82: Simple Brain Science That Can Change Your Life with Dr. Lee Warren

And you can behave differently. You can become differently. You feel differently.

I was having a conversation with my friend Kim Warren a few weeks ago, and she was boasting about our podcast and said, You know who you need to have? You need to have Doctor. Lee Warren on the on the podcast. And I said, great, Kim. Shoot me his contact information.

And she laughed and said, well, I don't know him. And so from that point on, I set out to get this lined up. And why I'm excited about Doctor. Warren today is, as you've heard us say before, Gimbal Financial is about thinking differently, buying wisdom, liking what you do, living adventurously, and that generosity wins. And Doctor.

Warren is spot on on that first topic, Think Differently. He spent his career inside the operating room saving lives, and outside of it, he's been helping people change their lives by connecting neuroscience and faith. His books, Hope Is the First Dose in the Life Changing Art of Brain Surgery, has taught many people what he calls self brain surgery, practical ways to rewire your brain and to find hope after trauma and become the person you were meant to be. Doctor. Warren, welcome, I'm glad you're here.

Like if you're anxious, if you're depressed, if you have ADHD or whatever, that's just who you are and you gotta deal with it. And that's why you see people doing things like putting their diagnoses in their bio on Instagram, like identifying themselves to the world as, You need to know this about me so you know how to treat me, you know how to interact with me so you don't trigger me or hurt me, and I need to be safe, and all that stuff. We're taught that. And then the problem is when you actually look at the brain science, and if you look at what scriptures always said, but in twenty first century neuroscience terms, it isn't true. It's really not true that your brain generates who you are, and then if you go through certain things, it changes your brain, that makes you behave the way that you do.

What's really true is that the way we think changes our brain structurally over time, and our brain becomes something different chemically and functionally and anatomically and behaviorally than it was before. And if you're unaware of that, if you don't know that you actually have the power to make your brain work differently by changing how you think and the things you say to yourself and that sort of thing, If you don't know that, then the sort of baseline activity of the brain is that when you experience something and you begin to think about it and it promotes feelings and emotions, you begin to ponder the feelings and emotions as if they're true, then you start to tell yourself a story about it, and your brain begins to wire to present you a reality and a world around you that that thing is true, that that thing has turned you into this person, or that creates this person's identity. And so then what we know clearly now from neuroscience is if you go through something hard, or some kind of trauma, or some kind of event, or some kind of problem with another person, that thing in and of itself is not what changes your brain.

It's not the thing. And we know that because two identical people, two identical twins can go through the same exact set of circumstances, and one person can be really jacked up by it, and broken, and messed up, and never get over it. Another person can almost have no effect on them at all, or even it can sometimes turn them into a better person than they were. So people can have the same circumstances and vastly different outcomes. And the science behind it is, and what we know very clearly, it's not controversial now, is that it's responses that we choose after things happen to us that turn our brains into what they are and what they do.

And that that stuff can change from literally moment to moment in response to what we think about. So if you're experiencing something hard, rather than it becoming who you are, you can learn a different way of responding to that thing, and it'll change the chemical and anatomical environment in your brain, and your life can become different than it is. So the real question for all of us is not, can I avoid having all these hard things happen to me so I can be happy, and my life will be okay, and my brain will be all right, and all that, or can I go back in time and get a different set of parents, or a different set of genetics, or a different set of things that have happened? All that stuff doesn't have to happen. All that has to happen is you learn how to operate your brain in a different way according to the science of how it was designed by your Creator, I believe.

And if you can learn how to operate it differently, it will behave differently, and you can behave differently. You can become differently. You feel differently. So And it's not that your feelings and emotions and your thoughts make you behave a certain way, it's that your brain can generate different feelings and thoughts and behaviors if you choose to think about them in a different

And what the pattern of this world is, is that our circumstances, our thoughts, our feelings, our things that we go through make us be a certain way, that we react to them in a certain way. That's the pattern of the world. And we hear people say things like that, Live your truth, follow your heart, honor your feelings, all that stuff. But the scripture says, Don't be conformed to that pattern, rather be transformed by the renewing of your mind. And now we know, know now clearly from brain imaging studies, that when you think one thought instead of another thought, your brain immediately begins to make structural changes.

And if you think a better thought, you make better brain chemicals. And so people that talk about brain imbalances and chemical environment imbalances and things like that, it actually doesn't turn out to be really true in the way that we think about it. And the best example of that on the pharmaceutical side is that people that take serotonin, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors for depression, the idea was that we need more serotonin in our brain, that'll make us feel better. But it turns out that depressed people don't actually have less serotonin in their brains than anybody else does. They just process it differently, handle it differently.

