Is It Intuition Or Anxiety? How To Tell The Difference - Episode 339

Welcome And Why It Matters Sandy Kruse 0:02 Hi everyone, it's me, Sandy Kruse. Welcome to Sandy K Nutrition Health and Lifestyle Queen. For many years now, I've been a trusted voice for people in midlife and beyond who want a deeper, more honest conversation about wellness, one that includes the physical, the emotional, the mental, and the esoteric. Most episodes are solo now because I want to bring you thoughtful research, lived experience, and grounded insight without noise or bias.

And when I do bring on a guest, it's because their work genuinely adds something meaningful to the conversation. Here we explore the full spectrum of what it means to be well, how the body functions, how the mind heals, how the spirit expands, and how all of these layers shape life lived with clarity and joy. Thanks for being here. And if this show resonates with you, please follow, rate, review, and share it.

It truly helps the message reach more people. Defining Intuition Beyond First Thoughts Sandy Kruse 1:31 Hi everyone, welcome to Sandy K Nutrition Health and Lifestyle Queen. Today I'm gonna talk all about intuition. So this is gonna be the science of intuition, fear, trauma, what your body picks up before your brain does.

And I'm gonna tell you that I'm gonna really do my best to try and keep my podcast episodes down to 20 minutes or so. And intuition, I'd done this topic before, and I decided to bring it up again, bring it up with science and also to really help you understand and hone in on what to intuition actually is. And I remember long ago, someone said, Oh, it's the first thing that pops in your head. Well, my friends, I'm gonna dismantle that belief system because some people believe that, but it's not really about the first thing that lands, it's more about where is that first thing landing from.

Now I'm gonna get into it. I'm gonna ask you to subscribe, hit subscribe wherever you're listening. I have noticed that my downloads have gone up in the last week, probably because the kiddos are back to school. And it's not necessarily because all the people who listen to me have little kids, but it's more about, you know, back to real life, right?

As soon as September hits. So let's get going on this. I'm gonna ask you to subscribe. I'm also gonna ask you to share this with a friend at the end if you found this to be helpful, because I'm really gonna get into the science and the soul of intuition.

And my entire plan is for you to be able to take something from this and go, oh yeah, this has really helped The Real Question: Intuition Or Trauma Sandy Kruse 3:32 me. Okay, let me set the stage. You walk into a room and you already know nobody has said anything, nobody has told you anything, nobody's spoken, but something in you goes, Nope, something is off. Or you meet somebody for the first time, they're very charming, they're well put together, they're funny, they're saying all the right things, and yet something in your body just doesn't buy it.

Then months later, you discover something about them and think, ah, there you go, I knew it. But here's the question I really want to answer today. How do you know whether that feeling was actual intuition, fear, anxiety, or an old trauma pattern that's just firing? Because that's the part that no one talks about.

And I've actually created a program, it releases on October the 1st. It's called the Sovereign Method. It is including some science that's already there, and it's incorporating methods by which you can create your own protocol to make sure that you're not always responding from these places of fear, anxiety, old trauma patterns, negative and limiting beliefs. Okay, because people just don't talk about it.

We're just told trust your gut. And I actually believe that that is really incomplete advice because your gut can give you incredibly useful information, but your nervous system can detect things before your conscious brain understands them. So the nervous system is a big part of this. It can also learn to detect danger everywhere.

So, how the heck do you tell the difference? And that's what I'm gonna get into today. And I'm gonna look into the science, the nervous system, introsception, sensory sensitivity, unconscious pattern recognition, trauma, and hypervigilance. And then we're going to go further into frequency and Carolyn Corey's work because I don't believe that we have to choose between science and soul.

It's always about a beautiful mix and balance of the two. But we also need to know where the science ends and where the unknown begins. Because I do believe that a lot of this is my experience. Okay, so maybe intuition isn't just one thing.

And I think that we've made intuition way too simple, just like what I said at the start. Oh, it's the first feeling. Oh, really? Is it now?

We talk about intuition like it's one mysterious faculty. You either have it or you don't, right? And then this is where it gets to be questionable, right? The actual research suggests that what we call intuition can actually come from several different processes.

It can be unconscious pattern recognition, something I'm really, really naturally good at. It can be your body detecting subtle information before your conscious mind has processed it. That's another thing I happen to be good at. It can involve interoception, your ability to sense what's happening inside your body.

It can come from years of experience, and sometimes what feels like intuition may actually be hypervigilance. Your nervous system scanning for danger because it learned that danger mattered. Those experiences can feel almost identical. And I can say I have a little bit of all of that, all of it.

