Four Ways to Operate Your Brain: Which One is Best? (Part I)

Good morning, my friend. I'm Dr. Lee Warren, and I am so excited to be back

with you for another episode of Self-Brain Surgery.

We're going to do some Mind Change Monday today because it's my favorite,

one of my favorite days of the week, Mind Change Monday, where we talk about

some way that you can change your mind and you can change your life.

We're going to talk about four different ways that you can operate your brain

today, and I think we're going to learn some things about the best way,

what I think is the best way to do it.

One of the most life-changing thoughts I ever had and how you can actually get

after the idea of changing your mind and changing your life.

But before we do any of that, you got to answer one question for me.

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. Are you ready to get after it? Here we go. Listen,

Mind Change Monday is that day of the week where we specifically talk about

some way in which we can all learn to change our minds and change our lives.

It's the self-brain surgery of how we can learn to think differently about the

things that we think about, feel differently about the things that we feel,

believe differently about the things that we believe, or at least be willing

to investigate them and ask hard hard questions about them,

all for the purpose of implementing a treatment plan so that we know what we

believe and we know what we can fall back onto when life gets hard,

when we hit trauma and tragedy and massive things and life sweeps the rug out

from under us. How far do we fall?

The answer is we fall to the level of our preparation and we want to be ready.

We want to have a treatment plan in place because life does get hard.

Friend, one of the most life-changing, life-transforming ideas that I ever ran

across, and I wish I could remember where I first heard this idea.

It wasn't in the context of neurosurgery or neuroscience or anything else,

but somebody said, in fact, I think it was a guitar video.

I just can't find it. I've been searching for it all weekend.

I can't find the first place I ever heard somebody say, what you're doing,

you're getting better at.

What you're doing, you're getting better at. And that became my mantra,

as you've heard me say a million times if you've been listening to this podcast

for a while or if you've been following me for any length of time.

You've heard me say, what you're doing, you're getting better at,

because that's neuroscience in a nutshell.

It's self-directed neuroplasticity, as Jeffrey Schwartz would call it,

and that's a little science-y for me.

I like to call it self-brain surgery because self-brain surgery incorporates

the neuroscience of the actual thing that happens when you're directing your

mind to change your brain, but also the spiritual side of how we connect to our Father,

how we can hear our Creator, how we can communicate with our Spirit and allow

Him to influence how we operate our mind. And He can take the controls.

And it's not self-brain surgery. The only part of self-brain surgery that you

do yourself is to admit to yourself that you can't help yourself.

And so you ask Him to do it. And connecting your spirit to your mind then allows

you to operate your brain and search for the mind of Christ that you already

have, but you've been living like you don't have it.

And you search for that mind of Christ to try to line your brain up with the

kind of brain that Jesus would have had, if we believe that your thinking can

make your brain structurally better and Jesus never sinned with his mind,

then his brain must have been pretty special because he never messed it up by

thinking down rabbit holes and crazy trains of thought that were harmful to him or to other people.

And so what you're doing, you're getting better at.

And we're going to talk about today four different ways to operate your brain.

I think it's going to help you.

It certainly helps me to think about it like this. Before we get started,

tomorrow on the Spiritual Brain Surgery Podcast, please go out and find Spiritual

Brain Surgery, bookmark it, follow it, subscribe to it, like it,

whatever you do to make sure that you're getting new episodes.

Because tomorrow we have New York Times bestselling author Jenny Allen on the

Spiritual Brain Surgery Podcast.

I am so excited to introduce you to Jenny.

And I can't wait for you to hear that episode. I'll send you an email tomorrow

if you're following the email, if you're subscribed to my email.

If you're missing my weekly newsletter, by the way, you're missing a huge part of the work that I do.

And I think it would be helpful to you. So please go sign up.

DrLeeWarren.substack.com is the easiest place to sign up. There's free options,

the free newsletter every Sunday since 2014.

It's read in almost 100 countries around the world every Sunday now.

And that newsletter is really where I try to put some good thoughts together

for you in one place every week for you to have some thinking around the ideas

behind self-brain surgery and all the things that we talk about.

There's a little spiritual content in there every week as well,

and so I think it'll be helpful for you.

But I'll send that email out, not from the normal podcast email that you get for the Dr.

