276: Self-Brain Surgery: Neuroscience, Faith, And Healing From Trauma

What if most of your automatic thoughts aren’t true—and your body pays the price when you believe them? We sit down with Dr. Lee Warren, W. Lee Warren, MD, is a neurosurgeon, an award-winning author, an Iraq War veteran, and the host of The Dr. Lee Warren Podcast. He teaches the art of connecting neuroscience, faith, and daily practices for leading a healthier, better, and happier life. 

www.DrLeeWarren.com 

The Life-Changing Art of Self-Brain Surgery - https://www.netgalley.com/widget/897209/redeem/8bef54f4147ff6d63f2dfe6b94784e67155f495b79ab8b6190a88f48c82ddb68

SELF-BRAIN SURGERY MIGHT JUST SAVE YOUR LIFE - https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5bd26c48b2cf79b5897a6c45/t/68b701504975283eb3c60afb/1756823889694/Press+Kit+-+The+Life+Changing+Art+of+Self-Brain+Surgery.pdf

Through a vivid fMRI moment and hard-won personal story, he shows how a single choice of thought can alter brain activity, shift physiology, and open a path out of anxiety, grief, and chronic stress.

We unpack the difference between emotions and feelings, and why your heart racing can signal fear or excitement depending on the story you attach to it. Dr. Warren explains neuroplasticity in plain language—neurons that fire together wire together—and how rumination keeps cortisol high, sleep poor, and pain persistent. You’ll learn his “thought biopsy” method to test whether a thought is true before letting it run your day, plus how to move decisions from the amygdala’s fight-or-flight to the frontal lobes where wisdom lives. We also dig into patterns behind migraines and avoidance loops, and how reframing, gratitude, and scripture-backed replacements can transform relationships—starting with a powerful marriage turnaround story.

If you’ve felt stuck, spiritually numb, or trapped by old patterns, this conversation offers a practical, hopeful plan: notice, pause, and rewire with truth. Dr. Warren shares three steps you can start today to separate mind from brain, reclaim agency, and build healthier defaults that feel like peace. His new book, The Life-Changing Art of Self-Brain Surgery, lands on February 3 with tools, stories, and science to help you renew your mind and restore your life.

Ready to stop trying harder and start healing smarter? Start with the $5 Faith Reset Challenge — your first step to regulating your nervous system, stabilizing your metabolism, and reconnecting with your identity in Christ through simple, faith-centered rhythms. This is where most women begin. 

👉 Start the $5 Challenge here: https://ftf.fasttofaith.com/empoweredbyfaithlive

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Learn more + success stories: https://fasttofaith.com https://fasttofaith.com/testimonials-2/

Follow Dr. Tabatha: Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/DrTabatha 

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/gutsydrtabatha

Transcript

False Thoughts And Trauma Triggers

SPEAKER_02 0:00

Not everything you think and feel is true. And especially when you've been traumatized, this becomes really important to understand there's really good neuroscience research that indicates that about 80% of the automatic things that pop into our heads on any given day and the automatic things that we feel at any given time are not true. If you think that you're supposed to react to everything that pops into your head, or that every time you hear that thought, you know, if this happened to me, it must have been because I did something wrong, or if I was, if I went through this, then I must be, I need to be ashamed of that for the rest of my life, or whatever that thought process that nobody will ever love me again, or he's never going to stay with me, or whatever. If you, if you, if you think that everything that pops into your head is your voice and therefore it must be true, then you're going to spend about 80% of your time reacting to things that are leading you down a set of responses that aren't helpful to you because it was based on false information.

Show Intro And Guest Setup

Dr. Tabatha 0:57

If you're tired of doing all the right things and still feeling exhausted, stuck in your body, and disconnected from God, this podcast is for you. I'm Dr. Tabitha, triple board certified functional medicine physician, and I help women stop fighting their bodies and start healing them God's way. This isn't about another diet or quick fix. This is about restoring your energy, your confidence, and your faith through fasting, functional medicine, and biblical truth. Welcome to Fast of Faith, where you don't just lose weight and feel great. You step into who God created you to be. So let's get into it. Welcome back to the Fast of Faith podcast. This week is a special conversation. It's almost a continuation of what we've been doing so far in 2026. We have been talking about the bridge of neuroscience, trauma, faith, and healing. And we just keep bringing you amazing experts. And this one you may have met if you participated in the Midlife Reset Summit. Dr. Lee Warren is a wealth of knowledge. And the interview we did for that summit was so powerful. He shared such personal story that was really compelling. And it really just gave me so much love for you, Dr. Warren. So I'm excited to have you back because we needed to continue the conversation that we started because I think for women, it's an onion. They just need to hear this in layers, right? Wouldn't you agree, Ashley? Yeah, I I agree 100%. So welcome.

SPEAKER_02 2:43

Thank you. It's so good to be with you again, Tabitha.

Ashlee 2:45

And I was gonna say too, this conversation is for anyone that's stuck, like stuck in that spiritual numbness, stuck in anxiety, stuck in depression, just stuck with like emotional eating and not knowing where to go next. And they just kind of feel literally stalled and stuck.

