Progressive Intuition-Trust Ladder
Build trust in your gut by staking small decisions on it and recording the outcomes
- Difficulty
- Moderate
- Time to result
- ~months to results
- Steps
- 5
- Confidence
- 70%
Swart frames intuition as a muscle strengthened by evidence rather than a fixed trait. The ladder starts physical: because the gut-brain-microbiome axis underpins intuition, you first improve gut health through a diverse diet, fermented foods, and possibly a probiotic, changes that can shift the microbiome within days. Next comes journaling, first just noticing and recording when you did or didn't use intuition, then reading back to surface repeated patterns. Then you deliberately take a low-risk decision where intuition and logic disagree, go with intuition, and record the outcome. As the evidence that trusting your gut produces good results accumulates, you slowly raise the significance of the decisions you stake on it. The mechanism is a self-reinforcing feedback loop: small wins build the trust that permits bigger bets.
Origin
Outlined by neuroscientist Dr. Tara Swart from her coaching practice and MIT teaching, shared on Modern Wisdom with Chris Williamson.
Core principles
- 01Intuition is an aggregate of lived experience, honed through use
- 02Trust is earned with evidence, not asserted by willpower
- 03Start with low-stakes decisions to keep the downside small
- 04Reading back your journal reveals repeated patterns you would otherwise miss
- 05Physical gut health is the foundation for accessing intuition
How to run it
- 1
Fix the physical foundation
Improve gut health with a diverse plant-rich diet, fermented foods, and a quality probiotic. Diet changes can shift the microbiome within days.
Pro tip Eat in a way that acknowledges your genetic ancestry; a Mediterranean diet works for most people.
Watch out Under chronic stress, high cortisol dehydrates and inflames the brain-body system, blunting intuition regardless of effort.
- 2
Notice and record
Journal your decisions and whether you leaned on intuition, without judging. The goal at this stage is only raising awareness of when you have or haven't used it.
- 3
Read back for patterns
Periodically re-read your entries. Seeing the same behavior repeated in your own handwriting is what makes journaling game-changing rather than busywork.
Pro tip The value is in the read-back, not the writing; skipping it wastes the practice.
- 4
Take a low-risk intuitive bet
Choose a low-stakes decision where intuition and logic disagree, go with intuition, and record the outcome.
Pro tip Run it by a trusted friend first to override the loss-averse fear response before you act.
- 5
Escalate the stakes
As recorded outcomes show that trusting intuition works out, gradually increase the significance of the decisions you base on it.
Watch out Don't jump straight to high-stakes bets before you've gathered enough evidence to justify the trust.
In the wild
Swart describes trying several different probiotics and, because she relies heavily on her honed intuition, being able to feel which one is right for her body. It's a small, low-consequence decision, if she's wrong, she just switches. But it's exactly the kind of low-risk intuitive bet that builds the trust ladder: she notices a gut signal, acts on it, and observes the result, reinforcing her confidence for larger decisions later.
→ A trivial, safe-to-be-wrong choice becomes reps that strengthen intuitive trust.
Common mistakes
Journaling without reading back
Writing entries but never revisiting them hides the repeated patterns that are the whole point; you keep making the same mistake unaware.
Starting with high-stakes bets
Testing untrained intuition on a major irreversible decision courts a large loss and can destroy the trust you were trying to build.
Ignoring the gut-health base layer
Trying to access intuition while inflamed, dehydrated, and chronically stressed fails because the brain is stuck in survival low-power mode.
Is it for you?
Best for
Analytical overthinkers who sense a gut signal but cannot yet commit to acting on it.
Not ideal for
People under 25 or with very little life experience, whose intuition lacks enough aggregated data to be reliable.
From the transcript
“I would encourage people to take a low-risk decision and where intuition and logic don't align and go with your intuition and see what happens…”
“my biggest game-changing tip for journaling is not actually to do with the journaling, it's to do with reading back over it. Because that's when…”
From the episode
How to Use Your Intuition as a Superpower - Dr Tara Swart - #990
Dr Tara Swart