← Stay True with Madison Prewett Troutt
Loading summary
Transcript45 lines
- [00:00]
A
How have you seen science and faith work together?
- [00:03]
B
If you really look at it objectively, scientifically, the more you focus on the problem of anxiety and mental health and all those things, the worse the problem becomes. The research is really clear now that probably about 80% of what you think automatically and the things that you feel are just brain activity that aren't represented by anything. That's true. The brain can't tell the difference between something that's actually happening and something that you're just imagining. You can count on the fact that that your brain gets better at what you repeatedly do and that can hurt you. You can get better at getting more frustrated or staying more stuck or falling into old habits. You can get better at that. Or you can get better at having better outcomes by choosing better thinking.
- [00:38]
A
How much of the thoughts that we think are attacks from the enemy or are, you know, the spiritual warfare happening against us?
- [00:47]
B
Don't let that trauma have the inherent power to define the rest of your life. Feelings aren't facts. They are chemical events in your brain.
- [00:54]
A
What is happening in our brains when we're having a panic attack?
- [00:58]
B
Social media is hijacking our brains and it's designed that way.
- [01:07]
A
What's up guys? Welcome back to another episode of Stay True podcast. I'm your host, Madison Pruitt Trout and I'm so excited for this episode you guys. Today we are joined by Dr. Lee Warren, a board certified neurosurgeon and best selling author who spent 14 years as a neurosurgeon in the US Army. And Dr. Warren helps people understand the connection between science and faith and how our brains can actually heal and change. He's the author of no Place to Hide and host of the Dr. Lee Warren podcast. And he has a new book out named the Life Changing Art of Self Brain Surgery. And today we are going to talk about how most of the thoughts we think are not true, how science and faith actually work together, what's going on in our brain when we feel anxious and how to stop a panic attack when what AI and social media are doing to our brain and so much more. Dr. Lee Warren, thank you so much for coming on the Stay True podcast. I'm so excited for just to hear more about your story. I know of so many people in my personal life that have been impacted by your voice, by your wisdom, by your story and some people who are listening may not be familiar with it. So I'd love for you to just start off by sharing your story and why you've written the books that you've written and why you are doing what you're doing today and what got you here.
- [02:24]
B
Thank you so much, Mattie. We're grateful to be here. And I almost said roll Tide, but we're Auburn fans, so we'll say War Eagle.
- [02:31]
A
War Eagle.
- [02:32]
B
So grateful for the opportunity to be here with you today. My story is kind of two things. So I'm a brain surgeon, and I've been kind of a neuroscience guy for 25 years. And so I write and talk a lot in that space around how our minds and our brains are not the same thing and why that's important and why it gives us hope. But I also come at it from the standpoint of being a person who's been through a lot of things myself. So I was in the military. I went to the Iraq war. I did 200 brain surgeries in a tent hospital and survived 100 mortar attacks and came home with PTSD and all that stuff. So my first book was about war and trauma and all that, and then went through a divorce, and we blended our families and got all our lives going again and found our hope again and all of that. And then our son died. Mitchell died. Died when he was 19 in Auburn. And so I come at this work from the standpoint of being a fellow traveler with our listeners today, of somebody who's been through some hard things. And so I found that the combination of understanding how our brains work and how our minds work and then understanding what God's been saying about the best way for people to live and how people can find hope, that kind of working those two things together has given me an opportunity to really speak to people all over the world about how you really can have some agency in the process of finding hope again when you go through hard things.
- [03:50]
A
Wow. Wow. I'm so sorry for your loss and also thank you for your service, man. I look at you and I'm like someone who's been through a lot of hard things, yet you still carry such strong faith and hope. How did going through these hard and horrible circumstances strip you of your control and also create in you a dependence? And how did it not, like, take away from your faith? Like, how have you stayed so steadfast in your faith and hope filled, even in the midst of seeing all of that and going through all of that?
- [04:22]
B
I think it comes down to the way we lost. Our son's a good example. He was. He was stabbed, and we never. They never solved the crime, so we never got to understand what happened. And so you end up in this position where if you're faced with. With a devastating loss that you can't explain, you either have to give up and just accept the fact that you're going to be sad for the rest of your life, or you have to press into the things that God has said are always going to be true. And we found this verse in Isaiah 48:10 that says, I have refined you in the furnace of suffering. And so I recognized that there was this opportunity that we could either be defined by the loss or we could let God keep his promise and refine us through it. And so I think for me, it was always this pivoting towards the hope of God. God having a plan that's going to work out in the end in a way that would benefit us or allow us to help other people and find purpose in that suffering.
- [05:12]
A
Wow, that's beautiful. And you have seen a lot in the spiritual world, the scientific world. I want to hear, because I feel like we live in a world where they put those things up against each other, right? Like the spiritual and the science side of things. Like, you know, you have those who I feel like are in the spiritual world, and it's like everything against science, and then you have the science world and everything against spirituality. How have you seen science and faith work together and not against each other? And what would you say to the person who maybe is camped out in just one of the camps?
- [05:42]
B
Well, the first thing is it's a big lie that science and faith have ever been antithetical to each other. It's never been true. In fact, Western science started Newton and Galileo and Copernicus and Kepler and all those guys that started Western science did so for the purpose of glorifying God and explaining to normal people what God had done. So trying to use a process that was repeatable to understand how God has done the things that he's done that was the purpose of science in the first place. So it's never been true. But in this world that we live in, it's, like you said, commonly presented as something that's a. That's a fight that smart people can't believe in God or faithful people are silly and don't believe in science. And the truth is, especially since the 21st century has been around and we've developed things like the ability to image your brain and see what your brain's doing when you're thinking, as I'm sure we'll talk about, especially since then, it's become progressively more clear that a lot of the things that science has said for a long time, like. Like, science can prove that there is no God, for example, just aren't true and they're not defensible. And the longer we study what the brain is actually doing, the more evidence we're finding that mind and brain are not the same thing. And that all the things that the scripture has said along the way about how humans are best to live and best to flourish are being validated by neuroscience in the 21st century now. So for me, it's just this long process of science unfolding and waking up to things that God said a long time ago.
