Frontal Lobe Friday: Epigenetics, Childhood Trauma, and Becoming the CEO of Your Brain

Good morning my friend, I hope you're doing well. I'm Dr. Lee Warren here with you and we're going to do a little self brain surgery today

because it, my friend, is frontal lobe Friday.

It's the second edition of frontal lobe Friday. I told you we were going to have some Fridays when we talk about the incredible things that

you are created to be able to do with your giant frontal lobes, the things that separate

you from everything else that God created.

You have the incredible ability, a gift of what we call selective attention, where you

can literally decide what you want to think about.

That may sound silly or like pop psychology or like some kind of motivational speaker

coming at you, but I'm just going to give you a little bit of information today about

the science of epigenetics, the importance of nature versus nurture, how you're not a

slave to your genetic code, and a couple of scriptures to give you an idea that literally

when I say that you can do self-brain surgery by changing how you think, it's really true.

The human brain is the only computer that can upgrade its own hardware.

And God has given you an unbelievable and incredible ability to change what you think about,

and that will change how your life works, change how your body works,

change how your genetics work,

change how your generations work,

and you can set yourself free.

By learning how to change your mind. It's really true.

Sounds crazy? It's actually true, because you can't change your life until you change your mind.

And on Frontal Lobe Friday, I have one question for you, my friend.

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.

Ooh, let's get after it. Hey, it's Frontal Lobe Friday. Will you do me a favor, please?

I'm trying to understand the algorithm that Apple uses in their podcast rankings because

the higher in the rankings we are, the more people see the show, the more people can be

helped by this, I think, revolutionary idea of self-brain surgery.

So it turns out that it's subscriptions as part of it. So if you listen to the show on Apple or Spotify or wherever you listen, go ahead and subscribe.

It helps to raise the...

Apple and Spotify and the other places awareness of the show the more people subscribing that helps it get up there

The second one is share it with your friends If you're listening to this this morning and you say I'm tired of being so tired

I'm tired of watching my dear friends struggle with this problem and I want to help them in this,

Episode is helping me. It'll help them to go ahead and just click on the little share icon

Wherever you listen and copy and paste the link and text it to somebody say hey

This is the thing that's going to help you today this this idea this information is going to help you

Please listen to it. And if you like it subscribe, so I think if you share an episode that it means something to you,

With someone you love who you think it will be helpful to,

That's going to help in the algorithm. So just just for one day. Let's see what happens if everybody listening that feels it's beneficial.

Shares it with another person. I'm just trying to do a little research on the algorithm

They're really tight-lipped about how the algorithm works. I figured out that,

Subscriptions ratings and reviews and shares are a big part of it. It's not just downloads

It's how interactive the community is with the show So if you think it's helpful try that today just copy and paste the link share with a friend,

See what happens out there? Okay. Okay. Listen, it's frontal lobe Friday. God has given you an incredible gift of,

Of selective attention you are not stuck in a rut like a wagon with the wheels bound by the tracks,

You are not stuck. You can change how you think and Changing how you think will change everything about how you live,

Listen, I want to talk for a second about,

magic, okay Imagine hundreds of years ago you are a native and,

You're living somewhere and you figured out how to use knives and you figured out how to make fire and you figured out how to

make bows and arrows to hunt and all that and all of a sudden army shows up

from some other place and they have guns.

They're shooting at you and people are getting shot off their horses and it looks like magic to you, right?

You don't understand how this stick can make so much noise and blow fire and people die. It seems like magic.

It's not magic. It's gunpowder and lead being used and harnessed by a rifle barrel

And and it's it's the result of applied science, right?

But to you as the observer it looks like magic And so I just want to suggest to you that magic always precedes science, that there's

always somebody who's figured something out, they've observed a phenomenon, they've figured out something.

They may not even understand it. Surgeons are great about this.

For hundreds of years we've been figuring out that if you amputate a limb that the patient

doesn't die of gangrene.

So we didn't understand what gangrene was and we didn't understand that you could actually

get there more easily with wound debridement and antibiotics than with aggressive battlefield

amputations, but we did it because surgeons did that because they figured out that that

would keep people alive long before the science caught up.

