Waiting for the Other Shoe to Drop (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. I'm Dr. Lee Warren,

and I am so grateful and honored and excited to be with you today.

It is Frontal Lobe Friday. It's one of my favorite days of the week.

These are my favorite episodes because we look at how fearfully and wonderfully

made we are and how your brain is so different from anything else that God created,

any other animal, plant,

anything else that God created in the whole universe, the frontal lobe of the

human brain is the most remarkable thing, and I'll tell you why,

of all the living things on the earth.

You are the only one that has the ability to select what you want to think about.

And I've been saying that for a long time. You have this selective attention

gift that you have have that allows you to choose to think about one thing or

not, or to choose to think about this thing and not that thing.

Harvey and Lewis, our wonderful, beloved, dearly departed dogs didn't have that.

They couldn't decide to think about one thing and not another,

but you can because you have frontal lobes.

You have this special, incredible ability to decide, I'm going to think about

this and not think about that.

Now we've been, had our nose to the ground and just like Like Harvey and Lewis,

when they were after a gopher, they ran all over this 300 acres out here at Moon River Ranch.

And by the way, the full moon last night was unbelievable, rising up over the

river with the snow. It was just incredible, beautiful last night.

But when they got their nose to the ground, they would hunt and hunt and hunt

and sniff and dig and finally come up with the gopher. They wouldn't get off that trail.

And we've been having our noses to the ground for a while,

chasing this idea that selective attention is the

most important part of self brain surgery because it can set you

free from being stuck in one train of thought from being trapped in grief or

shame or fear or your traumas and tragedies and other massive things this one

idea of selective attention is the biggest thing I think it's the most important

gift God gave us in terms of how we think.

Because it can change literally, unlock chains, and let you out of prison,

and stop having one thing define your whole life.

Well, we've also been chasing these ideas around quantum physics,

and I've been fascinated with the idea that we can literally turn thoughts into things.

That the way we think affects our DNA expression, and affects what we inherit

from our parents, and stops it from becoming an inevitable reality that we have

to be just like our mom and dad were.

That just because you inherited a set of biases and thinking and fears and challenges

doesn't mean you have to live in them.

That because your dad ate sour

grapes, your teeth don't have to be set on edge, as the scripture says.

And we've been chasing that. Well, it turns out, God's put that in my heart

for a reason. You know what?

It turns out to be all related. Sorry, I bumped into my microphone.

I got so excited. I was throwing my hands around like preaching,

and I bumped into to my microphone.

I made a little racket there. Sorry about that.

Listen, this is where they come together. They come together because of quantum

physics and something called the quantum Zeno effect.

And we're going to talk about that for just a few minutes. I've had an emotional

morning. It's been a busy week.

We started out in Texas and traveled all the way on Christmas Day to Denver

and got our flight canceled and had another flight canceled and rented a car

and drove in a a blizzard and got stuck in our own driveway in a snowbank.

And we've had a busy week. And then I did two days of surgery in a big clinic and I'm exhausted.

But I woke up this morning with this incredible building excitement because

I want to talk to you about quantum physics and the frontal lobe of your brain.

I want to talk to you about Susie Larson.

And I want to talk to you about Lee Strobel, two people I get to interview today.

And I'm so grateful and excited.

And I want to give you a gift of being able to look at your brain in a different

way and to have your mind set you free from things that you think you can't stop thinking about.

To have your mind set you free with the power that the Creator gave you from

these things that have kept you focusing on your traumas and tragedies and massive

things and the brokenness that you think you can't escape from.

And have somebody I want you to pray for. We're going to talk about a listener's email today.

And we're going to just touch on the huge topic of the quantum Zeno effect because

that's going to help you understand that this isn't just motivational speaking.

And it's not just silly optimism. And it's not just positivity bias training.

But we're actually getting to start to understand the physics of how our brains

and our minds actually work and how that turns out to be the thing that allows

you to set yourself free from the things that you thought you could never move past in your life.

And therein lies incredible hope. And as I always tell you, my friend,

there is a treatment plan that can help you overcome the hardships of life.

And hope is the first dose.

But before we get into any of that stuff, I have one question for you.

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.

