Interoception: your body’s inner sense, explained

Interoception is your brain’s sense of what’s happening inside your body: your heartbeat, breathing, hunger, muscle tension, and other internal states. Neuroscientist A.D. Craig described it in 2002 as “the sense of the physiological condition of the body.” It works alongside touch, sight, and hearing, but points inward, and it plays a key role in emotional awareness and calm.

Where does the term interoception come from?

Physiologist Charles Sherrington introduced the related terms proprioception and exteroception in 1906, describing receptors inside the viscera as “interoceptive.” According to a 2016 review in Frontiers in Psychology, the noun “interoception” itself didn’t appear in scientific journals until the 1940s. Even then, it stayed a narrow, gut-only term for decades.

Neuroscientist A.D. Craig’s 2002 paper in Nature Reviews Neuroscience broadened the definition. Today it means the brain’s ongoing read of its own physiological state. Much of that reading runs through the insula, a brain region that turns raw body signals into feelings.

How do researchers actually measure interoception?

Mostly through heartbeat tests. A 2015 paper in Biological Psychology by Garfinkel and colleagues split interoception into three separate parts. Accuracy is how well you actually detect a signal, like counting your heartbeats without checking your pulse. Sensibility is how strongly you believe you notice body signals, and awareness is how well your confidence matches your real accuracy.

The three don’t always line up. Someone can feel deeply in tune with their body and still score poorly on the objective test.

Why does interoception matter for calm and anxious feelings?

Interoception feeds directly into how emotions form and how steady you feel. A 2018 roadmap paper in Biological Psychiatry: Cognitive Neuroscience and Neuroimaging found disrupted interoceptive processing showing up across research on anxiety, mood, and eating-related difficulties. That’s one piece of a larger picture, though, not a diagnosis by itself. Catching a racing heart or a tight chest early depends on this same inward sense staying switched on, not drowned out.

How does this connect to EMDR and bilateral stimulation?

Body-based somatic approaches to trauma lean on interoception directly. A 2015 paper in Frontiers in Psychology names interoception and proprioception as core elements of Somatic Experiencing, a body-oriented trauma approach. That puts it in close company with the felt sense and somatic memory: all three describe the body registering something before the thinking mind catches up. Staying inside your window of tolerance while you notice these signals is part of good nervous system regulation.

EMDR works with this same body-and-emotion channel through bilateral stimulation, the left-right rhythm at its center, rather than talking alone. EmEase, a self-guided EMDR app, offers the guided version of this technique for everyday stress at app.emease.com.