Fear vs. Intuition | How to Tell the Difference

People often struggle to tell the difference between anxiety and intution. Here's the difference.

Tapping into your intuition takes practice but it’s a gift we all have. I’ve always been on the more highly intuitive side of the spectrum, but even so, the difference between fear and intuition wasn’t always clear.

People often refer to intuition as a feeling and therefore attribute intuition to just a feeling. But this isn’t quite correct. Although it comes through as a feeling, intuition is part of a higher guidance system innate inside all of us.

The problem though is that most people numb this sense and are totally unaware of its power. You might have a gut feeling about something, but it’s hard to understand why. This lack of understanding forces us to dismiss this as just a feeling when in reality it’s a form of higher guidance.

How do you know the difference between fear and intuition?

This can be hard to discern at first because the mind tends to default to fear and anxiety. Most people confuse anxiety for intuition when they say things like “I have a bad feeling.” This can be both true and false. If you’re trained to know how to listen to your intuition, you’ll be able to recognize the feeling of worry and fear vs. a genuine feeling of intuitive guidance.

Intuition usually comes in a soft form of knowing which doesn’t feel anxious or fearful. One example of fear dominating intuition is when there was a string of airplane crashes in the news about six years ago. I traveled a lot at the time and I hated to fly and it genuinely freaked me out.

I used to board the plane and say “I have a bad feeling.” Of course, I had a bad feeling, I was drowning in anxiety.

The last year has been a challenge for nearly everyone, but if you can quiet your mind and get to a place of calm where the mind doesn’t dominate in fear, then you can better tune into that quiet voice inside. Intuition is there to guide us through life and challenges and when you can tune into and trust your intuition, you’ll be able to handle life’s challenges a bit better.

There are times however when your intuition will give you a warning or maybe a head’s up on something to come. Your body is an extension of the subconscious mind and it often picks up on things before we are consciously aware of them.

In our busy hectic modern life, the mind never shuts off and we are always occupied. Sometimes we can miss these subtle flags or signs if we’re not careful. Furthermore, we’re often preoccupied with our phones and end up internalizing consciously and unconsciously everything we read. It’s essential to shut off the phones and all your mind to filter things out and return to a place of calm. From this centered place, you can listen to what your intuition is telling you.