Slow Knowing: When's the right time to trust your gut?
Unconscious thought, gut instinct, and discernment
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Burnt Out? Stuck? You're Not Broken – Find Your Discernment – Click Here To Work With Me –
NOTE: Usually, the second blog post of the month is focused on the hard science, and then the third focuses on practical applications of the science.
Since the first week of January was an introduction to 2026, this post will have both, all squished into one. Here we go…
As someone who does decisions for a living, I’m most fascinated by consequential decisions, those choices that fundamentally alter your life, the ones that leave a mark—beautiful growth or an equally beautiful scar—etched on your soul.
There are the daily decisions—Do I go to the gym? What do I choose off the menu? What time do I set my alarm?—which have their own fascination, but it’s the big ones that truly enthrall me. Like:
Do I quit this job? Do I take the new one?
Do we have a child? Do we have another one?
Do I buy this house or that one? Do I keep renting?
Do I ask them to marry me? Do I leave my relationship?
And, after nearly two years of writing weekly about how to make consequential decisions, of coaching people through their hardest ones, of giving TEDx talks about career decision-making, and of going through my own spate of consequential decisions, there’s a whole area of decision-making I’ve barely touched on.
I spent the holidays thinking a lot about the idea of discernment. What does it mean for us to feel in our bones, to know that a decision is good? And how do we know that we can trust that feeling?
Discernment is a complicated thing. It’s hard to pin down because it’s so…nebulous. So today, let’s talk about what a friend of mine calls “the ‘woo’ of decision-making.”
What’s the role of the unconscious mind in decision-making? How do you tap into it? And how do you know when to trust it?
Before we go on: I work with people on guiding them through their most difficult decisions. Find a discernment coach here ↓
Spirituality and decision-making
In last week’s introductory post, I shared stories from two people—myself, and a client—who spent literal years agonizing about a consequential decision each. In my client’s case, the decision was whether to move to a completely new country to chase a better job with a higher salary.
In mine, it was whether to end a long relationship.
What drove both of our years of agonizing was a deep desire to find the “right” answer—one that we hoped the universe, God, our subconsciousness, our friends, our feelings would provide.
There’s a reason that many of the world’s religions talk about discernment. A very human impulse is to outsource our decisions to something or someone outside of ourselves. The impetus for this externalization is simple: decisions are hard, because decisions are uncertain. And we, physiologically, struggle with uncertainty. It’s just the way we’re wired.
So, we externalize big decisions. It looks different for each of us. Some of us flip coins. Some of us open Bibles up to random verses. Some pull out tarot cards or lay out golden fleeces. We consult the stars. We ask our friends, pastors, rabbis, imams, therapists, advisors, spouses, or even parents if they could make the decision for us. However it looks, we basically want the universe to “show us a sign.” We’re looking for discernment.
Because—here’s a tautology—if decisions were simple, we wouldn’t struggle with them.
That word, discernment, feels very religious. Understandably so. Rabbi Even Posen wrote an excellent piece on the Jewish approach to what she calls “the sacred art of discernment.” The Friends General Conference (ie, the Quakers) publish a thirty-minute exercise on “the Quaker way of individual discernment.” Just last month, Professor Shahul Hameed discussed how a Muslim could discern the divine’s plan for their lives. Saint Paul lists “discernment” among the gifts of the Spirit in his first letter to the Corinthians.
A unifying theme in many of these religious treatments of discernment is that discernment supersedes the rational. It is found in sacred practices. Discernment somehow speaks to us on a subconscious level.
And there may be something to that…
May.
Photo by Mirella Callage on Unsplash
Unconscious thought theory
Back in 2004, a pair of Dutch researchers proposed a theory of “unconscious thought.”
The theory goes something like this: you know how you sometimes have your best ideas in the shower, or when you’re on a long drive, or at the gym? They wanted to see if there was something to that—specifically, they hypothesized that people might make better decisions when they were distracted from the decision itself. If they were right, then thinking through a decision would result in worse outcomes than letting the subconscious make it.
