How to Train Your Body to Read Its Own Signals
Researchers tested 18 professional financial traders on how accurately they could sense their own heartbeat. The traders who scored highest made the most money and lasted the longest in their careers. So what is the link between your body and your brain, and how do you train it?
Pattern
Your heart reacts to stress before your brain names the feeling.
Your body is constantly taking in information and adjusting to what's happening around you. Most of these adjustments happen automatically, without you having to think about them.
Picture a stressful moment, like almost missing a step on the stairs.
Your body is constantly taking in information and adjusting to what's happening around you. Most of these adjustments happen automatically, without you having to think about them.
Picture a stressful moment, like almost missing a step on the stairs.
Your heart speeds up right away. Then your brain identifies what happened and thinks, "Oof. That scared me."
The body reacts first.
The thought comes after.
The thought comes after.
And this isn't limited to obvious moments of stress. Your heart is constantly adjusting, even when you're sitting quietly. It speeds up slightly when you breathe in and slows down slightly when you breathe out. This natural variation in the timing between heartbeats is called heart rate variability, or HRV.
HRV can give us information about how the cardiovascular system is adapting from moment to moment. When tracked over time, it can also give us clues about how your body is responding to and recovering from stress.
But your body sending a signal and your brain noticing that signal are not the same thing.
Belief
What you think is happening in your body isn't always what is actually happening. Scientists can measure the difference.
Researchers have studied this by looking at how accurately people can sense their own heartbeat.
They can ask someone how good they think they are at noticing their heartbeat. Then they can give that person an objective test to see how well they can detect their heartbeat, but those two things don't always match.
Someone can be very confident in their ability to sense their body and perform poorly on the test. Someone else can be less confident and perform quite well.
In other words, feeling like you're good at reading your body and actually being good at reading your body are two different things.
This is interoception, your brain's ability to sense and interpret what's happening inside your body.
Interoception also involves things like breathing, hunger, fullness, temperature, pain, and changes happening inside your organs.
We often talk about "listening to your body" as if the body sends a clear message and the brain simply receives it but it isn't quite that simple.
We often talk about "listening to your body" as if the body sends a clear message and the brain simply receives it but it isn't quite that simple.
Your body is generating signals all the time. Your brain has to detect those signals, make sense of them, and decide what they mean.
Sometimes that interpretation is accurate. Sometimes, not.
The Reflex
Your body is constantly sending information to your brain through pathways like the vagus nerve.
Your body is constantly sending information to your brain through pathways like the vagus nerve.
A long nerve called the vagus nerve runs from your brain through your neck and into your chest and abdomen, connecting your brain with organs including your heart, lungs, and digestive system.
These organs are constantly sending information about what's happening inside your body, and some of that information travels through the vagus nerve to your brain. The communication also goes the other way, with your brain sending signals back down the vagus nerve to your organs.
One thing the vagus nerve helps regulate is your heart rate. The amount of influence the vagus nerve has on your heart can change from moment to moment. Scientists call this vagal tone.
When your heart rate changes, your brain receives information about that change and has to figure out what it means.
You might notice your heart beating faster and recognize that you're anxious. You might notice the same sensation and assume something is wrong when you're actually excited, exercising, or have had too much caffeine.
Your body is giving you information. Your brain has to figure out what that information means.
These organs are constantly sending information about what's happening inside your body, and some of that information travels through the vagus nerve to your brain. The communication also goes the other way, with your brain sending signals back down the vagus nerve to your organs.
One thing the vagus nerve helps regulate is your heart rate. The amount of influence the vagus nerve has on your heart can change from moment to moment. Scientists call this vagal tone.
When your heart rate changes, your brain receives information about that change and has to figure out what it means.
You might notice your heart beating faster and recognize that you're anxious. You might notice the same sensation and assume something is wrong when you're actually excited, exercising, or have had too much caffeine.
Your body is giving you information. Your brain has to figure out what that information means.
So what happens if we change the activity of the vagus nerve? Could changing how strongly it influences the body also change how we notice and interpret what's happening inside us?
Behavior
Researchers have been testing this through practices that can influence vagal activity. One of the best studied is slow breathing.
When you slow your breathing, you change the signals moving between your body and brain. Your heart rate also begins to rise and fall more noticeably with each breath, and measures of cardiac vagal activity increase during the practice.
With repeated practice, these changes can extend beyond the breathing session. Studies of slow breathing and related interventions have found changes in measures of vagal activity over time.
But here's the part we're interested in:
What happens to your ability to notice what's happening inside your body?
Some research suggests that practices involving slow breathing, HRV biofeedback, and direct interoceptive training can improve aspects of interoception. For example, studies using body-focused training have found improvements in people's ability to detect internal signals. Other studies have found that interventions designed to influence cardiac vagal activity can affect measures related to interoception.
The findings don't mean that more vagal activity automatically makes you better at sensing your body. They suggest the systems involved in sensing and interpreting what's happening inside your body may be trainable.
That's what we're interested in practicing here.
We've included two tools to help you experiment with that process.
The first is a slow breathing tool, which gives you a simple way to practice changing your breathing while paying attention to what happens inside your body.
The second is the heart rate tool from earlier in this piece. Heartbeat detection is one of the ways researchers study interoception. Being able to feel your heartbeat is one part of interoception, but remember it doesn't tell us everything about how well you sense what's happening inside your body.
Try both. Notice what you can detect, what you can't, and whether your awareness changes with practice.
The point isn't to become perfectly accurate at reading every sensation.
It's to get better at noticing what's there before your brain decides what it means.
Sources
Cameron, O. G. (2001). Interoception: The inside story: A model for psychosomatic processes. Psychosomatic Medicine, 63(5), 697–710.
Fischer, D., Messner, M., & Pollatos, O. (2017). Improvement of interoceptive processes after an 8-week body scan intervention. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 11, 452.
Garfinkel, S. N., Seth, A. K., Barrett, A. B., Suzuki, K., & Critchley, H. D. (2015). Knowing your own heart: Distinguishing interoceptive accuracy from interoceptive awareness. Biological Psychology, 104, 65–74.
Kandasamy, N., Garfinkel, S. N., Page, L., Hardy, B., Critchley, H. D., Gurnell, M., & Coates, J. M. (2016). Interoceptive ability predicts survival on a London trading floor. Scientific Reports, 6, 32986.
Laborde, S., Allen, M. S., Borges, U., Dosseville, F., Hosang, T. J., Iskra, M., Mosley, E., Salvotti, C., Spolverato, L., Zammit, N., & Javelle, F. (2022). Effects of voluntary slow breathing on heart rate and heart rate variability: A systematic review and a meta-analysis. Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, 138, 104711.
Laborde, S., Mosley, E., & Thayer, J. F. (2017). Heart rate variability and cardiac vagal tone in psychophysiological research: Recommendations for experiment planning, data analysis, and data reporting. Frontiers in Psychology, 8, 213.
Try it