Help! Is It Relationship Anxiety Or Gut Feeling?

Written by Oliver Drakeford, LMFT, Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist in Los Angeles.

How Do We Know If It's Relationship Anxiety?

Relationship anxiety follows predictable rules that keep you scanning for danger and doubting your partner. At the same time, gut feelings are unconscious signals rising from information you've picked up without realizing it.

Anxiety feels repetitive, urgent, and suspicious - it pushes you to analyze and check for proof. Gut feelings are often subtle, rooted in data your mind filtered in the background, and they don't demand endless detective work. The challenge is learning to separate past ghosts and anxious stories from the present signals that actually deserve your attention.

3 Step Gut-Check

1. Signal Check: Anxiety pulls you into theories and detective work; intuition is unconscious material that emerges slowly.
2. Ghost Test: If it feels like the past is happening again, maybe you're meeting an echo of memory, not what's happening now.
3. Body Meter: Anxiety cranks up urgency and tightness; intuition doesn't flood you with adrenaline even when it points to something real.

The Threat Detective in Your Head

It's 2 AM and you're lying awake again, replaying that weird moment from dinner. The way your partner paused before saying "I love you too." How they angled their phone away when a notification came through. That slightly different energy when they kissed you goodbye this morning....

Either your gut is warning you that something's genuinely wrong, or your anxiety is playing its greatest hits again.

The more you think about it, the less apparent it becomes. By 3 AM, you've checked their Instagram activity, analyzed your last ten text exchanges, and you're still no closer to knowing: Is this relationship anxiety or gut feeling?

As a couples counselor and relationship therapist, I help people struggling with anxious thoughts that impact their relationships all the time. According to the CDC, about 18.2% of U.S. adults reported symptoms of anxiety in 2022 - showing how common anxiety is, even among people who aren't diagnosed.

The Ten Rules Of Relationship Anxiety.

What I tell all my clients in my private practice is that anxiety follows specific, predictable rules that are designed to keep you small, safe, and separate. This is the perfect emotional response when we were hunter-gatherers and needed to be on the alert for danger.

Today, however, the same wiring is in place, perceiving threats in hastily typed romantic texts, seeing danger in natural communication barriers, and reinforcing patterns of fear around ambiguous body language. It's no wonder with all these alarms going off that you're wondering if you can trust your intuition.

Anxiety's job remains the same: to keep you safe and separate, so that inner voice turns couples away from supporting each other, to mistrust and disconnection.

Relationship Anxiety Archetypes

I'm a marriage and family therapist with a decade of experience in helping people understand their anxiety and how it impacts their interpersonal connections, emotional intimacy, and relational health.

The "rules of relationship anxiety" aren't guidelines you should follow-they're the hidden patterns anxiety uses to control your behavior without you realizing it. Think of them as anxiety's playbook, the predictable strategies it uses to keep you in a state of fear and hypervigilance in your relationship. These rules are meant to be protective, like they're keeping you safe from being hurt, but they actually create the very problems you're trying to avoid.

Every person with relationship anxiety follows some combination of these ten rules, though which ones dominate depends on your past experiences, how you respond to external stressors, and your emotion regulation skills.

The thing about these rules is that they are persistent, predictable, and patterned, which is good news. Once you recognize which rules you're following, you can start breaking them. It's like finally seeing the strings that have been controlling you.

The Threat Detective

Definition: The Detective is a relationship anxiety archetype where vigilance becomes miscalibrated. The person constantly scans their partner's behavior for hidden meaning, treating the relationship like a mystery to be solved rather than an experience to be lived.

 Anxiety shows up for some people in a pattern I call the Threat Detective - it's one of the five relationship anxiety archetypes I see in my work with adults.

For The Detective, the brain's threat detection system got miscalibrated somewhere along the way. Maybe you've been betrayed before. Perhaps you grew up having to read the room to stay emotionally safe constantly. Your nervous system learned that watching for danger meant survival.

The problem is, your brain can't tell the difference between a real warning and an echo from your past. That protective mechanism is now like a smoke alarm that goes off every time there's a whisper of uncertainty or doubt. 

When your mind becomes a crime scene investigator in your own relationship, every interaction transforms into potential evidence. You're not just experiencing your relationship anymore-you're investigating it, analyzing it, sometimes torturing yourself with it, not knowing if it's a gut feeling or if your anxiety is playing tricks on you. The hyper vigilance and physical symptoms, when combined with the worry of whether it's anxiety wearing the mask of intuition, are a triple burden.

The Three Rules That Masquerade as Intuition and Gut Feeling

The three most common rules that The Detective follows are below. If they resonate or feel familiar, consider taking the Relationship Anxiety Archetype Quiz to see if you match up.

