New Year, New Brain

Good morning, my friend. I hope you're doing well. I'm Dr. Lee Warren. Happy New Year.

We are here on Mind Change Monday, January 1st, 2024.

It's a brand new year, and we're going to get after it today.

We got a little bit of listener mail, a good question about neurochemistry and hormones.

We got a blessing for you for the new year, and just a little roadmap for where

we're going and what we're doing next.

And I just want to get you off to a good start. I hope you're off today.

I hope you're spending some time with family.

I hope you don't maybe even have time to listen to a podcast today,

but we're going to get after a few things and just cover some ground to get

after 2024 and make sure we got our heads on straight as we get into the new

year and make sure that we're on the right path so that we can change our minds and change our life.

But before we do any of that, my friend, I have one question for you.

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

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

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.

All right, let's get after it. You ready? First episode of the new year.

This is episode 90 of season nine.

I can't believe it. We're almost at 2 million downloads since we We started

this little crazy thing, and I'm so grateful.

Lisa and I and Tata are incredibly grateful to have you along for the journey

as we try to understand how God created our minds and our brains and how our

minds and our brains affect our bodies and our generations and everything about

us, how we're smashing faith and science together

so that we can change our minds and change our lives. That's really the goal.

If you've been through trauma or tragedy or any kind of massive thing,

you need to learn how to change your thinking so that you can find a path forward

and land on hope. And hope's the first dose of the treatment plan that we'll get it done.

So that's why we're here, and I'm grateful and honored to have you with me.

Yesterday we got a nice letter, email, from a woman who is dealing with her

husband who has lymphoma, and she's dealing with some medical problems as well. Her name is...

Kendra, and Kendra, I appreciate the incredible letter that you wrote.

And you asked a specific question about neurochemistry and hormones and thinking

and how they're all related.

Here's a segment of what she said. So first of all, we'll be praying for Kendra's

husband and for her as they navigate lymphoma and these other issues that we're dealing with.

But let's get to the question. She said this, in a podcast, you mentioned that

thoughts can become hormones.

Could you please teach me more about this or point me where I can do more research

on this? What thoughts produce what hormones?

How can I change those thoughts? I feel like if I can identify that and regulate

it, I will have victory if and when triggers arise and be able to help others.

Great question, Kendra. Here's the deal.

So we know very clearly that the things we think about affect our neurotransmitter levels.

The mechanism of how they do that has been shown clearly now with functional

MRI scanning and spec scanning that when you change your thought environment,

different areas of your your brain actually get bigger structurally.

A good example of that is people that learn to meditate and pray and calm their

minds increase the volume of their hippocampus, which is the part of your brain

involved in memory, emotional regulation, resilience, and all that.

And it's an important connection point between our frontal lobes,

which give us executive function and the ability to rationally and calmly make

decisions on how we process and respond to things rather than reacting.

But the hippocampus also can go the other direction and connect directly to

the the amygdala and launch us into reactive fight-flight-freeze type emotional reactions.

And people that learn to calm their minds and meditate, pray, etc.

Increase the volume of their hippocampus and increase the resilience of the

pathway between the hippocampus and the frontal lobe.

The mechanism of how they do that is really unknown, but we know that directive

mental force changes the structure of your brain.

Now, when those structural areas of your brain that are are responsible for

producing the neurotransmitters that make you feel what you're used to feeling,

dopamine, serotonin, GABA, oxytocin, all those important neurotransmitters.

Those things then go and connect to other cells, like your pituitary gland and

other glands and organs in your body, and they trigger hormone releases, hormone releases.

And when you have a negative thought environment, you trigger negative neurochemical

events that produce stress hormones, like cortisol, and that affects every cell in your body.

And so there's a direct link between how we think and how we feel,

and the workout of that mechanism is all related to how neurotransmitters get

increased or decreased in production.

That means that we're able to turn gene production,

gene transcription on and off with our thinking, which we've covered recently.

That's the little byline that we always talk about how thoughts become things.

But most people don't think about their thinking. They don't understand that

your thinking is actually a chemical event in your brain.

And we don't think about how we can use our thoughts to manage our brain chemistry.

That's really one of the whole points of this entire podcast.

We talk about how brain chemistry is your mental health.

And if you balance it right with good thinking, and that comes also so back

into creating a good environment for your brain to produce the hormones it needs, which means nutrition.

That's why we're talking about products like Armora and Peak and Athletic Greens

and the things that we talk about all the time in the show notes.

You want to have good building blocks for those proteins that turn into neurotransmitters

and turn into hormones and turn into muscles and cells and other things that

your body's making all the time.

But if it's unbalanced, if you don't have a good thought environment,

and you don't have the right reaction and response between emotion,

thought, feeling, and action, then you start to get things out of balance.

And before long, you have this feedback mechanism where your brain anticipates

negative feeling and wires into that pathway, and you get really,

really good at being anxious all the time.

