Classic: Who Self-Brain Surgeons Are (S13E54)

Introduction

0:00Hey, it's your friend, Dr. Lee Warren. I am grateful and honored that you're here today spending time with me for some self-brain surgery. If nobody else has told you this today, I'm proud of you. We love you. We're grateful for you. And we know that you're the kind of person who isn't sitting around waiting for something to get better. You're ready to get after it. You're taking the bull by the horns. You're learning self-brain surgery so you can achieve healing and hope and higher performance, that Triple H therapy of self-brain surgery that you're always talking about. And I got some exciting news for you. We are at December 1st

0:31when you're hearing this. We are 62 days away now from the launch of my brand new book, The Life-Changing Art of Self-Brain Surgery. I want you, if you're new around here, I want you to go back to November 1st on the podcast that's on YouTube as well and go back to the episode on November 1st that we called the 100 Days to a Transformed Life. All the episodes that we recorded in November. There's some video-only episodes on YouTube. There's some audio-only episodes over on the podcast apps like Apple and Spotify. So make sure you're

1:03subscribed to both places to ensure that you catch every episode that we release. The best way to do that is to subscribe to the newsletter over at drleewarren.substack.com or my website, drleewarren.com. You can sign up for the newsletter. That way you make sure you get everything that we're doing. Because in the next 60 days, we're going to be creating and releasing to you a lot more content than we have been in the last few months. I'm going to inundate you with every tool you could possibly need to transform your life before the book comes out

1:34on February 3rd. I'm doing that because I want you to have a three-month download, a three-month sort of compendium that if you never read or listen to anything else that I record or release or write, if you don't ever buy my books or get my newsletter, if all you have are November to February podcasts, I want to make sure that you have a transformational library of material at your fingertips that you can listen to anytime you want to make sure you have a good handle on how you can transform your

2:05thinking and your life by mastering the art of self-brain surgery. And I hope that you'll find it so valuable that you'll want to read the book because the book is going to blow your mind. It's going to expand your territory. It is going to open doors for you. It's going to eliminate barriers for you. It's going to help set you free from some of the things that have been hindering you and holding you back for way too long. And it's going to help us all get ready to step into the life that God intends for you to be able to have, for us to be able to have in 2026 and beyond. It's going to

2:38change relationships. It's going to change marriages. It's going to change families. It's going to help kids and parents. How do I know this? Because the people who have read the book already are sending me emails that say things like that. This might save my marriage. This helped me stop drinking alcohol. This is going to help me in my career. This is going to help me in my finances. This book is changing my life. So with all that being said, today we're inside, almost inside of 60 days. And I'm going to give you some insanely practical and tactical things in December and January.

3:08We're going to have at least 20 and maybe more episodes. Some of them, again, will be just on YouTube. Some will be only on the audio apps. So make sure you're subscribed in both places and we are ready

Upcoming Content

3:19to get after it. Today, I'm going to give you some information about exactly who self-brain surgeons are. Who are we? Now, you already know this if you've been listening or reading for a while. You know that we're not the kind of people that sit around and wait for life to change. We're the kind of people who are becoming the change that we want. We're not just thinking and reacting. We're not just feeling and reacting to things anymore automatically. We're not letting our traumas and our tragedies and our massive things hold us back or force us into some type of life where we think we

3:51have to behave and live the way we always have. We recognize now that the things we think about have structural performance command on the brain. The things you think about tell the brain what it's supposed to do. And you're rewiring in real time, all the time, to become a new person as soon as you change the things you think about. So today, I'm going to just give you some things. It's not a complete list. And I'll probably, in fact, do another episode this month with some more things about who self-brain surgeons are. But these are some that I came

4:21up with this morning and just sort of charted out some basic character traits that people who identify themselves as self-brain surgeons will have. If you go through this training, if you do the work, if you really focus on taking your thoughts captive and learning how to manage your mind and control your brain and your body, your physiology, your genetics, your epigenetics, the people around you are getting better because you're getting better, you're breaking change, you're finding some momentum again, you're believing that you can feel hope again no matter what you've been through. If you're that kind of person, then you're going to see that the things we talk about today will become character traits that you develop over time. Because before we

Self-Brain Surgery Basics

4:57talk about what self-brain surgery does, we need to talk about the kind of people who do it. So a self-brain surgeon is a person who has learned the most radical truth that neuroscience and scripture both teach. And that is this, your mind is not at the mercy of your brain. Friend, your brain changes in response to your mind. This is not positive thinking. It's not pop psychology. It is directed neuroplasticity. It's a process God gave you and expects you to learn.

