There is no reason not to follow your heart.
Steve Jobs
There are no rules, just follow your heart.
Robin Williams
Do what you feel in your heart to be right – for you’ll be criticized anyway.
Eleanor Roosevelt
This seems like good advice, right? If you just follow your heart it will lead you to happiness, joy, fulfillment, purpose, etc. Pick any major celebrity and you’ll find one of these quotes. Listen to any commencement speech and you’ll hear advice about following your heart, finding your passion, or chasing your dreams. We’ve bought into the idea that the heart knows best, but I don’t think blindly following it is very good advice.
In fact, I think it’s codswallop. I promised my kids I would use that word in a post. Mission accepted, mission accomplished. Hopefully, I didn’t ruin my credibility by using a quote from Hagrid here. Back to the regularly scheduled post.
One problem with this advice is that I don’t think the people who give it are really saying what they mean. Another problem with this advice is that there’s a better way to live. I did a little research, and there’s some science that backs me up.
What do people really mean when they tell us to follow our hearts? In America, we typically separate logical thought from emotional thought. Thinking vs. feeling. We embody these two types of thought with the head and the heart. So when people give the advice to follow your heart, what they’re trying to tell you is to listen to and obey your feelings. The problem with that sentiment is that feelings aren’t facts.
I listened to a podcast recently that got under my skin a bit. While I didn’t agree with everything in the podcast (maybe even most of it), the discussion forced me to think more deeply about what I do believe and why I believe it. It was one of those moments where maybe you see something that’s a blind spot for someone else.
During the podcast, the guest said that the Holy Spirit had revealed some things to her, then proceeded to say something that didn’t line up with what Jesus taught. I will readily admit that there are things in the Bible that I don’t fully understand. I also believe that Jesus’ teaching was full of subtle contradictions. However, this statement from the podcast guest was in direct conflict with a topic that Jesus was pretty clear about. When your feelings lead you to a conclusion that doesn’t agree with what Jesus taught, then there’s a good chance your feelings are trying to deceive you.
The Heart is Deceitful
The heart is deceitful above all things and beyond cure. Who can understand it?
Jeremiah 17:9 NIV
Jeremiah’s advice echoes through my conscience every time I hear the admonition to follow your heart. When Jeremiah made this assertion, he was doing his best to warn people who had been following their hearts to their own destruction. I see that same pattern in the culture around us today. The world tells us to follow our hearts, but often, what the world means is that we should follow our feelings.
But our feelings often lead us to places we’d rather not go. People often claim that they have to follow their hearts when they want to justify their own bad behavior or rationalize poor decisions. It’s often an excuse for ignoring what they know to be wise in favor of what they want. Confirmation bias also encourages us to feel more strongly about the things we really want to be true.
There is a time and place for following our hearts. But to tell someone always to follow their heart is bad advice. I don’t know about you, but my heart is frequently an idiot. My heart tells me to ignore my responsibilities (and my family) and spend more time playing video games or watching Netflix or YouTube. My heart told me to buy a house with $0 down using an interest-only loan near the peak of the housing market in 2007. My heart led me to the bottom of a bottle for a good portion of my 20s. My heart leads me toward ease, comfort, and laziness at best, and greed, selfishness, and resentment at worst. Jesus warned us about this as well:
For it is from within, out of a person’s heart, that evil thoughts come—sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, greed, malice, deceit, lewdness, envy, slander, arrogance and folly.
Mark 7:21-22 NIV
There’s some new research that proves following your emotions leads to poor decisions. A Psychology Today article cited a study performed at East China Normal University. For the study, they primed the emotions of two groups of people in different ways and then had them make a decision. The result was that the participants who were primed to feel happy were far more likely to make risky decisions than those that were primed to feel sad, particularly when forced to make decisions quickly. The study confirms that feelings play a large role in our decision making, and when we rely on feelings too much, we are more likely to make bad decisions. Remember, the heart is deceitful above all things.
