Interoception is your body’s way of sensing what’s happening inside, like when you feel hungry, thirsty, tired, or upset, so you know how to take care of yourself.
When interoception is poor, you might struggle to recognize what your body needs or how you feel.
Poor interoception rarely has one single cause. It’s usually a combination of biology, life history, mental health, interpretation patterns, and environment.
Key Takeaways
- Interoception has many parts: It’s not just about sensing bodily signals but also paying attention to them, telling them apart, and knowing how accurate your awareness really is.
- Awareness differs across systems: You might easily notice your heartbeat but struggle to sense hunger, changes in temperature, or your breathing.
- Much of it is unconscious: Your body regulates itself automatically, so feeling “bad” at interoception often means you’re less aware of the signals, not that your body isn’t working.
- Experience shapes awareness: Trauma, stress, mental health conditions, and even cultural habits can all influence how clearly you notice and interpret signals from your body.
1. Natural Differences Between People
Not everyone is born with the same sensitivity to their inner signals.
Just like eyesight or hearing, interoception exists on a spectrum. Some people can sense their heartbeat without even touching their pulse, while others can’t detect it even when they try.
Scientists call this interoceptive accuracy – how well you can notice and interpret internal signals such as hunger, thirst, or changes in heart rate.
But accuracy is only one part of the picture.
Researchers also talk about interoceptive sensibility (your own beliefs about how tuned in you are) and insight (how well your confidence matches your actual ability).
You might think you’re bad at noticing body signals but actually be more accurate than you realize – or the opposite.
Importantly, sensitivity also differs across body systems.
Someone may be very aware of changes in their heartbeat but less tuned in to stomach sensations or shifts in temperature.
And most interoceptive processes happen outside of conscious awareness, so having less “felt” access to your body signals doesn’t necessarily mean your body isn’t regulating itself well.
For example, two people might both need food, but one feels a sharp stomach pang while the other only becomes aware when irritability sets in.
If your baseline sensitivity is naturally lower, you may often feel “out of touch” with your body—even though nothing is medically wrong.
2. Chronic Stress and the Body
Stress is a normal bodily response to a perceived threat, whether that threat is external (like a looming deadline) or internal (like worrying thoughts)
When stress becomes constant or overwhelming, the nervous system can slip into a state of dysregulation — meaning it no longer shifts smoothly between rest and alertness.
Instead, the body gets stuck in patterns of over-activation or shutdown, often without you even realizing it.
There are two common ways this shows up:
- Hyper-alert stress: The body stays on high alert for too long, leaving you tense, anxious, and irritable. Problem-solving feels harder because your brain is focused on survival.
- Over-fatigue stress: After prolonged hyper-alertness, the body may “crash,” leading to exhaustion, low energy, and difficulty getting motivated.
In both states, signals from the body can become confusing:
- Misinterpretation: Hunger signals might be read as emotional distress, making you feel “hangry.” People with high anxiety may notice every change in their heart rate or stomach, which can feel overwhelming.
- Missed signals: On the flip side, stress can dull awareness, so basic needs like hunger, thirst, or tiredness go unnoticed until they cause bigger problems.
When stress dysregulates the nervous system in this way, it disrupts not just interoception but also emotion regulation, focus, and overall wellbeing.
3. Trauma and Disconnection From the Body
Trauma doesn’t just affect memory or mood — it can also reshape how the nervous system processes signals from inside the body.
In moments of overwhelming stress, the brain may “turn down the volume” on sensations linked to danger or pain, reducing how much you feel them.
This protective response helps you cope in the moment but can have long-term consequences.
Early trauma is particularly powerful because the developing brain learns to prioritize survival over subtle forms of self-awareness.
Children who grow up in unsafe environments often adapt by unconsciously tensing their muscles, holding their breath, or numbing themselves to internal discomfort.
These “body armor” patterns once helped them feel safer, but over time they blunt awareness of hunger, fatigue, and emotion.
As these habits become ingrained, the connection to internal signals weakens.
Sensations such as a racing heart, a tight chest, or a churning stomach stop being helpful cues and instead feel threatening.
To protect itself, the mind may then avoid or ignore bodily awareness altogether — leaving the person feeling disconnected from their own body.
4. Dissociation
Dissociation is a survival strategy where awareness detaches from the body.
Imagine your body’s signals being broadcast on a radio, but the volume is turned almost all the way down.
You may feel numb, foggy, or as if you’re observing life rather than living it.
