Your brain is never the same two days in a row.
It's not even the same 2 minutes in a row.
Problem is, most of us think the same things over and over. 80%
of the things we think and feel every day are false.
No, wait, 80% somebody might say, well I've always been this
way. It's never going to change.
What is your hope to that person?
God built your brain to get better overtime and not to get
worse overtime. There is an element of what we
hear in our heads that is not just neurological activity but
spiritual warfare. Wow, what do you think the
percentage is of people that are held back by their thoughts
versus their actual circumstances?
All of them. What if you could actually do
brain surgery on yourself? What if you could actually move
away from those parts that kind of seem to linger and limit
what? Today we're going to be talking
to Doctor Lee Warren. And Doctor Warren has been a
friend to our family for quite a while and he's just written an
amazing book called The Life Changing Art of Self Brain
Surgery. We're not going to use knives,
but we are going to use something actually way more
powerful to pull things that are holding you back out of your
life. Doctor Warren, thank you so much
for joining us. And I believe this book is so
crucial. There is so much going out there
right now that is about mind over matter manifesting new age.
And you are approaching this from a completely different
frame of mind. You are going with scripture and
you are going with the word of God.
And I cannot wait to unpack this book.
Thank you for having me, Lisa. Absolutely.
It's a joy. Well, why?
Why did you write this book? Well, so I'm practicing
neurosurgeon, right, for 25 years now.
But I'm also a guy who's been through a lot.
I've been to the Iraq war as a neurosurgeon and dealt with PTSD
from some of the things I saw there.
And then we lost his son in 2013.
And so as a person who works in the space of helping people
process and navigate through hard things, I became one of
those people that was navigating hard things.
And I found that my faith and my science that I taught and
practiced needed to unite and unify.
And so I, I started studying how science and faith are supposed
to work together to help us flourish, which is what I think
both of them are designed to do. And so for the last 12 years
since Mitch died, I've been working on that.
And now I'm ready to help other people understand how how things
have been does not have to be how they are.
Yeah, you know, I, we were talking just very briefly
beforehand and I said it's like people have lost their minds
and, and no, and I wasn't, I wasn't, you know, like you used
to say, oh, they've lost their mind.
And it, it seemed like it was a few people, but it feels like
there is a collective people just they're not making sense.
They're not processing things correctly.
They're not processing other people's pain correctly.
And what can we do about that? Because I feel like this is
something, and I'm, I'm assuming that you're saying we start here
and then we respond out. Can you kind of kind of frame
what your greatest hope is for this book and why this is
incredibly crucial because somebody might say, well, I, you
know, I've always been this way. It's never going to change.
My past is, is today is like yesterday.
It's just going to keep going back.
And what what is your hope to that person and what is your
hope for this book? My greatest hope is that I can
help people understand that there is a tremendous amount of
agency and control and therefore hope and the fact that God built
your brain to get better over time and not to get worse over
time. In our, in our cultural moment
right now, we're being taught that if the wrong stuff happens
to you or you're raised by the wrong folks, or you inherited
the wrong genes, or you go through something hard, that it
can break your brain in a way that you can't recover from.
And then everybody needs to just huddle around you and pat you on
the back and and feel sorry for you for how hard you've had it.
And stop triggering you and. Stop triggering you.
And, and we put, we put these things that we, we almost adopt
them as identities. We put them in our Instagram
profiles and say, here's how I am.
Here's my personality type. Here's my Enneagram score.
This is how you need to treat me.
And the perception has been that our brains create who we are and
therefore we're stuck with that. But the truth is, from both
Scripture, what it's always said, and from what neuroscience
is discovering in the 21st century, your brain is never the
same two days in a row. It changes constantly.
So your brain, wait, hang on, your brain is never the same two
days in a row. That's right, It's not even the
same 2 minutes in a row because your brain is constantly
disconnecting and reconnecting itself from neurons and groups
of neurons in your brain. And so that means that you're
literally never have the same structural brain as you had a
few moments ago. And what we've learned in the
21st century is that the primary thing that drives how neurons
connect going forward is not how they've always been.
It's about what you're thinking about.
And so our thoughts actually literally structurally change
what our brains become structurally.
And that changes turns into what our bodies do hormonally,
neurotransmitter wise, and how our genes get turned on and off
and passed on to our children. So literally from thought to
thought, you're building a brain that's different than the one
before. The problem is, most of us think
the same things over and over. We begin to believe that how
it's been is how it has to be. This is just who I am.
