“The real voyage of discovery consists not of seeing new landscapes but seeing with new eyes.” - Marcel Proust
Most of us have an awareness of the role our five senses—sight, hearing, touch, smell, and taste, play in our enjoyment of life, but their importance is amplified when we begin to lose one or more of them either to disease, aging, or an acute condition. Difficulty reading small print on a menu at a restaurant or trouble understanding conversations in a crowded room make us appreciate the importance of good eyesight and the ability to hear different pitches. We appreciate the role touch plays in balance when neuropathies deaden the nerves in our feet and hands. And a single bout of COVID, which can trigger a loss of smell as well as taste, can completely change our relationship with certain foods that we once enjoyed. We take our senses for granted, until they change and make our lives more challenging.
Even less appreciated than our five senses are three other sensory systems which are related to kinesthetic intelligence and body awareness—the proprioceptive, vestibular, and interoceptive senses. Proprioception gathers information about our muscles and joints using fast-firing mechanoreceptors that send messages to the brain about what our limbs and torso are doing. This enables the brain to adjust our position and fine-tune our movements. Athletes tend to have highly developed proprioception, which is why they move with exceptional grace and fluidity. The vestibular system, associated with the inner ear, enables us to move smoothly, maintaining our balance when we walk and run, as well as keeping us upright while sitting or standing. Your ability to sit upright and read this blog is due, in part, to the information gathered by the vestibular system and sent to the brain, enabling it to make small postural adjustments to keep us stable.
Compared to the proprioceptive and vestibular systems, which work mostly outside of our awareness, interoception can include both conscious feelings and unconscious monitoring of bodily processes by the nervous system. Like other sensory systems, interoception gathers information from strategically located sensors, which for this system, are found on the internal organs. The information gathered from the viscera is sent to the brain, which then makes the necessary physiological changes to maintain homeostasis. Through introception we become aware of how our body feels—hungry, thirsty, tense, hot, irritated, and so on. Provided we are tuned in to this system, we take appropriate action to maintain balance in the body, such as eating when we are hungry or putting on a sweater when cold.
The mechanoreceptors of the proprioceptive and vestibular systems are fast acting, so their communication with the brain is instantaneous. The speed of their communication keeps the adjustments they make to our movements and balance imperceptible. But interoception moves more slowly, with messages from the viscera taking longer to reach the brain and requiring more time to process. That’s why you may “suddenly” feel ravenous when, in reality, hunger signals have been flashing for quite some time--you just weren’t tuned in to them. What seems like sudden awareness of extreme hunger is just the brain’s way of turning up the volume on a message it has been sending but we continue to ignore. Sensitivity to our body signals gives us important information about exactly how we are feeling and is important for our capacity to make appropriate-- and timely--health decisions. And there is growing evidence that interoception has numerous benefits that go beyond physical health, as it also plays a role in our emotional well-being, influencing our feelings of safety, as well as our ability to regulate stress and make meaningful social connections.
We live in a society that tends to dismiss interoception. Newborns are quite good at recognizing and expressing their needs, but part of a child’s social development is teaching them to manage their physical needs so that they are in sync with others. Children are taught to deny or subvert body sensations, sitting still when they have a natural urge to get up and move around, and to eat and sleep at designated times, even if it is out of sync with their natural rhythms. Our regulation of bodily sensations continues through adulthood which, depending on the environment, can dampen interoception. We deny a need for sleep to complete a work project, ignore hunger signals to lose weight, or address physical pain with pain relievers rather than investigating what the body is trying to tell us. In social settings, we might overlook vague feelings of unease when we meet someone who seems bright and cheerful. How many of your worst decisions were made when you ignored that uncomfortable feeling in your gut?
Research shows there is a great deal of variability in people’s ability to recognize and regulate bodily sensations. Those who are adept at identifying and responding to visceral feedback, such as noticing their heartbeat or recognizing muscle tension, report higher levels of overall well-being than those who show a more blunted sense of awareness. For example, people who report high levels of depression often struggle with heartbeat detection tasks in which they are required to notice and count their heartbeat over a minute. This reduced ability to tune into body signals may contribute to the overwhelming sense of lethargy and reported emotional numbness associated with severe depression. Conversely, people with anxiety tend to hyper-focus on even the slightest body sensation, but they are more likely to misinterpret or catastrophize these feelings in ways that trigger a sense of panic or dread.