- [07:04]
A
That's so good. I know. I feel like I've seen so much recently, Even on, like, YouTube, it's like, oh, they found this thing, or they discovered this thing. And I'm just like, yeah, scripture's been talking about this for a really long time. Like, how are we just now catching up? And you said something earlier about the difference between the mind and the brain. Can you talk about that? What does that mean?
- [07:24]
B
Yeah, so really important that we drill into this, because for the past 50 or 60 years, everybody's basically been taught and we've accepted this idea that we are the product of our brain activity, that everything about you, your hopes, dreams, fears, potential capabilities, talents, is about how your brain works. And so the idea that the genes that you inherit and the family that you're raised in and the traumas and difficult things that you go through can shape your brain in certain ways, and that produces how you have to live. That's the whole basis of the hopelessness that a lot of people have. Because the fact is, Maddie, in the 21st century now, we have more mental health resources, more medications, more therapists, more techniques, more accessibility than ever before. But the mental health crisis is getting worse and not better, which means if you really look at it objectively, scientifically, the more you focus on the problem of anxiety and mental health and all those things, the worse the problem becomes. And so then we look to scripture, and we see what is 21st century neuroscience really showing us and how does it relate to scripture? And we're seeing that when you talk about mind and brain, you can put somebody in a functional MRI scanner like the one we have in Auburn, and you can see that when you think about something and change to thinking about something else, your brain responds to that and does a different thing, and then your body responds to that physiologically. And I'll tell you a story if I can make it really personal. So about a month after Mitch died, we. We were working at the time in Auburn. Lisa ran our practice, and our office was on the third floor of the MRI Research center in Auburn. And so I was this neuroscientist that had been practicing neurosurgery for about 15 years by then. And traditional neurosurgery and neuroscience training is that brain is the generator of mind. So basically everything about your brain is what you are and what you can do. And so I've been raised in that scientifically, but also a person of faith. And everybody who is a Christian would agree on that. There's some part of you that lives after your body dies. Right now, all of us think we're going to go to heaven, but our body's going to be in the ground. So that must mean that there's something about us that isn't our brain, that's still us. And so we had these ideas from faith and ideas from science that I'd never really thought about. So it was kind of this dichotomy. So Mitch died. And about a month after he died, we had to go back to work. We had employees, and we had to run our practice. And so at some point, you got to go back to work. And we got invited to this meeting down on the first floor of the MRI research center. And they're doing something called functional imaging, which is basically where you put somebody in a scanner, and instead of just seeing a picture of the brain, you can see what the brain's doing when the person's moving or thinking. You can actually see what parts of the brain are active and what transmitters are, what neurotransmitters are getting made and all that. So they put this lady in the scanner, and they had headphones on her so they could communicate with her. And they said, Mrs. Johnson, think about the worst thing you've ever felt. And I was thinking, I know what the worst thing I've ever felt was. It happened a month ago. I was empathizing with this lady, and after she thought for a second, her brain began to react to what she was thinking about. And the part of the brain called the amygdala, which is about fear and fight flight, and all that stuff started to light up and got really active on the screen. We could see it. And then shortly after that, her vital signs began to change. Her blood pressure went up and her heart rate went up, and her respiratory rate went up, and we could see her thought turn into brain activity that then turned into stuff happening in her body. And then they said, okay, now stop thinking about that. And Start thinking about the best thing you can remember, like, recall your best day, your happiest memory. And shortly after that, her frontal lobes got really active. The part that's about executive decision making and remembering and recalling happy events and good, good events. Those parts of the brain began to light up. The amygdala calmed down, her blood pressure came down, her heart rate came down. And we saw again thought produce brain activity, produce body activity. And Lisa, my wife, said, that reminds me of Philippians 4. And I said, what do you mean? And she said, well, it says, if you don't want to be anxious, be grateful instead, or think about this and not that, and you'll be filled with peace. And I started thinking about it, and I'm not a charismatic person at all. I was raised in a really traditional sort of church. And you don't go around saying, God told me this or God said that to me. But in that moment, I had this really crystal clear sort of voice that said, hey, Lee, when you go to do brain surgery on somebody, you're making an intentional decision to change the structure of their brain for the purpose of improving their life. That's surgery. And when you change from thinking about one thing to another thing, you're making a decision to change your brain structure for the purpose of changing your life. And it's the same thing. It's exactly surgery. So what we saw is that your mind generates immaterial things that you can think of that are not represented by brain activity, not caused by brain activity. And then your brain reacts to what you think about.
- [11:54]
A
Interesting.
- [11:54]
B
And then your body reacts to what your brain is doing. And that's the genesis of this idea that mind and brain are not the same thing. And now science is proving it. The Bible said it all along, like the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart, two different things. David recognized there's stuff you do in your body and things that you think about in your mind. The Bible uses words like soul, mind, heart, all kind of conflated to this idea that there's an eternal part of you that's made in God's image. The part of you that's made in God's image is not what your hair color is or what your eyes look like. He doesn't look like that. It's your mind that you're in. You're an eternal being that's not trapped in your body. Your brain is the organ through which your mind embodies and engages with the world. And now we can put you in an MRI scanner And see that happening. So it's becoming harder and harder for scientists to defend this idea that the brain is in charge of everything. Because now we know we can change your brain by what you choose to think about.
- [12:45]
A
Wow, interesting. So you can control your thoughts, Is that what you're saying? We have control over what we think about. And how would we begin to do that? Because I think sometimes we think we're a victim into our thoughts. We can't control what just comes into our mind.
