How To Strengthen Your Moral Compass (And Why It's Good For Your Health)

Helping others helps you, too. Research has shown that many kinds of altruism are associated with resilience, positive mental health, and well-being. One study of 6,944 older adults (age 64 to an incredible 107!) found that those who volunteered more had a greater sense of control over their lives and felt more socially capable and less lonely (Lee 2021). Examples of altruism, from donating time or money to charity to risking one’s life to save others, are all around us. Even in the darkest times, we see humble people who are motivated by a desire to help. They ask themselves, If not me, then who?

As we have discussed earlier in the chapter, altruism provided a guiding light for many of the people we interviewed. What do we know about the neuroscience of altruism? Research studies frequently involve games in which a participant can choose to give money to another person or a charity, with no expectation of getting something in return. This work shows consistently greater activation of the brain’s reward center, the nucleus accumbens, when people act altruistically instead of “selfishly” (Cutler & Campbell-Meiklejohn 2019).

What about people who have engaged in significant acts of altruism in their own lives? Abigail Marsh and her colleagues studied “costly altruists” – individuals who had donated a kidney to a stranger. These researchers wanted to know if there was evidence in the brain that donors were more sensitive to the pain of others – in other words, did their extraordinary empathy drive them to donate? Participants completed an experiment where they first viewed a stranger in pain and then experienced pain themselves. Compared to non-donors, the donors showed greater overlap in activity in an area of the brain involved in pain processing (the insula) when viewing pain in others and receiving pain (Brethel-Haurwitz et al. 2018).

What do both imaging studies tell us about altruism? For most people, increased activation of the reward center would drive them to continue to act in the interest of others over their own – it feels good. For some, like kidney donors, others’ distress rather than reward may be driving them to act.

We also know that there is usually no need to search for situations that require moral courage: opportunities are all around us and we can start small. In her book, The Life Heroic (2019), Elizabeth Svoboda points out that small daily acts of kindness will build up a habit of helping others and prepare us to act heroically. In addition, we can practice heroism by imagining situations in which we would need to act, learning from role models, and using the lessons we have learned from difficult life experiences to help others.

Adherence to our moral compass anchors us as individuals and can bring us together in a common purpose in difficult times. According to Rabbi Jonathan Sacks,

[the] availability of collective strength that we find in strong com- munities held together by moral bonds is an important source of resilience that we will need as we face the kind of uncertainty that seems to be the mark of the twenty-first century thus far. It is easier to face the future without fear when we know we do not do so alone. (Sacks 2020)

We can become more faithful to our moral compass by taking an inventory of our most closely held beliefs and values, by learning from the writings and examples of others, and discussing our beliefs with people whose values we respect. When we most need to do the right thing, we will be ready.

Excerpted from Resilience: The Science of Mastering Life's Greatest Challenges by Steven M. Southwick, Dennis S. Charney, and Jonathan M. DePierro. Published by Cambridge University Press. Reprinted with permission. All rights reserved.