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Interoception is your ability to sense what's happening inside your body—hunger, thirst, heartbeat, temperature, and more. It's the foundation of emotional awareness and deeply connected to alexithymia.
My body speaks a language I'm still learning to understand.
Interoception is often called the "eighth sense"—the ability to perceive internal body signals like hunger, thirst, heart rate, breathing, and the physical sensations that accompany emotions. For many people with alexithymia, this sense works differently.
While most people are familiar with the five external senses (sight, sound, taste, touch, smell), interoception is an internal sense that monitors what's happening inside your body. It tells you when you're hungry, when your heart is racing, when you need to use the bathroom, and when your body temperature is off.
Crucially, interoception is also how your brain detects the physical components of emotions. That "gut feeling" of anxiety, the warmth of affection, the heaviness of sadness—these all rely on interoceptive awareness. When interoception works differently, it can affect both physical self-care and emotional understanding.
Research consistently shows a strong link between interoceptive differences and alexithymia. People with alexithymia often show a paradox: they may be hyperaware of body sensations (noticing every heartbeat or stomach gurgle) while simultaneously struggling to interpret what those sensations mean.
This disconnect helps explain why someone might not recognize they're anxious even as their heart pounds, or might not realize they're hungry until they're shaky and irritable. The signals are there, but translating them into useful information is the challenge.
Understanding this connection offers hope: improving interoceptive awareness through practices like mindfulness and body-based therapies may help improve emotional awareness over time.
Interoceptive differences can affect daily life in practical ways. You might forget to eat or drink, not notice you're getting sick until symptoms are severe, have trouble regulating body temperature, or struggle to identify what your body needs in the moment.
Many neurodivergent people develop workarounds: setting timers for meals and water, using external cues instead of internal ones, and learning to recognize patterns in their behavior that signal unmet physical needs. These strategies don't fix interoception, but they help manage its practical impacts.
Linking alexithymia to interoceptive differences (Van Bael et al., 2024)
In studies examining alexithymia-interoception relationship
Between "Difficulty Identifying Feelings" and interoceptive confusion
Noticing internal sensations like hunger, thirst, heart rate, and temperature changes.
Understanding what those body signals mean and what action they require.
The physical sensations that form the foundation of emotional experience.
Being hyperaware of sensations while struggling to make sense of them.
Exercises to develop interoceptive skills
Structured prompts for monitoring physical needs
Key findings on the body-emotion connection
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