Is it Anxiety or Intuition?

Being able to differentiate between anxiety and intuition can be very challenging if we aren’t sitting with sensation or feeling. Here are a few pointers to help yourself differentiate between the two:

1: How has your mood been lately? If you have been (at a baseline) anxious or depressed, we know that you will have a higher propensity for having anxious thoughts. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy is great for helping you identify those thoughts associated with your moods.

2: Is this a recurring fear or is this new? Usually if you have been having a recurring type of thought (ie something horrible is going to happen to my child), you can chalk it up to anxiety. Again, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy and even trauma interventions like EMDR or Somatic Experiencing can help people identify their thinking patterns. Sometimes these types of fears are associated with experiences or traumas and shouldn't be taken as an “omen” that something bad is about to happen.

3: Gather context. Is there anything outside of yourself you can point to that makes that thought make sense? Do other people look worried or concerned? Reality test your thought process and really ask where you are getting that input from. If it is random, hey it just may be your gut. (But really don’t put that responsibility on me to tell you, I can’t I’m so terribly sorry.)

-Stevie