It just seemed like a good idea. They practiced it. They got better at it.

And that's what happens throughout history. Somebody figures something out, observes something, and they figure out how to monetize it, and

they go around and become a carnival act and sell their medicine, right?

And it turns out that some of those things are actually helpful.

They just don't understand the science.

So from the observer's side, it looks like magic. It looks like this guy's got some power or some gift or some skill or some potion that

can save the day for you or kill you if you don't do what they want.

And it's not actually magic. It's just science that somebody hasn't explained to you yet.

But once you understand it, it stops being mysterious and starts being useful, right?

Well, let's talk about epigenetics for a second.

Would surprise you surprised me to learn That identical twins with the same set of genetic information die on average more than 10 years apart.

Why if they have the same genes if we're if we're fated to live our lives according to how our genes,

Make us be then why don't we live the same age as our identical siblings?

Why don't we generally live about the same lifespan? Well, you could say well some of them get hit by buses and some of them choose to smoke and they get lung cancer

Those things are all true But it's actually more powerful that it turns out that the choices you make across an entire lifetime,

Turn genes on and off in different ways and the genes that you share with your identical

Sibling don't get expressed in the same way in each of your bodies because you marry different people you live in different places

You live in different houses. You have different likes and dislikes you choose different dietary things

You you expose yourself to different things and you think differently and that produces

Dramatic changes in how the cells in your body and the DNA inside of them are expressed and what proteins get made and don't made

And don't get made that turns into what happens to your offspring,

And what we're learning is this is the science called epigenetics. So if you think about.

Photograph I read this in a book called genie in your genes by Dawson Church

If you think about a photograph of a symphony orchestra, right, you can see, in fact, if you think about it

as a jigsaw puzzle, a symphony that they cut up,

a picture of a symphony they cut up and turned into a jigsaw puzzle,

and you can put the whole thing together, and what you end up with is a photograph of an orchestra,

right, you can see the conductor, you can see all the musicians,

you can see the music sitting on the stands, you can see the trombone in somebody's hands

and the violin in someone else's

and this guy about to crash the cymbals and the lady playing the harp,

and you see all that stuff, it doesn't make the music happen, right?

It's just a picture of the symphony. And even if you went in person to the orchestra

and you sat and you looked at the orchestra on the stage, it wouldn't tell you what they're about to play, right?

But somehow we bought into this idea that the DNA in our cells determines

what music we're gonna play in our lives, and it doesn't.

It might determine your eye color and your hair color and your height.

Those things are pretty, those genes are pretty hard-coded, right?

But there are actual proteins that get produced or not produced in your body

based on what genes get turned on and off. And one of the key elements of how you turn those genes on and off

Turns out to be how you think.

That's incredible, isn't it? The things you think the things you experience the things you eat the things you.

Surround yourself with in your life experiences memories other people attitudes actually turns out to be,

What has the biggest impact?

On your gene expression Well, there's been all kinds of research now

There's a there's a species of mice that tend towards obesity and heart disease

They get fat and they die early because they eat too much and they kill themselves with

overeating and the mechanism is heart disease and diabetes, right?

Well, this researcher at Duke discovered that adding a chemical called methyl to their diets

would actually produce offspring in those mice that didn't have the tendency to overeat

and get diabetes and heart disease.

Why? Because their genes became methylated. This is a biochemical change that happens in certain genes where this methyl group,

it's a bunch of atoms that get attached to DNA, and it turns out that methylating certain

genes changes how those genes are expressed and allows them not to be produced at the

same, not to be activated at the same rate.

And when I read that, I remembered it's actually relevant in glioblastoma, there's a gene called

MGMT promoter that turns out to be one of the genes that allows that tumor to grow at an

uncontrolled rate. And if the MGMT promoter gene is methylated, then those tumors don't reproduce

and grow as rapidly and they respond more to chemotherapy and radiation and patients have

better outcomes when their MGMT promoter gene is methylated. So this thing that they learned at Duke

about the mice resonated with me as a glioblastoma surgeon because it turns out that methylation

is the mechanical means by which gene expression can be reduced.