Through a series of experiments, they found some pretty compelling evidence of their hypothesis. Specifically, the researchers noticed that, for big, complex decisions which require people to balance a lot of information and competing priorities, “just sleep on it” turned out to be great advice. The distracted groups came to the correct answer more often than the groups that thought about the decision.
The theory is that the subconscious mind has a lot more information-processing capacity than the conscious mind. In other words, if we let it, our subconscious can synthesize vastly more information and come to the right decision far better than our conscious mind can.
Tantalizing stuff. Except.
Their finding? Well, it’s really not been replicated. Paper after paper after paper has either not been able to show the same unconscious thought effect that the original researchers showed—or has shown the exact opposite.
In fact, one of the more fascinating replication papers found that if, during the “unconscious” period, the subjects were asked about their thoughts on the task (kind of a meta-ask), they did even worse. In other words, for the unconscious thought effect to even have the slightest chance of working, people couldn’t think about their decision at all.
When was the last time you faced a big decision, and never thought about it again?
Do all roads have to (problematically) lead to Freud?
As much as I’d like to not, I can’t talk about unconscious knowing without discussing Freud.
As a reminder (and a massive oversimplification), Freud broke the psyche down into three parts
the id, the unconscious force in us that acts according the “pleasure principle”
the superego, made up of internalized cultural rules, parental authority, and other mores—sometimes conceived as our conscience
the ego, which is tasked with navigating and harmonizing the other two
On one level, every decision is this harmonization between id and superego. Every decision is the function of the ego.
And this harmonization is what, therefore, we’re trying to navigate. Whether we’re relying on a spiritual discernment, unconscious thought theory, shower-based epiphanies, or more formal decision frameworks, what we’re doing is operationalizing the ego.
So, how do we do it? How do we navigate that harmonization between id and superego, especially when there are boat-loads of information and myriad competing priorities to manage—and not enough mental energy to process it?
Perhaps a better question even: how can we know when to trust our unconscious gut to smooth that navigation? At the foundation, it’s that harmonization we’re always trying to navigate.
Competing demands
The reason consequential decisions fascinate me so much is because they live at the intersection of the biggest domains of our lives—identity, finances, family life, expertise. A surgeon I recently worked with, for example, was debating whether to stay in medicine, leave it altogether, or do something in between. Over our eight weeks together, he asked all the hard questions:
“Who am I without my white coat?” (Identity).
“How will I pay for my kids’ college—and my lifestyle!—if I leave?” (Finances).
“Is it worth staying just for the lifestyle?” (Purpose vs. path)
“What if my spouse doesn’t agree with my decision?” (Key stakeholders)
Anyone at the crossroads of a big decision will always face a similar intersection of competing priorities—some of which will which argue “stay” and others of which couldn’t kick you in the butt fast enough.
As much as I firmly believe in the spiritual, emotive nature of discernment (and I do!), I have found some of the advice that people in these realms give to be somewhat lacking. That’s because—and maybe it’s just my experience—it’s actually very rare for the Divine to tell you what to do. So rare that, when it happens, scriptures are written about it.
Similarly, it’s so hard to know if the answer from your unconscious is truly the one you should listen to. I’m sure you, like me, can point to times when your gut did know best—and times it didn’t.
So, taking all that into account, here are five tips you can do, today, to operationalize your discernment. To incarnate your unconscious thought. To give your ego a push in the right direction.
How to know when you know
1/ First question: Is this a situation where you can think with your d*ck?
Crude, yes. I’m sorry.
I stared at my computer all morning trying to figure out a better way to say this. I failed. (Also, for the purposes of this discussion, “thinking with your d*ck” is a gender-neutral term).
Remember that the role of the ego, the role of any sort of decision-making framework, is to mitigate the id’s urges, to harmonize them with the superego. To reconcile competing demands.
Well, first question, then: is that necessary?
One of the cardinal rules drilled into our superegos is: “Don’t think with your d*ck.” In other words, don’t be led by the primal urges, the pleasure principle, the desire to feel good (whatever “feeling good” looks like in your situation).
