Interoception: Your Ultimate Hack for Self-Awareness

Interoception increases your self-awareness.

Interoception is the ability to notice, read, and understand bodily sensations. This is a skill that is paramount to emotional agility since emotional agility requires us to understand our emotions and their sources correctly. A person with high interoceptive ability has a higher awareness of their emotions and their bodily sensations.

What are the kinds of bodily sensations that accompany emotions? The rise or fall in heart rates, increase in blood flow which causes blushing or reduction in blood flow, making one pale, sweating, urge to urinate or excrete, shivering or shaking of the body, churning or fluttering in the stomach, stiffening of the body, a ‘lump in the throat’, numbness, etc. are some of the visceral sensations associated with emotions.

On the other hand, not having this skill leads to poor life outcomes. Poor interoception produces poor emotional responses, poor decisions, and eating disorders, apart from several addictions and depression. They have very poor self-awareness and low empathy.

Higher interoception reverses these tendencies and produces superior emotional functioning and well-being. People with higher interoception have better social skills, higher empathy, and an ability to finely distinguish their emotions. People with higher interoception have better financial success.

Have you ever felt a nagging body sensation that tells you that you are forgetting something very important? You scratch your head to figure out what that is and eventually find out. This sensation comes from interoception.

It happens when you plan to do something, such as pay the bills before the due date, and then go about doing other business. Your highly attuned interoception then reminds you of the task on time.

How can you tell whether you have a good interception? You need a pulse meter. Try counting your heartbeats without touching your chest. Then, compare your count with the count given by the pulse meter. If you are within the 70% to 130% range, you fall within the average group.

Try to count with your palm over your chest and see if accuracy improves. People with higher interoceptive ability have closer to 100% accuracy without touching.

We will discuss a number of measures to improve your interoceptive ability in the next issue.