
Classic: Your Mind is not Your Brain (S13E55)
March 30, 202635 min · 6,771 words
Show notes
[We are on a short break while Dr. Warren prepares new episodes for Action April 2026! While we're waiting, we're bringing back four of the most popular episodes from last year] In this episode, we discuss the crucial distinction between the mind and the brain, essential for the process of self-brain surgery. I introduce the fourth commandment of self-brain surgery, which emphasizes that our mind controls our brain, and we explore how our thoughts shape our cognitive architecture. We contrast "brain-out" and "mind-down" worldviews, showing the power of intentionality and personal responsibility. You'll get practical steps for engaging in self-brain surgery, and exercises for reflection to challenge limiting beliefs. This conversation sets the stage for further exploration of personal transformation in future episodes. Click here for the transcript Note: This is a replay of an episode that came out before Dr. Warren's new book was published. He mentions pre-order bonuses in the episode, but those expired on February 3, 2026. They are now available for purchase as an expansion pack at https://school.wleewarrenmd.com. Resources and Links The most important book you'll read this year (besides the Bible) is my new one, The Life-Changing Art of Self-Brain Surgery The School of Self-Brain Surgery is live! You can get a taste for free by taking my powerful 3-part video training course, You Can Change Your Life. Get instant access for free by clicking here. My book, 2021 ECPA Memoir/Biography of the Year, I've Seen the End of You If you need a dose of hope, read my book Hope Is the First Dose! Sign up for my weekly Self-Brain Surgery Newsletter here!
Highlighted moments
“you can't image what it looks like to be conscious. You can't find the part in the brain that makes you conscious.”
“The extent to which you believe that the structure and function of your brain determines your behavior and your future and that it can be broken but not repaired, that's the measure of your ability, your capacity to make progress in your life.”
“if your mind is trying to control a brain that's defective or injured or broken or inebriated or hungover or overdosed on some substance, then you're going to harm your ability to operate yourself in a mind-down way like God intended for you to.”
“Directed mental force, as my friend Jeffrey Schwartz says, allows you to take command of the top-down processes of neuroplasticity, which allows you to convert mental energy into brain activity with your thinking.”
Transcript
Mind and Brain Difference
0:00Your mind and your brain are not the same thing. Understanding that you have mind-down control over the way that your brain is structurally formed from thought to thought sets you free from the common belief that you're just your brain or that you're stuck with the brain that you have or that your brain was formed by your genetics and your parents and your upbringing and your traumas and tragedies and other things that happen in your life and that you can't do anything about it. So you begin to believe, this is just who I am. This is just how I am. Well, the truth is you have a different brain every second of your life because every thought you think shapes your brain structurally.
0:35That's why I call it self-brain surgery. Understanding that what you think about and the way that you bring attention and intention to your mind-brain interface changes your brain structurally and makes your life better. You can become happier and healthier and better. You can have healing and hope and higher performance. You can become healthier and feel better and be happier as soon as you understand that your mind and your brain are not the same thing.
Introduction to Self-Brain Surgery
1:05Hey, it's your friend, Dr. Lee Warren. I'm so grateful to be with you today. We're going to do some self-brain surgery around the fourth commandment of self-brain surgery from my upcoming book, The Life-Changing Art of Self-Brain Surgery. And we are going to get after it in just a second. But before we do, I want to tell you how proud I am of you and how grateful I am that you're joining me here for this holy and hard work of changing our minds and changing our lives. I'm just grateful that you're willing to do the work, that you're ready to dig in. This is not a thinking-only podcast. This is a doing podcast.
1:37So take some notes, record some messages if you're driving. Make sure you dig in, do the work, review the show notes, and we're going to get after it.
Fourth Commandment
1:44What's the fourth commandment of self-brain surgery right now? The fourth commandment of self-brain surgery is that I must believe that my mind is in charge of my brain. I must believe that my mind is in charge of my brain. Say that with me. The fourth commandment of self-brain surgery. I must believe that my mind is in charge of my brain. We're going to explain why that's so important in just a second. But I would love to remind you to go back to the previous three podcast episodes. We talked about the first commandment, which is I must relentlessly refuse to participate in my own demise.