I got the wrong set of stuff for my folks.
I went through the wrong things. And so we create the same brain
over and over that we've always had.
And that's why we feel so stuck. And is there safety for people
to actually perpetuate the stuck because I do feel I do feel like
my OK, I'm a boomer. I think you might be a boomer.
I don't know. But I was born in 1960 and we
did have the mindset that, hey, you go through some hard stuff,
it makes you stronger. You, you, you go through these
hard things. It doesn't mean they're, doesn't
mean they're easy. It doesn't mean, you know, you
losing a son. I, I cannot even imagine that.
But I've talked to every single person that's ever been in that
situation and they don't deny the grief, but they redeem it.
And it sounds like you've taken this and said, I, I'm, I'm not
going to make excuses for you to remain in captivity when God is
offering you freedom. That's right.
And I, I do think there's sometimes people would rather be
prisoner of war than warriors. Well, I think we we develop a
comfort level with what we know, right?
And so psychologically speaking, it seems safer sometimes to stay
even in an uncomfortable position.
Or if you find validation and identity in that place and other
people are, in fact, you'll have no shortage of people who will
come along and pay you on the back and say, I feel so sorry
for you, right? It's easy to find those folks.
What's hard is to start changing the dynamics of the family you
grew up in or the people that you're around or the people who
have gone through something hard with you.
And you say, I want my future to be different than this.
I don't want to think these same things again.
Sometimes that challenges power structures and other
relationships, and so it can be hard and scary to change.
But what's interesting is we've learned from neuroscience in the
21st century that it's actually true that when you go through
something hard, your brain gets stronger and more robust and
more able to deal with hard things.
But we're being told it breaks down.
That's right. But we're seeing with what we
call functional imaging now. We can put you in a scanner and
we can look at what your brain is doing when you think certain
things. And we can actually see people
get more robust and more resilient and develop more
willpower because they've gone through hard things, which is
what Romans 5 says all along, right?
The suffering produces endurance.
Endurance produces character. Character produces hope.
So neuroscience is coming around to the idea that if you want to
be a hopeful, resilient person, you need to have gone through
some hard things. And then that backs up to how do
we raise our kids? We're seeing this generation
that are we got to protect them. We can't let them, can't let
them go through anything hard. If they're sitting behind a mean
kid, we need to write a letter to the teacher and make sure
they move my kid and put them on a team with the coach that they
like. And what we're teaching, what
we're seeing is that kids are growing up and they they can't
launch, they can't go through hard things.
Life is hard and they don't know how to deal with it because we
didn't let them go through hard things when they were younger
and their brains were looking for proof that they could
survive hard things. And so one of the things I'm
most passionate about now is having gone through the loss of
a son. And I've seen God keep that
Romans 828 promise on the back end that he's going to work good
out of this. Not that it will become a good
thing, but that he can work something good and beautiful out
of it. He can, He can show us what
meaning and purpose look like on the backside of trauma.
And I can just tell you, 12 years after losing my son, it is
it, it, it became the thing that showed me what my life was for
because I lost such a went through a such a great loss.
And me and my family went through that and we found that
God's promises were true. You do get stronger, you do get
more resilient. And then you find other people
who don't have the same gifts that you do, who need you to
show them that it's possible to find hope again.
And that's this whole self brain surgery ideas applying what
neuroscience and scripture have said all along in a way that you
can see a future that doesn't look like the past did.
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Going back to what you said, you go through something and there
is there always a more robust possibility, but some people
don't choose that. There is.
So there's always a robust possibility, but sometimes
people are like, no, I'm going to, I'm going to stay with the
victim mentality. And then your brain would
reprogram accordingly. That's right.
So the, The thing is, a lot of us, and I think most of us at at
least on some level, we equate quality of life with ease of
circumstance. So if I, as long as nothing bad
happens, I can have a good life. And then and then society will
validate that, right? If you're, if you're a good
person, you work hard and you do right, and God will protect you
and nothing bad is going to happen to you.
And then when something does, it can throw your faith into a
tailspin. Or if you're not a believer, you
can wonder, you know, why would a, would a good guy allow this
kind of thing to happen? Or maybe there's not a God or
something like this evil can exist.
And what we find out is you can either choose to wallow in the
circumstance and allow it to define what your future looks
like. Isaiah called that the furnace
of suffering, right? You can.
You can be burned up and defined by the suffering.
