September 5, 2024 • 43 mins
Did you know that we have 30,000 - 40,000 thoughts per day & most of them are not true? They're made up of a host of chemical signals that we interpret as feelings, which you make meaning out of, based on your past experiences. Amy's guest Dr. Lee Warren (neurosurgeon, veteran & author) is on to discuss our thoughts, our brain's response to trauma & how finding solid ground during a time of suffering is imperative for our brain + overall well being.
Dr. Lee shares his personal journey with the sudden death of his son and how he maintained hope during this season by leaning into his faith + creating positive-thinking neural pathways. Dr. Lee reminds us that two things can be true at the same time...it's not ok when you lose someone you love, but at the same time it is true that you can be happy, connect with new people, and become a more compassionate person.
We love Dr. Lee's 'biopsy your thoughts' exercise...after you have an upsetting thought, ask yourself: “Is this really true?” And then remind yourself, “not everyone in my life is going to do this to me.” By doing this, you put an executive decision in between the stimulus and the response. This will reliably produce better outcomes for you than if you just react to whatever you think or feel.
Lastly, Dr. Lee and Amy talk about why gratitude is so important for the health of your brain and how it is actually the BEST way to combat anxiety. He also shares 4 things he is currently grateful for.
Books Dr. Lee Warren Has Written:
- Hope is the First Dose: A Treatment Plan for Recovering from Trauma, Tragedy, and Other Massive Things HERE
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:13):
Cass up little food for yourself life.
Speaker 2 (00:18):
Oh it's pretty bad.
Speaker 3 (00:19):
Hey, it's pretty beautiful, man, beautiful for that for a
little more.
Speaker 1 (00:23):
FA's exciting, said he.
Speaker 3 (00:28):
You're kicking with four with Amy Brown, Happy Thursday. Four things.
Speaker 2 (00:34):
Amy here and doctor Lee Warren is my guest. He's
a brain surgeon, inventor, IRAQ war veteran and author. And
I'm excited to talk to you, doctor Lee, about our
brains today. Which do I call you, Doctor Lee? Doctor
Lee Warren, doctor Warren Lee?
Speaker 3 (00:51):
What do I call you?
Speaker 1 (00:52):
Professionally? People call me doctor Lee Warren, but we can
call each other first name, of course.
Speaker 2 (00:56):
Okay, I'm going to keep the doctor in there because
that feels right. So, doctor Lee, since you are a neurosurgeon,
I'm going to walk you through something that just happened
to me and had me thinking about our brains and
how we care for them. I was in the attic
and I stood up really quick and hit my head
and I immediately felt to see if there was blood,
and I could feel a not on my head, and
I thought, okay, if I were to be bleeding, I
(01:18):
would tend to this immediately. I would go get a
bandage or maybe go get stitches or whatever I needed,
and I would do that pretty quickly. But when we
go through emotional trauma, it got me thinking about how
we stuff that down. We maybe don't address it right away,
We don't pay attention to it, we don't tend to.
Speaker 3 (01:35):
It like we would a physical trauma.
Speaker 2 (01:38):
So how important is it that we pay attention to
the emotional traumas that are happening in our lives.
Speaker 1 (01:45):
Yeah, I think that's a good point. You know, we
have physical trauma that happens to our brain that can
damage cells and create emergencies like you just describe, But
on an emotional level, the things that we feel are
imperceptibly different from the things that we actually experienced in
the real world. So when you feel an emotional trauma,
you've undergone something that's created a wound. If you don't
(02:06):
heal from it properly, you're going to make synapses around
that and rewire that experience so that it will play
and come back when you don't want it to and
affect your life going forward, even in times when it's
not helpful to you. So I think it's very important
amy to pay attention to those things that hurt us.
And deal with them properly, not to overly fixate on them,
but to make sure we learn healthy strategies going forward
(02:27):
after they've occurred.
Speaker 2 (02:28):
Well, And like, this is a good tie in to
your latest book. You've written four now and the latest
is Hope is the First Dose, a treatment plan for
recovering from trauma, tragedy and other massive things. And I
want you to share a little bit of your backstory
because it is a wild one, no doubt, but basically
(02:49):
what led you to write a book like this and
why it's so important for you to share this message.
Speaker 1 (02:54):
Being a brain surgeon and I deal with a lot
of people in their kind of most desperate moments. Right
we have head injuries and people with malignant brain cancers,
and I'm the guy that delivers the news. A lot
people come to me and I'm the one that tells
them something devastating is happening. And I started trying to
figure out when I couldn't cure somebody's illness, Like if
you've got a fatal cancer and I can't cure you,
(03:16):
started recognizing that it was important to help you continue
to have a life that has meaning and purpose and
hold on to hope anyway, So I was studying that
the different ways that people respond to trauma and different
ways that people handle hardship like that. And right in
the middle of that research that I was doing that
ultimately became my third book, our son, Mitchell died when
he was nineteen. Mitch was stabbed to death. And when
(03:39):
we lost our son, and so I went from being
a person who was learning about other people's trauma and
trying to help them navigate and process it to being
a brief parent and figured out that a lot of
the things that I thought I knew about how to
help people weren't as effective when it was me that
was hurting. And so hope as the first dose, came
out of how we managed to put as a family
(04:02):
and as individuals kind of put our hope and our
faith and our future back together after going through that
kind of massive thing and kind of ties a lot
of brain science research up with our personal experience and
how people can walk through those emotional injuries like you said,
that aren't physical, they're not bleeding, but it sure feels
like you are. And how do you find hope again
(04:23):
after something like that happens?
Speaker 2 (04:25):
You know, my mom was diagnosed with cancer. I feel
like her hope and her faith and her attitude prolonged
her life, and I would hear doctors talk about that.
I mean, of course we spent a lot of time
in and out of the hospital over two years, but
it seemed important to her that she maintained that. But
she was only able to do it because of her
(04:45):
relationship with the Lord. Spreading joy was sort of her
mantra around the hospital and choosing it for herself, obviously
acknowledging the hard times, right, but she knew me and
my eighten the joy of the Lord is my strength,
and she clung to to that, and so that's what
sustained her. Like she had that, and then she had
hope and knowing that where she's going on the other side,
(05:07):
like that's truly home for her, and so it was
also okay for her to part with this side of
life as well. So how important is it to maintain
that type of hope when we're going through something difficult?
And is that why doctors even encouraged that even if
it's a placebo effect.
Speaker 1 (05:26):
Well, it's not a placebo effect. Actually, the research is
crystal clear that people who find their meaning and purpose
in things that can't be taken from them, have healthier lives,
healthier mindsets, and actually do better across every way that
we can measure outcome other than length of life. So
if you say you've got fatal cancer, and you measure
(05:48):
all the things that we define as quality of life,
you know, peace, relationships, how much alcohol you drink, how
much medicine you take, how much pain you report, it's
all better in people that maintain hope and feel that
their life has some meaning, purpose or some even eternal
purpose than people who give up. And that's why one
of the surprising things that I found in my research
when I was looking at trying to put these books together,
(06:10):
was that people that stop believing that their life means
something after something hard happens, they get a bad diagnosis
or something. Even if they recover from their cancer, they
still have worse quality of life than the people who
die from their disease but maintained that hope. Stunning.
Speaker 3 (06:27):
So what did you do to walk through your tragedy?
Speaker 2 (06:30):
I mean, obviously the research you've got that, but you
have to implement certain things.
Speaker 3 (06:35):
What were those things for you?
Speaker 1 (06:36):
For us, it really came back around to faith, you know,
I felt like, at first, like many people do who
we're suffering, that God had abandoned us, or maybe what
I thought about him wasn't true, or maybe he wasn't
real at all. I went through all that those things
that people do in the face of suffering. But then
I realized, like, you can't change your mind about eternal
(06:57):
things based on short term circumstances, because everybody you know
has gone through something hard or is going to go
through something hard. It's a universal qualification of being a human.
You're going to suffer. And so it's not that believing
in God or holding on to faith or any of
that prevents you from suffering, but it gives you a
set of tools to use when you're suffering, to recognize
(07:18):
that you're not alone in the suffering. And I started
looking for me. It was scriptures, promises from scripture that
turned out to be true even when I was hurting.
The first one was Psalm thirty four eighteen that says
the Lord is close to the broken heart, and I
started realizing he really is. Like he sends people to
be around you, and you find somebody sends you a
message at just the right time that rescues you. From
(07:39):
that despair and you've probably been through something like that,
Like when you go through a hard moment, it seems
like somebody shows up just at the right time with
a good encouraging word and people come around to you.
And so we just started seeing these promises come true. Amen.
And for us it found we found that the bottom
didn't drop out like we were falling. It felt like
we were kind of falling out of what felt like
our normal world, but we didn't fall all the way
(08:02):
to oblivion. We found something solid to land on. What
it was for us was our faith.
Speaker 2 (08:06):
I have esplot tattooed on my wrist, which a spla
means hope in Haitian Creole, because we were in the
process of adopting two kids from Haiti and it took
years almost where we thought is this even gonna happen?
Speaker 3 (08:21):
But I had it.
Speaker 2 (08:21):
Tattooed so that I could look at my wrist every
day and see espla and see hope and believe this
will happen. And then ultimately it did. But I had
to look at it every day.
Speaker 1 (08:32):
They keep your eyes on it.
Speaker 3 (08:34):
Yeah, what is it with our brains?
Speaker 2 (08:36):
Like if you look for something negative, you're going to
find it, and if you look for something positive, you'll
find it.
Speaker 1 (08:42):
Well, that's right. I mean, there's there's amazing research from
neuroscience that talks about how we pay attention to things
and the way that we pay attention makes them more
or less real. And it's really interesting that there's a
whole principle from quantum physics called the geno effect, where basically,
when you look at something in a particular way, it
becomes almost stuck in that way. And so we see
(09:02):
that when people focus on their anxiety. For example, if
your therapist keeps you focused on all the things that
happen in the past or all the ways that you feel,
you're going to find that those things continue to get
bigger in your life. But if they focus you on
the future, on the belief that you can get there
from here, which is a good working definition of hope,
then it turns out that you can heal from the
(09:23):
past and move towards something more hopeful in the future.
So you're saying, fixate on the belief, on the promise,
on the idea that this thing is going to come
to pass doesn't mean that you can manifest everything that
you want, but it means that you're going to make
decisions to connect to those ideas and take purposeful steps
towards them over time, and that produces more and more
(09:43):
hope as time goes on.
