Those sensations that we all feel, but can not explain
Scene 1: There’s this decision standing right in front of you. It is some minutes before the deadline of some very attractive looking offer on the web, but you need to invest some considerable amount to purchase it. You have a very good feeling about it, but some part of you is also afraid of losing that money, because of it turning out a scam! What if it is a scam? You can clearly imagine how you would feel right after finding out that you were deceived. This is the situation you find yourself in. What are you going to do? Will you go with your gut feeling? Or will you surrender to your worries?
Scene 2: A friend is telling you the details of this great investment opportunity on a Friday evening, after a long working day. This friend of yours is listing a group of very convincing reasons why you should not hesitate but take that chance straight away. He tells he would do it himself, but he is currently low in funds. Everyone around the table agree with him and they are all excited for you, already. It sounds great, but there is this sense of contraction in your abdominal area, as if someone is mildly squeezing it. You are feeling confused. All he is telling you is so convincing that it is almost flawless. Your mind can not think of any reason, why you wouldn’t take it. What if you hesitate for long and someone else will take it instead of you? What if all the peers around that table would think you are a chicken…something? How is your response going to be? Will you go with your gut feeling and turn the offer or will you surrender to the peer pressure?
Alright, I added those time-sensitive elements to those two scenarios, in order to spice it up a bit. Please be my guest and take out those elements of deadlines out of those two stories. The dilemma will still probably be there, only to be experienced mildly, this time.
Is there no app that can decide for us?
Taking a deep breath and trusting your gut might take some courage, but it wasn’t always this way. it used to be a daily practice for Homo sapiens sapiens for millennia, let alone many other species that entirely relied -and they still do- on their gut and instincts. Intuition and instinct kept humans safe for thousands of years, even though these two are different sources of intelligence. As we’ve evolved, we’ve become more sophisticated, learned to observe, collect data, rely on that data, repeat our learned responses, and later discredited our gut as ‘primitive’ or ‘unreliable’.
The more we observed others and learned from their mistakes -without precisely knowing the true dynamics behind those mistakes-, the more cautious we became. Those reference points became more sensitive. Then we hopelessly lost ourselves in the quest of ‘collecting more data’. A lot of data! That was our only true hope which we thought that substantial amounts of data would assist us greatly, so that we can meet our decisions easily, in our peace of mind. We started feeling not any true motivation to go with our gut feeling.
The more data we collected, the less decisive we became. Approximately sometime around there on the timeline, we learned to postpone our decisions. There are plenty of business strategists & consultants out there, who advise their clients to postpone their decisions as long as they can, until they have enough data(!) to lean on. Does it even exist, to collect ‘enough data’, at any time?
There is another element in this equation
We like to see ourselves as objective, smart and logical beings, when it comes to making decisions. Our brains use logic quite intensively during the decision making process, but also involve emotions in it. Many of us are not aware of it, but it is very difficult to escape the fact that we’re all prone to biases. We mostly take our emotions heavily into consideration while coming to a conclusion.
According to the book “Discovering Psychology” by Don Hockenbury and Sandra E. Hockenbury, an emotion is a complex psychological state that involves three distinct components: a subjective experience, a physiological response, and a behavioral or expressive response.(1)
Have you ever felt your stomach swing & twist from anxiety? Have your palms ever started to sweat all of a sudden, because of worrying? If you are familiar with such situations then you must have already realized that emotions also cause strong physiological and physical reactions.
This is the point where you, dear reader, take the lead and ask me the following question: “Hold on! Did you just mention the stomach as an example of a physical reaction, triggered by an emotion? I thought gut feelings we mostly feel, are in that area. How can we be sure which one we are dealing with?”
Let’s get clarity and the discernment
You have the very right to ask this question, and my hint for you would be so: “Emotional reactions are mostly about the fear of repeating past experiences, and they have some ‘panicky’ tone in it. Gut feeling, however, radiates a certainty in itself, and focuses solely on the current situation. It has a self-assuring tone in it. Its certainty is not based on any data nor does it rely on any logical thinking. It simply knows. It knows it, as if it connected to a certain network of… universal wisdom.
Trusting your gut feeling is different than constantly listening to your self-doubts. It is also different than your instinct, which is described in Collins Dictionary as “The natural tendency that a person or animal has to behave or react in a particular way.” Instincts are mostly ‘hard-coded’ in your DNA. Intuition or that gut feeling is more dynamic. It varies according to circumstances.
There surely is some serious amount of confusion regarding the terminology out there on the web. Some people differentiate gut feeling from intuition, but I see them as very closely cooperating team mates.
What if you ask an old friend for help?
Well-trained and sincerely trusted gut feeling can give us such signals & messages, that mountains of data can not!
Algorithms that are generated by AI can give you the best possibility / probability calculations, but not that ‘unlikely possible option’, that may just come true.
Having a razor-sharp intuition and interpreting your gut reactions accurately might not happen overnight. Similar to almost everything in life, it takes practice. How about starting small?
How to include your gut feeling as a tool in your life?
Here, it can be your road map on your quest of developing a closer relationship with your gut reactions & intuition:
- When it is time for a fast decision -no time for data research- and when the stakes are low, see it as an opportunity to train yourself. Improve your communication with your gut.
- Pay attention to your initial thought before the analytical mind -and then emotions, and then references of past experiences and similar others- kicks in. Your first thought would provide you the clearest picture. It takes awareness to pay attention to it, therefore ‘practice it!’
- Now you know how to differentiate gut reaction from emotions, instincts etc. Pay deeper attention to all of those to become more accurate of knowing ‘which one is which’.
- Take it a step further: Create situations that you will need to rely on your intuition & gut feeling. Don’t miss those chances. Add some feeling of curiosity into it, and turn it into a game. A game, for which you may even keep a score card, displaying the accuracy of your recent gut reactions. 🙂
Important Note:
Please don’t forget it: You don’t need to go for an “all or nothing’ approach! if there’s enough time, if the circumstances require you to collect more data, and if the stakes are too high, you may decide to come to a logical & analytical conclusion, after your careful & longer consideration. Just feel free to take a ‘blend of the best of two worlds’.
Kıvanç Öroglu
Healer & Transformative coach
Illustration: <a href=’https://www.freepik.com/free-photos-vectors/people’>People vector created by pch.vector – www.freepik.com</a>
(1) Hockenbury, D. and Hockenbury, S.E. (2007). Discovering Psychology. New York: Worth Publishers.
