Tap into Interoception to Get Unstuck
I am a reasonably intelligent adult. I have overcome many obstacles to get where I am today. But I’m stuck. I’m stuck when it comes to this one thing. And at this point, I’m just getting more and more frustrated with myself. I’m letting myself spiral or get distracted or totally avoid the one thing altogether. I know it doesn’t make any logical sense. I know what I should do to address the issue. But somehow I can’t make myself actually do it. I want to work through this challenge, get my butt in gear, and follow through. Why can’t I simply do what I need to do and stop being my own worst enemy?
There are dozens of possible answers to this question. If this is how you’re feeling about some aspect of your life, the roots of your concern could be based in neurochemistry, childhood experiences, environmental barriers, a combination of these factors, and more. With so many options for inquiry, it’s easy to feel lost. One very helpful place to get started in your search for answers is, as cheesy as it sounds, inside yourself. Literally.
Interoception is one of our senses
Interoception is the ability to perceive our internal body signals. It is a sense, like vision, hearing or touch. The same way nerve endings in our skin send messages to our brain about pressure, pain, and temperature, nerve endings in our muscles and organs relay information about their current state and activity level. When these messages enter the brain, they are registered and processed to become what we call sensations. With interoception, it can be easy to focus on sensations like muscle tension, chest tightness, and hunger, but more pleasant sensations, like muscle relaxation, chest expansion, and satiation, are just as important.
The tricky part of interoception is that this information about our muscles and organs is often being sent up to the brain without our noticing. For the most part, this is a good thing, essential to our survival and growth. We don’t want to have to think about our breathing rate or heartbeat every moment of every day. We’re busy building roads and computers and relationships and societies. But sometimes we end up too checked out when it comes to our internal state.
A friend of mine once realized he had been walking around disconnected from his body for years. “I was a floating head,” he told me. He treated his body like an inconvenient necessity, a vehicle for his brain. He provided it with the minimal attention needed for survival. For him, and many others having this experience, this disconnection once served a purpose - protected him from feelings and experiences that his younger self was not equipped to manage. It wasn’t until he began practicing mindfulness that he began to close the distance between his mind and his body.
Interoceptive awareness can be improved with mindfulness practice
Mindfulness is a means of developing greater interoceptive awareness - the conscious awareness and processing of your internal body signals. As I mentioned before, your body is always sending signals up to your brain to keep you alive and basically functioning. But human life generally consists of many long-term, complex social and existential goals. And we can get stuck on any number of them due to automatic internal processes that can happen outside conscious awareness. So, in order to work towards those complex goals, it helps to develop more conscious awareness of what our bodies are communicating and intentionally process that information in a productive manner. If you think it sounds easier said than done, you’d be right.
Mindfulness is a practice, not a state of being. It is not a state we can enter and exit at will, but a mental skill that must be learned and improved over time through repetition. What we are practicing in mindfulness is the act of being purposefully, non-judgmentally aware of the present moment. Mindfulness researcher Jon Kabat-Zinn, often stresses the importance of each component of this definition. He emphasizes that we cannot accidentally be mindful; that we habitually think about the past or future and appraise our experience. Therefore, to hold our attention with mindfulness requires persistent effort and patience.
Many find the effort of practicing mindfulness worthwhile, particularly when directed towards interoceptive awareness. This involves directing our attention towards our present internal body sensations. For example, we practice actively paying attention to the rising, squeezing feeling in our throat without labeling it “good” or “bad” or running away from it. Instead we practice observing the sensation as it arises and saying to ourselves, “There is a rising, squeezing feeling in my throat. Interesting. I wonder why? What does it mean? What would I like to do with this information?” It might sound like an alien response to what most of us would immediately identify as pain or discomfort, but this is exactly the kind of “observational distance” that can help us get unstuck. And though it is a common misconception that mindfulness involves clearing your mind, asking questions can be a helpful tool to guide the mind skillfully.
