A beginner’s guide to Interoception - Your eighth Sense
Read time : 6-8 minutes
Includes an audio practice of 11 minutes
If we can recognise where we are, we can support ourselves where we are.
‘All symptoms are about fixity - all healing is about moving from fixity to flow’ - Peter Levine
We need to be able to sense where we are, then we can more easily move from fixity to flow. Interoception is a sense that helps us with this.
When our nervous systems become dysregulated through the events of our lives, stress and trauma, we tend to become less in touch with the internal experience of our bodies, as well as having a less accurate perception of our environment. We can become fixed on externally focused behaviours, for example keeping busy to distract ourselves from feeling. Paradoxically, the less we’re in touch with what we feel, the more intense our reactions and responses tend to be : they’re unconscious, and they drive us in unconscious ways.
Interoception, the perception of sensations inside our body - everything from the skin and deeper down, is a sense that brings us back into relationship with our body. We can make a practice of feeling, and as we do this, we can process our experiences more effectively, instead of getting shut off from them or fixed in them. As we connect with our experiences through sensation, we get to welcome in all of our experiences : the ones we label as ‘good’ and the ones we label as ‘bad’ too. As we do this, we widen our nervous system capacity, our ability to be with stress, and to regulate our emotions more effectively. We also get more choice in how we respond to what we feel.
'Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.' - Carl Jung
‘All the evidence suggests that people who have better interoceptive awareness have better emotional awareness and fewer body image concerns’ Manos Tsakiris - Professor of Psychology at Royal Holloway
Interoception - Diving Deeper
Interoception - also known as our ‘eight sense’ - is the felt-sense of our inner body - everything from the skin and beneath : your organs, muscles, joints, and the processes like digestion and circulation. This sense gives us the ability to feel what is happening inside our body (eg ‘need the loo, hungry, cold, exhausted’).
In addition to your five outer (exteroception) senses - sight, sound, smell, touch, taste
We also have :
Proprioception : which is the awareness of where our muscles, joints and whole body is in space, in relation to our surroundings. So for example, if we have our eyes closed, and we try to touch our nose with our finger, it’s proprioception that lets us accurately gauge the distance to do this.
The Vestibular System : This provides your brain with information about balance, motion, and the location of your head and body in relation to your surroundings.
With interoception, we’re able to track our internal physiological processes : how our cells and organs, our digestion, circulation of fluids, muscles and connective tissue feel. If we feel something is ‘off’ we can then make adjustments to come back to balance (which is called homeostasis).
By practising interoceptive awareness, we can strengthen it, and by doing this we can help our ability to come back to homeostasis (see below for an audio recording which is designed to help strengthen interoception).
The vagus nerve and its role in interoception
The vagus nerve, which means ‘wandering nerve’ in latin, is a long nerve which starts at our brainstem and goes down into our face, to the thorax (rib cage), down into the abdomen. 80% of its fibres are sensory, and it provides a feedback loop from your body to your brain, brain to body, and gives us the sensory information we pick up through interoception. The sensory fibres of the vagus nerve send information from our organs back to an area of the brain called the insula. The remaining 20% of it’s fibres are motor - the information that's received by the brain then triggers signals from the brain down into the body to make adjustments to come back to homeostasis. The way these signals are interpreted by your brain is key to this process, and will affect the outcome in terms of our physical, mental and emotional health.
The link between interoception and emotional health
There’s a connection between how strong or accurate our sense of interoception is and our emotional health and regulation. Interoception allows us to pick up and register the felt sense of our emotions, through sensations in our body. Our ability to pick up sensations will determine how in-tune / or connected with our bodies we are, and you could say how ‘at home’ we feel in our own bodies.
We might register that we feel ‘rubbish’ emotionally, and actually it’s something physical that we need, like a hearty lunch. Our ability to distinguish between them might not be very refined, but again, this is something we can strengthen, through practice.
