What does “going with your gut” feel like to you? How did you learn to “trust your gut”?

This has happened to me so many times that I sometimes think I've gone clinically insane with severe psychopathology like schizophrenia, histrionic, and borderline personality disorder, not to mention bipolar. Of course, I don't actually have these disorders (or maybe I do). But all this is to preface that what I'm about to share has accumulated to make my past self seem insane to my present self whilst also regretting and wrecking my past self for not doing certain things based on gut feel.

First kind of "gut feel" is actual fear and premonition that something wrong is going to happen. In college, I just felt something wrong with my college final project group despite everything turning out to be fantastic in academic sense. Turns out, the supervisor of my group was a jealous mf. The supervisor turned us against one another and the culmination is my elimination as well as emotional scarring for others in the group. His actions were very insidious and happened step by step. First, he would invalidate a member by saying that they were just overthinking. Then, he would turn other members against another. Then, he would gaslight about not knowing certain information and so would cause havoc in work and schedules. My gut sense just strongly suggested I leave my project group very early on but I shook it off, which then turned out to be the wrong decision as the group went through more drama and torment. The signs above are actually in hindsight. I was fearing the supervisor instinctively.

Following this, I then had this "deep sinking feeling" (the second type) that something was wrong with my relationship, which I did nothing about at the time as well. Well, it turned out that my gf at the time was cheating on me. There were absolutely no clues, no hints, no egregious signals. How I found out was when my GF, acting cute at the time, took my phone and started playing with it. In return, I, acting cute as well, took her phone and started playing with it. Her phone wasn't unlocked since she just placed it on the table right after using it. As I was about to message myself using her phone, I automatically hit the first person in the chat list, expecting that to be me. As I was about to type, I realised that it was in fact not me. Shamelessly, I scrolled up and found the scroll bar barely moved. I was baffled. I kept scrolling and found more and more evidence of cheating. I ended it not long after. After just 3 months or so after the breakup, the two of them (my now ex-GF and the first person on her chat list) got together.

The third kind of gut feel is the "creeping feeling" kind or the "writing on the wall" kind of idiom. This is when you can mostly see everything start to fall apart with actual evidence. This has happened to me twice, where the companies, which were doing very well, still made a lot of us redundant. I thought I had it good because I was productive, completed tasks, and was overall nice and had no enemies. Nonetheless, I still felt something was wrong and so I started looking for new jobs. Then the axe came down, so it was good that I started looking.

Fourth kind is something like "immediate repulsion" wherein you just FEEL like something is wrong without any evidence. The sensory combination of a particular moment just leads your brain to trigger this kind of gut feel. It may be the subconscious processing of smell, sight, feel, person and so on, like an eye contact that was a bit too long several times, and other kinds of body language that were just off-putting for some reason. This has happened with me on business deals and even when I was looking for rentals. Just something really off with some occurrences. Now, since these were immediate repulsions, I have no idea what would've happened had I proceeded with these. All I know is that one of the businesses went bankrupt soon after.

There's a fifth kind of gut feel which is the "protracted prisoner" kind of feel wherein I felt like a prisoner in my own friendships and platonic relationships. This is when I feel like my friends are starting to see me as overbearing or whatnot, or when social media is overtaking my life. This kind of gut feel, I think, is a way of preventing parasocial relationships and dependency and social validation disorders from forming. These gut feels are strong enough for me to disconnect.

As for good gut feels, those are very scary too. I've had "good gut feels" about contractors only to be immensely disappointed by the outcome. These good gut feels are generally when what I am saying and what the other person is saying immediately connect and they understand what I'm trying to convey. The problem here is that these can be gamed by people who learn how to game these sorts of things. I've now reached a point where I really can't trust anyone.

Finally, there's another gut feel that I had to leave my home and country behind and that I had this nagging feeling that I need to start over. I call this the "reset" gut feel. Almost similar to the "protracted prisoner" feel. This is a bit more evidence-based. I just had this claustrophobic feeling that despite being free to leave any time, it seemed as if my existence was starting to become a burden to others and to myself. Well, best decision ever. My mental health improved drastically. That said, I was also lucky as not everyone can just leave.

