You Know The Gut Feeling You Have When Things Go Wrong? It Has A Name: Interoception

Imagine a world in which our bodies had their own built-in health and wellness data tracker, which kept tabs on our rest, heart rate, and breathing, the way an Apple Watch would. No longer would we have to defer to our pieces of wearable tech to check spikes in our heart rates or note our sleep deficits the morning after a disturbed night of rest. Instead, our bodies would keep a score, that we could read ourselves, from our very own data store.

This isn’t some Black Mirror futuristic vision, but rather the reality of a new frontier within mindfulness called interoception. You might not have heard of the term yet, but some of the wellness world’s most prominent voices are extolling the virtues of this ‘basic power of detection that we’re born with,’ including Dr Rangan Chatterjee who makes the case in his latest book, Make Change That Lasts, that interoception is one of science’s most exciting new fields of research.

Interoception is a sixth sense we are born with. It’s not about us interpreting signals from the outside world but about the signals transmitted from our internal organs to our brains. And it can help us carve out time to improve both physical and mental health in a world where external stimuli are often in overdrive. 

Interoception is a way for us to ‘train the mind and body to work better together, so we can almost hack the nervous system to induce calmness,’ says science journalist Caroline Williams, the author of new book Inner Sense: How the New Science of Interoception Can Transform Your Health, who advises working on 'making friends with your body' through breath-focused meditation and mindful movement like Pilates, yoga and Tai Chi. In talking to experts for this piece I realised I had also practiced interoception without knowing. In a recent session, my therapist was encouraging me to ground myself when I sense that my inner child feels fearful. She advised me to close my eyes, focus on my breath, and to place my dominant hand on my chest, my heartbeat pitter pattering beneath my skin. ‘In through the nose,’ she said softly, her voice barely audible. ‘And out through the mouth.’ The exercise, I’d later learn, was a way of developing my own interoceptive awareness.

Interoception Is A Sixth Sense We Are Born With

There are three main types of interoceptive signals: unconscious — heartbeat and breathing, for example, which happen most of the time without much awareness; conscious — which you can teach yourself to tap into, such as thirst, hunger or anxiety — and gut feelings, which are tricky to pinpoint to one particular area of the body but affect you anyway. "These are things like how much energy you've got, and whether you feel like you've got enough energy to do what you need to do, whether you feel capable today and confident, whether you feel a little bit on edge, and you're not quite sure why," Williams notes, adding that interoceptive signals are important because they affect how you feel, what you’re motivated to do, the way you think and the decisions you make, but they’re not easily quantifiable. And while we may have talked about ‘gut feelings’ for years to describe a sense of intuition, many people don’t realise that they’re grounded in science, which is where interoception comes in.

Breathwork exercises are a key part of building interoceptive awareness, although the critical difference between wellness-focused mindfulness breath work and interoceptive breath work is the latter asks that you apply your bodily signals critically to the knowledge you have of what’s happening around you. Rob Rea, a breathwork specialist has seen a marked increase in clients coming to him for help with problems he has treated by helping them to become more interoceptively tuned in. He tells me about a client who’s a principal ballerina at the Royal Opera House. "Before she performs sometimes, we’ll Zoom and she’ll often tell me that she’s in stress mode," Rea explains. "My job is then to regulate her nervous system. I’ll ask her to look around the room and to tell me what she sees, what she’s wearing, which colours she can see in the room. This is called somatic experiencing, which utilises interoception to gain awareness and insight of what’s really happening in the body." Rea then asks his client to tell him what she can hear and feel, and where the feelings are manifesting in the body. "It can feel a little bit like a waste of time for people whenever they close their eyes," Rea says. "But it’s only in getting in touch with what your body’s telling you that you can really hear it properly."

An Improved Sense Of Interoception Can Have A Transformative Impact On A Person’s Wellbeing

I recently shared a traumatic experience from my childhood with my therapist; her response, like Rea’s, was to ask me how I felt, and where in the body the feeling manifested. In locating the feeling — which we uncovered as fear and shame — I was able to process it better, without becoming triggered by it. The exercise was a way of enhancing my interoceptive ability. When I thought about what I experienced as a child later that day and my heart started racing and my stomach sunk, I sat down, closed my eyes and allowed my body to metabolise the feelings that were manifesting in my solar plexus. It made me feel more in control during a moment that otherwise felt overwhelming. 

An improved sense of interoception can have a transformative impact on a person’s wellbeing. Research from 2013 found that good interoceptive awareness was what allowed ‘intuitive’ eaters – those who eat in response to physical rather than emotional cues and as a result eat only when hungry – to keep their weight down. "That's something that's really important these days, because we live in the era of gym selfies, and young people are trying to live up to these unrealistic body images from the outside," Williams says. "And actually, if you feel your body more from the inside, then you like yourself more. You have less body image issues." Another study from 2021 found that by training autistic individuals to be more aware of their heartbeat, stress levels could be dramatically reduced. After six sessions, 31% of them recovered completely from their anxiety, compared to just 16% of the control group. Interoception has also helped experts to understand why physical exercise can help relieve symptoms of depression. The fitter you are, the more active your heart is, and the more attuned you’re likely to be with the body’s muscles and organs. ‘People who are very sedentary may have problems tuning into their interoceptive senses because they haven't experienced their heart rate rising and their breathing rate rising — they may not understand that that’s completely fine and healthy,’ Williams adds.

A Large Part Of Interoception Is Actually Training Yourself To Focus And Pay Attention

Being interoceptively aware is harder than it sounds though. Our increased reliance on digital devices has also impacted our interoceptive awareness. "The digital ecosystem is set up to keep us online and to give us instant dopamine hits," Rea warns. "We're up against a very powerful beast that is training our brains to switch from one thing to another every 8 or 9 seconds. That's a huge change in how our attentions have shifted, so a large part of interoception is actually training yourself to focus and pay attention to what’s happening in your body."

It's something I remember the next time I reach for my phone and start doomscrolling. As my screen flashes through dancing, cooking and hair washing videos, I take a minute to stop and detect what the nebulous feeling of sadness is inside of me, and whereabouts in my body it's located. I sit in the sadness and do some deep breathing just like my therapist advised and I physically feel something shift. The more I do this, the more I feel in tune with, and ultimately in control of, my own body.

While the instruction to ‘listen to your body’ might have been bandied around in the age of wellness, it holds more weight, and scientific backing, than previously thought. Interoception is the sixth sense we could all tap into more. After all, everyone’s body has something to say, it’s just a case of tuning in more intentionally so that we can hear and understand it more clearly.

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Read the original article in ELLE USA