“Interoception helps us ‘feel’ the inside of our body. It is the sensory system that gives us important clues about how we feel, both physically and emotionally.”

– Kelly Mahler

Interoception: Feeling Our Bodies

The ability to feel what’s happening inside our bodies is one of the more important biological functions for surviving. Unfortunately, in this hyper-cognitive time, many people lose this instinctive of body awareness. This can lead to less satisfaction in life because we are not able to naturally regulate our nervous systems with our awareness. Learning how to recognize what is happening inside us can lead to better decision making, less anxiety, and deeper connections with the people around us.

What is Interoception?

If you take a moment right now to bring your attention inward and feel the beating of your heart or the movement of your breath you are experiencing interoception. It is the awareness of our emotions and bodily experience. It is how we make sense of our emotions.

“For most people, their attention is directed towards exteroception stimulus. This is a stimulus outside of a person. Interoception is directing our attention inside and feeling a queasy stomach, a tight throat or a staticky feeling in the hands. All of this is information that the nervous system is attempting to bring attention to.”

– Emma Seppala, the author of The Happiness Track, wrote in a Psychology Today article about interoception.

Most of us prioritize externally oriented attention. When we think of attention, we often think of focusing on something outside of ourselves. We “pay attention” to work, the TV, our partner, traffic, or anything that engages our senses. However, a whole other world exists that most of us are far less aware of: an internal world, with its varied landscape of emotions, feelings, and sensations. (https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/feeling-it/201212/the-brains-ability-look-within-secret-self-mastery)

When we have emotions they are not abstractions made up in our head. They are actually sensations in our bodies that indicate something is either safe or unsafe for us. We can experience a feeling of joyful elation when our body may have a warm lightness. We can also feel fear, which may show up as a furrowed brow and a holding of the breath. All of this is important information we can use to manage our lives.

How is looking inside helpful?

Interoception is important because it helps us tune into our emotional needs better. Instead of overriding our emotions and focusing attention just on thoughts we can cultivate the ability to feel what our nervous system is trying to tell us. This information can get overridden by the constant focus on thinking.

Emma Seppala speaks to this:

“Because we don’t pay as much attention to our internal world, it often takes us by surprise. We often only tune into our body when it rings an alarm bell –– that we’re extremely thirsty, hungry, exhausted or in pain. A flush of anger, a choked up feeling of sadness, or the warmth of love in our chest often appear to come out of the blue.” (https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/feeling-it/201212/the-brains-ability-look-within-secret-self-mastery)

Mindful Regulation

When we are aware of the sensations in our nervous system awareness we can regulate ourselves much better. The moment we tune in to our bodies and what we are sensing or feeling our nervous system will start to calm down. This is mindfulness in the bodily form. Instead of noticing our breath we may be feeling a tightness in our chest, or tension in our bellies.

This is no different than using the breath as an object of attention. In many ways I think of it as listening to what our bodies are trying to tell us. The nervous system is sending us information and hoping we will pay attention. If we don’t pay attention the body will often increase the intensity of the signal.

However, if we slow down and pay attention our nervous system can relax knowing that we got the signal and it no longer has to continue to send it.

Improving Our Connections

A racing mind makes it difficult to listen or really notice how the people around us are feeling. When we show up in our relationships feeling more centered and regulated we are able to be present and engaged with the people around us. This allows for more empathy and a better sense of how to support the people we care about.

When we are tuned into our emotional world we are better able to connect with the people around us.

In her book, It’s Not Always Depression, Hilary Jacobs Hendel, explains the importance of emotional awareness:

“When we are out of touch with emotions, we suffer loneliness, because the connections to both ourselves and the people we care about are enriched through empathy, the emotional connector.” (Hendel, 2018).

Interoception is the way that we stay tuned into our emotions. Emotional intelligence and awareness is the way that we connect with other people. I can’t feel your sadness if I have no access to my own.

How This Shows Up in My Life

In my work with clients I focus a lot of the session on helping them to be more aware of their internal bodily experience. What I have noticed is that over time, clients start to feel more regulated in all aspects of their lives. At first they struggle with this new skill. Once they start to understand how emotional awareness can help them out of anxiety or depression they are more than willing to pay more attention.

Some of my clients struggle to feel safe in their relationships. When conflict arises they get overwhelmed with emotions. Oftentimes their nervous system defaults to defensiveness and emotional shutdown. As they learn this skill of being with their experience they can take greater responsibility for their own internal experience and not blame it on their partner. Little by little they start to stay in the conflict and offer more care and empathic responses. Often this has a significant impact on the satisfaction of their relationship.

