Reduce or Expand (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.

Good morning, my friend. I hope you're doing well. Dr. Lee Warren here with

you, and it is Frontal Lobe Friday, one of my very favorite days of the week.

And I'm excited because today my wife, Lisa, is coming home.

She's been in San Antonio. We had three loved ones in hospice care at the same time.

We lost one of those this week. We had a death in the family.

We're going to be going back to Texas for a funeral next week.

And Lisa's been away and Tata's been away.

And she's been driving all over Texas, visiting relatives and spending time

with people and dealing with that. And she's coming home today.

So I'm always super excited when Lisa's coming home.

And it's been one of those weeks where we had kind of like a Charles Dickens

novel. but we had the best of times and the worst of times.

We had some really sad, difficult moments and some really sweet moments and

some stressful things and some wonderful rejuvenating things.

And so today on Frontal Lobe Friday, I want to just get your mind changed about one or two things.

And the one big thing that I want to change your mind about,

we're just going to talk for a couple of minutes today.

We've got some incredible interviews today and some great podcast guests that are coming up.

You're going to love it. But the one thing I want to kind of get on the table

this morning is that there's always an opportunity whenever we're going through

something to reduce it to a particular thing,

a binary thing, a this or that, or the defining thing, or to expand it and add

context and nuance to it.

And I just want to suggest to you today that a way to become healthier and feel

better and be happier in general in your life, a way to honor God,

help other people, find hope in the darkest moments, is to become a people,

a person who routinely learns to expand the situation in our lives,

the way that we think, the way that we respond,

the way that we react, the way that we attend to the universe,

to expand it rather than contract it or reduce it.

And we'll talk more about what that means in a moment. But before we get into

Frontal Lobe Friday today, my friend, I have a 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 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 is your place. This is your time, my friend. Let's get after it.

Music.

All right, my friend, here we go. So again, quick opportunity today to just

change your mind about something. It's Frontal Lobe Friday.

I want you to engage this incredible ability to selectively attend to something.

And today, I just want to give you this concept of reductionism versus expansion.

If you look at Western medicine, for example, for the last 50 years,

the war on cancer is a good example.

We've tried to reduce our view our training in medical school,

our practice of medicine in general, has reduced everything down to a diagnosis,

an underlying cause of that diagnosis, and to try to find the most essential

way to treat that diagnosis to produce a cure for the patient.

And sometimes that's led us to things that seem a little crazy,

and the best example of that is in cancer care,

where we develop these incredibly toxic treatments like chemotherapy and radiation

with the goal of killing the cancer and trying to leave a little bit of human

left alive at the end of it.

And we consider it a victory if we kill the cancer cells and you still have

enough skin and hair and bones and blood cells to survive.

And we consider that a victory. And sometimes it is. I'm not saying that that whole model is wrong.

I'm saying that the approach has been one of kind kind of a balance of kill

everything bad and hope that there's some good left over.

And we've reduced the treatment of cancer in many cases down to this binary thing.

Like, do we kill the cancer or do we not kill the cancer?

But the truth is, if you look at this person, this whole human who has developed

a cancer diagnosis, they're not just a group of cells that are bad and a group of cells that are good.

And as long as we kill all the bad cells and have a few good cells left over,

we've done the job and made the person well.

Because well doesn't necessarily just mean that you no longer have cancer.

And I can prove that to you by saying this.

All of the research, as we've talked about, continues to show that many people

who develop cancer, at the end of their fight with cancer, regardless of the

outcome, find that they in some ways have become grateful that they went through that experience.

They find that the hardship of the cancer that they went through proved to have

benefited their life or their family or the way they think about things or they

found their faith or they fell in love or they reunited with a lost family member

because of the problem instead of in spite of the problem.

And that the hardship and And the things they went through taught them something

about themselves, that they found that they were more resilient or stronger

than they thought, or that their marriage was stronger than they thought,

or that their loved one, who they never were 100% for sure whether that person

would stick with them through the hardest moments.

And they did, and they showed up, and it turned out to be an incredible love

story, even if the person dies of cancer.

All this research has shown that people find meaning and purpose in hardship.

And so you can't reduce that to just a binary choice of did this person survive or not.

I remember the football coach of the LSU, the University of Louisiana State

University, LSU Tigers, Brian Kelly, a few years ago when they played Auburn.

And they beat Auburn, but it was an ugly game and nobody played well.

And it was a bunch of turnovers and a bunch of just disappointing plays.