And we all know that person, the person who 20 years ago,
something hard happened. And if you bump into them on the
street today, you'll say, how's it going?
And they'll say, well, I'm having a rough day because I
went through this hard thing 20 years ago.
And right, they're staying in that.
And it has become the thing that defines them.
And now that we understand that your thoughts turn your brain
into what it is, which means that's how you feel.
Those are the emotions that you feel.
Those are the neurotransmitters that you make your, your, your
repetitive thoughts create the brain that creates the life that
you have. If you decide instead I'm going
to allow God to show me what my future could look like, how I
could find meaning and purpose again, then you'll begin to
develop a brain that supports you in trying to learn how to
find hope and move forward again.
And so it's a choice. It doesn't always seem like an
easy choice, but it is always an available choice to each of us
if we're willing to do the work. Doctor Lee, how much of our
thinking processes are disinherited from our parents or
it's just like woven into our environment At what are your
thoughts on that? That's a really important point
because most all of us are raised in an environment with a
certain set of genetics that we inherited in a culture and a
worldview before we ever have language or understand the rules
of engagement for the world are sort of imposed upon us.
And so the baseline ways in which we think, feel, believe,
and act are imprinted upon us before we ever have an
opportunity to get cognitive about it and think about it.
And so that's why so many of us feel like this is just how I am.
This is how my dad was, this how my grandfather was.
There's another thing called epigenetics that that sort of
programs a lot of your baseline stress responses and cortisol
levels and all those things based on hard things that your
parents and grandparents went through that you've never
experienced yourself. And so understanding those two
things that that you react a lot of the ways that you do because
of the rules of engagement that were imprinted upon you before
you were aware of it. And that a lot of the things
about how your genes are expressed came from things that
happened to generations before you.
Then if you understand that and that you begin to remodel your
brain as soon as you change the the way that you think about
things, then you can say it's not my fault how I got here, but
I have responsibility for where I go next.
And the process of neuroplasticity and renewing
your mind changes as soon as you start thinking one thing and not
another thing. Wow, that is amazing.
I love that. That is so.
That is so empowering. You know, because the Bible says
that the sins of the parents are not to be visited on the
children. OK anymore.
It says, you know, it's used to be for three to four
generations, but you're saying the thought patterns can still
be there with the epigenetics. That's right, and not only the
thought patterns, but we know that certain things do run in
families. Alcoholism, abuse, abnormal
stress responses have been studied really well in Holocaust
survivors down to 4 generations that those kids are born with
abnormally high cortisol levels. So that means what you do is
that the generational curse mentioned wasn't a threat from
God. I'm going to punish your kids.
It was a warning because if you don't get this right in your
lifetime, your kids are going to struggle with things they've
never actually encountered. And so the the freedom there is
that if we get it right, our kids can improve it in their
lifetimes and future generations can be born better off than we
were because we learned how to renew our minds in our in our
generations. Wow.
So if we don't, what's at risk is our children are going to
struggle with things. Perpetuating things that that we
are they. Never even faced, but they're
going to still wrestle with those things that were in
previous generations. Wow, wow, wow.
That is sobering and empowering at the same time.
It is. So, Doctor Lee, let's say
there's a mother and a baby, a mother and a father, and they're
sitting home and they have bought into the lie that
avoidance of every problem is the best situation for our son
or for our daughter. And now they're realizing, wow,
I did not position them to develop strengths that they
needed. Where do they start?
Now? What do they do?
They let's say their, their child is, is 10 or their child
is a teenager and they're like, Oh no, is there, is there hope?
Is there a way to, to flip some of this?
What, what what? What would some of that catalyst
look like for them? I think the the the first thing
is that that because we know the science is on your side, that
the brain begins to remodel and change as soon as you start
thinking different thoughts. And the first thing is to
understand this. The research also indicates,
Lisa, that about 80% of the things we think and feel
everyday are false. No way, 80%.
About 5 to 1. Most of the thoughts that pop
into your head are not true. I'm pretty sure 80% before I
drink coffee is definitely wrong.
I know that. It is, and so So here's the
here's the interesting thing. If your thoughts create the
brain that you have, and about 80% of your thoughts are untrue,
if you don't know that and you react to them as if they are
true, then you're building a brain to support you and making
decisions based on information that was never true.
So I'm making a brain that lives supported by falsehoods.
