The Life-Changing Art of Self-Brain Surgery with Dr. Lee Warren

Graced Health Podcast 

Amy Connell, Host

Dr. Lee Warren, Guest

AMY: Hey, I am so grateful and so excited for this conversation today with Dr. Lee Warren. He's a neurosurgeon and award-winning author, an Iraq war veteran, and host of the Dr. Lee Warren Podcast. And he will be teaching us some of the art of connecting neuroscience, faith, and daily practices for leading a healthier, better, and happier life.

Dr. Warren, it's an honor to have you here. Thank you for joining us here on the Graced Health Podcast.

DR. LEE WARREN: Thank you. Great to be with you today.

AMY: Dr. Warren, what you have done is so impressive. You are a board-certified practicing neurosurgeon. I know you're still in clinic, if I understand correctly. You've been doing that for over 25 years. But you have also encountered several traumatic events, including performing over 200 brain surgeries in 125 days when you were in the Iraq war. I cannot even imagine that.

And then you went through the horrific death of your teenage son in 2013, which I just feel like I have to hold space for both of those right now—the trauma of the war and then the trauma of your son passing. You call these situations "the massive thing." And so I was wondering if you could start by sharing how your massive thing impacted your health and your faith.

DR. LEE WARREN: Yeah, so I mean, those are two big things that you go through in life. And I think most people have lots of little things that happen over the course of our lives, and for some people that's it. It's a bunch of small traumas, a bunch of disappointments or any of those things, and they affect us on real levels.

But then many of us also go through these big things—loss of a spouse, loss of a child, loss of a marriage that we weren't expecting. Those kinds of big, big things. And we, in our family, we called the loss of our son "the massive thing," our TMT. This is our big thing that's going to happen, that has happened in our life.

And so I think when you talk about faith, I mean, most of us, whether we say it out loud or not, most of us sort of think that if we do everything right, God's going to honor us and take care of us and protect us and all that. And then when something devastating happens, it shocks us. How could this happen to us if God loves us?

And so that's not a very rational thought, because if you read the Bible very long, you see that really bad things happen to really good people all the time. Especially me being a neurosurgeon—I'm the guy that's there with your family when that thing happens to you and giving you the bad news that your child didn't make it or the tumor's malignant or whatever.

So I should have seen it coming that I would have gone through something like that. But I think the war was a lot more understandable because I was sent to a place to help people who were dealing with the fact that humans kill each other and that wars happen and countries fight and all that. So I was prepared for that emotionally when I joined the military. But then you don't expect it to feel like it feels, I guess. But at least I saw that coming.

But with the death of my son, it was just a random Tuesday night in 2013 and we were living our lives. We had another child still in high school, and Mitch was off—he'd been to college at Auburn and was living in the Montgomery area of Alabama. The phone rang and our son was dead. He'd been stabbed to death.

And so that was this unexpected, devastating thing that immediately you go to that place of "Why, God, did you allow this to happen?" And then I think the very next thing that most of us think is, "Well, maybe God isn't real, or maybe he doesn't love me. If this could happen, then God can't be who I thought he was."

And so it turns out that after that sort of thing happens to you, you find out pretty quickly that if you don't find your way back to believing the things that you thought you believed before, there's no place to turn for hope. Because Christians, especially, we need to believe the resurrection's true. We need to believe I get to see my son again someday. I need to believe God's going to be close to me when I'm brokenhearted.

And if it's not true that he loves me and he has a plan for me and all that, then those other things can't be true either. And so that's really what hurts at first—is this gap between what you need to be true and what you feel is true.

AMY: You know, it's interesting to hear you say you didn't see it coming. And I think in so many situations we don't see it coming. And I think it's very easy to think, "Well, you know, I go to church, I check the boxes, I do the things, so of course God's going to take care of me."

And of course, Jesus never promised that, right? In this world you will have troubles. But yeah, I can—I've read your book, so I know a little bit of what you've shared there—but the work that it takes after, to recalibrate yourself in your world and also stay tethered to God when there's maybe just temporary conflicting emotions with that. And maybe emotions isn't the right word, but yeah.