Like the danger is not, you know, I don't want you to go and think that I've been in like major serious danger, but I have been in social settings where things have felt off for me, where I have been almost cast aside for my voice on this platform. And then something kind of makes it feel for me like that place is not a safe place for me. When clearly people who know me know I do this out of passion over profit to make the world a better place, and anyone who sees it differently, like it's an attack on them, are actually responding from their own pain bodies. This all really matters because I don't want you to walk away from this episode thinking that every strong feeling is intuition, or, you know, this person is psychic and this person is not, because sometimes the most important thing you can learn is how to tell signal from static.

So your body can pick up information before your brain What Science Can Demonstrate Sandy Kruse 9:05 does. Let's start with the science that can actually be demonstrated. In 2012, researchers studied whether humans can detect emotional information through smell. Men watched either frightening footage or calm nature footage, and researchers collected their sweat.

Yes. Women then smelled the samples without knowing what they were or what emotional state they represented, and the women weren't consciously thinking, Oh, I'm smelling fear, but their responses changed. So fear-associated sweat produced measurable changes in facial and physiological responses. So, yes, humans can pick up emotional information without consciously knowing exactly what they're detecting.

This part is very important. Because when you say I walked into a room and I could feel something, that doesn't automatically mean that you've detected some mystical energetic field. You might have. But you may have picked up the person's facial expression, their posture, their breathing, their voice, their movement, their smell, the tension in the room, tiny inconsistencies.

Your brain can process all of that before you consciously know what you're seeing. And there's a beautiful example of this called thin slice perception. Researchers and Batty and Rosenthal found that people could make surprisingly meaningful judgments about teachers after watching extremely short, silent clips of their behavior. The point isn't that you can judge someone's entire character in six seconds, six seconds because you can't.

I know TikTok, there's this guy who's on TikTok who kind of claims he can know everything, he's like the human lie detector. It's pretty hard. But the point is that humans are really remarkably capable of extracting information from very small amounts of behavioral data. Your brain is constantly comparing what it's seeing now with what it has seen before, and this is where the limiting and negative belief systems come into play.

Okay, those are developed, and sometimes the conscious mind receives the answer before it receives the explanation. This is one very plausible version of intuition. Now, some people really do have a bigger antenna, and I think this is a piece that women need to hear. Not Sensitivity: Not A Flaw Sandy Kruse 12:12 everybody processes sensory information in exactly the same way.

Researchers study something called sensory processing sensitivity or SPS. It's considered a temperament trait rather than a disorder, and research suggests that some people are more deeply affected by sensory and emotional information than others. I actually recorded a podcast that I'm very proud of about sensitive people. I'm one of them.

There's no question because sometimes the way I think about things, there's no way like my husband would ever even think. He's like, geez, like I can't even understand why you're thinking about these things. In fMRI research, people higher in sensory processing sensitivity showed greater activation in brain regions involved in emotional processing and empathy when looking at emotional faces. I get this so much.

And go back and look for my podcast if you want to hear more about a sense, if you're a sensitive person, because a lot of people are like this. Like if I watch certain things on the news, or if one of my kids tells me, let's say they, I'm just gonna give an example, they fell off their bike and they got a massive gash, I will get these weird feelings in the back of my legs. And my sister's exactly the same way. Like it's like we feel other people's pain.

Sometimes when I watch news, which is why I don't watch a lot of news, it it's like I'm I somehow feel that scene, that situation, what's going on, even still, like I don't watch a lot of violent TV for that reason. So the bottom line is when someone says you're too sensitive, I want to challenge the assumption behind that. Because maybe you're not imagining more, maybe you're noticing more because you're built that way. And there's research around something called differential susceptibility.

This is the idea that some people are more responsive to their environments, both negatively and positively. So sensitivity isn't a flaw. But, and this is really important, it also doesn't mean every sensation you experience is 100% accurate information. A sensitive receiver can pick up a lot, it can also pick up a lot of noise, and this is where things get really interesting.

This is probably one of the most important questions. Is it intuition or is it fearslash anxiety? Let's say you're meeting someone new, you suddenly feel uncomfortable. Your chest might tighten, your stomach drops, you want to leave.

Like, what is that? Is that intuition? Is it anxiety? Is it trauma?

Is it your nervous system picking up something that's real? Here's the first thing that I want you to understand that feeling itself does not tell you what caused it. That's huge. A racing heart is information, it isn't an interpretation, a tight chest is information, it isn't a diagnosis.

By the way, I recorded a great podcast about how the body keeps the score, and the body can really be a great map to what's going on with you. Just so you want to go back maybe last week and check that out. A feeling of danger is information. It doesn't necessarily mean that there is danger.

