Self-Brain Surgery Saturday: Me and My Brain

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

and we are getting ready to get after some self-brain surgery Saturday today.

I told you we are on a two-week break from new episodes.

We're getting ready for season 10 and for spiritual brain surgery.

We have a lot of exciting things coming up for you.

And today I'm going to give you back an episode we did at the early part of

season nine and And kind of in preparation for the interview we had with Dr.

Sharon Dierkix, which I played for you last week, about her incredible book, Am I Just My Brain?

This is an episode that I called Am I Just a Sack of Neurons?

I want you to know that there's something special about the fact that you have

a brain, but you also have a mind.

And mind and brain are not the same thing.

Mind is not just a product of brain. It's not just a function of electrical

impulses and neuronal firing and chemical factors happening inside your skull.

Well, you are more than just the product of cellular activity.

And that's important. And it's important for you to know it deep in your core.

You are created with a purpose and a design in these image of your creator,

the great physician, the great engineer, the great designer,

the guy who said, Fiat Luce, let there be light. And then he made it. He did it himself.

The book of John tells us Jesus is the one who knitted all this together and

lit the fuse on this thing and managed every aspect of it. And you,

my friend, are not just a sack of neurons.

I wanted to bring that back top of mind before we get to season 10.

I'm gonna give you that episode back now. But before we get started.

Remember, you can't change your life until you change your mind.

And the good news, my friend, is even on this cold three below zero day here

in Nebraska or wherever you are, you can start today.

Good morning, my friend. I hope you're doing well. Dr. Lee Warren here with

you on Self-Brain Surgery Saturday.

I am really excited to get after it today. I've got kind of a jumbled up series of thoughts.

We've been sick and my brain still isn't quite online. line.

So I may ramble just a little bit, but I've got an important message for you

today that was prompted by a letter from a listener named Stephanie.

And Stephanie, I'm going to protect your identity here a bit,

but I want to get to the heart of the question that Stephanie asked me,

because I have so much compassion for this concept, because we have been really

sold a bill of goods over the last 90 years, 80 years.

We've been convinced that our genes and our physical brain structure determine most of our lives.

We've been convinced by this, by science, by the media, by entertainment,

and by almost every other aspect of our society and culture.

We have been convinced that we have little to do with the outcome of our lives.

And we're mostly just determined by genes that we inherit from our parents.

And I just want to tell you, that isn't true. And there's something important,

a little important thing I want

you to know about your your brain and your mind and your spirit today.

We're always talking about smashing neuroscience and faith together on this show.

And I think my mission, my primary mission is to teach you that your creator

puts your mind and your brain inside your body in order to help you become healthier

and feel better and be happier.

Not to be victims of them, but to be able to use them the way they're designed

so that you can break free.

Because he knew that massive things were coming, because he knew that you'll

have trauma and tragedy and hardship and difficulty and relationship problems.

In this world, you will have trouble, and we know we're not alone in that.

But if you are saddled and burdened with the wrong idea about your brain,

it's an easy off-ramp to despair and hopelessness.

If you don't think that those things can get better because that's just how

I am or because this thing happened and that broke my brain and now I can't be better.

I want you to know there is real hope.

And the truth is that the bill of goods we've been sold isn't the case.

And there is a path to real hope by understanding the mind-brain-spirit interface,

smashing together of neuroscience and faith.

And that, my friend, is why we're here together today on Self-Brain Surgery Saturday.

But before we get to all of that, 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. First, and my friend, there's a place where

the neuroscience of how your mind

works smashes together with faith and everything starts to make sense.

Are you ready to change your life? Well, this is the place, Self-Brain Surgery School.

I'm Dr. Lee Warren, and this is where we go deep into how we're wired,

take control of our thinking, and find real hope.

This is where we learn to become healthier, feel better, and be happier.

This is where we leave the past behind and transform our minds.

This is where we start today. Are you ready? this is your podcast this is your

place this is your time my friend let's get after it.

Music.

All right, you ready to get after it? Here we go. Hey, I've got an email from

a woman named Stephanie.

Stephanie, I'm going to reply to you personally because I want to address,

I'm so grateful for your email. But let me just give you the gist of this, okay?

