5 Gut Instincts You Shouldn’t Ignore – Ajit Patel Sanda Wellness
The quirky urge. A
funny tingle. That little voice in your head.
These are your gut feelings talking. But what are they telling you, and should
you listen? Here’s how to make the most of your own innate wisdom.
Most of us have experienced the sense
of knowing things before we know them, even if we can’t explain how. You
hesitate at a green light and miss getting hit by a speeding truck. You decide
on a whim to break
your no-blind-dates policy and wind up meeting your life partner. You have a
hunch that you should invest in a little online startup and it becomes Google.
If only you could tap into those
insights more often, right?
Turns out you can, especially if you learn to identify which signals to focus
on — whether they’re sweaty palms, a funny feeling
in your stomach, or a sudden and inexplicable certainty that something is up.
According to many researchers, intuition
is far more material than it seems. Hope College social psychologist David
Myers, PhD, explains that the intuitive right brain
is almost always “reading” your surroundings, even when your conscious left brain
is otherwise engaged. The body
can register this information while the conscious mind remains blissfully
unaware of what’s going on.
Another theory suggests you can “feel”
approaching events specifically because of your dopamine neurons. “The jitters
of dopamine help keep track of reality, alerting
us to those subtle patterns that we can’t consciously detect,” Jonah Lehrer,
author of How We Decide (Houghton Mifflin, 2009) notes.
So how do you choose which gut feelings
to trust? Judith Orloff, PhD, a Los Angeles–based intuitive psychiatrist and
author of Second Sight (Three Rivers Press, 2010), suggests
that it’s a matter of “combining the linear mind and
intuition,” and striking the right balance between gut instinct and rational thinking.
Once you’ve noticed an intuitive hit, she says, you can engage your rational
mind to weigh your choices and decide how best
to act on them.
To that end, here are five gut feelings
that Orloff and other experts recommend you pay attention to — and some reasons
why you’ll be glad you did.
No comments:
Post a Comment