- [12:58]
B
That's right. Well, there's this interesting verse in Second Corinthians, chapter 10, verse 5, that says we take every thought captive, right? So that sounds impossible because you have six to 80,000 thoughts a day, depending on how the research is done. So how do you take all your thoughts captive? As a surgeon, I think about what we call biopsies, right? We. If I want to know what a spot on the scan is, I don't just go do radical surgery or start radiating it. I go to surgery and take a little tiny piece of that tissue so I can examine it and. And get interested in what the tissue is before I decide how to treat it. Right. With our thinking, we often believe that every thought that pops into our head is true and everything that we feel is true. But the research is really clear now that probably about 80% of what you think automatically and the things that you feel are just brain activity that aren't represented by anything that's true. So that means if you can do what the psychologists call metacognition, get into this idea of you start thinking about what you're thinking and thinking about what you're feeling before you react to it, then you can start saying, if I know that about 80% of what I think and feel isn't true, and if I go around reacting to stuff that's not true, that's not going to help me in my life, then if I can just develop a little process where I biopsy my thoughts or take them captives, Take a second to be curious about what I'm thinking and feeling and asking some questions of it. Is this thought true? Is it helpful? Is it compassionate? Is it something that I can control? And if it's not, then I just replace it with something that is true. That's where I think scripture is really helpful. If you have a bunch of God's words in your heart to replace those negative thoughts with, then you can start operating out of things that are always true. That was really helpful after Mitch died. Like, no, my future is not hopeless. It's not always going to feel like this. God says he has a plan for me, a purpose to help me and not harm me. So I would replace those automatic negative thoughts with ones that were more powerful and more true. And so you can start getting on top of it by just developing a practice of. Of being curious about what you're thinking and feeling, rather than responsive or reactive to it, as if it's always true. The good news is there's a thing called neuroplasticity, which is this process by which your brain begins to automate things that you think about repeatedly. And your brain gets better at them over time. They become more automatic. And so if you feel stuck and you feel unable to control your thinking, if you just practice a little bit every day, I'm going to take one negative thought that I keep having over and over, write it down, challenge it, replace it with something that's true, you get better at that, and it becomes more automatic over time.
- [15:18]
A
That's so good. I love that you spoke to that because. Yeah, and you hinted at this earlier, but so often when we're born into a traumatic situation, or we're maybe like these words are spoken over us or something's modeled for us, or there's just something passed down generationally. You know, it can impact our thinking, how we feel about ourselves, how we view God, how we view the world. So. So what would you say to the person that feels like they are a victim to their circumstances? And I guess another question to that would be, are. Is our unhealthy thinking patterns linked to, you know, generationally, those thinking patterns being passed down? Like, is it inherited from our family members?
- [16:00]
B
Yeah. So there's several parts of that question. Remind me if I forget one of them, because all of them are incredibly important. The first one, this generational issue is really important. There's good research now that shows that in people who went through traumatic events like the Holocaust, that down to four generations, their great grandchildren can be born with abnormally high cortisol levels and abnormal stress responses, which means you literally can be born sort of afraid of things you've never experienced before. You can be born uncomfortable in your own skin through no fault of your own because of things that happen in your family line that relates to those verses in Deuteronomy about how the sins of the father are passed down to the generations. But it's not a threat, it's a warning. Hey, be careful how you live, because the decisions you make, the things you focus on, the things you go through, they affect your family. In the future. Right. But the research is also really hopeful because it's shown that those people that are born with those abnormal stress responses, if they get it right, if they do the work to get better, their children are born with normal stress responses, which means that you can change it in your lifetime. So if you feel trapped in a generational issue, Everybody in my family is an alcoholic, or everybody in my family is anxious, or any of those things, the good news is, if you're willing to invest and do the work to get better in your lifetime, the future is better for your family. So that's the first piece. The second piece is that the reason why you feel unable to change is two. Two parts. One, you've believed the idea that your brain creates who you are. And that's kind of hopeless because I'm obviously the brain in my head is what it is. How can I change it? That's. That's an idea that we used to have, that we're stuck with the brain that we have. But the truth is, because of what we said a minute ago, neuroplasticity. Your brain is constantly changing. Every second of every day, it's breaking and making new connections between all the cells in itself every second of every day. And the primary thing that changes those connections is what you think about repeatedly. And so that means if you feel overwhelmed by the way that you feel, as soon as you're willing to start purposefully thinking new thoughts, challenging them, replacing them with things that are true, and rehearsing that, repeating it, get that neuroplasticity working for you instead of against, what I call self. Brain surgery. Like this idea that you literally can change the structure of your brain. Research shows now that those structural changes begin to happen within seconds to minutes of you thinking down a new thought pathway. So if you can say, wait, it's not helpful to me to think of myself as, I'm always a loser. I never do anything right. You know, X, y, Z, whatever it is that you think, it's not helpful to me. It's not producing good results in my life. So I'm going to think for a little while about some things that God says are true of me, right? What's my future look like? What does he think of me? He died for me. All those kinds of things. If you rehearse those kinds of thoughts, instead, you begin automating those structural changes to work on your behalf. And all the research shows that the brain change is structurally happening in real time in response to those thoughts. That's incredibly helpful. Because you have some power, you got some skin in the game. You got something you can do about it. The social scientists define hope is having agency, which means this belief that you can do something to change your circumstance, agency and opportunity, that there's actually a chance for you to do it. And here it is, right here in front of us. Like, as soon as I'm willing to start purposefully thinking different kinds, of thinking different kinds of thoughts, my brain is going to respond. It's. Everybody's brain is designed to listen to your mental instruction and make changes in response to it.
- [19:15]
A
Wow, that's so powerful to think about. Like, we can. Our brain is constantly changing. We're not just stuck. It's not like we're just like a victim to however we were raised or to what we saw or to what happened to us. But we get to create new brain pathways. And I think about that in scripture all the time, you know, of just. There's so many verses, but even just thinking about, you know, you are a new creation, or thinking about Romans 8 of, you know, the mind governed by the flesh is death, but the mind governed by the spirit is life and peace. And I think about that so often because. And it even talks about in Colossians 3. But it's so easy to get our eyes and our minds set on earthly things instead of eternal things. So what are ways we can continually create healthy thinking? And what are ways that we can set our eyes, our minds on things above? How has that helped? Like, what do you. What do you do for that, practically?
