Intuition: 5 healthy gut feelings you should never ignore

psychology
5 gut feelings you should never ignore

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Gut feelings can deceive us, yes – but sometimes they also point us in the right direction. In these cases we should by no means suppress them.

When our rabbits used to run around freely in the garden, I would often ask my mother if they might accidentally eat something poisonous. Finally, they happily gnawed their way through beds of flowers and lettuce. She always replied: “They listen to their gut feeling”. Rather, it was and is probably their learned sense of smell that lets animals decide between poisonous and edible. Nevertheless, this sentence stuck in my head. Sometimes it’s good to listen to your gut feeling. In nature, it may even save creatures’ lives.

However, nowadays our everyday life – in most cases – has hardly anything to do with nature, and our gut feeling is no longer what it used to be. In recent years we have been constantly bullied by people and the media to even leave our comfort zone. Apparently not only success awaits in this new territory, but also love, luck, money and health. Well, for the latter you should certainly overcome your weaker self from time to time, and crossing new borders is also part of life. But: With the belief that we have to leave our comfort zone, we have also learned to often fight against our gut feeling.

That’s the common thing about him: the stomach is not an easy companion. He does not give us the right advice per se. Rather, it is often influenced by fear and thus prevents us from new experiences that could actually help us. The new job, where the gut feeling says we should stay with the old one, can turn out to be a dream job – if the feeling is only based on fear of change. But if it is based on the new boss, the mood at the job interview and in the new office, for example, your gut may well be right.

How do we get out of this maze? When I ask this question, I often think of the control center from the animated film “Everything is upside down”. In this, situations of personalized feelings are often discussed. Before we simply suppress a gut feeling, it is definitely worth listening to. And to analyze whether the reason behind it is the baseless fear of something new or the avoidance of eating the wrong plant. Because: If something really doesn’t feel good, then I think of my rabbit lady. And she’s gotten damn old because of her gut feeling.

5 gut feelings we shouldn’t suppress

1. “This is too much for me”

Burnout is not a reward for being a good coworker, friend, or partner. Every person has individual limits. In the job as well as private context, we tend to exceed it for others, although our stomach has been rebelling for a long time. Stop! If you want to be fair to everyone, you forget yourself.

2. “I can’t see a future with her:him”

Your partner is busy making plans for the future and wants to move in together, does the thought of sharing an apartment give you a stomach ache? When it comes to partnerships, we have far too often forgotten how to listen to our gut feeling – and rely on the social ideal of love at its expense. If the supposed prince charming in front of you doesn’t match your life’s dream, you’ll be unhappy. Also, out of consideration for the feelings of others, your own should never be suppressed. When it comes to love, it really pays to go with your gut.

3. “Somehow this makes me angry”

“It hurt me, but…”, “I don’t understand why he:she did it, but…”, “He:she definitely had reasons” – do these sentences sound familiar to you? Anger is a feeling we don’t even allow ourselves to feel these days. At most, one can describe it in words when something upsets us – but only with the well-known “but”, which signals that everything is not so bad. Every anger has a reason. And when we swallow it, we only get real stomachaches.

4. “I want more”

Another gut feeling that we suppress in a flash. It sounds kind of selfish after all. And “want”, who says something like that anymore. If at all, it means wanting to … over, over, over. When our gut tells us we want more – be it from life or from people – something is obviously out of balance. And while we’ve learned to always meet the needs of others, our gut instincts kick in to prevent us from giving more than we’re currently getting.

5. “I’m right here”

Not to forget: There are also good gut feelings. And that usually happens when we are with the right people or in the right place. The secret: savoring them to the full and, above all, noticing them. For example, if you only feel “right” on vacation, something is obviously going wrong in everyday life. Here, gut feeling can lead us to an all-round happier life – and show us that there is not one socially correct way for everyone, but for everyone: their very own.

mjd

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