PODCASTThe Science of Happiness

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What if burnout isn’t a breaking point, but an invitation to slow down, tune in, and hear the intuition you have been trying to say all along?

Summary: When we’re deep in burnout, even the simplest decisions can feel overwhelming. This episode of The Science of Happiness explores the difference between urgency and intuition, and what it takes to rebuild trust in your inner knowing. It’s a conversation about slowing down, listening inward, and finding clarity on the other side of exhaustion.

How To Do This Practice: SMILE Self-awareness, Mastery, Impulses and Addictions, Low Probability, and Environment

1. Pause the noise: Set aside 5–10 minutes without screens, music, or conversation. Let yourself settle into stillness, even if it feels uncomfortable at first.
2. Feel your body: Bring your attention inward. Notice physical sensations—tightness in your chest, a flutter in your gut, warmth in your hands—without trying to change them.
3. Breathe and soften: Take a few slow, gentle breaths. With each exhale, invite your body to soften and release any tension.
4. Ask a simple question: Bring to mind something you’re unsure about. Ask yourself softly, “What do I really know about this?” or “What feels true right now?”
5. Notice what arises: Pay attention to the first felt sense—not the loudest thought, but the quiet feeling underneath. It might show up as a word, image, emotion, or subtle pull in the body.
6. Close with trust: You don’t need a final answer. Just acknowledge what you noticed, thank yourself for listening, and carry that quiet knowing with you as you move forward.

Today’s Guests:

ZAKIYA GIBBONS is an award-winning journalist. She is a host, story editor, podcast producer, writer, and voice actor based in Brooklyn.

Learn more about Zakiya here: https://www.zakiyagibbons.com/

Follow Zakiya on Instagram: @zak_sauce

Zakiya was also a guest on Proxy, a podcast hosted by Yowei Shaw, where guests are paired with someone uniquely suited to help them unpack a problem. In this episode of proxy, you’ll hear more from her and her conversation with psychologist Dr. Bill Chopik on how and why our personalities change over time. 

JOEL PEARSON is a Psychologist, Neuroscientist and public intellectual, keynote speaker, working at the forefront of science, innovation and agile science.

Learn more about Joel here: https://www.profjoelpearson.com/

Follow Joel on Instagram: @profjoelpearson

Related The Science of Happiness episodes:  

How Awe Helps You Navigate Life’s Challenges: https://tinyurl.com/2466rnm4

How Exploring New Places Can Make You Feel Happier: https://tinyurl.com/4ufn2tpn

Are You Following Your Inner Compass: https://tinyurl.com/y2bh8vvj

Related Happiness Breaks:

Tap into the Joy That Surrounds You: https://tinyurl.com/2pb8ye9x

Pause to Look at the Sky: https://tinyurl.com/4jttkbw3

A Walking Meditation: https://tinyurl.com/mwbsen7a

Tell us about your experience with this practice. Email us at happinesspod@berkeley.edu or follow on Instagram @HappinessPod.

Help us share The Science of Happiness! Leave us a 5-star review on Apple Podcasts and share this link with someone who might like the show: https://tinyurl.com/2p9h5aap

Transcription:

ZAKIYA GIBBONS: I used to really love myself. I loved my personality. I loved my friends. I loved everything about my life, my energy, my intuition, how I move in the world, the choices I make. My life felt very vibrant and full. It felt like I had a light within me that I carried around and then around COVID it felt like that light was snuffed, and I'm like, Well, I don't know if that light will ever turn on again. I think I was just in survival mode, and so I wasn't going off of what feels right. It's just like, Okay, what will make me money? How can I stay safe? How can I keep my community safe? I just went to completely being fear based and anxiety driven and scarcity driven, to the point where, yeah, I didn't really recognize myself.

DACHER KELTNER: Welcome to The Science of Happiness. I'm Dacher Keltner.

We make decisions all day, every day. Some are small, like what to eat for breakfast or what floss to buy to keep your teeth healthy. Then there are choices that quietly steer our life's direction. So what tools are at our disposal to help navigate those decisions, intuition is one and it's a lot less mysterious than we may think. Neuroscience is revealing that intuition is real. The unconscious mind, or what Nobel Prize winner Danny Kahneman called system one thought, is our brain's fast, automatic and intuitive way of processing information without conscious effort. Award winning journalist, producer and storyteller, Zakiya Gibbons, tapped into intuition by trying some practices to develop and strengthen it.