And both teams should have won that game in different ways. And I remember in

the interview after the game, Brian Kelly said, somebody asked him about the

way the game played out, and he said, hey, there are no pictures on the scorecard.

There are no pictures on the scorecard. And what he means, he's referring to golf.

If you've ever played golf, you have a scorecard and you write down the number

of strokes that it took you to complete that hole.

And the one with the lowest score wins at the end of the game.

And there's no pictures. There's no explanation of how the hole played out.

If you took four shots to get your ball in the hole, then that's a four.

If you took 12 shots, then that's a 12.

And if you've ever seen the crazy old Adam Sandler movie, Happy Gilmore,

I'm not advocating for Happy Gilmore.

There's some language and some other things in it, so I'm not telling you to go watch it.

But if you've seen it, there's a scene where a guy hits a golf shot and it bounces

off a tree and hits a car and bounces up in the air and lands on a roof and

rolls down a gutter and bounces off of somebody's leg and just goes all through

these ricochets and all stuff and ultimately ends up rolling into the hole and

he makes the putt to win the tournament.

And that would be written down as a certain score.

But if you just looked at that scorecard, you wouldn't see

that that incredible shot had bounced all over the place and

gone through all these unlikely things and somehow managed to find its way into

the hole you wouldn't see any of that information on the scorecard you would

just see the score and so if you reduced the experience of that round of golf

if you reduce the experience of that football game down to the final score,

then you would have no concept that a bunch of incredible things that happened

on even that lsu Auburn game, even though it was disappointing,

there were some moments of exceptional performance and some great triumph and

some good sportsmanship and some penalties and some injuries.

And it was just a whole incredible coming together of two teams to compete on the field of play.

And ultimately, one of those teams prevailed the wrong team,

because I'm an Auburn fan.

Sorry if you're an LSU fan. But the winning team gets the winning score.

And if you just see that in the newspaper, paper, LSU defeats Auburn,

then you don't get the whole context.

And that thing becomes a very narrow, kind of laser-focused,

binary thing that on this date, at this time, LSU beat Auburn in this game.

On this date, at this time, the putt rolled in and the score was three.

On this date, at this time, the cancer won the battle and the person died.

On this date, at this time, the cancer was in remission and

they survived and if you

just look at your life in these binary terms if you reduce everything down to

an outcome or a diagnosis or a feeling or she left or he died or we went bankrupt

or he won the lottery if you just reduce your life to that thing it doesn't tell the whole story.

It doesn't tell the whole story. And so what I want to tell you today is the

two halves of your brain attend to the world in very different ways.

And we talked about that recently.

But the left side of your brain is very focused on a particular detail.

If you're a bird, we talked about this the other day, if you're a bird and you

need to eat, your left side of your brain will see a seed on the ground and

you'll become hyper hyper-focused on that need to survive by eating that.

And you'll need to zoom down there and be able to pick that one seed out of

all those blades of grass.

You see that one worm under the leaf that if you can have a laser focus and

see that thing that you need to survive, then you can make your whole life about

that one thing that you've got to get or that you've got to do or that you've got to overcome.

And everything can be focused and driven to achieve that one thing. That's left side.

The right side, though, is equally necessary, but very different.

The right side says, wait a minute, if I fly down there right now,

look, there's a hawk over there on that branch.

He might come down here and kill me, or there's a person over there on that patio.

There's a peripheral vision. There's a whole 3D scape of the world around that

seed or that worm or whatever it is that you've got your attention focused on.

And the right side adds nuance and and context and breadth and diversity of thinking.

And it adds this sort of whole experience outside of just the one thing that

you're laser focused on.

And so I would just suggest that if you get those two things out of balance.

Then you're in some danger.

Then you're in some opportunity for things not to go well for you.

If you only focus on the narrow laser focused thing, then you might miss out

on a whole bunch of meaning and purpose and beautiful stories and things that

you might have missed otherwise.

Wise, but you might get the seed, you might get the prize, you might get the

one thing, you might get to write a good score down on your scorecard,

but you're going to miss a lot of things.

And you're going to find yourself wondering why it doesn't ever quite taste

right or feel right or why it feels like there should be more than there is to your life.

On the other hand, if you spend your whole time out there in that broad,

wide expanse of context and nuance and all of that, then you may never actually get anything done.

You may just sit around and sort of experience and feel, and you may not ever

actually be able to feed, you know, find the thing that's going to allow you

to feed or survive or overcome or deal with the situation.

