Karen Restivo
In other words
We arrived on this earth as the most sophisticated piece of equipment ever assembled, 86 billion neurons firing in perfect orchestration, capable of composing symphonies, solving equations, and falling in love.
Not one of us came with an owner’s manual.
Think about that.
We get an instruction booklet for a toaster.
A setup guide is included with a television remote, plus a warranty card with a blender.
But the three-pound supercomputer sitting between our ears came with no quick setup guide, just the impression that we’ll figure it out.
Good luck.
Is it any wonder we’ve been running it wrong? Thankfully, neurosurgeon Dr. Lee Warren tackles this dilemma by issuing his own Quick Guide Setup on Instagram under @drleewarren.
Dr. Warren points to a humbling truth: your brain doesn’t know what time it is.
Every time you replay that conversation from last year, that mistake from last month, that moment you wish you could take back, your brain accepts it as present moment information.
Same stress chemical, same alarm bells and same full-body emergency response to something that ended, in some cases, before certain smartphones were invented.
We are, in the most literal neurological sense, haunting ourselves.
“Not only can we change our brains just by thinking differently, but when we are truly focused, the brain does not know the difference between the internal world of the mind and what we experience in the external environment.
Our thoughts can become our experience.” - Dr. Joe Dispenza, “Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself”
Read that again slowly.
Your thought becomes your experience.
That means the loop you’ve been running, the argument you keep rehearsing, the worry you keep polishing, the worst-case scenario you’ve been auditioning in your head - your brain has been producing it like a feature film.
Full cast.
Full budget.
Rated R most likely.
And you’ve been buying a ticket every single day without realizing you also own the studio.
This is referred to as neuroplasticity, and it is gloriously non-judgmental.
It doesn’t care whether what you’re rehearsing is helpful or harmful, real or imagined, past or future.
It simply gets better at whatever you repeatedly do.
Practice anxiety and you become excellent at it.
Rehearse resentment and you earn a PhD.
Replay failure on a loop and your brain will helpfully automate the process so you don’t even have to try anymore.
Dr. Warren calls this self-brain surgery, the hard and holy work of interrupting the loop.
He’s not asking you to pretend the past didn’t happen or accept toxic positivity dressed up in neuroscience language.
Dr. Warren is suggesting you make a deliberate, conscious decision to stop rehearsing what you don’t want to become a permanent program.
In one way, maybe the owner’s manual was downloaded/inspired in the Bible.
Dr. Warren suggests The Apostle Paul, who had considerably more reason than most of us to dwell on the past, put is plainly in Philippians 3:13: forget what lies behind and strain towards what lies ahead.
Not denial. Redirection.
A choice about which direction the camera points.
Here is the liberating, slightly inconvenient truth that nobody put in the manual: we have far more control over our life experience than we have been led to believe.
The brain is not a fixed, predetermined machine delivering a predetermined life.
It is responsive, trainable and remarkably eager to build new roads when we stop driving the old ones.
We didn’t arrive knowing this. Nobody handed us the instructions at birth.
Alleluia, we know it now. So the question becomes: what are you rehearsing? Because whatever it is, your brain is getting very, very good at it.
In other words, the manual was inside us all along.
It just took a neurosurgeon and an apostle to help us track it down.
Karenrestivo57@gmail.com