So one of the things I find interesting is you've been practicing for 25 years, and as I understand it, the science has exploded in the world of neuroscience and what we understand about our brain over the last 20 to 25 years. So I'm wondering if you could tell us what you've learned, what you've witnessed, what modern brain imaging and neuroscience has revealed about the mind's power to alter your brain. Because, you know, I remember first growing up as an adult, it was like, well, your brain's your brain, right? You don't think much about it. And now we know so much more.

DR. LEE WARREN: Yeah, so neuroscience really taught throughout the 19th and 20th century—and really a lot of people still to this day teach this—that you are your brain. You're the product of how your brain is. And so your personality, your mindset, your abilities, and all those things in that school of thought come from how your brain acts, the firing of the neurons in your brain.

And then if you back up a step from that, we get our brains from our parents, our genetics, our experiences and traumas that we've been through and all that stuff. And so we've all had this general belief that our brains create who we are, and our parents and our genetics create how our brains are, and that we're sort of stuck with that.

And I think if you look at our society right now and you see what people mostly do—we mostly believe that how we are is who we are. And we create these identities: "Well, I've got anxiety and I have ADHD, and I have this Enneagram score and I have this personality, and I've been through these sets of adverse childhood experiences, so I am this way."

And then we start putting those things in our Instagram bios: "I'm, here's who I am. You have to treat me a certain way or I'll be triggered or I'll be hurt," or all those things. And we believe that stuff because we think that we're the product of our brain activity.

And so interestingly, I was a practicing neurosurgeon and raised in that school of materialism, we call it, where you are the stuff from which you're made, right? But at the same time, as a Christian, there are a lot of things that you believe as a Christian that don't fit into that worldview.

Like if you're a Christian and you believe there's a resurrection, then you believe that when your body dies and your brain is buried and the worms eat you up, or they cremate you or whatever, there's still some part of you that's still alive out there. And you believe that you have a soul, something that's persistent about you.

And I never really smashed those together as a grownup who was practicing neurosurgery and practicing Christianity. I never really integrated the fact that I had some chasms in my two worldviews, right?

But then after my son died, I had this incredible experience where my wife, Lisa, was running our practice at the time. We were practicing on the campus of Auburn University in Alabama, and our office was on the third floor of a building in which they were doing this MRI, functional MRI research, where they were looking at what brains do when people are thinking certain things.

And functional imaging is something that just came along in the early 2000s. So like you said, the last 25 years, neuroscience has exploded, and it's exploded largely because of functional imaging. I'll just say as an aside, when I say functional imaging, what that means is you break your arm and we take an X-ray of your arm. The X-ray is a picture of the bone in your arm. It's a picture of the thing. It doesn't tell us what your arm's doing. It just shows us a picture.

Functional imaging is you can look at the brain and you can actually see what the brain is doing chemically, electrically, while people are thinking or moving. So functional imaging is this ability that we have to look at what the organ is doing while we're imaging it.

So Lisa and I—and it was a month after Mitch had died, so we were still really broken and still really bereaved and just had gone back to work and really struggling there—we went down to this meeting and we were standing there and watching these people. They put this woman in the scanner with a pair of headphones so that the researcher could communicate with her, turned the machine on, and you could see what her brain was doing when she wasn't actively thinking about anything.

Then they said over the earphones, they said, "Okay, Mrs. Johnson, think about the worst thing you've ever been through in your life." And you would see her think for a second, and then parts of her brain would begin to light up—fear and anxiety and pain, all the amygdala and all those parts of the brain that are involved in fight, flight, and freeze and all that.

And then very shortly after—so she was instructed to think something and her brain began to react to what she was thinking about—shortly after that, her vital signs began to change. They had her hooked up to monitors. Her heart rate went up, her blood pressure went up, her respiratory rate went up.

And then after a second after that happened, the researcher said, "Okay, stop thinking about that bad thing, and now think about the best day of your whole life, like your favorite memory of all time." So she would think of whatever it was. Very quickly, the amygdala began to calm down and the frontal lobes began to light up—the parts of her brain involved in processing and rational thought and joy and peace and all those good things. And all of a sudden her blood pressure started coming down, her heart rate came down, and her vital signs began to improve.

