Trust your gut; it’s the age old, timeless saying that most times proves to be true. I’ve always taken that saying with a grain of salt. As someone with anxiety, oftentimes my mind and body will react to someone, or something as if I’m in danger or something bad and omnious is going to happen. And in many of those cases, I mistakenly tell myself it’s intuition, when really, it’s just anxiety being clever. This misinterpretation can lead us to not trust our bodies. Not to mention the embarrassment of going about a situation or person thinking so surely it’s one way, when it’s really not. Seriously though, this can happen to the best of us and it’s understandable when these two concepts feel so similar. We often experience that warning feeling in our gut — and that’s where intuition can manifest too. Tuning into our body’s reactions and noticing how our environments make us feel can be helpful when it comes to distinguishing the two.
Two key notions taken from Rosalie Puiman, a life coach specializing in personal presence, are to remember: First, intuition is neutral and without emotion, while fear is emotional and charged. She goes on to explain that in truth, intuition focuses on the here and now, it is not worrying about the future. This brings us to anxiety, which is exactly that. Moreover, anxiety can definitely strike wounded cords and feel overwhelming. Intuition simply confirms preconceived notions. Puiman even offers up a helpful exercise; sit down, get real with yourself and write down a list of all your fears. Acknowledging your fears makes you more aware of yourself and also what could be triggering those dreadful, anxious feelings. If you know you’re in or around a situation that’s related to one of your fears, it’ll make it quite obvious that it’s not your intuition.
What I can say from personal experience is that not only identifying what my fears are, but if they’re logical, illogical or debilitating has cleared up so much fog and confusion for me. Going into a situation I feel is bad and wrong, but knowing it’s not an immediate threat has even left me intuitively thinking, “Why am I acting like this? There’s no danger, no threat. You don’t have to be afraid.” Clearly anyone with anxiety will know there’s not a simple fix to the complexity of it all, but this technique can help differ the two. Having the ability to definitively recognize your intuition vs other feelings for what they are is not only empowering, but encourages you to make better choices about people and situations in your life.