The morning of my job interview, my stomach twisted into knots. I told myself it was nerves. Normal interview anxiety. I drank tea, practiced answers, ignored the feeling.

I got the job. Three months later, I understood what the knot was trying to tell me.

The boss was cruel in ways that left no evidence. The colleagues smiled while undermining each other. The culture was poison, invisible but potent. I spent two years there, slowly diminishing, before I finally left.

That knot had known. On the first morning, before I had any information, before I had met anyone, before I had any reason to suspect—the knot had known.

I have spent years thinking about this. About the knots and the churnings and the nameless unease that arrives without explanation. We call it anxiety. We treat it as malfunction. We medicate it, therapize it, try to make it go away.

But what if it is not malfunction? What if it is message?

My grandmother never used the word anxiety. She said things like “something is not right” or “my heart is uneasy.” She trusted these feelings completely. When her heart was uneasy about a person, she kept her distance. When something felt not right about a decision, she waited. She could not explain why. She simply knew.

We called this superstition. Old woman’s intuition. Nothing scientific about it. But she was right more often than she was wrong. She avoided people who later revealed themselves as harmful. She refused opportunities that later proved to be traps. Her unease was radar, scanning for threats her conscious mind could not see.

Science is beginning to catch up with my grandmother.

There are five hundred million neurons in your gut. A second brain, the scientists call it. This enteric nervous system processes information constantly—micro-signals from the environment, subtle cues from other people, patterns too complex for conscious analysis. It knows things before you know them. It speaks to you in the only language it has: sensation. Tightness. Churning. The knot that will not untie.

We have been taught to ignore this language. We have been taught that the rational mind is superior, that feelings without reasons are irrational, that we should override our bodies with our thoughts. So we walk into toxic workplaces despite the knot. We marry people despite the unease. We make decisions that feel wrong but seem right, and then we wonder why our lives collapse.

I had a first date once with a woman who seemed perfect. Educated, charming, beautiful. We talked for hours. She said all the right things. But something in my chest felt tight. I could not name it. I told myself I was being foolish.

I saw her for six months. She was manipulative in ways I am still untangling. The tightness had been warning me. I had called it anxiety and pushed through.

My friend Rahim calls himself a worrier. He worries about everything—his health, his family, his investments, the state of the world. People tell him to relax. They say he overthinks. They say his anxiety is excessive, unwarranted, exhausting.

But Rahim predicted the 2008 financial crisis. Not from reading newspapers—from feeling something was wrong. He moved his money before the crash. He worried about a relative’s marriage before anyone else saw problems; the marriage ended badly. He felt uneasy about a business partner who later committed fraud.

His “excessive” anxiety is pattern recognition operating at a level his conscious mind cannot access. He processes vast amounts of data—body language, economic signals, historical patterns, subtle inconsistencies—and the processing arrives as worry. The worry is not the problem. The worry is the conclusion of a calculation he cannot see.

Perhaps anxiety is not disorder but early warning system. Perhaps our modern lifestyle has pathologized something ancient and valuable. Perhaps we should not be medicating the alarm; we should be listening to it.

I am not saying all anxiety is prophetic. Sometimes a knot is just a knot. Sometimes worry is just worry, generated by stress or chemistry or the thousand pressures of modern life. But sometimes—more often than we admit—the anxiety knows something.

The question is how to tell the difference.

I have no perfect answer. But I have noticed patterns in my own life. The anxiety that comes from nothing—no obvious trigger, no clear cause—is often the most reliable. It arrives like weather, without explanation. This is the gut brain speaking. This is the ancient radar detecting something the modern mind has missed.

The anxiety that comes with reasons—I am worried because of this specific thing—is more often noise. The mind has found a target for general stress. The worry attaches to whatever is available. This anxiety can usually be talked through, rationalized, reduced with logic.

But the wordless unease, the knot that has no name, the feeling that something is wrong without knowing what—this deserves attention. This is data. This is your five hundred million neurons reporting what they have found.

I wish I had listened sooner. I wish I had trusted the knot before the interview, the tightness before the date, the thousand small uneasinesses I overrode with rational thought. My life would look different. Some pain would have been avoided. Some mistakes would not have been made.

But I am learning now. When the knot comes, I pause. I do not immediately dismiss it as irrational. I ask: what might this be detecting? What am I sensing that I have not yet seen?

Sometimes the answer comes. Sometimes it does not. But the asking itself is a form of respect. A recognition that the body knows things the mind does not. That anxiety, for all its discomfort, may be trying to help.

My grandmother died fifteen years ago. Near the end, she told me something I have never forgotten. She said, “Your body is older than your brain. It remembers things your brain has forgotten. When it speaks, listen.”

I did not understand then. I understand now.

The knot in my stomach is not enemy. It is ancestor. It is the accumulated wisdom of a million years of survival, compressed into sensation. It kept my ancestors alive when predators stalked, when strangers meant danger, when one wrong decision meant death.

It is still working. Still scanning. Still trying to protect me.

The least I can do is listen.