And Lisa had this insight. She said, "That reminds me of Philippians 4, where it says you can't be anxious and grateful—they sort of compete with each other."

And I started thinking about it, and it dawned on me—I think the Holy Spirit gave me this insight in real time—when you think one thing and not another thing, your mind is in charge of your brain, and your brain listens to what your mind says. So that means the mind is not a product of brain activity. It's the other way around. The mind is different. And that's the part of us that we would call soul or heart.

And the Bible uses all those terms, conflates all those terms. Your mind is immaterial. It's not your brain, but it has controlling influence over your brain. And we saw that with our eyes. Like if you think this thing and not that thing, your brain does something different.

Just so you know, we're not talking about some kind of metaphor or some sort of self-help idea. When the brain changes its chemical activity, that means that genes have been switched on and off. That means that proteins are being transcribed. It means that different neurotransmitters are being released. And so when you think a thought and your brain changes, your brain is structurally changing. It's making new connections between different neurons and it's making structural changes in the brain.

And that's when I had this thought: When I go to surgery in the operating room to do brain surgery on my patient, what I'm doing is intentionally making structural changes in my patient's brain to try to help them in some way.

And we saw with our own eyes that day that when somebody thinks a better thought than they were thinking before, they're intentionally changing the structure of their brain for the purpose of making their life better in some way. That means that that's surgery in every way that you can define surgery. We're physically taking command of something and making a change in the body to produce a better outcome. And so that's why I've called the book Self-Brain Surgery. It's this idea that you can literally change how your brain works. You're not the product of how your brain works. You're just allowing it to work until you decide to make it work differently.

AMY: I love the empowerment of that. And I think so many of us have grown up thinking, if I have a problem, then I go to a doctor or a provider to help me with that. And what I love that you do in your podcast and have done in your book is really give us the tools to do this, you know?

And going back just a little bit, it's so interesting to see how science is catching up with what Scripture wrote 2,000 years ago. I mean, you know, when we talk about God being omniscient and omnipresent, it's like, okay, you know, he was there and he is here, and they're all aligned with what science is discovering about how God created us. We just didn't have that language for it. I love that.

So you were talking some about neuroplasticity, right? Which is that creating of the new—or maybe not new neurons, but new neural pathways. I'm wondering if, number one, if you can explain that a little bit better than I just did, because you're the expert and I'm not. And then also talk to us some, Dr. Warren, about what's happening in our brain. And then for those of us who are in a continual loop of maybe it's depression, maybe it's anxiety, maybe it's chronic pain—all of the various areas, and if you want to expand on that, I invite you to do that. Talk to us about how we can get out of that, you know, some people will call it a spiral, and move into better pastures, for lack of a better word, to quote Psalm 23.

DR. LEE WARREN: So most of us live our lives thinking that what we think and feel are real, that they're true, because they usually sound like they're in our own voice. But research is very clear now, Amy, that about 80% of the thoughts that pop into your head in a given day are false—they're not true. So four out of five things that you think, these things that pop into your head, are just not true. And at the same time, about 80% of the things that we feel are not true.

And so if you are aware of that, and then you can be aware of another thing that God gave humans—this ability that nobody else has, of all the other things that he made, humans have something called metacognition.

Metacognition is the ability to not just think and feel the things that pop into your head, but to think about what you're thinking about. So in other words, you might have a thought, "Oh, nobody loves me and I'm going to die alone and I'm going to have a terrible life." You might have that thought, and it might be accompanied by an emotion that feels lonely and sad.

But then you can stop and say to yourself, "Wait a minute. I have a wife who loves me. I have four kids who love me. I have friends. I'm not going to die alone. I've got people in my life that matter to me."

That process of interrupting the thing that you're thinking about and feeling, and thinking about that and questioning it—that's called metacognition. And humans can do that.

The problem is most of us are unaware that we can do that, or at least we don't do it as a habit. We don't make a habit out of investigating our thinking.

Again, the Bible comes in here. Second Corinthians 10:5 says, "Take every thought captive." And what that's talking about is the fact that you can't trust the things that you think and feel.

