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Dr. Danny Huerta: Well, hi, I'm Dr. Danny Huerta. When a teen is struggling with anxiety, the stress often brings sleepless nights and being pulled apart as parents. But many couples have walked this road and found deeper unity along the way. On Fearless Faith, I share common places where anxiety begins while young adults like Caroline share how they've grown with faith, patience, and community support. You'll also hear practical ways to care for your teen while strengthening your marriage. Listen at navigatingteenanxiety.com.

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Dr. Lee Warren: And when you change what you think about, you're changing what your brain is structurally for the purpose of helping you. This idea of self-brain surgery is you can change what your life looks like by changing how you think about things.

John Fuller: That's Dr. Lee Warren sharing about God's incredible creation of the human brain and how you have choices to literally make your brain better. I'm John Fuller and welcome to a fascinating conversation today on Focus on the Family with Jim Daly.

Jim Daly: John, I'm so looking forward to the discussion today because I think sometimes in the Christian community, we don't see science for what it is, which is the discovery of God's creation. That's how the early scientists looked at it, like Newton, in discovering and figuring out calculus because he felt if this is a created universe, then there's a way to know the created universe. We just need to find out what God intended and how he built it. Today's discussion is going to be fascinating because we have a very special guest, Dr. Warren, who's a neurosurgeon. That area of brain science, brain research, it is a fascinating field.

John Fuller: It is, and he's captured some of his insights in a terrific book called *The Life-Changing Art of Self-Brain Surgery*. I love the title and will encourage you to get a copy of that today.

Jim Daly: Dr. Warren, it's great to have you back. It's been some time, 2021 I think, when we had you here last time. So thank you.

Dr. Lee Warren: Thank you. It's great to be back with you guys. Thank you so much.

Jim Daly: Let's kick it off right there. Let's knock this down. So many of us in the Christian community, we struggle a bit with that bridge into science. To me, it's exciting because I think more and more right now science is proving creation, that there is a creator.

Let me give you one that I found in some of the research and have you respond. The telomeres, and these are the caps of your DNA. The longer your telomeres, the more likely you'll have a longer life. You will live a longer life. They're looking at that score saying what predicts a longer telomere in your genetic makeup is less stress in your life as a child. If you have an absent father—and they connected those dots saying if your dad is loving, in the home, present with you, your telomeres are going to be longer and you should have a longer life. This is right out of scripture. What do you say about that kind of observation that we're learning now?

Dr. Lee Warren: Well, I think the thing I've tried to sum up and I've been looking at for many years is that every time scripture writes a prescription for human flourishing, science eventually comes along and says, "Guess what we figured out?" It always lines up. That's exactly what we see with DNA. Stress when you're younger shortens your lifespan.

Jim Daly: It's so fascinating to me. In your research and in the book, you mention this idea of genetics having a role and brain science having a role in generational difficulty. You think again of scripture where it says the sins of the father will rest upon the third and fourth generation, something like that. When you read that scripture as a neurosurgeon, knowing the research that you have, how do you translate that?

Dr. Lee Warren: Well, we always talk about that like it's a threat, like God's going to do something bad to your kids if you don't live a certain way. What we've figured out through the science of epigenetics is it's really just a warning. The things that you do in your life, the things you think about, the way you live your life affects the genetic makeup of your kids when they start.

That's the bad news, so to speak, that your kids can be born with some burdens that they didn't need to have. But the good news is we know now that you can reverse all those things if you figure out how to manage things well in your life. All those genetic starting points can be switched off and you can develop a more healthier and longer life if you get it right in your generation and that can be passed on to your kids.

Jim Daly: And we're going to talk about how you can begin to do that. I know some people are going, "Wait a minute, this lack of leaning on God." You're not saying that at all. This is to lean on God, the designer, to better understand his blueprint for how life lives. When we become Christians, and there's people listening and watching who are not believers, we know that through our research and we're grateful that you're listening and we with all our heart want you to come into a relationship with Christ. But in that context, as a scientist, as a neurosurgeon, when we read those scriptures, it really is a blueprint for how God intends for us to live a good life in him. Describe that.

Dr. Lee Warren: So Jesus said in John 10:10, he gave us this dichotomy. The thief comes to steal and kill and destroy. I came that you might have life and have it abundantly. So that's this idea that we're supposed to have a life of fulfillment while we're here, not our circumstances, but the way we feel, the way we manage things.

