Interoception: How Listening to Your Body Supports Healing
Three years ago, when I was 53, my phone would buzz several times a day with a reminder that nobody else knew about. Wherever I was, I would quietly place my hand on my lower belly, breathe in, follow the breath down towards my hand and then let it leave my body as slowly as I could. I did this in secret because it felt far too odd to mention to anyone, and for weeks I felt very little apart from mildly ridiculous.
What I did not know then was that this small habit would change my relationship with my body, my feelings and my life.
“Our bodies tell the story of our struggles to love and be loved” Aline LaPierre
A life lived from the neck up
For most of my life I lived almost entirely in my head. I spent my early working years in emergency care and then 25 years in social work and mental health, and in all of those roles staying in my head was how I kept going. Thinking my way through things was a skill that served me and the people I worked with, because it helped me stay steady in situations that would otherwise have been overwhelming, and in work like that steadiness matters.
Looking back now, I can see how much that steadiness cost me. I was disconnected from the people I worked with in a way I could not recognise at the time, because I held compassion as an idea in my head rather than as something I could feel. I knew what compassion looked like, I could talk about it and I could act in ways that were considered compassionate, yet I had never felt that warm, tender response to another person rising up inside me.
I want to be gentle with that younger version of myself, because I understand now that this way of living kept me safe and allowed me to keep showing up in very demanding roles. If I had felt everything I witnessed in emergency care and social work without any way of regulating it, I am not sure I could have carried on. My mind did what it needed to do, and it did it well, although it meant living at a distance from my own heart and from the people in front of me.
If you have shelves full of self help books and can explain your patterns in impressive detail while still feeling much the same inside, you may recognise this way of living. I could think about my feelings for hours, yet I had rarely considered my body at all, and I had certainly never considered the inside of it. It did not occur to me that compassion, like every other feeling, might be something that lives in the body and needs a body that is present enough to feel it.
How I found my way back
My path towards my body began when I got sober. Without alcohol to soften the edges, I needed new ways to be with myself, and I found yoga, which gave me my first experience of moving and breathing with some awareness. Later, my training as a somatic therapist, including NeuroAffective Touch training with Dr Aline LaPierre, gave me a language for what I was beginning to discover.
That is where the phone reminders and the hand on my belly came in. For the first 5 to 6 weeks almost nothing seemed to happen, and my mind was quick to tell me that this was a waste of time. Then one day, during one of those quiet moments, I noticed a warmth inside my body that felt comforting and expansive, with a calmness and stillness I had never felt before.
Something shifted when that warmth arrived, because my mind suddenly became interested rather than resistant. The practice I had needed reminders for became something I wanted to return to, and I grew curious about what was happening inside me. It felt as though a new sense was waking up, a sixth sense alongside the familiar five, and I later learned that it has a name.
What is interoception?
Interoception is our sense of what is happening inside the body, including the heartbeat, the breath, hunger, thirst, warmth, tension and the subtle fluttering or tightening that often comes before we can name an emotion.
The idea has a long history. In its original definition, interoception was understood as the body-to-brain flow of sensations about the state of our internal organs, with early work by Sherrington, and the neuroscientist Bud Craig later widened it to the perception of the physiological condition of the whole body at any given moment. Craig’s research pointed to a part of the brain called the insula, which gives rise to finely detailed feelings from the body, including pain, temperature, itch, touch, hunger and thirst, and which he linked with our subjective awareness of a feeling self. In 2018 a group of leading researchers led by Sahib Khalsa described interoception as the whole process by which the nervous system senses, integrates, stores and represents information about the state of the inner body.
The researcher Sarah Garfinkel and her colleagues helped show that interoception has different layers. Interoceptive accuracy is our ability to objectively detect internal signals, while interoceptive sensibility is how well we believe we sense them, and interoceptive awareness describes how closely those two match. When I look back, I can see that my hand on my belly was gently building all three, as I learned first to notice sensation and then to trust it.
Key voices in this work
Bessel van der Kolk, whose book The Body Keeps the Score brought many of us to this subject, describes how trauma affects the insula and the systems we use for self-awareness, so that people who have experienced trauma often lose touch with themselves. He writes that people who feel chronically unsafe inside their bodies often become expert at ignoring their gut feelings and numbing awareness of what is happening inside, which describes the way I lived for many years with great accuracy.
The neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett, in How Emotions Are Made, suggests that our brains build emotions partly from interoceptive signals, which helps explain why people who are disconnected from their bodies can find it so hard to know what they feel. Peter Levine, who developed Somatic Experiencing, has long encouraged people to attend to the felt sense of the body as a gentle route through trauma, and these ideas sit at the heart of the somatic work I do now.
Cynthia Price at the University of Washington developed an approach called Mindful Awareness in Body-oriented Therapy, which combines touch, mindfulness and education to teach interoceptive awareness and related self-care skills. She has observed that people recovering from abuse and substance use are often very disconnected from their bodies, which I recognise in my own story and in many of the people I work with.
Why disconnection makes sense
If you have spent years living in your head, it can help to know that this was very likely a wise adaptation. When feeling was too much, or when there was nobody safe to share our feelings with, turning the volume down on the body was a way to survive and keep going.
Research is beginning to reflect this. A 2023 study of people with difficult childhood experiences found that body dissociation, which refers to a habitual non-attendance or disregard of interoceptive signals, was the measure that linked those early experiences with difficulties in managing emotions later in life. In other words, many of us learned to stop listening to our bodies because listening did not feel safe, and that learning can gradually soften once safety becomes possible.
Interoception: How Listening to Your Body Supports Healing
This is where I find the research so hopeful. When we can sense what is happening inside us, our nervous system has more information to work with, and we can respond to our needs earlier and more kindly. In 2024, Kelly Leech, Peta Stapleton and Alan Patching at Bond University in Australia published a scoping review in the journal Frontiers in Psychiatry, bringing together 43 studies on interoceptive awareness and post-traumatic stress, and they found that the most common and compelling function to emerge was its connection with emotion regulation. Their review also highlights that being able to perceive our internal bodily cues appears to shape how well we can regulate our emotions, which is exactly what I have experienced in my own body.
Cynthia Price’s work offers some encouraging evidence. In a trial with 187 women in treatment for substance use, those who received interoceptive awareness training showed significantly better outcomes around substance use at six and twelve months, alongside positive effects on craving, emotion regulation and interoceptive awareness itself. As someone who found her way to her body through sobriety, I find that deeply moving.
I see interoception as one of the quiet ways our nervous systems heal from trauma. As we learn to feel sensations without being overwhelmed by them, the body slowly discovers that it is safe to be present again, and we begin to reconnect with feelings and needs that once had to be set aside.
The science is still unfolding, and some researchers argue that interoception may be better understood as a useful way of organising several distinct lines of research than as one single ability. I find that reassuring, because it leaves room for each of us to discover our inner world in our own way.
When the breath is not the right place to start
My own doorway was the breath and the belly, although I want to say clearly that this will not suit everyone. For many people who have experienced trauma, turning attention inwards can feel unsettling rather than calming, especially at first.
David Treleaven, author of Trauma-Sensitive Mindfulness, explains that the breath is not always neutral for people living with trauma, because our breathing is closely connected with the stress response. He suggests that other anchors for attention can work well instead, such as the feet, the back, the hands or the other senses, including what we can see or hear, and he reminds us that more practice is not always better, so finding the amount that feels just right matters.
If focusing on your belly or your breath feels like too much, that tells you something important about what your body needs, and it is a signal to begin somewhere gentler.
Something to try
You might like to try this now or come back to it later, and you are welcome to stop at any point.
Find a position that feels comfortable enough, keeping your eyes open or closing them if that feels right for you. Choose a place in your body that feels neutral or pleasant to notice, which could be your feet on the floor, your back against the chair, your hands resting on your lap or the warmth of a mug between your palms. If it feels comfortable, you could rest a hand on your lower belly and follow one breath down towards it, letting it leave as slowly as it wants to, although your feet or hands are just as good a place to begin.
Stay with whatever you notice for a few moments, without needing to feel anything in particular. If very little seems to happen, that is completely normal and it was true for me for weeks. If anything starts to feel like too much, you can open your eyes, look around the room and let your attention rest on something you can see, such as a colour you like or the light at the window.
You might like to come back to this a few times a day, perhaps with a gentle reminder on your phone, for as long as it feels helpful.
