The Subject-Object Shift (Self-Brain Surgery Saturday)

Good morning my friend, I hope you're doing well. Dr.

Lee Warren here with you. We're going to do a little self brain surgery today

because it is self brain surgery Saturday.

Today we're going to talk about something called the subject-object shift and

that is going to set us up for Monday when we get to mind change Monday we're

going to do something called Default Mode Monday, not Depeche Mode.

Music.

Not Depeche Mode Monday, that's an old band from the 80s, but Default Mode Monday.

We're going to talk about the default mode network and the task positive network

and some areas of your brain that get involved when you're thinking actively

about something and when you're not thinking actively about something.

But today for self brain surgery Saturday We're gonna look at the three levels

of self brain surgery and how this little operation called the subject object

shift can actually turn out To make you significantly maybe infinitely happier,

but you have a choice three different ways You can change your mind and change your life.

But before we get into that Recovering from Thanksgiving and all this stuff

that we got to eat and all the wonderful time we had to spend with family I

hope you had a great time But before we get into any of that subject-object,

shift for Self-Brain Surgery Saturday, I just 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 for 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 and 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.

You're ready to get after it. I hope you had a great Thanksgiving.

We had family in town and it was great.

A little snow. We had our first kind of big snowfall of the year here in Nebraska

and hope that you're warm and safe and ready to cozy up to this day.

Gonna be some good college football games and all kinds of stuff but before

we do any of that we're gonna do some self-brain surgery.

So if you really want to become healthier and feel better and be happier and

we've talked Recently about why that's important why it's important.

Jesus said the world's gonna be hard John 1633. You're gonna have trouble He

also said in John 10 10 though.

I came here so that you could have an abundant life He wants us to be able to

have an abundant life. Why is that important?

Oh because the Christian life is not designed just for us to knuckle through

it and get to heaven someday It's designed to show people that you can live a resilient.

Hopeful purposeful life full

of meaning and you can live that

way in the midst of hard things

and this resilience and this sort of untouchability that

you can develop if you learn how to get your mind under control then

becomes a source of hope for other people who are striving and working hard

and can't figure out why life is so hard and why they can't seem to find their

way and everything they try to make them happy doesn't seem to really make them

happy and you're supposed to be out there able to show that kind of resilience right?

That's really the whole purpose of it I think is so that we can have abundance

here like Jesus wanted us to and that abundance and resilience and ability to

find meaning and purpose and hope and even happiness when hard things happen,

then becomes a lifeline for other people like Tish Harrison Warren recently

said There's a line that you can grab on to all throughout history,

going back to the start of the church when Jesus was here.

It's this line of hope that you can hold on to, and that consistent with Old

Testament and New Testament words for hope that turn out to sort of reference

this idea of holding on to a rope that's going to pull you out of the pit of

despair and suffering and give you an ability to hold on and move forward when things are hard.

Well, when we get down to thinking about how our brains work.

Then we can look at and see what people have done all throughout history to

try to get their thinking under control because we're not the first people,

Christians and neuroscientists, aren't the first people who have ever figured

out that your brain talks to you all the time.

You constantly have a voice in your head that's constantly pointing you towards

negative things, making you think about the past or making you think about the

future, making you stressed out, not able to stay in the moment and making you worry, right?

There's this negative voice all of us have it and if you're honest you have

it too and what do we do about that?

Well, that's led to a $15-billion self-help industry in the world with the latest,

guru writing the latest book And having the latest weekend seminar to try to

give you their version of how you can do it.

It's led to Lots of Eastern religions that focus on meditation and quieting

the monkey mind and things like Buddhism that are all about,

meditation and calming your brain to reach this state of enlightenment which

is really in their worldview emptying the mind of anything so that you don't

think about everything.

And there's even been some sort of popular programs and people and books that

have led to taking those ideas from Eastern religions and Eastern,

philosophical traditions and stripping anything spiritual away from them and

just sort of mining them for the hack of Neuroscience that you can use to get

your brain under control and that led to somebody like Dan Harris writing a book called 10% happier,

And Dan Harris's book we've talked about a lot of times It's this idea that

you don't have to be religious and you don't have to be spiritual you can just

learn how to meditate and you can declutter your mind and you can rewire your

brain to be more resilient and Generally happier.

