My best friend had planned an epic 40th-birthday celebration: a girls’ trip to a wine festival in Italy. While the trip itself sounded heavenly, my feelings leading up to it were hellish. The plan was to take a red-eye to Milan, then drive several hours on Italian highways after no sleep. I felt so anxious about this trip, as if the gods were telling me not to go—I was having nightmares about the car being stuck in reverse or careening off a cliff; I was looking at the route on Google Earth; I was making frantic phone calls to others going on the trip, asking questions like “How well do you sleep on red-eyes?” and “Are you an experienced driver?” I was tied up in knots for weeks. The signal I was getting very strongly was don’t go. Was this anxiety or a premonition, my intuition trying to protect me from an unspeakable disaster?
Anxiety and intuition can feel so similar: The feelings can be urgent, their messages protective, and in both cases, the call is coming from inside the house. In the midst of a chaotic and nonstop news cycle, we are in a constant state of fight-or-flight. We have outsourced our inner bodily authority to biometric gadgets and spend most of our waking hours staring at screens. It’s no wonder we’re confused. Discerning between anxiety and intuition means becoming experts in ourselves and our patterns. It requires the work of collecting data, observing, and repeating. In the process of developing my intuition, I came to realize that, for me, becoming intuitive is synonymous with trusting myself. It is the antidote to overthinking and spiraling—and to personal gaslighting. In the microscopic view of one woman’s life, that looks like having more better days, fewer sleepless nights, living a life without regret. Zooming out to the macro, however, women trusting themselves in this culture, where billion-dollar industries tell us the many ways we are wrong, is nothing short of revolutionary.
I spent four years studying, researching, reporting on, and using myself as my own personal laboratory for my book Everyday Intuition: What Psychology, Science, and Psychics Can Teach Us About Finding and Trusting Our Inner Voice, to develop and test different approaches to intuition. I interviewed neuroscientists, evolutionary psychologists, gastroenterologists, AI experts, therapists, ER doctors, disaster preparedness experts, hostage negotiators, psychics, mediums, Reiki healers, psychedelic ceremony leaders, and, most important, everyday people who have mastered and trust their intuition.
Intuition is knowing without knowing why. All of a sudden, you know something, and you know it deeply. You can’t always mark how you got from point A to point B, and a lack of linear logic can make you doubt. We are taught implicitly and explicitly that there is only one way of coming to know things, which is data-driven materialist knowledge, you can graph and extrapolate into a kind of certainty. But intuition is data: It’s the data of our bodies and our experiences. Intuition is literally everything that’s ever happened to you that this supercomputer of your brain and body can dial up at light speed. It’s not irrational; it’s extra-rational.
To neuroscientists, intuition is rapid pattern recognition, based on expertise, that often shows up in the form of biofeedback. This is why experienced ER doctors can sometimes diagnose a malady rapidly, as if by magic, and why fraudsters can con people by recognizing patterns of vulnerability. But we all have this superpower. For example, market analysts can predict fluctuations based on trends they’ve witnessed over years of experience and feedback they’ve gotten on which kinds of trades were profitable and which were not. The scientists I interviewed, along with behavioral economists like Daniel Kahneman, have pointed out it’s important to gauge your level of expertise on a given topic to determine whether or not you should listen to your intuition.
We can turn pattern recognition based on expertise and experience back on ourselves. How can we become the utmost experts at knowing our patterns so we can better hear our intuition?
Prior to the birthday trip to Italy, I was most hung up on the drive to the mountain town. I was in a car accident in high school and have been anxious around car travel ever since. So that’s a factor I need to consider—not to gaslight myself; my anxiety is real, but it is also habitual. Since I know this about myself, I need to take any car travel “intuition” with a grain of salt.
Trigger responses from trauma can look a lot like intuition from the outset. Stephanie Foo, the author of What My Bones Know: A Memoir of Healing from Complex Trauma, told me, “Because of how I was raised and having my life endangered when I was a child, I have a tendency to think people are angry with me.” Due to the imprinting Foo experienced as a child, her brain still has her on the lookout for anger. Her experience of navigating threat and violence set her filter, as it does for all of us. As she puts it, “You touch the stove and you learn that it’s hot. So what stoves have you touched in your lifetime?”
I had help in becoming an expert in myself through cognitive behavioral therapy, where the patient learns to identify distorted thought patterns. I am a textbook catastrophizer, and I know this from filling out reams of those CBT worksheets. My “intuitions” of doom and disaster? More likely my anxious thought patterns than premonition.
Becoming experts in ourselves means knowing what our patterns are, and also when to deploy our tools. In recovery circles, there’s a useful acronym: HALT. It stands for “hungry, angry, lonely, tired.” The thinking is that if you are experiencing any one of these conditions, you are not to make any big decisions, have any important conversations, or make any proclamations about what things mean.
HALT is incredibly useful when it comes to the anxiety/intuition dilemma, too. In addition to these four categories, what is your personal profile of circumstances that cloud your thinking? At nighttime, when I am exhausted from the day, I find that my thinking is at its most paranoid. One friend says that when she hasn’t exercised for a few days, she will be keyed up and on edge.
Evaluating the tone and tenor of your impulses can help diagnose intuition versus anxiety. Margaret Sheridan, a UNC-Chapel Hill neuroscientist, theorizes that over the millennia of human evolution, the amygdala—the ancient, peanut-size structure nestled deep inside the lower region of the brain, which accounts for less than 0.3 percent of the brain’s volume but initiates much of our emotional landscape—has evolved to do more than just the fight, flight, and freeze responses that are often attributed to it. Sheridan says the amygdala acts as “our certainty checker,” always on the lookout for a piece of information that will put us at ease. “I think that’s why we love Google Maps,” she says. “You know where you’re going, but you can also just plug the address into your app and be sure. It’s also why we love texting to tell your friend you’re almost there. No one needs to know that, but we love it. We’ve created these tools to decrease our uncertainty.” I desperately wanted an answer as to whether I was going to be safe driving in Italy, and my amygdala was trying to keep me from taking a risk. I appreciate it doing its job, but preventing me from going to a wine festival with my friends is definitely not intuition. If your intuition is about getting an answer and knowing what to do now now now, that’s more than likely your body’s evolved response to search for certainty in the swamp of unpredictability that is our lives.
In studying premonitions—visions of the future—researchers also noted dreamers’ emotional state on waking as key evidence. Anxiety dreams, like not being able to find the classroom on the first day of school, produced “a rich emotional state upon awakening,” cognitive neuroscientist Julia Mossbridge told me. Dreamers reported their dreams feeling real and urgent, and all the associated knots in the stomach and racing heartbeat were present. But intuitive precognitive dreams that did, in fact, come true “produce[d] upon awakening a more neutral knowing. Like ‘my father will die today.’ It feels like it already happened,” she explains. Examining the emotional residue a dream leaves you with can be useful in determining whether it is anxiety or intuition: If it’s more emotionally laden, that’s probably anxiety. More neutral? Premonition. Or, as designer Derya Altan put it, “Intuition is a comment. Anxiety is a question.”
In the end, I went on my friend’s birthday trip. With the help of half a tab of Klonopin, I climbed into the back seat of a rental car (upgraded to an Alfa Romeo—if you are looking for signs, this seems like a good one) and buckled up. We had the time of our lives. There is another version of this story where I didn’t go, looked on enviously at the pictures on Instagram, and told myself that the only reason they survived was because I wasn’t there. That is not a good story—and one that would only double down on self-abnegating anxiety. The story that happened is a lot better, the one where I am laughing with friends and slurping bowls of pasta.
