What Traveling 30 Countries Taught Me About Trusting My Instinct Underwater and On Land

In the fall of October 2024 I went camping with my friends in the south of France. One day we wanted to go scuba diving since we heard that there are some amazing spots nearby. So we located a dive shop that would take us there and called to book a dive for the next day.

While gearing up we noticed that they didn’t give us a dive computer. (For non-divers: this is an essential gear that you can’t go diving without.) So naturally, we asked if we could get one and they told us it would be enough if our guide has a computer.

We were all still inexperienced divers so we didn’t have enough courage to say something, so we went on the dive without a computer and felt uneasy the entire time. After, we realized that we should have called the dive off or be more persistent that they gave us a computer since it potentially could have been really dangerous.

What that incident taught me is to always listen to my instinct. And this is true for every situation you find yourself in, especially as a solo female traveler. Wheter it is in a dive shop, bargaining with a taxi driver or walking into a new hostel.

The pattern I didn’t notice until I looked back

For years I thought of “trusting your gut” as something vague, almost mystical, the kind of advice that sounds nice on a poster but doesn’t actually tell you what to do. It wasn’t until I started noticing the pattern across dozens of countries that it clicked: my gut was never guessing. It was noticing.

Noticing when I felt uneasy, noticing when all I wanted to do was leave, noticing when I hung out with people I didn’t feel comfortable with.

Underwater and on land, it’s the same skill

Diving taught me this more clearly than anything on land ever could, mostly because underwater there’s no room to overthink your way out of a bad situation. You either notice the diver next to you breathing too fast, the current pulling slightly wrong, the guide who’s checked their gauge one too many times — or you don’t, and you find out the hard way.

On land, the exact same muscle is doing the work. The version of you that clocks a street changing character block by block is running the identical process as the version of you that clocks a dive site feeling off before the briefing even finishes. Both are just you, quietly cross-referencing the situation in front of you against everything you’ve absorbed before, faster than you can put it into words.

The only real difference is that on land, we’re much more practiced at talking ourselves out of a bad situation. It’s easier to walk away from something that makes us feel uneasy.

Instinct gets sharper with experience, not with bravery

None of this is about being a fearless solo traveler. If anything, the divers and travelers I trust most are the ones who are quickest to admit when something spooks them. What’s actually happening with experience isn’t that the fear goes away — it’s that the read gets faster and more precise. Thirty countries in, I can often tell within a few minutes of walking into a dive shop or a neighborhood whether something’s off, not because I got braver, but because I have started to notice patterns.

This is the part I wish someone had told me earlier: it’s a skill, not a personality trait. You don’t have to be naturally intuitive. You just have to keep paying attention, and keep letting the feeling count as evidence even before you can fully explain it.

What I actually do with it now

A few things that changed once I started taking the gut feeling seriously instead of demanding a reason first:

• I name the feeling instead of arguing with it. “Something’s off” is allowed to be a complete sentence, not a problem I need to solve before I’m allowed to act on it. Is it the people I don’t trust, the environment that makes me anxious or did I notice that something with the scuba gear is wrong? Be specific with yourself so you start noticing patterns more easily.
• I give myself permission to leave without justifying it. Not to a dive operator, not to a stranger, not even to the friend I’m traveling with. “I don’t want to” has to be reason enough.
• I pay attention to my body, not just my thoughts. A tight chest, a stomach drop, an urge to physically step back. These things show up before the conscious explanation does, and they’re usually right.
• I stopped keeping score of the false alarms. Not every gut check turns out to be correct, and that’s fine. The cost of listening to a wrong one is a few awkward minutes. The cost of ignoring a right one can be a lot more. It’s better to leave one too many times instead of staying in a situation where it just gets worse.

Conclusion

Diving and solo travel, especially as a woman, have taught me the same lesson from two different depths: the version of you that’s paying close attention already knows more than the version of you waiting for proof. Thirty-plus countries in, the biggest shift hasn’t been getting fearless. It’s been learning to trust the diver (and the traveler) who’s quietly, constantly reading the room, and letting her call the shots without making her explain herself first.