Speaker 2 (09:45):
Yeah, I think that everyone's been through different seasons of
life where they get stuck, maybe in a pattern or cycle,
where they can realize there's a lot of negativity happening.
But once you can make that shift, you can really
see the difference. Even just believing that what does this
circumstance make possible? Believing that something can come from this,
(10:07):
some sort of growth, some sort of change that is
going to be positive. Of course, I didn't want my
mother to have cancer. I didn't want to lose her,
but a lot of amazing things came from that.
Speaker 3 (10:17):
I can't even think back to my childhood.
Speaker 2 (10:18):
I didn't want my parents to get divorced, but a
lot of amazing things happened from that. My mom's life
was completely transformed because of the divorce. That's when we
finally started going to church we didn't go before that,
and then she became a completely different person, not being
able to get pregnant. Now I've got two beautiful adopted
children now seventeen and fourteen and things that seemed negative
(10:42):
and hard, but what did they make possible? And I
think just maintaining that faith, that hope that there's a
bigger picture here that's.
Speaker 1 (10:49):
Right and if you can find a way to put
yourself at a different point in the story when you're suffering,
like what you just said is it turns out to
be true that all the research that looks at suffering
and cancer patients are a great example, has been well
studied where a huge majority, like way more than you
can imagine, of people who are going through cancer, even
that ultimately succumbed to it, say things like what you
(11:10):
just described with your mother, that they actually find that
they've grown through it, they've found purpose through it, that
their lives had become enriched by it. So it's almost
like suffering is not optional if you want to be
a really well rounded and fully developed human. It's almost necessary,
like you have to go through hard things if you
want to become a really fully developed person. And so
(11:30):
we find gratitude through those hard moments because we recognize
that they've given us experiences and opportunities to change and
grow and learn and connect with other people in ways
that we wouldn't have been able to do if we
hadn't gone through suffering. And it's interesting because just like
we talked about while ago with quantum physics, like this
idea that two things can be true at the same time,
Like it's never going to be okay that I lost
(11:53):
my son, Like I'm just as sad and broken about
that eleven years after it happened than I was a
day it happened. You're not okay with you lose your mom,
and you never will be. But at the same time,
it is true that I've grown, I've written books, I've
connected with people all over the world, like a lot
of the things that I am. I'm a much more
compassionate physician and husband and father and grandfather now than
(12:14):
I was before I lost my son. All of that
because of having suffered. So doesn't make it good, doesn't
make it right. You would trade it all for having
your mom back, or I'd trade it all for having
my son back. But that sort of secret sauce of
life turns out to be this meaning that we find
because we navigated through something hard. And on the brain
science side, it's true too, like you look at what
(12:36):
makes resilience in the brain's this area called the mid
anterior single and what they find is when you do
hard things, it becomes easier for you to do hard
things in the future, like all across the board. So
you do something that's hard, even if you don't want to,
your brain gets more resilient and you develop more willpower
and you find more sort of joy in engaging in
hard things the next time. So it's almost like you
(12:58):
start saying, I'm ready for the next thing that's hurt,
that it's going to hurt because I know I can
get through it because I've done it before.
Speaker 2 (13:05):
Is there a magic number of how many times we
have to do something for that new neural pathway to
be built or is it different for everybody?
Speaker 1 (13:12):
Well, it's different for everybody. But on the basic physiology side,
there's a structure in your brain called microtubules, and that's
the stuff that makes new synapses, the little building blocks
of new synapses, and they start happening within minutes of
you trying something new or doing something new. So that's
why we always say on my show, like thoughts become things,
because when you think about something, you actually make something
(13:35):
in your brain structurally, make changes in your brain, and
what happens is within minutes you start laying down what's
going to become ultimately the highway towards making a new
habit or making a new process. But if you don't
use it, continue to use that new thing, it disappears
within about three weeks, and so in order to ingrain
it and make it permanent, you have to engage in
(13:55):
that thing over and over and over for a while.
Some people say twenty one days. That's probably true for
things that are sort of life or death. That's probably longer.
For things that are really hard, like giving up smoking
or something, probably takes longer than twenty one days. But
in terms of what's happening in your brain, it starts
almost instantly in the first hour of you trying to
make a change, a positive change in your life. You're
(14:16):
making it structurally in your brain. So that's encouraging. It
gives us hope because we feel like we can't change,
we feel like we're stuck. We inherited the genes, we inherited,
we went through the trauma that we went through, and
that means that we can ever change what the truth is.
As soon as you start trying to change your brain's
right there with you.
Speaker 2 (14:32):
Well, so then that's epigenetics. We have the ability to
change certain parts. You're probably the better person to describe this,
but I think I have a fear inside of me
because both my parents had cancer that I'm going to
get cancer. And sometimes that is a thought that will
take over and I immediately have to squash it and
back up because just because they had it does not
(14:54):
mean I will. But if I keep having those thoughts,
then I'm increasing the likelihood of something negative happening.
Speaker 1 (15:01):
That's right, because so if you think about the big picture,
so epigenetics, if somebody is not familiar, is that the
things that we think about and certain things that we
go through and lifestyle choices can turn on or off genes.
So to speak up, up or down regulate genes is
the way the biochemists call it. And what that means
is that the genetic material that you inherit from mom
and Dad is not guaranteed to be expressed or turned
(15:24):
true in your life. So we know that from identical
twins studies. For example, identical twins often have very different
length of life and very different disease profiles that they get.
And it's because even though they have the same genetic
starting point, they don't have the same lives. And so
what that means is that your life has a lot
of impact and what genes get turned on and off.
So if both your parents have cancer, for example, and
(15:44):
you spend a lot of time worrying about that and
stressing about it, your cortisol level is going to rise,
and the systems in your body that fight cancer and
do things on your behalf to try to avoid cancer
are going to be depleted because you're spending so much
time in a negative chemical state, and your thoughts are
becoming those things that are fighting against you and beating
(16:05):
those cancer cells. So it's true that you can spend
time in your brain thinking healthier thoughts, and that will
promote an environment that's going to produce a better chemical
environment to optimize the epigenetic opportunities that you have to
turn things on and off and make your life as
good as it can be.
Speaker 2 (16:22):
Yeah, it's fascinating. I got more into the brain stuff
when I started doing the neuro feedback. But it's because
of my adopted children and some of their early life
(16:45):
trauma and just basic needs that were never met for them.
Where I had a loving mom and a dad that
when I cried, they held me.
Speaker 3 (16:56):
When I was hungry, they fed me.
Speaker 2 (16:58):
And so from birth to three or even older, but
those are the crucial years, they had certain needs where
when they needed to be held, they weren't held, and
that wired their brain in such a unique way that
we've been dedicated to doing a lot of work to
build those new neuropathways of safety and security and you're okay.
(17:20):
So that's when I got into a lot of it.
My son was actually the first one to do the neurofeedback,
and when I saw the scans of his brain, I thought, well,
this change is absolutely fascinating. And he was doing that
in addition to talk therapy, so there was multiple therapies
going on, and also hedgehog therapy because they can sense
(17:42):
your anxiety and if you're feeling stressed, they'll flare up
their little poky thingies. But if they sense that you're calm, like,
they'll be calm with you because that energy is real.
So I guess to that point, it makes me think
of who you surround yourself with and how important that
(18:03):
is to our mental health as well.
Speaker 1 (18:05):
Absolutely, community matters, and it matters because you need some
people who will call you out when you're being excessively
negative or you're not focusing on things that are true.
One of the things that we have a tendency to
do is to continually turn our mental eyes backwards, like
that Gabrmante said. You know, trauma's not what happened to you.
Trauma is your response to what happened to you. And
(18:27):
that's really good news because if trauma's what happened to you,
then it would never stop being true and it would
be unchangeable. You'd be hopeless if the trauma was actually
the thing that happened. So whatever happened in the past,
your response to it is what tells the future. So
if you can learn then to unwind your trauma responses
like you're describing with your son, if you can learn
a healthier way to process the things that you feel
(18:49):
and turn them into current events that you can do
something about going forward, rather than constantly looking back and
reliving the thing that happened, then you can start to
really create a hopeful future.
Speaker 2 (19:00):
It makes me think of the more emotional side of
my brain when I flip to that. I'm a very
emotional person and I have to often pause before making
any decisions because I don't want my emotions in the
driver's seat.
Speaker 3 (19:16):
So is there anything.
Speaker 2 (19:18):
We can do, like in a moment or what are
your thoughts on pausing and getting into a more rational space.
Does it just take time or is there a brain
exercise we can do.
Speaker 1 (19:28):
There's a lot you can do. In fact, we call
it self brain surgery. I mean this idea that you
have thirty or forty thousand automatic thoughts that happen every
day that you're not responsible for. They come out of
different places in your memory, and they are different parts
of your brain throw thoughts up to your mind, and
most of them are not true, and they are infused
with a whole host of chemical signals that we interpret
(19:49):
as feelings that most of which are also not true,
at least not currently true. So what happens is in
the basal Gangli of your brain you get this kind
of like fuel injector shooting thoughts feelings together. And then
what happens is you feel something and you think something,
and you make meaning out of them based on your
past experiences, and so you decide, for example, you feel
(20:11):
a certain set of feelings and that means that this
event that's happening now is going to end the way
the previous one did. And if you can learn then
to do what I call, since I'm a brain surge
and I call it the biopsy, the thought biopsy, Like,
look at that thought. Oh, I'm a loser, and every
time this happens, he's going to leave me, or this
is going to happen again, and I'm going to start
(20:31):
drinking again. Even though I've been sober. It's inevitable that
this is going to occur. If you can see that
thought and say, wait a second, hang on, is that
really true, and just give it a little pause, then
you'll give it just enough time for the like you said,
the executive frontal low part of your brain to step
in and say, wait a second. I've done this lots
of times and I haven't had that particular failure. Not
everybody that is in my life is going to do
(20:52):
that to me. Not everybody hates my guts and whatever
it is that you routinely think and feel your front low,
will you, or if you've got a good community of
people around you, somebody else, if you say it out loud,
will say wait a minute. Not everybody's going to do
that to you, Amy, You're not always going to fail.
You're successful. You know, they to start giving you truth.