And falsehood, That's right. So if you've got a child and you
recognize, hey, I've taught my kid to be over sensitive to
risk, to be risk averse, and now I'm saying that they're a child
who can't engage with anything that feels scary or dangerous
and it creates anxiety and panic in them.
The first step is to say, well, the first, I need to teach my
child that not everything they think and feel is true.
And that's what the Bible said all along, right?
Take your thoughts captive. Second Corinthians 10/5, reform
your thinking, don't conform your thinking.
But research has shown very clearly now that not only are
80% of the things we think false, but about 90% of the
things we think about every day are the same set of things that
we thought about the previous day.
And so that means if you take those two things in context,
that most of what right, most of what pops into my head isn't
true. And most days I wake up and
think about the same bunch of stuff I thought about the
previous day. And now that I know that my
thoughts turn my brain into what it is, I'm continuing to feed my
brain the same generally untrue thoughts and and tell my brain
that the generally untrue things I feel are true.
And then my society says I need to validate my feelings.
I need to follow my heart, I need to live my truth, all those
things. Then what I'm doing is I'm
creating a brain that's looking at the world and seeing
falsehood and not having a mechanism by which to determine
that it's false. And so your, your, your job as a
parent is to say, hey, I know this feels big and I know it
feels powerful, but it might not be true.
And so let's develop a mechanism for discerning whether the
things I feel and think are true or not before we react to them.
Because if it's not true, you don't need to react to it.
You don't need to live in it if it isn't true.
Wow. Well, I mean, that explains what
I said at the the very beginning.
Like people have lost their minds.
They're they're actually living in a stronghold of lies.
It sounds like everything's being processed through faulty
reasoning. OK, so going back to that
parent, because I, I know I've got lots of moms and they're
like, Oh my gosh, Doctor Lee, what do I do?
So I love that you can say, hey, that's big.
Would it be beneficial for the parents to maybe sit their son
or daughter down and say, listen, we love you so much that
we thought the best situation for you was to keep you and
shelter you from any type of hardship or confrontation or,
you know, conflict? And we realize now that that was
a mistake. And we realize now, because it
sounds like you're actually saying that the parents are
trying to protect them from anxious situations is actually
creating anxiety a generation of anxious children because they've
never developed the skill set to realize, oh, I went through that
and I, I lived, I survived. I, I'm still friends with that
person. I had a hard conversation, but
it's OK, I lost that game. But I can doesn't mean I'm a
loser. I mean those kind of things.
So can there be a turning point where the parents can say that
to the child and then the family as a whole says this is the new
way of we're looking at things? Because if it really feels like
if the parents don't see it, they're going to by accident
perpetuate that. That's right.
I'll just speak for myself personally.
My mother and my father, my mom had a very traumatic upbringing.
And I would hear her retail incidents of things that
happened 20-30, you know, 40-50 years ago.
And some of those I was part of. And I didn't even recognize what
she was saying because she repeated it so many times, but
it got layered with emotion and her present day contacts or, or
whatever where it was, I was like, wait.
And, and I, it was like there was a situation where there was
no ability to move forward because we were working with a
bunch of non truths over here. And, and almost like, I remember
there was a day I, I said to her mom, that's just not true.
And her, her little eyes, she just looked at me like, Oh my
gosh, have I built all this time on something that was false?
And, and I do believe there's a lot of people right now that are
waking U an realizing that there's been a constant
messaging of you're a victim. You're a victim.
People are after you, you know, divide, division, you know,
whatever's going on and you choose sides instead of renew
your mind. As a woman who is 65 and went
through menopause in the last decade, I'm going to tell you
there's a crazy woman in your brain if you don't renew it.
I mean, it is, it is a, it is a real thing.
And 80% of probably the things I was thinking or reacting to
emotionally and wanted to spend emotional would have gotten me
arrested, you know, or thrown off of airplanes or out of
public speaking or edited in my books.
And so it sounds like there needs to be a a turning what we
model, our children learn, even how we navigate tough times.
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So as a brain surgeon, one of the hardest things to do is to
recognize in the middle of an operation that I made a choice
that isn't going to help me complete that operation in the
way that I wanted to. And it's hard as a surgeon, we
call it, we call it approach in surgery.
The, the, the, the set of things that we're thinking about the,
the way that we put the patient on the table, that the location
of the incision, the technologies and tools we're
going to use for the operation, all those things.
We go into what we call approach.
And one of the hardest things to do, Lisa, is to be in the middle
of an operation and start to see that it this is going to be
harder than it should be. I'm going to lose more blood.