Stephanie says she listens to the show every day, and she wants to put into

practice everything that we talk about here.

And she's been more aware of her thinking, which is all good stuff.

But here's what she said. I haven't had a traumatic loss or event that I'm trying

to move past, but I was in a car accident when I was a teenager,

and I believe I sustained a brain injury.

And the doctor said I was fine, but looking back, I can see what led now to

my 26-year struggle with depression and other brain issues.

I've been on medication and have not really felt better.

I think my question is, am I just spinning my wheels trying to change my thinking

if I have a chemical imbalance?

And is a chemical imbalance a real thing? I pray every day for healing and help

and joy to be restored. I don't want to use depression as an excuse.

And at the same time, I feel like for me trying to change my thinking and get

out of these ruts is as though I'm running a race with other athletes while I'm missing a leg.

I know you've mentioned depression in your episodes before, so I apologize if

I've missed you addressing this issue already.

Listen, this is a perfect example, Stephanie. It's a perfect example of the

kinds of things that I want to get to here and in my next book,

the self-brain surgery book that we're going to be working on, that I am working on.

It's always funny how you spend so long writing a book, and when it finally

comes out, hope is the first dose is out in the world.

I'm promoting it and interviewing about it and talking about it,

but I'm already working on what's next. It's like you constantly have the next

thing ahead of you. Hope is the first dose. It's brand new.

It's just a little baby out there in the world, and I'm already working on the

next thing. But they flow together, okay?

But the next book is all about this issue, like what's going on between brain,

mind, spirit, and your life, and how do we smash those things together,

okay? So here's the root of the question.

Here's the root of it. If we have a brain injury that creates a problem with

our neurotransmitters or neurochemicals,

does that mean that we cannot influence that or get better from it by addressing

it on the thinking and our thought life side?

Or are we just hopeless? If our brain isn't working properly,

then does any of this other stuff matter? And that's really what we've been taught, right?

If you don't feel good, you need a medicine. If you have a feeling, you have a diagnosis.

And if you have a diagnosis, then other people need to just empathize with you

and understand and avoid triggering you and do all these things that your culture

is telling us right now. We built this system around feelings.

We built the system around diagnoses. We pathologized everything.

And there's some value in some of those things, okay? OK, so but the bottom line is this.

From a Christian perspective, we believe that God says he can heal our diseases.

We believe that God says that he can make things better for us. Right.

So that's one part of it. The other part of it is the neuroscience with a capital

in as the academic neuroscience,

the media, the public wants us to think that mind is a concept created by brain,

that you're not you don't really have a thought life.

You don't really even have free will. You just have what your brain does.

And that's amazing to me to think that because the science actually over and

over and over again has shown us that is not the case.

But we're dealing with dogma, which becomes religion.

So don't let anybody tell you that atheists or materialists or hardcore scientists

don't have their own religion.

They do, and they defend it to the death.

And it goes all the way back. It goes way back, actually all the way back to Hippocrates.

But more recently in 1962, Francis Crick, who was the co-discoverer with James

Watson of DNA and won the Nobel Prize for Physiology and Medicine in 1962,

wrote a book called The Astonishing Hypothesis. And here's what he said.

Get this. Francis Crick said this.

You, quote, end quotes, you, your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions,

your sense of personal identity and free will are in fact no more than the behavior

of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules.

Molecules as Lewis Carroll might've phrased it.

You are nothing but a sack of, you are nothing but a pack of neurons.

This hypothesis is so alien to the ideas of most people alive today that it

can truly be called astonishing.

Francis Crick wants you to believe the guy who discovered DNA wants you to believe

that everything about your life, even your choice to listen to this podcast

is just a result of neuronal activity from nerve cells and the molecules in your, in your body,

and that you're basically nothing but a pack of skin cells and electrical impulses,

as I said in my book, I've seen the interviews. I quoted that thought process.

Francis Crick and all of established academic neuroscience wants you to believe

you don't have a choice in the matter, Stephanie, that you're just stuck.

If you got brain damage, so be it. You're stuck with it. Take medicine, right?

I'm here to tell you something different because guess what the Bible said? This little...

