“Wait, hunches are IN THE BODY?”

Oct 29, 2025

Mentor: “…and what does your body say about that?”
Me: “Wait, hunches can be IN THE BODY?”

For the first few months after this exchange, I thought, “Maybe I’m just different and don’t have intuition in my body. Maybe that’s just a weird thing that happens to other people but not to me.”

Nope.

Turns out I was bottlenecked on noticing sensations in my body. Sure, I’d get butterflies in my stomach or “know” emotions in my head, but I blocked out sensations like “expansiveness in my chest”, “tingling in my fingers”, “tension in my arms”, or “pleasure on my skin”.

Ok, so I was living at 360p. So what?

Well, the nervous system is a distributed system, so information must propagate somehow.

“Hunches in the body” seem like a very common way to experience this:1

Illustrated: Where I DIDN’T feel in my body. (Maps of subjective feelings)

By default, this information flows freely—unless there’s resistance. When there’s resistance, updates fail to propagate across the whole system.2 And there was a lot of resistance in my system…

a human body with a graph network inside, network in the head is stronger than network in the body because it's cut off

This was partly a good thing (locally optimal). It helped mitigate body pain and social risks. Direct access to intuition would’ve actually made my life worse, given the state of my life and mind at the time.

So while it was locally optimal, it wasn’t globally optimal:

I’d brush my teeth too hard and only notice from the blood instead of the pain.
Other people made decisions in seconds by checking their gut. I made a decision by agonizing my way to a heady answer that still felt bad. Decision-making spiraled because every option felt equally gray.
I thought I didn’t like animals! I missed the beauty around me—even though I found it incredibly cute when crushes would suddenly stop on a snowy street overwhelmed by what she was soaking in.
Everything I did had to be “useful”. All of my desires needed “reasons”.
I couldn’t tell the difference between “I’m feeling really jealous right now” and “Did I eat something bad?”
I didn’t really experience deep pleasure.
I was prone to addictions and distractions.

At the same time, this bottleneck numbed awareness of itself. I went on like this for years until close friends told me they were concerned.

Eventually, with courage, more financial and housing security, 1:1 help that took too long, and skill, what made accessing intuition risky got updated into irrelevance.

After I regained the ability to access my intuition in high resolution, I journaled:

Wow.
There’s so much intricacy to the emotional ripples in my stomach alone. I found strange happinesses in the tip of my fingers (???). And self-loathing there, too! Love in the “cave of the heart” on the right side of my chest…

Soon I realized that these hunches are better described as (sensation, location), and more useful than emotion words:

Image Not ‘anxious’ but (tension, lower chest) Not ‘happy’ but (pleasure, arm skin) Not ‘confident’ but (expansiveness, chest and shoulders)

My progress continued:

Decision-making: Before, I’d make decisions by making big google docs listing pros and cons, share it with all of my friends, then ruminate for weeks. Now, I propose options to my body, body says “Yes” or “No, more like this…”, and I reach the satisfying answer without the weeks of rumination. Decision-making became so easy that “I” am not even making the choice, it just happens, it’s obvious.

Misc.: I became more empathetic and see others’ emotions easily. I notice fears without avoiding them, which allows me to listen to them. Life is more colorful and I’m more intuitive. I see and hear more. “4k” awareness allows for “4k” behavior.