And that's one of the reasons why the right brain

left brain divide is a little

bit false because you can't actually just use one but

people that spend a lot of time meditating for example and

particularly eastern meditation the buddhist meditation where

the goal is to detach yourself from worrying about evil and good and all that

stuff and you can surely control and improve your brainwave activity and you

can reach that sort of bliss brain state and you can spend time out there,

you know, becoming one with the universe or whatever.

But the fact is when you're doing that, you're not engaging with the real world

and you're not having an opportunity to be moving forward in your life and processing

things and dealing with things. So there has to be some sort of balance.

You can't just spend your time off in space and you also can't spend all your

time hyper-focused on things and turning people into objects and turning life into a goal,

of something just to be conquered or some amount of money to be earned or some

victory to win or what the final score on the scorecard is.

So there has to be some balance. We're treating a whole person.

We're treating a whole life. We're trying to come fully alive.

We're trying to discover what our meaning and purpose is. And to do that,

we have to have a whole brain.

Ideology, and a whole system faith that integrates the balance of nuance,

context, meaning, and purpose with the practical reality of what we need to

do and what's right in front of us and what we have to take care of right now. Does that make sense?

That's the expand or reduce idea. So do you spend your time trying to reduce

everything down to a transaction, a goal, a contest, a competition,

a moment, an opportunity to needle somebody, harass somebody,

tease somebody, give them a hard time so that you cover up your own insecurities?

Or do you spend your time sort of trying to understand that everybody's in the

middle of a big, long life arc,

that everybody's got a story and everybody's got problems and everybody's got

things that they're going through and every moment is potentially the best thing

that's ever happened to them and the worst thing that's ever happened is going on at the same time.

And you sometimes get to be the deliverer of something that can really turn

somebody's life around in this particular moment.

Or you can be the one that tips them into having the worst day they've ever

had or pushes them to believe that, yes, everybody's always just going to manipulate

me or, yes, everybody's always going to just take from me.

And you get to choose how you interact with other people. Are they a whole person

with a big story, a big, wide, broad arc?

Are they created in the image of God? Are they created to be filled with purpose

and to find their way to Him?

Or are they a person to be manipulated or an object to be desired?

Are they somebody to be overcome or competed with or destroyed or challenged?

What do you think? Is it reduced or expanded?

Or is it both? Yes, sometimes we need to focus.

Sometimes we need to reduce. Sometimes the moment is in front of us and it's

time to pull the trigger and take the shot or do the thing.

And sometimes, though, we need to spend a little bit more time thinking about

context and putting ourselves in this story in the shoes of other people.

We need to learn to read the Bible with this Lectio Divina idea and with this

changing perspectives and looking around in the stories from different perspectives

and chewing on the Word and learning and extracting everything we can from it

instead of just turning it into a rule book.

So reduce or expand is the thought i

want to give you today and in every interaction in

your whole life and every time you think about what your day is going to

look like and every time you reflect on the things that you've been through try to

spend some time in each part of your brain

try to get your mind to expand to not just the transaction the moment the detail

the interview the interaction but the whole concept the whole context you my

friend are more than a two-dimensional And so is everybody else that you're

going to encounter in your life.

Everybody else is also dealing with context and meaning and purpose and nuance

and everything else that God created them to be.

And so in your life, if you want to become healthier and feel better and be

happier, you have to decide to expand beyond the scorecard to the whole experience

of the story that you're living out,

of the reason maybe that God puts you in this moment at this time to interact

with this person in front of you.

It's certainly not to see who wins.

It's to see what kind of eternal impact you can have on their life and let them

have on yours. because guess what? You're not just a two-dimensional object either.

You have a whole three-dimensional, broad, expanded world that you're living

and story that you're living.

And ultimately, it's to live out the life that you've been given as a gift to

glorify God, enjoy Him forever, and find and live out your specific calling

on this planet. Why are you here?

Expand that universe, my friend. Understand that you're more than just numbers on a scorecard.

Now, on Frontal Lobe Friday, you can change your mind about that.

And you can change your life if you're able to do that. And the very good news

is that you can start today.

Music.

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

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Hey, the theme music for the show is Get Up by my friend Tommy Walker,

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And go to my website and sign up for the newsletter, Self-Brain Surgery,

every Sunday since 2014, helping people in all 50 states and 60-plus countries

around the world. 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.

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