Oct 31

Oct 31 Why You Should Always Trust Old Women’s Intuition!

It’s not an “old wives tale”. It’s science.

Trust your women’s intuition! And trust it even more as you age. That’s right. Old women’s intuition is a treasure that we need to celebrate and tap into more.

Remember “Women’s Ways of Knowing”, the popular feminist tome from the eighties? It came to mind recently when we began thinking about, well, thinking. And its relationship to intuition, and pervasive ideas about the superiority of women’s intuition.

Seems to us that “knowing” is a more expansive and accurate way to describe what goes on in our fuzzily defined minds. It encompasses both conscious thought and unconscious processes like intuition. It also fits in with more contemporary ideas of the “extended mind.”* This research-based model holds that our minds aren’t limited to our brains, but extend to our bodies, and not just our gut: our heart, lungs, skin, and all sorts of other bodily parts, feelings and physical movement. There is just too much going on around us in this world for our brain to take it all in, so our body picks up the slack and files the experiences away to draw on later. More often than we realize, we bypass conscious deliberation and analysis and wordlessly shape our actions based on those archived bodily experiences. The body tells the brain what to do instead of the other way around. Sometimes, we are not aware of it at all. At other times, it is a conscious, felt sense, a gut feeling, a hunch –we just know. That’s intuition.

Science writer Annie Murphy Paul calls these processes “thinking with sensation.”* Researchers have found that it is faster than conscious reasoning. Interestingly, they also found that it often leads to more successful decisions. Among the reasons they hypothesize that this is so is that “thinking with sensation” is free of some of the cognitive biases that regularly trip up even the most intelligent among us. An example of these biases that a college psychology professor impressed on Idelisse decades ago is that the correlation between what we believe and what we want to believe is 98%. (Just think about that!) Intuition avoids this and other cognitive pitfalls.

While there is no conclusive scientific evidence to support “women’s intuition” (yet), there are scientific theories explaining it. One argues that in the course of evolution, as child bearers and primary caretakers women developed sharper, more sophisticated levels of awareness to protect infants and children. That is the nature-based theory. On the nurture side, another hypothesis is that girls and women are encouraged to trust their intuition, while allegedly less emotional and more rational boys and men are encouraged to ignore their gut feelings.

Regardless of its origins, Two Old Bitches couldn’t help but wonder whether the women’s intuition we firmly believe exists improves with age. The idea of the extended mind suggests it does.

With time, women’s archive of unconscious experience grows and grows. This burgeoning, embodied database allows older women to make more and more connections to what and who we experience in the moment. That means that we are more likely to make more and better connections between past and present patterns which then surface as gut feelings or intuition. We are also more likely to trust and act on our hunches.

One of the themes that cuts across our many conversations with older women on the podcast is that with age, women speak their minds more freely, trust themselves more, and care less and less about others’ reactions and opinions. We call it the why-the-fuck-not (“WTFN”) mindset.

Next time that old woman’s intuition kicks in, yours or someone else’s, act on it –WTFN!

Even one of the wisest of old men, Alberts Einstein, recognized that “The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift.”

[Interested in sharpening your intuition? Studies find that meditation will do just that along with a lot of other good things for your mind and body. Jon Kabat-Zinn’s body scan is specifically recommended. You can try it out here.]