When Your Body Lies to You: False Messages and Appetites

Your problem is not all in your head. But that doesn’t mean it reflects reality.

The alerts created by our bodies are merely like warning lights on the dashboard of a car. They tell us something needs our attention, but they don’t give us absolute truth.  When people say “follow your heart,” they are giving you the worst possible advice, because our bodies lie. This article is for all of us: the healthy, the anxious or depressed, and the chronically unwell.

Jesus never said follow your heart. Instead he said “follow me”.

In my last article, I spoke about what The Traitors reveals about the deception inside every human heart. Newton also explained how knowing the evil in our own hearts is the only path to Christian maturity.

“The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately sick; who can understand it?” (Jeremiah 17:9, ESV).

But what does the Bible mean by heart? What do we mean by heart today? The two concepts definitely overlap: According to one biblical dictionary the heart is:

A vital bodily organ. The word also refers to anything that is central or essential, such as the inner life of a person.

Manser, M.H. (2009) Dictionary of Bible Themes: The Accessible and Comprehensive Tool for Topical Studies. London: Martin Manser.

Sometimes the heart is used to refer to the body as a whole as in this example of poetic parallelism where the first phrase reflects the same concept as the second:

“So then, banish anxiety from your heart and cast off the troubles of your body, for youth and vigor are meaningless” (Ecclesiastes 11:10,  NIV).

We must avoid dualistic notions that the body doesn’t matter. Jesus came not just to save our spirits but to save our bodies:

“Man belongs to two worlds, the visible and the invisible. In his constitution, the material and the spiritual, body and soul, are wonderfully united. In the fall both came under the power of sin and death; in redemption deliverance has been provided for both. It is not only in the interior life of the soul, but in that of the body too, that the power of redemption can be manifested . . . It is in the body, as much as in the spirit, that the saving power of Christ Jesus must be felt.”

Murray, A. (1894) Let Us Draw Nigh!: The Way to a Life Abiding Continually in the Secret of God’s Presence: Meditations on Hebrews 10:19–25. Chicago; New York; Toronto: Fleming H. Revell, pp. 57–58.

There are things that we can do practically to help our bodies, minds, social functioning, and spirit. God loves our bodies because he made them:

For you formed my inward parts; you knitted me together in my mother’s womb. I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made.  (Psalm 139:13–14, ESV)

Our contemporary culture tells us  to “trust your gut”, “listen to your heart”, “obey your thirst”, and “follow your instincts”.  Those dealing with chronic illness are told to “listen to your body”.  All of these sentiments are essentially urging us to follow our bodily impulses.  Society is constantly urging us to follow the physical sensations we all feel. That is the most unhelpful thing to do.

The Bible warns us that our instincts or bodily impulses may themselves be deceptive. Our body and brain are fallen, and our appetites and drives are distorted by sin and sickness. As a result our physiological impulses are not trustworthy. The Bible refers to “walking in the flesh” (Rom 8:8) as opposite to walking in the Spirit. That doesn’t mean the body is entirely evil, just that we shouldn’t blindly follow all its urges or messages.  Something might feel right even when it is actually very wrong. Our biology is not a perfect guide. The body’s signals are meaningful but morally ambiguous. Our appetites echo a fallen world. The problem is not the body itself, but its disordered loves.

C.S. Lewis captured this perfectly:

“It would seem that Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.”

C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory, and Other Addresses

Our biological urges are not in themselves evil; they are simply too easily satisfied by distortions and distractions rather than what God intended them for. Even psychologists are starting to realise that biology is not destiny, although it is important.  As Antonio Damasio said, “We are not thinking machines that feel; Rather, we are feeling machines that think.”

Appetites that are not appropriate

The obvious bodily drive that we tend to focus on is sexual. And that appetite can definitely lie to us and lead us into all kinds of mess and moral failure. The classic worked-through example of this in the Bible is King David:

“As he looked out over the city, he noticed a woman of unusual beauty taking a bath . . . Then David sent messengers to get her; and when she came to the palace, he slept with her” (2 Samuel 11:2-4, NLT).

