Just Follow Your Gut

Just follow your gut. Trust your heart. Follow your instincts. Ah yes, those vague and elusive pieces of advice that some people like to give. Perhaps some of you readers have been given this advice by someone. I know I have been several times, but what does it mean? It’s almost as if they are suggesting the answer will come out of thin air, or that if you dig deep down inside yourself you already know the answer. These statements sound awfully reminiscent of certain function viewpoints, don’t they?

At its core, following your gut or even your heart is a suggestion to use abstract or subconscious information to guide your decision. Trusting your instincts to me seems to point to not making a decision until you absolutely have to. To some it may seem like a piece of cop out advice, while to others it may be genuinely helpful. So, let’s go over the three different but seemingly similar pieces of advice and see what they root back to.

1. Just follow your gut

This piece of advice seems pretty Ni in nature. Having gut hunches and the like are all things that have stereo-typically tied back to Ni. As such, following your gut would be a very Ni piece of advice to hand out, suggesting you should be able to intuitively know what your next move should be if you try hard enough. So, if you do have Ni somewhere in you stack you might find this piece of advice helpful.

For me as an ISTJ, the advice of following your gut is probably the worst possible piece of advice I could ever hope to try following. As a Si user, all of my collective experiences sit in the conscious part of my mind. There is no subconscious well of information for me to draw on. So, if I try to dip my bucket into that well, it’s going to come up dry. Attempting to follow my gut would be akin to me making wild guesses and leaving my decisions up to chance.

‘Just follow your gut’ would probably be good for other Ni users. Honestly though, if you have Ni high and use it regularly, following your ‘gut’ is something you’ve already been doing anyway. Even though Ni ‘gut’ knowledge seems to come from nowhere, it does indeed come from somewhere. That somewhere happens to be the repository of all your subconscious impressions and experiences.

2. Follow your heart

This piece of advice seems to lean more Fi in nature. It’s possible it could lean Fe as well. At its core, it seems to suggest that the answer lies somewhere within your feelings. It suggests that somewhere deep down you know what’s right and introspecting on those feelings should bring about the answer to your problems.

I can relate better with this advice than that previous one, but for me personally, I can’t find it to have a practical application for myself. Throughout life, you may find that the heart does more in the way of leading you astray than it does leading you to correct choices. Bad career choices, poor decisions, and dead end roads can all be the end result of following your heart’s desires. While it may have its time and place, it feels more akin to a tired movie cliche than a piece of valuable advice. However, I am not saying it is completely without time or place. I’m sure it’s possible it could be considered good advice in a specific set of circumstances.

3. Follow your instincts

This sounds like advice a high perceiver would give, be that Se or Ne. What does the advice mean? Well, this more or less boils down to taking each moment as it comes and immediately reacting to it (sometimes for better, sometimes for worse). At the end of the day though, you’re not so much listening or trusting your gut as you are choosing to let an “in the moment” reaction dictate your decision making process. Some may argue that it’s the same thing, but I would argue there is a difference between following your gut and following your instincts, even though I have seen them used interchangeably. I would say trusting your gut would be thinking you have the right answer without being able to quantify why; while using your instincts would be not coming up with an answer at all until you absolutely have to.

Again, relating this advice to myself would be catastrophic. By its very nature, the advice is admonishing me to rely on my inferior function for the answer to my problems. While I am an advocate of exercising your inferior function in order to develop it, I wouldn’t advise trying to exercise it in a situation where you need to make a critical decision (and as a result, feel compelled to actively seek advice from others.)

If you have a high perceiving function and you perhaps had a momentary doubt in your dominant function, someone giving you this advice could end up being legitimately helpful. Perhaps, it would give you the push you need to reinvigorate your confidence; but like the two other pieces of advice, I feel like the timing and the person to whom it is spoken to needs to be tailored in order for it to be of any use.

In conclusion

That’s my take on the three. Let me know if any of you guys have ever been given any of the above advice. Did you find it helpful? What was your experience with it? Let me know down in the comments below.