If you listen carefully, your heart
will tell you what you really need

By David McElroy · January 28, 2018

By the time I finished showing houses late Sunday afternoon, I was exhausted and starving. It had been a busy weekend and I suddenly realized I hadn’t eaten all day. But what did I want?

I felt a gnawing craving inside. It was a familiar craving, but what was it for? Was it for steak? Pizza? Chicken? I genuinely felt confused.

I’ve gone through this odd process a thousand times before. I’m hungry but everything I think of feels wrong. I stopped at a couple of restaurants, thinking they might be what I needed, but each time I stopped, I felt a cold emptiness — because I realized what I needed wasn’t inside.

I started feeling more agitated. It wasn’t sugar I was craving, was it? I haven’t had anything sugary for about the last five weeks — since the gallbladder pain started — so that was out of my system, but I was so frustrated with my inability to name what I was craving that I considered maybe something sweet would calm the storm inside.

Then as I sat silently in the parking lot of the third restaurant I considered — with the dull realization that the food there wouldn’t fill my craving — a wave of emotion suddenly swept over me.

Yes, I was hungry, but that wasn’t what I was craving.

This wasn’t about food. It was about her. My emotions and craving and physical needs were all confused.

I didn’t need any special food. I didn’t need to give myself a treat. I didn’t need all the things that my agitated mind had been offering.

With blinding emotion, I realized that I simply wanted to talk with her.

I wanted to see her.

I wanted to touch her.

I wanted to sit down with her and eat … well … something. It didn’t matter what. It was her that mattered, not the food.

My rational brain kept giving me food choices, but it was leading me astray. It was pushing me to fill my craving with the only things it knew to give. Yes, I was hungry, so that approach seemed rational.

But it wasn’t until I told my brain, “No,” over and over again that the emotions surfaced clearly. It wasn’t until then that my chattering monkey mind was quiet enough that I could hear that voice from my heart:

This isn’t about food. It’s about her.

I picked a place to eat, almost randomly. It didn’t matter what I ate. I knew that after I started listening.

The food was OK. The music was too loud. The people were too noisy and intrusive. When you can’t have what you need, almost anything can feel alienating. I just wanted to go home and be away from these people.

My brain constantly misleads me. That’s why I’ve spent so many years using food to try to fill unfulfilled needs. My brain offers me what it has available — and it tries to silence the voice in my heart that attempts to point out what I really need.

I can’t have what I need today, so my brain thinks it’s best to push those feelings aside and fill the need with something — almost anything — that’s available. There’s a certain cold logic to that, but it leads to somewhere I don’t need to be.

We like to count on our brains. We like to do what seems logical and reasonable. That’s what we tell ourselves.

But the truth is that our hearts know what we need. Sometimes we need to be less attentive to that constantly chattering monkey mind inside our heads. Sometimes we need to stop the chatter and the rational options.

Sometimes we just need to listen to the voice in our hearts. It knows what we need — and it will tell us clearly when we have the courage to listen to the truth.

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Why are children unhappier today than in the past? And why are today’s teens at least five times as likely to be clinically depressed as teens of 50 years ago? In this sobering article for Psychology Today, a research psychologist argues that children are being deprived of the opportunity to play on their own and take responsibility for themselves. Peter Gray is a professor at Boston College who specializes in the role of play in child development. He blames “coercive schooling” and the rise of additional adult-directed activities for taking away children’s sense of autonomy and self-ownership. Gray says this leads to anxiety and depression. I went through a very traditional system of schooling, but today’s children have even less control of their time than I did. Parents who think they are helping their children by controlling their time and giving them so many well-meaning activities are hurting them instead.

If you get here from Flipboard, you might have noticed that many of the keywords with which Flipboard tags my stories are horribly inaccurate. I’ve reported this to Flipboard, but the system is automated — and there’s nothing I can do about it. If I happen to mention something in an article, the automated algorithm at Flipboard often randomly picks that extraneous item as a tag. The article above, for instance, is about making personal changes inside yourself. I compared it to the process of renovating a crumbling old house which has been abandoned, so the Flipboard software thinks the article is about home flooring. Another recent article mentioned Tom Hanks — though it was about something entirely different — so the software tagged it as being about Hanks. So if you end up here expecting to read about flooring or about Tom Hanks, I apologize. I’m aware of the issue, but it’s a Flipboard problem beyond my control. I’ll keep looking for a way to change it if I can.

Do antidepressants work? It depends on who you ask and what standards you use. But a new Danish study concludes we just don’t know. There’s no question antidepressants make chemical changes in the brain, but the truth is that doctors don’t know enough about those brain processes to do anything more than try certain drugs and see what they do. The Danish study says that if antidepressants do help, the effects are tiny. I know plenty of people who swear they couldn’t live without their antidepressants, but the more I study about the root causes of depression, the more I suspect the placebo effect is what’s going on. Although some studies suggest these drugs have slight positive effects for some people, others argue that the positive effects are tiny — and that they cause more deaths than can be explained. There’s nothing wrong with using any drug that helps with something wrong with us — especially short term — but I’m coming to suspect that whatever good SSRIs and similar drugs do comes from masking our underlying issues, not fixing them. Denial is popular with humans, so it will be no surprise if this eventually turns out to be true.

Your brain has almost certainly tricked you into making bad romantic choices. A California psychology professor writes in Psychology Today that there are four things our brains do that cause trouble: 1) We think we know what we want — but we don’t. I’ve seen this in myself and if you haven’t seen it yet, you will. The things I wanted in a mate when I was young are completely different from what the mature version of myself wants. 2) We like more choices — as many as possible. We tend to believe that more choices lead to a better selection in all sorts of areas, but the truth is that too many choices tend to lead to the paralysis of failure to choose. 3) We try to be rational by “keeping our options open.” We’re scared to make the choices we need to make, because we’re scared of doing the wrong thing. This keeps us trapped in bad situations — and better choices eventually disappear. 4) We stay with the wrong people, because we don’t want our effort to go to waste. I’ve done this. Maybe you have, too. On several occasions, I’ve stayed in a relationship that I knew was dead and needed to end. At this point in my life, I know to trust my gut. It’s a lot smarter about most things than my conscious brain.

I just noticed that I’m approaching 3,000 subscribers for this site again. Although I’ve had plenty of individual days with far higher readership, the core of any site is those readers who are interested enough to subscribe and keep coming back. In the days when I wrote about politics, I hit 3,000 subscribers at my peak, but once I shifted focus, those subscribers started dropping like flies. These days, the readership numbers are still lower than they were when I wrote about politics, but I think it’s a better quality reader — people who are interested in something more important to long-term happiness than politics will ever be. I don’t know if I’ll hit 30,000 readers in one day anytime soon — as I did one day years ago when Rush Limbaugh and several conservative commentators linked to me — but I appreciate those of you who keep coming back again and again. I can’t thank you individually — and I don’t even know who you are — but I want you to know that I really appreciate you.

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