Beyond intuition

I have found out that some people say that their intuition is good and that they make their decisions based on it. "I trust my intuition" is a commonly used phrase. But should you always trust your intuition?

What is intuition?

Intuition exists because there's too little or too much data for your brain to process at the moment to make a (right) decision fast enough. So you get a gut feeling instead. Which is a shortcut to help you make the decision in the moment.

But in the moment, you don't know what it is exactly that affected your gut feeling. It could be many things. Wouldn't it be better if you knew what were the things that made you feel a certain way about something? I certainly would.

I think that's a great way to learn about yourself. The things that make you feel good, the things that make you feel scared. Also, an important point about being scared: it is normal to be scared of something and it doesn't mean that the thing you are scared of is a bad thing.

If your intuition says that "something is off here", you should pause for a moment to think about your feelings. What is the actual feeling? It's probably that you are scared: "if I trust this person/situation, something bad could happen".

However, intuition can be wrong. After all, it is a coping mechanism that is based on things that have happened for you in the past. But if you only trust the stuff that has worked for you in the past, you are limiting yourself of new experiences.

Let's look at a couple of examples.

Money and houses

Intuition is a feeling. And there's a good reason there's a saying "don't mix money with feelings". You should never invest money based on how you feel. If you sell a stock when you are scared, you will sell it when the stock value is low and you will lose money. And if you buy a stock when you are just feeling good about it, if the reasoning it isn't based on any actual data about the company, you will probably lose money too.

Buying a house with just intuition is another way to get in trouble later. There's so much more to buying a house. It is essentially an investment, probably the biggest one in your life. But even if you knew all this stuff, there's another point to be made here when choosing a house for you.

Here's an example: maybe you have always unconsiously liked how quiet it was in your parent's house and your current apartment feels a little off, because there's a motorway nearby. But if you never really thought about it, you would just have the intuition that "something is off" in the current apartment.

Now, imagine you are going to a house viewing in a nice quiet neighbourhood and immediately your intuition tells you: "this feels good, I like it". And at this moment the intuition is right. But your intuition doesn't know that every night there's a dozen planes that fly over the house and you don't even think to ask about something like that, because you didn't know it was all about the soundscape in the first place that made you feel good about it.

Intuition in dating

Let's now consider an example in dating: you meet a new person, you get the first impression, you don't know the person well, but your intuition tells you that this feels good, so you continue seeing him/her. After a couple of dates, maybe even a dozen dates, your intuition starts to tell you that maybe this isn't right for me after all. You just get the feeling that something is off.

If you can't say concretely the things that make you feel a certain way about a person, you will never know to search for the right type of person for you.

For the whole time you trusted your intuition. But essentially you are lost. You don't know what it is that makes this person not suitable for you. Your intuition was wrong at least once, but was it wrong in the beginning or is it wrong now? If you can't say concretely the things that make you feel a certain way about a person, you will never know to search for the right type of person for you.

Also, you don't know if you would have had a great life together. Not by asking intuition, because it doesn't tell you the actual things that you find out-of-place. In a relationship, many things that feel off, can be corrected too. For example, if you'd want your partner to say "I love you" more often, you could just ask him/her to do that. That's why it's so important to try to find out the actual things that make you feel good and then tell them to your partner.

Final thoughts

So to get to the bottom of things, I suggest you to ask yourself these questions:

• What actually was right/wrong with the person/situation that caused me this feeling?
• Is this feeling justified?
• Is a bad feeling an actual warning sign or am I just scared of something?
• If I like/dislike someone/something, why is it exactly?

Intuition is an important tool in modern life, but you should start to get beyond just intuition to truly know yourself.