When was your "gut feeling" actually right?

Yes, “gut feeling” is a real thing. It’s your intuition, and it’s not a magic power, it’s your brain picking up on very subtle things and warning you.

One time I was out for a walk on a street with a lot of bars and clubs. Suddenly a young woman randomly linked arms with me and started chatting about what "we" were gonna do that night. She glanced behind a few times so I figured out she needed to not be alone. I just continued walking with her while she called a friend who was in a different bar nearby and once we reached it I dropped her off. I provided her protection from someone for a few blocks and off she went. It's messed up that women sometimes have to grab a literal stranger just to feel safe.

Y’all if you ever are suspicious of someone be careful you subconscious knows a lot more than you do

For those curious, a gut feeling (intuition) stems from a connection your mind unconsciously makes to past experiences and knowledge. Yes, there is a real psychological base to them as it comes from subconscious thought, and listening to your gut feeling can be valuable given that it is based on patterns your brain recognizes.

Many years ago on New Year's Eve, my grandmother was on her death bed. Most of the family had gone away for an hour or two to get some food and rest, so the only ones with her at that time were my grandfather, my dad and aunt, and me. My grandfather had mentioned he wanted to speak the priestly blessing over grandma while she was still alive. All of a sudden, I knew, and I said to grandpa: "If you want to speak the blessing over her while she is still alive, you must do it now." He asked "Shouldn't we wait until your mother and the others get here?" to which I responded "No, now!". He recited the blessing by heart and with the last syllable he spoke, she let our her dying breath. Two minutes later, the rest of the family arrived. I stepped out of the room to call my sister, who was living in another country, to tell her grandma had passed away. The phone never rang, but was connected immediately, as my sister somehow also knew and picked up the phone at the exact moment that I called. One side effect of this was that, when my grandfather passed a couple of years later, I knew to speak the blessing over him too, because I knew how much it had meant to him.

According to Gavin de Becker it's actually not really the dogs that sense that something is wrong with someone in situations like this. They pick up on the fact that we unconsciously know that something is off about a person and act accordingly, which in turn makes us more aware of that bad feeling that was there all along but that we would otherwise choose to ignore in an attempt to not be rude, but dogs don't have a concept of being rude so they express openly what we don't.

I sometimes think of gut feelings as your guardian angel taking the "way to a person's heart is through their stomach" and having to turn it around because the stomach is more often listened to.

4:00 same thing with my father. I cried any time he held me as a baby, and as a young child I remember just being afraid of him. I never felt safe and secure around him at all, there was just something in his eyes and voice I never liked. This got worse when I hit my teens and I noticed the way he'd look at any friends I brought over (I am a girl and they were girls) so I started not letting friends come over any more. As a young adult I learned he had a history of going for "young" girls if you get my meaning. I knew my parents had me young (he was 18, my mom was 16) but I didn't know that he actually dated my mom's sister briefly before moving on to my mom. My mom's sister, at that time, was only 13. They all came from terrible home lives so of course they've never really processed these things.

Out of the blue, a friend of my father’s who he had not seen for a bit called him and told him he needed to get his leg checked out. My father’s leg had been a bit painful for the past few days, but he figured he had just pulled something, so he had not done anything about it. With the prompting of his friend, he went to his doctor who ordered testing and he was found to have a massive blood clot in one of deep veins of his thigh. Had it gone to his lungs, it could have killed him. He asked his friend about it the next time he saw him. The friend just shrugged and said that sometimes he just has dreams about things…

I wish I had listened to mine, but when my mom told us we were going on a trip to help her elderly cousin, I got a feeling in my chest that I can beat describe as a black hole opening up. I dismissed it as anxiety. That trip ended up claiming the life of my mother, brother, and niece, stranded my sister, her friend, me, and my baby half way across the country, and rendered my sister's friend's service dog unable to do her job. I am never dismissing that feeling ever again.

Story 18 OP really is amazing. I didn't expect this story to happen. The fact that OP had a feeling to contact a friend on the exact day they were contemplating to die so they could unintentionally stop it is amazing. I'm so happy they helped their friend.

That last story was just wonderful and amazing and just really makes you wish you could be half as lucky as that guy was in that moment

I've once had kind of a gut feeling, except it was a dream and a gut feeling. I had a friend who lived in a different continent and she was diagnosed with a brain tumor and needed to have surgery. Well, the day came when she was going to have the surgery, and being far away it was a night time for me. I had trouble falling asleep because I kept thinking of her and wishing she'll be alright. Eventually I fell asleep and had a dream of her. She was walking with someone at a store that sells supplies for her hobby , just browsing and living her normal life. I woke up and the first thought in my head was "she's going to be doing things like this for a long time to come". And I felt a peaceful feeling and knew the surgery had gone well or would go well. And not many days later I learned that the surgery had indeed been a success.