2:20The second commandment, I must believe that feelings are not facts. They are chemical events in my brain. The third commandment, I must believe that not all of my automatic thoughts are true. And the fourth commandment, which we're at today, I must believe that my mind is in charge of my brain. If you missed those previous three episodes, go check them out. There's also a great PDF document that we put together. Our assistant, Lauren, made it beautiful. It's downloadable as part of the pre-order bonus package. If you pre-order the book, drleewarren.com slash pre-order, you can get the book before February 3rd.
2:53And it comes with four amazing pre-order bonuses, one of which is a complete list in PDF form of the 10 commandments of self-brain surgery, accompanying scriptures and some dialogue about what they are and why they're so important. And in the book, there's a whole chapter on each one and how they integrate to help you achieve healing and hope and higher performance.
Brain Out Worldview
3:12Today, we're talking about the difference between your mind and your brain. And we've done a lot of talk about this on the podcast before. But it's so important to understand that your consciousness, as my friend Dr. Sharon Derrick says, consciousness simply cannot be reducible to physical processes in the brain. No matter how much you hear neuroscientists say it, no matter how many times it's implied in the media or in books that you may read, it's not true that consciousness has been proven scientifically to come from the brain.
3:43Well, why? There's lots of reasons why. But one is you can't image what it looks like to be conscious. You can't find the part in the brain that makes you conscious. Now, careful. There are some parts of the brain that when they are injured, a person can't be awake. OK, but that's not the same as the process of consciousness, which is where we think about what we're thinking about inside our heads, where we can have a dialogue with ourselves, where we can be aware that we're in there and that there's something like a me in there. That process has never been identified as arising from the brain.
4:15Well, why? Well, I think because, as people of faith would always have said, there's a difference between you and the parts from which you're made. If you're a Christian, for example, you believe that part of you lives after you die, that there's something about you. Different traditions or different understandings call it heart, soul, mind, self, all those different things. Whatever it is, that immaterial part of you that lives forever, that's outside of your body. That's the part that we're talking about when we say mind. In the 21st century, neuroimaging has made it very hard to defend the idea that everything about you can be reduced to the activity of neurons in your brain.
4:53So we want to understand that when we're operating as self brain surgeons, we have a distinction in the way we think about what our minds are and what our brains are. And the extent to which you believe that the structure of your brain determines your behavior and your future and that it can be broken but not repaired is the measure of your capacity to make progress in your life. The extent to which you believe that the structure and function of your brain determines your behavior and your future and that it can be broken but not repaired, that's the measure of your ability, your capacity to make progress in your life.
Limitations of Brain Out Worldview
5:32And we talked a couple of episodes ago about this brain out worldview, this idea that the brain generates your concept of you, your concept of self, so that your sense of self is an illusion that's just produced by the activity of neurons in your brain. And if you believe that, that brain out worldview, that belief system, if you follow it to its logical conclusion, it really means that ultimately your life has no purpose beyond the evolutionary aims of survival and reproduction. Somebody wrote in the other day to the YouTube channel, left a comment and said, do neuroscientists agree that there is such a thing as free will?
6:06Well, no, they don't because all of the materialist neuroscientists, and I remember what materialism is. Materialism is this school of thought that's been really prominent in the West for about 300 years now, the school of thought that everything can be broken down to the parts from which it's made. And once you understand what those parts do, you can understand what the thing is capable of doing, including your brain, including you and your life. And if it's true that everything about you is just the activity of cells in your brain, then once your brain dies and those cells dies, then you're gone.
6:37And so if you have a brain out worldview, that means you can't really believe in free will. And even though you might think, well, look at how smart I am. I understand that the brain's just a bunch of neurons and that everything about me is made up of the activity of neurons. And I'm so glad that I can see that more clearly than this other guy. So I'm going to try to convince him or her what I believe to be true about the brain. Well, if you have a brain out worldview and there's no such thing as free will, then it wouldn't make sense for you to try to convince another person who believe differently than you because they wouldn't be able to change their mind if their neurons in their brain made them who they are and made them unable to have free will and made them unable to make their own decisions.
7:18The free will is just an illusion in that worldview because your decisions are only yours in so much as your brain tricks you into thinking you intended to make them. So ultimately, everything that you think in that worldview is predetermined by your genes. And it's the undirected result of natural processes, which means there's not any real meaning or purpose to your life in that worldview, since those concepts even are just electrical events bouncing around in your head like sound and fury, as Shakespeare might have said.