Rule #1: The Mind-Reading Mandate

Your brain convinces you that you can decode every pause, sigh, and emoji. When they look at their phone and smile, you "know" it must be someone more interesting. You can spend hours analyzing why they used a period instead of an exclamation point.

 Here's the difference: Real intuition arrives clean and straightforward, like a fact you suddenly know. Anxious mind-reading requires detective work. You build cases, gather evidence, analyze, and reanalyze. Intuition whispers once.

Anxiety shouts twenty different theories and keeps you up at night.

The physical feelings are different, too. Real intuition often feels neutral or calm, even when the message is concerning. But when anxiety makes you mind-read, your chest tightens, thoughts race, and you need to figure it out RIGHT NOW.

 Q: What are the signs I'm following the Mind-Reading Mandate?

• You catch yourself decoding pauses, emojis, and sighs as if they were hidden messages.
• You build elaborate cases from tiny details and keep revisiting the "evidence."
• Your body feels restless - chest tight, mind racing, urgent need to figure it out right now.

Rule #2: The Ghost of Relationships Past

Your partner does something innocent-mentions a coworker, comes home late, seems distracted- and your body reacts like you're back in that moment when someone betrayed you.

The feeling is so strong it must be intuition, right?

 Actually, your nervous system is being misled by that inner voice - similar to a trauma response. Your brain spotted something vaguely similar to a past threat and hit every alarm bell. You're not really seeing your current partner; you're seeing everyone who hurt you before.

Here's the test: If this feeling feels exactly like something from your past, if you can name the specific situation it reminds you of, of-you're dealing with a ghost, not intuition about now. Real gut feelings about current situations feel fresh. They don't come pre-loaded with old emotional intensity.

Q: How do I know if I'm haunted by the Ghost of Relationships Past?

• Your partner's neutral behavior sparks a huge emotional reaction that feels too familiar.
• The intensity mirrors an old betrayal or breakup almost exactly.
• Instead of seeing your current partner, you feel like you're reliving everyone who hurt you before.

Rule #3: The Sabotage of Serenity

Everything's going well. You've had a great weekend, they're being loving and attentive, and that's when your inner voice says, "This is too good to be true. Something must be wrong."

This happens when your nervous system is used to chaos. If past relationships were rocky, or if love growing up was unpredictable, then calm feels dangerous. Your anxiety treats the absence of problems as a problem itself.

Looking for problems often creates them. Your partner notices your suspicion during what should be close moments. They pull back, confused. Suddenly, you have "proof" that something was wrong, except you created it.

Q: How can I tell if I'm sabotaging serenity in my relationship?

• Calm moments feel "too good to be true," and you start scanning for what must be wrong.
• You equate stability with danger because chaos was what felt normal in the past.
• By searching for problems, you unintentionally create tension that wasn't there.

Is this relationship anxiety or a gut feeling?

Knowing if an instinct is relationship anxiety or a gut feeling requires some self-reflection and processing. 

Learning the difference isn't about trusting yourself less-it's about knowing which part of yourself is activated and learning to separate out what's a feeling, what's a thought, what's a memory, and what's anxiety.

Gut feelings are not simple to understand: when we talk about gut feelings or intuition, we're talking about messages coming in from our unconscious. It sounds a bit more magical than it is, but consider how much data we get hit by all the time - an overwhelming amount, from colors, sounds, noises, textures. To cope with the barrage of data, our minds filter out a lot, if not most of the incoming data, and what we're left with is what we experience all the time, like right now.

The majority of information coming in through our senses just gets processed in our unconscious, which is why our dreams are such a mushed-up jumble of things. Occasionally, and if we train ourselves, things will slip through from our unconscious into our reality or 'ego'. 

A gut feeling could be related to information that you consciously didn't pick up on - something you saw from the corner of your eye, an imperceptible change in someone's behavior, or a different inflection in their voice.

How do we know? Well... we don't. We can't. It's unconscious - sometimes though you can pay attention your feelings and try and collect more data to back it up. 

Anxiety complicates intuition. Anxiety's job is to keep us safe - to be on the lookout for threats and danger. It's also operating in our unconscious, and depending on our past experiences, it might be overly sensitive and ring the alarm when it's not needed.

This is why it's important not to act on one single feeling - an anxious thought or gut instinct. We want to listen to and consider that information, absolutely, but choose consciously what to do, not react.  

3 Step Check: How to Tell the Difference

1. The Signal: Intuition tends to appear once and be done; anxiety loops and replays until you're exhausted.
2. The Ghost Test: Notice if the feeling carries the weight of past hurt. If it mirrors an old story, that's anxiety, not the present.
3. The Body Meter: Anxiety stirs your chest, your thoughts, your urgency; intuition lands more quietly in the body.