In 2020, my dog had a cancerous tumor on his liver. They could have removed it, but he was old and it would be a waste of money (their exact words). Durring my free lunch period, i get this feeling of emptiness and melancholy while eating. When i got home, my parents told me he died right around the time i ate lunch. (11:40-ish). Still makes me feel like he was like, connected to me. I know its weird.

Once my husband and I were driving in western Colorado over rural dirt roads. We saw no one and passed no cars so I allowed myself to drive all over the road. There were places where there were steep hills and long runs to coast down and we were just having a good time doing that. All at once I had the feeling that I needed to drive on the far right. I obeyed this voice and a few minutes later a pickup, probably driving 90 mph, flew over the hill driving dead center of the road. Had I ignored that wee voice there would have been a serious and deadly accident.

Everytime I've had a gut feelings I've listened. The strongest one I had though was as a teen. I decided to walk home from school that day and go to the library I was almost to the library but got a strong urge, I mean extremely strong urge to go home immediately so I told my friend bye and I needed to go home. Good thing the library was close to my house because right when I walked in my mom was screaming how my grandma was going to die and she did (she had been slowly dying of liver failure for a few years). I'm glad I had that strong urge to go home because I got to say goodbye to the person I loved most in the world.

From what I understand gut feelings of something being wrong come from our brains being really good at pattern recognition. If something breaks from expected patterns, we get a bad feeling. Kind of like the uncanny valley but applied to situations. The unfortunate thing about gut feelings is they can be false flags. They're meant to pick up on when something isn't normal. Sometimes though "not normal" and "dangerous" aren't the same. This often leads to people getting a bad feeling about marginalized people of various stripes. One of the best examples I can think of is the way a lot of people find autistic people who aren't doing what's called "masking" (purposefully regulating their behaviors to mimic non autistic people) to be creepy because they don't interact the same socially. This can lead to mistreatment and even violence against people that are weird but ultimately harmless. On the flip side it can lead to a false sense of security if someone doesn't have a bad gut feeling. If a situation doesn't seem unusual someone might not pick up on danger before it's too late. It's a good idea to be cautious whether or not you have a bad feeling, and if you do have a bad feeling to evaluate why.

I've got a story like this: I was a bit of a troubled teen, and due to intense arguements that I had with my dad, I was sent to Juvy, and after a while at Juvy, they sent me to a residential behavioral rehab facility for teens. One night, it's hygiene time, followed by pre-lights out quiet time, and I was chilling on my bed. I was just staring at the wall outside my door thinking idly about random things, when I suddenly get a feeling of deja vu, and I tried to shake it off, because that sensation is a semi common experience for me. However, my gut didn't let me just drop it, so I went out and quietly asked one of the techs on 3rd shift that night if he would move his chair down the hall slightly, so that he would be stationed essentially just outside my room. He tried to assure me that I was just being paranoid, but I was insistent, so he decided to humor me. A few minutes later he told me that he had to go to the bathroom, but he was going to have the other tech keep an eye on my room from the end of the hall, about a minute after the tech left for the toilet, another kid from the unit ran into my room and tried to attack me, but the 2nd tech was able to pull the other kid off of me before the other kid got a single hit in, as he had ran down the hall as soon as the other kid left his room a couple doors down the hall from me. After the first tech had returned he jokingly complimented me on my "psychic powers" and after that, due to a rumor on the unit that I was precognizant, I was never attacked again.

i had a incident similar to 8, i was at a light, my mom in the passenger side, light turns green , she helpfully informs me its green but something in me just couldn't take my foot off the break. a heartbeat later a small delivery truck, bigger than a pickup, smaller than a semi comes blazing through the light, would have hit the passenger side of my car.. i trust that little 'don't do that its danger' voice.. its saved me more than once from other people's issues

Story 8: I’m from Pittsburgh and had a very similar thing happen to me. My mom was teaching me how to drive, and we approached an intersection to get onto 228. The light turned green, but I had a gut feeling not to go yet. My mom told me to go. I inched forward after a second. Right then, a huge Ford Explorer came speeding down the road, hitting the brakes into the middle of the intersection. My mom and I would’ve been dead had I gone. Pittsburgh drivers suck.