7:53Does that make sense? If you believe in a brain out worldview, if everything is just the activity of neurons in your brain, then even thinking of something like identity is really powerful. Brain out thinking, this worldview that everything comes from the brain is why the concept of identity has become so powerful in our culture right now. Because if uncontrollable and unchangeable things like genes or how your parents raised you or traumas that you've been through, if they can create or modify our brains and thus produce our personalities and our personality types and our behaviors and our quirks and our neurodivergences and all those things,
8:28then we're not responsible for how we react to difficulties that might come along in our life. If you can't help how your brain works and your brain makes everything about you what it is and you can't change that, then everything that happens to you is not your fault and people need to accommodate you. And therefore, your identity that you assume in that regard becomes an excuse for how you are destined to see the world, interact with others, and feel about our future. Identity then becomes something in this brain out worldview that we post in our Instagram profiles so people know how to treat us.
9:01Hey, I'm an Enneagram 8, so you better not challenge me, right? You need to know how I am so you know how you're supposed to act around me. After all, the way we're going to respond to those things is fixed and we can't change it in that worldview. And that leads to assumptions like, well, I'm just living my truth. But we actually become progressively more frustrated when our truth never seems to lead to our flourishing. You can look at society right now and see that. People standing on soapboxes preaching about who they are and what their truth is and how you need to honor their truth.
9:34But they're never happy. So even when people alter their behavior to try to accommodate these identities, it never makes anybody happy. It never makes anybody flourish. Why? Because the brain out perspective, even though it's widely adopted by neuroscientists and systematically metastasized across the Western world over the last 300 years, like I said earlier, seems to be the source of a lot of our floundering. That worldview, believing that you're just your brain. And I have to tell you, even a lot of people of faith, and I see this a lot.
10:06If you're a therapist or a counselor or a pastor or somebody who works with folks and you're kind of interested in neuroscience, it's just why you're listening here. You need to be very careful and very precise when you speak into science and how faith and science work together. Be very careful that you don't mingle brain out worldview with mind down worldview. Why? Because a lot of people, even people of faith, are infected with this defeating belief of this is just how I am. When the Christian worldview, and in fact the neuroscience of the mind down worldview, even if there's no spiritual stuff brought into it, even if you just look at the data and say, well, mind and brain are not necessarily the same thing.
10:44Or at least if you operate as if mind and brain are different, you get a better outcome. If you believe that, then you will see that this belief system of believing that you're just how you are, that you're just your brain, it doesn't help people live flourishing lives.
Christian Worldview
10:59And in the Christian worldview, we are called to die to ourselves, to not be like we have been, that God says, I will give you the mind of Christ, I will renew you, I will transform you, I will help you be different than you have been, and that will be better for you. You see that Christian worldview is incompatible with the brain out worldview. So if you're a therapist, if you're speaking into people's lives, make sure you have a crystal clear understanding of your worldview and that you don't co-mingle them, especially don't try to borrow scientific language to shore up your metaphor of how you're trying to make scripture and science work together.
11:37God doesn't need your help making himself more credible, okay? And I'm here to tell you, as a neurosurgeon and a neuroscientist, I've been studying this, researching it, practicing in it legitimately in this world for 25 years, plus over 25 years. And I can tell you, without any doubt, that the long arc of scientific discovery and inquiry is reinforcing what scripture has always said about the best ways for humans to flourish in their lives. You don't need to help it do that. God has already ordained that if you look at what he has done and you study it honestly, you will find that his prescriptions are always better than our prescriptions, and science will eventually get there to explain that.
12:18So be crystal clear. Be very precise. Don't mingle your worldviews. Don't borrow science to try to shore up faith because you don't need to. Faith is doing a really good job of that all by itself. Science, when you properly understand it and teach it for what it is, is no threat to belief. They work beautifully together. That's why I always say on this show, we smash faith and science together to help us become healthier and feel better and be happier because faith doesn't need science to prove itself, but science is going to eventually.
12:50Anyway, everything. Remember, every knee will bow. Every tongue will confess. Everything that God created was by him and for him and through him, and it all results in his glory. That's what Psalm 111, which, by the way, is inscribed on the door of the Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge University where Maxwell worked, okay, and where Watson and Crick discovered DNA. Over the door are inscribed the words of Psalm 111. Great are the works of the Lord. They are pondered by all who delight in them.