And so raising the level of it makes you feel better, but not really fixes your depression. And so people on SSRIs don't always get better. Some of them do, but not all of them. And if it was just a simple matter of making more serotonin, that would solve all of it for everyone, all of them. And so what Paul says, Romans 12, transform your mind, your brain will behave differently.

And in Philippians four, as you referenced a second ago, Philippians four:six-eight says, don't be anxious about anything, but in everything with prayer and supplication with thanksgiving, let God guard your heart and mind, you'll be less anxious. And then he goes into this long list of things. Think about things that are good and noble and lovely and trustworthy and beautiful and all that stuff. Now we can, again, we can put you in a scanner and we can say, Hey, if you're feeling anxious, just interrupt yourself for a second, and make yourself think of something that you're grateful for. And we can see in your brain in real time that the fear center, the anxiety center of your brain will calm down, the frontal lobes, parts that are related to peace and calm and better decision making will come online very quickly.

Within seconds, you can abort an anxiety attack by forcing yourself to think about different things. So that should prove to each of us that you have this incredible power to operate your brain the way the Bible says to operate it, and neuroscience will back you up, and you'll actually feel better when you do that without taking a medicine. That doesn't mean that some people don't need medications. I'm not saying that. I'm saying that the vast majority of people can learn to operate their brains in a different way that will produce measurable changes in their lives very quickly.

You can prove it neurologically. It's been published by thousands of neuroscience researchers that things like cognitive behavioral therapy, for example, is talking based type of psychotherapy. And it's been shown with obsessive compulsive disorder, which is really a brain disorder that produces terrible abnormal behaviors and devastating problems for people. And cognitive behavioral therapy has been shown to be as or more effective than pharmaceutical management for lots of people with obsessive compulsive disorder. It's been shown the same in anxiety and depression and other types of schizoaffective disorders and ADHD and all kinds of things that cognitive therapy can actually change their behavior and their feelings as much as medication can.

And so that means that none of us should think that the answer is always in a prescription or somebody giving me something or doing something outside of me to make it better, because you have this inherent power to kind of operate your brain like your own brain surgeon.

Now, answer is, to your question, is if they'd intervened earlier, done something different, not written the prescription, what could they have done earlier? And what you can do earlier is teach your kids, as they're growing up, that really good research shows that something like two thirds of the automatic things that we think about and feel aren't true. Lots of the things that pop into your head, everybody has these thoughts, I'm a loser, and I'll never be able to solve this problem, nobody's ever gonna love me, or whatever it is, that these thoughts that pop into our head, and an alarming number of them are negatively biased, or distorted, or just frankly untrue. And so that means that if we can teach kids not follow your feelings, honor your heart, live your truth, not that, don't teach them that. Teach them that when you feel something and when you think something automatically, you need to be curious about whether or not that's actually true before you react to it.

And if you can just build in this little pause, this little gap between the stimulus, something triggers you, somebody says something mean to you, you have an emotion that feels really strong, you feel sad or whatever, between that and what you do about it, like do you run off with a string of worst case scenario thinking? Do you take a medication? Do you open a bottle of alcohol? Do you watch pornography? Do you react in some way to this thing as if it's true?

Then instead of that, build in a little space and challenge, be curious or cynical about the thought or feeling and ask questions of it. Is that really true? Like, nobody ever loves me. Well, my dad loves me. Well, my friends like me.

I do have people who do love me. So question the thought and the feeling instead of just reacting and believing it. Then a couple things happen with emotion. So feelings pop up, and I like to tell people, know, feelings aren't facts, they're chemical events in my brain. Like good example is, so when you feel something strong, it provokes a physiological response in your body, right?

So if you open the mailbox and get a letter and it says IRS on it, right? Most of us go, Ah, there's some kind of reaction to that. And the reaction will be oftentimes the hair standing up on the back of your neck and your heart racing, your mouth getting dry and all that. Now, the question is like, why is your body doing that to you? What does it mean?

And it might be that you are afraid that you're going to get audited or get a fine or get in trouble because she cut corners or didn't file a tax return or something. It might be that you're afraid. And when you're afraid, what happens? Your heart races and your blood pressure goes up and your hair stands up on the back of your neck and all that. Or it might be that you've been anticipating your refund and money's really important to you and you need it to make your house payment or whatever.

