SCP Podcast: Change Your Mind, Change Your Brain: The Art of Self-Brain Surgery with Dr. Lee Warren

Welcome everyone to the stop chasing pain podcast. I am your host Dr. Perry where we strive to have deep and meaningful conversations to make things better What if one of the most powerful tools for changing your life is learning to change your mind? You know, I've been taking care of people for 30 years in chronic pain and I think this is a major major player of changing your life and changing your pain. My guess today is Dr. Lee Warren written one of my favorite books his latest book the life-changing art of self-brain surgery What a great title right? He's a neurosurgeon like he actually operates on brains saves lives Every day. So he definitely knows about brains He's also an Iraq war veteran uh New York Times best-selling author And someone who really knows the brain from a scientific perspective but also sharing his deep personal experiences on using the techniques he's going to talk about in the book exploring how thoughts shape our brains how we can change the patterns that keep us stuck in old behaviors and old habits and one of my favorites why hope This is such an important part of healing because if you don't have hope, I mean my goodness. What do you have? We explore some neuroplasticity you may have heard of that term before That's how the brain and the nervous system can change itself The relationships between the brain and the mind. I mean, what is the difference between the two? And it's a conversation that I really enjoy it a lot So we talk about neuroscience for sure But different active things you can do in your life to help yourself heal you're really going to enjoy this one I know it for sure and make sure you pick up the book 100% Doc, thank you so much for coming on to the stop chasing podcast. It's indeed an honor to have you here sir Parade great to be with you. Thanks today Well, we're talking just a little bit before I came on of how much I absolutely Love your book and the concepts that you you teach actually I came across your book after I came across your social media feed and the wonderful way that you share things I saw it on Instagram first and I was like oh This guy gets it right and then I got your book and man. Oh, man First of all, thank you for writing that book is changed my life and it's also Help me change the life of the patients that I work with who are suffering from a lot of these chronic diseases So let me just lead off with a big giant. Thank you Thank you appreciate that So great title for the book by the way because you are an actual surgeon who operates on brains all the time And I love that book. I'm going to really hear the life changing art of self-brain surgery Connecting neuroscience and faith to radically transform Your life So let's talk a little bit about what self-brain surgery actually means Yeah, so I think we've been we've been duped a little bit Especially since 1954 when Watson and Crick gave us DNA, right? everybody jumped on this idea that our genetics or Our code was how our brains turned out to be that we would that we were formed by genes And that led to this doctrine of genetic determinism and for decades everybody thought you know Everything about you is because of the genes you inherited the parents that raised you And then all the stuff that you go through can mess you up But you're kind of stuck with how you are based on your genetics And now of course in the last 20 years, especially we've learned that only about 2% of what we are is actually directly the result of a gene And about 98% of it is about what we call epigenetics or the the environment the decisions We make the choices that we make and now what we know about neuroplasticity this idea That's not controversial anymore that the things you think about actually make structural changes in your brain And that's just like surgery so when I go to the operating room and I perform surgery on somebody Intentionally making a structural change on their brain for the purpose of helping them in some way And that's that's what we do when we decide that this particular process of thought isn't Isn't very helpful to me or it's causing me trouble when I think about things in a certain way And we decide to change it We literally make our brains different and our brains become chemically different genetically different They express different genes epigenetics effects which genes are turned on and turned off and we become different people Because of changing what we think about and that has all kinds of implications in your work And in mind as a surgeon, but also in our things like hope and faith and and and and just peace of mind and quality of life All comes down to the kind of brain that we're building rather than the kind of brain we're born with Yeah, I love that and even the concept of neuroplasticity, right? I mean, I think that you know more people are familiar with it now But I mean when did that term even come about to your knowledge because I think that like you said There was a time when they didn't think you could actually physically change your brain in any way So the scientist started talking about it with vigor in the late 1990s But there was a psychologist named William James actually in the late 1800s that wrote about how he perceived that people's brains were plastic He called it like like he could you could change them by changing how you think and behave and so the psychologist Some of them figured it out a long time ago And then everybody sort of forgot about it like this this idea became lost in the in the in the hullabaloo of genetics Like everybody jumped on the bandwagon. You are what you inherited And so that led to this generations of us being sort of victims of our parents victims of our circumstances victims of our stuff that we go through And it really wasn't until the late 1990s that people started taking it seriously when they developed what we call functional brain imaging now So so before about 1999 if you got an MRI every brain or a specs scanner or some kind of scan of your brain You basically saw what the brain looked like right a picture of your brain like if you get your arm x-ray Do you see the bones if you get your head x-ray? Do you see the skull and if you do an MRI you see the brain But functional imaging is this this technology that came along in 1999 or 2000 where you can actually see what the brain's doing Like so if you move your thumb you can see what parts of the brain are metabolically active And that's kind of a proxy for which parts of the brain are Doing something structurally And so you can then say You can watch people and ask them what to think about and tell them pay think about your best air your worst air Whatever and you can see what parts of the brain are active when their processing certain memories or making certain decisions or thinking about certain things And that led to this this clear line of research that now has shown without controversy that your brain literally Is listening for your thought processes which means mind and brain are not the same thing too, by the way So so your brain in generating this idea that you have a mind and it's all sort of the product of neurons that we were taught for decades It's actually that mind and brain are functionally not the same thing that when you choose to think about something It has a structural impact on what your brain does so within seconds to minutes Of you changing your perspective on something or pondering a different thing for example There's a structure called a microtubule that's like a little pipe in your brain And they begin to remodel and lay down new microtubules And the neurons the axons that connect one neuron to another grow down these microtubular channels And create new synaptic connections from neuron what between groups of neurons Within seconds to minutes of changing how you think so it's not a metaphor when you say hey your brain changes structurally It's not a way of thinking about it like a self-help sort of Sort of you know metaphorical way of thinking oh, I can make my life better by changing my thoughts It's literal like it's structural so the the downstream effect of that for people like you and me is its hope right? It's it's you can tell somebody that if the way your brain has been working Because of the trauma as you've been through because of the chronic pain that you have if if the way things have been going for you Aren't working well for you You literally have the power to change it as soon as you're willing to do the work to learn how to think about your life in a different way And that has all kinds of implications in chronic pain and chronic disease It's been people like Norman doggie written books about Parkinson's and movement disorders and then the great progress that people are making And dementia's and Parkinson's like I said and other Structural brain disorders and stroke patients for example with neuroplastic sort of training of