As the title said, I am curious how folks have “gone with their gut intuition”, especially in circumstances where they are faced with tough decisions or life-altering changes. Some thoughts/prompts for discussion:
What does your “gut” feel like to you?
How do you reconcile differences between your “gut feeling” and what your brain is thinking/telling you?
How do you get to the point where you decide to “go with your gut”?
Can you share examples of when you went against your brain, and followed your gut, and it turned out to totally be the right decision for you?
Do you have any examples of when you followed your gut intuition, instead of what your brain/logical mind was telling you, and it came back to bite you?
How have you learned to “trust your gut”?
What tactics or steps have you learned to take when trying to parse between what your “gut” is telling you and what your “brain” is telling you?
Curious how other people listen to their gut and use that intuition to make decisions or choose which direction to go in (with regards to life stuff, career stuff, relationship issues, etc.).
Gut being wrong: I’ve made gut assumptions about people that were wrong (such as assuming someone was atheist when they were in fact Catholic; various other assumptions.) I regret accusing a student of lying when I was a teacher (when he was in fact telling the truth) because of gut feeling. I have 2 relationship breakups that I later regretted because of going by gut feeling. I broke up with women who, in hindsight, I think I shouldn’t have broken up with because “I didn’t feel right” but then later on realized I was over-gut-intuition-ing it.
In 2010, my gut wanted to quit a job in Virginia and move back to New York (I was miserable in VA at the time) but in hindsight, going with my head and persisting in the Virginia job was the right decision.
Gut being right: I feel my deconstruction from Christianity was my gut telling me most of Christianity was false, and I feel it was right. I’ve detected scammers before (such as a car seller) because something about them seemed off, that was later proven to be correct.
My gut wanted to pursue aviation as my career path, and I regret not having listened to it. There was also one relationship I should NOT have gotten into (my gut was telling me to stay out,) and I regret not listening to my gut then.
To answer the question of how I choose to go with gut or head - honestly, I don’t know. That’s the $1 million question for me. My life has been battered quite a bit because of mix-ups - going with head when I should have gone with gut, or vice versa. If I could know which situations call for which, I’d be much better off right now.
If you reason out a situation, but the result you arrive at is emotionally unsatisfying, that’s your “gut” communicating its emotional discomfort.
Sometimes both head and gut come out not with opposing answers but with ambivalent answers. e.g. “On the one hand [whatever] but on the other hand [something else] and on the third hand [blah blah blah]”. Back and forth, around and around, and no “tiebreaker” to help you decide.
My technique for that ambivalent situation is simple, but IME very effective. Formulate one outcome of the dilemma into a single simple affirmative proposition. e,g. “I’m moving out”, “I’m going to buy the Ford”, “I’m voting ‘yes’ on proposition 12”.
Then say “Heads I’ll do that; tails I won’t.” Now flip a coin. At the instant of the coin’s reveal you’ll either experience a flood of relief / happiness or else a flood of anxiety / aww shit!
Don’t do what the coin “decided”. Do this instead: if you feel relief, do what the coin says to do. Conversely, if you feel anxiety, do the opposite of what the coin said to do.
I’ve found that’s a very effective way to make your “gut” really tell you loud and clear what it thinks / feels about the situation.
In your case your gut and head ought to be in total agreement on what to do: GTFO ASAP you silly MF. And I say that with nothing but good wishes for your future. The future that starts after you’re out of that trap and can’t / won’t start until then.
For me, “following my gut” is the culmination of gathering information, analyzing, comparing, and thinking things through. Then, often when faced with the need to make the decision now, I “go with my gut”. That is, I don’t go back over all the previous thinking I’ve done.
I don’t have much respect of “going with your gut” in lieu of thinking things through.
There’s a fantasy novel I read where a character has a skill called “Know What’s Real” that pierces illusion and notifies the user of outside mental influence. The thing is, the character doesn’t always have it running - they fire it up because their instincts have already alerted them that things are inconsistent with their experience in some way. Things are going improbably well or badly, someone’s behaving inconsistently, something’s slightly skewed in a way that’s subtle enough to be unnoticed consciously. Basically, their gut or instincts alert them to look deeper.
There’s also “Blink” by Malcolm Gladwell that describes how our brains come up with what we call our “gut” feelings, how accurate they are, and our own biases that skew them.
For me, it’s usually that I get a gut feeling about something, think it through, and if the intellectual consideration isn’t conclusive, I usually follow that original gut feeling, as it’s as good as anything else at that point.
But if there’s an obvious “head” solution, I go with that. Only in situations where it’s a matter of quick reaction for safety’s sake do I just go with the gut- driving, in sketchy situations at night, etc.
“over-gut-intuition-ing” sounds exactly like what I am experiencing. I’m struggling with known what is right and what is right…that doesn’t make any sense, typing it out, but I am just stuck in my head thinking: “You feel this way, and have all these stressful/anxiety inducing thoughts and fears and worries swirling around…but then you get stuck with decision paralysis, not knowing if your thoughts/fears are valid and real and you should make the decision that seems to bring you relief because that is not only your intuition and your GUT telling you that’s the right course…or are you just feeling those worries because you are overly stressed/anxious or exhausted because of life and are looking for a way to find “relief”?”
