Intuition is your gut feeling, your inner voice! Indeed, your gut knows what you want and which way you want to go. It is the inner voice that shows us the path of contentment, love, and happiness. It is a perfect example of the pious magic that exists inside each one of us, and very easily we tend to ignore it owing to our daily expectations, pressures, and deadlines.
When you begin listening to your instinct, you tend to come to a fork in the road. But, how can you tell if it’s your instinct guiding you, or it’s your impulse?
Let’s find out, but before that, we need to decipher what exactly impulse is?
An impulse is something that our subconscious mind suggests. It is up to us if we want to follow it or not.
When you act on an impulse, you are neither wrong nor right. You simply act without getting into the details. Thus, you don’t compare the pros and the cons. It is similar to playing darts being blindfolded. You hold the dart, and you know you need to throw it to hit the bullseye, but you are clueless where the bullseye is.
Consequently, you might hit the bullseye or might end up hitting your friend who is playing with you. There is no accurate way of knowing how to hit it correctly even if you are confident of your skills.
Similarly, when you make decisions based on your impulse, you react immediately to the situation, person, place or emotion in front of you. You don’t fundamentally sit down to analyze the entire thing.
You shoot in the dark! Do you want to go on this way in your life journey?
Let’s Find Out The Top Reasons Why You Need To Act Based On Instinct And Not Impulse:
- Our Brain Is Always At Work
We continue to accumulate a lot of learning as we turn the pages of our life. Every day, minute or second we live, our brain is storing all our experiences. According to Dr. Herbert Simon, our brain forms specific patterns, and we tend to recognize the similarities in the situations we encounter.
It is our brain that can associate one or more of these patterns formed and becomes a storehouse of the entire knowledge that is gained from our life experiences. Dr. Simon believes that when we sense a little familiarity in any situation, we tend to recognize it. This is what he thinks is our instinct.
Dr. Damasio supports his study which says it’s the instinct that makes our decision making relatively easier by giving it one direction.
We don’t only remember the facts of the outcome, but we also remember how we felt, whether the feeling was good or bad. The associated emotions and the facts play a more substantial role in our decisions.
By acting on our instinct, we tap on our subconscious mind which is a storehouse of all information which our conscious mind has no clue of.
- Instinct Is Learned Knowledge
Dr. Gerard Hopkinson who is a renowned professor at Leeds University Business School has also been successful in drawing reliable conclusions from his research on instinct. He has also driven similar results as Dr. Damasio and Dr. Simon. He explains that events in our life might happen so rapidly that we might not realize that our intuition is acting by a logical thinking process.
Time and again, our brain compares all the details of the present situation with the events happened in the past.
So, it might happen that instinctively we might react physically as compared with an impulsive thought.
According to researchers, if our intuition seems to arise from some unknown inner source, then it is undoubtedly a form of logically reasoning done by our subconscious mind.
Thus, our instinct might have more power than we think of it.
- Before Making A Decision, Check With Your Instinct First
If anytime you feel that something is not correct, NEVER ignore it. Give your instinct a chance to think and respond. Do not act impulsively.
Your first step towards making any crucial decision should be to check your gut instinct. As you all would be knowing, our brain has two hemispheres. In the left hemisphere, all the sequential, logical, verbal, and rational processes take place. In the right hemisphere, all artistic, imaginative and creative activities take place. For the best decision, use both hemispheres.
Always combine your instincts with your logical thought for your decision making.
- Your Instinct Completely Belongs To You
Whether your instinct is correct or not depends entirely on your judgment. The best part is that it belongs completely to you and nobody else can take its access from you. One can become aware of only one’s instinct as you become aware of yours.
Thus, what your instinct tells you might not be what somebody else’s is telling them, and this might be one of the other reasons why your instinct is just perfect. As your instinct belongs to your personal truth – what is best for you, what makes you satisfied, happy, fulfilled and at peace. So, act on it, it is your secret to your self-knowledge, self-respect, self-security, and self-love.
- Your Instinct Is Your Secret For Your Life
Your instinct is your secret. It is not for your life in general but your life journey. It is your map that will show you the best way, step via step, even though you will be unsure of your destination, you will have some sense of security of knowing exactly where you are at that point. So, taking decisions from your instinct give you a sense of security.
- Our Instinct Is A Behavioral Persuasion That Is Hard-Wired Into Our Body
We all have built instincts of what we need for our survival: Instinct to breathe, the instinct to find shelter, instinct to eat and the instinct to respond to danger. For certain instincts, we have no choices around, and we even bypass our impulses for them. We have no control over them. For example, if we accidentally touch something hot, we take away our hand.
For other instincts, we have certain control as there is time for us to react. For instance, when you are hungry (you exhibit the instinct to feed), you can get very grumpy and can have a powerful impulse to munch on anything. But, you can talk to yourself and say, “I cannot eat just anything just because I’m hungry. I am only 10 minutes away from food, so can eat it then.”
Thus, you can overpower your impulse to eat just anything with your instinctive thinking.
- Being Impulsive Can Be Possibly Dangerous
There are times when acting impulsively in your life be distressing. When impulsivity becomes proportional to anxiety, it can be a sign a potential threat. One can take wrong decisions in life being impulsive. Learn to control anxiety and begin taking your decisions based on your instincts.
At The End…
It is significant not to confuse instinct with impulse. While impulse is an urge, instinct is understanding. Thus, it all comes down to acting in a spur or having the control of whether to act or not. We all need to make decisions in our life. We need to work on ourselves to make instinctive decisions till the time it becomes a habit. Only then, instinctive decisions will lead to more instinctive decisions.
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