116. "Signals vs. Spirals™: Is It Intuition, Anxiety, or Old Conditioning?

Holly Toscanini: Last week we talked about what happens when you start questioning your just fine life. You get quiet enough to actually hear yourself, maybe for the first time in a while. And then another voice shows up. And maybe it says something like, this job is no longer for me. Or this relationship really needs to change. Or I wanna do the thing I've been filing under someday. And then almost immediately another voice shows up. And it says, but what if I'm wrong? What if I'm not ready? What if I regret it? Now you've got two voices and they both sound like you and you have no idea which one to trust. Now a lot of us get stuck here, not because we don't have inner wisdom, but because we can't tell it apart from our anxiety. So we wait, not for clarity exactly, but for certainty, for one of the voices to win convincingly enough that acting feels safe. That certainty almost never arrives. And in its absence, waiting continues. Today, we're going to fix that. Welcome back to How to Lose the WAIT. I'm Toscanini, and we have moved into the second phase of the WAIT WAIT Framework Series, ⁓ A, a tuning to your Intuition ⁓ Now for the past five weeks, we've been in the witness naming all the patterns, the inner the research loop, the someday cycle, fear with a planner, and last week, the just fine trap. We have been making the invisible visible. And now we're going to get down to the work of actually hearing ourselves again. Because here's what I found. Once women start questioning the conditions they've placed on their lives, a lot of voices rush in. Voices like fear, old rules, other people's opinions, that inner critic who has a remarkable talent for sounding like authority. And underneath all of that, quieter, steadier, Often getting drowned out lies actual inner wisdom. The condition this episode is gonna remove is one of the most sneaky ones in the waiting cycle. I'll trust myself when I'm 100 % sure, because 100 % sure requires certainty. And this requires silencing every other voice, which never fully happens. The bottom line is this, your intuition gives you a direction. Your anxiety usually demands a guarantee. So today, we're gonna talk about signals versus spirals, how to tell the difference between the two, why they can sound so similar, and how to start using your own intuition as the primary source of wisdom again. And at the end, I'm gonna point you toward the Activate Your Intuition ebook, which is a short, super practical resource for exactly this stage of the work. Now, before we talk about how to tell signals from spirals, I wanna spend a few minutes on why the signal gets so hard to hear in the first place. because it's not random and it's not a personal failure. Most women have been systematically trained away from their own inner knowing or intuition, and it starts early. You learn that your instincts are negotiable and that an appropriate response to what you feel is to check with everybody else before you make a decision. You learn to run all your reads on situations through a filter of, this acceptable? Is it gonna cause problems? What are people gonna think of me? And when you layer on top of that, years of diet culture, which explicitly teaches you to override your body signals. Ignore hunger, distrust cravings, push through fatigue and generally treat your physical experience as a problem to be managed rather than information to be received. Add perfectionism, which teaches you to stay in the planning phase indefinitely instead of moving on something without being 100 % certain. Add on top of that people pleasing, which teaches you to monitor everybody else's comfort before you take care of yourself. And then add the particular pressure that accumulates over decades. the weight of roles and responsibilities and expectations that have been telling you for years what a woman is supposed to do, feel, want, and put up with. After all of that, of course the signal is hard to hear. It's not that your intuition left. It just got crowded out. It got quieter because every time it spoke up, something else got louder. And here's an additional complication, just in case you needed one more. Anxiety isn't stupid. It's learned over years of observation to mimic the voice of wisdom. It knows what you respond to. It knows how to frame fear as caution, avoidance as prudence, and staying stuck as just being responsible. So when that signal finally says, hey, this needs to change, anxiety shows up immediately and says, but are you sure? Have you thought about this from every angle? What if you're making a mistake? And if you haven't learned to tell them apart, you end up in analysis paralysis, not because you don't have an answer, but because you can't determine which voice the answer is coming from. That's what we're solving today. Let me describe a signal and a spiral in just a little detail because the distinction is definitely something you can learn. It just takes a little practice, but it's absolutely learnable. A signal has a few recognizable qualities. First, it's calm, not peaceful necessarily. A signal could show up about something that is gonna require a hard conversation or maybe even a significant change. But the tone of it is steady. It doesn't rush, it doesn't demand, it doesn't catastrophize, it states. It's also consistent. A signal tends to say the same thing over time. It might get louder if you ignore it, but it doesn't change its position. You've been hearing versions of the same message for months, sometimes years, the same quiet knowing that keeps coming back. It's also directional. a signal points somewhere very specific. It tells you something. It might tell you that this relationship is over or that this work no longer fits or that the desire you have is real. It also moves you toward truth and it's your truth. When you sit with a signal, it feels recognizable like something you've always known at some level, even if you've been talking yourself out of it. It sounds like the most honest version of you. A spiral, on the other hand, is different in almost every way. It's urgent. See, anxiety doesn't say things once. It repeats, it escalates, it loops. If you answer one fear, it generates two more. And there's a hungry quality to it. Anxiety wants more information, more reassurance, more certainty. It can never quite be satisfied. It's also catastrophic. Spirals tend to jump to worst case scenarios. They extrapolate, taking one small fear and multiplying it until it equals the end of the world. It's also controlling. A spiral is trying to prevent something, usually the vulnerability of a real move or a real change or real commitment. It's working really hard to keep you in place. It also masquerades as wisdom, but its actual function is protection. And it