13:22Okay? This stuff will come to pass, and the scriptures will be validated, and we don't have to stretch or borrow or make metaphors to try to make them sound more impressive than they already are. Okay? So, as a result of believing in a brain-out worldview, people settle for lives that they believe to be limited by the structure or function of their brains and their genes. So, if you think you've got a bad brain or you had something happen or your parents were abusive or neglectful or something occurred in your life and that you only have some sort of distant hope that someday God will make it all better,
13:57that's not the abundance that Jesus said in John 10, 10, 10, that he wants to have for you, okay? It is not your call in life to be sad, sick, stressed, stuck, or constantly settling. God has a better life for you. He said it in John 10, 10, the thief comes to steal and kill and destroy, but I came that you might have life and have it abundantly. We're here to flourish in spite of the fact that we will have hard circumstances, okay? I've watched the eyes of many believers brighten once I convinced them that the choices that they make can change their brains functionally.
14:33When you really buy in to the fact that mind has controlling influence over the structure and function of your brains, your genes, your body, your physiology, even epigenetically to your offspring and to the people around you, then I've seen people perk up and come alive and have hope for the first time and their lives get better. Self-brain surgery, this understanding that you can operate your mind and your brain the way God designed them to be operated, will make your life better. It will help you achieve healing and hope and higher performance, but you have to ruthlessly eliminate the brain-out worldview,
15:09and you have to fully and wholeheartedly embrace the mind-down perspective, okay? That's the path to abundance. The findings from neuroscience line up repeatedly with God's prescriptions, Scripture's prescriptions for how to flourish here on earth. And it turns out, friend, this is important, okay? Look in my eyes, okay? Look in Dr. Lee's eyes here for a minute. You don't need a miracle to change your life. You don't need to be praying that God will work some kind of magic or pull off some kind of miracle.
15:39Then you can finally be happier or be healthier or overcome some kind of hardship or understand how to process your suffering. You don't need a miracle to do that. You need to master the miraculous processes that God has already built into you, into all of us. 2 Peter 1.3 says, His divine power has given you everything you need for life and godliness. 2 Timothy 1.7 says, God did not give you a spirit of fear, but of power and of love and of a sound mind. Friend, you are designed to heal and grow and hope and change and have meaning and purpose in your life, even in the face of a life that is hard.
16:18Why did He do that? Why didn't He just make our lives easy? Because no story that you've ever been moved by was one in which everything that happened was easy. And I would just challenge you to look back on your own life. Everything good in your life, everything good that's ever happened has come on the other side of something that was difficult or challenging. The Bible prescribes that too, Romans 5, 3 through 5. We know that suffering produces endurance and endurance produces character and character produces hope. And so you don't need a miracle. You need to learn how to operate the miraculous system God has already put inside you.
16:53And to do that, you've got to pick up the scalpel and become a self-brain system. Because that process that He already put in you allows you to change your brain by changing the stuff you repeatedly think about. That perspective shift, that patient-to-doctor shift, allows you to use your baseline characteristics and the ways that your life has shaped you and gotten you here, not as excuses anymore, but as insights to help you move your path forward, to map out your life going forward, knowing how you're inclined to react in a situation, knowing you have certain tendencies, certain proclivities,
17:28knowing that your heart tends to push you in a certain direction and that your automatic thoughts and feelings tend to react in a certain way. And knowing that, using the biopsy and the whole system scan and all these tools that I give you, that gives you a responsibility to manage those inclinations and enables you to use a mind-down perspective to change any responses that are not helping you. Did you know 3 out of 4 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,
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18:30There's no plumbing, no installation. AquaTrue has been featured in Business Insider, Popular 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.
19:05And AquaTrue even comes with a 30-day best 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. In fact, even the hardcore atheists, the most committed skeptic, the people that I've met that are the least likely to ever be believers, will understand the value of taking control of their thoughts. Once they see the research, the neuroscience evidence from functional imaging, and what
19:37quantum physics has to say about intention and attention and the way we observe things, even atheists have to admit there is value and productivity in thinking about what you think about and how you instruct your brain with your thoughts. And even if you believe that your life is largely determined by the activity of the neurons in your brain, then changing the way you think about those why and what now questions that we all ask when we're under pressure, if you can change the way you think about that stuff, it has radical power to transform your quality of life.
