Trauma can change the accuracy of your eighth sense: INTEROCEPTION.
This is your ability to notice and understand your internal sensations.
Interoception is key to regulating the nervous system following chronic and traumatic stress.
The surge of evidence on interoception points to the vagus nerve’s role as the main pathway for communicating information about the internal condition of the body to the brain.
The most important region being the insula.
Sensations of a racing heart or butterflies in your stomach are a foundation for your emotions and your physiology.
Previous life circumstances may change your interoceptive accuracy.
An adaption to traumatic stress is to dissociate from sensations and block out internal awareness.
There may be less activity in the insula and a feeing of numbness.
In research, people with depression often have less interoceptive awareness.
The reduced ability to feel their bodily signals may lie behind their sense of exhaustion and emotional numbness – the sense that they can’t feel anything at all.
On the other hand, anxiety may make you attentive to signals, but you may not read them as accurately.
A small fluctuation in your heart rate may be misread by the insula as being a much bigger danger signal than it actually is, causing anxiety.
This may lead to sensations becoming overwhelming. Research shows following chronic and traumatic stress there can be increased connectivity between the insula and several regions of the fear circuitry in the brain, and this can amplify your sense of panic.
Both of these states can create an inner homelessness.
You leave your body and the present moment, swept up in survival states and dysregulation.
You don’t feel comfortable in our body.
Interoception is a sensory system that you can train, just like you can re-train other systems to improve things like balance.
You can influence the two-way communication between the vagus nerve and the insula. This is like improving the phone signal between the body and the brain - it becomes clearer and more accurate.
The greater accuracy you have for tuning into sensations and understanding your physiology, the greater agency you have in shaping your life. You feel in charge of your body, your feelings and yourself.
Interoceptive awareness is the key to regulating the nervous system following chronic and traumatic stress.
Re-training interoception helps you develop greater accuracy at reading body signals in the present moment, rather thank responding to challenges like you’re still in the past.
Uncoupling sensations fro a story that just around the corner something terrible is going to happen, calms the brain’s fear circuitry, regulates the nervous system and reduces anxiety.
You can also change the under-activity in the insula so that we don’t feel numb, flat and disconnected to life whenever you are facing demands or conflict.
Re-training the insula means you can stop swinging up to the highs of anxiety and agitation, down to the lows of burnout and shutdown.
You get a balanced, accurate input of what’s happening in the present moment and you can use those signals to guide you, rather than confuse and overwhelm you
As you improve this skill for your inner world, your outer life will flourish,
Being at home in your body again is something that you can train and is a big piece of the puzzle when it comes to recovering from chronic and traumatic stress.