When Should You “Follow Your Gut”?

Our subconscious ideas and feelings can be enormously helpful—or hugely destructive—depending on the conscious thinking that informs them.

The idea that you should “follow your gut” or “listen to your intuition” has become popular in Western culture and the self-help industry of late. Figures from Warren Buffet to Jordan Peterson tell us to “listen to your intuitions” and “go with your gut feelings,” implying that listening to your emotions is more effective than thinking deeply about your decisions.¹ There are even self-help websites offering courses in “How To Follow Your Gut Feeling No Matter What” and “How to Follow Your Gut Feeling Instead of Going with Logic.”²

So what does it mean to “follow your gut”? We’ve all felt, at one time or another, an inexplicable apprehension about something or an inclination to make a certain choice, for no obvious reason. Sometimes, these feelings later turn out to have pointed to the right choice. Perhaps you’ve had a “funny feeling” about somebody who later turned out to be dishonest or abusive. Perhaps you’ve ignored a feeling that a particular job, career path, or relationship was wrong for you, only to have that feeling validated by subsequent events. From these experiences, it’s easy to conclude that “gut feelings”—those feelings of tightness in the chest and stomach that come when something “just feels wrong” and that buzz in the body when something feels right—are a source of insight into the world around us.

But our bodies do not come pre-programmed with knowledge about how to lead a good life. Our “gut” does not contain information about careers, relationships, social dynamics, and so forth. So what actually is a “gut feeling,” and can it tell us anything about how to act in the outside world?

The human brain and body are not two separate, divisible entities; they are one and the same organism. Our brains connect down our spinal column into our central nervous system, forming one integrated unit. What goes on in our brains affects our bodies—observe how your emotions can lead to sensations of coldness, tightness, or buzzing throughout your body—and likewise, feelings in our bodies affect our emotions. Your brain is not simply a conscious unit inside an unconscious body—your entire body is one conscious unit with the brain as its core component. We think with our brains, but we feel with our entire bodies, and our thoughts and feelings deeply affect each other.³

Our brains are engines for integrating our experiences into an understanding of the world we live in. They operate on two levels: the conscious and the subconscious. The conscious mind thinks actively and knowingly, integrating experiences and ideas through a process of explicit thought. The subconscious mind operates automatically in the background, integrating experiences into a feeling of how something is. In the words of philosopher Ayn Rand,

The subconscious is an integrating mechanism. Man’s conscious mind observes and establishes connections among his experiences; the subconscious integrates the connections and makes them become automatic. For example, the skill of walking is acquired, after many faltering attempts, by the automatization of countless connections controlling muscular movements; once he learns to walk, a child needs no conscious awareness of such problems as posture, balance, length of step, etc.—the mere decision to walk brings the integrated total into his control.⁴

If you play the guitar, you can observe this fact by turning the guitar upside down and trying to play it left-handed (or right-handed if you normally play left-handed)—you’ll essentially be back where you started, trying to figure out where to put your hands consciously, unable to automatically find the right positions and movements. Such skills are virtually impossible until they’re subconsciously integrated.

The subconscious is active from the moment we’re born. In our early years, it integrates conclusions about such things as what food and drink we prefer, what kind of people are kind and unkind to us, what objects in the world are good and bad for us, and so on. Sometimes, these integrations are correct—after a few tries, children figure out that plastic toys are not for eating, for example, and extend that knowledge to other similar objects. They also subconsciously understand some of the character traits and subtle signs that indicate that an adult is trustworthy, which we also retain into adulthood. By the time we develop a mind capable of reasoning about such things, we already have a seemingly inbuilt idea of how to interact with many aspects of the world around us.

But these subconscious integrations can also be badly wrong. If a particular person in your childhood was unkind to you, you may subconsciously integrate that all people of similar appearance are unkind. If you were force-fed a certain food, you may subconsciously associate it with trauma, even though you might have liked it otherwise. These early integrations have a huge effect on how we perceive the world as adults. 

But the subconscious doesn’t stop integrating as the conscious mind becomes more developed. As adults, we still form subconscious integrations on top of the ones we retain from childhood. The difference is that our conscious decisions inform our subconscious integrations over time. In Rand’s words,

Your subconscious is like a computer—more complex a computer than men can build—and its main function is the integration of your ideas. Who programs it? Your conscious mind. If you default, if you don’t reach any firm convictions, your subconscious is programmed by chance—and you deliver yourself into the power of ideas you do not know you have accepted. But one way or the other, your computer gives you print-outs, daily and hourly, in the form of emotions—which are lightning-like estimates of the things around you, calculated according to your values. If you programmed your computer by conscious thinking, you know the nature of your values and emotions. If you didn’t, you don’t.⁵

We subconsciously integrate how to feel about situations and people, building a subconscious process for how to interact with and interpret others. If we decide that somebody does or doesn’t like us—consciously or not—we’ll start acting and interpreting accordingly. If we integrate the idea that people of a given sex, race, or nationality are dangerous, we’ll experience fear and hate accordingly. “The subconscious,” writes Rand, “is not an entity with a mind of its own. It is like a computer and will do what you consciously order it, within the limits of its knowledge and training.”⁶ In short, what your subconscious tells you about a person or situation is informed by what you consciously think about it, if you do consciously think about it. If you don’t, your subconscious will do what it can based on what it knows from your past.

We’re not responsible for the subconscious integrations we made as small children, but we are responsible for what we do with them as conscious adults. Our feelings don’t come from nowhere—they come from our experiences and past thoughts. The more reality-oriented our conscious thinking is, and the more experience we gain of the outside world, the more reliable our “gut feelings” will be. But they will always be just that—feelings. 

Our feelings serve several vital functions in our lives. For one, they enable us to make snap decisions when there isn’t time for rational calculation. But they also give us information that isn’t consciously accessible to us—information based on past experiences that we may have forgotten, processed through the lens of our premises and ideas. When you feel that you’re in danger or that a person might be suspicious, your subconscious is telling you that it’s recognizing something it’s integrated as being associated with danger or wrongdoing. That feeling may be telling you something important that your conscious mind can’t identify or remember. But it may also be completely wrong.

We should “listen to our gut,” the same way a captain of a ship should listen to those under his command. Then, when we have time, we should use our reason—our conscious mind—to analyze what our gut is saying. We should introspect in order to understand why our subconscious is throwing us this feeling, and find whatever facts—if there are any—support it. But when our “gut feelings” do not correspond to reality, we need to change our premises, align our thinking with reality, and begin the long process of forming new subconscious integrations that do fit the facts.

1. Charlotte Hilton Andersen, “Gut Instincts: How to Trust Your Intuition and Start Making Smarter Decisions,” Reader’s Digest, September 20, 2024, https://www.rd.com/article/gut-instinct.

2. Sade J, “How To Follow Your Gut Feeling No Matter What,” The Fire Inside, October 3, 2018, https://thefireinsidesade.com/2018/10/03/how-to-follow-your-gut-feeling-no-matter-what.

Health Courses Online, “How to Follow Your Gut Feeling Instead of Going with Logic,” https://www.healingcoursesonline.com/bio-energy-healing-articles/how-to-follow-your-gut-feeling-instead-of-going-with-logic.html.

3.  Health Direct, “Central Nervous System,” October 2023, https://www.healthdirect.gov.au/central-nervous-system.

4. Ayn Rand, “The Comprachicos,” The New Left: The Anti-Industrial Revolution (New American Library: 1971).

5. Ayn Rand, “Philosophy: Who Needs It,” Philosophy: Who Needs It (New York: Signet, 1984) 7–8.

6. Ayn Rand, The Art of Nonfiction (New York: Plume, 2001), 59.