Brain health · Sanctum

Not noticing your own body (interoception)

You do not realise you are hungry until you are shaking. You do not register thirst, or needing the loo, or that you are bone-tired, until it is suddenly urgent. The early signals other people seem to feel all day simply do not reach you, and then they arrive at once.

This is interoception, the sense that reads what is happening inside your body. For some brains it runs quietly, so the steady stream of small internal signals, hunger, fullness, temperature, a racing heart, the first edge of an emotion, does not come through clearly until it is loud. It is not carelessness with yourself. The information is not arriving.

Because no one asks about it, it stays invisible while it quietly shapes a great deal: eating that swings between forgetting and overdoing, anxiety that seems to come from nowhere when it is really a body in alarm you cannot read, and a sense of being slightly disconnected from yourself. It also makes the next thing harder, because if you cannot feel the body, naming the feeling attached to it is harder still.

We ask about the inside as well as the outside, because how well you read your own body shapes mood, eating and regulation far more than people realise. None of this is a diagnosis. It is what we explore with you.

Written by Dr Asad RaffiConsultant Psychiatrist · Founder & Medical Director