How Does Your Child Process Signals from Their Body?
Does your child ignore, miss, or over attend to internal signals from their body, such as hunger, thirst, full bowel/bladder, body temperature, heart rate, breathing, pain, or muscle tension? Maybe it depends on their stress level or physical health.
Interoception can be defined as the ability to perceive the internal state of one’s own body. Some believe this includes not only sensations from the body (organs and nervous system) but also how we perceive external stimuli, such as touch.
Our scientific understanding of interoception is just beginning. Scientists don’t yet agree on how to define, describe, or measure interoception. We also don’t have a good sense of how these abilities grow and mature across development.
For individuals with a history of neurodevelopmental disorders, medical conditions, or trauma, it’s not uncommon for them to be hyper or hyposensitive to their body’s internal state. If an individual also has a sensory processing disorder, this can further contribute to challenges with interoception.
Do you notice any of the following in your child?
- Gets “hangry” because they go well past the hungry phase and this causes irritability. Or maybe they overeat because they don’t notice they are full.
- “Forgets” to drink because they don’t recognize thirst
- Has a high pain tolerance that leads them to ignore an injury
- Doesn’t recognize when they are tired until they are irritable, tearful, or exhausted
- Gets worried at the first sign of a stomachache, headache, body pain, or illness
- Doesn’t dress appropriately for the weather
- Ignores signals to go to the bathroom and has accidents.
- Becomes anxious about their heart or breathing (e.g., heart rate is too fast, can’t catch their breath), despite reassurance that their body is healthy
Interoception is critical to self-regulation. This includes our ability to regulate our attention, behavior, and emotions to fulfill meaningful goal. Here are 2 examples:
“I need to manage my anxiety during gymnastics meet, even when I experience a lot of discomfort due to my pounding heart and sweaty hands, because I want to do well”.
“I need to pay attention during math class, even when my mind wanders and my body is restless, because I want to do well on the test”
Interoception integrates with other sensory experiences (and thoughts) to provide information about how our body feels during an emotional experience. How would you describe your physical experience of being happy, sad, nervous, or angry? What would your child say? If your child doesn’t yet understand how to label their emotions, this is the place to start.
If your child has a hard time with self-regulation, explore how they understand the signals from their body. Explore how they link physical sensations to emotion. For example, when nervous, one might notice that my heart races and pounds, my face feels hot, there are butterflies in my stomach, my hands sweat, etc. When calm, my body feels light, my muscles are loose, and my breath is slow and long.
Model and provide examples from your own experiences. Help build a “somatic vocabulary” around these physical experiences. You might draw specific attention to their breathing, because this is something your child can learn to control.
Based on the age of your child, explore visual and contextual tools that could help make these abstract ideas more concrete (e.g., art, books). If you search online, you’ll find lots of ideas, and then you can decide based on your child’s age, language and cognitive abilities what might be helpful. Get creative and find ways to integrate this into conversations about your feelings and those of your child.