how to think and direct your brain And they're making incredible strides in those diseases without medicines without surgeries without you know invasive treatments By using the leveraging neuroplasticity that the thing that turned it on for me was after our sunday that you've read that in the book But I had to I had to figure out that the stuff I was thinking about projecting into the future was causing me in my family harm But it was it was keeping me stuck. I was seeing this dark future. I was constantly thinking about all the Difficulty and the loss and the pain that we were having and what I realized when I started looking at this functional brain It was in research is that that when you focus on the downside of something that the hardship the loss the pain you project Out of the future your brain doesn't know the difference between what's actually happening in real time and what you're just imagining your brain can't tell the difference And so if you if you're in a position of thinking about something on negatively It makes sense if you're grieving of course you're thinking about negatively But but when you're when you're thinking about the future like like all is lost I'll never feel better than this. I'm a terrible parent. I'm gonna lose my wife and all that stuff that you think about When you're thinking that way your brain begins to model and increase the the harmful neurochemicals that keep you in a stress response and that begins to affect your body. I got shingles. My hair turned gray. I started grinding my teeth and broke all my mullers, you know, in the few months after I lost my son. And basically, if you can start leveraging neuroplasticity to your own benefit, then you can start thinking, well, okay, what else is still true? Like besides the fact that I lost my son, what else is still true? Well, I had him for 19 years. I learned a lot from him. He affected my life positively. I'm a better person than I was because of him and I can project into the future some purpose. Maybe I can find some way to honor him, right? You start thinking different sets of things and all of a sudden, your brain chemistry gets better and your dopamine circuits start rewarding you in a different way. You start feeling better and then you have less pain in your physical body and then you start taking better actions and you start working on your marriage and being more present with the other kids and all that stuff and the things you were afraid of become less possible because now you're acting differently than you were before and it's because your brain's working differently than it was before. It's neuroplasticity on the positive side. The thing we can't do, we can't stop neuroplasticity from happening. It's always happening, but it happens in response to your negative thoughts and just as well as it does to your positive thoughts. So you get to choose, right? You get to choose. Do I harm my brain? Do I keep myself stuck? Do I stay the way I am? Do I get worse over time or am I going to do something to fight back and that's why I came up with the idea of self brain surgery. It's like do something positive for your patient who's also you. Yeah, yeah, thank you so much for breaking that down. There were a few concepts that really stood out with me and one of them you just mentioned that neuroplasticity is always happening whether you want it to or not and why not take more of a role in shaping it the way that you want to because somebody else can shape it one, two, three, that was huge for me. And that's the choice that you have, right, and to go down this pathway or go down that pathway. And another one that you mentioned that hit home for me was your neuroplastic patterns in your thinking process is not just affecting you. It's the people in your life and your loved ones. And I find that a lot of times we'll do far more for someone else than we would ever do for ourselves. So that reframe there I think can be very empowering from someone and maybe think about my own children. If I'm coming home and I've got this thinking, thinking, going on, how that's going to impact their day or the rest of their life, honestly. That's right. And I call it the two-patient rule. I mean, anytime you're working on changing what you're thinking about and either making positive or negative changes in your own brain and your own genes and your own life and your own body and all that, there's a number of different ways that research has shown really clearly that we affect other people. One is this concept of limbic resonance that they talk about where you're, and there hasn't been well, the underlying mechanism of limbic resonance hasn't been laid out. So the science isn't as solid as I'd like here, but everybody has the experience of when you're around somebody who's having a strong emotional state, you begin to feel the things that they feel. So if somebody's in a super bad mood, you just sort of absorb that and we call it Debbie Downer, right? Somebody's in a bad mood that walk in a room and before you even know it, like you're kind of feeling bad too, that limbic resonance is some sort of electromagnetic level effect that our brains have on other people's brains. Then there's an electromagnetic heart effect that the heart, math people have done really good work with this where within about 10 meter radius, even if you're not in the same room with another person, the coherent state of your heart. So how stressed you are, how calm you are, all that affects other people's electromagnetic fields and it's been shown in a couple of different papers where within about 10 meters of distance in different rooms, one person can have an elevated heart rate and it'll affect the heart rate of the other person. So the other person's physiology changes in response to what yours is doing. So that means, and then there's this other a little bit more fuzzy concept called quantum entanglement that people across vast differences who have had a strong relationship with one another can affect each other's emotional states and moods and that's been shown really clearly. A lot of people think that has to do with intercessory prayer and healing and all those kinds of things that seem really weird and woo-woo, but there's pretty good evidence that it's true that when you're connected to other people, the things you think about and the decisions you make, the state that you're in affects them even if you're not close to them. And so there's at least three different mechanisms and then the fourth one is what we call mirror neurons. There's a system in your parietal lobe that literally begins to mimic the facial expressions and emotional state of people around you. And that's a survival mechanism, right? If you're walking up on a guy you don't know and he has a big smile on his face, then your defenses go down. You're less likely to pull out your sword and murder him. You know, if you're back in the day, everybody's fighting, right? So if you see somebody who looks friendly, then you're disarmed a little bit. You're calmer. If somebody looks angry or threatening, you're going to start to mirror that. Your cortisol's going to go up. Your heart rate's going to go up. You're going to become more defensive. And so that mirror neuron system is designed to across a big distance kind of prepare us for the state that another person's in. So we'll have an appropriate reaction around them. And so the design feature, I think God gave us. And so that's four different ways that your state and therefore backing up from that, the choices that you make about the state you want to put yourself in affects other people directly and immediately. And so then the fifth one is on the epigenetic side. So if you haven't had kids yet, then the cortisol state, the on/off state of a lot of the genes that you can pass on to your children are affected by choices and decisions that you make. And there's really good research, human research and Holocaust survivors that shows that down to four generations, the offspring of people who went through the Holocaust have elevated cortisol levels at birth. And so it's like they've been through a stressful event even though they haven't because their great grandfather or great grandmother was through a really stressful event. And that sounds awful. Like I can stress my grandkids out for stuff that didn't even go through. But the interesting thing is it's been shown that if those people get the right kind of help and they learn how to process it and they get themselves squared away, their generation, their kids can be flipped back to the normal cortisol state in the first generation and their children's children will be born with a normal stress response. And so that means you can fix it in one generation if you're willing to get after it and do that and sort of self-brains or do your work. And so it's just this multiple different ways that the decisions, choices and behaviors, attitudes and thought processes that we have affect other people