Dr. Tabatha 3:00

Yeah. Oh my goodness. So before we dive into it, let me just sing Dr. Lee Warren's praises because you are legit. You are a neurosurgeon with over 25 years of experience, an Iraqi war veteran, a trauma survivor personally. You are an award-winning author, host of the Dr. Lee Warren podcast, and you have this incredible book coming out that I cannot wait to dive into. So we're gonna talk about your concept of self-brain surgery today, right?

SPEAKER_02 3:32

Yep, that's right.

Dr. Tabatha 3:34

Oh my goodness. Let's dive into it. So why do you think that we get stuck and we end up in the pit?

Why We Get Stuck: Neuroplasticity 101

SPEAKER_02 3:43

I think the number one reason that we get stuck is that we may not understand what our brains are up for, really. A big part of what your brain does is try to automate things so you don't have to think about them so much. Just separate, if you can separate at least conceptually, the difference between your mind and your brain, then you understand that you can think about stuff and your brain can be doing other stuff at the same time. And so one of the brain's constant functions is to try to offload things that you don't have to think about as much by automating them. And the way it does that is creating these literal structural connections called synapses, as you know, between neurons and groups of neurons. And if we're unaware of that process, that process is called neuroplasticity, by the way, where neurons are constantly disconnecting and reconnecting in different ways. And if you're unaware that that's happening, if you believe that your life basically is the product of how your brain works, and you don't think that you can do anything about what your brain works, how your brain works, then you can begin to feel stuck because you think that you're the way that you are, the things you think, feel, believe, and do. You think that's because of what you've gone through, or because of the genes that you inherited, or because of the family you're raised in, and all that. And in fact, everything about how we are is related to this process of how our cells are connecting in our brain constantly. And once you learn that, and that you can change those connections by changing the things that you repeatedly think about, and they're things that you habitually do, then you can flip that control lever and all of a sudden you can become in sort of in charge of those processes instead of a victim of them. So we start to feel stuck when we're unaware of the incredible agency and power that we actually have to sort of write a new brain for ourselves from thought to thought.

Dr. Tabatha 5:25

Oh my gosh, that's so powerful. And tell can you share with my listeners how you even came to understand this on a like a faith-based level of renewing our minds as Romans 12 2 tells us to do? Because it's one thing to be a neurosurgeon and understand like how physically the brain works, the computer, but to understand, like we can change the software, we can renew our mind and create new thought patterns and behaviors. Like I know that was that came out of trauma, and I just want you to share that with women because they they think that you're just this academic, like you know, he couldn't possibly understand, but like there's some humanity there, right?

