The Ten Commandments of Self-Brain Surgery: All-In August #16

Good morning, my friend. Dr. Lee Warren here with you. It is Frontal Lobe Friday,

and we are in the middle of all in August.

I'm so grateful to be with you for some self-brain surgery today.

If you've never listened to the podcast before, if this is your first episode, welcome to the show.

I am a neurosurgeon and an author, and I am here to help you change your mind

and change your life through the power of what we call self-brain surgery.

There's a lot to know about that, but today we're going to cover the basics of where we start.

They came from my deep dive into the neuroscience of how we're wired.

I'm going to tell you why all about that in a minute. But before we get started

today, on this Frontal Lobe Friday, it's kind of a mid-month check-in on what

we're doing with All In August.

Before we get started, I want to share a voicemail that I got from a listener

named Lori. So if you're new around here, I want you to know what Lori is getting

out of the show and what Lori is getting out of All in August.

Let's hear from Lori real quick. Hey, Dr. Warren, Laurie, New Brighton, Minnesota.

I just wanted to tell you that when you mentioned the guy who had been doing

the all in August with you for four years, but never read the book,

I didn't want to be that person.

So I got the book and you're right. It is fabulous.

And again, thank you so much. Without your podcast, I literally don't know where

I'd be today. and frankly get choked up about this.

But sharing it with others has been such a blessing too because so many people

haven't heard about you and they are equally blessed.

By your encouraging us to change our minds and that we don't have to be stuck.

All right, thanks so much. Thank you much, Lori.

We appreciate you and are grateful that you are listening and that it's helping you.

And we're grateful that you got the book all in. And listen,

friend, if you're new around here, every August on the show,

we do what's called All In August.

This is our fourth year of doing this. It started when I read a book called

All In by Mark Batterson.

I read the book after my son Mitch died.

We lost a son back in 2013, coming up on 11 years here.

August 20th, actually, so just in a few days here, coming up on 11 years since

we lost our son. And if you've gone through something like that,

Lisa and I, my wife, we call them massive things.

There's traumas in your life. There's drama in your life. There's tragedy in your life.

And then there's these massive things, these things that are bigger than anything

else that you can encounter, these massive episodes or events.

And they don't have to be the loss of somebody. They can be the loss of a dream

that you've been chasing for a long time.

You've been pursuing something and it's just not going to happen.

It's the loss of a relationship.

It's the loss of an opportunity.

It's the loss of a function, a capability.

You had a stroke or you've developed something. So massive thing just encompasses

all these ideas that it's not just about grief.

It's not just about physical injury or disease. It can be a lot of different things.

So all of us have these massive things. And a lot of us have a series of kind

of miniature, like many massive things.

It's just like this drip, this water torture thing where life can be really hard.

And sometimes you don't really have any problems, if you will. Everything's okay.

But you're just finding that your life isn't what you felt like it should be.

Like there's something missing.

And so the whole idea is that we have to learn how to process these hard things,

difficult circumstances, massive things, and how to keep from getting stuck.

But we also have to be able to develop a plan for how we're going to make our

lives matter and how when we have this sense that there's more, how do we find that more?

And so I started realizing after we lost Mitch that we were stuck. It was a while.

We'd come back to work and life was moving forward and things were moving forward again,

but it was hard and we were stuck and we didn't have that joy,

that joy of life, that meaning and purpose and goodness and sense of being okay. And we just were stuck.

And somebody gave me All In by Mark Batterson. I didn't read it for a while.

And when I finally got around to reading it, it just was this idea that,

hey, you're at this place and the place you want to get to, the place you feel

like the Lord is calling you to, the place you feel like your life is supposed

to be aiming at, you're not there.

And the things you've done to get here aren't gonna get you there.

Like you've gotta change something. And the thing you have to change is to fully

commit to finding out what it's gonna take and to getting it done.

That's the idea of All In, okay?

Now, most of the listeners of this program Again, I'm talking to you as if you've

never heard this before, okay?

We're in the middle of this all in August, and if you just got here,

because we've had hundreds of people sign up.

We've had a lot of people sharing these episodes, and through my association

with Susie Larson and her radio network and other people that have had us on

their show recently, there's a lot of new listeners.

And I just want to make sure that you don't feel like you dropped into the middle

of a Class 5 rapid and you don't know where you're going.

