Classic: Who Self-Brain Surgeons Are (S13E54)

Hey, it's your friend Dr. Lee Warren. I am grateful and honored that you'd hear 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 they were always talking about.

And I got some exciting news for you. We are at December 1st. When 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 to, 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 that 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 subscribed 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 drlyworn.substac.com, my website drlyworn.com. You can sign up for the newsletter that,

but 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 on 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 thinking 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 change 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. We'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

so make sure you're subscribed in both places. And we are ready to 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 have 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 that'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 up with this morning 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 changes, 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 talk 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. 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 expect

you to learn. It's guided by 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 as well. So self brain surgery then is directed neuroplasticity, guided by

metacognition, attention and intention. So 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 thing 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

and 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 only 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 the outcome of things

the experience has a lot to do with what you intend to find when you deal with them. So we're

going to talk about medication, 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 to don't be conformed to the

world be transformed by the renewing of your mind. It's second Timothy 17. You aren'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 anxious. 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 medication 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 than they have felt in the previous months

in 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

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.

Regardless of what circumstances you go through, you can continue to improve your quality of life,

your peace of mind, your self-esteem and the impact that you have on others throughout your entire

life through the process of self brain surgery. 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 or difficult. It's a trained mental state.

MRI studies from people like Andrew Newberg, Sarah Lazar and Richard Davidson 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 that 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 your 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 singular 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 things. So in real terms,

instructional 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, they're preparing for it, they desire it

and they're pursuing it. These are the parts of the brain that singulate cortex, the hippocampus

and the prefrontal cortex. These are the regions of the brain that handle focus, emotional regulation

and stress recovery. Now, scripture's been saying it a long 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 second

Timothy 17. A sound mind is a trained and resilient mind. And 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 second Timothy 17 because I want you to know when you live in that place where

you know, God didn't give me a spirit of fear. So if I'm, 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. The 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 second one? Self brain surgeons are happier

than people that don't practice these things. That's not just an opinion either, by the way.

It's measurable in MRI scanners. It's immeasurable. It's measurable on psychological profiles.

It's measurable in the number of antidepressants they require. The number 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 circumstances.

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 that makes your kids more stressed out when they're born.

So 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 restore 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 Donald 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. So 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 Ayman says, your brain is always listening. And 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. So 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. 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 you'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 and 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, self 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 running

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, fight, 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

hand 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 functional 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 anxious 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 is 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 that 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

and then we put our mind and top down control over what our brain is doing. 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 of 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. Number 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 are. 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

are 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. Self-brain surgeons take the

pin back from trauma. Trauma doesn't get to write your story anymore. We get 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. You're just a victim of. It's something that you

get to shape. 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 creative 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 self-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,

it'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 thinking 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

lips 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 the 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. It 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

will, we are willing to partner with 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 locust 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, letting 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've accepted in the past but 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 anyway. 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 doctor switch. In 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. And 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. And second Corinthians 10 and 5 on 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 heaven's law in action. It's the ninth commandment, but I'm doing I'm getting

better at this is neuro theology. This is discipleship. This is healing. So that's what we're going

in season 13. We're going to become those people. I'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 those automatic thoughts,

who biopsies them and rejects the false ones and transplants the 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 for 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

face together in all kinds of practical ways. I can't wait to give you an opportunity to join the

School of self brain surgery on February 3rd when the book comes out. It's going to be so much fun

and we're going to learn so much together. I'm going to get an email from you some day. It 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 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, drlywaring.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, the 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 opera ports and all those kinds of things, 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 will find out about it. So

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 that 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. And 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.