Interoception and Mental Health: A Plain-English Review
Interoception is our ability to sense, interpret and integrate signals coming from within our own body. These can include signals associated with breathing, heartbeat, hunger, temperature, pain and many other internal bodily processes.
This influential review by Khalsa and colleagues brought together research from neuroscience, psychology and psychiatry to examine how interoception may contribute to mental health.
Rather than testing a particular therapy, the paper provides a framework for understanding what scientists know about interoception, where difficulties with interoception may occur, and what researchers still need to discover.
What did the research find?
One of the central messages is that interoception is not simply a matter of being able to “feel your body.”
The brain is continually receiving, interpreting and integrating information from inside the body. These processes contribute to maintaining the body's internal balance and can also influence emotions, motivation and behaviour.
The authors discuss evidence suggesting that altered interoceptive processes may be involved across a range of mental health conditions, including anxiety, depression, eating disorders, addiction and post-traumatic stress disorder.
Importantly, however, different conditions may involve different kinds of interoceptive difficulties. Someone might be very sensitive to certain bodily signals, for example, while having difficulty interpreting what those signals mean.
What does this mean in practice?
This research helps explain why paying attention to bodily experience can be relevant within psychological and body-based therapeutic work.
Noticing a sensation is only one part of the process. How we attend to a bodily signal, how the brain interprets it, and what meaning we give it may all influence our emotional experience.
For body-oriented approaches, this provides an interesting scientific framework for exploring why developing a more nuanced relationship with bodily sensations may be useful.
It does not, however, mean that simply increasing awareness of bodily sensations will necessarily improve mental health. For some people — particularly when bodily sensations themselves feel threatening — increased attention to the body may initially be uncomfortable.
A note of caution
This paper is a major scientific review and research roadmap, not a clinical trial of Somatic Experiencing or any other particular therapy.
Although it provides a strong scientific basis for considering interoception important to mental health, it does not demonstrate that a particular body-based therapy is effective.
The authors also identify substantial gaps in the research and call for better ways of measuring different aspects of interoception.
For me, its value lies in helping us understand the complexity of the relationship between bodily experience, the brain and emotional wellbeing — while remaining appropriately cautious about what the science can currently tell us.
The original research
Khalsa, S. S., Adolphs, R., Cameron, O. G., Critchley, H. D., Davenport, P. W., Feinstein, J. S., Feusner, J. D., Garfinkel, S. N., Lane, R. D., Mehling, W. E., Meuret, A. E., Nemeroff, C. B., Oppenheimer, S., Petzschner, F. H., Pollatos, O., Rhudy, J. L., Schramm, L. P., Simmons, W. K., Stein, M. B., Stephan, K. E., Van den Bergh, O., Van Diest, I., von Leupoldt, A., Paulus, M. P. & Interoception Summit 2016 participants (2018). Interoception and Mental Health: A Roadmap. Biological Psychiatry: Cognitive Neuroscience and Neuroimaging, 3(6), 501–513.
Comments