Why You Should Trust Your Gut

Want to stay current with Arthur’s writing? Sign up to get an email every time a new column comes out.

If you are looking for a job right now, you’re not alone. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, last month, 6.8 million Americans were not employed but looking to be. Many more people are in a job but interested in making a change: The Pew Research Center reported in 2022 that about one worker in five was either very likely or somewhat likely to look for a new job in the next six months.

The good news is that with the unemployment rate at 4.1 percent, the labor market is strong. This means that if you are job hunting, you might have some choices. If that’s the case, the problem is not finding a job; it’s finding the job.

The next step is to get it. In interviews, potential employers ask you a lot of questions about your habits, skills, and ambitions. Research suggests that what they might really be looking for is a gut feeling of enthusiasm about you. So you need to be good at eliciting those feelings.

But the excitement needs to go both ways. To find the job that gives you the best chance of loving your work, you need to be attentive to your own gut sense. These feelings contain a lot of information that you need but to which you might not have conscious access.

Three specific feelings should command your attention as you evaluate your opportunities, because these emotions can strongly predict your future work satisfaction: excitement, fear, and deadness. The meaning of those first two is self-explanatory, and I’ll say more about the third shortly. The trick is to be able to tell which of them is most present in that inchoate gut feeling, and use that knowledge to decide whether a job is the job.

[Uri Friedman: 7 ways to find meaning at work]

The connection between decision making and gut feelings has become a hot field for research. Our understanding of the mechanisms of “gut” and brain is still incomplete, but tests of the quality of decisions made from feelings as opposed to conscious analysis yield strongly suggestive and useful results.

For example, researchers writing in the journal Emotion in 2011 asked survey participants to make car-buying decisions that varied in complexity. Those decisions were based either on their intuitive feelings about the options or solely on reasoning about the details at hand. The researchers found that for simple decisions, it didn’t matter which method they used to reach a verdict. But for complex decisions, a feeling-based decision was more than twice as likely to lead to an optimal outcome as one based on an analysis of the details.

This finding suggests that it doesn’t matter how you decide something straightforward, such as whether to take the one job available when you have been unemployed for a long time. But when you have multiple professional options, using your gut to evaluate the choices may be the best course.

This is where being able to recognize which of those three key feelings your gut is trying to communicate comes in. The one that should never be absent when you’re considering a job is excitement. Another way of defining this sort of excitement is prospective happiness, or joy about having a better future in sight. If you don’t have that sense of excitement when you hear about an opportunity, your subconscious is telling you something important—that this opportunity is unlikely to provide enjoyment, a sense of accomplishment, and especially meaning. Researchers have run experiments that illustrate how central excitement about the future is to an activity’s ultimate satisfaction. Psychologists writing in 2019 in the Journal of Happiness Studies showed that anticipated meaning, which is crucial for well-being, and excitement about the future are closely linked.

[Arthur C. Brooks: What you need to know about making a good impression]

The second feeling to track as you evaluate a professional opportunity is fear. This comes in two varieties: danger and dread. In the right dose, the first of these is positive, but the second sort is always negative. Fear founded on a reasonable degree of danger when taking an opportunity provokes an increase in the brain’s dopamine regions in anticipation of a possible victory while facing risk. This matters because it indicates that you’re sensing an imminent challenge of a difficult but doable task. No danger means no real challenge; boredom is the likely result.

When I was hired as a professor at Harvard some years ago, I felt a positive fear of a somewhat dangerous challenge. If I had been, say, drafted into the NBA instead, the feeling would have tipped into dread (the anticipation of something entirely negative), because I would have failed at that with 100 percent certainty. Dread is so destructive of well-being that in experiments, some people who know for sure that they are going to get a painful electrical shock will accept a higher voltage immediately rather than experience dread of the future pain.

You probably would not take a job at which you were certain to fail (this would take us back to deciding a simple choice). But faced with a more complex evaluation of a professional opportunity, dread may arise when your gut tells you that the position will leave you feeling hollow and devoid of meaning.

This brings us the third feeling to watch out for in your gut reaction: deadness (which some scholars alternatively refer to as emptiness). Researchers have found that this sensation is associated with such feelings as boredom, loneliness, numbness, despair, and hopelessness. So if you feel dread, ask yourself whether it portends this deeper deadness—because this living death is exactly what you should avoid in a job, notwithstanding whatever pay, power, or prestige it seems to offer.

[Arthur C. Brooks: Jung’s five pillars of a good life]

There is no way to get perfect information about a professional opportunity in advance. You might make a mistake in seeking a position—I have, more than once in my career. But a reliable way to raise the odds of a good choice is to look for a lot of excitement, a little fear of danger, and as close to zero deadness as possible.

In my work advising graduate students on their way into the workforce, I have devised a brief questionnaire for evaluating opportunities. I can’t claim that it’s been exposed to academic peer review, but I find that it works well to give my charges the basic insights they need. The survey is made up of three sets of three questions. Each question should be answered as a value from zero to four, where 0 = “completely disagree” and 4 = “completely agree.”

Excitement
1. This job sounds fun and interesting to me.
2. If I take the job, next year I anticipate being happier than I am today.
3. I think I will look forward to going to work most days.

Add your scores across these questions. To move forward on the opportunity, the target range to look for is 9–12.

Fear
1. There is a chance that I might not succeed in this job.
2. Success is going to take hard work, and maybe some good luck as well.
3. If I do succeed, I will be very proud of the accomplishment.

The target range for these questions is 5–8.

Deadness
1. The idea of this job does not inspire me.
2. I have trouble focusing on this job’s day-to-day tasks.
3. I might hate it, but this job is only temporary.

The target is zero, or as close to zero as possible.

[Olga Khazan: When yogurt affects the brain]

Evaluating professional opportunities is just one area of uncertainty in life that can cause a lot of stress, of course. Consider, for example, choosing a spouse—a case in which the decision-making stakes are much higher than judging the labor market correctly. Yet the same principle can apply to any complex life choice: Organize your thinking in such a way that you are paying systematic attention to your gut feelings.

For example, if you are considering a wedding proposal—either making or accepting one—ask yourself if the prospect excites you because of the greater meaning you’d anticipate in life. (Right answer: Yes, in a big way.) Is it a little frightening because the partnership will be full of unknowns and new challenges? (Right answer: Yes, but not in a “We met last night in Vegas” kind of way.) And, of course, ask if a future with this person for the rest of your life makes you feel a little dead inside. (Only acceptable answer: No.)

Life never offers any guarantee of success. But your heart—and your gut—will usually steer you in the right direction.