Thought → Brain → Body Chain

SPEAKER_02 6:12

Yeah. Um, yeah, I'll share the story with you. You know, you and I talked before. I I went through the Iraq War and I was deployed as a neurosurgeon. I went through a hundred mortar attacks, I did 200 brain surgeries in a tent hospital. And so I I delivered a lot of high-intensity trauma care there, but I also went through a lot of you know bombings and rocket attacks and a lot of traumatic things and saw people bleed to death and all that. And I came home from that and was was pretty beat up, as you might imagine, and went through several years of dealing with PTSD and struggling to regain my own sort of sanity and sense of control and figuring out what my where my faith was and all of that. And right after I kind of found my way back from that, right about the time that I thought things were going to be okay again, our 19-year-old son Mitchell was stabbed to death in 2013 and died. And and it was sort of doubly traumatic because the the police never really figured out what happened. He and his best friend were both killed in the same house on the same night. And and the story never really got resolved. And so we had this unknown thing that happened unexpectedly in our family that we could never sort of figure out. So you couldn't even get that sense of closure of understanding what happened, right? And so Lisa, my wife, and I um worked at the time together, our office, she ran our office, and and I was the only neurosurgeon in the practice. And we lived in Auburn, Alabama, and the our office was on the third floor of a building on the university campus at Auburn University, and the first floor of that building was all about MRI brain research. And the type of MRI research that they were doing there was something called functional imaging. And so, if you if a listener's not familiar, when you go get an MRI of your knee or your shoulder, that normal MRI is taking a picture of the thing, looking at your organ, looking at your bone, looking at your joint, and seeing what the thing looks like. So you can tell if it's been injured or something. Functional imaging is where we can actually put your brain in a scanner and see what your brain is doing. So not just what it's what it looks like, but what it's actually doing on the cellular level. And that involves seeing things like what parts of your brain are getting certain blood flow and what parts of what neurotransmitters are getting made, and all those kinds of things. So we can see what someone's brain is doing when they're thinking about something or moving a certain part of their body or whatever. So shortly after we went back to work after Mitch died, we were invited to go down, of course, put yourself in our context. We're traumatized, we're bereaved, we've just lost our son, we've just gone back to work, and we've been invited to go down to this research uh basically demonstration of this powerful machine that they had installed. It was only one of three of the scanners like that in the United States at the time. And they put this woman in the scanner, and we were watching, and they put headphones on her so they could communicate with her. And you could see what her brain was doing at a baseline state when she wasn't particularly thinking about anything. Of course, you know about the default mode network where when you're not really doing anything, there's certain things that are happening in your brain at baseline. And then they said, okay, Mrs. Johnson, I want you to think about the worst day of your life. Like, think about the hardest thing you've ever encountered. And we were relating to that because we were in the middle of the hardest thing we'd ever encountered. And shortly after they said that to her, you saw her kind of furrow up her brow and think about something. You could tell that she was thinking. And then a few seconds after she started thinking about whatever that traumatic memory was, her brain started reacting to that. And the amygdala and the limbic system of different parts of the brain that are involved in fear processing and emotional stuff started to light up. And we could tell that the parts of her brain that are involved in being afraid and remembering hard things were coming online in response to what she was thinking about. And then shortly after that, her vital signs began to change. Her blood pressure went up and her heart rate went up and her respiratory rate went up. And we saw, and I'm I'm a practicing neurosurgeon and I'm a bereaved father and I'm a person of faith at the same time watching this happen. And I saw a person think about something that led to her brain doing something that led to her body do something, doing something. And then they said, Hang on, Mrs. Johnson, now stop thinking about that. And now think about the best thing you've ever felt. Your happiest memory, your best day ever, the day your kid was born, the day your husband, you know, proposed to you, whatever it was. And again, you saw her brain go back to that sort of default state. You saw her kind of curl up her forehead and think about something. And then her frontal lobe started to come online and her cingulate gyrus and her insular cortex, the parts that are involved in better memory production and processing and thinking about things. And and then we saw her physiology change and her blood pressure came down, her heart rate came down, and respiratory rate came down. And we watched her think about one thing and not another thing. And we watched her brain react and then we watched her body improve in its physiology. And my wife saw this instant connection between that, and she said, That reminds me of Philippians chapter four. And I said, What do you mean? And she said, Well, that that part of the Bible that says if you don't want to be as anxious, then think about something you're grateful for, or switch to something that's good or lovely or trustworthy or kind. And and literally, I'm not a I'm not a person that goes around saying that God says things to me out loud. I don't I don't talk like that very often. But in in as real as you and I are talking, I heard this idea in my brain that formed. And it was when I go to surgery and I perform brain surgery on somebody, what I'm doing is intentionally making a structural change in their brain for the purpose of improving their life in some way. And in that moment, I saw this woman intentionally change the structure of her brain for the purpose of changing her life in some way. And I just heard this voice, just as loud as you're next to me, saying, that's the same thing as you do in surgery. Like she's performing surgery on her own brain when she thinks one thought and not another thought. And that began this intense desire that I had to show myself and my family that we didn't have to be sort of that our future didn't have to be written by the traumatic thing that we had just experienced. Because as long as we could process it and think about it in a way that we could can, that we should could get on top of, think about things about Mitch that Mitch that we loved and we remembered and the parts of him that we wanted to honor and and the stuff that wouldn't die when his had even though his body had it, and all that stuff. As long as we could make ourselves think about that and be grateful for his life, then we had a chance for our brain to start producing different stuff and our bodies to start feeling different. And in the two weeks after Mitch died, I had developed shingles in my right shoulder that I still feel sometimes sometimes today. My hair turned gray, like I broke several of my molars in my mouth from grinding my teeth at like my body was reacting to that trauma. And in the months following that, when I learned to process that and think about it in a different way, I began to be able to get on top of some of that stuff. And so in that moment, I recognized that we get to choose how we are responding to the things that we go through. Not that the things that we go through have some inherent power to write the story of what our future is going to look like. And that's where it all started for me to get better.

Rumination, Zebras, And Cortisol

Dr. Tabatha 13:18

Wow. I'm so glad you shared that. That was the most powerful thing I've heard in a long time. And it's just, it was so clear and easy to picture this idea of your thoughts create chemicals in your brain, which creates a response in your body. And the fact is, she wasn't experiencing trauma for the first time. She was just having a memory of it. She was just recalling that trauma. And so talk about what happens after we do that repeatedly over time, how that wears and tears on our body and creates such deep neural pathways of like just recalling the traumas.