Scripture, I think, is the key idea. And I've missed it so many times in my

life. I read right past it.

Here's 2 Timothy 1.7. Are you ready for some cognitive neuroscience from your creator?

Here it is. God has not given us a spirit of fear, but of power and of love.

And I've stopped right there many times when I read this.

God has not given us a spirit of fear, but of power and of love.

But keep reading. Reading, God has not given us a spirit of fear,

but of power and of love and of a sound mind.

2 Timothy 1.7, God hasn't given us a spirit of fear, but of power and of love and of a sound mind.

He didn't say he gave you a sack full of neurons and that determines everything

else. He says, I gave you a spirit of a sound mind.

The Holy Spirit of God, if you're a believer, is inside you and he communicates

with your mind and that tells your brain who's boss, okay?

You can change the way that your brain works by learning to change the way that

you think. Now, there's some implications for people that have brain injuries.

There's some implications here that we need to get, okay? This is important.

And there are roles for therapy and there are roles for medicine and there are roles for surgery.

All those things are true. I make my living doing brain and spine surgery, okay?

So don't conflate the idea that I'm, don't take away from this that I'm saying

it's all just about how you think and the spirit changes how your brain works

and everything's gonna be fine.

I'm not always saying that because God created medicine too.

This is an incredibly crucial point that we're getting ready to make.

Before we make it, though, we need to understand something. I used a quote from

E.B. White. E.B. White was a writer.

He wrote some famous books, Charlotte's Web, Stuart Little, The Trumpet of the Swan.

He also was a writer and contributing editor to the New Yorker magazine and

the co-author of a book that's required reading for anybody who wants to learn

how to write books called The Elements of Style with another guy named Strunk.

That book, Strunk and White's Elements of Style, basically you have to read

it if you're gonna learn how to write because all the publishers,

all the agents, all the editors expect certain stylistic things of your writing.

And if you don't comply with them, nobody buys your book. Nobody publishes your book.

So you gotta match it up with Strunk and White, even to this day,

even though that book's been around forever.

In fact, I remember Kathy Helmers, my agent, when Philip Yancey introduced me

to her after I decided I wasn't going to really try to be a writer and my self-published

book, in Philip's estimation, wasn't good enough to be published,

Kathy said, hey, I'm going to give you a pile of books or recommendations and

I want you to read them and use them to rewrite this manuscript and we'll see

if it's good enough to be published.

One of those books was Strunk and White's Elements of Style.

Another one was Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott.

And as an aside, a number of people recently have written in and said,

hey, you mentioned books in almost every episode and there's so many of them

we can't keep up, but please do an episode or make a list somewhere about all

the books that you want us to read.

I'm gonna do that. I'm gonna start a recurring, let me ask you if you think it would be valuable.

I was thinking about doing a series of episodes once in a while called.

Three things I've learned from three books I love. And so each episode would

have a conversation about three books and one take home from each of those books.

And then I would put in the show notes, links to where you can buy them and

all that stuff, as I always do, by the way.

And if you hear me say something about a book, if you go to the notes of that

episode, it's always gonna be in there. I always put a link to the book.

So I do always tell you where that came from. But if you think that would be

fun to do episodes about books from time to time, I'd love to do that.

I think it would be great. Let me know if that sounds fun to you.

Okay, so Strunk and White wrote the Elements of Style that's still used,

and E.B. White was this famous author.

He died in 1985, born in 1899, and he wrote Charlotte's Web and all these other

great books. But he had a letter.

He was famous almost for writing back to fans that wrote to him.

And this one guy named Mr. Nadeau wrote him a letter that basically said he was feeling hopeless.

It was in 1973. 1773, this guy had lost his hope. He lost his spirit.

He lost his faith in humanity.

And here's what E.B. White said to him.

Dear Mr. Nadeau, as long as there is one upright man, as long as there is one

compassionate woman, the contagion may spread and the scene is not desolate.

Hope is the thing that is left to us in a bad time.

I shall get up Sunday morning and wind the clock clock as a contribution to

order and steadfastness.

Hang on to your hat. Hang on to your hope and wind the clock for tomorrow is another day.

Now, obviously, we don't have to wind clocks very often anymore.

