Is It Intuition or Anxiety? How to Tell the Difference When You Have an Anxious Attachment Style

If you struggle with insecure attachment — especially anxious or disorganised patterns — you’ll know the feeling of constantly scanning your environment for signs that something might be wrong. A tone shift. A delayed text. A subtle change in someone’s energy. Your body picks up on these things immediately, often long before your conscious mind can make sense of them.

This hypervigilance isn’t a character flaw. It’s your nervous system working overtime to predict (and hopefully prevent) something bad from happening. It’s a protective mechanism shaped by past experiences — often long before you had any say in the matter.

But here’s where it gets confusing: sometimes your “gut feeling” is spot on. And sometimes, it’s a complete false alarm.

Which leads to a question I hear all the time:

How do I know whether what I’m feeling is intuition… or just anxiety?

For people with insecure attachment, the line between the two can feel blurry at best. And while there’s no perfectly clear-cut formula, there are patterns that can help you understand what’s happening inside you with more clarity and compassion.

Below are three guiding principles to help you differentiate anxious reactivity from true intuitive knowing.

1. Trust the feeling — but question the story

One thing I say often is this: Anxiously attached people are usually excellent at noticing shifts… but not always great at interpreting them.

You might pick up on the very real fact that your partner is being a little distant or short with you. That part is often accurate — you’re not imagining it. But what happens next is where your anxious parts can swoop in and fill the gap with catastrophic meaning:

• They’re losing interest.

• I’ve done something wrong.

• They’re going to leave.

• They’re cheating on me.

Meanwhile, the reality might be far more benign: they’re stressed, tired, preoccupied, or simply in their own world.

This is why a helpful rule of thumb is:

Trust the feeling, but question the story your mind attaches to it.

The feeling is valuable information: I’m sensing something is different.
The story is a hypothesis: And here’s why I think it’s happening… — and it’s almost always worth challenging.

A huge part of healing insecure attachment is consciously retraining your mind to consider gentler, less catastrophic alternatives. It’s not about dismissing your feelings. It’s about widening the lens.

And remember: even if the worst-case scenario did unfold, you would still have your own back. You would still be okay.

2. If it feels urgent, it’s probably anxiety

A hallmark of anxious attachment is urgency — that sense that something must be addressed right now, otherwise everything will fall apart.

But intuition rarely operates on urgency. True intuitive knowing tends to feel calm, steady, grounded, and consistent over time. It doesn’t demand immediate action. It doesn’t feel like a fire alarm going off in your body.

Anxiety, however, often does feel like that. It’s fast, loud, and time-sensitive. It pushes you to act before you’ve had a moment to think. It creates an inner pressure to do something, usually to relieve discomfort.

So if you feel an urgent impulse to confront your partner, send a long message, or push for clarity right this second, that’s a good cue to pause.

Try this instead:

• Regulate your nervous system first.

• Give yourself some time.

• Revisit the situation once the urgency has cooled.

Very often, the thing that felt like a crisis an hour ago becomes significantly less charged once your body has settled.

Things are almost never as urgent as your anxiety would have you believe.

3. Either way, don’t ignore your anxiety

Many people assume the goal is to trust intuition and ignore anxiety. But dismissing your anxious responses outright is neither kind nor effective.

Your anxiety isn’t trying to sabotage you; it’s trying to protect you. Even when its predictions are inaccurate, its purpose is to keep you safe.

So rather than silencing or overriding your anxiety, the work is to meet it with curiosity and compassion. You might try asking yourself:

• What is this part of me afraid of?

• What past experience is this reminding me of?

• What would I say to a younger version of myself who felt this way?

The key is this: Validate the feeling without taking the content of the fear as fact.

Over time, approaching your internal world this way builds deep self-trust. When your system learns that you won’t abandon or shame yourself in moments of activation, the volume of the anxiety naturally softens — and your intuition becomes easier to access and hear.

Key takeaways

Distinguishing intuition from anxiety isn’t about getting it right every time. It’s about cultivating a relationship with your inner world where you can notice your signals, question your interpretations, regulate your body, and respond from a grounded place rather than a panicked one.

As you continue this work, you’ll find that your system becomes quieter, steadier, and more attuned. You won’t feel thrown around by every shift in your partner’s tone or every wobble in the relationship. Instead, you’ll feel more anchored in yourself — capable of discerning what’s real, what’s imagined, and what needs your attention.

And that, truly, is where secure attachment begins.