It's been six years since the COVID-19 pandemic reached the United States, and I feel like I'm just now ready to rejoin society. It's a late start for sure, but I bet I'm not the only one.
Meeting new people IRL again gives me the opportunity to retell the story of making the decision to move from Seattle to Albuquerque in 2018. The idea came upon us ... suddenly. Then, while my husband was home in Seattle recovering from back surgery, I flew to ABQ and spent two days with a real estate agent looking at houses. I put in an offer — above asking price — on the first house I saw on Day 2. I'd never owned a home before. I'd never bid on a home before. My husband had only the Zillow listing and a rushed FaceTime tour to go on, but he was so hazy on pain meds that he basically said, "Sure, if you think it's a good house, buy it." So, I did.
Eight years later, I can confirm that it was the right decision.
I trust my gut, and I rarely regret it, but neuroscientist Anne-Laure Le Cunff got me thinking about instinct vs. intuition. Ready to wonder along?
Follow your gut and join me!
The Small Idea: Not All Gut Feelings Are Created Equal
What if "trusting your gut" is terrible advice, unless you know which kind of gut feeling you're experiencing?
Nancy Martira
Clew Strategy
We talk about "trusting our gut" as if it's a single, reliable compass. But Anne-Laure Le Cunff, founder of Ness Labs, makes a crucial distinction. Our "gut feelings" stem from two very different sources: instinct and intuition. Because they feel so similar (fast, automatic, sometimes emotional), we treat them the same. But overlooking the difference can lead to poor decision-making.
Instinct is evolutionary and biological — your fight-or-flight response, the hair standing up on the back of your neck when something feels dangerous. It's hardwired, universal across humans, and designed to keep you alive in immediate physical threats.
Intuition, on the other hand, is pattern recognition built from experience. It's your brain rapidly processing familiar situations based on thousands of previous encounters, even when you can't articulate why something "feels right" or "feels off." As Gary Klein, who developed the Recognition-Primed Decision model, explains: intuition is pattern matching accelerated by expertise.
When facing a complex decision like changing jobs, buying a house, or pivoting your business strategy, your instinct might be screaming "danger!" simply because change feels threatening. Your actual intuition, built from professional experience and self-knowledge, might be whispering something entirely different.
"Gut feelings" stem from two very different sources: instinct and intuition. Treating them the same can lead to poor decision-making.
When Your Gut Gives You Bad Information
Your INSTINCT doesn't care about your career fulfillment, your creative growth, or your long-term happiness. It cares about keeping you safe and comfortable right now. This served our ancestors well when immediate physical threats were the primary concern. But in modern life, instinct often becomes an obstacle to changes that would improve our lives.
Research on decision-making shows that when we're stressed, uncertain, or facing unfamiliar situations, our instinctive responses tend to dominate, pushing us toward safety and the status quo even when change would serve us better. Psychologist Daniel Kahneman, known as the ‘Father of Behavioral Science,’ calls this System 1 thinking: fast, automatic, and often biased by our evolutionary wiring.
“System 1 thinking” is why so many people stay in jobs they hate, relationships that drain them, or cities where they feel stuck. Their instinct keeps shouting "don't risk it," and they mistake that primal fear response for wisdom.
But your gut isn’t just a fear factory: sometimes your gut feeling is wisdom. True intuition, the kind worth trusting, comes from experience-based pattern recognition. When someone with 15 years of experience in a field gets a "gut feeling" about a strategy or a hire, they're accessing vast stores of tacit knowledge: thousands of similar situations, outcomes they've witnessed, subtle patterns they've learned to recognize even when they can't articulate why.
The question isn't whether to trust your gut. The question is: which gut are you listening to?
Photo by Nathan Dumlao via Unsplash
The Gut Decision Matrix
Le Cunff's framework helps you distinguish between instinct (which you should often ignore for big decisions) and intuition (which might surface insights you don't consciously recognize yet).
