You’ve been asked what you want for dinner and felt – nothing. Not indecision. Not preference. Just a kind of blankness where an answer should be.
Or someone asks how you’re doing and you say fine before you’ve even checked. Not because you’re lying. Because you genuinely don’t know.
This isn’t a character flaw. It isn’t emotional immaturity or a failure to be present. There is a name for what’s happening in your body, and once you understand it, the blankness starts to make a different kind of sense.
The word is interoception. It refers to the body’s capacity to sense itself from the inside, to register hunger, fatigue, temperature, tension, the subtle shift that signals something is wrong before the mind has caught up. Neuroscientist A.D. Craig describes it as the sense of the physiological condition of the body. Put simply: it is how you know what you need.
And it can go quiet.
Not all at once. Gradually, over time, through a process so ordinary it barely registers. When we chronically override what the body is telling us — push through tiredness, eat at our desks, hold our breath through hard conversations, defer our own needs to keep the peace — the internal signal weakens. The body keeps sending. We stop receiving.
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