Are You Silencing Your Intuition With Food?

We have a brain in our gut that is primarily responsible for mobilisation (taking action), self-preservation (keeping you safe) and core identity (who you are). The messages/wisdom/intuition from your “gut feeling” relate to these areas.

Mbraining, Using Your Multiple Brains to do Cool Stuff.

So, if you;

Struggle to decide what action to take.
Keep making the same mistakes and end up getting hurt.
Are unsure of who you are aside from your societal roles

The messages from your gut brain are either being ignored or overpowered and overeating or eating the wrong foods could be the cause.

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The importance of “gut feeling”

“You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backward. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something–your gut, destiny, life and karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.” Steve Jobs

We live in a predominantly head-based society, favouring logical thought over gut feeling. We feel uncomfortable when we don’t know all the “how’s”. If something can’t be logically explained, we often disregard it.

Whilst our head brain is extremely important, we cloud its creativity with shoulds and can’ts. We’re feeding it information from external sources rather than looking internally for the answers, which is where the greatest wisdom can be found.

Research by Pierre Pallardy, osteopath, dietician, physical therapist and author of Gut Instinct: What Your Stomach is Trying To Tell You, showed that abdominal massage releases deep-rooted emotions and traumas. This is why many massage therapists stay away from the stomach area and why many of us get caught in the trap of comfort eating — we are using food to suppress our emotions.

We store a lot of hidden, unaired emotions in our gut, but our emotions are vital in letting us know when something is right or wrong.

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Is your diet silencing your intuition?

One of the main ways in which we unknowingly silence our intuition is with food.

The gut cannot think or process information properly when digesting a big, rich meal. Our wisdom, courage and motivation are negatively impacted by a belly full of food.

Think of how foggy your head can feel when you have over-indulged in junk food and how sleepy you feel after a large meal.

If you often struggle to “know” what to do, regularly say, “I knew I shouldn’t/should have done that”, and heavily rely on logic to make decisions, your gut feelings are not being heard.

These messages need silence to be heard and come in short, simple sentences or words, metaphors and symbols. They come through a lot slower than the messages from your head, which is why they often get overlooked.

If you are overeating or eating unhealthy foods, your gut is too busy digesting to provide valuable insight.

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Rediscovering your gut intuition

Leaflet with the words, let your intuition guide you. You are what you’ve been looking for.

Many spiritual traditions include fasting as a precursor to meditation and rituals involving deep intuitive processes. I know I can’t meditate when I’m full. I can’t clear my mind when I am bloated.

By allowing your gut to take a break from digesting, you are giving it the space required to communicate with your head brain in the way it does — slow, abstract and random.

The two branches of the autonomic nervous system innervate the gut-brain — sympathetic and parasympathetic. For optimal gut wisdom, these two systems should be balanced; however, we need to be in our parasympathetic system to digest food.

This parasympathetic state activates the left side of our head-brain, which produces logical thinking. The right side, activated by our sympathetic nervous system, has creative and intuitive thoughts.

Continuous grazing or filling yourself up until your stomach hurts puts you in a logical frame of mind. It disables your ability to develop creative explanations and solutions and inner wisdom.

Taking a break from eating gives your gut a chance to speak out and provide the knowledge you need to make wiser, more confident decisions. Ones that feel right.

Your gut is a powerful messenger. The food you feed it will decide how often and clearly you can hear its messages. Keep it healthy and use your internal guidance system — it’s the system that knows you best.

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This post was previously published on medium.com.

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