There's another group called acetyl or acetylating genes is a type of biochemical process that

happens where an acetyl group instead of a methyl group gets attached to genes and that

turns out to be promoting.

So if you attach an acetyl group to a gene, it expresses at a higher rate.

So you have now two different ways to understand that that booming fire stick isn't magic, it's just science.

And here you have this understanding of an ability to see that how you think and what

you do in your life turns genes on and off. And the biochemical reality of how that works is part of it is methylation and acetylation.

This is the mechanics of what's actually happening at the gene level.

And so what I'm telling you all that nerdy stuff is that it's not a self-help positive thinking thing.

So when you change how you think, you change how proteins are expressed or produced in

your body. And that happens because genes get turned on and off by controlling forces such as methylation or acetylation.

And that happens inside your cells to take the DNA that you inherited from your parents

and turn it on or off in response to how your life plays out.

It's not magic magic precedes science science is the ability to observe something and reproduce it in a controllable and safe way

Right to take what we see and finally understand how it works and be able to use it to our advantage

That's what science is. Okay,

And so now we understand That you have the ability to direct and change your stream of thoughts because of your incredible frontal lobes,

You're not stuck with your limbic system telling you it's time to fight or flight,

time to fight or flee. You're not stuck obeying the whim of your DNA. You're not.

You can control it. You can change it and you can't change your life until you

change your mind. How amazing is that? Now let me tell you some things about

nature and nurture. We just talked about identical twins and how they don't live

of the same amount?

Well, there's been incredible research into adverse childhood experiences.

This thing called ACE. And it turns out that adverse childhood experiences

are one of the most powerful things

that can affect how your life plays out.

This is really sad, but it's true. And it's also encouraging because it can turn out

to be one of the most freeing and liberating things in your whole life.

Understand why you behave in certain ways, and why you feel certain ways,

and why your life seems to be playing out according to a script that you didn't write

and didn't want. Maybe you need to go back and look at your childhood.

There's an experiment, or a research project done in the Kaiser Permanente system in San Diego,

a while back, and they looked at 17,000,

a little over 17,000 people who were enrolled in their health plans,

and they did surveys of things that might have happened these people.

When they were children and they found a strong inverse link between emotional well-being health and longevity and,

Early life stresses. So the more stress you faced as a child.

The shorter you lived and the more trouble you generally have You can't just get over some things that happen in your life if you don't understand them,

This is kind of kind of devastating in a sense Here's some just bullet points from the study.

The study found that a person raised in a family where there was significant stress,

abuse, alcoholism, physical abuse, sexual abuse, verbal abuse, all that kind of stuff,

had five times more depression as an adult.

Five times.

The same people had three times, they were three times more likely to smoke.

They were at least 30 times more likely to commit to attempt suicide in their life.

A man with a high adverse childhood experience score was 4,600 times more likely to use illegal

drugs or alcohol, 4,000 times.

So having an adverse childhood experience, listen fathers, listen moms, listen people

who are grandparents.

If your children are exposed to a high-stress environment in their home, it is going to hurt their lives.

So every moment, every thought captive, 2 Corinthians 10, 5, we take captive every thought

before you open your mouth and say something labeling or harmful or put your hand on a

child, you think about their future and their children's children's future.

Let me read it again. People with adverse childhood experiences are five times more likely to be depressed.

Times more likely to smoke.

30 times more likely to attempt suicide in their life men particularly with the high adverse childhood event score are.

4,600 times more likely to use intervening illegal intravenous drugs it gets worse,

All these following diseases are statistically significantly more common in people with adverse childhood experiences You ready for this?

Obesity heart disease lung disease diabetes bone fractures hypertension and hepatitis all.

Significantly higher in people who have had adverse childhood experiences,

Why is it magic? No, it's gene expression It's the things that happen raise the cortisol levels in your body. They make your brain more stressed out

You divert energy away from healing and healthy thought processes towards how am I gonna survive this?

