We have more than just five senses
We have more than just five senses
Ever tapped into something you can't quite explain? Here's a guest column all about exploring your inner landscape
If you enjoy receiving this newsletter, please consider joining as a member. By paying roughly £1.50 a week, it helps keep the lights on, pay excellent guest columnists, allows me to write freely and work on long-form pieces and run this epic growing community of almost 2,000 paying subscribers.
This piece was originally just for paying subscribers, but I wanted to send it out more widely as I think it is an important topic. It is a piece about how to tune into yourself when you’re not sure which way to go; how to go even further beyond our five senses, how to make more informed decisions, avoid burnout and regulate our nervous system in an increasingly overwhelming world.
This is a guest column from Jonny Miller; TED speaker, host of the Curious Humans podcast and founder of the Nervous System Mastery course. I met Jonny seven years ago at a panel event about the future of work hosted in London. I remember the evening I met Jonny rather vividly; his energy in the room mainly, his curiosity, kindness and the passion for the work he does. It’s a pleasure to give him this space today to talk about the lost art of interoception, something many people have never heard of. I got a lot from reading his piece and now I get to share it with you.
Important note: This piece talks about mental health and includes a mention of losing someone to suicide so please only read on if you feel comfortable doing so today. Last week was Suicide Prevention Day, you can read more here on the Samaritans website.
We have more than just five senses
by Jonny Miller
Five years ago, I was living with my fiancé in the English coastal town of Brighton, where she worked as a doctor. She had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder before we met, yet for the most part, she was bursting at the seams with life, with a mischievous grin and luminous presence.
One morning, while I was traveling, she suffered from an anxiety attack at work. In the intensity of that moment and without friends or family present to intervene, she rode home and overdosed on her own medication — taking her own life.
As I embarked on the long process of dealing with the pain of this loss, I began to explore parts of myself—the repressed emotions and authentic expressions—that had lain beneath my conscious awareness. I was afraid that if I didn’t learn how to metabolize my grief, it would lead me to become bitter and perhaps unable to love fully again.
One of my more profound realizations—and gifts of grief—was that I had unknowingly spent the vast majority of my life living in my head and emotionally numb from the neck down.
Growing up in the British education system, Somatic Literacy 101 (aka learning how to listen to your internal physical and biological feedback) was, unsurprisingly, not part of the core curriculum. So, over the past five years, I dedicated myself to exploring the psychological and emotional terrain of my inner landscape. This path has included hundreds of breathwork journeys, guided psychedelic experiences, a vision quest, and 10 days of meditating inside a dark room. The most unexpectedly potent experience was learning how to freedive down to 120 feet underwater with a single breath. To equalize — aka relieve the pressure that builds in the inner ear and sinuses as a result of increasing one’s depth below the surface—requires a refined, subtle awareness of physical tension, which I came to understand as a form of high-stakes interoception training.
So, how do we gain more awareness of our internal state?
The idea that we humans have five senses — sight, sound, smell, touch, and taste—is a belief that dates back 2,000 years to Aristotle. Back then, it was a decent guess, but neuroscience has advanced significantly since the days of ancient Greece. It turns out that we have at least four additional senses — and the most underrated and practical of them is known as interoception.
Interoception, in essence, means awareness of our internal state. This includes learned associations, memories, emotions, and all the data running through the interconnected pipelines of the 100 billion neurons in your body. The word has two parts: “intero–” refers to “internal” and “–ception” to “awareness.”
Intero-ception can be contrasted with “extero-ception,” which involves receiving data through the external senses. Most of us tend to prioritize external sense data—like endlessly refreshing a newsfeed after dinner when internally, our body is sending signals to recover and begin winding down.
In the center of the brain lies a remarkably sophisticated piece of biological machinery called the insula. This spongy core is the headquarters for cortical representation, which refers to how your brain processes all the information about your internal state.
Imagine that this area of your brain is like one of those gorgeous 16th century maps that had “here be dragons” scribbled over the yet-to-be-explored areas. In much the same way, you might think of these cortical maps in our brainstems as having smudges all over them that can only be restored and brought into higher definition through interoceptive exploration.
Three reasons to flex your interoceptive muscles
1. It’s leads to more informed decisions
By learning to cultivate this internal receptivity, we can learn to listen more clearly to the treasure trove of data coming from our neurotransmitters—like adenosine cueing a need for sleep, a change in our breathing signalling a shift in our arousal response, or just being aware of how rested we feel upon waking and making choices about our day accordingly. The little things really aren’t so little.
2. You avoid the burnout dump truck
Prolonged periods of high stress cause allostatic overload, or accumulated wear and tear on the body, leading to increased fragility in the nervous system. We call this the “feather, brick, dump truck” phenomenon. Often, these high achievers would push through initial fatigue or poor sleep (feather) and again through a minor health crisis (brick) until it practically runs you over (dump truck). Sometimes it takes total burnout to convince them to begin listening to their body. Multiple studies also tie interoceptive abilities with the ability to feel and coregulate with the emotions of others—in other words, increasing our capacity for empathy.
3. Enhanced emotional regulation
Productivity boils down to emotional regulation, and intentional emotional regulation requires the ability to sense, track, and feel the sensations that get interpreted into emotions—the capacity to interocept. When there is a lack of this, we’re unable to fully feel the sensations associated with emotions. Unfortunately, this means they remain beneath our conscious awareness and instead are projected onto others — or we find ourselves emotionally overreacting in ways that are rarely conducive to our long-term goals.
I now feel like an entirely different person. I notice myself making more intuitive decisions, with less emotional reactivity and a sense of greater aliveness in my day-to-day experience.
A personal or health crisis often facilitates radical shifts in perspective, and my own journey was no exception.
If you enjoyed reading this and are interested in learning more, Jonny is accepting applications for the next cohort of his course Nervous System Mastery here.
If you enjoyed this post and like receiving this newsletter in your inbox, please consider joining as a paying member. You can join today for 15% off, available for 24 hours only.