The link between interoception and overriding our own body boundaries
If we have low-level, or inaccurate interoception, this will mean our connection to our felt sense, physically and emotionally, is less sensitive. If we’re in this place, it’s also more likely that we override signals from our bodies - like pressure that tells us we’ve had ‘enough’, a sense of tension that tells us we’ve worked enough, and now it’s time to rest. This low level or inaccurate interoception is linked with chronic health issues, like chronic pain, anxiety, depression and gut disorders.
We can strengthen interoception, and there are benefits to this
When we practice interoceptive awareness, we can strengthen our connection to it, and there are several benefits : it’s inherently soothing, actually improves the physiological processes in your body like digestion, and the function of your organs, and it also helps with emotional regulation.
When we retrain interoception, and we notice, acknowledge and allow all sensations (tension and constriction, as well as more easy sensations), when we do this in a little and often way so it’s gentle, not overwhelming and you can remain grounded, this can restore regulation to your nervous system.
As you restore the connection between your brain and your body, your nervous system can become more adaptable and flexible and provide you with more well-balanced energy.
An Audio Practice for Strengthening our sense of Interception
Tapping and Tracking Sensations
In this practice, first we tap the body for a few minutes, to increase the sensory input, and ‘turn up the volume’ on sensation. We then track the sensations : notice and follow them with our awareness for a couple of minutes. As we make a practice of noticing sensations, we can get better at this and as we do, we can also notice the difference between different types of sensations. So our hunger can be distinguised from our tiredness, and our joy can be felt. Sensations, also, tend to not be static, but to move, shift and change. As we experience this, we can perhaps also get the understanding from direct experience of how all the experiences we have are not constant, but shifting and changing, too.
The audio practice is below that you could follow, if you’d like to.
You could try this 2-3 times a week, or even daily, for a little while, and notice if your ability to stay with your felt-sense, and sensation, improves over time? When you’re familiar with the practice, you might prefer to do it by yourself rather than follow the recording, or you could follow the recording each time.
Sensations Word List
To help get better discernment between different types of sensation, I’ve also added a sensation word list below. Can you name the specific types of sensation that you connect with in your body, and get more discerning and specific in your perception, over time?
Intensity of Sensations
Sharp, dull, intense, weak, soft, hard, pressure, solid
Muscle Sensations
Shuddering, aching, tense, aching, trembling, sharp, twitching, pulsing, fluttery, shaky, shuddering, throbbing
Skin sensations
Itchy, prickly, tingly, sweaty, moist, clammy, dry, flushed, goosebumps
Temperature
Frozen, icy, cold, cool, numb, warm, hot, boiling, steaming
Constriction Sensations
Stuck, contracted, knotted, tight, blocked, congested, tense, constricted, compressed, breathless, suffocating
Expansion Sensations
Expansive, floating, flowing, fluid, relaxed, radiating, glowing, waves, streaming
Whole Body Sensations
BTrembling, gurgling, heavy, energised, thick, light, fizzy, vibrating, calm, wobbling, fidgety, flaccid, spinning, full, jumpy, buzzing, puffy, tingling, jittery, faint
Working Together further on this
It’s often so helpful to work with someone on this, you don’t have to do it alone. It’s my intention to provide solid information and good value here, especially for people who are not financially in a position to afford working with someone at the moment. At the same time, working with a practitioner can really help to create leaps in your understanding and to help you grow and develop more than when approaching the work by yourself.
Three ways I can work with you to help you build more Interoceptive awareness :
Group Movement classes (online)
Somatic Experiencing Sessions (online and in-person Canford Cliffs, Dorset, UK)
Bodywork sessions (in-person Stoke Newington, London and Canford Cliffs, Dorset, UK)
Send me a message to enquire about any of the above, or read further through the menu above
Research on Interoception
‘Interoception: A Multi-Sensory Foundation of Participation in Daily Life’ 2022, Carolyn Schmitt and Sarah Schoen
‘Interoceptive Awareness Skills for Emotion Regulation: Theory and Approach of Mindful Awareness in Body-Oriented Therapy (MABT)’ 2018 Cynthia J Price and Carole Hooven