Finding Your North

A few weeks ago, I shared some of my thoughts about an exciting new piece of research by the neuroscientist Dr. Eric Nestler and some of his peers which talked about the biology of stress resilience.

Since stress, as you know, is one of the biggest topics I like to talk about in my work, I figured this was a concept I could easily milk for a few more blog posts. In particular, I want to talk about one of the factors of human resilience that Dr. Nestler references. There are ten in the paper, which come from a widely respected book called “Resilience: The Science of Mastering Life’s Greatest Challenges,” which I have since purchased, but not yet read. Before I get to that, I wanted to look at one of these human resilience factors in particular and give my thoughts on it.

The third human resilience factor listed in my copy of the book is a Moral Compass—not a religion, necessarily, these are talked about later, but a stable moral code of some kind. So why does this help us develop resilience in our lives? Many people would and have argued that restraining yourself to a moral code is a disadvantage. Nietzche saw such codes as nothing more than a means by which the masses attempt to exert control over the exceptional, and that the truly exceptional Übermensch ought to be above morality in that sense. Of course, this places him in a minority, but there’s something in that idea that nearly all of us feel at one time or another: that morality is what we are expected to do, and that it exists to restrict and counter-balance the things we want to do. In other words, morality is a threshold that you have to meet in order to be considered a good person, but it is an imposition on the fun you are allowed to have.

Now, I don’t actually believe that, and you probably don’t either. But I bet that you’ve FELT that way at times. Well, I’ve heard it said that when you want to convince someone of something, it is better to appeal to their self-interest, and presumably this also works well of convincing yourself of things. So let’s rephrase the question: what purely selfish value does a moral compass bring to my life?

I’m going to reference several different concepts to try to answer that question. The first is cognitive dissonance. This is the mental distress which is caused by holding contradictory beliefs, and it’s something that most of us deal with fairly regularly. Lately, I’ve been feeling that cognitive dissonance may be causing a much larger part of our suffering than we expect, since most of the problems we deal with can be traced back to an internal conflict on some level. Even if it’s something that was done to us, through no fault of our own, it might still cause us to feel conflicted.

In the parable of the sower, Jesus describes the thorny soil as represented “the cares of the world and the deceitfulness of riches.” My Bible app says that the Greek word for “cares” in that context is “merimna,” which literally means “division,” referring to that which fragments a man into pieces, setting him against himself.

That’s certainly been my experience throughout my career. Unforgiveness, for example, is the single biggest issue I’ve seen throughout my clients—I don’t think I’ve worked with one person who didn’t have an unforgiveness issue, and for most of them, it was their biggest issue. Surely there can be no doubt that unforgiveness is a form of division, and I can tell you from experience that no matter how justified you might think you are in holding that grudge—even if you really are justified, for that matter—unforgiveness is a poison.

But what does that have to do with the personal benefits of a moral compass? Well, we have this concept that internal division causes unnecessary suffering, so how do we avoid internal division?

As you may know, my son Harry has taken to writing and teaching of his own recently. One of his teachings that I think would be useful to us here is about mirrors. Essentially, human beings need to occasionally reflect on themselves in order to keep themselves oriented and correct divisions, but we’re not very good at seeing ourselves for exactly what we really are. Reflection requires a mirror—by which he really means a framework through which to look at ourselves. We’re all aware of this on some level: you can look at yourself from a perspective of legal justice, or familial responsibility, or success in your career, or any number of others, and they will all likely tell different stories. A lot of mirrors are useful for specific purposes, but fall apart when we try to judge our whole lives by them.

One of the biggest problems people run into is that when you’re not intentional about choosing your mirror, you’ll tend to flip-flop back and forth. Changing yourself is hard, and it’s a lot easier to just find a new perspective which shows you from a better angle—which is why one of the most keys to stability and integrity is in binding yourself to a framework that will show you something true. This is what we mean when we talk about a moral compass. You can’t have a stable orientation without a stable North, which is why finding and holding that North is such an important part of our development—and one that never really ends.

Have a blessed, wonderful day!

Dr. Alex Loyd