Theology in the Raw - How to Rewire Your Brain to Live a Flourshing Life: Dr. Lee Warren

Episode Date: February 9, 2026

Head over to Patreon to become a TITR member to gain access to this extra innings portion of our conversation.Check out When God Seems Distant by past guest Dr. Kyle Strobel and John Coe. Available here.Dr. W. Lee Warren, MD, is a neurosurgeon, an award-winning author, an Iraq War veteran, and the host of The Dr. Lee Warren Podcast. He teaches the art of connecting neuroscience, faith, and daily practices for leading a healthier, better, and happier life. His latest book is The Life-Changing Art of Self-Brain Surgery: Connecting Neuroscience and Faith to Radically Transform Your Life, which forms the basis of our fascinating conversation. We also explore questions surrounding gender identity among young people and why some people are unwilling to change their minds, in our extra innings portion of this episode.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Your brain does not generate what you think of as your mind. Your mind actually has controlling influence over how your brain behaves and how it forms itself structurally. From thought to thought, you literally are performing surgery to create a new brain inside your head. And now neuroscience is showing that the best type of human brain is one that has been through some hard stuff because it gets better at handling hardship and it finds a way towards hope. I'm literally creating a more resilient and robust brain. every time I go through something hard. Hey, friends.

Welcome back to another episode of Theologist. My guest today is Dr. W. Lee Warren, MD, who is a neurosurgeon, an award-winning author in Iraq War veteran, and the host of the Dr. Lee Warren podcast. He teaches the art of connecting neuroscience, faith, and daily practices for leading a healthier better and happier life. His latest book is called The Life-Changing Art of Self-Brain Surgery, Connecting Neuroscience and Faith to Radically Transform Your Life. which forms a basis of our fascinating conversation.

Oh, my word. I couldn't take notes fast enough. I learned so much in this conversation, and I think you will too. And I think if you integrate some of the things he's talking about into your life, it truly can be transforming. It was a fascinating conversation. We also explore questions surrounding gender identity among young people and why some people are willing to change their minds in our extra innings portion of this episode.

If you want to get access to this, head over to Patreon.com forward slash theology and Ra to become a Theologian Ra member to gain access to this extra Indians portion of our conversation. Okay, please welcome back to the show. The one and only, Dr. Lee Warren. Dr. Lee Warren, good to have you back on Theology in the Ra. You're tuning in from Nebraska. Is that right?

Are you buried in snow out there? I know there's a cold front sweeping through most of the states right now. Now, it's a little cold, but we're having a beautiful day here, Preston. It's great to be back with you again. Yeah. Yeah, good to see you again, man. So there's a lot of talk about mental health these days. Some may even call it a mental health crisis, especially among younger people. I think that's accurate. I think, you know, at least I hear people talk about that. But I don't know too many people speaking into this conversation as a neurosurge. I mean, there's lots of counselors, psychologists, or even armchair influencers, lots of good stuff out there. But you bring a different unique perspective. What are some key things in this conversation that you are noticing and that you are contributing to as a neurosurgeon? Yeah, so I think that the big thing is that most of us, I think because of society and even traditional neuroscience and psychology,

most of us have believed that the way we are is the product of our brain activity and that our brain activity comes from our parents, our genetics, our traumas, our upbringing, all those things. And the truth is, I think scripture has always said it, but I think 21st century neuroscience is really proving it. The truth is our thought life creates the structure of our brain. And so if we can learn to then become curious about what we're thinking about and feeling, we can actually take agency and control of how our brain, brain's actually structurally become. And so we're not actually serving at the behest of what our brain does, but we can take command of that and turn it around. So you're not really ever stuck being the way you've always been. And as a surgeon, I just found that to be true in my own life, that I learned that truth and it transformed how we recovered from great loss, as you and I've talked

about before. And it gives you power bad because if you're just the function of how your brain is, you're kind of stuck, right? Right, right. And you, yeah, you mentioned you have trauma in your background, right? Yeah. Can you unpack that a bit? Yeah. So I deployed to the Iraq War as a neurosurgeon in 2005. I did 200 brain surgeries and attended hospital and got mortared 100 times.

Oh, my gosh. There are all kinds of that sort of thing. So I came home with a pretty good bout with PTSD that took a lot of to unpack and been to a divorce in that same time period in my life. And then sort of put everything back together and found happiness and found my faith again and all that. And then right about when everything seemed to be going well, in 2013, our son Mitchell was killed. He was 19. So I've navigated, you know, child loss and major trauma and all that. So I'm not just, not just a provider dealing with people in their

hard times, but I've been through it myself. So as, yeah, okay, so as not, if you can speak, I guess not just as a neurosurgeon, but as somebody who's been through several waves of trauma, what practices have you done to heal from that? Is that the right word heal or recover from that? I think healing is, I don't think you ever fully recover from any of those things, but I think healing and learning that you can have joy and you can have sorrow at the same time in your life.

That few things can be true at once. But I think for us, especially in my case, at the time that we lost our son, I was practicing as a neurosurgeon and had been brought up educationally in that traditional neuroscience training where you're sort of the product of your brain activity. And I think most of us, even professionals,

and I think most Christians, have never really stopped to think about the fact that we believe something other than that because you don't really believe if you're a Christian that when you die and your brain dies, that that's the end of the story. You believe that there's a resurrection and eternity. So that means that brain and mind are not the same thing.

