OUTWEIGH: We are back with Dr. Lee Warren to explore the two-way-street between thoughts and beliefs. In Part 1 we explored the power of neuro-thoughts, and part 2 revealed how they influence your neuro-feelings. Now, we get to the core: your beliefs! Dr. Warren delves into the fascinating world of neuro-beliefs, explaining the intricate dance between your thoughts and your core convictions. You'll learn how thoughts shape beliefs, and beliefs reinforce specific patterns of thinking and feeling. Prepare to unlock the secrets of your belief system, understand how it impacts your reality, and discover strategies to cultivate beliefs that actually empower you.
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
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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 be outwait 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. I'm strong, I
feel free, I know everybod of me. It's beautiful.
Speaker 1 (00:19):
And then will always out way if you feel it.
Speaker 2 (00:24):
But she'll some love to the h I get there,
say go one day and did you and die out way?
Speaker 1 (00:35):
Happy Saturday, Outweigh. I am grateful to be back here
with doctor Lee Warren. We're here for our neuro series
here on Outweigh. Two weeks ago we talked about your
neuro thoughts. Last week we talked about neuro feelings and
how feelings are not facts and they can actually lie
to us a little bit. If we're being honest, they're sneaky.
This week we are going to get into neuro beliefs,
(00:56):
and if you missed the past couple weeks, definitely go
check it out because there's a lot of chicken egg
cause and effect going on here bringing us into the
belief side of it. But what I'd love to do
todate Doctor Warren is really kick off when it comes
to our beliefs and believing what we're believing you know,
first of all, we have to kind of become aware
of it. And there's the unconscious, there's the subconscious, there's
(01:17):
the conscious. Can you just kind of share a little
bit about your perspective of beliefs and how it comes
into your self brain surgery thought.
Speaker 2 (01:25):
Process absolutely well. Beliefs lean sort of start with this
thing that I call that's called worldview. Like, basically, worldview
is the set of filters and ideas and beliefs that
you use to sort of investigate and think about new
ideas that are presented to you in the world. And
(01:45):
so when you encounter something, the way that you decide
if it's true or not, the way that you decide
if it's worthwhile for you to pursue or to believe
that it affects you is dependent on the set of
filters and underlying beliefs and your overall worldview how you
view the world. Right, So that means that the belief
systems that we have, whether they come from our family,
(02:06):
our heritage, or our own reading or our own experiences,
those belief systems really impact everything that you do and
everything that you feel and think, and everything that happens
in your life and the people around you, even if
you're not sort of consciously aware of it all the time,
because whether or not you recognize it. And some people
might say, oh, I'm a really open minded person, don't
(02:27):
really have a worldview? Yes, you do. Your worldview might
be everything's true all the time. And if that's your worldview,
I'll challenge you to say, that's going to harm you
in some ways because you're going to accept some things
that really aren't true, and then you'll find yourself reacting
to some things that weren't true in the first place,
and you've got to clean that up. So having a worldview,
having an awareness that you do have a worldview, and
(02:49):
then spending some time questioning what that is and understanding
identifying what your belief systems are. That's what we talk
about on Spiritual brain Surgery. Concept is this podcast is
this idea that you have a worldview, So you need
to know what it is so you can explain it
and then decide if it's worth living with.
Speaker 1 (03:06):
Yeah, and I think people, you know, they download it
from like you said, upbringing parents, friends, even today, we're
being influenced. Everything is influencing us. And if we don't
have this basis of our own foundation of beliefs and
worldviews that really align with the version of ourselves that
we want to be. And that's where it really connects
to this identity piece of the puzzle in our self image,
which we did kind of talk about a bit in
our neuro Hope and neuro Faith episodes, so we'll link
(03:28):
those as well. But really it's it's knowing what you believe.
I love how you just pointed that out, because a
lot of people are walking around kind of with blinders
on and they don't know what they believe. They're just
kind of repeating what they've heard or what they've downloaded.
And I feel like what you just said is almost
like a permission slip of like, hey, you get to
vote on what you believe, so can you speak a
(03:50):
little bit more about this voting process. So, now that
you're aware of this worldview when it comes to our beliefs,
how do we shift our beliefs now that we're actually
aware that we have that.
