If I listened to my gut, I’d probably never leave the house. Every time I have a really bad gut feeling, it’s just anxiety trying to stop me from doing things. When I ignore the gut feeling, everything turns out okay and I’m glad I didn’t let my anxiety get the best of me.
When bad things do happen, it’s just random. No gut feeling to warn me otherwise.
Edit: I meant “trust YOUR* gut” but I can’t edit the title ugh
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“Trusting your gut” essentially means “have enough common sense to make the right decision.”
Nothing more.
You should trust your brain, not your gut, or your heart. Listen to ‘em, sure. But the brain needs to be in the driver’s seat.
Gut intuition is a real thing. It’s not failproof by any means but it has value just as other data points do for decision making. Certainly the case that some people intuition’s are worse than others, just as some predictive models are worse than others.
Every time I’ve rushed ahead with emotional sentiments to determine my actions I have fucked up. Every. Single. Time. So my guts have shit for brains. If I want to make a good decision, I need to analyze it, temper by feelings, write things down, and conduct a serious cost/benefit analysis.
I have anxiety issues as well.
I understand what you mean as someone with anxiety. That being said, you can train yourself to separate intuition from anxiety.
I remember seeing something about this: someone said to treat your gut as a parrot and try to ‘talk’ to it; the intuition behind it is that your gut instinct is your brain picking up information and subconsciously recognising something is wrong, so by doing the aforementioned method, you can unearth the cause of the feeling, and reason with it.
If your anxiety is that bad, you really need to find a completely different way to handle it.
Most of the decisions we make in our modern world are generally rather meaningless. You’re generally not going to be making a mistake that results in a tiger eating you. Even most of the big choices we have to make, who you will date/marry and where you work, have comparatively minor negative outcomes and are changeable. The advice to “trust your gut” just means to go with whatever you feel is the best choice and not to over think it, because it will realistically not end that badly for you.
Not everyone has anxiety
Trusting my “gut feeling” has saved my ass on more than one occasion. I think I’ll keep trusting it.
When I get gut feelings I usually just don’t know how to interpret it!
E.g. when I’m playing a card game where you can pick from two stacks, my gut seems to be telling me something but I never know what – which stack are you saying picking from is best?!
Even with anxiety, does your intuition not tell you that ultimately going out into the world is the right thing to do? Genuine question.
I’m high anxiety and trust my gut. I find it helps my anxiety knowing that my gut knows or something.
For the vast majority of people ‘trust your gut’ is good advice.
Because it doesn’t work for you doesn’t mean it’s bad advice.
Maybe you should get some help with your ‘anxiety’.
I trust my gut the way I trust a twelve year old kid who cries wolf. Take everything with a grain of salt and do my best to independently verify, but if something is a big deal I can’t automatically write it off just because they’ve lied before.
My son as a young child was such a people person. He went up to a grandpa in the park and wanted a hug. He never disliked anybody.
You better bet the day he got antsy and shy when a guy said something to me while checking out (at grocery store) made me jittery. He never disliked anybody. But the moment that guy came up to us he acted different. You better bet your ass I waited until I knew he was gone to leave.
Intuition is “gut instinct” is a thing.
Edit-Wording
I have awful anxiety and my intuition about bad situations or people are usually correct.
Well, keep your skepticism to yourself if you are afraid of a possible solution. Everyone has anxiety in one way or another. But some people need someone else to tell them to stop acting like a little b**** and make a decision
In order to trust your gut you actually have to know how to differentiate anxiety from intuition.
If you work on separating your gut instinct from your anxiety then this statement will click for you.
I definitely agree. If you’re familiar with the MBTI, I’m an INFJ, which INFJs are known for having good intuition. A lot of INFJs let this go to their head and then they make a huge ass out of themselves by “going with their gut” on something that they’re just wrong about.
I say go with your gut if you feel like you’re in danger. If you feel unsafe, leave the situation immediately. It’s better to be safe than sorry. I say this, but of course if you’re feeling scared just to leave your house to run simple errands, it’s probably just your anxiety. I’m talking about if you’re in a sketchy situation. I have anxiety too, so I get it.
But there’s tons of other things that you can cool it with your intuition. Think someone is a scumbag? Before assuming anything, maybe just let them reveal themselves as a scumbag. It’ll naturally happen. Otherwise, you might just reveal yourself as a judgmental asshole, and they might actually a perfectly fine person and now everyone hates you.