Trust Your Gut, But Still Verify

“From the very beginning, make it your practice to say to every harsh impression, ‘you are an impression and not at all what you appear to be.’ Next, examine and test it by the rules you possess, the first and greatest of which is this whether it belongs to the things in our control or not in our control, and if the latter, be prepared to respond, ‘It is nothing to me.'”

EPICTETUS, ENCHIRIDION, 1.5

In today’s chapter of The Daily Stoic, the author makes a big point of warning about the risks of ‘trusting your gut’ or relying on instinct. He does this to highlight the fact that our gut can often be wrong and lead us down the wrong path. He even says there are numerous studies to support this.

I happen to be of a different persuasion, and I have also read numerous studies showing that trusting your gut usually leads to the correct outcome. This is because your gut feeling is a combination of all the experiences and knowledge you’ve gained throughout your life, and your mind works in powerful ways to combine all this experience and learning and present it to you as an instinctual feeling.

So I don’t feel that your gut feeling should be dismissed with just a handwave. Further, second-guessing yourself can lead to changing course away from the optimal one, and making errors from just simply overthinking things.

All that said, Ryan Holiday still makes a good point, and he’s still right: you can’t just automatically trust your first impression. If you think you have everything figured out, you are probably wrong, and you risk falling flat on your face. Test everything, as the saying goes, including your assumptions. I’ll add to that: trust your gut, but still verify.

Why? Because we are complex, and we often have a battle raging inside us that leads to conflicting desires. We lie to ourselves, we deceive ourselves. We can’t always trust that our first thought is the right one. That gut feeling may have been compromised.

So don’t dismiss your instincts, but put them to the test. Assess your reason, always. And enlist your brain — combine your gut feeling with some good old-fashioned analytical thinking: is this impression something you can control? If not, it’s best to move on.

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