Interoception etc

Sally Jones, from The Murderer's Ape by Jakob Wegelius

This post is linked to the earlier ones on Topping up your cup, Rest, and When to slow down, When to stop. This one is about how we know when to slow down or stop and rest, about paying attention to your body and why this can be problematic in our culture.

What is interoception

Interception is the information your body gives to you, such as going to the toilet, the sensations of thirst, hunger, fatigue, or the feeling of your stomach falling away if you think your child is in danger or lost. We aren't really taught interoception. It's taken for granted that we all have and understand it.

The five senses problem

The problem starts when we are taught that we have five senses, with interoception  excluded. We are taught that information comes to us from these five senses, and is analysed by our brain. From the first moments of nursery we are taught that what is interesting or useful is only or primarily the external world. So for most of my adult life even while I knew, vaguely about interoception, I didn’t question the five senses story from primary school. Actually, though it’s essential to wellbeing to pay attention to what our body is telling us.

Starting self-awareness early

Babies are interested in the external world, but they are first fascinated with themselves: they will watch their fingers opening and closing, endlessly. They will spend hours trying to co-ordinate putting hand to mouth, and eventually anything else that may or indeed may not fit. So when they are only a little older might we not encourage them to enquire about their bodies and emotions or how they know what only they feel compared to sensations that might be shared. I can see green. So can you see green? Or maybe you see red? My foot hurts. Does that mean your foot hurts? What are our difference perceptions of sound? Of character?  How do our internal physical experiences of the same event differ? Or of similar experiences: Do we share the same physical sensations of fear, of delight or do we differ?

This may seem elementary and intuitive but it also sets a focus of enquiry that our experiences through our bodies and our emotions are important and relevant. Moreover, if earlier attention were paid to these things there might be earlier identification of sensory or information processing or other problems in individuals and therefore earlier assistance for things like dyslexia or autism or other special needs. As a society might have a better understanding of and awareness of things like sensory difference between people, proxemics sensitivity, or conditions like misophonia and synaesthesia and have well thought through strategies or just better public conscience of how to manage these better in group settings.

The perils of ignoring the body

So for most of my life I believed, as probably most people brought up in a similar culture do, that the important information came from outside us. Yet we all know, and will have seen in others, that with the loss of our health we can become much more limited. So the really important information we take in is actually what our body tells us. Yet we regularly sideline information from our body: suppressing rest, pushing ourselves too hard, not getting natural daylight first thing, staying up late at night, ignoring signs of fatigue, anxiety, stress, unfitness of health issues. We might also do that very British thing of not wanting to “bother” the doctor or of wanting to appear stoical, strong, independent. This is especially true of anyone who came from a generation or family raised on the ”stiff upper lip”. We were taught to ignore our body and “soldier on”.

I am not sure how it is in other countries, but there is certainly a British element to this. France is a famously hypochondriac nation. But pause there: is perhaps calling someone who pays attention to their health hypochondriac as insulting as someone highly sensitive being called oversensitive? The French famously also take their food very seriously and few who have experienced it would want them to stop doing that. In France at one time, Brits came away believing the French thought they could catch a cold from a draught. To a nation brought up with a history of open windows, fresh air and cold water showers in an already dubious climate, mocking the French obsession with colds and medication was for a while in the twentieth century, practically de rigeur. As far as I know, the French are still great scarf-wearers, but perhaps that's fashion and no-one is going to laugh at them about that either.

There is a more serious point to be made though elsewhere about balance in awareness of our bodies and our emotions for that matter.

Ways of paying attention to the body.

Get your health and health concerns checked. There is more to say on this too.

Learn to scan your body. I now know that I hold tension certainly in my pelvis and sacral area, where I have some degeneration, also in my shoulders and my back. I can feel it and I can release it through the day. I can even sometimes feel some faint tension in my cheeks and face.

Breathing well is probably the most valuable thing you can learn to do. All practitioners of better breathing talk about the health and relaxation benefits and the immediate effect on the vagus nerve in calming the nervous system. It is amazing how much we hamper breathing, by breathing shallowly or holding our breath, of just not allowing ourselves deep breaths. For years, I didn’t understand how people can breathe in the belly. Now I can breathe into the belly, ribs and chest.

I have learned bits and pieces about breathing in yoga, Feldenkrais, Alexander technique and tai-chi. Pilates and martial arts probably teaches it, and I expect many other activities too. I have learned about releasing tension mostly from yoga, my own explorations in Feldenkrais and from early forays in Alexander technique about how not to pick up habits of storing tension in the first place - mostly by pausing before you do something, which they call “inhibition”.

Allow your body to rest. Things will surface.

Be curious about your body.  Explore.  Lie on the floor.  If you move one part in a tiny direction what do you feel in other parts of you? How far can that sensation travel? Can you change the sensation?   

Delight your body.  Wink wink, nudge nudge in the back row.  No, but notice how your body enjoys relaxation.  Swimming and sports and sunshine and exercise, of course, but also the relaxation from doing nothing, just being with your body in the present moment.  I can now often excite pleasurable ingles in all different parts of my body simply through relaxation, curiosity and following the pleasant sensations in my body, which work like an echo, reverberating and expanding.  If your body can make you smile it's a good path.

More broadly, a theme across most of this learning is that the body and mind run on patterns. If we are aware of these patterns we can interrupt and change them for the good when they are not or no longer useful.

An example of good interoception

In The Murderers Ape, the silent but intelligent gorilla, Sally Jones is constantly giving us interoceptive details. When she is scared, she feels a knot in her stomach or her heart races. Or she feels sad or anxious and loses her appetite. She spends long periods of time lying or sitting still waiting for these feelings in her body to pass. It takes hours or days for these cycles to complete. Towards the end, she sleeps for five days to get over what happened to her. Unlike her adult friends, she only drinks milk, never alcohol. She is an example for us about being more in tune with your body, respecting your body and to giving it permission and time to experience the things it does, both good and bad. 

This point about Sally Jones is not particularly central in the novel and certainly is not laboured. But one notices a pattern. She is framed mostly as an observer on the moral or immoral actions of the other characters and a counterpoint to some of the more morally repugnant behaviour.  But in such a way quiet way, with those patterns, literature can highlight what everyday culture may fail to convey.