One of the most mysterious concepts of the human being refers to the mental realm, to the realm of thoughts and the subconscious. The reality is that, as much as we want to, we cannot easily access our own unconscious, or even the conscious awareness of another individual. Each one is free from his inner truth and from what he wants to share or not with others and to what extent he wants to do it. It is important to also talk about those thoughts that we do not feel contain the same level of certainty and that, nevertheless, are based on an intuition that goes beyond rational and logic: hunches, those feelings we have that something is going to happen.
This type of unconscious omen produces a certain level of confusion in us "¿What is a feeling?" "What does it consist of?" "How do you know if a feeling is good or bad?". These are some of the doubts that may arise in our head, if you want to know more about this mental phenomenon, we invite you to read the following Psychology-Online article.
Index
- Definition of hunch
- How to tell if a feeling is good or bad
- Are hunches real?
Definition of presentiment.
To make the correct definition of a hunch, in the first place, we must clarify that it is a poorly studied mental process given its unscientific nature. We define hunches as those feelings or intuitions that something is going to happen, usually appear in the form of furtive thoughts that appear in our head quickly and leave us with a strange feeling, a presentiment can be born from intuition and become a totally conscious thought, it can also be defined as premonition or future forecast.
All of us could say that we have had some kind of feeling in our life, some feeling that something good or bad was going to happen on a specific day. It is likely that we were even right with that hunch, however, there is no evidence that hunches are phenomena capable of "seeing the future".
How to know if a feeling is good or bad.
In order to distinguish whether a hunch is positive or negative in nature, we have to pay attention to our internal sensationsIf that thought has been so furtive that it has passed without our being able to analyze it, we will have to examine the sensations that this thought has left us. If the feeling is positive, we are talking about a feeling that something good is going to happen. If, otherwise, the emotion is negative, we are talking about a bad omen.
It is normal to have a certain fear of a bad omen, nobody wants anything bad to happen to them in life. However, living with constant fear is not a good solution since this fear can lead to stress and anxiety.
It is important to clarify again that these sensations are untrue mental processes. It is true that we may feel that, for example, visiting a specific site is a bad idea. However, it can be nonsense to call it a foreboding when, in fact, it has been a conscious process to come to think that we do not want to visit such a site. Strengthening our conscious decisions increases our personal strengths and our capacity for responsibility.
Are hunches real?
Despite the fact that there is no scientific evidence that fully demonstrates the existence of thoughts that divine our future, there are studies that affirm that the human brain is designed to perceive the future1. These studies speak of neural structures that could be destined to the perception of all temporal planes (present, past and future). This phenomenon is constantly being investigated and denying its impact on a social level is useless. However, all your studies need a critical and scientific look to prevent implausible situations or evidences from being affirmed.
What is undeniable is there are times when you think that something you are living you had already dreamed of (this effect is known as a Déjà Vu), or suddenly, you have a very strong hunch that is inexplicable to you. It is difficult to define what happens but it is. If you want to know more about these phenomena, we recommend you read this article about what is a Déjà Vu and why does it happen.
On many occasions, it is advisable to be careful not to confuse hunches with negativity And it is that there are people who live stuck and permanently connected with negative thinking. They always put themselves in the worst, therefore, when the worst happens they believe that they already knew it through an act of self-affirmation. Far from thinking like that, the best thing is that you always keep in your mind those positive hunches that were fulfilled and that left a sweet taste in your soul.
The functioning of the mental realm produces a constant astonishment even to the scientists themselves who do not stop research on this question as philosophers have done for many centuries, for example, Descartes. It is likely that with the passage of time we will be able to clarify how our unconscious works and where the limits of our mind are but, for now, we will have to settle for live these hunches and learn to detect them.
This article is merely informative, in Psychology-Online we do not have the power to make a diagnosis or recommend a treatment. We invite you to go to a psychologist to treat your particular case.
If you want to read more articles similar to What is a hunch?, we recommend that you enter our category of Social psychology.
References
- Bem, D. J. (2011). Feeling the future: experimental evidence for anomalous retroactive influences on cognition and affect. Journal of personality and social psychology, 100(3), 407.
