Developing Your Sixth Sense & Understanding Its Meaning

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Intuitive counselor Kari Samuels shares how to understand and grow your sixth sense

Co-authored by Kari Samuels and Jennifer Vasquez, BA, MA

Last Updated: April 6, 2026 Fact Checked

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Quieting Your Mind

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Tapping into Your Intuition

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Cultivating Your Perception

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What is your sixth sense?

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Benefits

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Video

The sixth sense is sometimes described as intuition, or the sense of knowing something without previous knowledge about it. The idea of the “sixth sense” is that in addition to our basic five senses, we have a sense that’s attuned to subtler, non-physical sensations. For this article, we partnered with intuitive counselors to find out how and why to tap into your “sixth sense.” From quieting your mind to cultivating your perception, we’re sharing how to nurture your intuition.

Quick Tips for Strengthening Your Sixth Sense

Intuitive counselor Kari Samuels explains that getting in tune with your intuition involves getting out of your head and listening to your heart. Here are some ways you can do this:

Quiet your mind by talking walks, meditating, and focusing your attention outward.
Access your intuition by keeping a dream journal.
Nurture your perception by paying attention to detail and recording your observations.

Section 1 of 5:

Quieting Your Mind

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Take a walk. Going for regular reflective walks can be an excellent way to get out of your conscious mind and into a more intuitive, sensory state. Walk somewhere where it’s calm and quiet. According to Samuels, many people feel that being close to nature helps connect you to a place that’s “bigger than you,” which helps you become more attuned to the world around you and less fixated on your conscious and rational mind.^{[1]
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Expert Source

Kari Samuels
Intuitive Counselor & Happiness Coach

Expert Interview}
- As you walk, intentionally turn your attention outward. Focus on what you see, smell, taste, and touch. Try to pick up the smallest sounds you can. Pay close attention to small changes in the landscape. Try to sense the smallest changes in temperature, wind, and pressure.
- Keep a notebook in which you record the things you perceive. Take note of what you observe and how you react to those perceptions.
Meet the wikiHow Experts

Kari Samuels is an intuitive counselor who has over 21 years of experience helping people develop their intuitive gifts.

Kelly Ferguson is an Intuitive Empowerment Coach and founder of the Intuitive Empowerment Academy based in Toronto, Canada. She specializes in helping others develop and enhance their intuitive abilities.
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Develop a meditation practice. Part of learning to be attuned to the world around you is learning to quiet your own mind and calmly observe. Meditation trains your mind to move away from its normal freneticism and to tap into your body’s inner calm.
- Begin by finding a calm place where you can sit quietly.
- Close your eyes and begin paying attention to the sounds, smells, and physical sensations around you.
- Breathe deeply and regularly, focusing on breathing through your diaphragm and noticing the pause between each breath.
- When random thoughts pop into your mind, gently and calmly let them go. Don’t follow them.
- Gradually build up the length of time you spend meditating. At first, you may only practice for 5 minutes a day. Gradually build up to 10 minutes a day, then 15, then 20.
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Direct your thoughts outward. When you’re overly focused on the running dialogue in your own head, you easily miss what’s going on with other people and things in the world around you. Paying attention to things outside of yourself helps you to be more mindful of the emotions and experiences of others.
- When you find yourself caught up in your own head, consciously turn your focus outward and notice the people, places, and things around you.
- Take outward actions, like exercising and socializing. These activities not only calm your mind but also boost your mental health.^{[2]
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Section 2 of 5:

Tapping into Your Intuition

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Cultivate your intuition. Samuels explains that intuition is the term for “gut feeling”—something that you know or think likely based on instinctive feeling rather than conscious reasoning.^{[3]
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Expert Source

Kari Samuels
Intuitive Counselor & Happiness Coach

Expert Interview} When you get an instant liking or disliking for someone you just met, or have a good or bad feeling about something about to happen, it’s considered intuitive feeling.
- Scientists believe intuition is a form of quick information processing, and it’s a skill that can be developed with practice and attention.^{[4]
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- The ability to use intuition develops out of repeated exposure to various situations and outcomes.
- Consequently, developing your intuition begins with exposing yourself to people, places, and things and observing them closely.^{[5]
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  Research source} The more practiced you become at observing others and your unconscious reactions to them, the more attuned you’ll be to your intuition.^{[6]
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- If you want to know how strong your intuition is, take our How Intuitive Am I quiz!
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Keep a dream journal. Make it a habit to write down everything you can remember from your dreams immediately upon waking up in a dedicated journal. Note people, events, places, objects, and feelings. Try to make connections between the content of your dreams and ongoing feelings or situations from your conscious life.
- Dreams are thought to be unconscious expressions of our inner feelings, thoughts, and ideas. As such, Samuels shares that they can contain valuable intuitive information of which your conscious mind may be unaware.^{[7]
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  Kari Samuels
  Intuitive Counselor & Happiness Coach
  