- [20:06]
B
So the first thing I think that's crucially important is to set some time apart in the morning for yourself. Because what most of us do is they. We get into our day and we react all day long. We react to things. We get into a situation that triggers us in some way. We react the way that we're programmed to do it. There's this old saying that when the pressure's on, we don't rise to the occasion. We fall to our preparation. And that's what most of us do. We just wake up, go to work, react all day. So if you can take some time in the morning, spend some time in the words, spend some time worshiping, doing things that get your brain focused on that awe and wonder. That's really good stuff for your brain. And then start thinking through the day you're going to encounter. When I get with my husband, we tend to argue about this thing, and I tend to react in that way, start thinking through those things. Or when my Kids are. When it's hectic and we're busy, I start yelling or whatever happens, or I get to this meeting at work, I tend to get in trouble. Whatever it is, you think ahead, you kind of plan ahead of the day that you're going to have, and you decide ahead of time on a different response that will have a different result than the one that you're frustrated by. And so then you mentally rehearse that there's something really important from really good research that the brain can't tell the difference between something that's actually happening and something that you're just imagining.
- [21:14]
A
Wow.
- [21:15]
B
And that's important. And it's been shown in people like concert pianists and fighter pilots that if they visualize the thing that they're going to do, the performance that they're going to do, or the flight that they're going to take, the brain begins activating the motor regions, the parts of the brain that are going to be required to carry out those tasks and as if they're actually happening. And then when they actually perform those tasks, there's something like 25% better at actually doing the thing if they spent the time visualizing it. And so that means for all of us, if we can just think through the things we're going to need to do that day, your brain will begin to model it and you can begin laying down those structural connections that we talked about earlier, the physical, literal connections between neurons that are going to enable you to carry out that better plan. And so you can count on the fact that your brain gets better at what you repeatedly do, and that can hurt you. You can get better at getting more frustrated or staying more stuck or falling into old habits. You can get better at that, or you can get better at having better outcomes by choosing better thinking.
- [22:11]
A
It's so cool. Visualization. See, I grew up in Assemblies of God church, so I grew up pretty charismatic. But I. I've been doing more visualization lately, and it has been so helpful. Even just like, going through, reading through passages of scripture and like, inserting myself. I think it's so easy when we read through the Bible, it's just kind of like, okay, gotta read through the Bible. And it's like, I want this to apply to my life. I want to meditate on this. I wanna feel like I'm there. I wanna see it, I wanna feel it. And I've started to, like, ins. Whether it's John 4 and I'm like, they're watching, like, the woman at the well and Jesus have This encounter in this moment. And what would that be like if he was saying that to me? And anyways, I think visualization has been such a powerful tool in my life lately, and I'm so glad that you spoke to that. I want to talk about anxiety and panic attacks, because I've seen that be such a tactic of the enemy against this generation. This, like, over. And I, I, and I want to talk about social media, too, in a little bit, because I think a lot of it is tied to social media. But there's this overstimulation happening in our minds and our brains all the time, where we feel so paralyzed. And I know I've walked through parts of that and myself, I've seen people I love walk through that have panic attacks, have anxiety attacks. And so what is happening in our brains when we're having a panic attack?
- [23:30]
B
So what's happening, your brain, is that the, the physiology of your brain or your body rather changes in response to the neurotransmitter levels in your brain. Okay, so the parts of your brain that are designed to help you stay alive when something dangerous is happening activate. That's the amygdala, the hippocampus, the limbic system of your brain is involved in triggering that fight or flight response. And so humans are designed, your creator gave you this ability to not have to think about running away from the bear or the axe murderer or whatever's in your house. You need to get away. You don't want to stop and ponder that for a while. You just want to engage right, and get away. And so you're designed for that, for a purpose. But it goes back to what I said a minute ago, how the brain can't tell the difference between something you're just imagining and something that's really happening. And so the system is not designed to be exposed to high cortisol levels all the time. So when you're, when you're just imagining something that's scary or that something really did happen in the past, and you're recalling it and you're starting to have that physiological response, there's this interesting thing that happens in the brain where, when you focus on something, that mindset on the flesh is death that we talked about earlier. When you focus on something, your brain begins to amplify it as if it's happening in real time. And so the more you focus on the anxiety that you're building, that you're feeling, or the physiological thing that's happening. Here goes my heart rate. Here goes my breath. That's happening again. I'm going into a panic attack. The more you start focusing on it, the bigger it becomes physiologically and the more true it becomes. And so when you start to have that sense that a panic attack is coming on, most of us begin to focus on the sensations that we're feeling and the things that are bubbling up in our bodies, which then amplifies it. And so if we can learn a method of saying, wait a minute, I need to do something to abort this, because it's not going to help me right now to have this happen. I don't want to have to run away every time I start to feel uncomfortable in public. I don't want to have to give into this sensation. If we can start to develop a method for interrupting that, then we would be on the right side of that, getting better at what we're practicing that we talked about a minute ago. And the way you do it turns out to be related to what Philippians 4 says all along about, if you don't want to be anxious, be grateful instead. There's this one way switch in that part of the brain called the hippocampus that's involved in triggering that fight or flight. And the switch happens if you focus on something that's making you anxious, you get more anxious. Or if you can think about something that you're grateful for or divert your attention to something else, then your frontal lobes come online. And the frontal lobes are involved in executive decision making, helping you make better choices, using a bigger part of your brain to think your way through the situation instead of just feeling your way into it. Right. And so it turns out that what Philippians 4 said all along was exactly true on the neuroscience side, that you can't actually do two things mentally at the same time. You can't be anxious and grateful at the same time. The problem is we're really good at switching rapidly so we can go back and forth really quickly, which makes us feel like we're stuck. But if you can divert your attention, think about something that you're grateful for, or recall a happier time or a different memory, or make yourself think of something that you want to do. And a good example is the psychologists use this technique called 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, which is where they, they call it grounding. But basically, if you can, instead of focusing on the thing you're feeling, look around the room and find five things that you can see and make yourself think about them. I see that camera. I see you sitting over there. Make yourself do five things. What you're doing is not some magic trick. You're getting blood flow to a different part of your brain and stealing blood flow from the amygdala that's involved in generating that panic attack. And then do four things you can hear, three things you can taste, or two things you can touch. And just make yourself use your mind to command your brain to do something different than it was trying to do when it was forcing you into that panic attack. That's been shown to be extremely helpful in avoiding those attacks.
