Gut instinct or just my lunch?

I have always envied people for whom their gut instinct is like a lighthouse, helping them navigate through the choppy waters of contradiction and indecision onto the shores of resolution and clarity. These people always tell me their gut instinct is audible to them, ringing clear like a bell. For example, my friend, who I will hereon refer to as Fat Pants, is one of these people who as a rule functions on merciless logic to get him to that point just before he makes his final decision. Then he lets his gut (HEH) take it from there. I asked him once how he's sure it is his instinct that he's listening to and not just another line of reasoning. His said two very powerful words to me. "Fucking. Introspect."

"Lock yourself up in a room, cry your eyes out if you have to, scream if you must. But don't get out till you have your answers," he explains.

Now here's where it all starts to go pear-shaped.
For someone who blogs about what she's feeling and thinking and opining, I really suck at introspection. It just doesn't come naturally to me. I blame it on my daily-diminishing attention span, my soaring propensity for procrastination and my tendency to second guess myself all the time.
Plus I am someone who's always been unable to delay gratification - it's why I smoke, it's why I'm overweight, it's why I stay up late watching back-to-back episodes of Mother instead of writing my stories for work. So there's a very good chance that I could be mistaking what I really want to happen in a situation (want to feel the comfort of being in a relationship, want to eat fries, want to be liked) as my gut instinct. A very obvious and a very real trap.

I've swung by the seat of my pants for so long, but for the first time I'm feeling the weight of my malformed opinions and underdeveloped decisions weighing down on me. I'm tired of 'definitely, maybe' and I'm ready for 'definitely'.

To this end I've decided I need to first shut out the physical noise before I'm able to shut out the noise in my head. I'm withdrawing my cards, I'm leaving the building, I'm putting out the 'closed for business' sign. For a while anyway.