Mind Blown đ¤Ż
Interoception, impossible art, and why relaxing your shoulders is more important than you might think
Hi friends,
If you know me well, you know Iâm a big advocate for mental health and talk therapy. But sometime last year, at the height of pandemic stress, I hit a wall with talking. I felt limited by my mind.
Itâs not that the issues went away. I was deeply aware of my patterns and their whys â this is from childhood, this is intergenerational, this is coming up in xyz situations. Yet I couldnât let it go and destress. Far too often, I found myself in normal situations with my jaw clenched, my shoulders stiff, and my pelvic floor braced (yes, thatâs a thing! Many people carry stress in the pelvic floor).
A close friend suggested I try to stop thinking my way out of stress and anxiety and instead, try feeling. She introduced me to somatic experiencing (SE), a combination of therapy and bodywork or âneurobiological healingâ that was founded by Dr. Peter Levine.
The philosophy of SE is that people can get stuck in fight, flight, or flee responses to situations that donât actually pose a threat. Itâs a method of reprogramming your nervous system to slow down, notice what is actually present, and respond (v. react) in a way that is aligned with reality. If you meditate, these concepts are likely already familiar, though the approach is more body-centric.
I started working with Amy Doublet, an incredible practitioner in LA last year. Ironically, I canât explain in words whatâs happening to me, but I feel massive shifts in myself. Iâm more grounded, more in touch with my gut, less reactive, and more aligned.
These body-orienting practices â somatic experiencing, meditation, yoga, etc. â are rooted in a simple yet hard to grasp truth for our brain-bound western culture:
Our bodies help craft our mental reality.
Donât take my word for it. I just finished a book that literally blew my mind (and Ezra Kleinâs).
In Annie Murphy Paulâs book The Extended Mind: Thinking Outside the Brain, she argues (with a lot of scientific research) that understanding reality often starts in the body, not the brain.
The pioneering American psychologist William James deduced this more than a century ago. Imagine you meet a bear in the woods, James wrote. Your heart pounds, your palms sweat, your legs break into a runâwhy? It might seem that itâs because your brain generates a feeling of fear, and then tells your body to get moving. But James suggested that it works the other way around: we feel fear because our heart is racing, because our palms are sweating, because our legs are propelling us forward.
As he put it: âCommon sense says, we lose our fortune, are sorry and weep; we meet a bear, are frightened and run; we are insulted by a rival, are angry and strike.â But, he went on, âthis order of sequence is incorrect.â
It would be more accurate, wrote James, to say that âwe feel sorry because we cry, angry because we strike, afraid because we tremble.â
This is radical!
Murphy Paul explains:
Our culture insists that the brain is the sole locus of thinking, a cordoned-off space where cognition happensâŚ[and yet] the human brain is limited in its ability to pay attention, limited in its capacity to remember, limited in its facility with abstract concepts, and limited in its power to persist at a challenging task.
Simply put, the brain on its own isnât great at thinking. And this isnât only about managing stress. Itâs only when we think outside the brain using (1) our bodies, (2) the spaces around us, and (3) conversations do the best ideas come to fruition.
Thinking outside the brain means skillfully engaging entities external to our headsâthe feelings and movements of our bodies, the physical spaces in which we learn and work, and the minds of the other people around usâdrawing them into our own mental processes. By reaching beyond the brain to recruit these âextra-neuralâ resources, we are able to focus more intently, comprehend more deeply, and create more imaginativelyâto entertain ideas that would be literally unthinkable by the brain alone.
Yet the world we live in actively inhibits âextra-neuralâ thinking because of a brain bias.
A classic example: our entire educational system is designed to keep kids sitting still under the premise that the best thinking is done quietly, without moving, sitting at a desk. Yet âstudents are âmore focused, confident, and productiveâ when given license to move,â according to Murphy.
Or take financial traders, a field stereotypically dominated by highly intelligent people analyzing spreadsheets and doing complex math in real time. Studies show that traders with a better sense of their own heartbeat â not their ability to do math in their heads â are able to make better investment decisions.
Time for a big word: interoception
How this works in practice is rooted in a relatively new field of study called interoception, or how the mind perceives the inner state of the body. Colloquially, you might call this âlistening to your body.â Somatic experiencing and body scan are two tools that can help cultivate interoceptive skills.
Acute interoception not only helps support basic bodily maintenance (e.g., hunger, sleep, pain, pleasure), but it can also improve emotional experience.
An awareness of our interoceptive signals can assist us in making sounder decisions and in rebounding more readily from stressful situations. It can also allow us to enjoy a richer and more satisfying emotional life.
Research finds that people who are more interoceptively attuned feel their emotions more intensely, while also managing their emotions more adeptly. This is so because interoceptive sensations form the building blocks of even our most subtle and nuanced emotions: affection, admiration, gratitude; sorrow, longing, regret; irritation, envy, resentment.
As Iâm writing this post, Substack is telling me âinteroceptionâ is spelled incorrectly. But caution readers, you heard it here first đ. While this might all sound a bit wonky right now, interoception is at the core of the zeitgest already, threading through mindfulness, feminine leadership, and a movement from âdoingâ to âbeing.â
I highly recommend reading Extended Mind and would be happy to book club it with any of yâall.
And if youâre curious about interoception, check out of the research coming out of the Carolina Affective Science Laboratory.
GEEK OUT FEST OVER. NOW, SOME COOL ART.
đť
Rosha Yaghmai, at Kayne Griffin
She uses acrylic and ink on organza and cotton to create a surreal landscape that changes with distance.
Isabela Lonso Vega
She captures dyed smoke in plexi glass, creating delicate sculptures that are both permanent and ephemeral. Currently on view in Mexico City.
Raul Guerrero, at David Kordansky
Guerrero remixes time and place, comedy and dark histories.
Hiroshi Nagai
Dreamy summer and LA vibes.
Enjoy the rest of summer! đĽ
Carine
PS - have thoughts? email me back!
PPS - loving these tracksL