loops. If you follow a spiral, you end up right back where you started. More anxious, no clearer, still stuck. Because it doesn't resolve, it just recirculates. So here's a practical example of how both might sound the same in any situation. let's say you're considering leaving your job. You've been unhappy there for years. The signal might sound like this. This work is no longer right for me. I've known it for a while, I've outgrown it. It's time to start making a plan. The spiral might sound like, but what if I can't find anything else? What if I leave and regret it? What if I fail? What if I succeed and I've got to sustain it? Notice the difference. The signal is one clear statement. The spiral is a barrage of questions that have no satisfying answers because they were never designed to be answered. They were designed to keep you from taking any action at all. Now here's a complication I want to name honestly because sometimes the spiral contains a legitimate question. Sometimes the But what about the finances? Concern is real and it deserves attention. The signal doesn't ask you to ignore practical reality. What the spiral is hoping is that one real concern is gonna be enough to reactivate that whole looping pattern and pull you back into waiting. See, your job isn't to silence every single anxiety before you trust a signal. It's to give the signal its rightful weight, to let it have a real vote without needing to defeat every other voice first. Here's a practical way you can apply this. When you can't tell whether you're in a signal or a spiral, run what you're experiencing through these four questions. First, is this thought repetitious or is it clarifying? Because signals clarify. They show up, they say something specific and give you more information the longer you sit with them. Spirals repeat. They circle the same fear in different forms, generating urgency without generating any additional insight. If the thought you're having has been on repeat for 20 minutes and you're not any clearer than when it started, that's a spiral. The second, what does this move me toward? Truth or toward control? Because signals are oriented toward truth, even uncomfortable truth. They point you toward what's actually happening, what you actually want and what actually needs to change. Spirals are oriented forms of control toward preventing an outcome, avoiding risk, not rocking the boat. So ask yourself, is the voice trying to show me something or trying to stop me from something? Three, is this asking for one honest step or demanding total certainty? Now this is the one of the clearest ways to tell because a signal asks for one thing, acknowledgement or one small honest action. It doesn't require you to have the entire path mapped out in advance. A spiral demands certainty. It's not gonna be satisfied with the next step. It wants a guarantee. So if you're feeling like you can't move until every single risk is eliminated and every question answered, that's a spiral. Four, does this sound like me or like an old rule I inherited? Because this is where conditioning enters the pattern. Not because everything that sounds like anxiety is anxiety. Some of it's internalized instruction. The voice that says, you shouldn't want too much or who do you think you are? Or good girls don't do that. That's not your wisdom and it's not your fear. that somebody else's rule that you absorbed and never consciously chose. See, when you run your thoughts through these four questions, a pattern is usually going to emerge pretty quickly. Signals tend to get clearer once you examine them. Spirals tend to escalate or loop on repeat. Now here's where you can bring in the three micro desires practice. One of the most effective ways to practice trusting your signal is to start with stakes that are pretty low. Not should I leave my marriage, but what do I actually want right now in this present moment? The three micro desires practice is essentially a daily signal training exercise. Every time you notice what you want, name it without editing it and act on it even once, even briefly. You're reinforcing the connection between your internal signal and your response to it. You begin to teach yourself that when I know something, I can act on it. That is the foundation of self-trust. and self-trust is what makes the bigger signals possible to hear. You don't develop the ability to trust yourself on the hard decisions by waiting until a hard decision shows up. You build it through daily practice on the little decisions. Here's what I would really love for you to take away from today. The condition this episode is helping you remove is the belief that you can't trust yourself until you're completely certain. And that certainty for most women is the thing that never quite arrives. There's always one more question that the spiral could generate, one more risk to account for, one more voice that you've got to satisfy before you feel safe enough to act. But here's what's actually true. Your signal doesn't need certainty to be valid. It just needs to be heard. So your practice this week is the four question filter. The next time you can't tell whether you're in a signal or a spiral, run it through the four questions. Is this repeating or clarifying, truth or control, one honest step or total certainty? Is this my voice or an old rule? You don't have to have it perfectly sorted out. You just have to start noticing the difference. And then alongside that, you can practice the three micro desires once a day. What do I actually want right now? In this small moment, notice it, name it, act on it if you possibly can. You're building the evidence that your intuition is worth listening to. Now, if you wanna take this further, if you want a more structured practice for reconnecting with your intuition specifically, I'm going to invite you to download the Activate Your Intuition ebook. This is a short, practical resource I designed for exactly this stage of the work, when you're ready to start listening inward again, but need something to hold the structure while you're rebuilding your habit. The link is in the show notes and it'll be in the description below this video. Now, next week, we're going to stay in the A phase, the attune to your intuition phase, and go somewhere that might surprise you. See, episode 117 is all about the specific way that high functioning women have learned to tie their worth to their output, to their usefulness, to being needed. Because here's something I want you to sit with between now and then. A woman can leave diet culture and still treat her entire life like a performance review, measuring, tracking, proving, apologizing even, trying to earn approval through constant productivity. That is its own form of conditional living. and next week we're naming it. I'll see you then. Bye for now.