Hacker News Reader

Comment by mewpmewp2 | Hacker News Reader

We feel things in our gut?

I know the saying "gut feeling", but I thought it was just a saying.

It's to an extent just a saying, probably based on it often feeling like that, in that the physical sensations of some feelings are linked to parts of the body.

But specifically with respect to the gut, the gut has a huge number of nerve cells that act like reward neurons, can directly trigger changes to hormone levels, and has a very substantial direct connection to the brain (the vagus nerve), so it's reasonable to say that we do genuinely have "gut feelings".

https://www.science.org/content/article/your-gut-directly-co...

I'm going to chime in to say something I didn't see anyone else mention, which is that your gut has neurons and it probably can make decisions, aka gut feelings.

https://neuroscience.stanford.edu/news/your-gut-second-brain

There are some cultures/languages in which their word for what most English speakers use "heart" for (as in, source of emotion) is instead the same as their word for "stomach". I want to say this was in Papua New Guinea but I can't remember for sure.

Weirdly enough we have that in English too - "gut feeling", etc. Languages are weird.

Some primary feelings are more pronounced in hands and feet (anger), others in face (interest) but many express themselves strongly in the gut (surprise, happiness, disgust, fear).

In my culture we are often not taught to pay attention to our feelings (especially men, I suppose) so it's easy to miss these cues. I certainly didn't notice until I had some training in it.

What kind of training did you do? I have trouble figuring out how I'm feeling and want to get better at it. I'm particularly bad at noticing when I'm stressed, and by the time I notice I'm already redlining.

I can't explain it briefly nor do I know what it is called, but it consisted of a series of weekly lectures from a psychologist who was good at this stuff. Then some homework in between, which had themes circling around decomposing complex feelings into more basic ones, mindfulness, communicating needs, etc.

It is easily the most adult-preparing course I have ever taken, but I really stumbled into it as part of something else and I wouldn't even know how to point other people in the right direction since I was not the one organising the whole thing.

We definitely can. If you go on an elevator and it starts descending you should definitely feel that.

Anxiety has a strong effect on one's gut, of that I am certain.

good example would be: butterflies in your stomach

But that's extremely rare, and it's rare enough that I'm not sure if it's stomach or also includes the chest, because if I have felt something like butterflies I think it's actually more in the chest area or full body.

I have only mild anxiety, but "butterflies" or other anxiety-related sensations in my gut are not at all uncommon for me.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com