Power Up!
Hello! Vanessa here today. This week, Karen will be discussing a superpower that we all can share: Interoceptive Awareness. This skill provides us with information about our body states and our emotional states. It’s basically how we feel our internal experiences.
However, it’s common for this superpower to get dampened or lost. Common kryptonites include: dieting, chronic or acute stress, sleep disruption, a demanding schedule, mental or physical health conditions and a history of trauma.
When a person has interoceptive awareness difficulties they may confuse internal signals, over-feel these signals or simply have difficulty differentiating between body signals and emotion signals (for example, struggling to differentiate between hunger or anxiety).
While it takes time and intention, interoceptive awareness can be improved with practice. The "How low can you go" exercise below helps to increase body awareness by helping you to become aware of your own heartbeat, as well as practice strategies to help you decrease your nervous system activity. For this exercise, you can use any device that captures heart rate like a smartwatch or Fitbit, or you can track your pulse with your finger and a watch.
- Step 1:
- Do an activity for 30-50 seconds that increases your heart rate (jumping jacks, push-ups, running in place).
- Step 2:
- Try to estimate the rate of your heart rate.
- Step 3:
- Now measure it and see how close you were.
- Step 4:
- Track this over time so you can track your interoceptive awareness improvement.
Bonus exercise:
After you've practiced these steps several times, it's time to level up: do Step 1, then take your heart rate and then try to see how low you can get your heart in 60 seconds.
- The goal is to decrease your heart rate as much as you can in 60 seconds (this is where the name "how low can you go" comes from).
- Experiment with different things (slowing down your breathing, focusing on something calming, etc.). Track how much you can lower your heart rate in one minute. Again, keep recording this so you can watch yourself improve over time.
In time, you may be able to better tune into bodily signals so that you can match your actions with your needs!