I want to give you a moment here, a little touchstone, to say this is where we're starting.

And you can go back in time and listen to the old episodes and get caught up.

But today I just want to reorient you and aim you downstream so that you know

where we're going and understand.

OK, so a lot of the listeners here are people with Christian faith.

And I don't want you to feel like you've got to be a born-again believer to

get something out of this show.

In fact, I hope that there's a lot of people listening that don't believe in

God or don't know what they believe.

Or maybe they used to believe and something happened and they lost their hope

or lost their faith. That almost happened to us, okay?

When you go through a massive thing, it's okay to have doubt.

When you go through a massive thing, it's natural to have your belief system

shattered and you have to figure out what's true and not true again.

So that's okay. okay, I'm just telling you, this will be a safe place.

We're going to explore some ideas from science.

We're going to explore some great writing, some great thought processes.

And I'm going to teach you a way of looking at your life that will give you

some places to put your feet down on something solid again.

And I believe that leads to some places where you encounter how faith and science can smash together.

But I want to give you opportunity and a safe space to explore and ask questions

and doubt and worry and shake your fist and wonder and all those things, and it's okay.

Because I'm going to give you a way to look at it. It's going to give you some

tools. We call them self-brain surgery.

And we call them that because the fact is you're not stuck with the brain that you have.

That your brain is changing structurally. At every second of your life,

you're making new neurons and new connections between them.

And you can change most of those things in a way that will help you and not

hurt you if you learn how to think differently.

That's the truth of 21st century neuroscience. science it's the truth of first

century christianity and when you smash those two things together you can learn

how to operate your mind and your brain and your body and your life and your

spirit in a way that helps you and doesn't hurt you so that's where we're starting okay now.

How I got there, how I got to that place is the day that I realized that the

idea that taking charge of your mind is performing surgery exactly in the same

level of realness and maybe more than it is when I go to the operating room

and perform real surgery.

I put air quotes around that with my hands. You can't see me.

But when I say real surgery, I'm talking about the flesh and blood stuff that

we do in hospitals in the operating room when I shave your head and cut your

scalp open and use a drill and a saw to open your skull. That's quote-unquote real surgery.

But the truth is, the types of structural changes that are made in that type

of surgery are more destructive and harder for you to recover from than the

types of structural changes that you can make by changing how you think.

And for Lisa and I, that came down to one specific day. I wrote about it in

my most recent book, Hope is the First Dose.

We talked this month and all in August. We talk about two books,

All In by Mark Batterson, which is our textbook for this month.

Just this idea that what got you here won't get you there. And you got to draw

a line in the sand and say, I'm going all in. I'm not going back.

I'm going to burn the boats.

I'm burning the bridge that got me to this place. I'm not going back there.

I'm going forward from here.

And All In gives us that kind of mindset and some great stories and some great

lessons of how we do that.

Mark Batterson's done a masterful job giving us those tools.

And by the way, he's got a new book coming out in November. I'm super excited

to introduce you to. I've got to endorse it. Tremendous honor.

Called A Million Little Miracles. And we're going to have Mark back on the show

in November to talk about that.

But as an aside, that's an aside. We'll get there later.

All in is the textbook for this month. The other textbook for this month is

my book, Hope is the First Dose.

It's a treatment plan for recovering from trauma and tragedy and other massive things.

And if you're not, if you haven't read Hope is the first dose yet.

I encourage you, please go back because in that book is the story of what we

did, not just that we survived losing a son, not just the fact that we lost

our son and got through it, but what did we do?

What was the treatment plan? How did we put it together?

How did we build our life going forward after that massive thing and what you

can do about yours? Because you're going to have one, okay?

You're going to have a massive thing. You're going to have a series of massive things.

You're going to have a series of many massive things that But everybody's life

has this stuff in it, okay?

And if you don't have a plan, we have plans for what you're going to do if you

have a flat tire or what you're going to do if you catch on fire.

You're going to stop, drop, and roll.

But we don't ever talk about a plan for being ready to apply certain principles

to being able to handle hardship when it comes along and not be devastated by it.

In spite of the fact that everybody has to go through hardship.

What do we do? How do we put that plan together? And all of those things,

that's what Hope is the First Dose is about.