Apple watches keep on running. Our batteries in our watches keep us from having

to wind the clock. So that phrase is old.

But his point is, I'm going to get up tomorrow morning, I'm going to wind the

clock, and I'm going to get after it no matter how I feel because there's always a reason to hope.

If you read, I've seen the interview, if you had an opportunity to go to a book

signing, and if I signed a copy, I almost certainly signed Romans 12.12 when

I signed copies of I've Seen the Interview.

Romans 12.12 in the voice translation says, don't forget to rejoice because

hope is always just around the corner.

That's why you wind the clock, okay? There's always hope. Today,

Stephanie and everybody else listening to this, I'm going to give you a reason

to hope, okay? I brought up that

quote about E.B. White, which was amazing because he talks about hope.

But I brought it up because in my epigraph to Chapter 28 of I've Seen the End

of You, I quoted E.B. White when he said this.

And it makes the point about how often famous scientists are elevated to some

position that's almost godlike.

And I'll get back to Francis Crick in a moment.

But I just want you to recognize this thing that we do in society.

Society somebody comes up with a smart idea or writes

an important paper that turns out to be important in our understanding of

some thing some scientific concept and then we make

this switch to where they have a voice of a celebrity in society that gives

them the ability to speak into things as if they're true and everybody just

believes them because they're so smart here's what eb white said einstein is

loved because he is gentle respected

because he is wise relativity Relativity being not for most of us,

we elevate its author to a position somewhere between Edison,

who gave us a tangible gleam, and God, who gave us the difficult dark and the

hope of penetrating it. E.B. White said that. He's exactly right.

He's saying people can't really even understand what Einstein wrote about in

relativity, but they know he's super smart.

And so they elevate him to this celebrity position where he's almost like God.

So if Einstein says it, it must be true.

Now, let me come back to Francis Crick.

Crick and Hippocrates and lots of other scientists did something smart, right?

He discovered the identity of what? The nature and characteristics of DNA.

Amazing. So now we understand how we inherit our hair color and eye color and

bone structure and all those other things that come along with genetics.

But we turned it into this religion, right? Where this thing called genetic

determinism came along.

Out of this teaching that you're all about your DNA. A.

Genetic determinism is basically, I can't help it.

I'm made that way. My mom and dad were that way. I'm just stuck with how I am.

I inherited it. I'm big boned. I'm going to have diabetes.

I'm going to be overweight. Everybody in my family is. And we know now that's just not true, right?

The vast majority of how our life plays out comes down to our decisions.

Remember T.D. Jakes said, we're born looking like our parents.

We die looking like our decisions.

And here's some stunning things. You can have Francis Crick say,

hey, guess what? You're just a sack of neurons, right?

You're all stuck with how you're made. You can't change it. This idea that you

have a mind, it's independent.

You're just, you're wrong. You're just a pack of neurons. There's no hope in that, right?

And years and years later, we still think that's true in some way.

We still buy into it, at least subconsciously. And we've bought so much of our

teaching that we begin to to feel hopeless if we're diagnosed with something.

I'm sorry you're depressed.

You're just stuck with it. You better take Wellbutrin, okay?

Let me just give you some other ideas, okay?

This idea, the reason it's so important to drill into this is because we've

accepted a lot of beliefs without critically examining them.

You could say that about a lot of our society right now, by the way.

And it's our job as discerning, smart people who God gave us a sound mind, okay?

We have a job to to relentlessly refuse to participate in our own demise.

That's one of the commandments of self-brain surgery, right?

And part of that is to pay attention to places where culture is putting ideas

into us that are going to harm us if we don't root them out.

Because this idea that we don't have free will, that we're just stuck with our

genetics and with our neurons that are built into our head and we don't even really have a mind,

in fact, those strict materialists will fight you if you say the word mind because

they have this belief Belief that mind is just a concept, but it's all about brain.

There's actually a neuroscience term called reductive physicalism,

which is the view that the mind is reducible to physical processes in the brain.

Everything about what you think is mind is just some physical process in your brain.

Therefore, there's really no such thing as the mind. The mind is the brain.

The flip side of that is that substance dualism where there are two distinct

substances that characterize a mind and brain, a physical brain and a non-physical mind.

