Anxiety or Intuition?

Dear Ask A Coach, I would love to get your perspective on the difference between anxiety and intuition. For most of my life I’ve thought my anxious feelings were intuitive feelings. It’s only been in the last few years that I’ve started to wonder if I was misinterpreting my anxiety as intuition. This has come up a few times this week over seemingly small things which has led me to ask this question.

My fall goal is to get my finances in order. One of my action steps was to meet with a financial advisor. I’ve been intending to do this for years, and this weekend it seamlessly happened that I met a financial advisor in my extended friend group. I feel anxious about how easily this came about and can’t tell if that’s intuition or anxiety. Another decision that I made following the fall workshop was to get some outside support in navigating my (challenging) relationship with my mom. I had to be quite flexible in regard to getting that support and yet seem to have found a wonderful counselor to work with and yesterday her schedule opened up so now I can meet at a time that truly works for me. My reaction to this was anxiety! That doesn’t make sense to me—I don’t understand why I would feel anxiety about these seemingly small, positive things. I welcome your input on this and how I can differentiate between anxiety and intuition. Thank you!

 

 

Answer:

You would feel anxiety about these things because your unconscious brain doesn’t like change. It doesn’t want to do things differently. It is used to not having your finances in order and having a challenging relationship with your mom. Even though these things bring their own uncomfortable feelings, they are KNOWN uncomfortable, which is much better than unknown to your brain. So it is throwing up red flags to warn you. That’s ok. You can be excited and nervous at the same time. What do you think?

For your question about intuition or anxiety…why does it matter? How do you describe intuition? How do you describe anxiety? Where do you think they come from? What would you do differently if it was one versus the other?  Explore this a bit and bring back any questions or models that you come up with.