Listening to Your Intuition, When Other Thoughts Are Shouting Louder

Sorting Through the Internal Chatter

We’re told to listen to our intuition, but it’s not always easy if you’re an overthinker.

If you overthink, you might not have the luxury of dealing with a singular inner voice guiding you along your path. There are probably several competing for attention, and some of those voices will stomp over the others to be heard.

How do you extract your hunch from the hollering?

And what if logic tells you one thing, but your gut tells you something else?

Sifting Through the Noise

OK, let’s break down this internal cacophony and look at what your internal chatter might consist of.

1. The Logical Voice

I think of this as the getting things done voice. This voice might guide you in your daily work. My logical voice is just what I need when I’m structuring outlines for my articles. Anything involving organisation or following a process is when your logical voice excels.

It’s rational. It can help you weigh up the pros and cons of a decision, presenting you with facts and evidence.

But if we worked with logic alone, we’d be little more than robots. One of the criticisms levelled at AI content is it lacks the human element to help us emotionally connect to the story.

2. The Emotional Voice

It’s the voice that makes us human. It helps us empathise and show compassion. Our emotions can play a considerable part in our decision-making process.

When you decide to get married, it’s not just completing a tick box to measure how good a prospect is on paper (or at least it shouldn’t be). How you feel about the other person is kind of a big deal.

But emotions can also cloud our judgment. Think about when you receive a snarky email from someone, and it gets your back up. Your fingers furiously hit the keyboard as you reel off an angry response, but this will escalate the situation. There’s a reason why we are told to take a moment before allowing our emotions to dictate our reactions.

My emotional voice is often fear-based, and oh boy, it wants to run the show. It takes its job of keeping me safe to the extreme. Fear wants to be my superhero, so it wraps its wings around me in a Batfink-style shield of steel. It will view anything unfamiliar with suspicion, throwing out a series of what-if scenarios to draw me back to safety and predictability.

3. The Voice of Others

If you’re a people pleaser and worry too much about what others think, their voices will find a way into your head.

Some voices could be shaped in childhood, as family members, teachers, or other care providers help us form some of our earliest life rules. In adulthood, we continue to be influenced by our interactions and what we watch, see and read.

We can get valuable insights when we seek advice or follow the example set by others. But if we haven’t established our personal values, we risk living our lives based on the expectations of others instead of our own.

The voices we retain from others tend to include should or supposed to in the vocabulary. If you think you should have something or be doing something at a certain point in life, you’re probably being influenced by the voices of others.

You might also absorb the voices of cynics, especially if you’re breaking the ground for a new path. This can be particularly difficult if you deal with self-doubt, as I do. One single naysayer has the potential to stop you in your tracks.

4. The Intuitive Voice

Intuition feels like a sense of knowing. You might not have a rational explanation. It just is. Here are some other signs that your intuition is talking:

• It can be spontaneous without too much conscious thought.
• You may feel a level of certainty about the feeling.
• Intuition speaks with calmness and without fear or panic.
• Intuitive thoughts may keep returning even after you’ve dismissed them.
• You may experience physical sensations such as tension, butterflies and even pain.
• You may feel a sense of peace about a particular decision, even if there are risks with this course of action.

If my emotional voice (especially the fear-based one) is the extrovert, my intuitive voice is the introvert. When other voices jostle to be heard, my intuition can be drowned out.

So how do you clear the noise to allow intuition to enter?

Develop Self-Awareness

Start paying more attention to your thoughts and begin to recognise which voice is talking. If you notice your emotional voice is speaking, question whether it’s working in protective mode. This mode’s concern is safety. It doesn’t consider whether some risks are necessary, so won’t always have your best interests at heart.

Notice how your body reacts to different situations, feelings and voices. You’ll start to detect patterns in how your body responds to each voice. This will make it easier to recognise your intuition. It will also help you trust your feelings.

Mindfulness Meditation

Meditation is not about suppressing thoughts. It’s about observing them and letting them pass. This can help quieten your mind and create space for your intuition to make itself known.

I’ve been practising meditation for a while now. I find some days are easier than others. Sometimes, I can let my thoughts float past like a balloon. Other times, I grab hold of their strings, clinging onto an increasing number that threatens to whisk me away.

But I’m sticking with it, and if it doesn’t quite work for me each time, that’s OK.

Journaling

When your thoughts are whirling around in your head, they need somewhere to go. Journaling can be that outlet.

I don’t keep a daily journal, but when I feel overloaded, I’ll often give myself twenty minutes to write in a stream-of-conscious style. It helps relieve some of the pressure and can provide clarity. This might come through in the form of my logical voice or by a gut feeling. This practice is something I think I could benefit more from.

Try on Decisions

Just like trying on a coat to see if it fits, you can try on a decision. If you have a dilemma, why not sit with one of the choices for a time and see how it feels? Your intuition then has time to guide you. If you feel comfortable making the decision, you know you’re on the right track.

But if your intuition doesn’t agree, it won’t sit well with you. If you’re still unsure whether it’s your intuition or emotions speaking, check for the protective mode again.

I’ve used this technique before without even realizing it. A few years ago, I was offered a job that initially seemed to tick the boxes. My logical voice agreed. I’d pretty much made the decision to take it. I’d essentially tried to accept the job, but something felt wrong.

I had a long, sleepless night with extreme stomach pains. My gut was literally telling me it wasn’t the right decision. Once I resolved not to take the job, everything lifted. I knew it was the right choice.

Don’t Force It

Allow things to percolate. I always draft my work on one day, then leave a day before I start editing. This allows me to look at my writing with a fresh perspective.

If you’re ruminating over something, try and distract yourself by getting involved in another activity. Inspiration often strikes during those moments. I find it can happen when I’m exercising. As I’m peddling away on my exercise bike, my mind drifts, making it a perfect opportunity for inspired and intuitive thinking.

Schedule Your Worries

If worry is overtaking everything else, try using worry time. The idea is to reduce how long you spend worrying by containing it in an allotted period of time each day.

When your mind is freed up from worrying all the time, it may allow a window for your intuition to get through.

As worries enter your head throughout the day, write them down before releasing them. Once your worry time begins, you can address the items on your list. If you’d like to learn more about this technique, the link to my article about worry time is here.

When Logic and Intuition are Misaligned

Your logical voice can be an essential part of the decision-making process. It can be the voice of reason when the emotional voice takes over. It may even help strengthen your intuition.

But you’ve probably had situations where your head is telling you one thing, but your heart is telling you another. So which do you listen to?

This is tough to answer, as every problem, situation and decision will be unique. What’s right for one person may be different for another.

If I return to my trying on the decision example, my intuition about not taking the job was absolute, despite logic telling me otherwise. But if I had no alternate way of paying my mortgage that month, I’d have to listen to logic over my gut feeling.

Perhaps that could mean I was asking the wrong question for those circumstances. If I asked whether I’d be prepared to make tough choices to keep a roof over my head, the logical and intuitive voices would agree.

The Leap of Faith

Following your gut when logic tells you something different takes courage. I like to believe if your intuition is intent on you taking a leap of faith, it will get the message across to you despite differing voices.

Perhaps it’s about getting to know yourself better and understanding what you’re comfortable with. The more adept we get at allowing space for our intuition to come through, the more we can trust ourselves in asking the right questions so we make choices that work best for us.