To be intuitive is to be self-aware. To be self-aware is to be able to grasp the immaterial parts of yourself that exist within the physical doing and being.

The benefits to this kind of understanding are obviously endless, but seldom discussed are all the challenges that come with being very attuned to your intuitive, inner ‘knowing.’ To speak to it and more, here, all the things highly intuitive people have to deal with every day:

1. We always know when someone is bullshitting us, even when we aren’t able to say anything about it.

For the sake of maintaining our family structures or keeping our jobs, we can’t always call people out on their absolute lack of awareness, and that becomes really frustrating when we see them being tripped up by the lack of insight that they’re closed to having.

2. Almost nothing is as infuriating as when people fake emotion, because we can pick up on that as much as we can pick up on the real stuff.

And it’s something people do all the time: feign emotion to get a certain reaction from others (usually attention or love.)

This is as physically palpable as any real emotion, and is endlessly frustrating, because we end up feeling as though we have to fake a response and feigning our own emotional experience is essentially the antithesis to our existence.

 

3. We feel weirdly responsible for fixing the world’s problems. 

This is probably just the result of letting intuition fade over into empathy and then letting empathy fade over into adopting emotions and issues that aren’t really ours.

We routinely find ourselves in hours-deep conversations trying to figure out everyone else’s problems as though they were our own.

4. It’s sometimes difficult to be able to determine whether we’re over-thinking or actually picking up on something.

 The irony of not intuitively knowing whether or not you’re being intuitive is not lost on me, but the point is that we’re human, we’re fallible, sometimes we think we’re feeling something only because our thoughts have convinced us so.

(It’s extremely crucial for intuitive people to be able to use logic to determine what they trust and how they act on it.)

5. We live in a world that values mental logic, not emotional reasoning. 

Our “get things done at any cost and as quickly as possible” attitude is responsible for much of our collective misery, though people haven’t entirely picked upon that yet. In the meantime, we more emotion-based individuals still have to exist in this world, and we all know how overly-emotional people are treated in the structure as it stands (… not particularly well).

6. We can sense more than we often want to, so we end up closing ourselves off. 

We honestly don’t always want to know the things we instinctively do, and the realization that we have that capability often leads to a fearful shutting down of our own emotions just so we don’t have to cope with the potential of running into something we don’t know how to deal with.

7. We are hyper-self-conscious because we’re aware of how people think. We were the kids who were always anxious about what other people were thinking – usually because we could pretty much accurately ‘know,’ in a way that other people weren’t able to. It’s not that we were particularly victimized, only that we were conscious of people’s inner thought processes to a degree that others weren’t.

 8. There’s nothing we want more than just to “figure things out.” We’re the people who thrive on certainty, who only want to dive into a relationship when we’re sure that it’s with “the one.”

This becomes a struggle because life isn’t about being certain, it’s about trying anyway. Nothing ever happened because someone was certain it “should,” it happened because someone was certain they wanted to try, and did.

That simple misplacement of awareness can cost you a lot of mental-emotional sanity, if you don’t know you’re doing it.