Your gut is fast, not always right. It’s trained on your past, and your past didn’t see everything.

Instinct is pattern matching at speed, and the patterns came from everything that has already happened to you. That makes it excellent in familiar situations and unreliable in new ones, because it will confidently apply an old rule to a case it has never met. The feeling of certainty is the same either way, which is the part that catches people out.

When your gut says no, ask what it is comparing this to. If you can name the earlier situation, check whether the resemblance is real. Fast answers are fine on familiar ground; for anything genuinely new, give yourself a day.