genetics

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Choose Well, What You Will Live For

Self-Care Tip #96 – Choose well, what you will live for.

Yesterday we discussed finding our reference point for why we do what we do.  All day today I found my thoughts returning there and had to spend another blog-post-opportunity on it’s “friendliness.”  I was happy to find that I was not the only one when I got a reader‘s response:

I’m still coming out of the fog of doing anything for survival-as-a-habit.  As in, being in panicked survival mode even when all is calm and safe–that is no way to live, any dog knows better than to live like that.

I contrast her response with my colleague’s:

The intentions of any life is self-serving.  Altruism doesn’t exist except in God, (which I accede not to understand), and people can’t rise above their own genetics.

Now this man is the kindest, sweetest, most generous man you’d ever meet and he doesn’t say these things with any meanness, anger towards a past offense, or to turn people from God.

However, contrast his take on our reference point in life with the reader’s above.  She talks about her choice.  Can a choice transcend our genetics?

You may remember some of a previous post mentioning the work of MIT neuroscientist, Sebastian Seung. His research tells us that memories are stored in our neurons and not in our genes.  Eg. Habits are memories and not genetic therefore not permanent.

There is an interplay between choice and genetics.  YES!!@!!  We aren’t robots!  😉  Nor are we a picture without a frame.  We so often don’t think about all the good that our genetics do for our lives.  There’s just so much talk about how we fight our genetics.  We have been given both a design and free choice.  Of course we can’t change our design, but as our reader later said so well:

For some people it is a process just to ask “why am I doing this?” … AND actually ask that question to themselves. (man-o-man the times I have asked everyone else why I was doing something) Maybe it will take sometime for an answer to come, but asking means we are on our way!

Choice is the gift from God that the apple and the serpent and thousands, or billions of years (what ever is true) can’t take away from us.  Only you can.

Be a friend to yourself.

Question:  Where are you in process between your choice and your design?  Is the interplay one that is smooth or rocky for you?  Please tell me your story

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Why Are You Walking The Road Alone?

Part of humility is not isolating.  You have to be able to receive to be a friend.  Dan Allender Ph.D. calls it suffer the kindness.

From looking at him, I didn’t guess at first that Fink was lonely, but he was.  Under-appreciated, whenever Fink thought about making new friends, he remembered that he wasn’t young any more.  All his “real” friendships were made when he hung-out for hours, had spares in the trunk so to speak.  If one relationship didn’t develop well, he still had time and possibilities that the future offers.  In this sense, Fink had been rich.  He had after all that, maybe 3 friends he considered “real.”  But over the last several years, with real jobs and families of their own, his real friends weren’t returning his calls.  Now, he thought, he may as well as not have given them his special self.  Now he was older and not so rich.  Fink kept picking at that scab, even though he knew it wasn’t so masculine to be upset about your neglected special self.

At times we are lonely, but have trouble valuing the relationships being offered.  We see ourselves as something set apart.  This might be part of our drive to self-preserve.  Bits of neurons fighting over signals in our brain telling us that we need to dominate to propagate our genes.  Maybe.  But there is that intersection when choice crosses.

We remember from Sebastian Seung‘s work that our memories are not stored in our genes.  That gives us something tangible to work with.

I remember walking on the beach with a girlfriend when we were still in medical school.  I told her, “I’m tired of feeling bad about things I never had a choice in!”  It still seems wasteful to moralize things like temperament and our nature.  In fact, we’ve argued the opposite at length in previous blog posts.  Embrace that part of you and run with it! we said.

So what do we do with Fink?  For starters, tell him that his drives are what they are.  The real question is, what’s he going to do with his genetic drives?  Do good things with that energy?  (If we can call genetic drive an energy.)  Or will he do things that aren’t so good for him.  There comes the choice.  Fink.  Suffer the kindness.  (Thanks Dan Allender!)  In the end you will be happier and healthier for it.  Even if you are half as hot as your genes tell you you are, who cares if you are walking the road alone.

Self-Care Tip #86 – Suffer the kindess.  Be a friend to yourself.

Question:  What has been a barrier in your life from connecting with others?  Please tell me your story.

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Get to Know Yourself to Be A Friend to Yourself.

On the Threshold of Eternity

Image via Wikipedia

Let us put our efforts toward becoming who we can become, who we were wired to be, who we want to be, what gives us pleasure.

We can get beaten up by wanting.  Wanting to be someone who gets energy from being with people rather than from being alone.  Wanting to be someone who is a finisher rather than grazer.  Wanting to blend and lead and be chosen.

Some of this filters out as we age.  Aging fills our lives up with so many responsibilities that wanting to be anything more than someone who gets solid sleep hasn’t crossed our minds in a very long time.  Children get more of it right than us in this regard.  They have space to want more openly.  Our wanting muffles and cramps when we turn away from who we were genetically designed to be.

My patient came in depressed again.  Depression was familiar for him.  A psychiatrist works with a specific area of medicine.  So I get to see people after multiple medication trials before their primary physician refers them to me.  Well this patient hadn’t found lasting help from medications. He came to me with doubt.  I wish I could say we worked it out.  I can say that we are still trying.

What we are working on influences the way his genes express themselves.  We can’t change the genes but we can affect some of how and when they are activated.   We can do this by choices, such as medication therapy, sleep hygiene and exercise.  Choices are more effective when we know what and who we were wired to be.  What are our natural talents?  What are we interested in?  Feeling inner congruence when we are doing something points the way for this.

In Outliers, author Malcolm Gladwell says

“the biggest misconception about success is that we do it solely on our smarts, ambition, hustle and hard work.”

I don’t know if Mr. Gladwell recognized how closely his thoughts harmonized with Carl Jung‘s regarding temperaments.  Doing what is natural for us recruits our best through the path of least resistance – our interest, our attention, our creativity.  Rather than forced effort, drudgery and dragging feet, time looses some heaviness as we get caught up in inner and outer congruence.

Intuitively, we all surmise that when this happens, we have less stress inside and outside of us.  Ah.  What a relief.  This is what my patient is working on and when he is able to say he is doing what he wants to in life, he is less hopeless and panicked.

Self Care Tip #40 – Get to know yourself to be a friend to yourself.

Question:  What do you think?  Have you been using these tools?  Have they made a difference for you?