Intuition, Fear, or Wishful Thinking? How to Tell the Difference.

You trusted it. You acted on it. And later you wondered... "Was that actually my intuition?"

In this episode of The Energy Xchange, we're breaking down three things that can feel identical in the moment — intuition, anxiety, and wishful thinking — and how to actually tell them apart before they cost you a decision you'll regret.

We're diving into:

• Why highly sensitive people are especially prone to confusing these three things
• How your nervous system conditioning affects how clearly you can receive intuitive signals
• The difference between what intuition feels like versus fear in the body
• Why wishful thinking is the sneakiest of all three 
• The #1 reason our intuition gets blocked
• Five ways to tell the difference in real time

If you've ever stayed too long, moved too fast, or talked yourself out of something you knew was right for you, this episode will give you a framework for trusting yourself more clearly going forward.

The Energy Xchange is a podcast for highly sensitive people, empaths, and deep feelers navigating relationships, business, and personal growth.

Links & Resources For This Episode:

• Subscribe to my Weekly Newsletter
• Visit My Website
• Get the Book: The Empath Detox
• The Empath Detox Oracle Deck

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:03

Welcome to the Energy Exchange, a podcast for deep feelers and quiet leaders. Here, we explore what happens when we start working with our natural energy in both our business and personal lives. I'm Colleen Wallach. I'm a highly sensitive professional who spent years untangling patterns of overthinking, people pleasing, and playing small just to feel safe. Now, I help others like me step more fully into their power without losing the superpower of their softness. We don't have to be allowed to be seen, and we don't have to push to be powerful. Everything is energy. Let's start this exchange. Welcome into this week's episode of the Energy Exchange. It's a beautiful morning in Whitefish, Montana. Sun is popping, life feels good. Today's topic is one I've been wanting to get into for a while, and it's a little more woo-woo than some of my other episodes, but I think it's relevant for everyone. I want to talk about intuition and more specifically, how to actually tell the difference between intuition, fear, and wishful thinking. All three of these can feel almost identical, especially if you're a more feeling forward person, and getting them mixed up can trip us up big time. Before I dive into how to tell the difference, I want to touch on why they're so hard to distinguish between in the first place. The first one is your nervous system and specifically how conditioned it is. Do you feel safe in your body right now, in your life? That's gonna affect how clearly you can receive information from your internal systems. If we're dysregulated, if we're anxious, if we're in survival mode, everything gets louder and blurrier at the same time. And it's really hard to hear a calm internal signal, which is what our intuition is, when our nervous system is basically screaming. The second layer to this is your attachment style. And I'm gonna do a whole separate episode on this, but the short version is do you have a fear of loss? Do you have a fear of abandonment? A fear of being controlled or losing control? Those underlying fears are going to color every gut feeling you have, especially in relationships. So if you have any attachment wounds, those will literally distort the signal. Next up, and this one hits hard for me, is if you have any sort of ADHD tendencies. Like I don't have an official diagnosis, but I relate to a lot of those traits, fast thoughts, the impulsivity, the pattern jumping. When your brain moves that quickly, it's easy to mistake a fast feeling for a deep knowing. They're not the same thing, but we can't always see that in the moment. And then last up, if you've ever been a hyper-vigilant person, meaning someone who scans the room to know whether or not you're safe, that is going to affect how you read both external situations and then your own internal cues. Hypervigilance is protective, but it also creates a lot of noise. Okay, so let's dive into the differences between intuition, anxiety, and wishful thinking. People often speak about intuition as being that gut feeling, but not every gut feeling is intuition. So let's break down what each one feels like in the body. Intuition feels calm, it's neutral, it's clear, it doesn't necessarily have a lot of urgency to it. So even when the thing you're receiving the nudge about is maybe a little stressful, the knowing itself isn't loud. It's almost quiet, it's steady. It's that thought or feeling that's just there. And sometimes it's a thing you keep coming back to even when you want to talk yourself out of it. Anxiety feels very different. It's urgent, it's a little spirally, it needs immediate reassurance. It almost has this edge to it, like you can't settle until someone confirms something for you. There's maybe even a little feeling of desperation to it. And that's not to say that your intuition will never have any emotional charge to it, but if you're feeling that frantic, grasping kind of energy around a decision, we don't want to make a big move from that place. We sleep on it, we take a beat, we get back into our body. If we're in that frantic energetic place, we need some space between the feeling and then the resulting action that we're gonna take. What I've noticed for myself is one of the clearest indicators of intuition, there's almost nothing anyone can say that will change it for me. I could talk to five people about it, get five different opinions, and none of it will actually move the needle on what I know inside. So it's that steadiness that we're looking for. That's your core. That's what feels real for you. And that fits that intuition checklist. If you're feeling any sort of need to crowdsource your intuitive nudge, that's usually a sign of fear, not intuition. And I did a full episode on crowdsourcing your intuition. So definitely check that one out if that resonates with you. So we've got intuition and anxiety, but then there's a third one that I think is actually the sneakiest one of them. And that one is wishful thinking. Wishful thinking feels a lot like hope, and hope