What has changed for me
Interoception has become a place where I can anchor myself. I can feel my feelings as they arise rather than days later, and I notice when overwhelm is building or when tiredness is asking me to rest, often before it takes over my day or I become ill and I am forced to rest.
Perhaps the greatest change is the freedom of no longer living only in my head. My mind is still a valued companion, although it now works alongside my body rather than doing everything on its own, and that feels like coming home to a part of myself I had been away from for a very long time.
If you have lived from the neck up for many years, your body has been waiting patiently, and it is still there for you whenever you feel ready to listen. You were always worthy of that kind of attention, and you still are.
If you would like support
If something in this has felt familiar and you are curious about exploring it with support, I would love to hear from you. You can book a free connection call, which is simply a relaxed conversation about what you are experiencing and whether working together feels right for you, with no pressure either way.
If you would rather explore at your own pace, the Sunday Pause is a gentle weekly email with a moment of reflection and a short practice to help your nervous system soften and reconnect. You are warmly welcome to sign up using this form below.
Crisis Support
If you are finding things very hard and have thoughts of harming yourself, please reach out for support straight away, whether to your GP, NHS 111 or to Samaritans, who you can call free at any time on 116 123.
About the author
Laura Starky is an integrative somatic therapist based in Beverley, East Yorkshire, offering sessions in person and online. Her path into this work began in pre-hospital emergency care and continued through 25 years in social work across child protection, substance misuse and mental health. Her somatic training began with ISOHH and has since deepened through NeuroAffective Touch® training with Dr Aline LaPierre. She holds ACCPH Senior Member accreditation and works under regular professional supervision.
Laura is also a qualified yoga and meditation teacher and a committed practitioner of contemplative practice, rooted mainly in the non-dual tradition of Shaiva Tantra.
Resources and references
Research
Craig, A.D. (2002) ‘How do you feel? Interoception: the sense of the physiological condition of the body’, Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 3(8), pp. 655–666. doi:10.1038/nrn894.
Garfinkel, S.N., Seth, A.K., Barrett, A.B., Suzuki, K. and Critchley, H.D. (2015) ‘Knowing your own heart: distinguishing interoceptive accuracy from interoceptive awareness’, Biological Psychology, 104, pp. 65–74. doi:10.1016/j.biopsycho.2014.11.004.
Leech, K., Stapleton, P. and Patching, A. (2024) ‘A roadmap to understanding interoceptive awareness and post-traumatic stress disorder: a scoping review’, Frontiers in Psychiatry, 15, 1355442. doi:10.3389/fpsyt.2024.1355442.
Khalsa, S.S. et al. (2018) ‘Interoception and mental health: a roadmap’, Biological Psychiatry: Cognitive Neuroscience and Neuroimaging, 3(6), pp. 501–513. doi:10.1016/j.bpsc.2017.12.004.
Price, C.J., Thompson, E.A., Crowell, S.E., Pike, K., Cheng, S.C., Parent, S. and Hooven, C. (2019) ‘Longitudinal effects of interoceptive awareness training through mindful awareness in body-oriented therapy (MABT) as an adjunct to women’s substance use disorder treatment: a randomized controlled trial’, Drug and Alcohol Dependence, 198, pp. 140–149. PMID: 30928884.
Schmitz, M. et al. (2023) ‘The impact of traumatic childhood experiences on interoception: disregarding one’s own body’, Borderline Personality Disorder and Emotion Dysregulation, 10. doi:10.1186/s40479-023-00212-5.
Schoeller FA, Zhang B, Garcia T and Reggente N (2025) There is no such thing as interoception. Front. Psychol. 16:1488415. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2025.1488415
Sources
University of Washington (2019) ‘Mindful body awareness training during treatment for drug addiction helps prevent relapse’. Available at: https://www.washington.edu/news/2019/04/16/mindful-body-awareness-training-during-treatment-for-drug-addiction-helps-prevent-relapse/
Books
Barrett, L.F. (2017) How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain. London: Macmillan.
Levine, P.A. (2010) In an Unspoken Voice: How the Body Releases Trauma and Restores Goodness. Berkeley: North Atlantic Books.
Treleaven, D.A. (2018) Trauma-Sensitive Mindfulness: Practices for Safe and Transformative Healing. New York: W.W. Norton.
van der Kolk, B. (2014) The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma. New York: Viking.
Last updated: November 2026
