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During digestion, the physical process—movement, stretching, and pressure on the intestinal tissues—can communicate directly with the brain through spinal nerves as well as the vagus nerve, the cranial nerve that connects the brain to the body. Some examples of this communication are hunger and satiety hormones that are secreted based on ingested foods. Other examples are possible behavior changes, emotions, and memory formation based on microbial activity in the gut. The gut can also affect the decision-making process. These gut feelings or intuitive decisions could be a result of emotions created around memories and experiences of food, hunger, cravings, and nausea, and they form links to regions of the brain. The gut may know more than you think, so take the gut-to-brain connection into consideration. Knowing yourself a bit more in this way can make considerable differences in athletic performance and longevity. One strategy for knowing yourself better is to journal, especially right around the time you eat or around the time you make a decision. What emotions come up? What cravings do you have? What are the feelings in your gut? Slowing down during this process can help you be more aware.