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Commentary
Is Trusting Your Gut a Good Idea?
Implications from The Emotional Mind
Elizabeth L. Whiting
Wake Forest University, NC
Whiting, Elizabeth L. 2024. “Is Trusting Your Gut a Good Idea? Implications from The Emotional Mind.”
Journal of Philosophy of Emotion 5, no. 2: 44-51. https://doi.org/10.33497/2024.Winter.6.
Abstract: What exactly does it mean to “trust your gut”? What use are gut-level insights when a person is attempting to consciously and deliberately navigate life altering decisions, such as those surrounding marriage, divorce, job changes, home buying, etc.? This essay provides a partial answer to those questions by leveraging the account of “emotional bodily feelings” offered in Tom Cochrane’s The Emotional Mind: A Control Theory of Affective States. This essay shows why “trusting your gut” is a reasonably good path to emotional self-awareness in decision-making. The first half of the essay offers an analysis of what many people mean by the colloquial advice to “trust your gut,” at least when they deploy that advice in context of an ongoing dialogue about a friend or family member’s major life-decision. In the second half, this article briefly summarizes Cochrane’s account of emotions and emotional bodily feelings, and spells out how these concepts might be deployed to understand the advice to “trust your gut” as nearly tantamount to saying “pursue emotional self-awareness.”
Keywords: intuition, emotional bodily feelings, deliberation, self-awareness, emotions
“Trust your gut.” Perhaps you have received this advice at some point. Friends tend to dole it out when a loved one faces some major decision–whether to seek a divorce, take a job offer, buy a house, etc. This advice has served me pretty well, but not perfectly, and my attempts to follow it have raised several questions. What exactly does it mean to “trust your gut”? When is doing so a good or bad idea? How should we think about the relationship between gut-level insights and conscious deliberation? What role does trusting one’s gut play in the exercise of practical wisdom?
Tom Cochrane’s (2018) The Emotional Mind: A Control Theory of Affective States provides a wealth of concepts and theories that could help explain the usefulness of (and the problems with) “trusting your gut” in decision-making. This essay will sidestep most of those resources, focusing on Cochrane’s concept of “emotional bodily feelings.” Cochrane uses this concept to argue that the somatic aspects of emotions–a racing heart, a
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flushed face, tensed or relaxed muscles, etc.–are a source of “emotional meaning in their own right” (89). Therefore, bringing these somatic feelings to conscious awareness is tantamount to achieving emotional self-awareness. In the context of Cochrane’s larger argument, acquiring emotional self-awareness is an incredibly valuable capacity; it paves the way for discernment of moral values, creative problem-solving, the navigation of competing personal interests and social norms, and rationality in general. If Cochrane is correct, then we all have very good reasons to follow the advice “Listen to your gut,” if not the stronger advice “Trust your gut.”
To lay the foundation of that argument, this essay pursues a much more modest goal: it relies on The Emotional Mind to show why listening to your gut is a reasonably good path to emotional self-awareness. Toward this end, the first half or so of the essay offers an analysis of what many people mean by the colloquial advice to “trust your gut,” at least when they deploy that advice in context of an ongoing dialogue about a friend or family member’s major life-decision. Then, this article summarizes (at a rather breakneck pace) Cochrane’s account of emotions and bodily emotional feelings. Then it briefly spells out how these concepts might be deployed to understand the advice to “trust your gut” as nearly tantamount to saying, “Pursue emotional self-awareness.” (Exploring Cochrane’s larger argument about the function of emotions in rationality, morality, and social life is beyond the scope of this essay, although I suspect doing so could enrich an account of the utility of the advice “trust your gut.”)
“TRUSTING YOUR GUT” IN COMMON PARLANCE
What do people mean when they tell each other to “trust your gut”? Much depends on the context in which the phrase is deployed. I have often heard women give each other this advice in anticipation that the advice receiver will face some situation requiring quick decision-making to protect her physical safety. For instance, throughout my adolescence, my mother urged me, “Pay attention when you feel uncomfortable around someone, especially a man, even when you can’t quite put your finger on why you feel uncomfortable. Feel free to keep some distance from that person. Don’t feel obliged to explain yourself. Trust your gut.” She–and I suspect most of the people who tell others to “trust your gut”–meant, roughly, “Rely on your feelings for guidance, especially for help detecting subtle red flags about risks in your environment, especially when you need to make a fast call.” These relied-on feelings might or might not include tangible bodily sensations like a quickened pulse or goosebumps. Rather, relied-on feelings might entail a generalized sense of unease or alertness, a sense without any conscious physical expression. In this usage-context “trust your gut” can mean something almost entirely metaphorical, something equivalent to “trust your intuitions,” with little or no reference to physical sensations.