ZAKIYA GIBBONS: Before I would try to problem solve or remedy the situation or act out of pure emotion, and that's rarely helpful in the long run.

JOEL PEARSON: Intuition is a response to the environment, and so your brain is always recalibrating intuition as the environmental things change. 

DACHER KELTNER: That's neuroscientist Joel Pearson. 

JOEL PEARSON: Those things turn out to be pretty important once you understand what intuition is and what it's not. 

DACHER KELTNER: We also hear from him about his lab's research on intuition. Stay with us.

SHUKA KALANTARI: Hey everybody. This is Shuka Kalantari. Tomorrow, we're sharing a bonus episode by our friends at Proxy, a podcast hosted by Yowei Shaw, where guests are paired with someone uniquely suited to help them unpack a problem. You'll hear from the same Zakiya we're talking with today on the Science of Happiness, and it connects beautifully to her journey of learning to trust her own intuition. Enjoy today's show.

DACHER KELTNER: Welcome back to The Science of Happiness. I'm Dacher Keltner. Today, we're demystifying intuition with real tools that neuroscientists can measure and define. Brooklyn based, Zakiya Gibbons has been practicing steps to strengthen her own intuition, and she's here today to share her experience. Zakiya, thanks so much for being on the show. 

ZAKIYA GIBBONS: Oh, thank you for having me. 

DACHER KELTNER: Talk a bit about sort of a transformation you've been going through. You've told our producers before the pandemic, really extroverted, social, like, everywhere, and then, you know, the pandemic had a big effect on you. 

ZAKIYA GIBBONS: Yes.

DACHER KELTNER: I'm really curious. And you know, you talked about this, Zakiya, like the challenge of intuition is to kind of let what you learn, the wisdom of your feelings and sensations, help you make positive decisions, reframing what we all have been going through out of COVID, and you've talked about, what lessons did you learn about yourself and identity?

ZAKIYA GIBBONS: It felt like a personality shift. I just wasn't as gregarious as outgoing. I felt like I lost my social skills, and that's something I used to really enjoy, and I just felt like a lot of what made me me was gone, and so that made me feel broken.

And then, starting in 2023 just one bad thing after the other kept happening. Like my mom was in the hospital. I was working with some people who were racist. There's no, I don't want to pussyfoot around it. I don't want to sugarcoat. I was just in a constant state of being in the red. And I think that, just like, made me disconnected. I wasn't, like, thinking straight. I didn't even realize how disconnected I was for myself, because I was so disconnected. You know what I mean?

DACHER KELTNER:  One of the things I noted about coming out of COVID, for me, everything was so disrupted, working online, teaching online, Zoom, downtowns of cities became vacant, you know, and then we felt alone. And we know from a Lancet article, 25-30% rise in depression anxiety worldwide. It's harder to make decisions. Sometimes, you know, harder to trust my intuition. I think that part of the disruption of our times, not only COVID, but this political moment and all the hatred in the air is that it puts us into this weird social life where our intuition is really compromised and disrupted. And it's so timely. You turn to this work by Joel Pearson, a scientist on cultivating intuition. Walk us through this practice, Zakiya, of cultivating the intuition and what it was like for you. 

ZAKIYA GIBBONS: This was really helpful, because I used to think of myself, and I still do, as an intuitive person, but being more mindful and intentional with doing an intuitive practice made me realize, oh, this is kind of like a muscle, and I haven't exercised this muscle in a while, and I know it like somatically, but to put it into words, I'm like, what actually is intuition? How would you define intuition? Before I would try to problem solve or remedy the situation, or I would just act out of pure emotion, and that's rarely helpful in the long run. And so, you know, with this intuitive practice, okay, how are you feeling right now? And it's hard to use intuition when you're in such a hyper, dysregulated space where you can't even see straight. So that's just the first step, is calming down, and then try to do what you can to get more regulated. And that looks different for everybody. For me, I like screaming into pillows. I like going on walks and being outside, and I love venting, just like getting it out, whether that's journaling or I am the queen of voice notes, and then usually that makes me feel more regulated just externalizing those feelings and thoughts.

DACHER KELTNER: Were there specific feelings that you became aware of in this practice of intuition?

