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Remember how you were always told to trust your gut instinct because it is never wrong? That well worn advice trope has another side and most likely life experience has taught you otherwise and that is when Gut Instinct turns into Butt Instinct.

Why does this even happen?

You may describe that vague feeling of knowing something without knowing exactly how or why, they used words like “professional judgment,” “intuition,” “gut instinct,” “inner voice,” and “hunch.” Other than that can you explain it any fruther? Most people cannot. Although the inner workings of the human mind are a mystery that may never be solved, recent research has uncovered some striking clues suggesting that our emotions and feelings might not only be important in our intuitive ability to make good decisions but may actually be essential.

Ah emotions. That means the intuitive pemdulum can swing either way. When does it tend to be right—and wrong?

It's primal.

First, your mind continuously processes information that you are not consciously aware of, not only when you’re asleep and dreaming but also when you’re awake. This helps explain the “aha” sensation you experience when you learn something that you actually already knew. The sense of revelation at the obvious occurs when your conscious mind finally learns something that your subconscious mind had already known. The lay terms “left brain” for the conscious, rational, and logical and “right brain” for the subconscious, intuitive, and emotional. Decision making is far from a cold, analytic process but, emotions and feelings play a crucial role by helping us filter various possibilities quickly, even though our conscious mind might not be aware of the screening. Our intuitive feelings thus guide our decision making to the point at which our conscious mind is able to make good choices. So just as an abundance of emotion (anger, for example) can lead to faulty decisions, so can its paucity but the main contender for Butt Instinct is BIAS. And we all have those.

Often, your gut is just plain wrong—because it's subject to biases. For instance, we usually overestimate our abilities—failing to get feedback on our decision-making mistakes, and therefore not learning from them. And we conveniently forget about the times when trusting our guts led to poor decisions.

When you have trouble learning and self correcting well ... it stinks because you have used Butt Intution (Pun intended). I am not suggesting that you should not acknowledge or distrust your intution. You shold always consider it but to take the time to study your responses to it from past experiences. The gut is not always the best source of truth but understanding more about your responses is. Remember, gut responses are in fact highly curated and developed from exposure to different stimuli and events. Your gut is in chaoots with your brain - and the brain  uses memories of past experiences to predict what will happen next when a series of events or stimuli are repeated. You then feel the effects of your body’s interpretation of this predicted event, often triggering a fight or flight response. Do you take the risk or not? a signal is sent to the gut and viola! What's that you say? You are not biased? The fact that you even say or think that is an examole of cognitive bias. 

May all of this Gut Instinct stuff is simply a normal body response letting us know we need to look into a sitiuation at hand more deeply.

After all is better than passing all that gas.

Resources:

https://hbr.org/2001/02/when-to-trust-your-gut

https://www.betterup.com/blog/when-trusting-your-gut-can-get-you-in-trouble