And for us, after Mitch died, We happened to be working at Auburn University where they were doing MRI research in this fancy new zone called functional imaging where you can actually see what the brain is doing and is thinking. We had this incredible experience, Preston, where I'm a month after my son died and broken, I'm angry with God, I'm devastated and I don't know what the path forward is. And we went down to watch this research happen. One day we were invited to watch Lisa and I, my wife, who ran my practice, invited to watch this. research where they were putting people in these brain scanners and asking them to think about specific things, and then we could see what their brains did in response to the thinking. So they would say, hey, think about the worst thing you've ever been through in your life.

And all these neurotransmitters would change, and the blood flow would change in different parts of the brain. And then the physiology would change, the heart rate and blood pressure and breathing rate and all that stuff would change. And we could see what happened when you think a particular thing and the brain does something different and then the body does something different. And then they would say, okay, stop thinking about that bad thing. thing and now think about the best thing you've ever felt, the happiest day of your life.

And in real time, the brain would change. The frontal lobes would come online. The amygdala would calm down. Blood pressure would come down. The person would calm down physiologically. And we had this incredible, visible little gift from God where we could see that the way your brain is structurally can actually change, that you're not stuck being the way you've always been.

And so Lisa and I had this insight that Philippians 4 has told us that all along, that anxiety and gratitude are opposites of one another in the brain. And so I had this opportunity then to see that the way I believed I was going to have to be since I had lost a son. I was always going to be broken, always going to be sad, that I couldn't be as hopeful or happy as I'd ever been before. That that was all related to how I responded to that trauma and not to the trauma itself. Because the brain wasn't actually, I wasn't stuck with the brain I'd always had, and therefore that trauma couldn't just break my brain in some particular way, it would be permanent.

But I could actually lean on the fact that God says our minds can be transformed, that we can take our thoughts captive and all that stuff that we talk about. And I could know that my brain would respond if I could get my hope back. And that's how it played out. So that led me to this connection that that's the same thing as I do in surgery in the operating room. Like when I intentionally make structural changes in somebody's brain, I can change their life. And when I recognize that I didn't have to feel the way I'd always felt

if I was willing to change how I was thinking about what I've been through, and my brain would structurally change. That was the same thing as doing surgery. So that for me, in my hard-headed kind of neuroscience, neurosurgeon way, God showed me that with my eyes, and I could find hope in that, that I wasn't stuck with this trauma being, having the inherent power to change the rest of my life in a negative way if I didn't allow it to.

That's fascinating. Can you take us down into the weeds, like the absolute nitty-gritty, say you wake up Wednesday morning, you have trauma in your background. And you wake up and the sky just feels black. You have this sick to your stomach feeling. Maybe you're reflecting on a past abuse situation, a loss in your life, some traumatic background. Like in that moment, it's 9.34 a.m. on a Wednesday morning, you feel like you can't get out of bed. What, what practice steps do you do at that point? Well, the first thing that you have to realize is that research is very clear now that

about 90% of the thoughts that we think on a given day are the same thoughts that we thought the previous day. So we just keep playing these loops of thinking, okay? And then the research is also clear that about 80% of the things that we think about are not true. Really? Really? Yeah, about four out of five things that pop into your head, these voices that you hear

that sound sort of reasonable because they usually sound like you, right? The voices you hear in your head sounds like you. But about 80% of the things that we think are overtly negative and not true, not really faithfully true. And so if you know that, and then you know that the vast majority of the things that we feel aren't actually correlated to real events, but the research is very clear that most of the things we feel are just your brain trying to make sense of the environment that you're in and bringing up something in the past that sort of reminds it of what you have felt, and then giving you the option to feel that and run with it or not. And so if you know that your feelings aren't facts, there are chemical events in your brain,

that most of your automatic thoughts aren't true, and that most of the thoughts you think every day are the same thoughts you thought before, then you can take the trauma research, where people like Gabramonte have written beautifully to say that the trauma is not actually the thing that happened to you. It's the response that you've developed is the thing that happened to you. And there's hope in that because if it was the thing, if if the way I was feeling and thinking and living was because my son had died and that was always going to be true, then I would know that there was no hope that I could ever feel or think anything different than I felt after I lost him. But the truth is the patterns of thinking and responding and the emotional consent we give to our brain to develop certain things and habits and our brain and hormonal habits and chemical habits and all those things. they become true over time because we continue to enable them.

We give them mental consent to continue to be true. But as soon as you know that, so you wake up on that Wednesday morning and you feel the way you felt every day before and you think the same thoughts that you've thought every day before and you hear that same voice in your head that says, this is how I am now because of that trauma that I went through. Then if you can just remember that it's not actually the event that you went through,

but the response that you created after that thing happened, then you can say, wait a minute, If I can just develop some different thinking around this, then I don't have to feel and think the same things I felt yesterday. And my brain will structurally rewire to support the new thought that I'm telling it I want to feel and think. And so that's actually what the Bible is talking about in Romans chapter 12, by the way, in verse 2, when it says don't conform to the world. Don't let your trauma put you in a box until you have to how you have to feel for the rest of your life. But it says be rather transformed by the renewing of your mind. So if you take your mind and you tell your brain that you want it to feel different and think different than you did the day before, in structural terms, there's a protein structure called a microtubule.

