While we often tend to listen to our minds, new studies show how important it is to trust our intuition more often.
What happens when we make decisions
It has been scientifically proven that our gut makes decisions unconsciously and based on the many experiences we have already had in life. The mood we are currently in also plays a role. If we are stressed or afraid of something, we act on the basis of this feeling. The voice in our head, on the other hand, appeals to us. Our reason is rational and sticks to the clear facts and figures. We therefore have two different evaluation systems - whereby the power of intuition is often underestimated.
Why pros and cons lists are not everything
One piece of well-intentioned advice that is now somewhat out of fashion is: if you have to make a choice, draw up a list of pros and cons. But what good is it if, in the end, all the facts speak for no and a yes still feels right? Then it's worth listening to that feeling. Because what we feel in our gut is a wealth of knowledge from personal experience that is very important for our future.
How strongly the gut and brain interact
That tingling in our stomach when we are excited or in love. That unpleasant pinch when something literally hits us in the stomach: our gut reflects all the big emotions, both positive and negative. And it does much more. This is because our gut works around the clock, generating an enormous amount of sensory data. We don't really notice most of this data, so it goes straight into our subconscious. As the gut and brain are very closely connected, our brain automatically creates a kind of giant library of gut feelings with important information about ourselves.
What the giant library can do for us
When we find ourselves in a certain situation, our brain can access this library like a search engine at lightning speed, allowing us to intuitively recognize whether we have already made the right decision in a similar situation - or whether we have fallen flat on our face. So we no longer need to weigh things up for long, we just have to listen to ourselves: We will find the answer within ourselves.
Why we still sometimes feel nothing
Simply listening to your gut sounds good at first. But what if we don't receive a signal at all? It is no coincidence that courses in mindfulness, meditation and hypnosis are currently booming: many of us have lost our sense of our own body in our hectic everyday lives between work, family and the belief that everything has to go higher, faster and further - and have replaced it with pure logic and rational thinking. This makes us long all the more to become more aware of ourselves and our needs again and to do something good for body and soul - with feeling.
How we can train our gut feeling ourselves
Everyone has intuition. But we usually suppress it. We can reactivate it when we act spontaneously, make decisions and put them into practice. If we do this three to four times a day over a longer period of time, we give our subconscious the okay to become active without asking too many questions. Let's trust ourselves!