The biggest decision of my life so far was made almost entirely on gut. I quit my job and went travelling, with no real plan beyond that. It is still the biggest risk I have ever taken.
I loved it, and I came back a different person. What I did not expect is what it did to every decision after that one. Here is what trusting my gut on the big one taught me about overthinking the small ones.
TL;DR
Quitting my job and travelling with no real plan was the biggest gut decision I have ever made, and it worked out better than I could have hoped. What I did not expect was the effect it had afterwards: once you have made one genuinely big decision on gut and lived with it, smaller decisions stop feeling so heavy by comparison. I think overthinking often comes from never having proven to yourself that you can trust a gut call. Once you have, everything else gets easier, not because the stakes are lower, but because your own judgement has evidence behind it.
In this article
The Biggest Risk I Have Ever Taken
I quit my job and went travelling for six months with nothing close to a proper plan. Looking back, it is still the single biggest risk I have ever taken, and at the time it did not feel calculated at all. It felt like a gut decision, made because staying suddenly felt like the wrong thing far more clearly than going felt like the right one.
I loved it. I came back a different person, and that trip is where the meditation and inner-work habits that eventually became this whole site first started.
What Happened to Decisions After That One
Here is the part that actually changed how I make decisions day to day. Once you have made one genuinely big decision on gut, and lived with it, and it worked out, every smaller decision after that has something to measure itself against. I had already proven to myself I could trust a gut call on the biggest possible stakes. Everything else stopped feeling as heavy by comparison.
That is not the same as every decision becoming easy. It is that the fear behind most decisions, what if I am wrong, what if this ruins things, had already been tested against the largest version of itself, and survived. Smaller versions of that same fear lost most of their power.
Telling Your Gut Apart From Fear
This only works if you can actually tell the difference between a gut instinct and plain fear, and they can feel confusingly similar in the moment. The way I tell them apart now is the same test I use for most thoughts and feelings: does it make me feel stronger and more open, or smaller and more constricted. Fear tends to close you down. A genuine gut pull tends to open something up, even when it is frightening.
Quitting my job felt frightening and open at the same time. That combination, not just the fear alone, is usually the sign worth paying attention to.
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Get Free Weekly TipsWhy I Think Overthinking Actually Happens
I think a lot of chronic overthinking comes down to never having built up evidence that your own gut is worth listening to. Without that evidence, every decision feels like it is starting from zero, so the mind reaches for analysis instead, trying to think its way to a certainty that was never actually available. I write more about this pattern, and the position the mind ends up defending instead of actually deciding, on my overthinking and decision-making coaching page.
The fix is not more information. It is proof, the kind you can only get by actually trusting a gut call, on something that matters, and living with the outcome.
Building Your Own Evidence, One Decision at a Time
You do not need to quit your job to build this. Start with a decision that is real but not catastrophic, and practise noticing the gut pull versus the fear before you let the overthinking take over. Each time you trust it and it holds up, even in a small way, you are building the same evidence I got from a much bigger risk.
Underneath this is the same letting-go work I write about everywhere else on this site. Trusting your gut usually means letting go of the need for certainty first, which I break down in How I Let Go of Negative Thoughts and Feelings Every Day.
Common Questions About Trusting Your Gut
Is trusting your gut just another way of saying ignore the risks?
No. I still weighed the risk of quitting my job, I just did not let the analysis run forever, waiting for a certainty that was never going to arrive. Trusting your gut is deciding once you have enough information, not deciding with none.
What if I trust my gut and it goes badly?
It can, and it is worth being honest about that rather than promising it never will. Even then, in my experience, the confidence you build from having actually decided, rather than avoided deciding, tends to outlast any single bad outcome.
Why did one big decision make smaller ones easier?
Because the fear behind most decisions is roughly the same fear, just scaled differently. Once I had faced that fear at its largest and survived it, the smaller everyday versions of it stopped carrying the same weight.
How do I start if I have never made a big gut decision before?
Start smaller than you think you need to. Pick a real but low-stakes decision, notice the gut pull versus the fear, and trust it once. The evidence builds the same way regardless of the size of the decision, it just takes longer to compound.
Written by Harry
Not a trained life coach or counsellor, just sharing what has helped me on my own journey. For more free guides on confidence, self-belief and letting go, visit the blog. To read the full story, see the about page.