Trust Yourself

“Why am I sad? I shouldn’t feel this way — I should be happy to have a well-paying job in this economy.”

“I feel hurt because that friend didn’t invite me to that party, but I’m probably overreacting — they probably just forgot.”

“I feel sad whenever I meet this friend of mine. I don’t know why — he’s so nice! Something must be wrong with me.”

“Oh, I feel rejected and hurt because he hasn’t responded to my message all afternoon… he’s so busy, I should be more understanding. I know I have anxious attachment…”

If you recognize yourself in any of these statements, this post is for you.

The pattern usually goes like this: “I feel bad, but I shouldn’t feel this way because of reason XYZ.”

In other words, we are telling ourselves: I don’t trust my deepest perceptions or the subconscious conclusions that surface through feelings.

We are essentially saying: I do not trust myself.

Maybe we pride ourselves on our reasoning skills and enjoy analyzing our thoughts and feelings. This is occasionally helpful, because we might indeed be perceiving certain situations incorrectly for many reasons — hormone levels, physical health, restfulness, past experiences, and more.

But we shouldn’t try to self-analyze every mental process — it’s a waste of time and energy, and our so-called logical conclusions are often wrong.

As human beings, we have incredibly complex, multi-layered, parallel psychological processes happening beneath conscious awareness. There is so much continuous input that we simply don’t have the capacity to process everything consciously.

Just like other animals we evolved from, our perceptions and conclusions are processed internally, and the results appear as bodily sensations — feelings that non-verbally tell us what is happening around us.

Imagine early humans — our evolutionary ancestors who hadn’t yet developed language. All communication relied on body language, and all of their conclusions came through feelings: who was reliable, who was deceitful, whether it was safe to continue hunting, whether danger was near.

It’s reasonable to assume that these non-verbal mechanisms remain robust and reliable — and are often telling you the truth.

“Trusting your feelings is your most ancient form of intelligence.”

Try it for yourself — you may find that many of your troubling questions have straightforward answers if you simply trust yourself i.e. you trust your feelings and instincts.

The answers may be simple, but they might lead to new challenges:

“Why am I sad? My job is indeed well-paid, but it doesn’t reflect my true interests.”

“It hurts that my friend is excluding me from the party. Our friendship seems to be different from what I thought.”

“Although my friend is very nice, he just isn’t receptive to my ideas and concerns, which makes me sad. I need to go out and seek deeper connections with others.”

“Oh, I feel rejected and hurt because he doesn’t want to engage with me.”

Yes, the answers may be difficult and challenging, but trusting ourselves brings enormous rewards — it is absolutely worth the momentary discomfort they might cause because we finally begin to see that we are not as lost or confused as we once believed.

We actually do have strong preferences — for certain activities, friendships, romantic dynamics, and even small things like scents, flavors, images, and colors. And we have strong dislikes, too.

Paying attention to how we feel helps guide us away from situations that require constant emotional analysis and toward situations that simply feel right — no analysis needed.