I Have a Feeling You Should Trust Your Gut

Trusting your gut should come naturally to you. It’s in our DNA. But if you’re like me you’ve been conditioned not to. You were conditioned to trust other people over yourself. You were conditioned to trust a religion or an expert over yourself. You were conditioned to ignore your feelings, so even if you intellectually understand you should trust your intuition, you can’t even figure out what it’s trying to communicate to you. Maybe you are “too in your head” or “overthink” everything. Decisions are hard for you, committing to things is hard for you.

I have always been an over thinker. I discovered philosophy, which can be a good or bad thing if you’re an over thinker. For me it was very good, because I learned that thinking is itself only part of our story. Our process is only partially revealed by our thoughts. The other parts get labeled differently depending on whose framework you’re looking at, but there are always more parts. For example, autonomy requires more than just our thoughts. In order to be autonomous, we must be capable of acting from our own inner capacities. Think about how we decide when a child can make a choice for themselves. They have to be able to make one that keeps them safe and doesn’t harm others. And it isn’t just their thoughts that give us reason to believe they can do that, there’s also an emotional component. We have to trust that their instincts will be good, and that their mind can override the bad instincts. And some kids seem to have an intuition on their own for when these things aren’t in place. Have you ever seen a kid lock up and not be able to make a decision, then totally melt down? Somehow this kid knows enough to know they can’t make this decision and it fries them. Have you yourself ever locked up in indecision and then totally melted down? How did that feel? For me that feels like I have a grasp on the reality of the alternatives I’m facing, but my gut is either in conflict with both, or with the decision my reason is pointing to, or it isn’t giving me any information. And sometimes there’s further pressure because I think my mind should just be able to make that decision for me, why do I even need to listen to my gut? That feels dumb.

But why put all that pressure on the mind? Among the piles of theories about the way humans work going all the way back to antiquity, a lot of them put forth the idea that the intuition, feelings, emotion, etc are a huge part of our practical and moral decision making process. And if that isn’t good enough for you there is contemporary research to back it up. There are a lot of studies that show that people who lose the ability to process emotional input tend to run their lives into the ground making decisions that are harmful to themselves and others. I don’t have research at hand for what that means for those who have repressed their emotions, lost touch with them through somatic issues, or have alexithymia. I do, however, have my own account and the anecdotal accounts of others who will tell you that being disconnected from their emotions coincided with indecisiveness, loss of intuition, and loss of self trust. The research I’ve found seems to be addressing different problems than I am. But I have seen and made good arguments that these same theories can be applied in addiction cases, and I believe the same logic extends to other emotional impairments, congestions, and consitpations. So I will say here that I believe that a poor relationship with your intuition will make decisions at the very least difficult.

That’s what I see emerging from my own thinking about my over thinking. My rational mind would come to a decision that seemed logical in the face of my circumstances, and was in fact logical in many ways. Faced with a huge decision to lead a life that would preserve my relationships and assure stability, my rational mind thought that was the way to go. But I was in constant internal conflict. My gut was telling me to run screaming. My intuition was trying to send me the message that following that logical path would break me. I didn’t know that was what was happening. I had very little respect for my intuition. My little corner of the world was always demanding logically sound verbal explanations and rationalizations and my gut would only scream “AVERSION.” Because that is just how the intuition works. It processes things you don’t notice faster than you can notice them and it doesn’t bother with giving you concrete reasons. If you sit with it and try to understand it you can usually get to a sound reason, but it takes a lot of effort. It takes a willingness to accept the feeling with open curiosity. It is like a feral dog hiding under your porch and you have to be willing to earn its trust before it will come out on its own. But I was instead kicking the ideas back to my head where I would toss them around like a hot potato, hoping they wouldn’t drop into the boiling water of my intuition. (Feral dogs are better than hot potatoes and that’s just science.)

As several popular books on the physical effect of trauma on your body will tell you, ignoring or blocking the screaming messages from you body has negative consequences. My intuition was screaming, I was ignoring and repressing it and all of the other emotional messaging my body was trying to send. My body screamed louder, I ignored harder. I ended up emotionally disengaged and in constant pain. Recovering from that has been interesting.

Once I started listening to my intuition it was very obvious why I had chosen not to. I was right, my life did change completely. Blown up. Kaboom. And it was painful. One of the pains was realizing how far back my ignoring of my gut went and how much pain it had cost myself and others. Could some of that pain have been avoided? Maybe, but here we are. Apologize and do better. I also had to learn how to tolerate the discomfort of making life choices that seem downright bizarre to some people. But “bizarreness” is no longer a factor in my decision making. Many bizarre choices have led to the moral and spiritual improvement of myself and others and that is criteria I align with. Maybe for you avoiding the bizarre is in alignment with your intuition and reason and I don’t judge you for that, as I hope you won’t judge my bizarre life.

I read a model of decision making today that makes a great deal of sense. The way it describes the process is that there are two connected systems of decision making, system one is intuitive, and system two is deliberative, and these two systems work together, with people having individual preferences for one over the other. If your natural inclination is to primarily make decisions intuitively, but you’ve been forced to make them deliberatively think of how that has impacted you? You’ve been forced to ignore and doubt your primary means of engaging in decision making. That was me. No wonder I was such a mess. Or maybe you are naturally deliberative but you have been told to discount your intuitive input, so that means of support is undervalued and underdeveloped.

Feeling your feelings is important for your mental health, and that was why I originally decided to open up to that. Intuition was the magical gift I got when I opened to my feelings, and it was a huge epiphany for me. Our ability to engage with our intuition is dependent on our ability to feel our feelings. Our ability to make good decisions is dependent on our intuition. Our ability to trust ourselves is dependent on our ability to make good decisions. Our ability to feel comfortable authentically expressing ourselves is dependent on our ability to trust ourselves. It goes on and on. Intuition is therefore my frame of reference for making my own life into something comfortable for me, and it is where I start when I help others.

Look, if you are happy with the way your intuition works, and it’s working for you that’s great. I love that for you. Maybe this will help you get a more firm concept of what underpins that process and you can sit back and appreciate it. Maybe you disagree, and that’s fine, I don’t need everyone to find this useful. It is after all just one way of understanding how we work. If this resonates with you and helps you understand where you are, or provides you with a map to get somewhere you would rather be, then that is the big juicy magic I’m here for. Stay with me and maybe we can unravel the mysteries of the universe together.

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1. “Accounting for Intuition in Decision-Making Capacity: Rethinking the Reasoning Standard?” by Helena Hermann, Manuel Trachsel, Nikola Biller-Andorno. Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology, Volume 24, Number 4, December 2017, pp. 313-324 (Article)