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Decision-Making & Intuition, Everyday Intuition, The Joyful Mind: Mood & Intuition

Intuition and Intellect Work Better Together

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Many clients and students come to me with an all-or-nothing attitude toward intuition. They want to know if they should trust their intuition and use it instead of logic, or give up on it entirely and rely only on logic if they cannot always trust their intuition. Interestingly, this mindset puts way too much pressure on ourselves—and on our intuition—and can even quiet it down. It is like telling a wise friend to never speak up unless they are one hundred percent accurate. What we tend to forget is that whenever we need to make an important decision, it is best to gather all the inputs we can access, consider all the factors involved, and then put them together and sift through them to reach a conclusion. 

Intuition is the ability to access your accumulated knowledge and experiences—including those stored in your subconscious and unconscious—and to generate new ideas or answers to your questions. Joel Pearson, a neuroscientist and professor at the University of South Wales, defines intuition in his book The Intuition Toolkit as “the learned, productive use of unconscious information to improve decisions or actions.” He emphasizes that intuition involves drawing on unconscious information in a way that enhances decision-making and behavior, distinguishing it from impulses, habits, or random guesses. Pearson’s approach is grounded in neuroscience and offers practical guidance for developing and trusting intuition under the right conditions.

Pearson uses the acronym SMILE, to describe five conditions that need to be satisfied in order for intuition to work: The letters correspond to: Self-Awareness (caution about using intuition when under the influence of high emotions); Mastery (relying on intuition in areas where the person has a lot of experience or expertise); Impulses (knowing the difference between impulses and addictions and intuition); Low probability (not using intuition for low probability events or situations such as rare occurrences); and Environment (using intuition only in familiar and predictable contexts). These conditions all make sense when you consider that intuition is based on all of our accumulated knowledge and experiences. 

 

I always tell my clients and students to learn how to tap into their intuition and capture its response, but also to compare it with what their intellect or logic suggests, as well as with what experts on the topic say when relevant. As you test your intuition, you combine it with conscious thinking and analysis. You can review and analyze the conditions under which your intuition was activated. You can also ensure that you were not anxious or frustrated when you tried to access your intuition, as strong emotions may have influenced your response rather than true intuition. By comparing the input from your intuition with expert opinions on the topic, you expand your base of accumulated knowledge and experience beyond your own. It is healthy to question your intuition in this way.

Some of my clients and students ask why we should even get into intuition if we cannot trust it completely. In response, I ask them if they can trust all their conscious thoughts all the time. They immediately say, “No!” Then I ask why they don’t just stop thinking or never take their conscious thoughts into account when making decisions. They reply that they think because they are able to, and many times it is useful to them. As you can imagine, this is when I point out that they can use their intuition as well, since we all have that ability and it can be useful in many cases. The key is to learn to tap into intuition in such a way that the conditions for reliability are mostly met, capture the response, and still question and compare it to what your intellect and research suggest.

You can read more about how to activate your intuition and make decisions using it alongside your logic in my book Down to Earth: Demystify Intuition to Upgrade Your Life that is scheduled to be published on September 15th, 2025.

Sources:

Pearson, J. (2024). The Intuition Toolkit: The New Science of Knowing What without Knowing Why. Simon & Schuster Australia.

https://www.amazon.com/Intuition-Toolkit-Science-Knowing-Without/dp/B0CGJR475B

 

Decision-Making & Intuition

Intuition Works Better When We Relax

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During intuitive coaching sessions and lessons, I observe my clients’ and students’ intuition emerging more easily and making more sense when they are relaxed. Research supports this observation as well. Many scientific studies reveal that our intuition is more active and accurate when we are in a good mood, and less active and less accurate when we experience negative emotions. 

Psychology researchers Annette Bolte, Thomas Goschke, and Julius Kuhl published a study titled “Emotion and Intuition: Effects of Positive and Negative Mood on Implicit Judgments of Semantic Coherence” in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology in 2003. In this paper, they defined intuition as the ability to reach better-than-average conclusions through the unconscious processing of information. They tested how intuition functioned when participants were prepared in different ways, then presented with word association puzzles.

The research team showed that participants were able to intuitively find subtle associations between word groups that were only weakly linked when they were primed to be in a positive mood beforehand. The study also demonstrated that inducing a negative mood in participants had the opposite effect: their ability to find coherent links within the weakly linked word groups dropped significantly. This suggests that one of the best ways to prepare ourselves for intuition is to put ourselves in the best possible mood. 

 

In a classic intuition research study from 1985, Urie Bronfenbrenner and Stephen J. Ceci, psychologists at Cornell University, studied the behavior of ten-year-old children. The team had participants sit in front of computer screens where geometric shapes periodically appeared. These shapes would suddenly jump to different locations on the screen. The children were told to predict where the shapes would jump next. There was a hidden pattern involving the type and color of the shapes, but it was too complicated for the children to consciously figure out. Initially, they were told this was part of their schoolwork. After several trials, the researchers found that the children had not learned the pattern intuitively by observing where the shapes jumped. However, when they were told they would get to play a game, they performed better. 