In my own life I have worked hard to learn mindful regulation as well. When the people I love get upset I also get dysregulated. The more I have practiced the more I have learned to come into a better place. It gets easier and easier. I still get really upset at times but there are lots of times when I am able to hold space for the distress of a loved one and not have to fight back. Instead I listen and validate their experience, letting them know they matter to me even though we are in conflict.

Learning this skill has allowed me to show up as my best self more often than in the past. I’m not run by the ups and downs of the people around me but instead I have more control of how I step into my relationships.

When we succeed and connect with others in enriching ways, emotions such as joy and excitement propel us to engage further, so humans grow, expand, and evolve (Hendel, 2018).

Wishing You The Day You Need To Have!

References:

Hendel, Hillary Jacobs. (2018). It’s Not Always Depression: Working the Change Triangle to Listen to the Body, Discover Core Emotions, and Connect to Your Authentic Self. New York, NY. Random House.

Seppala, Emma. (2012, December). “The Brain’s Ability to Look Within: A Secret to Self-Mastery.” Retrieved from URL: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/feeling-it/201212/the-brains-ability-look-within-secret-self-mastery

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“No matter how much insight and understanding we develop, the rational brain is basically impotent to talk the emotional brain out of its own reality.”

Bessel van der Kolk

One of the most important shifts that happens in psychotherapy is the integration of the brain. When people struggle with overactive emotional systems like anxiety or depression it often means that there is a lack of integration in how the brain supports these emotional experiences. By bringing the emotional brain and the thinking brain into harmony people will feel a lot more freedom in how they can manage their feeling states. It often leads to less activation (less anxiety) and more vitality (less depression).

The fundamental issue in resolving traumatic stress is to restore the proper balance between the rational and emotional brains, so that you can feel in charge of how you respond and how you conduct your life. (Van Der Kolk, 2014)

Why Integration is Important

For most people growing up in even the most ideal family system there will still be some painful childhood moments that can lead to emotional dysregulation. If this happens enough it can permanently direct the brain’s chemistry to act in unhelpful ways.

For example, if you are continually harassed by a parent or sibling (who may think they are being playful) the brain can become hyper-vigilant to any kind of teasing or benign critical feedback. This means the brain can get activated by someone in your adult life joking around with you. Instead of being able to play along, the trigger initiates a defensive reaction.

What is happening in that moment is your unconscious mind is fighting back against the parent or sibling who may have disrespected your boundaries as a child. Even though you know in your head that the person in our adult life is being playful, our nervous system is still reacting defensively.  The defensiveness results from a brain that is not integrated enough to know the difference between what is playful and what violates our dignity.

Most triggers or big defensive reactions are due to a lack of internal integration. People who have been severely traumatized will have such a lack of integration they will feel dysregulated much of the time. For most people, the lack of feeling safe or opening up to creative or playful moments limit our overall life satisfaction. Often people don’t even know they are incapable of something better. Our triggers delude us into thinking the world is out to get us or that we are just broken.

How Do We Integrate?

One of the challenges of our anatomy is that our thinking brain, in the prefrontal cortex (right behind our foreheads) and our emotional brain, in the limbic system (in the middle of our brain) are not joined very well. There isn’t a direct anatomical linkage. When we integrate our brains we need these two areas of our brain to talk with each other.

So how do we do this? We use a part of our brain called the Medial prefrontal cortex (knowing this brain name is not important). This part of our brain has connections to both our thinking brain and our emotional brain. The interesting thing about this area of the brain is that it is the place where self-awareness happens. When a person engages in interoception or the process of looking inward this part of our brain lights up.

For example, when you are noticing a bodily sensation or consciously feeling hungry the medial prefrontal cortex lights up. When this happens it helps to link the feeling brain (hungry sensation) to the thinking brain (“I should eat something”). It is in this process of self-awareness that we have the possibility of integrating our brains.

By developing more self-awareness we create the capacity to feel our emotions and thus we can counteract the triggering response. When you notice the sensations in your body of anger, tight forearms, contracted jaw and constricted belly you can  allow the thinking brain to come in and announce “I’m feeling angry.”  This  interrupts the habituated response in the brain. It is in this noticing you have the possibility of responding rather than reacting.

The more we use  self-awareness the more integrated these triggers become. We start to build new neural pathways and our brains become more flexible. Instead of one or two reactions we now may have 5 or 6 responses to the same environmental stimulus.

In the example above, where a friend teased you, the limbic system will pull the memory of being teased in your family system up into your unconscious mind. Then it will bring up the same defensive response you have expressed for years. However, with increased self-awareness you can sense your body getting defensive. You can tolerate these sensations and emotions and have your thinking brain in the background gently reminding you that your friend is just being playful. Over time this gets easier and it becomes less necessary to tolerate. The self-awareness has created a new more integrated brain that can flexibly handle being teased.

