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Good morning, my friend. Dr. Lee Warren here with you. It is Mind Change Monday.

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On the first Monday of Mind Change March, and today I'm going to give you the

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Ten Commandments of Self-Brain Surgery in one convenient place.

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We've had several people route in lately saying, hey, you're always referring

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to the Ten Commandments. Put them in one place. We've done that several times before.

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They're always on the website at drleewarren.substack.com. You can find them

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if you search for the Ten Commandments of Self-Brain Surgery.

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But today, given that we're in Mind Change March, we're going to put them all in one place.

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I'm writing the book, Self-Brain Surgery, How to Rewire Your Brain,

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Reorder Your Mind, and Radically Transform Your Life. It's coming.

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I'm getting after it. And as I write it, there may be some reordering of the Ten Commandments.

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I'm trying to figure out the best way to structure the book because it's going

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to going to come along with worksheets, a workbook that'll be published separately,

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and probably some workshops that we can do virtually together or in physical places together.

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So we're going to try to present this work to the world as a way to change your

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mind and change your life. So today, I'm going to give you the 10 commandments of self-brain surgery for

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mind to change March, so you can really get after it.

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I hope you're continuing with your abide practice to learn how how to listen,

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pray, meditate, and get your mind and your brain right to help you accomplish

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the goal of becoming healthier, feeling better, and being happier.

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Go back to yesterday's podcast on the spiritual brain surgery side for more about that.

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And before we get started today, I have one question for you.

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Hey, are you ready to change your life? If the answer is yes, there's only one rule.

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You have to change your mind first. And my friend, there's a place where the

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neuroscience of of how your mind works smashes together with faith and everything

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starts to make sense. Are you ready to change your life?

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Well, this is the place, Self-Brain Surgery School.

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I'm Dr. Lee Warren, and this is where we go deep into how we're wired,

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take control of our thinking, and find real hope.

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This is where we learn to become healthier, feel better, and be happier.

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This is where we leave the past behind and transform our minds.

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This is where we start Are you ready? This is your podcast.

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This is your place. This is your time, my friend. Let's get after it.

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Music.

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All right, you ready to get after it? Here we go. There's a great horned owl

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right outside my window hooting and hollering, so you may hear some owl noise

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out there. He's wanting to be on the podcast today.

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We were sitting last night in the living room, all of us, and I spent the weekend

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clearing a bunch of this river grass that has grown up really tall on the riverbank.

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It's kept us from being able to see the geese and the cranes and all that in

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the river, so I spent some time clearing the riverbank, and that revealed a

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rain gauge that Dale and Joe Margaret,

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when they built this place, put out there so they could see how high the river was.

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Not really a rain gauge. It's a marker to tell how high the river is.

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But I looked out over my shoulder and sitting on top of that river rain gauge,

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was a huge owl just sitting there in the yard.

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So we all got a chance to look at him or her and watch him fly off into the

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woods. And it was really cool. It's a neat place that we live in. But nevertheless, the owl apparently is back

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and making some racket out there. So if you hear him, that's pretty cool.

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If you can't hear him, trust me, he's pretty loud right outside my window.

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So I've been hearing from a lot of people that they want another round of the

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Ten Commandments of Self-Brain Surgery. So I thought, well, it's Mind Change March, and it's the first Monday of Mind

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Change March, and I'm writing the book, Self-Brain Surgery, so why wouldn't it be a perfect time?

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To go back over it. These are our core values. If we're going to be self-brain

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surgeons, if we're going to learn how to radically sort of reset and transform

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our minds, as the Bible tells us so clearly that we need to do.

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Then we need to have a set of operating principles. Now, you could say,

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well, we're Christians. The operating principles is the Word of God. Well, that's true.

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But I'd like for you to have a little distilled handbook of principles that

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are consistent with neuroscience. Consistent with Scripture, that

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you can get your hands around and sort of memorize and keep in mind as,

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hey, if I really want to have a better thought life, if I really want to not

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be so reactive to the things that happen, and if I really want to not spend

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my whole day chasing a feeling,

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if I want to finally get control and start to gain traction on my grief, on my anxiety,

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on my depression, on my anger, on my habits, on my addictions,

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I really want to start feeling like I'm in control of some aspect of my life,

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then I need to get a set of principles. I need to operate my life under a set of tangible, repeatable principles, right? Right?