I might hurt my patient in some way.
I might not be able to get this whole tumor out.
One of the hardest things is to stop an operation and change
approaches and recognize and admit to my team, hey guys, we
need to close this up. I need to move the patient.
I need to change the approach. It's hard and a lot of surgeons
don't have the juice to do that and they'll.
Just would that be humility? It's humility, it's integrity,
it's it's willingness to introspect on your own decision
making. And so sometimes surgeons just
finish an operation and they tell the family, we did all we
could do when they really just chose the wrong approach.
And I think going back to your question about parents, like one
of the one of the hardest things to do is to say to your
children, we've been saying some things to you that we recognize
aren't the best advice to have given you.
We chose the wrong approach. We need to rethink how we
discuss feelings and thoughts in this house.
We need to rethink how we make decisions in this house because
a lot of the things we've been reacting to were never true.
And so now we need to change approaches.
And I can tell you though, that if you're a patient, you want a
surgeon who is willing to say, you know what I do, I'm going to
switch approaches here because I want this tumor out.
I want my patients to survive. I want the best outcome here.
It takes it takes a lot of courage.
And so when I talk about self brain surgery, it's this idea
that you're a patient, you're dealing with your own life, your
own brain, your own mind, all these things going on, your own
family, but you also have some agency and control as if you're
a surgeon because you can decide to interact with your thinks,
with your thoughts and feelings in a different way than you have
before. I think especially when it comes
down to parenting, like love your kids enough to acknowledge
when you chose the wrong approach and show them that that
good people can make mistakes and that they can pull the
trigger and change when they need to to get the best outcome.
Wow, Wow. I love that.
And again, you know, we, we've had to change approaches so many
times with our own children. And, and I know for us, that has
always been an opportunity to learn.
That's right. It's always been an opportunity
to learn. And it's not just us that learn
in that moment, but our children learn.
Yeah. Oh, it's OK to own a mistake.
That's right. It's OK to to say you made a
mistake. You know, John and I were even
just talking about something yesterday and I thought, could
it be that we need to change our approach on some of this?
And he was like, you know what? I think that needs to be a
conversation. And so I just want people to be
empowered. That almost sounds and and it
sounds like you're saying you can step away and you can look
at this in the light of God's Word.
That's right. And the approach you're doing
right now, it's not working. So maybe we need to flip this
and maybe we need to look at it from a different angle.
Maybe we need to approach it from a different way.
Maybe, you know, this is a, a way that we've never walked
before, but we know the scripture will give us light and
give us truth. And, and let's just be curious
enough to, to say, let's, let's do this.
You know, I am, I am half Sicilian, which I'm very proud
of. And I always say to the women,
when we're talking, when I'm doing certain messages, I say
you think you're a victim. But because I'm Sicilian, if I
get attacked, I think I'm a threat.
And they said you need to see yourself as a threat rather than
a victim. And the attacks against your
life have more to do with who you might be in the future than
who you have been in the past. But most people live in the
limitations of their brains past.
And then it sounds like here's the past where there's pain.
And then you're saying the enemy comes and layers false
information. God doesn't care about you.
People don't care about you. You'll never be enough.
You'll never be loved. You'll never change.
All men leave, all women, whatever that that false
narrative is that keeps people from actually going to the root
of getting like that tumor out. That's right.
We need to understand that there is an element of what we hear in
our heads that is not just neurological activity but
spiritual warfare. And it's not always diagnosis.
Sometimes it's devil too, right? I mean, so I think we do need to
be aware that we have an enemy. Jesus said in John 1010, The
thief comes to steal and kill and destroy that came that you
might have life and have it abundantly.
And Jesus isn't talking about material circumstances,
possessions, wealth. He's talking about our Peace of
Mind, our ability to be resilient and to navigate
hardship in a way that still shows us that there's meaning
and purpose, right? So you have an enemy that
doesn't want you to live in abundance, doesn't want other
people to find their way towards that abundance.
And he gets in your head and everything he says to you is a
lie, or at least is a truth wrapped in lies.
And so that's why it's so important to discern and be
aware that not everything you think and feel is true, but also
not everything you think and feel is from you or from the
Lord. And so sometimes we have a, we
have an enemy spirit operating who wants us to focus on our
feelings, who wants us to focus on the past, who wants us to
separate from our parents if they were mean to us when we
were nine, You know that we see this whole spirit right now,
people disowning their families, but who hasn't made mistakes
raising their children right? Like so I heard you talk to
Henry Cloud about that, about boundaries.
