To Know Yourself is to Know PsychoNeuroBiology

It’s who you are — and you are unique

We all want to know where this universe is taking us, but how many are thinking about how they will respond when they get there?

To know how one will respond to life’s circumstances we must know ourselves and correct any malfunctions that exist to the best of human ability for each individual person. We must change/develop in order to flow in the new “current”, “connection”, or responses (whatever word you wish to plug in there as long as it means the same thing).

The body cannot be changed unless the sciences between the brain and emotions to its current state are known. Phantom limb syndrome is an example of just how out of touch our thinking may be. In this syndrome, the brain thinks a limb is still there after the limb has been removed. Specialists work with people on getting their brains to realize it. The person doesn’t say “well, it’s who I am”. No, thinking in a way that prevents healthy living or is not clinically accurate is not “who you are”. It is NEVER who you are. Work on yourself. Don’t neglect yourself.

Just as the brain cannot be healthily altered if the same connections are not known and also where it’s going is not known, or it’s just a shot in the dark. Life is not Fortnite. Your worth is more than that. As Kathleen Berger, Ph.D. stated, I will loosely paraphrase, a child has preferences about connection, toys, clothing, and even colors based on the psycho-neurobiology of a child. That most female children will pick out the color pink and even when interacting with more male-related toys, they will play with the toy differently. These choices are made before reasoning has even really surfaced. Kathleen Berger, Ph.D. is the author of the textbook used in over 700 colleges, The Developing Person Through the Life Span.

We cannot deny ourselves, as having reached the stage of reasoning, to neglect our DNA and psychoneurobiology. psychoneurobiology breaks down to:

• psychology
• biology
• & neuroscience (neurological sciences) (neurology is the study of medicine on the nervous system)

Example

If we are working on responding in confidence in every situation, then that is where “we are going”.

Meta-cognitive confidence is important because it affects whether people use their primary cognitions in guiding judgments and behaviors. The research described in this review is organized around the type of primary thoughts for which people have confidence, including judgments about memory, choices, and evaluative judgments. Along with other areas, prefrontal cortex and parietal regions have been consistently associated with judgments of meta-cognitive confidence in these three domains. Although metacognitive confidence might be associated with particular brain activity in most of the studies reviewed, confidence often seems to be confounded with other potentially important dimensions, such as effort and ease (Luttrell, 2013).

This research involved five female participants who were contemplating a career change. They took part in a coaching programme which consisted of four positive psychology interventions based on a proposal of core confidence as a higher order construct composed of self-efficacy, hope, optimism and resilience. Data were gathered through semi-structured interviews and written reflections and an interpretative phenomenological analysis showed that participants perceived their career confidence before the programme as low, incorporating negative affect and self-doubt. After the programme, participants demonstrated increased career engagement, self-awareness and a positive and optimistic outlook (Archer & Yates, 2017).

[Findings]: Participants became better at thinking about bad events or experiences in a more objective way ‘what would be the worst situation and then trying to give myself the opposite kind of thoughts’. They were more aware of their thought patterns and the value of maintaining a conscious awareness of the factors that would help them: ‘I will keep in mind … resilience and optimism’, and the benefits of consciously changing their thought patterns: ‘an element of wanting to stop that thought rather than not caring that I was going down that thought’ (Archer & Yates, 2017).

[Findings]: The coaching itself, the participants felt, acted as a catalyst by increasing their knowledge and motivation, changing their perspectives and giving them a sense of progress with one participant describing its motivating effect: ‘I needed a push to get going in the direction’, and another that ‘it has given me the boost … the confidence to get going’. All the participants reported enjoying the coaching process, of feeling supported, and this sense of movement appears to contribute to their confidence (Archer & Yates, 2017).

References

1. Andrew Luttrell, Pablo Briñol, Richard E. Petty, William Cunningham & Darío Díaz (2013) Metacognitive confidence: A neuroscience approach, International Journal of Social Psychology, 28:3, 317–332, DOI: 10.1174/021347413807719148
2. Sarah Archer & Julia Yates (2017) Understanding potential career changers’ experience of career confidence following a positive psychology-based coaching program, Coaching: An International Journal of Theory, Research, and Practice, 10:2, 157–175, DOI: 10.1080/17521882.2017.1292535

It is like this in every area: depression, love, marriage, laziness, athletic, etc. There are always biological foundations to change. There are always neurological foundations in change. There are always psychological foundations in change.

To Know Yourself is to Know the psychoneurobiological makeup of yourself

That is the reason why I tossed out the BS “fake it till you make it” long ago and replaced that illogical stupidity with “develop until you make it”. We all develop/change towards our goals. If our goal is playing Xbox we will adjust to the psychoneurobiological factors of our decision. And if/when that brings social-neglect guilt, that’s just part of neurological repercussions.

There are many people who get jealous of other people, but we need to understand that we do not have the psychoneurobiological makeup of other people. Don’t get jealous, develop.

What we have to do, is work with one person through what processes (a systematic series of mechanized or chemical operations that are performed in order to produce or manufacture something)(through counseling, coaching, consulting) to have the desired outcome, so they get the good side of natural selection.

More reading on confidence

Scholarly and peer-reviewed

1. Claire Tsai, & Ann McGill. (2010). On the Psychology of Confidence — the Effects of Fluency and Construal Level on Confidence Judgments. Advances in Consumer Research., 37.
2. Chris Beaumont, Ian W. Maynard & Joanne Butt (2015) Effective Ways to Develop and Maintain Robust Sport-Confidence: Strategies Advocated by Sport Psychology Consultants, Journal of Applied Sport Psychology, 27:3, 301–318, DOI: 10.1080/10413200.2014.996302