I used to think I had no intuition of my own. I didn’t disbelieve the concept entirely, I just assumed it was a skill or gift others possessed that I did not.

Then a couple decades ago I went to Japan for a month and climbed mountains. I spent a huge amount of time by myself in a country where I didn’t speak the language and after about three weeks it was like I could hear a voice that I hadn’t been able to hear before.

By following this very faint impulse, I learned to choose one street over another in the dark and that’s how I found the only english-speaking sushi chef on Yakushima. Example after example convinced me that either I had found my quiet intuition or created a filter for myself that somehow allowed me to derive meaning out of chaos.

Since then, I’ve learned that what I had always thought was a kind of contrary irritability and tiredness in me is actually my intuition telling me not to do that thing. It can easily be mistaken for the inertia of habits, laziness, or fear, but once those weaknesses have been accounted for, my intuition has been telling me my whole life what I really should and should not be doing.

It’s like the most pure expression of subjectivity. Many people will just tell you that you are lazy and it hardly ever makes me popular, following these impulses. So listen to them at your peril.

I don’t think I can answer your questions the way you want, because I honestly don’t make too much of a distinction. Your gut is your brain. It’s just the parts that are outside of your consciousness. For the most part learning to trust your gut is to understand what is going on in your head, and that is something that can be accomplished with self-reflection, meditation, or even some degree of subconscious suggestion.

I honestly think it’s a much better way to live because you are trusting yourself to take care of things for you. Some things just don’t quite work if you leave it to logic. Take savory buttermilk biscuits for an example; there are thousands of recipes out there because it’s something that can be made any number of ways. But the first time you make it, it will almost certainly will turn out bad. Some steps, like the proper amount of mixing or folding techniques, just have to be done by feel rather than logical steps.

I have learned to not trust my gut when it comes to big things or anything even remotely based in emotions.

I have anxiety and BPD so my "gut feeling" is basically like flipping a coin at best. If it's about life stuff, as in big decisions, I have to do the opposite of what my gut tells me because otherwise I avoid and reject any and all responsibilities.

Concerning relationships, I have to double check, triple check, wait an hour or two, then check again.. I have been burned by myself so many times by both my gut and brain lying to me, misrepresenting reality as I almost always make a big deal out of nothing. If I wait a bit before responding though, giving myself time to calm down and think things over, it really does end in rational decision making most of the time. Someone can say something, or something will happen, and I will genuinely believe that this is the end of my life as I know it, I cannot recover from this, I'll never be okay again, etc.. but chances are I'll be completely ok the next day, even just a few hours later. This happens on at least a monthly basis for me. So I never trust my gut in those matters.

There are times when your gut instinct is screaming at you to pay attention. Those times are easy and you should listen to your gut. There are other times when you just know something is right. You feel freedom and lightness in your decision. Easy to go with.

It's those in between times when it's hard. When you drop your kid off at a new babysitter and the usual fears come to mind. Is this person secretly a sicko who will harm my child? Did I get a bad vibe from some small thing or am I feeling the normal amount of parental anxiety?

Relationships were always hard for me too until I got older. Is this person a good fit for me? They do some things I don't like, but so does every human being. What's the difference between nobody is perfect and this is a red flag? What's the difference between relationships take work and this is too hard?

So yeah, gut instinct can be very obvious but it can also get muddled with irrational fears and anxieties.

Definitely listen when it's screaming at you. If something seriously doesn't feel right, or does, then go with it. When your gut isn't screaming at you, you have to use logic.

The book The Gift of Fear is a long treatment on this topic - I don't want to ruin it but basically when it comes to bad, interpersonal situations the gut is dramatically effective at warning you. Less so for other stuff.

The way I always interpreted it is that gut feelings are just your subconscious jumping to conclusions. It's working constantly to unpack minute details, emotions, knowledge and interactions to make a ton of connections. But they're not always logical connections and you can't tell if they're all good or not.

