What Happens When You Follow That “Inner Voice”

Photo by ian dooley on Unsplash

Maybe you had a dream that left you feeling like you should call your mom today. You call her, and it turns out she had a terrible week and really needed to hear your voice. Or, a bad feeling you had about someone turned out to be right. They’re not as great of a person as everyone says they are. Maybe you took the long way to work instead of the faster route for no reason at all, only to find out that an accident occurred on the faster route that day. It happened at the exact time you would’ve been driving it.

Having an “inner voice” is having an intuition.

Everyone has varying levels of intuition, but more often than not, people chose to ignore it. People call it just having “a hunch,” being superstitious, or maybe they’re just judging a situation way too quickly. Intuition, as defined by Francis Polle in Psychology Today, is “a process that gives us the ability to know something directly without analytic reasoning, bridging the gap between the conscious and nonconscious parts of our mind.” I think that’s a perfect way to explain it. Your intuition, or the “inner voice” you hear, leads you in the right direction without you realizing why you should go in that direction in the first place. It alerts the conscious part of your mind about things that only the unconscious mind can conclude, so that you may become aware of something that might not be so obvious. It’s like when something just feels right, or feels wrong. You don’t realize that there’s an explanation for this feeling. To you, it’s just your “gut.”

In my opinion, I am a very intuitive person. I always get good and bad feelings towards people or situations that turn out to be true, sometimes to the point of predicting things I had no prior knowledge of.

Using my intuition kept me from falling into a deeper depression.

A few months ago, I was extremely unhappy with what I had going on in my life. I had just finished out the semester at school and moved back home, where I was registering for new classes I didn’t want to take, working a job that stressed me out, developing a great deal of anxiety over how much money I had, and having a huge lack motivation to go out and see people. I did not like who or where I was at all. I wanted to change all that, but how could I, right? As much as the little voice inside me told me to, I couldn’t just drop my required classes, quit my job with no backup plan, spend money without thinking about it, and have the time to connect with new people, right? No, wrong, actually. I did all those things in the span of like five days.

I listened to myself, my feelings, my gut. I dropped classes I knew I was going to hate even though I needed the credits. Then new, far more interesting opportunities to get class credits opened up for me a few weeks later. I impulsively quit my job without a new one lined up, and then got three interviews at places I had applied for only days later. I took a trip to the beach with my best friend, where I had opportunities to go out, spend a little money, and had the best time. I decided I wanted to become closer with some new people I had in my life that I intuitively knew were good for me. I invited them out, and now I talk to them almost every day. I didn’t have time to think or second-guess. I just did, without a concrete reason or a cause. That’s the beautiful thing about intuition, there isn’t a “but” or a “why,” there just is. It’s our connection to a powerful tool- using what could also be explained as “rapid cognition”- the unconscious part of our mind makes decisions for us much faster than the conscious mind would. It eliminates over-thinking and the self-doubt and welcomes confidence and opportunity.

Intuition leads to manifestation.

Believing your intuition, in a more spiritual, energy-related sense, can help you to manifest what you desire in life. It allows you to trust yourself and trust the universe. When you follow that inner voice, it sends a message (call it a signal, maybe) out: that you will let the universe take care of you, and that you are confident in your own decisions. If this positive energy is emitted out, positive energy will come right back to you. Once I began listening, my thoughts, feelings, and ideas didn’t feel trapped inside my head anymore. They were manifested into real-life opportunities, people, and situations. Whatever I needed just came to me, as if it was showing up at my doorstep and knocking, and all I had to do was trust my intuition to open the door.

Anyone can do this. Turn off all the noise in your head and just let yourself be. Practice mindfulness: meditate, become aware of your surroundings, focus on how you feel in the present moment, stop thinking for just a second or two. That’s when you’ll hear it, and you’ll be able to listen. You’ll be in-tune with yourself and with what’s around you. Intuition is a gift, it allows us to unlock pieces of us we didn’t know we had right in our heads. The more you use it, and the more you trust in it, the better life gets.