Differentiation Of Self

Definition: Differentiation of self is the ability to separate thoughts from feelings, and to distinguish one's own inner experience from another person's behavior. It allows someone to respond with clarity rather than being swept away by anxious reactivity or old relational patterns. The Bowen Center explains that lower differentiation means greater emotional reactivity and more fusion with others' opinions.

One of the grounding strategies I help people with as a mental health professional is to consider how they can separate out their thoughts from their feelings. Both are providing us with data and information, and we want to believe them both as separate data sets. Personal growth comes from knowing where to distinguish the line between 'self' and 'other'.

Jenny's partner Billy came home late, after promising to be home by 9 pm, and she's furious with him, convinced he's cheating or up to no good. Billy hasn't cheated on anyone, and swears the stress from work made him forget.

• Thoughts: 'He is cheating on me, he's lying. This is all happening again.'
• Feelings: Anger... but underneath anger, she's afraid, and perhaps hurt.
• Other: Billy didn't call when he could have. Billy also broke his promise to be home at 9 pm.
• Self: Jenny's been cheated on in the past, and her parents got divorced due to infidelity.

Applied Example: The Thoughts-Feelings-Self-Other Check

Thoughts: Jenny's gut instinct was to jump to cheating, but in our therapy sessions she was able to see that it's not as simple as believing the first anxious thought in her head as labeling it as intuitive thinking. 

Self: Jenny's attachment styles play a part in her assumptions, and as a couples counselor, we would have to do some relationship coaching to understand that further. 

Feelings: part of the work was building distress tolerance around anxiety and uncertainty.

Other: in couples counseling therapy sessions, Billy had to see if he was avoiding emotional and physical discomfort of some part of their relationship which was contributing to his avoidance. 

3 Step: Spot the Difference: Anxiety vs. Intuition

1. Anxiety's Signal: Urgent, repetitive, demanding evidence.
2. Intuition's Signal: Subtle, grounded in unconscious cues you've picked up without realizing.
3. Your Body's Clue: Anxiety revs you into fight-or-flight; intuition gives you information without the panic.

As described by the Gottman Institute, differentiation is the ability to hold your own values and emotional responses while still being close - it is the balance between intimacy and autonomy.

What's Next For The Detective?

For someone caught in Detective Mode, the hardest part isn't noticing - it's knowing what to do with what they've seen. Their attention to detail is real, and often accurate, but anxiety twists that skill into something exhausting and corrosive. What's needed isn't to shut down the Detective entirely, but to retrain it.

The path forward is learning how to separate ghosts of the past from what's actually happening in the present, how to distinguish between anxiety's story and reality's signals. It's about gradually shifting focus so that trust and connection come back into view, rather than being filtered out. And it's about finding a way to communicate anxious thoughts that doesn't put a partner on trial, but instead opens the door to curiosity and closeness.

The Detective doesn't need less awareness - they need a framework for directing that awareness in a healthier way. When they have strategies that ground their observations, broaden their attention to include signs of safety, and translate suspicion into connection, the relationship stops feeling like a crime scene and starts feeling like a place where love can breathe again.

For some people, that shift happens most effectively with the support of therapy or relationship coaching. Working with a counselor can help uncover the roots of hypervigilance, practice new patterns in a safe space, and repair trust in both self and partner. If you're in California or Los Angeles and want to take that step, you can make an appointment with me and read more at www.oliverdrakefordtherapy.com.

And if you're not ready for therapy or relationship coaching just yet, but want to begin breaking free of Detective Mode, I've put together a step-by-step guide that expands on this approach. It's designed to give you practical ways to calm the anxious Detective in your mind and start building more clarity, safety, and connection in your relationship.

FAQ: Relationship Anxiety vs. Intuition

Q: Can anxiety feel exactly like intuition?

Yes - anxiety can disguise itself as intuition because it's urgent, repetitive, and emotionally intense. Real gut feelings usually don't recycle old betrayals or demand endless checking; anxiety does.

Q: What physical signs point to anxiety, not intuition?

Anxiety often shows up in the body with racing thoughts, a tight chest, urgency to act, or restless energy. Intuition may bring concern, but it doesn't flood your nervous system with adrenaline in the same way.

Q: How do I stop mind-reading my partner? 

Notice when you're building a case from pauses, emojis, or tone shifts. Instead of assuming, pause, name the anxious story in your head, and choose to ask directly or step back rather than investigate.

Q: What if my gut is right - how do I act without panic?

Treat your intuition as one piece of data, not a complete verdict. Slow down, gather more information, and decide how to respond consciously, not reactively - that way you honor your instincts without letting anxiety run the show. 

Oliver Drakeford is a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist (LMFT) in Los Angeles with over a decade of experience helping couples navigate anxiety, intimacy, and family systems."