Follow Your Intuition

By Louisa Kamps

It can trigger smarter decisions and lead to closer relationships- if you learn how to listen.

When an editor at iYogaLife phones to see if I'm interested in writing about intuition, my gut reaction is: You should have tried me when I had some--before I became a harried, married, working mom. Once upon a time, calling the large and small shots of my single life, I just knew, in my bones, who to trust, what moves to make, even what menu items to order at a new restaurant. Social psychologists say that intuition--the knowledge we gain through experience, without even realizing what we're learning--bubbles up wordlessly in the form of "gut" feelings and hunches, and my inner compass steered me well. For example, on my second date with my now-husband, I announced--the thought literally unconscious until it flew out of my mouth--that I wanted us to live together. To my relief, he agreed.

Now that I am the busy mother of a clingy toddler, my once-trusty intuition has been buried beneath a mountain of daily deliberations. Always thinking tactically, I'm grindingly aware of words in my head directing me to do this and that: Okay, Louisa. The boy's momentarily enjoying his Legos; better jump to start cutting onions for supper. Okay, now the kid's napping. Better fold laundry, then return those work calls before he stirs again. I've lost touch with the yay or nay hunches I used to have about people. Nowadays, when I meet somebody new, I tip my head and squint, trying vainly to summon some sense of whether or not this is somebody I can trust. (Looking pretty shifty myself, no doubt.)

But when I explain all this to the editor, thinking she'll surely want to find someone more in tune with her intuition, she says, "Now I think you really have to write this story. We want to see if you can get back in touch with your gut." Remembering how great it was to feel effortlessly certain of so many things, I accept the challenge.

Scientists used to take intuition about as seriously as a Magic 8-Ball. But over the last couple of years there has been a lot of excitement about it, in academia and beyond, that intrigues me, too. Business schools are hiring psychologists to teach intuition's role in decision-making, and Malcolm Gladwell's book Blink, hailing the power of first impressions, was a bestseller. Suddenly, a lot of folks are convinced that people who go with their gut--instead of crushing hunches under logical thinking--have the upper hand in business, friendship, gambling, and love.

Psychologists are still sussing out the mental mechanisms that spark intuitive reactions. But they agree we have an uncanny ability to detect patterns in the world around us, and to extrapolate larger truths. "In times of relaxation, creative insights and impulses often appear like Web site pop-up ads," says David G. Myers, Ph.D., a psychology professor at Hope College in Holland, Michigan, and author of Intuition: Its Powers and Perils. "We mostly drive through life on autopilot, but intuition can come naturally to all of us. It is a huge phenomenon."

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