And so you're excited. Well, what happens when you're excited? Your heart races and your blood pressure goes up and the hair stands up on the back of your neck. And just be aware that in two different scenarios, one that you would say is scary and one that you would say is exciting, your body is sending you the exact same signals physiologically. So what makes one of them scared and one of them excited is the story that you're telling yourself about what you're feeling, not the feeling itself.

And so what happens to many of us is we feel something and we identify that as a certain negative emotion, and then from now on, that's the story that we tell ourselves about what that feeling means. But if you look at that envelope more closely, you might see that it was addressed to your neighbor. It wasn't even yours, and so it was never true. Neither one was true. Or maybe it's just a notice that they're running behind on processing the turns, it's going be six weeks or whatever.

It's something different than you thought. It just teaches the lesson that not everything you feel turns out to be based in reality. And we know from neuroscience now that your brain doesn't have any ability to discern between something that's actually happening in real time and something that you're just remembering or imagining. So that's the reason that at night, if you hear a sound in your house and your brain says, Oh, there's an axe murderer in the house. He's gonna kill me.

You get really scared, right? And maybe there is one. And if there is, then it's appropriate for you to be scared and you wanna run away. But it also could have been a branch against the window or a deer bumping into your window outside or something. It happens to us all the time here in Nebraska.

An animal runs into the window at night and scares us to death. But there's not an axe murderer in the house. But our body tells us that something's wrong, that there's something scary happening, even when there's not, because your brain can't tell the difference. And so if you teach your kids that, and you teach yourself that, and you teach your spouse that, you teach people around you that, hey, not everything you feel and think turns out to be true. And so if you spend your life reacting to things as if they're true, and they turn out not to be true, then you get frustrated, and then you feel like you're making mistakes, and you start beating yourself up, and you start having to apologize for stuff all the time, and then you end up in this negative cycle all the time.

It really didn't have to happen if you just put that little space in there between stimulus and the response.

And it seems like it's a subtlety, but I think the more that you are trained that your feelings are the most important thing, it can sure send you in a lot of different directions.

And the more you pay attention to that and the more density you put on that feeling, your body will amplify the signal because your brain thinks it's real now, because you've told your brain that you're having it. You say, I feel an anxiety attack coming on. So your brain says, Oh boy, I better get ready to put you in fight or flight because I want to keep you safe. And so then your amygdala fires up, and then your physiological stuff happens, and cortisol gets released, and your body goes into a real emotional state that feels like a panic attack because you made one happen by anticipating that you might have one. And so that's a real phenomenon now.

And it doesn't mean there's anything wrong with you, it's just that you've misplaced your attention and you misdirected your neural inputs to your brain. You understand, I can feel something and it doesn't mean that it's real, and therefore I'm not obligated to react to it as if it is real. And I had to deal with this. I'm not just prescribing stuff. I had to deal with this after the war.

I was deployed to the Iraq war as a combat neurosurgeon, and I survived over a 100 mortar and rocket attacks. So this is in real danger, know, some stuff rolling up and people killed and stuff. I had to do 200 brain surgeries in a tent hospital and all kinds of scary things happening. And three years after that, like I would hear a sound, a car muffler or something, somebody shutting a freezer door, and it felt the same kind of sound, that's a vacuum sort of sound, sounds like a mortar getting launched. And I would feel like I was in danger, like physically feel in danger.

My heart would race, and all that stuff would happen, it PTSD. I know now, but I had to learn how to tell my brain that I wasn't actually in danger and that there was actually nothing objectively wrong. I was just feeling something because a sound made me remember something from a time in my life when I was in danger, but I'm not now. And so I could build myself a case for, Hey, go ahead and abort that panic feeling because there's not actually anything unsafe happening here. And your brain will do it, your brain is always listening to your mind.

Yeah. Wow. One of the things I've, and again, I don't have the knowledge that you do, one of the things that I've had the strong opinion was is that we can't change the memories that we have in our brain, but my observation is the emotions that are attached to those memories seem to mute over time. Like if you lose somebody and they die, the emotions initially are a lot higher than say a decade from now. And that seems to be kind of what I heard you saying even about your time in Iraq, that the emotions weren't necessarily as strong today as twenty years ago or whatever.

They just get stuck in grief or in trauma response or whatever. And we know from the brain now, there's a part of your brain called the anterior cingulate cortex, and it's the part of your brain that's involved in switching from one emotional state to another one, like from being sad to being happy or whatever. And people with complex, profound grief that they don't, and same thing with PTSD, they get stuck there, and their anterior cingulate just basically shuts off. Like, just goes quiet on the scans. And to fix it, what we've learned is you have to engage something else that that part of the brain does.