Improving interoception can be the first step in getting unstuck
Unfortunately for many of us, a common knee-jerk reaction to any perceived unpleasantness or craving is an immediate attempt to make it go away as quickly as possible. Upon noticing the not-good, not-right feeling, we might find someone to blame and project anger destructively or assume we’ve messed up and scramble to fix it immediately or quite simply panic, shut down, and space out. Most of the time, these patterns of thought, emotion, and action are so difficult to change because they evolved out of our early attempts to cope with a world that cannot be perfectly attentive to our needs. Our brains learned strategies to deal with the worst of our childhood pains, but these patterns often remain with us into adulthood, like neurological scars. There are many flavors and varying intensities of these unhelpful, distressing reactions, and each of us must first learn to notice our own patterns in order to change them.
By learning to be with our internal body signals from moment-to-moment, we generate tolerance for a broader range of experience, giving us space to pause and think before we act. This is crucial because while mindful interoceptive awareness creates an opportunity to listen to our bodies, it is what we do with this opportunity that really matters. We want to break the pattern of conditioned automaticity - stop jumping into immediate reaction or falling into involuntary inaction. Our muscles and organs provide us with physical hints about how we unconsciously process the world, but we have to use conscious processes to release ourselves from sticky patterns.
The key connection between interoceptive awareness and getting unstuck is learning to interpret our internal body signals and responding to them with intention. This too is more challenging than it sounds (and let’s be honest, it sounds pretty challenging). Perhaps the most important step in this process is the first because nothing will change without it: preparation.
Changing our interpretation of interoceptive signals requires preparation
Once we have become familiar with the process of attending to our internal body signals, we have options for how to interpret them. If we continually feel that tension in our throat and think, “Nope. Nope. Bad. Don’t want. Make it stop. I’m in trouble. I don’t want to cry. I hate this,” then of course, the obvious next step is to search for a way out of this feeling. No one wants to suffer. The problem is that in our search we may find an exit that is not in alignment with our goals or values. For instance, we might avoid asking for a hard-earned raise or resist asking our partner for help during a tough week. Each of these could be major occasions for growth, connection, and joy. But instead we’re thwarted by our own short-sighted protective mechanisms. Darn.
When we feel old patterns creeping in, kind, non-judgemental self-talk comes in handy. By replacing thoughts of fear and avoidance with ones that reflect curiosity and compassion, we stop fueling activity in the part of the brain that would burn down all our long-term dreams to side-step a bit of discomfort today. Here’s where some of the work comes in. To do this effectively, we need to prepare new ways of talking to ourselves during moments of discomfort in advance - even better - in writing. There will always be a future moment of pain, displeasure, disappointment, frustration, you name it. Readying our minds can help us interpret them in more useful ways. Start by writing down one or two forms of discomfort that commonly derail your plans, what you believe triggers them, how you usually interpret them, and what kinder, wiser self-talk you’d like to practice.
When working to change how we interpret our internal body signals, there are a few guiding principles to follow:
Start with curiosity and compassion. Curiosity and compassion are antidotes to anxiety and shame. The natural response to curiosity and compassion is to move closer to the object of our attention, to lean in and learn more, to hug and hold steady. Anxiety and shame prompt the opposite reactions. So when discomfort arises, ask questions with a note of warm, gentle surprise, “Oh? My throat feels tight. I wonder why that is. What is my body trying to tell me? How can I give it what it needs? When could I realistically do that?”
Be honest with yourself. Don’t minimize your experience by telling yourself, “It’s not that bad. It’ll go away soon. Calm down.” Also avoid insincere positivity - “I am amazing and beautiful and everyone loves me, so I don’t need to feel bad right now.” While these statements contain kernels of truth, they also reject your current experience in a way that can amplify distress. Instead work on admitting that the moment is uncomfortable and you don’t know how long it will last, but you can survive and work through it with the strengths and supports you have. This will feel more balanced, authentic, and empowering in the long run.
Stay in the moment with your body. If you notice your thoughts wandering towards worry about the future or regrets about the past, bring yourself back to the present. Name things that you can see, hear, touch, smell, and taste. Say your own name, location, and current activity. Make fists with your hands and pay attention to the feeling as you relax your grip and spread your fingers. Grounding yourself in the present can have a calming effect on the body and mind.