And it happens that we're in a cultural moment, especially for our young people, we're in a cultural moment where we're being highly encouraged: "Feel your feelings, follow your truth. You do you, you follow your heart, that's your identity." All those kinds of things are basically telling people that what you think and feel are trustworthy, and you should react to them as if they're true.

But that is not true scripturally, and it's not true neuroscientifically.

And so when you say "I'm caught in a loop of thinking anxious thoughts," you can just take a second and say, "Wait a minute. I know that most of what I think and feel isn't true. And because I'm feeling anxious right now, I typically would react to that by drinking alcohol or scrolling on Instagram or turning on the television or doing—I typically react to this thought and this feeling with this behavior."

If you can just make yourself think about that from the top down, you can say, "Is that actually the healthiest way for me to respond to this? Or could I choose, with my big frontal lobes, a different response that might be more adaptive for me, might be more powerful or helpful for me?"

So if you can just interrupt that process—I call it the thought biopsy. So as a surgeon, if I look at a scan and I see a spot on somebody's brain, it's not usually the most appropriate thing for me to just run off to the operating room and go take that thing out. It's usually more appropriate to run some tests or do a little biopsy, a little minimally invasive biopsy, figure out what it is that that spot represents before I decide how to attack it. Or even sometimes it doesn't need to be dealt with. Maybe it's something you were born with. It's just a birthmark on your brain.

And so it's not usually appropriate for me to react. It's more appropriate for me to think and respond. And that's what we can do with our thinking and feeling. We can say, "Okay, if I know that most of what I think and feel are false, then my brain has an ability to think about those things instead of reacting to them. And I can build that little space in there where I have time to biopsy it and decide if it's true or not."

Then if it's not true, I'm not obligated to think about it anymore, and it doesn't help me to think about it anymore. If it's not a true feeling, I don't have to feel that. I don't have to accept that anymore. And I can choose a healthier thing to dwell on.

AMY: That all makes so much sense. You know, it's funny, when you were talking about the metacognition, to me I kind of got a vision of like a 3D perspective rather than just a 2D. And I like all that you said.

I'm wondering, though, how, when we are stuck in that—how can we have almost the awareness and maybe the drive to actually do that thought biopsy? And I ask this because I have someone in my life who struggles with depression a little bit. And there's another person who was talking to them and they said, "You know, I totally get that. I get that way too. What I have found the most helpful thing to be is just really changing it"—and this isn't what you're talking about—"but basically having a heart of gratitude and just thinking about all the things that I'm thankful for."

And then he admitted, "But I also am aware that that's the very last thing that I want to do when I'm in that space."

It's very simple when we are drowning and someone throws us a life preserver and we reach out and grab that. But sometimes people have a really hard time getting out of their head and just doing that thought biopsy. So do you have any guidance for situations like that?

DR. LEE WARREN: Yeah, so wonderfully God has equipped us with something called neuroplasticity, which we addressed a minute ago. Neuroplasticity is this ability to change how your brain cells are connected to each other by changing the things that you think about. Okay, so that's a scientific principle. Set that aside for a second.

There's a guy named Donald Hebb, who is a Canadian neuroscientist in the sixties, and he came up with this thing that we now call Hebb's Law, which is—you'll hear it on podcasts, if you listen to neuroscience experts, you'll hear people say, "Neurons that fire together wire together," right?

That's Hebb's Law. And what Hebb's basically saying is that when you do something repeatedly, your brain makes connections to automate that thing and make it better and easier for you to accomplish it in the future.

So in the context of what we're talking about here—how do you handle repetitive thought loops or things that we can't seem to stop thinking about? How do you deal with that? Because it's so hard in the moment to remember to take that time to biopsy.

The way I handle it is I start my day every day with some intentional practice of quiet time, Bible study, worship, and some journaling and some time to set my mind on the things that I'm likely to encounter that day.

There's an FBI hostage negotiator guy named Chris Voss that wrote a book called Never Split the Difference. And he has this line in that book where he said, "When the pressure's on, we don't rise to the occasion, we fall to our preparation." So I stole that line from him because it's so great. I always give him credit, but I use it all the time.