Lee Warren podcast, but Substack will have an email tomorrow that you'll get

that spiritual brain surgery episode with Jenny Allen.

So make sure you're subscribed and following the newsletter as well.

I don't want you to miss that.

Be sure you check out the interview with Jenny Allen tomorrow.

It's going to be a great one, and I think it's really going to help you.

She has a new book that's dropping tomorrow. tomorrow everywhere books are sold

it's called untangle your emotions it'll really help you get some clarity around

this idea that feelings aren't facts but they're there for a reason and they're

very important and we need to understand what we're feeling while we're feeling

it and what we ought to be doing about it so jenny allen's book is going to

be very very helpful in that regard.

Okay. Also, we are coming up to the end of the first week of our Abide prayer

and meditation practice.

If you haven't joined us on that yet, go back early.

Late last week, we had two episodes about the Abide practice.

The first one was on spiritual brain surgery. The second one was on the normal

podcast that you're listening to now.

And we talked about Abide, this method of getting in touch with our mind and

our brain and trying to learn how to pray and meditate in a way that will structurally

change our brains to be more in tune with our bodies,

to direct our bodies in a healthier way, to hear God's voice in a more clear way.

And just to really try to learn how to center down and become less anxious and more resilient.

And that abide practice is going to be helping us. So as we talk about the four

levels, four different ways of operating our brains today, I want you to take

that idea and take it to your abide practice if you're doing that with us.

So 10 to 12 minutes a day for up to eight weeks, for eight weeks has been shown

to structurally make significant changes in the parts of your brain that control

anxiety and resilience and calmness and reduce anxiety.

And we're just going to try to make our brains as efficient and effective as

we can, right? It makes sense to do that, right?

So let's just for a minute, really quick minute here, let's talk about four

different ways to operate your brain.

This really applies to any type of learning or any type of interaction with

technology or with education or with a hobby that you have.

There's basically four ways that people interact with things.

You can see it in just about anything.

But for the purposes of our conversation today, I'm going to use the cell phone,

the smartphone, as an example. I'm holding my smartphone.

Lisa and I recently had to upgrade our phones because our phones were super

old. We're always way behind the technology curve.

We buy a phone, we keep it for years until it it stops charging or something

happens, and then we buy new ones.

And so we recently upgraded from the iPhone 11 to the iPhone 15 Pro Max.

So it's a brand-new phone. It's got a much better camera. I've been taking pictures

of bald eagles and owls, and Lisa took some great pictures of the horned owl

that lives in a tree outside our house a couple of days ago, yesterday, actually.

And it's just been fun to kind of get to know these new devices a little bit.

They have a lot of new capabilities. But if you think about your smartphone.

I would guess that the vast majority of us interact with our phones in a way

that is just a fraction of all the different things that they can do,

just a fraction of the different possibilities that this technological marvel is capable of doing.

I mean, you might use it as a phone, so you make phone calls.

You might use it as a wireless communication device to send text messages.

You might use it as a way to send and receive email. You might use it to surf

the internet and go to Amazon or buy things or do some shopping.

You might use it for banking to deposit checks or check your balance or pay a bill.

You might use it as a calculator, as a screen recorder.

You might use it as a voice recorder to keep messages. You might use it as a

flashlight or an alarm clock, right? There's dozens of different ways that you might use it.

But if you think about it, with the App Store that you have,

and even if you don't have have an iPhone, if you have a Samsung or some other

type of phone, smartphone,

certainly there's an app store where you can go and buy almost or even freely

download an almost infinite amount of different programs that can allow you

to use that phone in an infinite number of ways, right?

But most of us use it in a very limited way. And then when something goes wrong

with our phones, phones, most of us have a limited understanding of what to do about it.

Most of us will have to Google what I do if my phone won't restart or what I

do if my phone won't charge.

Or most of us will call one of our kids. They usually have a better handle on it than we do.

And we have a limited set of tools that we can use if something isn't working.

Most families have one person that's kind of the tech guru that falls on me

and our family. I'm sort of the tech guy.

And so Tata I'll bring me his phone or Lisa will sometimes if something's not

working. Lisa's really good at technology as well, but I'm sort of the tech guy.