SPEAKER_02 14:06

So it's interesting. This really good research that shows that the human brain does not have the capacity to discern between something that's actually happening in real time and something that we're just remembering or imagining. So it doesn't even have to be something that has actually happened. It can be something that we're just worrying about or ruminating about. Your brain can't tell the difference between those things. And there's this story that this guy wrote a book called Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers. And the idea is that when the zebra is out grazing on the Serengeti and the lion jumps out of the bushes and chases him, the zebra has an appropriate fight or flight response and runs away. And if he's fast enough, eventually the lion gets tired and stops chasing him. And the zebra goes on and finally stops running and just immediately starts eating grass again, right? Just goes back to what they were doing. The zebra does not go and and try to find the lion to get closure on understanding why the lion was so mean to him, right? The lion doesn't, the zebra doesn't go and try to go to a counselor and try to figure out why those why he's this unique zebra that the lion wanted to eat. Like the the zebra just goes back to what they were doing before because the zebra doesn't have this ability that humans have to imagine things that might be happening or have happened in the past. Humans have this unique ability to switch from one thought process to another and to engage in ruminating behavior. And nobody else that God created has that. And so what happens then is if you're unaware that the imagined response or the recalled response will create the same physiologic response. If you're unaware of that, then what's actually happening is you're engaging this neuroplasticity process that we talked about earlier, which is the famous line is neurons that fire together, wired together. That's called Hebb's Law. And what that literally means is your brain is is automating things that repeatedly happen so that you don't become as aware of them, so you can use your mental energy for something else that you might want to deal with. And so what happens in trauma then is when we recall or something triggers us, some environmental cue or some anniversary, or something happens that makes us recall, then initially we will vividly remember the thing we went through, and we'll have a we'll have a cognitive rehearsal of what we went through. But over time, the more often that happens, we begin to automate the response that we have. And we don't even necessarily become aware of it on a conscious level that now we are running that play again, and our body's responding with the same physiological events that it gave us when we had the actual injury or the actual thing happen. So, like when the the way your body's wired, right, to respond to the to a real threat is to release cortisol and stimulate your adrenal glands and get your fight or flight reflex engaged and run away or keep yourself away from the threat. But you're not designed to experience a high cortisol stress state all the time. And so while the zebra goes back to grazing, we keep ourselves in that loop all the time and our cortisol stays high. And that, as you know, has tremendous harmful effects on the physiology of the rest of our body. It breaks your brain down, breaks your joints down, breaks your cardiovascular system down. Like staying in a high cortisol stress state is tremendously harmful for your body. And so once you begin to understand that you've wired in those responses, then the way to the way to unwire them is to learn to think about what you've been through in a different way.

Dr. Tabatha 17:35

Oh my gosh, I have so many thoughts about past patients and clients and things we hear from women all the time. Are are you feeling the same way right now, Ashley?

Ashlee 17:44

Yeah, I am. And I I feel like so many women are gonna be able to relate to this while they're listening to it.

Dr. Tabatha 17:50

Yeah, because they're they're stuck in this perpetual cycle of, you know, why can't I get out? Why can't I feel better? I was remembering times I've gone through, like a certain time of the year where a traumatic event happened. And when I get to that time of the year, my physiology kicks in, it remembers and it responds, just like you with the shingles, you know? And so let's break down like where do we go from there? For I'm guessing the first step is awareness.

Awareness And Reframing As Healing

SPEAKER_02 18:23

That's right. It's awareness, and Gabin Mate's written a lot about this where he says that the good news is that trauma is not what happened to us, it's the response that we've developed to what happened to us. That's good news because if it was, if it was the fact that my son had died or that I had been bombed in Iraq and all that stuff, if that was what actually created what was going on in my brain, then I would be hopeless because I can't go back in time and make that stuff not have happened, right? But once you understand, once you're aware of what's happening in your brain and how brains work, right? And and also to understand it's not a bad thing that your brain works that way. It's actually a good thing because the same process that automated all those harmful responses is the process you're gonna use to automate better responses, that neuroplasticity process. And that neuroplasticity process works on repeated attention to something over something else. So once you decide that you can think about something different or in a different way, or you can revalue my friend Jeffrey Schwartz, the psychiatrist who's done a lot of really amazing work on obsessive-compulsive disorder, gives us these ideas of reframing and relabeling and revaluing and refocusing the things we've been through. Like, like, okay, that that event where I lost my son, that's the most devastating thing I've ever been through. And it will hopefully be the worst thing I've ever gone through, will ever go through. But it's not the only thing I've ever been through. And so I can take that loss of Mitch and I can say, you know what, I had him for 19 years. And during that 19 years, there were a lot of incredible, beautiful moments. There were things I learned from him. There were laughter, there was joy, there was happiness, that there's this stuff that I learned from him that I can now use to help other people in my life. I can, I can revalue some of the things that I feel and think about when I think about Mitch. And one of the things that a lot of us do is when we think about that person that we lost, or we think about that assault we went through, or we think about the thing that happened to us, the only thing we allow ourselves to think about is that particular event and what we felt around it and the time and the way that it affected us. And because of that, what we're doing is engaging neuroplasticity to continue to automate that abnormal response that we have habituated. And we're basically making that response more robust in our brain. And so then the physiology that happens out of it is going to become more robust. And so being aware of that is the first step to say, you know what, if that response isn't helping me, it's not the trauma that's writing the story of my future, it's my response to it. And so now I need to get any kind of help that I need to help myself develop some different responses so I can begin to leverage that automation process to my own benefit.

Metacognition And Taking Thoughts Captive

Dr. Tabatha 21:11

Yeah, that's so powerful. The fact is that we do have so much control over how we perceive what we just went through. And there's two ways to look at it. And I I kept thinking of the scripture, take every thought captive, because that is our downfall. If we're just on autopilot and falling prey to those patterns, our our brain has created those patterns, but it's in an effort to keep us in survival mode and keep us alive, right? I'm sure you were in that for a while of just being in survival mode. That's how you go back to work, that's how you like just kind of move forward a little bit. But then you do have to get to a point where it's like I need to live again, I need to come back. Back online spiritually and get out of this. So I'm hoping that women are hearing hope today. Like they're feeling okay, there is hope. He has been through the worst of the worst. Because there's nothing worse than losing your child. And I'm you know, and that's I think that's why God sent Jesus and sacrificed him the way that he did, because there is no harder loss to overcome. And he he was with you through that, and he knows that pain, and that's so powerful. And I'm just I'm so grateful that you you moved forward and you chose to keep pressing on and not lose that hope because you are such a blessing to so many people now to like show them there's a way through this.

