From the \"Our Everyday Mind\" series<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n It's past two in the afternoon. You're reading an email from a colleague and you feel irritation rising in your chest. The tone seems curt, the wording almost insulting. You're already composing your reply in your head.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Then you eat something. You come back twenty minutes later, reread the same email, and can no longer find anything in it that bothered you. It's an ordinary message, written in a hurry, by a busy person.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The email hasn't changed. Something has changed in you \u2014 and not in your thoughts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n We grew up with the idea that we have five senses. Sight, hearing, smell, taste, touch \u2014 all turned toward the world outside. The list is useful, but it's a popular classification, not a complete one: physiology describes many more forms of perception, from balance to pain and temperature. And among them is a sense that works constantly in the other direction, inward: the one through which we know we're hungry, that our heart is beating faster, that we need air, that our stomach has tightened.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It's called interoception<\/strong>The term goes back to Charles Sherrington, a British physiologist who, at the beginning of the twentieth century, divided the body's receptors into three families: those that receive information from the outside (exteroceptors), those that tell us where the body is in space (proprioceptors), and those that report what is happening in the organs (interoceptors).<\/p>\n\n\n\n For decades, interoception was a subject for physiologists: how the body regulates breathing, blood pressure, digestion. Only in the early 2000s did it truly become a subject for psychology. In 2002, the neuroanatomist A.D. (Bud) Craig published in Nature Reviews Neuroscience<\/em>, an article<\/a> whose title sounds almost like a therapist's question: How do you feel? Interoception: the sense of the physiological condition of the body<\/em>Craig proposed understanding interoception more broadly \u2014 not only as signals from the viscera, but as the general sense of the body's condition \u2014 and described a pathway through which these signals reach a region of the brain called the insula, which he later linked to the way we become aware of ourselves right now<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I've touched on this concept before, in the series \"The Anatomy of Emotional Life\", in the article\u00a0We feel what we think we feel?<\/mark><\/a>, where interoception appeared as the body's \"living map\" from which emotional experience is built. Here I'd like to pause on it for its own sake \u2014 because it is perhaps the most everyday of the senses, and the least noticed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The idea that emotion begins in the body is older than the word. In 1884, in an essay titled\u00a0What Is an Emotion?<\/mark><\/em><\/a>, William James wrote one of the most quoted ideas in the history of psychology: we don't cry because we're sorry, we feel sorry because we cry; we don't tremble because we're afraid, we're afraid because we tremble. It was a deliberately provocative formulation, and it was challenged almost immediately. But it raised a question that never went away: how much of what we call emotion is, in fact, the perception of a change in the body?<\/p>\n\n\n\n To be studied, interoception had to be measured. And the most accessible internal signal was the heartbeat. In 1981, the German psychologist Rainer Schandry proposed what became a classic task: you sit still, without touching your pulse, and count the heartbeats you feel over a short interval. Meanwhile, a device records the real ones. The difference between the two numbers becomes a measure of how precisely you \"hear\" your heart.<\/p>\n\n\n\n People differ enormously. Some count almost exactly. Others feel almost nothing. And the research that followed linked this difference to very different things: how intensely we experience emotions, intuitive decisions, even success in risky professions. A study published in 2016<\/a> in Scientific Reports<\/em> by Narayanan Kandasamy, John Coates and colleagues found that traders on a London trading floor who perceived their heartbeats more accurately earned, on average, more and lasted longer in the profession.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The story is seductive: those who feel their body better would decide better. \"Listen to your body\" seems, in this way, to receive scientific confirmation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n You don't need an electrocardiograph to recognize it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n You find it in the moment you realize, halfway through a tense conversation, that you've been holding your breath. In shoulders raised toward your ears without knowing since when. In the \"knot in your stomach\" before a difficult conversation, which you felt before you knew you were afraid. In the tiredness that turns out to be thirst. In the restlessness that turns out to be the third coffee.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But interoception doesn't only tell us when something is missing or hurts. It's also there in the feeling of fullness after a good meal, in the warmth that spreads through the body when we relax, in the way we sense that we're well without needing to explain why. The body isn't just an alarm system. It's also one of the places where we recognize comfort and pleasure.