INTEROCEPTION

The hidden sense that helps you feel what’s happening inside — and what happens when it goes quiet.

What Is Interoception?

Interoception is your brain’s ability to sense what’s happening inside your body.

It includes signals like:

  • Hunger

  • Thirst

  • Fullness

  • Heart rate

  • Breathing

  • Temperature

  • Fatigue

  • The need to use the bathroom

  • Physical tension or pain

But it also plays a quieter role: it helps you track your emotional state, your sense of presence, and your internal boundaries. When interoception works well, you can feel what your body needs — and respond to it. You know when you’re tired, when you’re anxious, when you’ve had enough, or when something’s off.

When interoception breaks down, that internal feedback loop becomes unreliable. You may feel disconnected from your needs. Or you may not feel much of anything at all — until your system crashes.

Many people have never heard the word interoception — yet it affects nearly every part of daily life. It’s often described as the “eighth sense” — alongside sight, hearing, smell, touch, taste, vestibular (balance), and proprioception (body position). But interoception is different. It’s not about the world around you. It’s about what’s happening within.

Some people can feel a single skipped heartbeat. Others don’t notice hunger until they’re lightheaded. Some can track subtle changes in their breath. Others breathe shallowly for hours and don’t realize they’ve been holding tension all day.

That’s interoception. Not how your body works — but how well you can feel it working.

When the Signals Go Quiet

What it feels like when your body’s feedback system doesn’t come through. Interoception isn’t always consistent.

For some people, it works smoothly most of the time. For others, it’s dulled, delayed, or scattered. And for many, it disappears entirely during periods of stress, trauma, shutdown, or burnout.

When this happens, it becomes harder to:

  • Recognize what your body needs

  • Name what you’re feeling

  • Know when to stop or slow down

  • Trust your own internal cues

And the effect is subtle — not dramatic. It doesn’t feel like something’s “wrong.” It often just feels… blank.

You might recognize it like this:

  • You forget to eat until your body starts shaking — and even then, you’re not sure what it needs.

  • You drink nothing all day, not out of defiance, but because thirst never really showed up.

  • You feel overstimulated but can’t tell if it’s hunger, lack of sleep, or emotional overload.

  • You miss signs of illness or exhaustion until your body gives out.

  • You try to meditate or relax, but can’t find yourself “inside.” You feel vague, foggy, or somewhere far away.

For some, this has always been the baseline. For others, it appears after trauma, after stress, after years of ignoring signals in order to survive.

This disconnection can lead to a kind of body-anonymity — like you’re living inside something you can’t quite hear. You move through tasks, try to do the right things, but don’t feel the internal yes or no that makes those choices real.

And when interoception is missing, even the most practical routines — eating, sleeping, cleaning, resting — become hard to track. Because they’re no longer guided by felt need. They’re just actions you try to remember.

When your body stops speaking clearly, it doesn’t mean it gave up on you. It means it wasn’t being heard for a long time — and it got quieter. Not to punish you. To protect you.

Why Interoception Matters

It’s not just about knowing when you’re hungry — it’s about knowing where you are in yourself. Most people think of body signals in simple terms: hunger, thirst, tiredness. But interoception goes deeper than physical maintenance. It’s the system that helps you track:

  • Whether you feel calm or tense

  • Whether you’re safe or overwhelmed

  • Whether something feels right or wrong

  • When you’re nearing your limit — physically, emotionally, or mentally

This makes it central to self-regulation. If your body can’t send accurate signals — or your brain can’t interpret them — it becomes much harder to make decisions that protect your well-being.

You might:

  • Push past exhaustion without noticing

  • Miss early signs of anxiety until it becomes panic

  • Struggle to tell the difference between hunger and emptiness

  • Confuse physical symptoms for emotional ones, or the other way around

In many cases, interoception is what helps link emotion to the body. Without it, feelings become detached from physical cues. You know something is wrong, but can’t trace it. You feel dysregulated, but can’t tell what will help. The feedback loop is broken.

Interoception and Presence

This sense is also deeply tied to embodiment — the ability to feel “inside” your own body and your own moment. Without it:

  • You might feel disoriented in time

  • You may not notice how long you’ve been sitting still

  • Movement, stillness, or rest might not feel satisfying — because there’s no internal signal confirming “this is working”

  • You may live mostly in your thoughts, struggling to reconnect with your physical self

This doesn’t mean you’re disconnected on purpose. It means the part of your system that tracks what’s happening inside has been disrupted, overloaded, or tuned out — sometimes for years.

The Emotional Cost

When interoception goes quiet, so does the ability to self-correct gently.

You don’t know you’re nearing the edge until you’re already past it. You don’t know you’re holding your breath until your chest aches. You don’t know you need rest until you collapse into it — and even then, you might not feel it land.

This can create a subtle but constant feeling of distrust in yourself:

  • “Why didn’t I notice earlier?”

  • “Why can’t I tell what’s wrong?”

  • “Why do I only respond when things are already bad?”

But again, the problem isn’t lack of care.

It’s a signal system that’s gone quiet — and needs space to return.

This isn’t about getting better at “listening to your body.” It’s about slowly learning how to hear it again — when it’s ready to speak.

How Interoception Becomes Disrupted

And what that tells us about recovery.

Interoception is sensitive. It’s shaped by biology — but also by experience. While some people are born with low interoceptive awareness, others lose it over time. Especially when life teaches them, directly or indirectly, that listening to their body isn’t safe, useful, or allowed.

There are many reasons this system can go quiet:

Chronic Stress & Burnout

When your nervous system is in survival mode, your brain begins to ignore subtle signals. It prioritizes external danger over internal cues. Hunger becomes secondary. Fatigue is pushed aside. Breath goes shallow. You stay “functional” — but only in a narrow, reactive way.

Over time, this becomes a baseline. You stop noticing early signals because your system learned to skip them. It speaks only when it’s too late.

Trauma & Emotional Suppression

If you’ve experienced trauma — especially in childhood — your body may have been a source of discomfort, fear, or disconnection. In these cases, tuning out internal signals becomes a survival strategy.

  • If emotions weren’t safe to express, you may have learned not to feel them.

  • If your needs were unmet or punished, your brain may have numbed them.

  • If you were expected to perform, achieve, or endure — no matter how you felt — then ignoring your body may have become a way to stay acceptable.

This isn’t weakness. It’s adaptation. But one that can last long after the threat is gone.

Cognitive Overload & Modern Life

In many lives, the body is treated like a background process — something to maintain, not something to inhabit. Long work hours. Blue light. Screens. Constant input. Minimal rest. Minimal movement. Minimal awareness.

Over time, the body fades into noise. You start living almost entirely in the mind — planning, managing, reacting. The deeper signals still exist, but they get buried beneath the static.

What This Means for Recovery

There’s no trick to “fix” interoception. No shortcut to suddenly feel your body again. But what the science — and lived experience — tells us is this: Interoception doesn’t return through willpower. It returns through safety, rhythm, repetition, and trust.

This might mean:

  • Letting silence exist, even when it’s uncomfortable

  • Letting breath be uneven, until it settles on its own

  • Letting hunger feel unfamiliar, until it shows up without guilt

  • Letting your body be a place of curiosity, not performance

You don’t have to force connection. You just have to stop running from it. And when it returns — even in fragments — it changes everything. Time feels different. Food tastes different. Movement feels real. Emotion has edges again. The present becomes something you can feel, not just pass through.

You are not disconnected because you failed to try hard enough. You are disconnected because your body had to protect itself — in ways it may not have had words for. You are allowed to return slowly. You are allowed to feel again.