How to trust your intuition when you keep second guessing yourself

I'm quite good at recognising my gut feeling after I've ignored it. Something goes wrong, and I remember that I didn't feel right about it in the first place. At the time, though, there were very sensible reasons to carry on. The money made sense. It looked good on paper. Someone else said I should do it. My own hesitation seemed harder to explain.

That was the question I brought to Sim Stevens: why do I ignore my gut feeling? Sim, also known as Simone, worked in PR and marketing before moving into work she describes as energy healing and psychic mediumship. She approaches intuition through a spiritual lens. I wanted to understand her perspective, and to explore how to trust your intuition without assuming every strong feeling must be right.

What do we mean by intuition?

Sim describes intuition as a sense of knowing or perceiving something without being able to supply a neat chain of reasoning. It can arrive as a feeling rather than an explanation. She also talks about lived experience: have I encountered something like this before? Have I felt this before?

For her, that sits alongside beliefs about energy, spirit and an inner compass. Those are her beliefs, not established explanations for how every person's mind works. You don't have to share them to recognise the ordinary experience of having a hunch before you've worked out why.

A hunch can be worth exploring without being proof. It may draw your attention to something you haven't put into words yet. It may also be mistaken. Trusting yourself doesn't have to mean granting every first impression the final say.

When something looks good on paper but feels wrong

I told Sim I feel things in my heart area and my stomach. Yet I often dismiss that response because a choice is financially attractive, logically defensible or encouraged by other people. I can build a very convincing argument for something I don't actually want.

Sim thinks we learn to prioritise answers we can measure and explain. In her corporate experience, intuition was often treated as less reliable than analytics and measurable outcomes. Her view is that years of looking outside ourselves for validation can make it harder to give an internal response any space at all.

There is a difference between checking a feeling and dismissing it. If something looks good on paper but feels wrong, you can ask what the paper isn't capturing. The day-to-day work? The people? The way you're expected to live? The fact that you simply don't want it? Those questions are a way of exploring the feeling, not evidence that the opportunity is necessarily wrong.

How to stop second guessing yourself at work

Second-guessing can look very responsible. You ask another person, reconsider the decision, gather another opinion and then start again. Sometimes that produces useful information. Sometimes it becomes a way of avoiding the discomfort of choosing.

In our conversation, Sim connects self-doubt with the authority we give other people's views. Colleagues, friends and family can reinforce the doubts already running through our heads. Their advice may be well meant without being the right answer for our particular life.

If you're asking how to stop second guessing yourself, or how to stop second guessing yourself at work, the aim doesn't need to be never reconsidering anything. Good decisions can change when new information arrives. A more useful distinction is whether you're learning something new or replaying the same worry.

You might give a decision a clear question: what information do I actually need, and whose perspective will help? That's an editorial suggestion drawn from the conversation, not Sim's formal method. Trusting yourself without everyone else's approval still leaves room for expertise, collaboration and honest disagreement.

Intuition or anxiety? Gut feeling or fear?

This was the question I most wanted to get into. How do you know whether a feeling is a useful nudge or fear trying to keep everything familiar? If you already experience anxiety, the question can feel especially difficult. A physical sensation doesn't arrive with a label explaining what caused it.

Sim describes her intuitive voice as gentle and quiet, almost a whisper, while fear can feel louder and more insistent. That description resonated with my experience of wanting to leave corporate life. But it's a personal framework, not a reliable test for distinguishing intuition from anxiety.

Calm doesn't prove a thought is accurate. Urgency or discomfort doesn't prove it should be ignored. Asking gut instinct or fear? cannot be settled by where a sensation appears in your body, which thought arrived first, or whether it feels soft rather than shouty. People's accounts on Reddit can show how common the question is; their answers cannot diagnose what's happening to you.

A pause, when the situation allows it, can give you room to look at the feeling alongside the facts. What have you actually observed? What are you imagining might happen? Is there information you can check? You don't have to identify the feeling perfectly before taking a sensible, proportionate next step.

