Instinct — The Voice of Safety and Survival

Our (gut) instinct is primarily driven by biological factors and designed to keep us safe, carrying knowledge inherited through evolution. It is innate, automatic, unlearned, and present across species, following basic drives such as hunger, thirst, reproduction, fear, etc. It communicates in simple terms, and as far as it is concerned, things are either good or bad for us, safe or unsafe.

One of the problems associated with it is that our lives today are very different from the lives of our predecessors, and what was once protective might be confusing or even completely misleading today.

Also important is that we do not have to develop instincts—they come automatically to us.

Instincts guide our behavior without the involvement of conscious thought. As such, they are valuable and needed for our survival, but survival and thriving are not the same thing.

Instinct is sometimes considered to be the most basic level of intuition. I personally prefer to keep them separate. I experience instinct as connected primarily to safety and survival, while intuition gives us access to a different kind of knowing—one that does not necessarily come through conscious thought or analysis.

See also: Intuition; Inspiration