Let's get after it. Hey, we had a book signing at the Twig Bookshop down in San Antonio last week.

And thank you for the great folks at the Twig for making that happen. It was wonderful.

But two incredible things happened at that book signing.

So number one, they announced it going until 7 p.m.

And several people arrived right before 7 and the store was already closed.

So what happened is, of course, it was getting close to Christmas and all that.

And once the crowd kind of thinned out and everybody left, the store closed.

They normally close around 6, 6.30. And they just closed. And so we started

getting phone calls from people like Weldon Lister and people like Tommy and

Cammie Pollard who said, hey, we're trying to find y'all. We came down to the

book signing and the store's closed.

So we're sorry about that. But they rushed us out of there once the books were

gone and the people were gone and they closed down.

So we didn't get to see Weldon and we didn't get to see Cammie and Tommy and

all those great people who drove all the way down there.

And I'm sorry about that. But that was amazing that we had so much support.

But two things happened. One,

there was a young lady in the crowd that neither Lisa and I recognized.

So we went over to introduce ourselves, and it turns out her name is Peyton.

And Peyton is a PA student in the Air Force.

And she read my book, No Place to Hide, and she saw on Instagram that we were

going to be there. And she's training in San Antonio, going to school.

And she came out. This young woman who's interested in neuroscience,

interested in medicine, came all the way out a couple days before Christmas

to meet us and shake our hands. And it was great to meet you, Peyton.

And God bless you in your life. And we're so grateful that you took the time

to come out. And then Ellen Criswell and her daughter drove almost three hours

from a small town in Texas to come and be there with us.

And Ellen, I'm sorry I didn't get your daughter's name, but we were so grateful

to meet you both and so grateful that you took the time to drive out and get

to meet us and shake your hand.

And we're very thankful for your support.

And it was just amazing to see those folks getting out of their homes right

before Christmas to come and meet us. Listen, friend, next time we do an event,

I think the next one in public is going to be in March down in Florida.

We'll be sure and give you a lot more notice, and we'll have a good timeline

on when we're going to be there.

And we'd love to meet you if you have a chance to come out and say hi. Lisa and I love it.

All our kids were there. It was great to have everybody there.

So listen, I got an email from William Gilchrist.

William Gilchrist sent an email yesterday, and he said this.

Dr. Warren, I love your podcast. I have a question for you. Yes,

I believe everything I just heard on your podcast. The brain is amazing.

I agree with you, William. But here's the question.

How about skills like musical or technical or sports?

I can change my thoughts, but I don't see how I could sing like an opera singer

or operate on people like you do.

Isn't there a predisposition we were born with that is set?

Like, yes, I can improve musically, but not solo perform.

I can learn medical skills, but not become a brain surgeon. And how does this

idea fit with change your thoughts, change your brain?

Can I create new potential or make myself skillful?

Like not everyone plays professional sports, but many athletes want to.

Please help me think through this. That's a great question. It's a great question.

And I want to answer it by doing two things. Number one, I want to talk a little

bit about the difference between positivity and optimism and reality,

and I want to talk a little bit about Scripture and give you some scriptural

ideas about this concept.

When we say you can't change your life until you change your mind,

we are not saying that you can just decide anything and it will manifest in

your life and be true. I don't believe that.

I think it's false teaching, and especially when people start to get faith involved

and And they say, you know, you can just demand of God if you have enough faith

and give enough money, you can demand anything of God and he'll do it. That's just not true.

It's not true. And the Bible even says it's not true.

The Bible says you're going to have a hard time in this world.

Jesus said you're going to have some hardship.

You're going to have trouble. You're going to suffer. I did,

he said. And so you will, too.

So it's not true that if you have enough faith or you believe enough or you

manifest enough or you do whatever, that you can have whatever you want.

It is not true that there's prosperity that's owed to you in exchange for your

faith. That is just not true.

And by the same token, it's also not true that we can do everything we set our

mind to in God because we have faith. That's not true.

So a commonly misquoted scripture, a common scripture that is often taken out

of context is Philippians 4 and verse 13, which says, I can do all things through

Christ who gives me strength.

People use that. They put it on coffee cups. They put it on T-shirts.

They put it on bumper stickers.

