What is interoception? The body sense that shapes every emotion
Interoception is your body’s ability to sense and interpret its own internal signals. Things like a racing heart, a tight chest, a hollow feeling in your stomach, or warmth spreading through your face.
While interoception is the biological foundation of every emotion you have ever felt,¹ most people have never heard of this word. And, fewer know that it is a learnable skill.²
Most of us were never taught this skill, which quietly shapes every relationship, decision, and emotional experience we have.
Here’s what that means for you, and what you can do about it.
Your body is constantly talking. Are you listening?
Right now, your body is generating thousands of internal signals.
Your heart rate, muscle tension, breath depth, gut activity, and temperature. All of it is being monitored and reported to your brain in real time.
Interoception is the sensory system responsible for receiving and labeling those signals.
Interoception is often called your “eighth sense.”³
The first five senses are our external senses. These are the senses most people are familiar with: visual, auditory, olfactory, gustatory, and tactile.
The sixth sense is vestibular, which has to do with balance and movement.
The seventh sense is proprioception, which has to do with body awareness.
While all of your first seven senses help you navigate the world outside your body, interoception helps you navigate the world inside it.
The signals your interoceptive system picks up are not just physical data.
According to neuroscientist Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett, author of How Emotions Are Made, your brain uses these body signals as raw material to construct all of your emotional experiences.
Contrary to popular belief, emotions are not pre-programmed reactions that happen to you.
Emotions are your brain’s best interpretation of what your body is feeling. Built in real time, using past experiences as a guide.⁴
This is not a metaphor. It is neuroscience.
Why interoception is the missing piece in emotional awareness
Most emotional wellness tools skip interoception entirely.
They teach you to label emotions, reframe thoughts, or practice gratitude. While all valuable things, they skip the step that comes first: learning how different emotions feel in your body.
Think of interoception as the hardware. Everything else, like naming your feelings, understanding them, regulating them, is software. If the hardware is underdeveloped, the software runs poorly, no matter how much you try to become an expert at the software.
Research confirms this connection: people with lower interoceptive awareness show more difficulty identifying and regulating their emotions. Not because they lack emotional intelligence, but because the body-brain signal is unclear.⁵
This is why many intelligent, self-aware people still feel emotionally confused. It is not a mindset problem. It is a body signal problem.
Signs your interoception may be underdeveloped
You do not need a clinical diagnosis — PTSD/CPTSD, eating disorders, dissociative conditions, ADHD, ASD, etc — to have gaps in interoceptive awareness. These patterns are common across everyone:
You often feel overwhelmed by emotions, but can’t identify what you’re actually feeling
You tend to intellectualize emotions rather than feel them in your body
You routinely ask others, “How should I feel about this?” Or, find yourself waiting to see how someone else reacts before you decide how you feel
You frequently feel emotionally numb, or like you’re watching your life from a slight distance
Physical symptoms like headaches, gut issues, or tension show up before you recognize any emotional cause
You know something is “off” but cannot locate or name it
None of these are character flaws.
They are signals that the connection between your body and your brain has some static in it, and the static can be cleared.
I want to make something very clear here: the goal of interoceptive training is not to increase sensitivity to your internal signals. The goal is to improve accuracy and trust in reading your internal body signals. And by improving both accuracy and trust, static can begin to clear.
How your brain uses body signals to build emotions
Your brain does not receive a completed emotion, fully formed and labeled, from your body.
What your body actually sends is raw interoceptive data: elevated heart rate, shallow breathing, tightness across the chest. Your brain then predicts what is causing those signals, and that prediction becomes your emotional experience.
Notice what that means: Two people can experience the same physical sensations and construct completely different emotions from them.
One person’s “racing heart and dry mouth” becomes excitement.
Another’s becomes dread.
Another’s becomes defensiveness.
The body signal is the same. The emotion is different. What changes is the brain’s interpretation of the body signal.
This is Dr. Barrett’s Theory of Constructed Emotions in its simplest form.⁴ The brain operates as a prediction engine, constantly generating its best guess about what internal signals mean, drawing on past experiences to do so.
This theory has a profound implication! If you can get better at receiving and reading your body’s signals accurately, meaning if you develop your interoception, you gain real influence over your emotional experience.
Not by suppressing or controlling emotions, but by understanding them at their source.⁶
Interoception is a skill. You can learn it.
Interoceptive awareness exists on a spectrum, and like any skill, it can be developed at any age.²
Researcher and occupational therapist Kelly Mahler, OTD, OTR/L, whose work is among the most widely used in applied interoception education, has demonstrated through multiple research projects that targeted practice improves interoceptive accuracy in both children and adults.⁷
The brain’s interoceptive pathways are trainable. The body-brain connection strengthens with attention.
What does interoceptive practice actually look like for adults?
It involves slowing down and tuning into physical sensation without immediately jumping to interpretation or reaction.
It means learning to notice:
What am I feeling in my body right now?
Where am I feeling it?
What does it feel like physically?
Is it warm or cool, tight or loose, sharp or dull?
It sounds simple. But often it is not easy, especially for people who have spent years, sometimes decades, learning to override or ignore body signals.
The good news, though, is that it is learnable. And it is the foundation of every emotional regulation tool that actually works long-term.⁸
What does this have to do with coloring?
Color Mending® is a body-based emotional regulation methodology built on this science.
