Rewiring Your Heart and Mind, Part One – Dr. Lee Warren

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Rewiring Your Heart and Mind, Part One

Guests:Ron Deal and Dr. Lee Warren

From the series:Rewiring Your Heart and Mind (Day 1 of 2)

Air date:March 6, 2025

Dr. Warren:Feelings are not facts. Feelings are chemical events. And what happens with a feeling, your body, your brain, your body, your gut releases some sort of hormone or neurotransmitter. And the meaning behind what that chemical means depends on your memory and your current mood and your current experience. But if you’re not aware of that, then you sort of reattach the previous meaning the last time you felt that thing or the common times that you felt that thing.

And so what happens then is we begin to believe that every time I feel a certain set of physiological things, that means the situation I’m currently in is the same as it was the first time I felt that.

Ann:Welcome to FamilyLife Today, where we want to help you pursue the relationships that matter most. I’m Ann Wilson.

Dave:And I’m Dave Wilson. And you can find us at FamilyLifeToday.com. This is FamilyLife Today.

I tell you, when you go through something really hard, which I think we’ve gone through a few.

Ann:I think everybody has.

Dave:I mean, once you’ve gone through something, you’re not naive anymore.

Ann:Not only are you not naive, but you become anxious that that thing will happen again.

Dave:Yeah, like the time you got a melanoma removed from your arm and the scars from your shoulder to your elbow, and I wasn’t there. Husbands, listen up, whatever—

Ann:That’s a whole nother story.

Dave:—whenever the word cancer is involved, go with your wife to the appointment, okay? I’m just telling you that’s a lesson learned.

Ann:But you’re right. Once you go through something like that, so then I have a little mole, and that pops back into my mind of, “Oh no,” and this fear starts to come up and you’re thinking, “Will that happen again?”

Dave:Well, here’s the thing. I didn’t even know this, but that’s actually something that happens in your brain. It changes the structure of our brain, but your mind can change your brain. And today and tomorrow we’re going to hear a portion of Ron Deal’s conversation with a brain surgeon, Dr. Lee Warren from his book, Hope is the First Dose. Many of you know this. Ron is our director of blended here at FamilyLife and he sat down with Dr. Warren and it’s fascinating to think how our brain changes as we go through hard stuff.

Ann:And this guy is legitimate too. He’s the author of three books, including the award-winning book, Hope is the First Dose. In addition to being a neurosurgeon, he hosts this great podcast about exploring faith and neuroscience. He and his wife Lisa have a blended family with four adult children, four grandchildren, and they live in North Platte, Nebraska. Now think about that bio.

Dave:Yeah, and you’ll find out he’s gone through PTSD himself. He’s had an unwanted loss of his marriage. His son was tragically killed, and so Ron and him sit down and talk about those things among other things through the lens of a blended family. You may not even be in a blended family, but I guarantee you this conversation is going to impact you, and people you know, in a powerful way.

[Recorded Message]

Ron:Hope is the First Dose is about giving hope to people who have lived through really hard things. Blended families have lived through hard things, sometimes even traumatic things. So what becomes of those things, those big, massive things as you call them, what becomes of those things in our life if we don’t apply hope to them?

Dr. Warren:Basically, I’ve said it many times, Ron, I take care of people with brain tumors and the hardest things that people can go through medically, but brain cancer is not the worst thing that can happen to somebody. It’s not the most fatal thing. The most fatal thing that can happen is hopelessness. If you lose hope, really, you lose the ability to see a future beyond where you are now. You lose the ability to see how God could make the situation better. And so hopelessness really turns everything dark and keeps you stuck.

I think hope is the driving force to change, to healing, to refining purpose and happiness after these hard things happen. So I think hope is the engine that keeps us moving forward.

Ron:Yeah, absolutely. Okay, so let’s unpack some things. Neurologically what happens to us when we experience grief or tragedy or some significant attachment injury in our life?

Dr. Warren:Well, I think the first thing that happens is we get an unmooring from what we thought our future was going to be. Especially like you and I, we’ve lost children, and you had this notion before you lose a child that your kids will be around to bury you someday. And those things that we think we know turn out to be really important to us. And when we lose something that we thought we were sure of, then it can become an unanchoring.