And so if you can put that little biopsy step
(21:13):
in before you react to feelings or thoughts knowing that
many of them are negative, automatically negative and untrue, or
feelings that are just chemical triggers that make you feel
a certain set of things that may or may not
necessarily reflect to what's really happening now, then you can
put an executive decision in between the stimulus and the response,
and that will reliably produce better outcomes for you than
(21:35):
if you just react to whatever you think or feel.
Speaker 3 (21:38):
I like that name a thought biopsy.
Speaker 2 (21:39):
I think I'll start using that on myself for a
you like step aside, I need to go perform a
thought biopsy really quick and evaluate the data versus the drama.
Speaker 1 (21:48):
That's right, And the good news is about that is
that we have another rule. What we say is that
the things you're doing you're getting better at. So that's negative.
If you have a bad habit and you keep doing it,
then you make synapses. Then it gets easier to do that.
All of us know that. But the good news is
that if you start doing better thought practices like taking
a biopsy. You get better at doing that too, and
(22:10):
your brain automates it and before you know it, you're
biops seeing all your thoughts. Turns out there's a scripture
thinking Corinthians ten to five says take your thoughts captive,
Take them captive, and grab a hold of your thinking
and think about it, biopsy it before you react to it,
and it really quickly becomes a way of life. Like
you'll start saying, oh, there's that negative thought again. Maybe
I should think about that for a second before I
(22:30):
send that text message and apply, or before I quit
my job, or before I do this thing that I
always do when I think that thing, And you'll find
that becomes a second nature, like breathing with that thought.
Biopsy becomes an automatic little space that you put in
there that protects you a lot.
Speaker 2 (22:44):
I just quoted the scripture there, and we're talking about
the brain and science.
Speaker 3 (22:48):
And what's happening.
Speaker 2 (22:49):
Has faith always been a part of your life, like
a relationship with the Lord, and of course after losing
your son, did it grow or is it something where
you had your career for and then that happened, or
have you always married up science and faith.
Speaker 1 (23:04):
Well, I was raised in a Christian home, but I
was I had sort of a we call it legalism,
this idea that you have to behave or perform certain
ways for God to approve of your life. And you know,
if you don't do the right things, God's not going
to love you and stuff. And I had that sort
of really ingrained in me. But then I got into
my life and my professional training and my practice, and
I went to war and the Iraq War and got
(23:25):
PTSD and all kinds of things happened, and I realized
that I didn't have the ability to save myself, Like
I couldn't control everything enough to make God love me
enough to survive my life that way. So fortunately I
found the book the writing of a guy named Philipp
Ansi who wrote a book called What's So Amazing About Grace?
And that kind of turned my faith life upside down.
(23:46):
So I had fortunately that book in my heart when
I lost my son, and so I recognized that God's
not out there looking to blow us all up and
punish us. He's looking to rescue us from this hard
life and give us a new way of living that
renews our mind and helps us to handle hard things,
and so for me it was kind of the science
side was constantly showing me that the nervous system was
(24:08):
far more wonderful and complex than we could ever imagine
it being possible to have arrived that accidentally, So I
knew that as a scientist like this can't be an accident.
And then on the faith side, I had all this
evidence that God really does love people and wants them
to have abundant lives. So that's what Jesus said, And
after I lost my son, I just sort of was
able to somehow smash those two things together so that
(24:28):
I can now have a life where I teach people
how to use their brains the way they're designed to
be used and find some way to be happy no
matter what happens.
Speaker 2 (24:37):
And writing about what you went through, I'm sure that
was very therapeutic for your brain and your heart.
Speaker 1 (24:43):
Yeah, absolutely well, and it gives purpose again. Victor Frankel
said that suffering stops being suffering when you find purpose
for it. And for me, like the ability to use
our story, my wife and my kids, our story to
help other people find hope gives it. Meaning. My son
didn't die for nothing. You know he's got a legacy
that lives on beyond his short nineteen years because he's
(25:06):
helping people all over the world find hope through our
story of how we navigated losing him, So that means
it's got meaning.
Speaker 2 (25:13):
Yeah, I mean Victor Frankel, his story is very fascinating.
Speaker 3 (25:16):
People aren't familiar.
Speaker 2 (25:17):
I encourage you to go check that out because I
even think of myself in tough situations, like if I
have been through something like you have been through with
the death of your son, and if am I correct
in that it's an unsolved situation.
Speaker 3 (25:31):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (25:32):
Leanne Ellington is how I learned about you. And I
saw her at our friend's book release party the other night,
actually a book that she wrote to help people heal,
not even to publish, like she wants to encourage people
to write their story, even if it's just for themselves,
because of how healing it can be and how much
it can give you purpose and connection and confidence. Even so,
(25:56):
Leanne and I were there and we were talking about you,
so that's how we got connected. And she was telling
me about your son's story and that it's an unsolved
it's a cold case, and I would imagine for a
lot of people when you don't have that closure, how
that can be more difficult. There seems to be another dose,
another level of hope and faith that has to step in.
Speaker 1 (26:19):
Yeah, you know, actually, and shout out to Liamne by
the way, thank you for introducing us. She's great. But
one of the things that I think made me able
to move forward was this crossroads that we got to
with not knowing what happened to our son. Our son
and his best friend, both nineteen, were found stabbed to death,
and all kinds of mysteries surrounding it, and here eleven
(26:39):
years later, we don't know what happened. And so the
bottom line was I recognized pretty quickly with my sort
of scientific mind that I was going to go to
my grave trying to solve this unsolvable mystery and become
this bitter person who was never going to be able
to have all the answers, or I was going to
have to let God have that unknown and just say
(26:59):
I have to that I'm never going to know what
happened to my son, because that's the truth. I mean,
they clean the crime scene, that cremated the bodies, there's
no way unless somebody shows up and tells us what
really happened. I'm never going to get to know that.
And so your life can be defined by something negative
that happens, and it can tear you up and become
all that you are. And you know people like that.
I mean, there's somebody that you know that you bump
(27:21):
into them and thirty years ago something bad happened and
you say, how's that going? And they say, well, I'm
thinking about that thing that happened thirty years ago, and
I'm going to support group and I'm doing all these
things because their life never was able to evolve past
that event that happened. For us, it had to be
we had to come to this place where we said,
you know what, we don't get to know what happened
to Mitch, and what happens next is what's going to matter.
(27:43):
That's what's going to tell our story is what happens next.
And so for us, that was really the turning point,
was this ability to let go of the need to
know everything because it was not going to be possible.
And so for me, I had to decide am I
going to be defined by this thing or refined by it?
And again Scripture Isaiah says that he will refine you
(28:05):
in the furnace of suffering. And we all know when
you go through something really hard, it has an opportunity
to burn away stuff that you shouldn't have had in
the first place, some character traits or habits or ideas
that they were not helpful to you. That suffering seems
to clarify and all of a sudden, you know what
your life's about. And I know what my life's about now.
Speaker 2 (28:24):
Granger Smith is a country singer. He since retired from
that part, but he's a speaker, author and works with
me at iHeartRadio. He hosts a show called After Midnight
and I saw him last weekend in Austin, and he
recently was on an episode.
Speaker 3 (28:40):
Of The Bobby Cast.
Speaker 2 (28:42):
I also work with Bobby, and Bobby played a clip
from it the other day and it said that Granger
wouldn't change losing his son, his son drowned, if he
could snap his fingers and have his son back. I'm
paraphrasing a little bit of how the conversation went, but
that he wouldn't it because of who he is now
(29:03):
and the type of father he is now, husband person
like he just wasn't even living life before that really
and who it has transformed him into, and how he's
able to show up better in everything that has come
from River dying.
Speaker 3 (29:19):
He wouldn't change it.
Speaker 1 (29:20):
He was on my podcast too. I had a good
talk about River and he said something that was interesting,
like he doesn't think he would be a saved Christian
going to heaven if he hadn't lost his son. Sometimes
it turns out that loss can give you a future
that you never imagine being able to have.
Speaker 2 (29:38):
You mentioned gratitude earlier, so as a neurosurgeon and the
different things we can do for our brain to better
take care of it. I know gratitude rings up there
as something that we could do every single day. That is,
you know, a simple act. I mean sometimes people overcomplicate it.
I know I did. When I first started several years ago.
(29:58):
I thought, I don't really journal. I don't write. That's stressful,
But even just making mental note or jotting down one
or two word things and not neglecting the everyday stuff
we take advantage, like the computer we're able to be
on right now, my phone, my car, my legs, my eyes,
different things that I have to be thankful for that
I don't really think about all the time. But why
(30:19):
is gratitude so important? Why are there so many amazing
benefits for our brain? Why is gratitude so important? Why
are there so many amazing benefits for our brain?
Speaker 1 (30:39):
I think the most important one is that there's a
one way switch in this part of your brain called
the hippocampus, And hippocampus is all about resilience and drawing
in memories and deciding what they mean and deciding what
action needs to be taken on them, and experiences like
a threat that shows up and are you going to
run away from it? Or can you in some way?
(31:01):
Are you actually safe? Are you actually in danger? Hippo
campus makes those decisions, and it turns out that Hippo
campus can only go one direction at a time. It
can go down towards the middal, which is emotion and
fear and flight and flight and all that stuff, or
it can go up to frontal lobe and get some
context and add executive function like we talked about while ago.
So if you think about like an old railroad track,
(31:23):
whether it was a switch and the guy would come
and pull the switch and it would change the track,
and the train can only go one direction that's hippo campus,
and it's true from a neuroimaging standpoint. Now we know
for sure that you cannot actually be anxious and grateful
at the same time. And so if you struggle with anxiety,
you have to decide, like, do I want to allow
(31:44):
this anxiety to push me down into this physiological thing
that I know it's going to do, or is there
some way I can snap out of it? And the
way you can snap out of it is to think
about something you're grateful for. It sounds so simple, but
it's a brain fact, it's a neuroscience hardwired fact that
if you can make yourself take a minute, take a breath,
find something you're grateful for, even if it's just the
(32:04):
breath that you just took the ability to take that breath,
then you can switch that direction and you can go
up towards more helpful physiological and neuroanatomical truths that are
away from that anxiety provoking difficulty that Amigola wants you
to feel. And gratitude is the switch that makes that possible. So,
from a brain science standpoint, finding something to be grateful
(32:26):
for is a perfect way to be less anxious and
be less stressed out and spend less time in a
high quartersol state where you start manifesting those cancer cells
and things that you just talked about that, I think
gratitude is the secret to all of that. It's probably
the most important thing you can do for your brain overall,
is to get into a habit of reminding yourselves of
all the things that you're thankful for and grateful for.