is a beautiful thing, right? But the problem is when that hope, that want, starts masquerading as a gut knowing, we'll use it to override the actual information we're receiving. The number one reason our intuition gets blocked is that we get too attached to a specific outcome. That could be a potential romantic partner, a job, a move, a version of your life you've decided is the right one. Whatever it is, when we become attached to a one and only outcome, our brain literally starts filtering out the signals that are trying to redirect us. This is why those red flags that seem so obvious in hindsight are often completely invisible to us in the moment. Like we're not oblivious, we're just heavily invested. And investment changes what we're willing to see. If you're convinced that someone is your person, you will find ways to explain away incompatibility. When you've decided a job is your path, you'll rationalize the signs that you're undervalued or underseen. When you've told yourself this is just how life is, you stop noticing the nudges that are trying to show you another way. And there are lots of reasons that we can get attached in this way. It could be a lack mindset, believing that, you know, this is the best it gets, or there just aren't that many options for you. It could also be a need for control, clinging to a specific outcome because the unknown feels scarier than staying where we are. Discomfort that we know can feel safer than that unknown, which sounds crazy when we say it like that. But I have, I don't know, dozens of examples of awful things I've stayed in for too long because I was afraid of what was on the other side or what wouldn't be on the other side. And sometimes we get attached to an idea or an outcome because we lack trust in ourselves. We don't believe that we can handle whatever comes next if that thing doesn't work out. But as our tolerance for our current discomfort increases, our access to the signal that something is off will decrease, which is the opposite of what we need, because that discomfort, those nudges, those little whispers, that's the whole point. That is our guidance system trying to do its job. Okay, so how do we actually sort through which one we're dealing with? Number one, we check the urgency level. I've talked about this several times before. I do not make big decisions from urgency, not from my own, and certainly not from someone else's. If something only works under pressure, that's worth paying attention to. Urgency has a very specific feeling. There's heat to it, kind of a graspy feeling, and that's usually a sign to slow down, not speed up. If you're having that urgent, racy feeling about something, it's probably fitting into that fear bucket. Next up, ask yourself, am I open to an alternative outcome? This is your wishful thinking check. If you genuinely cannot imagine a version of this situation that looks different from the one that you're hoping for, your intuition might be muted because you're not open to receiving anything that contradicts that story. This doesn't mean abandoning hope for something. We can have things that we're reaching for that we want, but we want to stay open to the idea that we don't have all the answers yet and that we haven't seen all of the available options for our circumstances. Next up, we want to pay attention to what external feedback does to that feeling that we're having inside. When it's fear, outside opinions can temporarily move the needle. So you get that reassurance, you feel better for, I don't know, 20 minutes, however long that is, and then the spiral starts again. When it's wishful thinking, outside input that doesn't support the story you have will get rationalized away. When it's actual intuition, other people's opinions might give you some things to consider, but your inner knowing is still there and it's pretty unchanged. The check there is that you actually find yourself open to the feedback of others. Like you're just making sure you're not overlooking anything. And then one of the most important things we can do is get back into our body. Fear tends to pull us up into our head. We get looping thoughts, we think about the what-ifs, the mental arguments going back and forth. Intuition tends to come from somewhere lower. So it feels a little more grounded. So when you're trying to sort through a decision, it helps to drop out of the mental chatter and notice what's actually happening in your body. Do you feel tension? Do you feel constricted or do you feel expansive? Your body is already tracking information that your brain hasn't caught up to yet. And then last up, we regulate ourselves before making any sort of decision. You cannot hear your intuition clearly from a dysregulated nervous system. The signal is there, but the noise is too loud. So before any major decision, the goal is to get ourselves away from the noise back into our body. For me, even just stepping outside for 10 minutes, going on a little walk, that does something to me. Being in a bigger environment, getting out of my head, that helps put decisions into greater perspective for me. Other things you can do, a few minutes of breath work, meditation, moving your body, maybe sleep on it if you can. You could also journal your thoughts about something, like get it all out of your head onto paper. We don't have to be perfectly calm. We just want to feel regulated enough to actually hear ourselves think. So here's what I want to close this out with. If we can stay really open to the idea that we don't have all the answers, that nothing is set in stone, and that there are more ways than one to build a life that feels right for us, that's when our intuition actually has room to work. That's when we start trusting those little internal cues instead of overriding them with fear or fantasy. Our intuition isn't loud. It doesn't have to be. It's the thing that's still there when everything else has settled down. And the more you practice actually listening to it and honoring what you hear, the clearer it's gonna get over time. That's the work. All right, I'm gonna leave it there. If this episode spoke to you, a quick review would mean the world to me. It helps. More like minded souls find this space. You can also connect with me on Instagram at the.energy.exchange. That's with an X. Thank you for being here, guys. I'll chat with you next week.