The Art and Science of Interoception

In the last lesson, Jonny shared his favorite practice for nourishing your nervous system. In this lesson, we'll explore the concept of 'interoception' and how it can help you avoid burnout, make better decisions, and experience more day-to-day joy.

‍

With sufficient practice, you can 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 Jonny's own journey was no exception.

In 2018, he was living with his fiancé in the English coastal town of Brighton, where she worked as a doctor. She had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder before they met, yet for the most part, she was bursting at the seams with life, with a mischievous grin and luminous presence.

One morning, while Jonny 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 Jonny embarked on the long process of dealing with the pain of this loss, he began to explore parts of himself—the repressed emotions and authentic expressions—that had lain beneath his conscious awareness. He was afraid that if he didn’t learn how to metabolize his grief, it would lead him to become bitter and perhaps unable to love fully again.

One of his more profound realizations—and gifts of grief—was that he had unknowingly spent the vast majority of his life living in his 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, Jonny dedicated himself to exploring the psychological and emotional terrain of his 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 Jonny came to understand through this form of high-stakes interoception training.

Fast forward to the present moment and Jonny now feels like an entirely different person. He noticed himself making more intuitive decisions, with less emotional reactivity and a sense of greater aliveness in his day-to-day experience.

The single skill that underpinned these dramatic changes in his experience was interoception. And in this lesson, Jonny shows you how to start honing that skill for yourself.

What is 'interoception'?

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.

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.

Before we dive into a practice that will help you develop this superpower, let’s talk about the benefits of doing so.

Three benefits of interoception training

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 his own research on emotional resilience, in which Jonny's co-author and he surveyed over 250 leaders worldwide — they 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 co-regulate with the emotions of others—in other words, the capacity for empathy.

3. Better productivity + emotional regulation

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 aren't conducive to our long-term goals.

How to improve your interoception

Imagine that you’re learning how to cook. The process would require you to cultivate sensitivity in your palette that senses six basic tastes — sweet, sour, salty, bitter, savory, and umami. Along these lines, our interoceptive palette includes:

• Mental (racing thoughts or foggy vs. calm and alert)
• Awareness (expanded and receptive vs. narrow and protective)
• Posture (open and relaxed vs. tense and collapsed)
• Breath (deep, slow, and soft vs. shallow and rapid)
• Emotion (gratitude, joy, sadness, etc.)

Just as with a chef composing a five-course tasting menu, there is an huge number of flavor permutations within these categories.

As with training your flavor palette, interoception is a skill that can be cultivated through curiosity and intentional experimentation.

If this still seems a little vague, here’s a concrete practice you can do to improve your interoception…

Challenge #3 — Try A.P.E.

A.P.E. is an acronym that Jonny Miller coined that stands for “awareness, posture, and emotion".

These are the three critical components of your interoceptive capacity, all of which can be enhanced through training. By paying attention to these three aspects, you’ll bring awareness to the state of your nervous system and, therefore, any subtle filters through which you’ll experience your day. Students going through Jonny's training (see his course on Nervous System Mastery) have reported noticeable changes from doing this for just five minutes a day for 30 days.

Increased receptivity occurs through neuroplastic shifts that serve to permanently heighten your internal self-awareness.

Here’s an example practice:

How is your awareness (A) right now? If you’ve been reading this lesson, you might have forgotten about the space above or behind you. Ask yourself if you feel distracted and eager to jump to other tabs or if your awareness is settled. Do you feel sleepy or alert? Focused or frantic?

Turn your attention to (P) for posture. If you’re reading this on an iPhone, you might be hunched over with a rounded spine. Briefly scan your upper body to see if there are any points of tension. Don’t try to change anything for now—just notice. How does your head feel resting on your neck? How do your jaw, face, and eyes feel? Perhaps there’s some sensation behind the eyes. Can you feel your breath and notice its shape, and its rise and fall? Can you even feel your heartbeat?

Finally, there is (E) for emotion. Imagine that you’re a scientist objectively reporting on internal sensations or a weatherman giving an update on the weather systems of your own body. Do you feel any noticeable emotions? Recent neuroscience tells us that emotions are just sensations plus context. What might be the emotional tone at this moment? Joy? Curiosity? Sadness? Frustration? Gratitude? Grief? It’s okay if you don’t connect to anything right now; this is only about listening intently to what is already present.