<\/p>\n\n\n\n You find it, too, in the opening scene. English even has a word for it: hangry<\/em> \u2014 from hungry<\/em> and angry<\/em>. In a study published in 2019<\/a> in the journal Emotion<\/em>, Jennifer MacCormack and Kristen Lindquist showed that hunger colors judgments of ambiguous things more negatively, especially in an already unpleasant context. And in a laboratory experiment, hungry participants reported more negative emotions and judged the researcher more harshly only when they hadn't first been prompted to pay attention to their own emotions. Hunger doesn't automatically turn into anger. It can contribute to irritation, especially when we don't recognize its influence \u2014 and attribute it to the email.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It often happens to me, in body-based work and in constellations, to notice how quickly a physical signal appears and how slowly its meaning arrives. A chest that tightens, warmth in the palms, a heaviness in the stomach. For a long time I treated these signals like messages already written, which I only had to read. Over time, I learned they're more like letters that don't yet form a word. The sensation is real, as experience \u2014 and it's a starting point for exploration, not a confirmation. The body signals what is happening within it. But that doesn't mean it also tells me why it's happening. <\/p>\n\n\n\n This distance between signal and meaning is, in fact, at the heart of current research on interoception.<\/p>\n\n\n\n An important part of today's neuroscience describes the brain not as a passive receiver, but as an organ that is constantly making predictions \u2014 including about what is happening in its own body. Anil Seth, in a 2013 article in\u00a0Trends in Cognitive Sciences<\/em>, and Lisa Feldman Barrett, together with W. Kyle Simmons, in 2015 in\u00a0Nature Reviews Neuroscience<\/em>, proposed, each with their own emphasis, that what we perceive from within is to a large extent the brain's\u00a0hypothesis<\/em>\u00a0about the state of the body, continuously corrected by the signals rising toward it. I wrote more about Barrett and the idea of constructed emotions in\u00a0Emotions have a history<\/mark><\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This doesn't mean every emotion can be explained exclusively by this mechanism \u2014 predictive models are themselves still being debated and refined. But one practical consequence is simple and important: the same racing heart can become fear, excitement, attraction, the effect of coffee or of stairs climbed in a hurry \u2014 depending on the context and on what the brain expects to find. The body provides the raw material. The meaning is constructed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And we don't learn this translation on our own<\/p>\n\n\n\n A child says \"I'm cold\" and hears \"no, you're not.\" Says they're full and is told \"eat a little more.\" Says their tummy hurts before school and hears \"there's nothing wrong with you, stop making things up.\" Not every such response leaves a mark \u2014 most of them are haste, tiredness, or care expressed clumsily. But we also learn to understand our bodies through the way others respond to what we feel. The child who says \"I'm hungry\" or \"it hurts\" is beginning to put words to sensations, and the responses they receive show them whether those words are taken seriously.<\/p>\n\n\n\n When sensations are repeatedly invalidated, a person doesn't lose their interoception. But the relationship between sensation, interpretation and self-trust can become more complicated: the signal is there, it just isn't believed anymore. This isn't a universally demonstrated mechanism, but rather a perspective worth exploring \u2014 one I've written about, from another angle, in\u00a0How we learn to feel<\/mark><\/a>\u00a0and in\u00a0That's how it was back then<\/mark><\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Sometimes, learning to listen to our body also means rediscovering the right to take what we feel seriously \u2014 without assuming that the first explanation is necessarily the right one.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Here things get more complicated, and it's worth saying so openly.<\/p>\n\n\n\n First, the heartbeat-counting task \u2014 on which a large part of the famous findings rests \u2014 has turned out to be more fragile than it seemed. Several teams, including that of Olivier Desmedt, Olivier Luminet and Olivier Corneille, showed in 2018 that the scores depend to a large extent on how well people estimate<\/em> their heart rate, on what they know about pulse, and on how careful they are to count only what they truly feel. Part of what was being measured as a \"sense of the heart\" was, in fact, inference. This doesn't cancel interoception. But it means many of the spectacular correlations \u2014 including the one about traders, obtained on a very small sample \u2014 should be read with caution.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Second, believing you feel your body well and feeling it accurately are not the same thing. In 2015, Sarah Garfinkel, Anil Seth, Hugo Critchley and their colleagues proposed, in an article<\/a> from Biological Psychology<\/em>, a distinction between three dimensions: objectively measured accuracy, the subjective belief about one's own sensitivity, and the degree to which the two match. In many people, they don't coincide. Someone can experience their body very intensely and still read it imprecisely.<\/p>\n\n\n\n One finding that gave me pause comes from a 2008 study led by Sahib Khalsa and published in Psychophysiology<\/em>. Long-term meditators, from Tibetan and Kundalini traditions, were compared with people without a meditation practice. The meditators reported better body awareness. On the heartbeat detection task, however, they didn't perform better. The practice had changed their relationship with the body \u2014 not necessarily the accuracy with which a particular signal was read. (Other studies, on other practices and other signals, have found different results; the picture remains mixed.