5:29It's guided by this, this thing that we call metacognition, this idea that only humans have of all the things that God created. Only humans have the ability to not just think and feel things, but to think about the things that we think and feel. And we can change those things if they're not serving us well. So self-brain surgery then is directed neuroplasticity guided by metacognition, attention and intention. So if you can, if you can wrap your mind around those things, metacognition, this idea that you can get outside of what you're thinking about and think about that

6:03thing instead. And then you get to choose what you pay attention to. That's a huge one. Most people think that we feel something, we think something, we see something, and we have to pay attention to it and deal with it. But the truth is you have agency and choice in the things that you choose to pay attention to. And we know now, as we'll discuss later from neuroscience, that attention is a commodity and you only have so much of it. So it's super important to learn how to spend your attention. We say pay attention. It's like having a certain amount of money in your wallet. You can

6:34only pay so much before you're out of it. You learn how to pay attention on the things that really matter. And then you set your intention because we know now from quantum physics and from neuroscience that what you intend has a large influence on what actually transpires. It's not that you're just living your life and things happen and you have to deal with them. It's that the way you set your intention, the way you set your filters, the way you pay attention actually affects what turns out to be true and real. And the outcome of things that you experience has a lot to do with what you

7:05intend to find when you deal with them. So we're going to talk about metacognition, attention, and intention a lot in the coming months because those are three things that we can direct and control and no longer have to be at the mercy of because of the gift of selective attention and neuroplasticity. This is Romans 12, 2. Don't be conformed to the world. Be transformed by the renewing of your mind. It's 2 Timothy 1, 7. You weren't given a spirit of fear, but of power and of love and of a sound mind. It's Philippians 4, 8. It's think about this stuff and not that stuff and you won't be as

7:38anxious. It's the updated neuroscience consensus that attention changes the structure and function of the brain. So who are we? What makes a self-brain surgeon a self-brain surgeon and why are you one and why do you want to be one? This is not a personality profile. It's not some people are good at metacognition and some aren't. It's a decision profile. When I say what kind of person is a self-brain surgeon, it's a person who decides that they want to feel different tomorrow

8:10than they have felt in the previous months and years. That they want to do things differently tomorrow than they have done in the past. That they want to experience life on a higher level of that graph that we always talk about. How satisfied am I with my life? How close to what I think I'm designed for? What I think I'm called to? What I think I'm supposed to be living? How close to that life am I actually getting? That's a decision profile. You don't have to be a victim of your circumstances anymore. And regardless of what circumstances you go through, you can continue to improve your quality of life, your peace of mind, your self-esteem,

8:45and the impact that you have on others throughout your entire life through the process of self-brain

Character Traits of Self-Brain Surgeons

8:52surgeons. So who are self-brain surgeons? Number one, we are more resilient than other people. Why is that? Because resilience isn't something that you're born with or without. Resilience isn't a trait. It is a trained mental state. You learn how to be resilient. And the sort of interesting trick of neuroscience and scripture is it turns out that it's not just that some people are good at it and some aren't, but people become resilient by going through hard things and not giving up and pressing through those things. Not shying away from things that are uncomfortable

9:24or difficult. It's a trained mental state. MRI studies from people like Andrew Newberg, Sarah Lazar, and Richard Davison show that mindfulness and metacognition, which we talk about all the time, mindfulness is this sort of meditation. And in a Christian standpoint, it's this learning how to quiet the noise in your head, the automatic thoughts and feelings so you can hear the voice of God, the one voice that's going to help you. And metacognition, again, that thinking about your thinking instead of just thinking your thoughts, that those two things, mindfulness and metacognition, increase activity and the volume of the gray matter in your prefrontal cortex, which is