Why does this always happen to me? Why did my dad not love me? Why did my mom say that thing to me?

Why did my uncle do that thing to me that night when they were supposed to be babysitting me?

Why and later in your life your body's making heart disease and obesity and diabetes and hypertension and osteoporosis and suicide attempts and,

Alcoholism because of your adverse childhood experiences. That's not an excuse. Okay, it's your baseline

It's what genes are being expressed because of those events.

The genetic links between a nurturing childhood environment and gene expression in children

have been also traced in other studies.

It's been reproduced.

It's not just the Kaiser study.

One found that children with a gene that produces an enzyme that metabolizes neurotransmitters

like serotonin and dopamine are much more likely to become violent in their teens if

that were mistreated as children. This is fascinating. So they can test for the gene

that looks like they're going to be violent people, but they're not violent people if they weren't,

mistreated as children. That gene gets expressed only if there's been adverse childhood experiences.

So get this sentence, Dawson Church wrote this, loving parenting is epigenetic therapy.

Being kind and creating willfully purposefully creating a low-stress kind parenting environment is performing future surgery on your children my

my friend.

Now understand that it ought to change how you live, right? It ought to change how you live if you understand it,

Genetics are only a small part of the picture of you and your life.

Your frontal lobe gives you the ability to say, you know what? I know it's harmful to have a high stress environment

Therefore i'm going to radically Aggressively try to create a lower stress environment. That doesn't mean you don't discipline,

It doesn't mean you don't argue when you need to, it doesn't mean you don't deal with things in a healthy way.

It just means that given a choice between being a person who offloads your own internal stress by blowing up on others and saying harmful things and using physical violence and

being aggressive with one another,

given the choice between that which produces later challenges in life for people or saying, hey, I'm gonna let the Lord,

I'm gonna give my brain to Jesus and I'm gonna let the great physician help me learn how to harness my thinking so that I can

Behave and move forward in a healthier way. I can take command of every thought. I'm gonna aggressively learn to biopsy my thinking

I'm going to eradicate harmful thought processes I'm going to aggressively try to control how I behave towards others because I know it makes a difference in their life

Later on, if you love your kids, if you love your grandkids, you need to be changing how you think.

You need to be learning how to be a good frontal lobe operator and not operating out of your

fight-or-flight limbic system.

My friend this is critically important here on frontal lobe friday We need to be good self-brain surgeons. We need to take captive.

Every thought because as a man thinks in his heart proverbs 23 7 says so is he how you think?

Turns out to be What your life is about so?

I would just say this If you're tired of being so tired

You're wondering why your life is this endless stream of things that seem to be the same

You can't get off the the merry-go-round the superhighway that Dana said the other day.

If you can't seem to get off of it You've had these massive things that it puts you in this hellhole of negative thinking or you can't figure out why it just never seems

to change Start with your frontal lobe,

Start with understanding that you do have the ability you do have the ability to change the things you think about now

Now here's the problem, the negative pathways have been encoded in your brain by your life

experiences, by the genes that you inherited, the epigenetic switches in your genes that

you inherited, your baseline, right?

Like those mice that were afraid of cherries even though they've never been exposed to

the shock because their dads were shocked when they smelled cherries, like you inherit that stuff, right?

And you can't change it in 20 minutes listening to one podcast.

You've got to develop some surgical practices.

That's why residency is so long. It takes me six, seven, eight, nine years to become a neurosurgeon because you have

to practice these things over and over and over and over and keep practicing them to

develop real, almost instinctual skill at handling your surgical practice in a safe

way. Same thing with your thinking.

You don't change it. You don't change hundreds of years of influence, epigenetic influence in your family and a

a lifetime of the things that you've reacted to and the patterns you've

developed and the habits you have, you don't change that by one podcast. You

don't change it by a 21-day program. You change it by relentlessly refusing to

participate in your own demise anymore. You change it by saying, okay, now I

understand that these things happen in my cells when they start in my soul and

and therefore I'm going to aggressively ask God to help me change my thinking,

to start aggressively trying to change my thought patterns, to develop a treatment plan for what

happens the next time I get knocked down, to stop thinking that everything is some kind of magic

trick happening around me and understand the things I can take control of scientifically

that I need to. I need to say, hey God, I want to be a person who's in submission to your will.

