Interoception is our ability to feel what’s happening within our own body- something many of us have learned to tune out without realizing it
I was sitting with my dog the other day, holding him against my chest while he was on edge (he has dementia and gets bouts of anxiety) feeling him tremble a little when something shifted in my attention.
I turned inward. I had a subtle awareness of the stress I myself had been carrying but wasn’t fully aware of it.
Underneath the surface of what looked, from the outside, like a pretty normal afternoon, my nervous system was on edge. A deep tension sitting in my core, low in my chest- not at all dramatic, not obvious, just there. Subtly but Persistently. The kind of thing you could go weeks without noticing if you never stopped to look.
this might sound a little silly but I’d been stressed for a while. I knew that intellectually. But I hadn’t actually “felt” it in my body until that moment. When I paused and felt inward, I could feel this almost electrically charged feeling in my core.
And the moment I did (the moment I leaned into that tension, let myself acknowledge and steady it) my dog stopped shaking. As the electric feeling at the center of my being mellowed for a second- my dog’s body responded. I wasn’t sure if it was just a fluke or actual resonance.
My attention quickly drifted back out as I pondered that idea. The tension crept back in. He started trembling again.. I was able to calm my system again & again and each time the result was the same- he would stop physically shaking.
Now I don’t claim that to mean anything profound. I don’t share that as a mystical story. I share it because it taught me something concrete about how disconnected I’d been from my own interior— and how much that disconnection had been running my life without my knowledge. and that without the awareness of my own inner-world I am much less capable of doing anything about it.
Interoception is the nervous system’s capacity to sense the internal state of the body-
Heartbeat, breath, temperature, tension, hunger, discomfort, calm. It’s sometimes called the “eighth sense”, and researchers like Dr. Sarah Garfinkel at the University of Sussex have demonstrated that it’s foundational to emotional regulation, decision-making, and self-awareness.
When interoception is well developed, internal signals function like a reliable compass. Discomfort guides you away from what isn’t working. Ease signals alignment. The body participates actively in helping you navigate your life.
When it’s disrupted (when the connection between internal signal & conscious awareness gets dampened or distorted) you lose access to that compass. You move through the world reading external cues instead of internal ones. You intellectualize your emotional states rather than feeling them. You can be flooded with stress hormones & barely register that anything is wrong.
This is not a character flaw. It’s a learned adaptation.
And IEC environments are exceptionally good at producing it.
Why IEC Environments Disrupt Interoception
The Missing Link article on IEC here
In homes where emotional connection is inconsistent (where the adults around us were not attuned to their own internal states, let alone ours) children don’t learn to listen inward.
They learn to watch outward.
When a child’s emotional signals are not mirrored back (when they feel something and no one around them acknowledges or validates that feeling) the brain gradually learns to treat those signals as unreliable. Neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett’s research on emotion construction demonstrates that the brain is constantly making predictions about body states based on past experience. When internal signals have historically been overridden, dismissed, or simply never acknowledged, the brain’s predictive model shifts accordingly. It stops prioritizing those signals. They get quieter & harder to access.
Meanwhile, the child learns to scan the external environment for information about what’s safe, what’s expected, what’s coming. Hypervigilance develops- a finely tuned radar for other people’s moods, tones, energies, and signals. This is adaptive in an unpredictable emotional environment. You need to know what’s coming from the outside when the inside isn’t being tended to.
But over time, the external radar becomes the dominant mode. And the internal one goes quiet from disuse.
This is how someone can walk around for years or even decades under significant stress, running a dysregulated nervous system, and genuinely not know it. Not because they’re in denial. But because they were never taught to look there. And the looking, like any skill, atrophies without practice.
What It Actually Looks Like
For most of my life, my stress showed up in how I moved through the world before I ever registered it as stress.
Shorter with people. Less warm. Less open. Less patient. Moving faster, thinking sharper, tolerating less.
I could usually tell something was off because of how I was behaving- not because I’d felt something internally & responded to it. The behavior was the signal. The body had already been speaking for a while by then.
That afternoon with my dog was different. For a moment, I actually felt the energy of it before it even expressed itself outward. Felt the exact location of it, deep in the sternum, sitting in the center of my chest. Felt its energy, like electricity turned up just a bit too high.
And in feeling it, I had a choice that I don’t usually have when I’m already acting from it.
That’s what interoception gives you. It doesn’t magically take the stress away or immediately create a new peaceful reality. But it does give a moment of awareness before the automatic response. A small but real gap between what the body is experiencing & what you do next.
That gap is where agency lives.
Why This Matters Beyond the Personal
When we’re disconnected from our own interior, we’re not just flying blind emotionally. We’re also much less able to regulate in relationship with others.
The polyvagal theory, developed by Dr. Stephen Porges, describes how the autonomic nervous system communicates safety and threat- not just internally, but between people. We co-regulate. We settle each other’s nervous systems through presence, tone, touch, and attunement. But that co-regulation requires some degree of access to our own interior state. We can’t offer what we don’t have.
My dog felt my nervous system settle because it actually settled (briefly & imperfectly, but genuinely) Not because I performed calmness. Because I found a thread of it internally and followed it.
That’s not something I could have faked. And it’s not something I could have accessed at all if I hadn’t stopped and felt inward.
Starting to Come Back
Rebuilding interoceptive awareness isn’t dramatic. It doesn’t require a meditation retreat or a specific technique.
It starts with pausing and asking a simple question: “what is actually happening in my body right now?”
Not what am I thinking. Not what do I feel emotionally in the conceptual sense.
What is physically happening. Where is there tension & Where is there ease. What is the quality of my breath. What does the center of my chest feel like right now.
It feels strange at first (even awkward) especially for those of us who grew up disconnected from our bodies. There can be a kind of blankness when you first turn the attention inward, like trying to tune into a station that’s been off the air for years.
That blankness is information too. It tells you how long the channel has been quiet.
But it comes back. Slowly, with practice & with patience it does come back.
And when it does, things begin to shift. Not all at once. But steadily, the signals get clearer. The gap between internal experience and conscious awareness starts to close. You begin to know, in real time, what your body is actually living through.
And from there, you can actually do something about it.
Breaking IEC Informed Behavior patterns
The Masked Child: How IEC Environments Teach Us to Hide and What It Costs
IEC-Informed Self-Reliance: When Strength Becomes a Barrier to Connection
Article Categories:
- Holistic Nervous System Regulation
- I.E.C. Informed Behavior
- Perspective Shift
- Reflections
- Stoicism for Healing
- Uncategorized
Leave a Reply