The Science Of Perception & Intuition
#5. One neurobiological lens that has the biggest impact on how to trust your gut
20 August, 2024
One core pattern of prediction has the biggest impact on how to trust your gut.
It is hugely related to how you see success, your self worth and often how you respond in times of stress. Seeing it can be a critical piece of the puzzle in discerning whether you should trust what feels like your gut.
That instinctual feeling that your boss is annoyed with you when they say ‘okay’ in that way. The instinct that your new colleague isn’t to be trusted. The gut feeling that you need to fix something or the pull to do it alone and not trust anyone else. Some of these might be instincts to really listen to and trust. Others might be attachment patterns running on outdated data— and unless you learn how to discern which is which, they can feel identical.
Attachment algorithms are the unconscious beliefs your system holds about how you need to behave in order to ‘do well’ and connect with the people that matter to you most.
They are one of the most powerful things to learn about yourself, if you want to stop second guessing your instincts, is how your attachment wiring affects how you see certain situations
When I began my journey as a perception coach, I did not expect to talk about attachment. Yet the neurobiology and science of deep lasting change points to it again and again – like a central repository of (mostly unconscious) coding that deeply affects our sense of ourselves and what we believe to be our instincts.For example, do you see the world as a fundamentally safe place that will help you when you need? Or do you expect the world to be a battle ground? Do you believe there is a certain way you need to act in order to succeed?
These often form what become your instinctive responses. It might be the desire to withdraw in certain situations, feeling flat and ‘unbothered’, the insatiable impulse for validation and affirmation, crippling anxiety, or a mist of brain fog at the hint of any potential disagreement. They show up differently in each and every one of us.
“Attachment [patterns], developed in infancy, become non-conscious filters for the relational world…”
– Kirke Olson (2014: The Invisible Classroom )
You’ve probably heard of it. Attachment is talked about a lot, it’s 101 for any psychology student and it often comes up in the dating world.
Books like Attached have made attachment language mainstream — but it’s important to note that they’re usually talking about adult romantic attachment. It uses the same vocabulary as the developmental research I refer to, but it’s a separate body of work — both ways of looking at attachment have delivered studies that show a significant ability to predict findings, and whilst logic would suggest they overlap, no studies have yet found the two are correlated with each other in a statistically significant way (Siegel, 2017).
What matters when it comes to cultivating discernment over what instincts to trust is the earlier formed childhood attachment: the patterns laid down before you had language for any of it.
what is attachment and how can it help me trust my instincts?
“Becoming aware, at an embodied, neurobiological level, of your attachment inclinations can help change what's felt like recurring reality or fate — and it certainly will help you learn to discern what is a genuine intuition you should follow and what is a reflexive pattern of prediction that might be pulling you back.”
– Zoe Zambakides
Attachment algorithms are the unconscious beliefs your system holds about how you need to behave in order to ‘do well’ and connect with the people that matter to you most. And ultimately impact how you feel yourself to be as a person.Attachment algorithms (or patterns of prediction as we learned in #4) show up in:
- Your relationship to yourself
- Interactions with your loved ones
- Romantic relationships
- Colleagues at work
- Any important interaction in your life where vulnerability, power and psychological safety are in play.
Think of attachment as your patterns of prediction about how someone close to you will behave in a certain context, and the automatic behaviours you adopt to feel as emotionally safe as possible in response. You don’t need to know conceptually where a pattern came from. You need to build awareness of what’s happening within you right now, so you can create space for change and discernment.
What secure processing, versus an attachment pattern, actually looks like
Attachment falls broadly into two camps. One is secure: these are the children whose nervous systems and neurobiology registered the relationship with their primary caregivers as safe, soothing and secure. But a substantial proportion of people, rarely through parental intent, have insecure attachment instead. In some way their neurobiology laid down patterns of prediction that meant their safety, security and ability to be soothed felt conditional. In 1979, Ainsworth, Blehar, Waters and Wall classified three broad attachment styles, and in 1990 Mary Main and Judith Solomon identified a fourth — which I believe is also understudied, applicable to far more people than originally envisaged, and will evolve over the next few decades.
So notice if any of these feel familiar, in different contexts:
- Noticing someone else is snappy, and assuming they must be having a bad day. Noticing someone hasn’t replied to your email, and assuming they’re busy or didn’t see it. Being told a deadline’s been brought forward and the team around you is stressed, but managing to stay calm because your identity doesn’t depend on it — these are hallmarks of secure attachment.
- Refreshing your inbox and reading a delay as a sign something’s wrong. Volunteering for extra work because your gut says someone will be annoyed, or that it’s less risky than saying yes. Replaying a piece of feedback for the rest of the day. Dreading “can we grab five minutes?” before you even know what it’s about. These are often seen as more anxious.
- Solving a problem alone at night rather than raising it with the team. Giving a flat “I’m fine” when someone checks in on you. Preferring async messages over a call. Struggling to hand off work, even to someone perfectly capable of it. These are often seen as avoidant.
- Fully engaged on Monday, hard to reach by Thursday, with no clear reason why. Wanting a leader’s recognition, then feeling suspicious of it once you have it. Over-explaining a decision one day, going quiet about it the next. Swinging between total commitment and a sudden urge to walk away. These may be hallmarks of disorganised attachment.
It is important to understand that we don’t necessarily have one attachment ‘style’. Our early algorithms are built by a relationship or experience. Very often when I do this work with clients they try to fix themselves into one box — and that’s not always helpful.