And we know now that microtubules begin to form to connect neurons together. That's how synapses in your brain form, these connections between neurons and groups of neurons. Microtubules begin to form to support synaptic connections in your brain within seconds of you telling your brain that you want to think and feel something different than you had before. So literally structural changes start to happen in your brain that support this new response that you tell your brain that you want to develop in within seconds of you starting to think a new thought. And that's why if you do that repeatedly over time, if you wake up on that Wednesday morning and challenge that feeling, this is how it's always going to be, I'm never going to get over this, whatever it is, I'm such a loser, whatever that voice is that you hear. If you challenge that thinking and replace it with something that is true, since 80% of your thoughts are not true, and I think, scripture is a great thing to use there because you can trust that scripture is true. So if you say, if your voice and your brain says, I'm such a loser, I'm never going to recover

from this, and there's no hope for me, and then you say, well, what's a transplant thought that I can put in there that is true? And God says, I have a plan for you to price for you and not to harm you. I died for you. I came here so that you might live. I came to give you abundance and replace of all the other stuff. So you put something true in there. Then your brain starts to rewire around that truth instead of around the false thought and feeling that you've had. And that's not just a metaphorical way to think about feeling better. It's actually what your brain does structurally in response to you thinking that you want to feel better. And so the great hope here is that this is not just some self-help sort of trick,

but it's actually brain surgery that everybody is already performing. So the problem is if you think the same thoughts that you thought yesterday, your brain just continues to reinforce those same thoughts. There's something called Hebb's Law. There's a Canadian neuroscientist named Donald Hebb that came up with this statement that everybody talks about. Neurons that fire together, wired together. You probably heard that before. And what that literally means is that when two things happen in your brain all the time in the same sequence,

like you have a particular thought and you do a particular thing or you have a particular feeling and you respond to it in a particular way, like drink alcohol or do something to try to numb the feeling. And when you do that repeatedly, your brain just connects that in audits. automates it so you don't have to think about it anymore and those things become habitual. And that same thing is true of our thought life and our emotional life, that when you repeatedly think and do and feel the same things over and over, that becomes automated and you start to think, if you're not aware of that, you start to think this is just how I am. This is just how it's going to be for me.

But the truth is it's because you have repeated that process enough times that your brain automated it, neurons that fire together, wired together. But interestingly, as soon as you say to your brain, my friend Daniel Lehman says, your brain is always listening. And what it means is your brain's out there waiting for you to give it different mental instructions. And as soon as you do, your brain begins to lay down the hardware to structurally make your brain different than it was before.

So if you've previously believed that I'm stuck with the brain that I have, I'm stuck with this feeling, this response, this trauma, this thing, as soon as you challenge that and put something true in there, your brain literally in real time becomes different than it was before. Like I'm giving you some new things to think about now. Your brain is different structurally than it was. was when we started this conversation. It's true. If we scanned you before and after this conversation, your brain would be behaving differently because you're laying down some new tracks

in response to pondering ideas that you haven't pondered before. Sorry, I'm kind of stunned right now because this is pretty fascinating. So I want to go back. So with you in particular, Wednesday morning, you wake up, you feel a stone in your gut thinking about your son. Now, if, you know, 80% of your thoughts are untrue, but I mean, you're, you did lose a son that is factually terrifying and traumatic. And so what do you, what do you personally do in that moment? Because it's not like you're, it's not like you have some memory that's, that's, that's warped and untrue. Like, that's very true. Is it, is it, is it, it's mainly to kind of reorient your brain so that. you don't have to continue living in, you know, depression and misery. It's not denying what happened and denying the fact that that's a horrible thing, you know.

That's right. Yeah. We need to parse that out a little bit. I'm glad we brought that out because nobody hearing this should say, oh, just don't ever let anything negative pop in your head because bad things do happen. And the Bible says it, weep, morn and wail, you need to agree with those who are mourning. mourn with those who are mourning, right? So if, and it actually turns out to be true, my son died on a Tuesday night. So it is Wednesday morning that day.

I'm waking up the next day. And it is true that this massive wound is in our life. And so those thoughts that pop in that say how bad you're feeling and how devastating this is and how that's going to be permanent, a lot of those things are true. But what happens, and I think some of it's spiritual warfare too, what happens then is there's a sneaky back door in your When something true becomes a thought that you're thinking about, it's the second and third order thoughts that begin to be really difficult for you to pay attention to and recognize when they become not true. And so in the example here, my son died, it's never going to feel better than it feels right now.

I'm never going to recover from this. Those two things are not true, even though the first thought was, right? Because God says, hey, you can heal. There's hope for you. In this world, you will have trouble, but take heart, I've overcome the world. There's a resurrection coming. There's a reuniting coming. All those things are true.

So what happens then is you have these devastating events that happen in your life, and you need to grieve them. You need to heal, and you need to go through those processes. But you have to be careful that you don't let that second and third order negative false thinking creep in. That's where spiritual warfare can happen too. That's where you can say, why would God allow something like this to happen? Where's God in all this? Those kinds of things are not true.

God's got a plan. He's got a purpose. He's got a mission that this event will eventually accomplish, right? And so I think it's really important that you recognize that it is possible to have a negative thought that's true. It's possible to have a negative emotion that reflects something real that's happening or something dangerous. And you need to be aware of that. That's why the Bible says in 2 Corinthians 10, 5, to take every thought captive. Like, investigate your thinking.

Humans are the only things that God. created that have the ability to do what we call metacognition, this idea that you can think about what you're thinking about instead of just feeling and reacting to it, right? You think about what you're thinking. You can analyze your own thoughts with thoughts. That's right. That's what Second Corinthians 10-5 is telling us. Way before they knew what metacognition was.

He's saying, take your thoughts captive. Take a second. I call it a thought biopsy because I'm a surgeon. So I say, don't react to everything that you feel. take a second to look at it. Like I take a piece of a tumor and look at it under the microscope and decide what chemotherapy drug would be best or what surgery would be best for this. I don't just start cutting on somebody when I first see something on a scan.

