Anxiety vs. intuition and how to tell the difference
A checklist to make it easier.
This article is cross-posted from my weekly newsletter, The Sunday Soother, a newsletter about modern spirituality and useful tips for creating more meaning in your life that goes out every Sunday morning. To get more content about how to infuse your life with thoughtfulness, reflection, and meaning, subscribe here. I am also a holistic personal development coach. You can learn more about working with me here.
What’s the difference between when you feel anxiety vs. when you’re feeling intuition, and how do you learn to work with and understand both?
First things first: I actually talked about anxiety vs. intuition in the realms of dating in the last episode of my podcast, so give that a listen if you’re so inclined on that topic.
Next: I find it useful, when thinking about concepts, to check out the literal dictionary definition of the term to remind yourself what it truly means, and if that aligns with what you want to know. So! Take it away, Merriam Webster:
- Anxiety: apprehensive uneasiness or nervousness usually over an impending or anticipated ill
- Intuition: quick and ready insight; immediate apprehension or cognition; the power or faculty of attaining to direct knowledge or cognition without evident rational thought and inference
Cool. So intuition is a useful skill which anxiety can often cloud or get in the way of.
Now, the question: why is it even worth understanding your intuition and how to better access it?
I really liked how this great Holisticism article, How To Start Understanding And Listening To Your Intuition (great tips in that piece, btw), put it:
Intuition can help us make microdecisions by communicating that we should avoid walking down a sketchy alley, buy a particular herb from the farmers’ market, or trust a stranger we’ve only just met. On the macro level, intuition can help steer us toward big life choices by keeping us in constant alignment with our soul’s purpose. Most importantly, when we feel comfortable using our intuition, we stop looking to external forces for guidance. Instead of turning to the prettiest wellness expert to tell us what’s right for our health or asking a mentor to tell us how to make meaningful career choices, we check in with ourselves to get the most correct answer *for us*. Then, outside opinions carry less weight, and can simply support what you already know by maybe providing more clarity or information.
For me, a few things are operating at play today making the ability to tell the difference between when you should truly be anxious vs. actual inner knowing extremely difficult: we have a billion external factors screaming at us; we do not take time to be alone with ourselves; and we are generally out of touch with the wisdom of our bodies.
Cool. So. Uh.
How to remedy this?
Here is my checklist of suggestions.
Ready?
Name a word around your feeling: Chances are, whether you’re feeling anxiety or intuition, there is a literal, you know, feeling associated with it. But it can be hard to pin down what that feeling is without a name. Pay close attention to the thoughts swirling in your mind, and see if a word leaps out at you. Tight? Eager? Nervous? Soft? Dark? Heavy? Open? Believe it or not, most of us don’t have practice with naming and thinking about our day-to-day or moment-to-moment states of feelings and we don’t often slow down to reflect on what our emotions actually are. If you feel particularly out of practice with this naming or knowing, try using something called an emotions wheel every day, two times a day, to start learning how to check in with yourself and name your feelings.
Check your body: I’m a firm believer that our body has as much wisdom and insight as our brain, yet we spend 99% of the time discounting or ignoring it. GUYS — WE LITERALLY BASICALLY HAVE A SECOND BRAIN AT OUR DISPOSAL THAT WE NEVER USE!! Aliens are truly shaking their heads at us.
If you think you are not tuned into the wisdom and knowing of your body, try working on what is often referred to as a “felt sense”: “Felt senses lie under the radar of normal consciousness. They are unclear somatic sensations that for the most part go unnoticed. Yet they are not wholly unconscious; they can be “found” by bringing a special quality of gentle mindfulness to the zone of subtle bodily experiencing in which they form. When attended to with friendly but dispassionate attention, felt senses that start out vague and indescribable can show up with greater clarity and presence. A felt sense can come alive and offer what it already knows about life situations that you — the conscious, conceptualizing you — don’t yet know.” Here is an exercise that can help you start to work on this area. There’s also a literal WikiHow page (god bless) that will walk you through accessing your felt sense. If you’d like to go deeper, the book Focusing in Clinical Practice is a great read.
Then, reflect on this gem of a concept: Emotional understanding and intuition aren’t just linked to the body; they actually originate in the body.
Note: my personal work in tuning into my felt sense and somatic knowing (which used to be essentially non-existent) has led to my strongest breakthroughs, healings, and capabilities, more than almost any of my other work.
Reflect on past experiences. Think of a time when you felt good. Think of a time when you felt bad. Think of a time you trusted your intuition. Think of a time you ignored your intuition. Journal on each of these four prompts, asking yourself, What happened? and How did it feel? Note commonalities or stark differences, and observe your reflections. The idea? A log of observations of facts in the past that can guide the way you will choose to respond in the future. It’s basically science!
Understand trauma and your nervous system, and explore ways to heal it. Basically all of us have had big T trauma and/or little T trauma at some point in our lives. And let’s be real, we’re essentially all living with trauma playing in the background of our society today. Trauma bumps our body’s nervous system into a state of haywire that lasts long after the traumatic event. This makes it difficult to tell between anxiety and intuition. As this article notes, “Trauma pushes the activation of the nervous system beyond its ability to self-regulate. When a stressful experience pushes the system beyond its limits, it can become stuck on “on.””
The good news is that there are practices to calm down a hypervigilant nervous system that may be upping our anxiety and clouding our intuition. Meditation, breathwork, and craniosacral therapy are great places to start, as is reading about the vagus nerve and polyvagal theory (you’re gonna hear a lot about these phrases in the coming months and years if you haven’t already). This book, Accessing the Healing Power of the Vagus Nerve, is on my nightstand right now and is blowing my mind.
Know that intuition and self-knowledge are a muscle like any other — you definitely already have it, you just may have to work at developing it, and practice. This is good news. Nothing about you is out of whack or broken — your intuition muscle may just need some toning up, or be clouded by amped-up anxiety. The suggestions above will help, as will general self-knowledge and self-awareness about how you are going throughout the day — pausing, noting, observing, naming.
In the meantime, if you think you could use some help with that practicing, consider signing up for my intuition retreat. I’d love to see you there.
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