Speaker 2 (04:00):
So if you have a worldview that says that you
know there's no absolute truth, for example, that's a common
worldview these days. Everybody has their own path to truth,
and you can find your way and all of that.
And I'm not challenging if that's what you believe. But
what I'm saying is, if that's your worldview, then you
have to say, okay, well, there are some things that
are consistent with a happy, productive life that I can
(04:22):
build out of that worldview. And when something, some other
idea comes in and challenges me, then I need to say,
wait a minute, is this idea that I'm being asked
to accept consistent with my belief system? Is it consistent
with my worldview? And when I say to other people,
this is my set of things that I operate by
my operating system, if you will, then if a new
(04:42):
idea comes along and I'm presenting that to myself as
if I want to incorporate this in my behavior and
my feelings and all of that, then I've got to
be able to say, wait, is this consistent with what
I believe? And if it's not, then am I harming
myself on an integrity level by accepting this new idea
or practice? Is if it's true, when it's really not
consistent with my overall worldview? And now that brings up
(05:05):
a question. Sometimes we find things that may need to
revise our worldview maybe something comes along and you try it,
you taste it out a little bit, and you test it,
and from a good science you and I are both
kind of science nerves. If you take something and test
it and run all the exams on it and it
turns out to probably be true, then maybe your worldview
needs updating. So one of the problems we have sometimes
(05:26):
is we dig our heels in to our belief system
and we say, I don't care if this turns out
to be beneficial, and maybe even turns out to be true.
If it's not consistent with what I've said I believe before,
I can't accept it. Right That's one of the problems
we have in our society right now. We pick this
side and that side, and if you're on this side,
you can't agree with anything or you got to cancel
everybody on the other side. And the problem with that
is sometimes the other guy has something that's true and
(05:50):
it might be helpful to me, and that sort of
conversation and back and forth. As part of I think
being a fully embodied, fully developed human is to say,
can I accept an idea that's challenging to me, and
can I use my intellect to process that idea and
test it out as a scientist and see if it
might actually be helpful to sort of evolve and mature
(06:11):
my own world view a belief system.
Speaker 1 (06:13):
Yeah, and I love how you also brought up the
piece of the puzzle of integrity, you know, because when
you believe a certain way and you witness yourself acting
out of alignment with it, that gap in between is
where the shame lives and the cognitive dissonance, and you
end up being out of integrity when I think all
of us want to be in alignment with who we
want to be. Now, I talk about all the time
how we can't out behave our beliefs, and our beliefs
(06:34):
shape our behaviors, and we're going to get into the
habits and actions and behavior side of it. But can
you share because you already started talking about you know,
what I heard you say essentially is like you have
to have the beliefs of the person that you want
to become right and believe your way there. So can
you just speak into that a bit.
Speaker 2 (06:50):
Yeah. So you referenced something called cognitive dissonance, and that's
really important to remember, and there's a lot of relevance
here when we talk about habits and numbing the behaviors
that we might use alcohol or food or whatever it
might be. It has to do a lot with cognitive dissonances.
When you believe that something is harmful to you, or
you believe that something is bad for you or good
(07:11):
for you, or helpful or not helpful, but then you
do that thing anyway because there's some other benefit that
you think you're going to get from it. Then you
have this sort of little disturbance in the force inside you,
this little birr under your saddle that says, wait a minute,
I know this is going to hurt me. I know
that if I do this tomorrow, I'm going to pay.
What I call the tomorrow tax is sort of this tomorrow,
(07:34):
I'm dealing with something that I did yesterday instead of
being able to deal with today, which we don't talk
about spiritual things a lot here, but Jesus said, each
day has enough trouble of its own right. So the
tomorrow at tax idea is like, if you choose to
engage in a numbing behavior, you nesetize yourself because you
don't feel good about what's happening today, then tomorrow when
(07:54):
that numbing behavior wears off. You still have the original problem,
and now you got the effects of whatever it was
that you did to numb yourself. You spent too much money,
you ate too much food, you drink the wrong things.
