5 Gut Instincts You Shouldn’t Ignore









This means if something in the environment is even slightly irregular — the speed of an approaching truck, the slightly unusual behavior of someone at a party — your brain squirts dopamine and you get that “weird” feeling. Whether you pay attention or not can make all the difference. You might meet your future spouse — or meet your maker. Those signals carry a lot of important information, so it’s wise to listen up.


But she also notes that gut instincts are far from infallible. The right brain’s skill with pattern identification can trigger suspicions of unfamiliar (but not dangerous) things, or cause you to be especially reactive to people who simply remind you of someone else.

So how do you choose which gut feelings to trust? Orloff suggests that it’s a matter of “combining the linear mind and intuition,” and striking the right balance between gut instinct and rational thinking. Once you’ve noticed an intuitive hit, she says, you can engage your rational mind to weigh your choices and decide how best to act on them.

To that end, here are five gut feelings that Orloff and other experts recommend you pay attention to — and some reasons why you’ll be glad you did.

“Something feels wrong in my body.”






“I’m in danger.”

Jackie Larsen was leaving her Grand Marais, Minn., prayer-group meeting on an April morning in 2001 when a clean-cut young man named Christopher Bono approached her, asking for help. He told her that he was on his way to meet friends in Thunder Bay, and his car had broken down. During their brief conversation, she got a visceral feeling that something was wrong, accompanied by a sharp pain in her stomach. She sent Bono inside to talk to the pastor of the church and called the police to have them trace his Illinois license plates. It turned out he was the prime suspect in a gruesome crime and was fleeing the scene.

Larsen’s brain had likely detected subtle irregularities in Bono’s behavior. “Mere ‘thin-slices’ of someone’s behavior can reveal much,” writes Myers, who relates Larsen’s story in his book Intuition: Its Powers and Perils (Yale University Press, 2002). His understanding of this capacity is more socio-historical than neuroscientific; he believes that the feeling you get about a person in the first 10 seconds expresses an “ancient biological wisdom.” Early humans who could speedily detect whether a strangerwas friend or foe were more likely to survive, he says, and they would create descendents who were able to read emotional signals in another person’s face almost instantly.


Because social conditioning helps to create unconscious beliefs, and these beliefs can produce first impressions and snap decisions that are utterly flawed, Orloff suggests that it’s important to check your gut feelings against your rational mind whenever possible. And there are simple ways you can attend to what feels like a warning signal in the short term, she says.

“If you don’t trust somebody, even if it turns out to be inaccurate, it is something to pay attention to,” she explains. “If you’re walking down the street at night and you get the feeling ‘stay away from that person,’ just cross the street.”

“I want to help.”


Since evolution has made you a quick read of other faces and their emotional signals, you don’t always need to wait for a verbalized cue before you reach out. The sympathy instinct nudges you to change the subject when wedding talk makes a newly divorced colleague cringe, or to start up a conversation with a nervous seatmate during an airplane landing — subtle gestures that can make a big difference in someone’s day. The capacity to empathetically identify with other faces can even be what compels you to donate money after a natural disaster. Studies of humanitarian relief efforts show that people are markedly more compelled to give after seeing a photo of an individual in need than after reading statistics about damage.

Finally, this ability to “read” other faces isn’t just good for those you help. One recent brain-imaging study suggests that generosity makes the pleasure centers in the brain light up like the Las Vegas Strip. When participants were given $128 of hard cash along with the choice to keep it or donate it to charity, the reward centers of those who chose to donate went wild.


“I know how to do this.”

Basketball announcers can be merciless when otherwise talented players choke at the free-throw line, but most of us can identify with the player’s sense of panic. You might have a well-developed yoga practice with one pose that still stumps you. Or maybe you’re a stellar driver who forgets how to parallel park whenever your intimidating sister-in-law is in the car. Or you’re a great cook who botches your favorite dish each time you make it for guests. In situations like these, the can-do instinct you’ve developed through years of experience is being drowned out by an onslaught of overthinking.






“This is it!”

Most people have a great “I just knew it was right” story. It might be about the time they first spotted their sweetheart or crossed the threshold of their first house or figured out they wanted to switch careers. There’s a reason most of us have memorable stories about the biggest and best decisions we make in life, says Orloff — they’re typically remarkable for their lack of cognitive heavy lifting.




Several studies support the wisdom of emotional decision-making in the realm of big choices. Lehrer cites one conducted at the University of Amsterdam that simulated the experience of buying a car, providing research subjects with overwhelming amounts of detailed information. Some car buyers were briefly distracted, then left to choose quickly and with their emotions. Follow-up surveys revealed that they selected the most satisfying car 60 percent of the time. Other subjects who had more uninterrupted time in which to choose were pleased with their decision less than 25 percent of the time — worse even than random chance.

In another study, the same Dutch researchers shadowed shoppers at IKEA, observing their shopping behaviors. Later interviews indicated that those who spent less time making their choices ended up more satisfied overall. Choosing a couch and choosing a spouse are decidedly different acts, to be sure, but both tend to provoke the kind of agonized overthinking that leads to poor choices. Using your intuitive brain in these situations, on the other hand, will almost always point you toward a lasting fulfillment.

Of all the reasons to use your gut instincts to make big decisions, this may be the best: It leads to the choices that are most fully satisfying — decisions that can improve the quality of your life.

“It allows you to find relationships that resonate for you, instead of what looks good on paper,” Orloff says. “It allows you to connect with people on a heart level, it allows you to deeply experience life instead of just letting it wash over you, and it allows you to be really smart about how you make your decisions.”

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Courtney Helgoe is an Experience Life senior editor.

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