The Art of Grit

(10 minutes)

I’ve always been curious about hunches—the quiet tug beneath thought, the faint whisper that insists before reason arrives. They don’t announce themselves loudly, the way logic does. They murmur. They hover at the edge of awareness like a faint radio signal you have to lean toward to hear.

For most of my life, I treated them as background noise—useful at times, inconvenient at others. It wasn’t until I learned more about how intuition works in the body that I began to see hunches not as vague feelings, but as sophisticated data. Biological, not mystical. They are the sum of everything we’ve observed but haven’t yet articulated, our subconscious keeping score long before our conscious mind catches up.

The Quiet Science of Intuition

In neuroscience, intuition isn’t magic—it’s pattern recognition at high speed. The brain, always scanning and categorizing, learns to detect familiar cues long before we consciously interpret them. Researchers have found that certain areas—particularly the insula and anterior cingulate cortex—light up when we experience a “gut feeling.” These are regions tied to emotional memory and bodily awareness, not language or logic.

This might explain why hunches are felt rather than reasoned. They register in the body first—an unease in the stomach, a sudden calm, a flicker of attention. What we call intuition is really the body’s early detection system: a synthesis of millions of subtle signals—facial expressions, tones, microgestures—that the conscious mind doesn’t have time to process.

It’s not infallible, but it is ancient. Long before we had words, we had sensations.

The Cost of Overruling Ourselves

Modern life, however, doesn’t make much room for this kind of knowing. We’ve trained ourselves to privilege the rational, to “trust the facts” even when something inside us disagrees. In offices, we defer to data. In relationships, to appearances. We’ve become fluent in metrics but tone-deaf to instinct.

The trouble is that when we ignore hunches long enough, they don’t stop speaking—they simply go underground. They show up as indecision, as restlessness, as a vague sense of being out of alignment. Our bodies feel the dissonance even when our minds deny it.

There’s a phrase in psychology—somatic marker hypothesis—that suggests emotions serve as shortcuts for decision-making. When something “feels off,” it’s often because your brain has unconsciously compared it to thousands of past experiences and found an anomaly. The feeling is a flag, not a flaw.

Yet most of us learn to dismiss these inner cues in the name of reason. We call them irrational, when in truth they’re pre-rational. They arise from a kind of wisdom older than words.

The Language of the Body

Hunches rarely speak in sentences. They communicate through the body’s subtleties: a tightening in the jaw, a sudden clarity, a sense of relief you can’t explain. They don’t argue or persuade; they nudge.

The philosopher Eugene Gendlin once wrote, “Your body knows the situation better than your mind.” I’ve come to believe this. The body collects data we don’t consciously record—the pauses in someone’s voice, the rhythm of a conversation, the silence between words. It’s the original instrument of perception.

We often think intuition lives somewhere mysterious—perhaps in the heart or soul—but it’s closer to home. It lives in the nervous system, in the delicate interplay between memory and sensation. When something feels “right” or “off,” that’s the body’s quiet intelligence at work.

Learning to Listen

The challenge isn’t in having hunches; it’s in making space for them. They thrive in the margins—in stillness, in pauses, in the moments before reaction. When life becomes too loud, they retreat.

Sometimes listening to intuition means resisting the urge to immediately justify it. It’s allowing a feeling to linger long enough to be understood. I’ve found that writing helps—describing the feeling without analyzing it, letting language catch up to sensation. Other times it’s movement: a walk, a swim, anything that lets the body express what the mind can’t yet translate.

The key is to build trust—not blind faith, but familiarity. The more we act on hunches and see where they lead, the clearer their voice becomes.

The Proof of Experience

I can think of countless moments when ignoring a hunch led me astray—not dramatically, but subtly. A project that didn’t sit right, a conversation I delayed, a decision I rationalized into being. In hindsight, my body knew. It always knows first.

And there were times when I listened—to that faint inner pull toward something or someone—and the outcome wasn’t always “safe,” but it was always true. Hunches don’t guarantee comfort; they guide us toward alignment. There’s a quiet integrity in following them, even when logic can’t yet defend the choice.

Neuroscientists might say this is the brain leveraging its hidden archives, while philosophers might call it a return to the authentic self. I don’t think the distinction matters much. What matters is that we remember to listen.

Reclaiming the Whisper

The modern world rewards speed, but hunches are creatures of stillness. They require us to slow down, to let the body have a say. This isn’t about rejecting logic—it’s about completing it. Intuition and reason were never meant to compete; they were meant to collaborate.

If anxiety is the body remembering the future too soon, perhaps intuition is the body remembering the truth before the mind can. Both are biological, both ancient, both ways of keeping us alive. The difference lies in what they ask of us: anxiety demands vigilance; intuition invites trust.

To cultivate that trust is to rejoin a conversation with ourselves that’s been going on all along.

A Toast to the Quiet Knowing

If I were to raise a glass to anything, it might be to that quiet knowing that never stops trying to reach us—the flicker of awareness behind every decision, the feeling that precedes understanding.

We live in a world overflowing with information and starving for wisdom. Hunches are how wisdom still gets through. They are the body’s shorthand for truth, written in sensation rather than language.

So here’s to the instinct that hums beneath thought, to the signal behind the noise. May we learn to give it a louder voice, and may it lead us—not always where we planned to go, but where we most need to be.