Pay Attention to the Tears (Frontal Lobe Friday)

Hey, Lisa. Hey, Lee. It's good to see you today.

It's good to see you, too. Will you help me with something? Of course.

I can't remember what day it is. It's Frontal Lobe Friday.

Hey, my friend. Good morning. I'm Dr. Lee Warren, and it's Frontal Lobe Friday.

Thanks for Lisa setting that up for us. Hey, I just wanted to go back to yesterday, Theology Thursday.

We did two episodes yesterday, and both of them ended up a little bit longer

than I thought they would.

And I didn't really get to the epigenetics part and the part about how if you

go back to last week, we talked about how using self-brain surgery is kind of

like choosing your own adventure for life.

And so today I just wanna wrap up on Frontal Lobe Friday, the way in which we

can use selective attention and self-directed neuroplasticity to choose our

own adventure and tell ourselves a different story when we suffer,

when we hurt, when we're going through hard things and how we can use that to

find hope, not to ignore our feelings,

but to understand them and process them properly and give ourselves another

way to see the story that we're in so that we can change our minds and change

our lives. We're going to do all that this morning.

But before we get started, I have one question for you.

Hey, are you ready to change your life? If the answer is yes, there's only one rule.

You have to change your mind first. And my friend, there's a place where the

neuroscience of how your mind works works smashes together with faith,

and everything starts to make sense. Are you ready to change your life?

Well, this is the place, Self-Brain Surgery School.

I'm Dr. Lee Warren, and this is where we go deep into how we're wired,

take control of our thinking, and find real hope.

This is where we learn to become healthier, feel better, and be happier.

This is where we leave the past behind and transform our minds.

This is where we start today. Are you ready?

This is your podcast. This This is your place.

This is your time, my friend. Let's get after it.

Music.

All right, you ready to get after it? Hey, it's Frontal Lobe Friday.

I just want to kind of go back to where we started yesterday and give you just

a couple more things. There's a quote from Frederick Buechner.

I've said it before on the show. It's about tears.

And I think it's important. Here's what he said. Whenever you find tears in

your eyes, especially unexpected tears, it is well to pay the closest attention.

They are not only telling you something about the secret of who you are, but more often than not,

God is speaking to you through them of the mystery of where you have come from

and is summoning you to where if your soul is to be saved,

you should go to next.

Frederick Buechner's teaching us to pay attention to our tears.

I just had a conversation with Jenny Allen.

You're going to hear that next week. And then I was on her show.

We talked about it again.

Her new book is called Untangle Your Emotions. And it's about feelings.

And I'm always telling you feelings aren't facts. But I want you to never make

the mistake of thinking that means you're not supposed to feel your feelings.

Because as we talked about yesterday on Theology Thursday, if you don't feel,

you will hurt yourself. You can't heal.

And your life won't be what it's supposed to be.

Feelings are important. They're just not always true.

So learning how to discern, learning how to pay attention to those tears in

our eyes is an important part of becoming healthier and feeling better and being happier.

And I want you to become a master self-brain surgeon, to biopsy those thoughts,

take every thought captive, to learn to put them in the right context and mash

up your thoughts and your feelings and understand where they're coming from,

understand what they mean, why you've assigned a particular meaning to them

that you have. That's part of what your amygdala does, by the way.

Amygdala, we always talk about fight or flight and how it's all about fear and

all of that, but it's also about assigning value to a stimulus and to say,

hey, wait, is this going to help me? Is it going to hurt me? Which way should I go?

Should I get the frontal lobe involved or should I just fire off a bunch of physiological things?

Amygdala is involved in that sort of assessment of threat or reward situation.

And so we need to be able to examine what we're dealing with and learn how to

discern it and use it properly on the thinking side and on the feeling side, okay?

Kurt Thompson wrote a book years ago called Anatomy of the Soul,

and he talked a lot about self-directed neuroplasticity in his field,

which was really founded by Dan Siegel, which is called Interpersonal Neurobiology.

And he talks about epigenetics. And we didn't get to epigenetics very much yesterday

on Theology Thursday, but I want to cover it real quickly here.