In the game version of the experiment, the children caught animals with a net. The animal images followed the same pattern as the geometric shapes in the previous experiment and darted across the screen. When the task was presented as a game, the children relaxed and learned the pattern. They were able to predict where the images would jump. It seemed that when the children relaxed and approached the task as a game instead of schoolwork, they were better able to engage their intuition and unconsciously detect the pattern, and therefore catch the animals on the screen. 

There has also been research on the impact of negative emotions on intuition. In a 2016 study, Carina Remmers and Johannes Michalak found that when people experience intense negative emotions—the kind that can occur at the extreme of clinical depression—intuition is markedly impaired.

We have all noticed how our attention becomes rigid and narrow when we are in a foul mood, and, in contrast, how novel solutions and creative ideas arise when we’re receptive and positive. This is intuition in action. Relaxation is an important factor in a good mood. When we’re relaxed, our minds are capable of switching from conscious thinking to intuition. As we relax and enter a playful state of mind—one in which we are not overthinking or analyzing the situation—our intuition can come forward. These are good reminders to begin thinking of our intuition as a fun game that all of us are capable of playing.

You can read more about how to activate intuition in my book Down to Earth: Demystify Intuition to Upgrade Your Life that is scheduled to be published on September 15th, 2025.

Sources:

Bolte, A., Goschke, T., & Kuhl, J. (2003). Emotion and intuition: Effects of positive and negative mood on implicit judgments of semantic coherence. Psychological Science, 14(5), 416–421. 

https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9280.01456

Ceci, S. J., & Bronfenbrenner, U. (1985). “Don’t forget to take the cupcakes out of the oven”: Prospective memory, strategic time-monitoring, and context. Child Development, 56(1), 152–164. 

https://doi.org/10.2307/1130182

Remmers, C., & Michalak, J. (2016). Losing your gut feelings. Intuition in depression. Frontiers in Psychology, 7, Article 1291.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4993771/

Decision-Making & Intuition, Everyday Intuition

Intuition is Already in Your Daily Life

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If you think your intuition is inactive, you might be overlooking the ways it quietly operates in the background of your daily life. Would you like to know how?

Intuition is the ability to access your accumulated knowledge and experiences—including those stored in your subconscious and unconscious—and to generate new ideas or answers to your questions. Unlike conscious thoughts, which follow reasoning or analysis, intuition arises spontaneously, without any deliberate processing.

One common form of intuitive processing is implicit learning—a type of learning that occurs when our conscious mind isn’t directly involved. Our lives are filled with examples of this. In fact, we all practice intuition without even realizing it! Many daily functions—such as typing, showering, or driving—are performed on autopilot. We simply do them, and, if necessary, modify them intuitively in the moment. 

The term “implicit learning” was first coined by Arthur Reber in 1967. It is also referred to as “learning by doing” or, in some cases, “muscle memory,” as it involves acquiring skills through repeated practice, often without conscious awareness. We store details of the activity in our unconscious and subconscious mind, as well as in our neurological system, while nerves and neurons send and receive signals. All of this happens without us consciously trying to do so. After the learning period, we begin to perform the activity without thinking about each step.

It is very easy to observe implicit learning—and, therefore, intuitive processes—in action among masters of any profession. Take a master baker, for example. You can see their muscle memory at work if you watch them bring together flour, water, and other ingredients to make a perfect dough. They knead it for just the right amount of time, applying the perfect amount of pressure. The temperature of the bakery, the moisture in the air, and other factors are not the same every time they bake, but they know how to adjust. They add a bit more flour here or knead a bit harder there—intuitively—so that the bread tastes and even smells exactly as intended. 

The learning and performing process for a professional tennis player is another example. While they initially learn skills from their coaches, as they become highly skilled, implicit learning—and therefore intuition—comes into play, making them move their body and hit the ball in specific ways, as if a complex algorithm were optimizing each step.

You may be wondering, “Okay, that might be the case for professionals, but how does that relate to my daily life?” You are a master of the activities you do repeatedly on autopilot. These might include certain tasks at your job that you can “accomplish in your sleep,” walking or running in your neighborhood and knowing where to slow down or turn, watering your plants just the right amount, playing catch with your friend or child, making your toast in the morning, and so on—all without thinking about it. In most of these activities, you are also able to make the necessary adjustments intuitively when conditions change, such as not running or walking at the same speed on rainy days.

When you are getting to know your intuition and learning to use it more intentionally, remember that it is already active. It is there like a quiet, supportive friend doing everything they can to make your life easier.

You can read more about intuition and implicit learning in my book Down to Earth: Demystify Intuition to Upgrade Your Life that is scheduled to be published on September 15th, 2025. 

Sources:

Reber, A. S. (1967). Implicit learning of artificial grammars. Journal of Verbal Learning & Verbal Behavior, 6(6), 855–863. 

https://doi.org/10.1016/S0022-5371(67)80149-X