Listen to your body: How interoception can shape emotions

This post is also available in Dutch.

Have you ever felt your heart racing before getting on stage, only to feel your anxiety intensify? Or a chill on your skin as your nerves take over and your breath quickens? Being in tune with our body’s signals could offer insight into our emotions.

Body and mind: a two-way street

Interoception, our ability to detect internal changes, and emotional processing are closely linked: when we feel anxious, our body reacts. For example, our heart starts pounding before a big presentation. But it works the other way too: sometimes just noticing that your heart is pounding can make you feel more anxious. The brain’s interpretation of those body signals thus influences and can even determine what type of emotion you feel at a given moment. Certain physical signals are associated with a fight-or-flight reaction, like a faster heartbeat being interpreted as revealing a threatening situation and in turn leading to more perceived anxiety. This two-way relationship shows that the body and mind are closely linked and mutually influence emotional processing.

Interoception and emotion: a possible key to mental health?

Scientists have been fascinated by how the interpretation of these bodily signals might contribute to difficulties in emotional processing, potentially leading to symptoms of mental health disorders. Clever tasks have been designed to enable them to study how interoception influences mental health. One of these, the heartbeat detection task, tests how well people can actually feel their heartbeat, by asking them to match their heartbeat to a flashing light or sound. One study found that participants who accurately detected the timing of their heartbeat reported experiencing emotions more intensely, suggesting that how we pick on these signals impacts how strongly we feel emotions. Researchers also examined what role interoception could play in depression or anxiety. Garfinkel and colleagues proposed that one’s awareness of these internal changes significantly influenced anxiety symptoms. They found that people who were better at detecting their heartbeat reported feeling less anxious overall, suggesting that tuning it to our body’s signals could improve emotional regulation and mental health.

Feel it in your skin: thermosensation and its effect on mental health

Interoceptive signals are also coming from the largest organ, the skin! It allows us to detect temperature, pain, pressure, or a gentle touch, all of which influence how we feel emotionally. Crucianelli and colleagues recently found that people who were better at detecting temperature changes on the skin also reported higher anxiety. In contrast, worse detection on the palm was linked to signs of depression. These observations suggest that our perception of temperature changes on our skin could offer insights into our emotional and mental states.

Investigating how interoception influences emotional processing could help us better understand why we feel the way we do at a given time. It might even help develop tools to identify people at risk for mental health disorders, for example by monitoring atypical patterns in bodily awareness and its effect on one’s emotional regulation. By listening to our body and mindfully interpreting its signals, we can gain deeper insight into our emotions and learn to better regulate how we feel at a given moment.