20:11So regardless, friend, of your underlying belief system, atheist, agnostic, Christian, Jew, Buddhist, Hindu, people that don't even think about it, regardless of that, to find meaning in your life. Remember, Viktor Frankl said suffering stops being suffering when you give it purpose, when you find the meaning to it. If you want to find meaning, you must first decide. This is so important. Look in my eyes again. You must first decide that your life does matter and that you have a real purpose. Now, if you don't believe in Christianity, if you don't believe in the afterlife, if you
20:46think that you're dead when you're dead and your brain rots and you're all gone, you can still believe what quantum physics teaches us about the fact that everybody's life makes a difference in everybody else's life. There's something called the observer effect, where the choices you make, the type of attention and intention you bring to the world affects the outcome of everything and everybody that you interact with. So your choices and your decisions change other people's realities. So you matter, my friend. There's a purpose for your life, even if you don't agree with me that there's an eternal
21:18purpose for it. But if you get to the place where you start seeing that everything scripture says about how humans flourish. So, friend, there is a purpose to your life, since how you interact with everyone else, even yourself, ultimately creates a different reality than would have occurred without your choices. Now, in case you're discounting this because you think that quantum physics and the biology of your brain's behavior are not relevant to each other, if you're not a science person, there's a lot of people that think quantum physics only describes the tiny interactions
21:48of subatomic particles and that you have to use classical physics and normal cellular biology, math, and equations to explain what happens in a warm, large environment like the brain. Let me just say this. Your brain is made of cells, proteins, and other bits of material, all of which are made up of molecules, and molecules are made of atoms and subatomic particles like protons, neutrons, electrons, gluons, quarks, etc. So, quantum physics describes the behavior of particles more accurately than classical physics
22:20does, which is why those smart folks in the early 1900s came up with it in the first place. So, friend, if you're made of atoms and the mathematics that explains how atoms behave shows that using your mind, your attention, your perspective, and your choices changes the behavior of your physical brain and the brains of the people with whom you interact, then it's clear that you are here to make a difference. Your brain is not the boss of you. It is waiting for you to direct its behavior from a mind-down perspective. And therefore, friend, you're not your brain.
22:54You are your embodied mind. That outdated belief system, brain-out, that your brain is some sort of supercomputer that creates everything that you think and feel and believe and do in your life, it's fading fast for people who honestly assess the 21st century evidence. From a self-brain surgery perspective, the internet provides a better example than this supercomputer model. If you think about your mind and your soul, then you're the server on the internet, and you're the master computer that's connected to and receives input and feedback from and ultimately
23:28directs your brain and body, which in this example would be the host computer, your body. But the host computer isn't running the whole internet. Your mind is doing that. Your brain just wants to serve you by automating things and running the programs that you've consented for it to run so that your mind is freed to think about other things. So I want you to recognize, having said all of that, that an unhealthy brain will harm your life. So don't ever hear me say, just worry about your mind. Your mind will program your brain.
23:59Don't worry about your brain. That's not what I'm saying at all. Because if the computer on my desk that's recording this, if there's a bad hard drive in my computer or a bad module, if there's some other part that's broken, then the server's ability to interact with the computer will be hindered because the computer can't do what it needs to do, then no matter how much information there might be out there on the internet, it will be unable to present that information to my computer if it's not working properly. So that means that you need to take care of your brain because if your mind is trying to
24:33control a brain that's defective or injured or broken or inebriated or hungover or overdosed on some substance, then you're going to harm your ability to operate yourself in a mind-down way like God intended for you to. So since the brain is the organ that your mind uses to direct your body, to communicate with other people, to store your memories, and to run your physical life, then it is imperative that you take good care of it. Okay? Remember Romans 12, 2 is the don't be conformed but be transformed by the renewing of your mind
25:07verse that we're always talking about. Romans 12, 1, the verse before that, says we need to offer our bodies to God as a living and acceptable sacrifice and that that's a form of worship and your body includes your brain. Okay? So you need to provide your brain with the right materials, the nutrients, the supplements, the blood flow, all the good stuff that it needs to do the work that it has to do and you need to protect your brain from harm in any way that you can. In the new book, I give you a bunch of examples of that, things you should and shouldn't do for your brain, we talk about alcohol, we talk about wearing helmets, we talk about different
25:40things that you should be supplementing in your body and I want you to read the book, drleewarren.com slash pre-order. Okay? You need to take care of your brain. You should follow my friend, Dr. Daniel Amen. He's always talking about how do you have a healthier brain so you can have a healthier life. Okay? So even though you're a self-brain surgeon and you're practicing with the knowledge that your mental activities are separate from and have controlling influence over your brain activities, if your brain is physically unhealthy, if you're not giving it the right stuff, if
26:13you're not protecting it in the right ways, your mind will not be able to function properly, interface with your body properly. And to that end, you need to, as my friend Daniel Amen always says, love your brain. Okay? Bathe them in the proper thought environment. Bathe them with words and thoughts and feelings that are going to help them wire better brains. Okay? Bathe your mind in good stuff. That's why the morning quiet time is so important. But also, take care of your physical brain.