What we're learning through science is if you think about the right things in the right way, your brain makes structural changes to improve your physiology and your life gets better regardless of your external circumstances. So scripture and science again lining up. The idea that if you come to a relationship with your creator, you start to see his plan and his design for your life. That turns out to be what science is showing us all along.

Jim Daly: When we get into it now, when you look at brain science, for so long we've been told these things are fixed. In other words, if you have behavioral issues, these are things that are immutable and can't be fixed. But again, brain science is saying not so fast. In that context, what has modern brain science revealed and completely challenged in that area?

Dr. Lee Warren: It's been amazing since the 1950s when they gave us the structure of DNA. The whole prevailing doctrine of science in general and that leads to psychology and therapy and general opinion of everybody in society is that the brain that we have creates the life that we have. The genetics, your upbringing, things that can affect your brain all determine what kind of capabilities and possibilities you have for your life. So everybody thinks that if you get the wrong brain, you get the wrong life.

Then 21st-century neuroscience comes along with functional imaging and shows us that your brain is structurally changing itself every second of every day of your entire life. It's never been the same brain two days in a row and the primary driver of those structural changes turns out to be the things that you most frequently think about and the perspective from which you think about them.

That's why all of a sudden you start reading scripture like Romans 12 about renewing your mind and you start seeing that the Bible had it right all along again, that what you think about turns your brain into what it is. It's never been that your brain determines who you are. It's what you think about determines what your brain becomes.

Jim Daly: Those that would preach this message of positive talk, someone like Tony Robbins. I don't know him, he's probably a great guy. In other words, you can just positively talk yourself into a greater place, greater wealth, greater social skills, whatever it might be, more friends, etc. I would think those people are tapping into a bit of this, but describe the difference. What you're talking about spiritually and physiologically, the difference.

Dr. Lee Warren: So I want to make a very clear distinction between this whole doctrine of sort of manifesting a better life and all of that and what we're talking about from scripture and science properly applied. There is some truth to the fact that the way you think about things affects the things that happen to you. There's all kinds of science around how our brains affect other people, even non-verbally. Our mirror neurons and electromagnetic field that we put off and all of that and you can increase your chances of having better circumstances by changing how you think because it makes your brain and your body and your emotions line up with other people in a different way.

So there's some truth to that. The real truth underlying all that, though, is that the way God made our brains is we have a system called the reticular activating system that actually filters what we see and perceive in the environment around us.

The reticular activating system is a system of neurons in your brainstem that when you tell your brain that you are going to look out for something—like "I'm going to have a lousy day," for example—your brain begins to filter to show you things in the environment to reinforce what you've told it to be looking out for. This is why scripture is always telling us to rejoice in all of our circumstances, to keep a positive attitude, to look for things to be thankful for. Because if you're looking for things to not be thankful for, you're going to find a lot of them because your brain will literally try to show you the environment that you're looking for. It's not magic. It's the way God made our minds to help us see the world that he's put out there. There's always possibility around us and there's always trouble. He says look for the positive because that's going to help you make your brain function as best it can.

Jim Daly: I know you're a neurosurgeon, a psychologist, or psychiatrist. What they're dealing with with high levels of anxiety and depression in the culture right now. How does a person that wakes up already predisposed to kind of thinking fearfully of everything around them structurally? How do they begin to rethink that when that's your pattern?

Dr. Lee Warren: The first thing is to realize that the research shows that a large percentage of the automatic things that we think and feel—these thoughts that pop into our heads or these moods that come upon us—a large percentage of those are not based on anything that's real. They're just based on your brain trying to make sense out of the environment or out of your past experience.

If you're used to feeling a certain way all the time, your brain will sort of wake you up feeling that way. But as soon as you learn that you can start to ponder things from a different perspective and your brain will begin to reinforce what you're telling it to focus on, your mood will follow that.

The psychology is very clear now that people who learn to think more positively—again, not false positivity, but to think more realistically that I have some control and some agency in what I feel and what my life turns out to be if I choose to renew my mind like the Bible says—I would say if you're struggling with mood or affect, understand that you're not the victim of that. You don't have to respond to what your brain and your emotions are telling you. You can literally use your mind to control your brain from the top down and decide rather how you want to feel and begin to make that more real.

