On some days, even as I drive to work, I know I would not spend much time there, and rightly so, I end up returning home due to a fever that spiked shortly after I got to my office. On other days, a feeling floats by that tells me I won’t spend much time at work, and rightly so, the systems are down, and I end up home early.
But are these two incidences similar? Not remotely. The first one is a gut feeling whereas the second one is an intuition. Like most English-speaking human population, I used the two terms interchangeably, but recently, I realized they are as different as night and day.
A gut feeling is a statistical response by our brain, particularly, our subconscious brain. It collects data over time, and processes the world around us in relation to the collected and processed memories. In the above example, even though I could not tell I was going to be sick, my brain paid close attention to cues from my body that hinted a possible spike in body temperature, and indicated to me that I am going to have to return home soon.
Further, a gut feeling is like dark clouds in the sky telling you it is going to rain heavily the whole time because the subconscious brain has data to believe it. On the other hand, an intuition is like a cloud, it passes by and if you are lucky, you see it.
Intuitions are fleeting feelings that do not wait for you to acknowledge them. Interestingly, there is no data required for these feelings to form, and therefore, sometimes you overlook them, and only later realize ‘I knew it!’. We don’t know where intuition comes from because we do not need any pre-existing experience with it.
I would like to share an experience close to my heart to explain what I mean. A few years ago, I was running errands when I got a call from a friend and she said ‘Did you hear?’ and I replied to her that I couldn’t hear her and I will call her back once I get home. The moment I hung up, I had a vision of a man on his motorcycle. It only lasted for a couple seconds. When I got home, I called my friend and she told me another friend of ours lost her father in a motorcycle accident, and that was the man I saw in my vision. I had never seen him, but I knew what he looked like from my friend’s childhood pictures she shared with us once upon a time. This was a freaky incident, but I didn’t think much of the vision. Recently, during my meditations I revisited the vision, prompting me to think harder about the distinction between a gut feeling and an intuition.
But why am I writing about it now? Because recently during my meditations I realized that whereas intuitions are freaky and have nothing to do with previous experience, gut feelings are based on past events. Does that mean that we can trust them both equally?
Could it be that if you have had bad experiences, your gut feeling will automatically tell you something is wrong, which may not necessarily be true. Does that also mean that you cannot 100% trust your gut feelings?
No, you cannot trust your gut feelings all the time. If you have had bad experiences in the past, your subconscious mind will look for clues and warn your like a beacon. Just to be clear, this also applies to good experiences, but the bad once cost us more than the good ones, and hence the emphasis on bad experiences. Let me illustrate.
I have been the target of some classic workplace drama that damaged my confidence in public speaking. Over the years, I have gained my confidence back but it was difficult because every time I tried to speak to even a small audience of five, my body would engage in extreme flight response, so much that I would shiver and my body temperature would shoot up, and my gut feeling would tell me this is not the right thing to do and list everything that it thought would go wrong. Public speaking is scary itself, but the important distinction here is that I never feared it before, and the only reaction I would have was tiny butterflies in my stomach, which is a fair response. However, after a series of incidents that systematically broke down my confidence in speaking to an audience, the butterflies became elephants, and my gut feeling tried very hard to pull me out of that position to keep me safe.
Reviewing these life events, I have come to a conclusion that you cannot trust your gut feeling blindly, and in some cases, you need to think objectively about why you feel the way you do, particularly in relation to your past experiences. However, you also need to look out for fleeting thoughts that appear out of nowhere, especially during your quiet hours, away from the chaos, when staring in the void.
Please share your thoughts with me, or if you have had any experiences around gut feelings and intuition.
Notes from the Void 