EPISODE DESCRIPTION
Welcome to It's Gonna Be Fine, the podcast where we highlight current topics and trends you may have missed, cut through the noise, and dig deeper to understand what's really going on.
This week, what if the thing you keep second-guessing is actually your intuition trying to tell you something? Matti explores why it can be so difficult to trust ourselves, and why we’re so quick to look outside ourselves for the “right” answer. From experts and algorithms to social expectations, self-improvement culture, and endless advice, there’s no shortage of voices telling us how we should live.
Matti shares some personal experiences with career decisions, overthinking, and the search for someone — or something — to tell him what to do. Along the way, he looks at what research says about intuition, the surprising potential downsides of meditation (something your intuition may have said is not for you, but society said it was), and the case for knowing when it’s time to quit.
Referenced in this Episode
Psychology Today - "Intuition"
The Atlantic - "The Dark Side of Mindfulness"
CBS News - "Why Quitting Can Be a Better Option" (via YouTube)
TRANSCRIPT
Hello and welcome to the It’s Gonna Be Fine podcast. I’m Matti, and I have a question for you: Have you ever heard of the sitcom Father Knows Best? It’s totally okay if you haven’t. It’s an old sitcom from the 1950s, one of those early, wholesome, family-friendly shows. The reason for the title is that whenever the kids in the family had an issue or made a mistake, the father character would offer the right advice to fix whatever was going on.
Admittedly, I’ve never seen the show, but for some reason, I knew it existed. I’m sure it was very cute, and I think it was pretty popular. It ran for six seasons. When I was putting this episode together, I thought of the show because of its title. And you know what? I don’t think I agree with that statement. Father knows best.
Sure, our dads, our moms, our parents know more than we do. Perhaps they have more wisdom and definitely have more life experience. But if you ask me, father doesn’t know best. There’s someone else who knows more. Someone else who knows better. And my hope is that after this episode, you’ll also walk away thinking: Father doesn’t know best. Mother doesn’t know best. YOU know best.
So let’s jump into it.
Why Is It So Hard to Trust Ourselves?
We’ve all had this happen, right? Probably so many times. I think I should do X, but I don’t actually want to. I think I should want Y, but something in me is saying no. I should take this job, shouldn’t I? I shouldn’t leave this job, right? I need a job. I should want to get married. I should want kids. I should stay in this relationship. I should leave this relationship.
Everyone says this is a great opportunity, so why don’t I want it? Do I actually want it? Why do I keep feeling like I shouldn’t do this when I can’t explain why? And the question becomes: What happens when your rational brain says one thing, but something inside of you says another? And why is it so hard to trust ourselves?
By the way, intuition isn’t just a feeling or a sixth sense. There’s legitimate research behind it. According to Psychology Today and some other research I’ve done, intuition, or gut feelings, is essentially our brains performing a rapid pattern-matching assessment based on previous experience. Your brain can recognize similarities between a current situation and things you’ve experienced before, even when you can’t articulate exactly what it’s noticing. Maybe you’re not consciously picking up on something, but your brain is making those connections. So intuition and gut feelings are real things worth listening to. We should be paying attention to them.
But why is it so damn hard to listen to our gut? Why do we feel like we have to research more, consult more people, and get caught up in analysis paralysis when we’re trying to make decisions? Well, there are definitely some reasons we all go through this, especially today.
The Noise of Everyone Else’s Expectations
If we think about the world we live in today, we’re absolutely saturated with instructions about how to live. It’s like a manual for how to maximize everything, if you will. We’ve got everyone else’s advice: experts, quote-unquote experts, friends, family, Reddit, reviews, podcasts, influencers. The list goes on and on. There are people in our ears about absolutely everything.
There’s also this pressure to optimize. Think about the popularity of meditating, journaling, exercising, finding your purpose, finding your life’s purpose, and having the best morning routine. If you don’t have your five-to-nine before your nine-to-five, are you even living? We’ve all seen that.
Then there are social expectations: what we’re supposed to want, what everyone else is doing, what our families expect of us, and what the social norms are. And we have that lovely tool, the necessary evil called the internet. With social media and algorithms constantly telling us what to buy, what to want, what to believe, what to worry about, and what to become, it’s no wonder we have trouble hearing ourselves.
There’s also our own history. Past experiences, fears, insecurities, and biases can all affect how we feel about certain situations in the present. And, as I mentioned, there’s analysis paralysis. We’re constantly gathering more and more information because we’re so afraid we might make the wrong decision.