Now you've got a headache and you're hungover, and you're
late to work, and now you're all day long trying
to catch up and process and pay that tomorrow at tax,
and you've got this dissonance in your brain and your
(08:16):
spirit that says, wait, man, I didn't do the best
job I could have done. I let myself down because
I acted out of balance with what I say that
I believe, and so that'll harm you in some way.
So I'm not saying that your worldview is always right
and always has to be perpetually the same. But what
I am saying is that it's valuable on a spiritual
(08:37):
and emotional and neuroscience level to know what you believe,
revise it when necessary based on evidence and practice, and
live your life in accordance with that. That's how you
become healthier and feel better and be happier.
Speaker 1 (08:51):
Well, coming back full circle to our very first episode
around neuro thoughts, you know, because really a belief is
a thought that you repeat and you eventually believe it. Right,
there's that repetition, and of course the worldview comes into play.
So can you talk a little bit about how you
teach shifting your beliefs when it comes to becoming aware
of your thoughts? And if you were just going to
give us beliefs shifting one oh one, what would that
(09:14):
look like.
Speaker 2 (09:14):
I think it's this if you constantly observe your own behavior,
because a lot of us don't. I mean, frankly, a
lot of us are stunningly unaware of our own part
that we play in life. And I heard somebody say
the other day, if you meet a jerk in the
morning and that evening, you met a jerk that morning
and the rest of your day was pretty good, then
he was probably really a jerk. But if you meet
(09:36):
jerks all day long, then when you get home and
you say, man, everybody I met today was a jerk,
you might be the jerk.
Speaker 1 (09:42):
You're the jerk.
Speaker 2 (09:45):
So a lot of us don't spend any time evaluating
our own behavior, the consequences of our behavior, the effects
on other people of our behavior. And what that means
is if you spend a little time looking at the
evidence of what your life is producing at looking at
the fruit of what you're life is doing, then it
may be that you're acting as if you believe some
things that you don't really believe because you're not willing
(10:06):
to practice them. And so then maybe you say, well,
if I'm never practicing these things I say I believe,
maybe I need to revalue those things, reorder them a bit.
Maybe I need to tune up my world view so
that I'm living more consistently with the things that I believe,
and then maybe the outcomes that I'm seeing in my
own life will start to be more effective for myself. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (10:25):
Absolutely. You obviously talk a lot about the spiritual side
of things on your podcast. So you share a concept
and then you align it with scripture. Was that something
that you kind of unconsciously started doing and it was
just something that resonated with you. Was it a conscious
thought process, Like, so, if somebody did want to say, listen,
this feels like a spiritual belief problem and I want
(10:45):
to up level my beliefs to align with my spirit
what was the process like for you to just start
aligning scripture with beliefs.
Speaker 2 (10:53):
You know, I was trained as a scientist as a
biochemist in college, and I became a neuroscientist, neurosurgeon and
all that. But I was raised as a Christian, So
I had this sort of two worlds that I was
living in because a lot of the people in the
science world are kind of materialist reductionists, people that don't
believe there's an overall purpose or meaning to life and
all that kind of stuff. But then I had this
(11:14):
other side of my life that was about spiritual things
and Christian worldview in particular. And what I started noticing
was every time science finally got down to where they
could prove that something was actually good for humans to live,
it aligned with something that I had learned from the
Bible a long time ago. Here's a good example. Science
(11:35):
now says that when you think about better thoughts, you
have better brain chemistry and you feel better. Your physiology
gets better, you have less heart disease, less stress, your
quarters all goes down, your diabetes get some better control.
All of that stuff can be done by thinking better.
In fact, it's been shown that cognitive behavioral therapy, for example,
is as effective or more effective than certain medications for
(11:56):
improving people's physiology. Right so basically, the Bible said the
same thing a long time ago. There's a book in
the New Testament called Philippians and Philippians, Chapter four. He says, hey,
if you want to be less anxious, pray more and
be more grateful and think about better stuff. And so
two thousand years ago you had this guy in Palestine
who was saying things that turn out to be true
from functional neuroimaging two thousand years later, and so I
(12:19):
just started noticing that there were a lot of things
that aligned with scripture and modern cognitive neuroscience. And whether
that's just that people are good observers of behavior and
they can make smart sayings like the Stokes did, or
if it's actually that the Bible was onto something and
those guys knew something is up for you to decide.
