David Dellanave

Monday’s email kicked of a conversation with one of my very, very smart friends. We were talking about biofeedback and he mentioned that he’s been monitoring and using his resting heart rate as biofeedback for some time now.

One of his observations is that when he’s at work, no matter what he does he sees an elevated resting heart rate – indicating a greater stress response.

But the interesting part of this is that the work doesn’t ​feel​ stressful to him at all. In fact it feels really easy.

So what is the explanation when your intuitive feeling says that everything is fine, but your objective biofeedback says that everything is not in fact fine?

One of the incredible features of the body is its ability to obfuscate things from you. Some of those things are simple functions like not having to think about what to set your heart rate at to keep your heart beating. Others are much more complicated like allowing you to feel completely at ease even in a stressful situation.

But the catch is, you have to take a debit from your reserve capacity to resolve stress for it to feel that way.

I want to make this really clear. Something can be stressful to you to the point of being distressful, but you won’t even notice it’s distressing because your body is tapping into various reserves to resolve that stress.

Ideally afterwards you’ll then top off those reserves with eustress like sleep, food, and regenerative exercise and nothing bad will ever come of tapping into those reserves. The magic of the body is that you don’t even need to know you’re objectively taking on more stress than you can easily resolve by tapping into those reserves.

So back to the original question. Can you trust your intuition? What does it mean when something feels totally fine. Is it really?

What is intuition? I think of it as informed experience. Little children don’t tend to have a whole lot of intuition about anything – they have neither deep nor wide experience nor have they informed that experience through feedback. Old people tend to have amazing intuition because of the amount of accumulated experience, and even greater intuition if they’ve truly been paying attention all that time to the factors surrounding those experiences.

A successful entrepreneur with multiple businesses under their belt is going to have a very reliable intuition about how things are going just by taking one look at the inner workings of a business. Giving a chef the exact same look at the business and asking for their intuitive feel of how things are going is a pointless exercise. Their intuition is honed and informed on how ingredients are going to taste when combined or how to setup a kitchen line.

The only way to be able to trust your intuition is if you’re consistently informing it.

Biofeedback is one incredibly powerful way to inform your intuition. Notice how you feel and how your body performs when you eat certain foods – that’s informed experience and it develops intuition that if you eat these things you’re going to feel bad.

In a training context the only form of biofeedback most people use is the objective output of how much weight they move. But that output varies depending on the context. You could objectively not move a lot of weight, but that might just mean you’re in a downswing of the cycle, but the movement itself is very eustressful. It’s impossible to know without having a standard measurement.

Squats might feel totally fine but that’s only because the cost of doing them is being obscured from view. You may even get away with it, but wouldn’t you rather know what the price is you’re paying?

Intuition is an incredibly powerful asset, but it’s not free. You have to invest in it to be able to use it.

You probably don’t realize you have a superpower.

It’s not flying like Superman, the ability to control the elements and conjure weather like Storm, or being able to rearrange matter like Jean Grey.

But this superpower is no less amazing if you think about it.

You have a superpower of being able to know things without ever having learned them or experienced them first-hand.

Allow me to explain.

Let’s start with a really simple example. You walk into a dark room you’ve never been in before, the door swings open to the right. Without looking, you reach to the left, about chest height and flick on the light.

How did you know it would be there? You didn’t know.

Another example. You get into a car you’ve never driven before. There’s no key to start the car, only a button on the dash, and the shifter is in a weird place, but in less than 10 seconds you’re pulling out and driving down the road. How did you know how to drive this car that isn’t the same as cars you’ve driven before?

Another example. In the 1950 Monaco Grand Prix legendary Argentine racer Juan Manuel Fangio blasted out of the dark tunnel into the daylight when he suddenly braked instead of staying on the gas. There was nothing visibly wrong on the track ahead, and this is one of the fastest parts of the circuit – no place for braking. But in fact, Nino Farina had slammed his car into the wall near Tabac, and eight cars had piled into him. How did Fangio know to brake when he couldn’t see the accident?

The superpower is intuition, the integration of past knowledge and experience, and present information you can subconsciously perceive but not be cognitively aware of.

This is an incredible power!

You know light switches are usually opposite the door hinges at about chest height. You have driven several cars, so you can look for common cues and functions even if you’ve never seen the exact one before. Fangio instinctively braked because he saw (but only later became aware of and was able to explain) that the fans weren’t looking towards him like normal, but they were turned to the side looking and something seemed off.

Intuition is an incredible power. The more honed your intuition the faster and better you can make decisions, to the point where they’re happening with automaticity.

The only rub with intuition is that it’s actually highly domain or context specific. You may have incredible intuition as a tennis player, but it won’t translate to being a race car driver or making medical decisions.

Which is another reason it’s so beneficial to develop a system for honing your intuition and then applying it to the widest array of domains, skills, and applications possible.

For example, biofeedback testing is the best method I’ve found for informing your intuition about what movements are going to work best for your body. It’s a systematic way to test and re-test the response. Over time what people find is that they don’t even need to test to “know” what is going to be best. You’re integrating past experience and the result of pasts tests with the unconscious perception of the responses.

Skill development allows you to broaden the library of knowledge and experience you have to draw on when using your intuition with skills. I don’t necessarily know how to use every tool in a shop (I’m getting close though) but based on my previous experience and my intuition I can figure almost anything out. People are always baffled at how I can figure out a feature or an option on an app I have never seen before when they’ve been struggling for minutes. I’ve just been using tech so deeply for so long that I recognize the common patterns and I can predict where things will be. You do this too in areas where you have deep expertise, and it’s very unlikely that you’d be able to explain your exact thought process because it’s intuitive.

Aaaaand there’s more. Intuitive conclusions have been shown to be “weighted” in sort of a Bayesian fashion based on the confidence of the intuition as it relates to previous experiences and the potential outcomes of the decision. The more you work on your intuition, the more you can trust it.

So to summarize, you already have this superpower of being able to acquire and integrate knowledge without any awareness or rational thought applied to the process that then allows you to “know” things you couldn’t possibly actually know in the rational sense and you can train and improve this ability further and further by broadening and deepening your domains. Pretty cool, to say the least.