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This has to do with what we talk about on spiritual brain surgery all the time.

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Know what we believe and why we believe it and how to explain it to other people

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so that they can find some hope in it too. So without further ado, let's just hit the 10 commandments.

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Okay? Now understand I'm not being sacrilegious when I say the 10 commandments.

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I'm not literally saying God says you have to change your mind or change your life.

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He does, but I'm putting these in a context and using the phrase 10 commandments

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because these are 10 things that if you do them,

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you will find yourself living consistently according to

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scripture and solid neuroscience and you'll find

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that things begin to feel better and not

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so hopeless and not so scary and not so reactive all

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the time okay so the first one the first

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day of medical school they teach us the oath and the

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oath based on the famous hippocratic oath starts with the phrase primum non

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nocere in latin which means first no harm first no harm so the first commandment

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of self-brain surgery is I want you to relentlessly refuse to participate in your own demise.

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So much of our life is spent thinking down rabbit holes, trails of worst case scenarios.

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Catastrophizing things in our minds, convincing ourself that because this happened

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or because we did this or because she did that or because this thing happened

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or because my son passed away or because he divorced me or because I got this

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diagnosis or my husband died because X, Y, or Z,

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that that means the rest of my life has to be a certain way.

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So we spend this whole amount of huge energy in our lives going down rabbit

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holes of thought that lead to physical harm for our body, okay?

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I've proven it to you over time and science shows it conclusively that what

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you think about turns into physical things in your body.

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It turns into electrical events between you and other people.

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It turns into how you affect the generations of your family.

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What you think about turns into what you live and how you live and even how your family lives.

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So then therefore, getting control over what you think about,

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And deciding not to harm yourself anymore with your thinking is the first principle.

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Relentlessly refuse to participate in your own demise.

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We'll have much more to say about that. It'll be an old section of the new book.

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But first, no harm, okay? So whatever you're going to do, however you're going to spend your time,

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whatever's going on between your ears, make a commitment to yourself not to

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do harm to yourself anymore with your thinking, okay?

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Number two, you must believe that feelings are not facts.

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Feelings present themselves to us and they feel so real. I feel anxious.

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I feel depressed. I feel scared. I feel tired. I feel stressed.

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I feel whatever. And our feelings have been taught to us by our recent,

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at least secular worldview, that what you feel, you need to follow it,

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man. Just chase your heart. Follow your dreams.

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You do you. Live your truth. And I'm just here to tell you, that's not a livable worldview.

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It's not a livable philosophy. And primarily because from a chemical standpoint, from a neuroscience standpoint,

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feelings aren't true. They're just barometers.

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Feelings happen inside you. Emotions happen to tell you that something's going on.

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But they don't tell you what's going on. And you're supposed to use your frontal

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lobe to discern what that feeling is about.

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Spend some time with it. Think about it. respond to it in a healthy way rather

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than being reactive to it. But the problem is we've trained ourselves to think that what we feel is real.

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And we forget that we have a limited emotional palette of things that we can feel.

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And so that means it's something that makes you feel anxious,

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that in some point in your past was tied to a particular thing,

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like, I feel anxious when this happens, and now I'm feeling anxious,

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so this must be happening again. That's where it breaks down, okay?

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Because the feeling triggers something that you've assigned meaning to in the past.

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And if you're not careful, if you're not very careful, then you will spend a

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lot of time in your life reacting as if that thing is happening again.

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When the only thing that's actually happening is you're having a feeling that

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you've previously assigned a particular meaning to.

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And so the whole game is to learn how to stop for a second, biopsy your thought,

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and make a decision based on what's actually happening now and not what that

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feeling has made you think about or believe in the past, okay?

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So feelings aren't facts. That's commandment number two.

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Commandment number three, closely related, thoughts are not always true.

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You must believe with all your heart that thoughts aren't always true, not always true.

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We know from neuroscience that there's somewhere between 30,000 and 100,000

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negative thoughts that you think every day, thoughts that pop into your head

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that aren't true, that are biased towards negativity.

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Negativity, and most of us spend our whole lives chasing those thoughts,

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reacting to them as if they're true, letting them be law in our minds.

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And here's an example. You might see somebody give you a look, for example.

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You look across the dining room, and you see your spouse, and their eyes return

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towards you, and you see a look on their face, and you decide in your mind, oh, he's mad at me.