I take a second to get some data so that I make an informed and correct response rather than reacting to something. And so that means that you get curious about what you're thinking and feeling rather than believing that you're obligated to react to it because that's just how I am or that's what we do in my family or this is how I've always handled these things. Because again, if 80% of your thoughts aren't true and 90% of them are the same thoughts you had the day before, then you just have to ask yourself a question. If I start to feel stuck in my life and I start to wonder why nothing ever changes,

maybe it's because I keep thinking and reacting to the same thoughts in the same way every day. So it's not denying the past. It's believing the future from a Christian perspective. I don't over simplify it. You could do that if you're not. not a Christian. You can just look at the neuroscience and say people who develop a positivity bias, which doesn't mean to be unrealistically positive. It just means to in every situation, be willing, if you're going to be a wash in the negativity of it, be also willing to look at

the possible positive things that could come of it or steps you could take to turn it in a more positive direction. So in every case, be curious about what you're feeling and thinking and start to investigate it like a surgeon would, like a, like a, like a, like a, a, like a, a, like a, doctor would, look at it and say, what would the best way to get to a better outcome here be rather than just reacting the way I always have since that hasn't been serving you well. Are you feeling spiritually dry like God's gone quiet? Well, you're not alone and you're not failing. In the book, when God seems distant, Kyle Strobel and John Coe reveal something surprising. Those desert seasons aren't signs you've messed up and, you know, signs you've failed. They're

actually part of God's plan to draw you closer to him. This isn't another book about trying harder or fixing yourself through willpower. Instead, you can discover how spiritual dryness can deepen your faith in ways that zeal never could. So whether you're a new believer, whose initial excitement has faded, or you've walked with Jesus for years, this book offers wisdom and compassion for the wilderness seasons that we all face. It's available now wherever books are sold. I'm curious. I don't want to take it in too far of a different direction, but is this the same for addictions? You mentioned addictions in passing.

Addiction is a... Go ahead. Well, I have... This is pretty deep in my past, but I was addicted when I was a baseball player in my past. I still like to think I have a baseball player, kind of like the Marines. Like, you were a Marine, you are a Marine, right?

I am a baseball player. I keep telling myself. But I was pretty addicted to chewing tobacco as a lot of players are. I mean, I would dip two or three cans of Copenhagen a day, which is a lot. And I specifically remember as a 19-year-old

and not just in the ball field, but like after a meal or, you know, if we're hanging out in my dorm room or hanging out in my apartment, like talking. Like, I remember specifically thinking, throwing in a dip and thinking, I can't imagine.

Imagine sitting here in a room, having a conversation and not throwing in a dip of Copenhagen. I'm like, I couldn't even, I couldn't physically even. I remember thinking like, it's like the air I breathe. Right. Became a Christian, still dipped for about a year. And then for me, it was weird. It was like, I got really sick for a week. And when you're sick, you don't want to whatever you're addicted to.

Typically, you just like don't crave it. And after that week, I was kind of like, you know what? I've got a week under my belt. Maybe I should stop dipping. And I haven't dipped sense. So I didn't actually go through whatever. But so I vividly remember that feeling of thinking, I can't not do this thing. So anyway, just to give you some a framework, but you're about to say that addiction is slightly different than what we're talking about here?

It is a little bit different because there's a component of it that's not just about how we think about the issue, right? So there's things that cause physiological addictions, right? your body literally becomes dependent upon them. Okay. And so you can't just think your way out of that. And you can't just hold turkey, quit heroin, right? Your body will kill you if you try to do that. So there's part of it that's physiological that has to be managed in that way.

Then there are things that are more psychologically addicting, right? And in that realm, this thought-feeling process becomes really important. And something like alcohol, for example, that has both, right? So physiological and psychological addictions. The problem with alcohol is it hijacks your brain's reward center. and you begin to misunderstand what it is that you're feeling when you drink alcohol. So that thing we talked about earlier, Hebb's Law, the neurons that fire together, wire together. The super nerd version of that phrase that Heb actually coined is that those are called

coincident-based synaptic plasticities. So what that means is a big word. But what it means is coincident. When two things happen at around the same time, your brain links them as if they were causative, as if one caused the other. And that's what happens with alcohol. You drink alcohol, it releases a bunch of dopamine in your brain, and then you feel calm because of some other chemical things that happen. And your brain makes a connection that says alcohol calms me down.

Alcohol makes me feel good. But dopamine is actually part of your brain's reward system. So what your mind does is it thinks that that was a reward that you deserved. And then so you start to believe that because you've had a bad day, you deserve to drink alcohol and it will make you feel better. even though the next day you actually don't feel better, right? There's a whole bunch of things that happen that are negative. So, but your brain's reward system has been hijacked. So one of the keys to recovering from alcohol addiction, for example, and probably tobacco

is similar, is to say, is to understand the reward mechanism that was actually in play. It wasn't the alcohol that I was rewarding myself for. I was actually trying to avoid some feeling I didn't want to feel and turning my brain off with alcohol was allowing me to do that. So that wasn't actually a reward. It was never good for me to do that. that because I still had the same problem the next day. I still had to deal with the thing.