(32:47):
And it turns out, again not to over quote scripture,
but that's what Philippians for is all about when it says,
if you want to be less anxious, be grateful instead,
pray more, be less anxious, and your life will get.
Speaker 2 (32:57):
Betteran I mentioned being grateful for the breath I just took,
and that made me think of breathing exercises and how
thankful I am for breath work that I've adopted the
last few years.
Speaker 3 (33:11):
And some people are like, what breath work?
Speaker 2 (33:13):
I don't even take the time to breathe, And for me,
I've noticed a huge difference. So what is it about
the breath and why that can be so transformative in
our state our being, how we're feeling in that moment.
Speaker 1 (33:26):
Well, I think part of it is just that space,
that pause that we talked about. It's just you take
that deep breath and think about it for a second
and why you're holding your breath. You can't really overthink
anything else except that moment that you're in that space.
So we talked about the thought biopsy and putting that
little space between stimulus and response. So when you're thinking
about not letting your breath out, you're getting your vegas
(33:48):
nerve involved, you're calming your heart right down, you're spending
some time in a more relaxed state, and you're sort
of clarifying that this moment is about this thing and
not about the other twenty million things that I might
want to think about pop into my head at the time.
So I think that's part of it. Is just that
you're physiologically and physically putting some space in between your thoughts,
(34:08):
and that allows you to slow down and take a
breath and allow yourself some space and some time before
you get back into the crazy round table thoughts that
we all have all the time.
Speaker 2 (34:19):
Before I have you share four things you're thankful for.
We'll do a little four things gratitude. But I've just
got four things, little questions that are popping into my
head right now. Like if they're as a neuro surgeon,
if there's four brain foods, you can only have those
for the rest of your life.
Speaker 3 (34:36):
What fo foods are you choosing?
Speaker 1 (34:39):
Grass fed steak, really good high quality protein or eggs.
I would say for me, something like a good high
quality cheese, Get a little bit of dairy, a little
bit of fat, and then probably water. That doesn't sound
like food, but it's the most important thing you can
put in your body all the time.
Speaker 2 (34:58):
Oh and fun fact you probably know this, but our
brain's ninety percent water ish yep. And so sometimes when
I'm feeling brain fog, I'm not funching, like wait, I dehydrated.
My brain just needs probably a little bit of water.
So I think that's a great one to put on there, Okay.
And then yeah, if we want to do four specific
things that you're thankful for, it's a book, an Instagram
(35:19):
follow and then well we just did a food and
a drink. But you can you can add more fun
stuff in there if you want to, Like if you
weren't concerned about your brain.
Speaker 1 (35:27):
I read the Bible every day. It's part of my
quiet time. So that's my number one book. But in
terms of non biblical books that I would recommend that
people read if you've been through something hard. There's a
book by Tis Harrison Warren called Prayer in the Night,
and that book was instrumental in me learning how to
find language around what we call lament, which is your
ability to sort of call out the things that are
(35:49):
hurting you and not stuff them in and call them
out and pray and get them out into a conversation
between you and God. And that that book Tis Harrison
Warren just brilliantly lays out how you can navigate finding
the words that you need when you've been through something hard.
So I think Brion the Knight's probably my favorite non
Bible book, at least in the last few years. There's
also a great novel, The Beekeeper of a Leppo by
(36:11):
Christy left Hary. I think it's the best novel I've
ever read, So if you like novels, that's a tremendous one,
really great story about human suffering and human grit. Great book. Music.
I think music incredibly important for your brain. I played
the guitar. I love to spend time just playing the
acoustic guitar and letting that out of my soul and
Tommy Walker is my favorite musician. I love his music
(36:33):
and he's a great worship songwriter, but also just world
class guitar players. So Tommy Walker.
Speaker 2 (36:38):
I've been thinking about taking up piano. I'm forty three.
I took piano lessons probably when I was eight years
old and haven't really done much with it since at all,
But I feel like it's a hobby I could take
up that could be a game changer for my brain.
There's a lot of activities I've realized lately. I did
(36:59):
improv last summer, and I felt like I was functioning
at a higher level after I did it. And I
was thinking about this just the other night with a
friend because I ran into someone that was improv class
and I thought, I need to go back to that
because I'm just not really firing and off the way
that I liked to, especially at my job, and I
was faster. So it's almost like just exercising a muscle.
(37:22):
That's what our brain is.
Speaker 1 (37:23):
Yeah, learning new skills and taking up new things really
gets you in a different place in your brain. So
you're having to work a little bit to create something
new and it's incredibly good for you. So taking out
something new is very helpful.
Speaker 2 (37:36):
Have you ever done one of those surgeries on someone
where they're playing an instrument while you're working on their brain,
or they're singing a song.
Speaker 1 (37:42):
Awake brain surgery. Yeah, we used to do deep brain
stimulators in Pittsburgh. And if you have a person who
has a particular thing that they can't do because of
their trimmer, like play the violin or play guitar, then
you can do that procedure with them awake. And it's
amazing when you stimulate the right part of the brain
and they can perform that task in real time. Again,
it's stunning.
Speaker 2 (38:00):
Yeah, that's always fascinating when I see new stories like that.
What are these people that you know, go into a
coma or something happens to them and then they wake
up and they start speaking a different language and they
didn't speak the language before.
Speaker 1 (38:12):
I don't know. That's been hard to figure out on
the research side how that's possible. The brain is just
a fascinating, almost black box. There's all kinds of things
that we don't understand still, which is one of the
reasons it's so much fun to be a neurosurgeon. I'm
still learning stuff after twenty years.
Speaker 3 (38:26):
What's the craziest thing you've learned lately?
Speaker 1 (38:29):
You know, I think honestly over the last twenty years,
so not just the most recently, but learning that our brain,
that we're not stuck with the brain, that we have
in more and more ways every year. Now we're learning
that you really have dramatically incredible ability to control the
structure of your brain. Imagine if you I've got an
iPhone fifteen. I'm holding up an iPhone fifteen. Imagine if
(38:51):
you plugged in your iPhone at night and set it
to do an automatic update Amy, and the next day
you woke up and it was an iPhone sixteen. The
actual machine changed because of a software update. That'd be impossible, right,
a different structural machine, but your brain does that. You're thinking,
changes the structure of your brain. So in that setting,
(39:11):
and that's in that metaphor, the software changes the hardware,
which is not possible with computers, but it's possible with
your brain. So the more we learn about that, the
more just geeked out I am about it, Like how
you think really literally changes your brain. So you're never stuck,
you're never hopeless, it's never impossible because we don't even
have the same structural brains that we have when we
started this conversation.
Speaker 2 (39:33):
Yeah, I was talking to someone the other day about
like some of their childhood traumas that they get stuck
in and they're in their forties now, and turn into
a conversation about hard drive, and it's like, imagine if
we were still working on a computer we had twenty
years ago, with no updates, no work towards it. Of
course it would be wonky. But that's why it's important
(39:55):
to like plug it in, do the work, like take
it in, get it worked on, get it fixed, get
it up graded. So we have to take the time
to invest in ourselves so that we can update our
software because we have the ability. Unless you get stuck
in that cycle in a rut where you're thinking that's
not possible, but you're here saying it is absolutely very possible,
And so why operate off of old software when you
(40:18):
have like there's such hope in a new life.
Speaker 1 (40:22):
That's right. Let me make it one more level, even
more amazing. So not only is it possible to structurally
change your brain, it's happening whether you direct the process
or not, which means you can either choose to let
things be the way they've been and continue to become
more automated in the way that they've been hurtful, harmful,
be stuck in the past because it's happening. Your brain
(40:43):
is making new cells and new connections between them, and
they automatically turn back into what you've already had. But
you can change it. So not only is it possible,
it's now your responsibility now that you know it. If
you want to feel better, you can. You just have
to learn how to think differently.
Speaker 3 (40:59):
I love that.
Speaker 2 (41:00):
Okay, what about that fun food and fun drink that
you're thankful for.
Speaker 1 (41:05):
I'm like a curious comfort food guy, and my wife
is a professional chef. She cooked for an NBA Hall
of Famer or travel with the family and all of that.
So she makes this lemon cream cheese pound cake that
is not good for your brain and it is not
good for your body, but boy is it good for
your heart sometimes. So I love Lisa's amazing things that
she makes.
Speaker 2 (41:24):
Well, I'm sure you would back this up though, that
sometimes the stress we cause around thoughts about certain foods
can do more damage than if we were just to
sit and enjoy the food. Because of the joy that
food brings you, knowing this is my wife's recipe.
Speaker 3 (41:38):
I love it.
Speaker 2 (41:38):
It tastes so good, absolutely, And then what about a drink.
Speaker 1 (41:42):
You know, I'm a really boring guy in one way.
I drink black coffee in the morning, I drink water
all day. I don't really drink alcohol anymore, but I
used to love Negroni's. That was my favorite cocktail because
it's so bitter, and I'm not a sweet guy. I'm
a bitter guy. And we just found a non alcohol
like negronie that absolutely loved, called Saint Augrestas. It tastes
exactly like a real negroni, and I love it. I've
(42:03):
been having one at nine a lot.
Speaker 2 (42:04):
And so you found something that you can still enjoy
that gives you that flavor, that sensation of like you're
having it, but it's no alcohol.
Speaker 3 (42:12):
Which what was it called.
Speaker 1 (42:12):
Again, it's Saint Aggrestas. It's just a brand. I'll look
it up and give you the Instagram handle, But the Nigrony,
their non alcoholic version of the Negroni, is delicious.
Speaker 2 (42:23):
Well, speaking of Instagram, you are at doctor Lee Warren
just like it sounds, and you have podcasts yourself the
Doctor Lee Warren Podcast.
Speaker 3 (42:33):
Do you have two?
Speaker 1 (42:35):
I have two. Spiritual brain surgery is the other one.
Speaker 2 (42:37):
I would just encourage people to check out your book
as well, Hope as the first dose your latest book.
And if you've experienced any type of massive life event, trauma, tragedy,
this is a treatment plan for that.
Speaker 3 (42:50):
I'm right, and so thank you for coming on and
talking with us.