SPEAKER_02 22:54

That's right. One of the most important skills that that you can develop to just to press this in a little bit further, is that understanding that not everything you think and feel is true. And especially when you've been traumatized, this becomes really important to understand. There's really good neuroscience research that indicates that about 80% of the automatic things that pop into our heads on any given day and the automatic things that we feel at any given time are not true. Which means that if you think that you're supposed to react to everything that pops into your head, or that every time you hear that thought, you know, if this happened to me, it must have been because I did something wrong, or if if I was, if if I went through this, then I must be, I need to be ashamed of that for the rest of my life, or whatever that that thought process that pops nobody will ever love me again, or he's never gonna stay with me, or whatever. If you, if you, if you think that everything that pops into your head is your voice and therefore it must be true, then you're gonna spend about 80% of your time reacting to things that are leading you down a set of responses that aren't helpful to you because it was based on false information. And that's pretty validatable for each of us because if if you just think back in the last six months, there's probably been at least once when you got a text message from your husband or your friend or somebody and you read it and you were in a bad mood when you got it, and you read it, and you reacted to it and said, Why are you being such a jerk? And they wrote back and said, Wait, read that again. Maybe you misunderstood what I said, and you read it again and oh, I took that wrong. And then you have to now apologize for what you said because you reacted to something that wasn't true. The thought that you had wasn't valid, right? So that's why I say feelings aren't facts, they're chemical events in our brain. And thoughts, most of my automatic thoughts are not true. Like if you understand that, and then you couple that with what we've already been talking about, that the more you think about something and the more attention density you give it, the more wired in it becomes and the more automated the response to it becomes, then it starts to be sort of understandable that we feel stuck, that we keep doing the same things and experiencing the same things and feeling the same things every day, because we keep reacting to things that were never true in the first place. And so then if you can just develop some sort of discernment tool, some sort of biopsy ability to look at what you're thinking and feeling before you decide to react to it or how to respond to it, then two kind of miraculous things happen. One is you're gonna be, instead of 80-20 wrong, you're gonna be 80-20 right, because you're gonna be reacting 80% of the time to stuff that is true. But two, that that verse you mentioned tangentially a minute ago is 2 Corinthians 10, 5 that says, take every thought captive, right? And that sounds impossible when you think, well, I've got six to 60,000 thoughts a day. How am I ever gonna take all of them captive, right? But then you're leveraging Hebb's law to your own advantage again. You're gonna teach your brain that before you allow a response to become automatic, you're gonna think about it for a second. And that's this miracle that humans have called metacognition that the zebra doesn't have, as we talked about. Metacognition is where you decide that instead of thinking every thought that pops into your head, and instead of feeling every feeling that pops into your head, instead of that, you're gonna think about the things that you're thinking and feeling for a second before you respond to them. And the other miraculous thing that happens then is your the hippocampus of your brain, which is involved in memory retrieval and context of what you're going through and threat detection and all of those kinds of things. But the hippocampus is also involved in deciding whether you're going to trigger amygdala and get into that fight or flight kind of trauma response mode, or if you're going to engage your frontal lobes. And your frontal lobes are about a trillion times more powerful than your amygdala in terms of processing. And so if you can get the hippocampus to send that signal up to your frontal lobe, then all of a sudden you're making decisions with the best part of your brain that's designed to help you make decisions. When your amygdala is about the size of a walnut and it's designed to help you stay alive, to run away, fight or flight, freeze, fawn, do all that stuff. It's not designed to help you noodle out the appropriate response to something important. And so understanding that most of what you think and feel isn't true, and then deciding to think about those things before you react to them engages your frontal lobe in a way that then allows you to say, wait a minute, last time I did this in this way, it didn't work out very well for me. So maybe I should choose a different response. And then you begin to automate that step, that little gap in there between stimulus and response. And before you know it, you're in charge of those things instead of reacting to them. And that's how you manage to sort of unstick yourself if you've been repeating the same old patterns over and over.

Emotion Versus Feeling: The IRS Letter

Ashlee 27:36

So this has me thinking about we just um we have a weekly call that we do with our members, and we had that call before this, and we were talking about being in a rush and just always being in a hurry to do everything. And your example of text, I think, was perfect, and it fits right along with this, because we don't have to instantly respond to every single text. I think, yes, you should respond to text, but it is okay to stop and think about your response before doing it. Because I I think several times just this week that my husband has texted me and I've like responded negatively because I read it wrong because I'm in a rush. And so um I do feel like that's super important that we just need to slow down because we're always in such a hurry and we don't, we really don't need to be for certain things.

Dr. Tabatha 28:23

Yeah, or you only half read it, and so you get complete wrong guilty. Yeah, you know that Ashley, did you read the first half? Yeah. It's true though. Yeah, I think another piece of it, I would love for you to speak to this. Ashley and I see this a lot with women, is they are so afraid to feel the feelings they know that are behind something that they won't even allow themselves to address it or deal with it. And it's like, no, the feelings are not gonna take you down if you can learn how to regulate and work through them and change your thoughts. I would love to for you to speak to that a little bit because as soon as they feel the heart racing or the sweatiness, like someone who doesn't want to go through a confrontation, they just avoid and like let me bury my head in the sand. And so women stay stuck in that regard as well.

