Intuition – that strange combination of gut feeling and natural wisdom – can be a useful tool in our everyday lives, from aiding us in making the most basic of decisions or changing the course of our lives entirely.
While intuition is often explained away as a gift only a lucky few may have, science has become more attuned to its existence.
From actuarial science to parenting, we are becoming more and more encouraged to place high stakes on our intuition to make the best decisions. However, knowing exactly what it is that your intuition requires of you is what makes intuitive decision-making complex.
Sometimes we counteract our intuition by overthinking or using logic, resulting in lengthy decision-making processes that simply waste time and often result in missed opportunities and feelings of regret. Ideally, decision-making should be based on a combination of logical thought processes and feelings.
There are, however, several situations in which one should (almost) always trust your gut first:
When your body is telling you it’s ill
If you have a feeling you are ill, or about a particular bard not agreeing with you, listen to your body and have yourself checked out by a doctor. Often we don’t believe our own senses and feelings about our bodies, leading to problems that may have been solved had they been spotted sooner.
When you feel tired around someone
Our bodies are finely attuned to our surroundings. In fact, our right brain’s constant subconscious analysis of our surroundings has been shown to be active even when our left brain is focused on something. If you find that you feel sleepy or tired around a particular person, job, or situation, it probably means that they or it is taking more energy than you can give. This gut feeling may help you stay away from people who are negative or energy vampires, from jobs that are likely to leave you exhausted and depressed.
When you feel you are in danger
We are all tempted to ignore the feeling in the pit of our stomachs when someone seems to be following us a little too closely or an alleyway makes us particularly nervous – we tell ourselves we are simply imagining things. But our intuition can save us from dangerous situations if we are well-attuned to it, as long as we also consider underlying biases3. Our social lives condition how we react and feel about people, sometimes resulting in false first impressions that contradict our intuitive feelings. We need to find a balance between our rational thinking and what our intuition is telling us to avoid making mistakes about people. If you feel unsafe with someone and you’re not sure whether it is because of a bias or because of your intuition, be on the safe side and simply avoid them if you can.
When you want to show sympathy or help
Because of our social nature, we have evolved the capacity to sympathize with others using facial and emotional cues4. We usually easily place ourselves in others’ shoes and thus are often compelled to reach out to a grieving friend or donate money to a worthy cause. Being generous has been shown to light up regions of our brain associated with pleasure, and we also often enjoy “helper’s high”5, which has been shown to result in increased immunity, improved mood, and health. Investing in your need to sympathize with other people is a good investment in your intuition and health.
When you overthink things you know how to do
If you’ve been building up a skill over many years, such as writing novels or creating beautiful pieces of art, it’s likely you’ve felt that concept of writers’ or artists’ block – your creativity has simply disappeared. Often this block is the result of beginning to overthink your skill. It turns out that engaging the rational mind in something that you have already learned overrides the muscle memory and neural pathways that you have already trained, resulting in failure. When you know you can do something – because you’ve done it dozens of times before – it helps to distract your left brain with something that has nothing to do with the task at hand so that your instincts can take over.
If you think someone is lying to you
Researchers believe that humans have been lying to each other ever since they could first communicate, so it would make sense that being able to recognize a liar is an evolutionary advantage. A 2014 study found that people who make quick judgments about a person’s honesty are more likely to be correct about whether or not that person was a liar than people who took their time to consider the facts in depth6. We may be on the lookout for the usual physical signs such as shifty eyes or quick talk but we can be easily deceived by frequent liars – often our intuition can tell us exactly what we need to know.
If you think your relationship is not working
Relationships are complicated things, even more so when you gut feelings get in the way of what seems to be the ideal romance. If we have negative emotions about our relationships, we often push them aside and call ourselves insecure and irrational. But sometimes our intuition is trying to tell us that the relationship is not good for us. If we feel unhappy in our relationship but aren’t certain why, we need to employ our logical brain to discover the reality of the relationship, such as whether our partner often dismisses us or our feelings or we feel ill-at-ease.
For many of us living in the modern world, accessing our intuition has become more difficult as we’re constantly distracted – by cellphones, entertainment, families, social lives, and work. What if there were an easier way to access your intuition and also improve your sleep, your ability to relax, the quality of your dreams?
Synctuition’s specific audio programs have been designed to tap into your brain’s intuitive pathways and retrain it to recognize and use them in a more conscious way. All that is required from you is some time to be able to listen to the audio tracks, ideally before you fall asleep so that your brain can enter the relaxed state required to repeat and recode it into your neural networks.