…the only way we can consciously access the emotional brain is through self-awareness… (Van der Kolk, 2014)

Finding Compassion For Ourselves

When we start to integrate our brains the intensity of emotional states start to relax. By having our thinking brains online when we feel a lot of emotional upheaval we have the opportunity to bring a level of care and compassion to our emotions. As we integrate we notice we are less in the emotion and more in the awareness of the emotion. When this happens we can acknowledge what is happening and bring a sense of care and appreciation for our nervous system responding to a perceived threat in order to help us survive.

When we have a better understanding of why we are reacting in certain ways (using our thinking brain) we can also know that why we are feeling triggered is based on a younger part of us that is in need of care and support. This can help to soothe our emotional brain and create more linkages within the brain structures.

When we have a greater capacity to soothe ourselves by understanding why we react to things we end the conflict that often shows up as judgment about ourselves. “I’m too anxious, too stressed, too sad…” Instead we can learn to nurture our younger parts and show compassion for how they are still trying to protect us.

When we “rest in awareness” we can sense that the lower area’s input is honored, and so it can be differentiated but it is not enslaving us…This is how an awakened mind* moves toward being more spacious and stable. It is this acceptance of our ongoing moment-to-moment experience that sets the stage for us to be present with what is and then move our internal state to a more integrated way of being. (Siegel, 2012).

How This Shows Up in My Life

Having spent the better part of nearly two decades doing lots of awareness work, meditation and other practices to know myself, it is really the embodied self-awareness that has been the most helpful. I often have an idea of why I get triggered or when I get triggered. However, this knowledge doesn’t seem to help me change my behaviors. What has helped me more than anything else is sensing in my body the emotional experience that is arising.

When I can notice in myself that I’m getting irritated, annoyed or frustrated I can actually be with this experience and redirect the habitual behavior. This self-awareness at the body level gives me a lot more freedom in how I want to respond in my life.

Although it is difficult to measure, I do believe that over time developing self-awareness has also created strong neural pathways in my brain that have helped integrate my thinking brain with my emotional brain. Creating these pathways by using interoception (noticing my internal sensations like heart rate, etc.) has made my life more satisfying by allowing these signals to get turned into different behaviors. I now have more capacity to find patience, compassion and presence with my loved ones.

If you want to develop a more integrated brain or know someone else who does please contact me here.

Wishing You The Day You Need To Have!

References:

Siegel, Daniel. (2012). Pocket Guide to Interpersonal Neurobiology: An Integrative Handbook of the Mind. W.W. Norton and Company, New York, NY.

Van der Kolk, Bessel. (2014). The Body Keeps The Score: Brain, Mind And Body In The Healing Of Trauma Penguin Books. New York, NY.

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Living life from our values is one of the ways we can create meaning.   I find that many people I work with are stumped when they are asked what they value. Often people are not attuned to their values and how they are living them. Without awareness of our values we are making choices without a foundation of what brings meaning to our lives. When we are in harmony with our values we can make choices in our life that keep us aligned to our integrity and the person we want to be.

