I won't let my body out me outwait everything that I'm made, don't won't spend my life trying to change.
I'm learning to love who I am again.
Strong, I feel free. I know everybod of me.
It's beautiful.
And that will always out way if you feel it.
But she'll some love to the vio. Why get there. Let's take one day, Anita, did you and die out way? Happy Saturday, Outweigh.
I am grateful to be back here with doctor Lee Warren. We're here for our neuro series here on Outweigh. Two weeks ago we talked about your neuro thoughts. Last week we talked about neuro feelings and how feelings are not facts and they can actually lie to us a little bit.
If we're being honest, they're sneaky.
This week we are going to get into neuro beliefs, and if you missed the past couple weeks, definitely go check it out because there's a lot of chicken egg cause and effect going on here bringing us into the belief side of it. But what I'd love to do today, Doctor Warren, is really kick off when it comes to our beliefs and believing what we're believing you know, first of all, we have to kind of become aware of it. And there's the unconscious, there's the subconscious, there's the conscious.
Can you just kind of share a little bit about your perspective of beliefs and how it comes into your self brain surgery thought.
Process absolutely well. Beliefs lean sort of start with this thing that I call that's called worldview. Like, basically, worldview is the set of filters and ideas and beliefs that you use to sort of investigate and think about new
ideas that are presented to you in the world. And so when you encounter something, the way that you decide if it's true or not, the way that you decide if it's worthwhile for you to pursue or to believe that it affects you is dependent on the set of filters and underlying beliefs and your overall worldview you view the world right, So that means that the belief systems that we have, whether they come from our family, our heritage, or our own reading or our own experiences, those belief
systems really impact everything that you do and everything that you feel and think, and everything that happens in your life and the people around you, even if you're not sort of consciously aware of it all the time, because whether or not you recognize it. And some people might say, oh, I'm a really open minded person, don't really have a worldview? Yes, you do. Your worldview might be everything's true all the time.
And if that's your worldview, I'll challenge you to say, that's going to harm you in some ways because you're going to accept some things that really aren't true, and then you'll find yourself reacting to some things that weren't true in the first place, and you've got to clean that up. So having a worldview, having an awareness that you do have a worldview, and then spending some time questioning what that is and understanding identifying what your belief
systems are. That's what we talk about on Spiritual brain Surgery. Concept is this podcast is this idea that you have the worldview, So you need to know what it is so you can explain it and then decide if it's worth living with.
Yeah, and I think people, you know, they download it from like you said, upbringing parents, friends, even today, we're being influenced.
Everything is influencing us.
And if we don't have this basis of our own foundation of beliefs and worldviews that really align with the version of ourselves that we want to be. And that's where it really connects to this identity piece of the puzzle in our self image, which we did kind of talk about a bit in our neuro Hope and neuro Faith episodes, so we'll link those as well. But really
it's it's knowing what you believe. I love how you just pointed that out, because a lot of people are walking around kind of with with blinders on and they don't know what they believe. They're just kind of repeating what they've heard or what they've downloaded. And I feel like what you just said is almost like a permission slip of like, hey, you get to vote on what you believe, so can you speak a little bit more
about this voting process. So, now that you're aware of this worldview when it comes to our beliefs, how do we shift our beliefs now that we're actually aware that we have that.
So if you have a worldview that says that you know there's no absolute truth, for example, that's a common worldview these days. Everybody has their own path to truth, and you can find your way and all of that. I'm not challenging if that's what you believe. But what I'm saying is, if that's your worldview, then you have to say, okay, well, there are some things that are consistent with a happy, productive life that I can build
out of that worldview. And when something, some other idea comes in and challenges me, then I need to say, wait a minute, is this idea that I'm being asked to accept consistent with my belief system? Is it consistent
with my worldview? And when I say to other people, this is my set of things that I operate by my operating system, if you will, then if a new idea comes along and I'm presenting that to myself as if I want to incorporate this in my behavior and my feelings and all of that, then I've got to be able to say, wait, is this consistent with what I believe? And if it's not, then am I harming myself on an integrity level by accepting this new idea or practice? Is if it's true, when it's really not
consistent with my overall worldview? And now that brings up a question. Sometimes we find things that may need to revise our worldview. Maybe something comes along and you try it, you taste it out a little bit, and you test it, and from a good science you and I are both kind of science nerves. If you take something and test it and run all the exams on it and it turns out to probably be true, then maybe your worldview
needs updating. So one of the problems we have sometimes is we dig our heels in to our belief system and we say, I don't care if this turns out to be beneficial, and maybe even turns out to be true. If it's not consistent with what I've said I believe before, I can't accept it. Right That's one of the problems we have in our society right now. We pick this side and that side, and if you're on this side, you can't agree with anything or you got to cancel
everybody on the other side. And the problem with that is sometimes the other guy has something that's true and it might be helpful to me, and that sort of conversation and back and forth. As part of I think being a fully embodied, fully developed human is to say, can I accept an idea that's challenging to me, and can I use my intellect to process that idea and test it out as a scientist and see if it might actually be helpful to sort of evolve and mature my own world view a belief system.