But I found, as a person who tries to think
critically about how I think and help other people get there,
(12:42):
that the Bible is a pretty good guide to how
humans can flourish. And whether you think that's real and
eternal truth or you think it's just a good book
full of information, it's worth knowing. So the first thing
I would say is, if you want the final thing
I would say is if you want to talk about
or sort of benefit from what scripture might say, the
best way to do that is to read it for
(13:03):
yourself and not let somebody else tell you what it says.
Speaker 1 (13:05):
Yeah, I love it well before we end today's episode
and head over to the beliefs and behavior side of it,
which if you're getting the memo, it's all interconnected, this
idea of the difference between unconscious subconscious conscious. Can you
just give us your thirty thousand foot overview of what
that looks like and how that transforms into each other.
Speaker 2 (13:24):
So your subconscious has a lot to do with synapses,
as we've been talking a lot about in the last
three episodes. So you attach meaning to physiology, feelings, and
past memories, and you basically stick those in parts of
your brain that don't require the input of your frontal
lobe and your higher cognitive centers to operate. So that's
how you automate certain behaviors, and it's how you automate
(13:47):
certain ways that you operate your life without having to
sort of use metabolic energy to think about those things.
But you find yourself having done a lot of things.
You walked across your house, this morning when the lights
went on and the sun wasn't up yet, and you
didn't hit your foot on the coffee table because your
brain already knows where it is. You've wired that in
and so subconsciously you'd make the turns and you avoid
(14:09):
the trouble. And you do the same thing in your
mental life. You sort of do a lot of things
mentally without having to think about them because your subconscious
is out there accessing all that information without you having
to literally think about it. And then there's this sort
of super conscious idea if you want that. We now
know for sure that your mind is non local to
(14:30):
your brain, like a brain in mind are not the
same thing, and we can have a whole multiple hour
conversation about that, but mind and brain are two different things,
and they're two different things that and that's been proven
mathematically in quantum physics, basically that your mind can affect
other people's lives without your body and being involved in it.
And that's a long conversation. But the reason I mention
(14:52):
it is that part of how you're operating and navigating
your life comes from outside of your brain. And I
think that mind brain interface is also where we have
sort of a mind spiritual interface with our creator, and
that's the way I think it's designed to operate, not
brain out, but mind down.
Speaker 1 (15:10):
I'm so glad that we're touching on all of this
because most of the people that are listening to this podcast,
it's a very focused, narrow conversation of it's just about
the food, it's just about the fitness, it's just about
my weight, it's just about my body. And those are
all such downstream things to everything that we're talking about here.
So if there's anything that will give you hope, it's
just know that when you start solving the right problem
(15:31):
with such as the things that we're talking about on
this podcast, anything's possible. I mean, it's proven scientifically, but
then if we do open up the spiritual realm, it's
like miracles can happen too, you know. So don't lose
hope wherever you are. And that's actually a great segue
to talk about your books, your podcasts and where people
can find you.
Speaker 2 (15:49):
Yeah, so anywhere you listen to podcasts, you can find
the Doctor Lee Warren podcast. I have a second podcast
called Spiritual Brain Surgery that goes a little bit deeper
on the spiritual side. Of things, and then I write
a substack newsletter every week called Self Brain Surgery and
that's doctor Leewarren dot substack dot com. And if you
want to read my books, just tap in my name
on Amazon or anywhere you buy books and they're all
out there, easy to.
Speaker 1 (16:08):
Find me amazing. And if you want to hear more
about what brought doctor Warren to become the man that
he's become, we did a deep dive on the What's
God Got to Do with It podcast where he share
he has such a beautiful story and testimony, but also
how he used the tragedy and trauma in his life
for good and he's really speaking hope and truth into
all of our lives and really just I believe changing
(16:31):
the face of how we see the brain and hope
and possibility, and my spiritual heart has opened. So I
really can't endorse his podcast his books anymore. So we'll
also link those in the show notes and we will
be back to finish up this neuro series next week
where we're going to be talking about neuro habits, so
that includes the doing side of it, which is what
(16:52):
people rush to to start with, but obviously we put
it last for a reason, so we will be back
to talk about that next week and have a beautiful
week five.
