How to Give Your Heart a Shake

I owe the expression "give your heart a shake" to the superb song "Tanqueray" by the Canadian singer-songwriter William Prince. The more usual expression "give your head a shake" urges people to change how they think, but Prince's line urges people to change how they feel.

Is such intentional emotional change even possible?

In common views, the heart and head are so independent that we cannot expect people to alter their emotions. The French philosopher Blaise Pascal said, "The heart has its reasons that reason does not know."

This remark is part of his defense of Christianity, in which he stated that the heart perceives God and not reason, and he clearly thought that emotion was superior to reason. He even said that people have a war between reason and passion and that reasoning comes down to surrendering to feeling.

Reason works slowly, but feeling works instantly. The British philosopher David Hume said, "Reason is, and ought only to be, the slave of the passions."

A similar barrier between feeling and thinking is assumed by the expression "the heart wants what it wants," used by Emily Dickinson, Woody Allen, Selena Gomez, and the TV show "Girls." (I discussed it in a previous article.) Like the Pascal quote, this saying assumes that emotions will not yield to critical thinking.

However, the best evidence that emotions can be influenced by reason is the host of people helped by psychotherapy. People go to therapists because of negative emotions such as excessive sadness and anxiety, and millions of people have been helped by cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) and other techniques. Therapists can help people realize that their emotional suffering can be lessened by changing beliefs and inferences that unreasonably support their distress.

How emotional change works is explained by the theory, which I co-authored, that emotions are brain processes that combine neural representations of (1) a situation, such as being stuck in a bad relationship, (2) physiological changes, such as heartbeat and breathing rates, and (3) evaluations of the relevance of the situation to personal goals such as being loved. From this perspective, emotions can indeed be changed by altering situational representations, physiology, and appraisals of goal relevance, including paying attention to a full range of goals.

This perspective suggests many ways to give your heart a shake.

1. Cognitive: Reevaluate your beliefs, goals, and the relevance of your current situation to your goals, for example, by reappraising the value of toxic relationships.
2. Physiological: Change your bodily states by techniques that include exercise, meditation, and medications such as anti-depressants, which affect neurotransmitters.
3. Social: Transform relationships that hurt emotions by avoiding toxic people and painful social media.
4. Political: Work to change institutions that fail to meet people's biological and psychological needs.

An essential part of these transformations is replacing misinformation with accurate information through methods outlined in my book Falsehoods Fly. Making a better world, or at least keeping it from worsening steadily, requires seeking true beliefs and avoiding disinformation spread by harmful agents pursuing their greed for power and wealth. This pursuit also requires changing values, which are emotional attitudes toward concepts relevant to assessing what is good for people.

So, I think Prince has a better perspective on the heart's capacity for emotional change than Pascal, Hume, or Gomez. We can modify our thinking, physiology, social worlds, and political environments to encourage more positive emotions.