Here's something Dan Harris said in the preface to his book 10% happier.

He was talking about the way that Meditation has all these gurus and weird people

and it can be sort of off-putting to normal,

people And so he said this meditation suffers from a

towering PR problem largely because it's

most prominent Proponents talk as if they have a perpetual

pan flute accompaniment if you can get past

the cultural baggage though What you'll find is that meditation is simply exercise

for your brain It's a proven technique for preventing the voice in your head

from leading you around By the nose you get that so he's saying if you learn

how to meditate you can stop letting that voice push you around

He says it won't make you taller or better looking,

it won't magically solve all of your problems,

and you should disregard the fancy books and the famous gurus promising immediate enlightenment.

In my experience, meditation makes you 10% happier.

That's an absurdly unscientific estimate of course, but still not a bad return on investment.

So his whole purpose is to say with this book that has sold millions of copies

and has led to an industry where he sells workbooks and seminars and podcasts

and all kinds of things, It's basically, hey, you just learned how to clear your mind.

You'll be a little happier and maybe that's enough for you.

He even goes on to say, Once you get the hang of it, the practice can create

just enough space in your head so that when you get angry or annoyed,

you are less likely to take the bait and act on it.

There's even science to back this up, an explosion of new research,

complete with colorful MRI scans, demonstrating that meditation can essentially rewire your brain.

This science challenges the common assumption that our levels of happiness,

resilience, and kindness are set from birth. You get that?

So Dan Harris is on to something here. He's figured out that if you can calm

your mind down and put a little space,

a little pause between stimulus and response, then you can be happier.

And he goes on through his entire book to talk about how this doesn't have to

be religious. It doesn't have to be spiritual. It doesn't have to be weird.

It's just a way to hack the neuroscience. And then that's enough for him and

for some people maybe that is enough,

but I suspect it's not enough

for you It's certainly not enough for me If you've gone through some really

massive things some really hard thing loss of a child Death of a spouse a difficult

diagnosis some really massive thing then being just a little bit happier won't

help you It won't help you find your feet again because you're not just a little

bit sadder than you used to be,

And so you need more than 10% happier.

And so if you think about sort of any level of interest in anything that there's

always a group of people who?

They don't really want the deep training. They don't really want to spend a

lot of time with it They didn't want to read the textbook or the how-to manual

They just want the hack that they want you to they want to watch a quick YouTube

video and learn the basic thing that they Can do to solve the problem at hand, right?

Well, that's how I view the 10% happier idea Just just learn how to put a little

space in your head and you'll be a little happier And that's fine.

If that's all you need. Okay, it's fine.

But there's always also another group of people who become sort of Really invested

they they read the manual they get on the chat rooms They they they go deep

into the how-to and the why and the understanding,

of what's happening in a situation And they really learn the ins and out of

it ins and outs of it, right?

You know people like that They buy the t-shirt with the little apple logo

on it They get deep into the weeds of why something works and how to use it

and how to operate it effectively and that's what the gurus do in the neuroscience mind space area.

There's a group of gurus and a group of people who become real advanced

practitioners of these things so they learn how

to operate their brains at a more effective and

efficient level and that makes sense and that's why I love somebody like Dawson

Church and Dawson Church has written several really great books that sort of

bring together the mysticism side of the Eastern meditation and all that stuff

and the neuroscience and the metaphysics and all of it and try to put it together in one place.

And I've told you before, he has some incredible ideas and some incredible grasp

of the researchers out there and really is able to cogently put them together

in a way that makes sense.

But he takes it into a direction that I think falls off the cliff in a way.

And that it always kind of fascinates me how two smart

people can look at the same set of

evidence or the same set of facts

and come to stunningly different conclusions and so

I see people like Dan Harris and Dawson Church

and groups like that who look at how your brain is wired and begin to understand

it and go deep into how it works and then come to a conclusion that it just

evolved that way out of nothing and to me that's hysterical like right to me

it seems like it's so obvious that We're incredibly well-designed.