But I got into this idea of what I call self-brain surgery when Lisa and I had

the opportunity, right after we went back to work, after Mitch died,

our office was on the third floor of a building at Auburn University in Alabama

that was called the MRI Research Center.

And on the first floor, they had a very fancy MRI machine, machine,

a brain imaging machine called a 7-Tesla MRI.

At the time, it was only the third one in North America.

And 7-Tesla MRI allows you to do some incredible detailed imaging of the brain,

including something called functional imaging,

which is where you can actually see what's happening metabolically and structurally

inside the brain when people think about something or not something or one thing or another thing.

When people change the things they think about, You can actually see what's happening in the brain.

And we were down in the control room watching some experiments and they asked

somebody who was in the machine, the technician asked them through headphones,

hey, think about the saddest thing you've ever thought about in your life.

Think about the hardest thing you've ever been through. Think about the day

your wife died or the day you got that diagnosis or the day you learned about

your son being killed or whatever it was for that particular subject.

Think about the worst thing, the hardest thing.

And you would see the different areas of their brains light up where they were

processing grief and remembering hard things.

They were having those emotional difficulties and recalling those.

And then they would say after a minute, okay, now think about the best day of

your whole life. The thing that makes you the happiest.

Think about the thing that you just were overjoyed when it happened.

And when she said yes or he came home from the war or whatever happened,

the happiest day of your whole life, the day your son was born,

the day your daughter was born, the day this happened or that happened.

And think about the best thing ever.

And what would happen right on the screen is dramatic changes in which areas

of the brain were lighting up and the blood flow and metabolic activity and

different neurotransmitter levels were happening in real time.

The brain was responding structurally to the mind's instruction.

So when you make yourself think about one thing, your brain behaves differently

than when you allow yourself to think about another thing.

And Lisa said later that day, that's what Philippians 4 is about.

When Paul says, if you want to be less anxious, think about better stuff.

Think about things that are good and noble and trustworthy and lovely and all that stuff.

Think about good stuff and your brain will do better stuff.

And that's when I, as a neurosurgeon, I'd grown up in this culture, this what they call,

reductionist determinist worldview training, which is where you believe basically

on some level at least, that your brain has just developed the way it is and

that everything about you, in fact, I said that before, everything about you,

your thoughts, feelings, memories, beliefs,

activities, all the stuff you do comes from your brain.

And that was the first day that I ever separated that in my mind that,

wait a minute, you can use your mental energy to tell your brain to structurally

do something different than it was doing before,

which means your brain isn't generating your mind, your mind is in charge of your brain.

And that led me, after 20 years of practicing neurosurgery, in this realm of

believing that you can reduce brain activity down to the function of neurons and cells in your brain.

And then once you can do that, then you could determine how somebody's going to be.

Like basically, if you understand what the brain's doing, you'll understand

what their life's going to be about.

That's called determinism. So reductionism is breaking down an organism into its component parts.

And determinism means that you can then determine what's going to happen to

them, how they're going to behave, what they're going to be like,

what they're going to struggle with.

You can determine that based on the structure of their brain.

And I was looking at the screen of something that was proving that not to be true.

So I decided then to go on this years-long search to study and learn everything

that I could about what neuroscience and scripture and great writing and psychology

and philosophy and all the world's smart people who have looked at this issue

and what they had to say about it.

And here's the punchline. I'm going to have a new book, by the way,

in about a year called The Self-Brain Surgery Handbook.

And it's going to tell these stories of all this work that

I did to try to get to the point where I could truly believe it and live it

out and teach it to you that you can change your mind and that will change your

brain and that will change your body and that will change your life and that

will change the even genetic starting point epigenetically of the children that

come after you and the people that you encounter in your life.

Changing your mind literally changes generations, can break chains,

dissolve generational issues, can resolve addictions and habits.

It can overcome diagnoses and labels and limiting stories and any kind of trauma or tragedy.

Changing how you think will change how you live.

And that work led to me formulating what I call the Ten Commandments of Self-Brain Surgery.

So today, since it's all in August and since it's been a while since we covered these.

And since you might be a new listener, or even if you're not,

just since you might not have thought about this for a while,

I'm going to give you what I came up with as ten foundational principles of

things that are true from science,

they're consistent with scripture and they will produce the highest level of

flourishing, highest level of ability to be resilient, the highest level of overcoming hardship,

getting your thinking under control, breaking down habits and things that are

holding you back and being able to say that I want to choose hope in my life.