So if you think about that, like, okay, when I'm in the heat of the moment, I'm in a meeting at the office and the boss is yelling at me, I tend to overreact and say something that gets me in trouble. Or when I get a text message that I didn't expect, I tend to fire off something angry, and then I figure out that I misread their text and I shouldn't have said that. And now I've got to repair that relationship because I said something mean or whatever.

If you have a tendency to react in certain situations in certain ways, then if you anticipate that in your morning quiet time, and you say, "Okay, I'm going to map out what I'm likely to think and feel today, because I know that 80% of my thoughts are kind of the same things I thought the day before, and I tend to have repetitive issues that I don't perform well in," then I'm going to try to rise—I know that knowing that I can't rise to the occasion, I'm going to try to improve the ceiling on my preparation. And so I'm going to prepare myself for these things.

And then Hebb's Law kicks in. What I do, I get better at. And I make these neurons fire together where I say, "Okay, the next time I feel anxious, instead of reacting to it, I'm going to biopsy that thought and I'm going to think this thought instead. And I'll have a scripture to transplant in there, something that says, like, 'Be anxious for nothing, but in everything with prayer and supplication, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God, and the peace of God will guard your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus.'"

So I'm going to say, "Okay, instead of anxiety, I'm going to choose gratitude. And I know that God's going to reward me by kicking in the neurotransmitters that are going to make me feel better. I'm going to make a frontal lobe response instead of an amygdala response. And I'm going to prepare for that so I don't fall to some level of being unprepared."

AMY: Okay. That makes a lot of sense. I've heard you describe that, if I'm correct, about your daily scrub-in. Is that right?

DR. LEE WARREN: Yep.

AMY: I love in your book all of the analogies that you use to your process in practicing medicine, either in the clinical or in the surgical area, and how we can take that to our own daily life. And so, yeah, like that daily scrub-in. I love that. I mean, so can you go through what your daily scrub-in is again? Because I think those are helpful for people to hear, like, "Oh, maybe I should add this or consider this."

DR. LEE WARREN: I think about what I do when I go to the operating room. I'm going to go in and do surgery on somebody. The first thing we do is we scrub our hands at the sink, and that process takes six minutes. That's about how long it takes to properly sterilize your skin. So it's about a six-minute process.

And there's multiple things that happen during that scrubbing-in process. One of them is I'm getting stuff off of my arms that doesn't need to be in my patient, right? Dirt and bacteria and dead skin cells and all that gross stuff.

But what it's also doing is it's allowing me some time to think and prepare my mind for that case. Like, is there anything that's distracting me? Am I worried about something that might keep me from performing well on behalf of my patient in this operation? Am I worried about my finances? Did I have a fight with my wife that morning? Did I say something I shouldn't have said to my kid on the way out, and I'm feeling bad about that? I got to get my mind off of anything that would hinder me from doing the job at hand, of taking care of my patient, right?

So I spend that scrub-in time to prepare not just my skin and my hands, but my brain and my mind so that I can accomplish that task.

And I think if you think about your morning that way, then you can say, "Okay, I'm going to spend some time in prayer because I know prayer and meditation are known—neuroscience now has shown with imaging that prayer and meditation actually makes your hippocampus bigger. It makes you more resilient. It makes you more emotionally stable."

And so if you spend some time in prayer, you interact with God and you prepare your mind for those moments. I spend some time in the Word of God, and that helps me to transplant some things into my heart that, again, when I'm under pressure, when I identify a thought that's not going to be helpful to me, I have something to transplant in its place. I have a scripture, something true that I know I can count on to replace those negative, false thoughts that might pop in there. And so I'm preparing that in the mornings.

Worship, music, prayer, journaling—all those things that are going to help me later when I'm under pressure to be more responsive and less reactive. So that's what that scrubbing-in process looks like for me every day.

AMY: Thank you for sharing that. Six minutes for a scrub-in—that's a really long time. But you know, I had never considered that. There's something great about just to get your head—your head, it's not mine, I'm not doing the surgery, right?—but your head in the space of where you're going into. So I love all the analogies that you suggested with that.

