Use Intuition to Bring Out Your Best Performance

INTUITION MAY SEEM like an abstract thought process, but recently, experts have brought it into more tangible experiences.

- KIERA CARTER

Dietitians talk about "intuitive eating," trainers talk about "intuitive fitness," and there's even a MasterClass on "intuitive cooking." Is intuitive running next? I put the practice to the test recently and trusted my own intuition, which led to me running my fastest (and happiest) half marathon in 12 years. And experts confirm that using this gut feeling to guide your training and racing decisions could indeed help you run better.

Defining intuition / "Intuition is the productive use of unconscious information to make better decisions or actions," says Joel Pearson, PhD in neuroscience and founder of the Future Minds Lab at the University of New South Wales. "We can feel information even though it's unconscious, and people often describe feelings in their gut, stomachs, or back of the throat."

Pearson has a goal to move intuition out of the woo and into the real, and his research shows people can use unconscious information to inform conscious decisions.

"Our brains take in an immense amount of information each day, but we're only conscious of a tiny tip of the iceberg," he says. "The bulk of the associations we make are below the surface, things that we mostly ignore in order to go about our lives."