The consequences were disastrous, lifelong, and affected his whole family.  But he was forgiven and even after this horrendous incident due to his humility and the famous psalm he wrote at the time:

We need to be reminded of David’s story both to recognize how damaging sin can be, but also to remember that we must not always cancel everyone for every offense, although we do not have to reconcile with everyone either. Wisdom is about learning the difference.

But we often forget that other bodily appetites can be equally damaging and lead us astray. Whether we are talking about normal appetites or sinful ones, bodily craving disguises itself as a moral necessity and tells us we simply MUST have whatever it is we desire, in other words,

“Their god is their stomach” (Philippians 3:19, NIV).

^“Temptation comes from our own desires, which entice us and drag us away. These desires give birth to sinful actions. And when sin is allowed to grow, it gives birth to death” (James 1:14-15, NLT).

All our appetites can often disguise themselves as necessity. Hunger becomes gluttony, desire becomes entitlement.

Gluttony is an important sin we rarely talk about today. Take my own example. Years of not being able to exercise due to my poor health combined with over eating has made me significantly overweight. And following my diabetes diagnosis I am having to dramatically cut down on obeying my appetite in order to try and lose weight. It is far from easy.  And whilst drugs have been discovered that reset our bodies appetite drive, this confirms that our bodies often lie to us through our appetites.

Addiction works in a similar way. Neuroscientists tell us,

“Addiction is defined as a chronic, relapsing disorder characterized by compulsive drug seeking and use despite adverse consequences.  It is considered a brain disorder, because it involves functional changes to brain circuits involved in reward, stress, and self-control. Those changes may last a long time after a person has stopped taking drugs”   The body literally rewires itself to crave what destroys it. The chemical rush of dopamine creates a counterfeit peace—a biological “amen” to a lie.”

The urge to go on consuming alcohol, cigarettes, and certain prescription medicines  or illicit substances are often incredibly difficult to resist. The body craves what is doing it harm and so it lies to us “just one glass” and yet one is never enough to the alcoholic.  The only way to freedom seems to be complete self denial, and even then most will still call themselves an addict years later, knowing they must still take abstinence one day at a time due to their disordered urges.

But we can be addicted to anger, or outrage. And whether we doomscroll through unhelpful social media posts, or watch countless cat or dog videos, we are very often addicted to the digital drug our internet pimps pretend to give us for free, whilst all the while selling US.

“If you are not paying for it, you’re not the customer; you’re the product being sold.”  Blue_beettle, 2010

Addiction neuroscience shows us that whether we’re talking about heroin, sugar, or memes, repeated stimuli rewire our reward systems (the dopamine pathways).  As a result our desires become compulsive rather than rational. And some of us will feel we have no choice but to ruin our whole lives rather than exercise a little self-control. The body sometimes demands what is destructive.  At times our instincts may appear urgent and valid but be obviously false and leading us away from a healthy path.

But the ways our body lies to us is not only about our appetites. Our emotions can deceive us too.  Emotions are embodied, and begin in our bodies before they are interpreted by our minds.

Fear when there’s nothing to fear

Our actions are shaped by our thoughts and they in turn are shaped by a range of hormones and other inputs pulling our strings.

Psychologists have discovered that fear tends to make risk appear worse to us and so we avoid it, becoming unable to function. Anger does the opposite making us feel in control and immune to risk so we do things we later regret.

 The emotions of the body masquerade as certainty; physiology dresses up as conviction.  This is why James cautioned believers to be “slow to become angry, because human anger does not produce the righteousness that God desires” (James 1:19–20).

Cortisol, the body’s stress hormone, was designed to save us from lions, not email. When it floods the bloodstream, perception narrows, and moral clarity blurs. High-stress states make us certain of our instincts precisely when we should pause.  

When a flush of cortisol and adrenaline hits us.  Our physical hearts begin to race, we may feel palpitations. Sweat streams from us. Our legs feel like jelly. Our arms and legs may shake. Our stomach churns. Blood rushes to parts of us and drains from others. Our nerve endings are triggered and messages flood our brain.

