How Can We Improve Our Gut Feelings?
We often have gut feelings. But they are not always right. So how can we improve making decisions based on our gut feelings?
We have all been in those situations. You know the ones where we know if something is a good or bad idea without having considered any cues or information from our external environment.
This is often referred to as a ‘gut feeling’ where we just know what to do without being able to articulate the justifications behind that behaviour.
While such intuitions may seem more like a superpower, decades of research exploring the phenomenon have identified occasions when our gut feelings can work in our favour and when they can backfire on us.
In this article, we explore what causes the onset of our gut feelings and how to ensure that it does not lead us down the wrong road.
What Is a Gut Feeling?
Also known as intuition, gut feeling is an innate response towards something, or someone, that cannot be explained and does not have to be decided with extensive reasoning.
The onset of our gut feelings tends to be sudden, triggering a range of sensations within us, from the barest signs of unease to strong, overwhelming feelings that are hard to overlook. Some common signs that suggest our gut feeling is active are:
A sudden sense of clarity
Goosebumps or shivers
‘Butterflies’ or a sinking feeling in our stomach
Sweatiness in our palms or feet
Feeling nauseous
Contentment or relief once we have made a decision
Where Do Gut Feelings Come From?
Although seeming to arise from nowhere, our intuitions are deeply entrenched in neurological processes. Those aforementioned sensations, like butterflies in our stomach and experiencing chills, highlight the connection between the brain and the gut. This is known as the gut-brain connection.
There are over 500 million neurons lining our digestive tract. This is 5 times more than the neurons found in our spinal cord!
This extensive neural network allows the gut to function independently from our brain and central nervous system, resulting in scientists referring to the stomach as the ‘second brain’.
Moreover, the fact that 95% of the neurotransmitter serotonin, significant for regulating our moods and emotions, is produced in the gut further corroborates this theory.
The connective link between these 2 major neural hubs happens to be the vagus nerve, one of the longest nerves in our body. Part of the parasympathetic nervous system, the vagus nerve is responsible for triggering many reflex responses in our gut as a response to changes in or outside our body.
Previous literature has observed that messages relayed by the vagus nerve, from the gut to the brain, are found to affect our moods as well as specific types of fear and anxiety; in other words, gut feelings.
So when something seems out of place, the gut alerts our brain, and the gut-brain connection enables emotional experiences to be felt as gastrointestinal distress.
For example, when we make a decision based on intuition, our brain and gut work ‘hand in hand’, quickly evaluating our current experience with our past experiences to identify the best course of action for a given scenario. The decision occurs before our conscious becomes aware of something our subconscious already knows.
At the same time, it is also important that we acknowledge that our gut feelings can sometimes lead us astray. Our gut feelings go awry because of human factors, such as revisionism, self-fulfilling prophecy, and overconfidence.
Revisionism: we often tend to recollect instances when we have ignored our intuitions when we shouldn’t have, overlooking the other instances when ignoring our gut feelings was the right call.
Self-Fulfilling Prophecy: our tendency to align our future actions to justify making a decision based on our intuition instead of evaluating whether or not it was the right decision
Overconfidence: our dangerous belief in overestimating our ability about everything can also lead us down the wrong road, especially when considering our gut feelings.
These factors often blindside us about how faulty our intuitions can be. So how do we work on improving our intuition?
How to Improve Our Gut Feelings?
Trusting our intuition can sometimes be a foolhardy plan, but the following pointers highlight ways to improve our ability to evaluate if going with our gut is the best course of action.
We can further enhance how we listen to our gut feelings by following 5 tips suggested by Professor Joel Pearson, founder of the Future Minds Lab. These tips can be remembered using the acronym SMILE.
Self-Awareness: Before relying on our gut feelings, we must beware of our current emotional state. Making any decision when experiencing any kind of extreme emotion, be it happiness, sadness, or anger, should be avoided, as they are more likely to not work in our favour.
Mastery: The more experience we gain, the better our intuitions get. Research has observed gut feelings are often more reliable among experienced professionals.
Impulse Control: We often use the terms impulse/instinct and intuition interchangeably. However, that is not the case. Instinct/impulse is something we are born with, while intuition is something we gain through experience.
What is more challenging is that both intuition and impulse can feel very similar, and thus we need to ensure we can differentiate between the two.
Low Probability: When dealing with numbers or probabilities, we should avoid using our gut feelings to make a decision, as it can lead to an error in our judgement.
Environment: This refers to how the experience we gain is situational. For example, if you have extensively practised dancing on wooden floors, your intuition will be based on that specific context and will not necessarily transfer over to when you dance on carpeted floors.
Other factors that help us efficiently hone in on our gut feelings include our biases, time available, and our emotional intelligence.
Biases: Our biases and/or prejudices can affect our gut feelings. For instance, we are more likely to get ‘positive vibes’ from someone who is more like us than someone different from us.
Time Available: One of the deciding factors for whether or not we should follow our gut feelings is time. Our intuition is most helpful when we are short on time, heedless of whether we are subject experts or laypeople. For example, whether or not we have the time to cross the junction before the signal turns red.
Emotional Intelligence: Recent research has found that our overall emotional intelligence has an effect on the quality of our decisions based on our gut feelings. By working on developing our emotional intelligence, we can improve our intuition-based decision-making processes.
Considering the above, let us consider a few scenarios where our intuitions are the most efficient.
When Do Gut Feelings Help Us?
Regardless of how well we have honed in on our gut feelings, they do not have a 100% success rate. Let us consider scenarios where our gut feelings lead to positive outcomes.
Time Restraints
When we have limited time to make a decision, we do not have the luxury to evaluate all available options. Making a quick decision would be the best course of action. In these scenarios, our gut feelings tend to help us choose without falling into the pitfalls of indecision, overthinking, or panic.
Considering Safety
Our gut feelings help flag scenarios where we might be in danger. If our intuition suggests that we take a different route home, we should take a minute to gauge what is happening around us.
Volume of Complex Information
When we are exposed to a high volume of complex information, our gut feelings help us make a decision. Research studies have found that when presented with extensive details about various apartments, individuals who did not have the time to analyse the information were more likely to pick the better choice than those who were given time to analyse the data.
Acknowledging our emotions and physiological cues can help us not just be aware of our gut feelings but also learn when to use them. The bottom line is that though there is a risk of being wrong by relying on our intuition, with time and experience, we can work towards the decisions we make.
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