directly. And so you say, well, my life's all about me and I make my own choices and all that. Well, guess what? You're, you're, you got a spouse, you got children, you got co-workers, you got friends, you got people around you. And they are affected by your choices, decisions, behaviors and all of that. So if you want to make your life better and other people's lives better, improve your marriage, improve your parenting, improve your impact, then you can get yourself under this kind of control and always be improving your own physiologic state, mental state, brain structural state, epigenetic state. And you're going to have other people around you getting better by direct impact and unspoken influence. And I think that's a, that's a huge amount of power and responsibility that we have. Yeah, I was just thinking for a moment there is like a super power, like an adventurous power that everybody has inside of them. It's just tapping into that power. It's almost like Spider-Man with great power and great responsibility, right? You got to weave Spider-Man into the conversation somehow. But yeah, I, I loved that because I could tell you for me, I began to note when I started to focus on this, I noticed just how much of a physiological change I had in my body from my nervous system by the thoughts I would think of something that stressed me out. And my immune system started to go bananas. Like I had an autoimmune disease in the past and I become sensitive to sensation sometimes. And then I said, oh my goodness, like what's happening here? And then I was just doing the little thought experiment. And then I chose to not focus on that, focus on something else. And then in just a short period of time, almost instantly, everything began to change. And I thought, you know, that's, that's one thing I read from a neuroscientist who said once that one of the biggest stressors for the human nervous system is the lack of control and uncertainty about something. And then I thought for myself, well, what's, what's something you can control? What, what you choose to focus on and what you choose to think. But also the meaning that you give something, right? And then, so it's almost like these guys from the past, like, you know, Napoleon Hill or Old Knight and Gale and Tony Robbins might have been on to something here. That's right. That's right. Or even the indigenous cultures, right? I mean, even from Eastern medicine, when they talk about the mind, body connection. That's right. I mean, the Bible is full of it. I mean, there's all kinds of references in the Bible, but as a man thinks in his heart so is he. And out of the man's heart, the man speaks and, you know, the words can be medicine or a curse and all those things that like, like ancient people observed these things and saw how they played out. And then somehow in the 21st or 20th century, we kind of forgot about it in our society. We thought there's a pill for everything. There's a, you know, there's a, there's a medicine, there's a surgery, there's a thing for everything. And it's not my responsibility. Like I am how I am. Like it's not my fault, you know, I inherited my trauma, made me be this way. But now what we're learning is you really do have a tremendous amount of choice. You have a tremendous amount of opportunity and the social scientists divine hope as what they call agency and opportunity. So agencies, the belief that there is something that can be done about your situation and opportunity is that you have a chance to do that thing, right? So, so if you're, if you have hope, it means that there's something that can be done and that you can actually do that thing. And so what we learn with our brains and our genes is that there is something that can be done. But it's up to us. Like nobody can change you, but you. And so when you think about therapy, for example, a good therapist will tell you, "Hey, I can give you all the tools, I can give you all the techniques, I can talk you through stuff, but you've got to decide that you're going to engage these things. You're going to buy in, you're going to get after it, you're going to do the work." And that's again that the self brain surgery metaphor holds up really well there because I can, I can tell you how to do surgery all day long. But if you don't pick up the scalpel and do it, the patient's going to bleed out or whatever the situation is not going to get better. Like, I can't do that operation on your brain for you, you have to. And so again, once you have this insight that the brain is changing in response to what you think about in the decisions and choices that you make, that gives you opportunity, which then leads to hope, but it also creates responsibility. So a lot of us in our society nowadays, we don't, we don't want responsibility, we want, you know, we want it to be somebody else's fault or we want to know who to blame or my mom and dad did this to me or my circumstances did this to me and all that. But the bottom line is, you may have gone through something really hard and that wasn't your fault. But if you're stuck, now you've got a choice to make. Like, do I want to get unstuck? And if I want to get unstuck, I got to change how my brain's working. And if I want to do that, I got to go upstream from that and change how I'm thinking about it, change the internal decisions that I'm making. I got to pick up that scalpel and start operating my brain instead of being a victim of how it has been operating. Yeah, I'm curious. Do you, you're in the world of medicine, right? And then out of that is a world where words are really powerful, how you speak to your, your patient or your client. Do you see this following into your world with the, you know, no CBO plus plus CBO type effect with like in a functional MRI, you could say a couple of words and you see their brain go haywire depending on the words you chose to use. That's probably really critical in your world. It is. I've seen countless patients who they come in with a problem, back pain or sciat pain or whatever. And they're at the end of their ropes. They've tried the medicine, the shots and the physical therapy and all the things. And, and I tell them what you need surgery, we can, you know, we can fix it. And they decide before the operation that they're not going to get better, like they just say, I don't, my uncle had back surgery, didn't help him. I'm just, nothing's going to work for me. And they have surgery and it goes perfectly and the post-op MRI looks great and they don't feel better. And it's like, you can't convince that person to get well until they decide to get well. And it's just true. I mean, you can do all the imaging. And I've seen it with, I've seen it with post-operative brain tumors. I wrote my, my last book before this one was called Hope is the First Dose. That took care of a woman in Wyoming who had a benign brain tumor that was completely removed and the scans were perfect. And she had like three years of follow-up scans since no residual disease. And she still had this sense that there was something wrong in her head and it drove her insane. And she was convinced that that tumor was still there. And she ended up killing herself. She overdosed some pain medicationally. She could not believe that she was actually cured. But she was. I mean, the scans were, we did PET scans. We did MRIs of contrast. We did special kinds of thin, sliced scans. We centered to the Mayo Clinic and got a second opinion. Like this woman was cured, but she didn't believe it. And it led to her demise. Right. That kind of reminds me of the neuroplastic pain that some of my guests have talked about. Like Dr. Schubner who has unlearned your pain. Where, you know, they didn't find like a physiological reason for something and ended up being more of this thing, right? Yeah. Well, it's interesting because it's not a, we have to be careful when we say that. And actually, he just reached out to me. He's going to get, I'm going to get him on my podcast. He's done some great work in chronic pain. Yeah. But it's, we have to be careful when we point to our brains and we say it's in here because the patient hears us say, you're crazy or you're making this up or, you know, it's, it's a, it's a willful thing that you're doing this. But the research doesn't back that up in a lot of cases. What the research looks like is that something happens in people who have had pain for a long time, where the, the pain is no longer being generated about organic disease. The best example of this is phantom limb syndrome. Like my grandfather lost his leg in an accident in the 60s and a bull nose around over his leg. And until he died in his 90s, so 30 years later, he still had pain in his foot that hadn't been there in 30 years. He would say, my, my foot hurts, you know, and he would sit around and not do anything and not be willing to use his prosthetic because he had pain in his foot that wasn't there. And so that, that research has now shown pretty clearly that there's