Yeah, and I love how you also brought up the piece of the puzzle of integrity, you know, because when you believe a certain way and you witness yourself acting out of alignment with it, that gap in between is where the shame lives and the cognitive dissonance, and you end up being out of integrity when I think all of us want to be in alignment with who we
want to be. Now, I talk about all the time how we can't out behave our beliefs, and our beliefs shape our behaviors, and we're going to get into the habits and actions and behavior side of it. But can you share because you already started talking about you know, what I heard you say essentially is like you have to have the beliefs of the person that you want to become right and believe your way there. So can you just speak into that a bit.
Yeah. So you referenced something called cognitive dissonance, and that's really important to remember, and there's a lot of relevance here when we talk about habits and numbing the behaviors that we might use alcohol or food or whatever it might be. It has to do a lot with cognitive dissonances.
When you believe that something is harmful to you, or you believe that something is bad for you or good for you, or helpful or not helpful, but then you do that thing anyway because there's some other benefit that you think you're going to get from it. Then you have this sort of little disturbance in the force inside you, this little burr under your saddle that says, wait a minute, I know this is going to hurt me. I know that if I do this tomorrow, I'm going to pay.
What I call the tomorrow tax is sort of this tomorrow, I'm dealing with something that I did yesterday instead of being able to deal with today, which we don't talk about spiritual things a lot here, but Jesus said each
day has enough trouble of its own right. So the tomorrow tax idea is like, if you choose to engage in a numbing behavior, you nesetize yourself because you don't feel good about what's happening today, Then tomorrow, when that numbing behavior wears off, you still have the original problem, and now you got the effects of whatever it was that you did to numb yourself. You spent too much money, you ate too much food, you drank the wrong things.
Now you've got a headache and you're hungover, and you're late to work, and now you're all day long trying to catch up and process and pay that tomorrow at tax and you've got this dissonance in your brain and your spirit that says, wait, man, I didn't do the best job I could have done. I let myself down because I acted out of balance with what I say that I believe, and so that'll harm you in some way. So I'm not saying that your worldview is always right
and always has to be perpetually the same. But what I am saying is that it's valuable on a spiritual and emotional and neuroscience level to know what you believe, revise it when necessary based on evidence and practice, and live your life in accordance with that. That's how you become healthier and feel better and be happier.
Well, coming back fall circle to our very first episode around neuro thoughts, you know, because really a belief is a thought that you repeat and you eventually believe it. Right, there's that repetition pattern, and of course the worldview comes into play. So can you talk a little bit about how you teach shifting your beliefs when it comes to becoming aware of your thoughts? And if you were just going to give us beliefs shifting one oh one, what would.
That look like?
I think it's this if you constantly observe your own behavior, because a lot of us don't. I mean, frankly, a lot of us are stunningly unaware of our own part that we play in life. And I heard somebody say the other day, if you meet a jerk in the morning and that evening, you met a jerk that morning and the rest of your day was pretty good, then
he was probably really a jerk. But if you meet jerks all day long, then when you get home and you say, man, everybody I met today was a jerk, you might be the jerk.
You're the jerk.
So a lot of us don't spend any time evaluating our own behavior, the consequences of our behavior, the effects on other people of our behavior. And what that means is if you spend a little time looking at the evidence of what your life is producing at looking at the fruit of what you're life is doing, then it may be that you're acting as if you believe some things that you don't really believe because you're not willing
to practice them. And so then maybe you say, well, if I'm never practicing these things I say I believe, maybe I need to revalue those things, reorder them a bit. Maybe I need to tune up my world view so that I'm living more consistently with the things that I believe, and then maybe the outcomes that I'm seeing in my own life will start to be more effective for myself. Yeah.
Absolutely.
You obviously talk a lot about the spiritual side of things on your podcast. So you share a concept and then you align it with scripture. Was that something that you kind of unconsciously started doing and it was just
something that resonated with you. Was it a conscious thought process, Like, so if somebody did want to say, listen, this feels like a spiritual belief problem and I want to uplevel my beliefs to align with my spirit what was the process like for you to just start aligning scripture with beliefs.
