Stress Hijacks Reality: Why You Can’t Trust Your Intuition When Dysregulated When you’re stressed, anxious, or emotionally flooded, your intuition can feel loud and certain — but neuroscience shows that certainty often increases as clarity decreases. When stress spikes, the brain can shift from thoughtful reasoning to fast survival reactions. You’ve probably heard “trust your gut.” Sometimes that’s great advice. But there’s an important exception: when you’re dysregulated — anxious, activated, panicky, shutdown, or emotionally flooded — your “intuition” can become unreliable. That’s not a character flaw. It’s a built-in survival feature: under stress, the brain reallocates resources away from complex thinking and toward threat detection and rapid response. [1] The result is a distorted version of reality that can feel urgent, personal, and absolutely true. The amygdala: your threat alarm (fast, react...