two places. One is in the spinal cord. There's a neuroplastic arc in the spinal cord in the, the place where those neurons used to come in and send their signals to the brain that that can create a reflex loop and and basically keep sending a signal like there's a pain from downstream to that. So there's a spinal cord part of neuroplasticity. But more importantly, there's one in the brain that happens. But if you, if you do functional imaging on these people that are having chronic pain and you say, tell us when you're having pain and we'll, and we'll scan you and they say, okay, I'm hurting right now and they'll scan those people and what's lighting up in the brain is not the areas where the pain should be mapped to their body. It's in the memory circuits. And so they're, they're having a memory of having been in pain that has become a loop and it's automated now. And neuroplasticity has created this circuit that says, hey, I remember that I used to have an injury and it hurts, it still hurts. And it's presented to them as if it's actively painful, but it's a memory of the pain. And so that's why people like Norman Doge have had such good luck with using neuroplasticity to unlearn pain for people. It's because it's not an active, ongoing, organic problem. It's a memory that's triggering in the wrong way and it can be unlearned. That's one of the, the doctor, Sheila or whatever, I can't think of his name. His book is called unlearned your pain. It's, it's hitting that target. It's the memory of chronic pain. And that's where it's so important for people with chronic pain, chronic, non-organic structural things that used to be there that aren't there anymore post-operative pain, people, post-operative people that still have pain, it's, it's, it's neuroplasticity on the memory side where all the hope was I think in that research. Thank you so much for reinforcing that. I know when Dr. Schubert was on here as well. He took great pains, you know, pun intended to make sure that people understood that, right? Because there's this kind of thing where even doctors say it's all in your head. I'm like, well, yeah, you're kind of right. Yeah, you know, I mean, that's where pain is on that one. And I think I read somewhere that the emotional circuits, you know, over Chris Cross and Cohen's eye with the pain circuits, right? Yeah, that's right. That, that, once again, that, but it's really hard like when you're in the quicksand, it feels like overwhelming and you don't feel like you have control. I mean, so when somebody's like that, where would you suggest they begin to just grab onto the branch that's keeping them from going into the quicksand? Well, the first thing I think we need to, clinicians need to be, like I was like you and me, who are treating patients, we need to be really clear on it ourselves because the first thing is that that most people go to the doctor and they say something's hurting and they get a prescription, or they get a scan and it's negative and they get told, "No, there's nothing wrong, you know, fell on your head," or whatever. And the patient gets left with a problem that they still have and no answer, which creates then hopelessness in this building belief that nothing can be done for them. And that creates the whole opioid prescription issue and all these other issues and depression and anxiety and all these things that go along with it and alcohol and, you know, pain, chronic pain patients get into all kinds of trouble. So the first thing is getting smarter doctors and practitioners to say, "Hey, there's something going on here that's not volitional on the path, on the path, on the behalf of the patient. They're not intending to stay in pain. They're not making it up. It's something literal that's happening in their brains, but we're shooting at the wrong target when we prescribe opioids, when we're giving medicines that are aimed at parts of the brain that are related to pain processing. When we know already from functional imaging that the problem is in the memory circuits, the answer is not going to be pharmacological for those people, at least not with narcotics for the most part. But what is the patient want? I mean, pain, I need pain medicine. I mean, pain, I need surgery. I mean, pain, I need something. You got to do something for me. You have to give me something to fix this and the answer is not something that can be given. There's something that must be taken on the responsibility side. And so having clinicians that understand that and really get into it. And this guy, Mosquevitz, was one of the big pain guys that's first started figuring this out. He's the normal doer dresser a lot about him the brains way of healing, which is a great book. And he's one of the ones that figured out that neuroplasticity is the lever that we can start pulling to get these people better. But one of the hardest things is to convince somebody, because it's so counter-cultural, to convince the patient that number one, there's not a structural problem anymore. But there's not a physical structural problem, but that's not the same as telling them that they're making it up or that it's all on their head or they're trying to get disability checks or whatever. It's not the same. And we're not saying they're drug seekers. We're saying that the desire to be given something that will fix it will never fix it will only make it worse. And so the real solution then is to learn how to think about this problem in a different way and attack it with a different type of mental scalpel if you will. Yeah, that kind of reminds me I wanted to bring up here with your book. It's such so beautifully designed and written. And I actually got the audio version first because I love your voice very soon. Thank you. So thanks. And there was these kind of different phases that people go in through, the four possible like approaches. If we could talk about that, a little bit. I'll name them here and if you want to reinforce them, you can. It's just like this. I found this for me. Nothing can help. You know, I'm done. Then you go out to something, maybe something and help me, but that can be overwhelming because there's five billion choices of what somebody's going to tell you can help you. And then you have the, maybe there's some science stuff that can help me, but that can be its own quicks hand. And then the fourth one is that maybe God can help me. So before I break into that, I want to say that I was never really a spiritual person most of my life, but I found my way to number four through a long journey, realizing that I've obviously been at four first. And if you find that in other people or even with your own journey into number four, yeah, I wish in retrospect, I wish I'd added a chapter on the, on a fifth approach to because and I think I mentioned it. I certainly have been talking about it in the month since the book came out. I've been talking about a lot, but the probably 98% of people in the world, their approach is that they don't have an approach. They don't even think about it. They just think this is the way it is, you know, have pain or I have depression or have anxiety or I have whatever I've been through trauma, get the wrong parents, you know, whatever they just, this is how I am. I am how I am. And they don't even think about it, which then leads them to not even trying to make it better. So they just live in it. That's most people. But once you start getting sufficiently frustrated with how your life is playing out in whatever particular area, and this doesn't have to just be about chronic pain, it can be about your attitude, it can be about your relationships, it can be about your work, your professional success, if it can be about your finances or whatever. Once you decide that it's not working for you, and you need something, then that's why as a surgeon, I use this idea of approaches because an approach in surgery is like this guy's got a tumor in his frontal lobe, how am I going to get to it and remove it safely without killing him or without creating some additional trouble. And so approach means how do I put the patient on the table, where do I make the incision, what kind of technique am I going to use, what kind of tools and instruments, and also philosophical stuff, like how much is it safe to remove. I try to get all of it, I'll leave some behind, all those sorts of things that go into it. So it's technological, philosophical, and all that. And so the first point that needs to be made as a surgeon is it's not a character flaw. If I find that the approach I've been using isn't working and I need to change to a different approach because a lot of us have this idea that, hey, you know, this is just who I am. And if it's not working, then somebody else's fault or I just need to give up because if what I know isn't working, then I can't, I can't make it better. So they just quit. And so the first thing, good surgeons get in the middle of an operation and they find that it's not working, they