The Ten Commandments of Self-Brain Surgery (Mind Change Monday)

Good morning, my friend. Dr. Lee Warren here with you. It is Mind Change Monday.

On the first Monday of Mind Change March, and today I'm going to give you the

Ten Commandments of Self-Brain Surgery in one convenient place.

We've had several people route in lately saying, hey, you're always referring

to the Ten Commandments. Put them in one place. We've done that several times before.

They're always on the website at drleewarren.substack.com. You can find them

if you search for the Ten Commandments of Self-Brain Surgery.

But today, given that we're in Mind Change March, we're going to put them all in one place.

I'm writing the book, Self-Brain Surgery, How to Rewire Your Brain,

Reorder Your Mind, and Radically Transform Your Life. It's coming.

I'm getting after it. And as I write it, there may be some reordering of the Ten Commandments.

I'm trying to figure out the best way to structure the book because it's going

to going to come along with worksheets, a workbook that'll be published separately,

and probably some workshops that we can do virtually together or in physical places together.

So we're going to try to present this work to the world as a way to change your

mind and change your life.

So today, I'm going to give you the 10 commandments of self-brain surgery for

mind to change March, so you can really get after it.

I hope you're continuing with your abide practice to learn how how to listen,

pray, meditate, and get your mind and your brain right to help you accomplish

the goal of becoming healthier, feeling better, and being happier.

Go back to yesterday's podcast on the spiritual brain surgery side for more about that.

And before we get started today, 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 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 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. There's a great horned owl

right outside my window hooting and hollering, so you may hear some owl noise

out there. He's wanting to be on the podcast today.

We were sitting last night in the living room, all of us, and I spent the weekend

clearing a bunch of this river grass that has grown up really tall on the riverbank.

It's kept us from being able to see the geese and the cranes and all that in

the river, so I spent some time clearing the riverbank, and that revealed a

rain gauge that Dale and Joe Margaret,

when they built this place, put out there so they could see how high the river was.

Not really a rain gauge. It's a marker to tell how high the river is.

But I looked out over my shoulder and sitting on top of that river rain gauge,

was a huge owl just sitting there in the yard.

So we all got a chance to look at him or her and watch him fly off into the

woods. And it was really cool.

It's a neat place that we live in. But nevertheless, the owl apparently is back

and making some racket out there. So if you hear him, that's pretty cool.

If you can't hear him, trust me, he's pretty loud right outside my window.

So I've been hearing from a lot of people that they want another round of the

Ten Commandments of Self-Brain Surgery.

So I thought, well, it's Mind Change March, and it's the first Monday of Mind

Change March, and I'm writing the book, Self-Brain Surgery, so why wouldn't it be a perfect time?

To go back over it. These are our core values. If we're going to be self-brain

surgeons, if we're going to learn how to radically sort of reset and transform

our minds, as the Bible tells us so clearly that we need to do.

Then we need to have a set of operating principles. Now, you could say,

well, we're Christians. The operating principles is the Word of God. Well, that's true.

But I'd like for you to have a little distilled handbook of principles that

are consistent with neuroscience.

Consistent with Scripture, that

you can get your hands around and sort of memorize and keep in mind as,

hey, if I really want to have a better thought life, if I really want to not

be so reactive to the things that happen, and if I really want to not spend

my whole day chasing a feeling,

if I want to finally get control and start to gain traction on my grief, on my anxiety,

on my depression, on my anger, on my habits, on my addictions,

I really want to start feeling like I'm in control of some aspect of my life,

then I need to get a set of principles.

I need to operate my life under a set of tangible, repeatable principles, right? Right?

This has to do with what we talk about on spiritual brain surgery all the time.

Know what we believe and why we believe it and how to explain it to other people

so that they can find some hope in it too.

So without further ado, let's just hit the 10 commandments.

Okay? Now understand I'm not being sacrilegious when I say the 10 commandments.

I'm not literally saying God says you have to change your mind or change your life.

He does, but I'm putting these in a context and using the phrase 10 commandments

because these are 10 things that if you do them,

you will find yourself living consistently according to

scripture and solid neuroscience and you'll find

that things begin to feel better and not

so hopeless and not so scary and not so reactive all

the time okay so the first one the first

day of medical school they teach us the oath and the

oath based on the famous hippocratic oath starts with the phrase primum non

nocere in latin which means first no harm first no harm so the first commandment

of self-brain surgery is I want you to relentlessly refuse to participate in your own demise.

So much of our life is spent thinking down rabbit holes, trails of worst case scenarios.

Catastrophizing things in our minds, convincing ourself that because this happened

or because we did this or because she did that or because this thing happened

or because my son passed away or because he divorced me or because I got this

diagnosis or my husband died because X, Y, or Z,

that that means the rest of my life has to be a certain way.