- [27:08]
A
I love that so much. That's really cool. And a very practical way to respond when you are feeling those anxious feelings or you start feeling panic. Come on. I know for my husband, he's opened up a lot on the podcast of just different methods. He hasn't. I don't think he's tried that full method yet, but he but trying to get his brain to think about something else. And a lot of times it's just like he'll start sharing the gospel with the person sitting next to him on the plane because he's just like, as soon as I engage in conversation, as soon as I take my mind off of myself or off of what I'm feeling, it immediately, you know, just like I feel better. Yeah. And. Or his other go to is like Psalm 23 and just like reciting it over and over again. But I love that so much. What role has social media played in our anxiety and panic? And what has social media done to our brain?
- [27:58]
B
Social media is hijacking our brains, and it's designed that way. It's built by people who want to keep you on their platform. And in order to keep you on their platform, they have to show you more novel content all the time. The way the brain works is you release dopamine in response to a new thing, whether it's something you've never seen before or something you're interested in. You get a little bit of dopamine, which is part of your brain's reward cycle. So you believe that you have been rewarded by having seen something novel. And so what happens though, is your brain gets accustomed to that novelty and it's not novel anymore. And so you don't get the dopamine again. So your algorithm designers need to show you progressively more alarming or progressively more sort of of shocking content over time or more interesting content to get you the same neurochemical release. So you begin to become acclimatized to that and swiping and swiping and swiping because your brain is trying to get that reward, which is the same thing that happens in addiction, by the way. It's exactly the same thing that happens. Your brain becomes progressively narrower at the things that can give it pleasure or joy and anything that gives you pleasure or dopamine without you having to work for it, narrow, sort of progressively narrows your ability to experience joy in your life. So the things that God gave us that naturally produce joy are like nature and awe and wonder and things like that and interacting with humans. Those give us dopamine in a much more controlled and longer lasting way. And our brains don't sort of chase a new high constantly like we do with social media. So social media is creating anxiety because when you don't get that dopamine reward, you feel anxious. Instead you get other neurotransmitters that are saying, hey, I need this thing and so I've got to get back on my phone. And that's by design because they want to keep you on the platform so they keep making more money off of you. Right. So if you're aware of that, then you say, hey, I need to limit my exposure to this or I need to look at longer form content. Short form content is the worst because it's that constant release of dopamine that you're chasing that next hit. So I think it's just a, it's an awareness that were being manipulated and that you can use the platform in ways that don't create that short dopamine release for yourself. Longer form content is better if you're going to be on the platform at all.
- [30:08]
A
Yeah, yeah. And being honest with yourself is so huge because I know for me, like I am taking a break from social media right now and it's been such a gift. I feel like I'm so much more present. I feel like I'm so much lighter. I'm not constantly in this, you know, doom scrolling or like comparison or whatever it may be. Distraction. I feel so much more close with the Lord. Like I can hear his voice. Like the distractions and the noise is, is, is silenced and it's so sweet. Like my daughter and I, we go sit in nature and I just, we have like what I call the Holy Spirit hour. And we just sit out there and we're like, holy Spirit, will you speak to us? And we just listen and, and we point to the birds and the trees and it's what you're saying, it's that healthy dopamine of like, I feel joy. Like this is what I was made for, you know, and I'd Love for you to talk more about the healthy dopamine levels, like what are the things that we can be doing that create the healthy dopamine, that create the better thought patterns and feeling better about ourselves versus the unhealthy dopamine which creates the negative feelings and we feel the depression and the anxiety and all the other negative side effects.
- [31:16]
B
The neurotransmitter you really want to go after is serotonin. And so serotonin is about joy and dopamine is about pleasure. And pleasure as a really, as a proxy for reward. Right. So your brain believes you've been rewarded and it releases a pleasurable feeling. So dopamine is always about short term stuff. Serotonin is always about real underlying right hemisphere of your brain. Big picture. There's a lot of good things happening in the world around me and not just on this three inch screen. And so I think when you get outside and you see the things that God has done, there's this verse in Psalm 111 that says, Greater the works of the Lord, they are to be, they are delightful to those who ponder them. So delight is part of that serotonin pathway. So we get outside and see the things that God has done. We interact with other humans. We, we don't have ourselves attached to this device. Then we begin to experience that deeper and longer lasting neurotransmitter rush that we're designed for. That's real pleasure rather than this sort of cheap, narrow version of it that we get through the dopamine access to the reward system. So I think first of all, just demand better for yourself. Like, I want something in my life that's real, that's reproducible, that, that's honoring of God, but also helps me connect to other people. And I don't want to just sort of cheapen my experience of life by chasing something that's never really going to last for me anyway.
- [32:32]
A
Yeah. So good. I'm curious, your thoughts on AI and what, what do you feel like it's doing to our brain? I feel like that's kind of become a new crutch, you know, for a lot of people, especially this younger generation of relying more, more on going to AI. For ants, you know, critical thinking is like going out the drain, you know, and it's like the, it's interesting to think about like how when I went through school like that it wasn't even a thing. But now it's like schools are having to really, you know, be like, don't be on AI because we're going to be able to tell if it's writing your papers for you, you know, type thing. But so many of us like that has become our crutch. And so, I don't know, I'm just curious your thoughts on AI and what you think that that's doing to our brain.
