Life is full of chances, challenges, dilemmas, and decisions.

Every day we need to choose between different options. Sometimes these choices are easy to make. Other times, we feel overwhelmed by the difficulty of making these decisions. Do we trust our gut or heed the counsel of our heads? Do we rely on instinct, intuition, or reason?

We often use the words “instinct” and “intuition” interchangeably.

However, there is a difference between the two. Instinct is the faculty we share with other animals. It is the survival impulse that is hard-wired into us. For example, if someone throws something at you, you will spontaneously move out of the way. Our instinctive reactions happen in the blink of an eye, often before we are even aware of it.

Intuition, on the other hand, is a feeling of knowing that comes from past experiences. It is the hunches we have that tell us what to choose or who to trust. Some people, on the other hand, regard intuition as a higher “sixth sense” that operates at the level of the soul or our higher consciousness.

What’s common between the two is that they don’t involve conscious, rational thought, which is the ability to think through things logically and systematically.

So which should we rely on?

If you asked Daniel Kahneman, author of Thinking, Fast and Slow, he would say that we should depend more on our rationality because it helps us weed out the unconscious biases that often get in our way. But if you asked Malcolm Gladwell, author of Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, he would stress the importance of intuition, especially in moments when there’s no time to think.

So who should we believe?

To answer that, let’s look at the strengths and weaknesses of both.

As Daniel Kahneman rightly points out, we are indeed often influenced by a number of unconscious biases that dictate how we make decisions. However, if we slow down, take a step back, and rely on our rationality, we can take a more logical approach.

For example, we might be at a shopping mall and have an impulse to buy something that attracts us. We buy it, get home, and realize that we didn’t actually need it, and don’t in fact like it that much at all. Now we have yet another possession adding clutter to the already cluttered home.

On the flip side, rationality can lead to over-thinking. A person who can’t use their intuition may be crippled with indecision about the most trivial of things, like deciding between two different chocolate bars. Another example is of the logician Kurt Gödel who literally reasoned himself to death. He became paranoid that he was being poisoned and died of starvation, showing that reason can even be lethal.

Intuition, on the other hand, can enable us to make quick decisions that are lifesaving.

There are cases of people who have had gut reactions not to trust certain people which ended up saving their lives or their loved ones. There is also some evidence that intuition can help us to cope with overly complex situations. Nonetheless, Kahneman seems right: fast thinking can often be blind. We can be swayed by our own prejudices and biases. For instance, we might trust the advice of a friend rather than an expert.

So which should we depend on?

Both. We need to learn how and when to use both reason and intuition.

To decide the big “what” or “why” things, it seems that intuition is the best faculty to use because it guides us according to our deepest passions and values.

Intuition tells us what we want.

Reason enables us to methodically bring our wants into fruition.

As the philosopher David Hume said, “Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.” And as Steven Pinker further explains, this means that “reason is the means to an end, and cannot tell you what the end should be, or even that you must pursue it.”

Once we are clear on our goals, we can rationally and strategically figure out how to accomplish them.

And here’s another possible rule of thumb:

If an issue is basic, we can use intuition to quickly deal with it without too much mental effort. If something is more complex, we often need rationality to help us work through this complexity. But if something is overly complex and we don’t have the option of “calling a friend” or an expert, then we need to revert back to intuition because our rational minds cannot cope with it.

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