Making an enormous life resolution will be agonizing: Do you have to give up your job and begin your individual enterprise? Have a child? Dump your accomplice? Even if you’re shuffling your tarot playing cards, shaking your Magic 8 Ball, or checking your horoscope to seek out a solution, deep down, you recognize it’s all as much as you. And there’s all the time some well-meaning individual reminding you to simply “belief your intestine,” which isn’t all the time useful—notably if the final time you probably did that, your intestine instructed you to get again along with your ex, and everyone knows how that turned out.

However in line with individuals who truly research decision-making, instinct is an actual factor—and there’s a solution to faucet into it that will help you make huge selections in a method that’s barely much less scary than throwing the cube and taking a leap.

“Intestine emotions will be an necessary supply of proof, in the identical method that we use our eyes or our ears to collect proof, to construct beliefs concerning the state of affairs in order that we will make the proper varieties of selections.” Karl Friston, MBBS, a professor of neuroscience at College Faculty London, tells SELF.

What precisely is a intestine feeling?

A intestine feeling, also referred to as your instinct, is mainly unconscious intelligence. Whereas it may be empowering to imagine solutions merely come to you out of skinny air, your instinct is definitely grounded in your private experiences, prior beliefs, and even what surrounding individuals inform you, Dr. Friston says. Primarily, your physique may replicate your frame of mind with out you even being conscious of it, within the type of one thing like a queasy feeling within the pit of your abdomen. “Don’t deny your physique,” he says. “That’s a extremely delicate and necessary supply of proof.”

Put one other method, instinct isn’t some kind of “magical expertise or additional sensory notion,” Gary Klein, PhD, a cognitive psychologist who focuses on decision-making, tells SELF. “Experience relies on tacit information, on refined cues, issues that folks didn’t even know that they knew, and one thing like a spidey sense.”

Whereas it’s a good suggestion to make notice of what your instinct is telling you, it’s additionally smart to query your preliminary “intestine feeling” and have a look at all of the components that may be affecting it, says Dr. Klein. “The actual world is difficult, it’s complicated, and it’s chaotic,” he says. “The knowledge we get is ambiguous. It’s a part of what makes life so thrilling, but additionally makes it arduous to know precisely what we will belief.”

The excellent news is, there are expert-recommended methods for utilizing your instinct that may higher set you up for fulfillment when taking a leap into the unknown.

First, take a beat to replicate on the previous. Have you ever made the identical kind of resolution again and again—as a result of it’s simply what you do—and had some not-so-great outcomes? That may very well be an indication that it may very well be time to rethink your reflexive method. “Concentrate on the mechanisms of your individual decision-making,” says Dr. Friston. “There’s a steadiness between going with what you usually do, and the type of choices you usually have interaction in, versus enthusiastic about issues.”