Finally, there’s this desire for certainty. We want someone or something to tell us what the right answer is. That one really hits home for me. Sometimes there are things going on, and I’m just like, “Just tell me what to do. What should I do? I don’t want to have to think about this.”
In fact, I remember one of my past therapists telling me this all the time. Apparently, during my first session with him, when I went in to talk about whatever was bothering me, I basically sat down on the couch and said, “The reason I’m here is because I’m going to tell you everything that’s wrong, and I want you to tell me how to fix it. What should I do?”
That wasn’t his style. But throughout our time together, he would constantly reference that moment. He’d say something like, “Remember when you just sat down and wanted me to tell you what to do?” He made it his goal to help me learn how to do things for myself and make my own decisions rather than relying on external things. And that’s something we all face.
Honestly, there’s just so much noise. We’re so busy listening to everyone else that we never get quiet enough to notice what we think, what we feel, and what our actual selves are saying and telling us. This introduces a concept I guess we could call borrowed expectations. How much of what we think we want is actually something we’ve been taught to want, even though we might not really want it?
For some of us, the noise has gotten so loud that we’ve become disconnected from ourselves. We don’t trust ourselves anymore. And I’m one of those people.
When Looking for Answers Becomes the Problem
This is why I’m so passionate about this topic: I’ve absolutely experienced it myself. I’ve gone through a few different career transitions, and one in particular stands out. It was about 12 years ago, and it was a particularly challenging time.
I had no idea what to do. I had just moved cities, left a job, left friends, started a graduate school program, and then pretty quickly decided it wasn’t the right thing for me and left it. And I was stuck.
So what did I do? I watched YouTube advice video after YouTube advice video. I watched TED Talks. I read articles. I took all the quizzes. I even remember sending an email to a bunch of trusted colleagues, former colleagues, and friends. It was probably some video I’d seen that suggested emailing people you trust and asking them what they think because they know you best. So I did.
People responded and gave me tips and suggestions, but one person’s response really stuck out to me. She shared her thoughts and then said, “You know what might really help? This helped me in the past.” And then she said: “You might want to consider therapy.”
I guess she read my email and thought, “This guy has got to get it together. He’s trying a wee bit too hard, and something else is going on.” And she wasn’t wrong.
Thankfully, everything worked out. But at the time, I was frozen. I had put all my effort into getting something external to tell me what decision I should make.
I remember one YouTube video in particular. I don’t know why this one stands out to me, but it was called something along the lines of What to Do When Faced with Tough Choices. And I thought, “Oh my God, this is the one. This is the video. Thirteen minutes from now, when the video ends, I’m going to have all the answers.”
Well, I’ll let you take a wild guess about what actually happened. I did not have all the answers after those 13 minutes. In fact, I probably had more questions, because these videos can’t answer what we need answered.
And so, as we do on It’s Gonna Be Fine, I have a few pieces of real-world content to share with you that help illustrate this idea that perhaps you do know best. In fact, listening to yourself may even protect you from potential harm, even if you can’t see it at the time.
When Mindfulness Isn’t Right for You
There was a really great, fairly long article in The Atlantic called “The Dark Side of Mindfulness.” Have you ever felt like society is constantly telling you that mindfulness and meditation are the answers to everything? Maybe it’s not quite as prominent anymore, but I still think it is. A few years ago, though, meditation was definitely the thing. If you weren’t doing it, you were supposedly causing harm to yourself or failing to be your best self.
Apps like Calm and Headspace were all the rage. Companies were even offering subscriptions to these platforms as part of their employee benefits packages. And for some people, meditation absolutely works. They love it, they do it, and it helps them.
But maybe you’re like me. Maybe you think, “You know, I really don’t think this is for me. I don’t really want to do it.” And then you think, “But I guess I have to force myself to do it, even though I don’t enjoy it, because it’s so popular and beneficial and quote-unquote healthy. My friend does it, he likes it, and he’s encouraging me to do it.”
Your gut says it’s not what you want and you don’t have any desire to do it, but you do it anyway. Has that happened to you? Because maybe you were actually right all along.
Let’s dive a little deeper into this article, specifically the discussion of meditation. The article explains that there’s legitimate scientific evidence that meditation has benefits. Research has linked it to reduced anxiety and depression, improved attention and memory, better mood, lower blood pressure, reduced inflammation, greater self-awareness, and a whole list of other things. Some studies have even found measurable changes in the brain after relatively short periods of practice.
Part of the appeal of meditation is that you can do it yourself. You don’t need expensive medical equipment or treatment, and you usually don’t need a professional. Especially with these apps, you can do it on your own. The idea is that beneath all the noise, all the thinking, and all the things that go on in our day-to-day lives, there’s a more basic or true state that you can access.