And so your life, all of a sudden, doesn’t look like what you thought it was going to look like, and you find yourself asking big questions like, “How could God do this to me?” “How could my life not be what I thought it was going to be?” And all the things you’ve been working so hard for, all of a sudden, aren’t those things anymore.

And so I think that neurologically what happens then is your brain starts to tell you things that will appear to be true: “This is always going to feel this way. It can never get better than it is now. All my good days are behind me.”—those kinds of things that we start to hear. Because what your brain does is it takes a feeling, a neurochemical event, a signal that you’ve in the past associated with a certain reality—danger, fear, anxiety, whatever—and it brings that previously attached memory and thought and attaches it to the chemical signal that you’re getting that tells you you’re supposed to feel a certain thing right now; and then projects that into your future as if it’s always going to be that way.

And so what happens is you begin to believe that how you feel now about the situation is the truth about how you’re always going to have to feel about it. I think that’s the first thing.

Ron:And that sounds like hopelessness right there. So there’s some chemical things that are happening. There’s some wiring of the neurons within the brain and whatever fires together, wires together, and so all of a sudden, those things are connected, and if you’re not careful, you can find yourself just casting a negative future and being stuck.

What’s fascinating about that is that sort of spiritually speaking, we’ve talked about things like that within the Christian community for a long time and people have experienced it. You just have people telling stories about that sort of thing. But now, when we have this ability to look inside the brain and go, “Yes, and there’s something physiological that’s actually going on that’s connected to that experience,” I don’t know. What that says to me is that it’s more ingrained than we realize. Is that a fair assessment?

Dr. Warren:It is. Your body is a big feedback loop. I mean, the way that God built our minds and our brains. It’s necessary probably at some point in this conversation to separate mind and brain. I think a lot of people don’t spend much time recognizing that they’re different things. But body, mind, brain, gut, all those things are connected and they feed back on each other. So when you have a big trauma or a big event that changes that thing that you thought you knew, and all the things we already discussed, then you begin to sort of get physiological signals that are telling brain that your body is hurting in different ways. And so you then begin to think about the feelings that you’re feeling, and you start to then focus on them.

And so cortisol is a good example. You start thinking about the way that you’re feeling bad, and your brain brings back up how that in the past has felt bad and you start to focus on feeling bad. You start to release stress chemicals and biochemical events happen in your body that begin to then make that bad feeling become part of your body. That’s why I had a shingles outbreak right after we lost our son.

Every time I think about my son now, I have pain in my right scapula. That’s where the shingles happened. That’s a brain-body connection that my brain made that says when I hurt over losing my son, my body’s going to hurt in my right scapula. And so I think that’s a long, sort of short answer to your complex question.

Ron:But the reason that’s relevant for everybody who’s listening right now is things that you’ve experienced that are hard and difficult. You lose a spouse to death and now you find yourself doing life by yourself as a single parent, whatever that journey was for you. Or you went through a divorce and never saw that one coming, and you feel the weight of that and the pain of it. You see your kids suffering. You see them struggling and you’re trying to figure out what God’s doing in all this, what life holds for you, what’s this new future, and if you’re not careful, what can happen is you end up sort of digging your own rut. Is that a fair way of saying it?

Neurologically, there’s a rut going on inside your brain, and emotionally there’s a rut going on in your life, where you’re looking at and constantly seeing that negative future or forecasting negative things into what’s good.

One of the things we talk about on this podcast from time to time is what we call the ghost of marriage past; that those little notions of things that you learned—unfortunately, you learned in a difficult relationship and now you’re in a new relationship and if you’re not careful, you bring all that stuff with you and that’s easy to do. It’s easy for that to happen and you don’t even realize it’s happening, right?

Dr. Warren:Yeah. So you’re referring to this idea of the neuroscientists call synapses. Basically the neurons in your brain or the cells is where the business of brain activity happens. But the magic of how the brain works is in networks, and so cells connect to other cells. There’s a hundred billion or so cells in your brain. Nobody really knows the total number, but they make trillions of connections. And so there’s literally more connections between cells in your brain than there are stars in the universe. There’re just trillions of them.