I want to be a person who has a tight rein on my tongue. I want to be a person who helps others around me not have adverse experiences.

Because that makes such a difference in their life and I want to be a person who looks like somebody,

That other people would want to emulate because it looks like i've got something figured out

That they haven't figured out and maybe I can help somebody else find their way when things seem so dark,

You do that by letting your frontal lobes do their job,

right So imagine that we talked the other day about the ceo of the hospital

Like if there's a bad pattern in the kitchen that's leading to kitchen fires breaking out

every week in the cafeteria and all of a sudden you've got damage to your hospital and people

getting hurt and food not getting prepared for the patients and all that stuff happening

before long, that's going to get its way up to the C-suite and the CEO's going to have

to get involved and they're going to say, wait a minute, we need to, this person is

not safe. We need to move that person.

We need to change this policy. We need to get some new equipment down here.

We need to make sure we have better procedures in place. The CEO is gonna get involved

and put their hands on that process and get some changes made.

And then for weeks after that, they're gonna run drills, they're gonna have inspections,

they're gonna show up and make sure that things are being done right.

They're going to keep their hands on the process until it's ingrained and running reproducibly

in a safe and healthy way, right? The CEO has to get involved.

The executive has to get involved when there's problems on the ground.

And that's exactly what we need to do with our frontal lobes here on frontal lobe friday

If you've identified some areas of your life that are hurt by your childhood.

And you say yeah, I had a really rough time growing up and maybe that's why I seem to be struggling with this now

Then you need some help go get some therapy,

Right read some books listen to some podcasts read some scripture Find some ways to process those think those thoughts differently and understand that you are not

You're not stuck with the brain that you have.

You're not stuck with the behaviors that you were given by your parents.

You're not stuck with those epigenetic changes.

They can be modified and they can be modified by your thinking.

Sometimes by your diet, by activity, by therapy, by medication, all kinds of different things.

But there are tools and there is help available to you. You're not stuck, my friend, with the brain you have.

And here on Frontal Lobe Friday, it's time to get the executive involved.

It's time for you to stop reacting to everything that happens in your life.

It's time for you to stop flailing about, wondering why it's so hard all the time.

And it's time for you to say, hey, I'm gonna take control of this thing.

I'm gonna let God help me take control of my thinking.

And I'm gonna relentlessly refuse to participate in my own demise.

I'm gonna remember the 10 commandments of self-brain surgery. What are they?

Relentlessly refuse to participate in your own demise. Believe that feelings are not facts.

Believe that thoughts are not always true.

Believe and know that thoughts become things.

Refuse to treat bad feelings with bad operations.

We will love tomorrow more. We're not gonna make an operation out of everything.

We're not gonna perpetuate generational troubles like we just talked about.

And we're not gonna start new ones in our family.

And we are not gonna harm our brains with dietary or substance choices or not wearing helmets.

We're gonna be careful to protect our brains and we're gonna learn to practice mental first aid because we love,

Ourselves because the Lord told us to I mean Jesus died for you friend. You gotta love yourself.

He does So listen, we're gonna change our minds and we're gonna change our lives and here on frontal lobe Friday

We're just gonna say we start to understand the science,

It's not magic anymore. And then we're gonna go deep into understanding what we can do

about making our lives as healthy and better and happier as we can. So we can

try to help others, so that we can manage the massive things when they come along,

so that we can really make a mark on our world and tell a great story with our

lives. And guess what my friend, the good news about all that stuff here on

Frontal Lobe Friday, so we 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 book,

if you're not already tired of hearing my voice.

Hey, the theme music for the show is Get Up by my friend Tommy Walker,

available for free at TommyWalkerMinistries.org.

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If you need prayer, go to the prayer wall at WLeeWarrenMD.com slash prayer,

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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.