Interoception refers to your awareness of your bodily sensations.
It plays an important role in helping you recover from chronic and traumatic stress.
We can fall on a spectrum of being hypersensitive to sensations, or sometimes being hyposensitive. Neurodivergent individuals might recognise this.
An adaption to chronic and traumatic stress is to dissociate from sensations because they’re overwhelming.
What’s dissociation?
It’s when you feel numb, disconnected or separate from the physical sensations an emotions in part of the body. This leads to less interoceptive awareness and is linked with depression.
Dissociation from the body can also lead to chronic pain and inflammation in the areas you feel cut off from.
Blocking out visceral sensations and the body’s sensations can cause chronic health conditions because it dampens the two-way connectivity between the brain and the body, via the vagus nerve.
As well as chronic pain, anxiety, depression, gut disorders and eating disorders can arise from having low or inaccurate interoception.
When you train this sensory system you integrate the body with a region in the brain known as the insula - this plays a major role in emotional regulation and body awareness.
You engage the vagus nerve, which can help to bring you back into the state where rest and repair happen and inflammation reduces.
Interoception is not only intrinsically soothing to your nervous system and helps improve how your organs function, it also improves your emotional regulation.
As you restore the integration between the body and the brain following chronic and traumatic stress, your nervous system becomes more flexible, adaptable and energised.
Re-training interoception in a way that respects dysregulation and were you have the resources to remain stable and grounded is what restores balance to your nervous system.