ZAKIYA GIBBONS: Impulses and addiction. This one really resonated with me, because during COVID, I was doing a lot of couch rotting, just like hitting the bong, watching TV, because that was all there was to do. Post lockdown, I kept up the habit of smoking every day to the point where I'm like, Oh, this is actually making me anxious. This isn't fun. I had conflated my impulse with what felt right for me. 

DACHER KELTNER: It sounds like the practice sort of helped you focus on the ethical principles you really care about. Yes, how else did it affect your decision making?

ZAKIYA GIBBONS: What taught me to just really slow down and to even experiment with, Okay, what if I don't do this thing that I'm really feeling pulled towards? And it cleared out a lot of stuff in my life that was actively keeping me triggered, and then actively, honestly, keeping me in a state of red to yellow. I've been taking a break from dating, and even just like scrolling on the app, sometimes I'll just be bored and like the impulse is grab my phone and then scroll on the apps, and then it would make me misanthropic. I'm not that type of person, And so it's just like, even though it's my impulse to pick up my phone and scroll, I'm rationalizing. I'm like, Well, you know, being in a relationship sounds nice. I'm like, okay, I'm being self aware. I'm doing the right things. But it felt shitty in my body. And then I realized, Oh, this is an impulse, but my intuition is saying rest.

DACHER KELTNER: And it also tells us what not to do. 

ZAKIYA GIBBONS: Yes, exactly. I'm glad you said that, because I think I was always thinking of intuition as, okay, strong feeling in my body that tells me to do something. 

DACHER KELTNER: Yeah, my final question for you, Zakiya right, this is a conversation for the ages. I think a lot of people, coming out of COVID and during these hard times, and white supremacy is rising and authoritarianism, and we're worried about so many things, and you've really highlighted some deep lessons from this intuition practice. Given your experience with this practice, what's your offering to our listeners in terms of the strength of their intuition and how to cultivate it?

ZAKIYA GIBBONS: Being still with myself has been really helpful. And I feel like my life is usually very noisy, whether it was like, you know, before I'm out in East I'm in New York, it's a noisy city, and I'm social, I'm doing this, and when I'm at home, I'm watching, you know, these loud, obnoxious reality shows. And I realized sometimes I would have the impulse to turn on the TV or something, but then there'd be these moments where, I guess it was an intuition. I was just like, just put it on mute, turn it off.

I love colored lights. I have this light bulb, and you can change the color, and so sometimes I would just bask in this like soft, peachy pink light, and just sit there, just in silence. And that gave me the peace that I was hoping the weed would give me, or the TV would give me, or whatever, and that feeling of connection that I used to feel when I was out about in the streets talking to people like, oh, I still feel that same vibration in my core when I'm just still with myself. And then it made me realize, like, oh, I still love who I am. I still love the thoughts I have and the ideas I have and the feelings I have in the midst of all of this chaos. I think it's important to not fully retreat. Community is important, and being active in one's community is important, but just sitting with myself and being quiet and in tune with no goal but just sitting and being has been helpful.

DACHER KELTNER: Zakiya Gibbons, thank you for being on our show. It's been a really important conversation for us all to be thinking about in terms of using our intuition to find reconnection to the self. Thank you. 

ZAKIYA GIBBONS: Thank you so much for having me and for your wonderful questions and conversation. I really appreciate it.

DACHER KELTNER: Neuroscientist and author, Joel Pearson established the steps that Zakiya tried to practice intuition. 

JOEL PEARSON: Your body responds to things you have no idea are happening. Learning to feel and notice those bodily responses is literally a way to tap into unconscious information.

DACHER KELTNER: More after this break. 

SHUKA KALANTARI: Hi Shuka here, just a reminder that you can hear more about Zakiya’s internal work as she continues to find her new normal from our friends at the podcast Proxy, she'll be speaking with psychologist and professor, Dr. Bill Chopik, who shares research on how our personalities change over time that's coming up tomorrow on The Science of Happiness.

DACHER KELTNER: Welcome back to The Science of Happiness. Neuroscientist Joel Pearson says our brains make decisions by accumulating evidence.

JOEL PEARSON: That evidence can be conscious, that can be unconscious. It can be both. Intuition involves getting unconscious information in your brain on your body, and seeing how that can help you make better decisions. 

DACHER KELTNER: Joel's lab studies how unconscious information influences our decisions by measuring how our bodies react. 