Your job is to get curious about the source of the signal. And here's the framework that I want you to remember because I've tried that whole thing where the first thing that comes to mind is your intuition. It's the very first thing, the very first moment, the very first feeling. Sorry, my friends, that ain't it.

It's just not. Intuition can be incredibly simple, but it's not that simple. So something's off. Don't do it.

Wait, call her. Something about this isn't right. It can be, but it doesn't necessarily, so it doesn't have to come with a giant story. It doesn't need to convince you, it doesn't need 27 reasons, it can just be there.

But I will say, intuition is also not always negative. Sometimes it is the go. Say yes, talk to that person, take this opportunity, this feels right. So this is why it gets complicated.

So intuition isn't simply your internal alarm system, it's information. Now, Fear And Anxiety Feel Urgent Sandy Kruse 17:28 fear. How do we know if it's fear or anxiety? Fear or anxiety are often urgent.

Fear tends to want an answer right now. It starts generating possibilities. What if this happens? What if I'm wrong?

What if they leave? What if something terrible happens? Fear loves the future. Okay, I should put that in a quote.

Fear loves the future, fear fills in blanks, fear takes uncertainty and tries to turn it into certainty. And the nervous system doesn't necessarily care whether the story is true or not, it cares whether the story could represent danger. That's why fear can feel so freaking convincing, your body is having a real physiological response, even when the story attached to that response isn't accurate. Trauma or hypervigilance can also feel like intuition.

And this is a part I really want people to understand. If your nervous system has learned that other people's moods, facial expressions, tone of voice or behavior can predict danger, you can become incredibly fast at detecting these signals. Researchers Pollock and Cinna found that children exposed to violent homes were able to identify anger from facial information more quickly than comparison groups. Their systems had become highly tuned to threat-related information.

That doesn't mean trauma gives you magical superpowers. It means that your nervous system learns. It learns what matters, it learns what to watch, it learns what might happen next, that prediction. And it can be incredibly useful in an unsafe environment.

But here's the problem: you can leave the environment. Your nervous system may not immediately leave with you. So 20 years later, someone raises their voice slightly and your body says, danger. Someone doesn't text back and suddenly your stomach drops.

Someone becomes emotionally distant, and your brain starts preparing for abandonment. You may not be responding only to the person in front of you. You may be responding to every person who came before them. And that's where intuition and trauma can get tangled together.

And I'm going to take a little pause here and just say: if you do have a lot of trauma, if you do have a lot of, let's say, baggage, I strongly suggest you work with a practitioner who gets it and who maybe does techniques like EMDR. I've talked about that on this show. I I've done it, I've done EMDR, and you know, I I I have a lot of um or I had a lot of medical trauma, you know, with a sick child. And I I think it's really important to address these things.

Otherwise, you can end up in a loop. And you can also end up in this fear cycle, trauma cycle, anxiety cycle around situations that are never resolved. So, how do you actually tell the difference? This is the part that I want you to write down.

Don't ask only what am I feeling? Ask what is this feeling responding to? That's a very different question. The Four-Step Intuition Check Sandy Kruse 21:42 And here's my own little four step intuition check.

Okay. Number one, regulate before you interpret. So this goes totally against that first second feeling to make sure you you know respond to that, because that's gotta be your intuition, right? It goes.

Totally against that. If you're highly activated, don't immediately turn the feeling into a conclusion. Pause, breathe, walk, sit quietly, ground, let your body come down a notch because if your nervous system is screaming, you're not in the best position to interpret subtle information. This does not mean dismiss your feelings.

It means don't confuse activation with interpretation. Separate the facts from the story. Ask yourself, what did I actually observe? Not what do I think it means?

What did I actually see? Did their words contradict their behavior? Did their story change? Did their tone change?

Did I notice something specific? Or did I simply feel uncomfortable? All of this is worth paying attention to, but they're different kinds of information. Number three, ask Does this feel familiar?

This is the trauma question. Does this person actually feel unsafe or do they feel familiar? Because sometimes familiarity gets mistaken for intuition. If you're if you've experienced a particular pattern before, your nervous system may recognize the shape of it before your conscious brain does.

I've actually recorded about that neural nets and how they get wired and how much of our brain is actually conscious versus subconscious. So this is all useful information, but not necessarily proof that the current person is the same as the previous person. So ask, am I responding to what's happening or to what this reminds me of? Because that question really can change everything.

So four, see what remains after your calm. This might be the most useful one. See, and it goes against that whole immediate. Although I did say sometimes it can be immediate, yes.

