Default Mode Monday: Become Less Anxious by Increasing This

Good morning, my friend. Hope you're doing well. I'm Dr.

Lee Warren, and I'm excited and grateful to be here with you today for some self-brain surgery.

Listen, it's Memorial Day in the United States. That's the day that we take

a moment to remember and honor those who have given their lives for the cause

of freedom all over the world.

Over 1 million United States service members have died as a result of their

service to our our country.

So take a moment today in the midst of if you have a day off and all the grilling

and the hot dogs or the pool or the beach or whatever you're doing,

hopefully with your family.

And I pray that you are having some of that good time and a day off.

But take a moment to remember that that freedom isn't free.

It was 10 years ago this month that my book, No Place to Hide,

A Brain Surgeon's Long Journey Home from the Iraq War, was released.

That was my first major major publication.

And it's the story of my time in the United States Air Force working in a tent

hospital at Ballot Air Force Base.

We were mortared over a hundred times while I was there. I did 200 brain surgeries in that tent hospital.

And that time of my life turned out to be the most formative and difficult,

formative and lasting sort of shaping thing that happened in my entire life.

I became a tremendously better surgeon, but also learned a lot about control

and about how God will strip everything away from you until you become dependent

enough on him to recognize that he is the only place that is safe to hide against

all the bombs and the slings and the arrows and the things that happen in your life.

And it's the story of what happened after I got home, divorce and the difficulties

putting my life back together and the PTSD and meeting Lisa and getting married

and all those things that happened.

In the aftermath. And so if you have never read No Place to Hide,

it might be a good window into what happens to service members.

I was not a direct combatant. I certainly was shot at a bunch and mortared and

rocketed a bunch, but I never had to fire a weapon.

I was shot at by a sniper in Baghdad one time. That's another story. It's in the book.

But I have friends like my friend Al Genitone, a bronze star from Afghanistan

who has been in combat. It's a different experience for them.

And so my story, No Place to Hide, just gives you one look at what happens when

people are in that environment and what they come home with.

And it might be useful to you. So check it out if you've never read it.

I think it might be helpful.

But today on Memorial Day, I just want to take a moment to honor,

give thanks for, and remember those who have fallen. and we're grateful.

All over the world, people rise up when the call goes out.

Like the Old Testament prophet, the Lord says, who will go?

And he said, here am I, send me. That's what service members do.

For the majority of the time of our country, they've been volunteers.

They haven't been drafted and forced into service.

They have stepped up when their country said, hey, we need somebody to go.

And they said, here am I, send me.

And we're grateful for that. So today, just take a moment, put your knee on

that hallowed ground of remembering, and if you want to see my story and learn

more about my story and what I've been through and some of the things that turn me into the Dr.

Lee Warren that you listen to on this show every day, then check out No Place

to Hide. That's the book.

Hey, today we're going to talk about the problem of the default mode network in our brain.

We talked about it a little bit on Saturday, just to kind of get you the remembrance

of what the default mode is.

And I want to just give you some information about what you can do.

To learn how to get out of yourself. Because self,

this idea of ruminating and worrying about how we're going to handle things,

what's happened to us in the past, what the future might bring for us,

the things that we're concerned about, that mode of your brain that you get

into when things are quiet and you're not otherwise engaged in something else,

it's called the default mode.

And it brings in all these areas of your brain that maintain brain activity

at the same level as when you're active, but they begin to be intensely focused on ourselves.

And all the studies show that people who have an overactive default mode network are less happy,

more depressed, and have more trouble in their life than

those that can learn to tone that down and engage other parts of the brain and

teach their brain and their mind to learn how to dial down the self-dial and

dial up the relaxation and interconnectedness with other people mode that Scripture's

been telling us for a long time.

And so let's check out the default mode today. We're going to learn some new

things and some surprising research about what faith has to say about the default

mode and how you can get it to work for you and not against you.

Before I 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, you ready to get after it? Here we go. Listen, the default mode network

is this part of your brain that ties together a bunch of different areas that

get active when you're not purposefully thinking about something else.

They engage, they get busy when you're not busy.

And what we know now from significant neuroscience research and functional brain

imaging, is that the default mode is all about me.

It defaults your mind to thinking about miserable past memories and fearful

future possibilities, as Dawson Church has said.

Before we go into that, I just want to point you to something that might not be so obvious.

We talk a lot about how you can change your mind and change your life,

that your mind can control your brain and all that stuff.

