Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, GQ, The Atlantic and more. She lives in Brooklyn with her family, and can often be found supine on the couch watching Bravo.
The below is an excerpt from her new book Everyday Intuition.
Where do you go when things become uncertain?
I mean mentally. It can be really complicated. In later chapters I will talk more about trauma responses, but right now I invite you to think about your bespoke patterns of mind. Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) is a popular mode of identifying thought distortions. These include all-or-nothing thinking (seeing things in black and white), jumping to conclusions, and personalization. What is the specific flavor of your bad inner monologue?
For me, it’s catastrophizing. I can imagine the worst possible outcome to any benign, or even positive, scenario. The hotel won’t have my reservation. The flight will be canceled. My kid won’t be able to go to preschool in the fall because he will not figure out the mechanics of his bladder and the potty in time, thus initiating him into a life of crime. And I then of course apply this apocalyptic filter to myself and my shortcomings. This is just what my brain does.
In its misguided way, I think it’s trying to inoculate me against any of these eventualities. If I can imagine the doomsday scenario, then I can prep for it mentally. This, of course, never works. It only puts me on edge and prevents me from experiencing life as it is when my tendency is to white-knuckle it, always on the lookout for what can and will go wrong. It sucks, but it’s what many hours of therapy and reams of those CBT worksheets have revealed.
Since I know this is my habit, I have to be very skeptical of any “intuition” suggesting the worst. If a thought comes to me like My husband will leave me or everyone hates me that thought is very unlikely to possess any useful truth, other than to alert me to my sense of unease in that moment. If the punch line is “I’m fucked,” the windup is anxiety, not intuition. But here’s the tricky thing: when you stop and gaze out at the world before you, with fascism and roasting global temperatures and people being mean to one another online, then catastrophe is, indeed, real. But how can we approach it more skillfully?
Examining and naming thought distortions is one way to become an expert in our patterns. But we also face a whole other suite of cir- cumstantial challenges that contribute to a delicate mental state. When are you an unreliable narrator? My thinking is not clear at nighttime—I’m exhausted from the day, and the most intellectual endeavor I can undertake is to watch Real Housewives; any important decisions must wait until morning. I have PMS that can peel the paint right off the walls, otherwise known as premenstrual dysphoric disorder (PMDD)—a delightful condition that showed up after I had kids. Between days 14 and 28 of my cycle, if I have the inclination to fake my death, I know I need to counterbalance that idea with the more grounded reasoning of my follicular phase. I’m an anxious traveler, so any doom I foresee when it comes to the airport or the trip itself I must take with a grain of salt. You, my friend, are anxiety coming to protect me like one of those airplane neck pillows. They seem like a good idea at first, but they are actually just foul-looking and uncomfortable.
Becoming experts in ourselves means knowing what our patterns are, and also when to deploy our tools. In recovery circles, there’s a useful acronym: HALT. It stands for “hungry, angry, lonely, tired.” The thinking is that if you are experiencing any one of these conditions, you are not to make any big decisions, have any important conver- sations, or make any proclamations about what things mean. Instead you are to eat a banana, take a deep breath, lie down.
In these cases, intuition is not for prescription. When we are feeling depleted or triggered or at the mercy of the shoulds, our intuition is best utilized for answering a single small but vital question: What needs to happen next? Literally, in this moment, the moment after that. The answer is unlikely to be to move to Portugal or get a divorce. More likely, it’s to drink a glass of water. To log off. To rest. Here, intuition is for triage. What is the next most caring step I can take? In- tuition can be hugely cosmic and sweeping, like getting information from spirit guides about how best to live your life. But it can also be as straightforward as guiding you to your very next action. Intuition, at its most essential, can help lead us back to equilibrium. And from that place we can make clearer, more informed decisions.
HALT is incredibly useful when it comes to the anxiety/intuition dilemma too. In addition to these four categories, what is your per- sonal profile of circumstances that cloud your thinking? One friend says that when she hasn’t exercised for a few days, she will be keyed up and on edge. Another says that when her digestion is off, every- thing is off.
So when we are experiencing HALT or any of its cousins, intuition is not for diagnosis. Instead, it should be for triage. Resist any invitations to big action when you are under the influence of HALT. Don’t have the conversation, even if you feel a strong urge to tell your boss what you really think of her. Instead, use your intuition to answer the very simple question “What needs to happen next?” This might be as simple as realizing you’ve been holding it for hours and need to visit the ladies’ room. You might need to close your laptop and stare into the middle distance for three minutes. You very likely need to get off your phone and have a snack. Here, in these instances, we can use our intuition to bring us back to peace, not to solve big problems. They will be waiting there for us to engage with wisely and intuitively once we have reached a more even keel.
Author Melissa Coss Aquino explains how this everyday intuition shows up for her. “There’s definitely more pattern recognition,” she says. “I notice when I’m tired and when grinding on work instead of just going to bed means I’m going to have to do the thing twice.” Her intuitive practice is pretty simple: “It’s part of the tool kit of every day. I feel like you have better days because you don’t bully yourself into doing all the things and you intuitively do the things that are a priority. You check in with yourself: The real priority today is . . . and you follow that.”
What if intuition is actually this pragmatic? What if honing our intuition, following the gut, rather than being an airy-fairy spiritual pursuit, is actually the most grounded, realistic strategy for life? Life happens in days. I want more better days.
From the book: EVERYDAY INTUITION by Elizabeth Greenwood. Copyright © 2025 by Elizabeth Greenwood. Reprinted courtesy of Harper, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.