I can do all things through Christ who gives me strength. Well,

the context is not that I can decide as a 54-year-old man who lives in Nebraska

that I'm going to climb Mount Everest tomorrow and God will give me the strength to do that.

That's not true, okay? It's not true that I can go and become a starting linebacker

in the NFL at 54 years old if Christ gives me the strength.

He won't do that, okay? Okay, it's not true that I can do anything that I want

to do or anything I set my mind to. It's not true.

There are certain things that you don't have the gift and skill set from God to do with your life.

What is true, though, look at the context here. Verse 12 in Philippians 4 says

this, I know what it is to be in need, and I know what it is to have plenty.

I have learned the secret of being content in any and every situation,

whether well-fed or hungry, whether living in plenty or in want.

Verse 13, I can do all this through him who gives me strength.

Do you see the context? He's saying whatever situation God brings you into in

your life, he will give you the strength to endure it and go through it.

He will help you to get through it.

God won't give you more than you can handle, because He will sometimes give

you more than you can handle.

Or you may find yourself in a situation that you can't handle,

but you can handle it with Him who gives you the strength to endure what He puts you through.

Christine Kane says, if God brings you to it, He'll help you get through it.

If God calls you to it, He'll equip you for it. That's true, okay?

So, then how do we get around the idea that we can just think different thoughts

and become some kind of superstar? How do we get that context? context?

Well, the context is this.

First of all, Paul tells us in Romans to have humility and see ourselves clearly in God's eyes.

He says, by the grace given to me, I say to every one of you,

do not think of yourself more highly than you ought, but think of yourself with

sober judgment in accordance with the faith God has distributed to each of you.

God has given you the faith to look at your life and to see who he has made

you to be and to clear up any kind of misconception, anything that might be

hindering you, but also to look at yourself honestly.

If you're a quadriplegic, you're not going to climb Mount Everest, okay?

You're just not, unless somebody carries you up on their back,

which is obviously not going to happen, right?

So what he's saying is look at your life and see where I've put you and know

that if I've put you in a situation, I'll give you the tools and ability to

get through it with my strength, not yours, because I'll give you something

you can't handle because I want you to turn to me, right?

But he also says this nice little nugget in our favorite passage of Psalms, Psalm 37.

He will make, he gives us this ability to see in Psalm 37, 3,

trust in the Lord and do good, dwell in the land and enjoy safe pasture.

Listen to this, delight yourself in the Lord and he will give you the desires

of your heart. Do you see that?

It doesn't say have whatever desire and God will give it to you.

It says, delight yourself in the Lord and he will give you the desires of your heart.

When you line your will up with his, then he'll call you and he'll show you

what he He wants for your life.

And if He wants it for your life, you can guarantee, you can trust that He will equip you for it.

So, William, when you say, hey, I want to be a musician, well,

you can probably learn some musical skill if you don't have any.

You can probably get on YouTube and learn how to play the hammered dulcimer, the guitar.

You can take lessons, and you can practice, and you can work hard at learning something.

And if God intends for you to

be the next Tommy Walker, He will provide a path for you you to do that.

Now, there's going to be some work on your behalf, or you're going to have to

practice, and you're going to have to train, and you're going to have to prepare.

Because remember, when the pressure's on, we don't rise to the occasion,

as Chris Voss said. We fall to our preparation, right?

So when I say, I'm a decent guitar player, and I love to play,

but I'll never be Tommy Walker.

Well, part of that is that when Tommy Walker was 8 or 10 or 12 or whenever he

started playing, he decided that's what he was going to do with his life.

And I guarantee you that although he and I are close in age,

he has played the guitar tens of thousands of hours more than I have in his life.

So is it true that perhaps if I dedicated my life to the pursuit of becoming

a better guitar player when I was 8 or 10 or 12 like Tommy did,

and I played tens of thousands of more hours than I have, that I would be a

better guitar player than I am?

That is definitely true. If I practiced more and played more and performed more

instead of going to brain surgery school and all that, I would definitely be a better guitar player.

But can I guarantee that I would be as good of a guitar player as Tommy Walker? No.

Why? Why? Because God gifted him and obviously anointed him with special skill

and aptitude for learning music and playing guitar and writing songs and put that in his heart.