Speaker 2 (42:54):
And now I'm gonna I'm going to drink more water,
and I'm going to play piano do it and a
lot of other things from this chat, for sure, but
those are at the top of my list at least
for for today's to look into that.
Speaker 1 (43:06):
By your thinking bibs, your thoughts.
Speaker 3 (43:09):
Thought biopsy.
Speaker 2 (43:10):
All right, well, thank you so much, doctor Lee, and
uh we'll see you on that way.
Speaker 1 (43:15):
Thank you, Amy. Good to be with you.
Cass up little food for yourself life.
Speaker 2 (00:18):
Oh it's pretty bad.
Speaker 3 (00:19):
Hey, it's pretty beautiful, man, beautiful for that for a
little more.
Speaker 1 (00:23):
FA's exciting, said he.
Speaker 3 (00:28):
You're kicking with four with Amy Brown, Happy Thursday. Four things.
Speaker 2 (00:34):
Amy here and doctor Lee Warren is my guest. He's
a brain surgeon, inventor, IRAQ war veteran and author. And
I'm excited to talk to you, doctor Lee, about our
brains today. Which do I call you, Doctor Lee? Doctor
Lee Warren, doctor Warren Lee?
Speaker 3 (00:51):
What do I call you?
Speaker 1 (00:52):
Professionally? People call me doctor Lee Warren, but we can
call each other first name, of course.
Speaker 2 (00:56):
Okay, I'm going to keep the doctor in there because
that feels right. So, doctor Lee, since you are a neurosurgeon,
I'm going to walk you through something that just happened
to me and had me thinking about our brains and
how we care for them. I was in the attic
and I stood up really quick and hit my head
and I immediately felt to see if there was blood,
and I could feel a not on my head, and
I thought, okay, if I were to be bleeding, I
(01:18):
would tend to this immediately. I would go get a
bandage or maybe go get stitches or whatever I needed,
and I would do that pretty quickly. But when we
go through emotional trauma, it got me thinking about how
we stuff that down. We maybe don't address it right away,
We don't pay attention to it, we don't tend to.
Speaker 3 (01:35):
It like we would a physical trauma.
Speaker 2 (01:38):
So how important is it that we pay attention to
the emotional traumas that are happening in our lives.
Speaker 1 (01:45):
Yeah, I think that's a good point. You know, we
have physical trauma that happens to our brain that can
damage cells and create emergencies like you just describe, But
on an emotional level, the things that we feel are
imperceptibly different from the things that we actually experienced in
the real world. So when you feel an emotional trauma,
you've undergone something that's created a wound. If you don't
(02:06):
heal from it properly, you're going to make synapses around
that and rewire that experience so that it will play
and come back when you don't want it to and
affect your life going forward, even in times when it's
not helpful to you. So I think it's very important
amy to pay attention to those things that hurt us.
And deal with them properly, not to overly fixate on them,
but to make sure we learn healthy strategies going forward
(02:27):
after they've occurred.
Speaker 2 (02:28):
Well, And like, this is a good tie in to
your latest book. You've written four now and the latest
is Hope is the First Dose, a treatment plan for
recovering from trauma, tragedy and other massive things. And I
want you to share a little bit of your backstory
because it is a wild one, no doubt, but basically
(02:49):
what led you to write a book like this and
why it's so important for you to share this message.
Speaker 1 (02:54):
Being a brain surgeon and I deal with a lot
of people in their kind of most desperate moments. Right
we have head injuries and people with malignant brain cancers,
and I'm the guy that delivers the news. A lot
people come to me and I'm the one that tells
them something devastating is happening. And I started trying to
figure out when I couldn't cure somebody's illness, Like if
you've got a fatal cancer and I can't cure you,
(03:16):
started recognizing that it was important to help you continue
to have a life that has meaning and purpose and
hold on to hope anyway, So I was studying that
the different ways that people respond to trauma and different
ways that people handle hardship like that. And right in
the middle of that research that I was doing that
ultimately became my third book, our son, Mitchell died when
he was nineteen. Mitch was stabbed to death. And when
(03:39):
we lost our son, and so I went from being
a person who was learning about other people's trauma and
trying to help them navigate and process it to being
a brief parent and figured out that a lot of
the things that I thought I knew about how to
help people weren't as effective when it was me that
was hurting. And so hope as the first dose, came
out of how we managed to put as a family
(04:02):
and as individuals kind of put our hope and our
faith and our future back together after going through that
kind of massive thing and kind of ties a lot
of brain science research up with our personal experience and
how people can walk through those emotional injuries like you said,
that aren't physical, they're not bleeding, but it sure feels
like you are. And how do you find hope again
(04:23):
after something like that happens?
Speaker 2 (04:25):
You know, my mom was diagnosed with cancer. I feel
like her hope and her faith and her attitude prolonged
her life, and I would hear doctors talk about that.
I mean, of course we spent a lot of time
in and out of the hospital over two years, but
it seemed important to her that she maintained that. But
she was only able to do it because of her
(04:45):
relationship with the Lord. Spreading joy was sort of her
mantra around the hospital and choosing it for herself, obviously
acknowledging the hard times, right, but she knew me and
my eighten the joy of the Lord is my strength,
and she clung to to that, and so that's what
sustained her. Like she had that, and then she had
hope and knowing that where she's going on the other side,
(05:07):
like that's truly home for her, and so it was
also okay for her to part with this side of
life as well. So how important is it to maintain
that type of hope when we're going through something difficult?
And is that why doctors even encouraged that even if
it's a placebo effect.
Speaker 1 (05:26):
Well, it's not a placebo effect. Actually, the research is
crystal clear that people who find their meaning and purpose
in things that can't be taken from them, have healthier lives,
healthier mindsets, and actually do better across every way that
we can measure outcome other than length of life. So
if you say you've got fatal cancer, and you measure
(05:48):
all the things that we define as quality of life,
you know, peace, relationships, how much alcohol you drink, how
much medicine you take, how much pain you report, it's
all better in people that maintain hope and feel that
their life has some meaning, purpose or some even eternal
purpose than people who give up. And that's why one
of the surprising things that I found in my research
when I was looking at trying to put these books together,
(06:10):
was that people that stop believing that their life means
something after something hard happens, they get a bad diagnosis
or something. Even if they recover from their cancer, they
still have worse quality of life than the people who
die from their disease but maintained that hope. Stunning.
Speaker 3 (06:27):
So what did you do to walk through your tragedy?
Speaker 2 (06:30):
I mean, obviously the research you've got that, but you
have to implement certain things.
Speaker 3 (06:35):
What were those things for you?
Speaker 1 (06:36):
For us, it really came back around to faith, you know,
I felt like, at first, like many people do who
we're suffering, that God had abandoned us, or maybe what
I thought about him wasn't true, or maybe he wasn't
real at all. I went through all that those things
that people do in the face of suffering. But then
I realized, like, you can't change your mind about eternal
(06:57):
things based on short term circumstances, because everybody you know
has gone through something hard or is going to go
through something hard. It's a universal qualification of being a human.
You're going to suffer. And so it's not that believing
in God or holding on to faith or any of
that prevents you from suffering, but it gives you a
set of tools to use when you're suffering, to recognize
(07:18):
that you're not alone in the suffering. And I started
looking for me. It was scriptures, promises from scripture that
turned out to be true even when I was hurting.
The first one was Psalm thirty four eighteen that says
the Lord is close to the broken heart, and I
started realizing he really is. Like he sends people to
be around you, and you find somebody sends you a
message at just the right time that rescues you. From
(07:39):
that despair and you've probably been through something like that,
Like when you go through a hard moment, it seems
like somebody shows up just at the right time with
a good encouraging word and people come around to you.
And so we just started seeing these promises come true. Amen.
And for us it found we found that the bottom
didn't drop out like we were falling. It felt like
we were kind of falling out of what felt like
our normal world, but we didn't fall all the way
(08:02):
to oblivion. We found something solid to land on. What
it was for us was our faith.
Speaker 2 (08:06):
I have esplot tattooed on my wrist, which a spla
means hope in Haitian Creole, because we were in the
process of adopting two kids from Haiti and it took
years almost where we thought is this even gonna happen?
Speaker 3 (08:21):
But I had it.
Speaker 2 (08:21):
Tattooed so that I could look at my wrist every
day and see espla and see hope and believe this
will happen. And then ultimately it did. But I had
to look at it every day.
Speaker 1 (08:32):
They keep your eyes on it.
Speaker 3 (08:34):
Yeah, what is it with our brains?
Speaker 2 (08:36):
Like if you look for something negative, you're going to
find it, and if you look for something positive, you'll
find it.
Speaker 1 (08:42):
Well, that's right. I mean, there's there's amazing research from
neuroscience that talks about how we pay attention to things
and the way that we pay attention makes them more
or less real. And it's really interesting that there's a
whole principle from quantum physics called the geno effect, where basically,
when you look at something in a particular way, it
becomes almost stuck in that way. And so we see
(09:02):
that when people focus on their anxiety. For example, if
your therapist keeps you focused on all the things that
happen in the past or all the ways that you feel,
you're going to find that those things continue to get
bigger in your life. But if they focus you on
the future, on the belief that you can get there
from here, which is a good working definition of hope,
then it turns out that you can heal from the
(09:23):
past and move towards something more hopeful in the future.
So you're saying, fixate on the belief, on the promise,
on the idea that this thing is going to come
to pass doesn't mean that you can manifest everything that
you want, but it means that you're going to make
decisions to connect to those ideas and take purposeful steps
towards them over time, and that produces more and more
(09:43):
hope as time goes on.
Speaker 2 (09:45):
Yeah, I think that everyone's been through different seasons of
life where they get stuck, maybe in a pattern or cycle,
where they can realize there's a lot of negativity happening.
But once you can make that shift, you can really
see the difference. Even just believing that what does this
circumstance make possible? Believing that something can come from this,
(10:07):
some sort of growth, some sort of change that is
going to be positive. Of course, I didn't want my
mother to have cancer. I didn't want to lose her,
but a lot of amazing things came from that.
Speaker 3 (10:17):
I can't even think back to my childhood.
Speaker 2 (10:18):
I didn't want my parents to get divorced, but a
lot of amazing things happened from that. My mom's life
was completely transformed because of the divorce. That's when we
finally started going to church we didn't go before that,
and then she became a completely different person, not being
able to get pregnant. Now I've got two beautiful adopted
children now seventeen and fourteen and things that seemed negative
(10:42):
and hard, but what did they make possible? And I
think just maintaining that faith, that hope that there's a
bigger picture here that's.