26:44Ride a bike with a helmet if you're going to ride a bike. Put a helmet on if you're going to ride a motorcycle. Wear your seatbelt if you're in a car. Don't drink too much alcohol. And the right answer to how much is too much actually now, the research, I'm sorry to be a party pooper, but actually it looks like zero is the right amount of alcohol if you really want to be healthy. The guidelines are going to be updated soon. There's tremendous lobbying and pushback from the alcohol companies, but the research is crystal clear. There is no safe or healthy amount of alcohol. And don't send me an email about studies that show the heart benefit and all that stuff.
27:17All of that research, sad to say, it's proven now, all of it was sponsored by alcohol companies. And bigger research studies over many years have now shown conclusively alcohol is a class one carcinogen that directly increases your risk of at least seven different human cancers. There is no safe amount of alcohol. So things like that. Don't drink alcohol if you can. Don't drink too much, certainly. And too much is one glass or less is enough per week, probably. Andrew Huberman said that recently.
27:48The maximum that Huberman would even say could be potentially not even a minimal health risk would be about one glass of wine per week, as opposed to what they used to tell us, two glasses a day, right? So alcohol is a big deal and you need to reevaluate your relationship with it. So please don't email me and try to debate that. Just do some research, okay? Do some research. Love your brain. Take care of your brain. So I want you to read the book to get more. We talk a lot about some specific guidelines and all of that. Daniel Amon's website, amonclinics.com, has tons of research and information about how
28:20to have healthier brains, the kinds of supplements you should be taking, the kinds of things you should be avoiding. And my book has a lot of that information too. I just want you to remember, you live from a mind down perspective. That's how you get your brain to be healthier structurally and functionally than it has been, okay? And you don't ever agree with, co-opt, mingle, co-mingle, or otherwise confuse the brain out worldview from your mind down worldview, especially if you're advising other people. Keep your worldviews crisp and separate and know that you're preaching, teaching, learning,
28:56leading, and living from a mind down perspective. That's scriptural. It's consistent with 21st century neuroscience and it will help you and your clients, your friends, your family members flourish in your life. You need to have a healthy mind and you need to have a healthy brain and you need to remember that your brain is not the boss of you, okay? So, I wanted to cover the fourth commandment of self-brain surgery. I must believe that my mind is in charge of my brain, okay? Love your brain? Yes. Take care of your brain?
29:26Yes. Let it push you around? No. Believe that all you are is a collection of brain parts and the activity of the cells in your brain? No. You, my friend, are an embodied mind. Now, there's some neuroscience around the fourth commandment, okay? Your mind is distinct from your brain and literally has creative control over the way your brain's structure forms from thought to thought. Directed mental force, as my friend Jeffrey Schwartz says, allows you to take command of the top-down processes of neuroplasticity, which allows you to convert mental energy into
29:59brain activity with your thinking. And neuroplasticity is the brain side process that connects neurons to other neurons in real time based on what you're thinking about. And this allows you to direct your brain's function and override instincts or patterns that have not been helpful to you, okay? And that might not be serving you well. And that means that you're more than your biological hardware. However, since the hardware of your brain has to work properly in order for you to work properly, you have a responsibility to appreciate your brain, to appreciate your capacity for
30:31growth, and deliberately engage in activities that promote healthy brain function. There's also some scripture that's relevant here. Okay? For God did not give us a spirit of fear, but of power and of love and of a sound mind. I said that earlier. It's 2 Timothy 1.7. You weren't given a spirit of fear, but a spirit of a sound mind. Remember, you have a brain that responds to your mind and is designed to heal and grow in ways that help you. You can learn to use your mind to be in charge of your brain and to adopt a healthy lifestyle
31:04to keep your brain strong. And now it's time for five minutes self-brain surgery.
