A friend’s father died 90 days ago, after a life of effort and work. A humble, hard-working family, faithful to what family life implies. A whole life devoted to his family, work, work, and more work, much sacrifice in the service of the family. In the little free time he had, he devoted it to his faith and his parish. A man and a life faithful to universal values but, above all, resistant to the vicissitudes of life (resilient, we would say now). Last week, his wife, my friend’s mother, who was ill with Alzheimer’s, decided to leave this world too and join him in eternity.

At the funeral, while praying, I thought about how inseparable they must have been. Our senses can give us an indication of the complicity that exists between a couple, but there is much more than our eyes can see. As my friend’s mother had Alzheimer’s, she did not know that her husband had died. Yet she decided that it was time to go and join him.

When I shared my thoughts after the funeral with one of my friends, he told me: “It’s magic.” But no, it is not magic. We underestimate the importance of our hearts and, as so many other times, we take it for granted that we will always enjoy good health.

Recent scientific studies have shown the importance of the heart from angles that, for many, remain unknown. While the more physical effects are well known, our hearts play a critical role in how we experience our emotions. It is well known in the scientific community that there is not just one neural tissue in our body, but several; the heart is one of them. There are also many studies examining the effects of negative and positive emotions on a person’s health and relating them directly to the heart. The electromagnetic field of our hearts, compared with that of the brain, is 60 times more powerful and its magnetic component is 5,000 times stronger, making it vital in managing our emotions, our relationships and our social capacity. Our heart is essential not only to maintain our physical condition, but it also has enormous implications for our psychological health.

I have not seen much “management from the heart” in corporate life, even though it is vital, even though it has been set aside. I remember a senior executive telling me that one of the skills he looked for in the people who worked for him was management through emotion. The management of emotions should be one of the key ingredients of a more humanistic approach in business. Emotions play a role not only because they affect our hearts and our health in all its dimensions, but also because, if they are constrained and cannot be expressed, they rot the culture of the company and, obviously, our health.

Takotsubo syndrome was first described in 1991 and refers to how a person can die of sadness (emotions affect the health of the heart). I decided to believe that my friend’s mother, although she was ill with Alzheimer’s, still had her husband in her heart and, realising that she could no longer find him, the connection had been broken and she decided it was time to die.

If we have not done so already, it is time to pay the attention our heart deserves. Let us live to the fullest, let us take care of ourselves so that we can take care of others afterwards.