"GUT INSTINCT" IS MY SUPERPOWER

By Tristan Kealy

We have all had that feeling at some point in our lives, where something doesn’t feel quite right about a situation or another person. You make a decision to travel one way over another. You decide not to buy something or not attend a certain event or enter a certain building etc. You make the decision very quickly, with little to no thought, based on a very small amount of information. No analytical reasoning takes place at all……

We call this “Gut Instinct” and it is our own, personal, Super Power!

There are 3 ways in which our brain operates and accesses information:

1. The conscious: your present moment awareness

2. The subconscious: all the information that we store in our mind that can be accessed

3. The unconscious: this contains our basic primitive instincts and information that we have difficulty accessing on our own

The author of Blink, Malcolm Gladwell, talks about the “Adaptive Unconscious”. I believe what he is talking about here is when an external stimulus triggers our ‘Unconscious mind’ and our base instincts rapidly access appropriate information to formulate a judgment and an action in a very short space of time. As mentioned previously, all this happens based on a very small amount of information. 

Now that we know what it is, how can we trust it?

Studies have shown that people who have been provided with an abundance of time and information to come to a decision on a given topic or circumstance only obtained marginally higher results than people who were shown the same scenarios but only provided with a snippet of information and time to provide their answers.

“Gut Instinct” is very much about the visual information and cues that we take in and process. We may not have the time to analytically reason out an answer or action but we have received the information and taken it in. Something about it has made us feel uncomfortable, we don’t have time to process out the “Why?” but we know we don’t like it and we need to do something now.

This is “Gut Instinct” and it is here to help us!

What do we do with it? We train ourselves, forcefully, to acknowledge it, listen to it, and most importantly, Act on it!!!

Gut Instinct can save your life so start listening to your Gut today.