It's without question now. There's no doubt you inherit some of the baseline

things that you are uncomfortable with, afraid of, made stressed out by what

your parents went through.

And that's part of this notion. As Gina Berkmeyer, I mentioned her book about generational trauma.

This part of the situation when the Bible references the sins of the father

being visited on the third and fourth generation, it's not about God being capricious

or mean or punishing people.

It's about warning parents how you live affects your children and their children and their children.

And it's about giving us an opportunity to be intentional with what we do and

the things we think about and the decisions that we make because it's going

to affect the people that come after us.

And that sentence that I read to you the other day was, if you don't heal the

child inside you, you will harm the child that comes out of you.

And we all know that to be true because all of us have some wounds from our family.

And hopefully we haven't passed

those on, but there are some ways in which we have. I'm certain of it.

Thompson says this in Anatomy of the Soul, what is both complex and amazing

about the mind is how it emerges under the influence of what neuroscientists call epigenetics.

Simply put, this means that gene expression is influenced, turned on and off,

accelerated and slowed by experience.

For example, some people have a genetic predisposition for being more anxious

than other people, but if their parents are deeply attuned to their emotional temperaments,

the genes that turn on their children's anxiety response will tend to be quieted,

and they're more likely to develop a sanguine approach to life.

On the other hand, if their parents behave anxiously, they may activate the

genes that encourage anxiety to emerge, even in the most benign circumstances.

This is really important, friend, because when we're talking about how to live

in a world full of suffering,

one of the things we have to understand is that we live in communities,

where I wrote about it in Hope is the First Dose, and our community has a responsibility

for helping us understand who we are and how we're wired.

And And grandparents, we have a responsibility to, the Bible calls it,

training up a child in the way they should go.

We have a responsibility to paying attention to how our kids are wired and stewarding that,

to help them not be afraid all the time, to help them tamp down the things that

might be sort of baseline stressors for them, and to see them for what they

are, and to call out the things in them that are better,

that are higher, that are more able to navigate things with resilience and to

teach them techniques and self-brain surgery operations, if you will.

To help them be ready to handle life on their own so that they'll be less likely

to pass on some of those same fears and problems to their children.

So Dan Siegel is the sort of founder of interpersonal neurobiology,

and he uses this idea about directed neuroplasticity that we learned from Jeffrey

Schwartz, and he talks about this acronym, SNAG, that I think is really important.

We need to learn to stimulate neuronal activation and growth.

SNAG, stimulate neuronal activation and growth. You have the ability in your

brain, in your body, in your mind to create new neural pathways,

to make new synapses, to break down old ones that are harmful.

And the secret is to identify harmful thinking and feeling patterns and to implement

better strategies to hardwire better solutions.

There's several different ways to do this. Kurt Thompson points out three.

Aerobic activity has been shown, as we talked about before, with the release

of brain-derived neurotrophic factor, BDNF.

It happens when you move. So moving is good for your heart. It's good for your

mind. It's good for your neurotransmitters.

Focused attention exercises, this idea that practicing certain activities like

prayer and meditation, like our Abide program that we're on.

I hope you're joining us in the Abide idea.

Go back to last week and listen to the two Abide episodes and learn that we're

gonna learn how to direct our minds in meditation and prayer for 10 or 12 minutes

every day for eight weeks, and we're going to watch our brains structurally change.

So focus, attention exercises, change the structure of your brain,

help you become more resilient, more emotionally stable, and basically rewire

your brain to help you instead of hurt you.

And then novel learning experiences. So learning new things,

especially hard things,

learning things that you've never felt like you were going to be good at,

making yourself learn a new skill, making yourself work a puzzle,

doing things like that, especially as we get older, helps us to enhance the

building blocks of neuroplasticity in our brain.

That's important. It's not mundane rote memorization of things.

That doesn't stimulate the same way.

It needs to be novel, interesting, hard, challenging for you,

and you'll grow from that.

But the bottom line is, we're in a world in which there is suffering.

There are difficult things that make us wonder why and what.

And we have traumas and tragedies and massive things. and all of that is gonna

play in a way of trying to wire our brain.