And he delighted himself in the Lord's will for his life.

And that's why he's Tommy Walker, okay? That's why he can do what he does.

William and friend, everybody listening here, he delighted himself in the Lord

and God and God gave him the desires of his heart. I was drawn to science as a child.

I was drawn to medicine. I didn't know why.

I didn't have any doctors in my family except one uncle who was a DO after I was in high school.

But I delighted myself in the Lord and he called me to science and he made that

my dream to become a doctor.

And he gave me that desire because I pursued it and it was his will for my life.

Now, sometimes you pursue something and you can get good at it and you can make a living out of it.

But if it's not God's will for your life, it'll never delight you in the way

that you want it to, and it'll never honor Him,

and you won't be everything you could have been in the profession or the calling

or the place or the relationship or the whatever that He wanted for you.

If it's not in the place and path that He wanted you to be in your specific

calling, it'll never be as good as it could have been.

Okay, so I think then that when we delight ourselves in the Lord and we pursue

what He wants and pursue His desires,

that's when our brain gets involved and our mind gets involved and the Holy

Spirit starts communicating to us through our mind.

And that's when the superpower of this selective attention comes in.

Okay, we go to Isaiah 30 and verse 21.

We have a promise here about what the Holy Spirit will do in our lives.

He says, whether you turn to the right or to the left, your ears will hear a

voice behind you saying, this is the way, walk in it, okay?

When you delight yourself in the Lord and he starts to give you the desire of

your heart and you pursue him with all your heart, you lean on him, you pursue him,

you want to have a relationship with him, you seek his will for your life and

you practice and you train and you do the things that he's calling you to,

then you start hearing this little voice.

And I'll tell you, I'm not a charismatic person, but I hear it in the operating room.

When I put myself in a posture of taking myself to surgery for my patient,

and I give that case to God, and while I'm scrubbing my hands,

and Damon and I sometimes talk about, hey, we're praying for this patient,

and I'm thinking with God in my mind about the case that's laid before me and

the patient that's in the room ahead of me.

And I say, God, direct my hands in this surgery.

And I kid you not, there are times when I'm about to cut something with a scissor

or I'm about to do something and move a tumor a certain way or something,

and I'll literally know, no, this is not the way. Go the other way.

Look over there and not behind here. Take this bite and not that bite.

And that's the Lord, okay, helping me perform that surgery with his hands guiding my hands. Okay?

So that's different than saying, I want to be the best neurosurgeon in the whole

world, and I want to put my whole life in being better than everybody else,

and I want to be known as the greatest neurosurgeon that ever lived,

and I want to publish the most papers and become the head of a department and

be the chairman of the Congress of Neurological Surgeons and all that stuff.

If it becomes something I want, if it becomes my desire, if it becomes my fame

and my notoriety and all of that that I'm after, I'll start diverging from God's plan for my life.

If I delight myself in Him and follow Him, some of those things may come my

way. They might. But that's not what I'm pursuing.

And when I have difficulties, when I have hardships, when I have difficult cases,

I can get through those things through Him who gives me strength. right?

So I hope that makes sense. I'm not saying that God won't give you things that

you want and pray for. Sometimes He does.

But I am saying that when He gives you a desire and you pursue that and you

follow His leading, then He gives it to you.

There's no doubt about that. That's what the Scripture has to say.

So when we talk about selective attention, okay, we talk about the idea that

unlike any other creature in all of creation, you have a gift that your creator

gave you called selective attention.

You can decide, I have lost a son, and I have a child that is not going to be

there to bury me someday.

My son Mitchell died, and every day I wake up and think about him, and I have a choice.

I can spend this day in the service of my misery and my grief.

And I can easily, I can do it right now if I wanted to.

I can go down that mental staircase and I can see my son bleeding out on the

ground after he was stabbed.

And I can wonder why I wasn't there. And I can beat myself up about all the

million times that I wish I had said something different or did this or did that.

Or I wish I could have been there to take that blow for him.

You know, was I a good enough father?

Am I valid as a parent, as a grandparent now because I lost a child?

I can spend the whole day doing that.