Our family. But if something is wrong and I can't sort it out,

I'll send an email to our guy at Verizon.

We have a guy that is our guy who handles our account. We have a business account with Verizon.

And I'll say, hey, I'm having a problem with my Apple Watch or having a problem

with my phone and it's doing this or doing that.

And he's got some training that I don't have.

He's taken an interest and made it a profession.

And he's got a set of troubleshooting things and he can and take it a level deeper than I can.

And he can troubleshoot things and sort things out and run an algorithm and give me some ideas.

And once in a while, the answer will be, well, it just isn't gonna work.

You're gonna need to mail that back in and we'll send you a new phone or we'll

have the company repair the phone, right?

Or if you drop your phone and break the glass, most of us can't repair that ourselves.

We have to take it to someplace where there's a person who's got expertise that

we don't have. And they've learned more.

They've taken the steps to understand how the device operates and how it can

fail and different ways to repair it and different ways to fix it and different

ways to unstick it and different ways to expand its utility, right?

And so sometimes you can find that person. There's often a person on a hobby level even with a phone,

for example, that's taken the camera and they've learned all the different ways

to unlock the camera and adjust the f-stop and understand the focus better and

can use the camera at a much higher level than I can or you can.

My friend, Susan Jaden, who's my editor at Waterbrook over at Penguin Random

House, she's an almost professional photographer.

She's a hobbyist, but she's super good. She's won a bunch of awards for her

pictures and they've shown up in the newspapers in Denver and Colorado Springs

and she wins contests all the time with her photography.

But a lot of what she does is with her cell phone and she's just become a really,

really good user of the camera technology in that phone.

And there's always somebody like that, right? Who doesn't just go to the first

level of knowledge, they take it to the next level.

And then beyond that, if you get to a place where that next level person can't

fix the problem, they send it back to the company.

And at the company, they've got technicians who've gone to school,

who actually learned all the

different inside and outside parts of that phone. They can take it apart.

They can change out a SIM card. They can swap out a processor.

They can replace the camera if it's not working. They can do all the technical

things that they need to do to make it operate at a more efficient level.

But even those people, they don't have the knowledge of what's actually happening

inside that microprocessor.

They're not computer engineers or electrical engineers. They're not physicists.

They didn't invent the microprocessor. or they didn't build that device and

they can't actually make a device, right?

They didn't build the robot that puts them together in the clean room at Apple

or in China or wherever they make them.

They don't operate it at that level, at the level of the engineer designer, right?

So at every stage of interaction with the technology or with a hobby or with

a skill or with the science, there's people who are surface level users.

There's people who are a little bit more proficient and have taken some time

to get a little bit better at sort of hacking and repairing and making things better.

And then there's people who understand how to take it apart and understand the

parts and the processes inside it and how to make them work.

There was always the guy back in the 90s when personal computers got really popular.

There was always a guy that would go and buy all the parts to build a computer,

and they could put them together, and they would make a fancy computer.

That's how Michael Dell got started, that's now a billionaire with Dell Computers.

He wasn't manufacturing computers.

He was assembling them and making them, buying parts all over the place and

putting them together and optimizing them for gaming or for something else.

And he made a business out of putting computers together, even though he wasn't making them.

He was just a master in understanding the components and how they ought to be

working together, and he could make that happen.

But then down at the beginning level of everything, there's a designer,

there's an engineer, there's a physicist, there's a scientist who builds the

thing and builds the things that build the things, right?

And so I'm only making this point to say this, that we spend our entire lives

performing self-brain surgery, okay?

Whether you intentionally do it or not, because the fact is that what you're

doing, you're getting better at.

Every second of every day of your life, your brain is making synapses.

New neurons are being generated and they're being wired into your brain into

habits and patterns of behavior and of cell gene transcription and of hormone

and neurotransmitter production and cell activity and reproduction and epigenetic

switches, turning genes on and off.

That's happening every second of every day, whether you do it intentionally

or not. This is the single biggest realization of my professional life,

is that your brain is being changed.

It's being formed. It's being shaped.

Whether you passively allow that to happen by the events, circumstances,

people, trauma, tragedies, massive things, accidents.

