GUT FEELING
Gut instinct, or intuition, is your immediate understanding of something; there’s no need to think it over or get another opinion, you just know. Your intuition arises, a feeling within your body that only you experience. Because the feeling is so personal, no one else can tell if you’re in touch with your gut instinct or not.
According to research, we are equipped with a second brain in the area of our stomach. When one is experiencing stress, fear, the gut reacts with constipation, pain. When we feel anxious, excited, at times we describe it as ''butterflies in the stomach." The second brain informs our state of mind in other ways, as well. "A big part of our emotions are probably influenced by the nerves in our gut," Emeran Mayer says.
A deeper understanding of this second brain, reveals that it does much more than merely handle digestion, the little brain in our innards, in connection with the big one in our skulls, partly determines our mental state and plays key roles in certain diseases throughout the body. Although its influence is far-reaching, the second brain is not the seat of any conscious thoughts or decision-making.
Most times trusting your Gut feeling is often the best strategy, there is no such thing as a purely logical decision. The brain uses a combination of logic and emotion when making decisions of any kind. That specific emotion is intuition. We possess the capacity to feel, and thereby the ability to know things without consciously reasoning. The "gut feeling" is real, and we use it all the time. Listening to your intuition helps you avoid unhealthy relationships and situations. Throughout your life, many people will have ideas about what’s best for you, some held with good intentions, and some coming from a place of deceitful, harmful, selfish intent. It’s sometimes hard to tell which category someone falls into, but if you put aside all of those external opinions and instead listen to the advice of your own intuition, it will guide you to what is truly best for you.
According to "One Love," Your intuition is like your own personal North Star, but there are many obstructors that act as clouds dimming its light. Once you’re aware of them, you’d better catch yourself when you’re headed in the wrong direction for the wrong reasons so you can then take the appropriate steps to realign with your intuition. These are some of the most likely culprits:
- Overthinking: Since intuition is defined as “the ability to understand something instinctively, without the need for conscious reasoning,” overthinking is one of the biggest interferers. Putting excessive thought into every decision and walking through countless scenarios and outcomes can lead you away from your gut instinct, especially when you’re overthinking in order to rationalize or justify something.
- “Shoulds”: “Shoulds” often enter the picture when you’re overthinking and other times when you’re outwardly focused. For example, if you wonder, “Will [someone else] like me if I do this?” In these instances, you’re thinking about your behavior in a lens colored by the rules, preferences, and expectations that someone else has set rather than looking inwardly and allowing your own thoughts and needs to guide your behavior, which would lead you to ask a very different question like, “How will I feel about myself if I do this?” Because “shoulds” shift the focus away from you, they distance you from your intuition.
- Prejudices & Unconscious Bias: Even though prejudices and unconscious biases are in some ways the opposite of overthinking, they have similar effects on your intuition. As opposed to overthinking and over-analysis, prejudices and unconscious biases operate from quick judgments that the brain automatically makes based on past experiences, stereotypes, and backgrounds instead of based on reason or actual experience. As a result, neither of these culprits allows space for you to tap into the experiential nature of intuition.
- Previous trauma/abuse in childhood: Perhaps the most complex and powerful of all the culprits is having experienced abuse and trauma as a child. Why? Because childhood abuse can leave a lasting impact on a person that remains even in adulthood. Growing up experiencing physical, emotional/psychological, and/or sexual abuse can cause children to distrust their experience and blame themselves. Since trusting your intuition is the same as trusting yourself, tapping into this gut instinct can be a struggle.
There are several ways of trusting Gut Instincts:
Practicing the following steps will help you hone your feeling of intuition in your body and bring it to the forefront to guide you through important situations.
1. Slow Down & Clear Your Mind
When you’re living in a cloudy haze and rushing here and there, whether physically or mentally, you miss information. Slowing down helps you better recognize and process the information you receive, not only in your mind but also in your body. To do so, you must mentally and physically clear away the clutter, for instance taking a vacation before making a career change or spending some time apart from a significant other to determine if you’re right for each other.