Now, the other piece of it is, Kendra, that we know that cell surface receptors,

which is the way that cells receive hormonal signals, okay?

Cell surface receptors respond to the environment that they're in.

In other words, if your cells in your body are constantly bathed in a particular

hormone like cortisol, like you're constantly stressed out, then you produce

more receptors on your cell surfaces for cortisol.

In other words, the cells become

more attuned to the hormone that they're most frequently exposed to.

So if your negative thinking produces a negative neurotransmitter environment

that produces an increase in stress biochemical markers like cortisol,

which we know it does. We talked about that yesterday.

Then the cells in your body become progressively more sensitive and responsive

to those negative stress hormones.

And so you're literally training your body to be better at being stressed out

when you live in a stressed out state.

Hebb's Law says neurons that fire together wire together.

And the more we focus a particular thought stream that produces a particular

neurotransmitter environment that produces increase in the size and volume of

neural pathways that either help us by going back to the frontal lobe and getting

things under our control or hurt us by short-circuiting the hippocampus to amygdala

connection and launching us into that reactive mode.

Then we get out of balance or we get progressively better in balance.

Remember, one of our tenets of self-brain surgery is what we actively do,

we're getting better at.

So the question for us is, are we going to be better at learning how to be stressed out all the time?

Are we going to be better at learning how to be anxious? Are we going to be

better at learning how to be depressed?

Or are we going to train ourselves in truths that set us free,

as our friend Susie Larson says?

If we train our brains, we will wire better pathways. ways.

If we harness that quantum Zeno effect and begin observing our brains in a way

that says, God can give me the power to control this.

God can teach me how to rewire my brain. God can communicate better with me

through the Holy Spirit with the Wi-Fi network of spirit to mind to brain.

And I can change my thoughts and I can change my mind and I can change my life.

And you will literally improve your hormonal state.

That's how you do it. And so that's a big broad stroke stroke overview of how

thoughts become things.

And I hope that was helpful, Kendra. So there's more you can do.

You can just type in how do hormones, how does thinking affect hormones?

You'll find a thousand articles in Google about that. Just be a little careful.

Some of them are super nerdy. Some of them are purely secular.

Some of them are really strong and really good. And you can find all kinds of

research about that, but it's out there.

Dawson Church's books have a lot of information about that. He's clearly not

writing from a Christian perspective, but incredibly helpful.

Jeffrey Schwartz's book, The Mind and the Brain, I think is probably the the

best one overall, and he actually brought himself to Christ by learning more

about how the mind and the brain are connected. It's amazing.

So that's a big, broad-stroke overview. Now, let me give you a little blessing. This is a Lee Mail.

I send Lisa a Lee Mail every morning. First thing I do after my Bible study,

after my worship time, is I send Lisa an email, a Lee Mail.

And today, on January 1st, I sent her a blessing. I'm going to share part of

it with you because I think it's a good blessing for all of us. Here we go.

I told Lisa, this is the year of the Lord's favor, Luke 4, 18 and 19.

Jesus said, and we want to believe it. This is January 1st. It's a new year,

and we need to believe what Jesus said. He said, I came.

The Holy Spirit sent me to proclaim good news to the poor.

He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners, to recovery of sight for

the blind, to set the oppressed free, to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor.

Friend, maybe 2020 and 2021 and 2022 and 2023 and every year before that,

maybe they didn't feel like the year of the Lord's favor on your life.

And I just want to tell you, if you felt like you were in a place where you

didn't have any favor on your life and things feel stuck or you feel trapped

in grief or you feel unable to move forward or you feel traumatized,

whatever those things are,

what got you here to this place where you say, I need some favor.

The things and the decisions and the mental habits and the pathways and the

way we've always responded to the numbing behaviors and all the things we've

done to try to deal with the way our life has felt and the way our life has played out,

that won't get us to the place if we're looking for something different than what we've had.

So here on the cusp of a new year, starting out on day one, we want the year of the Lord's favor.

We've got to change some things because what got us here won't get us there.

There, I told Lisa, I want a year to behold the new thing God is doing, Isaiah 43, 18 and 19.

Forget the former things. Do not dwell on the past, my friend.

See, I'm doing a new thing.

Now it springs up. Do you not perceive it? I'm making a way in the wilderness

and streams in the wasteland.

Listen, there's a wasteland in the past for all of us.

There's some things back there that we need to forget, that we need to leave

behind, that we need to move beyond.

And God says, hey, don't dwell back there. I've got a new thing for you.

I'm going to make a way. It may seem impossible, but I'm going to do it.

I'm making a stream in this wasteland for you.

It's a year to see where he draws you new boundaries.

You can step into his promise in Psalm 16, 5. The boundary lines have fallen

for me in pleasant places.