But meditation can also have some unintended negative effects. Did you know that? I didn’t.
Researchers have become increasingly interested in reports of adverse experiences following meditation, including dissociation, insomnia, severe anxiety, and a phenomenon called depersonalization. In severe cases, people can lose their sense of self to such an extent that they have trouble functioning.
The article also discusses how meditation historically wasn’t primarily about relaxation or productivity. It was often a spiritual practice intended to fundamentally change someone’s relationship with their thoughts and even their sense of self. That’s pretty different from the modern goal of becoming a better or more productive version of yourself, which is one reason people meditate today.
For the record, I’m not an expert on any of this. The article was just super informative, and I want to set the stage a little.
The article quotes a historian of Buddhism at Penn State who explains that meditation was historically practiced mostly by monks and other spiritual seekers in East Asia and India. It wasn’t something ordinary people did. So meditation wasn’t simply about relaxing or clearing your mind. It was actually used to transform your relationship with your thoughts.
And that tracks. For a Buddhist monk who is trying to disconnect from the self, that makes sense. But for everyday people who are looking for more connection, trying to turn down some of the noise, or simply hoping to become more productive, maybe meditation isn’t the right mechanism or avenue for that.
Maybe Meditation Just Isn’t for Everyone
This actually made me think about what we hear regarding nutrition and processed foods. One argument we often hear about why processed foods are bad for us is that humans weren’t built, designed, or evolved to eat them. We were supposed to eat natural foods, things that grew from the ground or on trees, rather than the processed stuff we have today.
So maybe we weren’t built to meditate either. Maybe it’s a kind of processed practice that we’ve gotten involved with.
As someone who has tried meditation and mindfulness and honestly struggled with both, I’ve never really enjoyed them. But I felt I had to do them because of how popular they were. Maybe I was right all along. Maybe if I had continued, I would have experienced some of these negative side effects. Who knows?
The point is that just because something seems to be the right thing to do doesn’t necessarily mean it’s right for you.
There are benefits to meditation, and we know there can also be negative effects. So while I was reading about all of this, one question kept coming up for me: Okay, fine. Meditation can lead to adverse effects. But is that just the result of extreme meditation? Doing it for multiple hours a day, over many months? Maybe that’s where people overdo it, right?
It turns out, not necessarily.
The researcher featured in the article, Willoughby Britton, says she has found that about one in ten people who have meditated even once experienced an adverse effect that lasted more than a month. Think about that. If meditation were a drug and it caused adverse effects in about one in ten people, that would qualify it as having “very common” adverse effects under the standard classification used for adverse drug reactions. That’s another quote from the article.
That stopped me, too. I thought, “So wait a minute. Meditation can be considered something with very common negative side effects? Interesting.”
Now, Britton does say that the more intensely you meditate, the more likely you are to experience adverse effects. The article specifically discusses meditation retreats, which we’ve probably all heard about. Maybe some of us have even gone on one. I haven’t, but perhaps you have. People go to these retreats to improve their meditation practice, relax, and get away from it all.
But Britton points out that these retreats often aren’t relaxing at all. You typically wake up at the ass crack of dawn to start your practice. You don’t eat much throughout the day, and you sit focusing on your breath for hours.
Think about that. Think about the kind of day you’re having. I’m pretty sure humans weren’t designed to spend their time doing that, either.
After many days at a retreat like this, where you’re spending nearly all your time meditating, potentially not nourishing your body properly, and maybe not getting enough sleep, your neurons can become more sensitive. Little things, like a clock ticking, the sound of someone else’s breathing, a creak, or another sudden noise, can feel incredibly overwhelming. They can even trigger feelings of grief or rage.
The way I understood it, this intense practice can almost take you out of the real world. Then, when you experience the real world again, you don’t know how to deal with it.
There’s another fantastic quote in the article, from a psychiatrist at UC San Francisco who had done a lot of meditation herself. She said, “Retreats are some of the hardest things I’ve done in my entire life.” And that includes medical school.
So, that’s retreats. But again, going back to what we were saying earlier, these negative symptoms don’t only come from intense meditation or retreats. People have also experienced negative effects after just a few days of meditating, whether through an app or on their own. Some have reported issues after just one or two weeks of doing a 30-minute meditation every day.
I found this fascinating. Especially as someone who sort of fell for the mindfulness and meditation thing—and I say fell for because ultimately it wasn’t right for me—I was reading this and thinking, “This is such a great example of where trusting yourself might not only be the right thing to do, but could also come in really, really handy.”