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And then you spend the next few minutes inside your brain saying,

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well, he shouldn't be mad at me. I haven't done anything wrong.

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He's the one that does everything wrong. And then you go down this whole rabbit hole of why is my life always like this?

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Why does everything always feel so hard? Why do people always treat me that way? Who does he think he is, right?

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And the truth is, sometimes if you actually had, next time you had a moment,

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pull your spouse aside and say, say, hey, I saw your eyes kind of dart over

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me or over towards me for a second. What were you thinking about?

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And you might say, oh, I just had this memory pop into my head when my mom died

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and I was just sad for a minute and I was looking at you and I was just feeling really sad.

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Or it might be that they remembered a stressful meeting that they're going to

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have the next day at work and they were feeling bad about that and they were

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getting kind of worked up and anxious about it and their eyes just happened

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to dart over towards you. It may turn out that the thought that you had about the thing that you saw wasn't

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based in any type of reality at all.

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And then you spent a lot of mental energy and time and emotional distress that

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turned into cortisol in your body that stressed your system and made your stomach

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hurt and made your heart race and made your body ache and all that stuff because

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it was based on you reacting to something that you thought that was never actually true.

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And so principle number three is understanding that thoughts are not always

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true so that we learn to think about our thinking.

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I think a large percentage of my time as a neurosurgeon is spent dealing with disordered thinking.

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And we have to be careful when I say disordered thinking in this day and age because...

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We think everything's a disorder. Like everybody's got a diagnosis.

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Every weird person we think is on the spectrum.

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Every person who's stressed out today we think has anxiety disorder.

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We call everybody a narcissist if they disagree with us.

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Like everybody's pathologizing and diagnosing everything all the time.

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And the fact is, that's just not really true. Sometimes you can be anxious without having an anxiety disorder and you can

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feel sad without having major depressive disorder.

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And somebody can be kind of a jerk without being a narcissist.

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Maybe they're just having a bad day. And somebody can actually just be not a

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very nice person today without being some kind of disordered psychiatric diagnosis, right?

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So the truth is thoughts are not always true, and feelings aren't always facts.

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We have to remember that, okay? So I spend a lot of time in my practice dealing

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with thoughts that aren't true, people thinking wrong about their thinking,

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feeling wrong about their feelings, and believing wrong about their beliefs.

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Like that, spend a lot of time dealing with disordered thinking.

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Again, not a disorder that's a psychiatric diagnosis, but just thinking that's kind of out of order.

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And if you straighten that out and learn how to think about your problem,

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you can learn to attack it in a different way. Maybe you don't need to have brain surgery.

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Maybe you just need to change the way you think about your diagnosis a little

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bit, and we can make you better without having to cut you open. Okay?

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So that's the third principle. Thoughts are not always true.

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And again, closely related, number Number 4.

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Thoughts become things, okay? It's just true.

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Thoughts become things. The things you think about turn into

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genetic up or down regulation in

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DNA to encoding of genes or suppressing of genes to changes in your neurotransmitter

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levels to changes in hormone production to changes in cortisol and other stress

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hormones in your body to physical changes in how your heart and your gut and

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your skin and every other organ system work. work, thoughts become things.

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Thoughts turn into inherited characteristics in your children.

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The things you experience epigenetically alter the genetic expression in your

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kids, and your kids can be born afraid of things that you were afraid of,

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even if they never experienced them.

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That's been shown in human research with PTSD victims from Vietnam and Holocaust

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survivors, that those changes can last three and four generations into the future,

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and your kids can can be anxious about things they never experienced.

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And that puts a responsibility on us to understand that thoughts become things, okay?

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Number five, don't treat bad feelings with bad operations, okay?

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If we're going to learn self-brain surgery, we're going to learn some techniques

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and some operations to operate on our thinking and operate on our feeling and

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change the way we think and live. And we're going to transform our minds, as Romans 12 says, because as Romans

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Romans 12.1 says that's an essential and reasonable act of worship.

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We're going to try to change our minds and change our lives.

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We have to understand that sometimes we have a bad feeling and we perform the

14:58

wrong type of self-brain surgery on it. And we treated a bad feeling with a bad operation.

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And that never leads to a good outcome. In my practice, if I think wrongly about

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your problem and I do the wrong operation, that's called malpractice.

