The Pandemic Dulled Our Intuition

The Covid lockdown did more than just deprive us of crucial social interactions. It also dulled our innate intuition. Normally, we experience our intuition as an inner sense of knowing and understanding.?

Interpersonally, it encompasses empathy and extends beyond it, enabling us to interact with others because we have a sense of what they are going through, what they need, what they want, and how their feelings in the moment can be dealt with most effectively.?

Beyond the interpersonal, intuition also enables us to understand ourselves and our relationship to the world with clarity and self-confidence. Our intuitive response to world events and to professional situations enables us to act effectively without a laborious process of analysis.?

In the same way, intuition can guide critical thinking. When our intuition is sharp, it is easier for us to disregard the absurd and direct our attention to the real.?

Intuition also keeps us on track, helping us align our behavior with our values. Exactly how it arises is not clearly understood. We have neurons in our heads, neurons in our hearts, and neurons laced throughout out guts, creating our awareness in fantastically complex ways. Somehow the balance of all these inputs emerges in our conscious mind as our intuition.?

Strengthening our ability to discern our own intuition can help us overcome a wide range of psychological maladies. The Covid lockdown did the exact opposite. It caused people to lose touch with their intuition, making it difficult for them to discern it from outside inputs and pressures.?

I see this confusion in my practice daily, and helping people “get back in touch with themselves” is a cornerstone of the treatment we need these days.

The Disruption of Common Sense

The pandemic shattered the normal rhythm of life, creating an environment of uncertainty and fear. This was vastly exacerbated by the continuous influx of misinformation that dominated the media.?

To give one prominent example, the anti-malarial drug hydroxychloroquine was presented as a cure, a ridiculous claim that the peer-reviewed journal Biomedicine & Pharmacotherapy has linked to approximately 17,000 deaths.?

Yet during the pandemic, the scarcity of this useless substance significantly heightened people’s legitimate fears of the contagion. People were led to believe that a cure was available but was being withheld by evildoers in government.?

Once the media repeated that claim enough times, people were ready to believe practically anything. When vaccines became available, people couldn’t marvel at the speed with which this was accomplished. Instead, at one point, fully 20% of Americans believed that the vaccine contained a microchip that would serve the purposes of the same evildoers.?

The first example shows how disinformation during the lockdown drove people so far into fear that it compromised their intuition. The second example shows how their hobbled intuition deprived them of? basic critical thinking.?

The government’s behavior hardly provided guidance. People legitimately questioned the wisdom of the lockdown itself. It often seemed like more of a power play than a public health policy. Enforcement had the eerie aura of a police state run amok.?

History has provided credence to these beliefs: analysts estimate that the lockdown reduced the mortality rate by somewhere between 2% and 10%. At the same time, according to the Wall Street Journal, 200,000 small businesses folded in the first year alone. The World Bank determined that the lockdown’s vast economic impact landed hardest on the middle and lower classes, and it significantly widened the wealth gap.?

Meanwhile, government policies often defied common sense. In Pennsylvania and many other states, for example, parks and gyms, along with restaurants, workplaces and places of worship, were shut down. Liquor stores, however, stayed open. (I discuss the devastating impact of this in other articles – please subscribe.)

When leaders made decisions like these, impacting hundreds of millions of people, individuals questioned their own intuitive beliefs about what should be done and what they should do as individuals. The anxiety and self-doubt stemming from this disruption were not indicators of personal failure but rather a natural response to unprecedented circumstances. This led to confusion, nihilism, and desperation.?

No wonder people were ready to believe the microchip story. Their intuition had been pummeled to a pulp.

Intuition Has Not Recovered

We have not yet overcome these impacts.?

Slowing our ability to do so is the new hybrid work environment, which keeps people in lockdown-like states of isolation. Without ongoing interaction with others in the workplace as well as in our communities, people don’t get to practice interpreting the intangible clues that develop intuition.?

Without these in-person interactions, many people found it harder to read and relate to others. While some, particularly those with heightened intuitive abilities, could still sense these cues online, the majority struggled. This lack of socialization also meant missing out on unconscious learning, the kind that happens naturally in social environments.

The intellect attempts to fill in the gaps with analysis and probabilities, which are poor substitutes at best. The absence of these experiences left people feeling disconnected from their own body language and intuitive abilities. Consequently, expressing oneself skillfully became more challenging, often without an obvious reason. This gap in social training undermined our ability to understand and trust our intuition.

Finding Intuition

When my clients wonder what they can do to reignite their intuition, my first advice is the most obvious: scroll less, and get out more. This is easier said than done. Given our app-centric culture, even going out seems like it needs to begin with an online interaction.?

Many people believe that if they are going to do something–anything–it has to have a purpose. The apps reinforce this. Even ones like MeetUp that were designed to get people together in the real world end up giving us the impression that a gathering needs to have a theme, or that the only people we should meet are those who share a common interest.

Going out without a plan is the invigorating adventure we all need to hone our intuitive skills and lead richer lives. Being open to random encounters opens our hearts and our eyes in new ways. We can find these interactions anywhere, from the laundromat to a hiking trail.?

The main point is to get outside and look around. Many people are beginning to tire of the phone’s dominance over our consciousness. Look for those people, and become one of them. Train yourself to remain in the present when you are with others, no matter how many times your phone buzzes, and when someone with you relents and looks at their phone, don’t get yours out – wait until they return to you.

The lockdown had a profound impact on our interpersonal abilities, and it's important to realize that your weakened intuition and inexperience with authentic interactions is not your fault. You didn’t do anything “wrong.” It’s not because you have some innate weakness that you struggle with feelings of loneliness.

The cure is simple, which makes it difficult. Your intuition revives when you open yourself to the unknown. The unknown can be shaped into something pleasant simply by smiling. Respond to people without judgment.?

If you have time to scroll, you have time to have a random conversation with a stranger. The stranger will do you a lot more good.?