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The greatest deed any human being can carry out is to not cause any harm or distress to any living being.

Long term psychological research has demonstrated that practicing non harm (ahimsa) to any living being and that includes not creating or causing any distress to all living beings/things provides measurable mental benefits for you. Various studies on compassion, mindfulness and altruism have proven that reducing harmful behaviours or eliminating them, lowers the stress hormones such as cortisol which calms the amygdala, the brain’s fear centre and decreases anxiety potential.

By removing the cognitive dissonance or subconscious guilt, you can experience neural integration because this consistency strengthens emotional regulation and builds overall life satisfaction and deeper stable psychological fortiitude.

Causing harm

From a psychological perspective the causing of harm activates a hidden, destructive process in your subconscious mind even for people who think they are completely unaffected by this.

Your conscience says one thing but your subconscious speaks the truth! The subconscious will always come out on top!

You are never unaffected even if you don’t care. For the majority of humans, dishing out harm or distress to others creates subconscious, persistent guilt and severe stress. And this forces the mind to constantly build defensive boundaries and walls like denial rationalisation which will silently drain your mental energy and contribute to anxiety especially if you already suffer from it.

The Exception: What About People Who Enjoy It?

What about people with psychopathic or sadistic needs who love causing pain especially when they experience a rush of pleasure and intense power. Psychology experimentation has shown that even for people with this gross joyous pleasurable proclivity, this does not leave them unaffected or unharmed for the following reasons:

Emotional crashing:

Psychology shows that while people who love doing harm to others, feel a temporary high during their harming or aggression sessions, their mood drops later significantly because you cannot control what your subconscious will do. The mind will replace pleasure with internal pain and emptiness and this builds in layers outside of your control. It can come back to hit years or decades later in very bad ways in both mind and body!

Paranoia isolation:

Actively harming others including animals convinces the subconscious that the world is an inherently hostile and dangerous place. This locks the brain into a permanent and exhausting state of hyper vigilance and paranoia, that this harm can return to you.

Desensitization:

To keep feeling the same joyous high, they must keep causing more and more levels of harm to get their rush, thereby trapping them in an addictive loop of escalating hostility that contributes to ruining their own life stability.

Why choose non harm?

Choosing to move through the world without causing any harm or distress to any living being or creature is often dismissed as fantasy or impossible as the average person is bound by our daily stresses and social conditioning to defend ourselves and back bite, rarely considering how our actions affect another human, a bird or an insect or even an enemy.

Looking at the choice to not cause harm through a psychological eye reveals that committing to non-harm also known as karuna is not a burden. It’s profoundly liberating and emancipating and develops a stronger mental framework that directly enhances your own psychological well-being.

Psychological Structure of Non-Harm

From a psychological standpoint when you cause harm or distress to another being or creature, this requires a degree of internal hardening, so to hurt something, a person must first activate mechanisms of psychological defence, such as rationalization, emotional detachment and definitely projection and it is this that creates a state of deep internal friction which will come back to hurt you later.

When you actively make the choice and decide to cause no harm or distress to any living being including even insects and animals you eliminate this lower-level layer of friction that every human being carries. You no longer need to build cognitive structures to justify why one life matters and another does not, why this person should be punished and that person shouldn’t and so on.

This consistency removes a massive amount of subconscious guilt and cognitive dissonance and by treating this with equal care and concern your mind aligns to betterment and drastically reduces internal anxiety and produces deep emotional stability.

True liberation and emancipation

What this means in reality and day to day life is freedom from your own destructive impulses that we were all born with, such as reactive, conditioned biases and prejudices. The average person operates on an internal reaction basis. They experience discomfort and look for something to blame and lash out on. This is a loop that operates in everybody until you know how to switch it off. This keeps the mind trapped in a messy and defensive survival state or mind which you cannot register is taking place in you.

Choosing total non-harm breaks this subconscious loop. It does demand deep and radical self-awareness and emotional regulation. And when you choose not to inflict any form of distress or harm on anything, you liberate yourself on certain layers and levels within and reclaim complete control over your emotional ground thereby reducing your vulnerability to your own internal triggers and this leads to psychological increases in safety and self-resilience and you will further attract positivity from others.

Spiritual and psychological convergence

This new mindset change is how you interact with even the smallest creatures, the smallest minute beings that have nervous systems too. Where the average person might kill an insect out of minor inconvenience or even vexation, a well-trained mind in non-harm pauses, reconsiders or hesitates to act upon that arising thought or call to action.

If you would like to reduce causing harm or distress towards others and you’d like to psychologically explore managing this better. This counselling course may be of help to you.

The greatest deed any human being can carry out on this planet is to not cause any harm or distress to any living being.

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