Explore meditation, yoga, mindful breathing exercises, and other practices that move your focus from darting thoughts into a deeper space of calm and centered focus within you.
2. Notice Sensations in Your Body
Intuition is grounded within the sensations inside of the body, so learning to recognize what’s going on within your body i.e. what you’re feeling is key to developing your intuition, understanding how your body feels in response to an emotion, for example, anger feels tight, sore, hot, and tingly rather than simply naming an emotion like sad, angry, or frustrated, and stopping there. Doing so helps you stay out of your head where you risk being swept away by thoughts and instead tune into your body where your intuition resides.
Begin practicing as a novice observer, merely noticing with interest what’s happening to your body in response to different emotions. Guided body scan meditations are especially helpful in sharpening this skill. So are exercises where you bring to mind a specific memory and then label and feel the emotions it elicits within your body. In all of these exercises, pay particular attention to your breathing, muscles, and heart rate to see how your body reacts and what that reaction tells you.
3. Focus on You
Ask yourself, “What do I really need here? What’s important for me?” This is one of those times when it should be all about you, so give yourself full permission to do so. If you find your focus shifting to other people and their needs, notice and purposefully return your attention back to being curious about what you need and want, because that is where you will find your intuition; concentrating on these needs helps to more easily pave the pathway there. To clear the air around your intuition, it might be helpful to first go through the list of culprits above to identify the external factors influencing you, acknowledging them so that you can then put them aside for the moment. Your intuition is part of your highest, wisest self, so make sure the focus is squarely on you.
4. Take Action
The feeling of intuition is like an ocean current navigating you toward a purposeful life. Once you discover it, you still need to jump in a boat and set sail in order to derive its full value. After you answer the question “What do I need right now?”, do something to give yourself what you need. It might be the tiniest step, but size doesn’t matter here. Small steps can actually be beneficial at first to gradually build trust with your intuitive self whom you may be meeting for the first time or becoming reacquainted with after an unhealthy relationship separated you. What’s important is that you are following your intuition.
By: Sydiqah Uthman @rebirth_2003
According to research, we are equipped with a second brain in the area of our stomach. When one is experiencing stress, fear, the gut reacts with constipation, pain. When we feel anxious, excited, at times we describe it as ''butterflies in the stomach." The second brain informs our state of mind in other ways, as well. "A big part of our emotions are probably influenced by the nerves in our gut," Emeran Mayer says.
A deeper understanding of this second brain, reveals that it does much more than merely handle digestion, the little brain in our innards, in connection with the big one in our skulls, partly determines our mental state and plays key roles in certain diseases throughout the body. Although its influence is far-reaching, the second brain is not the seat of any conscious thoughts or decision-making.
Most times trusting your Gut feeling is often the best strategy, there is no such thing as a purely logical decision. The brain uses a combination of logic and emotion when making decisions of any kind. That specific emotion is intuition. We possess the capacity to feel, and thereby the ability to know things without consciously reasoning. The "gut feeling" is real, and we use it all the time. Listening to your intuition helps you avoid unhealthy relationships and situations. Throughout your life, many people will have ideas about what’s best for you, some held with good intentions, and some coming from a place of deceitful, harmful, selfish intent. It’s sometimes hard to tell which category someone falls into, but if you put aside all of those external opinions and instead listen to the advice of your own intuition, it will guide you to what is truly best for you.
According to "One Love," Your intuition is like your own personal North Star, but there are many obstructors that act as clouds dimming its light. Once you’re aware of them, you’d better catch yourself when you’re headed in the wrong direction for the wrong reasons so you can then take the appropriate steps to realign with your intuition. These are some of the most likely culprits:
- Overthinking: Since intuition is defined as “the ability to understand something instinctively, without the need for conscious reasoning,” overthinking is one of the biggest interferers. Putting excessive thought into every decision and walking through countless scenarios and outcomes can lead you away from your gut instinct, especially when you’re overthinking in order to rationalize or justify something.