And what happens is when you think about something enough times, you create a synapse to automate that set of feelings and chemical events and whole experience idea that you don’t have to then purposefully think about again to experience the same sort of emotional response anytime you’re in a situation that kind of reminds your brain of that having happened.

So you’re in a bad marriage, you have abuse, you had something that happened to you, and you wired into your brain that when somebody looks at you a certain way, your body’s going to respond as if it’s in danger because you were in danger then. Now, you’re in a new marriage and your husband looks at you a certain way, and that’s what you feel. “That thing is about to happen again. I’m in danger again,” even though you’re not.

Feelings are not facts. Feelings are chemical events. And what happens with a feeling, your body, your brain, your body, your gut releases some sort of hormone or neurotransmitter. And the meaning behind what that chemical means depends on your memory and your current mood and your current experience. But if you’re not aware of that, then you sort of reattach the previous meaning, the last time you felt that thing or the common times that you felt that thing.

And so what happens then is we begin to believe that every time I feel a certain set of physiological things, that means the situation I’m currently in is the same as it was the first time I felt that. So the thing your uncle did to you when you were nine made you feel a certain set of things, and now when you feel that your skin rises, you feel chill on your neck, or whatever, that means somebody’s about to hurt you, even though they might not be about to hurt you.

And so we have to learn then to discern. That’s what 2 Corinthians, in the Bible, 10 verse 5 says to take every thought captive; that this idea of, I feel something, but I don’t have to believe that that is currently happening, and I can think about it and then decide how to appropriately respond to it. That’s the beginning of learning how to take charge of our thoughts and feelings.

[Studio]

Ann:You’re listening to FamilyLife Today and we’re listening to just a portion of the FamilyLife Blended podcast with Ron Deal and guest Dr. Lee Warren.

Dave:I’ll tell you what I’ve never thought of 2 Corinthians 10:5, take your thoughts captive in that way.

Ann:I know.

Dave:That you can actually stop when you’re in the middle of a feeling and think I need to choose how to respond to that. Let me just say there’s more to come in this conversation with Dr. Warren and Ron Deal. But if you want to listen to the whole thing, you’re just getting a portion here, you can go to episode 144. It’s called Hope is What the Doctor Ordered on our FamilyLife Blended podcast.

Ann:So let’s get back to their conversation.

[Recorded Message]

Ron:My wife and I in our book called The Mindful Marriage, we talk about the story that you write that’s connected to those experiences. And so not only is there as this physiological response within the brain, but there’s a narrative that gets written over time, especially if some of those experiences sort of happen over and over again. And the story of your pain then becomes the story you walk out, even if that’s not necessarily what’s actually happening in the moment that you’re actually in.

And the next thing you know, you’re stuck in the past, now in the present, making the present more like the past. That’s one of the ironies of the ghost of marriage past is you end up creating a self-fulfilling prophecy in some ways by the way you respond to the current situation.

Dr. Warren:That’s exactly right. There’s the thing you referred to a while ago, the neurons that fire together, wire together, that’s called Hebb’s Law. And the guy, Hebb, was the one that figured out that this thing that we now call attention density. So the more you pay attention to something from a particular point of view, the more those neurons say, “Hey, you don’t have to spend all this mental energy thinking about this. We’ll just wire it so that it happens automatically, and you can think about something else.”

And so you basically create these ruts, as you call them, that the wagon of your thought is going to go into the wagon of your physiological response is going to go into, and that becomes a path that you don’t have to actively think about anymore. That’s why I always say, the things we do, we’re getting better at.

So you’re doing this, past feelings, maybe experience a certain thing, and now I’m bringing that into my current marriage and I’m causing trouble for myself today based on something that happened in the past. Then I’m going to become better at doing that. And so now all the little things about my spouse that remind me of something in the past, I’m going to start associating with those things in the past. And I’m going to start bringing attitudes and behaviors into my marriage now that aren’t about my marriage now. They’re about something that happened in the ghost of marriage past, as you just said.

