Science-backed Process for Self-appraisal & Change

The Brain’s Purpose

The early human brain was forged through hardship and ingenuity. The developing mind brought lineages of success in battle and perseverance through harshness and unimaginably trying times. Enhanced through each generation, today’s human brain is both super-wired and super-powered. This is our human experience navigating the world using our super brains.

Our brains have layers that vary in purpose. Like a computer, our brain uses different operating systems at different times depending on the environment’s needs. These systems assess and respond to different situations drawing from a catalog of learned experiences. Our mind relies on our brain’s operating system to rapidly utilize a multitude of processes in different combinations across different situations. The assessment system informs how we navigate our world.

As our ancestors adapted to their environment, the human brain evolved, adding a more complex layer to the prior. More capacity inspired new abilities to understand our environment and build skills to control it. Each experience expanded our imaginations and broader awareness. This awareness made us better at predicting threats to gain safety, assessing risks to make reasonable changes, and connecting emotions, adding predictability to our interactions. Predictability brought our ancestors the agency to stabilize food production lines, develop the practice of medicine, and stand in solidarity for community protection.

As humans developed collective goals, we built institutions. Then we made industries. Then we went digital. The 20th century put us in hyperdrive. Our minds’ reach went from an arm’s length to the outer stratosphere. Today, at the fringe of our brain’s growth is collective governance over an entire planet.

The Brain’s Function

Super brains are supercomputers, though no modern-day computer compares to that of the human brain. Our brain’s operating system is the most dynamic and adaptive in existence. We are both aware and unaware of a collection of complex operating systems. We are conscious of our ongoing experiences and use our imagination to understand the experience of others. Humans can communicate these experiences to each other now and through time. Given the vastness of our conscious experience, it is easy to overlook that much of our body functions without any conscious involvement. It is only when the unconscious programming is disrupted – our heart skips a beat, or our allergies flare up, that we become aware something is ”off.”. Take the exceptionally complex process of walking. Our bodies are massive and complex structures. It takes trillions of cells functioning independently and in coordination to execute balance and navigate momentum. That takes up a lot of processing power.

The brain’s operating system expanded in new environments. Each new niche presented new situations for the brain to observe, analyze, respond to, and record in its memory bank. We now have conscious minds. The more recent layer of our super brain can compare situations to each other and imagine unseen environments. Our newest skill is reasoning, explaining an action or event, and its advanced programming. What is interesting is that unconscious activity, especially the activation of the stress response system, commonly overpowers the conscious mind’s reasoning of a situation. Stress activation happens when our environment feels threatening. The threat can be immediate and all-encompassing, or it can be something upsetting that simmers in the back of our conscious minds. Our unconscious brain is tasked with ongoing assessing the environment in which we find ourselves, moment by moment. Our unconscious and conscious brain communicate through emotions surfaced from prior experience and self-belief systems. Even in safe environments, our conscious mind will stick to old unconscious patterns, and our resulting behaviors become barriers to success.

Assessing and processing what we perceive as a threat is how our ancestors survived and even flourished. Our ancestors were possibly more adaptive, being able to reform old beliefs, through experience. Forming colonies takes trust to collaborate. Having behaviors that impede community participation limits our success. Those who could not adapt did not survive. Those who advanced their understanding and core self-beliefs were a better match for their new environment. Their successes are the foundation for our success today.

In recent decades, humans have gone digital. Digital is a new environment, and new environments require adaptation. So what belief programming, passed down from ancestral days, limits our success in navigating today’s environment? Meta-Brain Labs believes that it is outdated unconscious beliefs that are not advantageous in our current conditions that once were in the past and they inhibit our success. As individuals, these beliefs can hinder our success by churning in the background, keeping our bodies on alert, and reinforcing the need for our unconscious mind to interpret our world as a threat. Stress-induced behaviors further elicit stressful outcomes, and this background wear and tear locks us into a cycle of disruption impacting our mind and body. Chronic stress in our body causes chronic illness.

Programming Of The Mind

At birth, our brains and body are not blank slates. We enter the world carrying physiological imprints. These imprints provide a historical record of our elders’ success. This physiologic knowledge guides our body’s development. When going from blueprint to grand opening, the builder accounts for historical and current environmental conditions. Ideally, we want the building to survive future events. Plus, needs differ by local surroundings. As our brains develop in childhood, they too learn what behaviors work in their local environmental and social surroundings. We learned through childhood training and experience how to assess our environment and successfully respond. When this assessment, perceived through the lens of our belief system, senses threat, lack of control, or unpredictability in a situation, our brain activates a stress response. The emotions we feel is our bridge between the unconscious and conscious mind, driven by the underlying perceptions that generate behavioral responses. 

This emotional bridge is our historical behavior-to-success record, that informs how we both perceive and behave in the world. Said differently, our conscious minds navigate our world through perception-based beliefs held in our supercharged unconscious brains. Outdated self-beliefs limit our success when navigating a changed world. Our success is often limited by the perception clung to that used to work but no longer do. This inhibits performance in learning, collaborating, and performing.

The world today is in a period of rapid change. Many of our imprinted beliefs held some utility in the past because they were successful in producing self-preserving behaviors. Navigating today’s social environment is hindered by outdated beliefs. This dissonance increases our experience of stress. Our personal experience is dissonance and conflict rippling through our body, creating a chronically stressed state.

We Can Reprogram Self-Limiting Beliefs

In our social world, each person is guided by their upbringing; specifically, the beliefs passed down through generations. With the right tools, humans can become active directors of their lives, no longer at the mercy of autonomous reactions. Though these early life beliefs are part of our brain’s operating system, they can be changed if they just don’t work. Just as computer operating systems need updates to stay current with today’s environment, so can our self-beliefs. With belief-altering updates, a process of overwriting old perceptions and behavioral responses, we are free from a stressed state.

The imprint of these limiting beliefs can be re-written. With updated self-beliefs adapted to current environments, behaviors and performance produce positive results. Updates to our “self-belief system” brings awareness of self and over two weeks of practice, provides a positive behavioral change. Now, when your boss makes whatever face they want to make to whomever they want to make it, your body doesn’t lurch into an internal stressed state. The power to control your body is under your control, not your boss’s. Doing with work of reprogramming limiting self-beliefs breaks the cycle of self-defeating behaviors, preventing a stress response while supporting cognitive participation to accomplish the task at hand successfully.

Barrier-breaking Innovation

Meta-Brain Labs provides a tool to identify and overwrite outdated beliefs that hinder your potential. They aren’t just any beliefs, though. They are the imprinted unconscious beliefs unaware of by the conscious mind.

Our founder, Alexandrea Day, envisioned the neuro-biochemically layering of belief-driven behaviors and developed a method to reprogram beliefs. Situated under cognitive behavioral theory, she developed a method to query the unconscious mind, identify self-limiting beliefs, and reverse them so we can align our beliefs with our current life situation(s) and the goals we have set for ourselves, which in turn reduces a stress response.