change approaches. I mean, we back up, we moved the patient, we changed the angle, we decided to close up and come back another day from a different spot. We do something because ultimately the goal is to help the patient get better, right? And so it's not a character flaw. If I chose the wrong approach, it's a character trait, a good character trait. If I'm willing to admit that I chose the wrong approach and change it. And so that's the first thing. Just be willing to look at the fact that there are more than one approach, there is more than one approach to your life. And so the first one is this idea. Nothing can help me. And that's a lot of people take this like I'm stuck. I've tried everything. Everybody in my family's been in alcoholic and I am too. And there's just that's just how it is. Man, I can't change it. So so they just quit and they don't try. And if you don't try, you won't ever succeed, right? And if you keep doing what you've been doing, you're going to keep getting what you've been getting. And so neuroplasticity works against you in that case because if you if you believe that you're stuck and that nothing can change for you, that will turn out to be true because your brain just is always just trying to automate and take things off your mental plate so you don't think about it. And if you believe, okay, I'm just anxious and depressed and I have ADHD and I'm neurodivergent and I'm this and I'm that. And so as my dad and so as my grandma, that's just how it is for me. Then your brain's going to say, okay, that's it. You're just going to keep wiring that in and it'll get more and more automatic. And that's who you are. And so nothing can help me turns out to be true. Like if you if you believe it, it's going to turn out to be true for you. But then some people say, you know what? I need to try something. I'm going to try something different. And there's a guy named Dan Harris who wrote a book called 10% happier that somebody gave me after my son died. Dan Harris was a the anchor for ABC not only news like big famous guy was on national television and he had a panic attack on air. Like he went, he lost his mind on air in front of a hundred million viewers or however many people were watching. It's one way to do it. Yeah. And just went crazy. And treated that for several months with cocaine and drugs and alcohol. He tried all kinds of things to make himself feel better. He just became, he started having panic attacks and he just basically almost lost his career because he developed this mental illness. And he sort of said, I've got to do something or I'm going to lose my job. I'm going to lose my family. I'm going to lose my everything. I got to do something. And so he started studying Eastern meditation because somebody told him about Eckert tolle and and Deepak Chopra and those guys and and they said, you know, meditation helps people have less panic attacks. And so he was like, well, I'm not a spiritual guy. I don't believe in any of that stuff. But I'm a journalist and I'm just going to investigate it. So he started interviewing these people and and studying and he figured out that people who meditate really do have fewer panic attacks and they have better neurochemistry and they have lower cortisol levels and all that. So he, he developed this sort of de-spiritualized meditation practice. He got better. He's just said, I don't believe the spiritual stuff, but I see how the brain is working and it's been imaged. And there's all this brain research that shows that people that do this or people campus gets less reactive. They're make the legacy less reactive. They feel better, better neurochemistry. Their cortisol levels go down. So I'm just going to start practicing that even though I don't understand the science behind it. And I don't believe there's anything supernatural about it. I'm just going to do it because it works. So he said, maybe something can help. And what he, what he realized, he wrote this book called 10% Happier. He realized when I do this, I'm about 10% happier. That's enough to control my mood. I don't have panic attacks anymore. And that works for me. And so that maybe something approach can get you better than you are. But then I realized after I lost my son, somebody gave me that book and I read it, I realized, you know what? 10% happier when you lose a kid, it's not enough. Like it's, it's, you're infinitely sadder than you were before. And so getting a little bit happier than that isn't going to help you. You're still under right. You're still host. And right. So, so I said, okay, 10% happier's not enough. There's got to be another approach past that. And then I started finding people like Norman Doige and people like Dawson Church who wrote books about mind to matter and epigenetics and all these kinds of things. And I started studying that stuff and realizing that, okay, science has shown us in the 21st century with imaging studies that people who change the way they think their brain gets structurally better. And like the best example is people that meditate and pray, especially from a, there's a guy named Andrew Newberg at Penn, there's done a bunch of studies and written several books about people who engage religious practices, prayer specifically, meditative prayer, not Eastern mindless meditation, but directed sort of spiritualized prayer. And his theory was that people who pray feel better because they have a hippocampus that's different than other people. And his theory was that this evolution had given these people a brain that was, that was evolved to, to make them feel better when they engage in these religious practice, to make them predisposed to to engage in these religious practices. That was a theory. But when he did functional imaging, he found that, that normal volunteers who had normal sized hippocampi, if they did six weeks of 10 minutes a day of this focus meditative prayer, their hippocampus got 22% bigger. And hippocampus is involved in resil, emotional resilience, decision-making memory processing, all that sort of decreasing of the fight or flight tendency. And so what he showed was people with normal brains get emotionally more resilient when they pray a few minutes every day. And so it's not that they were predisposed to it anatomically, it's that their, their anatomy got more better, got better able to process emotions because of the prayer. So that he found that spiritual practices had a structural measurable effect on brain function and brain chemistry. And so that science led somebody like Andrew Newberg to, to say, hey, there's a benefit to these practices. Even if I don't believe there's anything spiritual about it, it works structurally. And so using science then, you can find avenues using good sort of rational decision-making and the scientific method, you can find ways to make your brain work better, that makes your life work better. And it's more than 10% better. And so that's been shown, there's 22% better in the study on hippocampus, right? So, so I built these approaches like surgeons do, like I'm going to stack a different approach. If it's not working, I'm going to pivot and be, be a good enough scientist to say what I'm doing isn't working, I need to pivot and try something else. And that led me to finally that, that maybe God can help me approach that now because I realized like, there are some things that science is never going to be able to answer. Like, like, science can't answer every question. It believes that it can. So scientists, some that believe that science will eventually give us all the answers. But there's some things obviously that science can't ever answer. Like, like, what kind of personality did Julius Caesar have? Like, science can't answer that question, right? History can answer it. Archaeology maybe can answer it, but science can't answer it. So there's disciplines besides science that hold some truth that science can't get you to, right? And so I realized that there's some questions that you asked yourself as a bereaved parent, as somebody who struggles mental illness or had PTSD. I went to the Iraq war and came home after 100 mortar and rocket attacks. I was broken up and and science couldn't fix that like I had to learn how to operate my brain differently, but science wasn't going to give me those answers like like it was past that was spiritual for me. And so the maybe God can help me approach is saying, hey, as a scientist, use the scientific method to ask questions and make hypothesis and test them out. And when you find if something works, be willing to say, hey, I'm not sure that I quite understand why this works, but it does work. And so I'm going to be willing to practice it. And so if you get to a place where science isn't enough, science can't get you to the peace of mind that you need, be willing to explore other avenues. And one of those might be spiritual practices. I'm a Christian. I believe that there's good reasons to think that this stuff is true and functional imaging has