Welcome back to the savvy psychologist. I'm Dr. Ellen Hendrickson and every week I'll help you

meet life's challenges with evidence-based research, a sympathetic ear, and zero judgment.

Now, we've all been told to follow our heart, to go with our gut, and to trust our intuition. But how exactly? This week we'll talk about the what

and the how of going with your gut. So this week I got a really intriguing email from an anonymous listener.

She is a science PhD student and on the one hand is really into hard facts and figures.

On the other hand she's having a hard time using her well-honed logic to change a deep soul-level worry.

To be specific, a fortune teller once told her she would always be the third wheel in relationships and for years it's

turned out to be true. Now logically she knows this isn't really her destiny. She knows

it's a limiting story she tells herself, but how to overcome something that feels so true.

We've all been there, torn between logic on one hand, and intuition on the other. So what to do? Do you listen

to your gut or honor your mind? And how do you know if your gut is telling you the truth or

feeding you information based on fear. Now given the

evidence-based research part of my tagline it may be surprising to hear that

luck, gut feelings and intuition absolutely have a place in your life. You can't

spock your way out of every situation. And while the science of intuition may sound

like an oxymoron on the level of jumbo shrimp, living dead or freezer burn, it's actually

an important field of study.

If you want to hear it from the source, decades of research are distilled in Nobel Prize

winner Dr Daniel Connaman's acclaimed thinking fast and slow.

But for now here's the nutshell.

It turns out we humans have two systems to process information. One is the rational system.

Researchers out of Cornell University describe the systems succinctly. They call the rational

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