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The story I stopped telling
havegood instincts. I don't think that anymore. I think I got lucky once, on a coin that was weighted more than I knew.I turned down a client contract two years ago because something about the deal felt off, and I couldn't have told you what.
The numbers were fine. The references checked out. I said no anyway, went home, and felt slightly sick about it for a week, convinced I'd cost myself a decent retainer over nothing.
Four months later, that company was named in a fraud investigation that swallowed three of its vendors.
I told this story at a dinner for a year afterward as proof that I have good instincts. I don't think that anymore. I think I got lucky once, on a coin that was weighted more than I knew.
What both camps are missing
When people talk about "trusting your gut" or dismiss gut feelings as nonsense, they're actually referring to the same process: your body is always sending you signals.
These signals include changes in your heart rate, slight shifts in your breathing, and sensations in your stomach, all linked to what's happening around you, often before you even realize something's off.
Whether these signals help or hinder your decision-making isn't about whether you believe in gut feelings.
It's really about something more specific and measurable: how well you can sense what's going on inside your own body, a skill researchers call interoceptive accuracy.
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Same gut, different results
I think of it as signal and static. The signal is real: your body is genuinely tracking things your conscious mind hasn't caught up to yet.
Static is what happens when your ability to read that signal is poor - the same physical sensation gets misfiled as random anxiety, hunger, or excitement, and you act on whichever story is more convenient. Same body. Wildly different outputs.
Devon, who trades commodities for a small fund, used to treat every pre-trade stomach flutter as meaningful - sometimes it was, often it wasn't, and he couldn't tell the difference in the moment.
He started doing a specific drill before every trading day: sitting still for two minutes, counting his own heartbeats by feel, then checking against an actual pulse count.
Most days he was off by six or seven beats. After eight weeks of the drill alone, no other change, his estimates tightened to within two beats most mornings. He didn't start trusting his gut more.
He started trusting it selectively - the flutters that showed up on days his counts were accurate, and ignoring the ones that showed up on the days they weren't.
The trading-floor version of this isn't a metaphor. Kandasamy, Garfinkel, and colleagues tested eighteen traders on a London trading floor in 2016, using the same heartbeat-counting method, and compared them to forty-eight non-traders.
The traders scored significantly higher on interoceptive accuracy - and within that group, the more accurate a trader's heartbeat counting, the higher their profitability and the longer they survived in the job.
Separately, newer traders averaged a detection score of 68.7; traders with years of experience averaged 85.3, suggesting the skill itself sharpens with practice.
None of this requires believing in gut instinct as magic. It requires checking whether yours is currently well-calibrated or just loud.
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Here's the drill, the same one Devon uses and the same measure the trading-floor study used. Set a timer for sixty seconds.
Without touching your wrist or neck, count your heartbeats by feel alone. When the timer stops, press two fingers to your pulse for fifteen seconds and multiply by four.
The gap between your guess and the real number is a rough read on your current interoceptive accuracy - not a verdict, just a baseline.
You don't need to do anything with it yet. Noticing the size of the gap is most of what calibrates it.
This issue is archived at promptnproductive.com if you want the full sourcing. Reply and tell us how far off you were.