Making Decisions from Your Body

Making Decisions From Your Body

The Secret Your Gut Has Been Trying to Tell You

Reading time: 10 minutes
Best experienced: When you have a decision to make

There's a man sitting in a Wall Street trading office. He's about to execute a trade that looks perfect on paper. The numbers are solid. The timing is optimal. Every rational analysis suggests it's the right move.

But his stomach is tight. There's a subtle sense of dread. Something feelsoff.

He doesn't trade.

Three hours later, the market shifts dramatically. The trade he didn't make would have lost him hundreds of thousands of dollars.

His colleagues ask: "How did you know?"

His answer: "I didn't know. But my body knew."

This is not mystical thinking. This is neuroscience.

Your Body Knows Before Your Mind Can Explain

Remember the Iowa Gambling Task I mentioned briefly in an earlier post? Researchers asked participants to select cards from decks with different risk-reward profiles. The decks were rigged: some were traps that looked good initially but had hidden costs. Others seemed risky but were actually advantageous long-term.

Remarkably, participants' bodies figured this out before their minds did.

How? Through somatic markers—subtle bodily reactions that unconsciously mark options as "approach" or "avoid." The body was scanning for patterns, integrating vast amounts of data, and generating gut feelings. And those gut feelings wereaccurate.

Here's what's crucial:Your body is processing information that your conscious mind cannot access. It's detecting micro-expressions in faces. It's sensing incongruences between words and tone. It's pattern-matching against decades of experience. It's responding to subtle cues about authenticity, safety, and alignment.

When you feel "something's off" about a person who seems fine on the surface—your body is right. When you have a "good feeling" about an opportunity that logically shouldn't work—your body is reading something your mind hasn't yet formulated.

Your gut isn't just poetic language. It's where your integrated wisdom lives.

The Three Types of Bodily Knowing

Not all body signals are created equal. It helps to distinguish three types:

Type 1: Conditioned Fear

This is when your nervous system has learned to fear situations that aren't actually dangerous. Someone who experienced public speaking criticism might feel panic at the thought of presenting, even when the audience is supportive. The body is responding to an outdated threat assessment.

Conditioned fear often shows up as rapid heart rate, shallow breathing, and a sense of danger that doesn't match the actual situation. The body's message isn't wisdom; it's outdated protection.

Type 2: Somatic Markers

This is genuine wisdom emerging from your nervous system's pattern-detection. When you meet someone and feel they're trustworthy—even though you haven't verified facts yet—that's somatic marking. When an opportunity feels aligned with your values—before you can fully articulate why—that's your body's wisdom.

Somatic markers show up as warm expansion, clarity, or a sense of "rightness." There's no anxiety; there's just resonance.

Type 3: Values Resonance

This is when your body is signalling alignment or misalignment with your deepest values and commitments. It might feel like expansion, warmth, and energy. Or it might feel like tension, heaviness, and contraction—not fear, but disconnection.

A person might have a prestigious job opportunity that should excite them, but their body contracts. The body is saying: "This doesn't align with what actually matters to you."

The Practice: Embodied Decision-Making

How do you distinguish between conditioned fear and genuine wisdom? How do you make decisions that honour both your rational analysis and your embodied knowing?

Here's a practice you can use whenever facing a significant decision:

The Somatic Decision Inquiry (15-20 minutes)

You'll need a pen and paper.

Step 1: Define the Decision (2 minutes)

Write a single sentence describing your decision. Not the analysis—just the question. "Should I take this job?" "Should I end this relationship?" "Should I invest in this opportunity?"

Step 2: Establish Baseline (2 minutes)

Do a brief body scan. How are you currently feeling, physically and emotionally? Notice this baseline so you can detect shifts.

Step 3: Explore Option A (3 minutes)

Imagine you've chosen Option A. Vividly imagine it. You're doing it. It's working out. You're living it.

Notice what happens in your body over 60 seconds:

●Where do you feel sensations?

●Is it warmth or coolness?

●Expansion or contraction?

●Clarity or confusion?

●Energy or depletion?

Write brief notes. No judgment. Just observation.

Step 4: Return to Baseline (1 minute)

Take some deep breaths. Shake it out if needed. Return to neutral.

Step 5: Explore Option B (3 minutes)

Repeat the process with Option B. Imagine you've chosen it. Live into it for 60 seconds. Notice bodily response.

Write notes.

Step 6: Explore Other Options (if applicable)

If you have more than two options, explore each one.

Step 7: Integrate (3 minutes)

Now review your notes. Which options created:

●Warmth, expansion, energy, clarity?

●Coolness, contraction, depletion, confusion?

●A sense of rightness or wrongness?

Importantly: This is not the whole answer. You're gathering data from your embodied wisdom. You still need rational analysis. But you're creating a conversation between your gut and your brain.

Often, what emerges is clarity: "Option A looked good on paper, but my body contracts every time I imagine it. Option B feels aligned even though it's scarier." Or: "I thought I wanted Option A, but imagining it creates anxiety, not excitement. My body is telling me this comes from fear, not wisdom."

The Integration

Here's where it gets interesting: When you honour both your rational analysis AND your embodied wisdom, decisions become more sustainable. You're not just choosing with your head. You're choosing with your whole self.

Research on successful decision-makers—in business, medicine, sports, and life—consistently shows this: The best choices come when people integrate analytical thinking with somatic intelligence.

A Deeper Truth: Trusting Yourself Again

One of the deepest damages that happens through disconnection isloss of self-trust.

You don't trust your gut because you've been trained to override it. You don't trust your intuition because you've been taught it's unreliable. You don't trust your body because you've been told to ignore it.

But when you start practicing embodied decision-making, something profound happens:You begin to trust yourself again.

You realise that your bodydoeshave wisdom. That your gutisreliable. That your intuitionisworth listening to.

This isn't about becoming impulsive or rejecting rational thought. It's about recovering an integrated way of being where your whole self—mind, body, intuition, and reason—participates in your choices.

That's when decisions stop feeling like willpower exertion and start feeling like alignment. That's when you're not fighting yourself. You're moving as one unified being.

Your Homework

For the next week:

1.Use the Somatic Decision Inquirywith a decision you're currently facing.

2.Notice small decisions throughout your day.When you choose what to eat, what to wear, where to sit—notice your body's response. Is it expansion or contraction? Excitement or reluctance?

3.Practice saying "no" to things your body contracts around,even if your mind says you "should" do them. You're recalibrating trust in your body's wisdom.

4.Notice moments of good gut feelingsand moments when "something feels off." Journal about these. Were you right? What was your body detecting?

5.When facing a decision, practice saying: "I'm going to trust my whole self in this choice—my thinking mind and my body's wisdom." See what shifts.

Closing Reflection

Here's the thing about embodied decision-making: It requires something many of us have lost.

It requires trust.

Trust in yourself. Trust in your body. Trust that you're wise enough to make your own choices.

That trust has probably been damaged. Maybe through experiences where listening to your body wasn't safe. Maybe through being taught that your instincts were wrong. Maybe through a thousand subtle messages that you should listen to external experts instead of your own knowing.

Rebuilding that trust is radical. It's countercultural. It's powerful.

And it starts with something simple: deciding that your body's wisdom matters. That it's worth listening to. That it's guiding you—imperfectly, but genuinely—toward choices that align with who you actually are.

Next post:We'll bring it all together—Safety, Story, and Strategy—and explore how embodied wisdom becomes a lived practice that transforms not just individual lives but relationships, teams, and communities.