Cognitive neuroscience, for some reason, for the last past 100

years has focused on this materialist reductionist

worldview where they believe that everything about you

is the result of some brain activity that that

how you are whether you're happy or sad or productive or not productive has

to do with genetics and the way that your brain is formed and then everything

you think feel do and experience in your whole life is determined by neuronal

activity and you really don't have much choice about it you can't change your

genes You can't change your brain.

You're sort of stuck with it, and you're determined. Your life is determined

by the activity of the neurons in your brain.

Well, it's not true. It turns out the Bible told us all along we can transform our minds.

We can change our minds. We can make our brains and bodies behave differently.

The Bible's been saying that for thousands of years.

Stoic philosophers and other smart people have for thousands of years known

that how you think turns into how you live.

You show me your thoughts. I'll show you your life.

What they didn't know was how that's true. Until William James in the 19th century

started talking about the fact that you could observe somebody being able to

overcome bodily habits by changing the way they think, started to understand,

along with a number of other smart people in the 19th century,

started to understand that there must be some brain process that responds to mental processes.

And then lo and behold, the 20th century came along, guys like Albert Einstein

and Werner Heisenberg and Niels Bohr and Erwin Schrodinger and all these quantum

physicists figured out that you have a role to play in what happens in the universe around you,

including your own brain and your own body.

Quantum physics basically is the math and the science behind the fact that we

are not determined by our bodies, but we rather determine what happens in our

lives and the lives around us.

By how we think. Quantum physics is the math that shows us that we're not stuck

with the brains that we have. We're not stuck with the life that we have.

In fact, there's an incredible quote from, it's funny to me,

sometimes people, really smart people come across truths and they don't recognize

that those truths came from God.

They just think there's some kind of science trick.

Stephen Hawking, who certainly was no Christian, he was an atheist,

and his partner, Leonard Mladenow, said, we create history by our observations.

History does not create us.

We have this thought that our history, our past, our experiences,

our families, the traumas that we've had, and all of that creates who we are.

But the truth is, in the quantum world, which turns out to be how your mind

and your brain interact,

you are every moment in the possession of the ability to recreate who you are

and what your life will look like going forward, which is very consistent with the Bible.

Romans 12 says, don't be conformed to the world like the way that it's always

been, the way people think you should be, the way secular society tells you

you have to be, the way your psychiatrist or your therapist tells you that you

have to be. Don't be conformed to that.

Rather, be transformed by the renewing of your mind.

Change your mind and you'll change your life.

Hawking recognized from quantum

physics that history has to do with what you decide and observe now.

That turns out to be what happens in the future. You're not stuck with the way things have been.

What he didn't recognize is that that's how God created your brain.

Now, in terms of the default mode, what happens when you're quiet,

when you're resting, when you're thinking?

If you're honest, what does happen?

Most of the thoughts that you have revolve in some way around you.

What's going to happen today? What are people going to do? Are they still going

to suck? Are they still going to be negative to me? Are they still going to be mean to me?

Why is my life always so terrible? All these things that have happened in the past.

I'm destined to fail in the future. I might as well just give up.

I can't change. It's going to be this way forever.

Our minds wander, and when they wander, they progressively get more about us. Isn't that true?

So how do we get out of that? How do we get out of that me show,

as Dawson Church calls it?

Dredging up everything that's been bad or wrong in the past and might go wrong in the future.

How do we get out of that? so that we can actually learn how to relax and enjoy

the moment and connect with other people and have meaningful relationships in

the spiritual life in our mind.

This allows us to have communication with God that doesn't just devolve into

what I want and what I need.

Think about your prayer life. Does your prayer life beg God to take things away and give you new things?

Or does it worship and honor Him and ask you how He can connect you to the larger

mission that He's working on in your life and in the lives of others.

When the default mode kicks in, it takes your brain's CEO hostage.

It takes your brain's executive center, this frontal lobe that God gave you,

the ability to switch from this thought to that thought, the ability to control

other areas of your brain by thinking better thoughts.

The CEO, the executive center, the frontal lobes go almost offline when the

default mode is working.

It all gets wrapped up in what the default mode wants you to think about.

It gets the insula involved and you start replaying all the insults and slights

and failures and disappointments you've ever experienced and how people have

always let you down and how everybody's terrible and how there might be danger out there.

And this time that you're trying to quiet your mind becomes filled with thoughts

of harm and failure and future rejection and inevitable trouble that you're going to have.

