New Life LIVE

New Life Narrator: Welcome to the New Life Live Podcast. We hope to provide help and hope in your life through God's Word, counselors, and psychologists as we answer questions from listeners who call with the challenges of life. Let's go to today's episode.

Brian Perez: Welcome to New Life Live. I'm your host, Brian Perez, and we have a very special show for you today because we've got Becky Brown here. She's the president of New Life Ministries. She's also a licensed professional clinical counselor. But Becky, we've also got a special guest. His name is Dr. Lee Warren. He's a neurosurgeon. He's a trauma survivor. He's an Iraq War veteran. Thank you for your service, sir. And an award-winning author. We'll be talking with him today about his new book. It's called The Life-Changing Art of Self-Brain Surgery. Becky, I know you're especially excited to have Dr. Lee on the show.

Becky Brown: I am excited to have Dr. Lee Warren because I heard his story on an interview. Obviously, the life-changing art of self-brain surgery, what does that even mean? I know that you listeners are going to be in for a real treat today as Dr. Warren can answer your questions. But I don't want to take up this time. I want to hear from you, Dr. Warren. I'm just so excited about what you are teaching in this book. The Life-Changing Art of Self-Brain Surgery, how did you even come up with that?

Dr. Lee Warren: First of all, thank you both so much for having me on the show. I'm so grateful. I came up with this concept because as you said, I'm a trauma survivor. I'm not just a neurosurgeon who talks and pontificates about brain science and all that, but also a lifelong Christian and somebody who's been through a lot of stuff.

I went to the Iraq War and did 200 brain surgeries in a tent hospital and survived 100 mortar and rocket attacks and came home with what I now understand to have been PTSD. It took a long time to work through that and to find my feet and my faith again. Then in 2013, our 19-year-old son Mitchell was killed in a crime that was never solved.

Basically, my wife Lisa and I and our other kids were thrown into this despair and this hopelessness that I think a lot of bereaved parents or people who've gone through hard things would feel. The difference in that trauma and the previous ones I'd been through was that I before had always turned to my faith. In this instance, I was really ungrounded from my faith for a while and I was really angry at God and asking all those stereotypical questions that people ask when they're suffering. I was really mad at God for a while.

At the time, my wife Lisa and I, she ran our practice and I was a doctor, a neurosurgeon, and we practiced in Auburn, Alabama. Our practice was on the third floor of a building at the Auburn University campus where they did this functional brain imaging they call it. It's a special type of MRI scan where you can not just see what somebody's brain looks like, but you can actually see what the brain is doing when they're thinking or speaking or doing whatever they're doing.

We suffered after losing Mitchell for about a month and then we had to go back to work. We had our own practice and had a bunch of employees and we just had to go back to work. Shortly after we went back, Lisa and I were invited to watch some of this functional MRI research happen. They put this woman in the scanner and they asked her to think about the worst thing she'd ever been through.

We saw this happen where she used her mind to think about something, and then we saw her brain react to what she was thinking about. Then we saw her vital signs change, her physiology change in response to what her brain was doing. So blood pressure went up and her heart rate went up and her respiratory rate and all that stuff went up. We saw this sequence of mind.

Brian Perez: Well, hold on, Dr. Lee. We've got to take a quick break. So we'll continue our conversation when we come back. But yeah, that's very fascinating because a lot of people I think think that the mind and the brain are the same thing, that they're synonyms. But we'll talk about this more when we come back from the break here on New Life Live. 1-800-229-3000. Our special guest is Dr. Lee Warren. We'll be back.

New Life Narrator: To find out more information about New Life or to order any of the resources mentioned on today's program, call 1-800-NEW-LIFE. Now back to New Life Live.

Brian Perez: We are back on New Life Live. I'm Brian Perez, here with Becky Brown and our very special guest, Dr. Lee Warren, who has written a fascinating book called The Life-Changing Art of Self-Brain Surgery. When I found out we were going to have a brain surgeon on the show, kind of like what you just said, Becky, it's like this is going to be really interesting. They sent me the book so that I could read it ahead of time. And like you said, it's not full of these big words or anything. It's a very, very good book. It's got stories and everything else. In fact, Dr. Lee, you were in the middle of telling us a story when we had to go to break. So where were you, Dr. Lee?

