How To Tell The Difference Between Anxiety And Intuition

is it your intuition warning you about something or is it your anxiety this is a really common question and I believe that once you watch this video you won't confuse the two again so I know that's a big promise that you'll never confuse them again but I'm going to give you a couple of Concepts that will really highlight the difference so the very first thing I want you to think about is that an anxiety is an emotion intuition is actually not an emotion intuition is a system of processing information that will be a little bit more clear in a moment but anxiety is an emotion it is an emotional feeling now anxiety has physical components and I talk about this in a lot of my anxiety videos so you could have a physical feeling of an upset stomach heart race sweating tension right there's a lot of physical feelings and the emotional feeling and your brain knows this is anxiety so I think one reason people confuse anxiety with intuition is that they believe intuition equals gut response now your intuition might make itself known through a gut response but intuition is not only a gut response so the way I began to think about intuition both exploring it for myself as well as working with people for 20 years as a psych therapist is that intuition synthesizes our gut response with patterns that we are aware of both consciously and subconsciously and with our sense of knowing ourselves our emotional intelligence so intuition brings all of that together it's not just one piece intuition is actually a fairly complex almost full body process like it's kind of a mental process but it's really kind of a fullbody process and intuition works best when our whole brain is online when we have access to our unconscious subconscious and conscious thinking when we're in our fight-flight freeze mode we are only back here with this amydala right that tells us run away right it's not full brain thinking so beginning to think about intuition as more of a total process a system of thought right a system of integrating thoughts and feelings will help you distinguish so that's Point number one point number two knowing yourself and knowing your habitual emotions if anxiety is a habitual emotion then it isn't giving you good information most of our emotions give us lots of different information and if we learn to read our emotions it can be really really helpful in decision-making but if we have one emotion we just go to it could be depression it could be anxiety right we turn all sorts of information all sorts of emotions into that one emotion of anxiety so if anxiety is your habitual go-to you feel it a lot it drives your life then when you are having this question it's probably anxiety so emotional intelligence takes into account being aware of what our habitual go-to emotions are and not taking them quite as seriously as some of our other emotions which are giving us good information and I do have a bunch of videos on emotional intelligence which is very helpful for developing your intuition number three is that your intuition knows that risks exist your anxiety wants you to believe that there is one right answer here only one and if you make the wrong one it's disastrous that's your anxiety talking because we can all make decisions really be in touch with our intuition be in touch with all the facts and figures really think things through know what we want make a decision and it's not always the right decision life is complex and life is uncertain and I know sometimes people really dislike that when I talk about life being uncertain in a video trying to help people with their anxiety sometimes people will be like yeah you shouldn't emphasize that well not emphasizing it is ignoring a reality and learning to be like okay things are uncertain I'm powerless over certain things the weather for sure right so bringing in that reality and learning to sort of be okay with it is key for getting over anxiety number four your intuition at some point is sort of a calmer knowing it is not jumping around with all sort of what if what if we know what anxiety is we know what it sounds like well what if this person really isn't a safe person well what if I make the wrong decision and take the wrong job or move to the wrong town or marry the wrong person what if what if what off right so that's our anxiety our intuition is a given the information I have right now what I feel what I think all of it this is the best path to go down and I will see some videos on this topic on YouTube and people will say intuition is fast well I disagree we do have fast thinking and slow thinking and our fast thinking some of that is intuitive some of it is very instinctual and some of it is very bias-based our fast thinking is not always accurate and I know that when I struggle with a decision sometimes I'll like be getting to the point where I'm ready to make it and I'll make the decision one day and then I'll I'll say to myself I'm going to sleep on it because I know that if I make a decision and I'm like okay this I'm picking a out of A and B I go to sleep I'll wake up in the morning with a feeling of like yeah right decision going with a or I'll wake up in the morning with a h o don't no so relaxation sleep getting out of that urgency of thinking things through lets our whole brain work together and we get answers that way this is why sometimes when you're dealing with a big problem the answer might pop into your head in a shower you might not even be thinking about it all of a sudden you're taking a shower and you're like oh I know the answer and yeah that can be your intuition it can feel fast but it's been you've been thinking about it a long time you've been gathering information for a long time and you finally let your brain slow down and calm down to the point that it pulls every together and you just know so I want to give you a couple of real life examples somebody who I was talking to this week young woman 26 years old and I asked her do you ever confuse intuition and anxiety and she was like oh yeah absolutely all the time so I asked her to give me an example and she picked a pretty easy example and the three examples I'm going to give you today first one is on a pretty minor topic and they get a little bit more intense as I go on but she said that she and her boyfriend were going to go to Boston for the weekend and it was St Patrick's Day and at first she was excited but then a few days before the trip she started to get nervous St Patrick's Day in Boston it could be really crowded what if something happens and she said she had that whole refrain going on in her head and it was anxiety and part of her was like o is this a sign I shouldn't go is this a sign something bad is going to happen but