Immediate, Early Hope

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

It's Dr. Lee Warren here, your host for another episode of Mind Change Monday.

We're going to get after it with some information about how your body works, how your genetic,

I'm going to teach you about something called immediate early genes and give you some insight,

into how fearfully and wonderfully you're made.

And that's gonna leave you, my friend, with only one question.

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, my friend, welcome back to the show. Hope you had an amazing weekend.

And I want to give you just a little thought process today. We have, over the last 40 or 50 years

since Watson and Crick defined what DNA is,

we've had this building dogma, doctrine, almost religion of what they call genetic determinism.

Genetic determinism is this concept that you're really stuck with your genetic makeup.

However you, your parents, whatever genes they gave you, that's what you're fated to be.

You're gonna get cancer or not get cancer, you're gonna be tall and beautiful

or short and not beautiful, whatever, that your genes program who you are.

And that's led to almost a religion of I'm sorry this is just how I am, I can't change it.

My dad was grumpy, I'm going to be grumpy, my parents were an alcoholic, I'm going to be an alcoholic.

I was born into this family with diabetes and heart disease and there's nothing I can do about it.

Well, the fact is that turns out not to be true.

As we've talked recently, the Human Genome Project kind of opened a lot of people's eyes to the fact

that they thought they were going to discover hundreds of thousands of genes

genes that would be required to program for everything that turns out to be a human being,

and they ended up only finding a few thousand, twenty-something thousand genes that make

up the entire genome.

And what separates even identical twins from being identical humans, because as you know,

there's no two identical humans, what separates them is how those genes are expressed.

And what that means is there's a whole system that determines how genes are coded, turned

on, turned off, which parts of which genes are transcribed.

Ultimately, DNA really is a factory to produce proteins, and proteins turn into everything about your body.

Neurotransmitters, hormones, how your muscles and bones and organs work, and all that stuff,

and what you pass on to your children. So which genes are activated in your body when you reproduce, that's what your children

start with.

But what we've learned is that starting point isn't necessarily destined.

Course there are some genes that once they're coded and transcribed they can't

be changed like your eye color or what color your hair turns out to be and all

that but genes that turn out to

Have to do with the influence of whether or not you get cancer and all that sort of thing aren't incredibly controlled.

From the outside by the environment and some of that environment is your thought life,

And so I want to give you just one example of that. There's a thing called Immediate early genes iegs immediate early genes. This is a class of genes,

That responds within minutes to the things that happen in your life,

including in your environment and in your thought life.

These genes have now been described and understood to mediate or sort of influence the environment

and the body's neurochemical processes.

So what the environment is happening, stress, thought processes, actual danger,

actual events or perceived ones,

that environment influences the activation of immediate early genes,

and that influences the neurochemistry of your body.

Immediate early genes activate other genes. They turn genes on and off,

which in turn code for the proteins that govern how your cells adapt.

To the things that are happening around them.

Early activated genes reach their peak expression within an hour of an event.

And within about two hours, there's an immediate activated gene peak.

And that means that all these genes are turning on and turning off in seconds, minutes, and hours,

of the time that something happens.

You're not born stuck with a genetic process. You literally are reacting at the DNA level

within seconds of things happening in your lives. Genes are getting turned on and turned off

in every moment of your life.

Isn't that incredible? It's just stunning to think that every second of your life, your genetic,

makeup is being influenced by the environment of your life. This is why identical twins don't

turn out to be identical people. Because if one of them has a bad day at school, they express a

whole different set of genes than the other one does. And over the course of a lifetime, that

will turn into a whole different person. Because none of us are clones, even if we have identical

genetic material. There's incredible research coming out of the Karolinska Institute, which,

is a research institute in Stockholm that's a famous neuroscience center, and they're

studying this class of immediate early genes that are related to the clock, your chronobiological

system, your sleep and wake state. And they found that you have high levels of immediate

early gene during wake and wakeful states and low levels of them during sleep, and that

this fluctuation of gene expression happens in different cell populations of the brain

and not over the entire system.

So that means that different parts of your brain are particularly sensitive to things

that happen while you're awake and things that happen while you're asleep.

They even found that immediate early genes can be activated by cognitive changes in the

individual, things that you think about differently, and by cues from the outside, like threats or flood,

threats or food or sexual stimulation.

Like your life changes your genes, okay? Why is that so important?

It's important because you need to understand that you're not a slave to your biology, okay?

Psychology creates biology, which is why God told us a long time ago,

As a man thinks in his heart, so is he.

If you want to change your life, he says, stop thinking like everybody else does

and reform, transform your mind, and you'll change your life.

Here's an example by the way this book genie in your genes by Dawson Church is incredible,

Look at all of this now. He goes into some things that I don't Necessarily agree with but he's done a great job at laying out the science of of how our biology affects our,

genetics and here's an example that he talks about in genie in your genes an.

Example of the pathway followed in such transformations is demonstrated by an immediate early gene called C FOSS

That's the number the letter C dash FOS C FOS C FOS,

C FOS is a class a part of a class of immediate early genes that modulate our body's response to stress and,

that the entire class of genes is activated by stressful situations where there's a.

Rivalry in your office or in a disagreement with your spouse or an attack by a wild animal remember

I've told you numerous times that one of the problems we have with feelings and one of the reasons that

that feelings aren't facts is one of the rules or the commandments of self-brain surgery,

that we have to believe that feelings aren't facts.

One of the reasons is because you have a limited pallet of neurotransmitters that tell you what you feel

regardless of whether that feeling is triggered by a real event, a perceived event, an imagined event,

or just an anticipated one.

That fear feels like fear regardless of the underlying reality, right?

So here's the thing about CFOS.