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- As you begin to draw connections between your conscious and unconscious experience, you’ll become more aware of and attuned to the more subtle ideas and experiences happening below the surface of your immediate consciousness.
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Free write. Free writing involves sitting down with a blank sheet of paper and writing down whatever thoughts come. Free writing can be an extremely useful practice because it allows you to tap into the part of your consciousness that exists before your rational mind intercedes.
- To free write, sit down in a quiet, distraction-free place. Take out a blank sheet of paper and begin writing whatever comes to mind, even if it’s just “I don’t know what to write.”
- Continue writing until you’ve exhausted your thoughts.
- If you need a bit more prompting to help you get started, you can begin by asking yourself a question such as, “What do I need an answer to?” or, “What’s been on my mind lately?” You’ll be surprised by where you can go through free writing and by the unexpected insights you’ll stumble upon.

Section 3 of 5:

Cultivating Your Perception

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Learn to notice small things. Part of developing a sixth sense is learning how to pay close attention to your surroundings, particularly to small or minute details. The more attention you give to your surroundings, the more aware you become of slight changes and variations, and the more attuned you become to the world around you.^{[8]
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- Enhancing your perception this way helps you to notice subtle shifts and changes in your environment and eventually to anticipate certain things before they happen.
- For example, imagine a street you travel frequently. Write down as many details as you’re able to remember, then go visit that street and carefully fill in the blanks in your memory. Write down a detailed description of what you see. Later, test yourself to see how accurately you remembered the details you wrote down.
Teach yourself to focus your attention outward rather than inward. Take a notebook with you when you go places. Note what you see and sense in as much detail as possible. Make this a regular practice until you find yourself doing it automatically, with or without the notebook. Doing so will help you develop sensitivity to what goes on around you and will teach you to quiet your own thoughts and preoccupations when necessary.
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Learn to watch and listen closely. When talking with someone, train yourself to put your full attention on them. When you learn to observe someone closely and attentively, you often learn to pick up on small, nearly imperceptible cues that will indicate what the person is truly feeling or thinking.
- Note small variations in their tone and inflection, watch the movement of their eyes and the contraction or dilation of their pupils, pay attention to the words they choose, and notice the pauses and silences between their words.
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Rely on senses that don’t require sight. We tend to depend on our vision to interpret the world around us, so much so that sight can come to predominate over our other senses. But if you consciously work on prioritizing senses other than sight, you can begin to perceive more subtle variations in the environment of which you were previously unaware.
- Try closing your eyes and using your other senses to perceive people as they walk by. Note the sound of their clothing, footfalls, and breathing. Note their smell. Note the subtle changes in the air around them as they move. Note any temperature changes that occur as they pass. See if you can detect where their attention is directed and if you can tell when their attention falls on you.
- As you become more sensitive to people and the energy they give off, see if you can notice the particular type of energy of each person who passes. Can you pick up on any tension or on any negative or positive energy?
- Try to assess the energy of rooms you walk into. Can you sense any positive or negative energy?

Section 4 of 5:

What is your sixth sense?

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The sixth sense relies on instinct rather than the five senses to make judgements. The five basic senses are smell, sight, taste, touch, and hearing. These senses are based on material sensations—they allow us to perceive things that physically exist around us. But our sixth sense makes it possible for us to know things that aren’t obvious or perceptible by our other five senses. Also known as extrasensory perception (ESP), the sixth sense encompasses unique mental abilities such as being able to predict the future or know another person’s thoughts. Clairvoyance, telepathy, precognition, retrocognition, and psychokinesis are considered the main types of ESP by parapsychologists.^{[9]
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- Intuitive empowerment coach Kelly Ferguson explains the sixth sense in terms of our intuition. She explains that it’s “a combination of our natural senses that come through our body of seeing, feeling, hearing and knowing, and also, being in a space of imagination, allowing us to receive energy or information in our best good so that we can make accurate decisions for our life."^{[10]
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- There are also scientific studies that are looking at a sixth sense referred to as “proprioception,” which is our body’s subconscious ability to know its position and movements.^{[11]
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Section 5 of 5:

Benefits of Improving Your Sixth Sense

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Helps create a calmer and more balanced mind. Tapping into and cultivating your sixth sense or intuition plays an important role in keeping your mental state calm and balanced. When you regularly check in with your intuitive mind, you check in with feelings, thoughts, and ideas that aren’t always apparent to your daily conscious mind. Doing so allows you to recognize and address feelings or ideas that may be negatively affecting you.
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Increases empathy and creativity. Samuels explains that the more you develop your awareness of others and the world around you, the more understanding and empathetic you’ll become.^{[12]
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Expert Source

Kari Samuels
Intuitive Counselor & Happiness Coach

Expert Interview} Cultivating intuition is an excellent way to help you feel closer to and less alienated from people and things around you. It's also thought to help increase imagination and creativity, which is particularly helpful if you’re creative or have run into a mental rut.