The Difference Between Intuition and Anxiety - Learning to Trust Yourself

By Katrina Steel

One of the most important, and confusing, parts of healing is learning to trust yourself again. Especially when it comes to decision-making, relationships, boundaries, or sensing when something feels “off.”

When Inner Knowing Gets Clouded by Fear

So many clients come to therapy asking:

“How do I know if this is my intuition… or my anxiety?” “Is my gut trying to warn me, or am I catastrophising?” “I feel something, but I don’t know if it’s wisdom or just fear.”

These are not surface questions, they’re core survival questions. And they deserve clarity.

Why the Lines Get Blurry

To understand the confusion, we have to understand how the brain and body work under threat.

When you’ve experienced trauma, especially relational trauma, emotional neglect, or gaslighting, your nervous system adapts to prioritise survival over self-trust. Your brain becomes a threat-detection machine, scanning constantly for anything that feels familiar to past pain.

This mechanism is called predictive processing, your brain isn't just reacting to the present, it's anticipating danger based on your past.

So when something reminds you (even subtly) of past harm, your system sends an alert.

The problem? That alert doesn’t come with a label. It doesn’t say:

“Hey, this is anxiety rooted in childhood attachment wounds.”

It just says: danger.

And for people who’ve had to doubt their own perception to stay safe in relationships, that internal alarm system becomes overdeveloped, while internal trust becomes undernourished.

Anxiety Urges — Intuition Informs

Anxiety vs. Intuition: The Somatic Difference

One of the most helpful ways to distinguish between intuition and anxiety is to move from story to sensation from thoughts to the body.

Here are some general patterns:

	Anxiety	Intuition
Sensation	Tense, constricted, buzzing, tight	Calm, spacious, steady
Emotion	Fearful, frantic, pressured	Clear, calm, sometimes sad but firm
Urgency	"I have to decide now"	"I can wait and still know"
Tone	Panicked, repetitive, doubtful	Neutral, concise, non-attached
Language	"What if...?" looping	"This isn’t for me" clarity
Awareness	Is usually in the head, overthinking, worrying, fear future thoughts	Is usually in the gut, felt as off, wrong, centred, truthful.

Of course, this isn’t a rigid formula. But it offers a starting point. The key difference is often the energy behind the message.

Anxiety demands. Intuition informs. Anxiety spirals. Intuition lands.

How Trauma Disrupts Inner Knowing

When you've been repeatedly invalidated, told you’re “too sensitive,” “overreacting,” or wrong about your instincts, you learn to doubt yourself.

This is particularly true for:

• Children who were gaslit or emotionally manipulated.

• People in emotionally abusive relationships.

• Survivors of betrayal trauma, coercion, or neglect.

In these environments, intuition was often right, but it wasn’t safe to act on. So we buried it. Replaced it with hypervigilance. And now, in adulthood, the result is often:

• Overthinking

• Difficulty trusting your gut

• Seeking external validation before making decisions

Reclaiming your inner knowing means learning to listen again, and discerning which voices inside you are based in fear, and which are based in truth.

Practices to Rebuild Self-Trust

1. Somatic Check-In

When faced with a decision or feeling, pause and scan your body:

• Where do you feel the signal?

• Does it feel constricted or calm?

• Is it reactive, or does it feel neutral but clear?

Let your body be part of the conversation, not just your mind.

2. Name the Fear

Often, writing down what your anxiety is saying can help expose it for what it is:

“If I say no, they’ll leave.”“If I trust my gut and it’s wrong, I’ll regret it forever.”

These fears are valid in the context of your past. But are they true now?

3. Revisit Past Intuition

Think back to a time your gut did know something, even if you didn’t act on it. Remember what that felt like. Begin building a reference point for what intuition feels like in your body.

4. Pause Before Action

If something feels urgent, it’s likely anxiety. Intuition doesn’t rush you, even when it’s clear. Give yourself permission to pause. Breathe. Wait a moment. The truth will still be there.

Final Thoughts

Learning to tell the difference between anxiety and intuition isn’t about getting it perfect, it’s about creating enough inner safety to listen without panic.

It's about remembering that you’re not broken, you’re recalibrating. And that inner knowing? It’s still there. It might be buried under fear, but it hasn’t left you.

The more compassion you offer your internal world, the clearer that voice becomes.

You don’t need to rush toward certainty. Just keep practicing the pause. The knowing will come.

To keep it simple, when I feel anxious its in my head, my mind. When its intuiton I feel it in my gut, its a felt sense.