Good morning my friend!
I hope you’re doing well. We had a huge snowstorm on Friday, which left us buried in five-foot snow drifts. We spent the day digging out, but the county road that leads to our house still hasn’t been plowed, so we’re mostly cut off from the world until the plows arrive!
Don’t forget that you can get the recent podcast archive with transcripts of all episodes by clicking the button below.
As I begin the writing process for my next book, tentatively titled Self-Brain Surgery: Tools to Rewire Your Brain, Reorder Your Mind, and Radically Transform Your Life, I’m synthesizing an immense amount of information from numerous fields, some of which are listed below:
Biochemistry
Molecular biology
Quantum physics
Philosophy
Psychology
Interpersonal neurobiology
Psychobiology
Psychiatry
Cognitive neuroscience
Neurosurgery
Neurology
Theology
Apologetics
All of this information is swirling together to help me articulate how exactly it is that you can learn, at any age and despite any prior trauma, tragedy, or massive thing, to change your mind and thus find the hope of changing your life.
A popular term for the application of neuroscience to improving one’s life is self-directed neuroplasticty, which was coined by Dr. Jeffrey Schwartz, a psychiatrist and Jesus follower from UCLA. Dr. Schwartz is famous for making dramatic progress in the treatment of patients with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). He has written a number of bestselling books, but my favorite is The Mind and the Brain: Neuroplasticity and the Power of Mental Force.
I had a chance last week to speak with Dr. Schwartz on the phone, and he gave me his remarkable testimony of having been a secular Jew growing up, to becoming fascinated with Buddhist meditation and its power to help calm the mind, and how this slow evolution of his thoughts ultimately led him to find the hope and healing that only the truth of Jesus can offer. He became a Christian (after he wrote The Mind and the Brain), and now has extensively studied how faith uniquely improves brain function and helps people make progress with even the most stubborn manifestations of disordered thinking.
Here’s a video of Dr. Schwartz and his colleague, Dr. David Carreon, discussing these ideas. Dr. Carreon is a leader in the field of transcranial magnetic stimulation for depression. He and I had also had a great talk recently, which you’ll be able to hear on the podcast soon, when I’ll tell you about his amazing upcoming book, The Opposite of Depression.
The takeaway I want you to get from this is that a dramatic increase in the number of physicians and legitimate scientists are coming to agree that science clearly supports the notion that God is good for your brain. We’ll unpack that in coming weeks, but at the outset of my writing this book, there are a few things I want to make sure you know, because they are true of you. These will be presented today as facts, and I’ll prove them to you later.
My friend Tommy Walker wrote a song years ago that was instrumental in my faith being rescued from a spiritual crisis I was having. It’s a list of attributes of God, called These Things Are True of You.
Today, there are some things I want you to know, because they will help you process and take maximal value from the help I’m going to offer you in my upcoming letters, podcasts, and books.
So, without further prelude, here are things that are true of you, my friend:
You are not your brain. Science has shown conclusively (you will not hear this in the news or in “Popular Science”) that your mind and your brain are separate things.
Although your mind and brain are not the same, they do interact with and influence each other (The brain is the organ of the mind’s expression, but the mind exists without the brain, as shown in near-death experiences and as stated in the Bible).
The mind has tremendous capacity to make structural, anatomical, and chemical changes to the brain. Imagine if a software update could turn your iPhone 14 into an iPhone 15! Impossible, right? But your mind actually can transform or renew your brain structurally. See Romans 12:2.
You were born with a set of genes from your parents that pre-determined some things about your life that are outside your control (eye color, biological sex, etc.). But the doctrine of genetic determinism has been soundly defeated by science, and the truth is that most of of your genetic expression is also under the control of your mind, lifestyle, and environment. This means that you’re not doomed to be “just like” your parents, because you can change your mind.
Trauma and tragedy can also make structural changes to your brain, but you’re not stuck with those either. Trauma is not what happened to you, it’s your response to what happened. And again, the good news is that if you learn to change your response, you can heal and move forward again.
Habits and addictions can rewire our brains in harmful ways, and we can become convinced that we’re stuck with them. Again, science and faith smash together here to provide hope: you can learn to break habits and form new ones.
You have a tremendous number of feelings and thoughts each day, and the vast majority of them are untrue. You can learn a procedure to identify these and take action only on the real ones.
There are many more of these truths, but they all follow the same theme: you’re not stuck being the way you’ve always been, feeling the things you’ve always felt, doing the things you’ve always done, or hurting the way you’ve always hurt. You can change, you can overcome, and you can heal.
There are three paths to this kind of change:
The Immediate Hack: You can learn some “hacks,” or shortcuts that can help you quickly apply the neuroscience to your advantage, even if you don’t care to know all the details or underlying research. This approach has been proven to produce increases in happiness, as shown by Dan Harris in his bestselling book 10% Happier.
The Immersive Help: You can actually use science to understand your mind and brain, and begin to heal. This is more than 10%, it’s significant. It’s important. But you have to be willing to to dive deep, to stretch, to challenge things you think you know, and to accept that your brain may not work the way you’ve heard, and that this is a good thing.
The Infinite Healing: You can allow science and faith to smash together, like particles in a supercollider, and be almost infinitely bettered by the release of the transformative power of self-brain surgery (listen to that podcast to learn/remember what I mean by “self” there). This is the highest level of healing and hope, and it’s what I’m going to teach you in the coming months.
You’re not stuck, you’re not broken, and you’re not beyond help. You, my friend, simply have to stop contemplating all the things you wish could change, and start operating your mind and your brain like they were designed to work.
It’s time to stop contemplating, and start operating.
These things are true of you, and I’m going to prove it to you.
But you don’t have to wait for me to prove it before you start living the life you were made to live. You can start today.
Lisa and I are praying for you.
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
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Wow! Such incredible information and such hope through your message. Thank you for introducing us to others in the field who are also giving this hope to others. So thankful to have found you and your message.
Sounds like a powerful book Dr. Warren. I love the collaboration that goes into your writing. "Go alone you go faster, go together you go further.