When something doesn’t feel right, it might be a good idea to follow your gut. If it says this alleyway might be dangerous, choose a different route. If it says this manager is lying, set up a “rat trap”.

At least that’s what the redditor u/More-Jackfruit3010 did when he “smelled a rat” at a new workplace. He told the ‘Petty Revenge’ community that after nearly a week of smooth-sailing training, the hiring manager’s attitude changed completely. That’s when the newcomer felt something was off and took action to get his petty yet sweet revenge.

People can’t explain the gut feeling they get, but it often turns out to be right nevertheless

Image credits: prathanchorruangsak (not the actual photo)

This new hire had a bad feeling about the sudden change in his manager’s attitude

Image credits: borodai (not the actual photo)

Image credits: More-Jackfruit3010

The gut feeling we get is a complex matter based on brain activity and its connection to the digestive system

You’ve likely experienced it yourself—that type of inexplicable feeling that something’s not right. That sensation of your stomach turning into a bottomless pit for reasons only seemingly known to it rather than the brain. Well, as a matter of fact, the two are very much interconnected. Healthline revealed that our brain and gut communicate through what’s called a gut-brain axis. They’re also connected through neurotransmitters that are produced in the brain and control our feelings and emotions.

Such a type of gut feeling is often also called intuition, which, according to the Professional Leadership Institute, is based on our brain’s ability to notice repetitive patterns. When we encounter a situation similar to what we’ve faced before, our brain can make a prediction based on past experience. And the prediction is the hunch we get in these situations. That’s why, for instance, professionals with long years of experience have a really good gut instinct about work-related matters.

In an article about the science behind intuition, Forbes expanded on how the latter can be used to reach better results at work. It also explained what’s involved in it; the assistant clinical professor of psychiatry at UCLA told Forbes that our gut and the right side of the brain are responsible for intuition. She also revealed that the women’s corpus collosum, the part of our brain that connects the left and right hemispheres, is thicker than men’s. That allows females to access each hemisphere faster, this way optimizing the decision-making process when it’s related to emotion and gut feeling. (That might be one of the reasons the latter is often called women’s intuition.)

Image credits: Alexander Simonsen (not the actual photo)

The inexplicable feeling can also stem from certain subconscious processes

Scientific American revealed that according to the psychologist Gerd Gigerenzer, people rarely make decisions based on reason alone (especially when it comes to complex decisions). And that’s where intuition presents itself. He believes that it can alleviate the problem-solving processes based on heuristics—rules of thumb that reduce the load on our brain. They allow it to make the decision without having to consciously analyze loads of information beforehand.

In an article for Psychology Today, experts Lou Cozolino, Chloe Drulis, and Carly Samuelson pointed out that some information is often only intentionally analyzed in retrospect. They state that a lot of processing is happening outside of conscious awareness, and that’s why it feels like we know things without actually knowing them. And such feelings can manifest in the body as stomach aches, muscle tension, or simply a sense of what you should or shouldn’t do. In the OP’s story, he “smelled a rat” and decided to listen to his gut, which led him to execute a plan for petty revenge; as the story shows, for a reason.

People in the comments had questions and insight about the situation

Some redditors shared their own similar stories

Others didn’t seem to be convinced by the OP

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