Dr. Lee Warren: We had just lost our son and we were back at work at Auburn University watching this 21st-century neuroscience imaging. Then they asked this woman to think about the worst thing she'd ever felt and we saw what happened in her mind and her brain and her body in response to that. Then they said, "Okay, stop thinking about that hard day and now think about the best thing you've ever felt in your life, your happiest memory."

We quickly saw her brain change in response to what she was thinking. She thought of something different, different areas of her brain lit up, the fear center calmed down, the frontal lobes came online, and her body relaxed. Her blood pressure and heart rate went down. We saw this sequence again: mind changing brain, which changed body.

My wife, Lisa, said, "Hey, that reminds me of Philippians 4." I said, "What do you mean?" She said, "Well, it says don't be anxious, be grateful, and you'll be filled with peace. Think about this thing and not that thing and it'll change how you feel." I'm not a real charismatic guy. I was raised in a fundamental tradition. But as clear as we're talking, the Lord ministered to me in that moment and He said, "Lee, when you do brain surgery, you're intentionally changing the structure of your patient's brain in order to improve their life in some way. That's just what she did."

She changed what she thought about and it changed the structure of her brain and it made her body behave differently. If you're going to feel different about losing Mitchell, you're going to have to change how you're thinking about it. For the past month, I'd been filled with these toxic thoughts and all I could think about was the loss and the past. I just realized in that moment that it's a mechanistically real surgery that we perform on ourselves when we think different thoughts. Your brain changes its structure.

For the last 13 years, I've been pursuing that. How do we tie science and scripture together to understand what God has done to aim at our flourishing? Basically, everything that He prescribes in scripture is for our benefit. I've spent 13 years now putting myself back together with this and now teaching it to other people with writing and podcasts and all those things.

Brian Perez: It's really amazing. The other part of this too is the difference between the mind and the brain. I know that this is part of what you have discovered, Dr. Warren. I know you're not the first one to discover it, but the way that you teach this, explain to our listeners what is the difference between the mind and the brain?

Dr. Lee Warren: It's crucial to understand this. The first part is Christians already sort of believe this, even if we've never thought about it. As a neuroscientist who was a Christian, I had never thought about it really because we're always taught that your brain is who you are. Your brain creates what you're able to do and how smart you are and all the things you're capable of and all that stuff.

But the truth is, God said that we're made in His image and that part of us is going to be alive after our body is dead. That part is what we would call mind, soul, spirit, heart, those things that the Bible sort of conflates. What that means is that the part of you that's made in God's image that's going to live forever is not your physical brain.

When you die and we bury your body, your brain is going to dissolve into the dust. If you can understand that your mind is in charge of your brain, and now this is not controversial in science either because 21st-century neuroscience has proven basically that your brain changes constantly throughout your life. It's never been stuck by your genetics or your upbringing or your physical characteristics or the traumas that you go through. Your brain is constantly changing through this thing that we call neuroplasticity, whereby the things you think about drive structural changes in your brain, which is exactly what Philippians 4 said.

It's exactly why 2 Corinthians 10:5 says to take every thought captive. We know now that the number one driver of these neuroplastic changes in our brain, the thing that makes your mind perform surgery on your brain, is what you think about repeatedly. That's why you see scripture all over the place, Romans 12:2, saying don't be conformed to the world. What's the pattern of the world? Follow your feelings, live your truth, do what makes you happy, all that stuff. But rather be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Change what you think about and it'll change what your brain does. It'll change what your life looks like.

Becky Brown: Romans 12:2 is the core verse for New Life Ministries, so we are all about that. But just that is such a profound concept and I think about our listeners, our callers, people we've helped where we get stuck in our thinking. It's very hard to just say, "Okay, well just stop thinking about it." I mean, you've probably heard that before, right, Dr. Lee?

Dr. Lee Warren: Absolutely. The secret is just to take little small segments of your day where you intentionally bring a different kind of focus to your thought process. This is why I think morning quiet time is so important. Spend some time early in the morning when your brain is in that kind of relaxed theta state and you can direct your attention really well and set your own agenda for your thought life for that day.

