The Great Instinct Override

Image: When your inner wisdom meets your stubborn side - guess which one usually wins?

This is a true story about a chocolate brown and white striped bikini and a white linen shirt. I was about to leave for a weekend away, holding said yellowed shirt and 'stained with sea-salt' bikini, both calling for a proper soak. I thought I'd let them work their magic before I left, then wash them properly when I got back. My instinct spoke up immediately: "The chocolate will bleed. Don't soak them together."

But then an optimistic voice called Stella piped up saying "she'll be right, don't worry about it."

My inner wisdom tried again: "I don't think these should be soaked together. Consider them separately."

Stella wasn't having it: "Just throw them in there, I’m sure it will be fine."

One final attempt from my better senses: "Eleni, you know better than this."

And yet again, I went with Stella.

The chocolate bled, obviously. It ran onto the white linen shirt, and I ended up spending three hours on my return, with bleach, trying to salvage what could have been avoided entirely. The most infuriating question followed: why would I override that wise, learned voice that was ready to help me from the beginning?

Your Brain Knows Things

My instinct was bang on from the start. She's been trained by years of laundry disasters, colour-bleeding catastrophes, and probably a few choice expletives muttered over ruined clothes. That's pattern recognition at its finest—my brain's threat detection system working exactly as evolution intended.

Stella, meanwhile, was busy hijacking my prefrontal cortex with what psychologists call optimism bias. That delightfully human tendency to think "this time will be different" despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. We're literally wired to override our own expertise in favour of wishful thinking.

The neurological tug-of-war between experienced intuition and hopeful rationalisations was playing out in real-time. My anterior cingulate cortex—the brain region that flags conflicts and mismatches—was probably firing like mad, trying to alert me to the disconnect between what I knew and what I was doing. But cognitive dissonance is a powerful thing and it's often easier to silence that nagging voice than to admit we might need to do the sensible, slightly more tedious thing.

When Good Sense Goes to Die

This wasn't even high-stakes decision-making. It was bloody laundry! Which makes you wonder: if we can't trust ourselves with a bikini and a shirt, what the hell are we doing with the big stuff?

We're doing exactly the same thing, every single day. This is where good sense goes to die, in the mundane moments where we think the stakes are too low to matter. Take my period, for instance. I know, absolutely, positively that around my cycle I need to load up on extra vegetables. My body is working incredibly hard, and my digestive system gets completely thrown off. The more veg I eat, the better and more regular my bowel movements stay. But I'm also lacking energy fast in the days leading up, and I just want that easy plate of pasta to give me a quick fix. My body is pretty clear "leafy greens, iron, nutrients—keep things moving," and I respond with "carbs, now, easy." Good sense dies a slow death in the kitchen.

Or bedtime. I've spent over a year since burnout working on getting back to that state where I'm on fire from 6:30am. The magic formula? Getting to bed at 10:30. Simple, effective even. But then there's Pörni—this brilliant Norwegian series—and suddenly it's "just one more episode" at 10:15, then another at 11. My internal clock casually suggests "you’re tired, your sleep beckons" whilst my brain pipes up "it's just one night, it'll be fine." Good sense doesn't stand a chance against Norwegian drama and no prizes for guessing how effective I was the next day.

Instinct, Meet Stubborn

We override our instincts about relationships that aren't right for us ("maybe he's just really busy on his phone"), dubious business deals ("I'm sure they'll come good eventually"), and career moves that feel wrong in our gut ("I had no rapport with the CFO but perhaps I'm reading too much into that"). We silence the voice that knows "something's not right here" in favour of the one that says "don't be so dramatic, it'll probably work out."

Why does stubborn win so often? Because listening to your instincts requires admitting you might need to do something inconvenient, uncomfortable, or socially awkward. For example. your gut knows that you can't keep avoiding that anger that's boiling over inside of you, having you lashing out all over the place.But acknowledging that means admitting you're not handling things as well as you pretend, that you might need help, or that something fundamental needs to change. Much easier to push through and deal with the fallout later than face those uncomfortable truths.

The research on interoception—our ability to sense internal bodily signals—shows that people who are better at detecting their own heartbeat, breathing patterns, and physical sensations make better decisions about everything from financial investments to relationship choices. They're more emotionally regulated, less anxious, and generally happier. Their bodies are talking, and they're bloody well listening. The rest of us choose convenience over wisdom, every single time.

The Laundry Paradox

Your instincts have been collecting data your entire life. They know when someone's lying, when a situation feels off, when you're about to make a spectacularly bad decision. They're your personal early warning system, calibrated by experience and evolution. And we consistently tell them to shut up.

The paradox is this: we trust our smartphones more than our own bodies. We'll follow GPS directions without question but ignore the internal navigation system that's been keeping humans alive for millennia. I knew exactly what would happen if I soaked that chocolate bikini with the white shirt—my brain had catalogued years of laundry disasters to reach that conclusion. But I overrode decades of hard-won wisdom for the sake of convenience.

Studies on decision fatigue show that our cognitive resources are finite—every choice depletes the tank. When we're running on empty, we make progressively worse decisions. We choose the pasta over the vegetables, the screen over sleep, the meeting over the walk, the soak-them-together over keep-them-separate. What feels like laziness or poor willpower is actually just what happens when your brain is knackered and you're trying to function on determination alone.

The beautiful irony is that our bodies are constantly trying to optimise our health. Your gut literally has its own nervous system—the enteric nervous system—containing more neurons than your spinal cord. It knows what you need. Your circadian rhythm has been perfected over millions of years of evolution. It knows when you should sleep.

But we've become insanely good at overriding our own operating manual, one small decision at a time. The question isn't whether our instincts are reliable—the science shows they absolutely are. The question is why we've learned to ignore the very system designed to keep us functioning at our best.

Next week: How modern life has systematically trained us to distrust our own wisdom—and why we've been taught that ignoring our bodies makes us more productive..