If you close your eyes and focus on your body, can you sense your heartbeat without touching your chest or checking your pulse? Now, try doing this with your eyes open. This simple exercise measures your ability to practice “interoception.”
Interoception is the ability to sense your internal states, such as signals from your inner organs and muscles. This includes awareness of your heart. Many people struggle to detect their heartbeat or find it challenging. Their interoceptive abilities are not well developed. On the other hand, some people can easily sense their heartbeat, indicating a higher level of interoceptive ability.
Interoception is not a widely known term. I’ve used it frequently in my teaching since I first came across it a few years ago, and there’s almost always someone who hasn’t heard of it before. Recently, it’s become clear that lacking good interoception has significant drawbacks.
Not being able to sense your body’s inner states leads to poor emotional regulation. Imagine driving a car without a fuel gauge; you’d likely run out of fuel often because you wouldn’t have crucial information about your vehicle’s state. Similarly, if you’re unaware of your body’s signals until they’re intense, you can’t regulate your emotions well. For example, by the time you notice you’re anxious, you might already be very anxious. Recognizing these signals earlier allows you to take action sooner to stay calm.
Low interoceptive ability is linked to depression. In one study, women with depression (but not anxiety) scored lower on a heartbeat detection test compared to a control group. The poorer their ability to detect their heartbeat, the fewer positive feelings they reported.
This lack of interoceptive awareness also affects decision-making, as making decisions isn’t purely logical. We largely base decisions on how we feel. If we can’t detect our feelings, we struggle to make decisions. In fact, we might end up making poor choices, such as trusting someone untrustworthy or selecting an unsatisfying job.
My partner, who tends to be anxious, struggled to detect her heartbeat in a simple test. While this is just my observation, it seems that some people can only feel their heartbeat when they’re anxious. Feeling their heart beat stronger under those conditions might be misinterpreted as a sign that something is wrong, leading to more anxiety.
People with anxiety disorders typically have a heightened awareness of interoceptive signals. The challenge may be that these signals (like a faster heartbeat or stomach discomfort) are misinterpreted as signs something abnormal is happening, which can cause anxiety about being anxious.
Meditation, especially in the Buddhist tradition, emphasizes paying attention to the body’s sensations. Many meditators, including myself, report that meditation has heightened their sensitivity to the body. For me, the change has been drastic, from feeling almost nothing to experiencing a vibrant awareness of bodily sensations, which can be very pleasurable. This is my personal experience, though.
In a 2010 study published in Emotion, researchers from the University of California, Berkeley, showed emotive film clips to experienced meditators, professional dancers, and a control group. They measured physiological responses and asked participants to report their feelings using a dial.
The study aimed to assess how well the participants’ self-reported experiences matched their physiological states. Meditators showed the highest coherence, followed by dancers, with the control group having the lowest coherence. Meditators also reported the highest levels of visceral awareness, followed by dancers, and then the control group.
It appears that meditation training improves internal awareness. To determine if this effect was due to practice, researchers looked for a correlation between length of practice and body awareness but found no significant link, possibly due to the small sample size.
In a 2021 study published in The Lancet, researchers explored the effects of six sessions of interoception training on autistic adults with persistent anxiety symptoms. Autistic individuals often struggle with interoception and may over-emphasize the sensations they do feel. The training aimed to improve their heartbeat detection and help them interpret and regulate interoceptive signals better. Astonishingly, three months after the intervention, 31 percent of participants no longer had an anxiety disorder.
Interoception can be learned, significantly impacting well-being. Traditional mindfulness of breathing meditation often narrowly focuses on breath sensations, providing limited interoception training. My approach encourages awareness of the whole body’s movements and sensations during breathing, which can reveal subtler, often ignored sensations.
I encourage you to try the meditation practice outlined in my book, “This Difficult Thing of Being Human,” to experience full-body breathing sensations.