Rather than say ‘I have this attachment style’ it’s probably more helpful to your personal development to notice that you might have a completely different set of attachment associations with one person or another, in different circumstances. So if our system perceives us to be in a similar situation, it will respond accordingly — and that may not always be the same.
“There's now overwhelming empirical support for the fact that early experience is a powerful force in development…. ”
– Dr Alan Sroufe & Dr Daniel Siegel (2011: The Verdict Is In)
The early experiences children have with caregivers shape a number of mental processes. The ability to balance one’s emotions, to reduce fear, to be attuned to others, to have insight and self-understanding… have all been found to be associated with… attachment’. (Siegel, 2012)
The first understanding of attachment emerged from the work of John Bowlby in the 1960s, developed further by Mary Ainsworth through the Strange Situation Classification (1969) — observing how children responded to separation from a primary caregiver.
The early experiences children have with caregivers shape a number of mental processes — the ability to balance one’s emotions, to reduce fear, to be attuned to others, to have insight and self-understanding — all of which research has found to be associated with attachment (Siegel, 2012). This is exactly why it belongs in a series about trusting your gut: what you’re calling instinct may, in part, be one of these processes firing.
A recent meta-analysis shows that your childhood attachment determines how vulnerable you are to burnout, how much you trust your colleagues at work, and how satisfied and engaged you feel in your job. Warnock, Ju and Katz (2024) analysed data from over 32,000 employees and found attachment style predicted burnout, job performance, job satisfaction and turnover intentions — and, notably, that trust in your manager was one of the actual mechanisms carrying that effect through to how committed and satisfied you feel at work. This is just one example of how your neurobiology invisibly alters the landscape of your life, and why you need to take it seriously if you want to develop instincts you can genuinely trust.
From a neurobiological perspective, attachment isn’t a story about how much your parents or caregivers loved you, or whether they were good people. It’s about seeing your own deeply rooted patterns of prediction more clearly through your physiological responses.
Understanding the neurobiology of your attachment in certain situations
Parents, teachers, nannies, grandparents, siblings, pastors — all of them have played a role in wiring the attachment dynamics each of us have. Different caregivers can wire different patterns. You might have felt secure with one parent and anxious with another. That mix means that encountering a new person — someone who reminds your system of any one of them — can trigger a whole cascade of old predictions before you’ve consciously registered why you feel the way you do around them.
It’s also really important to remember that our wired responses (algorithms or patterns of prediction) sit on a spectrum. Some people find labelling and categories useful, some don’t, but either way it’s important to recognise they are unique patterns of prediction to you.
If you are learning to cultivate instincts you can trust, understanding whether you’re processing a situation from a secure place, or through a different attachment lens, will go a long way to helping you discern whether it’s something to follow or not. Having studied it as a graduate, seen the umpteen quizzes you could take to find out what ‘type’ you were it felt dumbed-down and way too grounded in conceptual self-awareness alone. And, as we know from previous principles the story we tell ourselves, or what we think we observe about ourselves, is usually never the full story.
So understanding what algorithms are running in you at an embodied self-awareness level (rather than the conceptual level) is central to shifting how you see the world and yourself in it. It will help you start to reshape your perception of success, your self-worth and often, your coping mechanisms in times of stress.
How to discern what to trust in the moment
Learning the principles and techniques we talked about in #1 – #4 provide us with the skills and the ability to explore these important unconscious patterns of prediction. Whilst illuminations, realisations and breakthroughs can be fast – we approach this gently, with humility and curiosity – we don’t know what wants to be seen.
Rather than cognitively saying ‘I have this style’ and trying to work with that, you will want to map your inner landscape in situations that feel really alive for you. Going back to where we started this whole series: being able to do that requires present-moment attention, the ability to widen your perspective and be as confident as possible that you aren’t a victim to any inattentional blindness or just seeing what you’re looking for, and that you’re confident your nervous system is settled and in a parasympathetic state. If it isn’t, being able to curiously delve into what you expect or imagine might be happening, and determining what predictions and expectations sit behind that, matters. If you can do this from your embodied self-awareness, and your instinct is still that your boss is annoyed, you’re likely honing in on an instinct worth trusting.
Questions like: what does my body do the second I feel it — does something in me want to withdraw, prove myself, or take over? When’s the last time I felt exactly this way before, with someone else entirely? Is there a version of this person, or this moment, that reminds my system of somewhere I once had to earn safety, or where it wasn’t guaranteed?
None of these questions will have a clean answer waiting underneath them, but your ability to stop second-guessing yourself is far easier when you can take yourself through this cascade. But in doing so we start to build a stronger bridge between the knowledge we are gaining through our embodied self-awareness and integrating that into our conceptual self-awareness. New stories emerge, old stories fall away – often there are new choices to be made (and practiced) as we rewire strong synaptic connections that have been built over a lifetime. I find the algorithm analogy useful because it reminds us how we can intentionally input new data and new results start to arrive.
This is exactly what RESET — my next self-guided journey to accompany PAUSE — is built to help you do: to build the discernment to know, in the moment, which instincts are still worth trusting.
Read on for Principle #6 where we bring it all together and look at how to develop instincts you can really trust, and rewire the older patterns that no longer serve you →
If you want to dive in more, Pioneer in interpersonal neurobiology, Dr Daniel Siegel explains that we start to attune to ourselves at a deep embodied level, we create the space for change.