Should You Follow Your Heart, or Not?

It’s one of the great personality-gauging questions of our day, isn’t it? You may think there’s a right and wrong answer, or you may think it’s simply down to personality differences, but it’s one of the big party lines by which you can organize people. Do you believe that logic and reason should rule our every decision, and emotions ought to be ignored, or do you trust in the wisdom of the heart?

If you’ve been following me a while, you would probably expect me to come down on the latter side, but the truth is a little bit more complicated than that. You might say I opt for option C. But I do feel strongly about it. You might even go so far as to say I believe there is a biblically correct answer.

But before we get into that, I want to briefly cover a couple of definitions. Broadly speaking, “emotions” and “feelings” are synonyms, but I’ve found it personally useful to draw a meaningful distinction between them. So for the rest of this post, anytime I say “emotion,” I’m referring to temporary emotions that result directly from your current circumstances. You feel happy receiving a gift on your birthday, you feel disappointed when a friend behaves poorly toward you, you feel hungry at lunchtime. These are emotions. A feeling refers to deeper emotional responses with roots in your memories and subconscious. For example, if you experienced a betrayal when you were young, and now become angry or fearful at very minor sleights because they touch on that trauma, or if you feel warm and fuzzy when you smell hot fudge because your mother used to share one with you on lazy weekends, those would be feelings.

Now, emotions are simple reactions to our circumstances and mostly inconsequential, from a psychological perspective. But feelings obviously have deeper roots, and reflect things about us with the capacity to shape our daily lives. In other words, feelings come from the subconscious mind, which I believe is either equal to or very closely related to the biblical heart.

Think about what this means, then. In this age of cognitive behavioral therapy, we all know that these sorts of traumatic memories and subconscious feelings can lead us in irrational and sometimes destructive directions. I’m sure we can all call to mind times when we’ve seen friends or loved ones act very foolishly against the greater good or even their own interests because of feelings from the heart that had nothing to do with their current circumstances. Why would we want to encourage this in ourselves?

And yet the heart can be an incredibly powerful tool. It is our subconscious mind that dictates most of how we will act naturally, outside of using our willpower to push ourselves in a particular direction. And since willpower always runs out eventually, you could say that the heart defines our natural selves, and insofar as it comes to agree with our higher reasoning and moral compass, it will allow us to live as we should far more easily and comfortably than we could ever do without it.

This perfectly matches what the Bible says about the heart. In Genesis 8, God says that the heart of man is inclined to evil from its youth, and in Matthew Jesus says that out of the heart of man comes all kind of wickedness. And yet, Jesus also says that it’s our hearts He wants. Why would he want them if they’re evil?

The new AI craze actually offers a pretty good metaphor for this. These large language models have to be trained on huge libraries of content, and one of the most challenging jobs in curating the bigger LLMs is curating that content. Why? Because the content they consume teaches them how to think. When the content these AIs consume is full of errors or filth, the AI’s output reflects that, and becomes either toxic, inaccurate, or both. You put garbage in, you get garbage out.

Our subconscious minds work in a similar way. We don’t consciously guide the output, of course, that’s what makes it subconscious, but we can guide the input. I’m not talking about making sure we never experience trauma or see anything inappropriate, I’m talking about finding the right meaning, the right interpretation when it happens, and focusing on good, positive, loving things. This is what King Solomon called, “taking every thought captive.” I think it’s also what he meant when he said, “Guard your heart above all else, for from it flow all the issues of life.”

So I would say to neither ignore your heart, nor to follow it, but as the Bible says, to guide it and guard it above all else.

Have a blessed, wonderful day!

Dr. Alex Loyd