And I can get myself into such a space that I'm going to say,

gosh, I need, you know, I need some way to numb my brain and stop thinking about this.

And I can then use shopping or gambling or alcohol or something else to try

to turn my mind off so I don't have to feel that.

And then the next day I'll pay a tomorrow tax and I'll wake up and I'll feel

bad for or whatever it was that I used as a numbing agent, and I'll remember

that I'm still sad about losing Mitch, and I'll start it all over again.

Or I can wake up today and say, yeah, I'm really still sad about losing my son, but praise God.

You got me and my wife and my other kids through that time.

And you helped us to see that Mitch had a whole life, not just a life that ended

tragically, but he had a whole life that was amazing.

And we're so grateful for the 19 years that we had with him.

And how can we honor his life now?

And we remember that J.I. Packer quote where he says, if you ask God why,

you don't get an answer usually. But if you say, how am I to glorify God now?

Then he says, okay, you know know what, Lee, you can take this pain and I've

given you a brain to be able to articulate and put into words what you're feeling

because there's somebody else that's lost a child that doesn't have that ability for me.

And they don't know what to think right now. And they don't know what to say.

And you can give them some words so they could just like a prayer book,

like the book of common prayer.

You can go in there and find a prayer that the church has prayed for 2000 years.

When you're in a situation and you don't have words that you can find words

that somebody else else has prayed, and they'll help you to express yourself to God.

And maybe I can write a book, or maybe I can do a podcast, or maybe I can do

a newsletter starting in 2014, and I can help other people who have been through something hard.

And all of a sudden, I'm finding that God is giving me this new path,

this ability to communicate with you, this opportunity to take my pain and use

it to help somebody else.

And all of a sudden, that thing from Viktor Frankl where where suffering stops

feeling like suffering when you give it purpose, starts coming true in my life.

And I start to see, my eyes start to open up, and I start to see all these promises of God.

The Lord is close to the brokenhearted, and all things work together for the

good of those that love the Lord and are called according to His purpose.

And all of those things start coming true in my life. Why?

Because I've delighted myself in Him, and I've had a desire not to be the person

defined by my massive thing,

not to be a person who's hopelessly lost and swirling in idolatry of my dead

son for the rest of my life and have that be the only thing that defines me, which doesn't honor him,

and makes his life about the end of it, makes his life about one thing and not

millions of things and millions of moments.

And it's a choice. And because I have the gift of selective attention, I get to choose that.

Now, sometimes your brain makes you think that you don't have a choice,

okay? OK, especially early in the grief process or early after some kind of

massive problem has occurred in your life. You don't think you have a choice.

It's all you can think and feel. But just like any kind of wound in surgery,

healing starts to happen, even if you don't mean for it to.

There are processes in place. Your brain is designed to heal.

And eventually you start thinking kind of two thoughts. Well, yes, I'm still sad.

And yes, I'm still broken. And yes, I'm still hurting.

But maybe I can think about something else for five minutes today.

Day instead of only thinking about that.

And you can. And then after the next day, maybe you can think about it for 10

minutes. And the next day, you can think about it for an hour.

And before you know it, it's kind of this quantum physics thing for, yes, I'm sad.

And yes, I'm starting to come alive again at the same time. And these two things

can be true at the same time.

So, friend, what I'm saying is your brain has an ability to consciously choose

one thing and not another. other.

And so as a self-brain surgeon, if you want to really engage this power,

then what you can start to do is say, you know what? I don't want to spend two years in this hole.

I want to learn how to take that selective attention and use it immediately

for my own benefit and the benefit of those around me.

I want to learn how to make that the default that I'm going to be able to zoom

out of a moment of a feeling, of a thought, of an emotion and say,

wait, okay, this isn't going to help me.

I need to change what I'm thinking about. I need to handle this thought in a different way.

And then the default mode of my brain will start to be that I engage selective

attention instead of waiting until I'm way down in a hole to remember that I

have the ability to do that. And then I have to climb back up out of that hole.

Does that make sense? So here we are in front of Lobe Friday,

and I got up this morning, and I'm reading Susie Larson's new book that I I

have an advanced copy of.

And like many of Susie Larson's words have done before, it broke me open. Okay.

