Why You Shouldn’t Always Trust Your Gut (and what to do instead)
Gut instinct can be helpful — but it can also be a reflex shaped by trauma, bias, or fear. Learn how to tell the difference between real intuition and emotional conditioning.
Trusting your gut isn’t always wise. This article explores when gut instinct is reliable, when it’s shaped by unconscious bias, and how to cultivate authentic intuition by integrating feeling, thought, and stillness.
It might seem like good advice, but trusting your gut should not be motto to uncritically live by. While intuition should no doubt have a bigger place in our decision making, gut instinct is no less immune to bias and irrationality than thinking is. Yes, intuition is real, and it’s a great pointer — but there are a few things you should know before putting all your trust in a system that can still lead you astray.
In this article will learn why you shouldn’t take your gut’s word at face value — and how you can build skills to increase your intuitive skills.
We Know Thinking Can Be Faulty
Thinking about thinking goes all the way back to Socrates - and while he valorised our cognitive capacities, he also suggested it should come with a user warning. Like modern LLM’s (AI’s large language models like ChatGPT), the confidence that comes alongside our thoughts cannot always be relied upon. This Socratic tradition has developed over time, achieving psychological sophistication in the form of modern cognitive psychology. This branch of psychology teaches that our thinking can distort objectivity by ways of concepts like these to name just a few:
Confirmation Bias: Seeking out or interpreting information in ways that confirm your preexisting beliefs
Availablity Heurisitics: Judging likelihood based on how easily examples come to mind
Negativity Bias: Paying more attention to negative than positive information
Groupthink: Conforming to group consensus to avoid conflict or isolation
Cognitive distortions like these not only direct our thinking about the world, but perhaps more importantly, direct our self-concept and behaviour. In cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) these errors of thinking are more personalised like:
Catastrophising: Imagining the worst possible out come
Dichotomous thinking: Seeing the world as black and white extremes rather than nuanced grey areas
Filtering: Taking in only information that confirms your “script” about the world (usually by taking criticism more seriously than praise).
On the surface level you can have all sorts of thoughts about particular things (e.g. “my presentation will be terrible,” “that person doesn’t like me”, “I can never do things right.) but below that, if you follow them down, you come to your core beliefs which are usually very simple statements like, “I am not good enough” or “I am unloveable.”
Core beliefs the more sophisticated narratives or conversations we have in our heads and they can affect actual outcomes in our lives. For example, if you think you are not good enough, you may not go for a job that you’re perfectly capable of getting because your irrational core belief that doesn’t accord with reality. Just because you’ve been told you’re not good at something, and just because you believed it, doesn’t make it true. It could just be your conditioning.
Cognitive Behavioural Therapy aims to correct this through a variety of techniques that help retrain our thinking to get a wider more objective perspective on things. Both Cognitive Psychology and CBT come from a worldview that prioritises the role of thinking while generally diminishing the importance of emotions, the body, and intuition. But relying too much on thinking doesn’t really work. Most of us have had the experience of trying to make an important life through thinking alone - making columns of benefits and disadvantages - and finding it doesn’t quite satisfy our answer. This approach usually doesn’t work because you’re only working with one set of data - when there’s a lot more available to support your decision.
Because this problem is so universally experience people often assume that you should just leave thinking behind, appeal to your intuition and “go with your feelings.” Your feelings, however, are equally open to disinformation - it’s just disinformation of a different kind.
Are Feelings and Emotions a Reliable Source of Data?
Western culture is thinking-driven and often doesn’t take feelings into adequate consideration - if it’s not empirical, if you can’t attach a number to it, it’s easily dismissed. However, incorporating feelings into decision-making is crucial, becuse it fills in a much bigger picture than columns of pros and cons.
This is why it often happens that when looking at these columns, one might still choose the less obvious choice because it feels better, despite the logic of the situation. It’s the same thing when you flip a coin, but disagree with the answer - your feelings are telling you something different from your mid.
Feelings may be more powerful than thoughts in moving us, but that doesn’t mean they are always right.
Just like thinking, emotions are built through conditioning too. A perfect example of this is the fear of intimacy. Oftentimes such a fear is built upon having had your trust broken before. Perhaps you have experienced abandonment from parents or carers, or people you have trusted, like lovers, who have severely let you down. This conditioning sets the scene so that that next time you feel vulnerable with someone, you are likely experience reticence, avoidance, or fear; your defences will rise, and you may walk away from the opportunity to form a perfectly loveable relationship. This isn’t thinking, it’s feeling. It’s a gut reaction, it’s most definitely real, but it’s not necessarily “correct”.
Your emotional systems are created similarly to your thinking ones. They develop over time and become habituated or programmed. Fear and anxiety are perfect examples. We learn very young to be afraid of things that may harm us like poisonous spiders or snakes - but we also learn to be afraid of things that have hurt us but aren’t essentially harmless, like rejection. It’s around these more fungible kinds of fears that we have the opportunity for personal growth through facing them.
When confronted with a venomous snake or when walking down a street alone at night in a city you don’t know, fear and caution are natural instinctual responses that arise due to your immediate environment. These are the situations in which you should absolutely trust your gut.
However, trusting your gut because you believe that for some mysterious reason it is blessed with the right answer is just as bad advice as “think it through and work out the positives and negatives. on paper” The ideal solution, in a situation where there isn’t an immediate urgency, is to find a still place inside you from which to draw on all your data — emotional, gut, bodily, intuitive, and your thinking.