I won't let my body out be outwait 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. I'm strong, I
feel free, I know everybod of me. It's beautiful.
Speaker 1 (00:19):
And then will always out way if you feel it.
Speaker 2 (00:24):
But she'll some love to the h I get there,
say go one day and did you and die out way?
Speaker 1 (00:35):
Happy Saturday, Outweigh. I am grateful to be back here
with doctor Lee Warren. We're here for our neuro series
here on Outweigh. Two weeks ago we talked about your
neuro thoughts. Last week we talked about neuro feelings and
how feelings are not facts and they can actually lie
to us a little bit. If we're being honest, they're sneaky.
This week we are going to get into neuro beliefs,
(00:56):
and if you missed the past couple weeks, definitely go
check it out because there's a lot of chicken egg
cause and effect going on here bringing us into the
belief side of it. But what I'd love to do
todate Doctor Warren is really kick off when it comes
to our beliefs and believing what we're believing you know,
first of all, we have to kind of become aware
of it. And there's the unconscious, there's the subconscious, there's
(01:17):
the conscious. Can you just kind of share a little
bit about your perspective of beliefs and how it comes
into your self brain surgery thought.
Speaker 2 (01:25):
Process absolutely well. Beliefs lean sort of start with this
thing that I call that's called worldview. Like, basically, worldview
is the set of filters and ideas and beliefs that
you use to sort of investigate and think about new
ideas that are presented to you in the world. And
(01:45):
so when you encounter something, the way that you decide
if it's true or not, the way that you decide
if it's worthwhile for you to pursue or to believe
that it affects you is dependent on the set of
filters and underlying beliefs and your overall worldview how you
view the world. Right, So that means that the belief
systems that we have, whether they come from our family,
(02:06):
our heritage, or our own reading or our own experiences,
those belief systems really impact everything that you do and
everything that you feel and think, and everything that happens
in your life and the people around you, even if
you're not sort of consciously aware of it all the time,
because whether or not you recognize it. And some people
might say, oh, I'm a really open minded person, don't
(02:27):
really have a worldview? Yes, you do. Your worldview might
be everything's true all the time. And if that's your worldview,
I'll challenge you to say, that's going to harm you
in some ways because you're going to accept some things
that really aren't true, and then you'll find yourself reacting
to some things that weren't true in the first place,
and you've got to clean that up. So having a worldview,
having an awareness that you do have a worldview, and
(02:49):
then spending some time questioning what that is and understanding
identifying what your belief systems are. That's what we talk
about on Spiritual brain Surgery. Concept is this podcast is
this idea that you have a worldview, So you need
to know what it is so you can explain it
and then decide if it's worth living with.
Speaker 1 (03:06):
Yeah, and I think people, you know, they download it
from like you said, upbringing parents, friends, even today, we're
being influenced. Everything is influencing us. And if we don't
have this basis of our own foundation of beliefs and
worldviews that really align with the version of ourselves that
we want to be. And that's where it really connects
to this identity piece of the puzzle in our self image,
which we did kind of talk about a bit in
our neuro Hope and neuro Faith episodes, so we'll link
(03:28):
those as well. But really it's it's knowing what you believe.
I love how you just pointed that out, because a
lot of people are walking around kind of with blinders
on and they don't know what they believe. They're just
kind of repeating what they've heard or what they've downloaded.
And I feel like what you just said is almost
like a permission slip of like, hey, you get to
vote on what you believe, so can you speak a
(03:50):
little bit more about this voting process. So, now that
you're aware of this worldview when it comes to our beliefs,
how do we shift our beliefs now that we're actually
aware that we have that.
Speaker 2 (04:00):
So if you have a worldview that says that you
know there's no absolute truth, for example, that's a common
worldview these days. Everybody has their own path to truth,
and you can find your way and all of that.