Start thinking ahead of the things you're going to encounter and the ways you're going to interact with your family and how your workday may play out and look for places where you typically react in ways that don't help you. Start telling your brain to prepare a different response for that. What we've learned is that your brain can't really tell the difference between something that's actively happening and something that you're just pondering or imagining. You can leverage that to your own benefit if you spend some time imagining a different outcome to your thought life and then therefore your physical life since we know that your thoughts create this physical life now. That's what Jesus said when He said out of a man's heart, your life flows out of your heart.

Basically, if you spend some time in the morning kind of preparing your brain for how it's going to respond in different circumstances, you can begin to leverage that neuroplasticity where you're building a brain that will produce different outcomes than you're used to with your thoughts.

Becky Brown: It's really amazing. We're not talking about things that are easy to get over. The fact that you and your wife were able to work through the grief, and I know grief doesn't disappear, I know that it's something that gets incorporated into our lives, but it was the loss of your son. I mean, any parent that has lost a child, it's devastating and it usually is the thing that will break up a marriage. The fact that you guys were able to make a shift and experience that, talk more about that because I know grief is a big thing that we deal with here at New Life and grief comes in many different shapes and sizes. But that's a pretty significant shift for the two of you to be able to come through that grief. Just talk more about how you made that change.

Dr. Lee Warren: I think the first thing to say is, as you said, grief is a process and it's just like wound healing. As a surgeon, I can't expect to cut my patient open and have them healed the next day. There's a process of how that wound is going to have to heal and if you interrupt it or try to skip it, you're going to get an infection or something bad's going to happen and that's how grief works. It's a process of healing.

Don't hear anything that we're saying today as saying you can just change what you think about and you won't be sad anymore. That's not how it works. It's more like what Jesus said in John 10:10 where He said the thief comes to steal and kill and destroy, but I came that you might have life and have it abundantly. He didn't say, "I came to stop all that stealing and killing business and you'll just be happy." He didn't say that. He said the thief's doing this and you can have an abundant life.

The secret to grief for us is that we recognized that there were still a lot of true things in our lives besides this big thing that was true of losing our son that would always be true. As it turned out, God gave us what felt like a thorn at the first, but it turned out to be a great blessing. Our first granddaughter Scarlett was born on the day we buried our son.

Our daughter was in San Antonio expecting us to be there when she had her first baby and we were burying her brother and she couldn't be there because she was having her child. As it turned out, while we were having the funeral, we were getting text messages with pictures of the baby and Katie's okay and Scarlett's okay. It was this little bit of light mixed in with the darkness.

It was sort of like God said, "Hey, don't forget, there's more than one thing that's true at the same time." That's kind of what grief does. Grief sort of focuses your gaze and all you can see is that thing you've lost. Over time, healing expands your gaze again and you can start to see that other things are still true. That's what happened for us is we got that early little bit of light that allowed us to pivot then into healing and be aware that we weren't going to stop feeling sad, but we still had things to be grateful for and happy about at the same time.

Brian Perez: Very powerful. Our guest today on New Life Live is Dr. Lee Warren, who's written this book called The Life-Changing Art of Brain Surgery. It's available for purchase in the NewLife.com store. We've often heard the phrase mind over matter over the years. Is that kind of what your book is about? What does that mean?

Dr. Lee Warren: Absolutely. Matter refers to material things like your physical brain. If you think of your brain as an organ, like your kidneys, your lungs, your heart, the brain is the organ that allows the mind, the immaterial, not matter, but the immaterial part of you to interact with the world around you.

God gave you a spirit, a mind, a heart, this non-material part of you that's going to live forever and He gave you a physical body. We talked earlier about Romans 12:2 that says don't be conformed to the world but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Romans 12:1 turns out to be about your body. It says present your bodies as a living sacrifice to God, that's your reasonable, essential act of worship, is how the voice translation translates it.

If you think about Romans 12:1 is about your brain, your physical body including your brain. Romans 12:2 is about not conforming but being transformed by the renewing of your mind. The mind helps you transform your body and worship God with your body. Mind and brain are right there. God told us all along they're not the same thing.

