The Art And Science of Interoception
How to become an intrepid explorer of your inner landscape
Hey, Jonny here 👋
I just contributed an essay to the writing collective Every that I'm proud of. It's titled 'The Art and Science of Interoception' and explores the lesser-known but vitally important skill of exploring our inner landscape.
Please enjoy!
🙋♂️ The Art and Science of Interoception
What if I told you that you could turn up the dial of your everyday experience? With sufficient practice, you could enhance your capacity to sense and track your internal state, as if you were upgrading from a 1960s television to experiencing the movie of your life at an IMAX in 4K.
This is the power of interoception––yet most people have never heard of it.
A personal or health crisis often facilitates radical shifts in perspective, and my own journey was no exception.
Five years ago, I was living with my fiancé in the English coastal town of Brighton, where she worked as a doctor. She had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder before we met, yet for the most part, she was bursting at the seams with life, with a mischievous grin and luminous presence.
One morning, while I was traveling, she suffered from an anxiety attack at work. In the intensity of that moment and without friends or family present to intervene, she rode home and overdosed on her own medication — taking her own life.
As I embarked on the long process of dealing with the pain of this loss, I began to explore parts of myself –– the repressed emotions and authentic expressions –– that had lain beneath my conscious awareness. I was afraid that if I didn’t learn how to metabolize my grief, it would lead me to become bitter and perhaps unable to love fully again.
One of my more profound realizations –– and gifts of grief –– was that I had unknowingly spent the vast majority of my life living in my head and emotionally numb from the neck down.
Growing up in the British education system, Somatic Literacy 101 –– aka learning how to listen to your internal physical and biological feedback –– was, unsurprisingly, not part of the core curriculum. So over the past five years, I dedicated myself to exploring the psychological and emotional terrain of my inner landscape. This path has included hundreds of breathwork journeys, guided psychedelic experiences, a vision quest, and 10 days of meditating inside a dark room. The most unexpectedly potent experience was learning how to freedive down to 120 feet underwater with a single breath. To equalize — aka relieve the pressure that builds in the inner ear and sinuses as a result of increasing one’s depth below the surface — requires a refined, subtle awareness of physical tension, which I came to understand as a form of high-stakes interoception training.
I now feel like an entirely different person. I notice myself making more intuitive decisions, with less emotional reactivity and a sense of greater aliveness in my day-to-day experience.
We have more than just five senses
As Michael Ashcroft pointed out, the idea that we humans have five senses — sight, sound, smell, touch, and taste — is a belief that dates back 2,000 years to Aristotle.
Back then, it was a decent guess, but neuroscience has advanced significantly since the days of ancient Greece. It turns out that we have at least four additional senses—and the most underrated and practical of them is known as interoception.
The word has two parts: “intero–” refers to “internal” and “–ception” to “awareness.” In essence, it means awareness of our internal state, which includes learned associations, memories, emotions, and all the data running through the interconnected pipelines of the 100 billion neurons in your body.2
Intero-ception can be contrasted with “extero-ception,” which involves receiving data through the external senses. Most of us tend to prioritize external sense data –– like endlessly refreshing a newsfeed after dinner when internally, our body is sending signals to recover and begin winding down.
In the center of the brain lies a remarkably sophisticated piece of biological machinery called the insula. This spongy core is the headquarters for cortical representation, which refers to how your brain processes all the information about your internal state.
Imagine that this area of your brain is like one of those gorgeous 16th-century maps that had “here be dragons” scribbled over the yet-to-be-explored areas. In much the same way, you might think of these cortical maps in our brainstems as having smudges all over them that can only be restored and brought into higher definition through interoceptive exploration.
Three reasons to flex your interoceptive muscles
1 // Make more informed decisions
By learning to cultivate internal receptivity, we can listen to the treasure trove of data coming from the activation shifts of neurotransmitters –– like adenosine cueing a need for sleep, a change in our breathing mechanics signaling a shift in our arousal response, or just being aware of how rested we feel upon waking and making choices about our day accordingly.
2 // Avoid the burnout dump truck
In the past decade, there has been a hockey stick-shaped increase in research interest in interoception within the scientific community. In my own research on emotional resilience, in which my co-author and I surveyed over 250 leaders worldwide — we observed how a lack of interoceptive capacity tends to be associated with prolonged maladaptive stress responses –– research-speak for the highway to burnout.
Prolonged periods of high-stress cause allostatic overload, or accumulated wear and tear on the body, leading to increased fragility in the nervous system. In addition, the stress hormone cortisol numbs us and reduces our ability to interocept, which creates a vicious cycle of diminishing receptivity to our body’s messages.
We call this the “feather, brick, dump truck” phenomenon. Often, these high achievers would push through initial fatigue or poor sleep (feather) and again through a minor health crisis (brick) until it took the giant dump truck of complete burnout to convince them to begin listening to their body.
Multiple studies also tie interoceptive abilities with the ability to feel and coregulate with the emotions of others –– in other words, the capacity for empathy.
3 // Enhanced emotional regulation
As Dan Shipper has been sharing on Twitter, productivity boils down to emotional regulation, and intentional emotional regulation requires the ability to sense, track, and feel the sensations that get interpreted into emotions — the capacity to interocept.
When there is a lack of interoception, we’re unable to fully feel the sensations associated with emotions. Unfortunately, this means they remain beneath our conscious awareness and instead are projected onto others — or we find ourselves emotionally overreacting in ways that are rarely conducive to our long-term goals.
🎙️ Healing & Thriving Through Radical Curiosity
Goosebump-inducing Waves of Knowingness - on grief, friendship, living abroad, founding a company, remote work, Rolf Potts, David Whyte, poetry, and finding work that matters.
Paul Millerd is one of my oldest and closest friends — we've lived in Japan, Indonesia, and Mexico together — so it was such a joy to sit down with him on his Pathless Path podcast and record this conversation to reflect on nomadic life & navigating the path of unconventional work together.
When we met five years ago — we were both single but now are both married in cross-country relationships and have navigated finding work that matters, getting married, and living in foreign countries together.
Watch us on Youtube or listen in podcast-format here.
🔗 Et Cetera
🤯 Write: Lex is a new GTP-3 writing assistant that I have had early access to and frankly has blown me away. The implications of a tool this powerful are fascinating to consider. Join the waitlist.
🎧 Listen: 'Productivity as emotional regulation' – a conversation between Dan Shipper & Sam Sager diving into Dan's journey with anxiety, selling his first company and what he's learned from neuroscience and psychology. Listen.
👨🎓 Learn: how you can change your face, jawline, posture, & reclaim your health by nose-breathing Read.
👀 Read: Alex Olshonski writes eloquently about 'a vine for troubled times' — it's one of the most in-depth and well researched pieces on plant medicine that I've come across. A must read for anyone interested in overcoming addiction or considering an ayahuasca journey. Read.
📚 Book Recommendation: 'A Return to Eros: The Radical Experience of Being Fully Alive' by Dr. Marc Gafni + Kristina Kincaid. This radical book is about how understanding the sexual and how to re-eroticize all areas of your life. Read.
📝 Parting Quote
"I’ve never seen any life transformation that didn’t begin with the person in question finally getting tired of their own bullshit."
— Elizabeth Gilbert