Someone asks what you want for dinner. You wait for an answer to arrive and nothing does. Not indecision, not two options you can’t choose between. Blankness, where the answer should be.
Or someone asks how you’re getting on and you’ve said fine before you’ve checked anything at all.
There’s a clinical name for this. Alexithymia describes difficulty identifying and naming your own emotional state. The feeling is there. The word for it doesn’t arrive. Peter Sifneos named it in the 1970s, and Ruth Lanius’s research has since traced how reliably it turns up in people carrying long-term stress, which tells you something about where it comes from. It has very little to do with emotional maturity, and rather a lot to do with what your body has learned to stop reporting.
Underneath it sits something more basic. Interoception is the body’s sense of itself from the inside — hunger, fatigue, temperature, the tightening that signals something’s wrong a beat before you could say why. A.D. Craig defined it as the sense of the physiological condition of the body. It’s the raw material emotion gets built from, which is why, when it goes quiet, the words go with it.
And it does go quiet. Not all at once, and never dramatically. It happens through something so ordinary it barely registers, pushing through tiredness and eating at your desk and holding your breath through a difficult conversation and deferring what you need to keep a room comfortable, until a signal that goes unanswered for long enough stops arriving with any force. The body doesn’t stop sending. You stop registering it, the way you stop hearing a fridge hum.
What fills the gap is confusion. And confusion, it’s worth noting, is an intellectual process.
It lives in the mind, not the body. When we’ve lost access to the body’s clear signal, we think our way toward answers that should be felt. We look outward. We scan the environment for certainty, the way a starfish orients to the nearest point of resistance. We look to what others seem to need, what the situation seems to require, what the culture tells us is appropriate.
Glennon Doyle, in Untamed, makes an observation that is hard to unknow: that selfish — as a word, as a concept — does a specific kind of work for women. To be selfish, she argues, is simply to have a self. And a society that depends on women’s self-negation needs a word that makes the act of finding a self feel dangerous. So we invented one. We call it selfish, and we wield it like a warning.
The effect, over time, is that many women learn to override their intuitive sense not because they are weak, but because they are trying very hard to be good — good partners, good friends, good colleagues. The royal we becomes a habitual reflex. Individual need disappears into collective preference. And the body, unlistened to, turns its signal down.
This is not irreversible. Interoceptive awareness — the capacity to sense and interpret internal body signals — can be rebuilt. Slowly, gently, without drama. Not through a practice of forcing yourself to feel, but through creating enough quiet that the signal has a chance to reach you.
Research by Sarah Garfinkel and Hugo Critchley at the Brighton and Sussex Medical School has shown that interoceptive accuracy is closely linked to emotional awareness and decision-making. When we can sense what is happening inside us, we make choices that are more aligned with our actual needs. When we can’t, we guess. We defer. We feel confused.
The body has not forgotten what it knows. It has simply been spoken over, for a long time.
If you recognise something in this, you don’t need to do anything dramatic. The invitation — if there is one — is simply to pause once today and ask: what am I actually sensing right now? Not what you should be feeling. Not what would make sense to feel. What is actually here.
That’s where it begins. Not in knowledge, but in noticing.
If you’d like to explore this further, the free guide What Does Your Body Actually Need? is a starting point — available at thepsychbody.com. And if these letters resonate, my substack, Body Dispatch , arrives fortnightly. I’d love you to subscribe here – @bodydispatch