Jim Daly: In that context, that sounds a bit like rerouting your neuro-pathways, which is something science is working with people that struggle with anxiety or depression. Describe what that means, rerouting neuro-pathway. That's what you're saying, but for the layman, what is that really doing?

Dr. Lee Warren: It's really important to understand. It sounds like a self-help gimmicky way of thinking about things. It sounds like a metaphor. It's actually real. Your brain works by connecting neurons to other neurons and then groups of neurons to other groups of neurons. These are called synapses. These little connections, they're physical wires like these wires on these microphones that connect different parts of your brain.

The science shows now that when you think about one thing and not another thing, you literally degrade the old pathway that was there and lay down the pipes, the wires, the wiring for a new connection between neurons that wasn't there before.

You literally are structurally rewiring your brain in a real physical way that can be measured. Changing how you think—that's what Philippians 4 is all about, by the way—if you want to be less anxious, be grateful, think about different things, and you'll be guarded by peace. That literally makes structural changes in your brain and we know now within seconds to minutes of changing the things you ponder, you're making new pathways through your brain. It's not metaphor. It's mechanism of how we can create this life that Jesus said he came here to give us.

Jim Daly: I need to ask this question because someone who struggles with anxiety or any difficulty in their emotional structure, it can sound so easy, but it hasn't worked for me. I wake up every day fearful and I live in that place. I just want to—how would you speak to a patient that struggles with that and there is help, there are ways, there's clinics that people can certainly go to that help them in this regard? I'm mindful of that person that is suffering and feels like this is too thin.

Dr. Lee Warren: First of all, let me just say, I'm here primarily today not as an expert, not as a neurosurgeon, not as somebody pontificating about this, but as a bereaved father who lost a son, as a PTSD victim from the Iraq War. I've been in this place. The reason I'm doing this research and writing this book is because I resonate with that person that's feeling that.

It's not a character flaw to feel bad or to have emotions that are pushing you around. But the thing you need to understand is the reason you feel that so strongly every day is because your brain has automated that as a pathway. The good news is as soon as you start to pursue a different pathway, your brain will begin to automate that and try to make that new neural environment and neurochemical environment real and more powerful for you.

This can be managed and can be overcome no matter where you start. If you need professional help, those folks know how to help you get to that new place. God's given you the mechanism. It's already inside you. The prevailing thing we need to know is we're designed for this kind of healing. We're not designed to stay broken.

Jim Daly: Dr. Warren, with Mitch, they will say, they being psychologists, etc., that the most difficult experience in life is a parent losing their son or daughter. You mentioned Mitch. What happened? What were the circumstances around that?

Dr. Lee Warren: We don't really know, Jim. He and his best friend were stabbed to death in the same house on the same night. They never solved the crime. They came up with theories but never gave us any more information other than that. Not only did we lose a child, but we didn't know what happened and we never were able to—

Jim Daly: How old was he?

Dr. Lee Warren: He was 19.

Jim Daly: Oh, goodness.

Dr. Lee Warren: And so you're right. That remains the most difficult season that we've ever been through. Then wrapped in all that mystery, it made it harder to process.

Jim Daly: Given you've experienced something that heart-wrenching, how did you and your wife just begin to climb out of that place?

Dr. Lee Warren: It actually turns out that it was brain science and faith working together that helped us navigate that. We were at the time working on an Auburn University campus. The building we worked in was doing this brain imaging, 21st-century brain imaging. We had a chance to watch some of that research one day. We went down to the scanner and they had a woman in the scanner. We were watching her brain be scanned and functional imaging allows you to see what the brain is doing, not just what it looks like.

They spoke into the woman's ear and they said, "Mrs. Johnson, think about the worst thing you've ever felt in your whole life." We thought, "Well, we know what that is for us." We watched the screen change as she thought about the worst moment of her life. We watched the neurotransmitters in her brain change and the fear center of her brain light up. Shortly after that, we saw her physiology change as her blood pressure went up and her heart rate spiked and all of that. We watched her thinking turn into brain activity that turned into body activity.

Then they said, "Okay, stop thinking about that and now think about the best day of your life." Shortly after she changed what she thought about, her frontal lobes came online, her amygdala fear center calmed down, and her blood pressure came down, her heart rate came down. We saw it in real-time thinking changing brain, changing body.