And the mind can exist without the brain, but in humans they interact.

Now let me ask you a question.

If you listened to yesterday's episode with John Burke about near-death experiences,

and I hope you did, how could someone whose mind was created by their brain

and whose brain is dead and has no discernible electrical activity,

how could they then come back and report on things in a near-death experience?

There was one woman. We didn't talk about it yesterday. I wanted to try to avoid

some of the more sensationalistic things that some of these folks have described,

but there was more than one study,

more than one person who had a near-death experience that described things that

could not have been described if they didn't really see them.

One was a woman came back and reported having been observing her surgery from

above the room, And she reported on a sticker that she could see on the blade

of a ceiling fan in the room.

And she said the color of it and some numbers that were written on it.

And several witnesses in the room got a ladder and checked that,

and the sticker was there, and it said what she said that it said.

Okay, so that could not have happened accidentally, and it couldn't have happened

if she wasn't actually having this experience.

And if her brain was creating her mind and her brain was dead clinically,

there was no heartbeat, no electrical activity, no pulse, no brainwave activity

during that time, then that mind couldn't have been there to observe the thing

that she said that she observed, right?

So this reductive physicalism idea, I'm just telling you, it's a doctrine that's

been taught. It's not a scientific reality.

It's a doctrine that's been taught. And your job as a discerning person with a mind of power,

a sound mind that God has given you, is to look for those places where you've

been hoodwinked, where we've all been sort of hoodwinked, and get them out of

our thought processes because that's the path to freedom, okay?

So this reductive physicalism idea came from Francis and people like that.

And the whole idea is that we just aren't anything but our brain.

We're just stuck with our brain.

And I'm just here to tell you on Self-Brain Surgery Saturday,

my friend, that that just isn't the case.

So now let's go to this idea of Francis Couric saying you're just a big sack

of neurons. And let's think about some of the implications of that.

There's a woman named Sharon Dirkix who's written several really incredible

books. She has a Ph.D. from Cambridge in functional brain imaging.

And she wrote this book called Am I Just My Brain? Am I Just My Brain?

And I hope to get her on the podcast sometime. time. But she talks about the

implications of Francis Crick's worldview here.

If you're just a sack of neurons, then there's some implications.

There certainly are implications for free will. If you're driven by your brain,

then you're not really free to make decisions.

You are simply driven by the chemical reactions within the processes of your body.

And therefore, how could you hold anybody responsible for their actions, evil or good, right?

If it's not your fault, you don't have free will, why is it a problem if you

stab somebody? Your brain made you do that. That's not your fault, right?

There are implications for robotics. She says robots occupy more and more of the workforce.

They're all over the house. Every time you say somebody's name,

a speaker talks back to you and asks you what you need, right?

I'm not going to say her name because she'll speak up on the podcast right here next to me.

And eventually those will be able possibly to have sort of consciousness and

artificial intelligence will become able to start to assume things and make decisions for you.

There's implications in that. There are implications for ethics.

If you're defined by your brain, then who's a person?

Is a person every human from the moment of conception on?

Or only those people whose brains are developed enough to be fully functioning?

Because if you're really only dependent on what your brain does and your brain

isn't working, you've got Alzheimer's or vascular dementia or you've had a stroke

or you're a baby and therefore your brain isn't working in full capacity,

then maybe you shouldn't have rights.

Maybe in order to protect the planet and reduce carbon, maybe we should kill

everybody that doesn't have a fully functioning brain.

I mean, that sounds crazy, but these things are being discussed, friend.

If you don't have free will because your brain is just an organ that creates

this illusion that you have a mind and free will, then why wouldn't that make

sense? We got to protect the planet, right?

There's implications for religion. Since it's come to light that the brain is

highly involved in religious belief and experience, as we've talked about here,

Can neuroscience actually explain religion enough to make it go away?

Is it just a bunch of electric-like impulses in your brain that make you think all these things?

Listen, this is an important idea, right? It's so important that we begin to

root this out, that we need to pay attention in culture even,

in the places where it shows up. There's a Disney movie.