made me even believe it more. But if that doesn't work for you, just at least say, hey, what I'm doing isn't getting me there. So I need to try a different approach. And in the book, I give you really good rational ways to look at these four approaches and be open-minded enough to say, hey, maybe I'll explore religious ideas too. But the book works for people regardless of where they come from and what background they have. Awesome. Thank you very much for that. And as you're saying that, I'm just thinking even from that perspective of if you're going to bring in prayer, right? Speaking to whatever you believe in. I feel that you get a sense of you and you're not alone in the world because so many people, we know that one of the primal needs of a human being is a connection to another human being, per se or whatever, or to anything where you just don't feel isolated outside the tribe because that kicks off your fight or flight response. And that if you can have a connection with something, there is the meaning for you that can take down just your stress response in general so you can get your foothold and then come out. Yeah, exactly. I mean, just have this willingness to explore and test it. So it's an inherently unscientific idea to rule things out without testing them. Like the whole scientific method is I have a theory, I test it out if the results of the experiment don't bear out my theory, then I need to revise my theory. But what we've done in Western science for the last 300 years is we've said, especially since Darwin, like really, we've adopted some things that we just all agree have to be true. And if you have research results that seem to indicate that those things might not be true, that's not going to get published. You're not allowed to question it. Materialism, Darwinism, those kinds of things. So that's just that's not science, that's scientism, that's philosophy, that's worldview. So science is this willingness to ask questions and progressively get less wrong over time. Like that's the whole principle of science. Not that we figure everything out and prove everything and finally get to the right answers because you look at quantum physics, for example, the last 100 years of physics, we know less things for sure now than we did 100 years ago. And every time we discover something, it brings up a thousand more questions. The same thing's true about neuroanatomy. It's the same thing's true about biology, about chemistry. Like we're getting less certain. So science has never been about being right about everything. It's being less wrong over time about things. And so if you really want to be a good scientist, you can't rule out God or supernatural or the impacts of religious practices or prayer. And you can't rule any of that out with that at least being willing to test it and be honest about your evaluation. Right. So I say just just keep an open mind, research things for yourself. Don't let anybody tell you what's true. Check it out for yourself. That's good science right there. That's what scientists do. Yeah, absolutely. Well said. That reminds me of a quote that James clear once said, you know, when you when you start in the beginning, people just don't even know. They don't even have a plan or a system. He said, you don't rise to the level of your goal. You fall to the level of your systems. That's right. And you know, you start with your systems. And I like that. It's like the scientific method. I'm going to start this system and what's the feedback given to me? And let me just let me just zigzag, you know, serpentine or do whatever I have to do differently from there. But at least you've got a starting point. That's right. Any Arthur Conan Doyle said as Sherlock Holmes, you know, once you've ruled out everything else, then the only thing left is the impossible. Like maybe that's true. Like so sometimes you have to be willing to accept something you thought was impossible before. Yeah. Absolutely. Well, another thing I really liked in the book, but when you started off early in there was, you know, because I hadn't heard this phrase in a long time, definitely, I don't think outside of a book that's not geared towards, you know, the medical approach, which was your soap note right down. I was like, oh my gosh. Oh, I know exactly where he's going with this thing and how valuable that is. The can you review that just for a moment and, and why you felt it like I need to start the book like with this premise. Yeah. So there's two things that got me to that. One is this idea that I'm trying to give you in the book. Like if you're, if you're going to operate your own brain and make it better by using your mind, and now we believe that that structure, it's real, it's really surgery. And that means you're taking on the role of surgeon and patient at the same time. Like you're literally becoming the doctor, but you're also the patient. And so when we have a medicine, we come to, we come to the practice of medicine, we realize that we need to document things really well, so that we can keep track of how far we've come and how much impact we've had on the patient, what's still wrong and what needs to be addressed. So we have a medical record of chart, if you will, most of it's in the computer now. But every medical student learns this format called the soap note. And it's basically a way to keep track of what the patient says, what the patient feels, and what the data shows and what the plan needs to be. And so if you can get this discipline of, of sort of charting your own progress, if you're going to practice self-brain surgery or any other sort of discipline, really, keeping a journal, keeping a record has all kinds of positive benefit. And the biggest one is that you can look back over time and get a sense of how much progress you're making, because we all have this sense that we're spinning our wheels all the time. But if you can look back on your records and say, wow, six months ago, it was really anxious and depressed, and now I'm better, I was drinking every night, and now I'm not. I was having fights with my wife every day, and now I'm not. I'm making progress here. The progress note helps. And the soap note specifically is easy to remember, SOAP, like soap that you wash your hands with. And there should have been a fifth one, and the chief complaint actually comes before the S. But chief complaint, basically, is just what did the patient say? When you ask yourself, what's wrong? And you say, super anxious all the time. Then that's your chief complaint. I feel anxious all the time. And so just write down what it is that you're working on that day that you're trying to get to and trying to document with the soap note with this thing that you're charting. And so the chief complaint is just not what is wrong, what you what you feel or think is wrong. So it's your complaint. You haven't figured the data yet. You haven't solved the problem. You haven't run the scan. You haven't done the test. You're just saying, what is it that I'm worried about? I feel anxious. I feel depressed. I'm drinking too much. That's my chief complaint. So then the S is this subjective thing. These are these are things that people feel the things the patient says, the things the patient believes. And that's really important. As a clinician, you know, it's important to understand what the patient thinks is wrong. Because if you don't address that, no matter how smart you are, they're not going to think you address their problem. So you have to acknowledge what is it that I think? And that's where you the chief complaint is the really succinct version. I'm anxious. The the subjective is I think there's something wrong. I think I have cancer, but I believe I've got the tumor because my mom had one and this is what she always used to say about how she felt. So I I'm scared and I'm anxious because I think I have cancer or I'm scared because I think my wife's cheating on me or whatever it is. It's subjective though. It's not facts. It's what you feel. It's what you're worried about. It's what you're concerned about. And so write that down. It's okay to put it out loud to put it on paper so that you can see on, you know, on what is said, the 21st of August, August 21st, I was really anxious because I was afraid that I was going to get fired for my job the next day. That's what I was feeling. That's what I'm that's what I'm subjectively worried about. But it's important to understand that the S part is not data. It's concern. It's feeling. It's fear. The O is objective. So that's somebody comes in the room and you're the patient and the doctor comes in or the nurse and they're going to start assessing you objectively. Like somebody that's outside of you that doesn't have a dog in the fight that's not going to judge you or any of that, they're going to say, yeah, you've got, you know, you got freckles and you're five nine and you weigh 185 pounds and you have this. That's the other thing that I can measure and here's