Without bringing your hands to your heart nor elevating your heart rate – can you pause and feel your heart beat?
– How do you feel your heart beating?
– How good are you at noticing or feeling your heartbeat?
– How often do you feel your heartbeat?
Interoception is like a hidden sense we don’t typically learn about in school. While we’re taught about sight, hearing, taste, smell, and touch. Interoception is our ability to perceive internal signals from our bodies—like feeling our heartbeat, sensing our breath, recognizing hunger, fatigue, or even anxiety.
This is a sense we can train and learn to get better at. And the implications for health and overall wellbeing are tremendous.
Interoceptive intelligence is not just detecting your heart rate. It’s noticing all the signals from your body and emotions… helping us ultimately make stronger connections with ourselves and others.
Our brains continuously track these internal signals, a process vital for maintaining homeostasis—our body’s internal balance. These signals travel through the thalamus, which acts as a relay station, sending information to areas like the insula.
The insula is a deep part of the brain that helps process emotions, taste, and body sensations, allowing us to interpret them—like realizing our heart is racing because we’re nervous about a presentation or excited at a sports event.
Interoception can be measured in different ways.
One method assesses interoceptive accuracy—how well we detect internal signals, such as our heartbeat.
Another measures interoceptive attention—how often we notice these signals.
Individual differences in interoception affect many aspects of life. Some people struggle to recognize bodily signals, which can influence eating habits, pain perception, and emotional regulation.
For example, highly anxious individuals may over-focus on internal sensations, amplifying distress, while others may be less aware of bodily cues altogether. Cultivating interoceptive intelligence includes a strong connection to our internal signals while also creating balance with this connection. (Sounds like the yoga practice!)
Interoception also plays a role in decision-making. Research suggests people with higher interoceptive awareness may make better choices by subconsciously linking physical sensations to past experiences. This might explain why some people “trust their gut” when making decisions.
Researchers continue to explore the best way to study this complex sense and its impact on our health, behavior, and well-being.
References
Interoception helps us recognize our own emotions and how how we recognize the emotions of others (e.g., Feldman et al., 2023).
Research suggesting that interoception might be very important for our own physical and mental health and wellbeing (e.g., Guu et al., 2023; Vabba et al., 2023).
Interoception: the hidden sense that shapes wellbeing ( D. Robson 2021 ).
