How to Follow Your Heart in the Age of Anxiety

A straightforward guide to acting with love

21st-century industrial society is a world built on anxiety. So many aspects of our lives (like our jobs, our laws, our habits and priorities, not to mention the systems that condition them), are designed by and for fearful thoughts about the future. We’re so entrenched in habits of worry and overthinking that the age-old advice to “follow your heart” might as well come from a different planet. In this Age of Anxiety, it’s something we have to make ourselves practice if we’re to do it at all.

Following your heart isn’t difficult per se, but it is very different from the way we usually think about decision-making. That’s exactly the difference: we’re used to thinking about decisions. Following your heart means feeling the right decision.

To the mind, that statement is vague to the point of meaninglessness, so we’ll draw it out in terms the mind can understand better:

How the Mind Makes Decisions

When we make decisions with the mind, we look at a situation and break it down with our thoughts. We analyze different variables, imagine different outcomes and try to assess the appropriate course of action based on where we think it will lead. The right choice is determined by an imagination of how the future will look, and the right next step to take is a specific action we think will move us towards that outcome.

Here’s the thing: when we want something to happen, what we actually want is how we believe that thing will make us feel. We think certain events will make us feel better (happier, more satisfied or fulfilled, less afraid or in pain, etc.), so we want them. If the event doesn’t make us feel the way we’d hoped, we feel disappointed and switch our desire to something else. It’s not really about that event at all; what we want is the state of being we think it will induce.

The mind has a hard time remembering this, because the mind exists for imagination and analysis. That’s all it can do. It’s not that the mind’s brand of decision-making is bad; it isn’t. It’s crucial in certain contexts, but over-reliance on the mind means basing more of your decisions on fear and avoidance (of a future outcome you don’t want) rather than on love and trust.

To follow your heart, you have to get your mind out of the way.

How the Heart Makes Decisions

The heart takes a completely different approach to making decisions. It isn’t concerned with how the future might look, but with how the present feels. When we talk about acting from the heart, we’re talking about acting with love: doing things while experiencing love, and doing loving things. If the word love feels too loaded with other associations for you, you could substitute a word like happiness, peace, trust or authenticity instead.

Whatever action arises from an authentic experience of love is what the heart chooses to do.

To the mind, “acting with love” can look like ten thousand different things, but to the heart, it always feels the same: you experience love and trust, and you do whatever you happen to from there.

The mind finds this kind of decision-making extremely dissatisfying because the answer doesn’t take a form the mind can grasp. It keeps asking, “But what does that actually look like in this situation?” It wants to know what specific form “acting with love” will take, when making such a determination is impossible unless you’re presently experiencing love. If you’re worrying about what to do, you’re not presently experiencing love. You’re experiencing worry.

Saying, “Come to an authentic experience of love, and then do whatever you happen to do from there” doesn’t offer the mind anything to do. It solicits no input from the mind whatsoever. That’s the whole point: we’re making decisions with a different tool entirely. But as we know, the mind doesn’t do well with voids. We need to give it some way to occupy itself so it can take a backseat.

How to Quiet the Mind

The trick to making decisions from the heart is to shift your focus before you act. Preoccupy the mind with something other than worry about the question. Distract it with experiences of love, gratitude and peace. If you’re in a situation that worries or upsets you, this may be difficult at first. It’s helpful to remember that you don’t have to feel love or peace about the situation you’re trying to resolve; the point is just the feeling. You can feel it about anything.

The quickest way to distract your mind is to check in with your body. What are your physical needs right now? Are you hungry, thirsty, tired or cold? Do you need to go to the bathroom or burn off some excess energy by moving around? You can tell your mind to only worry about the next five minutes, and put the rest on hold for now. When those five minutes are up, then you can focus on the next five.

The quickest way to experience love is to focus your thoughts and actions on something or someone you love. Think about anything you can feel grateful for right now, no matter how random, insignificant or unrelated it seems. Spend time actively thinking about it. Write about it, talk about it, sit with it. Do something loving, for yourself or someone else. Make a meal for someone, write someone a kind letter, run yourself a bath, play with your pets — anything that feels authentically loving.

To experience love, give love.

The mind will probably chime back in with worries and urgency, and that’s okay. If the situation feels too dire to delay, you can use your mind to make the decision, but if you have the opportunity to delay and practice following the heart instead, then treat the mind’s anxieties like you’d treat a cigarette craving after you’d quit smoking: notice it, and do nothing about it. Just sit there. It will pass.

The point of letting the anxiety pass is to learn not to make decisions from fear, or at least to get enough practice in not reacting to fear that you have the option to choose when to listen to fear and when not to.

Once you’re in a state of calm, happiness and love, then, let the right next step reveal itself. Don’t worry about what “the step” looks like; keep your focus on what you feel. Sometimes, the answer the heart gives you may seem to have nothing to do with the situation at hand, and that’s okay. The heart works according to its own clock, its own rhythms and its own paths.

The key is learning to trust it.

This Is a Practice

Trust is a skill. Like any other skill, you get better at it with continued practice. You can’t expect yourself to play flawless classical guitar if you’ve just picked up an instrument for the first time; you must first dedicate the time and energy to practice regularly. The same is true of faith and fearlessness.

The heart will never make sense to the mind, and vice versa. They use fundamentally different criteria for making decisions, and while both methods have their purpose in our lives, the methods have nothing in common.

When you act from the heart, all that’s really different is that you let your worries and fears pass over you before you decide anything. You prioritize feeling happy now over placating fearful thoughts. You learn to trust the part of you that lives deeper than your anxiety, the part of you that’s moving towards your happiness rather than away from things you want to avoid.

If you want to follow your heart, don’t worry about what to do. You already have the answer: come into an authentic experience of love and peace. That’s your next step. Whatever you happen to do from there comes next.