10:01your executive decision maker. So that means that being intentional and mindful and getting into that metacognitive state increases the size and the power of the parts of your brain that help you make better decisions. They also increase the size and the power of your anterior cingulate cortex, which is involved in willpower and drive and the hippocampus, which is involved in resilience and emotional processing, memory tagging and deciding whether you're going to be anxious or you're going to be cognitive, those kinds of things that meditation and metacognition increase your ability to do those

10:34things. So in real terms, in structural neurosurgical terms, you are creating a brain that is more resilient when you choose to strive to become more resilient. So that's who a self-brain surgeon is, a person who is more resilient than other people because they're training for it, they're preparing for it, they desire it and they're pursuing it. These are the parts of the brain, the cingulate cortex, the hippocampus and the prefrontal cortex. These are the regions of the brain that handle focus, emotional regulation

11:05and stress recovery. Now scripture has been saying it all along before the MRI scanners did. God hasn't given us a spirit of fear, but of power, of love and of a sound mind. That's 2nd Timothy 1 7. A sound mind is a trained and resilient mind. If someday, if I meet you at a book signing and you ask me to sign your copy of the life-changing art of self-brain surgery, I'm going to sign it 2nd Timothy 1 7 because I want you to know, I want you to live in that place where you know, God didn't give me a spirit of

11:37fear. So if I'm feeling fear, it's not from God. He gave me a spirit of power, of love and of a sound mind. And I can use that sound mind to engage these processes to help me become more resilient. A sound mind is a trained and resilient mind. Self-brain surgeons bounce back faster when they go through hard things. Not because their lives are easier, but because our minds are steadier. What's the 2nd one? Self-brain surgeons are happier than people that don't practice these things.

12:09That's not just an opinion either, by the way. It's measurable in MRI scanners. It's imageable. It's measurable on psychological profiles. It's measurable in the number of antidepressants they require, the number of therapy visits they require. It's measurable in the fact that they live longer, they feel better, they have fewer chronic illnesses. Happier, more positive people are people that learn how to manage their minds. This isn't by accident. It's by attention. It's by learning how to pay attention to the right things in the right way. Happiness is not the product, friend, of perfect

12:44circumstances. Happiness is the byproduct of what we repeatedly pay attention to. If you're constantly paying attention to the wounds, the problems, the issues, the offenses, then you're never going to be okay. You're never going to be happy because how you pay attention tells your brain that that's what you want to focus on and that's what you want to create in your future. This mind that's focused on the negative. That affects your physiology. It affects your electromagnetic field. It affects your epigenetic expression of genes. It makes your kids more stressed out when they're born.

13:16So focusing on things that you can change, on ways that you can become more positive, on ways that you can look at a situation and find lessons and not wounds, on ways that you can reframe things and re-story things so you're forward focused and future focused, that's going to help you become a more happy, more well-rounded, emotionally resilient person. That's self-brain surgery. In neuroscience, we call it the Hebbian triad. Remember the neuroscientist, the Canadian neuroscientist

13:47Donald Hebb gave us what we call Hebb's law, neurons that fire together, wire together. So the Hebbian triad is that what you fire, you wire, and what you wire becomes your default, and your default becomes your experience of life. So I'm always telling you, you are a co-creator with God of what becomes real in your life. God created you. He created your brain. He created your mind. He created your physical body, and He gives you all kinds of tools to use those things in a way that honors Him and helps you to live that abundant life that Jesus talked about in John 10.10.

14:21So if you then understand that the system literally is asking you how you want it to wire, how you want it to perform, that your brain is listening for your instructions, as Daniel Amon says, your brain's always listening. Once you understand that, then you get this Hebbian triad and bake it in and understand it and believe it and practice it. What you fire, you wire. When you think something, your brain responds by wiring that in to make that particular thought and the response that you asked your brain to carry out in response to that thought becomes hardwired and more automated,

14:55so that over time that becomes less and less cognitive. You don't have to think about it as much, and more and more automated, so that what you fire, you wire. What you wire becomes your default, and your default becomes how you experience your life, and before you know it, you think, this is just how I am. Did you know three out of four U.S. homes have toxic chemicals in their tap water? Even though contaminated water looks clear, it could put you at risk for devastating health concerns, including fatigue, hormone disruption, cognitive decline, even cancer. Surprisingly,