Sharon Dirk explains this out. I completely missed it. There's a Disney movie

that talks about the brain. It's basically, I think it's called From the Inside Out.

Yeah, it's called Inside Out, and it basically depicts the complex idea of human

brain and the importance of different emotions like joy, sadness,

anger, fear, and disgust. These are characters in the movie.

Sharon Dirkix lays this out. And this idea that we can be neuroplastic,

that we can change our brain, it's depicted in the movie as the breaking and

reforming of these islands in her experience.

And the narrative thread that runs through the movie is that everything that

makes Riley, the character, do what she does and be who she is comes from these

physical mechanisms that are happening inside her head.

That when her core memories are intact, her outward behavior is balanced.

And when they're not, the outside world falls apart.

So this idea that you're teaching little kids is that what your brain is, you are.

Everything happens from the inside out. Nothing on the outside can affect you.

You've got to get your internal state ordered, and you're just stuck with making

sure that that works as well as it can work.

So this is cognitive neuroscience being depicted in an entertainment way to

teach children that they are just their brains.

This is important. I'm not telling you not to watch movies. I'm not telling

you not to listen to music.

Tata and I last week talked about one of the reasons that I've chosen not to

listen to a lot of secular music, even though I'm a huge music fan,

is because I find myself repeating lyrics.

And then I stop myself and say, wait a minute, that lyric I just sang wasn't

holy. It wasn't good. It wasn't even true. It was counter truthful.

And a good example was I was singing along with a song that came on the radio

that Lisa and I heard the other day.

And one of the lines was, it can't be wrong if it feels so right.

And I was just singing along. Do you light up my life? It can't be wrong if

it feels so right. And I was like, wait, time out.

Hang on a second. My whole platform is about the fact that feelings aren't facts.

And sometimes feelings will tell you that something's good when in fact it is

not good and you should quit it, right?

And so you have to learn then to pay attention to the things that you put in

your brain and the things that you put in front of your eyes,

that old children song, be careful little eyes, what you see. Why?

Because what you see, what you hear, what you take in, what you swallow whole

without discernment turns into how you live.

This is important, okay? I'm not ranting. And all of this comes back to the original question.

Let's go back to Stephanie's question. Am I spinning my wheels by trying to

change how I think if I've got a brain injury?

And I just want to tell you this. This is super important, okay?

You can change. Several studies have shown that up to 95% of mental illness,

including depression, anxiety, all of these things, comes highly influenced by our state of mind.

The things we think about, the things we talk about, the way that we perceive

the things that we're going through. up to 95% of the symptoms of mental disorder

come from thinking disorders.

That's incredible. And it puts some responsibility on us because God says,

I didn't give you a spirit of fear or anxiety.

I didn't give you a spirit of

depression. I gave you a spirit of power and of love and of a sound mind.

Understand this. I'm not saying that it's wrong to feel symptoms of depression

or anxiety. Those are normal, natural things that do happen to all of us.

But where we go off the rails is when we begin to think and believe the idea

that we're powerless to do anything about them.

Daniel Amen, my good friend who has led his field of psychiatry in understanding

the importance of functional imaging, has shown, for example,

I've gotten several questions recently about ADHD.

There are multiple types of brain disorders that come from trauma.

The different ways that people hit their heads or different ways that people

have brain injuries that create symptoms that are commonly diagnosed as ADHD,

but they're all different brain disorders, all different types of brain injury,

and they all need to be treated differently.

And so if you go to a health practitioner, a therapist, a psychiatrist,

a doctor, and you say, hey, I'm feeling kind of depressed or I'm feeling kind

of anxious or I'm having trouble organizing my thoughts or my kid can't pay attention in class,

then if your words about your symptoms are met with, well, let me give you a

prescription to handle those symptoms because you must be depressed or they

must have ADHD or they must have anxiety disorder.

If you get a prescription for a symptom without doing brain imaging to understand

what the actual problem is, then effectively you're treating a symptom as if

it all comes from the same problem.

Even though Daniel has shown with SPECT imaging, for example,

and multiple studies have shown with functional brain imaging,

functional MRI scanning.

That ADHD, for example, is actually not one disorder, but multiple disorders

from multiple different types of injuries from multiple different types of brain

regions, and all of them need to be treated differently, sometimes with medication.