JOEL PEARSON: So we had cool ways of doing that, with visual illusions. In particular, one called binocular ivory, which lets us present an image to one eye and then a bright, flashy image to the other eye, and whatever you present the sort of the stationary image gets rendered unconscious so people never see it. 

DACHER KELTNER: Using binocular rivalry, his lab showed scary images of spiders and snakes, shark attacks or nice things like flowers and puppy dogs.

JOEL PEARSON: We can see the visual cortex is still processing them. We can see the activity in the limbic system and the amygdala goes up. So they're clearly still being processed, even if you have no idea I'm presenting them to you. Then at the same time, we know that there are also pathways which go from these early levels of visual cortex straight to the emotional parts of the brain. 

DACHER KELTNER: Emotion will trigger a shortcut to decision making, because our brains have evolved to keep us alive rather than give us an accurate representation of reality. 

JOEL PEARSON: When something big comes up, a new job, or move countries, or buying, selling a house, or start a new relationship, leave a relationship, they start talking about, oh, my gut is telling me this because the emotions come up. But if you do not practice the understanding and feeling of intuition, tapping into it, when to use it, when not to use it, this can really lead you astray. There are situations where people could have childhood trauma and that could be triggered by someone they meet on the street, for example, and that's not intuition. 

DACHER KELTNER: We're also not great at taking into account probability. 

JOEL PEARSON: There's a ton of research from psychology on how bad we are at understanding probabilities. Our brains don't experience probabilities and numbers in the same way we experience other things, so we're just really bad at it.

DACHER KELTNER: And biases will bubble up, driving decisions that influence what we eat, what we do.

JOEL PEARSON: And this also is a huge part of advertising. And you can think about all the cognitive nudges you walk into a shop, into a supermarket, the decisions you are making you're not even aware of which things you might just grab. So you need to be careful, because if you've trained it in an out of date or biased situation, that will come through into your intuition. But still, we never want to throw emotion out the window. We want to integrate emotion with decision making. The key is to have a framework and strategy and learn better ways of doing that. If you are in an emotional state, you want to be able to realize that, and that's using sort of parts of emotional intelligence, emotional awareness, and you want to do something, maybe box breathing or meditation or something to bring yourself back to a baseline before you're going to trust your intuition. 

DACHER KELTNER: Intuition is also dynamic. Recalibrating as environmental conditions change. 

JOEL PEARSON: The powerhouse, or the engine behind intuition is associative learning. So when you learn something, the place you're in is imprinted in that learning. So literally, the room and the space that you learn something in is part of that memory, and not just the physical space, but the internal state. If you're intoxicated, highly caffeinated.

DACHER KELTNER: There is one tool we all have access to, our unconscious.

JOEL PEARSON: Using your body or interoception to tap into these levels of the unconscious is a nice way to utilize that information, and that's a really nice way of thinking about intuition. This is my sort of more practical scientific definition of tapping into your body to access unconscious information. 

DACHER KELTNER: Since we know that our bodies will respond to unconscious information, we need to notice what they're experiencing.

JOEL PEARSON: Which is the internal perceptual state of our body, right? So my cold? Am I hungry? Am I to have the bathroom? If you sit really still, can you feel your heartbeat? Can you tap out with a finger? You know each beat of your heart? It's literally just where you embody that where your body responds to the unconscious information in your brain. Some people will feel it in the chest. Some people feel it in their fingertips. They might get sweaty palms and just feeling tingly and a bit uncomfortable. So it is different in different people, but generally it's in the upper body, somewhere from the hands, chest or gut area, the three most common ones. So it's learning to tap into that, to notice where that might be coming from, and learn when you can rely on those feelings and when you can't.

DACHER KELTNER: What is it about music that connects us so deeply? We dive into that question with the legendary former front man of talking heads, David Byrne. 

DAVID BYRNE: We're not just individuals. Our identity, who we are as entities and people, is intimately tied up with other people. 

DACHER KELTNER: Next time on The Science of Happiness. Thanks for joining us on The Science of Happiness. Our associate producers are Emily Brower and Dasha Zarboni. Our producer is Truc Nguyen. Sound designer Jennie Cataldo of Accompany Studios. Our executive producer is Shuka Kalantari. I'm Dacher Keltner, have a great day.