22 Sep The 6th sense that changes how you handle stress: understanding Interoception
You know that moment when you’re three slides into a presentation and suddenly realize your shoulders are practically touching your ears, your jaw is clenched, and you have no idea when that started happening?
Or when you walk out of a meeting feeling completely drained, but you can’t pinpoint exactly when or why your energy shifted?
If you’re nodding along, you’re experiencing something most people deal with daily, but are unaware of:
Living disconnected from an incredible sensory system that could change how you handle stress, emotions, and decision-making entirely.
The 6th sense you never learned about
We all know our five senses, right? Vision, hearing, touch, smell, taste.
But there’s a 6th sense that’s just as important for your day-to-day experience:
It’s called interoception—your ability to accurately detect and interpret what’s happening inside your body.
Heart rate, breathing patterns, muscle tension, that flutter of adrenaline before a difficult conversation, the subtle shift in energy when you’re about to hit a wall.
These are just a few examples of the countless signals your body sends you every day.
- One study found that people who could accurately detect their heartbeats (a measure of interoceptive awareness) performed significantly better on tasks requiring emotional intelligence and decision-making under pressure. (So quite literally: listening to your heart. Not such a cliche!)
- Another study showed that higher interoceptive sensitivity directly correlates with reduced anxiety and improved stress resilience.
Think about it:
How many times have you snapped at someone and then wondered where that came from? Or found yourself spiraling into anxiety without understanding what kicked it off? That’s low interoceptive awareness in action. You’re reacting habitually to internal states you can’t even detect.
Why this skill is so hard to access (and requires training)
Your nervous system is constantly sending you information, but most of it remains beneath your conscious awareness. Two forces work against you detecting these signals:
- Biologically: The five senses we’re familiar with—those external senses that tell us about the world around us—speak “louder” than our internal system. This is clever evolutionary design: we needed to respond quickly to external threats, so our outward attention naturally dominates. In relative terms, it takes more conscious effort to pay attention inside yourself than it does to pay attention outside yourself.
- Culturally: Has anyone ever asked you in school to count your heartbeats or notice how deep your breath is? Didn’t think so! We’re rewarded for focusing our attention on our intellect, on external results, on thinking our way through problems. We invest no time learning how to read our body signals.
The result?
All day long, we’re missing critical information about our stress levels, emotional states, and decision-making capacity that could help us respond more effectively and make better choices.
The good news is, of course, that interoception is a learnable skill. And once you develop it, everything changes!
“Of all the topics I could cover, this thing that we call “sense of self”, which is also called “interoception”, has perhaps the most foundational level of importance for all that we feel, all that we do, and all that we are capable of doing.” — Andrew Huberman
How this transforms your performance
1) Create space between the trigger and your reaction
Low interoceptive awareness means there is little space between those body cues and our reactions. We’re operating on autopilot, unconsciously, reactively.
Higher interoceptive awareness lets you spot certain signals early on:
- Is my heart rate accelerating?
- Are my palms getting sweaty?
- Does my chest feel tight?
- Is my breath very shallow? Or am I holding my breath?
- Are my shoulders tense?
Once you notice these signals, you can observe what’s happening and take the time and space to decide how to respond.
As this article in The Guardian puts it: “If you are more adept at accurately detecting your bodily signals, you will be able to form more nuanced interpretations of your feelings about a situation, and this, in turn, should help you to make wiser choices about the best ways to respond.”
Simple example: I now know that when I’m checking my phone first thing in the morning, my shoulders tense, my brow furrows, and my breathing becomes shallow. Low interoceptive awareness used to mean I’d look up 20 minutes later with no idea where the time went, or why I suddenly felt on edge. High interoceptive awareness means I spot these signs immediately and can choose to put the phone down.
2) Move through strong emotions with ease
Sam Harris, neuroscientist and philosopher, and Peter Attia, MD, dicuss this on The Drive podcast:
When experiencing a strong emotion like anger or annoyance, try this approach:
Focus deeply on how you physically feel in that present moment. Be curious about the sensations. Feel them fully in your body.
The pounding heart. The heaving chest. The tightness in your jaw. The temperature of your hands. Mentally scan from the tip of your toes to the top of your head.
It’s practically impossible to feel and think at the same time. As long as you’re completely present in the moment (which you are by definition when focused on present sensations), and you don’t ruminate on whatever triggered you, the feeling doesn’t persist.
It’s only when you’re lost in thought (thinking about what happened or what might happen) that negative emotions linger and compound.
It’s not about never getting frustrated or angry again. But there’s a huge difference between feeling that way for 30 minutes versus 30 seconds.
The ultimate form of self-mastery
To me, this is the ultimate form of self-mastery and self-regulation:
- Having the ability to create space so you can choose how to react
- Having the ability to move through strong emotions with ease
All from tapping into this incredible sensory system we all have access to.
Like any skill, interoception improves with attention and practice. Breathwork is one of the most accessible ways to start developing this awareness: sitting still without external stimulation, focusing on your breath, noticing muscle tension as it shifts, slowing down or speeding up your heartbeat simply by changing your breath pattern.
Through my framework of breathwork + nervous system regulation + embodied self-awareness, we take a systematic approach to training this internal listening skill.
And the payoff is profound: the ability to operate with a dashboard for your internal state instead of driving blind.
Your nervous system is already giving you all the information you need. You just need to learn how to listen.