Is it my intuition or am I just overthinking? Questions of an intuitive empath
Is it intuition, or am I overthinking again.
You've turned it over a dozen times in your head, weighed every angle, imagined every worst case, and you still can't tell whether what you're feeling is a warning or just your mind doing what it always does. If that sounds familiar, you've asked the question I hear more than almost any other from fellow highly sensitives and empaths. Is this my intuition, or am I overthinking again? How do we actually tell the difference between our intuition and the noise of our own mind?
The Overthinking Empath
Highly sensitive people ask this question more than most, because we've built a habit of overthinking, of going up into our minds to resolve things and find answers, since childhood. We're so attuned to the needs of others, so intent on keeping the group harmonious, that we overthink every move, every word, every response that comes back to us. We worry we've upset someone. We notice things nobody else has even registered. We become the social glue, quietly trying to fix people and situations to keep everyone happy, classic people pleasers.
We've made a habit of mental spiralling rather than intuitive knowing, and because it started so young, we assume it's normal. It isn't. Not everyone is doing this, and most people aren't even aware that we are.
Learning to Trust the Body
For highly sensitives, the real work is learning to trust the body over the mental spiral. For some of us, that means starting with trauma healing, because if old triggers are still loud and unresolved, they'll make it much harder to hear the intuitive voice underneath them.
Even without trauma symptoms, feeling everything as deeply as we do can make coming back into the body feel like a lot. The sensations are strong, partly because our interoceptive ability, our awareness of what's happening inside the body, tends to be heightened too. So this might be your first port of call.
Our sensitive nervous systems are also picking up more relational information than most, filtering and processing subtle data about people, situations and environments all day long, which can overwhelm the system further. As you unpack your own sensitivity, you may find you're neurodivergent, working with trauma symptoms, wired with a highly sensitive personality type, or working with psychic abilities, often more than one of these at once. (More on that in the further reading at the end.)
What Overthinking Feels Like for an Empath
Highly sensitives and empaths are classic overthinkers, and this kind of thinking feels very different from the intuitive voice. Set side by side, the mind's noise tends to:
Move fast, tight and urgent, the energy of anxious thought
Try to explain sensations too quickly, before they've even settled
Feel contracted, eager for a resolve or an answer
Sit in a loop of second guessing, what if I'm wrong
Reason with itself: this should work, or that sounds perfect, building a list of twenty different pros and cons just to prove its case
Keep us up in our heads, barely aware of what's happening in the body
We overthink because we believe more data means a safer choice, so the mind keeps making lists and running the analysis.
What Intuition Actually Feels Like
Intuition has a very different quality, and learning to tell them apart is the whole skill. Intuition is simple. It doesn't explain itself. The answer usually arrives as a sensation before it arrives as a thought, a feeling in the body rather than a case being made.
When it's a yes, there's a leaning in. A quiet, grounded quality with a gentle peace and clarity to it, no lists attached. The subtle energy in the body expands, opens, lifts. It can feel like a softening, a pull towards, a soft aha, or simply a really good feeling about a person or a situation. It feels like an invitation.
When it's a no, it arrives without urgency or fear, even when it's firm. The body's energy collapses, goes heavy, or pulls back. Sometimes it's just a plain no, with no explanation attached: I don't like them, I have no evidence why, I just don't trust them. That's intuitive knowing. No lengthy thinking, no explaining, no analysing, just a knowing you can learn to trust. Intuition doesn't catastrophise.
A Simple Practice to Strengthen Intuitive Clarity
Try it with something low stakes, like whether to buy a book.
Let your mind do its thing first. It will probably chatter away: I've heard it's really good, it sounds exactly what I need right now, and so on. Let it run.
Then consciously drop out of that mental space and back into the body. Come back to the breath, quieten the mind, and get curious about your physical sensations. Now ask the same question, should I buy this book, but ask your body instead of your head.
What happens to your subtle energy? Does it expand, drop, or stay neutral? Not every answer is a hard yes or no. Sometimes it's a four or a five out of ten. You can practise on books you know you loved and books you know you hated first, to feel the extremes and calibrate the scale.
As you experiment, notice where your mind's opinion and your body's answer diverge. That gap is exactly what we're training ourselves to notice, so we can drop out of the mental space and back into the embodied one for our answers.
Homecoming
Park the mind. Come home to the body and to the intuitive intelligence that's always been there. We have to let go of needing the detailed why, and learn instead to trust, let go, and follow. Over time, that habit saves you a great deal of time, energy, money and heartache.
This is the practice that has literally saved me thousands in my business for example, and I'm not exaggerating. In the early days, I remember looking at a course that was widely known and popular in the money space. It spoke directly to the problem I was having and promised the solution. My mind was so eager to jump in, desperate for my financial worries to be solved at the time.
But every time I asked my intuition, my energy dropped. It was a firm no. That wasn't what I wanted to hear. I wanted a solution straight away, because I was worried and scared. But I'd learnt to listen and trust, so I put down my anxious eagerness and let the idea go.
Within two weeks, I'd been introduced to another coach, the lovely Caroline Leon, a business coach teaching exactly what I needed to grow my business and actually make money. My intuition gave me a big thumbs up. It was still a leap to join, but it gave me exactly what I needed at that stage, and I was so glad I'd listened.
I use the same practice now with the people I employ to maintain the house, the products and holidays I'm tempted by, the timing of a trip, all the ordinary day to day decisions most of us just think our way through. Ask your intuition first, in the small things as much as the big ones, and every time you do, you build a little more trust in the relationship.
Our intuition isn't always loud, but it's a constant, loyal companion, waiting for us to quieten down and listen. It's an inner compass with access to information beyond the conscious mind, ready to guide us the moment we're ready to park the overthinking and drop back into the knowing body.
Where in your life are you overthinking something that your body already answered weeks ago? I'd love to hear, leave a comment below, or hit reply if this landed in your inbox.
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