But, that’s not true.
There are times when it’s perfectly okay to think with your d*ck. There are times when listening to the pleasure principle is actually perfectly alright.
Ask yourself: What would the consequences be if you did? Would those consequences be positive? Negative? And if negative, would you be able to handle them?
The answer to question #1 might just be yes—this is a situation where you can think with your id.
2/ Next question: Is your subconscious intuition adequate to the task?
Ok, so if you’re on step 2, then I’m going to assume the answer to the first question is no. You need to do that harmonization. You need to balance competing priorities.
Next question, then, is: can you trust your subconscious intuition in this particular case.
Let me give an example: I’ve been a surgeon for 25 years at this point. Sometimes, I walk into a patient’s room and I just get this gut sense, this feeling in my body that the patient isn’t going to do well.
If you pressed me in the moment, I couldn’t tell you what that gut sense is based on (though there’s some fascinating evidence that smell might play a role). In fact, it might even be counterintuitive: the patient’s labs may look normal; their physical exam may be unremarkable.
But something inside me has this intuition, just looking at the patient from the door.
And, after 25 years in the field, my intuition is uniquely calibrated—to this specific situation! I wouldn’t be showing up as a whole doctor if I didn’t listen to it.
On the other hand, that emphatically does not mean my intuition is uniquely calibrated to every situation!
I don’t day trade stocks, for example, because I have the intuition of a ficus tree when it comes to what a stock is going to do. My intuition is no better than anyone else’s — and possibly worse, because expertise in one domain can create overconfidence in others.
3/ Check: is there any emotional contamination?
If your intuition is up to the task, there’s one more check I recommend: is there any emotional contamination?
Our intuition doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It responds to our emotional state, our recent experiences, and even our traumas.
So, interrogate any gut feelings. Specifically, what else, besides your purest gut, might be influencing them?
Do you, like me, live with anxiety? Does that anxiety mean you’re convinced that every new possibility is a hidden threat?
Did a recent choice that went the wrong way make you overly cautious about your next risk?
Are you burnt out, sleep-deprived, stressed about finances, or dealing with relationship issues that might be coloring your perception?
And if the answer to those is yes (or if your intuition may not be an expert in this kind of decision), then it’s probably time to do a little more hard-data quantifying—in other words, time to turn to a more formal approach to a decision.
4/ Get a mentor
I cannot emphasize this enough.
We get stuck in situations we don’t want to be in not because we’re somehow bad at decisions. We get stuck because we make small, reasonable decisions that end up taking us down a road that—had we seen that road at the outset—we would never have chosen to go down.
And then we’re stuck debating whether our gut instinct is right, whether the voice we heard in prayer was truly divine, whether the sign we asked for truly was a blue-enough butterfly or a damp-enough fleece. I once has a client who told me that she and her husband had had the exact same conversation every day for four months, debating what their next life steps were. They never got anywhere.
So, get a mentor. Get a decision coach, a discernment coach, or a trusted elder who’s walked the road before you.
Because what these people can do is call you out on your ish when it’s blinding you, help you clarify your purpose, and (if they’re at all good at what they do) walk alongside you to make sure you don’t revert to old patterns. They can help you incarnate your ego.
As a decision coach, my role is to help my clients navigate the morass of competing demands with agency and with all the clarity possible. I do that by:
Interrogating my clients’ why
Collating the options they have available to them
Getting into—and trimming—the weeds of the finances, stakeholder conversations, practical considerations
And finding, in the middle of all this, the option that is most likely to optimize what they’re solving for.
We break down the consequential decision into its component parts, and then we make each component step as level-headedly as possible. And yes, it sounds boring and even-mathy—but it’s a sacred boredom.
One born of systematically creating a life that each person knows they want to be living.
It’s the incarnation of discernment, the operationalization of ego. It’s getting you to the discernment you want.
Today.
Are you looking for discernment around a consequential life decision? Are you stuck and not sure how to move forward?
You aren’t alone. Let’s talk about getting you to a life you’re not trying to quit every day.
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