So we spend this whole amount of huge energy in our lives going down rabbit

holes of thought that lead to physical harm for our body, okay?

I've proven it to you over time and science shows it conclusively that what

you think about turns into physical things in your body.

It turns into electrical events between you and other people.

It turns into how you affect the generations of your family.

What you think about turns into what you live and how you live and even how your family lives.

So then therefore, getting control over what you think about,

And deciding not to harm yourself anymore with your thinking is the first principle.

Relentlessly refuse to participate in your own demise.

We'll have much more to say about that. It'll be an old section of the new book.

But first, no harm, okay?

So whatever you're going to do, however you're going to spend your time,

whatever's going on between your ears, make a commitment to yourself not to

do harm to yourself anymore with your thinking, okay?

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

Feelings present themselves to us and they feel so real. I feel anxious.

I feel depressed. I feel scared. I feel tired. I feel stressed.

I feel whatever. And our feelings have been taught to us by our recent,

at least secular worldview, that what you feel, you need to follow it,

man. Just chase your heart. Follow your dreams.

You do you. Live your truth. And I'm just here to tell you, that's not a livable worldview.

It's not a livable philosophy.

And primarily because from a chemical standpoint, from a neuroscience standpoint,

feelings aren't true. They're just barometers.

Feelings happen inside you. Emotions happen to tell you that something's going on.

But they don't tell you what's going on. And you're supposed to use your frontal

lobe to discern what that feeling is about.

Spend some time with it. Think about it. respond to it in a healthy way rather

than being reactive to it.

But the problem is we've trained ourselves to think that what we feel is real.

And we forget that we have a limited emotional palette of things that we can feel.

And so that means it's something that makes you feel anxious,

that in some point in your past was tied to a particular thing,

like, I feel anxious when this happens, and now I'm feeling anxious,

so this must be happening again.

That's where it breaks down, okay?

Because the feeling triggers something that you've assigned meaning to in the past.

And if you're not careful, if you're not very careful, then you will spend a

lot of time in your life reacting as if that thing is happening again.

When the only thing that's actually happening is you're having a feeling that

you've previously assigned a particular meaning to.

And so the whole game is to learn how to stop for a second, biopsy your thought,

and make a decision based on what's actually happening now and not what that

feeling has made you think about or believe in the past, okay?

So feelings aren't facts. That's commandment number two.

Commandment number three, closely related, thoughts are not always true.

You must believe with all your heart that thoughts aren't always true, not always true.

We know from neuroscience that there's somewhere between 30,000 and 100,000

negative thoughts that you think every day, thoughts that pop into your head

that aren't true, that are biased towards negativity.

Negativity, and most of us spend our whole lives chasing those thoughts,

reacting to them as if they're true, letting them be law in our minds.

And here's an example. You might see somebody give you a look, for example.

You look across the dining room, and you see your spouse, and their eyes return

towards you, and you see a look on their face, and you decide in your mind, oh, he's mad at me.

And then you spend the next few minutes inside your brain saying,

well, he shouldn't be mad at me. I haven't done anything wrong.

He's the one that does everything wrong.

And then you go down this whole rabbit hole of why is my life always like this?

Why does everything always feel so hard?

Why do people always treat me that way? Who does he think he is, right?

And the truth is, sometimes if you actually had, next time you had a moment,

pull your spouse aside and say, say, hey, I saw your eyes kind of dart over

me or over towards me for a second. What were you thinking about?

And you might say, oh, I just had this memory pop into my head when my mom died

and I was just sad for a minute and I was looking at you and I was just feeling really sad.

Or it might be that they remembered a stressful meeting that they're going to

have the next day at work and they were feeling bad about that and they were

getting kind of worked up and anxious about it and their eyes just happened

to dart over towards you.

It may turn out that the thought that you had about the thing that you saw wasn't

based in any type of reality at all.

And then you spent a lot of mental energy and time and emotional distress that

turned into cortisol in your body that stressed your system and made your stomach

hurt and made your heart race and made your body ache and all that stuff because

it was based on you reacting to something that you thought that was never actually true.

And so principle number three is understanding that thoughts are not always

true so that we learn to think about our thinking.

I think a large percentage of my time as a neurosurgeon is spent dealing with disordered thinking.

And we have to be careful when I say disordered thinking in this day and age because...

We think everything's a disorder. Like everybody's got a diagnosis.

Every weird person we think is on the spectrum.

Every person who's stressed out today we think has anxiety disorder.

We call everybody a narcissist if they disagree with us.

Like everybody's pathologizing and diagnosing everything all the time.

And the fact is, that's just not really true.

Sometimes you can be anxious without having an anxiety disorder and you can

feel sad without having major depressive disorder.