The punchline to Romans 12:2 is the reason He wants to transform you by the renewing of your mind is so that you can test and approve what God's good, pleasing, and perfect will for your life is. If you start to understand what God wants for you, that's how you can grab onto the abundance that Jesus said He came here to give you. In the midst of all that stealing and killing and destroying business, you figure out what God wants for your life and then He's designed you actually with all these processes to enable your brain to go and get it.

Becky Brown: It's really astonishing because I know we have talked about changing your mind or mind over matter, but the process itself is what we all need help with, right? It's what you had mentioned before about taking that first part of your day and setting the purpose and thinking on these things, right? It's really amazing. I think what's also interesting too is how it's not just something that you have learned and you're telling other people to do, it's something that has impacted your own life. I know so many people who struggle where depression is concerned and depression is a brain and a mind disorder. It's both things. Have you helped people with that self-brain surgery where depression is concerned?

Dr. Lee Warren: Absolutely. It's important to note as we're talking about these things that obviously there's a lot of things that can cause depression and major depression can be a physical disorder. If you're struggling with mood disorders or any of these things, make sure you check with your doctor. Make sure it's not your thyroid, make sure it's not something physical with your body that you need to deal with because there are things that can cause you to have a depressed mood that can be medical and need to be addressed with your doctor. Don't hear anything we're saying as a substitute for the advice of your doctor.

That being said, the vast majority of the time when we have a depressed mood or we feel depressed, it's not the same as having a major depressive disorder. What we've learned is there are many ways to get your brain to feel better by generating a better neurochemical environment. One of the most powerful ones of those is to leverage that thing we talked about earlier where your brain doesn't know the difference between what's really happening and what you're just imagining.

We have this dopamine reward system which a lot of times with depression or depressed mood, one of the issues is the dopamine and the serotonin levels in your brain. We know now that just thinking about taking a different set of actions or having a different outcome with your life can boost the dopamine levels in your brain, give you some reward. If you start to just control, again leverage your thought life to think about yourself in a place where you're not as depressed as you are now. What kinds of things do people who aren't depressed do? Well, they exercise more, they move more, they change their diet, they engage with other people more. If you start seeing yourself in those situations, you get a little bit of change in your brain chemistry and you start feeling better.

Brian Perez: Our guest is Dr. Lee Warren and we're going to take a quick break here on New Life Live. 1-800-229-3000 is our number. His book is called The Life-Changing Art of Self-Brain Surgery. It's available at NewLife.com. It's not brain surgery on someone else that you're doing, you're doing it on yourself, which sometimes people will call to New Life Live and they'll say, "How do I change my husband?" It's like, "Well, sometimes it's about changing your perspective first." So we'll be right back here on New Life Live.

New Life Narrator: To find out more information about New Life or to order any of the resources mentioned on today's program, call 1-800-NEW-LIFE. Now back to New Life Live.

Brian Perez: We're back here on New Life Live. I'm Brian Perez, here with Becky Brown, the president of New Life Ministries. She's also a licensed professional clinical counselor. We've also got Dr. Lee Warren. He's an author, he's a neurosurgeon. He's written this book that's available in the NewLife.com store, The Life-Changing Art of Self-Brain Surgery. Earlier really quick we were speaking about grief and depression. We have a webinar coming up next week, next Thursday, July 16th. You can find out all about it on our website, NewLife.com, or by calling 1-800-NEW-LIFE. You can also text the word "webinar" to 28950 and we'll send you back a link where you can register and also a free tip sheet on grief. But Becky, you and Alice are going to be hosting this one.

Becky Brown: Yes. As I had mentioned earlier in this conversation, grief is such a universal experience. We all experience it individually, we all experience it in a different way. But even as Dr. Lee's talking about his own, he and his wife's recovery and journey of grief, it really is powerful just how we do have the ability to overcome. It is part of our faith journey. I love that you're integrating scripture into your work, Dr. Lee. I think about the people that we talk to that are facing chronic pain or old emotional wounds, they feel stuck and helpless like they can't think any different. Can self-brain surgery help them reduce the suffering and develop more resilience?

Dr. Lee Warren: Absolutely. I would say that the one thing that we've been lied to about with our society goes back to this idea that our brains create who we are, what we're capable of, and that trauma or our upbringing or adverse circumstances can harm our brains in a way that changes who we are. People begin to absorb these things as what they identify with as their identity. "I am depressed. I am anxious. I am betrayed. I am broken," or whatever, "I am bereaved." So we begin to believe that that defines who we are.

