Brianna Wiest - The Mountain Is You_ Transforming Self-Sabotage Into Self-Mastery (2020)

9 8 BRIANNA WIEST
INTUITIVE NUDGES
VS. INTRUSIVE THOUGHTS
When you start listening to yourself, you might find it
hard to tell the difference between thoughts that are helpful
and intuitive, and thoughts that are damaging and intrusive.
They both function similarly—they are immediate,
reactive, and offer some kind of previously unseen insight—
and yet they function so completely differently in practice.
This is how to start telling the difference between thoughts
that are informed by your intuition and thoughts that are
informed by fear:
• Intuitive thoughts are calm. Intruding thoughts are
hectic and fear-inducing.
• Intuitive thoughts are rational; they make a degree
of sense. Intruding thoughts are irrational and often
stem from aggrandizing a situation or jumping to the
worst conclusion possible.
• Intuitive thoughts help you in the present. They give
you information that you need to make a better-informed
decision. Intruding thoughts are often random
and have nothing to do with what’s going on in
the moment.
• Intuitive thoughts are “quiet”; intruding thoughts are
“loud,” which makes one harder to hear than the other.