Speaker 1 (10:49):
Right and if you can find a way to put
yourself at a different point in the story when you're suffering,
like what you just said is it turns out to
be true that all the research that looks at suffering
and cancer patients are a great example, has been well
studied where a huge majority, like way more than you
can imagine, of people who are going through cancer, even
that ultimately succumbed to it, say things like what you
(11:10):
just described with your mother, that they actually find that
they've grown through it, they've found purpose through it, that
their lives had become enriched by it. So it's almost
like suffering is not optional if you want to be
a really well rounded and fully developed human. It's almost necessary,
like you have to go through hard things if you
want to become a really fully developed person. And so
(11:30):
we find gratitude through those hard moments because we recognize
that they've given us experiences and opportunities to change and
grow and learn and connect with other people in ways
that we wouldn't have been able to do if we
hadn't gone through suffering. And it's interesting because just like
we talked about while ago with quantum physics, like this
idea that two things can be true at the same time,
Like it's never going to be okay that I lost
(11:53):
my son, Like I'm just as sad and broken about
that eleven years after it happened than I was a
day it happened. You're not okay with you lose your mom,
and you never will be. But at the same time,
it is true that I've grown, I've written books, I've
connected with people all over the world, like a lot
of the things that I am. I'm a much more
compassionate physician and husband and father and grandfather now than
(12:14):
I was before I lost my son. All of that
because of having suffered. So doesn't make it good, doesn't
make it right. You would trade it all for having
your mom back, or I'd trade it all for having
my son back. But that sort of secret sauce of
life turns out to be this meaning that we find
because we navigated through something hard. And on the brain
science side, it's true too, like you look at what
(12:36):
makes resilience in the brain's this area called the mid
anterior single and what they find is when you do
hard things, it becomes easier for you to do hard
things in the future, like all across the board. So
you do something that's hard, even if you don't want to,
your brain gets more resilient and you develop more willpower
and you find more sort of joy in engaging in
hard things the next time. So it's almost like you
(12:58):
start saying, I'm ready for the next thing that's hurt,
that it's going to hurt because I know I can
get through it because I've done it before.
Speaker 2 (13:05):
Is there a magic number of how many times we
have to do something for that new neural pathway to
be built or is it different for everybody?
Speaker 1 (13:12):
Well, it's different for everybody. But on the basic physiology side,
there's a structure in your brain called microtubules, and that's
the stuff that makes new synapses, the little building blocks
of new synapses, and they start happening within minutes of
you trying something new or doing something new. So that's
why we always say on my show, like thoughts become things,
because when you think about something, you actually make something
(13:35):
in your brain structurally, make changes in your brain, and
what happens is within minutes you start laying down what's
going to become ultimately the highway towards making a new
habit or making a new process. But if you don't
use it, continue to use that new thing, it disappears
within about three weeks, and so in order to ingrain
it and make it permanent, you have to engage in
(13:55):
that thing over and over and over for a while.
Some people say twenty one days. That's probably true for
things that are sort of life or death. That's probably longer.
For things that are really hard, like giving up smoking
or something, probably takes longer than twenty one days. But
in terms of what's happening in your brain, it starts
almost instantly in the first hour of you trying to
make a change, a positive change in your life. You're
(14:16):
making it structurally in your brain. So that's encouraging. It
gives us hope because we feel like we can't change,
we feel like we're stuck. We inherited the genes, we inherited,
we went through the trauma that we went through, and
that means that we can ever change what the truth is.
As soon as you start trying to change your brain's
right there with you.
Speaker 2 (14:32):
Well, so then that's epigenetics. We have the ability to
change certain parts. You're probably the better person to describe this,
but I think I have a fear inside of me
because both my parents had cancer that I'm going to
get cancer. And sometimes that is a thought that will
take over and I immediately have to squash it and
back up because just because they had it does not
(14:54):
mean I will. But if I keep having those thoughts,
then I'm increasing the likelihood of something negative happening.
Speaker 1 (15:01):
That's right, because so if you think about the big picture,
so epigenetics, if somebody is not familiar, is that the
things that we think about and certain things that we
go through and lifestyle choices can turn on or off genes.
So to speak up, up or down regulate genes is
the way the biochemists call it. And what that means
is that the genetic material that you inherit from mom
and Dad is not guaranteed to be expressed or turned
(15:24):
true in your life. So we know that from identical
twins studies. For example, identical twins often have very different
length of life and very different disease profiles that they get.
And it's because even though they have the same genetic
starting point, they don't have the same lives. And so
what that means is that your life has a lot
of impact and what genes get turned on and off.
So if both your parents have cancer, for example, and
(15:44):
you spend a lot of time worrying about that and
stressing about it, your cortisol level is going to rise,
and the systems in your body that fight cancer and
do things on your behalf to try to avoid cancer
are going to be depleted because you're spending so much
time in a negative chemical state, and your thoughts are
becoming those things that are fighting against you and beating
(16:05):
those cancer cells. So it's true that you can spend
time in your brain thinking healthier thoughts, and that will
promote an environment that's going to produce a better chemical
environment to optimize the epigenetic opportunities that you have to
turn things on and off and make your life as
good as it can be.
Speaker 2 (16:22):
Yeah, it's fascinating. I got more into the brain stuff
when I started doing the neuro feedback. But it's because
of my adopted children and some of their early life
(16:45):
trauma and just basic needs that were never met for them.
Where I had a loving mom and a dad that
when I cried, they held me.
Speaker 3 (16:56):
When I was hungry, they fed me.
Speaker 2 (16:58):
And so from birth to three or even older, but
those are the crucial years, they had certain needs where
when they needed to be held, they weren't held, and
that wired their brain in such a unique way that
we've been dedicated to doing a lot of work to
build those new neuropathways of safety and security and you're okay.
(17:20):
So that's when I got into a lot of it.
My son was actually the first one to do the neurofeedback,
and when I saw the scans of his brain, I thought, well,
this change is absolutely fascinating. And he was doing that
in addition to talk therapy, so there was multiple therapies
going on, and also hedgehog therapy because they can sense
(17:42):
your anxiety and if you're feeling stressed, they'll flare up
their little poky thingies. But if they sense that you're calm, like,
they'll be calm with you because that energy is real.
So I guess to that point, it makes me think
of who you surround yourself with and how important that
(18:03):
is to our mental health as well.
Speaker 1 (18:05):
Absolutely, community matters, and it matters because you need some
people who will call you out when you're being excessively
negative or you're not focusing on things that are true.
One of the things that we have a tendency to
do is to continually turn our mental eyes backwards, like
that Gabrmante said. You know, trauma's not what happened to you.
Trauma is your response to what happened to you. And
(18:27):
that's really good news because if trauma's what happened to you,
then it would never stop being true and it would
be unchangeable. You'd be hopeless if the trauma was actually
the thing that happened. So whatever happened in the past,
your response to it is what tells the future. So
if you can learn then to unwind your trauma responses
like you're describing with your son, if you can learn
a healthier way to process the things that you feel
(18:49):
and turn them into current events that you can do
something about going forward, rather than constantly looking back and
reliving the thing that happened, then you can start to
really create a hopeful future.
Speaker 2 (19:00):
It makes me think of the more emotional side of
my brain when I flip to that. I'm a very
emotional person and I have to often pause before making
any decisions because I don't want my emotions in the
driver's seat.
Speaker 3 (19:16):
So is there anything.
Speaker 2 (19:18):
We can do, like in a moment or what are
your thoughts on pausing and getting into a more rational space.
Does it just take time or is there a brain
exercise we can do.
Speaker 1 (19:28):
There's a lot you can do. In fact, we call
it self brain surgery. I mean this idea that you
have thirty or forty thousand automatic thoughts that happen every
day that you're not responsible for. They come out of
different places in your memory, and they are different parts
of your brain throw thoughts up to your mind, and
most of them are not true, and they are infused
with a whole host of chemical signals that we interpret
(19:49):
as feelings that most of which are also not true,
at least not currently true. So what happens is in
the basal Gangli of your brain you get this kind
of like fuel injector shooting thoughts feelings together. And then
what happens is you feel something and you think something,
and you make meaning out of them based on your
past experiences, and so you decide, for example, you feel
(20:11):
a certain set of feelings and that means that this
event that's happening now is going to end the way
the previous one did. And if you can learn then
to do what I call, since I'm a brain surge
and I call it the biopsy, the thought biopsy, Like,
look at that thought. Oh, I'm a loser, and every
time this happens, he's going to leave me, or this
is going to happen again, and I'm going to start
(20:31):
drinking again. Even though I've been sober. It's inevitable that
this is going to occur. If you can see that
thought and say, wait a second, hang on, is that
really true, and just give it a little pause, then
you'll give it just enough time for the like you said,
the executive frontal low part of your brain to step
in and say, wait a second. I've done this lots
of times and I haven't had that particular failure. Not
everybody that is in my life is going to do
(20:52):
that to me. Not everybody hates my guts and whatever
it is that you routinely think and feel your front low,
will you, or if you've got a good community of
people around you, somebody else, if you say it out loud,
will say wait a minute. Not everybody's going to do
that to you, Amy, You're not always going to fail.
You're successful. You know, they to start giving you truth.
And so if you can put that little biopsy step
(21:13):
in before you react to feelings or thoughts knowing that
many of them are negative, automatically negative and untrue, or
feelings that are just chemical triggers that make you feel
a certain set of things that may or may not
necessarily reflect to what's really happening now, then you can
put an executive decision in between the stimulus and the response,
and that will reliably produce better outcomes for you than
(21:35):
if you just react to whatever you think or feel.
Speaker 3 (21:38):
I like that name a thought biopsy.
Speaker 2 (21:39):
I think I'll start using that on myself for a
you like step aside, I need to go perform a
thought biopsy really quick and evaluate the data versus the drama.
Speaker 1 (21:48):
That's right, And the good news is about that is
that we have another rule. What we say is that
the things you're doing you're getting better at. So that's negative.
If you have a bad habit and you keep doing it,
then you make synapses. Then it gets easier to do that.