I want to become a more positive person by breaking, not unrealistically looking

at things positively, but by breaking down negative thinking.

It is a barrier to me to moving forward in my life.

And I want to have realistic thinking that bends me towards an opportunity to

make positive changes in my life because it is possible to direct your brain

to become structurally more sound,

to do things that work better for you than they have in the past.

And here's the 10 things that I've summarized from my deep dive into modern neuroscience.

Psychology, philosophy, theology, the study of scripture, quantum physics,

and all kinds of research that I've done to synthesize this for you.

And I gently and tenderly present them to you as the 10 commandments of self-brain surgery.

If you want to change your mind and you want to change your life and you want

to find hope and resilience and purpose and meaning and be able to move forward,

even when things are hard or even when they're just not quite right,

or even when you feel stuck, this is how you do it, okay?

I'm going to give you the bullet points. The book's going to have all of it.

The podcast in recent episodes has had tons of it.

And there's every day as we go through the podcast, we're going to deep dive

and unpack these things.

Today, I want to give them to you in one place. Now, as I complete the manuscript

for my new book, these are probably going to change just a little bit in the

way that I word them or the way that I order them.

So today, it's not necessarily a list in order of how you need to think about

it, But just the 10 things that I've come to that are definitely vital for you

to believe and use as part of your self-brain surgery practice.

Okay. It's crucial that you understand this. So here we go. Number one.

I must relentlessly refuse to participate in my own demise.

I must relentlessly refuse to participate in my own demise.

That means you don't commit malpractice against yourself. If you're going to

be a self-brain surgeon, your mode, your motto, your oath is first no harm.

Primum non nocere, we say in medicine, first no harm.

You must relentlessly refuse to

participate in your own demise because in self-brain surgery, guess what?

You're the doctor, but you're also the patient, and you don't want to be committing,

malpractice against yourself.

This can unpack in many areas. You're not going to eat the stuff that's going

to hurt you. You're not going to drink things or take things that are going to harm you.

You're not going to perpetuate issues that cost you trouble all the time.

You're going to make choices that lead to better tomorrows and less regret.

You must relentlessly refuse to participate in your own demise,

even in how you think, okay?

Number two, I must believe that feelings are not facts.

They are chemical events in my brain. I must believe that feelings are not facts.

They are chemical events in my brain.

This is a hot button right now because everybody in our culture is telling you,

hey, you follow your feelings. You follow your heart. You do you. You find your own truth.

And I'm just telling you, friend, that doesn't produce happiness.

You might think it will. You might think that chasing after your feelings will

produce happiness or understanding or let you figure yourself out or any of those things.

But the truth is, feelings aren't facts.

Feelings are chemical triggers in your brain that are in response to your environment

and memories of your past that are smashed together and brought to you as if

they're your own ideas and they don't require a response from you.

They're meant to be barometers. They are meant for you to be aware that something's

going on or that you're feeling a certain way because of something that's happening

or may have happened or might happen.

They are not necessarily true.

And learning to separate feelings that are pointing towards something true that

needs to be responded to appropriately with your frontal lobes.

And learning to recognize feelings that are triggered in certain situations

because of things that have happened in the past or because of insecurities

or things you're afraid of.

Learning to discern and separate those rather than just mindlessly reacting

or responding or living in fight-flight-freeze will set you free, my friend.

So I must believe that feelings are not facts. I'm going to give you the tools

to do that as we go along, okay?

But just knowing it is the first step. Just actually believing in your heart

that not everything you feel is true and not everything you feel has to be reacted to.

That will set you free. It will change your mind and it will change your life.

Number three, I must believe that most of my automatic thoughts are untrue.

I must believe that most of my automatic thoughts are untrue.

You have tens of thousands of automatic thoughts every day. They pop into your head.

They usually sound like they're in your voice, and by five to one,

they are negative and not true.

And so you hear this thought that says, oh, you're such a loser or,

oh, that's not safe or, oh, you ought not to try that because every time you

try that, you fail or, oh, all those people are talking about you or nobody

respects me or whatever or my husband's going to cheat on me, whatever it is.

Five to one, you have a thought that pops into your head that sounds like your

voice that you believe is a thought that you're having with your mind.