And I'm not challenging if that's what you believe. But
what I'm saying is, if that's your worldview, then you
have to say, okay, well, there are some things that
are consistent with a happy, productive life that I can
(04:22):
build out of that worldview. And when something, some other
idea comes in and challenges me, then I need to say,
wait a minute, is this idea that I'm being asked
to accept consistent with my belief system? Is it consistent
with my worldview? And when I say to other people,
this is my set of things that I operate by
my operating system, if you will, then if a new
(04:42):
idea comes along and I'm presenting that to myself as
if I want to incorporate this in my behavior and
my feelings and all of that, then I've got to
be able to say, wait, is this consistent with what
I believe? And if it's not, then am I harming
myself on an integrity level by accepting this new idea
or practice? Is if it's true, when it's really not
consistent with my overall worldview? And now that brings up
(05:05):
a question. Sometimes we find things that may need to
revise our worldview maybe something comes along and you try it,
you taste it out a little bit, and you test it,
and from a good science you and I are both
kind of science nerves. If you take something and test
it and run all the exams on it and it
turns out to probably be true, then maybe your worldview
needs updating. So one of the problems we have sometimes
(05:26):
is we dig our heels in to our belief system
and we say, I don't care if this turns out
to be beneficial, and maybe even turns out to be true.
If it's not consistent with what I've said I believe before,
I can't accept it. Right That's one of the problems
we have in our society right now. We pick this
side and that side, and if you're on this side,
you can't agree with anything or you got to cancel
everybody on the other side. And the problem with that
is sometimes the other guy has something that's true and
(05:50):
it might be helpful to me, and that sort of
conversation and back and forth. As part of I think
being a fully embodied, fully developed human is to say,
can I accept an idea that's challenging to me, and
can I use my intellect to process that idea and
test it out as a scientist and see if it
might actually be helpful to sort of evolve and mature
(06:11):
my own world view a belief system.
Speaker 1 (06:13):
Yeah, and I love how you also brought up the
piece of the puzzle of integrity, you know, because when
you believe a certain way and you witness yourself acting
out of alignment with it, that gap in between is
where the shame lives and the cognitive dissonance, and you
end up being out of integrity when I think all
of us want to be in alignment with who we
want to be. Now, I talk about all the time
how we can't out behave our beliefs, and our beliefs
(06:34):
shape our behaviors, and we're going to get into the
habits and actions and behavior side of it. But can
you share because you already started talking about you know,
what I heard you say essentially is like you have
to have the beliefs of the person that you want
to become right and believe your way there. So can
you just speak into that a bit.
Speaker 2 (06:50):
Yeah. So you referenced something called cognitive dissonance, and that's
really important to remember, and there's a lot of relevance
here when we talk about habits and numbing the behaviors
that we might use alcohol or food or whatever it
might be. It has to do a lot with cognitive dissonances.
When you believe that something is harmful to you, or
you believe that something is bad for you or good
(07:11):
for you, or helpful or not helpful, but then you
do that thing anyway because there's some other benefit that
you think you're going to get from it. Then you
have this sort of little disturbance in the force inside you,
this little birr under your saddle that says, wait a minute,
I know this is going to hurt me. I know
that if I do this tomorrow, I'm going to pay.
What I call the tomorrow tax is sort of this tomorrow,
(07:34):
I'm dealing with something that I did yesterday instead of
being able to deal with today, which we don't talk
about spiritual things a lot here, but Jesus said, each
day has enough trouble of its own right. So the
tomorrow at tax idea is like, if you choose to
engage in a numbing behavior, you nesetize yourself because you
don't feel good about what's happening today, then tomorrow when
(07:54):
that numbing behavior wears off. You still have the original problem,
and now you got the effects of whatever it was
that you did to numb yourself. You spent too much money,
you ate too much food, you drink the wrong things.
Now you've got a headache and you're hungover, and you're
late to work, and now you're all day long trying
to catch up and process and pay that tomorrow at tax,
and you've got this dissonance in your brain and your
(08:16):
spirit that says, wait, man, I didn't do the best
job I could have done. I let myself down because
I acted out of balance with what I say that
I believe, and so that'll harm you in some way.
