Run Game Approaching

Trusting your instincts: is it nerves or a real 'not now'?

6 min read

Your stomach drops, your chest tightens, and a voice says "not now." The trouble is that fear and a real warning feel almost identical. Same heartbeat, same urge to check your phone. So "trust your gut" is only useful advice if you can tell which gut is talking.

What follows is a rule of thumb for that, not a law. Your instincts will be wrong sometimes in both directions. The goal is to make the call on purpose instead of letting the feeling make it for you.

Why the feeling alone can't settle it

Three pieces of research are worth knowing, along with what they don't cover. None of them studied street approaches.

Intuition works best in learnable settings. In a 2009 paper in American Psychologist, Daniel Kahneman and Gary Klein compared two schools of thought on expert intuition. They concluded that a gut judgment is more likely to be sound when the environment is regular enough to learn from and the person has had practice with accurate feedback. They also concluded that how confident an intuition feels is not a reliable sign that it's right. Approaching a stranger is a noisy setting. Nobody tells you why she said no, so a strong feeling is weak evidence.

You're probably noticed less than you think. In the spotlight effect experiments (Gilovich, Medvec and Savitsky, 2000), people wearing a T-shirt overestimated how many observers would remember it. Those were experiments with a T-shirt and a group discussion, not real approaches. They can't tell you what any one stranger thinks of you, but they fit a familiar pattern: fear says everyone is watching.

Nerves can be relabeled. In Alison Wood Brooks's 2014 paper, 441 participants across three experiments (a speech, math problems and karaoke) said "I am excited" or a comparison phrase, such as "I am calm," before the task. The excited groups did better on several measures, such as speech ratings and math scores. Her explanation is that anxiety and excitement are both high-energy states, so relabeling is easier than calming down. The tasks were lab tasks, and the karaoke score came from the console's built-in rating. Treat it as a cheap thing to try, not a cure.

The NHS lists a pounding heart, sweating, trembling and feeling sick among the physical signs people with social anxiety often have. Those sensations mostly reflect your own arousal, and on their own they say little about her.

The three-second check

Run these in order. Speed matters, because every extra second feeds the doubt.

  1. Is the feeling about me, or about her and the place? Fear sounds like "what if I say something dumb," "everyone will watch," "I'm not ready." Those are about you. A signal sounds like "she's walking fast and checking the time," "she's on a call," "she's working and the line is out the door." Those are about the situation.
  2. Can I point to something I can see or hear? If you can name a specific observation, treat it as information. If the best you can say is "it just feels wrong," nerves are the likelier source, though not a certain one.
  3. Would I still skip if I felt calm? Picture the same scene with you relaxed. If you'd still walk past, skip. If you'd go over, fear is making the decision.
What you notice Likely source A sensible move
"I'll sound stupid" Fear (you) Go, with a one-sentence hello
Headphones in, eyes down, moving fast Situation (her) Skip this one
She's mid-conversation with a friend Situation Wait for a natural gap, or skip
Your hands shake, nothing else is off Fear Breathe out slowly, then go
She's working a busy shift Situation A short thanks, no pitch
You can't say why, but you're uneasy about safety Unclear Leave, no analysis needed

When safety is the question

That last row overrides everything above. If a place or a person makes you uneasy about your own safety or someone else's, you don't need to prove it. Brown University's public safety page lists "trust your instincts" first among its safety tips. That's advice from a safety office, not a research result, but it's a sensible default.

Both mistakes cost something

Skip too often and you never get feedback, and the fear grows because you never test it. Go every time and you'll sometimes interrupt someone who is busy.

Your read of "she looks open" or "she looks closed" is also a guess. In a 2009 study, 54 college students watched 24 speed-dating clips and judged whether each person was interested. They were fairly good at judging the men's interest and poor at judging the women's. In five clips, about 80 percent of observers decided the woman was interested when she wasn't. A 2022 set of three experiments (Samara and colleagues) found observers of muted 3-to-9-second clips weren't reliably accurate at spotting attraction, except when both daters were interested. Both used speed-dating clips, a different setting from a street or a bar.

Two takeaways. First, when you honestly can't tell, a short hello costs little and lets her answer for herself. Second, a no, or her turning away, means you stop. That one rule makes the "go" side of the check safe to use.

Log the call so you can learn from it

A skip is data. Run Game lets you log an approach as Success or Rejected with an optional note. There's no button for a skip, so write skips in your session's notes or your own: "skipped: on a call" or "skipped: nerves." After a few weeks, count them. If most say nerves, that's your pattern, and the answer is smaller steps. If most say a real signal, your filter is working.

What to do next

  1. Run the three questions on every approach you consider this week. Three seconds, no more.
  2. Write each skip in one line with one word for the source: "me" or "her," plus the reason.
  3. If it's "me," go within 10 seconds. Use a one-sentence hello, like the ones in how to stop overthinking before you approach.
  4. If it's "her," let it go. Try again at the next spot, and use the cues in choosing who to approach to pick the next set. No post-mortem needed.
  5. Warm up first. Do two low-stakes exchanges (a question about the menu, the time) before deciding anything. Slowing your breath on the way over pairs well with that, and calming your body with breathing and visualization has exercises for it. Warming up before your first approach has a routine.
  6. Count your notes after two weeks. If more than half say "me," read approach anxiety and shrink the next step.
  7. Know the exit. The signals in signs she's not interested and consent and respect tell you when to stop.

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