Genetic predisposition that you believe is inevitable and can't be influenced

by choices that you make of what to put in your body, body, tobacco, alcohol,

food choices, exercise or not exercises, all of those things,

what you put in your gut, what you do with your body, all of that is forming

your brain, whether you intentionally do it or not.

And so what that should do, this is the punchline of this episode.

It's Mind Change Monday.

I want you to actively understand this, that your brain is being shaped whether

you shape it intentionally or not.

Your brain is being formed. Your brain is being changed.

Your body and your generations are being influenced every second of every day.

And then we sit back and we say, I wonder why nothing ever gets better for me.

I wonder why I can't seem to overcome this. I wonder why everything feels so hard all the time.

Well, how much time, friend, are you actively engaging and trying to engage

with the processes that God put inside you that will produce changes in your

brain and in your body if you engage them and direct them?

Or how much time are you spending allowing your life to shape those things for you?

And so your mind is operating on your brain every moment of your life,

whether you actively do it? Are you allowed to passively happen?

So the problem is our brains are being formed and we can do that competently

and effectively as self-brain surgeons, or we can allow it to happen passively

as victims of circumstances, genetics,

other people, traumas, tragedies, our past, our memories, the things we're ashamed

of, the things we're afraid of, of the things we're too afraid to take action

on or simply by negligence or misunderstanding.

But what I'm telling you is once you understand it, the book of James says if

you know something and you don't do it, if you know it's right and you don't do it, it's sin.

If you know it's wrong and you do it anyway, it's sin. All I'm telling you,

you didn't know before, perhaps.

That your brain was under your own influence, that your raging thoughts could

become under the control of your executive frontal lobe,

that your anxiety could become under the control of the long circuit from your

frontal lobe to your hippocampus to your amygdala instead of the short circuit

directly to your amygdala and out to your cortisol-producing glands that make you scared and afraid.

Then once you know that, once you know that you can make this process better,

with self-brain surgery, with self-directed neuroplasticity,

if you want to science it up a little bit, then you have a responsibility.

Just like in the operating room, I've told you this before, if you slip and

fall and hit your head and get a brain hemorrhage and die on your bathroom floor,

even though I have the skills to save you, if I have the opportunity to save

you, it's not my fault if you die on your bathroom floor, God forbid.

But if you slip and fall and hit your head and your spouse sees it and they

call 911 and the ambulance takes you to the emergency room.

And my good friend, Renee Engler calls me from the ER and says,

Hey, this person is, has got a brain hemorrhage and they need you to save them.

And I say, no, I'm going to go back to sleep. And I hit the,

hang the phone up and go back to sleep. And I let you die of that brain hemorrhage.

Now it's my fault because I had the skills and the training to operate on you. And I chose not to.

Okay. I would never do that by the way, But I'm just saying, if

you have the training and skills to perform the surgery that you need to change

your mind in a way that will change your life and make you become healthier

and feel better and be happier and change your generations and break generational

curses and improve the quality of your life and those around you and allow you

to regain resilience and find your footing and regain faith and move towards hope again,

it's self-malpractice if you choose not to do that anymore.

So that's why the very first one of the Ten Commandments of self-brain surgery

is that we will relentlessly refuse to participate in our own demise.

We will take the Hippocratic Oath for ourselves and refuse to allow us to do harm to ourselves.

We will say, first, no harm, primum non nocere. We will not allow self-malpractice, okay?

That's the first thing. once you know that you

can operate your brain at a higher level then you have a responsibility to

stop being just a hobbyist in your own life you

want to get deeper you want to study you want to learn you

want to do as much as you can to become a master operator of

your own mind and your own brain it's

not enough just to be able to fix the screen if it's cracked anymore for you

it's not enough because you now have an insatiable desire to know more and to

fearlessly and wonderfully dive into this amazing body that God has given you

and the responsibility as our verse says.

We're going to learn how to present our bodies as a living sacrifice to our God.

That's Romans 12.1. I had a little brain cramp there. Romans 12.1,

I plead with you to give your bodies to God because of all He has done for you.

Let them be a living and holy sacrifice, the kind He will find acceptable.

This is the true way to worship Him.

Another translation, the voice translation said, this is a reasonable and essential act of worship.

