illusion

that you have a mind and free will, then why wouldn't that make sense?

We got to protect the planet, right? There's implications for religion.

Since it's come to light that the brain is highly involved in religious belief and experiences

as we've talked about here.

Can neuroscience actually explain religion enough to make it go away?

Is it just a bunch of electrical impulses in your brain that make you think all these things?

Listen, this is an important idea, right? It's so important that we began to root this out,

that we need to pay attention in culture even, in the places where it shows up.

There's a Disney movie. Sharon Dirk explained this out. I completely missed it.

There's a Disney movie that talks about the brain. It's basically, I think it's called From the Inside Out.

It's called, yeah, it's called Inside Out. And it basically depicts the complex idea of human brain,

and the importance of different emotions, like joy, sadness, anger, fear, and disgust.

These are characters in the movie. Sharon Dirkix lays this out.

And this idea that we can be neuroplastic, that we can change our brain,

it's depicted in the movie as the breaking and reforming of these islands in her experience.

And the narrative thread that runs through the movie is that everything that makes Riley,

the character, do what she does and be who she is, comes from these physical mechanisms

that are happening inside her head, that when her core memories are intact, her outward

behavior is balanced, and when they're not, the outside world falls apart.

So this idea that they're teaching little kids is that what your brain is, you are.

Everything happens from the inside out.

Nothing on the outside can affect you. You've got to get your internal state ordered and you're just stuck with making sure that

that works as well as it can work.

So this is cognitive neuroscience being depicted in a in a Entertainment way to teach children that they are just their brains. Okay, this is important

I'm not telling you not to watch movies I'm not telling you not to listen to music with Tata and I,

Last week talked about the one of the reasons that I've chosen not to listen to a lot of secular music

Even though I'm a huge music fan is because I find myself repeating lyrics and then I stop myself and say wait a minute that lyric

I just sang wasn't holy. It wasn't good. It wasn't even true. It was it was counter truthful,

And a good example was I was singing along with the song that came on the radio that Lisa and I heard the other day

And one of the lines was it can't be wrong if it feels so right,

And I was just singing along you light up my life It can't be wrong if it feels so right and I was like wait timeout

Hang on a second

My whole platform is about the fact that feelings aren't facts and sometimes feelings will tell you that something's good when in fact

It is not good and you should quit it right and so you have to learn then to pay attention.

To the things that you put in your brain and the things that you put in front of your eyes that that old children song

Be careful little eyes what you see why because what you see what you hear what you take in what you swallow whole without discernment,

Turns into how you live. This is important Okay, I'm not ranting and all this comes back to the original question,

And let's go back to Stephanie's question. Am I spinning my wheels by trying to change how I think if I've got a brain injury.

And I just want to tell you this this is super important. Okay You can change several studies have shown that up to 95% of mental illness,

including depression anxiety all these things comes.

Highly influenced by our state of mind the things we think about the things we talk about the,

the way that we perceive the things that we're going through, up to 95% of the symptoms of

mental disorder come from thinking disorders.

That's incredible and it puts some responsibility on us because God says I didn't give you a spirit

of fear or anxiety. I didn't give you a spirit of depression. I gave you a spirit of power

and of love and of a sound mind. Understand this. I'm not saying that it's wrong to feel

symptoms of depression or anxiety. Those are normal natural things that do happen to all of us.

But where we go off the rails is when we begin to think and believe the idea that we're powerless

to do anything about them.

Daniel Amen, my good friend who has led his field of psychiatry in understanding the importance

of functional imaging has shown for example, I've gotten several questions recently about

ADHD, there are multiple types of brain disorders that come from trauma, the different ways

that people hit their heads or different ways that people have brain injuries that create

symptoms that are commonly diagnosed as ADHD but they're all different brain disorders,

different types of brain injury and they all need to be treated differently and so if you

go to a health practitioner, a therapist, a psychiatrist, a doctor and you say, hey

I'm feeling kind of depressed or I'm feeling kind of anxious or I'm having trouble organizing

my thoughts or my kid can't pay attention in class and if your words about your symptoms

are met with, well let me give you a prescription to handle those symptoms because you must

be depressed or they must have ADHD or they must have anxiety disorder.