then she said to herself no you always worry about this when you have a trip to go on or there's going to be a lot of crowds you always worry about this you go you have fun and it's fine so what did she demonstrate there she demonstrated an awareness of her habitual pattern and by knowing that habitual pattern she was also able to bring in her past experiences where she's gone against that feeling and had a good time and she was able to integrate those things and come up with a decision and they went and they had a good time okay second example example you go for a job interview and the interviewer asks you a lot of tough questions throws you kind of for a loop you're not really sure you're giving good answers you're surprised you feel like his body language was not very friendly to you and after the interview you say to a friend oh I really think it didn't go well I don't think I'm going to get the job so is that Intuition or is that anxiety so on this one right our intuition is part part of our system remember I said it was a system it's part of our system that reads body language so this person you might in that situation have been reading the body language of the other person right and maybe they didn't like you the second you walked in the door sometimes we get that feeling from people but we don't know this person maybe this person doesn't have enormous social skills maybe they don't have great emotional intelligence maybe they're that way with everybody maybe they had a really bad experience earlier in the day in their personal life and they're in a bad mood right they could be in a really bad mood not be polite to you and you still may end up being the best candidate they saw all day so we can take into our count our gut response and our interpretation of how things go but that doesn't mean that we're 100% correct and so if you leave this interview and you just keep going going over it and over it and worrying about it that piece of it is anxiety that's the piece that matters whether your gut response to the person who interviewed you was correct or not doesn't really matter if you go home and you're going over it and over it and over it and you're worrying worrying worrying which to be honest many of us would if we really want the job right it's I'm not saying that there would be like something horribly wrong with you but that's anxiety anxiety is worrying about a problem you can do nothing about anxiety is not wanting to accept uncertainty and until you hear back after that interview you have uncertainty so that's where again like this relaxing with the concept of uncertainty super important okay let me know if that made sense to you that the key piece is not so much whether your interpretation of what happened was Intuition or anxiety the key piece is how much you're worrying about it afterwards and whether you can do anything about it let me know if that made sense all right someone else I was talking with this week has a family member who has addiction and alcoholism and is frequently getting into difficult situations if not very dangerous ones and often there will be gaps in time when the person I was speaking with doesn't hear from their relative right that happens when you have a relative who has addiction issues right sometimes they just go a while you don't know where they are is it natural to worry in those situations of course it's natural to worry but again worrying excessively about things you can do nothing about or future events that may or may not happen is anxiety but this person said to me sometimes days can go by they don't worry about a thing and other times they'll wake up with a sense something's not right is that is that Intuition or is it anxiety so if you wake up with a sense something's not right and there is something you can do you know where the person is you know who you could call you want to go check something fine do it but if you've been here before if this is like a common theme and you wake up in the middle of the night and then you end up calling all the police departments or the hospitals and you go into a whole Panic trying to find the person and you've done this a number of times and then in the morning you find that the person is like sleeping in your backyard or they're sleeping in their car or they're fine and you know this then yeah this is being driven by anxiety again understandable but not healthy and when I say not healthy I mean not healthy for you physically stress contributes like to health issues right and it doesn't make us happy so if we think of intuition as partially being pattern recognition right and you bring pattern recognition into that scenario you'll be like oh this is a familiar pattern I've been here before your intuition will tell you this fits the pattern of what you've already experienced all right I hope this was really helpful I hope I lived up to my promise and I'd love to know so comment below our best decisions and this is scientifically proven and I am about to come out with or maybe I already came out with it I don't know always know the order things will be posted but I will have a video on intuition and decision-making because it is proven that combining the two things of intuition as well as facts and data make the best decisions but we can develop our intuition to be stronger and we can learn to calm our anxiety so that it doesn't get in the way of our intuition and actually the program I have roadmap to Joy and authentic confidence really Builds on all the components that come into having solid intuition including emotional intelligence deepening your self- knowledge transforming and healing your negative core beliefs right because those are the kind of things that can get in the way of our intuition being able to speak to us more loudly than some of those negative beliefs or habitual emotions so if you're interested that program is on my website but I also do have a free pdf called transform your negative core beliefs which might be super helpful for you and I have a bunch of other free resources so check it out it will be in the description to this video or on my website and I'll put the link here and I hope you have a wonderful day and I'll see you next week

Channel: Barbara Heffernan

Views: 3,595

Keywords: barbara heffernan, @awakenjoy.life, anxiety vs intuition, intuition vs anxiety, anxiety or intuition, gut feeling vs anxiety, gut feeling, inner voice, intuition vs anxiety in relationships, relationship anxiety vs intuition, anxiety help, anxiety tips, generalized anxiety disorder, How To Tell The Difference Between Anxiety And Intuition, is it my anxiety or my intuition?, Is it intuition or anxiety?

Id: v8CM_oRlN8s

Length: 14min 54sec (894 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 16 2024