Dr. Warren, one of the things that I really like about The Life-Changing Art of Self-Brain Surgery is kind of at the beginning you almost give the why. You know, it's funny. When I talk with people about strength training—strength training is really big, especially in women my age in this age and stage right now—and I had someone tell me one time, "I know that you're telling me that I need to do this, but I need to know the why. Because when I understand the why, then I'm more likely to do it."

So as I received it, the beginning kind of gives us the why, and then you really get into the how. Can you just share a little bit? Because I can speak to this, but I think you're better to do it since you actually wrote the book. What kind of comes next? Because you kind of give us the why and then the 10 commandments and kind of go from there, just so people can get a vision of what you offer and what they'll receive in this book, because there's so many practical things that they can use in there.

DR. LEE WARREN: Thank you. I started, like you said, I started with sort of the backstory and how we got to this self-brain surgery place. And then I spent a few chapters explaining the way surgeons adapt when something that they're doing isn't working. And I think all of us have those times in our life when we come to realize that how I've been doing this isn't helping me very much. It's not working. So I need to be willing to change to a different approach.

We spend a few chapters talking about different approaches to how we navigate our lives in neuroscience and faith and how they work in those areas.

And then I give you what I call the 10 Commandments of Self-Brain Surgery, which basically are the 10 most important lessons I've learned in the 12 years since my son died about how neuroscience and faith work together to help people. And so I gave you some guardrails and some things that'll help you kind of stay out of the ditches if you want to learn how to operate your mind and your brain the way God intended for you to flourish.

And then, like you said, we go to the operating room and we start training you to handle different things that happen in your life. So I've got 15 different what we call self-brain surgery operations that are very practical and tactical things. What do you do when you're anxious? What do you do when you're grieving? What do you do when you're stuck in negative thinking or the worst-case scenario? What do you do if you have a child or a young person who needs some help navigating their mental health landscape?

So we'll give you a chapter on pediatric self-brain surgery. I have a chapter in there for therapists and counselors and people who are helping other people navigate these things. And so basically I've tried to give you a lot of very practical things about situations that you're going to face in your life where you can use applied neuroscience, if you will—self-brain surgery, as I call it—to handle those things in a way that helps you do three important things.

I want you to sort of become healthier and feel better and be happier in your life. And those are important things, the things that all humans are aiming for, the things that God said—he came here, John 10:10, Jesus said, "The thief comes to steal and kill and destroy, but I came that you might have life and have it abundantly."

God wants you to have an abundant life now. And abundance has been hijacked a bit to mean, "Well, I'm wealthier, I'm healthier, all these great things are happening." But what he means is I want you to be able to be resilient in the face of anything that happens to you and to know that there's still hope and purpose in your life, even if you go through hard things, because you will.

And so how do you find that ability to flourish when you're under pressure? That's what I've tried to give you in this book.

AMY: I like that reframing of abundance to resilience and being able to do that rather than—you're right. I mean, we have a tendency to automatically think that abundance has to do with things or how much or something like that. So I really like that.

One of the things that I do that is a great quality of mine and also drives my husband crazy is I tend to think about things from all different perspectives. And so I'm wondering if you, Dr. Warren, can speak to the person who is thinking, "But I don't want to get caught in toxic positivity. I don't want to just say the things and just say these positive thoughts." Explain to us how self-brain surgery is different than just positive thinking, or if we want to add onto that, toxic positivity.

DR. LEE WARREN: That's a great question, and it's incredibly important. I don't want you to focus on positive thinking. I want you to focus on realistic thinking. And what that means is every situation, every impulse of thought, you have an opportunity to either run with your first instinct or to use your frontal lobes to choose a more appropriate response. Okay?

And as it turns out, the switch—the place in your brain where that switch happens from reflexive to responsive thinking—is called your hippocampus. And your hippocampus is this part that surveils your environment to look for situations you've been in before to try to figure out how to keep you safe in that environment, basically.

