For the first time in a long time, I genuinely thought I was going insane. It wasn’t the first time that I thought I’d eventually end up in a padded cell or solitary confinement, but somehow it felt like it’s the closest I’ve been.

(Mental note: watching almost four seasons of Oz back to back doesn’t seem to have helped matters.)

But if I have appeared to be insane, or at least mentally deranged this week, it’s because I’m angry with myself. I’m angry because I chose to go against my instinct – my gut feeling – and it backfired.

I’m not going to mention the respective incident, or what my instinct told me, because everything that could be said about it has already been said, and I don’t want to go over it again. Let’s just say that the outcome of going against my instinct was rather painful and annoying, and I vow never to do it again.

In a world that’s constantly trying to tell us what to think and what to believe, one of the most valuable things we have is our gut-level instinct. Some people choose to ignore it because it’s not tangible, especially if it’s someone else’s. Other people, like myself, rely on it to make important decisions. I’ve found that my instinct – whenever I can feel it – is probably the most reliable source of advice I have.

Many salespeople aren’t actually any good at selling, so they find ways of manipulating potential clients into buying – often by employing tricks to override their instinct (for example, by using NLP) or by convincing them to ignore their own thoughts. They’ll often try to pressure you into making quick, affirmative snap decisions, without any opportunity to do any due diligence. Your instinct might be telling you to back away, but the salesperson will try to persuade you that any thought of not buying their products is “negative”. (“Negative” for the salesperson, that is.)

Similarly, you might have people insisting you’re being foolish, for having a gut-level instinct about something that’s either going to happen, or might happen. They’ll encourage you to “go for it”, as if the only difference between a positive and negative outcome is in your thinking. It’s fair enough that we don’t always know how something’s going to turn out – but sometimes, for whatever reason, we just “know”.

Personally, I can’t think of a time when my instinct has let me down. I haven’t always gotten what I wanted (or thought I wanted) by following my instinct, but my instinct has never led me towards pain. At least, following my instinct hasn’t hurt me nearly as much as going against it has.

The big problem with going against one’s instinct, is that it often leads to probably the most dangerous state a person can be in: having false hope.

False hope is like having a carrot dangled in front of you all the time, all the while seeing other people eating carrots – and until it’s too late, you can’t tell if the carrot being held in front of you is real, or a hologram.

I’m a big believer in fate: that there are some things that just can’t be changed, no matter what we try to do. So to buy into hope – the idea of things being different to how I imagine or see them – can be dangerous, if I start to think that things could actually turn out that way. It can be pleasant or shocking to be surprised by the outcome, but it’s always damaging to be disappointed.

In the end, whether one trusts their instinct or not, it’s up to each of us to make the call. And even people who let other people decide for them are making a call, but most likely not a very good one.

I say, learn to trust your instinct.