And don’t get me wrong. If meditation interests you, go for it. You do you. But if it doesn’t, it’s okay not to feel like you have to make it work or that you should want to do it.
The Case for Quitting
There was another segment I came across, this one from CBS News, where they interviewed a journalist and author named Lindsay Krauss about her new book, The Case for Quitting: The Surprising Benefits of Opting Out.
She discusses how sometimes the right decision is to throw in the towel. To stop. To quit whatever it is you’re doing. To take that risk, especially, I would argue, when it feels like the right thing to do.
Why? Because you know best.
This could be a job, a hobby, a relationship, or really anything.
The author discusses how sticking with something that isn’t right for you, even though you think—or society tells you—that it is right or should be right, can become a problem. If you keep going and it just isn’t working, you’re beating a dead horse. You’re wasting your time and losing your mind trying to accomplish or do something that just isn’t meant to be.
She makes a really great point: Quitting can free you up to find what’s actually right for you in the longer term. You’re no longer spending all your time trying to meet some external expectation. If you say, “You know what? It’s time to quit. I’m going to walk away,” that opens you up to figuring out how you should actually be spending your time.
And I think there’s something really powerful in that.
When I look back at my own experiences, I remember one job earlier in my career that was just awful. It was so bad. It was causing me so much anxiety. It was a combination of a lot of things, but I just knew it wasn’t right. I knew I’d made a mistake by taking the job.
But I kept pushing through. I was young, and I thought, “How can I quit? I can’t quit. What will I do? How will I support myself? How will I make money?”
Believe it or not, that job eventually led to me needing a multimonth leave of absence for my own mental well-being.
Looking back, I would have been fine if I’d listened to myself. If I’d listened to my body and what it was telling me, and trusted my intuition that this wasn’t the right thing for me and might not be worth the mental anguish it was causing.
If I’d walked away, things absolutely would have worked out. I would have found another job. And I did find another job.
At the time, I just didn’t have the confidence or self-trust to make that decision.
Of course, hindsight is 20/20. But that’s okay, too, because we can learn from these experiences. And those experiences, according to Psychology Today, are what help your brain with that pattern recognition we talked about earlier.
In the future, when you start to feel that intuition or gut feeling, your brain is drawing on past experiences—experiences you’ve hopefully learned from, and that your mind and body have learned from, too.
Maybe that’s the crux of it right there.
What If We’re Asking the Wrong Questions?
Perhaps we’re asking ourselves the wrong questions. We ask things like: Is this the right decision? Is this the wrong decision? Will there be consequences? Will things get worse? Will things get better? Will I survive this decision? How do I know if I’m making the right decision?
But that’s an impossible standard because you can’t know. You don’t know the future, as much as we’d like to.
If there were anything I could do, I would love to know—not necessarily everything that’s going to happen, but I don’t do well with the unknown. So I get it.
But really, all we can do is make the best decision with the information we have. Fact-based decisions. Information-based decisions.
So what if, instead of asking all those questions, we asked ourselves something different?
Do I trust myself?
Can I feel confident that if things go off the rails, I’ll be able to recenter and find my way? Do I really need all the answers right now? Or can I use my intuition and my knowledge of myself to lead me toward where I should be going—and what’s actually the best place for me?
Of course, this doesn’t mean you shouldn’t seek advice from people you trust. There’s absolutely a place for that. But I would argue that we should think of that advice as supplemental. And we should be really honest with ourselves about how we feel about the advice we’re getting.
When someone gives you advice, how do you react to it immediately? What’s your first gut reaction? How does it feel in your body? Does it feel aligned with what you want?
Is it what you want to hear—or is it something you don’t want to hear?
That’s a big one, too. Because if it’s something you don’t want to hear, that tells you something about what you might actually want.
So absolutely, do your due diligence. Get advice. Gather information. But let’s be honest about how we feel about the advice we’re getting, and let’s not allow it to overtake our own thoughts, feelings, and intuition about whatever it is we’re trying to figure out.
You Don’t Have to Get Every Decision Right
Look, you don’t develop self-trust by always making the right decision or the safe decision. You develop it by making decisions, learning from them, and discovering that you can trust yourself to handle whatever consequences might come.
So what if we shifted our goal when making decisions? Instead of needing everything to work out exactly how we want, or needing to know that we’re making the right decision, what if we focused on making the best decision we can with the information and intuition we have?
And then trusting ourselves enough to say:
Whatever happens, I’ll figure it out.
That’s literally the best definition of It’s Gonna Be Fine.
We’ll see you next time.
This transcript has been lightly edited for readability.