And so it either is going to switch you towards your amygdala and your limbic system—the parts of your brain that are involved in fight and flight and freeze and fear and anxiety and panic and responses of stress—or it's going to promote the frontal lobes to get involved and you becoming more rational and making a more reasoned choice in the moment.

And so it turns out that the switch is whether you're focusing on something for which you're grateful or something of which you're afraid. Anxiety and gratitude is a one-way switch in the hippocampus. So you literally, neurochemically, cannot be grateful and anxious at the same time.

And so when I say I want you to be positive, what I mean by that is I want you to choose the response that's going to get the best part of your brain involved, and that's your frontal lobe.

And it's been well studied. If you ask somebody what produces a better life, more positive thinking or less negative thinking, it's less negative thinking, and it's not even close. So if you can get rid of that automatic negative response that you have—"This is, I'm hosed. This isn't going to work out for me. Nothing—here we go again. This is just how my life is"—if you can get rid of that and say, "Okay, I just need to stop thinking that and start making a different decision about how I'm going to respond instead," you'll find that you begin having a habit of investigating your thoughts and choosing a better response rather than just feeling like you're running away all the time.

Like that's what happens to a lot of us who just constantly feel like we're having to react to something horrible, and "Here we go again." And you don't have to live that way. I'm just telling you that the switch is gratitude.

And then when I say that, somebody's going to say, "Wait, what do I have to be grateful for? My kid was murdered. My husband left me. How can you say I need to be grateful?"

In that moment, just find something you can be grateful for. And a good example is, okay, so the day after my son died, I was devastated. I'm hopelessly awash in all the things that you think about—you know, why wasn't I there? Could I have done something? Was this our fault somehow? All those things that you think.

And I said, "I'm so thankful that Lisa and Kaylin, my other daughter, are here with me and I'm not alone in this moment. I'm just so grateful that I'm not by myself in this."

So I had something that I could think about that was grateful. And the next thing that happened was I remember that verse in Psalm 34:18, "The Lord is close to the brokenhearted." I'm so grateful he's promised me that I won't be alone in these moments.

And all of a sudden I was still devastated, Amy, but I also had something that felt a little bit hopeful. And so I could start thinking about, "Okay, what do we need to do now? How do we navigate this?" instead of that "Oh my gosh, everything's—it's all over for me now." I'm able to start using my frontal lobe and process this in a healthy way. I'm not happy. I'm not feeling good, but I'm thinking more clearly, right?

So that's what I mean—not just mindless toxic positivity, but the ability to make the most appropriate choice of what you're going to think about in the next moment. And that will help you make better decisions that'll improve the quality of your relationships. It's been widely shown to improve your life at every measurable way, to be more responsive and less reactive.

AMY: I like that delineation. Thank you for that. And that also feels more reasonable. And the word "relaxed" comes to mind, which I don't know that that's exactly—but maybe that's a byproduct of the intentionality of what you're doing with that rather than just the "positive, positive, positive." And I really like how you said we're focusing on less negative thinking. That's key. Because that's an easy thing to do too. We have a default sometimes. Some people seem to have an easier default or a quicker default to the negative thinking than others. So I think that's a great place to start.

As we wrap up, you know, sometimes we write these books and as an author, you come up with, "Who is this for? Who is this book for?" And so as we start talking about practicing self-brain surgery, speak to the person who may be dealing with various issues and say how it can help. Because as I'm reading through, I'm like, "This should—this is good reading for everyone," which kind of answers the question. But I would love to hear from you, like, specific instances. I know you've walked your own tragedies and hard things, and as, of course, as a physician you've watched that too. So share with us who this book was written for.

DR. LEE WARREN: Yeah. Like you said, the easy answer is if you have a brain, it's for you, because the truth is neuroplasticity is happening every moment of your life. Your brain is making new connections between neurons. The problem is it keeps making the same ones unless you direct it with different thinking to change how those neurons are connected.

So that means that this process is happening with or without your conscious involvement. And so you can either choose then to take ownership as the surgeon and get involved in directing this for your own benefit, or you can continue to let the default process of how things have always been for you continue to be the way they'll always be for you.