If anxiety is making decisions or daily life difficult, a GP or qualified mental-health professional can help. Intuition exercises aren't treatment for an anxiety disorder. And an immediate safety concern is not something you need to meditate away or dismiss as merely fear.

How to trust your intuition again, without rewriting the past

Sim suggests looking back at times you didn't listen to yourself and noticing what happened. She compares developing confidence to training a muscle: recognising patterns over time rather than expecting trust to appear instantly.

There is a useful question there: what did I notice that I didn't give enough attention to? But hindsight can make an outcome feel more obvious than it really was. We don't know for certain what would have happened if we'd chosen differently.

If you're trying to work out how to trust your intuition again, be fair to your past self. Notice occasions when a hunch helped, but also when it didn't. The purpose isn't to gather evidence that you secretly knew everything. It's to understand your responses more clearly, without turning every disappointment into another reason to blame yourself.

How to develop your intuition: start with low-stakes decisions

Small decisions that have like low stakes.

Sim's starting point is something ordinary, such as deciding what to have for dinner. Not quitting your job tomorrow. Not making a major financial decision because a feeling has suddenly become intense. Small choices give you room to notice a preference without loading it with the whole future.

If you're wondering how to trust your intuition more or how to improve your intuition, that changes the task. You're not trying to become someone who predicts outcomes. You're practising noticing what you think and feel, making a choice, and seeing what you learn from it.

You can prefer something without proving it is objectively best. And you can discover afterwards that you would choose differently next time. That doesn't mean you failed to listen properly; it means you've gained information.

How to develop your intuition: exercises from the conversation

Sim mentions meditation, awareness of the body and journaling as ways she makes room for an internal response. She also discusses energy healing, tarot and pendulums within her spiritual practice. These aren't reliable methods for verifying facts or making medical, financial or safety decisions, and you don't need to buy a tool or treatment to reflect on your feelings.

• Choose a small, reversible decision and notice your own preference before asking for opinions.
• Make a little space without another feed, message or conversation filling it. Sim suggests meditation; quiet reflection may be a more comfortable starting point for you.
• Try journaling to understand your feelings: write what you notice without immediately editing it into something sensible or acceptable.
• Notice physical sensations gently, without treating them as a verdict. If focusing on your body increases distress, stop and use another form of reflection.
• Afterwards, consider what you learned. Include what surprised you, not only what confirms the story you already believe.

Those steps adapt themes from our discussion into reflection prompts; they aren't a clinically validated intuition programme. Sim's emphasis is on giving yourself time. Making space to hear yourself think doesn't require making your mind perfectly quiet.

Intuition and logical decision-making can sit together

Sim talks about people wanting to reconnect with themselves while technology increasingly offers answers. I told her I'm fascinated by both worlds: exploring what matters to me and using AI to solve problems I couldn't previously tackle. I don't see them as mutually exclusive.

That feels relevant to intuition and logical decision-making too. A feeling can raise a question; evidence can help you examine it. Your values matter, and so do the practical consequences. Listening to yourself doesn't require rejecting numbers, other people's experience or professional advice.

How to trust yourself to make decisions may mean accepting that certainty isn't always available. You can check the facts, consider your circumstances and choose without a guarantee. How to trust your gut isn't the same question as how to make sure nothing ever goes wrong.

Reconnecting with yourself after years of self-doubt

When we talked about leaving corporate life, I remembered the initial feeling as a soft whisper. I wanted to start my own thing and go on my own journey. Then other thoughts crowded over it: you're not good enough, you're not strong enough, you can't possibly do that. I ignored the wish for a long time, and it grew more insistent.

Sim's description gave me a way of talking about that experience. It didn't retrospectively prove every fear was wrong or every instinct was right. What mattered was recognising that the fear wasn't the only voice in the room.

Perhaps learning how to trust your intuition starts there: not handing it complete control, but no longer refusing it a hearing. You can listen to a feeling, question it, check it and still treat yourself with respect. You don't have to become certain about everything to stop treating everyone else's opinion as more important than your own.

This article shares a conversation and personal perspectives, not medical advice. Sim's spiritual explanations and suggestions are presented as her views, not established treatments or a test for anxiety.