Should We Trust Our Gut Feelings?

Over the last four weeks, I had a sinking feeling that I couldn’t shake. It was a shadow behind all my waking thoughts, and when I had a brief moment of “nothingness” in my head, that lurking feeling crept in. I tried to push it aside and forget about it. I tried to label it as “irrational” and tell myself that I was just overthinking. I convinced myself that I would be fine, it would dissipate, and the world would move on.

That sinking feeling was straightforward. I had a flight scheduled for January 2nd back to Salt Lake City, Utah. I was supposed to land at 9:45PM, and my plan was to take an Uber back to my apartment. I’ve taken Ubers alone countless times. Many of which have been at night. Many of which have been in foreign cities abroad and in big cities in the US. I’ve never had a sinking feeling about taking an Uber alone, but for some reason, when I thought of landing in Salt Lake City on January 2nd, my stomach tied itself into knots.

On January 1st, I walked into the living room where my mom was spending the evening. She knew nothing about my hesitation with flying back to Utah. I hadn’t voiced my concern to her because I was just going to suck it up, get on the plane, take the Uber, and pray I’d be okay. That night my mom turned to me and asked if I believed in a sixth sense. She told me, unprompted, about a book she read which addressed how we ignore our gut instincts. In the book, there was a story about a girl who had been brutally assaulted by a man. The book broke down the encounter, and it highlighted every point where she ignored her gut instinct telling her that something wasn’t right about the situation she was in. Why did she ignore her intuition? For the same reason I had been ignoring mine. We are conditioned to not trust it. We get this sinking feeling of “something isn’t right”, and then we take it upon ourselves to self-correct that gut reaction as if it’s there just for fun.

I sat on the couch opposite my mom and told her about the feeling I had about going back to Utah. She looked at me and said, “You cannot ignore that feeling, especially since I had no idea you felt this way and just finished explaining that whole story.” Needless to say, I changed my flight, and immediately, I was relieved.

Now, I’m not drawing a parallel between what might have happened to me and what happened to the girl in the book my mom read. I have no idea what that sinking feeling might have manifested as. I will never know if I were being irrationally fearful of Ubers or if something bad would have happened to me that night. The point is, I did not want to put myself in the position to find out.

I think back to the girl who was assaulted. She knew she was walking into danger before danger even presented itself. Had she listened to her intuition, would she have gotten away?

The thing is, we are programmed to dismiss our gut reaction. It’s part of a sixth sense that many people just do not believe in. But that’s really the part that gets to me. We live in a world that we simply made up. We constructed the idea of money, communities, companies, school systems, infrastructure. We have AI and facial recognition devices, planes, boats, little pills that can cure diseases. We are literally a product of generations and generations of inventions and innovation, all of which we completely made up. It confuses me how we can dismiss the intangible sensations and feelings that are not manmade, when those are quite literally the only things that the human hand didn’t play a part in making.

I’ve conjured that we cast aside our intuition because it’s hard to label. Who explains that the sole reasoning for backing out of plan is because she “had a sinking feeling”? I watched myself avoid that explanation even after I had a whole revelation about how ignoring my gut instinct goes against the purpose of why it’s there. People asked me, “why did you switch your flight?” and I found myself saying, “it just made more sense to fly out a week later.” That’s still not very straightforward, but people will trust a semi-concrete answer before they’ll welcome a gut feeling.

The fact of the matter is, I base my life off of gut feelings. I based my entire move to a new city on a gut feeling. I based the location of my service trip to Nepal on a gut feeling. I’ve walked away from guys and friends based on gut feelings, and I’ve welcomed new people into my life based on gut feelings. Just to throw it out there, too— obviously there have been times my gut feeling was wrong. I’ve had gut feelings about winning the lottery and answering a trivia question correctly, just to be laughably incorrect. But if there is something I cannot shake, a feeling that sticks around longer than I’d like it to, than I can’t help but think that’s a sign I should trust it.

It’s hard to wrap my head around the fact that we so readily welcome all the pieces to this game we made up, but as soon as someone mentions a piece that was here all along, we deem it “irrational”. The same species that allows love, an unexplainable phenomenon, to unite two people to spend forever together, look at a gut feeling and say, “ignore it”. I’m not sure who came up with this game, but I’m afraid the rules make no sense.

I don’t think I’ll ever have a good explanation for my gut feelings, nor do I wish to label them moving forward. I just pray that one day we as people can normalize the intangible reasonings just as commonly as we accept the concrete ones. That in a world intelligent enough to build the kind of life we have the liberty of living, we become a world emotionally intelligent enough to realize that the most beautiful, purposeful things about being here are the ones we can’t explain.