Don’t force it. Sometimes when we’re learning a new skill, we want to rigidly hold on to the “ideal” version of it. Being “perfect” becomes a defense mechanism in itself. However, in the case of mindfulness, forcing yourself to stick to the practice no matter what can be counter-productive and dysregulating. Particularly if you’re new to practicing mindfulness, anticipate and acknowledge the limits of your tolerance. Allow yourself to back off of very intense sensations and emotions and be prepared to nurture yourself with some healthy, soothing distractions. Consider practicing with a meditation teacher or mental health provider who can offer guidance and support.
Give yourself some space. When we’re first learning to tap into our interoception, there is a tendency to think of our sensory experiences, automatic reactions, and initial interpretations as direct reflections of who we are and beat up on ourselves for what we see. However, this is not really the case. It would be more accurate to say that these unconscious processes are reflections of how the human brain works. Who we are is the conscious knower and decider that is capable of surfacing to use these processes for our benefit. We could try: “Thank you, brain. I know you’re just trying to help me survive, but I’m actually safe right now. I can handle this.”
Remind yourself of what is important to you. Why put so much work into making these changes? Because there are things we want that are too important to be held back by unhelpful habits. What those things are is highly individual. Emotional intimacy, a university degree, a social movement, raising children, inner peace. Each of these takes time and consistent effort. Remembering that there is something bigger that we’re working towards offers a source of motivation and energy when it feels easier to give in to our fear-brains.
There’s a lot of nuance to exploring new interpretations that support your emotional regulation and it might feel like learning a foreign language. We don’t have to develop this skill alone though. Finding new ways to interpret your internal body signals is work that we can do with a trained professional.
Adjusting our responses to interoceptive signals also requires preparation
Almost there, folks. If you’re noting some fatigue just reading about this topic, then this is the perfect time to check in and choose how you’d like to respond to that feeling. There are several viable options: 1) bail and move on - I’ve learned enough and I have other stuff to do, 2) bookmark it, take a short break, and come back to it later - I’ll learn more effectively after some processing time, 3) take a deep breath, adjust your posture, and persist to the end - I’m almost there - just a couple more paragraphs! Each of these are totally acceptable and potentially appropriate options. There is no universally appropriate response. It’s all about what we value.
Responding effectively to our interoceptive signals requires thoughtful decision making and effort. Even though our body is providing us with a constant stream of information, we still have to set our priorities in order to figure out which signals we want to heed and which to acknowledge and work around. Just because we’re noticing these signals now that doesn’t mean we do everything they tell us or suppress, suppress, suppress. Again it’s about cultivating awareness and applying critical thinking.
When trying to get unstuck from a seemingly intractable pattern, it helps if we identify what we’re working towards big-picture-wise. From there we can define which actions would be most effective for reaching our goal, monitor our progress, and adjust our approach as needed. In theory, this problem solving and goal setting process might sound exhausting. (It will certainly require - yup, you know it - effort.) But the results are usually energizing. When goals are unclear, unattainable or non-existent, we generally don’t feel motivated to apply ourselves. On the other hand, when we can clearly picture our goal state, we tend to light up and get moving.
Having said that, let’s quickly dispense with one last harmful misconception: developing more mindful interoceptive awareness is not “one weird trick” that will make us a thousand times more productive and machine-like. Harnessing the power of interoception is meant to bring us closer to a sense of health and well-being. Being better able to pursue our other long-term goals is a natural by-product, but not the point. What we are doing is checking in with ourselves and responding to our bodies and minds with genuine care. Sometimes this means using the restless energy generated by anxiety to get work done. Sometimes this means fighting the impulse to keep working that stems from that same jaw-clenching anxiety so that we can get some quality rest. Sometimes this means saying yes to time with friends even though our chest tightens when we think about the work we could be doing. The effort is in noticing what we’re feeling and deciding what would be most effective this time.
We tend to do best when health is a part of our vision. Keep your eyes on the prize and interoceptive awareness in your toolbox.
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