And somebody can be kind of a jerk without being a narcissist.

Maybe they're just having a bad day. And somebody can actually just be not a

very nice person today without being some kind of disordered psychiatric diagnosis, right?

So the truth is thoughts are not always true, and feelings aren't always facts.

We have to remember that, okay? So I spend a lot of time in my practice dealing

with thoughts that aren't true, people thinking wrong about their thinking,

feeling wrong about their feelings, and believing wrong about their beliefs.

Like that, spend a lot of time dealing with disordered thinking.

Again, not a disorder that's a psychiatric diagnosis, but just thinking that's kind of out of order.

And if you straighten that out and learn how to think about your problem,

you can learn to attack it in a different way. Maybe you don't need to have brain surgery.

Maybe you just need to change the way you think about your diagnosis a little

bit, and we can make you better without having to cut you open. Okay?

So that's the third principle. Thoughts are not always true.

And again, closely related, number Number 4.

Thoughts become things, okay? It's just true.

Thoughts become things. The things you think about turn into

genetic up or down regulation in

DNA to encoding of genes or suppressing of genes to changes in your neurotransmitter

levels to changes in hormone production to changes in cortisol and other stress

hormones in your body to physical changes in how your heart and your gut and

your skin and every other organ system work. work, thoughts become things.

Thoughts turn into inherited characteristics in your children.

The things you experience epigenetically alter the genetic expression in your

kids, and your kids can be born afraid of things that you were afraid of,

even if they never experienced them.

That's been shown in human research with PTSD victims from Vietnam and Holocaust

survivors, that those changes can last three and four generations into the future,

and your kids can can be anxious about things they never experienced.

And that puts a responsibility on us to understand that thoughts become things, okay?

Number five, don't treat bad feelings with bad operations, okay?

If we're going to learn self-brain surgery, we're going to learn some techniques

and some operations to operate on our thinking and operate on our feeling and

change the way we think and live.

And we're going to transform our minds, as Romans 12 says, because as Romans

Romans 12.1 says that's an essential and reasonable act of worship.

We're going to try to change our minds and change our lives.

We have to understand that sometimes we have a bad feeling and we perform the

wrong type of self-brain surgery on it.

And we treated a bad feeling with a bad operation.

And that never leads to a good outcome. In my practice, if I think wrongly about

your problem and I do the wrong operation, that's called malpractice.

So we don't want to commit malpractice against ourselves. And a common one that

we do is we feel bad about something and we don't want to feel that.

So we use some sort of numbing behavior like alcohol or drugs or television

or something else, gambling or shopping or something, to make us not feel that thing right now.

And we've treated a bad feeling with a bad operation.

And the next day, guess what? We don't get the outcome that we want.

And so don't treat a bad feeling with a bad operation. And that leads to number

six, which is love tomorrow more.

Don't pay the tomorrow tax, okay?

Lisa and I call this thing the tomorrow tax. We don't love tomorrow enough to

not feel what we're feeling right now.

So we want to take the bad feeling that we're feeling right now and cover it

up in some way. We perform that bad operation.

And then tomorrow, we still have the original problem, and now we have a headache,

or now we have a debt because we spent money we didn't need to spend,

or now we've sent off a bunch of angry emails or text messages and we treated a bad operation,

a bad feeling with a bad operation and we hurt some feelings or we created some trouble.

And now today, we've got to deal with all of that stuff and the original problem

and we're paying the tomorrow tax because we didn't love today more than we

didn't like what we felt yesterday.

So don't pay the tomorrow tax by loving tomorrow more.

Number seven, don't make an operation out of everything. thing.

Peter Janetta taught us this. We'd be doing some kind of brain surgery, a literal operation.

And I would be, as a young trainee, making it more complicated than it had to be.

And Janetta would say, hey, don't make an operation out of it.

And that was a joke because we're actually doing an operation.

But it's not really a joke because there's always a way to simplify everything.

There's always a way to stop making it harder than it has to be.

The Bible says in in two places. Make level paths for your feet.

Think down the path of where you're going and try to simplify and streamline

and make things as comfortable and as manageable as they can be to get the job

done in a way that's not overly stressful or overly complicated.

You don't have to make a Rube Goldberg machine out of everything that you do.

Don't make an operation out of everything. We'll unpack all of these in individual

episodes in the coming months, by the way.

The next one, don't.

Sort of perpetuate or create generational issues for your family anymore.

Don't take troubles that you got from your dad or your mom and pass them on

to your kid. Don't start new ones either.

Recently read something, I think Gina Berkmeyer said it, like,

if you don't heal the child inside you, then you'll harm the child that comes out of you.

Like, so we have these generational issues. My dad did it that way,

so I've got to do it that way.