I love how God puts all these things in a little stream and puts them together.

And all of a sudden we have an episode of a podcast with no script and it all seems to be related.

And I'm reading Susie Larson's introduction to her new book,

Waking Up to the Goodness of God.

And I'm not going to say very much about it because we're going to have of her

on the show in a couple of days to really talk about it. But here's what she said. She was in a hole.

She was in this place in her life where she was bracing for impact all the time

because she was dealing with chronic illness and some trauma in her past,

and all these things were happening. She was just white-knuckling her life.

Even though she's a famous author and radio host, she's living this private

life of being sort of waiting for the other shoe to drop.

She says, Many days I found a way to be faithful and grateful and to stand in

God's Word when it It seemed no breakthrough was in sight.

And many, many times God met me with His peace, compassion, and comfort, so that's good.

But to be honest, she says, deep in the recesses of my soul,

unbeknownst to me, lived a certain distrust of and disappointment in God.

She was not sure she could trust him, and she was kind of disappointed in him.

She says, at first, I didn't identify it as such. I couldn't connect bracing

for impact with distrusting God. That's a big sentence right there, friend.

She didn't connect the idea that she was holding on to her life,

bracing for impact, waiting for the other shoe to drop.

And she didn't connect that idea with the fact that she didn't really trust God.

She just thought it was the natural result of living with an unpredictable disease

for many years, is that she wasn't sure when the next attack was going to come.

And here's what happened. A friend came along and reminded her of Psalm 23.

We could spend a whole season of the podcast in Psalm 23. Maybe we will sometime.

And the psalm says, Surely only goodness and mercy follow me.

David says this. Remember the context.

He's walking through the valley of the shadow of death. Then he reminds himself of something true.

He thinks a different thought. and instead of being overwhelmed by the fact

that he's in the valley of the shadow of death, he says, you know what?

Surely goodness and mercy will follow me all the days of my life. Surely they do.

Susie said this. I wept this morning, friend. I broke open when she said this.

If you don't live with a sense of expectancy, wondering what good thing God

is up to in and around you, that's a sign that you need healing,

truth, and a renewed perspective. perspective.

It's proof that something is out of alignment in your belief system.

Theft pulls us out of alignment.

It's the truth that sets us free. Remember John 10.10.

One of the premises of my book, Hope is the First Dose, was John 10.10.

When the thief comes to steal and kill and destroy, Jesus said,

the thief comes to steal and kill and destroy, but I have come that you might have abundant life.

Jesus says you can't have both. You can't have a thief thieving,

stealing, killing, destroying life, and an abundant life at the same time.

Susie said this morning, broke me open, theft pulls us out of alignment.

It's the truth that sets us free. And then she says this, she spent two years

earnestly cultivating an expectant heart around God's goodness,

and it's changed everything. thing.

Every day, she says, we're given the opportunity either to trust God or to accuse Him.

Our most repetitive thoughts reinforce either our captivity or our freedom.

How we think about God directly impacts the quality of our lives.

I could write a whole book about that paragraph right there.

First, let me read it again. Every day, Susie says, we're given the opportunity

to to either trust God or accuse Him.

Our most repetitive thoughts reinforce either our captivity or freedom.

How we think about God directly impacts the quality of our lives.

So, that brought me to that J.I. Packer quote that I shared with you the other

day, where he says, if we ask, why God?

We don't usually get an answer. But if we ask, how am I to use this in your glory?

Then we start to get an answer. It brings us to the C.S. Lewis quote that says,

if we seek truth, we often find truth and comfort in our lives.

But if we seek comfort, we don't get it. We usually end up in despair.

We don't get it if we seek comfort.

So what we have to do then is to set our minds on the idea that,

yes, we're going to have hardship.

Yes, we're going to have difficulty. Yes, there's going to be problems.

But God is pursuing us with goodness and mercy.

Surely, goodness and mercy will follow us all the days of our life.

So this is the selective attention opportunity that you have every day.

Do you wake up and wait for the next shoe to drop? Or do you wake up and look

for the places in your life where God's up to something good?

