517 Is This Anxiety or Intuition? (How to Know the Difference)

Kimberley Quinlan (0:01)

Okay, let's start this episode with a little pop quiz. I'm going to give you some thoughts that you may have had, and you are going to decide if it is either anxiety or intuition. So let's see. Number one, don't get on the plane.

Is that anxiety or is that intuition? Another one is, I just have this bad feeling about this person. Is it anxiety or is it intuition?

The last one is, something just doesn't feel right. You know that feeling like it's just this overall body feeling, like something doesn't feel right here. Is that anxiety or is that intuition? Well, the answer might surprise you.

Because the truth is, it could be either. It could be one or the other, or in some cases, it could be both.

The good news is, there are some helpful ways in which you can tell the difference between anxiety and intuition, so that you don't spend your entire day either avoiding or ruminating about which is which.

In this episode of Your Anxiety Toolkit, I am going to teach you how to tell the difference between anxiety and intuition, and show you some sneaky ways that anxiety can disguise itself as intuition. I think of it like, anxiety gets dressed up in a Halloween costume, the costume it's chosen this year is intuition. That's the way I always like to think of it. I'm going to hopefully get it to where you can reduce how much you're avoiding, you can reduce how much you're ruminating, and you can actually start trusting yourself to move forward without having to figure it out.

My name is Kimberley Quinlan. I'm an anxiety specialist and I am so excited to get into this with you. So let's go.

Okay, so let's talk first about how to actually tell the difference. It's actually pretty simple. Anxiety tends to be urgent, it tends to be catastrophic, and it tends to be very repetitive. It usually starts with phrases like, what if? If something starts with what if, it's usually anxiety. If it also comes across as like you have to do something and it's very intense, you have to, that is often anxiety. If it often says you need to figure this out, we don't want to have uncertainty, we need to know, that is often anxiety. If you're having the thought, don't risk it, don't take risks, that is usually anxiety. Or if it's telling you, you have to make sure, guarantee, it's anxiety. What we know about anxiety is there also tends to be themes in that I can usually tell for myself if something's anxiety because it's usually around the theme of hyper-responsibility. Most of my anxiety themes around hyper-responsibility. For others, it might be perfectionism, it might be the fear of the unknown or whatever, there's so many ways in which your theme may show up. For me, it's hyper-responsibility. And so I might have a thought, could I harm someone or how might this affect someone if I don't prevent it?

What if I'm responsible for this accident that may or may not happen? And so it's an easy way for me to identify by knowing what my general anxiety themes are.

Now let's talk about intuition. Intuition tends to be quieter.

It usually doesn't come with anxiety. It's usually this like deep knowing. It doesn't sound demanding and it's not repetitive. It's just this gentle nudge that says, mm-mm, this isn't for us.

Ultimately, it's just this noticing, this knowing. And I know what you're probably thinking is, that's complicated. Like how am I supposed to know really the difference? And I think the main point here is it doesn't come with this sense of panic. It's just a knowing. And so generally, you can run it through this basic, like, is it this or that? And you'll probably know pretty immediately if it's anxiety or if it's intuition. Now, what I want you to know, though, is this isn't completely foolproof. Because if you are an anxious person, like myself, you are going to question those rules. And I think the fact that you question them and then you're like, but I need to know exactly which one, like which one is it, is actually a symptom of your anxiety. Because people who don't have anxiety, don't spend time trying to figure out whether something's anxiety or intuition. They're not trying to get certainty on that in and of itself. And so again, we want to catch that if you're trying to figure it out, chances are it probably is anxiety. But what we can do here is we can identify the very specific trick anxiety uses to get you confused on this. And what I want to do is tell you a story about a personal experience that I have all the time, where this used to trick me into tons of anxiety, panic, tons of rumination, tons of reassurance seeking, like the worst. So as you guys know, I am an Australian, but I'm also an American. And I have to travel back and forward between Australia and America all the time. And so every single time I get on an aeroplane, I have the thought, don't get on the plane. And what I want you to know is it doesn't feel anxiety-provoking in that moment. It just feels like a fact. Like, Kimberley, do not put your foot on that plane and do not let that plane get off the ground with you inside of it. It is just, it feels like a knowing. It feels like the actual facts. And that feeling used to completely confuse me as to like, well, why? Why am I have this? And quietly what it was saying is, this could be the plane that people read about on the news tomorrow. This could be that plane. And I look at the plane. I know this feeling. You look at it and you're like, yeah. You have these images pop up of this plane with a wing in the ocean. And it's just like your brain is prepping you for like, this could be it. But the language there is so important. It's, it could be. What we can identify from that is that it's coming from a place of uncertainty. It's not coming from a place of knowing. It's coming from, it could be, which is, I don't know, and I'm struggling with the uncertainty and the anxiety of whether or not this is going to be the plane that people read about on the news tomorrow. And that is where we identify the trick that anxiety plays. It is trying to get you to not have uncertainty. It is trying to prompt you to not have to be uncertain. It wants you to not get on the plane. It wants you to run away as fast as you can, so that you can 100 percent guarantee you won't be on that plane that goes down. Because we can't control whether the plane goes down, but we can control whether we're sitting on one of those seats, and anxiety doesn't want you on one of those seats. So the moral of this story is, it wasn't necessarily screaming at me. It was sounding this warning, but it was urgent and it was catastrophic. That's where you're going to have to get really good at identifying when your brain tricks you into thinking it's intuition. Another way this shows up for me is when I leave my family for a few days. Let's say I'm going to a conference, and it's not a thought, it's this bad feeling. Again, it's this bad feeling of, again, imagery of bad things happening, my kids being in an emergency, there being an earthquake or something.