15:26standard fridge and pitcher filters do very little to remove most contaminants, and bottled water contains microplastics. So what's the solution? Introducing AquaTrue, the countertop water purifier tested and certified to remove 84 contaminants, including chlorine, lead, forever chemicals, and microplastics. It's got a patented four-stage reverse osmosis system that goes way beyond ordinary filters for pure, healthy water you can trust. There's no plumbing, no installation. AquaTrue has been featured in Business Insider,

15:56popular science, and it's named the best countertop water filter by Good Housekeeping. You can join 98% of customers who say their drinking water is cleaner, safer, and healthier. And three of those customers are me and Lisa and Tata. We drink AquaTrue water every day. It's been on our counter for over a year. We've blind taste tested it with each other, and you can tell the difference in how your water tastes, and you know it's good for you. Go to AquaTrue.com now for 20% off your AquaTrue water purifier using promo code Dr. Lee Warren. And AquaTrue even comes with a 30-day

16:28best tasting water guarantee. That's AquaTrue, A-Q-U-A-T-R-U.com. And use the promo code Dr. Lee Warren, D-R-L-E-E-W-A-R-R-E-N for your AquaTrue water purifier. But it's not just how you are. It's how you've wired. It's how you've directed your brain to become. And so if that thing that you are isn't serving you, guess what? You can engage the heavy and triad on your own behalf, and you can change it. You can become a different person. It's not about who you've been. It's about who

17:03you're becoming. It's not about what happened. It's about what happens next. It's Psalm 16, 8. It's Colossians 3, 2. This is Paul in prison writing. I've learned the secret of being content while he's in a Roman prison. But self-brain surgeons understand that because we get to choose our mental diet, and therefore we get to choose our emotional climate. We don't have to live imprisoned by automated thoughts and feelings. We don't have to live as a knee-jerk reaction to everything that happens around us. We get to choose what we pay attention to. And number three,

17:38self-brain surgeons are less reactive. The world trains you to react. Somebody punches you, you better punch them back. Somebody offends you, you better fire off a text and tell them off. If somebody does something you don't like, you better get yours. You better follow your heart, feel your feelings, live your truth. All that stuff, the world trains you to react. But self-brain surgery trains you to respond. Reaction is a limbic response. Reaction comes from those parts of the brain, those hippocampus and amygdala emotional parts of the brain that are about saving your life,

18:11running away, protecting yourself. Response is prefrontal. Response is cognitive. It's executive. It's intentional. Reaction is survival. Response is stewardship. Because self-brain surgeons refuse to hand our agency to our amygdala, to the part of our brain that's just going to run and hide and fight, flight, freeze, fawn, all that stuff. We don't want to live in fear. We want to live in response. We want to live in control of how we choose to respond. So again, we're not going to

18:45hand our agency, our choice, our self-power that God gave us over to a reactive part of our brain. Number four, self-brain surgeons are less anxious. This is an opinion. Again, this is imageable with

Anxiety and Self-Brain Surgery

18:59functional imaging. It's testable with psychological testing, and it's provable with the results of therapy and of medical care and of everything that has ever been published about what happens to people who are anxious who learn how to overcome it through cognitive behavioral therapy and other tools that metacognition produces people who are less anxious. And less anxiety always helps you and doesn't hurt you. Not because anxiety never knocks you down and never knocks on your door, but because we don't open the door without examining the thought first. It's completely appropriate for you to be

19:35anxious if you're in a life-threatening situation. It's completely appropriate for you to be anxious while you're waiting on a biopsy result. It's completely appropriate for you to be feeling anxious when you're in divorce court or when you're having to deal with the police or something that's really going on that is producing some stress for you and you're feeling that anxiety. That's not inappropriate at all. So sometimes anxiety does knock on the door, but you don't have to open the door and just be anxious without looking through the peephole first and recognizing and remembering

20:05that your brain lacks the ability to discern between something that's really happening and something that you're just imagining or worrying about. So guess what? You get to examine first and decide if the anxiety you're feeling deserves a response that's protective or fear-based rather than one that's cognitive. And you can be in charge of that and you'll stop feeling so afraid all the time. That's why we use the thought biopsy as our first procedure. We learn how to examine our thoughts and feelings before we react to them. We put our mind in top-down control over what our brain is

20:40doing. That's the operating room. And we use scripture as our atlas, our guide, our navigation system to help us find our way and stay in the zone of things that are true. The Bible says, be anxious for nothing in Philippians 4. That's not a guilt trip. It's a neurobiological invitation to examine your thoughts before you believe them because most, my friend, of your feelings are not facts. They are chemical events in your brain. The second commandment of self-brain surgery, by the way.