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So we don't want to commit malpractice against ourselves. And a common one that

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we do is we feel bad about something and we don't want to feel that.

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So we use some sort of numbing behavior like alcohol or drugs or television

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or something else, gambling or shopping or something, to make us not feel that thing right now.

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And we've treated a bad feeling with a bad operation.

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And the next day, guess what? We don't get the outcome that we want.

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And so don't treat a bad feeling with a bad operation. And that leads to number

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six, which is love tomorrow more. Don't pay the tomorrow tax, okay?

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Lisa and I call this thing the tomorrow tax. We don't love tomorrow enough to

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not feel what we're feeling right now. So we want to take the bad feeling that we're feeling right now and cover it

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up in some way. We perform that bad operation.

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And then tomorrow, we still have the original problem, and now we have a headache,

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or now we have a debt because we spent money we didn't need to spend,

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or now we've sent off a bunch of angry emails or text messages and we treated a bad operation,

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a bad feeling with a bad operation and we hurt some feelings or we created some trouble.

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And now today, we've got to deal with all of that stuff and the original problem

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and we're paying the tomorrow tax because we didn't love today more than we

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didn't like what we felt yesterday. So don't pay the tomorrow tax by loving tomorrow more.

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Number seven, don't make an operation out of everything. thing.

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Peter Janetta taught us this. We'd be doing some kind of brain surgery, a literal operation.

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And I would be, as a young trainee, making it more complicated than it had to be.

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And Janetta would say, hey, don't make an operation out of it.

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And that was a joke because we're actually doing an operation.

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But it's not really a joke because there's always a way to simplify everything.

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There's always a way to stop making it harder than it has to be.

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The Bible says in in two places. Make level paths for your feet.

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Think down the path of where you're going and try to simplify and streamline

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and make things as comfortable and as manageable as they can be to get the job

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done in a way that's not overly stressful or overly complicated.

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You don't have to make a Rube Goldberg machine out of everything that you do.

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Don't make an operation out of everything. We'll unpack all of these in individual

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episodes in the coming months, by the way. The next one, don't.

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Sort of perpetuate or create generational issues for your family anymore.

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Don't take troubles that you got from your dad or your mom and pass them on

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to your kid. Don't start new ones either. Recently read something, I think Gina Berkmeyer said it, like,

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if you don't heal the child inside you, then you'll harm the child that comes out of you.

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Like, so we have these generational issues. My dad did it that way,

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so I've got to do it that way. Or, you know, I was abused as a child, so I'm going to vent my anger on somebody else.

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And these become the fulfillment of God's prophecy that the sins of the father

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are visited on three and four generations of the children.

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That's not because he hates the children or he's a big jerk who punishes people.

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It's a warning to us. Be careful how you live your life because what you do

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affects your children and it affects them for generations until somebody comes

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along and marries the right person who had a different family and says,

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wait, we don't want to do this anymore. We want to change this. And fortunately, a lot of these things kind of peter

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out after a few generations. That's just, it's verifiable science, but God was saying it passionately,

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compassionately thousands of years ago.

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How you live turns into what happens to your great-grandkids in some ways.

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So be careful how you live, right?

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Don't perpetuate generational troubles. Don't start new ones.

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That's a commandment of self-brain surgery.

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And then on a physical level, if we have the mind that's us,

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that's our spiritual being that communicates with the Holy Spirit and with God

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and can control our body and our mind is seated in the organ of our brain,

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then it makes sense that we want to take care of our brain. So commandment number

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nine is don't hurt your brain. Be careful with the physical structure and organ of your brain.

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Wear helmets when you ride bicycles. Yes, adults, you need to wear a helmet. You're eight times more likely to die

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if you hit your head on a bicycle or a skateboard if you don't have a helmet on than if you do.

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You need to wear a helmet, and your kids need to wear a helmet.

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Every time they get on something that moves faster than they can walk,

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they need to have a helmet on their head. Love your brain. Protect your brain. Don't drink alcohol too much.

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It's a directly neurotoxic substance. It kills brain cells.

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And so if you don't want to run out of brain cells before you're done living

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and become demented or have some kind of big problem, problem,

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don't do things that are known to harm your brain.

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This is that Romans 12.1, like present your bodies as a living sacrifice to God.

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It's a holy, reasonable, and acceptable form of worship.