And that the design of our mind and our nervous system is to communicate with our creator,

and so When I read a book like bliss brain,

for example bliss brain by Dawson Church a tremendous book about how getting

your thinking under control Activates the neural networks that produce pleasure

and and reward and all those things and helps you to achieve this state where

you feel better Because your thinking is better and then he comes to the conclusion

that that's just how we evolve

because it was advantageous to us to feel better and learn how to find ways

to feel better and to me it just it's like you had this great conclusion and

then you just drive the bus off the cliff at the end and come to the wrong.

Punchline. It just doesn't make sense for me.

So here's what does make sense. I mean think about an analogy, okay?

You remember if you're old enough you're back in the days before the internet,

You would have a computer If in fact if you go way back to like my childhood

My father was one of the first people that I knew that had a computer in his

office And it was one of those big ibm machines That looks like a filing cabinet

and it just had a little tiny screen and he had to hire some nerd programmer

programmer to program it,

to do some accounting and some bookkeeping for his office and that sort of thing.

And then if you remember those computers though, you were at the mercy of what

the programmers or the designers intended for that particular machine to do

and most of those machines only did one or two things.

So you could get onto the computer and you could use it very effectively to

do some things that were harder for you to do like mathematics or programming

or accounting or whatever.

And so you had this big dedicated machine that could only do the thing It was

designed to do and you couldn't make it do more than that It could only do one

thing and that's sort of like the 10% happier idea to,

me it's like we have this brain inside our heads and,

We can operate it in a way that can make us a little happier by just hacking

the neuroscience Hacking the behavioral science and hacking the ways that it's

wired to get our thoughts under control But we can't really do much else with

it. We're stuck with how it's programmed.

Okay, we can just use we can learn to sort of Manipulate it for our own advantage.

Does that make sense? So we can hack the way it's designed,

but then if you think about Dawson Church's ideas and how

to how to understand how your brain is wired on a deeper level

and how to use the neuroscience to your advantage and how to mix in the meditation

and mix in the spirituality and all those things and you can operate at even

higher level and your whole life can become a little bit more manageable and

happier and and then you can handle some harder things and you can and you can

really go to a deeper level.

That's like having a computer that came along in the 80s or into the early 90s

that had a disk drive attached to it.

So you had this computer that was programmed to do a certain thing but it also

had a disk drive and you could buy programs and put them in there and make the

computer do more than it was designed originally to do.

You see that? So you have this computer that's got a disk drive and you can't

go buy a program to do something different.

Word processing or how to you know use the computer to help you write books

and I I remember the first time my dad bought a copy of WordPerfect,

which was a predecessor to Microsoft Word.

And it was like, well, why would you want to use that when you could use a typewriter?

Why would you have to go to all this trouble to get the computer to do typing for you?

And before long, everybody was writing everything that way.

But still, ultimately, you could only make the computer do what either it was

originally programmed to do or what you had physical access of buying a program

to put into the disk drive and manipulate the computer to do something else.

And that's sort of the idea behind Dawson Church's work.

To me, it's like taking a computer and learning how to operate it differently.

And it's capable of doing a lot more than it was originally programmed to do

because you can add some software to it to manipulate it and make it be more

effective at whatever you need it to do.

Well, then imagine you get into the 90s and the early 2000s,

and all of a sudden, computers can connect to the internet.

Okay, and now your computer is capable of not only doing what it's originally

off the shelf able to do or what you can stick Into a disk drive or a thumb

drive and add capability to it or add peripheral hardware to it Now you can

also connect it wirelessly to the entire universe,

of available knowledge Now you can instantly learn everything we were sitting

around at thanksgiving and we were watching some football and somebody would

say hey I wonder where that quarterback played in college and you boom you can

just look it up You can Google it and instantly know everything,

right? You can know all the stats from way back to high school.

You can know where he grew up. You can not have to wonder what other shows that actress has been in.

Like you can know it. You can get on the internet and figure it out.

And you can learn something about how to speak Mandarin, or you can figure out

what the best time of year to plant plants in your zone would be to grow something

that you've never grown before. You can learn all of that instantly.

We were sitting at the airport and my sister-in-law, Jessica,

loves to do Needlepoint.

And we were talking about, I wonder if there's any podcasts about Needlepoint.

