Years ago, in a dimly lit yoga studio, an instructor introduced me to an exercise that quietly upended my approach to not only listening, but thinking itself.

The exercise was deceptively simple. With our eyes closed, he began by asking us to gently become aware of the sounds around us. Notice the hums close by and the distant noises out in the city, beyond the studio walls. Then, he asked us to become conscious of the precise place where sound meets our consciousness. Were we sending our hearing out to chase these sounds, actively seeking them? Or were we allowing them to simply arrive at our awareness?

Until then, I had never considered that there were two ways to hear something. But once I played around with my attention, I realized that I rarely let the sounds just come to me. And what a delight it was, to reel my awareness back in from the world around and notice that the sensations made their way to me so effortlessly.

This simple exercise, which you can do in just a few minutes, has become the best metaphor I know for the difference between analytical thinking and intuition. Analytical thought is active: it takes a question, then goes out in search of the answer, trying methods, working the problem from different directions. Intuition, by contrast, is spacious. It doesn’t pursue the solution. It waits, creates space, and allows insights to surface.

The Pursuit Problem

To say that this is not a natural mode of being is an understatement. Most of us have learned to hunt down solutions. We take a question and immediately launch into pursuit mode—researching, brainstorming, working at the problem until it surrenders an answer. It’s the approach we’ve been taught since childhood, and it feels productive, urgent, necessary.

For a long time, it never occurred to me that there was an alternative. Years of encouragement to push, solve, and strive conditioned me to believe that not being pro-active was a recipe for failure. Everywhere you look, the message is the same: if you’re not hustling, you’re falling behind. The drive to be “high agency,” a current term of art among productivity bros, neatly encapsulates this idea. Successful people don’t just sit around and wait for answers. They go out and get them.

But what if this relentless pursuit is actually getting in our way?

LEarning to trust intuition

Recently, I’ve been playing with the idea of letting answers come to me, in the same way that my instructor encouraged me to do with sound all those years ago. At first, this felt awkward and uncomfortable. But over time I’ve found that greater clarity comes from living with a question and allowing space for answers to emerge.

The problem is that if you’ve spent your whole life reasoning and muscling your way through problems, you have zero experience with the phenomenon of answers surfacing on their own. Add to this that unlike logic, intuition doesn’t “show its work.” It delivers answers fully formed, without evidence or a neat chain of thought to see how it got there. So it’s not surprising that it’s hard to trust your intuition to bring you answers without you forcing them into the light. It takes a leap of faith to release control and see what happens when you’re not in the driver’s seat.

It’s very hard to break the habit of rushing into action, especially if there’s a problem that feels pressing or consequential. For a long time I would try to leave space for my intuition, but if answer didn’t come quickly, I would get nervous and jump into action. This is a little bit like a parent trying to give their child room to take more risks on the playground, but rushing in at the first little wobble. It takes both time and commitment to get the logical brain—and a parent’s protective instincts—to loosen their grip.

Creating Space for Insight

A powerful practice for making more space for intuition is focusing more on questions than on answers. Scott Britton, a writer who focuses on consciousness, gives a helpful guide to this in a recent post. He suggests writing down a list of all the questions that come to mind in a notepad before bed:

Insights would come as I was writing the questions down, in the middle of the night, when I woke up, and even days later when I was least expecting it.

The more this happened, the greater my confidence became that I could pose questions to my deeper essence and would receive the answer.

In order to realize and embody this capacity, you have to consistently experiment with it. It’s the only way you’ll start to recognize the connection between asking for things and receiving information. Otherwise, you’ll just think the information entering your awareness is random or good luck, instead of recognizing you have an ability to influence the information stream.

It’s a simple feedback loop: the more you practice living with the questions, the more you find that answers come to you naturally, and the more comfortable you get with trusting intuition alongside logical modes of thought.

The Science of Stepping Away

In case this is all sounding a little woo-woo, it’s worth noting that there’s hard science behind this. Neuroscientists John Kounios and Mark Beeman have spent years studying sudden moments of insight—those “aha!” experiences when a solution appears seemingly from nowhere. 

They’ve discovered that there are two fundamentally different modes of thought: analytic and intuitive. While analytic thinking follows that logical, step-by-step problem-solving approach we’re all familiar with, intuitive breakthroughs involve periods where it feels like little progress is happening, following by a sudden, holistic sense of an answer. These modes of thought don’t just feel different—they actually create distinct patterns of neural activity in the brain.

What’s particularly fascinating is their research on the “incubation effect”—those moments when unexpected insights strike during walks, sleep, or other periods of distraction. What’s happening in your mind during those breaks isn’t what most people assume. The common belief is that your unconscious mind keeps grinding away at the problem in the background, systematically trying different analytical approaches while you’re focused elsewhere. But Kounios’s research suggests something far more interesting.

He finds that the brain maintains a collection of loose associations and half-formed possibilities—potential answers that exist at the edges of your awareness. When you’re in tightly focused analytical mode, those wilder, more creative solutions don’t rise up to consciousness. They get crowded out by the logical, conventional approaches that feel more “right” or immediate.

But when you step away from a task—when you’re sleeping, showering, or lightly distracted—you release the logical mind’s dictatorial control over your through processes, allowing those stranger, less obvious possibilities to surface. Your brain isn’t working harder; it’s working differently, giving room for the unexpected connections to emerge. Psychologists call this “fixation forgetting”—letting go of your grip on obvious solutions so novel answers can slip through.

The Joy Connection

What helps create the conditions for this kind of breakthrough thinking? One surprising factor is joy.

Psychologist Alice Isen’s research has shown that inducing positivity can promote more flexible and creative thought. For example, in one famous study, doctors who were primed to be in a positive mood came to a correct diagnosis more quickly, and were less likely to get stuck on their initial hunches. More recently, research by social psychologist Teresa Amabile revealed that people consistently experienced a spike of happiness a day or two before major work breakthroughs. (Described in Kounios and Beeman, 2015)

This finding suggests something profound about the relationship between joy and insight. Those moments of lightness—a perfect cup of coffee, time spent in nature, or engaging in something purely for pleasure—aren’t frivolous breaks from serious thinking. They’re actually creating optimal conditions for more intuitive problem-solving.

The implication is striking: doing something that genuinely delights you might be the most productive thing you can do when you’re stuck.

Two Modes of Mind

While it’s often framed as a binary—analytical vs. intuitive—the reality is that we need both ways of thinking to be effective. As Kounios and Beeman’s research shows, the intuitive thought process often brings up different, less obvious solutions than the logical approach. But because the current model of schooling and work culture so heavily favor logic, most of us are given neither the space nor the encouragement to nurture our intuition.

To overcome this bias, we need to practice being intentionally receptive. This is different from just being passive or disengaged. It means being rigorous about asking questions, and just as rigorous about leaving space for the intuitive mind to work.

What works for you in creating space for your intuitive mind to take over? I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments!

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