That makes no sense either. What a bunch of word vomit.
Anyway, I also relate to your deconstruction from Christianity. I experienced the same thing and I think that it mainly stemmed from my gut telling me it was false, and me feeling it was right, and then using that feeling as a springboard into logically tearing down why Christianity and the religion I was raised in couldn’t be right. I have been so much happier since leaving the religion.
Now…I have a gut feeling…and similar logical intuition as to why going with my gut would be “right” in this instance…but I still have that weird “fearful/avoidant/anxious” feeling that is telling me, “But what if you are wrong?” or that’s saying “but look at the good things that come out of this, even in spite of the bad”.
I guess the fear of “mixing up” going with my head versus going with my gut just keep me stuck in what feels like quicksand, pulling me down and down until I’m lost and can’t do anything about it because I missed the opportunity to make a decision.
Thank you for sharing. I’m going to try this. I’d heard something similar, but have avoided doing it because I fear that I am so conflict avoidant and so fearful avoidant of making the wrong decision that I’ll flip the coin, feel a certain way and then just shrug it off and tell myself “maybe you’re just in your head and not making the right choice.”
Or worrying that I’m “suffering from confirmation bias” and my brain and gut are being influenced by thoughts and advice from others that feels relatable or good when I hear them.
Re GTFO ASAP….i know it’s stupid to say this but. It truly feels easier said than done…
I trust my gut in its areas of expertise. For instance, when my gut tells me that it’s getting about time for supper, or when it tells me that that milk I drank was past its best-by date.
For things like whether a relationship is positive, or whether someone is lying to me? I have a brain for those things.
Think of a time you bought something and after a while figured out that this purchase was a massive waste of money and a disappointing experience. Now think of a time when you bought something that was a fantastic purchase you are maybe even still happy about.
What is different in how you feel about those decisions? Does one feel more like it is in a certain part of the body as opposed to the other one? Might there be a qualitative difference in how one of those decisions feel when you think abou them? (size, pressure, colour, etc.)
As somebody mentioned above (re: Gladwell), if you have made certain evaluations and decisions hundreds of times and received feedback on the outcome, you can probably trust your gut instinct in the same situation more reliably than others (and purchasing decisions would probably count).
It is not possible to map this over to different situations, though. The same feeling that allows you to make a good decision in your field of expertise will trick you into thinking that this decision in an unrelated field is of the same quality.
A variation on the coin technique that my spouse and I worked out: Reason your way to a decision, then sleep on it. If you wake up in the morning still happy with the decision, go with it. If you’re unhappy with the decision, do the opposite. (Or, decide to do the opposite and sleep on that.)
I’ve made a lot of decisions in my life, some I look back on as good and some that didn’t turn out well. But I have no regrets over the bad decisions—I made those decisions based on the information I had at the time, as well as I could. I couldn’t know exactly how they would work out, so I don’t beat myself up over their not turning out.
This is a great thought. You make decisions based on the thoughts, feelings and information you have in the moment…not potential information you might gain in the future. You’ll never know the outcome until you make the decision.
One thing that makes gut vs. head so hard is that everyone’s probably been bitten multiples times by both. You’ve been bitten by going with gut when you shouldn’t have, and bitten by going with head when you shouldn’t have. And because the human psyche is wired to fear adverse results more than it desires positive ones, you’re deciding based off of fear-of-future-regret both ways.
I would call that “front of the head” and “back of the head.”
The front of the head runs on logic, or thinks that it does (it’s often rationalizing something decided in the back of the head.) The back of the head runs on emotions, and possibly on some different form of logic entirely. The front of the head has often logically figured out things about which the back of the head has no clue. The back of the head has often noticed things that the front of the head has missed entirely.
If what’s being decided has major consequences – I really like to get the front and the back of my head to agree. They may agree on a decision for entirely different reasons; but I find that agreement’s often possible.
I try my best not to make any major decisions if either of them is screaming at me not to. (Which of course may amount to making the major decision to not do something.)
You are your “gut”, just as much as you are the front of your head. It isn’t that one of them is you and the other is something else.
I mostly rely on gut feelings when meeting new people. In the past, when I had a nagging feeling that someone was hinky, I’d try to talk myself out of it by telling myself I’m being irrational or unfair. But nearly every time I gave someone like that the benefit of the doubt, it came back to bite me or they did something that proved I was right the first time. I’ve learned to trust that gut feeling.
It is easier said than done. But that is not the measure of merit of a good decision.
It took me months to get to the day when I was able to tell my wife: “I’m done. Goodbye.” The relief was so total and instantaneous that I (gently) kick myself nearly every day for having waited 18 months after the decision was obvious. I threw away a year and a half for lack of 'nads to say 3 words. I get it. I truly do.
Don’t be me.
You don’t care whether your thoughts or fears are “real” in the objective sense that somebody with a fear-o-meter could aim it at your situation and take a reading in the danger zone.
If you are experiencing this stress, it is real to you. If you are experiencing this fear, it is real to you. The reason your GF is such a wacko is that the stuff she’s experiencing seems real to her.
The difference is she reacts to her fears by making you miserable. And you’re reacting to your fears by making you miserable.
You might want to look hard at that formulation and see where there’s a slot for your happiness. Hint: There isn’t one.