I’d like to explore a different genre of “trust your gut” advice, deployed in the context of conversations about weighty, long-term decisions. In these contexts, “trust your gut” often does involve the suggestion that the advice receiver should pay attention to physical sensations. I suspect this genre of advice is an especially common element of advanced degree-holding American women’s friendship (or among anyone in Brené Brown’s [2022] listenership), though perhaps other groups dole out this advice to each other too. These conversations might go as follows:
Friend #1: “How are you feeling about [some big decision]?”
Friend #2: You know, there’s a ton I don’t know yet, but now that I’ve called it, I can just breathe easier. I feel steadier. Like my shoulders have relaxed for the first time in months.”
Friend #1: “I’m so glad for you! Trust your gut, listen to your body. How are you sleeping?”
Friend #2: “Never better. I sleep like a rock. Best sleep I’ve gotten in two years. I think it’s the relief.”
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In this usage of “trust your gut” advice, it seems that the instruction is meant to be taken at least semi-literally. Not entirely literally, mind you, since a quite literal paraphrase would be “do what the insides of your abdomen advise you.” That seems too narrow, and not just because the digestive tract does not deliver step-by-step behavioral instructions. Another reason an entirely literal interpretation would be too narrow is that “gut” feelings often involve some non-abdominal part of the body. In this subset of “trust your gut” advice, the physical sensations are understood to contain a kind of wisdom. Guiding intuitions might present themselves as tension between the shoulder blades, lightness in one’s step, upright posture, dizziness, in addition to presenting as a knot, hollowness, flutter, etc., in the pit of one’s stomach.
Situations wherein the advice “trust your gut” means something like “attend to your somatic experiences” interest me because, on the one hand, The Emotional Mind throws light on the possible value of this advice and, on the other hand, this specific type of advice seems to be having a cultural moment. Glennon Doyle (2023, 4:30-40:00), Prentis Hemphill (2021, 0:00-1:20), Brené Brown (2023, 40:55-45:00), Harvard Business Review (Wilding 2022), and Forbes Magazine (Wilson 2018) have doled out some version of this advice. These culture-generators seem to be reacting against a different strand of conventional wisdom, one which prioritizes rationality over emotion in decision-making. These sources not only reject the rationality/emotion hierarchy, they go one step further. They treat not just the conceptual aspects of emotional experience (the recognition “I am afraid that I will lose my job”), but the bodily experience of emotions (“my heart is about to pound out of my chest”) as important sources of insight and wisdom.
For figures like Brené Brown, Prentis Hemphill, and Glennon Doyle, “trust your gut” entails something more than “take an inventory of your body’s physical reactions.” Rather, it means something like, “draw guidance from your body’s physical reactions to inform your next steps.” This raises the question of what kind of guidance a person is supposed to draw from their bodily sensations once they have brought those sensations to conscious awareness. For example, what exactly is a person to do with the information that they feel exhausted, have a growing pressure behind their eyes, and a leaden heaviness in their whole body every time they consider broaching the topic of couple’s therapy with their partner? I suspect those who advise others to “trust your gut” would say that the next thing to be done with that information is to translate a bodily sensation into a recognition of one’s own emotions, presuming one has not already made that intuitive leap. In the foregoing example, it seems pretty clear that the headachy, tired person’s body is expressing the emotion of dread at the possibility of couple’s therapy. So, in this case, trusting your gut seems to mean, at least, acknowledging one’s dread.
What else might trusting your gut in this sense entail? Does it require going a step further and actually avoiding the thing one’s body clearly dreads (couple’s therapy in this case)? Does trusting your gut mean complying with, deferring to, or obeying the emotions and motivations revealed to us after probing our bodily reactions?
Not necessarily. Slogans like “trust your gut” admit a great deal of flexibility in their normal usage. There is a lot of wiggle room here. Furthermore, one of the most common reasons that one person would tell another to “trust your gut” is that the advice giver also finds the person’s decision challenging. It’s a way of not responding directly, of not giving concrete instructions that might later prove unsound. A person often admonishes another to “trust your gut” when the speaker really does not know what the other person should do. Thus, the very use of the phrase “trust your gut” should alert us to the possibility that the advice-receiver is facing a decision riddled with ambiguity, and that the advice-giver sees that ambiguity too. (It is fairly easy to imagine why people would want to offer vague advice to loved ones; no one wants to be held responsible for the regret someone might feel after leaving a marriage, quitting a job, buying an overly expensive house, etc.).