Like my mom didn't study botany or had any formal training in landscaping. But doing it for twenty years, she had really good hunches on what worked and what didn't. On the other hand, maybe there was a character you deeply dislike who looks or acts in a certain way. Seeing those traits in real life might automatically shape your perceptions of a stranger.

So maybe be a little introspective about your intuitions. If you have a strong gut reaction to something, dig into that feeling. Is it rational? Is it coming from a place of knowledge or ignorance? Does it even impact your life? In what situations does the result reliably match your expectations?

It's like any other tool and knowing how and when it works is the only way to figure out how and when to use it. There'll probably be situations where it's spot on, times when it's a good guide and occasions to bury it and focus on the facts.

That being said, don't only rely on intuition, especially if you have the luxury of time.

Two mistakes I made; one from following my gut, and one from not following it:

A couple of years ago, I quit my job. I felt unproductive and oppressed, and like I had to make a change. But, quitting my job was not really a solution to these, and really, I was to some extent misattributing the sources of my stress—the job was a symbol for it, and I did feel a weight had come off my shoulders when I left, but really, I'm going to feel unproductive in pretty much any form of gainful employment (alas, pending UBI, to keep a roof over my head I have to pursue ventures which are obviously economically beneficial to other people in the short term...), and, covid being in full swing, I was isolated. The work was uninteresting, but not oppressive; and I liked the people I worked with, and they liked me and were interested in finding me something to do that was more to my liking. I had started to make some noise about leaving, and they had started to negotiate concessions, when I left rather abruptly to take a gamble that was pretty obviously not going to work out. The right thing to do would have been to take a few weeks off, return to work with a different perspective and find something else to do that was more mutually beneficial, and pursue the gamble concurrently.

In high school, somebody asked me out. I hardly knew them—they'd become infatuated with me. I had to say something—quick!—on the spot! And they'd just gotten me a nice dinner too. I knew, right away, that it wouldn't work out. There was nothing between us, no reasonable grounds on which to form a meaningful connection.

...I said yes. Something rational said 'that's unfair. You don't know that. You don't actually know them. Go on and see what happens—isn't that what dating's for?' But that was just plausible deniability—I could plausibly deny (to myself) that I knew it couldn't work out, so I pretended (to myself) that I didn't—horrid justification for anything. I still feel really bad about that. (A few months later, I had to break up with them, the situation having unfolded exactly the way it was bound to have, and flubbed that too...)

As someone who has lived with anxiety pretty much their entire life, I often can't tell the difference between a gut feeling and my brain sounding the alarm as if I'm being hunted for sport. I've had moments where my panicky little friend has been right, others where it's been wrong. One thing I'm oddly good at however is spotting when someone I work with (colleague, client, partner, etc) is about to leave a company, even when there's 0 evidence to go on. I'm not sure if that's a gut feeling or just subconsciously noticing small changes to the person's behaviour or the atmosphere.

Humorous take from Taylor Tomlinson, one of my favorite standup comedians. "That's why you're thin in your 20s. You don't have a gut to listen to."

To me, intuition/gut feeling is about making a decision with incomplete information and incorporating information that we don't recognize on a conscious level. The "feel" of a situation is background information and pattern matching that your brain is doing. This is not always a good thing. There can be a lot in there that influences those feelings – things like trauma response, anxiety, paranoia, or bias.

One way to develop the gut instinct is by just trying things. Whether the thing succeeds or fails, retrospecting about what went right, what went wrong, did you weigh the conscious factors correctly, and how did you feel about it? You can incorporate outside feedback and reactions as well*. This kind of closing the loop can help you improve over time.

When it comes to recognizing and listening to the feel of a situation, I think self examination about why you felt a certain way is important. Introspection can teach you more about the self – what your triggers are, what things from your past have been incorporated, etc.

This can help also help separate things like bias ("whenever I am dealing with someone very tall, they don't seem trustworthy even when they have proven themselves trustworthy in the past") from insight ("the negative vibe I'm getting off this person is tied to the way they talk negatively about their coworkers.").

*The tricky thing with external feedback is that if you are with a group of people who have unhealthy or toxic behaviors this can warp your sense of normal. Allison Green of Ask A Manager talks about this a lot.