And so then the simple answer is, if you are not satisfied with the way that your thought life is helping you navigate your life, that you have been unable to move past something hard that has happened, and you would like to learn the process of how your brain and your mind are designed to work together to help you move forward, then this book is going to help you.

In a more specific way, I think it's three categories of people. And I call them healing, hope, and higher performance.

So if you're hurt in some way and you need to heal—you've got chronic illness, chronic pain, you're suffering from a loss that you can't seem to move past—this book will help you find a path forward or to navigate that, a set of techniques and tools that you can use to help you find healing.

If you feel hopeless, if something's happened and you don't think that tomorrow can be any different than today, and it's just a long series of failures and you don't think there's any way forward for you, then this book will help you find hope. Because hope, as the Bible says, comes from suffering and endurance and character development, and then hope comes at the end of that process.

So we all think that because we've suffered in some way that we can't have hope anymore. And it turns out the neuroscience is right on scripture's side again, that actually human brains are designed to get better because they've been through something hard. And so there's great hope for you if you can learn how to navigate the system and operate it the way it's designed. You can find hope. Whatever has taken your hope, you can find a new hope in it.

Then higher performance. So even if you haven't been through something hard, or your life's going pretty well and you just can't quite break through to that level, you feel like you're supposed to be performing better at your job, or maybe your relationships aren't quite what they need to be, or you just want to perform a little bit better—there's a lot of tools here on the neuroscience side that can help you break through to a higher performance level in your life. I think it'll really be helpful to you.

AMY: Awesome. Well, I can't recommend it enough. Thank you for writing such a wonderful resource. And tell people—really quickly, today's launch day. So congratulations, by the way, on the book. Tell people where they can get the book and where also they can connect with you.

DR. LEE WARREN: So you can get the book anywhere books are sold in the world. There's an audio version that I recorded myself. It's on Kindle, it's on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, your local bookseller. So anywhere you can find a book, you can get it on my website too—DrLeeWarren.com, just one word, no period. DrLeeWarren.com. And you can get my podcast, my newsletter, all the things that I do there as well. And we love to connect with people. I love to hear from you. So yeah, check it out.

AMY: Awesome. All right, great. I have a few questions I ask all my guests that we'll go through relatively quickly. Number one is I'm fascinated by tattoos. I have found that when people decide to put tattoos on their body, they often do so with a meaning behind it. I don't have one just for the record, but I was wondering if you have a tattoo. If you wouldn't mind sharing what it is. And if you don't have one, but you had to get one, what would it be and where would it go?

DR. LEE WARREN: Well, I decided when I was in medical school that I was never going to get a tattoo because, sadly, I'm in a position of seeing a lot of people's tattoos that they probably never thought anybody would see. And what I learned is tattoos don't age very well. And so I made a decision I wasn't going to ever have one.

If you force me to have one, I would probably put it on my arm, under my sleeve, and it would probably be something like Micah 6:8, some scripture that means a lot to me. Like, "What does the Lord require of you? Do justice and love mercy and walk humbly before your God"—something like that.

AMY: Okay. All right. Well, so you are confirming what so many of my guests have said, which is, "I don't have one because I'm afraid of what it would look like when I get old." So just—it's official from you.

Now, we've mentioned a lot of Bible verses in here. Do you have one particular meaningful one that you would like to share?

DR. LEE WARREN: Especially in this day and age when everybody tells us that we're so easily broken, and then that if you have anxiety or you have depression or you have ADHD, you're stuck with it, I want you to remember 2 Timothy 1:7, that says, "God has not given you a spirit of fear, but of power and of love and of a sound mind."

You were given a sound mind, and you can reject the idea that you have to be stuck with a brain that doesn't help you. There's a way forward from that.

AMY: Awesome. Okay. And you get the final say. I like to wrap up with letting my guests offer one simple nugget from our conversation. So one thing that you would like our community to remember, big or small, but that we can walk away with.

DR. LEE WARREN: I think just that you're never without hope because your system actually is designed to change for your benefit. So if you'll get in the game and learn how to operate your mind and the brain the way God designed them, there's no limit on your healing, your hope, your performance.

AMY: Okay, that's all for today. Go out there and have a graced day.