When to trust your gut (intuition):
You have significant experience in this specific domain
The situation resembles patterns you've encountered before
Time pressure requires a fast decision
The stakes involve familiar territory where you've developed expertise
Data is incomplete, contradictory, or unavailable
When NOT to trust your gut (instinct):
You're making a decision in an unfamiliar domain
Strong emotions (fear, excitement, anger) are clouding judgment
The situation is unprecedented or highly complex
You have relevant data available and time to analyze it
Your "gut feeling" is really just anxiety about change
Research by psychologist Robin Hogarth shows that intuition is most reliable in what he calls "kind learning environments," i.e. stable domains where patterns repeat and feedback is clear and immediate. Chess masters develop reliable intuition because the rules don't change and they get immediate feedback on their moves. But in "wicked learning environments" — where patterns are unstable, feedback is delayed or absent, and the rules keep changing — intuition becomes unreliable at best, dangerous at worst.
The challenge is that life's biggest decisions often happen in wicked learning environments. You don't get to practice changing careers, getting married*, or moving across the country hundreds of times before you develop reliable intuition about them. (*But wouldn't it be awesome if a "wedding rehearsal" was actually about decision-making and not about knowing where to stand?)
From "The Gut Decision Matrix: When to Trust Instinct and Intuition, Anne-Laure Le Cunff, Ness Labs
The Science of Informed Intuition
Fortunately, we don't have to choose between analytical thinking and gut feelings. The most effective decision-makers use what researcher Lutz Kaufmann calls a "blended approach" to leverage both rational analysis and experience-based intuition.
Here's a practical test: If you can articulate why you feel a certain way about a decision (even if the reasons are subtle or hard to pin down), you're probably accessing intuition built from experience. If you cannot explain it at all, if it's just raw emotion or vague discomfort, you're more likely hearing the alarm bells of a biological instinct.
Here are two small experiments to try:
The Gut Audit
The next time you face a significant decision and feel a strong gut reaction, pause and interrogate it. Write down exactly what you're feeling and where you feel it in your body. Then ask: Is this feeling based on pattern recognition from similar past situations (intuition) or is it a fear response to the unfamiliar (instinct)? Can you name three specific experiences that inform this feeling? If yes, you're likely accessing intuition. If not, proceed with skepticism.
The Replacement Test
When you get a strong gut feeling about a decision, imagine you're advising someone else with your exact situation and experience level. What would you tell them? If your advice to them differs dramatically from what your gut is telling you, examine whether fear or wishful thinking is distorting your instincts. This creates the psychological distance needed to separate genuine intuition from emotional reactivity.
Photo by Burst via Unsplash
The Wonder of Knowing Which Voice to Trust
What makes the distinction between instinct and intuition so powerful is how it transforms "trust your gut" from vague folk wisdom into a precise decision-making tool. Instead of treating all gut feelings as equally valid (or equally suspect), you can ask: Does this feeling come from my accumulated expertise, or from my nervous system's alarm bells?
I’m not advocating that you ignore your instincts entirely. Sometimes that primal fear response is telling you something important like a person truly isn't trustworthy, or a situation genuinely isn't safe. Most women I know have stories about trusting their instincts when it comes to personal safety. But recognizing the source of the feeling is a vital piece of information.
Experience-based intuition, when applied in familiar domains, can be just accurate as — and significantly faster than — exhaustive analytical processes. Just try not to mistake change anxiety for seasoned wisdom, or you may end up making fear-based decisions that keep you stuck.
Learning to distinguish between the two is like developing a new sense. At first, it requires conscious effort and interrogation. Over time, you begin to recognize the quality of different gut feelings, how pattern-based intuition feels qualitatively different from instinctive fear or wishful thinking.
As Le Cunff notes, not trusting your gut blindly doesn't mean ignoring it. It means becoming curious about where the feeling comes from and whether it has genuine information to offer, or whether it's just your ancient nervous system trying to keep you safe in ways that no longer serve you.
The Question
Think about a recent decision where you felt a strong gut reaction. Was it instinct (fear of the unfamiliar, desire for safety) or intuition (pattern recognition from experience)? How might that distinction have changed the choice you made?
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(or buy me a coffee.) Meet Nancy Martira. I'm a brand strategist and communications consultant who brings endless curiosity to every project. If you've got a challenge that needs a fresh, unexpected perspective, let's talk!
Communications consultant, brand strategist, & Wonder Work creator. Curious about everything from terrible orchestras to happiness algorithms. Feed your curiosity; starve the doom — one small idea at a time. Let's wonder!