Interoception 101 for Beginners (Start Here)

What does frustration look like in the body? How about joy or panic? And is it possible for us to learn specific protocols to intentionally notice and choose how we respond in challenging situations, increasing that space between stimulus and response? What if you could unlock the ability to treat life like a game? Going from being an NPC to playing your own character with agency, your physiology operates as a set of levers that can be pulled and systems which can be learned, practiced, and eventually mastered to create a fulfilling life in which you pursue the quests that are unique to you. And in this game of life, there is a particular skill that almost no one was taught growing up. But once you learn it, it will create exponential rewards in your life to help unlock new quests and level up areas of your skill tree that were previously inaccessible. That skill is known as interoception. Without this skill, when we ignore the gigabytes of sensory data that are being seamlessly passed from our body to our brain, many life paths will remain frustratingly locked, no matter how hard you push yourself. So what is interoception and how can you unlock its power? Let's break it down. Interoception is the skill of inner awareness. Interoception. Your character isn't just a brain on a stick or some super smart camera or computer being carried around by biological machinery. Instead, recent neuroscience shows that your brain is actually a prediction machine and constantly tests and updates its predictions about your life in real time, based on a torrent of data coming through your sensory neurons. If we live numb from the neck down, only from our thoughts, we become oblivious to the valuable signals and signs that are coming through. In one powerful study on anxiety, the Researchers looked at 43 individuals and reported that there were significant interoceptive signals that fired up to one hour before. And if these were ignored, they led to a panic attack. Without interoception, you lose the ability to notice when your body is going beyond its capacity, when it's drained of energy, or even just needing some food and drink. Individuals with low interoception go through a day confused by how their body responds, shifting wildly from creativity to anxiety. And many feel as if they're a victim of their biological response. They will accomplish less than they hoped for, and even in bed might be mysteriously restless, unaware of why they keep tossing and turning. The answer is to learn to attune to your internal state through interoception, which allows your brain to make better predictions about your state and the world around you. According to neuroscientists, our emotions are made up of sensation plus context or story. Basically, our brains are making predictions about what the sensations in our body actually mean. So let's say you're having a bad day. If someone asked, you might tell them that you feel sad, and you'd probably tell them why. But rather than the mental story of this thing happened to me and so I feel sad, ask yourself, what do the sensations actually feel like in your body? For some people, the sensory experience of sadness begins around the face and the eyes, down into the neck and sometimes a tenderness in the upper chest as this interoceptive heat map. From a research study where many individuals studied self reported as feeling sadness, the same study mapped anger, disgust, happiness, fear and many other emotions as bodily states. Now this may well be different for you. While there are many commonalities to where a body experiences emotion, it's an individual mapping to your own body. That's why a key interoceptive technique is called somatic mapping. Being a cartographer of your own inner world and the nuances of how it's expressed in your own somatic or embodied experience. But what if you took this even further, treating your own inner world as if you were a Michelin star, chef or sommelier drinking an expensive glass of wine? What if you were so curious about the flavors of sensation that you could delight in each moment, knowing that no two emotional experiences are exactly the same? What this looks like is mapping the more subtle emotions like feelings of self, doubt, creativity, joy, grief, introversion, focus. Do this and you start to develop an intuitive and sophisticated palette for your internal states. Beyond your emotional state, there are four more key aspects that you can learn to track for yourself, which in turn help you to unlock new states and abilities for the game of life. Category one, Your mind. What is the state of your mental activity? Do you have hundreds of racing thoughts or are they calmly floating to the surface? What is the tenor of your mind? Category two, your posture. Our posture will tend to correlate with our real time emotional experience. Are you feeling open, relaxed, receptive or hunched? Defensive and contracted? Category 3. Your breath. How is your breath as you're watching this? Is it soft and into the lower belly or shallow, fast and into the upper chest? Perhaps you were even holding your breath. Category four, your awareness. This is an interesting one that few people pay attention to. Is your awareness expanded or contracted? Does it feel like it's centered around your head? Are you aware of the space behind you, below you or above you? So as you can see, this is a skill set with so much depth to it. And once you start to unlock these layers of inner awareness. That's when things get really interesting. Interoception is powerful because it helps us get an indicators or a dashboard for our internal state to notice how we're responding to the world around us. This is absolutely crucial because if you don't know how you're actually feeling your current status, you won't be able to go on certain quests because you won't even notice them in the first place. You won't notice your own excitement or curiosity when you encounter an interesting person or perhaps an invitation to accept. You might miss an intuitive gut level sense that a business partner lacks integrity and shouldn't be trusted. You won't realize when your stats are massively decreased because you've unintentionally fallen into a state of disassociated shutdown times when connecting with others or really doing anything productive is super challenging. And you won't realize when you've run out of capacity early in the day after running in sympathetic mode, burning energy on tasks that don't require it. On the other hand, if you're aware of these subtle shifts, you have the ability to address them and therefore make far better decisions. If you're in a state that isn't appropriate for the current situation, you can shift to a new mode by going for a walk outside or perhaps doing a brief NSDR or non sleep deep rest practice. If you're able to notice the early warning signs of physical, mental or postural fatigue, you can prioritize states that recover your capacity. Perhaps you decline an invitation to go out that evening and focus on rejuvenating. What's more, as you level up your interoception, your social superpowers and ability to connect deeply with others will skyrocket. In other words, with this skill, when you are having a tough conversation with a friend, partner or colleague, you will be able to be far more attuned to your own needs, perhaps setting a healthy boundary or asking for support instead of a blank ui. Your ability to experience life is bottlenecked by your capacity to experience your inner world. When you're unskilled at listening internally, life will seem far harder than necessary because you're literally ignoring all of the essential pointers and information being served up to you by the intelligence in your subconscious. It's common for those with low interoceptive awareness to re enter toxic relationships, stay in jobs they dislike or follow social conditioning rather than what they deeply want for themselves. But once you acquire the skill of interoception, you gain the ability to know when to shift your state, unlock important quests and new skills, and effortlessly navigate your inner world. There are many ways that you can temporarily or permanently enhance your interoceptive capacity, and these skills are learnable. In the next video of this series, I'll break down several of these skills with neuroscientist and author Ann Lore Lecanth. Click here to keep learning and further climb your interoceptive skill tree.