If You Want To Trust Your Gut More, You Need To Make 5 Little Changes

Few things are worse than realizing, after enduring a terrible experience, that you could’ve avoided the whole mess if you had just listened to your gut. Why did I trust that guy? Why did I buy that car… accept that job… move to Alaska? We all have innate instincts that try to point us in the right direction, but, too often, we second-guess or ignore those instincts out of fear or insecurity. We talk ourselves out of the power of our gut feelings.

We try to rationalize them away and yet they’re always there, trying to grab our attention from the backs of our brains, trying to let us know that we already know what we should be doing — if only we’d listen. But how can we learn to start trusting our guts more? How can we start embracing our intuition rather than ignoring it? Former Senior VP of YourTango Experts Melanie Gorman recently hosted a panel of our Experts — Clara Wisner, T-Ann Pierce, Kathryn Foster, and Helen Fisher — and asked them how people can start paying attention to what their gut feelings are telling them.

If you want to trust your gut more, you need to make 5 little changes:

1. Practice

Sounds simple, but it’s not. If you want to train yourself to listen to your instincts more, you have to try it out occasionally. Let yourself embrace your gut feelings when the moment takes you. Maybe test it out on a low-stakes situation and gradually move onwards. See how it feels. Make a decision that feels impulsive and see how it feels different than a decision you make after days of analysis and overthinking. If you want to trust your instincts, you have to use them in real-world situations first and see what happens.

If You Want To Trust Your Gut More, You NEED To Do These 5 Things Pexels / Andrea Piacquadio

2. Listen to your gut

Did you know that you have a whole other brain in your gut? It’s true. It’s called the enteric nervous system (ENS), which is completely separate from the nervous system that’s controlled by your brain. It produces neurotransmitters, it has memories and instincts, and it can function completely on its own. Perhaps that’s where the phrase “gut feeling” comes from because human beings do carry an innate intelligence in their stomachs. The ENS can react and remember things, just like our brains do. So, when you feel a tightness in your stomach when faced with a big decision, that’s not just the Kung Pao Chicken you had for lunch. That’s your ENS trying to tell you something. The decision is up to you whether you listen or not.

3. Learn to become comfortable with just “knowing”

One of the hardest parts about listening to your instincts is simply opening yourself up to the experience. Because instinct offers us a much different mental experience than our usual decision-making process. Normally, we make decisions by constructing mental arguments. We compare and contrast, and we analyze. But, when it comes to instinct, it’s not about arguing, it’s about KNOWING. You just KNOW the answer. And your brain doesn’t always show the work, which can make it hard to trust. But if you open yourself up to the experience, you realize that innate knowing has just as much (if not more value) as any other mental rhetoric you might construct.

4. Believe in your brain

There is actual hard science that can explain how instinct works. Noted psychologist Daniel Kahneman won the 2002 Nobel Prize for economics for his work on “prospect” theory, which is all about the physiology of how people make decisions when faced with risky situations. This is important to understand because, too often, we try to portray instinct as something ephemeral. We say “I just had a feeling” and that makes it easier to ignore. But gut feelings aren’t emotions. They’re neurological responses to stimuli. When we have a gut feeling, our brain connects seemingly random chunks of memories and data to make patterns visible to us on an instinctive level. Our brains tell us — very very quickly — how to respond to something. And we need to trust it.

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5. Accept that facts aren’t everything

We live in an age of too much information. You search for something on Google and get 10 million results. You want to find a recipe and Pinterest, Twitter, and Instagram hit you over the head with a billion examples. How do we ever have time to process all that data? The answer is — we don’t. This is why gut feelings are so important. Because you can’t always make decisions solely based on hard data. There’s just too much, too many variables. There comes a moment when you need to let all of the information wash over you and let your instincts point you in the right direction. It’s just as valid (heck, it’s way more valid) than basing your decision on some blog article you found via Wikipedia through the third page of Google search results. Trust yourself as a source too.

Clara Belize Wisner is a feminine bioenergetic and quantum nutritionist and teacher. Tom Burns has served as a contributing editor for 8BitDad and The Good Men Project, and his writing has been featured on Babble, Brightly, Mom.me, Time Magazine, and various other sites. Helen Fisher Ph.D., is a biological anthropologist and Senior Research Fellow at The Kinsey Institute and Chief Scientific Advisor to the dating site Match. She is the author of the book The Anatomy of Love: A Natural History of Mating, Marriage, and Why We Stray, among other titles. T-Ann Pierce is a transformational life coach who helps empower parents to create healthy relationships with their children. Kathryn Foster, Ph.D., is a psychologist who practices psychotherapy. She's written a ground-breaking book on the neuroscience of romance, called The Naked Truth About Men (And Romance). Melanie Gorman is the former Senior VP of YourTango Experts.