I didn’t build this methodology around coloring because it is relaxing (though it often is). I specifically included coloring because it is a rhythmic, sensory-engaged activity that helps bring your attention back into your body.
Color Mending is a two-step process.
The first step involves a body scan to identify the strongest sensation in your body, and coloring out that sensation using any shape and color. This process is called intuitive coloring. Intuitive coloring helps to activate and train interoceptive awareness in real time.
The second step involves using the Color and Shapes Charts to help you identify what emotion(s) you’re feeling and why you’re feeling the emotion(s). Each color and shape that appears in your coloring acts as a valuable clue to help you further train your interpretive awareness.
Said more succinctly, emotions are clues. And Color Mending helps to train your interoception to learn how to read those clues in real time.
Ready to start building your interoceptive awareness with coloring?
The Coloring Bet is a 21-day program where you practice the Color Mending process from start to finish. One day at a time, until reading your body's signals starts to feel like second nature.
→ Join The Coloring Bet and start putting the science into practice.
Frequently asked questions about interoception
Is interoception the same as intuition?
Not exactly, though they overlap.
Intuition is the feeling that you know something without being able to explain why.
Interoception is the physical sense that underlies it.
Many intuitive “gut feelings” are actually interoceptive signals your brain has quickly interpreted without bringing them into conscious awareness. Developing interoception makes those signals clearer and more legible.
Can adults improve their interoception?
Yes!
The interoceptive system is not fixed at childhood. Research shows that consistent body-awareness practice improves interoceptive accuracy in adults.⁷ This includes activities like mindful movement, breath awareness, body scans, and practices specifically designed to train body-signal recognition, like Color Mending.
What does poor interoception actually feel like?
It can feel like emotional numbness, chronic confusion about your own feelings, or a pattern of discovering your emotional state after the fact (“I must have been anxious because I snapped at everyone all day.”).
It can also feel like being overwhelmed by emotions that seem to arrive without warning, because the earlier, subtler body signals were missed.
Is interoception related to anxiety?
Significantly!
Research across dozens of studies finds that anxiety is associated with heightened negative attention to bodily signals and difficulty interpreting them accurately.⁹
Improving interoception does not eliminate anxiety, but it does help you read your body’s signals more clearly, which means fewer misinterpretations and more informed responses.
How is interoception different from mindfulness?
Mindfulness is a practice of present-moment awareness.
Interoception is a biological sensory system.
Mindfulness practice can improve interoception, but not all mindfulness work is interoceptive, and not all interoceptive training looks like traditional mindfulness.
Color Mending is an example of an interoceptive practice that does not require sitting still or meditation.
What does interoception have to do with emotional regulation?
Everything!
Interoceptive attention is positively associated with the use of more flexible and adaptive emotional regulation strategies.⁶
Emotional regulation depends on being able to recognize an emotional state early enough to respond to it intentionally. That recognition starts in the body.
Without interoceptive awareness, by the time you recognize an emotion, you are already in the middle of it. Interoception gives you lead time.
References & further reading
The following sources directly inform the content of this article. For readers who want to go deeper into the science, each is worth your time!
1. Barrett, L.F. (2017). The theory of constructed emotion: An active inference account of interoception and categorization. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 12(1), 1–23. (Peer-reviewed academic paper — the foundational science behind how interoception builds emotion.) https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5390700/
2. Mahler, K., McLaughlin, E., & Anson, D. (2020). Interoception Across Varying Degrees of Mental Wellness. American Journal of Occupational Therapy, 74(S1). (Research on interoception and mental wellness across adult populations.) https://www.kelly-mahler.com/kellys-research/
3. Mahler, K. (2019). Interoception: The Eighth Sensory System. (The foundational text naming and defining interoception as the eighth sense, widely cited in clinical practice.) https://www.kelly-mahler.com/what-is-interoception/
4. Barrett, L.F. (2017). How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. (The accessible book version of Barrett’s theory — the single best starting point for non-academic readers.) https://lisafeldmanbarrett.com/books/how-emotions-are-made/
5. Longarzo, M., et al. (2019). Relationship between interoception and emotion regulation: New evidence from mixed methods. PLOS ONE / PubMed. (Study finding that lower interoceptive ability correlates with greater difficulty verbalizing feelings and regulating emotional responses.) https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30599372/
6. Panayiotou, G., et al. (2022). Interoceptive attention facilitates emotion regulation strategy use. Journal of Affective Disorders. PMC. (Research demonstrating that interoceptive attention is positively associated with the use of adaptive emotion regulation strategies.) https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9512845/
7. Mahler, K., Hample, K., Jones, C., et al. (2022). Impact of an Interoception-Based Program on Emotion Regulation in Autistic Children. Occupational Therapy International. (Peer-reviewed trial demonstrating that interoception-based training improves emotion regulation outcomes.) https://www.kelly-mahler.com/kellys-research/
8. Nikolaidis, N.P., Papadopoulou, S.K., & Hassandra, M. (2024). Interoceptive Ability and Emotion Regulation in Mind–Body Interventions: An Integrative Review. PMC. (Review of 31 randomized controlled trials finding interoception-based interventions more effective than control conditions across multiple mental health outcomes.) https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11591285/
9. Murphy, J., et al. (2024). The relationship between self-reported interoception and anxiety: A systematic review and meta-analysis. Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews. ScienceDirect. (Meta-analysis of 71 studies on interoception and anxiety, finding consistent links between anxiety and difficulty interpreting body signals.) https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0149763424003920