If you get a prescription for a symptom without doing brain imaging to understand what the

actual problem is, then effectively you're treating a symptom as if it all comes from the same problem.

Even though Daniel has shown with SPECT imaging for example, and multiple studies have shown

with functional brain imaging, functional MRI scanning, that ADHD for example is actually

not one disorder, but multiple disorders from multiple different types of injuries, from

multiple different types of brain regions and all of them need to be treated differently,

sometimes with medication.

Daniel has shown that cognitive behavioral therapy and learning to think about your thinking

and improving your diet and reducing caffeine and avoiding alcohol and reducing nicotine

and other toxins and things like that can actually make a huge difference in almost

all types of mental symptoms from any type of disorder.

And the whole point of that is just to say this, if you are struggling with some sort

of mental symptom, depression, anxiety, ADHD, whatever it might be, okay, from trauma or

not from trauma, from PTSD or not from PTSD, from an adverse childhood experience, from

any of those things, you need to get with a provider who understands that the brain

is an organ that needs to be imaged.

And if you're really struggling, now obviously a lot of things can be handled.

Improving your thought life the things that we talk about on this show all the time

But if you're really struggling and you can't make progress or you have major depression or major anxiety

You need a provider and sometimes you need medication even Daniel Lehman a great psychiatrist world

Probably most famous psychiatrist alive today who's been on this show at least four times,

He says there's no harm in medication in some settings But once you start them it can be very hard because now you're tinkering with your brain chemistry,

And it can become very difficult to get off those medications So before you go on them, you want to make sure that you're treating the right thing,

Okay Now if you're taking an antidepressant if your providers put you on one, there's nothing wrong with that

And I'm not saying you should go stop all your medicines. Please don't do that.

I'm saying check out Daniel Amon Amon clinics comm check out other places get a second opinion

Before you give up on the idea that you can get better,

okay? Because remember the promises of God. Psalm 103, there's five things that

God promises us, okay? He says, bless the Lord all my soul, bless the Lord and,

praise His holy name, bless the Lord all my soul, and forget not all His benefits.

What are the five benefits? He says He forgives my sins, He heals all my diseases,

Redeems my life from the pit. He crowns me with love and compassion and satisfies my desires with good things

So that my youth is restored like the Eagles. He forgives all your sins. That's the number one benefit number two

He heals all your diseases now. Does that mean that he'll heal your glial by stoma?

He may not in our timeline. Okay, we've been talking a lot about Retrocausality and about the long-term arc of his narrative plan for redemption and how he doesn't always remove our struggles

But he comes along aside us with it within them. And so the answer will he heal me? Yes, eventually he will,

We know he will eventually because we know where we're going if we believe in him and it's not a cop-out,

It's to say that you can learn to live in this world with hard Circumstances and know that he does have a redemptive plan for you and he will eventually heal all your diseases either here or in the next

Life it's not a cop-out,

It's a great source of peace and hope that he wants to get in this story with you and help you,

But in the meantime, believe that he can heal, because he can.

And certainly, even if you tend to struggle with a bias towards anxiety or a bias towards

depressive thought, we know there are lots of things you can do to make it better without

medication from the start.

Thinking about your thinking, learning to aggressively challenge those same synaptic

thought processes, to avoid habits that reinforce the feeling, alcohol, binge watching TV or

Netflix or whatever it is you do that puts you in that place where you usually feel the thing that you feel right.

Avoiding reading or listening to or watching things that reinforce those thought processes that you're just stuck with how you feel,

challenging lines of thought that you receive from outside influences that make you feel hopeless and,

pursue things relationships,

Environments, reading, listening, podcasts, all those things that you can use as prehab

to fall back on a better state of preparation the next time you feel the thing that you feel

so that you can more adequately challenge it and move forward in it to get better, right?

The self brain surgery piece, these are all important. Now let me sum this up.

Yes, depression and anxiety and ADHD and all these things are real things.

And yes, sometimes we need medication. Sometimes we need intervention.

Sometimes we do.

But you are not stuck living a life suffering under those things.

There are things that you can do to help. And the first piece of it always is to get your head on straight

about the fact that your brain

is not just a big sack of neurons and your mind is not just a construct of your brain,

but you are created with a spirit of a sound mind.