And that part of the brain is also involved in willpower and resilience and grit and things like that. And so they've learned that if you can make yourself do something hard that feels hard to you that you don't want to do, like when you're sad after trauma, you don't feel like getting out of bed, and you make yourself get out of bed anyway. You don't feel like making your bed, you make yourself make your bed anyway. You don't feel like going to the gym, you do it anyway. If you can make yourself do something you don't want to do, your brain, the singulate gets this message, Okay, I guess even though I don't want to switch, I'm going to switch because you told me to.

And it'll switch and activate a little bit. And then there's this thing called Heb's Law, where Heb's Law says that the neurons that fire repeatedly in the same way they wire and make themselves more robust, so neurons that fire together wire together. So what happens is that when the cingulate activates in response to you having the willpower to do that hard thing, then next time you need to do a hard thing, there's more wiring in there, and it's easier to do the hard thing. It gets easier. And so the more you persist, then it starts to build more robust connections.

And before long, the anterior cingulate comes back online, and those people start processing their emotions better. And so it turns out that doing uncomfortable things is one of the paths to getting through trauma and grief. And so it lines up really well with Romans chapter five, three through five.

You start to develop this sort of character to being the kind of person that can do hard stuff and navigate hard emotions and all that, and you start getting confident, and then that produces hope. So there's this social scientist that came up with this definition of hope that says that hope is the ability to believe that you can get there from here. And they define it as having what they call agency. And agency is the belief that there's something that you can do about the situation that you're in. There's the belief that, okay, can figure this out, I can solve it, there's a path, there's a process that can make it better.

And then there's opportunity to do that thing. And so that means that what the Bible says is to get to hope, you have to suffer a little bit. Like to become the kind of person who can be helpful in the face of hard things, you have to have previously gone through hard things. And that's actually for parents. If there's young people or parents out there, really important to say, we look at our society right now, and we're seeing a generation of young people that are struggling to launch.

They're not getting their driver's licenses when they're 16 as often as they used to. They're not able to go on job interviews without taking a parent frequently now. They're not dating like they used to, and they're not going to college as early as they used to. They're having a hard time because it's scary. And what we've done is we've protected them from suffering when they were little.

We've got this group of parents who were raised with the theory that, Hey, if your kid doesn't like the person they're sitting by in class, you ask the teacher to move them to a different seat. If they don't get on the sports team with their best friend, ask them to be put on a different team so they'll be more comfortable. Like to avoid suffering when they're little. And what we've learned is the brain, in order to be an adult who can operate in a hard world, you have to have gone through some hard things when you were young and learned that you could survive them. Because that engine of navigating hardship and turning it into hope depends on having run a bunch of reps and done that play enough times, at times in your life when it was safe.

Like it's not Nobody dies from having to sit next to a kid that they don't like in first grade, right? But people do die if they're not good drivers because they're too scared to drive, when they finally have to, they get in a car wreck and they die. And that backs up to what you did with them when they were five. You didn't let them play on the monkey bars because you were afraid they would break their arm. Didn't let them, you know, hang out with kids that weren't always nice to them.

You didn't let them play on a sports team when their best friend wasn't there and all that stuff. So they never learned that they actually are resilient enough to get through hard stuff, and they live scared all the time, and they don't know how to move out into their life. So it just turns out neurologically, again, lines up with scripture just right.

And then you get to chapter three, and this guy, whoever wrote Lamentations, the book is not named as to who the author is, but some people think it's the prophet Jeremiah, but whoever it is. He says, basically he's looking at all this suffering that's happening around him, and he says, I am the man who's tasted sorrow. Like he's the guy that's had all these bad things happen, even though all these other people have been killed and murdered and cannibalizing their kids and stuff. He's saying, Woah, man, my life is terrible. And he's starting to recount all of his suffering, right?

He's getting really depressed and hopeless, And he says, I'll never feel hope again. I'll never feel okay again. And then he does this remarkable thing where he gets into that metacognitive state and he snaps himself out of it. And he says, You know what though? I'm going to recall this to mine, and therefore I have hope.

The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases. His mercy has never come to any He preaches to himself stuff that's true. And what he does is he remembers that there's been hard stuff before that God got him through, and he just decides, even though the thing is still going on, he's going to hope that God will do it again. And that gives him the juice to start moving again. And the book goes on for two more chapters and it's still terrible.

So the lesson is he didn't wait to see how it was going to turn out before he decided if he was okay or not. He got himself okay by saying the right things to his brain, and then he proceeded through the hard stuff confidently because he knew God was gonna be there with him in it.

