As a middle schooler, I woke up every weekday morning completely overtaken by nausea. The practice of heading into a space that held so many other people was almost too much for an anxious kiddo like me. Nothing bad ever actually happened, of course, but that didn’t stop my body from reacting as if it was going to war day after day. There was no trauma around school, I was getting enough sleep, and I truly had no reason to be in such a state of panic. But the way my body responded still left me with a sense of doom that had me questioning my own ability to tell when something horrible was about to happen. After all, it’s hard to trust a gut that has an overactive response to pretty much everything.
Eventually, I got my anxiety under control (shout out to my school counselor, Mrs. Evans) and was able to manage the physical symptoms, but the thing that I’m still mastering to this day is the ability to cognitively understand what’s really going on when I get anxious. The experience of having struggled with anxiety that was not logical lends itself to a feeling of self-doubt whenever that feeling pops up. My own experience with this, paired with the fact that the majority of my clients also feel a similar way, leads me to believe that overthinking and intuition get confused more often than we think.
Maybe anxiety is trying to convince us something is wrong… or maybe we’re picking up on something we shouldn’t ignore. If both options are available to us, how can we become more attuned to when one is happening over the other? Or recognize when they might both be occurring at once?
When your Body Chimes in
Anxiety is our body’s way of telling us when something is really urgent. It doesn't necessarily wait for us to gather evidence before it reacts. This is, most of the time, a good thing. We wouldn’t want our bodies to wait to decide if something is valid before feeling fear, because then we might not respond quickly enough to a real threat. And overreacting and fleeing the scene is far less dangerous than under-reacting and getting caught by a threat. So, our hearts race before we know what we’re afraid of, our stomachs drop before we know what’s bothering us, and our conscious, logical mind often gets left out of the conversation until later.
This is all a part of what makes anxiety so hard to manage. The physical sensations we get, the feeling of doom and danger… when we think something is wrong on any level, it can be incredibly convincing. And, the presence of a feeling alone often doesn't tell us what caused it.
My middle-school nausea was real. My body was genuinely experiencing a stress response every morning. That didn't mean school was dangerous, rather, my body believed that it was. That's the distinction that we need to remember when we’re talking about intuition vs. overthinking. We tend to think about intuition as though it's a biological internal alarm system that will always tell us when something is wrong. “Trust your gut” has become common advice, because we believe that intuition is always somehow factually correct. But some of us have a gut that sounds the alarm even when there’s no danger. This is where things deepen in complexity.
Anxiety and Uncertainty have a Complicated Relationship
One of the things researchers have found consistently is a connection between anxiety and something called intolerance of uncertainty. Some people find that not knowing what is going to happen is incredibly uncomfortable. For them, uncertainty creates enough discomfort that the brain starts looking for ways to avoid it, or fill in the blanks. If you've ever reread a text message six times trying to figure out whether the period at the end meant something, you probably relate to this concept. Instead of sitting with the discomfort of not knowing what the person on the other end of the text thread is thinking, you create narratives to explain it. Maybe they’re mad at you, or tired of talking to you. Maybe they’re being blunt to send a message. Whatever through line you find, its purpose is to help you avoid the thing you can tolerate the least in the situation, which is not knowing.
Don’t Oversimplify Anxiety
Anxiety can distort our perception of what's happening, real or perceived. However, having anxiety doesn't automatically mean you're incapable of noticing real issues or dangers. You can be anxious AND be in a relationship that is toxic. You can have physiological responses to something that isn’t necessarily unsafe, but that goes against your moral code. This is a particularly important lesson for those who have received feedback in the past that they are overly-anxious, type A, or dramatic.
Sometimes we become so afraid of burdening others with our anxiety that we start invalidating ourselves before anyone else gets the chance. Maybe you hear yourself say “I’m probably just being dramatic” when something genuinely scares you. Maybe you question your ability to show up the same as others in life because you’ve panicked when they haven’t. Either way, you might have accidentally convinced yourself that your anxiety automatically signals something invalid, and that can be a dangerous connection to make.
Check the Facts
One of my favorite therapy tools, “check the facts”, is geared towards helping individuals identify what is real, what is likely, and what is emotional filler. When you're feeling anxious about something, try asking yourself “What evidence do I have to support this feeling?” Look for real, objective information or truth. Instead of “She ended the sentence with a period, so she hates me”, we could identify: “She used a period at the end of a sentence, but she never said anything to point to her being upset with me. My anxiety might be the thing leading me to believe that she hates me.”
What your body thinks it knows is often much different than what your brain actually knows to be true. Once we perfect the art of prioritizing both avenues of understanding, we can start to figure out when anxiety is relevant, when intuition is apparent, and when our body is just having an illogical response to stimuli.
Look for patterns
If you’re checking the facts whenever you get an anxious thought or feeling, you’ll eventually begin to recognize similarities between situations. This is one of the biggest things I encourage people to consider when they're trying to distinguish anxiety from an actual intuitive response.
Let’s say you get the most anxious when it comes to your relationships with others. If this happens more with one friend than other friends, it probably means that there’s something specific to that friendship that triggers you. Knowing this can help you to think more deeply about that particular friendship, why they cause you more anxiety than others do, and what you can do to change or control that.
Your narrative is hugely impactful when it comes to the way you handle anxiety. If you can get a hold of the narrative, insert factual, objective truths and separate the automatic anxious narratives that arise, you can begin to answer “Is it overthinking, or my intuition?” with confidence.