And that default mode drags your whole brain down into that hole.

We talked about it last week, how the default mode is kind of DMN,

kind of sounds like demon, as Dawson Church has said.

And that demon in your brain, I think sometimes is the real demon, the enemy.

And Jesus said, hey, the enemy came to steal and kill and destroy.

The enemy came to get in your head and mess up your life and keep you from connecting

with others and keep you from witnessing properly to help other people find

some hope of getting out of the hole in their life.

The enemy came to destroy your peace of mind, to ruin your life, to keep you stuck.

And whether you think that's just a brain-derived process of evolutionary change

that's designed to keep us alive by focusing on our threats,

or whether you think there's a real spiritual enemy,

like the Bible says, you can see that your brain is not your friend unless you train it to be. Now.

We talked a minute ago about how this neuroscience and modern neuroscience all

focuses on this reductionist determinist worldview.

Despite compelling evidence from quantum physics and from modern neuroscience

through brain imaging, that that's not exactly actually how it works.

How it actually works, rather than a brain out process where everything about

you comes from undirected brain processes.

The real truth is your mind has a profound impact. Your directed mental activity

has a profound impact about how your brain works.

And so one of the problems that we have is if you don't direct those processes with intense,

purposeful mental energy, if you don't learn how to tell your mind to be in charge of your brain,

and I think adding the fourth level, that spiritual level,

letting the Lord guide your thoughts constantly and be involved in how you think

and feel and using your mind under the influence of your great physician creator

to direct your brain towards a renewed mind that he wants you to have, optimal renewed mind.

Then you begin to believe that your brain is in charge.

And so then somebody will inevitably, some therapist will tell you,

we need to go scan your brain and see what's wrong with your brain.

So why you think this way? And somebody will say, well, there's reduced activity

in your temporal lobe and there's reduced activity in your frontal lobe,

and these must be from old traumas or old injuries.

And so we need to do all these things to get your brain to work better.

And that's all true, okay? We do need our brains to work better.

But the truth is, it doesn't start with brain and go up.

But if you learn to listen to the thoughts and feelings in your mind that pop

in there, you'll begin to believe that it is out of your control to change it.

Well, I feel this way, so I might as well not get out of bed.

I don't feel like doing anything because my brain is telling me that I'm depressed

or I'm anxious. us, we pathologize everything, and we stop thinking,

we stop remembering the truth that most of what we feel and think are not true and not reliable.

And most of those thoughts and feelings and issues that pop up in our mind can

submit to and will submit to

purposeful mental force directed at them to change them for the positive.

That's how we get the default mode to calm down.

And we talked about this on Saturday, okay?

Well, here's some interesting research that I found that I think will be fascinating to you.

And I certainly think it will be helpful to you. There's a paper from 2016 in

a journal called Neuroscience Letters.

The authors are Saibab, Wong, Weissman, Mikramarante, I think I'm saying that

correctly, and Posner from the College of Physicians and Surgeons at Columbia in 2016.

And of course, these are materialist reductionist neuroscientists.

They're not coming at this from a God-directed, mind-down process.

They're just reporting the results of their research.

Okay, so this is important. Here's what they found.

The paper's called Religious and Spiritual Importance, Moderate Relation Between

Default Mode Network Connectivity and Familial Risk for Depression.

Now remember, depression is a mental issue whereby you begin to believe that your life is hopeless.

You have the lack of positive feelings or sometimes any feelings,

and you have despair and rumination and loss of happiness instead of peace and

joy and all those things that we want in our lives.

Depression robs us of the ability to feel normal range of human emotions. It's not just sadness.

It's a narrowing of a possible feeling of emotional states that are appropriate,

whether good or bad, and certainly over time, a lack of happiness and a lack

of flourishing in your life.

That's what depression is. So it's a big deal if we can learn how to reduce

risk or symptoms of depression, right? Well, here's the abstract.

Individuals at high risk for depression have increased default mode network connectivity.

What does that mean? So people who have high risk for depression have greater

connection in their brain of the default mode.

The default mode, when you're not thinking actively about something or engaged

in a task, your default mode in depressed people connects more widely throughout

the brain to other areas, right?

As well as, this is a funny way that they worded this, reduced inverse connectivity

between the default mode network and the central executive network. What does that mean?

