Non-woo-woo reasons to trust your intuition
When you start working with your intuition, you’re bound to come across a situation where the advice offered by your intuition doesn’t make logical sense to you. Especially when you’re building your intuition muscle, it can be easy to dismiss the intuitive guidance in this situation, thinking perhaps you’re “reading it wrong” or you “didn’t ask the right question”.
But I’d suggest those are the precise times you do want to follow your intuition as it has a greater awareness of the situation at hand than you think you do! Today I’m not talking about the energetics or the universal connectedness reasons behind intuition (although I believe these are also pieces of the puzzle on why your intuition works the way it does) instead we’re diving into the hard science.
You might have noticed I talk a lot about the reason behind the mental & emotional hygiene tools and techniques I cover in this podcast. A big reason for that is because I like to understand the reason behind why we do what we do. Back in episode one I mentioned the Big Book of Facts I read and reread over and over as a kid until it was literally falling apart.
I was – and continue to be – fascinated by the science behind how things work. So if intuition has always felt a little nebulous and new-age to you, let’s dive into the science behind it!
The limited awareness of our conscious mind
In any given moment we’re exposed to countless sensory inputs. And while our senses might perceive all of these inputs, our conscious brain isn’t able to process them all as they come in. So we pick and choose what we focus on.
For instance, just because you’re listening a podcast doesn’t mean all other noise around you has ceased. Try turning off any audio you’re currently listening to and count how many noises you can hear that you didn’t notice before.
If you’re anything like me, you might have heard the hum of the refrigerator, the noise of traffic outside the house, a bird singing, and even the sound of your own breathing. And those are just the sounds you noticed – there are so many more that you didn’t notice because you were paying attention to the sounds you did notice!
Remember – this applies to all of your senses.
So we’re constantly receiving way more sensory input than our conscious mind can process. And that information gets stored in our subconscious brain.
A little side note fun fact – one of the functions of REM sleep is to allow our brain to consolidate memory. The better you sleep, the better your memory – both conscious and subconscious.
Tapping into your subconscious mind
When we connect to our intuition, we’re offering our conscious mind the opportunity to have a consultation with our subconscious mind. And the subconscious mind is able to offer input and advice based on patterns it’s noticed in all the details it’s received and consolidated throughout our lifetime.
Think about someone who’s able to find water using a divining rod. Perhaps their subconscious mind has noticed over the year’s that when the sand grains get fractionally smaller or the color of the vegetation takes on a specific shade of green, that’s been present in a spot where water’s been located 95% of the time.
The conscious mind might not be aware of those subtle patterns or indicators, but the subconscious mind is. And the act of using a divining rod is leaning into your intuition and the knowledge of the subconscious mind.
Learn how to harness your intuition to remove self-doubt in Intuition 101!
The gut-brain connection
Another piece of the intuition puzzle is the gut-brain connection. Not only does our gut have more neurons than the spinal cord, but it’s connected to the brain via the vegus nerve. In fact, your gut has so many neurons it’s actually classified as the enteric nervous system – your second brain. While a lot of research has been done on intuition and our gut, there’s still a lot left for us to understand and discover.
However, we do know that when we tap into our intuition, our brain and our gut communicate. Not only does this increase our processing power, but the gut brings a lot of emotional processing to the party.
Another interesting side note, only 43% of the human body is made up of human cells. The rest is microscopic organisms we’ve formed a symbiotic relationship with. The microbes in your gut regulate or produce many of the neurotransmitters used by the enteric nervous system. Another great reason to nurture a healthy gut microbiome.
Accessing the right hemisphere of your brain
Research has also shown that most of our intuition happens in the right hemisphere of the brain vs. the left. The left side of our brain handles reading, writing, and calculations – it’s the logic side of the brain. The right side works with visual input and abstract thinking.
Most of us spend the bulk of our time in our left brains – it’s how we get things done in the world. But when we want to tap into our intuition, we need to switch over to the right brain.
Interestingly, in women, the connective matter between the left and right hemispheres of our brain is substantially thicker than in men. That means it’s easier and faster for us to switch back and forth between hemispheres.
Learn how to harness your intuition to remove self-doubt in Intuition 101!
Building your intuition muscle
For anyone who struggles to connect with their intuition, there’s good news! A 2016 study by researchers from the University of New South Wales has not only demonstrated that our intuition allows us to make faster and more accurate decisions but that with practice, intuition improves over time.
A great way to get started practicing with your intuition is to start using it with small everyday decisions.
I use my intuition to help me decide what to eat each day. How to decide if an email or text message is ready to send. And to pick out an outfit in the morning. All things that could have once left me struggling with indecision paralysis – now it’s a simple process of a quick intuition check and I get back to my day.
Why I trust my intuition – and why you might want to too!
Which leads me to why I trust my intuition – even when the decision it’s pointing me toward may not be something I can think my way into.
I love to use the analogy of a ship sailing into a harbor during a windy day. The water is whipping around the ship in white caps and the sand on the bottom of the harbor has been stirred up and there’s no way of knowing what lies beneath the surface of the waves. As you steer your ship to the dock, you can avoid any rocks or other obstructions you see sticking out above the water, but you have no idea how to avoid what’s beneath it. This is like making decisions using only the information available to our conscious mind.
Now imagine you’re in the same boat and the same harbor but the weather is calm. The water is still and crystal clear. You can see all the way down to the bottom of the harbor. And you can see all the obstructions, not just the ones that are sticking above the water, but also anything that is lurking beneath it. This is the power of using your intuition.
The only difference between our intuition and this analogy is we can’t actually see the rocks in the bay, we can only have an awareness that we know there is a reason why a particular route is the best route for us to take.
Learning to trust your intuition
Which brings me to learning to trust your intuition.
Not only is it important to practice using your intuition to strengthen that muscle, but it’s also important to reflect back on times when you did (or didn’t) follow your intuition and help to build a conscious library of how your intuition has your back.
Sometimes we know right away the benefit of following our intuition. Sometimes we’ll never know because the circumstances are so far removed from our awareness. But often, we can do a little Monday morning quarterbacking and look at the action a few hours, days, weeks, or even months later and reflect back on how taking – or not taking – intuitively guided direction impacted us.
The more we do this, the deeper our trust in our intuition becomes as we notice time and time again that following it helps bring us to the outcome we need, while ignoring it doesn’t.
Get started working with your intuition
If you’d like to learn more about using your intuition, check out my Intuition 101 Course. This course is designed to help you learn how to harness your intuition to remove self-doubt. As with anything, I recognize we’re all different, so this course covers four different tools for tapping into your intuition so you can work with the one that resonates most strongly for you! Plus there are a few more resources in the bonus section of the course!
I’m so grateful to you for being a listener of this podcast, so I’d love to offer you a 25% discount on the course when you use the coupon code PODCAST. That brings the cost of the course to less than $30! You can register for the course using the button below!
And remember – living your best life isn’t about changing your life – it’s about changing the way you show up for your life! I’m sending you a great big hug – you’ve got this!
Show Notes
Additional Resources
Schedule a Discovery Session with me.
Submit your question to be featured on a future episode.
[…] many of us have learned to doubt our intuition – which is our inner guidance system – we often have a clear knowing when something […]
[…] of overthinking is tapping into my intuition. I covered the science behind your intuition in Episode 7 of the podcast, if you want to get deep into how it […]