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June 7, 2025 12 mins

In Part 2 of our series, "Conversations with A Brain Surgeon," we explore the profound connection between our thoughts and our feelings. Building upon the insights from Part 1, we delve into how our neuro-thoughts shape our emotional landscape, affecting our emotional regulation and overall well-being. Join us as we uncover the intricate interplay between our thoughts and feelings, and discover practical strategies to cultivate emotional resilience and balance.

GUEST: @drleewarren

Dr. Warren's Podcast: https://wleewarrenmd.com/podcast/

Dr. Warren's Latest Book: https://wleewarrenmd.com/books/hope-is-the-first-dose/

 

HOST: Leanne Ellington // StresslessEating.com // @leanneellington


To learn more about re-wiring your brain to heal from the all-or-nothing diet mentality for good....but WITHOUT restricting yourself, punishing your body, (and definitely WITHOUT ever having to use words like macros, low-carb, or calorie burn) check out Leanne's FREE Stressless Eating Webinar @ www.StresslessEating.com

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Episode Transcript

Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
I won't let my body out me out wait everything
that I'm made, don't won't spend my life trying to change.

Speaker 2 (00:08):
I'm learning love who I am again, strong, I feel free.
I know everybod of me it is beautiful.

Speaker 1 (00:19):
And that will always out way if.

Speaker 2 (00:24):
You feel it.

Speaker 1 (00:24):
But you.

Speaker 2 (00:26):
She'll some love to the HT there take you day
and did you and die out way?

Speaker 1 (00:35):
Happy Saturday, outweigh. We are back with doctor Lee Warren
for our neuro series. Last week, if you missed it,
we talked all about the thoughts and how to think
about your thinking and really become a self surgeon so
that you can take radical ownership of your thoughts. And
this week we are going to be talking about feelings. Okay,
and so this idea that your brain is multiple switch

(00:57):
up a ball anytime if you have gotten stuck in
a loop of your feelings or feel like maybe you've
gotten downward spirals, we're going to dive into that. So
before we get into some of the cause and effect
of it, when you talk about self brain surgery, what
do you share with your listeners about the feeling side
of it, Because obviously we can take ownership of our brain,

(01:19):
So where do the feeling side of this come into
play because I think there's a lot of people that
feel like they're almost a victim to their emotions.

Speaker 2 (01:25):
Yeah, you're exactly right, Lee, And so the big thing,
as we teach is feelings aren't facts. They're chemical events
in your brain. So that's not to say that feelings
are bad, but the problem is that the human brain
has a limited palette of neurotransmitters, and those seven or
eight neurotransmitters generate all the things that are possible for

(01:45):
a human to feel. And so what that means is
there's no discernible difference between what you feel internally, mentally,
or physiologically when there's a real threat to your life.
Say you know, a bear runs into your living room
and trust to eat you, or you wake up in
the middle of the night and wonder if you're going
to get fired the next day at your job, and
you get afraid, the same set of feelings right, the

(02:07):
hair stands up, your heart races, you feel cold. All
that stuff happens because physiology is triggered by feeling. Feeling
is a chemical event in your brain. So the most
important thing to realize is that the things that I
feel do not automatically deserve to have credibility as representing
actual current events that are actually happening. Most people don't

(02:29):
recognize that. In our society right now, we're inundated with
this idea that what you got to follow your feelings
and follow your heart and you fight for your feelings
and all that stuff. And I'm just telling you from
a compassionate physician standpoint, that's a terrible way to live
your life because if you try to believe every feeling
that you have as if it's tied to something that's real,
what you're going to find is you're pursuing a lot

(02:50):
of things that don't pan out to be helpful to you.
And that's that's just a fact. So the way you
deal with it, the way we deal with it anyway,
and teach people to deal with it, is to say
understand that the way your brain is wired, feelings jumble
up with thoughts in an area of your brain called
the basal ganglia, and it's like putting a fuel injector
in your car and adding an additive to the gas. Like,

(03:11):
once they mix up, you can't unmix them. So feelings
and thoughts tie together and you can't separate them, and
you have a part of your brain called the hippocampus
that ties in all these different areas that attach meaning
to the raw chemical signal of what you feel. So
basically you have a feeling like anxiety. For example, something