But the truth is scripture and now neuroscience have said, if you look at Isaiah 48:10, God says, "I will refine you in the furnace of suffering." And then you look at Romans chapter five, three through five, where he says suffering produces endurance and endurance produces character and character produces hope. Then we pivot to neuroscience and we know now there's a part of your brain called the anterior mid-cingulate cortex. It's kind of right in the middle. It turns out to be the part of the brain that gets stuck in people with complex grief that lasts a long time. These people that get stuck in yearning and can't move into a different emotional state, turns out that imaging studies show that the anterior mid-cingulate is unable to shift them into a different emotional state.

But there's been some new research that shows that it's the same area of the brain that's involved in willpower and resilience and grit. You can leverage that by saying if you have something that feels like you can't do it or don't want to do it, like when you're grieving, I didn't want to get out of bed. I had shingles and I gnawed my, I broke all my molars from grinding my teeth. I developed shingles shortly after my son died. My hair turned gray. My body was breaking down and I did not want to get out of bed.

But what I figured out is if I made myself get out of bed and just move around the house, I would feel a little bit better. What we know now is that the anterior mid-cingulate, when you make yourself do something hard that you don't want to do, it gets this message that says, "Hey, this person is telling me that even if I don't feel like it, I need to be able to enable them to move or to change their emotional state."

Then it puts down some new neurons and new connections. That's neuroplasticity again. It makes it easier to move or do something hard across the board, even if it's a different thing. Basically, your brain starts lowering the inertia for you to take new action because you make it take an action when you don't feel like it. It's powerful. You can image it now. So it's not something you're thinking, it's something that's actually happening structurally in your brain. It's surgery, just like we do in the operating room.

Then you go back to that verse in Romans that says, "Hey, suffering produces endurance." You see that your brain says, "Okay, if you're suffering and you get stuck and you make yourself do something hard, then your brain gets a little bit more durable and more resilient." Then what happens then is you say, "Well, guess what? I guess I'm the kind of person who can do something hard when I don't feel like it." That changes my character. That's giving me confidence because then smart people, all of us have realized this isn't the last hard thing I'm going to go through. Something else hard is coming. Then they develop hope that says, "Hey, the next time it gets hard, I know my brain's going to support me in getting through that hard thing." It turns out that the Bible has written us a promise that neuroscience is now able to demonstrate the mechanics of how it works. That's how you move forward. You trust that you're designed to get better in the face of adversity, to be refined by the suffering. All of us have this choice. Am I going to be defined by this or am I going to be refined by it?

Becky Brown: I love that because that is the hope. We will face hard things and then guess what? We'll get over those hard things and then there'll be other hard things. That's why heaven is going to be glorious because we won't have those difficult things anymore. But I also love the idea that our quality of life will be determined by the way that we think about the things that we've overcome and the faithfulness of God in the middle of all of that. It's really profound. We're not created for it to just be comfortable the rest of our lives and it's all going to go our way.

Brian Perez: I think that's a lot of times what Christians believe. If God loved us, why would He be putting us through this? Our life should be more easy, more comfortable, and why does God put us through hard things? We get those calls all the time. Our guest is Dr. Lee Warren. It's time for us to take another break here on New Life Live. Pick up his book in the NewLife.com store. It is called The Life-Changing Art of Self-Brain Surgery. We'll be back here on New Life Live.

New Life Narrator: To find out more information about New Life or to order any of the resources mentioned on today's program, call 1-800-NEW-LIFE. Now back to New Life Live.

Brian Perez: We're back here on New Life Live. I'm Brian Perez, here with Becky Brown, the president of New Life Ministries. She's also a licensed professional clinical counselor. We've also got Dr. Lee Warren. He's an author, he's a neurosurgeon. He's written this book that's available in the NewLife.com store, The Life-Changing Art of Self-Brain Surgery. One of the things that inspired Dr. Lee to write this book is the story of Dr. Leonid Rogozov. He was part of an Antarctic expedition and he had to perform some self-surgery. It's just amazing to read that in the book, Dr. Lee. So tell us the story of Dr. Leonid.