your blood pressure and here's your heart rate and here's what the X ratio is. That's objective stuff. That's data. It's it's not to be argued about it. It's facts, right? So the patient says, I think I have cancer and we run all these tests and they don't have cancer and so that's objective. Like they're anxious but they're not malignant, right? So, so the subjective is the stuff they're worried about. The objective is the stuff that an unbiased observer can put their hands on and another one can come in and run the same test and get the same answers. These are, this is true stuff that we're dealing with now. And then once you've dealt with the chief complaint and the subjective and the objective things, then the assessment comes as what would an unbiased caring wise provider, doctor, nurse, whoever say about this situation now that that could be verifiable and could lead to a treatment plan that's going to help the patient and that's the assessment. It's like, okay, patient's scared about this. All the tests are negative. We did detect that their thyroid level is too low. We think the diagnosis is probably hypothyroidism and if we put them on hypothyroid medicine or on thyroid medicine, maybe they'll get better. So the assessment is suspected thyroid problem and then the plan is what we're going to do about it, here's the prescription, here's the surgery, here's the pathway that we're going to take. And so if you do that, if you just run yourself through that little process and it doesn't have to be formal, doesn't even have to be written down, although I think there's great value. And like I said, tracking it over time, then you get into this place where you're now thinking of yourself as having some action that you can take to assess your own situation and begin to figure out the thing to do about it. And sometimes this needs to be said, I mean, we're talking about all this self stuff that we do. But sometimes the answer is that other people need to be involved in your care. Like as a neurosurgeon, for example, I'm getting ready to take you to surgery and take out your brain tumor or picture back or whatever. If you grab your chest and say, Doc, I'm having chest pain, like I'm not going to try to fix your heart, I'm not cardiologist, like I'm not going to take you to surgery and ignore it either because you might die on the table because you're having a heart attack. I'm going to call a colleague and I say, Hey, cardiology, come down here and help me make sure my patient's okay. Maybe they need a stint or stress test or something and the cardiologist comes down and assesses the patient. But I don't abandon them. I don't just run away and wash my hands a bit and say I'm done with you. I don't abdicate my responsibility. I'm as a wise caring provider. I'm bringing in the help that I need to deliver the proper care to my patient. So if you're going to be your own surgeon and your own patient, then sometimes you say, you know, there's a real psychological issue here that I need professional help with. I need a therapist to help me untangle this situation. Give me the tools that I need so I can operate my own life in a better way. A therapist is going to jump up and down with joy to have a patient like that, have a client like that. He's going to take responsibility to say, Hey, Doc, hey, nurse practitioner, hey, you know, psychiatrists, I need your help to give me the tools I need to operate my life in a more effective way. That's going to lead to your success, right? And so getting professional help sometimes is necessary. It's never a character flaw for you to reach out for help, right? Sometimes you might need medication. Sometimes you might actually have a problem with the gland or something physiologically wrong, hormonally wrong, it could be addressed. You need a professional help sometimes. That's not a character flaw. It's you being a good doctor for your patient, which is you. Yeah, I'm great to have a support team behind you, right? Absolutely. See another set of eyes or another lens to look through. And I really love that soap part for me because I was just focusing on it from like a medical perspective. And then I started to use it in my journal the way you suggested. And it reminded me of how something called Kiddlin's Law where it says if you write your problem down, it's already half solved. Yeah. So you can get this like rat this critter brain, I call it all over the place to at least get something down and then follow it. And what I found was interesting is when you had mentioned that when the people of other doctors and people were doing their residency or in school, they struggled a bit between the difference of subjective and objective. And you know, they on that one and I thought that was quite interesting. Well, it's a real problem in our society today, Perry, because we have spent a generation telling our kids that what you feel is true, that you know, if you think it feel it, it's part of your identity, people need to honor that. We see people putting their diagnoses and their personality taps in their biographies on Instagram and stuff. We're like, Hey, I'm anxious. I have ADHD. I have neurodivergence. This is, and what we're doing is we're telling people how they need to treat us because we are how we are and they shouldn't trigger us or offend us or hurt us in some way. So the idea that what we feel isn't always true is kind of foreign to our culture right now. And so when you're learning how to write a subnote, the most common mistake that students make is mixing up things that are subjective and things that are objective, the things that are felt and thought and believed versus the things that can be tested and proved and measured. And the truth is, if you think you're walking south and you're actually walking north, it doesn't matter how strongly you believe that you're walking north, you're going the wrong direction. And so if you feel that you are a certain way or you believe that something's true and it's not true, you will not get good results out of your life. You will put them progressively more frustrated that other people aren't solving the things that are hurting you because until you decide that the fix is internal, you have this, the psychologist call it developing an internal locus of control. Like if you believe that somebody else has to change to fix you, they won't be able to change enough to fix you. If you believe that your circumstances have to change in a certain way, if you have enough money or get the right job or marry the right girl or whatever, but everything's finally going to be fine. Guess what's going to happen? The target's going to move at an Olympic gold medal Bob's letter on my podcast. And he told me a surprising number of his peers committed suicide in the years after they won their gold medal because their whole life had been about chasing that thing. And now they had it and now they were too old to do it anymore. And they didn't know what they were about. That feeling they were chasing that thought that was finally going to make them stop feeling anxious or start feeling satisfied. And it didn't and their whole world fell apart. Like if you're, if you're thing that you think you need is outside of you, then you're in real trouble. And so you have to develop this internal locust control. I've got to do the work. I've got to change the attitudes. I've got to figure out what my brain's doing and make it do better things by changing how I think. There's a writer named Anne Lamont. You probably know her. She wrote them a book called Bird by Bird. It's a writing book, but she wrote a little book about hope called Almost Everything. And she has this line in there that I stole. I use it all the time. She said there's there's almost nothing outside of you that can really help in a lasting way unless you need a donor organ. And that's true. If you need a kidney, you got to get it from somebody else. But if you need peace of mind, you can't find it from somebody else. Yeah. You just can't. You got to find it inside. And I think that's where God helps me like that that internal stuff that that the Holy Spirit does, I believe, is what makes things better when external things don't. Yeah. I'm so glad you brought that up. I've seen that in the past too, where you're just chasing this thing. And that's what your meaning is and your life is. And then when you get it, like they went a gold medal or something like you said, and then what's my life supposed to be now? And then they just like crash and burn because their whole life was devoted to that. And they usually they often have to find their way in with that. And if you've seen the work of Byron Katie, you know Byron Katie, I don't think so. Yeah, you should probably like that a lot. I can't remember the four questions that she asked, but it's like that one is she says, you ask is this thing true? And then you have to go and then say, well, is it really true? Yeah, because you'll probably find out