However, when the researchers repeated the task, this time substituting images instead of words, depressed people didn’t have the same struggle. “We think the difference with semantics versus visual is related to the rumination people do when they’re depressed: You try to solve problems, but you just think in circles.” In other words, you can’t trust the language of your own brain.

She noted that in her work as a clinical psychologist, she helps people who are caught up in conflicting motivations. When you are a child, your motivations tend to be more straightforward, she explained. You like candy, and you don’t like social studies . Period.

But as you get older, you start developing conflicting motivations. “For example, you want to be free, but you want to be in a partnership; you want control, but you want to be taken care of,” she said. “You may have a specific phase in life where you cannot balance out the conflicts so well anymore, and things get stuck.” It’s hard to trust your gut when you feel stuck. Her approach is to help people get back in touch with their real selves, so they can regain access to the unconscious.

Dr. Pearson, too, believes that intuition can be compromised by life circumstances. “Intuition is only as good as the information you rely on,” he said. If the context you relied on changes, the information isn’t necessarily good anymore. He offers an analogy from physics: the difference between the observable world, which follows certain laws of physics, and the quantum world, which is nothing like the observable world. You can have the best intuition when you’re out among the electrons. But shrink yourself down inside an electron and your intuition ceases to be relevant, because the context has changed.

So getting older is not to blame for my hobbled gut instinct; rather, it may be my shifting context, along with the accompanying anxiety that comes with that. I left the knowable world and entered into my own quantum world when I had two kids in two years in my mid-30s. I went from a context of building a career and a family, to maintaining a career and a family. A world where opportunity seemed boundless, to one where every step felt like something was at stake. The contrasting information from my old world and my new world was like antimatter and matter meeting, only to annihilate each other.

The good news is that we seem to be able to train our intuition to get better. This is what Dr. Pearson plans to research next. In my case, it means training it to work inside a new context — something I might already be doing.

In fact, when I think back to that moment of sobbing on the bathroom floor, I see now that I was already trying to find a new pathway for better information. I remembered that I had thought about my dad , who passed away four years ago. But I was thinking about him less as a daughter, the young girl I once was, and more as a fellow parent, spouse and breadwinner — roles he had for more than 50 years and that I was now experiencing.