Trust Your Gut

Lately, I have been overthinking…a lot. My brain never wants to turn off, making it a constant hamster wheel of activity. Normally, I am a busy body but not a busy brain. I get where it is coming from — I have a lot going on with plenty of big things before graduation in May — but I cannot sustain the number of decisions I am cycling through and keep my sanity. 

Part of this, I realized, is because I run through thousands of to-do lists, optimized schedules and potential choices in my brain when often one simple gut decision would do the trick. I need to rely on my intuition more often. Instead of being buried under 100 options and taking time to make yet another pros and cons list, I could tune into my intuition. Recently, this idea has got me thinking: what is the relationship between our gut feelings and conscious decision-making? Is trusting our gut a reliable option?

Naturally, some people rely more on their heart and others on their head when it comes to decisions, but what about the gut, or intuition? We seem to have replaced a piece of our internal compass with modern technology; we use smartphones to wake up and supercomputers to make business decisions. While these are amazing tools, our bodies also naturally know what we need. 

Internal mechanisms have been sustaining the human race for thousands of years. Many people, especially analytical thinkers, tend to disregard intuition, brushing it aside as the opposite of reason. Intuition can actually be described, though, as “unconscious intelligence.” It moves quickly and automatically, motivating a person to take action, according to an article from The Decision Lab. Intuition is concrete and holistic, a consequence of evolutionary history and experience. This feeling is based on the gut-brain axis, which is a far cry from baseless, fleeting emotions. 

The gut produces up to 95% of the body’s serotonin and acts as our second brain. The gut can determine our mood as well as our stress response. Having butterflies or sinking feelings in our stomach and craving comfort foods after an emotional event are examples of everyday experiences of this integral connection. 

Keeping all this in mind, I am on a mission to trust my gut, to get out of my head and out of my own way. By digging into this a little bit, I realized that, deep down, I know what is best for me, a comforting thought. My decisions should not be strictly dictated by statistics or other people’s thoughts on the matter; they are my own to own. If things do not feel right in my core, I’m doing something wrong. If I remove all the barriers that keep me paralyzed, my body has the room to work exactly as it was created to. My brain does not have to work as hard when I eliminate extra internal noise with my intuition. 

Of course, I do not plan to make every decision with only my gut because we live in a world of outside factors and external stimuli. However, creating space for our physical and emotional needs in addition to our mental ones allows us to view the situation through a holistic lens and let our entire self drive the decision. Intuition leaves us without regrets because it cannot second-guess or overthink. It has our best interests at heart. 

When in doubt, go with your gut. 

• #experience
• #intuition
• #mentalhealth
• #self-awareness