It's a gene that gets turned on or off in response to stressful situations,

whether they're real or perceived, and it changes your DNA.

CFOS turns into FOS. CFOS activates brain neurons that produce a protein called FOS,

and FOS binds to the DNA molecule where it triggers the transcription of other genes.

So just like we talked about acetyl and methyl groups that turn on or off genes,

and can influence whether cancer happens or not, and is important in the biology of glioblastoma,

FOSS turns out to be important as well.

So, FOS is a triggering molecule that turns on or off other genes, and the stresses that

trigger the activation of CFOS can be physical traumas that can be stressful social or psychological situations.

And in this way, this entire family of immediate early genes sets up the response of the rest

of your body's mechanism for how you deal with stress.

This is fascinating, right?

Why am I going into all this? because you're maybe or maybe not interested in genetics or neurobiology,

but here's what you are interested in or you should be interested in.

Your thoughts become things, and some of the things they become are proteins that are transcribed

and genes that gets turned on or off.

And you literally can change the biology of your body's stress response by learning how to think differently,

about the things that you go through. That's why, my friend, you need a treatment plan.

That's why you need hope, because if you give up hope, you'll create an environment

that turns on more harmful genes,

that code for things like heart disease and diabetes and stress and all the things that happen

in response to how our bodies keep the score,

as Bessel van der Kolk said,

of the things that happen in our life.

There's a guy named Gary Marcus, he's a PhD, and he wrote a book called The Birth of the Mind,

how a tiny number of genes creates the complexity of human thought, and he said this,

A single regulatory gene at the top of a complex network can indirectly launch a cascade of

hundreds of thousands of other genes.

Think about that, like a little pebble that gets kicked down the top of a mountain can

turn into a massive landslide that can destroy a city, right?

Marcus goes on by compounding and coordinating their effects genes can exert enormous influence on biological structure the word,

He uses cascade Dawson Church says is often associated with,

regulatory gene expression the firing of a regulatory gene at the top of a cascade can lead to a

massive biological chain reaction and.

He gives examples of experiments in which a simple regulatory gene leads directly and indirectly to the expression of at least 2,500 other genes,

There's this incredible chart In Dawson Church's book that shows all the different things that can happen in your life and what genes get turned on and off,

like Psychobiological arousal and about a hundred different immediate early genes that can get turned on or off and how the rhythms of your mind and body

can influence these hundreds of early immediate genes and it affects your biology and your psychology.

There are all these research studies that have been done in the last 20 or 30 years

on gene expression, cell division, cell growth and healing, homeostasis and metabolism, central

nervous system arousal, epilepsy, hormones, sex and reproductive systems, immunology,

trauma and stress, diet and development, genetic disorders like cancer, cardiovascular disease,

energy and aging, psychosis, addictions, maternal behavior, psychosomatic disorders, pain and reward circuits,

novelty circuits, sleep and dream, stress and emotions, memory and learning, all these systems

that we have thought for generations were fixed genetically determined systems,

turn out to be under the tight control,

of immediate early genes.

And immediate early genes are under the tight, significant influence of environment.

An environment is affected by thought and experience and outside situations and other people.

And that, my friend, is why you need to guard your heart and guard your mind and be careful

what you prehab and what you put in your mind.

And you need to carefully and diligently build a system of resilience in your mind to know

that when something happens, because it's coming, your massive thing is coming, it's

coming and you know it is.

And if you haven't already had it, I'm sorry to say, Jesus promised in John 16, 33,

you're going to have trouble in this world, okay?

You're going to.

So knowing that you're not stuck with your genes and knowing that your genes are highly influenced

in turning on and turning off in seconds depending on what you go through and what you think about,

and knowing that you're gonna go through some hard things, you need to counterbalance that

by thinking about better things.

And that's why Paul says in Philippians 4, don't be anxious, be thankful that you have a father

you can turn to who is not just a good physician like Dr. Warren, but a great physician, okay?

And that great physician can help you heal your brain no matter what you're going through, okay?

So knowing that you're going to face hard things and knowing that the way you respond to those hard things

will literally change your body and literally change which genes get passed on and off

to your children as a starting point for their journey

in this sometimes hard life.

Wouldn't it be smart to take charge of your thoughts? That's why the Bible says take command of every thought in 2nd Corinthians 10 5 you see how all this is coming together

I hope friend that you'll stay with me on this journey We're gonna go deeper and deeper and deeper and I'm continually fascinated by the things

I'm discovering and they've been right there in front of me all along my whole career

I've been studying brain science and I've been practicing and I've been learning surgical techniques and taking care of people and I'm just now coming

living alive with this realization that we're not stuck with how we think.

We can change it.

And by changing how we think, we literally change how our brains work.

And by changing how our brains work, we literally take better command and better stewardship,

of the genes that turn on and off in response to the stress and those genes that code for

proteins that control other genes.

And by the end of it, there's a huge cascade of thousands of other genes that turn us into different people.

And that's why trauma and tragedy and massive things can leave you looking almost nothing

like you used to look.

Or you can take command of that process and you can take control of it and you can let

your great physician influence.

And please remember, I've been saying that lately, don't ever forget, I'm not saying

that, the only part of self-help that you do yourself is the self-help that you give

to yourself when you submit to the direction of the great physician who can really help you.

And He invites you, He nudges you, He calls you, and all you have to do is say, change my mind, God.

Help me change my mind so I can change my life. That's self brain surgery, my friend.

That's why we're here, because I want you to become healthier and feel better and be happier

and not think you're a slave to your genetics and not think it's hopeless and not think

that this super highway that you're on has no exit ramps,

because it does, and you can change the way you think and feel and you can find hope and happiness again.

And the best news about all of it is, my friend, 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 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.

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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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.