Gut feelings

The inspiration for today's post comes from a construction foreman I met last week. I was working on a construction site and during one of the morning toolbox talks (where the foreman goes through the days activities with the site crew) he ended his talk by asking everyone to pay attention to their 'gut feelings'. He was referring to gut feeling from a risk assessment perspective and he defined this feeling as the combination of our training and experience. If we "felt" that something was wrong then there was a good chance it was, and we should stop what we are doing and assess the risks. By paying attention to our gut feelings we could reduce/avoid hazardous activities. This prompted me to contemplate the concept of  gut feelings, and how we could apply this idea of learning to pay attention to how we feel about something to life in general.

Wictionary defines a gut feeling as "An instinct or intuition; an immediate or basic feeling or reaction without a logical rationale. Don't think too hard about the answers to a personality test; just go with your gut feeling". So gut feelings and intuition are essentially the same thing.

• A gut feeling is when someone can sense that there is a connection between in-obvious things, or that something in their environment is not quite right. It doesn’t involve telepathy or super-senses, it involves being open to the awareness that our bodies and minds will achieve, if we let them. 
• Intuition uses past knowledge and experiences to assess a situation, as well as a very quick assessment of the present, based on clues and details that may not be obvious to the rational mind. 

There are a number of explanations as to the root of our gut feelings such as:

1. Our intuition is associated with our immediate emotional responses to stimuli.
2. Our intuition is based on repeated experience that we access automatically. 
3. Societal conditioning creates a kind of gut reaction that operates without conscious awareness. 
4. Our brains are capable of forming very strong associations and this can lead to what might be interpreted as Gut feelings.
5. Gut feelings can be explained by our evolved instincts that are encoded in our DNA (or Mitochondria), which exist because they helped our ancestors survive in the world as it was hundreds of thousands of years ago. 

It's fair to assume that our individual gut feelings are a combination of all of the above. I would also suggest that as a species we have traditionally relied on our gut feeling/intuition in order to survive. Some decisions benefit from a slower more rational thought process but when the excrement hits the proverbial fan its your gut instincts that will save you.

We are conditioned by today's society to try and ignore our gut feelings and apply rational, logical thought processes to decision making and "Use your head not your heart". However research suggests that the conventional wisdom about decision making may be the opposite of what actually happens. It is easy problems that are better suited to the rational brain, and more complex problems best suited to the emotional brain. If we relied on reason alone we would be almost incapable of deciding anything at all. Some scientists believe that we can consciously process somewhere between five and nine pieces of information at any given time. Too much information can actually interfere with understanding. When the prefrontal cortex is overwhelmed the person can no longer make sense of the situation. Correlation is confused with causation and people make theories out of coincidences. On the other hand, the emotional brain has a longer path of evolutionary development and is especially useful at helping us make hard decisions. The emotional brain has massive computational power, it can process millions of bits of data in parallel and can analyse a huge range of relevant information when assessing alternatives.

And its likely that its not just the brain involved in our decision making processes. For decades, researchers have known of the connection between the brain and the gut. For example anxiety often causes nausea and diarrhea, and depression can change appetite. The connection may have been established, but scientists thought communication was one way, i.e.  it traveled from the brain to the gut, and not the other way around. But now a new understanding of the trillions of microbes living in our guts reveals that this communication process is more like a multi-lane superhighway than a one-way street. Gut microbes are in fact part of the unconscious system influencing behavior. and majorly impact on cognitive function and fundamental behavior patterns.This recent article also describes how Neuroscientists have found that specific types of gut flora help a host animal detect which nutrients are missing in food and then finely titrate how much of those nutrients the host really needs to eat.

So whether its by tapping into the collective intelligence of our microbiome or by unleashing the true power of our emotional brain there is benefit to be had in learning to trust our gut/intuition more and I think that this is especially applicable to our health/lifestyle choices. By arming ourselves with sufficient knowledge through research and becoming more aware of our bodies and how we feel in response to diet/exercise/lifestyle choices we can reengage with our gut feelings and allow those encoded instincts that have evolved over hundreds of thousands of years to help us survive in the world.

Deep down your body already knows what it wants/needs and what it should avoid, we just need to learn to listen again.