For thousands of years such a result has led to the “fight, flight or freeze” response.  It raises our alertness level and warns us of a threat. Depending on the situation we might interpret these signals  as anger and try to reassert control by defeating the enemy or predator animal that was attacking us.  Or we might interpret it as disgust and repulsion and feel that the only safe thing to do is to avoid the situation by running just as fast as we can.  Or we interpret it as sheer terror and if we were living in the wild we would find a safe place to hide and just freeze in the hope that we could not be seen by our threat.

Our emotions start in our body. They are interpreted by our mind and then they affect our responses.  The trouble is many of us live these days with a body that is constantly on alert even though there is no real threat.

The Bible describes this situation clearly:

I hear, and my body trembles; my lips quiver at the sound; rottenness enters into my bones; my legs tremble beneath me.  (Habakkuk 3:15–16, ESV)

When Jesus felt extreme emotions they impacted his body:

“And being in agony, He prayed more earnestly. Then His sweat became like great drops of blood falling down to the ground” (Luke 22:44, NKJV).

Imagine if you will two people experiencing all those symptoms I described earlier.  They are both standing next to a roller coaster in a theme park.

One says “I am full of adrenaline and I am so excited, I can’t wait to get on this roller coaster it looks awesome.  I am just such an adrenaline junky!”  In a sense they have been stimulated and decided with their mind that they are in the state of fight, and look forward to enjoying the ride.

The other says “I am full of adrenaline and I am terrified.  Who would ever want to go on such a death trap? We are not meant to fly, nor turn up side down! I need to keep my feet firmly on the ground no way I am going on that!”  This individual has been stimulated in just the same way but decided with their mind that they are in a state of fright and are much too scared to get on the ride.

The James–Lange theory of emotion holds that physiological arousal precedes conscious feeling.  Thus, our bodily states are the cause of feelings, not simply signals of truth and can lead to wrong decisions. Modern neuropsychology explains how the brain responds to stimuli including the bodily symptoms we interpret as emotion. It suggests that “using past experience as a guide, the brain prepares multiple competing simulations that answer the question, ‘what is this new sensory input most similar to?’”  Thus it is easy to see how  these alerting systems could lead to erroneous or unhelpful conclusions.

Some of those of us with chronic sickness have dysfunctional alerting systems in their physical bodies.  I have been told that a major part of my POTS and autonomic dysfunction is that my body has become far too sensitive to adrenaline.  As a result it treats every time I try and stand up as an existential threat to its survival.  I have even come close to fainting sometimes, and been unable to move, speak or swallow.

I once had what looked like a stroke, but it turned out that my body was simply over-reacting and effectively lying to me, the ambulance crew and the doctors in the hospital.  Ironically that time it turned out that my MRI did show a small stroke had happened previously but on the opposite side of my body to the symptoms I had.  Thus on another occasion my body had lied to me by failing to alert me that I was in fact having a stroke.

Too much adrenaline and cortisol can also be associated with mental illness. As can excessive dopamine and probably insufficient serotonin. Certainly genetic studies demonstrate clearly that at least some of the cause of mental illness lies in our physical brains.  Our bodies lie to us and in some cases this even leads to delusions and hallucinations.

Exhaustion without exertion

Our bodies also lie to us in other ways.  Every morning since 2017 I have woken up still feeling exhausted. It’s chronic fatigue and is caused by my growing list of  diagnoses, and when one is uncontrolled it gets worse but when they are all controlled it still doesn’t go away.  I cannot remember what it feels like to feel rested.

Some nights I can have 13 hours sleep and still want more.  This got even worse when I had uncontrolled diabetes I was not aware of. If I listened to my body all I wanted to do was sleep all day and all night.  Caffeine would keep me awake but the level of fatigue was appalling.  I was exhausted on top of already being chronically exhausted.