21:11Number five, self-brain surgeons are not labeled. We are label makers. Self-brain surgeons are not labeled by the events, the people, the things in the world. We are label makers. We get to decide what we call ourselves, what we believe about ourselves, what our story is. We don't accept every diagnosis. We don't accept every identity that culture wants to hand us. We are not led by our past and we don't let our past define our future. Identity is top-down. It's not bottom-up. It's not that how you are determines who you

21:44are. It's who made you defines who you are. And you get to step into that and live in that reality and rip those old labels off yourself that you've accepted. And you get to live according to who God made you to be and not who the world says you are. You're not what happened to you. You are not the neurons that are firing in your brain. You're not the mistakes or your moods or your past or your family or any of those other things. You are the observer of your thoughts, not the product of them, friend.

22:16Self-brain surgeons take the pin back from trauma. Trauma doesn't get to write your story anymore. We give that to God and he gets to help us write a new story after we've been through something hard. Number six, self-brain surgeons are co-creators with God of the reality of our lives. Friend, your life is not something that you experience passively, that you're just a victim of. It's something that you get to shape, that you get to help decide. Genesis chapter one says we were made in the image of our creator. And neuroscience says that the human mind is a

22:48creative engine that literally sculpts the brain. That's why I call this whole thing self-brain surgery. Because when you change what you think about, it literally changes the structure of your brain and the behavior and performance of your brain. It's not a metaphor. It's the mechanism of how you can truly believe that change is possible and you can accomplish it in your own life. Neuroscience says that the human mind, again, is the creative engine that sculpts the brain. It's

23:19self-brain surgery. And together, they say, self-brain surgeons say that we were designed to co-create our future, not be a victim of our past. There's a writer named Joshua Luke Smith, and he said this line that's just beautiful. It's in the Lectio prayer app that we use every day. And last week, I heard him say, Joshua Luke Smith said this, creativity is the yeast that helps the kingdom rise in my imagination, turning invisible truths into lived reality. See, if you can get curious about your

23:53thinking and your feelings, if you can start to think about them instead of just experiencing and reacting to them, and if you can let God call you into this creative place that your frontal lobes want to help you create a new life, then you can understand what Joshua Luke Smith is saying. Creativity is the yeast that helps the kingdom rise in my imagination. It sets the past in its proper place, and it sets the future in this zone of possibility, these invisible truths that can turn into lived reality in my imagination. It starts with believing that you have the power to co-create

24:26the life that God wants you to have with him. He'll help you do it. Self-brain surgeons do not wait for inspiration. We cultivate receptivity. Let me say that again. Self-brain surgeons do not wait for inspiration. We cultivate receptivity. We want to be the kind of people who receive inspiration. We want to hear with the right half of our brain connected to our creator. We want to hear that still small voice that says, I didn't create you to live in this fear and this pain and this lost hurt place. I created you for so much more than that. And then we are willing to partner

25:01with God. We participate in the renewal of all things, starting with our own minds. Number seven, self-brain surgeons are patients who decided enough was enough and we wanted to become doctors instead. We're going to make that patient to doctor switch. We're going to stop being people with an external locus of control, waiting for somebody to come along and save us, fix us, change for us, do something to lower the bar for us. Most people, sadly, go through their entire lives

25:32letting their brains be their doctors. Their brains tell them what to feel and think. Their brains tell them what they've got to do. And they never stop to think about the fact that you can change your brain as soon as you're ready to change your mind. And your brain always chooses something either to keep you alive, like run away and don't get in trouble. So fear, react to fear. Or it reminds you of lies and labels that you accepted in the past, that you're unworthy, that you're going to be involved in some kind of catastrophe, that everything bad is going to happen to you, that who would love you

26:03anyway? You're going to hear all those negative thoughts if you listen to your brain and let your brain push you around. But self-brain surgeons flip the script. We stop being passive patients and we turn into active physicians, trained surgeons, compassionate, wise surgeons who are advocates for our own healing. And we stop thinking about it. We stop contemplating and we start operating. That's the patient to Dr. Switch. And the moment that you stop letting your feelings treat you and you start treating your feelings, nobody else can ever put you in that box of being a victim again.