So I'm not saying that your worldview is always right
and always has to be perpetually the same. But what
I am saying is that it's valuable on a spiritual
(08:37):
and emotional and neuroscience level to know what you believe,
revise it when necessary based on evidence and practice, and
live your life in accordance with that. That's how you
become healthier and feel better and be happier.
Speaker 1 (08:51):
Well, coming back full circle to our very first episode
around neuro thoughts, you know, because really a belief is
a thought that you repeat and you eventually believe it. Right,
there's that repetition, and of course the worldview comes into play.
So can you talk a little bit about how you
teach shifting your beliefs when it comes to becoming aware
of your thoughts? And if you were just going to
give us beliefs shifting one oh one, what would that
(09:14):
look like.
Speaker 2 (09:14):
I think it's this if you constantly observe your own behavior,
because a lot of us don't. I mean, frankly, a
lot of us are stunningly unaware of our own part
that we play in life. And I heard somebody say
the other day, if you meet a jerk in the
morning and that evening, you met a jerk that morning
and the rest of your day was pretty good, then
he was probably really a jerk. But if you meet
(09:36):
jerks all day long, then when you get home and
you say, man, everybody I met today was a jerk,
you might be the jerk.
Speaker 1 (09:42):
You're the jerk.
Speaker 2 (09:45):
So a lot of us don't spend any time evaluating
our own behavior, the consequences of our behavior, the effects
on other people of our behavior. And what that means
is if you spend a little time looking at the
evidence of what your life is producing at looking at
the fruit of what you're life is doing, then it
may be that you're acting as if you believe some
things that you don't really believe because you're not willing
(10:06):
to practice them. And so then maybe you say, well,
if I'm never practicing these things I say I believe,
maybe I need to revalue those things, reorder them a bit.
Maybe I need to tune up my world view so
that I'm living more consistently with the things that I believe,
and then maybe the outcomes that I'm seeing in my
own life will start to be more effective for myself. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (10:25):
Absolutely. You obviously talk a lot about the spiritual side
of things on your podcast. So you share a concept
and then you align it with scripture. Was that something
that you kind of unconsciously started doing and it was
just something that resonated with you. Was it a conscious
thought process, Like, so, if somebody did want to say, listen,
this feels like a spiritual belief problem and I want
(10:45):
to up level my beliefs to align with my spirit
what was the process like for you to just start
aligning scripture with beliefs.
Speaker 2 (10:53):
You know, I was trained as a scientist as a
biochemist in college, and I became a neuroscientist, neurosurgeon and
all that. But I was raised as a Christian, So
I had this sort of two worlds that I was
living in because a lot of the people in the
science world are kind of materialist reductionists, people that don't
believe there's an overall purpose or meaning to life and
all that kind of stuff. But then I had this
(11:14):
other side of my life that was about spiritual things
and Christian worldview in particular. And what I started noticing
was every time science finally got down to where they
could prove that something was actually good for humans to live,
it aligned with something that I had learned from the
Bible a long time ago. Here's a good example. Science
(11:35):
now says that when you think about better thoughts, you
have better brain chemistry and you feel better. Your physiology
gets better, you have less heart disease, less stress, your
quarters all goes down, your diabetes get some better control.
All of that stuff can be done by thinking better.
In fact, it's been shown that cognitive behavioral therapy, for example,
is as effective or more effective than certain medications for
(11:56):
improving people's physiology. Right so basically, the Bible said the
same thing a long time ago. There's a book in
the New Testament called Philippians and Philippians, Chapter four. He says, hey,
if you want to be less anxious, pray more and
be more grateful and think about better stuff. And so
two thousand years ago you had this guy in Palestine
who was saying things that turn out to be true
from functional neuroimaging two thousand years later, and so I
(12:19):
just started noticing that there were a lot of things
that aligned with scripture and modern cognitive neuroscience. And whether
that's just that people are good observers of behavior and
they can make smart sayings like the Stokes did, or
if it's actually that the Bible was onto something and
those guys knew something is up for you to decide.