The Thought Biopsy Method

SPEAKER_02 29:22

I think you need to understand, all of us need to understand there's a difference between emotion and feeling. Okay. So emotions are these unconscious things that our body gives us, these signals that come from physiology and and come from brain. And emotions are inherent and they're not bad. And that what they are is barometers to tell you that something's going on or something might be going on. It doesn't necessarily mean that there is something going on. Feelings, though, are what we take from that subconscious indicator that something may or may not be going on, and we wrap it in a story based on our past experience, our current mood, the way we feel, whether we're hungry, tired, healthier or not, all those things. All of a sudden, we're building a story to try to make contextual sense out of what it is that we are emotionally processing in our body. The problem is if you're unaware of that and you just think that when you feel your heart racing, it means that you're having an anxiety attack, or that it means that somebody's about to hurt you or something. When you feel a certain thing that it means this every time, then you're again you're reacting to bad information from the weakest parts of your brain, right? So I think a good example, I think I told you this story before, I think maybe, but imagine going to your mailbox. I'm just going to prove to you right now that there's a difference between emotion and feeling. So I'll tell you how to how to prove it. You go to your mailbox, you pull out a letter, and you look at it, and it's from the IRS, right? Most of us immediately feel something. We have our heart races a little bit, our skin tingles, the hair stands up on the back of our neck, our mouth dries out. Is that sensation fear because you were creative on your taxes, or maybe you forgot to file them, or you're worried that you're going to get audited or you're going to have a big bill come up? Like, is it fear? Or is it that you've been waiting for the tax refund because you're a little behind on your car payment, and maybe that's going to help you make that payment and not have your car repossessed, right? What do you feel when you're afraid? You feel your heart race, you feel your skin tingle, you feel your hair stand up, your mouth dries out, all that stuff. What do you feel when you're excited or you're anticipating something? You feel your heart race and your hair stands up and your skin tingles and all those same things. What I'm pointing out to you is that humans have a narrow palette of neurochemicals and hormones that produce everything that we can feel emotionally. There's a small set of those chemicals. And when your body produces them, you will feel the same set of physiological things happening to you dependent on not dependent on what it means. Okay? So then what tells the story of how you react when you feel something? What tells the story is what your mind is thinking about or afraid of, or the context of a previous time when you've gotten that letter out of the mailbox, right? Now, look at the envelope again. Maybe it was addressed to your neighbor and it shouldn't have been in your mailbox in the first place, right? Maybe you open it and it says, Oh, we got your tax return, we're a little behind, it's going to be six weeks before we process it. Maybe it was never anything at all to be worried about or excited about because it turns out that the truth isn't what you're feeling. The truth is just the truth. And so, in other words, if you want to be accurate in how you respond to things that you feel, the first thing is to investigate them, become curious about them, ask questions. What is it, why is it that I'm feeling this? What was the first time I ever felt this? And is that why I'm thinking about it in the same way now? Because it was December or it was February, and I was wearing a red coat and I saw this thing happen. And now every time it's that weather, and I'm wearing a red coat and something similar happens, I feel the same things like you evaluate, you get curious about what it is that you're feeling. Instead of letting the previous story or your current emotional state tell you what it has to mean. And if you can do that and just again build that little space in there, that little pause. And that's why the Bible says in Isaiah 30, 15, in re in repentance and rest is your salvation. Like he's saying, learn how to rest for a second, learn how to pause for a moment, learn how to take a deep breath for a second, get your parasympathetics activated and calm your physiology down before you react to things. Because when you're in a reactive posture, you're in a very inaccurate posture most of the time. You're just in a protective, defensive mechanism. And you're not using the parts of your brain that are designed to help you make good decisions, right? So I think that that's the secret.

Dr. Tabatha 33:50

Is that what you refer to as your thought biopsy?

SPEAKER_02 33:54

Yeah. Yeah. If you come into my office and you say, hey, I've been having headaches, like I'm a brain surgeon, you've got headaches. What if the first thing I said to you was, well, let's just go to the operating room and I'll cut your head open and look around in there and see what I can find? You could say, wait a second, like timeout, don't you want to do a scan? Don't you want to get some information? Don't you want to do a by don't you want to do something before you go cutting my head open, right? It would be irrational and it would be malpractice for me to choose a reaction based on a symptom that you were having, right? Instead, I get a scan, I do a biopsy, I do something less invasive to try to define what the actual problem is before I determine what the appropriate response is. And that's exactly what we need to do with our thoughts and feelings.

Headaches, Trauma, And Avoidance Loops

Dr. Tabatha 34:39

I would love for you to talk about migraines and headaches, actually, because that is a common symptom that women complain of. And what we see is a lot of times we'll get improvement with cleaning up their diet, incorporating fasting, getting their hormones balanced. But sometimes there is a deeper spiritual issue going on. There's an identity issue, a belief, you know, mismatch. And so how would you use that thought biopsy in that scenario?

