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Intuition: should you ever trust a gut feeling?
Mark Twain said that good decisions come from experience, and that experience comes from making bad ones. Most of us have plenty of the latter to draw on.
In my practice, I often meet people facing genuinely hard decisions. Uproot themselves for a new life in another city? Walk away from a tired relationship? Even smaller calls, like how to ask for what you want, can be stressful. Here's what we think we do: lay out the pros and cons, then decide rationally. What actually happens is that our intuition has usually already decided, and we use our rational mind to justify it after the fact.
What intuition actually is
"Intuition" is a blurry word, meaning anything from common sense to clairvoyant superpowers depending on who you ask. We usually notice it as a feeling that something's "off", a strong sense that we should be on guard or take a particular course, without quite knowing why. In plain terms, intuition is your brain using your body as a signalling device to flag something that hasn't yet reached conscious awareness. Your subconscious is trying to get your conscious mind's attention, and for many people that shows up as a feeling in the stomach.
Our brains as prediction machines
Every second, your brain takes in millions of bits of sensory data, almost all of which you ignore. Rather than treat each as a new event, it constantly forecasts what deserves attention, acting as a prediction machine to stop you having a sensory meltdown. Highway hypnosis is a good example: you drive long distances on autopilot yet still respond correctly to events.
The hippocampus, which sits next to the amygdala, indexes new memories and compares incoming data against them. When something matches an existing memory, it's "nothing to see here". But when something unexpected happens, it generates a mismatch and signals the amygdala, which raises the alarm as an emotional response, that queasy feeling. Your body, in effect, gets the gossip straight from the horse's mouth, while your conscious mind finds out days later.
Not a mystical power
A strong intuition isn't clairvoyance. All that's happened is your brain has read a set of data and reached a conclusion without conscious thought or proof. You feel the need to leave a crowded station, or sense a partner is being evasive, not because of magic, but because your subconscious already registered the panic at the bottom of the escalator, or the way the phone got turned face-down. The evidence is there; your conscious mind just hasn't caught up.
Intuition isn't the same as instinct, which is a hardwired reflex, pulling your hand off a hot stove. Nor is it insight, which is the fruit of slow, deliberate thought and needs an incubation period. Daniel Kahneman called these two modes System 1 (intuition: fast, automatic, subconscious) and System 2 (reasoning: slow, deliberate, conscious). They're complementary rather than opposed, and research shows we usually use both at once. As I explored in my piece on the anatomy of a bad decision, leaning entirely on either one tends to go wrong.
So, should you trust your gut?
Remember that intuition signals a mismatch between your current situation and the bank of similar experiences in your memory. Logically, then, the bigger that reservoir, the more accurate your intuition. So trust your gut only in areas where you genuinely have deep experience to draw on. The more experienced you are, the better your intuition.
This is why people who excel at one level sometimes flounder when they step up: their memory reservoir no longer fits the new environment, generating false alarms where there shouldn't be any, and their intuition stops being reliable. Over-confidence in your gut, especially in unfamiliar territory, is a genuine trap.
Practising it
Intuition may be a "dumb" bodily response at root, but that doesn't make it any less powerful for complex decisions. Most of us simply ignore the bodily signals that would help us. Setting an intention to notice them goes a long way: ask yourself what you most want guidance on, then stay alert for answers, which might arrive as a thought, a sign, or a lyric that suddenly stands out. A simple exercise: sit quietly, breathe until your mind settles, hold the situation in mind for a few minutes, then ask your subconscious for insight and let it go, staying alert to whatever surfaces over the following days. It can feel a little woo-woo, but it's a useful way to lean into subconscious thinking, especially if you're a strongly analytical type.
Understanding your superpower
There's no magic to intuition, but it's still a kind of superpower, bridging the gap between your subconscious and your body to reach knowledge your conscious mind can't always access. When you next get a strong gut feeling, treat it as an invitation, not an instruction: if your gut says something's going on behind the curtain, ask your rational brain to check what's happening in front of it first. Watch for the common psychological biases that distort our judgement, and let gut and reason work together.
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