And boom, within two seconds, we know.

Yes, there are, in fact, YouTube channels and podcasts about Needlepoint.

And the reason we can do that is because the computer is now connected to a

much larger source of information and resources Than it was before you had the internet,

Okay, and I want you today on self-brain surgery saturday to understand that's,

how I look at your brain. Okay?

It's not just the hard-wired Three pounds of gray matter and white matter inside

your skull that you were born with It's not just the genes and the genetic predisposition

and epigenetics, which is that you got from your parents that you're stuck with, it's not that.

And it's not just the fact that you've learned through Eastern meditation or

manipulation of neuroscience to understand how to modify your brain's behavior

a little bit and get it under better control, but it's actually that your brain is designed,

connected to your mind, which is like its wifi router, to communicate with your

creator in real time, all the time. You're not alone.

You don't have to just react to your thinking You don't have to just get a little

bit happier by learning how to hack your neuroscience And you don't have to

just be able to operate it at a more efficient higher level and reach some state of enlightenment,

because you can connect to the universe of information and guidance and help

and therefore hope That you can have if you can learn how to operate your brain

and your mind in in coordination with your programmer,

and the great physician who wants to help you with your life. Does that make sense?

That's the big picture, okay? Now, let's just zoom in for Cell Brain Surgery

Saturday and I'm gonna give you one little operation that's going to help you a lot.

There's something called the default mode network, the DMN, the default mode network.

And the default mode network was discovered when people realized that they could

map out how much metabolic activity the brain has when you're doing something.

And everybody expected that when you go into a rest

state that your brain's blood flow needs

and oxygen needs and baseline Neural activity would drop

a lot when you weren't actively thinking about something But what

they discovered was that your brain uses just about the same amount of energy

And therefore the same amount of oxygen and blood flow and all of that At rest

as it does when you're actively engaged in the thought process And what that

means is there's a lot of mental activity that's happening in your mind all the time even at,

Baseline even in your default mode when you're not engaged in something And

so and you actually know that already By the way, cuz when you try to calm your

mind and you're not thinking about your work tomorrow There's still stuff going on in your head, right?

There's still stuff bouncing around in between your ears and sometimes it's

hard to fall asleep because you got this baseline Set of things that are bouncing

around in there and that's your default mode Now what we've learned.

Over time through neuroscience studies and functional imaging and all kinds

of psychological resource research is that the default mode of your mind and

I'm not singling you out the default mode of every mind is,

centered around something called I me and mine I,

I me in mind the default mode is focused on me and what I've been through in

the past and what I'm likely to deal with in the future and unfortunately,

our default mode has been trained over the course of our lifetimes to think about what's,

Experience has been in the past and to worry about what's going to happen in

the future is the me show We constantly think about the slings and arrows of

outrageous fortune as Shakespeare put it.

This is the default mode of every human being, the specialty Dawson Church said

of the default mode, the specialty is dredging up everything that has gone wrong

in the past or might go wrong in the future.

That's the problem with the default mode network.

Now one of our tenants of self brain surgery is that what you're doing you're

getting better at and that's true.

So here's the deal the mind defaults to wandering between your miserable past

memories and your fearful future possibilities unless.

You learn to interact with and

influence positively your default mode network And guess what you're made to

be able to do that You don't have to be the victim of the miserable past memories

and fearful future possibilities But to do that to get out of that mode You

have to get out of the me show.

You have to get out of the I, me, mine circle of thought that the default mode

is basically wired to do. Why?

Why is it basically wired that way? Well, it has to do with survival, right?

You need to think about what the threats are and to do that you have to think

back through the past of the threats that You've encountered in the past and

then project into the future Well,

if I see this I need to react that way and if this happens I got to do that

and if she says this I have to respond with that and if they send this message

I got to reply back and I got to defend myself.

That's the the baseline because in the past we had to worry about threats all

the time and that's why your limbic system is so wired up for fight or flight or fear, right?

But what God says is, in 2 Corinthians 10 5, you take your thoughts captive,

you take them captive and make them under your control and guess what will start happening?

You'll get the me show under control.

