Hello friends!

I don't know about you, but I've always found gut feelings to be some mysterious 'woo-woo' thing that we get told to avoid like the plague.

Well, I strongly disagree with that now.

Gut feelings are only mysterious because we don't understand them.

But there's a psychology to them, and that's what this week's exploration is about.

This week's theme:

The psychology behind gut feelings

1. Understanding the mind

Carl Jung, one of the pioneering psychologists who mapped out the human psyche describes the mind in two broad areas: the conscious mind, and the unconscious mind.

Basically, what we are aware of and what we are unaware of.

The conscious mind is pretty straightforward — it's the voice in your head as you're reading this sentence. It's the logical reasoning that you deliberate on to solve problems. It's familiar because you're aware of it.

The unconscious mind is less straightforward, because... well... you're not aware of it. There's stuff like the embarrassing childhood memory you've erased (or tried to). But there's also stuff like our ancestral wirings that tell us we shouldn't stand near cliff edges.

2. Understanding gut feelings

Now here's where things get interesting.

That embarrassing childhood memory you can't remember? Well that was part of your conscious mind at some point. That was... until you moved it into the unconscious mind. Maybe some day the reverse will happen when a therapist accidentally surfaces it.

And it's here where gut feelings begin to make sense.

Gut feelings are simply the signals that our unconscious mind sends into our conscious minds to process.

And gut feelings aren't communicated through thoughts or voices (maybe that's why they feel 'woo-woo); those channels are reserved for the conscious mind.

Instead, gut feelings are communicated through the body.

The butterflies in your stomach, the frog in your throat, the cold feet... they are all gut feelings, and they are all communicated through your body.

3. Making sense of gut feelings

So if gut feelings are communicated through your body, then what channel would make most sense to receive them?

That's right.

It's your body.

The mistake that most of us make when a gut feeling shows up is that we try to explain them with our conscious mind (e.g., "I wonder why I feel nervous?") or — even worse — we try to ignore them (e.g., pulling out our phones to distract ourselves).

But really, all we need to do is to sit with the feeling in our bodies. And over time, as we become curious to them, they will explain themselves to us.

This is something I had to learn for myself. This is what I do with my coaching clients. There's always resistance at first, but slowly, all of us begin to see the wisdom that our bodies hold for us.

So I'd really like to invite you to just notice the sensations in your body the next time a gut feeling shows up.

If you'd like to explore this more...

This week's video covers the theme of this email, but goes further into the psychological workings of the mind, as well as how to better translate our gut feelings into useful decision making inputs.

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Otherwise, that's it for this week's issue of Emotional Explorations! I hope it brought you clarity and I look forward to writing to you again soon.

Best,
Eric