For almost a decade, I sat with clients who described the same thing: a deep, bone-level certainty that something was wrong. Not anxious rumination, they would insist, real intuition. A knowing. And yet, when we slowed down and traced the thought, it almost always led back to the same place: a mind that had been on high-alert for so long that vigilance had become its resting state. That hypervigilance had convinced itself it was wisdom.
The physiological overlap between anxiety and intuition is real, and it is worth taking seriously. Both activate the autonomic nervous system. Both create a quickening of the heart, a tightening of the chest, a pull toward action. The ancient brain does not clearly distinguish between "I should trust this feeling" and "I am in a threat response." It simply fires. So when a client tells me their gut is telling them not to take the job, or to leave the relationship, I do not dismiss that signal, but I also do not accept it at face value without examination.
Cognitive Behavioural Therapy gave me, and my clients, a language for this examination. The thought record, that deceptively simple tool of writing down the thought, the evidence for it, the evidence against it, and the more balanced conclusion, is where the distinction between anxiety and intuition often becomes visible. Anxiety tends to be absolute: it catastrophises, and it picks its evidence. Intuition, when it is signal rather than noise, tends to be quieter, more specific, and not contingent on a worst-case outcome.
One client, I will call her Priya, came to me convinced that her business partner was planning to betray her. Every interaction felt like confirmation. She lost sleep. She rehearsed confrontations at 3 a.m. When we mapped the evidence together, what emerged was not a pattern of betrayal but a pattern of Priya's nervous system scanning relentlessly for threat, shaped, we discovered, by a childhood in which betrayal had been sudden and total. Her "gut" was not detecting present danger. It was re-running an old alarm.
The practical question I give every client: does the feeling expand or contract when you sit with it? Intuition tends to clarify when you give it space. Anxiety tends to amplify. If you write down the fear and come back to it the next morning and it has grown three new catastrophic branches, that is usually anxiety. If the quiet sense of wrongness remains consistent and specific, it deserves more attention.
None of this means anxiety is untrustworthy. Sometimes the alarm is pointing at something real. But learning to distinguish between the two, between the mind protecting you and the mind terrorising you, is one of the most freeing skills I know. It is also one of the things therapy does best: it slows the loop down enough for you to see what is inside it.
Dr. Meera Krishnan is a clinical psychologist practising on GetCalmly.