That maybe as a parent, I need to help them take a thought and just kinda inspect it and see whether it's true or not. Like I can help teach my children to reason. And that's of what I hear you saying.

That leads to some devastating consequences from surgical things that get done to kids because they feel certain things, to all kinds of societal and psychological problems that people are having as adults now. That happens because we let them do things that they're not neurologically equipped to do at a time in their life when they really need guidance and structure. And so just if we listened to the science and the scripture instead of societal things, sociology and pressure from culture, then we'd have better outcomes with our kids. So if your real mission is, do I want my kid to feel like that they're happy right now, or do I want them to be equipped to be happy for their whole life and make good decisions that keeps them safe and help them be productive and missional, and have purpose in their lives, all those things. It's a binary choice.

Like you can't give your kid everything they want when they're six, if you want them to know what the right things to want are when they're 16 and 20.

You don't get happier when you do that. There's good research around that too. The path is understand, what's the first time I felt this? What was going on in my life the first time I felt this? Not whose fault was it, but what was happening?

And what stories did I tell myself around it? What were the decisions that I made and the coping skills or responses that I developed around that? And then when I look at my life now, are those things serving me well? I mean, first don't beat yourself up too much, because obviously you survived it, right? You got from 18 to 30 and you made it, survived, you're alive, you're dead, you're not suicidal or whatever, made it.

So some of the things that you did got you through that, so don't beat yourself up about it. But if it's not serving you well now, you're raising a young family and you're saying, Do I want my kids to feel a lot of the stuff that I've felt for the last twelve years or fifteen years or whatever? Do I want them to feel differently than that? Do I want them to get to their thirties and say, Gosh, I wish I hadn't taken all this medicine. I feel kind of numb, it hasn't been the thing for me, or whatever.

And then if you say, Okay, I don't like the responses that I have. I don't like the outcome I'm getting from the way I'm thinking about all this. Then you need to understand two things. One is that all of the trauma research, and the brightest people riding in the trauma space, like Bessel van der Kolk, The Guy The Rope Body Keeps the Score, and Gabbard Mate, and all these famous trauma researchers, all of them agree now that trauma is not actually the thing that happened to you. It's the thoughts you have around that and the responses that you've made in response to it.

And that's, again, the best example of that is that if it was true that your life is irreparably altered by trauma, and I'm not saying if you get your arm cut off, that that is the thing that happened, your arms cut off, that's true. But in terms of your emotional and mental health, the event itself, if it had the inherent power to define the rest of your life, there would be no need for a counseling therapy industry because you couldn't change any of it if it was the event.

And your brain will reward you by giving you a different reality. And so that means that if how things are going for you aren't serving you well, then you need to do the work. You have a responsibility now to do the work, to change those responses so that they will serve you well. Because you want your life to feel right. And all of us had bought this idea that if there's something wrong with my brain and I can't feel right, then the only alternative is medicine despair or whatever.

And that's not the truth. Your brain will become a different brain in real time when you start thinking differently about your life.

I'm not abdicating my responsibility. I'm not weak and stupid because of it. I'm actually smart and wise because I'm going to get that patient the help they need, right? So if we're talking about how do we take care of ourselves, there's going to come some times in your life when you might not have the tools, the training, the insight, the wisdom to actually manage this thing yourself. You might need a professional, mental health professional counselor, pastor, chaplain, therapist, somebody to come alongside you and say, Hey, help me evaluate.

The way I'm thinking isn't helping me. Partner with me to help me understand and give me some tools. So professional help is not bad, but if you're gonna choose that, especially if you're a Christian, make sure that your therapist has the same worldview that you do. That your therapist says, You know what? I do believe in the sovereignty and the sanctity of scripture.

I do believe that the Word has more power than what we think we know about science does. And I do believe that your mind and your brain are not the same thing, you can make your brain better by changing your mind. I do believe it's not all just about prescriptions and blaming your parents and all that. So find you a therapist and interview them, and make sure you have a similar worldview. And don't just abdicate your responsibility to yourself and do whatever they tell you.

Be invested in Be part of the process. There is more mental health resources available today than there ever have been in history. There's more opportunity. There's less stigma. There's just better stuff and more available stuff than ever before.

And yet the problem is getting worse instead of better. The number of people that identify themselves as being anxious or depressed or suicidal or alcoholic is going up. And that tells us that it's not inherently the right move to get professional help or take medicine or any of that. That's not the sole fix for this. The fix for it is you getting invested in your own care, attaching what God has promised you will help you, and doing the work yourself, even though you may occasionally need an outsider to help you focus and get that right.

But I sure appreciate your time. You've been very generous with me today.