Right now, as you read these words, your heart is beating. Can you feel it? Without placing your hand on your chest or your fingers on your pulse point, can you sense the rhythm of your own heart? Most people cannot—or if they can, they're significantly off when asked to count their heartbeats accurately.
This simple inability points to a profound skill deficit that affects virtually everything about how we experience and regulate our inner lives. The skill is called interoception—the sense of the internal state of the body—and most of us were never taught it.
What Is Interoception?
We're familiar with the five external senses: sight, hearing, taste, smell, and touch. But we have another sense, equally important but far less recognized: the sense of our internal bodily states. This is interoception.
Interoception includes awareness of heartbeat, breath, hunger, thirst, temperature, pain, and crucially, the subtle physiological shifts that constitute our emotional experience. That knot in your stomach before a difficult conversation, the warmth in your chest when you feel loved, the electric tightness of anxiety—all of these are interoceptive experiences.
"Emotions aren't things that happen to us from outside. They arise as interpretations of bodily signals. Without interoception, we're flying blind through our emotional landscape."
The science here is fascinating. Neuroscientist Antonio Damasio and others have shown that emotions are not purely mental phenomena—they are, at their foundation, perceptions of bodily states. When we feel afraid, we're sensing the racing heart, the quick breath, the muscle tension that constitute the body's fear response. The "feeling" of fear is the awareness of these physiological changes.
Why Does This Matter?
The implications of poor interoception are far-reaching. Consider emotional regulation—the capacity to manage our emotional states. How can we regulate something we can't accurately perceive? It would be like trying to drive a car while blindfolded.
People with poor interoceptive awareness often experience their emotions as sudden, overwhelming, and mysterious. An emotion seems to come out of nowhere, fully formed and irresistible. But emotions don't actually work this way. They build gradually through cascading physiological changes. The person who can sense these early signals has a window of opportunity to respond—to breathe, to ground, to choose. The person who can't sense them is at the mercy of the fully-formed emotional storm.
Research consistently shows that interoceptive awareness correlates with emotional intelligence, better decision-making, and improved mental health outcomes. People who can accurately perceive their bodily signals report better emotional regulation, less anxiety, and greater wellbeing.
The Modern Interoception Deficit
If interoception is so important, why are most of us so bad at it? Several factors contribute:
First, we live predominantly in our heads. Modern life is abstract, conceptual, screen-mediated. We spend our days processing information, managing symbols, navigating digital environments. The body becomes little more than a vehicle for carrying our heads from meeting to meeting, screen to screen.
Second, we've learned to override bodily signals. Hungry? Power through. Tired? Have coffee. Stressed? Ignore it. The ability to override the body is sometimes useful, but as a default operating mode, it creates disconnection. We become strangers to our own physiology.
Third, our environment provides constant external stimulation. The signals competing for our attention are overwhelmingly external—notifications, media, other people's demands. The subtle internal signals of the body are easily drowned out.
The Anatomy of Interoception
The primary brain region involved in interoception is the insula—a fold of cortex hidden beneath the temporal and frontal lobes. The insula receives input from throughout the body via the vagus nerve and other pathways, creating what neuroscientist Bud Craig calls a "moment-to-moment" map of physiological state.
Crucially, the insula is not just a passive receiver. It actively constructs our experience of embodiment. The richness or poverty of interoceptive experience depends not just on what signals the body sends, but on how well the brain's interoceptive systems can receive and interpret them.
And here's the good news: these systems are trainable. The insula, like other brain regions, shows plasticity. Practices that develop interoceptive awareness actually change the brain, enhancing both the structure and function of interoceptive networks.
Developing Interoceptive Awareness
How do we develop this neglected capacity? The practices are simple, though not always easy:
Breath Awareness
The simplest entry point is the breath. Unlike heartbeat, breathing can be both automatic and voluntary, making it accessible to conscious attention. Simply noticing the physical sensations of breathing—the rise and fall of the chest or belly, the temperature of air in the nostrils, the pause between breaths—begins to develop interoceptive capacity.
Body Scanning
A more systematic practice involves moving attention deliberately through the body, region by region, noticing whatever sensations are present. This practice, central to many contemplative traditions, trains the capacity to perceive subtle bodily states that normally fly below the radar of awareness.
Emotion-Body Mapping
When an emotion arises, can you locate it in the body? Where exactly do you feel anger, sadness, joy, fear? This practice builds the crucial link between emotional experience and its physiological substrate, giving you access to emotions at their source rather than after they've fully formed.
Heartbeat Perception
Simply trying to perceive your heartbeat, without taking your pulse, develops interoceptive sensitivity. Research shows that this capacity can be trained—people who practice improve their accuracy over time.
Interoception and Equanimity
For those interested in developing genuine equanimity, interoception is foundational. The equanimous response to difficulty isn't to suppress or ignore what's arising—it's to meet it with full awareness and acceptance. But you can't accept what you can't perceive.
Enhanced interoception allows us to catch emotional reactions early, when they're still subtle physiological shifts rather than overwhelming experiences. It gives us a window of response—a moment of choice between stimulus and reaction that is unavailable to the interoceptively blind.
Perhaps most importantly, interoception reconnects us with the body as a source of wisdom. The body knows things the mind doesn't. It carries information about safety and danger, about what nourishes and what depletes. Learning to listen to this information—truly listen, not just intellectually acknowledge—opens a channel of intelligence that most of us have been ignoring.
The practice is simple: pay attention to the body. Not once in a while, but regularly, consistently, as a fundamental orientation to experience. Over time, the inner landscape that was dark begins to illuminate. What was vague becomes clear. What was overwhelming becomes workable. This is the gift of interoception—not just a skill, but a homecoming to the body we've been inhabiting all along.