Should you listen to your heart or use your brain?

Many well-meaning people provide the advice, "Listen to your heart." Proponents of this mantra believe that letting your emotions guide your decisions will lead to happiness. If you love someone, you should decide to be with them. If you hate your job, quit. Looking at these examples, this decision-making approach seems to make sense. Roxette pretty much sums it up when she says, "Listen to your heart, there's nothing else you can do."

There is something else you can do besides listen to your heart though: use your brain. Proponents of this decision-making approach believe that since our emotions are volatile, using our logic to make decisions is the path to long-term happiness. They believe that in situations that require delayed gratification, our emotions lead us to poor decisions. For example:

• Overcoming obstacles to achieve your dreams. If you "listen to your heart" every time you decide between goofing off or working, most people would have thrown their papers in the garbage and stopped working a long time ago. Although writing strategic plans or analyzing demographic information is not what our hearts want to be doing at that moment, our minds tell us, "Even though my heart doesn't want to work right now, I will so that I can go camping this weekend and still succeed in the long run."

• Healthy relationships. If all people "listened to their hearts" when they were angry or sad, this world would be full of flaky people. Everyone would break up with their sweethearts over insignificant tiffs, move out of their apartments every time their roommates forgot to wash the dishes, and a lot of friendships would end because someone had to lug a heavy purchase at least seventeen blocks through Chinatown. Our minds think, "I am frustrated right now, but I love my sweetheart/roommate/friend and we can get through this."

Proponents of the "use your brain" approach to decision-making appropriately distrust letting  their emotions guide decisions, but what they don't realize is that even decisions that seem to be logical are also guided by emotion. The heart decides what it wants, and the brain uses logic to justify the decision. Emotion is like a hyper puppy, guiding the decisions and then pulling the owner to go towards whatever it has already chosen.

image from thedogtrainerblog.com

The brain has no control over the decision, so she just goes with it. In the examples listed above, and others, emotion drives the decision and the brain justifies it with logic:

• Overcoming obstacles to achieve your dreams. Our heart knows that success will make us happy, and the mind justifies the means to get there, even if that means completing frustrating projects.
  
• Unsatisfying jobs. Our hearts also have trouble recognizing when we would be happier in another position, and the brain secedes to emotion. Over half of Americans are not satisfied with their jobs. (CBS News) Why don't they quit? Well, other emotions cloud the decision, and the brain finds a way to justify it, such as, "A job is work, so of course I don't like it very much. It supports my family and it would be even more work to start over. A new job will be just as bad as this one."
• Healthy relationships. Your love for your sweetheart/roommate/friend guides your decision. We get through tiffs by thinking, "Since I love my sweetheart/roommate/friend and we can get through this. Arguments are inevitable."
• Unhealthy relationships. On the other hand, sometimes humans don't recognize unhealthy relationships because their emotions guide their thinking. For example, many women remain in abusive relationships by disassociating the man's behavior from the man they love. They think things like, "He only hits me when he drinks to much, so it's the alcohol's fault, not his."  In other words, since they still love him, they use logic to justify staying in the relationship. I couldn't find the original study, but here is another good article describing battered women's logic behind staying in an abusive relationship.
• Saying "listen to your heart." When our little brains can't find a way to justify a decision that doesn't make any sense, they can always fall back on "Listen to your heart." You can justify many decisions with this phrase. Try it.

As you can see, some of these decisions were favorable and others were faulty. Although they appear to be logical, upon closer inspection we realize that emotions guide the decisions and logic goes along for the ride. Since we can't trust our hearts, and our minds think whatever our hearts tell them to, what can we trust to make our decisions? Maybe an unbiased but informed and honest third party. In other words, let someone else make all of your decisions for you. However, since our emotions would cause many of us to have trouble putting complete faith in someone else (even a BFF) to make all of our decisions, we might just have to make faulty decisions and then learn from them.