How much do you value your "gut" instincts?

all the time.
more than 80% of what i do is on instinct. I dont even notice when i drive anymore.

Gut is always right.
Emotions get in the way of the gut.

@ChazMaz
I think emotions ARE the gut

Ever take a test and circle one answer, then change it to another? The second answer is always wrong, and the gut reaction is right. The gut knows all.

@ChazMaz is dead on. Your gut instinct is always right, your emotions get in the way. As I get older, I have been able to distinguish between what my heart thinks it wants and what I actually need. I didn’t realize how important your gut is in making decisions, especially hard ones. We all could avoid a lot of the mistakes we make if we just trust our own instincts.

I see gut as the reason part. My instincts. Logic and wisdom. Rolled up with some spices, tied with some string. Baked in the depth of my GUT.

Emotion is all that emotional stuff.

I try to follow it, but then I start to second guess myself, and that’s where the problem arises.

I never used to trust it. I would over analyze things and usually make the wrong choice. So I’ve learned to fully trust my first gut instinct. I read somewhere that your gut instinct is almost always right. Wish I could remember where I heard that…

@ChazMaz : I see what you’re saying. I guess I just considered my first gut reaction, or knee-jerk reaction as an initial emotion.

Yes, that double edged sward decision. it is a tricky one to decipher.

@ItalianPrincess1217 grade school…. middle school….. high school….. college…... any kind of psyche class…... any kind of test prep class….. really everywhere. Everyone says it.

I trust my gut 100%. I have since a very profound experience. It was last summer. I was getting ready for work one morning and was finishing up some chores around the house. I had just switched over our bed linen to the dryer so we would have fresh yummy sheets for that night (I love Fridays!!) and was out the door and on my way to work.

I was about 5 minutes from the house when I had a weird feeling I should go home. Time was tight, and if I did I was for sure going to be late but I just couldn’t shake this feeling. After I hesitated, I finally turned around and headed home. Lucky for me I did.. My dryer buzzer was freaking out; and was over-heated. My home could have burned down. Our pets could have been lost. Our most prized posessions up in smoke.

I never EVER doubt my gut <3 – LB

Too much

I don’t trust the fuckers one bit any more after all the patent nonsense they make me think.
I see people mentioning they believe their gut instinct is almost always right. Maybe. But mine is almost always wrong. More often that not very obviously so.

Being high functioning autistic probably doesn’t help.

I’ve concluded that “guts” are a combination of instinct and emotion. I feel like I had more to say on the subject when I asked the question, but now I’m all lost on it. Maybe more will come with more responses.

Not at all. Everything I do is based on evidence, past experience or experimenting with new ideas. I’m not even sure how accurate my gut is, because it was silenced long ago.

I hardly ever do, and when I do, I turn out to be wrong. I hate being wrong, so I always try to do the research and have facts to back up what I believe.

@ElleBee , I’m paranoid about this sort of thing happening; I never run the dryer if nobody’s going to be home!

It depends on the situation, when we talk about people, I always trust it and have rarely been wrong, in other areas, it is usually a consideration but not a decider.

More and more. In the past I didn’t listen one time and it turned out to be a terrible mistake, one that cost me a lot and hurt many people around me. Nowadays, I listen to my gut and then look closely at the details, I’m right more and more which is kind of scary when I’m up against a challenge or feel out of my range but it keeps turning out okay.

My gut gets me into a lot of trouble. Usually, I’m a planner and an analyzer. It’s worked out pretty well for me.

Lately, though, my gut seems to have taken over, and I am doing things against my better judgment. This, I believe, is craziness. It’s crazy to take a course of action that you know will lead to self-destruction. And yet, here I am.

@daloon: stop calling it “crazy” and admit it’s impulsiveness grown stronger than your reasoning. The actions and results/consequences might be the same but you warrant more self respect than calling yourself “crazy”.

@hungryhungryhortence ”...admit it’s impulsiveness grown stronger than your reasoning.”

Isn’t that what craziness is?

In any case, based on my session today, it seems that deep inside I’ve always been ashamed of myself.

It’s just a word. A powerful word that can be angry or unpredictable. It can be a term of admiration or one of denigration. I like the word. I like the not knowing—sometimes. Other times, it upsets me.

And what else is there when you don’t even understand yourself?

Sometimes crazy is good! Even if it doesn’t seem like it at the time, you can always learn from it.

One of my teachers in High school did a 10 year study revolving around second guesses. On all of our tests throughout the year, we made an extra mark to the side to indicate we changed our original answer at least once. His results: 78% of all second guesses (up through my year) were wrong.

