The Science of "Trusting Your Gut"

Dear Reader,

If you’re new here — welcome! I’m so glad you’ve joined us.

I wanted to take a moment to share a few exciting things coming up. If you’re local to California’s Central Valley, I’d love for you to join me on September 19 for a Wellness Event I’m hosting with Burn Pilates. We’ve partnered with some amazing sponsors — including Four Sigmatic, LMNT, Ulta, Doppio Society, and more — to create a relaxing evening of restorative yoga, a sound bath, and practices designed to support deep nervous system rest.

If you can’t make it in person, no worries. I’m also creating a guide to help you reset your nervous system at home, so you can enjoy the same benefits no matter where you are. If you’d like a copy, just join the list, and I’ll send you everything we’ll be sharing at the event.

THE SHIFT

Trusting Your Gut

My sister was driving in a rainstorm recently, the kind where the windshield wipers barely keep up. Suddenly, something inside her screamed: Pull over. Stop. Her stomach tightened, heart pounded, and hands gripped the wheel. She eased the car onto the shoulder.

Five minutes later, the knot in her stomach loosened, and she continued driving.

A few miles down the road, she saw it. The two cars that had been behind her, mangled and crushed against a tree ripped from the ground and splayed across the asphalt. If she had stayed on the road, would that have been her?

It’s impossible to know. And yet… how many times have you made a choice and, when asked why, you could only shrug and mutter, “I don’t know… it just felt right”?

Perhaps you’ve felt it when something seemed “off” in a relationship, when you were drawn to a new opportunity without fully knowing why, or when you had to choose between two options that looked identical on paper.

That mysterious nudge, that flash of certainty, the “gut knowing” before your brain has fully caught up — what on earth is actually happening?

People have been tuned into this internal sense of knowing for thousands of years. Greek poets, from Aeschylus onward, regarded the bowels as the seat of emotions.

The Greek word σπλάγχνον (splagchnon) referred to the internal organs, especially the intestines, which were thought to be closely connected to feelings and passions. Depending on the author, different emotions were “housed” there — grief, anger, vengeance, even compassion and empathy.

What the Greeks lacked in scientific tools, they more than made up for in insight. Remarkably, they weren’t far off.

Today, we recognize the gut as a “second brain,” a highly sophisticated information-processing system, home to roughly 500 million neurons. Through the vagus nerve, it continuously communicates with the brain, shaping emotions, guiding decisions, and influencing behavior in ways we’re only beginning to fully understand.

Here’s how it works: your gut bacteria produce mood-altering compounds like serotonin and GABA. They release stress hormones and cytokines when they pick up on subtle signals of discomfort or unease, sometimes before your conscious mind even notices, giving you that instant “something’s off” sensation.

Meanwhile, your brain is also scanning for threats. If danger is detected, the amygdala fires, sending stress hormones pulsing through your body. These hormones tweak gut activity: digestion slows, muscles tighten, and blood flow shifts. You literally feel this as a “knot in the stomach.”

This two-way street, the gut talking to the brain, the brain talking to the gut, is always looping, giving and receiving signals.

Being tuned in to these internal signals, what scientists call interoception, has real benefits.

If you’re skilled at reading somatic cues (heartbeat, breathing, gut tension, hunger, temperature, muscle tightness or relaxation, posture, pain, and so on), you’re better able to identify your emotions, regulate them, and make sound decisions.

Because beneath the mystery of “gut knowing” lies something surprisingly practical: rapid pattern recognition.

Our brains are prediction machines, constantly scanning the environment and matching incoming signals against past experience. A driver might not consciously think, The road is slick and that car looks unstable, but micro-signals — a twitch of brake lights, a subtle skid, the sound of tires on wet pavement — are instantly compared to similar situations stored in memory. That rapid, unconscious matching sparks a bodily alarm before the thinking brain has time to catch up.

So how might this help you in your daily life and mental health?

Many of us ignore our internal compass. We drown it out with double espressos, endless scrolling, or well-meaning friends telling us what we should do. But what if the most reliable advice doesn’t come from anyone else, but from your own small intestine?

The body is always giving us information. Our task is to learn how to listen, question, and discern.

Of course, gut feelings aren’t infallible. Sometimes they save our lives; sometimes they just echo old fears. A racing heart might mean you’re in danger… or it might mean you had too much coffee. That’s the tricky part: how do we know when to trust the nudge and when to pause?

The answer lies not in ignoring the gut, but in calibrating it. Just like a compass can be thrown off by magnetic interference, our internal compass can be skewed by trauma, chronic stress, or mental health struggles.

• Anxiety can make you hypersensitive to reading your body's signals and scanning the environment for potential danger that often isn’t there. 

• Depression can blunt your connection to your body, so it’s hard to attach to the reality of the present moment. 

• Trauma distorts cues, making it difficult to distinguish between safety and danger.

Even if your inner compass feels “off,” practice helps. By slowing down, tuning into sensations, and checking your instincts against reality, you can learn to sort out which signals are false alarms and which are genuine warnings. In doing so, you give yourself access to a deeper kind of wisdom: a partnership between body and mind.

THE ESSENTIALS

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