(Is Someone or Something) Messing With Your Interoception?

How do you feel? It seems like an easy question, but it’s harder to answer honestly than it seems on the surface. Various factors may mess with your sense of interoception — and it’s a two-way street. Your interoception can also impact you in ways you fail to recognize.

Your interoception is one reason why mindfulness practices such as yoga are so vital to maintaining your sense of self and positive mental health. Let’s take a deep dive into this “sixth sense” and understand its effects on your daily life a little better. 

What Is Interoception?

If someone asked kindergarten you how many senses you had, you may have cheerfully responded “five.” Sight, sound, touch, taste and smell are great for a quick grounding exercise, but in reality, there’s considerable disagreement in scientific circles about how many senses humans truly possess. 

How, for example, do you know that you’re hungry or need to use the bathroom? The answer is your sense of interoception. Interoception is one of several senses beyond the “big five.” It refers to your perception of sensations arising from within the body. Some define it as your ability to “read” the messages your nerve receptors send your brain. 

It seems simple to interpret messages like, “I’m thirsty” or even, “I don’t feel well.” However, the human brain can get up to some interesting mental gymnastics, and the words, attitudes and reactions of other people can cause vital information to get missed or misinterpreted. It’s a lot like being on a call with a bad Bluetooth connection and seven screaming toddlers in the background. You might kind of get the message — but there’s a lot of room for error that can impact your health. 

4 Things That Can Mess With Your Interoception

Have you ever noticed how you can “push through” physical discomfort sometimes, but not others? It could be that your pain is more intense at times. It could also be other factors messing with your sense of interoception. Remain open when considering these factors that may intervene with the messages various nerve receptors send to your brain. 

1. Being Busy or Stressed

Being busy or stressed can mess with interoception in seemingly contradictory ways. Many people have temporarily forgotten hunger, for instance, when they’re too busy to eat. You may not notice your body’s signals at all while in a flow state. Conversely, each pang becomes more intense when you’re famished but the boss says no snacks at the register. 

Consciously ignoring your body’s interoceptive signals temporarily is something nearly every child learns as part of basic toilet training. However, problems can arise when you get so good at ignoring these sirens, you fail to tune into genuine danger. Like someone who lives in a bad neighborhood, you can grow so accustomed to the sound of blaring squad cars, you barely blink till the cops break down your front door. 

Unfortunately, despite “time-saving technology,” people’s lives are busier than ever — economic leaders seem determined to invent all sorts of organization apps and gadgets rather than simply allowing people more time to manage the realities of modern life. Everything has become a competitive race to an imaginary top. Because of this toxic societal mindset, stress is a constant companion for many of us. It’s natural to fall out of tune with your body’s internal clues when your mind already overflows with lengthening work days and to-do lists that never end. 

You might think that the last thing you have time for is sitting quietly and coming back to yourself. However, it can be one of the most powerful moves you make for your emotional and mental health. It’s why Only in Sedona Yoga features numerous short flows of 10 to 15 minutes. That’s all it takes to tune into your interoception and listen to what your body is telling you. 

2. The Words and Treatment You Receive From Others

When Ed and I started Only in Sedona Yoga, I was in such a profound state of burnout that my body was shutting down. I experienced migraines so severe, I would black out. Often (and worse), I skated on that edge, too incapacitated by nausea and vertigo that I felt like I would collapse at any moment. I have mild forms of various autoimmune conditions, which would all flare. It was like having the worst flu of your life while being pounded by a sledgehammer — and the worst part? No one would believe me about how severe my symptoms were. 

Yes. I look healthy. Even before I fully took charge of my wellness through mindful activity, diet and other lifestyle changes, I followed the “rules” for positive wellness — I ate healthy, I exercised. I tried. However, even though I went to lengths many would classify as dramatic, the treatment I received from others made me doubt myself. The rare days when I felt as healthy as I looked came with a heaping side portion of guilt. Was I faking, after all? Was I, just maybe, exaggerating how bad my symptoms were? 

These thoughts only lasted until the next attack hit. Then, there was no mistaking it. I was sick and needed help. 