Ron:I don’t know if it’s true, but a long time ago I was told that there’s a sign somewhere in Alaska. “Choose your rut carefully,” when you’re driving down the road. “Choose your rut carefully. You’re going to be in it the next 200 miles.” I just think that’s sort of what we’re seeing here, but we don’t choose. We sort of drift into ruts and don’t even realize that we’re in them. And then we’re going to be stuck in that rut for a very long time.

My guess is this is where we need to bring in the difference between mind and brain. Because if we’re going to talk about changing and getting out of our ruts, we’ve got to know the difference. Tell us about that.

Dr. Warren:That’s right. That’s exactly right. I’ll give you 400 years of cognitive neuroscience in about 3 minutes and that’ll catch us up, okay?

Ron:I love it. I love it; go for it.

Dr. Warren:Before Isaac Newton, most people in history kind of thought that their life had a meaning and a purpose, and that God put them here, somehow, they got here, and they had a reason why they were on Earth. They were supposed to honor God with their life or do something notable with their life; that their life meant something.

Then Isaac Newton came along who has gotten a bad rap. He was a Christian, and then the work that he did as a scientist was aimed at trying to explore what God did. So his intention was to use science to explain what we see in God and thereby honor God and help other people see Him. And guys like Maxwell who discovered the equations that taught us about electromagnetism and all that, that led up to Einstein in the 20th century, developing quantum physics with all those smart guys from Austria and Germany. That basically Newton said we need to be able to examine things and figure them out with a process.

So he came up with the laws of thermodynamics and the laws of motion and all those things. And then after Newton, what everybody did is they got this idea that we could figure something out and break it down to its component parts and reduce it to the stuff that it was made out of. Newton called them atoms, that he believed that it was hard physical structures that were little, tiny things that built up everything. I’m going somewhere with this, I promise.

Ron:Okay, I’m with you.

Dr. Warren:So Newton said basically you break everything down to its smallest part. Then you can build it back up and understand what’s going to happen to it and how it’s going to behave. So you break it down, understand the making of it, and then you can understand what it’s going to do. And people took that, and they created something called determinism, which means basically if you can reduce something down, you can reduce it to its component parts, then that will determine what those parts are going to do.

And they began to believe then, over the course of evolution, after Charles Darwin came along and said we all just got here from the primordial goo. And that came out of a bunch of accidental things that happened in the universe for billions of years before that. Basically they decided that if we understand how the brain works, we can then predict how it’s going to behave.

And this idea of determinism came along, which means basically you don’t have a purpose or a meaning. There’s nothing real about you. You just are what you are, and you can’t really change it. And then once Watson and Crick came along and discovered how DNA works, then the doctrine of genetic determinism came along and that led people for the last 50 or so years to believe that pretty much, Ron, you are going to be what your parents gave you genetically. That’s how you’re going to think. It’s whether you’re going to drink or not. It’s whether you’re going to be abusive or not. It’s how you’re going to turn out to be as a person. That you’re sort of stuck because of your genetics. You’re stuck because of how your brain is formed. And they never really figured out how mind arose out of brain.

But they believed that mind was just an epiphenomenon or sort of some sort of process that happened inside of neurons and the idea that you have a real life in your mind; that your mind can have a personality and that you are something more than the activity of a bunch of neurons in your brain is just a figment of your imagination. Like you’re in the matrix and you’re one of those meek computers that’s just plugged in and generating energy.

And so really neuroscientists from the fifties after Francis Crick and Watson gave us DNA, they have really taught pretty much everybody in neuroscience, including a lot of therapists and psychiatrists and medical practitioners, that the human mind is a construct of the brain and it’s nothing more than that.

And that’s important. I’m spending a lot of time for this because it’s important. That once the quantum physicist figured out that how you observe an experiment determines the outcome of the experiment. That’s the gist of Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle and all the big things that led to things like computers and microwave ovens, and space travel and all the things, that smartphones and all the stuff that we use now, all came out of quantum physics.

But what quantum physics teaches us is that you are not a passive participant in your life. That when you observe something from a particular point of view, it changes the outcome. The truth is that’s what the Bible has been saying all along.

Ron:That’s right.

Dr. Warren:The Bible has been saying all along that God communicates with your mind and your mind tells your brain and your body what to do. And that means basically, the long and the short of it is mind is not a product of brain. Mind is something that God gave us, and it communicates to us and to the outside world through the mechanism of brain.