Dr. Lee Warren: Leonid Rogozov was a young Soviet general surgeon who in 1961 was deployed to the Antarctic with a research team to explore the South Pole. Somebody realized as they were preparing this team to go down there that they were going to be there, the winter was going to come, the ocean was going to freeze, and there'd be no way to rescue them if something happened until the springtime. So they should send a doctor with them. Rogozov was the doctor that went with the team.

What nobody thought about, though, was what if the doctor gets sick? Shortly after they got there, Rogozov starts running a fever and developed abdominal pain and started getting really sick. He kept a diary that his family has. You can read it online now. It's really interesting. He said, "I've got a fever, my white blood cell count is up, my abdomen hurts. I must have appendicitis."

Then he was in trouble because if you have appendicitis and you don't have surgery, you easily die, especially in 1961 before we had powerful antibiotics and all that. Rogozov began in his diary to really despair. He went down all these rabbit holes of worst-case scenario. "I'm never going to see my family again. I'll never return home again." Woe is me kind of stuff. He was thinking thoughts that were true. He was the only one there that knew how to take out an appendix and there was nobody to come and save him. So he really was in trouble.

But then something remarkable happened because he decided to engage in what you psychologists call metacognition. Instead of just feeling his feelings and thinking his thoughts, he decided to think about his thoughts and feelings and his situation from a different perspective. He said, "Wait a minute. People who have appendicitis need to have surgery and I'm a surgeon. People who have their appendix inflamed need to have it out and I know how to perform an appendectomy."

He thought about the problem from a different perspective and he trained a mechanic to pass him instruments and to slap him in case he passed out from the pain. He trained another guy to hold a mirror up for him and Leonid Rogozov removed his own appendix and saved his own life. I tell that story in the book because the only reason he could do that was not primarily because he was a surgeon, but it was because he was willing to examine his circumstances and his thoughts and his feelings from a different perspective instead of just experiencing them.

Most people never stop for a second to interrogate the content of their thought or emotional life. In the 21st century with neuroimaging, we know now that something like 80% of the automatic thoughts and feelings that we have in our day-to-day life, there's 60 to 80,000 thoughts a day that pop into our head, and something like two-thirds to 80% of them are skewed towards negativity or are flatly false. That means that if you react as if everything you think or feel is true, then about 80% of the time you're going to be off-base in one way or another. This is why we so often have to apologize for things. We read a text message and it makes us mad, so we reply angrily, and then the person writes back and says, "Wait, that's not what I said at all. I didn't mean that." You read it again and you missed a word or you didn't give them the benefit of the doubt and now you're repairing a relationship because you reacted emotionally to something that was never true.

Rogozov was able to sort of shift out of that thought and feeling loop that most of us are trapped in and change his perspective and that's what allowed him to save his life. He recognized that the help he needed had to come from within. I talk about this all the time. Self-brain surgery, it is self-help because you've got to do it, you've got to operate the system, but it's not self-reliance. God gave us the brain that He designed for us with this ability to heal. He gave us the mind with the ability to control the brain and therefore the body. In Philippians 2:13, He works in us to will and to act in accordance with His good pleasure. He puts the drive to do these good things in us and we just have to be obedient. But He will not pick up the scalpel, Brian, for you. You have to operate it yourself. It's self-help but not self-reliance.

Brian Perez: That is so good. I think we talked about this earlier, how when people say "I'm depressed," "I'm grieving," a lot of people have almost an automatic negativity about them. You ask them, "How are you doing today?" and the response is immediately something awful that is going on in their life. We're not trying to minimize that they're going through something awful, but it's just how there's just that constant, always negative. You describe in your book about a thought biopsy. Tell us what that would mean in this regard.

Dr. Lee Warren: If you came into my office and you said, "Hey, doc, I've been having headaches," if the first thing I said was, "Well, let's just go to the operating room and I'll cut your head open and look around, see what's going on in there," you'd say, "Hang on a second. That's malpractice. Don't you need to do a scan or get some information before you go drilling into my skull?" You'd be right. But most of us just have a thought or a feeling and we react to it as if it's true.