But once you've regulated, gathered information, and separated fact from story, check again. Is that feeling still there? And what's its quality? Does it feel like a simple, clear something's not right?

Or has it disappeared? Or has it turned into a 10-page mental catastrophe? That doesn't give you foolproof scientific tests for intuition. There isn't one, but it gives you a much better process than blindly trusting every single sensation or blindly dismissing every sensation.

And here's the phrase I want you to remember. Trauma often says that this feels familiar. Fear or anxiety often says something terrible might happen. Intuition says pay attention.

These are not clinical definitions. I said if you need a therapist, go see one. But this is a practical framework because real life is messier than three neat little categories. You can have intuition and fear at the same time.

You can have a real observation and a trauma response at the same time. You can notice something genuinely concerning and still become activated by it. The goal isn't perfect certainty, the goal is discernment. By the way, I'm giving my own pitch for the sovereign method again.

I'm going to start linking it in my show notes if you want to learn more about it. Your body may know before you know why. There's another fascinating piece of research around this. Batara and colleagues studied decision making and found physiological responses could emerge before participants could consciously articulate which choices were advantageous.

And research by Barnaby Dunn and colleagues connected introsceptive accuracy. How well people detect their own internal body signals with intuitive decision making. This is why I love the phrase: your body may know before your conscious mind knows why. But what I would change, one word from how we usually talk about this, is your body may detect before your mind interprets.

That's different. Your body can detect something, and your brain still has to make sense of it. And that's where discernment comes Frequency And The Edge Of Proof Sandy Kruse 26:53 in. And then there is frequency.

There's going to be so much more coming out about frequencies, healing frequencies, energetic frequencies. It's like a signal. Now I'm going to move beyond what conventional research has established. And I'm telling you that explicitly because I think it the distinction matters.

You guys all know I'm always going to be about science and soul. I'm always about the balance. And some things cannot be proven with science. Frequency is real.

Sound has frequency. Light has frequency. Brain activity has measurable rhythms. Our bodies operate through rhythmic biological processes.

And humans can synchronize physiologically during interaction. Research has also found forms of neural coupling between speakers and listening during communication. So when people use language like energy, resonance, same wavelength, there are some very real physiological phenomena underneath those metaphors. But then there's a much bigger claim.

Carolyn Corey, by the way, she's coming out with Superhuman 2. It's a her new uh documentary about frequencies, healing frequencies. Her work takes frequency and consciousness into territory that goes beyond what mainstream science has established. Her framework describes reality in terms of information and frequency.

And she talks about vibrational entrainment, consciousness, and connection to what she calls source. She had her previous documentary, Superhuman, The Invisible Made Visible, explores extraordinary claims about human perception and consciousness. Those extraordinary claims have not been established as scientific fact, and that's okay. But Carolyn's work raises a question that I really find fascinating.

I love all this stuff, you guys, because I don't believe you know, I always say that science cannot dictate everything relating to our wellness, body, mind, spirit, soul. Her work raises a question: could some people genuinely be more gifted at perceiving information that other people don't consciously register? Science already gives us individual differences in sensory processing sensitivity. It gives us differences in interoception, it gives us differences in pattern recognition, in emotional perception.

So we already know that human beings don't have all identical receivers. I always say we're not robots. Does that prove psychic perception? Probably not.

Does it prove a universal energy field? Probably not. But does it leave room for a bigger question about human perception and consciousness? I think it absolutely does.

And I'm comfortable in saying it doesn't matter if we can prove it or not. The receiver and the static. I mentioned this. Here's the problem: the more sensitive the receiver, I'm gonna call me the receiver, Sandy Cruz, the more important it becomes to understand interference, which is what I talked about, because you can have a highly sensitive nervous system, which I know I do, and still misread what's happening.

Sensitivity and hypervigilance are not the same thing. You can be naturally sensitive without having trauma, and you can have trauma-related hypervigilance without being particularly high in sensory processing sensitivity. And you can have both, and that's the combination I think a lot of women struggle with: a big antenna and a lot of static. So if you've spent years being told you're too sensitive, I don't want you to swing to the extreme and say, therefore, every feeling I have is intuition.

No, your sensitivity deserves respect and your interpretations deserve examination, and that's called empowerment. Midlife Discernment And Hard-Won Data Sandy Kruse 31:41 So intuition can feel stronger as you get older. And this brings us to midlife and beyond because so many women say the same thing. I see people differently now.

I can know within minutes, I don't get fooled as easily. And I think there's a very good scientific reason for at least that part of it. So there were these Kahneman and Gary Klein, they looked at when intuitive expertise can actually be trusted. Their conclusion was that intuition becomes more reliable when you're operating in an environment with regular patterns, and you've had enough experience and feedback to learn those patterns.