To be afraid, to be scared, to be angry, to be ashamed,

to be stuck, to be mad at God, to be doubtful instead of being hopeful and resilient

and purpose-filled and have meaningful lives, even if we've been through hard

things, to be climbers and not crashers.

And so as we get to this idea, I'm going to wrap this up because I'm going to

get you out there doing better things on Friday than listen to me talk.

But I want you to understand that no matter how you think your brain is stuck,

how fixed your thinking is, how long your behaviors have been the same way,

you can change. You can write your own adventure.

The research is clear. You can make significant changes in the way you remember

your past, the way you experienced, the way your parents treated you,

even the way you treated your own kids, okay?

You can change that. You can influence them, you can influence their generations,

and you You can change your life by changing your mind.

And Kurt Thompson put it beautifully. Even though you can't change the events

of the story that have happened so far, you can change the way you experience

your story. You can change it, friend.

The most important thing to understand is that you're not stuck with the brain that you have.

You're not. You can change it, and you can change it in a way that helps you instead of hurts you.

You can change it in a way that influences the generations after you positively

instead of making them be stuck with generational curses.

You can change it by practicing things like the Abide Prayer Method that we've

come up with, where you're going to assess the situation honestly.

Look at your thought patterns. Look at your feelings. Look at your memories. Look at your habits.

Look at the way you interact with other people. And you're going to believe

that God can keep His promises.

You're going to believe that God can do the things that he needs to do to help

you make the changes that you need to make.

You're going to assess and you're going to believe, and then you're going to

pick up the knife and make an incision.

At some point, my team expects me to stop contemplating and start operating.

And that's what I expect you to do as well, my friend. If we're going to get

into self-brain surgery, at some point, we got to stop thinking about it and start doing it.

More doing and less thinking.

Stop contemplating and start operating. That's her motto. That's our goal as self-brain surgeons.

So we're going to assess honestly, believe that God can keep His promises.

We're going to make an incision. We're going to deepen that exposure and carry

out the operation to the best of our abilities.

We're going to pray about it, ask God to help us. He's going to line up His will.

We're going to line up our will with His will, and He's going to help us carry

out things, the Bible says, and good things that please Him in the way that He can help us do.

And we don't have to do it all on our own. We can stop contemplating and start

operating, and we can deepen that exposure and get it done.

And finally, we are going to expect a good outcome.

So when we apply good techniques and good training and good planning and good

praying to the operation at hand, we are going to expect a good outcome.

Does it always work out perfectly?

No. Why? Because we're in a fallen world, a world full of suffering,

a world full of difficulty that people sometimes do things that we don't want them to do.

Sometimes we can't pull through the way we want to. Sometimes we mess up even

though No, we said we weren't going to again.

There's some times that we just don't, it doesn't work out the way we want.

But when we carry out a good plan.

And when we submit that plan to the will of our Father, and when we use self-directed

neuroplasticity to change our minds, we will start to see our lives change.

And then we'll begin to observe with the quantum Zeno effect the power of repetitive

operation from a point of view of expecting positive change.

And then we're going to see Hebb's Law kick in, and we're going to begin to

see neurons firing together and wiring together and inspiring us to inspire each other to change.

And we're going to start seeing some traction come forward from this life that

we now have of being good self-brain surgeons instead of victims of our thoughts and feelings.

Friend, that's what Frontal Lobe Friday is all about. We're gonna use our brains

the way God intended for them under the direction and control of our minds,

under the direction and control of His Spirit,

and we're gonna start seeing some real change and we're gonna become healthier

and feel better and be happier in spite of the suffering, in spite of the hardships,

in spite of the difficulties, in spite of the past.

We are going to tell a different story about how we experience the things that

happen to us instead of having to react to them or live in fear of them or mourn

them or get stuck in the grief over them.

We're going to change our minds and change our lives, and we're going to start today.

Music.

Hey, thanks for listening. The Dr. Lee Warren Podcast is brought to you by my

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It's a treatment plan for recovering from trauma, tragedy, and other massive things.

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Self-Brain Surgery, every Sunday since 2014, helping people in all 50 states

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I'm Dr. Lee Warren, and I'll talk to you soon. Remember, friend,

you can't change your life until you change your mind. And the good news is you can start today.

Music.