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If you're worshiping God, when you decide I'm going to not do this anymore because

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it hurts my brain, I don't want to hurt my brain.

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I want to smoke cigarettes and starve my brain for oxygen.

20:11

I don't want to drink too much alcohol and literally kill brain cells.

20:15

I I don't want to bang my head against things when I don't have to.

20:17

I want to be careful with my brain. I want to take the right supplements and organize my diet properly because I

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know that nutrition affects how my brain functions. And I want to take care of it.

20:28

And then I want to protect it with my thinking because I know that the way I

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think rewires parts of my brain and either makes it healthier or makes it worse.

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And so I want to love my brain and I want to protect it. I don't want to hurt

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my brain. That's commandment number nine. Finally, number 10 is practice mental first aid.

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We all have a responsibility to each other to inspire each other to rewire our brains.

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This is what Dan Siegel said, the founder of interpersonal neurobiology, inspire to rewire.

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It goes great on a t-shirt, but it's true that we need to practice mental first aid.

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In medicine, there's a thing we teach called see one, do one, teach one.

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It's like you want to learn how to start an IV. You watch me do it,

21:07

and then I teach you how to do it, and then you teach somebody else.

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And you really ingrain an ability to do something by understanding it well enough

21:15

to teach it to somebody else, that's what mental first aid is.

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Say, hey, to the person that you love or to your child, hey,

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you seem to be beating yourself up a lot. You seem to be struggling with these recurring thoughts.

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Let's talk about that. Be willing to internalize these principles well enough

21:29

that you can help the people around you learn to deal with them more efficiently

21:34

and effectively as well. And we all help each other. Somebody emailed me yesterday and said,

21:38

hey, we're all just walking each other home, right? We're helping each other get through this life.

21:42

We have to be able to practice mental first aid. If you saw me bleeding to death

21:47

from a stab wound or something, you would stop and put pressure on that wound

21:50

and help me stop the bleeding. And we can do that with our loved ones too. We can say, hey,

21:55

I think you're really struggling here. Can I help you?

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Can we talk about this or can you give me some words to understand what you're

22:03

feeling so I can pray for you more effectively?

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Is there some way I can help you carry this burden? That's what the Bible says we're supposed to do.

22:10

Is bury one another's burdens. And practicing mental first aid will do that.

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So that's a rundown of the 10 commandments of self-brain surgery.

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Let me just restate them. Number one, relentlessly refuse to participate in your own demise.

22:23

Do not commit self-malpractice. Number two, believe that feelings are not facts.

22:29

Feelings are chemical events in your brains. They are not facts.

22:31

Number three, thoughts are not always true.

22:34

Number four, thoughts become things.

22:36

Number five, don't treat a bad feeling with a bad operation.

22:41

Number six, love tomorrow more. Number seven, don't make an operation out of everything. Number eight,

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don't perpetuate or start generational troubles for your family.

22:51

Number nine, don't hurt your brain. Love your brain. Do not hurt your brain.

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Number 10, practice mental first aid.

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Friend, these principles will help you change your mind and help you change your life.

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These principles will help you become healthier you and feel better and be happier.

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They might save your family. They might save the generations for your grandkids and great grandkids.

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And they definitely will help you start today.

23:16

Music.

23:21

Hey, thanks for listening. The Dr. Lee Warren Podcast is brought to you by my

23:25

brand new book, Hope is the First Dose. It's a treatment plan for recovering

23:30

from trauma, tragedy, and other massive things.

23:33

It's available everywhere books are sold. And I narrated the audio books.

23:37

Hey, the theme music for the show is Get Up by my friend Tommy Walker,

23:41

available for free at TommyWalkerMinistries.org.

23:44

They are supplying worship resources for worshipers all over the world to worship

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the Most High God. And if you're interested in learning more,

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check out TommyWalkerMinistries.org.

23:55

If you need prayer, go to the prayer wall at WLeeWarrenMD.com slash prayer,

23:59

WLeeWarrenMD.com slash prayer.

24:02

And go to my website and sign up for the newsletter, Self-Brain Surgery,

24:06

every Sunday since 2014, helping people in all 50 states and 60-plus countries

24:12

around the world. I'm Dr. Lee Warren, and I'll talk to you soon. Remember, friend, you can't change your

24:16

life until you change your mind. And the good news is you can start today.