Since we know that so many of those things are not in fact true, then we need to develop a process by which we take a few seconds to investigate the content of our thoughts and feelings and be curious about them. Ask some questions, be a little cynical about them. That's what 2 Corinthians 10:5 is all about. We take every thought captive and make it our slave. We are not going to let our automatic thoughts and feelings make us make decisions that are so often incorrect.

If you feel stuck, most of the time it's because you're reacting to everything you think and feel as if it's true. There's some other interesting research that says that about 90% of the thoughts that we have from day to day are the same thoughts that we had the day before. That means most of us are spending our time thinking about the same set of things: our mortgage, our marriage, our family, our future, our job. We think about the same stuff from the same perspective over and over and over.

Since earlier I told you that the primary thing that drives this neuroplastic renewing of our brain every day is what you're thinking about, since most of us think about the same stuff from the same perspective over and over, then what we're doing is just building our brain more robustly to function as it has been functioning. That's why we all start feeling like this is just who I am. It's not because your brain is stuck that way, it's because you keep telling it to rewire itself in the same way every day. So if you can learn first to investigate your thoughts and then think differently and give your brain some different targets for neuroplasticity, you'll begin to build a different brain that's not so reactive, that's not so automatically negative, that's not so anxious all the time. You begin to build a brain that supports you in seeking abundance that God came here to give you.

Becky Brown: Are you even aware listeners? Are you even thinking about what you're thinking about? What is that internal drive that's inside of you? What do you spend your time thinking about? I think so many times we're so unaware of what we're thinking or even feeling. We just are in a state of reaction. You also mention, Dr. Lee, about how in this contemporary culture, we're all about how we feel, yet we're not even relating to the truth of those feelings. We're so dependent on everything being perfect that when it's not, which it rarely ever is perfect, it dysregulates us and we can't function. But I think there's hope if we can think about what we're thinking about.

Dr. Lee Warren: Absolutely there's hope. Most of us have it exactly backwards. We think that we feel the way we feel because reality is a certain way. But the truth is reality is largely based on how you tell your brain to perceive it. Most of what we experience is this filtering mechanism that we have in our brainstem called the reticular activating system. The reticular activating system literally listens for your mental instruction as to what it's supposed to pay attention to and filter for, and then it begins to filter everything else out.

This is why you have had days where you overslept your alarm or you woke up in a bad mood and you said, "This is going to be a terrible day." All of a sudden, everything you see shows you proof that you're having a terrible day. You'll walk past your little girl who drew you a picture on your way out the door, you don't even notice because you're too busy. You yell at your wife and she's trying to hand you breakfast. You fuss at your husband. You're building a world that's showing you evidence you're going to have a lousy day. You miss the sunrise and the beautiful clouds and the flowers growing and you get yourself so worked up that you run a red light and get a ticket and then you're late to work and you miss a meeting in which your boss was going to give you a promotion. All these things happen because you built a brain that made you see that evidence it was going to be a bad day. It didn't have to be that way because all those other things were still true.

Brian Perez: I think about the verse that says, "This is the day the Lord has made. I will rejoice and be glad in it." We're speaking with Dr. Lee Warren, author of the book The Life-Changing Art of Self-Brain Surgery. You can pick it up in the NewLife.com store. We're going to go to the phones now on New Life Live. We've got a call here from Calvin in Dallas, Texas. Hi there, Calvin. Welcome.

Calvin: Dr. Lee, I have one quick question regarding Alzheimer's. Could you elaborate on Alzheimer's and any possibility for prevention for it?

Dr. Lee Warren: Alzheimer's is a structural brain disease. We know it actually causes changes in the areas of your brain related to memory and focus. I can't tell you that everything about Alzheimer's can be corrected with different types of thinking. However, there's really good research that shows that cognitive approaches can make a difference in all of the structural dementias. What that means is your mind still has controlling influence over your brain, even as your physical brain health declines. There's been tremendous improvement in many types of dementias with cognitive therapeutic approaches, like cognitive behavioral therapy. If you leverage the power of neuroplasticity, there clearly is benefit in even structural significant dementias like Alzheimer's.

Calvin: Do methods like transcendental meditation provide any help or prevention of Alzheimer's?