And the truth is it's being generated by brain activity and it's for the purpose

of trying to help you automate things that you don't need to actually spend

as much time mentally unpacking and dealing with and making decisions about.

So automatic thoughts have a purpose, but they're not mental thoughts.

They're brain triggers, brain inputs, and they're not necessarily true.

And just knowing that and then developing a system for taking those thoughts

captive, as the Bible says in 2 Corinthians 10.5,

having this process in place of biopsying a thought before you respond to it

will make a huge difference in your life, probably the biggest difference in your entire life.

Just learning that your brain's not completely reliable when it presents thoughts

and feelings to you, and your mind has the ability to process them,

vet them, and decide if they're true

or not, decide if they're worthy of a response or not before you react.

Learning to respond and not react will make a huge difference in your life.

That's an absolute must.

If you're going to change your mind and change your life and go all in on this

idea that you can move forward and not be stuck anymore, you've got to know

that most of your automatic thoughts are untrue.

Tomorrow on Self-Brain Surgery Saturday, we're going to cover the first procedure

of self-brain surgery, the thought biopsy. I'm going to teach it to you again.

Now, if you've heard me talk about it before, we're just going to practice a little bit.

I'm going to give you some work to do so you can start this process of learning

to separate feelings and automatic thoughts from reality so that you can make

Make decisions based on what's true for your own life.

Number four, I must believe that I am not just my brain. I am not just my brain.

We have an educational system that has taught most of us that you are your brain.

Makes you who you are. It makes you how you think. It makes you what you do.

It predicts your behavior.

And I'm just going to teach you from modern neuroscience and quantum physics

that you're not just your brain.

Your mind and your brain are not the same thing as we mentioned just a few minutes ago.

And the extent to which you can truly believe that and learn to operate your

life from a mind controls brain paradigm, from a mind down worldview.

You will become more resilient.

You will set yourself free from thinking you have to react to negative circumstances

in certain ways and you will become a more resilient, hopeful,

happy, powerful person by believing that you're not just your brain, okay?

So I'm gonna say today that you gotta buy into that.

Number four, I'm sorry, number five, I must love tomorrow more than I hate how I feel right now.

I must love tomorrow more than I hate how I feel right now.

What does that mean? we often feel so

bad about something that's happening in our

life that we choose a behavior to turn

our brain off so we don't have to feel it anymore we turn to alcohol or drugs

or sex or pornography or gambling or shopping or text messaging or scrolling

on instagram or something and understand if you're a christian i'm not saying

that necessarily every one of those things that we use to numb ourselves is necessarily sinful.

It's not necessarily sinful to spend an hour on Instagram, okay?

But if you're doing that for the purpose of not processing what's really bothering

you, then what happens is tomorrow you pay something that Lisa and I call the

tomorrow tax, that you're paying tomorrow for what you didn't want to process today.

And some of those behaviors will create new problems, taxes on tomorrow that

you have to deal with. Alcohol is a good example.

You use alcohol, you turn your brain off, you fall asleep, you don't have to

think about it, you think you've done something good for yourself, but then what happens?

Metabolically, you've just messed up your neurotransmitter situation significantly.

You might have done or said things or bought things or texted somebody or had

a fight with your wife or done something you would not normally do because you

chose that mechanism of numbing yourself with alcohol.

You might not sleep as well. You might have a hangover tomorrow.

You might have a headache. You might be grumpy. Your glutamate and GABA neurotransmitters

are out of balance and you feel anxious the next day. You don't perform at work as well.

You get in trouble with your boss because you're paying a tomorrow tax.

Because you didn't love today more than you hated how you felt yesterday.

And so that I must love tomorrow more than I hate how I feel right now,

that is an incredibly powerful and life-altering decision that you can make.

I'm not going to do something right now. In self-brain surgery terms,

we say, don't treat a bad feeling with a bad operation.

Don't choose a behavior that's going to help me feel a little bit better right

now, but is going to create a lot of trouble for me tomorrow and still have

the original problem that I didn't want to deal with.

That's a huge thing for your life, friend. I must love tomorrow more than I

hate how I feel right now.

Next, I must stop making an operation out of everything.

This is an inside joke. I've told this story before, but one of my professors

in residency, when we would literally be doing surgery,

if I was taking too long to sew or I was clumsy with my hands or I was having

a hard time learning how to do a particular thing, he would say,

hey, stop making an operation out of everything.

