You don't have to consciously know that you're in trouble to understand that you might be in trouble. Yes, sometimes the best course of action is to simply trust your gut — even if you're not precisely sure in the moment why your gut is warning you.
Indeed, the gut is a powerful thing. This r/AskReddit thread is a veritable celebration of what can happen when people trust their gut.
"My mom dropped my 3 year old brother off at daycare before she had to work in the morning. When she got to work she had this terrible feeling something was wrong with him. She ended up leaving work and drove to the daycare. She found the daycare lady inside sleeping while the daycare kids (including my brother) were running around the pool. My brother never went back to that daycare again."
"We were looking at houses a while back, and found one that was great location, would have been perfect size for us, and didnt appear to need any work other than new carpet, and stuff I wanted to do like painting and switching the it over from oil burning furnace. I just had a nagging feeling about it, and my husband agreed. As much as we loved it something was off with it (I actually thought ghost or something silly like that 😂), and we ended up passing on it. I was still kicking myself about it until a few months later when it had a major electrical fire. The whole house and everything in it was a total loss, and the family that lived there barely got out alive."
"When my husband and I were in college we came home late one night after a long day and had to get up early the next day. We were both so tired and he wanted to leave his backpack and computer in the car because we were going to be getting up and back into the car in a few hours. My gut feeling said absolutely not and I made him take his bag and computer. When we came back down the next morning his car had been broken into."
"I was president of a club, and a guy who'd recently joined just set off my alarm bells, but he never did anything wrong. I still couldn't shake the feeling he was off. I asked my best friend, a pretty burly guy, to just keep an eye on him during a conference we went to.
Most of the club (minus me) went to a party at the conference, my best friend kept an eye on the weird guy for most of the night, and ended up stopping him from raping a passed out drunk girl.
I pretty much always trust my gut feelings now."
"I smelled burning plastic early in the morning at my family cottage and almost went back to sleep (I was around 15), but got up to investigate. A socket on the outside of the building had caught fire and flames were shooting up the wall. The rest of my family was still sleeping and there wasn’t enough smoke for the alarms to go off. I ran and got the fire extinguisher, got my dad up, and put it in his hands and pointed him towards the fire. Stopped it and called the fire department."
"I was building a fort in the woods near my house as a kid. Got this eerie feeling that something was wrong so I packed my stuff and made my way home. Next day, on my way to school on the bus, my friend mentioned a cougar his family saw running across the road that was within a couple hundred feet of where I was. It just so happened to be at the same time I was out there."
"I was 15 years old and my mom dropped me off at McDonald’s to get breakfast while she went across the street to get Starbucks. It was a shopping mall in suburbia and we were on the way to pick up a new kitten a few hours away. Instead of walking the 100 yards to my mom I sat outside waiting for her to pick me up. Teenagers I guess. As I’m standing there a guy in an old station wagon with two kids in the back starts talking to me. He asks me where I’m going and I say whatever town it was. He says he’s going there too with his kids and asks if I want to come. I tell him no that my mom is across the street and he comes closer. My gut is saying something is off so I see a random woman walk out of Starbucks and I point to her and say that’s my mom right there. He freaked out and left really quick. I still remember those two kids in the backseat. They looked so off. I wonder to this day if they are okay."
"I matched with a guy on Tinder. We exchanged messages, and everything was fine, normal. We decided we would meet up for coffee in a week. A few days after we arranged the coffee date, he messaged me saying his father had passed away in those few days. He couldn’t meet me in public. He could only meet me in private at his apartment. I trusted my gut, sent my condolences, but said I couldn’t meet him somewhere private. He tried to tell me I could trust him because he had a dog. I still declined. He got really aggressive and started messaging me horrible things. He called me every name in the book. I ended up blocking him. I tried to find him later on, and he basically never existed. He could have blocked me on all social media. But I couldn’t find a trace of him anywhere. I don’t know what the outcome would have been, but I just couldn’t do it."
"I'm afraid of rollercoasters (mostly heights but they go hand in hand). My friends and I went to a theme park and went on one that was in darkness and went underground. I rode it once, sitting in the back, and really enjoyed it surprisingly.
When we reached the start again, there was no line (as it was the end of the day) so they asked if we wanted a final go before they shut down. Something in my gut told me not to go on so, despite my friends nagging, I didn't and waited with the bags.
My friends came back around a few minutes later white as a sheet. About 3/4 of the way through the ride, there's a big drop then it goes fast and just before that, my friend in the back's bar had risen up. Apparently they had to grip onto her for the rest of the ride whilst trying to push the bar back down."
