10 Things Highly Intuitive People Do Differently

Intuition is the sense of knowing something before you can explain how you know it. People who are good at using it are not psychic, and they do not ignore facts. What sets them apart is a set of everyday habits: they notice their hunches, give their minds quiet time to process, pay close attention to people and to their own bodies, and then check what their gut tells them against the evidence. The ten habits below describe how they do it, and the research sections explain where gut feelings are trustworthy and where they can lead you astray.

Steve Jobs told his biographer Walter Isaacson that he considered intuition "more powerful than intellect." The bestselling author Sophy Burnham, who wrote The Art of Intuition, described it to HuffPost as "a knowing without knowing." Both ideas point in the same direction: a great deal of our thinking happens below conscious awareness, and the results arrive as feelings rather than arguments.

What intuition is, and what it is not

Psychologists usually describe intuition as fast, automatic judgement that draws on patterns the brain has stored from experience. Daniel Kahneman, in Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011), called this quick mode System 1, in contrast with the slower, deliberate reasoning of System 2. A gut feeling, in this view, is the output of System 1 reaching awareness before the reasons behind it do.

That makes intuition neither magic nor nonsense. It is real mental work, done quickly and quietly. It is also only as good as the experience it rests on. An experienced nurse who senses that a patient is getting worse, or a firefighter who feels a floor is about to give way, is drawing on thousands of earlier situations. A beginner having a strong feeling about a stock tip is not.

The idea has practical interest well beyond self-help. In 2012 the U.S. Office of Naval Research launched a programme to study how service members make split-second judgements in the field, after reports that troops sometimes sensed danger, such as a hidden roadside bomb, before they could say why. The New York Times reported on the project at the time.

Habits that make room for the inner voice

1. They listen instead of overriding

The most basic difference is simple: intuitive people notice a hunch and take it seriously enough to examine it. Many of us feel the same nudges but brush them aside because we cannot justify them on the spot. Burnham has said she rarely meets a successful entrepreneur who does not credit at least one big decision to a hunch.

Taking a hunch seriously does not mean obeying it blindly. Francis Cholle, author of The Intuitive Compass, argues for balance: use intuition to generate options and flag concerns, then use reasoning to test them. The skill lies in letting both voices speak.

2. They spend time alone

Faint signals are hard to hear in a noisy room. Regular time alone, whether a walk without headphones or twenty minutes with a notebook, gives half-formed impressions a chance to surface. Burnham observes that many intuitive people lean toward introversion, but solitude is a habit anyone can build, extrovert or not.

3. They make things

Writing, drawing, cooking without a recipe, playing music: creative work depends on choices that are felt more than calculated. Carla Woolf, a writer on creativity, argues that creative work is at its best when it runs on intuition. The relationship seems to run both ways. Practising a craft trains you to trust small internal signals, and that trust carries over into other decisions.

4. They practise mindfulness

Mindfulness means paying attention to what you are experiencing right now without rushing to judge it. In a 2013 paper in Perspectives on Psychological Science, Erika Carlson of Washington University in St. Louis proposed that this kind of attention may improve self-knowledge, because it softens the urge to see ourselves in a flattering light and makes us more aware of cues we normally miss. Her paper was a theoretical proposal, not an experiment, but it offers a plausible link: the better you know your own patterns, the easier it is to tell a genuine intuition from anxiety or wishful thinking.

Arianna Huffington makes a similar case in her 2014 book Thrive, where she lists clearer intuition among the benefits of a regular meditation habit, alongside creativity and calm.

Habits of close attention

5. They notice everything

Burnham's first piece of practical advice is to keep a small journal of odd moments: coincidences, unexpected connections, times a hunch turned out right or wrong. Writing these down does two useful things. It trains your attention, and it gives you an honest record, so you learn which of your feelings tend to be reliable and which do not.

