How Trauma Can Affect Our Eighth Sense, We Call Interoception

Interception

Hey there, let's dive into something fascinating—trauma and how it affects our eighth sense. This sense is all about noticing and understanding the internal sensations in your body. It's crucial for regulating your nervous system, especially after chronic and traumatic stress.

The latest research shows the vagus nerve plays a key role in this process, acting as the main pathway for transmitting information about your body's internal state to your brain. The insula, a specific region in your brain, is heavily involved. When you feel your heart racing or get butterflies in your stomach, those sensations form the basis of your emotions and physiological responses.

Traumatic experiences can mess with your interoceptive accuracy. A common adaptation to traumatic stress is dissociating from these sensations, blocking out internal cues. This can lead to reduced activity in the insula and a feeling of numbness. Studies have found that people with depression often have lower interoceptive awareness, which might explain their sense of exhaustion, disconnection, and emotional numbness.

On the flip side, anxiety can make you hyper-aware of interoceptive signals but might distort how you interpret them. A slight change in your heart rate could be misread as a major danger signal, fueling anxiety. Trauma can increase connectivity between the insula and brain regions involved in fear, amplifying your sense of panic.

Both these states can make you feel like you're not at home in your own body. You might often feel disconnected, caught up in survival states and dysregulation, making it hard to feel comfortable.

Interoceptive accuracy is vital for more than just physical health—it's key for memory, decision-making, emotional processing, social interactions, body ownership, and a sense of self. It's closely linked to your sense of agency. The good news is that interoception can be trained, much like other sensory systems.

You can enhance the communication between your vagus nerve and insula, akin to improving the phone signal between your body and brain. Better accuracy in tuning into and understanding your physiological signals means greater control over your life. This helps you feel in charge of your body, emotions, and overall self.

Improving interoceptive awareness is essential for regulating the nervous system after trauma. It allows you to read body signals accurately in the present moment, instead of being haunted by past experiences. This uncoupling of sensations from fear calms the brain's fear circuitry and reduces anxiety.

You can also counteract under-activity in the insula, so you don't feel numb and disconnected when facing challenges. Training your interoception can help stabilize your emotional highs and lows, giving you balanced and accurate inputs about what's happening right now. This leads to trust and confidence in yourself.

As you enhance this inner skill, your outer life will flourish. Learning to be comfortable and at home in your body is not just possible—it's empowering.

Written by: Ali Astrid Moto LCSW