Interoception may be less well known than the 5 primary senses such as sight, hearing, taste, touch and smell, but it has enormous consequences for your wellbeing. Scientists have shown that our sensitivity to interoceptive signals can determine our capacity to regulate our emotions, and our subsequent susceptibility to mental health problems such as anxiety and depression.
Interception is now one of the fastest moving areas in neuroscience and psychology, with academic conferences devoted to the subject and a wealth of new papers emerging every month.
First, some definitions. Interoception includes all the signals from your internal organs, including your cardiovascular system, your lungs, your gut, your bladder and your kidneys. There’s a constant communication dialogue between the brain and the viscera.
Much of the processing of these signals takes place below conscious awareness: you won’t be aware of the automatic feedback between brain and body that helps to keep your blood pressure level, for instance, or the signals that help to stabilise your blood sugar levels. But many of these sensations – such as tension in your muscles, the clenching of your stomach, or the beating of your heart – should be available to the conscious mind, at least some of the time. And the ways you read and interpret those feelings will have important consequences for your wellbeing.
To many researchers, the very real application of interception makes perfect sense: if you are more adept at accurately detecting your bodily signals, you will be able to form more nuanced interpretations of your feelings about a situation, and this in turn should help you to make wiser choices about the best ways to respond.
Such processes may play an important role in many mental illnesses. A large subgroup of people with depression, for example, often show poorer interoceptive awareness on the heartbeat detection tasks, and, for these patients, the reduced ability to feel their bodily signals may lie behind their sense of lethargy and emotional numbness – the sense that they can “feel nothing” at all.
People with anxiety, in contrast, do report being attentive to their interoceptive signals – but they don’t necessarily read them accurately. They may misinterpret a small change in heart rate as being much bigger than it really is, for example, which can lead them to “catastrophise” their feelings and amplify their sense of panic.
Prof Hugo Critchley at Brighton and Sussex Medical School points out that poor interoceptive awareness can also lead to the sense of “depersonalisation” and dissociation, which are early symptoms of psychosis and may be a precursor of their delusions. Interoception helps us to form our most basic sense of self, he says – and it seems to be askew in these patients.
New therapies
Therapies that aim to address these problems are still in their infancy, but the early signs are promising. Critchley recently worked with 121 autistic adults – a group known to be at high risk of anxiety disorders – to see if improved interoception could reduce their feelings of stress. Over a course of six sessions, half the participants were given repeated attempts at the heartbeat detection tasks followed by detailed feedback on their performance.
The team found that the interoceptive training group showed markedly lower incidence of anxiety at a three-month follow-up, with 31% completely recovering from their anxiety disorder, compared with just 16% in the control group. “It improved people’s ability to recognize and ‘de-catastrophise’ their physiological experiences,” Critchley says.
Other teams have been investigating the potential use of mindfulness to improve people’s interoceptive awareness. There are many kinds of mindfulness, of course – some of which may place more focus on the mental experience and the appearance of thoughts.
Equally importantly, the practice of exercise should lead you to be more attentive to those signals, so that you are also more accurate in reading and interpreting the changes that you detect. Strength training has been shown to reduce anxiety, possibly because it alters the interoceptive signals our brains receive.
It’s not just aerobic exercise that will help; increasing evidence suggests that strength training can particularly effectively reduce feelings of anxiety. By engaging with our muscles, we feel physically sturdier and more capable to deal with threats – and this bolsters our sense of self-esteem and mental resilience, too.
Neurofeedback should also be considered as a viable way to improve interception. By balancing brainwaves, we gain more control over our conscious and subconscious self. When the brain works, the body will usually respond.
Interoception, it seems, is one of our most important senses. And by paying a little bit more attention to the signals it sends you, you may be healthier in body and mind.
At Restoring Health, we use neurofeedback to help maintain a healthy brain. Neurofeedback is a computer-based system for retraining brainwaves into making more healthy patterns. For those with advanced neurological issues, neurofeedback could help get you back into a more normal and healthy state of mind. To learn more, check out our neurofeedback page on this site or call (321)-444-6750 for more information.
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Source: https://www.theguardian.com/science/2021/aug/15/the-hidden-sense-shaping-your-wellbeing-interoception?
