Is It Fear or Intuition Talking?

The time arrives to leave for your first day on the new job, or, to embark on the trip of a lifetime and you are stopped dead in your tracks by a deep sense of foreboding. You become consumed by anxiety, doubts and the what-ifs. You aren’t able to quiet your fear long enough to examine if the scenarios playing out is a warning from your intuition or fear trying to hold you back from living your life.

We are told to listen to our gut and follow our intuition, but how are we to know the difference between fear and intuition? While many people have made their life’s work helping others distinguish between the two, there are some techniques that you can apply in your life to help you hear your intuition over the insistent whisperings of fear.

What is my emotional state?

When your emotions are running high is when it is most helpful to take some calming breaths and examine the source of anxiety. The energy released by your emotions can cloud your intuition and makes it easy to take away the wrong information. Remember, your intuition will give you information and guidance in an unemotional and factual way, whereas fear speaks in emotion. Fear won’t let your emotions rest and intuition will give you the information and let you decide for yourself.

Does it come from your gut?

Your intuition speaks to you from your gut and your heart. You’ll know at the core of your being that it is speaking to you. You just have to listen. Fear speaks from the head and clouds your thinking with emotions to drown out your connection with your deeper self. Typically, intuition won’t leave you and your first impression will be the right one. Fear causes you to over analyze to the point of confusion.

Is my past coming back to haunt me?

We all have psychological wounds that influence our current behavior and state of emotions. New situations often bring up these past experiences, even if you aren’t consciously aware of it. When you make a decision based out of fear, you are trying to avoid the past hurts, where as your intuition is not based on past experiences but new information that is relevant to the situation at hand.

What is my internal volume?

Fear and intuition are set at different volumes in the psyche. Fear is loud and persistent. Intuition is at first more gentle. It guides and leads in a way that won’t overwhelm. Fear is loud because it wants to drown out reason, while intuition wants to encourage you and give you confidence to follow your heart.

It is so important that we learn to listen to our intuition. At different times in our lives it may serve as a warning to danger not yet perceived, or, it may set us down a new path that we aren’t aware of at the moment. By connecting with yourself and learning to differentiate between fear and intuition, you will be in a better position to open yourself up to the possibilities of the Universe.