6. They pay attention to their bodies

A knot in the stomach before a meeting, tight shoulders around a certain person: emotions often show up in the body before we name them. The gut has its own extensive network of nerve cells, the enteric nervous system, with around 500 million neurons, and it is sometimes nicknamed the "second brain." It communicates constantly with the brain through the vagus nerve. Science has not shown that the gut makes decisions, but bodily signals are part of how we register risk and emotion, and people who notice them have more information to work with.

7. They connect deeply with other people

Psychologists use the term empathic accuracy for our ability to read what someone else is thinking and feeling from their words, face and posture. It can feel like mind reading, but it is learned from countless hours of watching people. Executive coach Marcia Reynolds, writing in Psychology Today, suggests improving it by tuning in to your own emotions first and by spending more time in real, face-to-face conversation, where tone and expression carry most of the meaning.

8. They notice their dreams

Burnham encourages people to pay attention to dreams as a window on what the mind is processing below the surface. Sleep researchers still debate what dreams are for, and there is no good evidence that they carry hidden messages. A gentler reading is more useful: dreams often replay worries and unfinished business, and noticing their themes can show you what is quietly on your mind.

Habits of rest and emotional balance

9. They protect their downtime

Constant busyness, multitasking and notifications crowd out the slow background processing that intuition depends on. In Thrive, Huffington argues that we usually do sense who is trustworthy and who is merely flattering us, but that we rarely stop long enough to listen; in her words, "we are often too busy to notice." Rest, unscheduled time and enough sleep are not luxuries here. They are the conditions under which hunches can form and be heard.

10. They let difficult emotions pass

Strong feelings, especially fear, anger and low mood, can drown out or distort intuitive judgement. A 2003 study in Psychological Science by Annette Bolte, Thomas Goschke and Julius Kuhl tested this with word puzzles. People in a neutral mood could sense, above chance, whether three words shared a hidden connection even when they could not name it. A positive mood made these intuitive judgements better, while a negative mood pushed them down to chance level. (The study is sometimes misdated to 2013; it appeared in volume 14 of the journal in 2003.)

That does not mean intuitive people never feel upset. It means they try to acknowledge a hard emotion, let it settle, and only then ask what their gut is telling them, rather than acting on a surge of panic or anger and calling it instinct.

When to trust a gut feeling, and when to check it

Research on expert decision making, especially the work of psychologist Gary Klein, suggests intuition is most reliable when three conditions are met: you have plenty of experience in that specific area, the situation follows regular patterns, and you have had clear feedback on past decisions. Firefighters, chess players and experienced clinicians often fit this description. Under those conditions, fast pattern recognition can outperform slow analysis.

Intuition is far less reliable in unfamiliar territory, in situations full of randomness such as gambling or short-term investing, and whenever strong emotions or prejudice are involved. Kahneman's work shows how confidently people can hold intuitions that are simply wrong. A practical rule follows:

Use the hunch as a question, not a verdict. Ask what pattern it might be picking up.
Look for evidence on both sides before making a big or irreversible choice.
Track your record. A journal quickly shows where your instincts are sharp and where they are not.
Be wary of gut feelings about groups of people. These often reflect bias rather than insight.

Common myths about intuition

Myth: intuition is the opposite of reason. In practice the two work together. Good decision makers move back and forth between quick impressions and careful checking.

Myth: some people have it and others do not. Everyone forms intuitive judgements constantly. What varies is how much relevant experience people have and how much attention they pay to their impressions.

Myth: a strong feeling is a reliable one. Intensity says little about accuracy. Fear, excitement and wishful thinking can all feel like certainty.

Myth: intuition is a psychic power. Nothing in the research requires a supernatural explanation. Fast, unconscious pattern recognition is remarkable enough on its own.

Putting it into practice

You do not need to adopt all ten habits at once. Start with two: a few minutes of quiet each day, and a short note whenever a hunch shows up, along with what happened next. Within a few weeks you will have a clearer sense of how your own intuition speaks and when it deserves a hearing. The short video below offers a visual summary of the same ten habits.