Daniel has shown that cognitive behavioral therapy and learning to think about

your thinking and improving your diet and reducing caffeine and avoiding alcohol

and reducing nicotine and other toxins and things like that can actually make

a huge difference in almost all types of mental symptoms from any type of disorder.

And the whole point of that is just to say this.

If you are struggling with some sort of mental symptom, depression, anxiety,

ADHD, whatever it might be, okay, from trauma or not from trauma,

from PTSD or not from PTSD, from an adverse childhood experience,

from any of those things, you need to get with a provider who understands that

the brain is an organ that needs to be imaged.

And if you're really struggling, now obviously a lot of things can be handled.

Improving your thought life, the things that we talk about on this show all the time.

But if you're really struggling and you can't make progress or you have major

depression or major anxiety, you need a provider. And sometimes you need medication.

Even Daniel Lehman, a great psychiatrist, world probably most famous psychiatrist

alive today, who's been on this show at least four times.

He says there's no harm in medication in some settings.

But once you start them, it can be very hard because now you're tinkering with

your brain chemistry and it can become very difficult to get off those medications.

So before you go on them, you want to make sure that you're treating the right thing.

Okay. Now, if you're taking an antidepressant, if your providers put you on

one, there's nothing wrong with that.

And I'm not saying you should go stop all your medicines. Please don't do that.

I'm saying, check out Daniel Amen, amenclinics.com.

Check out other places, get a second opinion before you give up on the idea that you can get better.

Okay because remember the promises of god psalm 103 there's five things that god promises us okay,

he says bless the lord on my soul bless the lord and praise his holy name bless

the lord on my soul and forget not all his benefits what are the five benefits

he says he forgives my sins he heals all my diseases.

Redeems my life from the pit. He crowns me with love and compassion and satisfies

my desires with good things so that my youth is restored like the eagles.

He forgives all your sins. That's the number one benefit.

Number two, he heals all your diseases. Now, does that mean that he'll heal your glioblastoma?

He may not in our timeline, okay? We've been talking a lot about retrocausality

and about the long-term arc of his narrative plan for redemption and how he

doesn't always remove our struggles, but he comes along aside us within them.

And so the answer, will he heal me? Yes, eventually he will.

We know he will eventually because we know where we're going if we believe in

him. And it's not a cop-out.

It's to say that you can learn to live in this world with hard circumstances

and know that he does have a redemptive plan for you and he will eventually

heal all your diseases, either here or in the next life.

It's not a cop-out. It's a great source of peace and hope that he wants to get

in this story with you and help you.

But in the meantime, believe that he can heal because he can.

And certainly, even if you tend to struggle with a bias towards anxiety or a

bias towards depressive thought, we know there are lots of things you can do

to make it better without medication from the start.

Thinking about your thinking, learning to aggressively challenge those same

synaptic thought processes to avoid habits that reinforce the feeling.

Alcohol, binge watching TV or Netflix or whatever it is you do that puts you

in that place where you usually feel the thing that you feel, right?

Avoiding reading or listening to or watching things that reinforce those thought

processes that you're just stuck with how you feel.

Challenging lines of thought that you receive from outside influences that make you feel hopeless.

And pursue things, relationships, environments,

reading, listening, podcasts, all those things that you can use as prehab to

fall back on a better state of preparation the next time you feel the thing

that you feel so that that you can more adequately challenge it and move forward

in it to get better, right?

The self-brain surgery piece.

These are all important. Now, let me sum this up.

Yes, depression and anxiety and ADHD and all these things are real things.

And yes, sometimes we need medication. Sometimes we need intervention.

Sometimes we do. But you are not stuck living a life suffering under those those

things, there are things that you can do to help.

And the first piece of it always is to get your head on straight about the fact

that your brain is not just a big sack of neurons and your mind is not just

a construct of your brain,

but you are created with a spirit of a sound mind.

There is a way that you can get your mind and your brain and your spirit in

order, and it starts with cell brain surgeries.

And remember, self-brain surgery is just a moniker that I give you for the peace

that you do yourself, which is just to say, hey, great physician,

come here and do some brain surgery

on me and help me get my head on straight so I can find hope again.