All of us know that. But the good news is
that if you start doing better thought practices like taking
a biopsy. You get better at doing that too, and
(22:10):
your brain automates it and before you know it, you're
biops seeing all your thoughts. Turns out there's a scripture
thinking Corinthians ten to five says take your thoughts captive,
Take them captive, and grab a hold of your thinking
and think about it, biopsy it before you react to it,
and it really quickly becomes a way of life. Like
you'll start saying, oh, there's that negative thought again. Maybe
I should think about that for a second before I
(22:30):
send that text message and apply, or before I quit
my job, or before I do this thing that I
always do when I think that thing, And you'll find
that becomes a second nature, like breathing with that thought.
Biopsy becomes an automatic little space that you put in
there that protects you a lot.
Speaker 2 (22:44):
I just quoted the scripture there, and we're talking about
the brain and science.
Speaker 3 (22:48):
And what's happening.
Speaker 2 (22:49):
Has faith always been a part of your life, like
a relationship with the Lord, and of course after losing
your son, did it grow or is it something where
you had your career for and then that happened, or
have you always married up science and faith.
Speaker 1 (23:04):
Well, I was raised in a Christian home, but I
was I had sort of a we call it legalism,
this idea that you have to behave or perform certain
ways for God to approve of your life. And you know,
if you don't do the right things, God's not going
to love you and stuff. And I had that sort
of really ingrained in me. But then I got into
my life and my professional training and my practice, and
I went to war and the Iraq War and got
(23:25):
PTSD and all kinds of things happened, and I realized
that I didn't have the ability to save myself, Like
I couldn't control everything enough to make God love me
enough to survive my life that way. So fortunately I
found the book the writing of a guy named Philipp
Ansi who wrote a book called What's So Amazing About Grace?
And that kind of turned my faith life upside down.
(23:46):
So I had fortunately that book in my heart when
I lost my son, and so I recognized that God's
not out there looking to blow us all up and
punish us. He's looking to rescue us from this hard
life and give us a new way of living that
renews our mind and helps us to handle hard things,
and so for me it was kind of the science
side was constantly showing me that the nervous system was
(24:08):
far more wonderful and complex than we could ever imagine
it being possible to have arrived that accidentally, So I
knew that as a scientist like this can't be an accident.
And then on the faith side, I had all this
evidence that God really does love people and wants them
to have abundant lives. So that's what Jesus said, And
after I lost my son, I just sort of was
able to somehow smash those two things together so that
(24:28):
I can now have a life where I teach people
how to use their brains the way they're designed to
be used and find some way to be happy no
matter what happens.
Speaker 2 (24:37):
And writing about what you went through, I'm sure that
was very therapeutic for your brain and your heart.
Speaker 1 (24:43):
Yeah, absolutely well, and it gives purpose again. Victor Frankel
said that suffering stops being suffering when you find purpose
for it. And for me, like the ability to use
our story, my wife and my kids, our story to
help other people find hope gives it. Meaning. My son
didn't die for nothing. You know he's got a legacy
that lives on beyond his short nineteen years because he's
(25:06):
helping people all over the world find hope through our
story of how we navigated losing him, So that means
it's got meaning.
Speaker 2 (25:13):
Yeah, I mean Victor Frankel, his story is very fascinating.
Speaker 3 (25:16):
People aren't familiar.
Speaker 2 (25:17):
I encourage you to go check that out because I
even think of myself in tough situations, like if I
have been through something like you have been through with
the death of your son, and if am I correct
in that it's an unsolved situation.
Speaker 3 (25:31):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (25:32):
Leanne Ellington is how I learned about you. And I
saw her at our friend's book release party the other night,
actually a book that she wrote to help people heal,
not even to publish, like she wants to encourage people
to write their story, even if it's just for themselves,
because of how healing it can be and how much
it can give you purpose and connection and confidence. Even so,
(25:56):
Leanne and I were there and we were talking about you,
so that's how we got connected. And she was telling
me about your son's story and that it's an unsolved
it's a cold case, and I would imagine for a
lot of people when you don't have that closure, how
that can be more difficult. There seems to be another dose,
another level of hope and faith that has to step in.
Speaker 1 (26:19):
Yeah, you know, actually, and shout out to Liamne by
the way, thank you for introducing us. She's great. But
one of the things that I think made me able
to move forward was this crossroads that we got to
with not knowing what happened to our son. Our son
and his best friend, both nineteen, were found stabbed to death,
and all kinds of mysteries surrounding it, and here eleven
(26:39):
years later, we don't know what happened. And so the
bottom line was I recognized pretty quickly with my sort
of scientific mind that I was going to go to
my grave trying to solve this unsolvable mystery and become
this bitter person who was never going to be able
to have all the answers, or I was going to
have to let God have that unknown and just say
(26:59):
I have to that I'm never going to know what
happened to my son, because that's the truth. I mean,
they clean the crime scene, that cremated the bodies, there's
no way unless somebody shows up and tells us what
really happened. I'm never going to get to know that.
And so your life can be defined by something negative
that happens, and it can tear you up and become
all that you are. And you know people like that.
I mean, there's somebody that you know that you bump
(27:21):
into them and thirty years ago something bad happened and
you say, how's that going? And they say, well, I'm
thinking about that thing that happened thirty years ago, and
I'm going to support group and I'm doing all these
things because their life never was able to evolve past
that event that happened. For us, it had to be
we had to come to this place where we said,
you know what, we don't get to know what happened
to Mitch, and what happens next is what's going to matter.
(27:43):
That's what's going to tell our story is what happens next.
And so for us, that was really the turning point,
was this ability to let go of the need to
know everything because it was not going to be possible.
And so for me, I had to decide am I
going to be defined by this thing or refined by it?
And again Scripture Isaiah says that he will refine you
(28:05):
in the furnace of suffering. And we all know when
you go through something really hard, it has an opportunity
to burn away stuff that you shouldn't have had in
the first place, some character traits or habits or ideas
that they were not helpful to you. That suffering seems
to clarify and all of a sudden, you know what
your life's about. And I know what my life's about now.
Speaker 2 (28:24):
Granger Smith is a country singer. He since retired from
that part, but he's a speaker, author and works with
me at iHeartRadio. He hosts a show called After Midnight
and I saw him last weekend in Austin, and he
recently was on an episode.
Speaker 3 (28:40):
Of The Bobby Cast.
Speaker 2 (28:42):
I also work with Bobby, and Bobby played a clip
from it the other day and it said that Granger
wouldn't change losing his son, his son drowned, if he
could snap his fingers and have his son back. I'm
paraphrasing a little bit of how the conversation went, but
that he wouldn't it because of who he is now
(29:03):
and the type of father he is now, husband person
like he just wasn't even living life before that really
and who it has transformed him into, and how he's
able to show up better in everything that has come
from River dying.
Speaker 3 (29:19):
He wouldn't change it.
Speaker 1 (29:20):
He was on my podcast too. I had a good
talk about River and he said something that was interesting,
like he doesn't think he would be a saved Christian
going to heaven if he hadn't lost his son. Sometimes
it turns out that loss can give you a future
that you never imagine being able to have.
Speaker 2 (29:38):
You mentioned gratitude earlier, so as a neurosurgeon and the
different things we can do for our brain to better
take care of it. I know gratitude rings up there
as something that we could do every single day. That is,
you know, a simple act. I mean sometimes people overcomplicate it.
I know I did. When I first started several years ago.
(29:58):
I thought, I don't really journal. I don't write. That's stressful,
But even just making mental note or jotting down one
or two word things and not neglecting the everyday stuff
we take advantage, like the computer we're able to be
on right now, my phone, my car, my legs, my eyes,
different things that I have to be thankful for that
I don't really think about all the time. But why
(30:19):
is gratitude so important? Why are there so many amazing
benefits for our brain? Why is gratitude so important? Why
are there so many amazing benefits for our brain?
Speaker 1 (30:39):
I think the most important one is that there's a
one way switch in this part of your brain called
the hippocampus, And hippocampus is all about resilience and drawing
in memories and deciding what they mean and deciding what
action needs to be taken on them, and experiences like
a threat that shows up and are you going to
run away from it? Or can you in some way?
(31:01):
Are you actually safe? Are you actually in danger? Hippo
campus makes those decisions, and it turns out that Hippo
campus can only go one direction at a time. It
can go down towards the middal, which is emotion and
fear and flight and flight and all that stuff, or
it can go up to frontal lobe and get some
context and add executive function like we talked about while ago.
So if you think about like an old railroad track,
(31:23):
whether it was a switch and the guy would come
and pull the switch and it would change the track,
and the train can only go one direction that's hippo campus,
and it's true from a neuroimaging standpoint. Now we know
for sure that you cannot actually be anxious and grateful
at the same time. And so if you struggle with anxiety,
you have to decide, like, do I want to allow
(31:44):
this anxiety to push me down into this physiological thing
that I know it's going to do, or is there
some way I can snap out of it? And the
way you can snap out of it is to think
about something you're grateful for. It sounds so simple, but
it's a brain fact, it's a neuroscience hardwired fact that
if you can make yourself take a minute, take a breath,
find something you're grateful for, even if it's just the
(32:04):
breath that you just took the ability to take that breath,
then you can switch that direction and you can go
up towards more helpful physiological and neuroanatomical truths that are
away from that anxiety provoking difficulty that Amigola wants you
to feel. And gratitude is the switch that makes that possible. So,
from a brain science standpoint, finding something to be grateful
(32:26):
for is a perfect way to be less anxious and
be less stressed out and spend less time in a
high quartersol state where you start manifesting those cancer cells
and things that you just talked about that, I think
gratitude is the secret to all of that. It's probably
the most important thing you can do for your brain overall,
is to get into a habit of reminding yourselves of
all the things that you're thankful for and grateful for.
(32:47):
And it turns out, again not to over quote scripture,
but that's what Philippians for is all about when it says,
if you want to be less anxious, be grateful instead,
pray more, be less anxious, and your life will get.
Speaker 2 (32:57):
Betteran I mentioned being grateful for the breath I just took,
and that made me think of breathing exercises and how
thankful I am for breath work that I've adopted the
last few years.
Speaker 3 (33:11):
And some people are like, what breath work?
Speaker 2 (33:13):
I don't even take the time to breathe, And for me,
I've noticed a huge difference. So what is it about
the breath and why that can be so transformative in
our state our being, how we're feeling in that moment.
