If your heart, lungs, abdomen and gut are trying to tell you something, maybe you should listen: Saga Briggs on interoception
Photo by Inge Poelman on Unsplash
An excerpt from a Psyche article, How to trust your body: Your heart, lungs, abdomen and gut are trying to tell you something. Learning to tune in can significantly boost your health, by Saga Briggs:
Four years ago, while recovering from an alcohol dependence, I heard the following words from a psychologist: ‘Your problem isn’t anxiety. It’s trusting yourself.’
At the time, I interpreted that phrase – ‘trusting yourself’ – philosophically: trusting yourself to get the job done, come to the right decision, make your friends laugh, defend a viewpoint, let the neighbour’s wily dog off its leash without a major disaster.
Today, after learning more about self-regulation than I thought possible, I no longer see it that way. Trusting myself is, first and foremost, a visceral experience, less like adopting a new set of beliefs and more like a trust fall into the inner landscape of my heart, lungs, abdomen and gut.
Each moment, interaction, relationship becomes a unique experience informed and guided by how my body receives it, not by the grand unifying way I’ve figured out how to live. What my psychologist really meant, whether either of us knew it or not, was: you don’t trust your body.
Most of us are familiar with what it means to ‘go with your gut’ or ‘follow your instincts’. And many of us have ignored red flags or nagging sensations from time to time, leading to consequences we later regret. Trusting your body includes these ideas but it also means more than that.
When it comes to decision-making and health, people differ in how much importance they place on bodily sensations – from hunger and fatigue to anger and joy. Some of us might dismiss or suppress sensations, talk ourselves out of a strong feeling (or let others talk us out of it), or simply place more importance on logic and rationality than on feeling.
People also differ in how well they can sense these signals, which affects their ability to make use of them. For example, people with alexithymia, a condition marked by difficulty identifying and articulating feelings, often don’t know they’re hungry until they’re in pain, or that they’re angry until they feel their pulse.
On the other end of the spectrum are those people who arguably feel too much, leading them to become easily overwhelmed by – and therefore distrustful of – their bodily signals.
Body trust can support better mental health
Body trust is not just a folk concept – it’s also a scientific construct. It’s used to measure ‘interoception’, which is the process of sensing the body from within. Poor interoception is associated with a wide range of mental disorders, including post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), eating disorders, depression and anxiety.
Alongside questions about body trust, researchers measure people’s interoception by tapping seven further features, from ‘noticing’ to ‘attention regulation’ to ‘body listening’. Of these features, ‘low body trust’ has emerged as particularly relevant to mental health.
People who suffer from suicide ideation, eating disorders, loneliness, and depression often report feeling ‘unsafe’ or ‘not at home’ in their bodies, in addition to mistrusting their bodily signals.
The reason for this connection isn’t yet clear, but one might speculate that if these people did feel safe enough to trust their bodily signals, doing so might lead to adaptive behaviour change and symptom reduction. Whatever the explanation, these findings suggest that body trust is crucial for wellbeing.
When I started cutting back my alcohol consumption in 2018, I experienced very difficult periods of anxiety, especially in the kinds of social situations for which I’d previously used alcohol to help me relax. I used to trust alcohol to help me navigate a social situation more than I trusted my own body.
Without alcohol, if I started feeling any unpleasant feelings, such as tension or a racing heart, my mind would automatically panic because it didn’t know how to regulate them on its own, which would exacerbate the unpleasant feelings. I couldn’t even hang out in the common space of my shared flat without this tension arising.
Since changing the way I think about internal experience, and cutting out alcohol from my life completely, I feel calm the majority of the time. But to reach that state, I’ve had to change the way I think about my feelings – to treat my internal experience with the same consideration I give to vision, hearing or any other sense.
There are ways to improve your body trust
Although it’s early days for research into interoception, one thing that has been found to improve it, as well as body trust, is mindfulness.
In order to properly engage in self-regulation, and make healthy decisions, you must be able to not only feel those physical sensations but relate to them in a curious, compassionate, mindful way. Not just when you’re at home or on your own, but when you’re out in the world, in a variety of environments, including with other people.
Some of these signals you may decide to act on, and other signals you may decide to ignore. Regardless, it’s all important information meant to help you survive, and even thrive. This respectful orientation toward bodily experience is what I mean by ‘trusting your body’.
You don’t have to be facing mental health challenges to benefit from trusting your body. Better interoception is helpful for athletes, actors, students, even successful financial traders who rely on gut feelings to make high-stakes decisions.
Thankfully, there are science-based practices you can adopt to help develop a more trusting relationship with your body, many of which have worked for me. For the rest of this article, I’ll focus on building body trust for the purposes of improving your emotional regulation. You might call these practices ‘mindfulness for the body’, but this is more than just another mindfulness guide.