Interoception is a sense that supports the body’s innate ability to monitor internal signals and respond accordingly. These body signals help us to sense hunger, thirst, body temperature, sleepiness, and even affective emotional states such as joy, anxiety or depression. Interoception provides us with a constant dialogue between our body and brain, a feedback loop that keeps us in tune with the physical and emotional needs of our body.
Despite its crucial role, interoception often does not often get recognition in discussions about mental health. Yet, it’s this very brain-body connection that can offer precious insights into our mental well-being. Interoception and mental health are so strongly linked—we can’t effectively support mental health challenges without the help and understanding of interoception.
Interoception and Mental Health
So, what’s the deal with interoception and its impact on mental health? Well, think about interoception as your body’s personal news broadcaster, constantly on air, monitoring, and reporting on the state of affairs from head to toe. It’s like a continuous live stream of information from areas such as your heart, stomach, muscles, and even your eyes, all to help your brain understand how your body is feeling.
This livestream airing from all your body parts provides clues to your emotion and body states in any given moment. Perhaps the livestream is indicating that your heart is racing, your stomach has a tingly feeling, and your muscles feel shaky. Your brain can use that incoming information as clues to what body or emotional state you are feeling. Is it anxiety? Fear? Hunger? And so forth.
The key to managing how we feel is understanding how we feel first which comes from a reliable interoception connection. When we’re in sync with these body signals, we can better understand and manage our reactions and adapt to stress. However, not noticing or misreading these signals could lead to the persistence of mental health issues like anxiety, depression or PTSD. Understanding interoception’s significant role in mental health can open up new ways to approach and improve our overall well-being.
Current Mental Health Approaches: Cognitive Approaches Can Fall Short
Current mental health approaches are largely cognitive, or cognitive behavioral in nature, focusing on thoughts and beliefs, or even worse attempting to teach a person to rationalize through highly stressful moments. Not only do these cognitive approaches often forget that there is an entire body below that brain that plays a vital role in mental health and emotional regulation, they also do not account for the fact that most people do not have access to the thinking or rational parts of their brain during periods of big emotions or stress.
While cognitive approaches to mental health can be helpful, they are often too “high” or forward in the therapeutic process. To be effective, we often need to rewind and use an interoception-based approach that captures the power of the body and all the important clues this sense provides.
A friend gave me this example that has stuck with me—”cognitive behavioral therapy was like someone giving me a DVD without first ensuring my DVD player works correctly.” My friend had been working with a variety of mental health providers for years and years with little to no positive outcome. They had her memorize coping strategies which she couldn’t use ‘in the moment’ because she did not notice the bodily clues indicating that she needed them. They tried teaching her to analyze her thoughts and how that was contributing to her overwhelm, yet she had little access to the ability to rationalize in this way when dysregulated. They would use lots of emotion words during sessions and failed to realize that emotion words can be abstract and meaningless if you don’t have reliable body signals that give emotions and emotion words meaning. It wasn’t until my friend began using The Interoception Curriculum to help her notice, connect and regulate her body signals, that she started to have life-changing outcomes. Interoception is the foundation—the work that gets the DVD player working.
“Cognitive behavioral therapy was like someone giving me a DVD without first ensuring my DVD player works correctly.”
Notice, Connect and Regulate Body Signals: The Interoception Curriculum
To effectively address mental health challenges, we need to take a more holistic approach that includes our bodies and our interoceptive experiences. We need to learn to notice, connect with, and regulate our body signals. This can be done through a variety of body-based therapies, including the evidence-based framework provided in The Interoception Curriculum.
The Interoception Curriculum consists of 25 lessons, divided into 3 sections:
Section 1: Body Lessons 1-16 are designed to teach the learner to notice body signals. Each lesson plan is focused on a single body part and encourages the learner to notice and describe signals within that single body part. Because positive practice during daily activity is an essential part of this curriculum, several strategies are provided to facilitate these practice opportunities in between lessons.
Section 2: Emotion Lessons 17-20 are designed to teach the learner to connect body signals to emotions. The theme in this section focuses on using body signals as clues to emotions–it is different for each person. Again, because positive practice during daily activity is an essential part of this curriculum, several strategies are provided to facilitate these practice opportunities in between lessons.
Section 3: Action Lessons 21-25 are designed to teach the learner to discover and use actions to regulate their body signals. The focus of the section is on finding individualized feel-good strategies, thus completing the body-emotion-action connection.
The Missing Piece: Interoception in Therapy
An unclear inner experience is found to be a common underlying area impacted across a majority of mental health diagnoses. For example, many people with anxiety, depression or PTSD report higher rates of interoception differences. This can include:
- an inner experience that is muted or intense, resulting in a breakdown in noticing body signals
- difficulty interpreting body signals
- and/or difficulty regulating body signals effectively
Given the importance of this lesser-known sense, there has been a surge of interest to gain more insight. Interoception has been declared a research domain of priority by the National Institutes of Health.
Interoception could be the missing piece in mental health supports. Recognizing how our bodies uniquely feel and respond to different situations can offer valuable clues about our mental health status. We can better understand and regulate our emotions by tuning into these signals.
The Power of Interoception Activities
Interoception is not fixed; it’s a highly changeable process. Our various activities and supports centered on nurturing interoceptive awareness have shown promising results in supporting mental health. Many of our resources are adapted forms of body mindfulness—in an attempt to make an often complex and abstract process more successful and accessible to more people. Check out some of our interoception resources below:
On-Demand Courses for Mental Health Providers: Learn More About Interoception
Our most popular resource, The Interoception Curriculum, provides a structured process for mental health practitioners seeking to incorporate interoception into their practice. This curriculum offers a step-by-step guide to nurturing interoceptive awareness in clients, promoting a curious and non-judgmental exploration of body signals.
The Interoception Curriculum can be used with clients of all ages (3-103 years) and can be adapted to meet a wide variety of learning needs and session styles.
Incorporating interoception-based supports into mental health care can open up new avenues for understanding and improving mental health. It’s not just about the mind but also the body.
Interested in learning more about interoception and its role in mental health? We invite you to explore our resources, including courses like these:
On-Demand Course: An Interoception-Based Approach for Supporting
Traumatized Learners
$79.00 USD
On-Demand Course: Interoception Supports for Chronic Pain, Health Management & Emotional Well-Being in Adults: It is Never Too Late!
$79.00 USD
On-Demand Course: Modern Emotion Regulation Supports for Neurodivergent Learners: Are you Keeping with the Times?
$79.00 USD
On-Demand Course: A 3 Step Approach to Nurturing Interoceptive Awareness
$149.00 USD
On-Demand Course: Implementing a Neuro Affirming Model: Come Get Your Shift Together!
$79.00 USD