My experience is familiar to countless other people with chronic illnesses, especially women. Consider this: One out of every ten women has endometriosis. It’s far from rare. However, it takes the average woman seven to ten years just to get a diagnosis, let alone treatment. It’s only going to get worse considering the Trump administration's removal of health information from national health databases. 

What matters is how this dismissal and invalidation messes with your interoception. You know when something goes amiss with your body. It sends you signals. However, when other people gaslight you, telling you that you’re fine when you know you are not, it can make an already bad situation worse.

At best, you may struggle with guilt if you do choose to pursue treatment. At worst, you might ignore those nagging symptoms until they become untreatable. How many souls have received a stage four cancer diagnosis when doctors could have treated and removed the tumor before it spread had they only listened to their patient’s symptoms and ordered the right tests instead of dismissing them as “stress?” 

Invalidation of your interoceptive cues can come from anywhere — your boss, your spouse, your parents and even your doctor. It takes enormous strength to say, “No, this is truly happening inside my body,” when everyone around you is telling you that it isn’t. The problem gets worse if you have few resources, the people around you also struggle, and no one will simply admit, “we don’t have the money to fix this.” Others may try to get you to dismiss your internal cues not out of malicious intent, but because the hope that it will all be okay, somehow, is all they can genuinely offer. 

Listen to your internal cues, anyway. 

3. Your Mood and Mindset 

One of the most harmful forms of medical gaslighting is when people say, “You’re making these symptoms up for attention.” Please, let me be clear — no one fakes being sick for attention. If we were able to “just be normal and lead a happy life,” that’s what we’d be out doing. We wouldn’t be waiting for hours on hard plastic chairs beneath fluorescent lights in offices that smell of sanitizer and despair, only to be scolded and dismissed during the two minutes we (finally) get with the doctor. 

That said, it is also crucial to recognize that your mood and mindset can mess with your interoception. Overreacting to your internal cues can be as harmful to your overall health as ignoring or minimizing them. 

Everyone has experienced the effect of mood and mindset on their interoception. For example, your shoulders can ache from hard labor, but when your favorite song comes through your earbuds, your energy levels lift, and you put more spring in your steps as your perception of pain decreases.

However, dark moods can also make existing pain cues feel worse. The connection between mental and physical disease exists for multiple reasons, including:

• Physical illness can lead to job loss and economic despondency, even homelessness in some countries like the U.S., and this reality is enough to make anyone depressed. 
• Physical illness often leads to isolation from family and friends, robbing you of your support system when you need it most. 
• Other people may invalidate or minimize your symptoms, making you feel even more isolated. 
• Many of the same brain regions “light up” in response to both physical pain and mental trauma. It sets off a cascade of many of the same physiological responses. For example, your heart rate and blood pressure increase, and you produce more stress hormones like cortisol. It’s one reason researchers believe such a strong link exists between childhood trauma and chronic illness. 
• Your perception that things will never improve can make the pain seem worse than it is, even intolerable. As a result, you get caught into a sucking vortex of negative thoughts followed by increased symptoms. 

Where it gets really complicated is when these factors interplay and feed off of each other. For example, you may interpret your pounding heart and chest tightness as a heart attack — and you should always get such symptoms checked by a doctor. However, your fear of the bill or copay could make you vacillate on seeking treatment. Your heart rate and stress levels continue climbing until you finally break down and reach out for care. 

All these competing factors can make it hard to discern when the something messing with your interoception is, in fact, your own mind. Here’s where grounding, mindful practices come into play. If sitting quietly for five minutes and practicing deep breathing eases your symptoms, that’s a powerful clue. If they persist, it may be time to call the doc. 

4. Being Neurodiverse

The final wrinkle that can mess with your interoception occurs when you’re wired just a little bit differently from the average bear. As someone who is now diagnosed autistic, I can tell you that’s exactly what much of my life experience has been like. It’s not that I feel totally alien; it’s more like being a diesel engine in a world of gas-powered cars. 

Neurodiversity is a broad spectrum, and here, I can only rightfully speak from my experience. My sensory experience is incredibly rich — but also painful. While my vision isn’t so hot, other senses are at least twice as keen to make up for it. My hearing, sense of smell and touch are incredibly sensitive. I’d dare to say my interoception is extra-sharp, too. 