And how about we're not supposed to be using boundaries to break
up families, We're supposed to be using them to heal families.
So, so remember that there's an enemy, and remember that
neurological activity explains part of what's going on in your
head, but spiritual activity explains most of it, or a lot of
it. You know, I I know I just did
something with Doctor Axe and we talked about how everything is
spiritual and it doesn't mean it's always the devil, but there
usually is a spiritual element, whether it's whether you want to
acknowledge it or not, like even what you said, those high things
that would exalt themselves, they consist knowing God.
There is thoughts, there is it, you know, those constantly
messaging and right now with what is going on in our world
with social media and all the irresponsibility of the media
and you know, everything going around, it feels like chaos,
chaos, chaos, chaos. And and yet God is, is saying,
people, I need you to renew your mind.
And we can't renew our mind by looking at yesterday's news.
And if we have to renew our mind with the word of God because the
word of God is alive and is active and it's sharper than any
2 edged sword. So Doctor Lee, what do you think
the percentage is of people that are held back by their thoughts
versus their actual circumstances?
All of them, I would say, if you think about this, this sequence,
I call it thoughts become things sequence that we just referenced
in Ephesians 4 a moment ago. When you choose, let's say you
think of yourself as a person carrying a bow and arrow, and
you got all these arrows and a quiver on your back, right?
Your thoughts exist in that quiver before you decide which
one to think and turn into a real thing in the world.
They're all equally possible. But until you choose an arrow
and put it in the bow and energize it and release it, it's
potential. But once you choose a thought
and react to it, a series of things happens.
And here's what they are. That immaterial thought in your
mind turns into an electrical event in your brain.
So now you've turned a thought into an electrical event in your
brain. That neuron fires and goes to
release a neurotransmitter in your hypothalamus.
And now that thought event has become an electrical event.
And now it's become a biological event.
Wow. And that neurotransmitter
releases a hormone in your pituitary gland that goes to
your adrenal gland and releases cortisol.
And now you have a physiological response that raises your blood
pressure or switches on epigenetics.
And you can take a thought to an electrical event, to a
biological 1, to a historical one by changing how your kids
are born. And so everything you think
about literally turns into something real in the world so
long before your circumstances have a chance to change how
things turn out for you. The way you think about
circumstances in general is already writing how you're
tending to respond to those things.
And so I would say 100% of people have more trouble with
the subset of things that they think about than they do with
what actually happens. And that explains how two people
can go through the exact same circumstance and have vastly
different outcomes. You know, so many, so many women
are now wrestling with a number of autoimmune diseases.
Is this something that can be addressed with changing their
thinking? Yes and no.
There there are. There are physical diseases that
we can't change with the things that we think about.
However, there is really good research to show that just about
every physiological process in your body will respond to
changing the milieu of things that you think about.
And so that's why cognitive behavioral therapy, for example,
has been so effective in chronic pain syndromes.
And so we can't ameliorate or eliminate every physical ailment
that comes along if we could by changing our thoughts and we'd
live forever. And we know that we don't.
We certainly can, man. We can make our thought
environment serve our physiological environment at a
holier level if you want to submit your thinking to God.
And then you can optimize the physiological environment of
your body, which we know now that that reducing inflammation
and changing the way that your body responds to things effects
and reduces the symptoms of many autoimmune diseases.
And so I think although we can't eliminate everything, we can
certainly improve our experience of it by changing the things
that we think about. I love that I, I didn't ask for
this test to be done, but somebody did a genetic test on
me and I guess I have a Yankee DNA strand or chromosome or
something. And it, they printed out this
list of all these horrible things that are supposed to
happen to me and I read them and I just like, I threw it away.
I tore it up, I threw it away. And a couple of them I'd
already, I'd already had cancer at 5.
There was a couple of things that already had happened, but I
remember calling another friend who would think very much like
we were thinking and he said, Lisa, pretty much everybody has
these things dormant in their body.
And he said stress is what he said.
These kind of things is like a gun held to your head, but
stress is what pulls the trigger.
And he said, so we're like, we weren't made to live forever.
We all have these kind of things that are like part of the fall
or part of whatever. And he said, but you just you
just have to manage your stress and your thoughts so you don't
pull that that trigger. So it sounds like you're saying
you you don't deny that those things are evidentially there or
a possibility, but you don't allow stress to cause you to
have those things be their focus.