it's not. And that changes what happens to the net. You'll probably like her quite a bit. Yeah. Yeah. And the last thing I want to get into and we're running on time. Thank you so much for taking your time. Is I love how you fit it into the book because you have some spiritual stuff in there, but you give some, you know, action plans, concepts for people to do. Uh, call the 10 commandments. Yeah. Of self brain surgery. I'm like, that's I like that. Now there's 10 there. There's a lot to unpack here. But, you know, well, but the last couple of minutes that we have here, what are one or two or a few that you would like to highlight for the people that are listening on the 10 commandments? Yeah. So again, these are the 10 things that I found to be most helpful after I lost my son and trying to find our way back and help my family doing that. And, and this is all the lessons I learned from neuroscience and my faith and trying to smash those things together. And I'll just keep you the overview. If you think about it like a series of steps that you can take out of the hole that your life is in up to some higher place where you can see better and feel better and navigate your life better, the first five commandments are the steps up to that higher level. And then the rest of them are walking out into this new life that I want you to have like this new better transformed life. So the first one is based on the idea that if you're going to become your own surgeon, the first day of medical school, they teach you not to commit malpractice against your patient. Like the the the phrase is I must relentlessly refuse to participate in my own demise so that that stole that from a patient who said that to me. Like I got to stop hurting myself with my choices. So powerful. That was really powerful. Yeah. I mean, we all do stuff. We drink too much. We know ourselves. We do things that we already know are going to hurt us and not help us. And that's just malpractice against yourself. So if you quit doing that, you're already about 80% better in your life. So that's the first one. No more self malpractice. The second and third ones go together. I must believe that feelings are not facts. They're chemical events in my brain. And I must believe that not all of my automatic thoughts are true. These two are based on the fact that really good research suggests that something like 80% of the automatic thoughts and feelings that we have from day to day are biased or skewed towards negativity or they're just false. Like so we all think that our internal narrator is accurate and most of the time it's not. So a lot of the things that pop into your head need to be asked those questions. Like you said, the author gave is this really true? Like it is what I'm thinking about true. And if it's not true, I need to stop thinking about it and do something different. And so those two commandments relate to that. There's whole chapter in the book about each of them. The fourth one is I must believe that my mind and my brain are not the same thing because if you believe that your brain generates your mind, then you don't really have an opportunity to change anything because brain activity is just going to happen. You can't control that. But once you understand what the research really suggests that mind and brain are not the same thing and mind has controlling influence over what brain becomes. You have power now. You have opportunity agency hope, right? The fifth one is you have to believe that that self brain surgery is not a metaphor. It's a mechanism of how you operate your life. And so understanding this is not some way of thinking. It's not some sort of focused focus. It's actually what's happening inside your brain. And you can choose to leverage to your own benefit. It's not a metaphor. That's important. And then we're walking out now from that elevated platform into a better life. The sixth one is that you need to love tomorrow more than you hate what you're feeling right now. So think again, you get to the end of the day, you don't want to deal with what you're feeling, you don't want to deal with what you're worried about for tomorrow. So you drink, you turn on Netflix, you spend money on Amazon, you get on your phone and scroll, you don't spend time with your family, you just check out. And the next day you pay what we call a tomorrow tax, because you still have the same problem. Now you're hung over, now you spend all your money, now your wife's mad at you because you didn't talk all night. Now your kids are upset because you didn't help them with their homework and you're paying a tax today on stuff you should have dealt with yesterday because you didn't love today enough to deal with it yesterday. So that's just reminding you to be in the moment now, be in it and you have a better chance to win it. The seventh one is one of my professors used to look at us operating as residents and residents are notoriously inefficient. We're doing too much with our hands or we're trying to go too fast for making mistakes. And he would say, "Hey, quit making an operation on everything." And I would say, "We're actually operating." We're literally operating. You're making it too hard, like you're making it harder than it has to be. And that's just a reminder to all of us that we complicate our lives unnecessarily with worry, with fear, with negative thinking. We try too hard. And you have to remember that rest and regeneration is a part of the plan and it's part of how your nervous system gets better. And now we know there's a lot of science behind that too. So don't make an operation of everything. Take it easy. The eighth one is related to epigenetics. I'm going to stop perpetuating these generational issues that I inherited from my family. Just because my dad drank and yelled, "Doesn't mean I have to do that in my home. I can change. I can choose to be different than I have been and that's going to lead to a better outcome." And that's just an important principle. The ninth one is I have to believe that what I'm doing, I'm getting better at, that's a nod to neuroplasticity. When you choose better thoughts, your brain becomes structurally better, those become more automated and more likely to show up. Like you said, James Clears said, "You don't rise to your intention. You fall to your preparation. That you fall to your system." And that's true. The more you look at something from a particular perspective, the more you tell yourself the thing from the same way, you think about it differently, the more your brain is going to automate that and help you become that new person, even no matter how long you've been stuck. And the tenth one is I have to believe that thoughts become things. Like everything that's real in your life, your podcast, started with a thought. I wonder if I could have a podcast. It started with, "I wonder if anybody would talk to me and I could help people maybe with my ideas." That started with a thought. Like everything you think, everything that happens in your life turns out to be downstream from your thought life. And so it's critically important. Everybody thinks thoughts aren't that important. It's what we say and do. But everything you say and do comes out of what you think about first. If you change that, you get upstream, and you fix your thought processes, you're going to have a much better life. Oh, thank you so much for reviewing all ten. That was wonderful. Two minutes. I got it down. You died. You got it, man. I'm like, wow, this guy's really got it down. He's got the neuroplasticity. I know your commandment. Well, and I've had that podcast thought 16 years ago. I've had this show for 16 years. I had a show before anybody knew what's a podcast. The first one I really like because I'm so glad that you put that one first to kick off everything because one of the things that I see is that people do contribute so much to their own demise by their own self-talk. They'll about themselves, about their pain, name, and blame stuff. And then I read a quote once that said, "Many times you get better from what you stop doing as opposed to what you start doing." That's right. Amen. Stop that first one, right? Beautiful. Thank you so much, Doc. It was a wonderful show. We hit the flow state. It went by just like that. It really did. Thank you, Perry. I appreciate your time. It's good to be with you today. Yes, you too. And everybody, listen, go get the book. It's going to change your life. We'll put links to everything down here below. And once again, thanks for subscribing to the show following us. And you have a podcast too, right, Doc? I didn't know that. That's your podcast. Dr. Lee Warren podcast. It's 150 countries every week. It's anywhere podcasts are found on my YouTube channel. It's easy to find. Oh, what? Awesome. I'm going to link to all that stuff as well. And I'm going to jump on the podcast myself. Take care, everybody. Stop chasing pain. This is Dr. Perry, as we say, live with Mojo because Mojo means magic.