This is especially common in trauma or when the nervous system enters a dorsal vagal state — a kind of shutdown mode. In that state, interoception becomes almost inaccessible.
This is why people with PTSD sometimes don’t notice they’re hungry, or realize they’re stressed only when their body collapses into exhaustion.
5. Mental Health Conditions
Many mental health conditions are linked to disrupted interoception.
- Hyper-awareness (too tuned in): People with anxiety disorders often notice every flutter in their chest or change in breathing. This constant monitoring can make normal sensations feel threatening, feeding a cycle of panic (“my heart’s racing — something’s wrong!”).
- Hypo-awareness (not tuned in enough): People with ADHD or depression may miss hunger, thirst, or fatigue signals until they’re overwhelming. This blunted awareness can lead to skipped meals, poor sleep, or difficulty identifying emotions.
Both extremes — feeling too much or too little — can make interoception feel unreliable and confusing.
6. Misinterpretation of Signals
Even if your body sends clear signals, your brain might misinterpret them.
Neuroscientists describe the brain as a “prediction machine,” guessing what sensations mean based on past experience.
Sometimes these guesses are wrong. For example:
- Feeling jittery before a presentation might be interpreted as fear, when it’s actually excitement.
- Low blood sugar might be misread as hunger with irritability (“hangry”).
- A tight chest could be read as anxiety, when it’s simply indigestion.
When the brain’s interpretations don’t match reality, interoception feels like it’s “gone wrong.”
7. Distraction and Modern Life
Modern culture trains us to focus outward, not inward.
Phones, podcasts, emails, and endless notifications flood our senses. While you’re focused on exteroception (the outside world), interoceptive signals get tuned out.
Think of it like trying to hear a quiet melody while a loud radio blares nearby.
Over time, if you rarely pause to “tune in,” your ability to notice hunger, tension, or subtle emotional shifts gets weaker.
8. Early Childhood Programming
Interoception is learned as much as it is innate.
When caregivers respond consistently to a child’s needs (“You’re crying because you’re tired — let’s rest”), the child links internal signals with meaning. This builds a reliable body map.
But if a child’s needs are ignored or dismissed (“You’re not hungry, stop fussing”), they may learn to mistrust or suppress signals.
By adulthood, this can show up as difficulty recognizing hunger, thirst, or emotional states.
The brain is especially malleable before age seven, when children absorb experiences almost like hypnosis.
Early neglect or inconsistent care during this time can shape lifelong interoceptive patterns.
9. Cognitive Biases and Negative Frameworks
The mind doesn’t just sense—it filters.
If you tend to focus on negatives, expect the worst, or interpret feelings through a pessimistic lens, you may ignore or distort signals from the body.
The way we think influences the way we feel.
For example, interpreting normal fatigue as failure, or everyday stress as catastrophe. These cognitive distortions act like tinted glasses, coloring how you experience your inner world.
Common thought patterns that affect interoception include:
- All-or-nothing thinking: “If I feel tired, I’m useless.”
- Overgeneralization: “I missed one meal — I’ll never eat properly.”
- Emotional reasoning: “I feel bad, so something must be wrong.”
These distortions don’t just affect mood — they color how your brain interprets body signals, making interoception feel skewed toward discomfort.
10. Cultural and Social Factors
Culture teaches us how much attention to give our bodies.
In many Western contexts, productivity is prized over rest, leading people to ignore hunger or fatigue.
Gender norms also play a role: men may be socialized to suppress emotions, women to downplay pain.
Over years, these cultural scripts can dull interoception.
For instance, “pushing through” a headache at work, or dieting that teaches you to ignore hunger cues, both weaken your connection to internal states.
References
- Craig, A. D. (2002). How do you feel? Interoception: the sense of the physiological condition of the body. Nature reviews neuroscience, 3(8), 655-666.
- Khalsa, S. S., Adolphs, R., Cameron, O. G., Critchley, H. D., Davenport, P. W., Feinstein, J. S., … & Zucker, N. (2018). Interoception and mental health: a roadmap. Biological psychiatry: cognitive neuroscience and neuroimaging, 3(6), 501-513.
- Ogden, P., Minton, K., & Pain, C. (2006). Trauma and the body: A sensorimotor approach to psychotherapy (norton series on interpersonal neurobiology). WW Norton & Company.
- Schandry, R. (1981). Heart beat perception and emotional experience. Psychophysiology, 18(4), 483-488.
- Van der Kolk, B. (2014). The body keeps the score by Bessel van der Kolk. MD New York: Penguin Books.