(03:33):
starts to physiologically make you feel like you're anxious, and
you basically pull in a memory and attach a meaning
to that chemical trigger, and you tell yourself you hear
an internal thought. And we already covered last week and
the idea that thoughts aren't always true. So you tie
in a previous experience with a similar feeling and you

(03:54):
attach a meaning to it as if it's the current experience.
And so basically what you're doing is you're not careful
and discerning about it is you'll start to think that
every time the hair goes up on the back of
my neck it means I'm about to be abused, or
it means I'm about to have this problem occur again,
because that's what it meant the first time I felt it.
And so if you're not careful to say, wait a minute,

(04:15):
there's a real difference. And I know there's a difference
because intellectually, if you get your fronel lobes involved. You know,
let me give you a scenario. You feel you're heart racing,
you feel a little bit tingly, the hair stands up
on the back of your neck. You find your mouth
drying out. And it could be that you're about to
open a love letter from somebody that you hoped was

(04:36):
going to fall in love with you and find out
that your life's dream is about to come true, that
this person's going to marry you. Because that's a feeling
and a bunch of physiology that happens when you're anticipating
something wonderful, it could also mean that you're about to
find out that you're having a heart attack. Right, the
same set of chemical physiological things make you feel two

(04:57):
different things. It's the meaning that you attach to them
that tells the truth of what's happening, or that could
potentially tell the truth about what's happening. So the important
thing to learn is that physiology is triggered by the
parts of our brain that generate feeling, and we attach
meaning to them based on prior experience. And the discernment

(05:17):
piece is where we have to say, wait a minute,
this feeling right now and this particular circumstance doesn't necessarily
mean that that previous bad thing is going to happen again.

Speaker 1 (05:27):
Yeah, and this is so relevant to people that are
struggling with a fired and wired experience alongside food of like,
when I feel sad, food will make me feel better,
or when I need comfort, food is what I need.
And part of it is there's got to be that
pattern interrupt. It's funny because there's an inside joke with
my clients and I made up a word one time
called excited because of how similar anxiety and excitement feel.

(05:47):
I'm like, I'm just excited because again, my nervous system
really couldn't tell the difference between the two. I was
experiencing them very similarly physiologically. But that's what happens too
when we think we're in danger, if we've fired and wired,
you know, food, sugar, Netflix, whatever it is online shopping
wine to be the thing that fills those voids of
those feelings. Again, that hippocampus, I've heard it described as

(06:09):
the elephant that never forgets right until we change the picture,
until we change that fired and wired experience. So can
you just talk a little bit about that. So if
somebody has felt something for so long, and their brain
goes into a threat and they believe, they truly believe,
and again coming back to the thoughts that they're believing
that food and sugar is the only thing that will
make them feel better. You know, can you just kind

(06:31):
of tell us a little bit about what that looks
like to break that pattern through your eyes?

Speaker 2 (06:35):
There's kind of three things we talk about, firing and wiring.
You're referencing something called Hebb's law, which is a principle
of neuroscience that says that neurons that fire together in
a particular pattern frequently begin to be wired synaptically so
that they automate that thing. So your brain's really good
at making things that you do a lot automated, so
you don't have to think about them to make them happen.

(06:57):
It's like when you drive to work. The first time,
you have to think about every turn that you make,
But after you've done it a few times, you can
make that drive almost in your sleep because you've synaptically
wired the steps that you need to take to get
that drive done. So that's Heab's law. But the way
that synapsis can be broken and retrained and repurposed to
make new ones. To make new feelings and new connections

(07:18):
between those feelings is to apply two other elements, and
one is called attention density and one is called the
quantum Zeno effects. These are big words, but basically in
quantum physics, there's a principle that the more you look
at something from a particular point of view, the more
it stays fixed in that state. And so what we
know is it's like having one of those cameras with

(07:39):
a really fast shutter speed. You can take a picture
of a hummingbird or something that looks like it's in
slow motion. Right, the more you look at something, am
I still going to be pleased by this food choice?
Am I still going to be comforted by this alcohol?
And if I do this and feel this and recreate
that thing, is it going to make me feel that
comfort that it always does. The more you look at
it from that point of the more true it will stay. Right. So,

(08:02):
then when you fix that thing in a state of
being true, and then you wire it with Hebb's law
into this idea that I'm going to make a synapse
where now the next time I feel that anxiety, I'm
just going to eat the thing and I'm not going
to process it mentally. I'm just going to find myself
with the bag of Cheetos and the red stuff all
over my fingertips, and I don't even remember it happening,