It’s important to separate that out. So what it means then is that the way that you think changes the brain structurally. So these ruts that we’ve been talking about, for example, the bad news is that when you think about something enough times from a particular point of view, you create ruts and synapses in your brain that automates those and makes them easier to perpetuate.

That’s the bad news. The good news is you can change them almost instantly by changing how you think about those things. So as we’ve been talking, your brain is breaking down and recreating synapses at an alarming rate. And since the first person clicked on this conversation and started to watch it, your brain is structurally different than it was at the start the conversation.

The problem is, if you allow that process to happen passively, then what happens is those synapses just get remade in the same way that they have been. And so if your behavior never gets consciously thought about and intentionally attempted to change, then what will happen is you’ll recreate the same behaviors and thought patterns.

And that’s why the Bible says so clearly in Romans chapter 12 that we need to renew our minds. We need to transform our thinking rather than conform our thinking. So the whole punchline of what I just said is to say that it’s very clear from 20th and 21st century quantum physics that the brain and the mind are not the same thing. Mind is a metaphysical thing that’s real, that has controlling power over brain, and brain and body feedback and make mind do certain things if we don’t consciously intervene in it.

[Studio]

Dave:We’ve been listening to a portion of the FamilyLife Blended podcast with Ron Deal and author, Dr. Lee Warren. Ron Deal, the host of our FamilyLife Blended ministry, he’s with us in the studio. Ron, I don’t even know what to say right now. I don’t know if my brain’s thinking or my mind’s thinking. I mean, that is some deep stuff, but definitely I got the part where your mind dictates your brain, not the other way around.

Ron:That’s right. So it’s really fascinating to think about Romans 12:2 that says, “Don’t be conformed to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your brain.” Oh, wait, no, it doesn’t. It says by your mind because your mind controls your brain. Think about that. Your consciousness, something that is bigger than your brain, who you are, the decisions you make, actually tells your brain what to do.

Now, your brain because of hard things gets affected and it goes into an automatic pilot sort of response set. And oftentimes those responses get us into trouble because we don’t know what else to do. And so our brain needs some help. It needs the mind controlled by Christ telling it what to do and how to respond. Again, we just see the beauty and wisdom of what scripture tells us about how we work and how we function. Mind is different than brain and that we can be in charge of that. We can grow in such a way that our past doesn’t dictate our future because we change our mind. It’s fascinating.

Ann:It is.

Ron:Dr. Warren is really good at helping people understand that there’s a difference, that we’re not victims of the past and the bad things that happen to us in life, we can renew our minds and that can help our mind, body, soul, respond in ways that are obedient to Christ.

Dave:And again, I think one of the things that hits me when I think about marriage is I think it’s easy to get in a rut in your marriage. And some of it’s the way we think. You sort of think “I’m stuck here. I’ve been here for a decade. I’m going to be here the rest of our life.”

Ann:Or you think you can’t help where your thoughts go.

Dave:Yeah, but he’s saying no. You can dig out of that.

Ron:That’s exactly right. And that’s what our book, The Mindful Marriage that Nan and I just released this year is talking about as well. We had a great synergy in my conversation with Dr. Warren. I didn’t realize it, but we ended up in similar places talking about all of this as it relates to marriage.

By the way, let me just tell you that Blended and Blessed is one month away, Saturday, April 5th. This year Nan and I are going to be doing a series of presentations at Blended and Blessed, specifically for blended family couples about how The Mindful Marriage principles apply to their life, their family, not just their marriage, but their co-parenting with a former spouse, for example, or how it applies to parenting with children and stepchildren.

We’ve got a great lineup of other speakers that are going to join us on that stage. We’d love for everybody listening to get involved with that. Go to BlendedandBlessed.com, sign up for you, help a friend find that event. Your church can host it for a group of couples for a very reasonable price, less than a hundred bucks you can put this event on. And we would love to have you join us Saturday, April 5th.

Dave:So that was a fascinating conversation, and we get to hear more tomorrow. Ron is going to be joined again with Dr. Lee Warren, and you don’t want to miss it. So we’ll see you tomorrow.

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