As a child my brother and I loved making lots of noise running around the house playing tag. After a while my Mother would say “Quiet, I can’t hear myself think!” I was always curious by that statement” I can’t hear myself think. Yet as an adult I know exactly what she meant.

In a time of overwhelm, you can’t seem to be able to think straight. It is often when you’re stressed out that you need intuition to guide you, but at that time, you just can’t hear it, but why?

Imagine that your mind had two floors like an elevator. Floor one is the Neo cortex, which makes all of your brilliant decisions; it is intuitive, inspired and motivated. Then there is the basement, the Reptilian or coping brain, which is in charge of keeping the body safe. It makes reactions to hostile or frightening situations. Therefore it is really hard to hear your intuition or make great decisions when you’re in overwhelm. Our attention cannot be on both floors at the same time, which means that these parts of the brain are not active at the same time. What activates the elevator to go up or down is not situations in your life, but how you feel about them emotionally.

You can see why when you are in the grip of these emotions, it is impossible to see a way out, as you’re on the wrong floor; the part of the brain that works with solutions isn’t the part of the brain you’re functioning from when you function through fear.

The mind, however, is wonderful; it works with the body to make sure that we stay at floor one with an open and fully functioning mind. Before you hit the emotion of ‘overwhelm’ you simply need to: exercise, take time out for meditation, laugh, sing, dance, play with animals and children or simply have fun to head back to the first floor. Having fun is really what happens when we are in flow, when you’re in flow all the answers intuitively come to you. Taking time to play is never wasted, and often the answers come to you through fun rather than worry. If only I had known as a child, I could have tagged my Mom, carried on with the game and helped solve her problems.

For more information about how the mind works with intuition see http://youtu.be/8FygtX5Sxz8