Actually my body was on that occasion trying to warn me that things were not well.  If we hadn’t found out about the problem when we did I would likely have slipped into a coma and been at risk of death. At other times though, my body is clearly lying to me when it says I must rest. If I listened to it every day I would probably never get out of bed.

Other nights I got to bed feeling shattered but as soon as my head hit the pillow the need for sleep evaporated and sleep escaped me. Sleepless nights with tear-soaked pillows were my regular companion for a while. Oddly a physical input of listening to an audible book or podcast eventually proved to be the best way to solve that for me.

Years and years of telling people to “follow their hearts” has produced a society that’s “desperately sick.”

Jeremiah 17:9
[9] The heart is deceitful above all things,
and desperately sick;
who can understand it?

— ���� ℂ��� �️ (@sola_chad) October 26, 2025

Pain without any purpose

Pain is meant to alert us to an acute injury and tell us to rapidly remove the part of our body from the place it is being injured. It tells us to protect the part of the body and rest it whilst it heals.  It warns us that something is wrong with us and tells us to go and seek medical help.

But chronic pain can often eventually be without a real purpose. There is nothing physically wrong that can be identified.  Our bodies lie to us that there is some severe physical threat to our brain, our muscles, or our bones. We go to the doctor, they do all kinds of tests and they assure us we do not have any tangible cause for the pain.  And yet sometimes debilitating pain continues to lie to us for decades causing huge disability.

Sometimes this pain is caused by pain signals over time leading to a central over sensitization to pain meaning that the slightest of stimuli becomes painful. This is not “all in the mind” but a bodily change that leads to pain being experienced that is far greater than any physical cause that remains.

In all these situations it is not that the feelings of fear, exhaustion or pain are not real. They are all incredibly real.  But these bodily reactions are not always conveying a helpful or truthful message to us. Our brains are programmed to believe the stimuli our bodies feed them and so they believe the lies.

We shouldn’t just assume that our bodies are lying to us all the time, however.  Remember my situation with diabetes. For months I thought my multiple year long struggle with chronic fatigue was just getting worse. I was getting upset that maybe this was the new normal and that I was rapidly heading towards being bedbound and able to do even less than I have been for years. If my doctors hadn’t investigated the worsening fatigue with a blood test, we would not have discovered that the worsening of fatigue was giving me a very real message: sort out your rapidly rising blood sugar before it is too late. My blood sugar was three times the level of normal before we discovered it.  Perhaps if I hadn’t suffered with fatigue for so many years, we would have identified this problem sooner.

The same central oversensitivity which we know is often at the root of chronic pain can also be associated with fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue and irritable bowel syndrome.

Immune response without Infection

Often genuine infections will cause the body to over-react and begin attacking itself as well as the invader.  Or the immune reaction can be extreme and harm the body indirectly. This is what causes sepsis.  It happened to me in 2017, following a pneumonia my damaged immune system couldn’t defeat.  There was damage done to my immune system during that infection that has never resolved.  Chronic inflamation and over-reaction to allergens was the result.  Our immune systems can sometimes be both no good at responding to bacteria or viruses and too sensitive to respond to allergens, our own cells, or just nothing at all.

Of course there is a huge overlap between what happens in our bodies and what sense our minds make of them.  I will address more fully how our mind also plays tricks on us in another article.

How the body leads us to sin

As well as all the more obvious sins we spoke of earlier, our bodies can lead us to sin indirectly due to the suffering that fear, exhaustion, pain, and inflammation can cause.  All these different forms of suffering often present their own temptations, including towards selfishness.  It is not just about giving in to our appetites.  When our bodies lie to us, sometimes our behavior towards others suffers as a result.

The brain tends to trust all the signals we have been discussing absolutely.  Pain says danger, fatigue says stop, anxiety says not safe, appetite says consume.  Often our minds simply believes these messages and we act instinctively without stopping to think if this is a path of truth and wellbeing we are being led down.