And that my friend will change your

life there's a physicist named henry stapp

and he his work was to

look at quantum physics and how it applies to the brain

and how we can use it to understand our things like consciousness and mind and

all these big ideas and jeffrey schwartz has written a lot about henry stapp

and jeffrey schwartz is the guy that came up with the idea of self-directed

neuroplasticity or the directed mental force the ability to use your mind to

tell your brain what what to do.

And it turns out that's one of the secrets of treating OCD, obsessive compulsive disorder.

And it turns out it's one of the secrets of learning how to live again after

trauma and tragedy and massive things happen. And Henry Stapp.

Noted that there's something in quantum physics called the quantum Zeno effect.

Zeno was a Greek philosopher, Zeno of Elia, and he was this famous guy who did

all these paradox thought experiments.

And you may have heard of Zeno's paradoxes story about if a rabbit is 10 feet

away from a wall and every time he jumps, he covers half the ground.

How many jumps would it take him to get to the wall?

And you would think two, if he covers half of it in the first jump,

then he could cover half in the next jump. But that's not actually the answer.

The answer is, Well, if he can only cover half of the distance with each jump,

then he will actually never get to the wall.

Because if he has 10 feet to go and he jumps 5 feet and now he's got 5 feet

and he only jumps 2.5 and now he has 2.5 feet but he can only jump half the

way, then each time he's only going to cover half the ground and he won't ever

actually get to the wall. You can think through that if you want to.

It's kind of silly because obviously at some point he would be so close to the

wall that he was essentially at the wall. all.

But the quantum Zeno effect is this idea in quantum physics that the more you

look at something, the more it becomes what you see it as.

The more you direct your mental focus on something, the more it behaves as if that thing is true.

Okay, now we did an episode a few months ago, back in October.

It was season nine, episode 28, Do We Observe or Create Our Reality?

It was a a Self-Brain Surgery Saturday episode, and I'm going to re-release

it later today because I want it to pop back up on your podcast.

I want you to listen to it after you listen to this episode.

There's a thing in quantum physics where we know it's true that the more you

observe something, it becomes what you observe.

Your observation sort of influences and turns the reality of the thing so that,

in other words, what you think of something and how much you pay attention to

it, it becomes more and more aligned with your thought and your expectation of it.

That seems silly, but it's true. So the quantum Zeno effect is this,

as Jeffrey Schwartz said,

The idea that the more you look at something, the more your observation influences

the reality of the thing, and it becomes more aligned with your observation over time.

And this is just the tip of the iceberg. I think we'll cover more of it in future episodes.

I'm going to try to get Jeffrey Schwartz or somebody, some smarter person than

me to explain it to you better.

But because we're almost out of time, I just want to give you this truth,

and we'll unpack it, and you'll help you explain why it's true later. But here it is.

If you wake up tomorrow morning and you say, my son died 10 years ago. Am I still sad?

You'll observe your brain and you'll observe your heart. And the answer will be, yes, I'm still sad.

And then you'll say, well, if I'm sad, then that has to mean that I'm depressed

and I'm going to be anxious and I'm not going to be able to get over this.

And it's always going to define who I am. And I'll never be anything but a broken, bereaved father.

And you're going to start observing that system and every time you observe it,

you will confirm that, yes, in fact, I am sad and broken and lost and hopeless

and maybe God doesn't love me and maybe my wife won't respect me and maybe I

should just keep drinking.

And you will turn your reality into the observed thing that you're looking at.

And the more you look at it, the more real it becomes and the more you code

for the transcription of proteins from your DNA that produce harmful neurotransmitters

and the the more you change your hormonal state to enforce the fact that you

are in fact sad and broken and lost,

and the more then you will begin to influence the fields of people around you,

and they'll feel sad and broken and lost, and you'll begin to turn your family

into a group of people who are broken and lost,

and that quantum Zeno effect of not choosing to think about one thing instead

of the other will define your reality in more and more real ways over time.

And that, friend, is a fact.

But the alternative is that you can say to your brain, am I still sad?

And your brain will say, yeah, you'll always be sad. Your son died. You'll always be sad.

This happened. She left. He lied. The tumor came back. But then you can say, but wait a minute.

I also could see how God wants me to view this situation, and maybe God will

help me to see it in a different way.

