Blog Article/Post Caveat (Read First Please: Click the Link)
Gut feelings are based on an immediate and intuitive decision making process while our logical mind is about slow, thoughtful and evidence based decisions. Fast thinking and gut feelings dominate our decision making process simply because it is what we use in our natural nature driven survival processes. Most of the time our gut feelings are good to go and our survival over the last thousand years proves that to be true. They provide us fast and appropriate guidance in our daily endeavors.
This is where things get dicey, we have to have a solid foundation of knowledge, understanding and ongoing experience to achieve a solid gut instinct before we are faced with fear and a perception of risk because the concept of risk is difficult for the human mind to grasp as it is typically based on a perceived threat rather than any quantifiable measure of the threat itself but as with threats, conflict and violence the human mind does NOT have time to use the logical mind processes as indicated by its lack of speed.
"Danger is real, but risk is a construct that has many different meanings and definitions, it's a word we attach to things that are dangerous to try to gauge how dangerous they are to us."
Risk is about judgements and assumptions that are based on emotions, feelings and moods much to our detriment, in many cases. When there is a lack of data our feelings, fear is a big one here, fill in any missing pieces, and when emotions, feelings and moods are miscalibrated we can end up using bad judgement or worse yet, dangerous behavior like overstepping force levels in self-protection for self-defense.
Why academic endeavors, study of words and other data sources, coupled with appropriate training, practices and experiences are how we assimilate enough data to fill in more of those missing pieces in regard to self-protection, i.e., conflict and violence. Without that data-base of knowledge and understanding we end up making decisions and taking actions inappropriate or we pump up fear so that what we perceive as a threat may not be a true threat resulting in bad things coming our way.
Now we have to start being aware of and careful of our biases and that can color our research because as humans we tend to tailor our research and training and practices so that what we see, hear or feel causes us to gravitate toward the stuff that tells us what we want to believe and that belief becomes our reality.
Unknowns tend to make things worse for us, violence is often a surprise and not knowing what we should know about it makes our bias tendencies worse. This heightens our perceived risks and that triggers the monkey-mind taking us on a roller coaster ride.
If you see, feel or hear something and you don't have the data to feed our gut and that allows us to use our logical mind to create proper responses then we exacerbate the emotions, feelings and moods triggered flooding our mind and body with excessive adrenal chemicals further making things difficult if not impossible to handle.
To make use of our gut feelings we need to beed our logical mind and memory so we have something to work with when the sudden impact of conflict and violence hits. It's the only way.
I apologize to the author of the original sources, I can’t remember where and what inspired my writings above.
For reference and sources and professionals go here: Bibliography (Click the link)
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