But I found, as a person who tries to think
critically about how I think and help other people get there,
(12:42):
that the Bible is a pretty good guide to how
humans can flourish. And whether you think that's real and
eternal truth or you think it's just a good book
full of information, it's worth knowing. So the first thing
I would say is, if you want the final thing
I would say is if you want to talk about
or sort of benefit from what scripture might say, the
best way to do that is to read it for
(13:03):
yourself and not let somebody else tell you what it says.
Speaker 1 (13:05):
Yeah, I love it well before we end today's episode
and head over to the beliefs and behavior side of it,
which if you're getting the memo, it's all interconnected, this
idea of the difference between unconscious subconscious conscious. Can you
just give us your thirty thousand foot overview of what
that looks like and how that transforms into each other.
Speaker 2 (13:24):
So your subconscious has a lot to do with synapses,
as we've been talking a lot about in the last
three episodes. So you attach meaning to physiology, feelings, and
past memories, and you basically stick those in parts of
your brain that don't require the input of your frontal
lobe and your higher cognitive centers to operate. So that's
how you automate certain behaviors, and it's how you automate
(13:47):
certain ways that you operate your life without having to
sort of use metabolic energy to think about those things.
But you find yourself having done a lot of things.
You walked across your house, this morning when the lights
went on and the sun wasn't up yet, and you
didn't hit your foot on the coffee table because your
brain already knows where it is. You've wired that in
and so subconsciously you'd make the turns and you avoid
(14:09):
the trouble. And you do the same thing in your
mental life. You sort of do a lot of things
mentally without having to think about them because your subconscious
is out there accessing all that information without you having
to literally think about it. And then there's this sort
of super conscious idea if you want that. We now
know for sure that your mind is non local to
(14:30):
your brain, like a brain in mind are not the
same thing, and we can have a whole multiple hour
conversation about that, but mind and brain are two different things,
and they're two different things that and that's been proven
mathematically in quantum physics, basically that your mind can affect
other people's lives without your body and being involved in it.
And that's a long conversation. But the reason I mention
(14:52):
it is that part of how you're operating and navigating
your life comes from outside of your brain. And I
think that mind brain interface is also where we have
sort of a mind spiritual interface with our creator, and
that's the way I think it's designed to operate, not
brain out, but mind down.
Speaker 1 (15:10):
I'm so glad that we're touching on all of this
because most of the people that are listening to this podcast,
it's a very focused, narrow conversation of it's just about
the food, it's just about the fitness, it's just about
my weight, it's just about my body. And those are
all such downstream things to everything that we're talking about here.
So if there's anything that will give you hope, it's
just know that when you start solving the right problem
(15:31):
with such as the things that we're talking about on
this podcast, anything's possible. I mean, it's proven scientifically, but
then if we do open up the spiritual realm, it's
like miracles can happen too, you know. So don't lose
hope wherever you are. And that's actually a great segue
to talk about your books, your podcasts and where people
can find you.
Speaker 2 (15:49):
Yeah, so anywhere you listen to podcasts, you can find
the Doctor Lee Warren podcast. I have a second podcast
called Spiritual Brain Surgery that goes a little bit deeper
on the spiritual side. Of things, and then I write
a substack newsletter every week called Self Brain Surgery and
that's doctor Leewarren dot substack dot com. And if you
want to read my books, just tap in my name
on Amazon or anywhere you buy books and they're all
out there, easy to.
Speaker 1 (16:08):
Find me amazing. And if you want to hear more
about what brought doctor Warren to become the man that
he's become, we did a deep dive on the What's
God Got to Do with It podcast where he share
he has such a beautiful story and testimony, but also
how he used the tragedy and trauma in his life
for good and he's really speaking hope and truth into
all of our lives and really just I believe changing
(16:31):
the face of how we see the brain and hope
and possibility, and my spiritual heart has opened. So I
really can't endorse his podcast his books anymore. So we'll
also link those in the show notes and we will
be back to finish up this neuro series next week
where we're going to be talking about neuro habits, so
that includes the doing side of it, which is what
(16:52):
people rush to to start with, but obviously we put
it last for a reason, so we will be back
to talk about that next week and have a beautiful
week five.
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Amy Brown
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