Dr. Lee Warren: I think so. Meditation, and I think especially in the Christian context, if you think of meditation not in the Eastern context of just trying to empty your mind of everything, but in the Christian context of trying to focus your mind to hear God's voice, there's clearly some benefit. Brain scans have shown that you activate the right hemisphere of your brain very powerfully when you're doing meditative-type prayer. The right hemisphere is involved in activating all kinds of different cognitive areas that can give you a bigger picture and a bigger story rather than kind of focusing you on the one thing that's happening in your life. I think there's good evidence that these meditative practices can be beneficial.

Becky Brown: When you talk about structural processes in the brain, like Alzheimer's or maybe even if somebody's had a stroke, those structural changes are impacted. That's what you're saying, right? It's not that it doesn't fix it, but they are impacted by your thought process.

Dr. Lee Warren: That's right. There's a guy named Norman Doidge, who's a doctor who's studied neuroplasticity extensively. He's not a Christian, but he's written a book called The Brain That Changes Itself and another book called The Brain's Way of Healing. Tremendous, amazing things that have happened in Parkinson's, dementias, stroke recovery, even visual loss that have shown that neuroplasticity can be applied to make the brain actually work better in areas even where it has lost function.

So stroke patients that have learned to walk again, for example, and people that have been cortically blind learning to see again, there's tremendous power in leveraging neuroplasticity. Since we know that that's actually how God designed our brains to respond to our mind to give us the opportunity to seize on to some of His prescriptions for our flourishing, then that means that you should never think that something is beyond your ability to improve it or heal it potentially.

Rumination and meditation are really just two sides of the same coin. They're directed in different places. Rumination is directed towards the worst-case scenario, the harmful outcome. Meditation is directed on how can God help me leverage His design for my brain and my body to improve my life as He said He came here to allow me to do.

If there's a process that God gave you to improve your life and the enemy can convince you that it won't work for you, then that's a win for the enemy. Almost every time I'm talking about our ability to improve our lives with our thoughts, somebody comes up after a speech and says, "Hey, wait a minute, but you don't know about my anxiety or my ADHD or my particular experience." The truth is the Bible says very clearly in 1 Peter 1:3, "His divine power has given us everything we need for life and godliness." It doesn't say He gave some of us part of what we need. 1 Corinthians 2:16 says He's given us the mind of Christ. We know we have access to how Christ would think about your situation and that changing your thinking changes how your brain works. The question is, do you want to keep thinking the thoughts that have gotten you to the place where you are now, or do you want to let Christ and the Holy Spirit help you change your thinking to potentially get yourself into a better place?

Brian Perez: We've only got about a minute left, Dr. Lee. Thank you so much for being on the show today. I love the fact that we have a neurosurgeon on the show today because sometimes people look at Christians and faith and they say, "Well, they can't be compatible." Could you tell us how they are and what your studies have shown about the compatibility of science and faith?

Dr. Lee Warren: It's a total fallacy. It's a media and enemy-generated lie that science and faith are in opposition to one another. Western science was founded by Christians: Galileo, Brahe, Copernicus, all those guys with the intention of showing what God had done so that people could be in awe of Him and worship Him and understand Him more clearly. Science has always been about revealing what's true. Scripture's always been about what's true and science has always been about becoming less wrong over time. So if you think about it, they're aiming in the same direction, but scripture never has to change and science constantly does. Science is the process of understanding over time more and more of what God is done.

Brian Perez: The book again is called The Life-Changing Art of Self-Brain Surgery. You can pick it up in the NewLife.com store. Becky, why should people donate to New Life?

Becky Brown: Because as you hear the callers that call in, people are struggling and New Life has been helping people with godly Christian counseling for decades. We are investing into the transformation of lives. That's the core of what we do here at New Life. So when you give, you're doing that and I want to say thank you in advance.

Brian Perez: That is about all the time we have on today's episode. I'm Brian Perez, for Becky Brown, and our guest Dr. Lee Warren today. We'll talk to you next time here on New Life Live. God bless.

New Life Narrator: Thanks so much for listening. We hope something you heard will help you live in freedom today. If this content was helpful for you, we would love it if you would take a minute, leave a review, post about it, and rate it. Remember we have resources and workshops online for you as you continue your journey. Go to NewLife.com to find out more information. And thank you for being part of the New Life community. We know that God desires all of us to live a life of wholeness and healing and we're so glad that you're here.