After learning that, I decided to rely far more heavily on instinct and I have ever since.

@Beta_Orionis : I’ve been told this repeatedly, and yet, I’m still too stupid to go by it…

@ubersiren You’re not stupid, just very rational. Sometimes, I have to remind myself of historical great outcomes and the undeniable percentage because I try to reason my way around that feeling.

I play racing games a lot, and it seems like, at least after a while, i just fall asleep in the game. I might be coming into a turn and then realize I just did two laps of Laguna. Weird stuff.

@Fred931 O_o… did you answer the wrong question?

meh

@Beta_Orionis his study should have included if the first choice was correct. Just because the second choice was wrong doesn’t make the gut choice right.

@fundevogel Oh, sorry! I neglected to mention that fully. It did! The “mark” we used to indicate an answer change was actually the letter of the original answer. I’m pretty certain the percentage came from the second guesses that were changed from correct answers, but It’s possible I’m misremembering.

that ‘s a good way to do it.

Not enough I think. Whenever I have, it turned out to be the right choice, even if it seemed crazy and incomprehensible at the time. Whenever I let logic kick in instead (or listened to sound advice), I later regretted it.

I’m beginning to do so more and more, but I’m finding it hard to master
The more I do it the stronger I get as a person and it’s always right

Very often.

My instincts (based on a combination of my morality and experience) are far more accurate than public opinion.

@proXXi
Those are some pretty low standards you have there. Weather forecasts are more accurate than public opinion.
But how about objective rationality? That at least is a worthy opponent to compare the reliability of gut feelings to.

@Fyrius, of course I employ objective rationality, usually after the formulation of an opinion using my “gut” instincts.

…I’m still not doing so good at all…and hints and tips….

@proXXi
That’s not really what I meant…
But if you use them together, I guess it doesn’t matter which is more dependable.

Yes,my instincts haven’t failed me yet :)

@Fyrius
“I don’t trust the fuckers one bit any more after all the patent nonsense they make me think. ”
I’ve changed my mind. My gut feelings aren’t always as unreliable as I made them out to be earlier, and I do listen to their advice sometimes.
Of course, still, if I ever do so without first getting a second opinion from rational scrutiny, I consider that an indication that something is going very wrong.

Not nearly enough.

I’m reminded of this each time I find myself in a predicament
my “gut” instincts warned me about earlier.

A lot.

About 90% of the time. as a police officer, this has proven to be true over and over again.

Always. It’s my little internal compass. Except on off days…
But yeah, I stopped worrying about what my mind keeps going “But what if…” and “Are you sure?” because whenever I listen to that, something goes wrong.
Instinct is awesomeee.

I won’t completely gainsay the gut, as it embodies a few hundred million years’ animal experience, a few million of primate experience, and some hundreds of thousands of human experience. On the other hand, it also embodies those same periods’ accumulated kruft that was not filtered out by the culling algorithm of evolution, as well as wisdom that might have made sense for a member of a fifty-primate band in the Serengeti, but might in fact be nonsense for an urbanite in the First world. Never, ever, trusting someone with whom you didn’t grow-up comes to mind, as does never trusting people with deformed faces that match a normal person’s aggression or deception faces, as does believing that someone will make a good life-partner completely on the basis of her or his high degree of facial symmetry.

Another problem with gut instinct is that we are very resistant to seeing when it is wrong. I think that this is the origin of the misleading feeling that it’s always right——that is, your gut continues to trust itself even in the face of evidence. For example, I used to believe that I could very accurately assess people within a minute or so of meeting them. With experience and analysis, I have come to see that often what was really going on was my refusal to really look again at other people after that initial impression; my gut saw no reason to pose the question to anyone but itself——and you should never trust any being that claims to be the ultimate authority on everything, always, and who is neither Prof. Irwin Corey or John Hodgman, his modern avatar for the hep.

(The “rational” mind can also be subject to this bias, but more often I see the bias supervene in people who have mostly deprecated that subsystem in favour of the gut, usually without noticing that they have transferred control of the “thinking” in mid-thought. See: “snarl word”.)

To indulge in bad language and to almost quote Ken Macleod: ‘Screw the force; trust the targetting [sic] computer.’

I’ve just read Malcolm Gladwell’s ‘Blink’... which explained a lot of this for me and helped me see when and when not to trust my gut instincts…but for the most part…it’s better to take note of what it’s saying to you!

Not much, really. Unless there are warning signs going off that the man I’m with is not a good guy. I never ignore those, and I GTFO.