Your body’s most advanced AI: Your Intuition

I have a scientific brain. Logical. Data-driven. Show me the evidence, and I’ll consider it.

For years, this served me well, but it also meant that I didn’t trust my own intuition. When my chest tightened during conversations with certain people, I didn’t pay attention to it. When something felt wrong about a job opportunity that looked perfect on paper, I pushed through anyway (and regretted it later).

Like many of us with analytical minds, I viewed intuition as the opposite of reason. Gut feelings were for people who didn’t think things through properly. Real decisions required spreadsheets, pros-and-cons lists, and rational analysis.

Over the years, I had been noticing my intuition was right. A lot. I would get an uncomfortable feeling about a person who seemed charming, but something felt off and later, I would realise I should have listened to that little voice inside. When I was looking at houses to rent, I would get an instant feeling when I knew it was “the one”.  I would feel an immediate “yes” about opportunities that didn’t make logical sense, but when I went with my instinct, they’d turn out to be the best decisions I ever made.

Was it just coincidence? Or was there more to gut feelings? I needed to understand how it worked. So I did what any researcher would do – research.

And what I found was that intuition WAS science. Happening faster than my conscious mind could track.

Your body is your first brain

Intuition is actually our nervous system running incredibly sophisticated pattern recognition in real-time. The concept of “the mind is not only connected to the body but that the body influences the mind” isn’t just philosophical, it’s neurobiological fact.

Our bodies are constantly scanning our environment, processing millions of micro-cues through sensorimotor contingencies. Essentially, our physical experiences become our learning database. Our interactions get stored not just in our memory, but in our muscles, our breathing patterns, our nervous system. These feelings in the body that are associated with emotions, such as the association of rapid heartbeat with anxiety or of nausea with disgust, are called somatic markers.

These body-emotion links are stored in the same region in the brain that is involved in complex decision-making. When faced with similar situations, your brain automatically retrieves these markers to guide your choices. So if I meet someone who is saying all the right words, and yet I get a feeling that something is off, it is my nervous system detecting facial micro-expressions, vocal patterns, and body language inconsistencies faster than my conscious mind can process them.

Psychologist Gary Klein, who studied decision-making in high-pressure professions, found that experts like firefighters, emergency room doctors, and military commanders rely on intuitive decisions about 80% of the time. But the most compelling proof came in the 1990s from the Iowa gambling task, where researchers rigged card decks and told people to win money. The participants’ bodies figured out which decks were losing ones after just 10 cards, their hands literally sweating when they reached for the losing decks. It wasn’t wild guessing, it was unconscious pattern recognition. It took their conscious minds 50 cards to recognise the same pattern.

Their intuition was five times faster than their logic.

Learning to trust your body’s intelligence

Your intuition isn’t mystical or spiritual, it’s computational. Learning to trust this system isn’t about abandoning logic, it’s about integrating two forms of intelligence. Your analytical mind excels at breaking down information step by step. Your intuitive mind excels at synthesizing complex patterns instantaneously. Both are valuable. Both are scientific.

So how do you actually develop this partnership between mind and body?

• Start with your baseline. I learned this the hard way after years of overriding my body’s signals. I accepted a role that looked perfect on paper, but my chest tightened every time I pictured the Monday commute. I ignored it,  and burned out within months. So I began simply: noticing what my chest feels like when I’m relaxed, what my shoulders feel like when I’m not stressed, and how my breath moves when I’m calm. Now, when my shoulders creep toward my ears in a meeting, or my breathing shortens during a conversation, I treat it like data, not drama.

  Try this (30 seconds): sit quietly and notice three physical cues that mean “calm” for you. Write them down.

• Track your patterns. I kept a log on my phone of my first bodily response and what happened next. That flutter in my chest when I met someone new who later became a trusted friend. The slow drain of energy around certain people. Over time you’ll begin to recognise your particular vocabulary.

  Try this (7 days): note the initial physical reaction and the outcome for three small decisions.

• Learn to separate intuition from fear. This was crucial for me. Fear is loud, urgent and future-focused, it wants you to run or hide. Intuition tends to be quieter, more nuanced, and feels like knowing rather than reacting. It makes you want to pay attention. Fear says “danger, run now!”,  Intuition says “something feels off here”.

  Try this (10 seconds): when a signal shows up, label it “fear” or “intuition” and notice how the sensation feels different.

• Give your system time to process. When I’m facing important decisions now, I practice what I call the strategic pause. I ask myself: “What does my body know about this that my mind hasn’t figured out yet?” Then I wait. Really wait. Sometimes the answer comes while I’m brushing my teeth or taking a walk, when my conscious mind stops trying so hard to control the process.

  Try this: before a non-urgent decision, take a 5–10 minute walk and notice any shifts.

• Pay attention to approach and avoidance. I’ve learned to notice what makes me want to lean in versus what makes me want to step back, literally and figuratively. When I’m deciding whether to speak up in a meeting, do I feel myself getting smaller, or do I feel energy rising? These physical responses are information.

  Try this: notice where your body moves in three social moments today (lean in / step back).

• Learn from your decisions. After important choices, I do a body-mind debrief. What did I notice physically before, during, and after? What was my initial response, and how did that compare to my analytical assessment? What was the outcome? This builds your conscious partnership with your embodied intelligence.

  Try this (3 minutes): after one decision, write down the physical cue, your analysis, and the outcome.

Your most sophisticated intelligence system

I spent decades thinking my scientific brain and my intuition were enemies. Turns out, they were just speaking different languages.

Now I know that dismissing your body’s intelligence isn’t scientific, it’s stupid. You’re ignoring the most sophisticated pattern recognition system you’ll ever have access to, one that’s been learning about your world since birth and running constant background analyses faster than any algorithm we’ve created.

Your logical brain and your intuitive wisdom are partners. And when you learn to listen to both, you make better decisions with both head and heart, logic and knowing, mind and body.

Your intuition IS intelligence, in its most embodied, integrated form. Are you finally ready to listen?