- “Shoulds”: “Shoulds” often enter the picture when you’re overthinking and other times when you’re outwardly focused. For example, if you wonder, “Will [someone else] like me if I do this?” In these instances, you’re thinking about your behavior in a lens colored by the rules, preferences, and expectations that someone else has set rather than looking inwardly and allowing your own thoughts and needs to guide your behavior, which would lead you to ask a very different question like, “How will I feel about myself if I do this?” Because “shoulds” shift the focus away from you, they distance you from your intuition.
- Prejudices & Unconscious Bias: Even though prejudices and unconscious biases are in some ways the opposite of overthinking, they have similar effects on your intuition. As opposed to overthinking and over-analysis, prejudices and unconscious biases operate from quick judgments that the brain automatically makes based on past experiences, stereotypes, and backgrounds instead of based on reason or actual experience. As a result, neither of these culprits allows space for you to tap into the experiential nature of intuition.
- Previous trauma/abuse in childhood: Perhaps the most complex and powerful of all the culprits is having experienced abuse and trauma as a child. Why? Because childhood abuse can leave a lasting impact on a person that remains even in adulthood. Growing up experiencing physical, emotional/psychological, and/or sexual abuse can cause children to distrust their experience and blame themselves. Since trusting your intuition is the same as trusting yourself, tapping into this gut instinct can be a struggle.
There are several ways of trusting Gut Instincts:
Practicing the following steps will help you hone your feeling of intuition in your body and bring it to the forefront to guide you through important situations.
1. Slow Down & Clear Your Mind
When you’re living in a cloudy haze and rushing here and there, whether physically or mentally, you miss information. Slowing down helps you better recognize and process the information you receive, not only in your mind but also in your body. To do so, you must mentally and physically clear away the clutter, for instance taking a vacation before making a career change or spending some time apart from a significant other to determine if you’re right for each other.
Explore meditation, yoga, mindful breathing exercises, and other practices that move your focus from darting thoughts into a deeper space of calm and centered focus within you.
2. Notice Sensations in Your Body
Intuition is grounded within the sensations inside of the body, so learning to recognize what’s going on within your body i.e. what you’re feeling is key to developing your intuition, understanding how your body feels in response to an emotion, for example, anger feels tight, sore, hot, and tingly rather than simply naming an emotion like sad, angry, or frustrated, and stopping there. Doing so helps you stay out of your head where you risk being swept away by thoughts and instead tune into your body where your intuition resides.
Begin practicing as a novice observer, merely noticing with interest what’s happening to your body in response to different emotions. Guided body scan meditations are especially helpful in sharpening this skill. So are exercises where you bring to mind a specific memory and then label and feel the emotions it elicits within your body. In all of these exercises, pay particular attention to your breathing, muscles, and heart rate to see how your body reacts and what that reaction tells you.
3. Focus on You
Ask yourself, “What do I really need here? What’s important for me?” This is one of those times when it should be all about you, so give yourself full permission to do so. If you find your focus shifting to other people and their needs, notice and purposefully return your attention back to being curious about what you need and want, because that is where you will find your intuition; concentrating on these needs helps to more easily pave the pathway there. To clear the air around your intuition, it might be helpful to first go through the list of culprits above to identify the external factors influencing you, acknowledging them so that you can then put them aside for the moment. Your intuition is part of your highest, wisest self, so make sure the focus is squarely on you.
4. Take Action
The feeling of intuition is like an ocean current navigating you toward a purposeful life. Once you discover it, you still need to jump in a boat and set sail in order to derive its full value. After you answer the question “What do I need right now?”, do something to give yourself what you need. It might be the tiniest step, but size doesn’t matter here. Small steps can actually be beneficial at first to gradually build trust with your intuitive self whom you may be meeting for the first time or becoming reacquainted with after an unhealthy relationship separated you. What’s important is that you are following your intuition.
By: Sydiqah Uthman @rebirth_2003
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