26:37And nothing else God created can do that except for humans. Nobody else has, nothing else he created has selective attention. And scripture calls you to live in that way. In 2 Corinthians 10, 5, when it says, take every thought captive. He's saying biopsy every single thought before you react to it. And guess what? You get better at what you do. That's Hebb's law in action. It's the ninth commandment. What I'm doing, I'm getting better at. This is neurotheology. This is discipleship. This is healing. So that's where we're going in season 13. We're going to become those people.

Season 13 and New Book

27:12I'm going to give you the training and the tools to become the person who is not afraid and bossed around by the events of your life and your thoughts and feelings that are so often, 80% or more of the time, untrue, negative, incessantly condemning and harmful to you. You don't have to live that way anymore. So here's your invitation. For the next 60 days, I want you to become the kind of person who practices the mind-down model every day. I want you to become the kind of person who refuses

27:47those automatic thoughts, who biopsies them and rejects the false ones and transplants in truth instead. I want you to be the kind of person who rewires your neural defaults and co-creates a better life for yourself with God. I want you standing at the operating room going, I have learned this process. I am not a victim of my brain activity anymore. I'm changing it with self-brain surgery. This season, we're not just talking about change. We're operating for it. We're going to stop contemplating and start operating every day, every episode, every thought. We are not going to wait

28:22for New Year's resolutions. We're going to start operating today so that tomorrow is better. But before we go today, I want you to know something exciting. My new book, again, The Life-Changing Art of Self-Brain Surgery is coming out on February 3rd. And on the same day, we're launching the School of Self-Brain Surgery. This is your go-deep, hardcore training sessions where I'm going to teach you how to operate your mind and make your brain better and make your life better and smash science and faith together in all kinds of practical ways. And I can't wait to give you an opportunity to join the School of Self-Brain Surgery on February 3rd

28:57when the book comes out. It's going to be so much fun, and we're going to learn so much together. And I'm going to get an email from you someday that says, this lesson or that module or that training program or that book changed my life. It set me free. It put me on the right path. And now I believe that I'm co-creating my life with God. That's what's going to happen. And don't forget, if you pre-order the book, drleewarren.com slash pre-order, you're going to get a whole pile of powerful bonuses to help you start rewiring your life today. You get the thought biopsy, the thought biopsy worksheet,

29:28the updated 10 commandments of self-brain surgery, a stack of self-brain surgery soap notes that you can download and start to learn how to document your progress and op reports and all those kinds of things. So the whole system scan reports, a 30 minute exclusive training video that I made for you and the self-brain surgery Spotify playlist. So you have some music for your quiet time in the mornings to help you get your mind on right for the day. All kinds of great stuff. If you pre-order, it's important to me too. It helps you because you get all the free stuff, but it also helps us because the more pre-orders, the more the book will show up on the Amazon algorithm and people

30:02will find out about it. So the higher that number of pre-orders, the more likely somebody is to stumble across the book because you pre-ordered it. And how great would that be if you helped spread the message of self-brain surgery and its transformative power to people all over the world. Friend, I'm so grateful for you. I'm proud of you. Don't forget that Lisa and I and Tata pray for you. We are happy that you're joining us in this holy and important work. And if you're new here or if you've been listening for years but haven't subscribed yet, please subscribe to the show wherever you're listening. If you're watching on YouTube, you're listening on audio, please click

30:35that subscribe button because there's going to be some stuff coming in December that I don't want you to miss because it's going to help you transform your life in the next 60 days. Okay, friend, I'm Dr. Lee Warren. I'm so grateful for you. Hit that subscribe button. Don't forget, you can't change your life until you change your mind. The very good news is you can start today.