Feeling Our Bodies and Our Emotions: Interoception, the “8th Sense”

Like many of us in the 21st century, I have to make a concerted effort to stay connected to my body.
Of course, there are the fundamental daily challenges presented by our digital (virtual) realities, constantly pulling us out of our analog bodies. For some of us, there are the added challenges inherent in claiming (or being assigned) social identities based on your physical body. As a queer woman of color, a first-generation immigrant from a Filipino Catholic family, for much of my life my body has been terra incognita.

How many of us feel safe and at home in our bodies, truly?

It is said that on the path of awakening, there should be no area outside the light and warmth of awareness. And yet, it is only in the last 5 or so years, beginning in my mid 40s (!) that I began to more seriously explore the wisdom of the body, and to include it, without any corner left out, in the sphere of awareness. This has opened up many new realms of investigation and insights.

Recently, as part of my interest in and teaching on resilience, I’ve been reading some of the latest work in psychology, biology, and neuroscience of emotions. At long last, the body’s wisdom is at the nexus of many of these current conversations in Western positivist science (though, as usual, contemplatives in the various wisdom traditions have been pointing to these principles for millennia).

The concept of interoception, or neuroception, is a critical term in these discussions.

Interoception, the so-called “8th sense,” is the one that detects the physiological state of the body. Colloquially, one could say that interoception is what it feels like to be in this specific bag of bones and muscles and tissues, ever changing in a dynamic flow, moment by moment.

In Polyvagal Theory, developed by behavioral neuroscientist Stephen Porges, the emphasis is on the vagus nerve, the longest nerve in the body and the one that is connected to all the major organs in the autonomic nervous system. As such, the vagus nerve plays a critical part in interoception. Porges explains how the two branches of the vagus nerve–the dorsal vagal and the ventral vagal–function to regulate our freeze, fight, or connect reactions.

According to Lisa Feldman Barrett, a leading emotions scientist, the biological function of interoception is to:

  • Constantly scan the environment
  • Help assess whether I am safe, connected, threatened, or in danger
  • Develop a mental model of my world, in order to predict what will happen next
  • Allocate our “body budget,” or energy in the form of nutrients, oxygen, blood, etc., appropriate to the situation.

Therefore, interoception is a basic feature of human experience–it is happening all the time, not just when we are feeling an emotion. Perhaps even more significantly, this level of constant scanning of the environment is happening instantaneously, before conscious awareness and prior to cognitive labeling of what’s happening. An expert on Polyvagal Theory in a therapeutic context, Deb Dana, says, “Neuroception precedes perception…State precedes story.”

When it comes to emotion regulation and resilience, interoception is key. When we stay present in our bodies, including and especially when emotions are arising, we get to know what the body markers of specific emotions are–the coarse as well as the subtle. These are like early warning signals for a coming storm.

If I feel my breath become shallow and my lower abdomen constrict, for example, these are body markers that signal that something has shifted in my perception of the environment that is causing me to no longer feel safe. From there, I can investigate further, both what’s happening inside and what’s happening outside, and doing my best to align my perception with what my body needs to do to survive and ultimately thrive. (Perception is the operative word here — my body’s interoceptive processes may or may not be accurate. In another post, I explore more of the many factors that influence how our body perceives safety, connection, danger and threat.)

In the same way that animals attuned to changes in the atmosphere can sense when a storm, a tsunami, or an earthquake is about to happen, we can learn our body markers, signaling arising emotions. In this way, we can either apply our skills of emotion regulation to work with the energy of the emotion before it escalates into a full-blown storm.

Beyond preparedness for emotional weather, interoception is a fundamental part of being human. What happens when we become disconnected from this fundamental aspect of being human? We lose a lot, actually.

Not only do we lose one of our most basic instruments for our emotional GPS, telling us when we are coming out of and back into balance, but we lose our ability to experience the joys and sorrows of being human. As the saying goes, when we turn down the pain, we turn down the joy too. Without a vital interoceptive awareness, we lose connection with the balance or imbalance of the physical environment around us, including the people, animals, plants on our fragile earth.

Isn’t this too high a price to pay?

The Emotional Rescue Method empowers us, as individuals and in community, to work with our embodied experience to build emotional resilience.

I am really excited about the innovative work that considers healing the impact of social injustice on the body as a key strategy for building stronger social movements.  See:

  • Resmaa Menakem, My Grandmother’s Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies (2017).
  • The work of generative somatics: www.generativesomatics.org
  • adrienne maree brown, Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good (2019)
  • The work of Dr. Sará King on the science of social justice. See “Where Science, Mindfulness, and Social Justice Intersect.

Lisa Feldman Barrett wrote an excellent book on the latest psychological, biological, and neuroscientific understandings of emotions, How Emotions are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain (2017). Specifically, she posits a theory of constructed emotions (to counter the classical theory of universal emotions), which I find very compelling. More on that a little later!

There’s a lot of great information on Polyvagal Theory:

  • This is quite a good summary of the science, written by its originator, Stephen Porges. (Warning: it is written in a dense academic style!) Stephen Porges, The Polyvagal Theory: Neurophysiological Foundations of Emotions, Attachment, Communication, Self-Regulation (2011).
  • For a more accessible explanation and an excellent exploration of its application to therapeutic contexts, see the work of Deb Dana, The Polyvagal Theory in Therapy: Engaging the Rhythm of Regulation (2018).

I also like this explanation of how interoception can deepen our emotions, by a professor of neuroscience and psychiatry, Sarah Garfinkle. {https://erraticus.co/2019/02/23/interoception-enhance-depth-emotions/ }

Musical inspiration

Do yourself a favor, and watch this (first with sound on, then with sound off, or vice versa): “Feeling Good” by the inimitable Nina Simone (sign language interpretation/performance by Anne Magalhaes)