Dr. Lee Warren on Self-Brain Surgery: Renewing the Mind with Faith and Neuroscience

Good Faith

Religion & Spirituality, Christianity

4.8 • 1.9K Ratings

🗓️ 12 February 2026

⏱️ 61 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Can You Really Change Your Brain by Changing Your Thoughts?

Neurosurgeon, Iraq War vet, and author Dr. Lee Warren shows Curtis Chang how to perform "self brain surgery"—no scalpel, just the brutal truth: your automatic thoughts are rewiring your brain every day, and a lot of them are lying to you. Curtis and Lee dig into neuroplasticity, why you keep looping the same stress scripts, how gratitude can hijack anxiety, and they connect the dots between brain science and faith as represented in Philippians 4 and Romans 12. If you're stuck in anxiety, trauma, or toxic patterns, this episode could be a wake-up call—and a way forward.

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02:38 - How Do Thoughts Reshape the Brain?

07:39 - Personal Story: Grieving and Neuroplasticity

11:08 - Philippians 4 and Neuroscience

18:01 - Gratitude as a Brain Switch

21:51 - Neuroscience vs. Classic Therapy

31:03 - Building New Habits and Synaptic Pruning

32:28 - The "Self" in Self Brain Surgery and the Holy Spirit

44:07) - Wisdom to Know What Can and Cannot Change

52:34 - Epigenetics and Generational Influence

56:49 - Final Word: Hope and Agency

Mentioned In This Episode:

Dr. Lee Warren's The Life-Changing Art of Self-Brain Surgery
Philippians 4:6–8 (ESV)
Romans 12:1–2 (ESV)
2 Corinthians 10:5 (ESV)
Romans 5:3–5 (ESV)
Deuteronomy 5:9-10 (ESV)
Summary: Study finds epigenetic changes in children of Holocaust survivors
Chris Voss's Never Split the Difference
The Original Serenity Prayer

Transcript

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0:00.0	You have this God-given process inside you where your mind will change your brain.
0:07.3	And when your brain changes, your neurotransmitters change, your hormones change, your body changes, your epigenetics change.
0:14.4	Everything in your life changes when your brain changes structurally.
0:17.9	So if you can decide that it is literally, quite literally, the responses to the
0:22.4	situations that you're in that's been creating the realities that you're living. And if you can
0:26.5	change the things you think about, you'll change those responses. That's when real change
0:30.8	to be possible Faith podcast. I'm your host, Curtis Chang. And the Good Faith podcast is we're friends who follow Jesus, help each other make sense of the world.
0:57.0	The podcast is a production of a 501c3 nonpartisan organization.
1:03.0	When we are making sense of our world, we are inherently using our brain.
1:09.0	God designed the human brain to be this incredible sense-making
1:13.1	machine within us. So getting better at making sense of the world means our brain getting better.
1:21.1	Which raises the question, is there a way for our brain to get better? Dr. Lee Warren believes there is a way for all of us to do this.
1:31.6	Dr. Warren knows the brain.
1:33.2	He is a neurosurgeon, an award-winning author, and an Iraq war veteran,
1:37.5	and the host of the Dr. Lee Warren podcast.
1:41.4	He teaches on the art of connecting neuroscience, Christian faith, and daily practices.
1:48.1	Here's my conversation with Dr. Warren. So welcome, Lee, to the Good Faith podcast. Thank you. I'm
1:55.8	glad to be here, Curtis. Thanks. Well, let's get to the central concept of your book, which is very well articulated in
2:03.1	the very title, The Life-Changing Art of Self Brain Surgery.
2:09.4	So let's start off.
2:10.8	What exactly is self-brain surgery?
2:15.1	Well, it's not as dangerous as it sounds, so I'm not advocating that anybody cut their heads open. It just turns out that our brains are not what many of us think. Many of us have been raised to believe that we're sort of the product of the way that our brain works and that we're sort of stuck with it. If you had the wrong parents or the wrong upbringing or you went through the wrong kind of circumstances, then your brain doesn't work the right way that you're kind of stuck
	...

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