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I think we come closer to understanding how the advice “trust your gut” relates to decision-making if we juxtapose it with another frequent bit of instruction about the body’s role in judgment. We can imagine an advice giver, in the same breath and without contradicting themselves, telling someone facing a weighty decision both “trust your gut” and “don’t make any knee jerk decisions.” These two pieces of advice point in the same direction in that they both direct a person to slow down, take a beat, and try to gain emotional self-awareness. Where these pieces of advice differ is the reason why a person needs emotional awareness. In the first case, the person is urged to seek information from the body in order to inform a decision. It seems to mean, “Pay attention to the information you know, but, for a variety of reasons, would really prefer not to know.” “Trust your gut” means “slow down and take your emotions into account rather than capitulating to social pressure or some other exigency that makes your emotional experience rather inconvenient or costly to attend to at the moment." In the second case, a person is urged to seek information about their emotions in order to avoid uncritical impulsive bodily behavior (including verbal behavior). “Don’t make any knee jerk decisions” means something like “slow down and make sure your not-fully-conscious emotions aren’t unduly biasing and rushing your judgment.”
There’s something here about grounding a decision-maker’s locus of control. Advice givers seem to be saying, “Find the middle path. Don’t neglect the emotions conveyed by your body because you’re paying too much attention to social norms and other important external realities (political, economic, cultural conditions, etc.), but also don’t neglect important social norms and other important external realities (political, economic, cultural conditions, etc.) because you are overwhelmed by your embodied experience of your emotions.”
In sum, it seems to me that the advice to “trust your gut” is less about confidently carrying out the attitudes revealed by one’s bodily-conveyed emotional state than it is about making emotionally self-aware, intentional decisions. What remains to be explored is the value of this conventional wisdom. Can attending to somatic experiences actually lead to emotional self-awareness (to say nothing of intentional decision-making)? If so, why so? On this front, Tom Cochrane’s The Emotional Mind is helpful because it offers an account of how “bodily feelings” can convey emotional meaning.
EMOTIONS AND EMOTIONAL BODILY FEELINGS
In order to leverage Cochrane’s account of “emotional bodily feelings” in explaining the utility of “trust your gut” advice, I first need to sketch Cochrane’s ontology of emotion. To quote him directly, an emotion is “a valent representation of a situated concern. The specific character of the emotion relies on (1) the characteristics of the object, (2) the formal features predicated of that object and (3) the characteristics of the response strategy” (Cochrane 2018, 213). This definition, though precise, requires some unpacking.
To condense a great deal of Cochrane’s argument, the human capacity to feel emotions is an evolutionary adaption that promotes species survival, although not every instance of emotional experience promotes survival, as suicidal feelings of sadness make clear (Cochrane 2018, 3-4, 12, 42, 66). Emotions serve this function by helping humans regulate their environments (Cochrane 2018, 24-27). Emotions prompt humans to act in ways that effectively regulate “situated concerns,” like physical safety, nutrition, social connections, and a variety of concerns we learn to care about through socialization (Cochrane 2018, 74, 83-88). Again, the actual concerns a human ends up emoting about may or may not promote their individual survival, but the underlying ability to identify a diverse range of concerns and to regulate environments in order to promote them is enormously helpful to humanity’s survival as a species (Cochrane 2018, 42, 67, 139, 188). Emotions help humans regulate our environment in two closely related ways. First, emotions are the phenomena by which a human nervous system represents to itself and the rest of its body an actionable account of its environment (Cochrane 2018, 37). Our emotions provide a map of what matters, an organized synthesis of the nervous system’s overwhelming
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mass of sensory experience. Emotional representations describe how our (internal and external, real and imagined) environment is blocking/supporting or might block/support our regulation of situated concerns, of those things that matter to us (Cochrane 2018, 67-9)
Second, and regardless of our conscious awareness of our emotions, the nervous system’s representations of environmental conditions trigger bodily responses that enable environmental regulatory behaviors (Cochrane 2018, 91-92). Hence, fear is constituted both by the nervous system’s recognition of danger afoot as well as the rest of the body’s automatic and synchronized response to that danger: increased heart rate, blood directed away from the digestive system and toward the limbs, contraction of the pupils, etc. Fear involves both the nervous system’s representation of the environment and the bodily response to that representation. All emotions have both aspects: the nervous system’s representation of the environment and a concordant physiological response (Cochrane 2018, 72-3).
One helpful element of Cochrane’s ontology of emotions is that it explains how it is possible to have an emotion without being aware of that emotion, without consciously feeling it (Cochrane 2018, 113). Emotion’s evolutionary function is to help an organism regulate its environment by seamlessly orchestrating the organism’s 1) perception of and 2) response to its environmental conditions. The nervous system can do this without a person’s conscious awareness (Cochrane 2018, 92-93). Take the felicitous example of a person who is not aware that they are feeling particularly happy about their work-life until a co-worker points out that they have been cheerily humming all morning.[1] Or the more difficult example of a person who only realizes how furious they are with a parent when they find themselves rehashing years-old slights and spitting bullets in psychotherapy. In both examples, Cochrane’s account of emotions would suggest that each person’s emotions have been operating the whole time to shape how the person copes with their environment, in more-or-less subtle ways, without the person being conscious of those emotions.
