How to spot instinct vs fears

I would like to write about how to recognize instinct versus fears.
Often people give the advice to "follow your instinct" which I think is great advice but is easier said than done.
I believe that nowadays we need to learn again how to listen to our instinct. It doesn't always come easily, at least to me.

There are times in life and in particular while traveling, where I need to take important decisions.
I'm talking about situations where I need to decide between the comfort of a known situation and the excitement of an unknown situation.
For example: Do I stay another night in this place which I like and feel safe or do I move somewhere new, which can be a potentially amazing or dangerous place?
Or also a situation where my trust could be broken, for example, if I meet a person who asks me for money. Do I trust that this person is genuinely in a difficult time and needs some help or do I think this person is trying to take advantage of my empathy?
And even more important situations like: should I keep traveling and work independently, earning less money, or should I move to a city, join a team in an office and learn and earn more?

In these cases is not always easy to follow my instinct.
My head is often confused and full of contradictory thoughts.
Let's stay with the example of the person asking for help.
My mental activity could be something like:
- "I would like to help, I can give some money/food/clothes/..."
- "The story he/she told me is way too sad, is not possible all those stuff happened to one person, he/she probably made up this story"
- "There are for sure many other people that give him/her money, therefore is not possible that this person is still in a state of need".
And so on and on.

I start to wonder: which one is my instinct? The one that is telling me to help this person or the one that is telling me to watch out for potential fraud?

Fears can dress up like instinct

I wish someone would have told me a long time ago that fears can dress as instinct.
Yes, sometimes what I feel is not my instinct but the fears that prevent me from experiencing new things, convincing me that what I want to do is dangerous (physically or mentally).
I want to share here what has helped me and is still helping me to spot which one is the "voice" of my instinct.
There are different tools that I use in those situations.
Sometimes one works and not the others, sometimes they all work and sometimes none of them work and is better to try again in a different moment.

First method: Listening to the body

I start taking a series of long breaths, close my eyes and stay still.
I try to clear my head as much as possible. It helps me focus on my breath or the little spot between a breath in and a breath out.
Then, I wait for something to happen inside of me.
First thought: 'I want to help this person. I trust he/she is saying the truth and I don't care if it turns out to be a fraud.'
I can feel it as a firework in my stomach. A clear input comes from the center of my body, going in an uplifting direction.
And then a very short moment of silence.
Right after it, another thought: "Yeah but this story about his father is way too absurd! It cannot be true, it must be a fraud"
A feeling of tension arises in my chest and shoulder area.
After that, many other confusing thoughts with many "if" and "but".
I have some experience with bodywork, enough to know how my body reacts to fear or to excitement.
Uplifting and explosive feeling for me means: Yes, I want this!
Closure and tension mean: I'm afraid!
At that point, I knew that the right thing to do FOR ME was to help that person.
This technique is based on listening to body reactions, therefore I needed to learn what are signals that my body gives to me in the case of a "Yes" or "No".
In the case you need to re-learn like me, there are a lot of workshops around the world and many amazing teachers that can help you learn how to listen to your body.
I didn't find a clear definition of this technique but you could search for "bodywork", "somatic bodywork", "consense bodywork".

Second method: Projection of the situation

Once again I start taking some deep breaths (usually around 3) and focus on what is inside my head, instead of focusing on external inputs like sounds.
I try to clear my head as much as I can. This can take some time.
Once my head is calm enough, I try to imagine myself in the first case scenario.
In our example, the first case is when I give money/clothes/food to this person.
I begin thinking and visualizing: "I'm in the parking lot outside the supermarket, talking with this person and listening to his/her story".
Here is important to try to image as many details as possible.
Am I standing? Are we one in front of each other? How are we dress? Are we smiling or not?
And so on.

When I'm caught in the story, I move on.
"I'm giving money/food to this person". What happens here? Am I smiling? Is this person smiling? This person is staying there with me or has he/she run away?
What are my body sensations? Do I feel happy? Sad? Fearful? Grateful?
How do we leave each other, with a hug? With handshaking? Or maybe without any touch? How does this make me feel?
And so on.

Once I'm satisfied with the first scenario, I go to the second one and repeat the same exercise.
For me, in this exercise, is important to not force my imagination but rather give some small inputs and let my head do the rest.
Is also important for me to not judge my body sensation straight away, not try to make any analysis or to drove any conclusion right away.
I see myself mostly as a silent recorder. I register all that is happening in me and leave it there.
Later on, when the exercise is done, I will have the time to take a little distance from the whole situation and make my analysis based on my body sensation.

Third method: Externalize the internal dialogue

There are times when my head is way too chaotic.
I try to sit down and clear my head, I do as many breaths I can and use all the meditation exercises I ever try in my life.. but nothing! No way I can calm my mind.
Is like a political debate, many different voices and opinions keep overcoming each other.
In this case, writing helps me a lot.
Some people find it useful to write in a "Diary style".
For me, it works more to write in "Dialogue style".
I write exactly what all those different voices say in my head. I literally write down my thoughts.
I like to make it fun as well and make fun of my craziness so I write the different voices in a bubble style on a piece of paper. Like a comics strip where there are just dialogue and no characters.

In our example it would go something like:
voice one: "I want to help this person. He/she need help"
voice two: "Don't say bullshit. Is obviously a fraud. Look how she/he is dress. And this super sad story of his/her life? It cannot be true c'on! How can you be such a fool?"
voice one: "Well, but I think nobody likes to stay in such condition, begging people for help. It must be true."
voice three: "Alright, let's say you go there and give money. Will this help this person? will you change his/her life? You should give him/her a job, not money. I think you just want to feel you are a good person"
And so on and so on.

I keep going until I feel my head is calmer and I don't have so many thoughts coming and going all the time.
Then I leave the written dialogue there and I read it again after some time.
Is then usually easier for me to spot which one is my fear and later analyze if makes sense or not to listen to it.

What do you gain by following your instinct

The great thing about following your instinct is that you are being true to yourself.
When I follow my instinct I feel that I'm doing something because is what I really want, is what makes me evolve as a human being and it makes me feel grounded, stable and calm.
Even when turns out to be wrong, it is still not a bad feeling because I know I did what I did consciously and I didn't betray myself.

If I decided to move away from a comfortable and secure place to one that is unknown and when I get there is a bad place, I don't think all the negative thoughts like: "You see, I should have stayed in the first place", "I knew it would have been disaster coming here" and so on since I know I decided to move because I want to experience something new. And I was also aware that this new place could have been not so good.

Trauma and negative thoughts

One last thing: These kinds of techniques worked well for me. I believe can work well for many other people and I hope they can help someone else out there to have a better and smoother traveling experience.
Anyway, that doesn't mean they work for everybody
In particular people with trauma or mental disorder like depression or anxiety can have a really hard time getting out of the loop of negative thoughts.
Indeed, it took me also some time to get to this point.

First I had to do some grounding work to recognize my negative thoughts, then I was able to separate those thoughts from who am I, how I define myself and understand them as just something that happens in my mind. And this is not necessarily the truth or the reality, is just a thought. (If I think I'm stupid doesn't mean I am actually stupid, is just what my mind produces in that moment.)
In this case, I would definitely suggest the support of a trauma-informed therapist.