AMP'd Up: The Neuroscience Power to Change Your Future
Self-Brain Surgery™ helps you create a brain that makes life better
How to Get Ahead by Thinking Ahead
Hey friend,
This week, I’m prescribing a powerful tool you already have, but you may not know about it or be using it well: anticipatory metacognition, the practice of thinking about what you’ll think about, before it happens.
We discussed several applications of this practice on the podcast last week, but I wanted to give you one of my favorite examples today.
✈️ Mental Rehearsal Before the Mission
The US Navy Blue Angels are one of the elite flight demonstration teams in the world (along with the USAF Thunderbirds and a few others). They fly incredibly dangerous performances, often passing within a few feet of each other at hundreds of miles per hour speed. To perform such intense routines safely, they need their minds laser focused and their brains tuned to the high-precision tasks each of the pilots must accomplish.
That’s when they need to get AMP’d up, and this operation can help you in your life as well. The self-brain surgery operation I want to teach you today is called Anticipatory Metacognition Practice, which I call AMP.
The Blue Angels don’t just rehearse their maneuvers in the sky. Before every flight, they sit in a room together and talk through the entire routine, frame by frame, visualizing every turn, throttle adjustment, and timing cue. This is mental surgery before the mission. And you can use the same process to rewire your brain toward clarity, calm, and better choices under pressure.
🎥 Here’s a short and fascinating video that shows the Blue Angels getting AMP’d up for one of their shows.
🎙️ Last week’s Mind Change Monday podcast episode walks you through how to use this amazing ability to navigate your life more effectively.
In that episode, I gave you three tools that work together to help you, as Hebrews 12:13 says, “make level paths” for your feet. The three tools are:
🧠 Anticipatory metacognition (AMP)
🧠 The Pre-mortem analysis (I wrote more about that here)
🧠 The greatest mental gift God gave to us humans, Selective attention (I talked about that here)
Check out the podcast, AMP’d UP to learn how these three superpowers work together to help you become healthier, feel better, and be happier. Click the buttons below to watch or listen.
🧠 Neuroscience Nugget: Your Brain Loves Rehearsals
Research shows that visualizing an action activates the same neural circuits as physically performing it. This is especially true for experts like concert pianists who improve not just by playing, but by mentally practicing. (Surgeons do this too!)
When you mentally rehearse a hard conversation, a business pitch, or a spiritual battle, you're pre-activating neural pathways that make it easier to follow through in the real moment. You’re not just thinking, you’re building structure.
✝️ Faith Fact: God Calls Us to Prepare Our Minds
1 Peter 1:13 (NIV) says,
“Therefore, with minds that are alert and fully sober, set your hope on the grace to be brought to you when Jesus Christ is revealed at his coming.”
The Greek for "alert" literally means to gird up the loins of your mind—a call to mental readiness. God built us to think ahead, to focus our hope, and to prepare for battle before it starts.
🧠✝️ The Science-Faith Smash: Avoid Self-Malpractice
The bad news is that AMP is easily hijacked, because you can take this incredible gift of preparing your mind and building your brain positively, and turn it into a something harmful instead.
How?
When you use anticipatory metacognition to catastrophize, focus on the worst-case scenario, or plan how you’re going to blow someone up with your words or actions, you’re going to get better at those things instead of building a brain to help you get better at getting better. (Remember the 9th commandment, “I must believe that what I’m doing, I’m getting better at.”)
Ephesians 4 gives us two examples of the pre-mortem analysis way of looking at this. In verse 17, we’re shown people who live their lives suffering from a faulty mindset (the author calls it the “futility of their thinking”). But verse 23 says we can, instead, be “renewed in the attitude of our minds.”
So, don’t violate our 1st commandment of self-brain surgery: “I must relentlessly refuse to participate in my own demise.” Use AMP as it’s designed- to help you and not hurt you.
Remember, you’re literally creating a new brain with every thought you choose to focus on and allow to become a real thing in your life. So choose wisely, and get AMP’d up!
🧪 News for Your Neurons
A groundbreaking study by Pascual-Leone and colleagues had two groups of people learn a piano sequence. One group physically practiced, the other just imagined playing. After five days, both groups showed similar increases in motor cortex excitability, meaning that mental practice alone changed their brains.
(Reference: Pascual-Leone, A., Nguyet, D., Cohen, L. G., Brasil-Neto, J. P., Cammarota, A., & Hallett, M. (1995). Modulation of muscle responses evoked by transcranial magnetic stimulation during the acquisition of new fine motor skills. Journal of Neurophysiology, 74(3), 1037–1045. This paper is discussed in detail in Norman Doidge’s amazing book The Brain That Changes Itself)
Your brain doesn’t need your body’s permission to start improving. Mental rehearsal is real training, and it pays off. Your mind creates your brain!
🧠💥 Prescription for the Week:
Choose one situation you’re nervous about—a meeting, conversation, relationship, or decision—and do a mental walk-through.
Visualize it going well.
Anticipate potential challenges.
Pre-decide how you’ll respond.
You’re not being anxious, you’re getting prepared by creating the brain you need for what’s coming in your life. That’s Self-Brain Surgery.
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📚 More Tools for Changing Your Brain
🎙️ Subscribe to The Dr. Lee Warren Podcast for weekly strategies to change your brain—and your life.
📖 Grab my book Hope Is the First Dose for a roadmap to recovery and transformation.
📘 And stay tuned for The Life-Changing Art of Self-Brain Surgery—coming February 2026!
🎧 This Friday on the podcast, we have a special guest!
My friend, the bestselling author and podcaster Mattie Jackson-Smith, is back on the show to discuss her new book, a 365-day devotional guide to healing, Through the Valley of Grief. Please be sure to listen or watch, as our conversation is so rich and helpful if you’re hurting.
📺 Paid subscribers can scroll down to watch it ad-free now.
⚡️Call to Action: Get AMP’d Up!
Getting good at AMP won’t just prepare you for success, it will protect you from misuse of your mental energy. As I said earlier, too many people use selective attention to catastrophize, worry, or dwell on what might go wrong.
But AMP helps you redeem that gift. Use it to shape your mind, rewire your brain, and walk confidently into the future God designed for you.
The good news is, you can start today.
Let’s get after it. 🧠✝️
Lisa and I are praying for you.
Dum spiro spero (While I breathe, I hope),
Lee
Psalm 71:14 ("As for me, I will always have hope.")
From the banks of the North Platte river on Moon River Ranch in Nebraska, USA
Be sure to check out the archive of previous posts if you missed last week’s letter.
This week’s letter is sponsored by Timeline
Just as we practice self-brain surgery to renew our minds, we also need to renew our bodies every day. That’s because good health is like home maintenance – eventually things break down if you don't clean up and repair. And as our bodies age, the energy to perform those repair processes in our cells begins to fade because our mitochondria lose efficiency.
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