It means that the executive network, the frontal lobes, the parts of your brain

that should be in charge, the rational, reasonable thinking areas that help

you make good decisions and help you reduce impulsive behavior and all that stuff.

Those areas are not as well connected to the rest of the brain and the default

network in people that are depressed.

A reduced inverse connectivity. The frontal lobe has a lower ability to diminish

these crazy things that are happening in our minds, these self-directed thought

process loops that we get into, the fear, rumination, worry,

anxiety, all that stuff.

The frontal lobes have a reduced inverse connectivity to the default mode network

to say, hey, calm down. It's okay. You've got this.

We've got a plan. We're going to make this better. Not everything is terrible.

That's reduced in people who are depressed. Other studies, the authors say,

have indicated that the belief in the importance of religion and spirituality

is protective against depression in high-risk individuals.

Given these findings, we hypothesize that religion and spiritual importance

would moderate default mode network connectivity,

potentially reducing connectivity of the default mode network,

or increasing the default mode central executive inverse connectivity in individuals

at high risk for depression.

Let me unpack that for you. Their theory was that the more importance you place

on spiritual and religious ideas,

that you would have a higher ability of your frontal lobes to connect and decrease

the activity of your default mode, and you would have a reduced connectivity

to areas of your brain of the default mode at baseline. Yeah.

By having more connection to God, basically, your brain would connect less to

the self-directed, ruminatory, anxiety-producing thought loops and patterns

and areas, and you would get your frontal lobes in better control.

That was their theory. So what'd they do? Using resting state functional connectivity

MRI in a sample of 104 individuals age 11 to 60 at high and low risk for familial depression,

we previously reported increased default mode network connectivity and reduced

inverse connectivity with the central executive network and high-risk individuals.

Here, for the current paper, we found that this effect was moderated by self-report

measures of religious and spiritual importance.

Greater religious and spiritual importance in the high-risk group was associated

with decreased default mode network connectivity.

These results may represent a protective neural adaptation in the default mode

network of individuals at high risk for depression and may have implications

for other meditation-based therapies for depression.

Here's the punchline, okay? They even go on to say in their conclusion,

which is hilarious to me, they say, we don't know,

we are unable to determine whether people with religious and spiritual high

importance causes a reduction in default mode network connectivity or if those

with lower default mode network connectivity tend to place greater personal

value on religion and spirituality.

So what they're basically saying in every paper from cognitive neuroscientists

that I've ever read throws in a sentence like this.

Like when they show, for example, that meditation and prayer cause your hippocampus to increase in its size,

they'll say something like, we don't know if this is just that there's some

brain process that makes people more, some people more sensitive to prayer,

or if it's that actually prayer is making your brain get better.

They always throw in a sentence like that. The conclusion is obvious, okay?

The conclusion is obvious. If the way the world really works is that God communicates

with our minds and our minds communicate with our brains and our minds can make

structural changes in our brains,

and we know that's how it works because we've proven it now with endless numbers

of imaging studies that your mind can direct structural changes in your brain,

which is the whole basis for us to have hope as self-brain surgeons.

The entire basis of my coming at you every day and telling you that you're not

stuck with the brain that you have because thinking better thoughts will produce

better structural brain activity,

which will produce better chemical and hormonal environments in your brain and

your body, improve epigenetically the lives of your offspring and the people

around you based on you changing your field.

All of that stuff is possible because the mind creates and directs the brain.

It's not the other way around. If it was, it would be hopeless for But it's

not because your brain is under the influence and control of your mind.

So here's the punchline.

They have shown now, this paper and many, many others have shown conclusively

that what you think about changes how your brain behaves.

What you think about changes how your brain structurally forms itself,

that you can shape your brain, but if you don't, the brain will shape itself

and it will continue to rewire the things you're already doing because what

you're doing, you're getting better at,

and it'll get harder and harder and harder for you to ever change because your

brain will continue to stay the way it is or get worse unless you learn to control it.

So the question is, what do you want?

Do you want to make things better for your life, or do you want to keep having

the same thing that you've been having? Because that's what will happen.

It will stay the same or get worse over time if you don't direct it.

And here's some information from non-spiritual researchers who say,

hey, the more importance you place on religious and spiritual activities,

the better your brain behaves, the less active your default mode network is,

the less you focus on self, on past traumas and future your potential anxieties and troubles,

and the more you're going to be able to connect with your frontal lobes,

increase your ability to switch from one harmful thought to a more positive one,

and you're going to have a better ability to connect with other people in your lives.