Lisa, my wife, said that reminded her of Philippians 4, where it says if you want to be less anxious, be grateful. Think about something better, all those different thought transplants you could do. Just as clear as I'm talking to you now, I heard this message from the Lord. When I do brain surgery, I'm intentionally making a structural change in somebody's brain to try to help them. When you change what you think about, you're changing what your brain is structurally for the purpose of helping you. And that's exactly the same kind of thing as I do with surgery.

This idea of self-brain surgery is you can change what your life looks like by changing how you think about things. I realized in that moment I can't change having lost my son. If I want to feel better, I've got to change how I think about losing my son. Can I make it legacy? Can I think of some way to make his loss a gain for us, not for us personally, but to help other people through it? Can I turn it into some purpose? Then my life became about how do I use this to help somebody find the footing that I was trying so desperately to find? How can I find scripture that reinforces this idea that my brain can change if I change my thinking? And that's really when it began to heal for me, Jim.

Jim Daly: Dr. Warren, that's a beautiful example of how to heal. This is Focus on the Family with Jim Daly and today we're talking with Dr. Lee Warren about his book *The Life-Changing Art of Self-Brain Surgery*. The subtitle is *Connecting Neuroscience and Faith to Radically Transform Your Life*. Get a copy of the book from us here at the ministry when you stop by focusonthefamily.com/broadcast.

Dr. Warren, you describe a fascinating experiment with mice and cherry blossoms. My son, who is doing his master's in biochemistry, knew about this research and was really interested in it as well. Describe its outcomes and what caught your attention.

Dr. Lee Warren: This is this theme of epigenetics. The research of epigenetics came out of this type of work. They looked at mice and they exposed them to a powerful smell. They used cherry blossoms. Apparently, mice like cherry blossoms. When they could see that the mice—their male mice—were reacting to the smell, they would shock them. They basically taught these mice to be afraid of the smell of cherry blossoms.

Then they studied their DNA and what they found is that they made powerful switches in the expression of their fear molecules, their stress hormones, in the sperm cells of these male mice in response to that threat and that that could be inherited. Basically down to four generations, they figured out that shocking the great-grandparent would produce babies born down to four generations with abnormal stress responses, elevated cortisol levels.

These mice were born afraid of the smell of cherry blossoms even though they had never experienced adversity in response to that threat. That says again things that happen in your life can affect your generations. That's been replicated in humans, by the way, in Holocaust survivors. They found that down to four generations, the children or great-grandchildren of Holocaust survivors can be born with abnormally high cortisol and abnormal stress responses.

That tells us that things that happened before we were ever born affect how we feel inside. The good news is in mice and in humans, it's been shown that you can reverse those changes in one generation. If you are born, for example, stressed by things you didn't experience and you do the work to learn how to manage that in your lifetime, your children will be born with a more normal stress response than you were. That means you can fix it. That's why God says down to a thousand generations we'll get it right, we'll make it better. There's great hope in learning how to get this right in your lifetime.

Jim Daly: I'm really intrigued, Dr. Warren, by "doing the work." I'm thinking of those of us in the adoptive community or foster care space. Children who've gone through deep trauma and difficulties that they can't control. These things happen to them. What does "doing the work" mean for us as parents or caregivers or family members when we have somebody in our life who's been really traumatized?

Dr. Lee Warren: I think the first thing is to really buy into the truth that your system was designed by your loving creator to give you an opportunity for your life to feel better than it has felt in the past. Things that weren't your fault, things that you went through, things that you experienced, things you inherited, don't have to be the future for you.

We've learned from the trauma research, for example, that it's never really been about the trauma that we went through that creates the life that we have. It's the responses that we've adopted to those traumas. As soon as you learn that, it becomes good news. If it was true that the loss of my son would create the future of despair for me—if it was the loss of Mitch, then I wouldn't have much agency or hope that I could change that because he's gone, right?

If you went through something as a child, that thing really happened. If it was that thing that created your future, then you wouldn't have a lot of hope. But it turns out when you understand that you adopted a set of responses that were maladaptive or were not helpful to you—that you believed some things to be true about yourself, that you accepted some labels, you believed some lies maybe from your enemy even, that the future had to look like the past—if you believe that, that's actually what's been creating the reality that you have.