If emotional self-awareness is important to us (and admittedly, it might not be to everyone), this emotional ontology presents a practical problem. It suggests our emotions could slip beneath our radars, driving our behaviors in ways we might not understand or approve of. Attention to “emotional bodily feelings” constitutes one possible solution to that problem. Cochrane defines an “emotional bodily feeling” as “the conceptualisation of a bodily response aspect of an emotion” (Cochrane 2018, 213). To paraphrase, a person has an “emotional bodily feeling” when they realize that something their body is doing (pulse racing, mouth turning up, eyebrows lifting, etc.) is an expression and constitutive part of how they are interpreting and responding to something in their (real or imagined) environment. For example, if a person has received good medical results and immediately feels their jaw loosen and recognizes in that feeling an expression of profound relief, then they have had an emotional bodily feeling.
What about subtler emotional experiences? The example cited above seems like one a person is unlikely to miss. But could attention to bodily feelings in general possibly yield insights into specifically emotional bodily feelings? Cochrane is aware that attentiveness to somatic experiences is not a perfect strategy for emotional self-awareness (Cochrane 2019, 107). It could produce false positives: I might confuse food poisoning for anxiety since both produce stomach churning; I might feel very, very sad when in fact I am mostly tired and just a little bit sad (personally, I try not to take very seriously any emotional reaction I have after 10 p.m.). Or a person might misinterpret bodily feelings: are these happy or overwhelmed tears? Still, paying attention to bodily feelings provides a good place to start asking questions about one’s emotional condition. Attending to bodily feelings could help us stumble across our specifically emotional bodily feelings and the emotional meanings they contain.
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At this point, we are a long way down the road to explaining the utility of the colloquial advice to “trust your gut.” If Cochrane is correct that it is possible to have emotions we do not consciously feel and all emotions involve a bodily response, then pausing long enough to take a deep breath and do a body scan seems like an excellent route to uncover hidden emotions. Cochrane’s account does not justify naïve or complete trust in one’s emotions, but that usage seems like a mismatch for the phrase’s common meaning in any case. What Cochrane’s account of emotions shows is that the emotions are fundamentally and unavoidably somatic phenomena. Therefore, paying attention to somatic experiences is an entirely reasonable path to emotional self-awareness.
This insight is a modest one. It leaves open the question of why emotional self-awareness is valuable in the first place. The Emotional Mind throws a great deal of light on that larger question. For me as a character educator, the real payout of The Emotional Mind is its implications for the role emotional self-awareness could play in a person’s moral self-regulation, i.e., in a person’s attempts to live a life that reflects their deepest moral sentiments. Along the way to building that larger argument, The Emotional Mind adds some validity to common sense wisdom.
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Notes
[1] However, it is hardly unusual to experience an emotion consciously. For instance, a person hurrying across a busy intersection is likely to be keenly aware that they feel afraid for their life and limbs. Cochrane would expect emotional self-awareness to be a common phenomenon, in part because one of the primary bodily responses emotions trigger is redirecting the sense organs toward relevant stimuli (Cochrane 2018, 54-64, 113). Our emotions do not just direct our attention, they often hijack it (as when we stop everything we’re doing to locate the source of a distressing/surprising noise or find ourselves obsessing about a lover or nasty interpersonal conflict). This hijacking of our attention may make our emotions particularly noticeable (Cochrane 2018, 97).
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References
Brown, Brené. 2022. “Episode 5: Places We Go With Others - And The Framework for Meaningful Connection.” Atlas of the Heart. Films On Demand. 2022. Accessed November 27, 2023. https://fod.infobase.com/PortalPlaylists.aspx?wID=107358&xtid=284183.
Cochrane, Tom. 2018. The Emotional Mind: A Control Theory of Affective States. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Doyle, Glennon. 2023. “We Can Do Hard Things.” How to Follow the Wisdom of Your Body with Dr. Hillary McBride. Podcast. Accessed November 27, 2023. https://podcasts.apple.com/si/podcast/206-how-to-follow-the-wisdom-of-your-body-with/id1564530722?i=1000612267965.
Hemphill, Prentis. 2021. “Finding Our Way.” The Embodiment Institute. Video. https://vimeo.com/589183970.
Wilding, Melody. 2022. “How to Stop Overthinking and Start Trusting Your Gut,” Harvard Business Review. Accessed November 27, 2023. https://hbr.org/2022/03/how-to-stop-overthinking-and-start-trusting-your-gut.
Wilson, Chip. 2023. “Trusting Your Gut Is The Best Business Tool You’ve Got–If You Can Listen,” Forbes. Accessed November 27, 2023. https://www.forbes.com/sites/chipwilson/2018/06/14/trusting-your-gut-is-the-best-business-tool-youve-got-if-you-can-listen/?sh=7ea69ba64b16.
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Elizabeth L. Whiting © 2024
Author email: whitinge[at]gmail.com