So once you have that knowledge, friend,

that you actually can change the cells in your brain, the synapses and the pathways

in your brain that produce automatic negative thinking, that you can make that

better by challenging it, by thinking about better things, as Philippians 4 says,

by taking every thought captive, as 2 Corinthians 10, 5 says.

By choosing to believe and practice as if you have the mind of Christ,

as Paul says in 1 Corinthians 2, 16.

Who can know the Lord's thoughts? Who knows enough to teach Him?

But we understand these things, for we have the mind of Christ.

Here, friend, on Mind Change Monday, this is just a soapbox moment.

I want to tell you there's four ways to know and operate systems in the world.

And it's not enough to be a casual user of your own brain.

You are stuck with your thoughts, and you talk to yourself more than anybody

else in your entire life.

For the bulk of your life, the conversation you're having is in between your

own ears. So doesn't it make sense to learn how to have that conversation play

out compassionately and in a way that will help you?

Doesn't it make sense to take yourself to the operating room and know what you're

doing when you get there,

to start performing self-brain surgery in a way that doesn't leave unnecessary

scars on your heart and on your mind and on the minds of the people around you

and on the bodies of the people around you?

That line we talked about the other day regarding generational issues.

If you don't fix the child inside you that's broken, you will break the child that comes out of you.

If you don't deal with the things that you've got to deal with,

no matter whose fault they are, right? Remember, we've talked about that before.

Like if you've got a problem that came from a bad parent or a bad uncle or some

bad thing that happened in your past, yes, that wasn't your fault.

But I'm sorry to say, and I say this as compassionately and tenderly as I can,

if you're still paying a tax for something that happened to you at the hands

of somebody else a long time ago, friend, you have a responsibility.

Once you understand it, once you have insight into what that trauma did to you

and the response that you made to it,

you have a responsibility to yourself and to everybody that comes behind you

to make every effort to make that better. because you can.

You can change your mind and you can change your life. You really can.

Trauma is not what happened to you, okay? If something terrible happened to you, I lost a son, okay?

My son was stabbed to death. I saw horrible things in the Iraq war.

I've been through a divorce, but I can't let those things define me or create

how I behave going forward or then they become an idol in my life that's bigger

than God and I tell God that he's not powerful enough to help me change how

I respond to those things. No, trauma is not what happened to you.

If it was, it would be hopeless because you couldn't change it.

You can't change the fact that it happened to you.

Trauma is your response to what happened to you. And you can always change that.

So friend, here on Mind Change Monday today.

This day, I want it to be the day that you say, what I'm doing, I'm getting better at.

I want to operate my brain on a higher level. I want God to show me how to use

my mind in a way that honors Him and how He can communicate,

with me the best way to operate my brain so that I create synapses that help

me instead of hurt me, so that I turn off every gene that I inherited that's

harming me if I can, if I can influence it to operate better,

to down-regulate or up-regulate what needs to to be done inside my body so that

things get better for me and for the people that come after me.

If I learn that I can be afraid of something or have anxiety around something

that happened to my parents because of epigenetics, then I want to make sure

that I learn how to make sure that stuff is as good as it can be before I pass

it on to somebody behind me.

And if I've already got those kids and I know that they inherited some things,

I need to go to them and say, you know what?

I've got some anxiety around something that happened when I was five or six.

And I just want want to make sure that you know that you might be uncomfortable

about this. You might have some thoughts and feelings and memories that didn't even happen to you.

And let's go see if we can help you figure out a way to make those better and

change the way you think about them.

Friend, if it takes a therapist, if it takes a pastor, if it takes a podcast,

if it takes a book, if it takes journaling, if it takes switching habits and

exercising more, whatever it takes to get your mind in a different place so

that you can start taking the high ground and say, Say, God, help me.

I'm going to abide with you. Help me to see this differently.

Help me to break these generational patterns of thinking.

Help me to break this habit of thought. Help me to get my thoughts under control.

Help me start talking back to that negative voice. Help me to start biopsying

my thoughts and make that a practice.

Help me to be compassionate and a good physician towards myself and to stop

committing malpractice towards myself. self. Friend, let's become master operators of our brain.

Let's start becoming really, really good self-brain surgeons.

And for goodness sake, here on Mind Change Monday, my friend, let's 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 audiobooks.

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,

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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.