It was even worse because now also I had a headache or felt bad or said things I shouldn't have said or whatever. So if you start to actually analyze what your life is and you can sort of decode the fact that that reward thing that your brain was doing was just a chemical event and wasn't actually ever good for you or helpful to you. And so I think that's one of the keys is to start to get curious about why it is that you think that that's helping you and what you actually feel like and think the next day when you've done it again. Interesting. Okay. Going back to recovering from past trauma, so

would you, when you wake up, and I'm sure you, I would assume you still do. And there are, there are times when you're like, man, I could go into really deep, dark places right now reflecting on the death of my son or all the things you saw in Iraq. I mean, you have a list of your divorce, a list of things you could probably, they could probably get you down. What do you specifically, what are you doing in that moment? Yeah, so when I start to sort of go down those trails, and with my son, there's a, there's a classic one that I had this vision in my mind, but I used to have these nightmares about, there was this staircase that went down into this dark room and in my dream, I would somehow

know that Mitch was past that door, and if I could get down there, maybe I could save him. Like, I had this dream. It was really vivid. Like, I would walk down this staircase and that door would be there. And then I started daydreaming that same thing. And it was like in my daydreams when I was awake, I would start to see my thoughts descending down into this dark staircase. And somehow I knew that if I kept thinking along that path, I was going to get into a really bad place in my mind.

And I could just see it. This is going to happen if I follow this path. And so for me, it was recognizing that when I allowed myself to ponder certain things, I became progressively more despondent and anxious and depressed. And so I had to sort of interrupt that process when I said, wait a minute, these things that are that I'm getting ready to think about that are at the end of this staircase of thought are going to lead me into thinking some things that I already know are not true and are not helpful and are not going to help me recover from this thing. And so I would have to back up a few steps

and feel that starting to happen and say, wait, that isn't a Philippians 4 kind of train of thought. It's not lovely. It's not praiseworthy. It's not helpful. It's not going to be. going to lead me into a place where my day gets better if I allow myself to think that. So I had to sort of take that, that active process and taking my thoughts captive. And I think that's part of the responsibility that God gave us with this metacognition ability. We call it selective attention. Neuroscientists call it selective attention. Like humans can literally decide, I want to pay attention to this thing and not that thing.

You can literally change what you're thinking about, right, if you've trained that muscle. And so nobody else has that. My dogs, my dogs were killed a couple years ago by coyotes. But before that happened, if they got onto a deer or a coyote or something, I couldn't stop them. Like they did not have the ability to stop and quit fighting that raccoon or whatever. Unless I shocked them with their shock collar, they weren't going to be able to stop thinking about that thing. Right. But you can.

Like, you can say, okay, wait a minute. The more I think about this thing, the more trouble I have in my life. And so I need to think about something else instead. And you can do it. But you have to train that. Again, what you do repeatedly you get better at, right? Your neurons that fire together, wire together. That's a beautiful thing about the brain.

When you give it repeated opportunities to do something over and over, it reliably gets better at doing that thing. So training your thinking this way really produces good results for you. You've mentioned, you know, a few Bible verses, flippings four, Romans 12. I mean, right when you started talking, I just immediately went to Romans 12. I'm sure most of our audience did. I mean, Paul's not a neuroscientist. This technology is extremely recent.

He's not, I don't think, thinking, he wouldn't, if I had Paul on the podcast today, he wouldn't be saying all the things you're saying. And yet, and yet these verses ironically are getting at the same thing. Do you just chalk that up to divine inspiration? that all truth is God's truth, there's nothing new under the sun, and that while Paul wouldn't have been able to articulate the neuroscience background of what he's saying, he's still speaking the same truth that we have now discovered more recently through science? Is that how you explain it?

The way I think about it, Preston, is that, in fact, Ecclesiastes 311, if I'm quoting that right, says that God said eternity in a human heart, but from beginning to end we'll never be able to fathom all the things that he's done. Right. So he says, we always are going to think and we're never going to figure it all out. But then if you get to neuroscience and you, especially in this day and age, because we've been presented with this idea that science and faith are somehow opposed to one another. But the truth is, I think if you look at scripture's prescription for human flourishing, if you look at all the different things that the Bible says will produce you having a more meaningful and purposeful and hopeful life, and then you watch neuroscience long enough, every time neuroscience comes out with a, major discovery, and especially in the 21st century now, because it's not just psychological research, we can actually image what your brain is doing when you think these things now, so we can really prove it. Now, if you look at neuroscience long enough, over the long arc of scientific history, science begins to validate God's prescriptions for human flourishing.

So if you look, for example, sexual revolution in the 60s, right? The psychologists all said, hey, free yourself from all these social mores and all these religious rules and you'll be happier, right? And everybody did that for a couple of generations. And what did it produce? People not being as happy, right? More divorces, more STDs, more abortions, all that stuff. But God said all along, there's a specific way I want you to live and you'll be happier,

not because I want to put all these rules on you, but because I want you to be happier. And now neuroscience is coming along and saying, hey, you know, monogamous people committed to relationships, those people are happier. They don't have as much trouble. And so if you just look at science over a long period of time, it seems like neuroscience is now putting nails in some of those things that scripture said a long time ago. I think it's just that God gave us the words that at the particular time in history that people could understand, right? They wouldn't have understood if you're saying, hey, your synapses will get better if you do all this. Right.

They wouldn't have understood that. But he said, think about stuff, be grateful instead of, and you won't be as anxious. The peace of God will fill your heart and guard your mind. And now we know that when you are thankful instead of anxious, that your hippocampus gets more active and that guards you against emotional overreactivity and make you more resilient and make sure frontal lobes come online more powerfully. Like all this stuff that Paul said in Philippians 4 can be, you can be imaged now and see that it's true. And 21st century neuroscience is backing scriptures up. So I think it's, I think it's just God revealing more and more over time that when he says something, it turns out to be true. there's an interesting book by Jonathan Haidt called The Happiness Hypothesist.

