How to Improve Your Intuition through Gut Health

Have you ever wondered how your gut seems to dictate how you feel or the mood you’re in?

We even say to one another, “I can’t explain it, but I’ve got a gut feeling about this.”

We call it intuition. Your gut somehow overrides what your cognitive process is telling you.

Everything looks good on the outside. It even looks good on the inside. But there’s that nagging feeling that something just doesn’t seem right.

A little time passes, and we find out our gut was absolutely right!

What if we use that same intuition to choose the foods we eat? What would our gut tell us?

We don’t need fancy tests to find out our exact microbiome, although they are helpful guides. We simply need to tune into what our body is telling us.

We’ve all had the experience of sitting down to an appetizing meal, only to realize that it did not agree with our stomach. We end up racing to the bathroom with diarrhea or vomiting or both if you’re especially giving!

This is an obvious scenario. We ate something and we know that we will not eat it again. At least not from the same source or even prepared in the same way. And if the same thing happens with a particular food, we figure out to simply stay away from it. You don’t need intuition for that!

But what about the foods that are not so obvious?

The Health of Intuition

There is a phrase that says, “Your gut is your second brain”.

They use it to explain that “gut-instinct” when you just feel that something does not seem right. Or when you get butterflies in your stomach because you’re nervous or excited. Why is that?

Scientists have determined that the gut has the second-largest collection of nerves in the body (the brain and spine are #1).

But what if your gut health is disrupted? That collection of nerves may start to constantly send weird signals which create a feeling or a sense of something that “just does not seem right.” Or a constant sense of butterflies. Anxiety is common.

Therefore the health of your gut is imperative to maintain the health of your intuition.

The microbiome is important. Proper diet is important. Exercise is important.

These things all contribute to maintaining gut health and by extension, intuitive health.

The Slow Decline

The bizarre thing is that our gut health has evolved slowly over time, and therefore we may not realize there is a problem.

There might not actually be any problem at all because the changes have been slow enough for us to adapt to them.

We still have full control over our moods and intuition. At least, we think we do. We might realize it’s not perfect, but no cause for alarm.

However there comes a time when we finally realize that we simply do not feel 100%. We don’t feel like what we used to be when we were young. And therefore we chalk it up to aging and figure it comes with the years.

But while aging is certainly responsible to some degree, we should be able to maintain and even expand our vibrant health!

We are meant to grow into our years; not fall out of them.

How to Reestablish Your Intuitive Health

So what is causing our intuitive system to go awry?

Well, that’s kind of the wrong question.

A better question to consider is: Why am I off-balance? And how can I restore balance?

Your Doctor will certainly walk you through the different problems that can lead to subpar gut health.

Diet and exercise, toxic exposure, infectious exposure, and genetic inheritance are but a few examples that should be discussed with your Doctor in order to create a well-rounded approach to the possible problems causing disharmony.

When you have addressed all these factors (and maybe more), then you may begin to consider alternatives.

Alternatives which must be addressed to reestablish the balance of your health and must be restored in conjunction with other possible treatments..

“When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.” ~ Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, stated by Sherlock Holmes

Your Doctor will help you eliminate one possibility after another until one of two things happen:

1. The problem is identified and treated.
2. Every known possible cause has been considered.

In either situation, you are looking for a cause by back-tracking from the effect it produces within you: a.k.a. your symptoms.

In the first situation, you find the problem and have the solution. The Doctor hands you a diagnosis and a medication to treat it.

In the second situation, you get closer to your answer just as Thomas Edison had done with his light bulb.

“I have not failed. I just found 10,000 ways that will not work.” ~ Thomas Edison

Obviously, we don’t want to look into 10,000 possibilities before finding our answer. But we intuitively know the answer that brings us our unique health.

You are recreating your intuitive light bulb. It shown brightly the moment you were born. Over time, life happened and the bulb may have dimmed. But the light is still within you.

You have simply found many ways to dim the bulb. Now find the ways that brighten it.

What Brightens Your Light?

People can tell you to eat well and exercise daily. That’s great. These pieces of advice are brought to us by research studies as well as years of common sense.

But we don’t act on information that we KNOW to be true. We often take action on what we FEEL to be true. Then continue the actions we know will provide us results even when the feeling has passed.

Don’t believe me? Here’s an example:

We KNOW that potato chips and soda are bad for us. Yet we continue to eat them because they make us FEEL good. The “feeling” is NOT the sensation of taste, but the sense of pleasure it brings which activates the reward circuitry in our brains. So we repeat the action we know is bad.

What if we took conscious control of the habits we formed. Let’s consciously tune into what our intuition tells us about the food we eat.

Our gut will inform us that eating potato chips and drinking soda might feel good in the moment it is enjoyed, but then makes us feel lackluster for hours or days after ingestion. So what do we do to feel better?

You guessed it; Eat more of the same stuff that will make us feel good NOW, while knowing the same poor feeling will recur in the future!

But if we consciously recognize this cycle, we can break it. If we consciously tune into our body, we can recognize why it feels poorly because of what we have done in the past.

Furthermore, with atunement to our body, we can learn to begin recognizing the things that are actually good for us. And we will KNOW that these things are good for us because our bodies will FEEL good in the short-term AS WELL AS the long-term.

This is where people say things like, “No one ever regrets eating a salad.” Or “No one ever regrets going to the gym.” Why?

Because even though you might start going to the bathroom more frequently from the increased fiber, or feel sore after a good work-out, we KNOW in our heart-of-hearts (a strong FEELING) that what we have done is actually to the benefit of our bodies.

We did something that revitalizes our human body. And anything that creates vitality makes a lot of intuitive sense.

Look for Vitality

Look for vitality, your intuition will direct you.

It won’t tell you exactly what you’re doing wrong. But it will tell you that something is currently unbalanced.

Make a change and see if it helps. If you feel better, then perhaps your body is telling you to continue that new habit.

Of course, you must always confer with your Doctor. Have your healthcare team to help you determine if what you are embarking on is having a positive impact.

Intuition is usually right, but it certainly helps to have an objective point of view for additional guidance as well.