Or, you know, I was abused as a child, so I'm going to vent my anger on somebody else.

And these become the fulfillment of God's prophecy that the sins of the father

are visited on three and four generations of the children.

That's not because he hates the children or he's a big jerk who punishes people.

It's a warning to us. Be careful how you live your life because what you do

affects your children and it affects them for generations until somebody comes

along and marries the right person who had a different family and says,

wait, we don't want to do this anymore.

We want to change this. And fortunately, a lot of these things kind of peter

out after a few generations.

That's just, it's verifiable science, but God was saying it passionately,

compassionately thousands of years ago.

How you live turns into what happens to your great-grandkids in some ways.

So be careful how you live, right?

Don't perpetuate generational troubles. Don't start new ones.

That's a commandment of self-brain surgery.

And then on a physical level, if we have the mind that's us,

that's our spiritual being that communicates with the Holy Spirit and with God

and can control our body and our mind is seated in the organ of our brain,

then it makes sense that we want to take care of our brain. So commandment number

nine is don't hurt your brain.

Be careful with the physical structure and organ of your brain.

Wear helmets when you ride bicycles.

Yes, adults, you need to wear a helmet. You're eight times more likely to die

if you hit your head on a bicycle or a skateboard if you don't have a helmet on than if you do.

You need to wear a helmet, and your kids need to wear a helmet.

Every time they get on something that moves faster than they can walk,

they need to have a helmet on their head.

Love your brain. Protect your brain. Don't drink alcohol too much.

It's a directly neurotoxic substance. It kills brain cells.

And so if you don't want to run out of brain cells before you're done living

and become demented or have some kind of big problem, problem,

don't do things that are known to harm your brain.

This is that Romans 12.1, like present your bodies as a living sacrifice to God.

It's a holy, reasonable, and acceptable form of worship.

If you're worshiping God, when you decide I'm going to not do this anymore because

it hurts my brain, I don't want to hurt my brain.

I want to smoke cigarettes and starve my brain for oxygen.

I don't want to drink too much alcohol and literally kill brain cells.

I I don't want to bang my head against things when I don't have to.

I want to be careful with my brain.

I want to take the right supplements and organize my diet properly because I

know that nutrition affects how my brain functions. And I want to take care of it.

And then I want to protect it with my thinking because I know that the way I

think rewires parts of my brain and either makes it healthier or makes it worse.

And so I want to love my brain and I want to protect it. I don't want to hurt

my brain. That's commandment number nine.

Finally, number 10 is practice mental first aid.

We all have a responsibility to each other to inspire each other to rewire our brains.

This is what Dan Siegel said, the founder of interpersonal neurobiology, inspire to rewire.

It goes great on a t-shirt, but it's true that we need to practice mental first aid.

In medicine, there's a thing we teach called see one, do one, teach one.

It's like you want to learn how to start an IV. You watch me do it,

and then I teach you how to do it, and then you teach somebody else.

And you really ingrain an ability to do something by understanding it well enough

to teach it to somebody else, that's what mental first aid is.

Say, hey, to the person that you love or to your child, hey,

you seem to be beating yourself up a lot. You seem to be struggling with these recurring thoughts.

Let's talk about that. Be willing to internalize these principles well enough

that you can help the people around you learn to deal with them more efficiently

and effectively as well.

And we all help each other. Somebody emailed me yesterday and said,

hey, we're all just walking each other home, right? We're helping each other get through this life.

We have to be able to practice mental first aid. If you saw me bleeding to death

from a stab wound or something, you would stop and put pressure on that wound

and help me stop the bleeding.

And we can do that with our loved ones too. We can say, hey,

I think you're really struggling here. Can I help you?

Can we talk about this or can you give me some words to understand what you're

feeling so I can pray for you more effectively?

Is there some way I can help you carry this burden? That's what the Bible says we're supposed to do.

Is bury one another's burdens. And practicing mental first aid will do that.

So that's a rundown of the 10 commandments of self-brain surgery.

Let me just restate them. Number one, relentlessly refuse to participate in your own demise.

Do not commit self-malpractice. Number two, believe that feelings are not facts.

Feelings are chemical events in your brains. They are not facts.

Number three, thoughts are not always true.

Number four, thoughts become things.

Number five, don't treat a bad feeling with a bad operation.

Number six, love tomorrow more.

Number seven, don't make an operation out of everything. Number eight,

don't perpetuate or start generational troubles for your family.

Number nine, don't hurt your brain.

Love your brain. Do not hurt your brain.

Number 10, practice mental first aid.

Friend, these principles will help you change your mind and help you change your life.

These principles will help you become healthier you and feel better and be happier.

They might save your family.

They might save the generations for your grandkids and great grandkids.

And they definitely will help you 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.