"About 10 years ago, working security at a site about 50 miles from home, got off shift at midnight, and didn't bother to change out of uniform because I was only going to stop for gas. Two stations in the town I was working in were open after midnight, but it slipped my mind as I drove past the first one. Pulled into the other, (same brand, same gas price, same sort of dump entirely) and just didn't like something about it. Nobody else around but he clerk that I could see, but I decided to go back to the other one.
Topped off and headed back out of town, I get close to that station again. Three city cop cars, two deputies and a state trooper are outside blocking the road with guns drawn. Turns out a city cop walked in on a robbery. Dude put a bullet in his vest, and the store owner knocked the robber out cold with a bat before the cop could recover enough to get his gun out."
"I was walking to the barbershop, and for some reason, everything just felt off. I ignored the feeling but every step I took just made me feel like something wasn't right, so I decided to just go grab some food and come back. While I was eating I saw police cars and ambulances driving to around where I was before, it turns out there was a murder. Now I always listen to my gut feeling."
"I was walking out of a grocery store when I saw this kid about to cross the road. Something came over me and I yanked him back onto the sidewalk. Not even a second later a truck came flying past. He was probably around 7 or 8ish."
"Was sitting on one of those metal cylindrical electricity boxes outside my house when there was a blackout.
Electricity was slightly flickering in my house, no other houses had a blackout. I looked down at what I was sitting on and I was like:
'uhh maybe this is the source of the problem
I stood up and stepped away from it and like 2 seconds later it BLEW UP. Like a pillar of flame shot out and above it for almost a full minute. It was basically a gigantic bunsen burner and I was a few seconds short of physically getting fried."
"I woke up from a deep sleep at like 2AM during a winter storm, something wasn't right... I immediately went looking for my senior dog and couldn't find her anywhere in the house. My roommates had a tendency to let her out for a walk and forget about her, closing the door.
I ran to the front of the house and found her laying on the welcome mat, she was hardly breathing and covered in snow... She had been outside alone for at the very least 5 hours. I moved out shortly after."
"My sister since she was about 5 was always obsessed with tsunamis and would always ask my dad every night before she went to sleep if there would be a tsunami that night (we lived on a beach)
About 5 years later when our family was holidaying in Samoa an earthquake struck at about 6am. It was only a dull low rumble but went on for over a minute. Everyone at the resort woke up and went outside for a few minutes then went back to bed. My sister having been obsessed with Tsunamis ran down to look at the water and noticed the sea going out and saved alot of lives including my own."
"I was learning violin when I was about 10 from an instructor at my local music shop. I got the weirdest feeling from him even though he didn’t do anything out of the ordinary. I wanted to vomit every time I looked at him, especially his hands. After 4 lessons I told my parents that I had a terrible feeling about him and I never wanted to go back. Luckily, they listened and didn’t make me ever go to him again. A few years later he was arrested for molesting multiple of his students. I have no idea how I knew something was off."
"Not me but my science teacher, when she was a teenager she was standing near some lights at a pedestrian crossing with her and her friend. Very chill but out of nowhere she had this gut feeling that both of them had to move.
They moved just a couple metres away and the next moment a car had hit another car and had hit one of the street electricity utility poles and it had fell and exploded (minor explosion enough distance away that it didn’t hurt the girls) exactly where they were. One of the wires had also snapped and hit it exactly where they were standing as well."
"In 2004, on Boxing Day. Not me but my mother. Family trip including all cousins and extended family on my dad's side to visit the coastal South of Sri Lanka on vacation, about 20 people in all.
Well planned trip, last moment my mother didn't want to go. No reason at all. None of us could get her to explain why but she refused to go. So we went inland on a different trip to see some other relatives.
Around midday, the entire extended family now on both sides were sitting shocked in front of the television watching the very same hotel we booked being washed away live by the tsunami."
"My mom and her entire family were saved from dying from carbon monoxide poisoning by her dad. He left for work, got a weird feeling and drove back home. Everyone in the house was unconscious, and he had to drag or carry them all outside one by one. They all survived."
"I used to just drive around country roads when I would feel stressed out or sad as a way to just get away and listen to music. One evening I was driving with my best friend in the car and we're on a gravel road that has a huge hill. We were driving towards the sunset but it was winter and the light was fading fast. As the car started down the hill I had this moment where I thought to myself "my brights should be on" and I flicked them on and at the bottom of this super steep hill stood 6 deer on the road. I slammed on the brakes and the car turned sideways and skidded to a stop like 4 feet from the deer."
