Blaise Pascal wrote it in the seventeenth century, and it has been quoted so often since that it risks losing its force. “The heart has its reasons which reason knows not.” It is the kind of line that gets printed on mugs and used as a caption for romantic gestures. But underneath the familiarity there is something genuinely important, something that psychology has spent decades trying to articulate in more clinical language, and that many people spend years learning to trust in their own lives.
The idea is this: your emotional experience carries information. Not always comfortable information, not always information that fits neatly into the story you are telling yourself about your life, but information nonetheless. And the fact that you cannot immediately explain why you feel the way you do does not mean the feeling is wrong. The heart has its reasons which your logical self doesn’t always understand.
The culture of rational justification
We live in a culture that places enormous value on being able to explain yourself. To give reasons. To make a case. In professional contexts, in relationships, and increasingly in the internal monologue most of us carry around all day, there is an implicit expectation that feelings should be justifiable, that if you cannot account for an emotion logically, it is probably not worth taking seriously.
This shows up in the language people use about their own experience. “I know it doesn’t make sense, but…” “I probably shouldn’t feel this way, but…” “Rationally I know everything is fine, but…” The “but” is doing a lot of work in those sentences. It is simultaneously acknowledging the feeling and pre-emptively apologising for it, conceding that the feeling has not passed the test of rational justification and may therefore be dismissed.
The problem is that emotional experience was never designed to pass that test. It operates on a different system entirely.
What feelings actually are
Emotions are not irrational noise that interferes with clear thinking. They are, as neuroscientist Antonio Damasio’s research demonstrated, an essential component of good judgment. In his landmark work with patients who had sustained damage to the brain regions responsible for emotional processing, Damasio found something unexpected: people who lost access to their emotional responses did not become more rational. They became worse at making decisions. Without the felt sense of what mattered, what felt right or wrong, what carried a quality of approach or avoidance, they were adrift. The capacity for rational thought remained entirely intact. What was missing was the emotional signal that gave rational thought something meaningful to work with.
Pascal, it turns out, was describing something neurologically real.
Emotions are the brain’s way of surfacing conclusions. When you feel a sense of unease about a situation you cannot yet articulate, or a pull toward something you cannot fully explain, or a grief that seems disproportionate to an event that others might dismiss as minor, your brain is not malfunctioning. It is processing. It has registered something, drawn on vast stores of prior experience and pattern recognition, and produced a signal. That signal arrives as a feeling before it arrives as a thought.
The particular difficulty of feelings that don’t make sense
There is a specific kind of distress that comes from having a strong emotional response that you cannot explain to yourself or to others. The relationship that felt wrong from the beginning, even though everything looked right on paper. The job offer that should have been exciting but produced a heaviness you couldn’t shake. The grief over something that others tell you is not a big deal. The persistent sense that something is off, with no evidence you can point to.
In these situations, the pressure to make the feeling make sense can be intense. From inside, it often feels like the feeling itself is the problem, something to be reasoned away, corrected, or at least kept quiet until it passes. From outside, well-meaning people offer rational reassurance that can inadvertently compound the distress. “But everything is fine.” “You should be happy.” “There’s no reason to feel that way.”
What all of this misses is that the feeling is not a mistake. It is a message. And the instruction to dismiss it, from yourself or from others, does not make the message go away. It simply makes it harder to hear.
On gut feelings specifically
The phrase “gut feeling” is more literal than most people realise. The enteric nervous system, the network of neurons lining the gastrointestinal tract, contains somewhere in the region of 100 million nerve cells and communicates constantly with the brain via the vagus nerve. The body is not a passive vehicle for the mind. It is an active participant in perception, processing, and judgment.
When people describe a gut feeling, they are often describing exactly this: a piece of information that has been processed below the level of conscious awareness and surfaced as a physical sensation before it has been translated into language or logical reasoning. Research on expert intuition across fields as varied as chess, firefighting, and clinical medicine consistently shows that experienced practitioners can reach accurate conclusions faster than they can explain how. The explanation comes later. The knowing comes first, and it comes through the body.
This does not mean that every gut feeling is accurate. It means that gut feelings deserve to be taken seriously as data, examined rather than dismissed, listened to rather than overridden by default.
When feelings mislead
Honesty requires acknowledging that emotional experience is not infallible. There are situations in which feelings carry old information rather than current information, in which the nervous system responds to the present as though it were the past.
This is particularly true when trauma or significant early experience is involved. A person who grew up in an unpredictable or threatening environment may carry a nervous system that is calibrated for danger, one that reads neutral situations as threatening and safe people as suspect. The feelings are real. The information they carry is real. But it is information about the past, not necessarily about the present.
The question, then, is not whether to trust your feelings, but how to listen to them carefully enough to understand what they are actually telling you. A feeling of dread in a genuinely safe situation may be carrying important information about what you have survived rather than what you are currently facing. A compulsive pull toward something familiar may be comfort-seeking rather than wisdom. Emotional experience is a signal worth attending to, but it benefits from being examined with curiosity rather than followed blindly.
This is part of what therapy offers: a space to slow down, to listen to what the feeling is actually saying, and to distinguish between the signal that carries current information and the signal that carries an older wound.
Learning to trust yourself again
For many people, the work of trusting their own emotional experience is not a small thing. It is the work of undoing years of being told, directly or indirectly, that their feelings were too much, wrong, inconvenient, or simply not to be trusted.
That undoing does not happen through a single act of decision. It happens incrementally, through small practices of attention. Noticing the feeling before moving to explain or dismiss it. Sitting with it long enough to ask what it might be pointing toward. Allowing it to be present without immediately requiring it to justify itself.
It also happens through the experience of being believed. One of the most consistent findings in psychotherapy research is that feeling genuinely heard and understood by another person changes something. Not because the other person validates every feeling as accurate, but because the experience of having your inner world treated as real and worth attending to gradually makes it easier to treat it that way yourself.
A final thought
Pascal was a mathematician and philosopher, not a psychologist. But he understood something about the architecture of human experience that clinical science has spent centuries catching up to. Reason and emotion are not opponents. They are partners in a system that works best when neither is silenced.
Your feelings do not need to make sense before they deserve your attention. The heart has its reasons. Sometimes the most important work is simply learning to listen to them.
If you find it difficult to trust your own emotional experience, or if feelings that feel confusing or disproportionate are affecting your relationships or your sense of self, the team at Excel Psychology can help. We offer individual therapy for adults at our Spring Hill, Brisbane clinic and via Telehealth Australia-wide. No referral is required, but with a GP Mental Health Treatment Plan, rebates are available.
References
Damasio, A. R. (1994). Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain. Putnam.
Gershon, M. D. (1998). The Second Brain: The Scientific Basis of Gut Instinct. HarperCollins.
Klein, G. (1998). Sources of Power: How People Make Decisions. MIT Press.
Pascal, B. (1670). Pensées. (W. F. Trotter, Trans.). Penguin Classics.
Porges, S. W. (2011). The Polyvagal Theory: Neurophysiological Foundations of Emotions, Attachment, Communication, and Self-Regulation. W. W. Norton.