And what he meant was, even though we were performing an operation,

there's a way of operating your life that's more efficient and more elegant than other ways.

And if you overcomplicate everything and you make it too hard and you add steps

and you make the easy thing the hard thing all the time, you're making an operation out of your life.

There's a way to streamline your life where you are more efficient and more

successful and that produces hope and reduces friction and overcomes inertia

and helps you not beat yourself up all the time because you're making an operation

out of everything. We're going to learn how to do that together.

Okay. Okay, next one is super important.

If you love your kids, and if you love your grandkids, and if you love your

future great-great-grandkids, hear me say this.

I must not perpetuate generational thought or behavioral issues in my family or start any new ones.

I must not perpetuate generational thought or behavioral issues in my family or start any new ones.

There's a thing called a generational curse that comes from some scripture in the Bible.

And we'll talk about that a lot. There's a woman named Gina Berkman who's written

a great book called Generations Deep that you should read if you're interested in this.

But the Bible says the Lord visits the sins of the father on the third and fourth

generation of the sons and daughters.

But extends his love to a thousand generations of those who love him.

That's a paraphrase, okay?

But this idea that sins can be perpetual in families for generations doesn't necessarily mean.

In fact, it doesn't mean that God is this capricious, vengeful God who's going

to punish your grandkids for something you do.

That would sound like a threat. That's not what he's saying at all.

What we know now from epigenetics and neuroscience is that when you have a problem in your life, alcohol,

abuse, whatever it might be, eating disorders, different kinds of issues that

we have in our lives that are difficult for us.

It's common to pass those on to our children because of the environment in which they're brought up.

But now we know even epigenetically, certain things that we deal with turn genes

on and off and influence how genes are either expressed or inhibited,

and those things can be heritable.

What we know then is that heritable epigenetic switches tend to persist three

or four generations before they peter out.

And that's the genetic basis of what the Bible is talking about with generational curses.

And so the idea then is you can learn to turn those things off and reverse those

changes in your lifetime and pass

on better starting points to your generations, to the people after you.

By learning how to think differently, by learning how to behave differently,

you can make a difference in three or four generations down the line.

So that your kids and grandkids and their kids and their grandkids are born

with a better starting place than you are because you chose to break the cycle.

You can be a chain breaker. You can be a person who learns to break those generational

issues, and you certainly don't want to be creating them, okay?

And so that's one of the commandments. I must not perpetuate generational thought

or behavioral issues in my family or start any new ones.

The next one, I must love my brain and believe that it is designed to change.

We're going to teach you the fact that your brain is structurally changing all

the time and that those changes are to a stunning degree under your control.

And the extent to which you believe that you have the power to change your brain

and change the way your brain and your body interface with each other.

To the extent that you believe that, that's the extent to which you can be hopeful

and have an abundant life.

The more you believe that you're stuck with the brain that you have,

the less hope you can have of making any kind of change.

And that's just the bottom line. We're going to unpack that in coming episodes and in my new book.

Next, I must believe that I'm getting better at what I'm doing.

This is so important. The way your brain is wired is to automate things that

you tell it to care about.

If you continue to practice catastrophizing, negative thinking, worst case scenario,

passing on labeling stories that tell you that you're a loser,

you're never going to be okay, or you continue to drink because you don't believe

that there's any reason not to because you might as well because tomorrow is

going to be terrible anyway. way.

If you do those things, you're getting better at it. Your brain will automate

and make synapses and create pathways that will keep you doing those things,

and it will require less and less mental energy to recreate those issues.

You must believe that you're getting better at what you're doing.

And last, I must understand that thoughts become things.

The things you think about turn into real things, structural things in your

brain, in your life, and in the world around you.

What what you think about turns into real things in the world.

That is one of the most important things you can decide.

You believe that thoughts become things. Friend, we're in the middle of all

in August. We're almost, we're past halfway there.

And today I want to just remind you of these 10 true things that you need to

buy into and believe if you want to change your mind and you want to change your life.

The time for making that decision is today.

It's time to draw a line in the sand and say, I'm going to use my frontal lobes

to take charge of my mind, to take charge of my brain, to change my life,

make things better, create hope, overcome inertia, get unstuck, and go forward.

And the good news, my friend, is that you can start today.