You don't have to do it yourself. It's God that works in you to will and to

act according to his good purpose. That's what he says in Romans, okay?

Your job is to consent to the procedure that the Holy Spirit wants to do inside

you to rectify the mind, body, brain, spirit interface.

Just smash them together and give you hope.

There's a treatment plan, okay, that can help you with anything.

Sometimes it requires going to see Dr. Amen. Sometimes it requires going to

see a different doctor who won't just write you a prescription first,

but says, hey, let me write a prescription for you to de-stress, to take a vacation,

to get off this train of thought that you're on that's harmful to you.

Don't just pharmacologically treat the symptom.

Get after the root cause of what's happening. If there's an old unresolved trauma

in your life, even if it was a car accident when you were a child,

if your brain isn't working properly, guess what? You can learn to work around it.

If you have chest pain and your cardiologist says you have a blocked artery,

that means there's something physically wrong with the organ of your heart and

you go do something about it, don't you?

You get a stent or you change your diet, you get on your cholesterol medications,

you do all these things to try to make sure that artery and that cardiac muscle works better.

But we don't ever do that with our brain. We just treat symptoms.

We just say, oh, I have anxiety. It must just be the way I am.

My Aunt Sally was anxious, and so I'm stuck with it. No, you're not.

You can deal with it more effectively by learning how to control the thought

process side of it, by understanding if there is a structural brain injury,

which requires imaging to diagnose,

then maybe I need to work on nutrition and blood flow and watch out for dietary

things that I'm doing that make it worse instead of better.

Maybe I need to change some relationships that are adding stress to my life.

Maybe I need to learn a different way of thinking about how I put my thoughts

together in the first place.

Maybe I need to do some soul surgery and go back and resolve some of that past

trauma that's contributing to this.

I'm blaming myself for something that I know now. If I had known what I know

now, I wouldn't have done it that way, so I need to forgive myself.

Maybe there's some stuff like that in there. And a good therapist will help

you get that done. I think it's important to have a therapist that has some

spiritual understanding so you're not going to just get told,

oh, you're just stuck with that.

You know, that's your great-aunt Sally's fault that you feel that way and you

can't do anything about it, so let's just make everybody bow to your feelings

and accept this is how you are and you better protect that and be triggered

if somebody doesn't agree with you about it.

Those are not helpful, okay? At the end of the day, what's helpful?

Becoming healthier, feeling better, and being happier. here and you can't do that.

By just accepting that you're broken in some way. God says, I will heal all your diseases.

God wants to help you. He wants to change your mind, and he wants to change your life.

He wants to help you do self-brain surgery because he's the one actually,

after all, doing the operation.

Because God didn't give you a spirit of fear.

He gave you a spirit of love and of power and of a sound mind,

and he will help you change your mind, and he will help you change your life.

Just because Francis Crick said it, my friend, don't make it so.

Stephanie, friend, everybody listening out there across the world,

I just want you to know there is great hope to be found no matter what you're struggling with,

no matter what kind of massive thing you've gone through, no matter what kind

of thought disorder you're dealing with, no matter what kind of problem you have.

There is valid hope. Yes, sometimes you need medication.

Yes, sometimes you need a psychiatrist. Yes, sometimes you may need a therapist.

But there is a lot of good that you can do by working on the space between your

ears and lining up your spirit with your mind and your brain.

It is not a bottom-up, brain determines everything.

You're just a sack of neurons, and it's hopeless. It is not true that you're

just what your DNA gives you.

Up to 95% of the things we feel can be modulated by changing how we think.

That's why Paul said in Romans 12, stop conforming to what Francis Crick,

that's my translation, stop conforming to what the world wants you to do and

think and feel and believe.

Rather, be transformed by the renewing of your mind. It doesn't have to be that way.

We can influence it. We can change it. We can do self-brain surgery.

And guess what else? 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 books.

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

available for free at TommyWalkerMinistries.org. They are supplying worship

resources for worshipers all over the world to worship the Most High God.

And if you're interested in learning more, check out TommyWalkerMinistries.org.

If you need prayer, go to the prayer wall at 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.