As soon as you learn that your brain will structurally change when you decide to change how you look at the things you've been through—when you decide to change your perspective and look at them in a different way—then you can start creating a brain that will support who you want to be in the future and not who you have been in the past. That's where the hope lies.

Jim Daly: There are so many scriptures jumping into my head that reinforce this very attitude, whether it's "fear not." Back to that point in the discussion a little while ago. The Lord is saying, "Don't fear. Don't set up your neuro-pathways to be fearful." Read my word so that it gives you hope. Man, is it that basic? That's amazing.

Dr. Lee Warren: It really is that basic. We're designed to heal and get better.

Jim Daly: That is something. Let me, as we're drawing to a close here, ask this question on the parenting side. We will joke from time to time again—these are things that us parents say to our kids—"Hey, we probably messed you up so we're going to set aside some money for you to get counseling at the right time." We say that in jest, but it sounds like this may be very true. In other words, we've participated as parents to either help or not help our children overcome these things.

Let me give you a specific example, like controlling parents, the helicopter parent. It's tough to build resiliency into your children if you're saving them from every moment, right? Speak to the importance as a parent of understanding brain science so you can appropriately, spiritually in tune with God's design, raise up your children in the way they should go.

Dr. Lee Warren: I wrote a whole chapter in the book about pediatric self-brain surgery because it's so important to understand that you're stewarding these little minds who are creating brains that are going to hopefully support them in a good way for the rest of their life.

It's incredibly important to understand, just like you said, the best example is resilience. We all have this idea that if we protect our kids from all kinds of hardship, that they'll have a better life. But the research doesn't back that up at all. We're seeing now kids that can't launch, they're taking their parents to job interviews with them. They're not getting driver's licenses when they turn 16 because they don't know that they can survive adversity because we never let them survive adversity when they were little.

The Bible says in Romans chapter 5, suffering produces endurance and endurance produces character and character produces hope. We're supposed to get to hope through the process of surviving some adversity. Now we know from brain science in the 21st century that the part of your brain that creates resilience and willpower and the ability to shift through hard things gets stronger only when you go through hard things.

That means you need to let your kids experience some hardship when they're little and they can survive it. It's not the end of the world if they have to sit by a kid that they don't like or if they fall off the playground equipment and hurt themselves a little bit. It's the end of the world if they grow up to become adults who don't know that they're wired to get stronger when they go through something hard. The Bible's been saying it all along. Parents have a responsibility to let our kids grow up in a safe way, understand that God has a plan for them, even though there's going to be some hardship, that they're going to get stronger. They're designed to get stronger by going through that hardship, not by avoiding it.

Jim Daly: Dr. Warren, this has been so fascinating. I love this stuff, partly because my son is always talking with me and Jean about what he's learning. So that's opened my mind up to some of the things that you're expressing. It's just far better for us as Christians to understand these things, not to be fearful of them.

My goodness, if we could talk to the creator and understand his architectural drawings, why wouldn't we want to do that? And then when it gets to these great scriptures, I am of the opinion that nothing is lost in scripture, that the words that God has given us are very purposeful. I think and I hope people today can hear that when the Lord says, "Fear not" and to trust him, that it has this connection into neuroscience. My goodness, but who better than the creator to give us those words to think about so that we can live a life that is more abundant in Christ, finishing the John 10:10 scripture that you gave us. So thank you for being with us. This is so good.

Dr. Lee Warren: Thank you, Jim. Thank you, John.

Jim Daly: I want to say to the listeners, why not? You need to get a copy of this book, *The Life-Changing Art of Self-Brain Surgery*, written by Dr. Warren, a Christian neurosurgeon. I think you'll find amazing answers in here about things that you've probably thought about but haven't thought about in this way.

John Fuller: Contact us today, make a generous donation as you can, either a monthly pledge or a one-time gift, and we'll send this book to you as our way of saying thank you for being a part of the support team. Our number is 800-A-FAMILY or stop by focusonthefamily.com/broadcast. Thanks for listening to Focus on the Family with Jim Daly. I'm John Fuller inviting you back as we once again help you and your family thrive in Christ.

Guest (Female): Focus on the Family Clubhouse and Focus on the Family Clubhouse Junior magazines provide loads of fun and faith-based messages for your kids. And you may also find some unexpected benefits for your family.

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