And then your mind will say, yeah, you know what? You can do all things through

Christ. He gives you strength.

And since this is a reality in your life, he'll empower you to get through it.

His promises will help you navigate it.

And maybe he'll give you a voice that says, hey, whether you turn to the right

or the left, I'll give you a nudge. And I'll say, no, this is the way you should go.

No, instead of just letting this thing define you, maybe you should start writing.

About it. Or instead of continuing that rift in your family,

maybe you should pick up the phone and call your sister.

You'll start hearing that voice. And over time, that'll become more and more real.

And then you'll start understanding that you can influence your reality by changing

how you think about it. And you can't erase the trauma.

You can't make it not have happened, but you can do something about it.

And speaking of trauma, by the way, I forgot to mention, I've talked to you

about Jill and Brad Sullivan on this show several times.

Jill and Brad lost a daughter to glioblastoma when she was just a teenager.

And they started the While We're Waiting podcast, and they started a group for

bereaved parents, and they've gone all over the world to help people who have

lost children find their feet and their faith again.

Well, Brad had a terrible ATV accident a few days ago, and he's been in the

ICU in Arkansas in a hospital there for several days. And he's got a brain injury,

and he's getting really hurt.

He's getting better, but they need your prayers. Jill and Brad Sullivan,

they need your prayers. They do so much good in the bereavement community for other parents.

And it's just hard to understand why these things like this happen, right?

But here they've been handed another massive thing. And what I can tell you

is based on the way they handled the massive thing of losing their daughter,

they will handle this massive thing by selecting the things to think about that

line up with God's promises for their life.

And they will find a way forward. And I guarantee you that they will lead other

people to help them navigate other hard things because they can do all things

through Christ who gives them strength.

Now, let me tell you, when Susie said, when Susie Larson wrote that about when you allow this life,

this process in your life to make you expect bad things to happen,

to make you wait for the other shoe to drop, to make you wait for the next negative

thing that's going to occur, when you allow that to happen, you have to start

to understand that that must be what you think about God.

How we think about God directly impacts the quality of our lives.

And so the question for us today, since we know we have the gift of selective attention,

is to say, how am I going to use that gift to change how I think about God,

to redefine how I look at the situations and events of my life,

and choose a path that's going to help me honor God with my life.

Navigate the situation at hand, get my brain and my mind and my heart under control,

and let my creator align myself with his will so that he can then help me to

see with new eyes the situation at hand and the life I continue to need to live.

A.W. Tozer said, what comes into our minds when we think about God is the most

important thing about us.

Get that in your heart, friend.

The most important thing about you is not the trauma or the tragedy or the massive

thing that's happened. and it's not the way you handled it and it's not the

way you'll choose to handle it today or tomorrow.

The most important thing in your whole life is what you think about God.

And if you've got a God that's out there waiting to punish you every time you

make a mistake, that's what's gonna become real in your life is you're gonna

feel like you're always waiting for the other shoe to drop.

If you've got a God who's too little to handle your real problems and you need

alcohol or gambling or sex or drugs or something else to help you handle your

life, Your God isn't the God who can help you do all things because that strength isn't very strong.

So what you think about God is the most important thing about your life.

And here on Frontal Lobe Friday, we're going to start using that quantum zeno

effect to progressively redefine reality based on what God says about it and

not based on what our fear or

anxiety or our depression or our past experience makes us think about it.

And we're going to use selective attention to our own advantage because it is

Frontal Lobe Friday. And we have the incredible gift of selective attention

that we can use to change our minds and change our lives.

And we're going to go more deeply into this in coming episodes.

And later today, I'm going to talk to Lee Strobel about his incredible new book,

Is God Real?, that I highly recommend that you read.

And the answer is yes, God is real.

And we're going to talk to Susie Larson. And we're going to redefine what we think about God.

And we're going to get into that place where we can truly say,

surely, goodness and mercy will follow me all the days of my life.

And sometimes, my friend, it takes a little self-brain surgery to get that done.

And to do that, you've got to get those frontal lobes under your control and

use them to your advantage, because that's why God put them there.

You've got incredible, beautiful gray matter in your frontal lobe that will

help you change your mind and change your life. but only if you start today.

Music.

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.