SPEAKER_02 35:13

Well, I think there's a number of things. And anytime we we talk about physical symptoms, we you know you and you and I are both physicians, we always have to say, do all the appropriate testing and check things out first. I mean, make sure it's not your thyroid, make sure you don't have a brain tumor, all that stuff. Like so don't hear me say that there's never a medical cause of headaches, because certainly there are. Right. But but once you know that you don't have a brain tumor, and once you know you don't have a sinus infection, and you're having a chronic issue with recurring headaches, there often is a cognitive or emotional aspect to why those keep being triggered. Now we know migraine, for example, there's lots of reasons why people have migraines, but one of them certainly is chronic stress. And also one of them is that people have been through traumatic events that can trigger those headache syndromes. And so if you are finding that when you feel a certain way or when you're going through a certain thing, you tend to have more symptoms, more migraines, more headaches. Then you need to say, what is it that I'm that I'm that's going on in my body, in my brain, in my life that are triggering these headaches? And how can I begin to unwind that instead of taking more medicine, instead of becoming a cripple because of it? So I see so many people, you probably do too, that have this almost headache paralysis situation where they are so afraid they're going to get a migraine that they stop engaging in their life. They stop going to dinner with their family, they stop going to work, they stop going and doing anything socially because they're afraid of that thing triggering and happening. And then they become this person who's automating the avoidance behaviors as a way to prevent the problem instead of dealing with the real problem. So I would say if you're having a chronic issue of any sort, not just with migraine, but chronic pain syndrome, chronic illness of any sort, investigate the emotional stuff that's underneath it and unwind the stuff that you can unwind. Take the medical stuff off the table, of course, but unwind the stuff that you can by learning how to think about the problem differently. Like don't become a cripple to it. Go in advance of it and think through the things that tend to trigger your symptoms and the ways that you may be able to ameliorate them.

Dr. Tabatha 37:15

I love that. That's really helpful because we do have people who they've done all the medical stuff and we've we've worked on identity and and you can just see the blockages, you know, from an outside perspective, and it requires them actually evaluating their thoughts and their past and going through all of that. So I think that's really helpful. Um, I would love for you to share a success story of somebody that you've taken through this self-brain surgery approach. I'm sure you have tons of stories, but you know, women are just they're looking for answers, and I think that your book is gonna be really helpful. I'm super pumped to read it, aren't you, Ashley?

Ashlee 38:03

Yeah, I am really. I I went down a lot of rabbit holes when I watched your um midlife reset summit interview. So I'm excited to read the book. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 38:13

Well, I think one uh we got her email recently from a woman who had been for many, many years struggling with her marriage and really having significant headbutting situations with her husband. And she started, she actually sent me an email and she had an insight that there's only three things that can really change in your life. One is that your circumstances can change, and one is that other people can change, and one is that you can change. And she'd realized that she'd been building her whole frustration with her marriage on the idea that her husband needed to be a better provider and that he needed to have a different personality.

Dr. Tabatha 38:47

And then Oh my gosh, I think half the women listening just agreed with you. It was all on him. Yep.

Marriage Turnaround Through Revaluing

SPEAKER_02 38:53

And and we worked together a little bit, and she and she finally came to this realization that it didn't really matter how much money they made or where they lived or what her husband did or said, because the target would keep changing. Like if he would change one thing, she'd be a little happier for a week or two, and then he would do something else and leave his sock on the floor again or whatever, and it would set her right back into the same attitude. So she realized that she was spending a lot of her emotional and mental energy thinking of all the ways that her husband was a big jerk. And then she finally had this insight that if if I if the real change that happen that needs to happen is inside of me, then what do I need to start changing and what I'm thinking about that might change the way that I interact with him? And that's when it really started to break down for her because she then realized that if she spent all of her imagination time planning what she was gonna say the next time he mounded off to her, or planning what she was gonna do the next time he didn't do the thing he was supposed to do. Then what she was really doing is projecting all this negative emotional energy onto her husband. And then he was reacting to that with the same old defense mechanisms. So she decided she was gonna change her behavior first, her thoughts about him, and she started thinking, why did I fall in love with him? What things about him do I appreciate? Instead of all the things I don't appreciate, what are some of the things I do appreciate? And then before long, she started she started softening in her posture to him, and then he started softening in his posture towards her. And she wrote that her marriage was better than it had been in many years because it all started inside of her.

Dr. Tabatha 40:24

That's so powerful, and that's really what we're called to do. I I think about the life of the apostle Paul, and the fact is, like God did not remove him from any of the troubles. He was in prison half the time, and he still found a way to grow and evolve and appreciate and build his character and become what God had created created him to be, despite all of his circumstances. So I I don't think God wants to remove you from your circumstances, I think he wants to change you, you know? And I love that example.

Ashlee 41:04

Yeah, me too. So there's women that are listening to this right now, and maybe some men too. And so they're like, okay, what do we need to do? So give us three things that they can start doing right away.