The sensitivity of the proprioceptive, vestibular, and interoceptive sensory systems are enhanced with sufficient amounts of physical activity and exercise, especially activities that engage a number of muscles and move the body in a wide range of motion. But it seems interoception may need a bit more fine-tuning than that of proprioception and the vestibular system. Increased awareness is only one part of the interoceptive process as the sensations associated with this system frequently require that we take action to satisfy a need, such as putting our fork down when we feel stomach fullness. The more adept we are at noticing and interpreting our body sensations, the better choices we make about how to respond. Studies have shown that, unlike the other sensory systems, interoception is enhanced with increased knowledge and understanding of the underlying factors associated with a particular sensation. Studies of arthritis patients show they are more likely to engage in physical activity when they are given information about joint pain and exercise. Typically, arthritis pain is worse at the onset of activity, but tends to dissipate after about 15 minutes when the joint receives sufficient blood flow. Many people with arthritis are hesitant to push through discomfort, concerned they may be causing additional damage to the joint. Those who were advised that the initial joint pain, although uncomfortable, was not a cause for concern but a common symptom of the condition, were significantly more likely to maintain an exercise program than those who were not given this information, even when the reported levels of pain were the same.
We don’t need to be medical experts or well versed in anatomy, physiology, or kinesiology to sharpen our interoceptive skills. Rather, we need to lower the volume of our endless mental chatter and listen to what our body is telling us. Keep in mind that the body communicates through sensations, not words, so heartbeats, respiration, tingling, tightness, clenching, are just some of the ways it speaks to us. And it is frequently through these sensations that the body tells us what our minds tend to resist. To grow our interoceptive skills, we need to relearn the language of the body, a skill we knew intuitively as infants and children but forgot as we got lost in our habitual ways of responding to the world.
Your body is the only home you have during your time on this earth, so it is wise to listen to what it has to say. And we benefit when we gain a deeper understanding of how this home we live in works—what makes it run smoothly, what it needs, and what helps it thrive. For many, the only information we receive about our body is through medical professionals, who frequently use highly technical jargon that sounds gravely serious, cold, and disheartening. I once trained a woman who was quite shaken by a diagnosis of chondromalacia patellae syndrome. She had visited the orthopedist because of some knee tenderness she felt after sitting for long periods of time. Upon receiving her diagnosis, this typically vibrant and fit 45-year-old was convinced she was headed for a double knee replacement. When I explained that chondromalacia patellae syndrome was a very technical term for “knee pain” and that her symptoms could be alleviated with leg strengthening exercises, she was instantly relieved—and, interestingly, felt less knee pain.
Over the next several weeks, we will be taking a journey through the various workings of the body to see what it can teach us about the world we live in and how it can help us respond more skillfully to the challenges of everyday life. Rest assured, this will not be a dry anatomy lesson, but an exploration of what is referred to in nontraditional healing practices as the “lived body”, which describes the relationship between our sensations, thoughts, and the environment. From this perspective, we’ll ask questions about relationships, exploring the connections between seemingly unrelated body parts, such as how the muscles in our feet and the ability to detect prosody in another’s voice can influence feelings of safety. We’ll also look at underappreciated but critically important systems, such as adipose tissue, the adrenals, and the autonomic nervous system, that send signals that can have a significant, but subtle and long-term impact on our health and well-being. The objective is to widen our understanding of the ways in which the body communicates with us about our surroundings. As our awareness grows, so does our capacity to respond skillfully to our world rather than get stuck in an endless loop of reactivity.
What messages is your body sending? Are you willing to listen? What might you be resisting? By developing our interoceptive skills, the world can seem a bit less bewildering and easier to navigate. I invite you to take some time this week to pause and tune in. What sensations show up when you aren’t distracted by your thinking? You may think that you are quite familiar with your body but tapping into feelings and sensations may open a door to a world that is richer than the constraints of your thoughts, helping you, as the quote from Proust suggests, take a voyage of discovery with new eyes.
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