Your Gut Might Be Lying to You

We're told to trust our gut. Follow your intuition. Listen to your body. Your instincts know what your conscious mind hasn't figured out yet.

Except sometimes your gut is completely full of shit. Literally and figuratively.

When Your Nervous System Goes Offline

The polyvagal theory — Porges' framework on how the vagus nerve bidirectionally connects gut, heart, and brain — tells us something crucial: roughly 90 percent of the sensory information traveling that pathway flows from your organs to your brain, not the other way around. Your gut is constantly signaling your nervous system about what it's sensing. And seventy percent of that vagal traffic originates in your gut.

This is why "follow your gut" works when your gut is actually calibrated. Your interoception — your ability to sense what's happening inside your body — is giving you real data.

But when your nervous system is dysregulated — whether from chronic stress, medication side effects, or systemic disruption — your gut isn't sending reliable signals anymore. It's sending noise. And you're making decisions based on corrupted data while believing you're listening to wisdom.

I've watched this play out twice this month: people I've worked with who had ambitious plans, solid strategy, and then hit a wall. They blamed themselves for poor execution. What was actually happening? Miscommunication at every level — because the people involved couldn't accurately sense what was needed, what was working, or what was falling apart. Their nervous systems weren't calibrated. Neither were mine, frankly, as I've dealt with my own acute health complications tied to medication.

The real problem wasn't the plan. It was that nobody could trust their own sensing apparatus.

Organizations Have Nervous Systems Too

Here's where it gets uncomfortable for leaders: your organization has a nervous system. And right now, a lot of organizational nervous systems are dysregulated.

Poor communication infrastructure masquerading as "culture." Crisis mode mistaken for urgency. Reactive decision-making dressed up as strategy. When an organization is running on a dysregulated nervous system, the "gut feeling" of that organization — what leadership senses, what gets amplified, what gets ignored — is misinformation.

You're sitting in a meeting, and someone says, "I have a feeling this won't work." That feeling isn't intuition. It's a dysregulated system sending static. And you design around it anyway, because everyone's learned to call panic "instinct."

Human-centered design assumes people can sense what they need and communicate it clearly. That assumption only holds if the nervous system doing the sensing is actually calibrated.

Before You Trust Your Gut, Check the Hardware

The organizations doing this well aren't the ones with the most inspiring values statements. They're the ones that invested in nervous system regulation first — in communication systems that actually work, in rhythm and recovery, in structures that let people think instead of just react.

They created conditions where intuition could be trusted again.

This doesn't mean ignoring your gut. It means getting honest about whether your gut is actually online. Is your nervous system regulated enough to sense clearly? Is your organization's? Are you designing for what people actually need, or for what a dysregulated system is frantically signaling?

The disappointment people are experiencing isn't usually about bad plans. It's about trying to execute good plans while nobody involved can actually sense what's happening.

Fix the sensing apparatus first. Then trust the signal.

References

Porges, S. W. (2011). The polyvagal theory: Neurophysiological foundations of emotions, attachment, communication, and self-regulation. W.W. Norton & Company.

Porges, S. W. (2021). Safety and polyvagal theory: The vagus as pathways to consciousness. In S. W. Porges & D. A. Dana (Eds.), Clinical applications of the polyvagal theory: The rise of social engagement (pp. 3-18). W.W. Norton & Company.