- [33:14]
B
A couple of things. One, especially for parents, I think be very aware that what you get out of AI is dependent on the worldview of the people who programmed that particular AI model. And so it's very clear that AI gives you not the truth, but a version of sort of popular consensus around what the programmers want you to know about that thing. Secondly, AI should never be thought of as anything that could counsel you or help you make wise decisions because it's algorithmic and it's again generated by people with an agenda and a worldview. So don't go to AI and ask it to help you be less anxious because it's going to give you some data and some advice that you wouldn't find in the word of God.
- [34:00]
A
So.
- [34:00]
B
So be very careful about that. There's actually been a couple of suicides that have happened because kids were using AI as a therapist and said, you know, I'm really hopeless and maybe I shouldn't be alive. What should I do? And AI said something like, well, maybe you should kill yourself. That's been. You can research that. So don't use AI as a. As a substitute for real human interaction. Secondly, when we talk about research and learning and studying and students been really well shown that AI, when people use AI to generate reports for them or to do research, the part of your brain that you use when you do that in traditional ways, going to the library, looking things up or writing things longhand, that part of your brain, frontal lobe, insula and cingulate gyrus, all those things gets really turned off when you use AI because you just basically are copying and pasting. There's some interesting research that says that people that use AI to write their reports for them can't even remember what they included in their own documents 24 hours later. So it's not a learning tool. It can be a good research assistant. You can use it as a sounding board to bounce ideas off of and work through things. But you should never substitute it for real deep research and you certainly aren't learning from it.
- [35:08]
A
That's so good. And I loved the first point that you're speaking to of just like AI, it's not, it's not a real person. So don't go to AI for counseling, for friendship, for, you know, dating advice. Like, we need to be turning to the word of God, especially as believers. Like, that should be our source of truth. Jesus says, I am the truth, not a version of it. Not one way. Like, I am the way, the truth, the life. And so for every question that we have, like, his word is our source of truth. I love that you spoke to that. I'm curious how you. What you would speak to spiritual warfare. You know, we live in a spiritual world. We're spiritual beings. We've talked about that. How much of the thoughts that we think would you say are attacks from the enemy or are, you know, the spiritual warfare happening against us? Because I think sometimes we can kind of be naive of, like, oh, no, like, these are just. And we beat ourselves up. Like, these are. This is my friend, These are my thoughts. Or we can swing the other way of everything is the enemy. Everything is spiritual warfare. And we take no ownership of, you know, our own thoughts and what we're taking in and what we're, you know, engaging with. And so what would you speak to as far as spiritual warfare goes and what that has to do with our brain and thinking patterns?
- [36:22]
B
Well, I think, first, be aware that we are in a spiritual battle all the time. And secondly, be aware that not everything is diagnosis because we have a. A terrible tendency right now to pathologize everything. Everybody's a narcissist. Everybody is, you know, adhd, I'm a neurodivergent. Everybody's got a label for themselves. Not always obtained professionally. Right. We all, especially with social media, we have this idea that we can explain everything in our life with a diagnosis or a label, but part of it is double, too. Like. Like you said, part of it is that you have an enemy of your soul who Jesus said very clearly in John 10:10, the thief comes to steal and kill and destroy. Like, he does not want you to have an abundant flourishing life. He wants you to be trapped in the frustrations of this life and not be an effective witness and all those things. And even if he can't get your soul, he wants you to be not an effective witness for other people to help them. Right? So there is a spiritual battle happening all the time. And I think when it comes to your thoughts, you can be a little bit, again, curious about the content of your thinking and pay attention to what you hear in your. In your head. There's a type of thought. I wrote about this in the book. At least three different kinds of things that happen in your Head. One of them are these automatic thoughts that are generally negative, but they're not evil all the time. They're just sort of, I'll never be able to get this done or I always fail in this way, or, you know, my future is never going to be bright again. Those kinds of things are not necessarily evil, but they certainly wouldn't be the kinds of things that God would say to you about your future. Right? So if you can check your thoughts against the word of God, you can say these automatic negative things that they don't sound like the devil trying to mire me down, but they're also not helpful and they're not true. Then there's a type that seems kind of sinister. The type that would push you towards self harm. The type that would make you question who God is or God's truth for you, or God's plan for you. Those kinds of thoughts or temptations, you deserve this, you ought to have this. Who's going to know those kinds of things? They're not automatic generated thoughts. That's spiritual warfare. And so I think, be discerning and always be checking what you hear in your head against what God has said. Because God's words won't ever be shaming and they won't ever be untrue. And God won't ever say something to you that contradicts something that's in the Word. In his written word. He'll always, you'll always be able to verify what he said against or what you hear in your head against what he wrote in the word, Right? So if you find something that seems alluring or too easy or too damning, check that against what God said. Because if it's shaming or condemning, it's not from the Word. And if it's asking you to do something that's not consistent with God's word, then it's not from the Word. And it's not an automatic brain generated thought. It's the enemy. So be aware that there's a constant spiritual battle. Not everything is diagnosis, not everything is double. But both of those things are real.
- [39:05]
A
Wow. Yeah. Amen. So you wrote a book called the Art of Self Brain Surgery, correct? Yeah. I want to hear more about that. What led to you writing this book and what is, how has it ministered to you? Like what was, what did you discover in. I know when I've written books, it's like it ministers to me. It's like this is a message. God is speaking to me right now. How did this message minister to you? And what do you pray it speaks to those who read it.