(08:22):
but it happened because I wired that in because of
quantum zeno effective attending to it over and over and
Hebb's law, I've now wired that into a synapse. And
the third one is this thing called attention density, which
means the more you pay attention to something from a
particular point of view, the more you can't stop paying
attention to it consciously all the time. So basically, when

(08:43):
you think about something so much that it becomes the
thing that you think you have to think about, then
your front lope says, Okay, I guess it's my job
to think about this all the time. So I'm going
to think about when do I get the next meal.
I'm going to think about when do I satisfy my
craving again. I'm going to think about when this person
lets me down inevitably or stock up on the thing
that I eat or drink or Netflix or whatever it

(09:03):
is that I do to make myself feel better about that,
convince myself that that's a better way to feel. So
you've taken these three scientific principles and you've turned them
into ways to harm yourself. We talked last time about
self malpractice, and the way to fix it is the
very same process. Is we stop believing the automatic thought
that this action is going to produce a better feeling

(09:25):
for me, because I can see that it's harming me.
So now I'm going to have to really get some
attention density working on my side. Now I'm going to
have to choose to pay attention to the new thing
that I want to create significantly over and over and
pay attention to it and wire it together so that
all of a sudden, I'll start finding that I've got
a better habit, i start finding that I've finally overcome

(09:45):
a little bit. And the problem with synapses is they're
like ruts in a wagon trail. Like it's really hard
once the tires get down in that rut, it's hard
to get them out, and it's easy for them to
fall back in. The ruts don't go away really fast.
So we've got to really diligently make ourselves create these
new thought pathways that will eventually wire and create new

(10:06):
synapses and well over time will deepen those ruts and
make new wagon trails that are better than the old ones.
And then the neat thing is there's something called microglia,
these little cells in your brain that chew up synapses basically,
so that over time, if you create a new habit
and stop the old one, you will start to break
down those old wagon trails, and those those ruts will

(10:28):
get shallower, and it'll be harder and harder to fall
back into that old habit, and you'll literally recreate your
brain in a healthier way by learning how to harness
that helps law for your benefit.

Speaker 1 (10:39):
And that's why a lot of this food and body
stuff can be kind of sneaky and insidious because a
lot of times it's very unconscious. People aren't consciously saying like, oh,
I'm sad, so therefore food will make me feel better
like you said, they're just looking down and they have
orange cheetoh fingerprints, right. And then it's also not a
lot of the mainstream is like, oh, we'll just stop
thinking about it. But you're giving it attention and density

(11:00):
still right by thinking. You're saying don't think about it,
don't think about it, instead of like you were talking
about giving it a new way of thinking. I call
it air attention intention repetition, because you need to have
a new way of thinking to replace it with. And
you just spelled that out so beautifully, and I really
feel like anybody who's listening can see that picture. I
can see those grooves in the wheel. But what you

(11:22):
just spoke to is really the importance of if you
missed last week, go back and listen to the concept
of paying attention to what you're paying attention to and
thinking about your thoughts because it all revolves around that
making the unconscious conscious. And we're going to talk a
little bit more about that when we get to the
neuro beliefs side of it next week, But in the meantime,

(11:42):
first of all, thank you so much for being back here.
You are just such a wealth of information. And I
love how you speak to us in you're a neurosurgeon,
but I love how you also break it down in
an are you smarter than a fifth grader kind of
science kind of way. That's how I love it. So
I'm just so I feel so grateful that you're here.
Where can people find you? Where can they google? Stock?
You? You have podcasts, you have books. You have a weekly

(12:04):
newsletter that you send out, so where can they find you?

Speaker 2 (12:07):
Yeah, so we do the self Brain Surgery newsletter every
week on Substack. It's doctor Lee Warren dot substack dot
com and my website is doctor Lee Warren dot com.
Have podcasts Doctor Lee Warren Podcast. Everything's my name, so
it's easy to find and anywhere you listen to podcasts.
And my books are all on my website or on
Amazon anywhere books are sold, so all over the place,
easy to find. I'd love to meet new people.

Speaker 1 (12:27):
Well, we will link that all in the show notes.
We are going to be back next week to talk
about neuro beliefs. Thank you again for being here, doctor Warren,
and we are out for this week. See you next Saturday.
Out way bye
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