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n Perhaps most importantly: more attention to the body doesn't automatically mean more well-being. The cognitive model of panic attacks, proposed by David M. Clark in 1986, describes exactly the opposite circle: a heart beating slightly faster, observed with fear and interpreted catastrophically, produces more fear, and the fear makes the heart beat even faster. Martin Paulus and Murray Stein described anxiety, in 2006, in terms of amplified interoceptive predictions. The body can therefore also produce disproportionate alarms: real signals, but stronger than the situation that triggered them. Attention to the body can be a support. It can also be a form of hypervigilance. It can be, for the same person, both one and the other, at different moments.<\/p>\n\n\n\n There are also moments when turning our attention inward doesn't bring us closer to calm, but to unease. For someone who has learned to associate certain sensations with danger \u2014 a heart beating harder, pressure in the chest, a stomach clenching \u2014 the simple invitation to \"feel what's happening inside you\" can be too much. I sometimes see this both in somatic work and in constellations. The first step isn't always to go deeper into the body, but to find enough safety in the present to be able to observe what's happening there: to look around, to feel the support of the chair, to orient first toward what we see and hear. Feeling the body and being able to stay with what you feel are not the same thing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n There are also people who perceive their body's sensations, sometimes even intensely, but find it difficult to identify and put into words the emotions associated with them. This difficulty may be part of what the psychiatrist Peter Sifneos named, in the 1970s, alexithymia<\/em> \u2014 literally, \"no words for emotions\". Several researchers have linked alexithymia to interoceptive difficulties. In 2016, Rebecca Brewer, Richard Cook and Geoffrey Bird went as far as proposing the idea of a general interoceptive deficit. It's a debated hypothesis, not a conclusion.<\/p>\n\n\n\n More broadly, interoception doesn't work the same way for everyone. Current research studies interoceptive differences in autism, ADHD, eating disorders and many other conditions \u2014 and what emerges more and more often is that these differences can't be reduced to a simple scale from \"feels little\" to \"feels a lot\". The same person may perceive some signals very intensely and others only faintly.<\/p>\n\n\n\n What remains, after all this, is something more modest than the slogan \"the body knows everything\" \u2014 but perhaps more useful.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The body constantly sends signals, and they matter: for regulation, for emotion, for how we find our way in decisions. But the signal doesn't come with the interpretation attached. Between what we feel and what we understand sit context, our history, the words we have available, and the state we're in.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Researchers working with the MAIA questionnaire<\/a>, developed by Wolf Mehling and colleagues in 2012, suggest that it's not only how much<\/em> we feel that<\/em> matters, but also how we are with what we feel: whether we can notice a sensation without immediately becoming alarmed, whether we can use it as information, whether we can experience the body as a relatively safe place. The questionnaire, in fact, measures separately the ability to notice<\/em> sensations and the tendency to worry<\/em> about them. One doesn't imply the other: you can notice tension in your chest and let it be just that \u2014 tension \u2014 or you can notice the same tension and immediately start building a story about what it might mean. The quality of the relationship, not only the intensity of the signal.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This is where other texts on the blog connect. In\u00a0How we see with our eyes closed<\/mark><\/a>\u00a0I wrote that bodily sensations can be real without the explanation we give them being correct. In\u00a0Emotional contagion<\/mark><\/a>, that we can take on, through the body, states that don't originate in us. And in\u00a0The body that remembers<\/mark><\/a>, that some reactions come from experiences the body learned long before words. Interoception is the common ground of all these experiences \u2014 the sense through which the news reaches us before we know where it comes from.<\/p>\n\n\n\n There's no need to turn interoception into constant surveillance of the body. No one needs to count their heartbeats ten times a day.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Perhaps it's enough that, the next time a state suddenly takes hold of you \u2014 irritation, unease, a sadness with no clear reason \u2014 you ask yourself, before any conclusion: what is my body feeling right now?<\/em> And only then: what do I think this means?<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n Sometimes the answer will be that you're hungry. Other times, that something important is moving in you and needs time to find words. The difference between the two isn't always visible in the first moment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Your colleague's email stayed the same. Only the translation changed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Perhaps the question isn't whether you listen to your body. Perhaps it's how quickly you rush to answer on its behalf.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\nThe sense we don't talk about<\/h4>\n\n\n\n
From William James to counted heartbeats<\/h4>\n\n\n\n
Where interoception shows up in everyday life<\/h4>\n\n\n\n
The body signals, the mind translates<\/h4>\n\n\n\n
I learned not to believe what I feel<\/h4>\n\n\n\n
Where the story is more fragile than it seems<\/h4>\n\n\n\n
When attention to the body doesn't help<\/h4>\n\n\n\n
We don't all feel the same way<\/h4>\n\n\n\n
What we can still say today<\/h4>\n\n\n\n
The next time something \"isn't right\"<\/h4>\n\n\n\n
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