- [39:30]
B
So it started that day in Auburn in the Scanner. My career up to that point, even the books that I'd written were all about things I'd gone through and sort of trying to explain them to myself and to my family and help other people, people kind of memoir sort of ideas. That day was the first time I had this understanding that if I wanted to feel something different than I was feeling and think something different than I was thinking after I'd lost my son, if I wanted there to be any hope in the future, I was going to have to change my perspective on the kinds of ways I was looking at the tragedy we had just encountered. And when I saw that woman change her brain structure and change what was happening in her body by changing what she thought about. And when Lisa made that connection between Philippians 4 and anxiety and gratitude, that's the first time I thought, this is real surgery. Like, it's not some sort of metaphor when I tell you that you can change what your brain is, and therefore you can change what you're capable of, what your future looks like, by being willing to do the work, to change what you think about repetitively, by stopping the victim idea and stepping into this empowered idea of, I'm going to operate this nervous system that God gave me in the way that he designed it. That's when you get to Romans 12. And when I start, when I got to this place in Romans 12, where I said, wait a minute. Neuroscience and faith are not enemies. There's a path here where I can recover from losing my son in a way that honors God, but also is consistent with science. And if I can figure that out, then maybe I can explain it to other people. That's been what I've been doing for the last 13 years of my life, is trying to put that stuff together. And that's where this book came from. Romans 12:1 and 2 gives us two pieces, mind and brain. Everybody says, Romans 12:2, right? Don't be conformed to the world, the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Everybody talks about that. People have applied it to neuroplasticity on if you can go to Instagram. There's lots of neuroscience Christians who are writing about that. But Romans 12:2 is about your mind. It's about changing the way that you interact with God and the things that you think about. Romans 12:1, it turns out, is about your brain. It says, present your bodies as a living sacrifice. Your body includes your Brain. Okay? And it says in the voice translation, which I love, if you do this, it's your reasonable, essential act of worship. So it's reasonable to give God your brain and let him change it in accordance to the path and the pattern that he gave us, which is called neuroplasticity. And then we do that by renewing our mind. Romans 12:2. Don't be conformed to the pattern of this world. What does the world tell you to do? Live your truth. Believe your feelings. Honor your feelings. I heard, Maddie, I heard a sitting United States congressperson, an elected official, say in an interview that your feelings and your lived experience are more important than objective truth. That's the kind of thing that people are saying now. And so if you can say, wait, Romans 12:2 says, don't conform to that pattern, that's not the pattern that's going to help me if I want to flourish. When Jesus said, the thief comes to steal, I came to give you abundance. Yeah. The path to doing that is letting God renew my mind. And that's where that verse in First Corinthians 2 about Paul telling us that we can have the mind of Christ. So if you let me make this connection for you, it'll change everything. If God says, I can have the mind of Christ, and if changing my mind makes structural changes in my brain, and if Jesus never sinned while he was here, that means he never sinned with his mind either. He never thought down a path that was harmful to him. Right. That means that progressively over the course of Jesus's life, he progressively made his brain structurally better. We know that when we think better thoughts, our brains become more resilient. We increase our willpower. That's. That's this research that shows that when you go through hard things, it actually makes you more durable, gives you more willpower. That when Jesus did that for the course of his entire life, and then he finally got to Gethsemane and the hardest moment of his life, he didn't shirk from it. He stood up to it. He was able to go through that hard thing because his brain was supporting him and the decisions that he was, his mind was making. So Paul says, you can have the mind of Christ, and because of neuroplasticity, your brain can be more like Jesus's brain too. That's the self brain surgery idea I'm trying to convince people to hold on to.
- [43:31]
A
Wow. That is. It's so cool because you read verses like that in. In, what is it, First Corinthians, Second Corinthians, and you're like, the mind of Christ. Like, I don't know if I can have the mind of Christ. Like, there's no way that feels like such an impossible thing. But, yeah, what you're saying, it's. It's so true. And. And they can. Yeah. Go together and work together. I love that so much. I would love to. To talk about kind of as we wrap up and. And near the end. You also wrote a book called no Place to Hide. And for those who have been through really traumatic and situations or upbringings or things that have happened to them, what are some ways that you can work through your trauma and PTSD to where, you know, you have those feelings of. I want to hide. I want to hide from this fear that I feel or the shame that I feel or this anger that I feel or this. Whatever it may be. And what would be your message to that person who has been through really, really hard things and where do they go from here?
- [44:34]
B
The first. I just want to look in the camera and say, we feel you. Like I said, we acknowledge the thing. You need to honor the struggle. Okay. So don't deny it. Don't say this didn't happen. Don't pretend like it didn't happen. It's. It's okay to acknowledge what happened, but don't live there either. Like, especially after the initial phase, you go through the grief and you go through all that at some point when you realize that your life is kind of stuck in the thing that you've been through. And after losing a child, after going to war, I can. I can say that I was there for a long time. The most important and most hopeful thing that I've learned, though, is that trauma is not the thing that happened. It's the responses that we've adopted to what happened. Gabor Mate has written about that, and the idea is very true, and it's very hopeful that if it were true that the loss of my son had the inherent power to change my life forever, to. To define what the future of my life and my family's life, it would be hopeless because I can't bring him back. It is true that he died. I can't fix that. It is true that I went to war. It's true that I went through all that. And whatever you're going through is true. But if that's what had the power to limit your future, then you should just give up, because you can't change the fact that that happened. It turns out, though, that it's the way you Think about what you've been through and the decisions you make of what you're going to automate and what you're going to turn your brain into going forward. That determines what your future is going to be like. So if the life that you have after that trauma is not serving you well, and if you're not flourishing, then you need to be willing to do the work to change what your brain is becoming after what you've been through. Don't let the thing define the future. Change to a more healthy response. So for me, it was learning how to think about what I had lost, both with war and with the loss of my son. Learning how to think about it in a way that could be honored in the future. So when I look at my son's life, for example, rather than focusing on the fact that I don't have him anymore, think about the ways that his life allowed me to be the person that I am now. What's better about my life? Because Mitch was here for 19 years, that turns that loss into legacy. So Viktor Frankl was in the concentration camps in World War II, and he said this beautiful line that suffering stops suffering, stops being suffering when you give it purpose. And so if you can take that loss and you can find a way to bring it into a legacy for the future, then all of a sudden you're looking forward and you're saying, yeah, everything about my life now is better because of. Not that I lost that person, but because I had them. And so the future looks different because now I'm looking, how can I honor him? How can I bring other people into this, this place where I can give them hope? Because of the lessons I learned from Mitch. Right? So look into the future after your event, after the trauma, after whatever you went through, and ask yourself if the response that you've been living is helping you or is it hurting you? And if it's hurting you, don't let that trauma have the inherent power to define the rest of your life. Let the fact that your brain is plastic, your brain is constantly able to change in response to your thinking. Let that work for you and not against you.
