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Hello ladies! Long-time lurker, 1st-time poster. I was asked to expand on a comment I made about intuition and how to improve it. Here’s what I know:
Intuition in psychology and philosophy can be called “thin slicing”. Our subconscious mind is very powerful and built to recognize patterns, and it can do so in very short amounts (“thin slices”) of time. Intuitive feelings are the subconscious mind notifying you of a detected pattern picked up from past experiences. For example, you may get an icky feeling when meeting someone for the first time. This could be because they make a similar gesture, facial expression, or say a similar phrase to someone in your past that turned out to be bad for you.
Thin slicing can help you make quick judgements about people, events, or environments, and these judgements have been found to be incredibly accurate. In 1 study, groups were shown 2, 5, or 10 second clips of people, and 1 group had longer interactions with them. The people who were shown short clips rated the teachers similarly to those who had longer interactions with them, and the length of the clips didn’t significantly impact the accuracy of their ratings, meaning that people can make accurate judgements of people in 2 seconds or less.
The only drawback is that thin slicing is personal and subjective. Because it’s based on our past experiences, our judgments may be clouded by picking up on the wrong patterns (eg is this person bad because they did something similar to a bad person in the past, or because they look like or have a shared identity with a bad person?) Personal biases can come into play. Also, emotions can cloud these judgements. Being sad or angry when making judgements can impair effectiveness.
Thin slicing has also shown to be effective in speed dating and predicting relationship compatibility, predicting sexuality, detecting pathological personality traits and personality disorders, and detecting deception. Also, it's been shown that women can accurately predict future partner violence.
So what does this mean for us? We have a powerful built-in danger radar that can protect us, if we learn to listen to it. Improving intuition is mostly a matter of being present in the moment and being connected to your body. Specific things to work on to improve intuition can include:
-Meditation. Learn to listen to and trust your body, and to slow down and live in the moment. This is my no. 1. Also body scans
-Practice with something low-stakes. We can even use thin-slicing on social media and videos. Try watching a court case (or youtuber apology video lol) and seeing if your intuition on the accused turns out to be correct. If you get a gut feeling IRL, trust it and act on it immediately. If you can teach yourself to trust your instinct now, you will automatically trust it later
-Getting outside, creating art, journaling, napping, anything that gets you in touch with your subconscious and inner self
-Listening to your dreams and writing them down
-Therapy and shadow work to notice your past patterns and understand yourself. Also, stop ignoring your feelings.
-To combat the potential drawbacks to thin slicing listed above, find where your inner prejudices may be and correct them. Also, try not to make judgments on people or be in situations where you’d have to do so if you’re in a bad mood
I hope someone finds this helpful! I'm not an expert, so feel free to correct me or add your knowledge
What do you do to help your intuition? Has there ever been a time where your intuition saved you?
Getting back our damn pelts!!
This is a reference to the "Homing" chapter in the book Women Who Run With Wolves by Clarissa Pinole Estes. I could write entire pages on this chapter. But it's basically about how being in relationships can drain of us our very souls because men steal and hide our "pelts" This is definitley an over generalization but Homing really woke me up to how I can come back to myself and my intuition. I recommend this book and this particular chapter to all women.
I've been single for years now and the longer I stay single the closer and more in tune I am with my intuition.
This is another reason why I don't go 50/50 or settle for anything less than what I think I deserve. I have so much more to lose to a man than he has to lose to me.
i pay attention to true crime documentaries, mainly because the criminals are male and the victims are, very sadly, often women. the cases that have a romantic or sexual aspect are the ones that have me super focused because the investigation goes into great detail on how the scrote manipulated their victims. i do not recommend it for the faint at heart of course because the reports can trigger past trauma.
as for intuition saving me, it usually does so at the last minute because i used to doubt myself due to everyone else gaslighting my intuition. that said, i was able to get out of near-frightening stalker situations (i ended up in those pretty often in my 20's) thanks to it and that was before i became interested in learning from true crime.
I'm not even sure we have to improve it. We just need to stop ignoring it
It can be useful to study micro expressions. There are some useful videos on YouTube. Look up the video “MICRO EXPRESSIONS in 4K”.
I highly recommend The Gift of Fear by Gavin de Becker. It Is great for women. He explains that you will feel intuition faster than you can think, and that we need to train ourselves not to override our feelings of fear.
Here is a free PDF version: https://www.docdroid.com/ncSUPFn/book-the-gift-of-fear-gavin-de-becker-pdf