Life is without meaning. You bring the meaning to it. The meaning of life is whatever you ascribe it to be. Joseph Cambell   Why does living your values matter? I think the main reason our values matter is that they give our life meaning. For better or worse humans are meaning making machines. We cannot experience the world without associating some kind of meaning to what is happening. In so many ways we, as humans, make this meaning up. Without having any values there is no meaning. If what you do in life has no value, not better or worse, then it is nearly impossible to find meaning. If you have ever done a job that you didn’t value it quickly becomes clear that you find yourself in place of meaninglessness. If there is no meaning in work it quickly becomes drudgery. If, however, we do find value in our work it is easy to find meaning in what we are doing. I believe it is important to be in touch with our values so that it can keep us in line with our integrity. Our integrity is the moral compass that directs us towards what we value. When we do things outside of our values we can immediately know this is not how we want to act in the world. This can lead to quickly course correcting our actions and choices so we can get back in line with our integrity.  Values are a way of informing our internal sense of who we are and directing us forward in our life. The last reason (I’m sure there are lots more) I think we should be more aware of our values is that we can then determine what is valuable to ourselves. Instead of living the values of your parents or some religion you can actually make sure that how you are valuing things is in line with what is important to you. Without making this conscious by exploring our values we might still be living someone else’s values.   Living a life in line with our own, personally chosen values, rather than pursuing others’ goals that may not be connected with our values, gives our life honor, meaning, and purpose. That is the well-lived life that ends with good tired. (LeJeune and Luoma, 2019) Living our values helps us in relationships. In his book, Soar Above: How to Use the Most Profound Part of Your Brain Under Any Kind of Stress, psychotherapist Steven Stosny explains how we can use our values to help us maintain emotional stability. “When we act out towards our loved ones we feel a sense of shame because we are often acting against our values system. This is a good thing. Many of the habits activated under stress violate our deeper values—for example, blaming, yelling, stonewalling, or devaluing loved ones.” (Stosny, 2016) By being aware of our values we can continually course correct toward our values. Once again, this keeps us in line with who we want to be in the world. We can use our values as a way to continuously change our unhealthy behaviors towards the people we love. It is also true that we can experience others as valuable. When we find someone or a group of friends as valuable we want to commit our time and energy towards these people. Often by doing this we are living out our values as well.   Finding self-value Not only is it important to value others but it is also critical for our relationships to find our internal value. Relationships are hard and often the people we love can lash out at us with criticism and blame. When this happens we must have the fortitude inside ourselves to tolerate the intensity of feelings that come up. This means we need to find our inner value that is not dependent on what others think or express. People in relationships often become overly dependent because they lack a sense of themselves. When we can find an internal value we start to stand on our own two feet. This allows someone to weather the inevitable storms of a relationship and not lose themselves in a cycle of self-aggression. When we can be in a relationship with a strong sense of our own individual value we won’t get caught up (as much) in the drama of our relationship. We can hold the space of the moment and acknowledge the hurt feelings of our partner but also be bolstered by valuing ourselves. This includes self-compassion, self-validation and self-empowerment. When we give this to ourselves we are much safer in our own skin and don’t project our emotions onto our partner.   Desire not emotional neediness When we are hurt, blamed, criticized or accused of something we often move to a defensive posture that demands retribution. This is a normal response from our nervous system’s need to protect us. However, in this often self-righteous place of feeling wounded we often get pulled into our toddler brain (overactive limbic system) which leads us to childlike behaviors. These behaviors are often not in line with our values. When we can move from our toddler brain to our adult brain we can reconnect to our values. Being attuned to our values allows us to move towards what matters to us rather than living from the moment to moment needs of our emotional experience. Living out our values provides a sense of living our purpose. We are either living a meaningful life or we need to refocus our lives towards what we value. Emotions are important but they are very momentary and are not necessarily about our purpose or values in the moment. Often we feel a sense of neediness because our emotions are telling us we have been unjustly hurt by someone.   Adults have only one emotional “need,” and that is to act consistently on deeper values. If we do that, all the preferences that seem like emotional needs will either be satisfied as a byproduct of meaningful living, or they’ll be deemed unimportant in the course of a purposeful life. (Stosny, 2016)   How this shows up in my life. The challenge for me is getting my emotional preferences confused with my values. This has led me to express my needs through the lens of emotions rather than something deeply important like my values. When I’m hurt in a relationship I often get overly expressive about repairing my hurt emotions rather than digging into what I value at that moment. I can spend a lot of time forcing the people in my life to rectify my internal space. In these moments I’m putting my personal emotions over my personal values and not acting in line with my integrity. I aspire to move out of this child-like thinking and instead find more of what I value in the moment. When I get hurt I can honor the need to establish a boundary with my partner while also not needing to beat her over the head with my hurt feelings. Instead I try to move out of the overactive child brain (limbic system) and connect with my adult brain (prefrontal cortex). Here I can connect to what I value which, may be finding compassion for myself and my partner and moving towards connection. Being stuck in emotional neediness doesn’t allow much movement towards what really matters. I often find myself feeling a sense of self-righteous disdain for my partner which is out of alignment with who I truly am. Who I truly am is someone who values connection and intimacy rather than being right. Take This Values Assessment For Free: Personal Values Assessment. If you or someone you know wants to connect with personal values please contact me!   Wishing You The Day You Need To Have! References: Stosny, Steven. (2016). Soar Above: How to Use the Most Profound Part of Your Brain Under Any Kind of Stress. Deerfield Beach, FL. Health Communications Inc EB. LeJeune, Jenna & Luoma, Jason. (2019). Values in Therapy: A Clinician’s Guide to Helping Clients Explore Values, Increase Psychological Flexibility, and Live a More Meaningful Life. Oakland, CA. Context Press.

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 Wishing You The Day You Need To Have!

References

Biswas- Diener, Robert & Kasdan, Todd. (2104). The Upside of Your Dark Side: Why Being Your Whole Self–Not Just Your “Good” Self–Drives Success and Fulfillment. New York, NY: Avery.

Fogel, Alan. (2013). Body Sense: The Science and Practice of Embodied Self-Awareness (Norton Series on Interpersonal Neurobiology). New York, NY: W. W. Norton & Company

Schwartz, Arielle. (2020). A Practical Guide to Complex PTSD: Compassionate Strategies to Begin Healing from Childhood Trauma. Emeryville, CA. Rockridge Press.

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