Five Minutes Self-Brain Surgery
31:09This is one of my favorite parts of the podcast. We have some questions, some things you can write down, some journal prompts, some things to think about when you're meditating or driving or working out. I want you to understand that working on thinking about things, writing them down, checking for progress over time, using your soap notes, all that stuff is a powerful way to become a better self-brain surgeon and to encourage yourself by being able to see the progress that you're making. So let's have some five minutes self-brain surgery. Here's the first question. I want you to write this down. If you're driving, maybe dictate a note or send a text message to yourself.
31:42Have you ever blamed your genetics, your upbringing, or your past experiences for breaking your brain in some way, for messing your brain up, and as an excuse for believing that this is just how I am? And if you have, what are some of the things that you've blamed yourself for, your past for, your parents for, your genetics for? What are some of those things? And have you actually agreed with yourself that this is just how I am? My dad's this way. My grandpa's that way. My mom has always done that. This is how we are in my family.
32:13Write some of those things down. Some of those beliefs that you have previously believed were just how you were. And how does knowing that, number two, how does knowing that your mind is in control and that you have a brain that will respond to your mind's direction, how does that empower you to work to change any of those assumptions that you just wrote down, those limiting beliefs? So understanding what those limiting beliefs have been and that you know now that you can rewrite them, mind can rewrite brain. How will that change things for you going forward?
32:46How will that help you? Hey, I'm so grateful that you've been here to do this work with me. The next commandment, the next episode is episode five, is the fifth commandment. And I think it might be the most important one. It certainly is the plateau. If you think of the commands, the first four as these sort of steps up to a plateau, the plateau is the fifth commandment. And from the vantage point of the fifth commandment, you can look out over your whole life and you can see these other commandments as a way to walk out into the future in an empowered way as a self brain surgeon who knows what you're doing, who's compassionate to your
33:20own flaws and failures and issues from the past. And you know with great confidence that you can make it better going forward because it's not ever been about what happened. It's always been about what happens next. Once you make that patient to doctor switch, there's no limit to your healing and your hope and your higher performance. Please, friend, subscribe to the podcast wherever you listen so you don't miss any episodes. And if you're watching on YouTube, make sure you subscribe on Apple or Spotify or somewhere else, too, because there are audio only episodes that you'll miss if you're only listening on
33:51YouTube. And if you're only listening on Apple or Spotify or iHeart or some other place, make sure you go over to YouTube and find at Dr. Lee Warren on YouTube and subscribe to the channel over there, because if you don't, you're going to miss some deep dive training every week, some videos that are not released as audio only episodes. So you need to be subscribed to both places. Make sure you get the newsletter, DrLeeWarren.com. Sign up for the newsletter because every Sunday since 2014, I've been giving you my best prescriptions for your healing and hope and higher performance.
34:21And you can change your life. The newsletter, friend, I promise you, will help you change your life. And finally, make sure you check out the book, DrLeeWarren.com slash preorder. There are four amazing bonuses. They're going to disappear forever on February 2nd. So I want you to preorder the book before February 2nd so you can get the bonus materials that will help you change your mind and change your life. And if you would like to help us get the word out, you could also join the launch team. So if you preorder the book, then you can go to DrLeeWarren.com slash launch and you can
34:52start reading the book today. I would love it if you do that. If you read the book early, I would love it if on launch day you would leave a review, an honest review. I'm not telling you what to say. If you hate it, write that. Give it one star. You don't have to like it. But if you think, like I do, that the book will change your life, if you would leave a review, that'll help other people find the book. So DrLeeWarren.com slash preorder helps you get the preorder bonuses and DrLeeWarren.com slash launch will help you join the launch team. And you can start reading the book today. And I can't wait to hear from you how understanding the difference between your mind and your brain
35:25has set you free and helped you change your life. I'm so proud of you. I'm so grateful for you. I can't wait to see you on the next episode, friend. I'm Dr. Lee Warren, your friendly neurosurgeon. And I'm here to tell you that you can't change your life until you change your mind. And the good news is you can start today.
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