I haven't read the whole. I've read just bits and pieces of it. It's been a while. But if I remember correctly, he's not religious. He's atheist or agnostic. Yeah. But he looked back into ancient religious wisdom from Christianity, the Hebrew Bible, I believe Buddhism and other religions.

But basically saying there's ancient, ancient wisdom. in how to be happy, which I found fascinating. He has no, like, Christian, you know, commitment at all. No, believe in inspiration, but said the ancients kind of nailed the whole happiness thing. And if we imitate those practices, we can find happiness too. I hope I'm not butchering that. If anybody's like, no, I read the book, that's not what he's doing. But I'm pretty sure that was the general, his general take.

can you speak to specifically anxiety and then depression? I'm assuming these are going to be two different things. Maybe they're not. But what's going on in the brain when someone is overwhelmed with anxiousness, overwhelmed with depression? And maybe depression is linked to the trauma that we've already been talking about. So maybe can you speak to anxiety? And is this?

Yeah. Clearly you can be anxious or depressed without having gone through trauma. So there are some, things in your brain. But remember I said earlier, in fact, in my book, we call it the second commandment of self-brain surgery, which is feelings aren't facts, they're chemical events in your brain. So when I talk about that, just understand. I can't say that to my wife when we're in an argument, can I? That's not good, badal advice. That is not my prescription. Don't do that. And don't say calm down either. But what I'm saying is, so if you feel anxious, you have to understand

one really important thing, and that is that the human brain cannot distinguish between something that's actually happening and something that you're just thinking about or imagining. Wow. And this is absolutely true. So if you feel anxious, you feel your heart rate going up, you feel your skin reacting, you feel your breath getting short, all those things that we associate with anxiety, your brain will say, I'm in some kind of danger or something bad happening or something bad is getting ready to happen.

And if you aren't aware of the fact that you can have those feelings without there being a corresponding real-world event happening, then you'll feel obligated to respond as if the anxiety means that you're in some sort of danger, right? And so people that have, I need to be careful here because there are people who have real anxiety disorders that are medical problems. Sometimes they're caused by thyroid disease. There's all kinds of real anxiety things. So please don't take anything I'm saying to substitute for the advice of your doctor or therapist. or don't hear me saying that you can always deal with anxiety this way. If it's a real problem, and the same thing with depression, especially if there's suicidal ideation, like, go see your doctor, okay?

But for most things that we feel anxious about, most normal folks from day to day, when you feel something that starts to make you feel anxious, what your brain is doing is scanning your environment, your hippocampus particularly, scanning your environment for clues of something to remind it of how you're, the situation, that you're in now. Like, okay, the last time I felt this, it was because my husband was cheating on me or my bank account was bankrupt or whatever. The last time I felt this, this was the situation, this was the context. And then it starts to remind you of that and you start feeling the same feelings and thinking the same thoughts that you felt when that other thing was

happening, even though it's not happening now. And so if you're unaware that you can be anxious in when there's not something really happening, then you'll start to react. and make decisions as if you're in some kind of bad situation, even if you're not. Does that make sense? Yeah. So then if you can then, again, get into that metacognitive state and say, wait a minute, most of my automatic thoughts aren't true. Most of the things I feel aren't reflective of something really happening.

So I need to get into a mode here where I investigate what is happening so I can respond rather than react reflexively. And that will help you with anxiety a lot. That will help you calm things down. because especially if you can find something in that moment that you can think about that you're grateful for. Because in the way the hippocampus works, it either pushes you into this amygdala driven. Amygdala is the part of your brain that drives that fight, flight, freeze, fear response. So your hippocampus is a one-way switch and it'll either drive you down towards anxiety and panic and fear and all that stuff.

Or it'll engage your frontal lobes. And when your frontal lobes come online, you start making rational, reasonable decisions. You start thinking better about the situation and just, deciding how you're going to respond. And then in the case of something really dangerous that is happening, then your frontal level will say, dang, there's a bear in the house. I better run away.

It's like, I was right to feel anxious about that. Yeah. Right. In the case of it, just being a thought loop that you're having, you'll say, wait,

you know, I'm feeling that because this bad thing happened, because my son died or because this other thing happened. That's not what's really happening now. And I don't have to respond that way now. And then if you can find something to be grateful for, that will really engage the other parts of your brain, that are involved in helping you calm down and feel better.

So gratitude is the antithesis of anxiety because it triggers that one-way switch between a megadola and funnel load. So that's why Philippians 4 again becomes so prevalent here and important here is that it says, if you can, when you're not anxious and you're grateful instead with prayer and Thanksgiving, it says, then the peace of God will guard your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus, right? And I think that's a little inside joke because he says, he uses the word guard here. And neuroscientists call the hippocampus your security guard because your security guard is like looking out for threats

and trying to help you decide what to do and whether to be reactive or to be responsive. And that's what the hippocampus is doing. And it turns out that gratitude is that switch that flips you from anxiety to peace. And so that's anxiety. Depression's a different animal. Okay.

