Intuition vs. anxiety: Identifying the difference

As I scroll through TikTok after an afternoon lecture, I see clip after clip of (mostly) women my age tackling the difference between intuition and anxiety.

For those who struggle with anxiety (Hey girl, I see you), following your gut is a lot more complicated than it may seem. We all let feelings of jealousy arise in our relationship from time to time, but how do we trust ourselves when we deal with anxiety? Whilst our bodies can communicate funny feelings to us that we’ve labelled intuition, anxiety also often speaks to us in the same way.

If your body is trying to tell you that something isn’t right in your relationship, it can feel impossible to gauge whether it’s rational or your own angst. But luckily, there are specific identifiers we can find suspicion with.

If jealousy claws its way up to the surface of your mind, a scale of urgency can be used to identify a gut feeling versus anxiety. You see a photo on your partner's IG story of him with another girl you’ve never met. A sense of immediacy washes over you. You must text now. You must call now. You must act now. The sirens are blurring and your palms are sweaty. This is not a calm call for communication with your partner. This is a shriek from your insecurities.

If you feel the urge to act immediately, you are reacting to the situation with anxiety. Those sweaty palms of yours are not your body telling you the truth. It’s the jealous suspicion in your mind retaliating to a trigger. If you struggle to tell between a valid hurtful feeling and an anxious spiral; the level of your sense of urgency can help you decipher the difference.

Mapping how heavy the weight of the situation feels to you can also act as a reference point from intuition and anxiety. A calm tuition does not take over your life. It isn’t an obsessive thought or an itch that needs to be scratched. It's a feeling that gives you the opportunity to open up a discussion with your partner about jealousy.

Psychologist, Olivia Guy-Evans, describes intuition as “adaptive unconscious processing” where our brains use shortcuts to make informed decisions. Whereas she explains anxiety as an unnecessary hypervigilance “causing us to overestimate threats or sense risk where there may be none”.

If the feeling holds an all-encompassing pressure on your shoulders, then it may be anxiety instead. If wrestling with your jealous thoughts is interrupting your study days on campus, shifts behind the coffee machine, and attempts at TikTok recipes, it’s taking over your life. If these thoughts are ruling your days, then they are not based on evidence that you can trust but in a general uneasiness.

Using reflection to follow your line of thinking can also be used as a strategy to find the difference between a gut feeling and anxiety. You can quickly jump from zero to one hundred based on your initial inkling when you're working from an anxious headspace.

It can start off with a missed call and yet your mind can end up in a scene of horror, one where your fears of rejection are at the forefront, but reality is not. When you have anxiety, jealousy has the ability to turn a silly feeling to brush off into a relationship-harming problem. These accelerations can come out of absolutely nowhere. Our bodies are unable to tell the difference between real danger and anxious feelings which can be extremely confusing to recognise in the moment.

A gut feeling is usually quite targeted. It communicates to your mind a specific message about a person or situation. Anxious thoughts are hyperbolised into one million ‘what-ifs?’. When you get jealous over a small trigger with your partner, are you calm and collected? Or are you scattered with hypotheticals? Jealousy almost always takes form in the latter.

Anxiety is a wound. Intuition is an understanding. If a world of heart-racing pain inhabits your body when you start to feel jealous, you haven’t uncovered a truth; your wound has been touched.

Reflecting upon your sense of urgency, the weight of the situation, and your line of thinking are all strategies that can help us approach jealous feelings. If we can calibrate to understand that they are simply our own anxieties, we can keep the harm of the situation to a minimum.

No one benefits from jealous outbursts sprouted from anxiety. Your partner is hurt and you feel an overwhelming guilt about letting your insecurities take over.

If you use these strategies and come out realising you are experiencing a gut feeling, simply take the opportunity to talk to your partner about this feeling. More often than not though, these jealous feelings are proof of previous wounds.