And that, my friend, is super hopeful and super important.

And the other thing that they said that was really interesting is we know that

there are certain networks that get involved when you meditate and pray,

and what they found here is that the areas that are connecting in a better way

when you have religious and spiritual value, when you place value on religious

and spiritual activities, when you think about God more, not just praying and meditating,

but spending time valuing the idea that there's a creator who cares and loves

about you, it's different networks that get involved than the ones that are

involved when you're actively praying or meditating.

What does that mean? It means that your brain is wired by God to improve itself

when you spend time thinking about Him.

To have a life where you spend your time thinking about things above,

as the Bible says, set your mind on things above, and He'll basically help you

then rewire your mind and your brain in a way that improves the overall quality of your life.

When you delight in Him, He helps you. That's why he says, taste and see that the Lord is good.

That's why he says, hey, if you're anxious, pray more. Don't be anxious for

anything, but instead, in everything by prayer and meditation and thanksgiving,

give your requests to God.

And the peace of God, which passes all understanding, will fill your heart,

transform your life. That's Philippians 4, right?

What he says is, the more you spend thinking about me, the more I'll help you.

You can change your life, but you have to change your mind first. The science is clear.

The world is not built up from brain processes.

Your world is built down from mental processes. Your brain is structurally improvable.

Everybody's brain is. Now, there are some people, yes, that have serious psychiatric

illnesses, but guess what?

Those people might not be able to do self-brain surgery and help themselves.

They might really require lobotomies and those kinds of things, but most people.

I always suggest if you're listening to a podcast, if you intended and chose

to listen to a podcast with the idea of perhaps being able to change something in your mind,

you're probably not one of those people that has such severe structural brain

pathology that you can't help yourself in some way.

So given that you're listening to a podcast with the intention of trying to

make things better for yourself, then there is hope for you, my friend.

And self-brain surgery is one tool among many that you can use.

And the important part is to remember it's not therapy. A therapy is where you

talk to somebody else to get a set of abilities to understand the things you're

facing and a set of tools to handle them and different ways to think and react

and changing behaviors and patterns.

And sometimes you need another person to help you see those things.

And yes, there's a role for medication in some cases.

There is. There's no doubt about that. I'm a medical doctor.

I write prescriptions for medicines. There's a role for that.

But self-brain surgery is this nod to the fact that your brain is structurally

rewiring and changing itself every second of every day.

And there are many in fact most of those

changes that you can control and change

and bring under the influence of yourself and of your creator through self-directed

processes that will help you and so that's what we're after the parts of this

that we can do ourselves the every second of every day part that we want to

get healthier and feel better and be happier that's the self brain surgery part.

And guess what? We just learned today that attaching value and engaging in religious

and spiritual activities, in addition to prayer and meditation,

help you change the balance of what happens when you're not actively thinking.

It reduces the activity of your default mode.

It unselfs you and helps you become more connected to the other people around you, okay?

There is no path to peace and joy and happiness in your life by expecting other

people to change enough or circumstances to break your way enough that you can finally be happy.

Because if you're not happy inside yourself, nobody else can change enough or

do enough or give enough or yield enough to you to make you happy.

If you don't respect yourself and love yourself and care enough about yourself

to try to do everything that you can to make it better, nobody else can do that for you.

Nobody's coming to help you except you and the Holy Spirit Great Physician that's inside you.

And everything inside you is able to change and improve if you change your mind.

That's the profoundly good news.

It's also bad news because if you don't find yourself in a place in your life

where you land on your feet and you find yourself fulfilling your purpose and

your calling and your destiny and connecting to God and connecting to other

people, if you find yourself not doing that.

There's no one to blame except you having chosen not to perform self-brain surgery, because you can.

Everybody can. And the good news is, my friend, you can change your mind,

and you can change your life, and you can become healthier and feel better and

be happier, But you've got to turn the dial down on that default mode.

You've got to connect your frontal lobe, your cerebral executive center,

to overtake the activity of your default mode network.

And you do that by reducing the me show, by getting out of your head,

and by prayer and meditation and controlling the things that you put in so you

have better baseline beginning points for your thinking.

You can change your mind and you can change your life. And the very good news

is you can take 2 Corinthians 10 5 seriously and take all your thoughts captive 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 wleewarrantmd.com slash prayer,

wleewarrantmd.com slash prayer, and go to my website and sign up for the news.

Letters, 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.