Now the psychologists have discovered something they call the subject-object shift and,

what that means is if you can learn to zoom out of your thought processes at

your baseline and stop making yourself the subject of every thought.

And rather realize that you are objectively looking at a situation in your mind,

then you will be able to step out of your suffering self,

and observe what is happening from a distance and make better decisions from

a rational place, an objective place, where you're in control of how you decide

to respond to what you're thinking about instead of reacting to it.

And that's really the whole punchline of 2 Corinthians 10 5,

of getting your spirit under your own control.

Now Monday we're going to talk more about the default mode and the task positive

network and all those things and try to try to really drill into how to improve

the behavior of our default mode.

But it comes down to this, where self-brain surgery Saturday and I'm gonna let

you get after watching football or whatever you're gonna do today. It comes down to this.

You have to make this shift between being the subject of all the thoughts in your head.

Why does this always happen to me? Why is everything so hard?

Why is she always ignoring me? Why did they always pass me over?

Why did this happen to me? Why did my uncle do that? Why did my mom not pay attention to me?

And what if what if this happens in the future? What if the economy tanks and

what if the diagnosis comes back and What if that biopsy result is bad and all

of that that worrying about the past and worrying about the future in relation to me?

I me mine If you can shift that through self brain surgery to looking at it

objectively and saying you know what?

This did happen and that might happen. But right now I can make a decision to

focus on something more positive I can I can make some some decisions to carefully,

Think about what I'm going to say when I respond to that email instead of being

angry I'm gonna respond from a position of strength.

I'm gonna pray more. I'm gonna take my thoughts captive I'm going to remember

that I was not given a spirit of fear but of power and of a sound mind.

I'm going to take that thing captive. I'm going to connect my computer to the

internet so I can communicate with the Holy Spirit who's going to help me.

Remember in the Old Testament when he says, if you pay attention,

you'll start to hear a voice that says, hey, this is the way to go.

Walk in this way. Don't go that way. Go this way.

That's your internet connection to your creator, my friend.

So you think about that. The 10% happier model gets you the quick hack of learning,

to put a little space in between stimulus and response. And it works.

But the significantly happier is getting to understand how your brain is wired

and how you can use it to get your thoughts under control and how you can use

it to shift out of the subject and into the objective mode of thinking.

But the infinitely happier mode is I know things are gonna happen in my life that are hard.

I'm gonna prehab myself to prepare for them and be more resilient because God's

gonna come into that story with me and walk alongside me and participate with

me in the troubles and travails and struggles and triumphs of my life and I'm

not alone and I'm gonna be ready for this.

The brain does amazing things when you let the great physician operate it.

When you connect it to the internet, it's not just a box that can do one thing

that was programmed, it's not just,

whatever discs you happen to have you can stick into the hard drive and run

different programs, but you can actually connect it to the entire possibility

of what God intended for you,

and that's what I want.

I want you to learn to become infinitely more than you are at your baseline,

and to do that, my friend, you've got to learn this little operation called

the subject-object shift.

You gotta be able to switch out of the me show and into how am I going to play

my life in response to the direction and communication with my creator so that

I can then learn to become healthier and feel better and be happier.

And I can change my mind and I can change my life. And I can do that on self-brain,

surgery Saturday by learning to control and influence positivity in my default

mode network because what I'm doing, I'm getting better at.

So if I'm thinking better thoughts, I'm gonna live a better life.

Because what I'm doing, I'm getting better at. I'm gonna remember that feelings

aren't facts and thoughts aren't always true, but they do become things.

Thoughts do become things.

And I'm going to stop making an operation out of every thought process that

pops into my head and I'm going to get control of this thing because I'm going

to take control of the me show.

I'm going to make the subject object shift. And I'm going to start today.

Music.

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

brand new book, Hope is the First Dose.

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

It's available everywhere books are sold, and I narrated the audio books.

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

available for free at TommyWalkerMinistries.org.

They are supplying worship resources for worshipers all over the world to worship

the Most High God. and if you're interested in learning more,

check out TommyWalkerMinistries.org.

If you need prayer, go to the prayer wall at WLeeWarrenMD.com slash prayer,

WLeeWarrenMD.com slash prayer, 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.

Music.