We can also tend to draw negative conclusions about ourselves from our experiences. If our appetites lead us to inappropriately indulge in pleasures we conclude we are helpless sinners addicted to things that are damaging to us.  If our immune systems stop us from living the life we want we may conclude we are letting other people down. If our pain isn’t associated with other obvious physical causes we might fear others think we are making it all up.  If we are tired all the time we might feel we are just lazy failures. If our emotional state is unstable, we may conclude we know nothing of the peace that knowing Jesus is meant to bring us. Sadly we are often making judgments of ourselves we wouldn’t make of others.  We must learn to be kinder to God’s child: ourselves.

Breaking the Body’s bondage to decay

The body and brain are part of the deceitful heart’s machinery. Even when we feel strongly (bodily urge, craving, adrenaline), that strong feeling does not guarantee truth or moral goodness.   The deceitful heart can be re-educated through spiritual disciplines that engage biology: fasting realigns appetite; rest resists anxiety; worship re-patterns neural pathways around gratitude. We must learn to question bodily impulses such as “My stomach tells me…” or “My adrenaline says…”.  Instead we ask, “Is this message leading me towards God’s design for me, or is it just momentary biological noise?”   However, as helpful as all these things can be, the ultimate remedy  is regeneration of the heart:

The gospel never despises the body—it promises its renewal. Paul urges believers to “present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God” (Romans 12:1).  

The day we are born our bodies begin to die. Every sickness. Every sign of aging. Every ache and pain. Every lie our body tells us. Every unhelpful emotional stimuli. They are all signs of death being at work in us.

“For we know that all creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time. And we believers also groan, even though we have the Holy Spirit within us as a foretaste of future glory, for we long for our bodies to be released from sin and suffering. We, too, wait with eager hope for the day when God will give us our full rights as his adopted children, including the new bodies he has promised us” (Rom 8:22-24, NLT).

Understanding that the body can lie does not mean dismissing its pain or fatigue, or even ignoring its appetites. These sensations are real, even when the alarm bell they are ringing does not give us a truthful  message. Or to put it another way “my experience is real, even if my body’s story isn’t entirely true.”

The different systems in our bodies can sometimes be like smoke alarms which have become too sensitive.  Every time we burn a piece of toast it does not mean that our home will go up in flames!

We must learn to show ourselves compassion.  We can do this by acknowledging the reality of our experiences without letting them dictate our responses, and without becoming self-centered.  Practically, this means slowing down, grounding ourselves, and gently questioning the body’s narrative: “Is this fear or pain real, or is this my alarm system misfiring?” And when we do get it wrong we know that we serve a master who is not unsympathetic of our weakness and will forgive us time after time:

“For we do not have a high priest who is unable to feel sympathy for our weaknesses, but we have one who has been tempted in every way, just as we are – yet he did not sin.  Let us then approach God’s throne of grace with confidence, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help us in our time of need” (Hebrews 4:15-16, NIVUK).

And yet because of Jesus’ death and resurrection his life can be at work in our bodies.  One day our very bodies will be glorified and we will live with Jesus face to face. No more suffering. No more pain.  No more sickness. No more lies from our bodies. Only basking in the glorious truth of glorified bodies living forever with our glorified Lord.  Then looking back we will understand fully the implications of the work of Christ in our bodies, souls, relationships and spirits:

Forgiven in a Moment. Renewed Over a Lifetime. Glorified for Eternity. In an instant, God declares us righteous and we are born again. For the rest of our lives, God shares His life with us, transforming us from glory to glory, as we are changed from the inside out.  When God’s work is complete, we will be like Him, and live with Him forever, reflecting His image, His glory, and His grace.

Read More

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What does justification mean? How can we be forgiven?

How to deal with shame, accusations, and condemnation

Eight Years of living with Chronic Illness

How Suffering Revealed What was in my Heart

TV’s The Celebrity Traitors Finale: Spellbound by Lies

Growing in Grace: When Shoots Take Root by John Newton

Retiring the Billy Graham rule: Men and woman CAN be friends

What causes mental illness? It’s Biopsychosocial-spiritual

The four pillars of mental health and wellbeing

Strength in Weakness

Transformed by the Resurrection: Sanctification

Bibliography