You know, I was trained as a scientist, so as a biochemist in college, and I became a neuroscientist, neurosurgeon and all that. But I was raised as a Christian. So I had this sort of two worlds that I was living in because a lot of the people in the science world are kind of materialists, reductionist people that don't believe there's an overall purpose or meaning to life and all that kind of stuff. But then I had this other side of my life that was about spiritual
things and Christian worldview in particular. And what I started noticing was every time science finally got down to where they could prove that something was actually good for humans to live, it aligned with something that I had learned from the Bible a long time ago. Here's a good example. Science now says that when you think about better thoughts,
you have better brain chemistry and you feel better. Your physiology gets better, you have less heart disease, less stress, your quarters all goes down, your diabetes get some better control. All of that stuff can be done by thinking better. In fact, it's been shown that cognitive behavioral therapy, for example, is as effective or more effective than certain medications for improving people's physiology. Right, So, basically, the Bible said the same thing a long time ago. There's a book in
the New Testament called Philippians. In Philippians, chapter four, he says, hey, if you want to be less anxious, pray more and be more grateful and think about better stuff. And so two thousand years ago you had this guy in Palestine who was saying things that turn out to be true from functional neuroimaging two thousand years later, and so I just started noticing that there were a lot of things
that aligned with scripture and modern cognitive neuroscience. And whether that's just that people are good observers of behavior and they can make smart sayings like the Stokes did, or if it's actually that the Bible was onto something and those guys knew something is up for you to decide. But I found, as a person who tries to think critically about how I think and help other people get there, that the Bible is a pretty good guide to how
humans can flourish. And whether you think that's real and eternal truth or you think it's just a good book full of information, it's worth knowing. So the first thing I would say is if you want the final thing, I would say is if you want to talk about or sort of bendit from what scripture might say, the best way to do that is to read it for yourself and not let somebody else tell you what it says.
Yeah, I love it well before we end today's episode and head over to the beliefs and behavior side of it, which if you're getting the memo, it's all interconnected, this idea of the difference between unconscious subconscious conscious. Can you just give us your thirty thousand foot overview of what that looks like and how that transforms into each other.
So your subconscious has a lot to do with synapses, as we've been talking a lot about in the last three episodes. So you attach meaning to physiology, feelings, and past memories, and you basically stick those in parts of your brain that don't require the input of your frontal
lobe and your higher cognitive centers to operate. So that's how you automate certain behaviors, and it's how you automate certain ways that you operate your life without having to sort of use metabolic energy to think about those things. But you find yourself having done a lot of things. You walked across your house this morning when the lights went on and the sun wasn't up yet, and you didn't hit your foot on the coffee table because your
brain already knows where it is. You've wired that, and so subconsciously you'd make the turns and you avoid the trouble. And you do the same thing in your mental life. You sort of do a lot of things mentally without having to think about them because your subconscious is out there accessing all that information without you having to literally think about it. And then there's this sort of super
conscious idea if you want that. We now know for sure that your mind is non local to your brain, like a brain in mind are not the same thing, and we can have a whole multiple hour conversation about that, but mind and brain are two different things, and they're two different things that and that's been proven mathematically in quantum physics, basically that your mind can affect other people's lives without your body and being involved in it. And
that's a long conversation. But the reason I mention it is that part of how you're operating and navigating your life comes from outside of your brain. And I think that mind brain interface is also where we have sort of a mind spiritual interface with our creator, and that's that's the way I think it's designed to operate, not brain out, but mind down.
I'm so glad that we're touching on all of this because most of the people that are listening to this podcast, it's a very focused, narrow conversation of it's just about the food, it's just about the fitness, it's just about my weight, it's just about my body. And those are all such downstream things to everything that we're talking about here.
So if there's anything that will give you hope, it's just know that when you start solving the right problem with such as the things that we're talking about on this podcast, anything's possible.
I mean, it's proven scientifically.
But then if we do open up the spiritual realm, it's like miracles can happen too, you know.
So don't lose hope wherever you are.
And that's actually a great segue to talk about your books, your podcast and where people can find you.
Yeah, So anywhere you listen to podcasts, you can find the Doctor Lee Warren podcast. I have a second podcast called Spiritual Brain Surgery that goes a little bit deeper on the spiritual side of things, and then I write a Substack newsletter every week called Self Brain Surgery and that's doctor Lee Warren dot substack dot com. And if you want to read my books, just tap in my name on Amazon or anywhere you buy books and they're all out there, easy to.
Find me amazing.
And if you want to hear more about what brought doctor Warren to become the man that he's become, we did a deep dive on the What's God Got to Do with It podcast where he share he has such a beautiful story and testimony, but also how he used the tragedy and trauma in his life for good and he's really speaking hope and truth into all of our lives and really just I believe changing the face of how we see the brain and hope and possibility, and my spiritual heart has opened.
So I really.
Can't endorse his podcast his books anymore. So we'll also link those in the show notes and we will be back to finish up this neuro series next week where we're going to be talking about neuro habits. So that includes the doing side of it, which is what people rush to to start with, but obviously we put it last for a reason, so we will be back to talk about that
Next week and have a beautiful week five.