Research is revealing the mood benefits of making intuitive decisions, but some situations call for an analytical approach
We make numerous decisions from day to day – some through deliberation, others more intuitively, from the ‘gut’. It’s only 7 o’clock in the morning, but I have already made a few gut decisions. I have a four-month-old son who was hungry at 5 am. After breastfeeding, he wanted to engage in our usual morning sing-song play. But, looking at him, I had the impression that he was still very tired. I don’t know exactly why; maybe it was something in his eyes, or the way he moved. Whatever it was, I listened to my intuition and decided to give him a kiss and leave him to sleep some more. I felt pleased in doing so. After getting back to bed myself, I realised that, unlike my son, I didn’t feel like sleeping. I already felt full of energy. Without thinking too much of it, I decided to make some coffee and took advantage of the calm to write this article.
Now take a moment to think about the decisions that you have already made today, whether they were big or small. Then consider this: did you decide after careful deliberation, or did you decide using your intuition? And how did you feel afterward?
These different approaches to decision-making – deliberate and intuitive – align with two modes of information-processing described in psychology. The first, more deliberate mode operates rather slowly, linearly and consciously. It operates, for example, when you try to solve ‘18 x 24’ or when you think about the pros and cons of spending your next holiday in Thailand. The results can usually be justified explicitly. For example, after carefully weighing which car to purchase, you could tell someone your reasons for choosing to buy this particular model and not that one.
The other, intuitive information-processing mode operates quickly and associatively. Its outcomes are experienced as gut feelings, hunches or intuitions. They can feel like knowing something without knowing how you know. They are strongly connected to affect and metacognitive feelings, such as feelings of rightness and confidence. When you make a gut decision at a restaurant, you have simply made a choice because it felt right – like the decisions I made this morning.
People who come to therapy suffering from depression often report difficulties with making decisions
My recent research findings suggest that people are often well-advised to decide intuitively, in terms of how it makes them feel. There is emerging evidence that the act of deciding – and, in particular, making gut decisions – is emotionally rewarding.
My interest in this possibility arose partly from my work as a psychotherapist. I have observed that people who come to therapy suffering from depression often report difficulties with making decisions. Patients also commonly report that they have lost trust in their intuition. ‘I have lost my inner compass,’ someone might say, or: ‘I used to rely on my gut, but that feeling is gone.’ My research colleagues and I have found mixed evidence on whether patients with depression have impairments in the processes that underlie intuition. Some findings suggested that people are less intuitive when they are anxious. My interest in intuition and wellbeing has since led me to explore the relationship between them more broadly.
A key hypothesis is that making decisions in daily life – especially intuitive decisions – makes people feel good. Why might this be the case? First of all, making a decision should make someone feel better because, by deciding, one regains cognitive resources for other tasks. Making a decision should also typically bring a person closer to their personal goals and help them to fulfil their needs. Intuition is especially important for this because it integrates a lot of information (such as bodily signals, emotional cues and environmental information) simultaneously into a coherent whole. In doing so, it might help someone come to a choice that is in line with needs they are not even aware of in a given moment. The satisfaction of a need usually makes people feel good. Finally, intuitive decisions are made more fluently than deliberate ones, and people tend to like what comes about fluently (and dislike what feels effortful and less easy).
To test our hypotheses, my colleagues and I asked university students to reflect back on decisions they had made that day and how they had felt before and afterwards. Generally, we found that they recalled feeling better after making a decision. And, in line with what we expected, this apparent mood change was more pronounced for decisions that people had made intuitively rather than deliberately.
We wanted to be better able to draw conclusions about cause and effect, so we recently followed up with an experimental field study, in which we randomly encouraged adults to decide either intuitively or deliberately as they went about their daily lives. For at least 14 days, participants in our project were asked to report to us online when they were about to make a decision – such as whether or not to meet a friend, what to eat, or how to solve a conflict with someone else. After receiving their prompt to make the upcoming decision intuitively (following their gut) or deliberately (thinking carefully and taking their time), they shared with us what they had decided and how they were feeling.
Day-to-day choices might lead to a stronger mood boost if you make them intuitively rather than deliberately
Again, we found that people generally felt better right after decisions – and that this mood increase was stronger after intuitive decisions, compared with deliberate decisions. This positive mood change after intuitive decisions even lasted until the implementation of that decision. Furthermore, people rated intuitive decisions as more satisfying and more in line with their preferences, and they were more likely to be implemented (eg, actually going to the gym after work, if that’s what was decided). We examined one of the expected mechanisms behind the positive mood changes – the ease of making decisions – and found that the more easily a decision was made, the better one’s mood afterwards. And intuitive decisions were made more easily than deliberate ones.
In many cases, gut feelings will accurately tell someone what is good for them in daily life because intuitions develop over time, based on the vast number of experiences that one has had. The more experience you have in a particular area, and the better the learning conditions were in which you developed your intuitions, the wiser it is to trust your gut. This could apply to decisions of the sort you’ve made many times before, and where the stakes of ‘getting it right’ are low: day-to-day choices about which meal to select, what movie to watch, or which shirt to buy might lead to a stronger mood boost if you make them intuitively rather than deliberately. At least, this is what our recent study results suggest.
To take a more complex example, if you have a vague feeling that your partner or friend might not be feeling well after a short phone call, you might be wise to follow your intuition, and go to see them. It is likely that many cues led to this intuition, from their tone of voice to the subtle pauses in between sentences, cues that are meaningful to you because of your extensive experience with this person. If you follow your gut feeling in this situation, there is little downside, and you will probably feel better than if you first carefully weighed the costs and benefits of following up.
The other side of this, of course, is that intuitive decisions may not always be the most adaptive ones. This might be the case, for instance, when you have little clue about what the best decision is because you lack relevant experience. This might happen when you start a job in a new field, or if you have to respond to someone’s behaviour in an unfamiliar cultural context. While an intuitive decision in a situation where you lack experience might feel good momentarily, you may end up being better off if you think deliberately about different options and compare your initial gut reaction with what your ‘head’ is telling you.
My clinical work has shown me how much the usefulness of intuition depends on someone’s past experiences and the quality of their learning environment. I think of a patient of mine, a young woman who had difficulty forming close relationships. She felt most secure when she kept people at a distance, but she also felt very lonely. During our work, it became clear that she had grown up with a mother who was emotionally unpredictable – sometimes reacting warmly when she sought closeness, other times turning away and disparaging her. More or less consciously, she came to terms with simply not expressing her need for closeness anymore. With this lesson came a recurring gut feeling that led her to choose to remain distant and cool in social situations. Although following this intuition made her feel safe and good in the short term, it was not helping her build trusting relationships. Intuition was leading her astray.
In these and countless other circumstances, intuitions can have a major impact on what people think and do. They have a great potential, not least because the underlying unconscious processes are linked to our preferences and past learning experiences. In many everyday situations, following a gut feeling will make you feel good in the moment, and sometimes it will also carry little risk. Please, in those instances, go with your gut. But in some other cases, our personal preferences may not be ideal for guiding a decision, or we have had experiences that taught our gut the wrong lesson. Sometimes it’s better to think things through rather than rely on intuition. Fortunately, as we face these various situations, we have both options at our disposal.