A New (Old) Definition of Heart
The only way to make following your heart reasonable advice is to get back to a Biblical definition of the heart. The word translated as ‘heart’ in our Bible is the Greek word Kar or Kardia. That word implies much more than just emotion. To the writers of the Bible, that word includes emotions, thoughts, passions, desires, appetites, understanding, will, and much more. It was meant to encompass the entirety of a person. The first of the ten commandments in the Bible is:
Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength.
Deuteronomy 6:5 NIV
Notice that the word ‘mind’ is missing from that passage. That’s on purpose. It’s not because it’s more important to love with our feelings than our thoughts. It’s because the original Greek word for heart implied both. Using the word ‘mind’ in that passage would have been redundant. It was the New Testament authors, in translating Jesus’ quote of this verse (Matthew 22:37, Mark 12:30, Luke 10:27), who added the word ‘mind’. They were trying to add clarity for a new audience that may not have fully grasped the meaning otherwise.
Heart and mind are both important. That is why the Bible is full of passages about both. We aren’t just supposed to be guarding our hearts (Proverbs 4:23), we’re also supposed to spend time renewing our minds (Romans 12:2). You need both (and more) because the mind alone can’t be trusted either (Proverbs 28:26).
How heavily you rely on each aspect of mind and heart is dependent on a number of factors. One study from the American Psychological Association suggested that younger people need to focus more on information and facts, while older people tend to make better decisions when they rely more heavily on their emotions. That makes sense to me. With age typically comes experience and a heavy dose of wisdom. The older you are, the less you might need to consider the facts, because you’ve probably already considered them at length at some point in the past.
I’m not saying that you should never follow your heart. It’s important to bring your heart with you everywhere. There are even times when it should take the lead. I suspect the reason the advice of following your heart has become so popular is that we’ve developed a tendency to rely too much on the head and not enough on the heart. If you’ve been diligent about protecting your heart by donning the Breastplate of Righteousness (Ephesians 6:14) then you can probably rely on it a bit more than most people.
But I know from experience that to follow your heart blindly isn’t wise. You should always ask your mind to proofread your heart’s directions. Always make sure that your feelings align properly with your values. If you find yourself using a phrase such as “I feel like” or “I know in my heart” or “The Holy Spirit Revealed to me”, then you should follow up with some questions and clarifications that invite your mind into the conversation as well.
None of our feelings should be closed for further discussion. None. Even my faith is something that can and should be questioned regularly. Your convictions will either be adjusted or strengthened through questioning them. Jon Acuff says in his book Do Over that “People who can’t be questioned often end up doing questionable things.”
4 Questions That Lead To Better Choices
Andy Stanley has a favorite question he likes to ask that I think works wonderfully here. In his Ask It series (which was formerly called The Best Question Ever), Andy advises us to ask the question “What is the wise thing to do?” To better answer that question, I’d like to propose 4 specific questions to ask when you find yourself wanting to follow your heart:
- How do I feel about this?
- What do I think about this?
- What did Jesus say about this?
- What do the people who love me think about this?
These 4 questions will help you to consider your Kardia, or the entirety of your being, not just your heart. Be brave enough to ask yourself these questions, and answer them honestly. I’ve heard Andy Stanley suggest adding the word ‘really’ to the end of questions like these to encourage yourself to think more deeply and answer more honestly.
Cognitive dissonance is being in a state of inconsistency between our thoughts, beliefs, feelings, attitudes, and behaviors. It is a major cause of underlying stress and anxiety in people’s lives today. Simply pausing to consider all aspects of a decision by asking questions like this can go a long way toward eliminating it in your life. The more you act in concert with what you truly value, the less you’ll experience it. The Bible tells us to direct our hearts, not follow them (Proverbs 23:19).
Conclusion
So follow your heart (maybe), but first make sure that your mind, your soul, your conscience, and every other part of you is on board as well. Give the people closest to you permission to ask you difficult questions that you may not like. Use the 4 questions above to make better decisions. I want you to live a good life, and I want you to find happiness. Jesus wants you to have those things, too. I just don’t believe that following your feelings alone will give them to you. From what I’ve read in the Bible, I think Jesus would agree.