Because depression kind of neurochemically gets you into the state in a different part of your brain. It's not amygdala. It's singulate gyrus, the mid-antiris. There's big words today we're using. But that part of your brain is sort of like a gear shift, and it has the job of shifting you from one emotional state to another. And when you experience complex grief or severe depression or prolonged depression,

that singular can sort of get out of gear and get stuck in neutral. And you can't motivate yourself to move. And you don't feel like you have the juice to get going again. And depression then creates this overlay of, inability to move forward because you feel so overwhelmed with with stuckness, right? And so what the research has shown is if you can convince yourself to do something when your depression is telling you that you can't do anything. So your depression says, I can't get up and go to work today. If you can make yourself, make your bed, or go send a message that you've been delaying,

sending, or respond to an email that you needed to do, if you can just make yourself have enough inertia to do one thing that you didn't feel like doing. The beautiful thing is your singulate gyrus, again I said earlier, your brain's always listening. Your singulate says, okay, well, I have to shift into some kind of momentum to allow me to make the bed or do that thing, that little thing, that little task. But then your singulate says, okay, well, if I guess if I'm able to shift into the gear to do that, then I could probably shift into gear to go to work too. And what we see is that synapses begin to form and the barrier to momentum lowers across the board when you need to do something else that feels hard. And so one of the secrets to dealing with depression is to start making

yourself do little things and finding little bits of momentum. And before you know it, you start to get a little bit of neurochemical reward that dopamine system kicks in and says, hey, I can actually move a little bit. So maybe I can move a little bit more. And that's not the, that's not the whole solution to depression, but that is a reliable way to deal with minor bits of depressed mood, is that getting that singulate to shift into gear happens because of willful acts of intention. And when you do that, you develop more willpower. You develop more ability to move, even when you don't feel like it. I mean, it's the movie, What About Bob, right?

It's baby steps. Yeah. I mean, it kind of is. Baby steps. That's right. I love that movie. I mean, that makes total sense. it is so yeah so you take if you can do one baby I'm sorry the whole time you're explaining

it's all I was thinking of it was like Bob was right or the Bob was right whatever the doctor's name was um what it is is exercise like physically moving not just going to your desk and write in the email like I guess there's two things psychological movement but also actual physical movement is that exercise is has been proven to significantly improve depression. So exercise, movement walking, exercise anything that gets you moving. And again, it's psychologically moving or physically moving or both. That's been shown to really dramatically improve those symptoms.

Okay. When, I'm curious, when do you, when do you or when should we decide to medicate? Because everything you're talking about so far is, is not, doesn't necessarily involve medication. You did mention in passing, like there might be some chemical imbalance where you might need to medicate. It seems like, correct me if I'm wrong. And I've said this before, and I'm not, I don't have studies or I'm not, you know, this is in my area. But it seems like at least American society is pretty, it seems like it's overmedicated. I'll say that.

I'll tell me if I'm wrong. If I'm wrong, I'll not say that again. You're not wrong. It seems like we kind of rush to medicate once there's any kind of. uncomfortable or if something feels slightly off, it seems like, yeah, medication seems to be the first response recommended, in some cases at least. Is that accurate? How would you, how would you analyze that? That's exactly right. I think they're way over prescribed, and we are not seeing a corresponding reduction in these symptoms. So if you look at the number of prescriptions written for

mental health issues is higher than ever, but the number of people with these reported issues is higher than ever, two. The number of suicide attempts is higher than ever. The number of completed suicides is higher than ever. So we're not seeing a corresponding impact on outcome from the increase in medications. So I think that should make us cautious, first of all. And then secondly, the research is pretty clear. People like Jeffrey Schwartz have written that in OCD, for example, one of the hardest ones to treat, that cognitive behavioral therapy is as or more effective than medications for most people with OCD. And so I think if you're thinking about starting in SSRI, for example, we know that those drugs do not first do what we thought they did.

They don't necessarily change serotonin levels. And we know that they don't necessarily create a situation where they can easily be stopped once they're started. And that should tell you that medicating first, if you have a doctor or a therapist who's medicating first, that's probably not the best move. And you might want a second opinion before you start those drugs. Some of them can be very hard to come off of. So again, there is a role for medications in some cases.

I think it's vastly over-prescribed. And we need to be really careful, especially with your kids, before you let somebody put your child on a medication that potentially could have significant side effects or long-lasting difficulty stopping them, be very careful and diligent and use every other resource available to you before you make that decision.

Yeah, it's such a sensitive, sensitive topic. What can you say specifically about ADHD? because that seems to be something that's pretty wide, a lot more prevalent today. And I know there's debates about are we diagnosing something that was just underdiagnosed or misdiagnosed earlier? Like it was a lot of people had ADHD before. We just didn't know what it was or it wasn't diagnosed.

Or the other side of the argument is we're diagnosing people with ADHD when this is when they might just have normal healthy variations. Or they're on their cell phone seven hours a day and they're like, I can't. That's right. I can't focus anymore. It's like, well, I wonder why. So ADHD is, again, I'm not a psychiatrist, so I want to be careful to separate myself from psychiatry.

I'm not a, I'm not a trained psychotherapist. I'm a brain surgeon. So take what I say with the ongoing caveat of talk to your doctor, right? But my friend Daniel Amon, who wrote the forward to my book, has used brain imaging to show that there are at least seven different types of brain issues that create symptoms that commonly diagnosed as one thing, ADHD. There's at least seven different kinds of issues going on in people's brains that can produce the same set of symptoms that often result in people being diagnosed and treated for ADHD,

especially kids. But they all, all seven of those need to be treated in different ways to have best outcomes. And so I would just say ADHD is one of those that is an Instagram diagnosis a lot of times these days, like autism spectrum and narcissism. And everybody thinks that because they've watched it. send up Instagram videos, they know how to tell if somebody's an narcissist or not, or if somebody else's kid has ADHD or somebody's on the spectrum, right? We all think we're mental health experts now.