Speaker 1 (33:26):
Well, I think part of it is just that space,
that pause that we talked about. It's just you take
that deep breath and think about it for a second
and why you're holding your breath. You can't really overthink
anything else except that moment that you're in that space.
So we talked about the thought biopsy and putting that
little space between stimulus and response. So when you're thinking
about not letting your breath out, you're getting your vegas
(33:48):
nerve involved, you're calming your heart right down, you're spending
some time in a more relaxed state, and you're sort
of clarifying that this moment is about this thing and
not about the other twenty million things that I might
want to think about pop into my head at the time.
So I think that's part of it. Is just that
you're physiologically and physically putting some space in between your thoughts,
(34:08):
and that allows you to slow down and take a
breath and allow yourself some space and some time before
you get back into the crazy round table thoughts that
we all have all the time.
Speaker 2 (34:19):
Before I have you share four things you're thankful for.
We'll do a little four things gratitude. But I've just
got four things, little questions that are popping into my
head right now. Like if they're as a neuro surgeon,
if there's four brain foods, you can only have those
for the rest of your life.
Speaker 3 (34:36):
What fo foods are you choosing?
Speaker 1 (34:39):
Grass fed steak, really good high quality protein or eggs.
I would say for me, something like a good high
quality cheese, Get a little bit of dairy, a little
bit of fat, and then probably water. That doesn't sound
like food, but it's the most important thing you can
put in your body all the time.
Speaker 2 (34:58):
Oh and fun fact you probably know this, but our
brain's ninety percent water ish yep. And so sometimes when
I'm feeling brain fog, I'm not funching, like wait, I dehydrated.
My brain just needs probably a little bit of water.
So I think that's a great one to put on there, Okay.
And then yeah, if we want to do four specific
things that you're thankful for, it's a book, an Instagram
(35:19):
follow and then well we just did a food and
a drink. But you can you can add more fun
stuff in there if you want to, Like if you
weren't concerned about your brain.
Speaker 1 (35:27):
I read the Bible every day. It's part of my
quiet time. So that's my number one book. But in
terms of non biblical books that I would recommend that
people read if you've been through something hard. There's a
book by Tis Harrison Warren called Prayer in the Night,
and that book was instrumental in me learning how to
find language around what we call lament, which is your
ability to sort of call out the things that are
(35:49):
hurting you and not stuff them in and call them
out and pray and get them out into a conversation
between you and God. And that that book Tis Harrison
Warren just brilliantly lays out how you can navigate finding
the words that you need when you've been through something hard.
So I think Brion the Knight's probably my favorite non
Bible book, at least in the last few years. There's
also a great novel, The Beekeeper of a Leppo by
(36:11):
Christy left Hary. I think it's the best novel I've
ever read, So if you like novels, that's a tremendous one,
really great story about human suffering and human grit. Great book. Music.
I think music incredibly important for your brain. I played
the guitar. I love to spend time just playing the
acoustic guitar and letting that out of my soul and
Tommy Walker is my favorite musician. I love his music
(36:33):
and he's a great worship songwriter, but also just world
class guitar players. So Tommy Walker.
Speaker 2 (36:38):
I've been thinking about taking up piano. I'm forty three.
I took piano lessons probably when I was eight years
old and haven't really done much with it since at all,
But I feel like it's a hobby I could take
up that could be a game changer for my brain.
There's a lot of activities I've realized lately. I did
(36:59):
improv last summer, and I felt like I was functioning
at a higher level after I did it. And I
was thinking about this just the other night with a
friend because I ran into someone that was improv class
and I thought, I need to go back to that
because I'm just not really firing and off the way
that I liked to, especially at my job, and I
was faster. So it's almost like just exercising a muscle.
(37:22):
That's what our brain is.
Speaker 1 (37:23):
Yeah, learning new skills and taking up new things really
gets you in a different place in your brain. So
you're having to work a little bit to create something
new and it's incredibly good for you. So taking out
something new is very helpful.
Speaker 2 (37:36):
Have you ever done one of those surgeries on someone
where they're playing an instrument while you're working on their brain,
or they're singing a song.
Speaker 1 (37:42):
Awake brain surgery. Yeah, we used to do deep brain
stimulators in Pittsburgh. And if you have a person who
has a particular thing that they can't do because of
their trimmer, like play the violin or play guitar, then
you can do that procedure with them awake. And it's
amazing when you stimulate the right part of the brain
and they can perform that task in real time. Again,
it's stunning.
Speaker 2 (38:00):
Yeah, that's always fascinating when I see new stories like that.
What are these people that you know, go into a
coma or something happens to them and then they wake
up and they start speaking a different language and they
didn't speak the language before.
Speaker 1 (38:12):
I don't know. That's been hard to figure out on
the research side how that's possible. The brain is just
a fascinating, almost black box. There's all kinds of things
that we don't understand still, which is one of the
reasons it's so much fun to be a neurosurgeon. I'm
still learning stuff after twenty years.
Speaker 3 (38:26):
What's the craziest thing you've learned lately?
Speaker 1 (38:29):
You know, I think honestly over the last twenty years,
so not just the most recently, but learning that our brain,
that we're not stuck with the brain, that we have
in more and more ways every year. Now we're learning
that you really have dramatically incredible ability to control the
structure of your brain. Imagine if you I've got an
iPhone fifteen. I'm holding up an iPhone fifteen. Imagine if
(38:51):
you plugged in your iPhone at night and set it
to do an automatic update Amy, and the next day
you woke up and it was an iPhone sixteen. The
actual machine changed because of a software update. That'd be impossible, right,
a different structural machine, but your brain does that. You're thinking,
changes the structure of your brain. So in that setting,
(39:11):
and that's in that metaphor, the software changes the hardware,
which is not possible with computers, but it's possible with
your brain. So the more we learn about that, the
more just geeked out I am about it, Like how
you think really literally changes your brain. So you're never stuck,
you're never hopeless, it's never impossible because we don't even
have the same structural brains that we have when we
started this conversation.
Speaker 2 (39:33):
Yeah, I was talking to someone the other day about
like some of their childhood traumas that they get stuck
in and they're in their forties now, and turn into
a conversation about hard drive, and it's like, imagine if
we were still working on a computer we had twenty
years ago, with no updates, no work towards it. Of
course it would be wonky. But that's why it's important
(39:55):
to like plug it in, do the work, like take
it in, get it worked on, get it fixed, get
it up graded. So we have to take the time
to invest in ourselves so that we can update our
software because we have the ability. Unless you get stuck
in that cycle in a rut where you're thinking that's
not possible, but you're here saying it is absolutely very possible,
And so why operate off of old software when you
(40:18):
have like there's such hope in a new life.
Speaker 1 (40:22):
That's right. Let me make it one more level, even
more amazing. So not only is it possible to structurally
change your brain, it's happening whether you direct the process
or not, which means you can either choose to let
things be the way they've been and continue to become
more automated in the way that they've been hurtful, harmful,
be stuck in the past because it's happening. Your brain
(40:43):
is making new cells and new connections between them, and
they automatically turn back into what you've already had. But
you can change it. So not only is it possible,
it's now your responsibility now that you know it. If
you want to feel better, you can. You just have
to learn how to think differently.
Speaker 3 (40:59):
I love that.
Speaker 2 (41:00):
Okay, what about that fun food and fun drink that
you're thankful for.
Speaker 1 (41:05):
I'm like a curious comfort food guy, and my wife
is a professional chef. She cooked for an NBA Hall
of Famer or travel with the family and all of that.
So she makes this lemon cream cheese pound cake that
is not good for your brain and it is not
good for your body, but boy is it good for
your heart sometimes. So I love Lisa's amazing things that
she makes.
Speaker 2 (41:24):
Well, I'm sure you would back this up though, that
sometimes the stress we cause around thoughts about certain foods
can do more damage than if we were just to
sit and enjoy the food. Because of the joy that
food brings you, knowing this is my wife's recipe.
Speaker 3 (41:38):
I love it.
Speaker 2 (41:38):
It tastes so good, absolutely, And then what about a drink.
Speaker 1 (41:42):
You know, I'm a really boring guy in one way.
I drink black coffee in the morning, I drink water
all day. I don't really drink alcohol anymore, but I
used to love Negroni's. That was my favorite cocktail because
it's so bitter, and I'm not a sweet guy. I'm
a bitter guy. And we just found a non alcohol
like negronie that absolutely loved, called Saint Augrestas. It tastes
exactly like a real negroni, and I love it. I've
(42:03):
been having one at nine a lot.
Speaker 2 (42:04):
And so you found something that you can still enjoy
that gives you that flavor, that sensation of like you're
having it, but it's no alcohol.
Speaker 3 (42:12):
Which what was it called.
Speaker 1 (42:12):
Again, it's Saint Aggrestas. It's just a brand. I'll look
it up and give you the Instagram handle, But the Nigrony,
their non alcoholic version of the Negroni, is delicious.
Speaker 2 (42:23):
Well, speaking of Instagram, you are at doctor Lee Warren
just like it sounds, and you have podcasts yourself the
Doctor Lee Warren Podcast.
Speaker 3 (42:33):
Do you have two?
Speaker 1 (42:35):
I have two. Spiritual brain surgery is the other one.
Speaker 2 (42:37):
I would just encourage people to check out your book
as well, Hope as the first dose your latest book.
And if you've experienced any type of massive life event, trauma, tragedy,
this is a treatment plan for that.
Speaker 3 (42:50):
I'm right, and so thank you for coming on and
talking with us.
Speaker 2 (42:54):
And now I'm gonna I'm going to drink more water,
and I'm going to play piano do it and a
lot of other things from this chat, for sure, but
those are at the top of my list at least
for for today's to look into that.
Speaker 1 (43:06):
By your thinking bibs, your thoughts.
Speaker 3 (43:09):
Thought biopsy.
Speaker 2 (43:10):
All right, well, thank you so much, doctor Lee, and
uh we'll see you on that way.
Speaker 1 (43:15):
Thank you, Amy. Good to be with you.
Feeling Things with Amy & Kat News
Host
Amy Brown
Popular Podcasts
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
Las Culturistas with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang
Ding dong! Join your culture consultants, Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang, on an unforgettable journey into the beating heart of CULTURE. Alongside sizzling special guests, they GET INTO the hottest pop-culture moments of the day and the formative cultural experiences that turned them into Culturistas. Produced by the Big Money Players Network and iHeartRadio.