Developing your intuition is one of the most important things that you can do for yourself. Learning how to trust your intuition, or in Hungry for Happiness terms, how to trust your gut feeling, is your ticket to freedom. It’s your ability to make decisions for yourself and make judgments based on what would best serve you. When your gut feeling is on point, everything else can come together in a seemingly flowy way.

When you know how to trust your intuition, it’s far more than just the tickle you get inside of your stomach. It’s about tuning into your Self and accessing a higher power that resides within you. It’s about letting go of all limiting beliefs and trusting yourself to make the right choice. Everything is happening for us, even those moments of confusion. It’s important to value your gut reactions to just about everything. Ever wonder why your gut insists that you just don’t like that person? Or why your gut can no longer stand waking up each morning to head to the dreaded office where you’ll spend the next eight hours? In both instances, it’s probably trying to tell you something.

Having a solid trust in your intuition is vital to your happiness. 

Every day, we go about our lives with intuition appearing in many ways as the answers to our questions, even questions we don’t directly ask. As an example, maybe you’re getting ready to leave the house for the day and as you’re locking the door, a feeling arises telling you to bring an extra coat or rain boots. Or you’re on the phone with your friend and can’t shake the feeling of needing to tell them the weird feeling you’re having about this new guy that just entered their life. Or maybe you’re interviewing candidates for a new position at work and within the first minute, you already know if they’re being called back in for a second interview.

Knowing how to trust your intuition is a topic that we dig deep into in our Hungry for Happiness Certification Program. We focus on evaluating any blocks that may be preventing you from seeing the truth all around (and within) you. And while it’s critical that you learn how to trust your intuition, it’s important to note that it takes practice. Your intuition is only as good as the information from past patterns that you have to draw from. In other words, your intuition comes from patterns that you’ve developed in your past experiences. These patterns often get stored away in our long-term memory. Since this happens, it’s important that you have had enough experience in noticing patterns in order to have plenty of information from which to draw your conclusions.

The process of noticing patterns is a lifelong activity and developing how to trust your intuition comes from the ability to recognize your own patterns for exactly what they are so you’re able to easily tune into what your intuition is telling you. If you’ve had a bad experience with dating a doctor and your friend starts dating a doctor, your initial feeling might be wrong in telling you that he’s no good. In situations like this and beyond, your role is to discern what is real at that moment and allow your truth to guide you, not your past feelings of betrayal or confusion.

There are factors to be aware of when you’re learning how to trust your intuition. These are things that can have an impact on your intuition and how clear the message you’re receiving is.

Here are a few things to recognize and shift away from:

• Overthinking: How to trust your intuition is the ability to understand something instinctively. And overthinking is a huge drawback to accessing clarity and truth. When you’re worried about all the different outcomes, you aren’t allowing your thoughts and feelings to flow freely and thus are restricting your ability to tap into what’s true. 

• Leaving parts of you unhealed: An example of this would be childhood trauma. Because childhood abuse can leave a massive impact on a person that remains through adulthood, growing up with trauma can lead to an experience filled with distrust and blame. If trusting your intuition is directly correlated with trusting yourself (and it is), trusting your gut can be tough. This is another topic we get into in our Hungry for Happiness Certification Program: healing the inner child that experienced being unlovable, mistreated, and bullied. When we leave these parts of us unhealed, we exhaust any room within ourselves to trust unbiasedly. 

Learning how to trust your intuition can be developed over time and truthfully, it should. There is a myriad of ways to begin cultivating your intuition… 

• Mindful practice: This can look like developing a meditation practice, or a practice in which you sit quietly for a few moments a day and reflect, contemplate, and truly spend time with your Self. This can also look like developing a similar practice such as a breathwork practice in which you enhance your focus and release stuck and unwanted energies. Clearing your energy is the perfect start to gaining closer access to your intuition and trusting you have the right answer at all times. 

• Practice mindful body awareness: This too can go hand and hand with breathwork. As you become aware of your bodily reactions, you can better tune yourself to the frequency that your intuition operates from. In any situation, recognize how you feel and the emotions that are arising through it. Sharpen your skill in staying out of your head and staying present to your body. 

When learning how to trust your intuition, remember this: Your intuition is a muscle that will be strengthened as you use it. When you practice with purpose and frequency, your ability to recognize patterns, biases, and truths will become greater tools at serving you.

Your Journey

Trusting your intuition is a huge part of your growth and your intuition becomes stronger as you continue on your journey of self-love. Your relationship with your food and body also affects your journey and that's why we're creating the Food Freedom Journey. I’ll guide you on a journey of self-discovery to uncover the reasons you’re using food as a drug and show you how to overcome emotional eating – for good. The process is gentle and much softer than the intense crash diets you’re probably used to. If you want to learn more about it, head over to this link so that you're notified once enrollment for the program opens, and join an incredible community of women embarking on the journey too while you're at it.