If It Feels Right, Stop and Think About It

“It just feels right!” Who needs any other reason to believe something if it resonates so deeply in your heart? From choosing jeans to picking a house, our feelings often tip the scales. But is leaning on feelings really a winning strategy?

  My twice divorced patient, now engaged for a third time, tells me, “This man is so different. I feel it in every bone in my body.” I want to serenade her with Debby Boone’s “You Light Up My Life,” but I also want to know more about Romeo. Sometimes, it can be wrong when it feels so right. So why do we trust our feelings so much these days?

That’s what a team of Dutch and American researchers set out to understand. Marten Scheffer and his colleagues devised a novel method to discover if we rely more on facts or feelings. They analyzed the mammoth corpus of English and Spanish printed literature since 1850—with speed-reading computers instead of underpaid lab assistants—to track the words we use. 

They identified the frequency of rational terms such as “determine” and “conclusion” as well as emotionally related ones such as “feel” and “believe.” They also contrasted how we use first versus third person pronouns to detect changes in collective vs. individual focal points. Pretty smart design if you ask me.

The researchers discovered that appeals to reason and facts increased steadily from the mid-nineteenth century until 1980. But since then, sentimental words have surged again, along with a significant rise in first-person pronouns. Our writing suggests that intuition has overtaken reason as a dominant authority. I could feel that conclusion coming, couldn’t you?

Many modern Americans know something to be certain because they believe it to be so. If challenged, they double down and seek confirmation from like-minded friends, supportive internet websites, or social media echo chambers. It’s the modern equivalent of “Oh yeah, well my cousin knows a smart guy, and he says …”

If the task is naming the capital of Australia, “feeling” like it’s Sydney, without consulting an encyclopedia, is trivial—it’s Canberra, even though I would have put it in Melbourne. However, when the topic is as consequential as crime associated with undocumented immigrants, the stakes are much higher because opinions inform political action.

 Harvard economist Stefanie Stantcheva surveyed attitudes about the U.S. estate tax, often derisively called the “death tax.” Although a married couple’s estate must be worth almost $30 million to trigger this tax (snaring 0.2% of Americans), most people surveyed thought it applied to 1 out of 3 estates. Many also thought that the tax was greedily exacted from the dying man or woman by IRS vultures waiting just outside the hospital door for a carcass to devour—while filling out Form 706 in triplicate. 

This feels very unfair, even to the rare CPA who has feelings. When informed of the accurate wealth thresholds and assured that the heirs paid this tax, it dramatically increased perceived fairness, and support for the tax doubled. For many, these facts overrode their feelings. And trust me, had they been informed about the many irrevocable loopholes used to avoid this tax, the support may have tripled. 

Some issues are deeply complex and require effort to understand them fully. The rise of opioid addiction and its stubborn resistance to treatment, for example, involves numerous sociocultural factors that differ from street-level drug problems. Ignoring these complexities obstructs effective responses. I’m not the first to worry that feelings outrun reason. Samuel Johnson nailed it back in 1751: “Nothing has more retarded the advancement of learning than the disposition of vulgar minds to ridicule and vilify what they cannot comprehend.” 

One might criticize the research by pointing out that these findings merely reflect the rise of informality in speech and writing. I don’t think so. As a Baby Boomer, I know how much my self-absorbed generation has insisted on defining our own reality. I know what a personal struggle it’s been to challenge my own beliefs.

I used to encourage my vexed clients to dissipate their anger in socially appropriate ways. I reasoned that taking an ax to a tree or journaling all the nefarious things floating around in their heads would expel this poison from the body and soul. Some had so much rage that I feared deforestation.

Social science research begs to differ. Expressing anger heightens arousal and engenders stress, releasing its harmful cocktail of stress hormones to run amok around the circulatory system and spread mayhem. Sometimes expressing anger increases it and makes aggressive actions more likely. I now view anger more like dynamite that must be carefully defused with controlled strategies instead of merely stepping back and letting it explode.

I was wrong about dissipating anger, even though it felt so right. I’ll accept Alexander Pope’s reassurance, “A man should never be ashamed to own that he has been in the wrong, which is but saying, in other words, that he is wiser today than he was yesterday.” That’s a positive reframe, but it’s not like we can ignore our emotions.

In The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde’s immoral protagonist asserts, “I don’t want to be at the mercy of my emotions. I want to use them, to enjoy them, and to dominate them.” Wouldn’t it be grand to command emotions as one might direct a sailboat? Too often, I ignore emotions because the winds and waters can be unpredictable. This delivers me from the vicissitudes of gales and strong tides at the expense of gliding atop exhilarating waves. Is this safety too expensive? 

We all wrestle with the tension between heart and head—that powerful tug where a feeling can seem as undeniable as a lightning strike. Like my patient who “feels it in every bone,” or the rest of us scrolling through ever-shifting “certainties” online, it’s easy to let feelings chart our course. So, when that feeling bubbles up—whether about jeans, relationships, taxes, or complex social issues— the smartest thing may be to stop and ask, “What am I missing here?” If trusting our gut was foolproof, we’d all be millionaires with children who never rolled their eyes at our sagacious wit. Passions are noisy and insistent, but unexamined, they can lead us astray. Better to swim against the current for a while than to discover—too late—that the roar that’s getting louder is a waterfall. Think about it.