- [47:37]
A
So good legacy. I love that. I would love to. I lied. I have one more question. I just could ask you a million questions. And it's funny because my very first one, I used to be on Twitter. I don't think I'm on Twitter. Twitter anymore. But my, like, Twitter bio or whatever, it was like, not Your life is 10% what happens to you and 90% how you respond to It. And I think about that when you're talking because it is, it is so true of like, we can't control. We live in a fallen, broken world and there are things that are cruel and horrible and hard and, you know, quote unquote unfair that we go through or that we experience or that we see or that we see to those that we love. And it's like there are things that are out of our control, but how we respond to it, we do have control over. And. And so I loved that response. So my last question is for those who, you know, maybe they've been following Jesus for a long time or, you know, grew up in the church or whatever it may be, they know what is true. Like, they know what the Bible says, they know the verses that we've talked about. They know kind of what to do, but it's so in tension with what they feel. A lot of times we can, like, know what we know, but then our feelings are like, in complete war with, with what we know is true. How. What would kind of be your like, final encouragement? And maybe it's something you've talked about in the book, but of just how do we like, say, you know, you know the truth, but you look in the mirror and you hate what you see, you know, and you're so discouraged about what you see. Or maybe you know it's true and that God has good plans in store for you, but you keep going through, through really bad breakups and you feel so rejected and it makes you feel bad about yourself, you know, whatever the. The situation is insert here. But we can know what's true. But until we believe it, you know, like, nothing, nothing changes. So what would be your encouragement to that, to that person?
- [49:28]
B
Well, the first thing is feelings aren't facts. They are chemical events in your brain. Okay. And I'll give you one little example of that. I wrote this in the book. If you go to the mailbox and you pull a letter out and you look at the letter and it says Internal Revenue Service, all of us have some sort of response to that. Most of us get some sort of rush. Our heart rate goes up. We feel a little trickle up the back of our neck. Get. Our breathing quickens. We see the irs, we assume something is getting ready to happen. And it could be that you're scared because you might be getting audited or you might have forgotten to pay your taxes and you're going to get fined. You could be afraid of what's going to be in that envelope, or it could be that you're excited because you're getting a refund, that you really need to make the mortgage payment this month. And so you're anticipating something good, right? But notice that the physiology of what you're feeling is the same. Your heart rate went up, your blood pressure went up, your feeling in your mouth and your skin changed. The reason one is fear and one is excitement is because of the story you're telling yourself in your head. Not the chemical event, not the actual truth on the ground. Now look at the envelope again and you notice it was addressed to your neighbor. It wasn't even your letter. And so it was never true that either of those two things were happening. It was just a feeling generated by chemistry and backed up by physiology in your body. So the first thing is, when you feel something, be aware that what's true about it or what you feel is true about it is based on the story that you're telling yourself about. It's not objective until you know it is. Once you open the letter and you read it and you find out what's really true, there's the truth that you mentioned a minute ago. There's, there's the truth, not a truth. Until you know what the truth is, it doesn't make sense to respond or to build your life about around what you're feeling. So figure out what's true. That's where the word of God is so valuable. And what, what that first thing you said was, you know a truth, you know that God's word is true, but you feel all these things that are so powerful and so real, and they are, but they become more real and more powerful the more you amplify that story you're telling yourself. So be curious enough to dig in and find out what's really true. And if you feel rejected or you feel overwhelmed, or you keep having relationships that end in the wrong way, then maybe question some of the thinking around what's leading you into that rather than just repeating it over and over, right? Maybe question, what kinds of things have I been thinking about when I step into this relationship that ends this way every time? And maybe I can start thinking some different things about it. Maybe that'll lead me to some different types of relationships. So you start working the problem from the front end. We call it a pre mortem analysis in psychology. So instead of an autopsy that happens after somebody died or after the thing is over, start looking at it as if, if I change this one thing, how's it going to change the outcome? So instead of being afraid that here's another relationship. It's going to end the same way. We'll change some of the things that happened along the way and maybe that'll change the outcome. So question the feelings rather than accept them as truth. Most of them aren't. Most of them are just things that we're imagining and your brain can't tell the difference. And then be curious enough to think through the pathway of how it always ends up and change that on the front end and maybe it won't end up that way.
- [52:37]
A
Wow, that's so good. We've talked about so many good things. I'm going to have to go back and re listen to this and I'm like, there's just been so many helpful, practical, insightful, wise scripture, truth filled things that you said that I have been so encouraged by and I know so many people listening no matter what it is that you guys are struggling with, going through, feeling, facing that have been super helpful. And so I'm gonna link all of the resources of where you can find Dr. Lee Warren's books. But I'm so encouraged by this message. I'm so thankful for your voice. This generation is so hungry for truth. This generation is so hungry for hope. I think we have felt like we are, you know, a victim to our feelings, a slave to our feelings. We've been very manipulated by culture and the mass media messages out there. And, and, and I love voices that come in, they say let's, let's talk about what's facts and let's talk about what Jesus has to say and how they come together and how together we can begin to renew our minds. And I love that you kept bringing it back to scripture too because that's what I've seen for myself is as I've meditated on and memorized scripture, so much of my thinking has been completely renewed and restored. And I was thinking about Matthew 6. My husband was preaching on it last night and just talking all about like the birds and the lilies and the grass and the fields and just like if he has created all of that and takes care of the birds and takes care of the, like he's going to take care of us. We don't have to worry, we don't have to get worked up like he is. If we are made in his image and we are his masterpiece, like he is going to take care of us. And so I'm so encouraged by you. Thank you so much for coming on Stay True and I am so excited to hear what you guys think about this episode I'm so excited for you guys to get these resources. And as always, guys, be sure to stay you and stay true. We love you.