Three Steps To Start Today

Book Details And Ways To Connect

SPEAKER_02 41:16

Number one thing that you have to believe that your mind and the brain and your brain are not the same thing because your brain's doing its job all the time. It's automating things, it's trying to take load off your mental plate, and you can change the stuff that you sit around and think about. And that will change the instructions you're giving your brain as to what to automate. And so once you really believe that in your core, that I have some agency and control over what my brain becomes, that I'm not stuck with the brain I've always had, I'm not a victim to how my brain has always behaved, because it's literally, we we know from from electron microscopy research, I got my tongue tangled. We know from good research at what neurons do, that there is literal instant change in neurons' connection to other neurons within seconds of you changing from one thought to another thought. Which means that this idea that you're stuck with this brain that's always been, people say, Well, I've always been this way. How am I supposed to change now? My dad was this way, my mom was that way, this is how my family is. Like, literally, you can think that, but as soon as you say, you know what, I'm gonna be, I'm gonna go to the gym today. Like, as soon as you say that, your brain begins to make structural connections to prepare your skeletal muscles to exercise. You begin to release some dopamine to give yourself a little reward for just the idea that you might go to the gym later today. So your brain literally is waiting for you to give it different instructions than you've been giving it. And as soon as you do, it makes structural changes to become the brain that will support what you're asking of it. And so the first thing is believe that your mind and your brain are not the same thing and that you have tremendous agency and control over what your brain becomes, and that it will start to become the way you need it to become as soon as you decide to think one thought and not another thought. That's tremendously empowering and hopeful. The second one is just get really curious about what you're thinking and feeling and start to investigate or biopsy it because it's true that about 80% of the stuff you think and feel isn't ever true. And you're not obligated for one more second of your day. If I can write you one prescription, it is that Dr. Warren said you don't have to react to thoughts and feelings that are untrue. Not ever again. And so knowing that 80% of the time that baseline thought or feeling is gonna be false, just give yourself that little grace of a moment, a space, a thought long enough to take a breath and just investigate is this true or not? When that thought pots into your head, nobody's ever gonna love me. Really? My mom loves me, like my my sister loves Dr. Tabitha loves me. You know, I mean, somebody loves me. It's not true that nobody loves me. So then question that. And once you identify that it's not true, you don't need to react to it anymore. You don't need to lie awake at night and worry about it anymore because it's not true. So just get rid of it. And once you Get rid of it. The third thing is have a bank of thoughts to transplant in place of the negative, false ones that you just got rid of. And I think the best way to do that is with scripture. So when I use scripture and memorize it, it gets in my brain and my heart and my mind in a way that I can replace false thinking, faulty thinking, with something that's going to be helpful and true. And so once you have something helpful and true that you can transplant in there, you identify a thought that says something like, I'm a loser and I've got no future. Well, you know that you decide that that's not necessarily true and you biopsy that and get rid of it. You replace it with something like Jeremiah 29, 11 that says, I know the plans I have for you, plans to prosper you, not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future. Like, like memorize something that's going to help you replace a false thought with a true one. And if you're not a scripture person, there's lots of you can read a good book or find some other place to put some stuff in your heart that will help you. But I think scripture is the one that always comes through for me. So those are three things I think will be really life-changing for you.

Ashlee 45:01

Those are powerful.

Dr. Tabatha 45:02

Oh, so good. I love that so much. Tell us about your book. When is it coming out? Where do we find it? And like, how do we connect with you?

SPEAKER_02 45:12

Yeah. So the life-changing art of self-brain surgery is coming out February 3rd. Um, it's everywhere books are sold in the world. So you can get on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, your local bookseller. It's an audible version that I recorded. Um, there's a digital version if you like to read Kindle. There's a hardback version. Um, and so the book's available everywhere. You can go to my website, which is just my name, Dr. Lee Warren. There's no periods or anything, just DR Lee Warren. And you can order it from there. Um, I also have a podcast that's uh two episodes a week that um is heard in 150 countries around the world. And this is what we talk about. We talk about self-brain surgery and how to connect science and faith and and try to make your life better. And I write a weekly newsletter on Substack. So easy to find me. Love to connect with people. Please get the book. I think it'll help you.

Dr. Tabatha 45:56

A hundred percent. Yeah, you you gotta get the book if you are listening. You are just such a wealth of knowledge. And thank you. Oh, I'm so grateful that you continued on and you pressed through the pain. And like, I love how God works. The fact that you were in that room that day and you saw the functional MRI, and he just gave you and your wife that, you know, aha. Like, if we can just see God for all the goodness, he really is trying to turn everything around and use the most painful parts of our lives to do some miraculous things. So thank you for being open to all of that.

SPEAKER_02 46:38

Thank you. And appreciate the work you all are doing, and you're really making a difference and connecting your faith to your work is is just inspiring. So thank you.

Dr. Tabatha 46:45

Oh my goodness. Ashley, you want to take us out of here? Yeah, do you want me to read the verse today? Yes, I love that.

Ashlee 46:52

All right, Isaiah 40, 31. But those who hope in the Lord will renew their strength, they will soar on wings like eagles, they will run and not grow weary, they will walk and not be faint.

SPEAKER_02 47:04

Amen.

Dr. Tabatha 47:05

Amen. So hope is available to you. God is waiting for you to just fall into his arms and take care of you. So thank you, Dr. Warren. We will definitely stay connected.

SPEAKER_02 47:18

Thank you both so much. God bless you.

Dr. Tabatha 47:19

Bye, ladies. Have a good week. Have a great week.