Is it Intuition or Anxiety? Here’s How to Tell with Laura Berman

You know that feeling when something inside you says, Don’t do this. Get out. Something’s wrong.

Sometimes that feeling is your intuition picking up on something before your conscious mind has caught up. But sometimes it’s anxiety. An old wound gets activated, your nervous system goes on high alert, and suddenly everything in you is saying danger even when you’re not actually in danger.

So how do you tell the difference?

A listener named Angel wrote in with this question, and it’s such an important one because once you’ve been hurt, especially in relationships, trusting your gut can get complicated. Maybe there have been times when your instincts were absolutely right. And there may have been other times when fear convinced you something terrible was happening when it wasn’t.

In this Language of Love Session, I talk about how I distinguish intuition from anxiety and, more importantly, what to do when you genuinely can’t tell which one you’re feeling.

One of the biggest clues is how the message arrives. Anxiety tends to be loud, repetitive and urgent. It wants an answer right now. Intuition is usually quieter and clearer. But when your nervous system is activated, even intuition can get tangled up with fear, which is why I don’t recommend making an important decision from that state.

I walk you through a few simple somatic practices to settle the fear enough that you can listen to what’s underneath it. I also show you how to begin learning your body’s own language of expansion and contraction, including a surprisingly easy exercise you can practice with something as simple as foods you love and foods you hate.

In this episode, I talk about:

How intuition tends to feel different in the body than anxiety

Why urgency is often a clue that fear has entered the picture

What to do when a gut feeling comes with a lot of anxiety

Three ways to regulate your nervous system before making a decision