There is a way that you can get your mind and your brain and your spirit in order.

And it starts with self-brain surgery.

Remember self brain surgery is just a moniker that I give you for the peace that you do yourself

Which is just to say hey great physician Come here and do some brain surgery on me and help me get my head on straight so I can find hope again,

You don't have to do it yourself. It's God that works in you to will and to act according to his good purpose

That's what he says in Romans Okay

Your job is to consent to the procedure that the Holy Spirit wants to do inside you to rectify the mind body brain

brain-spirit interface to smash them together and give you hope.

There's a treatment plan, okay, that can help you with anything.

Sometimes it requires going to see Dr. Amen.

Sometimes it requires going to see a different doctor who won't just write you a prescription

first but says, hey, let me write a prescription for you to de-stress, to take a vacation,

to get off this train of thought that you're on that's harmful to you.

Let me, don't just, don't just pharmacologically treat the symptom, get after the root cause

of what's happening. an old unresolved trauma in your life, even if it was a car accident when you were a child,

if your brain isn't working properly, guess what? You can learn to work around it.

If you have chest pain and your cardiologist says you have a blocked artery, that means

there's something physically wrong with the organ of your heart and you go do something about it, don't you?

You get a stent or you change your diet, you get on your cholesterol medications, you do

all these things to try to make sure that artery and that cardiac muscle works better.

But we don't ever do that with our brain.

We just treat symptoms. We just say, oh, I have anxiety. It must just be the way I am.

My aunt Sally was anxious, so I'm stuck with it. No, you're not.

You can deal with it more effectively by learning how to control the thought process side of it,

by understanding if there is a structural brain injury which requires imaging to diagnose,

then maybe I need to work on nutrition and blood flow and watch out for dietary things that I'm doing

that make it worse instead of better.

Maybe I need to change some relationships that are adding stress to my life.

Maybe I need to learn a different way of thinking about how I put my thoughts together in the first place.

Maybe I need to do some soul surgery and go back and resolve some of that past trauma

that's contributing to this.

I'm blaming myself for something that I know now, if I had known what I know now,

I wouldn't have done it that way, so I need to forgive myself.

Maybe there's some stuff like that in there.

And a good therapist will help you get that done. I think it's important to have a therapist

that has some spiritual understanding, So you're not gonna just get told,

oh, you're just stuck with that.

You know, that's your great aunt Sally's fault that you feel that way and you can't do anything about it.

So let's just make everybody bow to your feelings and accept this is how you are

and you better protect that and be triggered if somebody doesn't agree with you about it.

Those are not helpful, okay?

At the end of the day, what's helpful? Becoming healthier, feeling better, and being happier.

And you can't do that.

By just accepting that you're broken in some way. God says I will heal all your diseases,

God wants to help you. He wants to change your mind and he wants to change your life

He wants to help you do self brain surgery because he's the one actually.

After all doing the operation because God didn't give you a spirit of fear He gave you a spirit of love and of power and of a sound mind and he will help you change your mind

And he will help you change your life,

Just because Francis Crick said it, my friend, don't make it so.

Stephanie, friend, everybody listening out there across the world, I just want you to know,

there is great hope to be found no matter what you're struggling with.

No matter what kind of massive thing you've gone through. No matter what kind of thought disorder you're dealing with.

No matter what kind of problem you have.

There is valid hope.

Yes, sometimes you need medication. Yes, sometimes you need a psychiatrist.

Yes, sometimes you may need a therapist.

There is a lot of good that you can do by working on the space between your ears and,

Lining up your spirit with your mind and your brain. It is not a bottom-up brain determines everything

You're just a sack of neurons and it's hopeless. It is not true that you're just what your DNA gives you.

Up to 95% of the things we feel can be modulated by changing how we think that's why Paul said in Romans 12

Stop conforming to what Francis Crick, that's my translation,

stop conforming to what the world wants you to do and think and feel and believe.

Rather be transformed by the renewing of your mind. It doesn't have to be that way.

We can influence it. We can change it. We can do self-brain surgery. And guess what else?

We can start today. One, two, three, four. Hey, thanks for listening.

Music.

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.