In other words, experience builds your database, you've watched relationships play out, you've seen charming people turn into assholes, you've seen people say one thing and then do another. You've seen friendships change, or you cut friendships out completely. You've seen businesses fail, you've seen people reveal their true selves. You've made mistakes, you've been wrong, you've been right, and all of this is data.

So maybe at 30 you had the antenna, but at 55, you have the antenna and that database. And I think there's another piece that's much more personal. Sometimes we knew we just didn't listen. You saw it, you felt it, you noticed it, and then you talked yourself out of it because accepting what you were sensing would have required you to make a decision that you weren't ready to make.

So sometimes what feels like a new intuition in midlife, it's not new at all, it's an old signal that finally stopped getting vetoed. So, how do you train this? Not by becoming more paranoid or not by assuming everyone has bad intentions. You train discernment, you clear the negative and limiting beliefs, you do the work, you spend time alone, you actually allow the mind to go quiet.

This is something I actually love. I've been meditating for over a decade, and now I have built programs and things for myself, and I'm gonna have that available for you guys, but it's really going to help train your discernment. So it's not, you know, it's not saying, Oh, you're gonna become a master manifestor, or buy my 5,000 course and I'll teach you one-on-one how to get the life you want, how to train your intuition, how to bring in five million bucks. Okay, you're just being an asshole now, but I think it's really important that you figure out your discernment.

Key Takeaways And Next Steps Sandy Kruse 35:17 So let's go with this big takeaway. I'm gonna bring it all together. You walk into a room and something feels off. Maybe you picked up subtle social information, maybe your brain recognized a pattern before you consciously did.

Maybe your body detected something, your mind hadn't put into words. Maybe you're highly sensitive and you're processing information that other people aren't noticing. Maybe you're the only one who's sober in the room and you're just with a bunch of fucking drunks. That could also be it.

Maybe your nervous system is reacting to something that reminds us of the past. Maybe it's fear, trauma, maybe it's intuition. And maybe sometimes there are experiences that don't fit neatly into any of those explanations. I don't think we need to force everything into one box, but I also don't think we should surrender our discernment just because something feels profound.

Here's what I want you to take away: listen to this signal. Clear the signals first. Know what you're listening to. Do your best.

Check out my program. It's only 47 bucks because I want everyone in the world to be less triggered and more intuitive and more discerning and more honest with themselves and just know what makes sense for you. Wouldn't that be wonderful? So I want you to take away that.

Listen to the signal, learn the signals, question the interpretation, regulate your nervous system, look at the facts, check the pattern, and then decide. Because your intuition is not your boss, it's information. And fear isn't your enemy either. Fear is trying to protect you.

Trauma isn't proof that you're broken, it's evidence that your nervous system learns something. The work is learning when the alarm belongs to now and when it's coming from then. And perhaps that is one of the most powerful things about getting older. You don't necessarily become psychic.

I do believe that some people are definitely more attuned to have more special abilities, but I believe we all have the ability to become more intuitive in our life. If we just give ourselves a chance to become quiet, you can become more experienced and more self-aware and know your own patterns, know what you've survived, know what manipulation looks like, you know what peace feels like, you know what the difference is between someone who challenges you and someone who destabilizes you. Trust me, I have been there, my friends, where people have tried to destabilize me. Maybe finally you just stop abandoning yourself when your body whispers something you don't want to hear.

So the next time you walk into a room and you get that feeling, don't dismiss it. But I don't want you to worship it either. I want you to pause and get quiet and ask yourself, what did I actually notice? What am I feeling?

Does this feel familiar? What am I afraid might happen? And when I get calm, what remains? This is where intuition becomes discernment.

That to me is the sweet spot between science and soul. Because maybe your body is really picking up more than your conscious mind can even explain. Maybe some people really are more sensitive receivers. Maybe there are things about consciousness and frequency that we haven't figured out yet.

There are, not maybe, there are things. But until now, like we know everything. I don't think we'll ever gonna know everything. I want you to stay curious and grounded and discerning.

And the most important thing of all of this is never, my beauties, ever abandon yourself. Closing And Share The Show Sandy Kruse 39:43 Thank you so much for being here. Please share this with a friend, and we will see you next week. Have a great week.

I hope you enjoyed this episode. Be sure to share it with someone you know might benefit. And always remember when you rate, review, subscribe, you help to support my content and help me to keep going and bring these conversations to you each and every week. Join me next week for a new topic, new guest, new excited conversations to help you live your best life.