How to Trust Your Gut
For the most part your natural urgency reaction systems are pretty reliable. If you are in immediate danger, your system will generally give you the tools to deal with them (fight, flight, or freeze), and you can trust that. In fact, in these cases, it’s when people override their intuition that they get in trouble (it’s we mess up more when we’re drunk!). Fortunately for most of us those situations are rare. Unfortunately, it is less rare to have a strong gut reaction, even a traumatic reaction to a non-traumatic situation — so you’re in fight/flight/freeze even when you don’t need to be — in this case it might be wiser not to trust your gut. So here are some tips about how to manage this complexity:
If you are spinning out — it is not the time to make a decision.
Spinning out means that your thinking or feeling (or both) are in overdrive. You are feeling anxious (shallow breathing, quickened heart rate), or angry and your thinking is going a mile a minute. This means you are in reaction. You want to respond not react. So simply identify that you are spinning out and find a way to come down (take some deep breaths, meditate, walk in nature, etc.): break the cycle. Check out How Your ‘Crazy’ is the Key to Your Psychological Freedom for more on this.
Do not identify with your thoughts or feelings. Acknowledge them, recognise them, be curious about them, then let them be.
It’s hard to get distance when you are spinning out, but you can work yourself to a still place and simply witness all those sensory and cognitive experiences as they go by. Watch them totally, non-judgementally, and trust that your unconscious is aware of and picking up all that is going on.
Know yourself well enough to identify what thought and feeling complexes are familiar to you.
This part is tricky, but so helpful if you can do it. Can you identify when you’ve felt this way before? Sometimes the feelings and thoughts that are triggered in the here and now actually belong to your history and not the present. For example, if someone expressed irritation towards you but you experience that like an outburst from an abusive parent. The feeling you have now is a flashback of what you experienced then — but you are not currently being abused — so your response can soften. This will give you more choice and freedom to respond freshly in the present — even if that means putting off your response for a bit while you collect yourself.
Give yourself time. Ask your unconscious to provide you with an answer — don’t try to solve it with thoughts or react with feelings.
Sleep on it. Once you’ve allowed all your thoughts and feelings to express themselves, you can choose from a non-reactive place. The choice may not always be super clear — it may just start off as a direction. By choosing from a still place, however, you are getting off the merry-go-round of conditioned reaction and developing a responsive system suited for today, not yesterday or last year.
Intuition Is a Wonderful Thing
Intuition is an intangible quality that is really the result of wisdom. All the experience you’ve had in your life gets collected in your unconscious and helps direct you in life. However, all that experience and intuition is neither value nor bias free. If you live a life expecting to be abandoned because of your past experiences, this will distort the lens of your actual experience. Then, what feels like intuition or gut instinct, is merely emotion-based programming that is not based on direct information but arises as a feeling — often a gut feeling.
Just because it comes from your gut doesn’t make it right.
However, if we can get to a place of stillness where we don’t value or judge that information but simply witness it for some time, the answer to your question or problem may coalesce into a sense of clarity. Your gut reaction to close down a relationship just as it gets going shows up to you as a defence against previous hurt rather than the right intuitive choice right now. Your gut reaction resistance to applying for a promotion reveals itself as a fear of failure (or success) and you find a more subtle intuition below that, from the now, that says “go for it!”
When you are in a situation of real danger your gut reaction and intuition are not to be ignored. Finding a place of stillness is not advised when coming upon a poisonous snake or subjected to potential danger on the streets. Keep your wits about you and react.
However, the rest of the time (which is most of the time) don’t put all your eggs into one basket. It’s no more all about what you think about something than how you feel about something. Both human data sources can be faulty. You are not your thinking (sorry Descartes was wrong on that) — nor are you your feelings — you are subject to both of them — as well as a variety of other data sources that come with your Human Being Operating System. Finding your way to a third space, a still space to rest and acknowledge and accept those experiences while being witness to them — that’s where you’ll find true intuition and then you can trust your gut.
For more on leaning into discomfort and developing an ear for your psyche, the part of you that leads on intuition, check out my latest article for GQ, What Midlife Crisis Means for Millennials.
A Little FAQ:
Q: When should I trust my gut instinct?
A: In immediate danger, gut reactions are usually reliable. But for non-urgent decisions, they may reflect emotional conditioning - so listen in, but take your time.
Q: How do I build reliable intuition?
A: By integrating thoughts, feelings, past experience, and bodily awareness — then listening with a little bit of time and distance. It takes time, an open mind, and a good deal of courage to grow your intuition over time.
Q: What’s the difference between instinct and intuition?
A: Instinct is a hardwired biological response — like pulling your hand from a hot stove. It’s fast, automatic, and shaped by evolution for survival. Intuition, on the other hand, is a more complex unconscious integration of past experiences, emotions, and subtle perceptions. Intuition is built over time, it is akin to wisdom, and at its best when you allow flexibility into your thinking, feeling, and body systems through experience, open to change, as opposed to sticking rigidly to received ideas in order to feel “safe.”
This is a version of an article I wrote some years ago for Medium that has now been deleted.
Aaron Balick, PhD is a an international keynote speaker, psychotherapist, psyche writer for GQ, and author of The Psychodynamics of Social Networking connected-up instantaneous culture and the self; Keep Your Cool: How to deal with life’s worries and stress; and The Little Book of Calm: tame your anxiety, face your fears, and live free. He is an honorary senior lecturer at the Department for Psychosocial and Psychoanalytic Studies at the University of Essex.