But I would just say that ADHD is significantly overdosed, overdiagnosed, and I think very poorly understood, and I think is actually probably a family of multiple things happening rather than one diagnosis. And so it should not be treated as a blanket. My kid can't sit still, so he must have ADHD, something to put him on Ritalin. Right. Be very careful with that. Because sometimes it just turns out that your child, like you said, is overstimulated. They're underslept. They're using social media when they're, when they shouldn't be, their brain's developing an issue with concentration because of that. Or maybe they just need a different learning. They have a different learning style and you just sit in the back of the class and stand up once in a while. Like that doesn't necessarily mean there's something wrong with them. So just be careful and talk to your doctor and get second opinions before you start medicating these things. And it just, again, yeah, I don't want to get over my skis, but if a if a 10-year-old boy in the back of this toll to sit in the back of the classroom for

eight hours and sit still, and he has a hard time with that, I don't know, like I, it just seems like that it'd be more abnormal for a developing human to just, we're not, I don't think we're wired to just sit in a chair for, I mean, we get out for lunch and recess whatever, but it's like, if a kid's a little bit like energetic, could that not just be a healthy kid that wants to go climb tree and hunt a bear and do things that, maybe not hunt a bear, but I mean, I don't know. Not your 10-year-old. I'm curious what, just on a general level, you've mentioned a couple of times that

21st century neuroscience, there's lots of new developments. What are some most fascinating, interesting developments you've seen? seen just let's just say in the last couple years like is there always kind of new things coming out through neuroscientists like oh my gosh this is really uh pretty mind-blowing um yeah in fact i think all of it is but the biggest one and i think the reason i wrote this book the the biggest one is that it's becoming more and more clear that there is a difference between the mind and the brain but there's and again christians thought that all along but now you can sort of prove it that that your brain does not generate what you think of as your mind.

Your mind actually has controlling influence over how your brain behaves and how it forms itself structurally. And so from thought to thought, you literally are performing surgery to create a new brain inside your head. And that is now beyond any sort of metaphorical thought. It's actually proven to be true. Like you don't have to live in the shadow of the things. things that have happened to you, the genes that you inherited, the family you were raised in, the way you've always thought and felt, even with diagnoses like ADHD or depression or any of those things, like you don't have to live in that anymore because human brains are designed.

This is the most hopeful thing I'm going to say today for this time. Human brains are designed to heal. They're not designed to get progressively worse, the harder that your life is. In fact, the Bible said it in Romans chapter five, that suffering produces endurance and and Dennis produces character and character produces hope. And now neuroscience is showing that the best type of human brain is one that has been through some hard stuff. Because it gets better at handling hardship and it finds a way towards hope, the more it's been through. So rather than sort of suffering under the things we've gone through, we should say,

I'm literally creating a more resilient and robust brain every time I go through something hard. You talk about a lot of these things that we've talked about in your book, the life-changing art of self-brain surgery. What are some other things, maybe key ideas, big picture things that you talk about in the book that we haven't kind of touched on in this conversation? I think the big issue, a couple of them. One is that science and faith have never been enemies. And that I think a rational and reasonable approach to life is to let the evidence lead you to the right questions and find the answers to it. And I think if you follow the path of how was this brain that we know,

now responds to my thinking and gets better when it goes through hard things, that seems so clearly designed to help me be resilient and hopeful, that if that turns out to be a design, then there must have been a designer. And it's reasonable and rational than for a smart person to say, well, how would I find out about that? And that's going to lead you to some places where there are questions that can't be answered with science. And that's where faith comes in. And so I think, okay, if I can't answer everything with science, but everything that the scriptures have said has turned out to be true scientifically, then maybe I should start asking some questions of scripture and see where that would lead me. And so I think people will find themselves drawing closer to their creator

and more confident in the way that they can live their lives no matter what they go through if they let science and faith work together rather than independently. That's good. I'm curious, what you said about the brain and the mind, how does someone without faith explain that distinction? how do they account for that? Or is there no real accounting for that? Because you said that scientifically it's been pretty widely settled.

As long as you're willing to let the evidence speak for itself, right? So everybody has paradigms of things that they believe. And if you really believe in materialism, if you really believe that everything is reducible to its parts and then explainable by the function of those parts, then you can look at all kinds of evidence

and say, well, I just don't know how to explain that yet, but I know that the materialism. materialism is still true. And so that's what I think God's talking about when he says people's eyes are clouded and their minds are darkened and all that stuff. But sometimes you can just convince yourself that what you're seeing ain't really necessarily so, right? So I think that's why, but I think the more people study and look, if they're willing to be honest and let the questions be answered with the evidence, then I think it's hard to deny that mind and brain are not

that are different things. Okay. So your book, The Life-Changing Art of Self-Brain surgery connecting neuroscience and faith to radically transform your life comes out in January. I'm not sure when this episode is going to release. February 3rd. Oh, February 3rd. Okay. So, yeah, we'll see when this episode ends up being released fully. But either way, people can either pre-order it or order it if this is, if you're listening

to this after February 3rd. Thanks so much, Dr. Lee Warren for being a guest again on Theaulgen. I really appreciate it. If you want to listen to our fascinating extra innings conversation about why some people are unwilling to change their minds, and we also dive into understanding the rise of gender identities among young people from a neuroscience perspective, they just head over to Patreon.com forward slash theologianura to become a theological member to gain access to this extra innings portion of our conversation and every other extra innings episode ever recorded. Patreon.com forward slash theology and ra.