Conventional wisdom says that autistic people struggle with interoception, and I suppose, in one sense, I have. However, mine aren’t the “usual” variety. Many people are familiar with cases of people playing video games for hours, even days, without eating, drinking or using the bathroom — they’re so out of touch with their interoception that they do the deed right in their chair. In my case, I feel everything so much that it can interfere with my ability to function. If I am in sensory hell, everything else is a no-go. 

Telling me I am exaggerating or cannot possibly be as sensitive as I am changes nothing. Saying, “it can’t possibly bother you that bad,” is like saying, “you can’t possibly have two arms,” while I’m using both of them to juggle. My sensitivity is my reality, but I can no more take my nerves out of my body and place them in yours than I can pluck out my eyes and let you see through them. That doesn’t make my experience less real. You can’t see or touch electricity or the Bluetooth waves that connect your devices, either, but they don’t cease to exist simply because they lie outside the limits of your perception. 

Suffice it to say that folks with any type of neurodiversity — and there are probably many more than have been officially diagnosed, not less — are more prone to letting what’s going on both inside and outside of their bodies mess with their sense of interoception. They may misread internal cues or not know how to deal with them in a socially appropriate way. Alternatively, they may miss them altogether. However, being aware of this reality makes it easier to discern the truth amid the often confusing messages. 

How Your Interoception Can Mess With You

Your sense of interoception can mess with you if you don’t tune into it. While my own lack of awareness may stem from my neurodiversity, the root cause matters less than the impact ignoring my interoception has had on my life. 

Your sense of interoception, like nearly everything in nature, is a two-way street. Just as your mood and mindset can affect your perception of pain and discomfort arising from internal signals, those internal alerts can impact your mood and mindset. That’s what makes body scans such an incredible grounding and pain-relieving technique. You might not realize your headache originates from your tightly-clenched jaw until you breathe awareness into it. You might not even recognize how your pain is making you irritable until you snap at the wrong person and create a rift in a valued relationship. 

Awareness is key, which requires daily mindfulness practice. Fortunately, tuning into your internal cues — without judging, just listening to what your body is telling you — becomes easier with consistency. That’s why it’s not enough to indulge in the occasional yoga class. However, a few minutes of daily mat work makes checking in with yourself a matter of habit. 

How to Listen to Your Interoception

Learning to listen to your internal cues is crucial to fixing what’s messing with your interoception. The exact method you use may vary. Mindful activities can include any of the following and countless more, so choose an activity that calls to your spirit, such as:



• Yoga
• Meditation — guided or silent
• Walking meditation
• Gardening
• Ecstatic dance
• Drumming

Even simple acts, such as repetitive chores or playing with your pet, can create the right conditions for tuning into your sense of interoception. The idea is to find an activity that relaxes you while allowing you to practice detachment. Reminding yourself that your thoughts and feelings are not you, but only a part of you, like your arm or your leg, empowers you to examine what’s going on inside without judgment. Calm observation helps you avoid catastrophizing or minimization. 

The last part is crucial. Once you feel sufficiently calm and detached, scan through your body. What do you observe? Is it something that warrants further attention? If you do detect discomfort, avoid jumping to conclusions about possible causes. Instead, take careful notes as you notice. Is the pain dull or sharp? Does movement help or make it worse? You might even keep a journal after each session to get into the habit of recording your check-ins. 

Doing so enables you to recognize patterns. It can also help if you need to go to the doctor at some point. The ability to say, “I have been experiencing X symptoms for X number of days/weeks at this level of severity” can hopefully expedite the diagnostic process. 

What’s Messing With Your Interoception?

Humans have more than five senses. One which often goes uncounted is your sense of interoception, your ability to interpret signals stemming from inside of your body. Multiple factors can mess with your interoception, but educating yourself lends understanding. 

Engaging in regular mindfulness practices sharpen your sense of interoception, allowing you to better tune into what’s going on inside of you. This recognition can make you happier and possibly improve your overall health.