And hello to you and welcome to the Richard Nichols podcast, the Personal Development

Podcast series that's here to help inspire, educate and motivate you to be the best you can be.

I'm psychotherapist Richard Nichols, and this episode is titled, You Can't Always Trust Your Gut.

And if you're ready, we'll start the show.

Hi there everybody. Welcome to a new month. How's it all going?

Sounds weird, but sometimes it's difficult to tell, isn't it? On paper,

things can be fine, but you can still have a funny feeling that everything's going to go wrong

soon, as if our instinct, our unconscious mind hasn't quite caught up with reality. Instincts are

great, mostly. I love the fact that we have a conscious mind

and an unconscious mind. Never fails to fascinate me. I was taking us under school once,

never forget this, and we're about halfway there, and he just randomly said, oh, that's what it is,

damn it. What you want about? Says I. And he told me that all the

while we'd been driving, something had been bugging him. It had this funny feeling that he'd

forgotten something, but he didn't know what it was. Turns out, it was his watch. He wasn't

wearing his watch like he normally did. And he said that

there was this slight sense of anxiety in his body that had been there since we left the house.

But now that he consciously knew why it was there, the feeling went. He'd remembered what he'd forgotten, and so now, even though he can't do

anything about it, the anxiety was resolved. And obviously, being so interested in psychology,

the whole experience is fascinating to me, that our unconscious mind is telling us that something's wrong, but can't tell us what it is.

Because it doesn't work in language with words, unless we've got schizophrenia and we hear

voices. Usually our unconscious is too simple for that. It can only give us emotions, sensations in our body that either tell us that our expectations have been met and we're safe, or expectations have not been met and things are unpredictable and potentially dangerous. How amazing is that? This gut instinct that runs in the

background, effortlessly thinking so that we don't have to. It's brilliant. When it's working

...