There's a place where God wants you to be emotionally, spiritually, mentally, physically.

He said, I came here that you might have abundance and stop living in that thief

part where the thief comes to steal and kill and destroy in John 10, 10.

Jesus says, I have abundance for you. It may not be by prosperity.

It may not be by healing. It may not be by physical deliverance from your disease.

But He has an abundance for you in spite of the circumstances of your life,

and that requires mindset change.

We're going to talk about that in a minute. But Jesus said, I want you to remember,

I want you to truly believe that He came here to give you an abundant life in

place of the steal, kill, and destroy plans of your enemy.

Susie Larson said, Jesus is the way, the truth, and the life, John 14, 6.

And she says this, God is so good. He intends for you, friend.

To gain wisdom, authority, and credibility where you've experienced heartbreak

and messages that distort His love.

Train yourself in the truth that sets you free.

And friend, that's what we're here to do on this podcast. We are going to train

together to find the truth and live in the truth that sets us free.

We're going to do that through harnessing the power of neuroscience and smashing

it together with faith, finding how Scripture and science support one another,

and moving forward with our feet on solid ground of the truth that doesn't crumble

and change with culture.

He intends for us to gain wisdom, authority, and credibility,

Susie said, or we'll be experiencing heartbreak and hear messages that distort His love.

We're ready to break free. We're going to walk in freedom from everything that hinders and harms us.

God said, I want to restore to you the years that the locusts have eaten, Joel 2.25. brother.

And he said, I'm going to give you a, I'm going to take you out of the valley

of trouble and open a door of hope for you. That's Joel. That's a Hosea.

The door of hope in place of the valley of trouble, Hosea 2.15.

So that's part of the blessing I gave Lisa for day one, and I want you to have

it. I want you to have that, and I want you to believe it.

Over the course of 2024, we are going to do some new things on the podcast.

We have 10 episodes left in season 9.

In season 10, by the time season 10 starts, we're going to split out spiritual

brain surgery into its own podcast.

So we get all the Tuesdays we're taught to all the theology Thursdays,

all the things that are purely spiritual. I want to give you a place to have

all that content in one place.

Just in case you're one of the people, one of the few people,

that doesn't want to go so deeply into the science side of everything,

I'm going to give you an opportunity to have a place to go where you know exactly

you're going to get all the spiritual stuff in one place.

On the main channel, the podcast, the Dr. Lee Warren Self-Brain Surgery School,

we're going to go deep into how we smash faith and science together.

And we want to learn more and more and more of the practical tools of how we

do cell brain surgery, how we let the great physician remodel and reshape our

brain so that we can walk through that door of hope and get out of the valley of trouble.

And we're going to go deeper and deeper and deeper this year because I want

you to switch from a scarcity mindset to a possibility mindset.

I want you to let God change your mind that he's got more for you.

I want you to have a growth mindset instead of a fixed mindset.

I want you to believe that you can grow and you can change and you're not stuck

with the brain you have and you're not stuck with the genetics that you got from your parents.

I want you to have gratitude instead of anxiety because you can't have both at the same time.

And I want to teach you how to have a more grateful mindset and you start finding

what he said is true in Psalm 34.

He delivered me from everything that made me so afraid. eight.

And I'm going to teach you how to have a compassionate mindset toward yourself.

Because Jesus said, love your neighbor as yourself. He wants you to stop beating

yourself up for things that were in the past that you can't control anymore.

And maybe you were never responsible for anyway.

And have some compassion on yourself because he loves you enough to die for you.

And I want you to have a freedom mindset. I want you to be delivered from the

things that are keeping you enslaved.

And that's why on this January 1st, my friend, we're going to step into this new year.

We're going to finish season nine and this neuroscience and faith smashing together.

And then we're going to go supercharged hard into what our minds are designed

to do and how our minds can change our brains and change our lives through the

power of neuroscience and faith smashing together. That's where we're going.

And I want you to have the best year of your life. It's going to contain some

hard things. That's the bad news.

But if you can learn to separate circumstance from mindset, if you can learn

to give meaning and purpose to the things that you experience,

they'll stop feeling like suffering.

And if you can learn to let God open the door of hope for you instead of the

valley of trouble and start believing that when God opens a door,

nobody can shut it. And when he shuts the door, nobody can open it.

Then you'll start feeling free and you'll start understanding the value of training

yourself in the truths that set you free.

And we're here on January 1st. We're ready to go. We're ready to get after it.

And there's really just one more thing to do. And that, my friend,

is that we need to 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,

WLeeWarrenMD.com slash prayer.

And go to my website and sign up for the newsletter, Self-Brain Surgery,

every Sunday since 2014, helping people in all 50 states and 60-plus countries

around the world. I'm Dr.

Lee Warren, and I'll talk to you soon. Remember, friend, you can't change your

life until you change your mind. And the good news is you can start today.

Music.