That's right. Look at identical twins.
So they they don't live the same lifespans, they don't develop
the same disease profiles. They don't have the same kind of
health problems. And the reason is they, they
have a different lives and they have different thought lives.
And so we know that it's not the genes you inherit that tell the
story of what you're going to have in your life.
It's the epigenetic switches that come on and off in your
lifespan, lifespan. And so that means it's, it's
your environment, your thought environment, the decisions you
make. In fact, TD Jakes said in one of
his books that we are born looking like our parents, but we
die looking like our decisions. And that that line stuck with me
because it speaks to epigenetics.
It speaks to the things that become real in your life.
You have a lot of control over them.
So in this book, I love first of all, that you're merging.
I love that you said at the very beginning that science is
catching up to what the word of God has always said.
Like science is, oh, wait, wait, maybe God knew what he was
saying. Maybe Solomon knew, maybe, maybe
all of this kind of stuff was already in play.
So it's catching up. Is this book, is it user
friendly? Is it practical?
Yeah, so I give you what I call the 10 commandments of self
brain surgery, which are my and the right the why did I choose
10? The the 10 most important things
I've learned as I've tried to apply science and faith to each
other in a way that honors God and as a bereaved father, how
I've done that. So there's 10 lessons that are
insanely practical about how people can flourish in their
lives using science and faith together.
And then I give you 15 very specific, we call them self
brain surgery operations, that particular things you can do if
you're feeling panic or anxiety or grief or chronic pain or all
kinds of things. And so there's a lot of
practical stuff in the book as well.
And then I just try to teach you a process of how you can
practice this in your life going forward.
Because the one of the most important things is to
understand that that operating your brain the way God designed
it to be operated isn't something you do when you're
feeling bad or or when you're having a bad day.
It's how we're supposed to live our lives all the time.
Because if you look at Ephesians chapter 4, for example, Paul
talks about what he calls the Gentiles and, and, and the
problems that they're having. And he lists all these sinful
things that people are doing, the adultery, the murder, all
that. And then he says they're lost in
the futility of their thinking. So thinking turns into your
life. What you think about isn't a
problem in your life. It's the root problem in your
life. And he says in 423, you need to
be renewed in the attitudes of your mind, right?
So the prescription for human flourishing is to change the
things you're thinking about that'll turn into better things
coming out of your life. And so I tried to write a book
that was prescriptive and also descriptive of a life, what a
life looks like, if you want to pursue that flourishing and
abundance that Jesus gave us. Well, I love that and I want to
thank you for writing that book. And I am believing that there
has been never, well, there's never been a more desperate need
for a book like this. And I'm just going to say this
to you out there. This is a book that is going to
not only give you practicalities, but it's going
to hold you accountable. And a lot of people are afraid
of being accountable. But I just want to remind you,
you don't want to give away your power to everybody else.
You want to actually be accountable.
You want to own your mistakes so that you can walk free and go
forward. And this is a time where
deception is abounding, fear is just radically compromising
people's ability to love, people's ability to connect,
people's ability to learn. And so I believe this book is
going to be a tool. It's going to be a sword in your
hand to slice through the enemy's lies and actually
recover. I also believe it can be a
restorative, restorative tool. I believe it would be a
restorative tool for you to have conversations with your family.
So many people out there, they thought they were doing the
right thing with their children and then found out that maybe
they didn't position for strength or maybe you made a lot
of mistakes. I feel like John and I made a
lot of mistakes with our children.
But this can be a new beginning for all of you.
And so this is such a key, important book.
Imagine, imagine thinking you can build a God honoring life
with 80% of your thoughts being untrue, being false, and
therefore the conclusions being completely corrupted.
I believe that we need to renew our mind, that we need to get
into God's word. We need to allow that word of
God to have its way in our life like never before.
And Doctor Lee Warren, you have always been a pioneer for this.
So thank you so much for joining me today.
Thank you, Lisa. It's an honor to be with you.
And they can get this book wherever books are sold, I'm
assuming. The book is called The Life
Changing Art of Self, Brain Surgery, connecting neuroscience
and faith to radically transform your life.
It's releasing February 3rd everywhere.
Books are sold all around the world, inaudible to all.
Right, Grab a copy for yourself, grab one for your friends, grab
one for your kids that maybe you messed up with.
I believe this is the beginning and a catalyst for a new life
for your family.