What if I told you that something could make you a better athlete without requiring you to train more or get sweaty?
It’s called: awareness.
The best athletes have a finely tuned inner dial – the awareness (and ability) to know themselves and to use this knowledge to better understand pacing and energy management within the context of the conditions, the course, and event duration.
This awareness is called interoception.
I read about interception in Annie Murphy Paul’s The Extended Mind, specifically in a chapter on thinking with sensations.
Inside of our bodies, we have sensors sending our brain a steady flow of data from within. These sensations occur all over our body and combine with other information – thoughts, memories, sensory inputs from the external world – and give us a snapshot of our current condition, a sense of “how I feel” in the moment along with a sense of actions we must take to maintain internal balance. Therefore, at a level below consciousness, our body/brain is scanning the environment for threats and scanning internally for management of precious energy. While this happens largely outside of our control, we can insert our conscious self into the awareness to learn to improve respond and performance in challenging situations.
One way to improve this is through meditation. The “body scan” practice is a good starting point to reconnect your conscious mind to the feelings in your body, in it, you scan your body from toes to head. Often in our busy lives, we ignore or push aside these internal signals. A body scan teaches us to feel and look into these signals with curiosity and non-judgement.
Interoceptive learning encourages us to sense, label, and regulate our internal signals. During the scan, it helps to give a name to what you’re feeling. When we attach a name to our feelings, we can then begin to regulate them. Research has shown that giving a name to what you’re feeling helps the nervous system to dial down the body’s stress response. From there, we can draw connections between the sensations we feel and the pattern of events that follows. For example, “I feel my back muscles tightening” which typically precedes a cramp that stops us might be a cue to remind us to pause, take a walk break, breathe and reset.
Interoception also helps us become more resilient. We cannot face hardships and exert resilience unless we have the awareness of how to use the resources available to us. Every action we can take is weighed against an internal evaluation of how to conserve or use scarce energy.
“On a level below awareness, we’re constantly keeping tabs on how much energy we have on hand and how much energy we will need to take the actions the world demands of us. Interoception acts as a continually updated gauge of our present status. It cues to let us know when we can push ourselves and when we have to give ourselves a rest.” ~ Annie Murphy Paul
Research has shown that high resilience individuals are more likely to push on through success versus low resilience individuals (who tend to struggle, give up or burn out). One of the biggest differences between the groups is the interoceptive ability to detect changes in their heart rate. In one study, test takers were asked to identify the instant when their heart beats without putting their hand on their chest. Those able to identify the rhythm possessed a more keen sense of their internal world as well as higher resilience.
The ability to detect and sense is therefore closely linked to success. In studying elite performers, when put into difficult situations, these performers were able to mount an anticipatory response before the stressor – their internal awareness picks up on information before it even presents. In fact, these performers improve cognitive performance when put into extremely unpleasant experiences. They have a superior ability to sense their body’s cues, monitor and manage their body’s resources as they rise to meet a challenge.
Meanwhile, low resilience performers show low brain activity before a stress and high level of activity during and after the stressor. The self-management of low resilience performers is “sloppy, all over the place, like poorly calibrated motors that leak power. Discouraged by their failures, their energy reserves depleted, they lose motivation and give up.” (A. Paul)
To more efficiently use your resources, you’ll need to remain alert to preliminary signals – become more aware of internal states (rather than stuffing or ignoring feelings). Think of interoception as a proactive strategy vs an overaroused reactive strategy.
Our perception of our feelings also matters. Our heart rates increases as a result of perceiving a threat and then we label that feeling as fear – we do not first feel fear. The body generates sensations first, the body initiates actions and then the mind assembles the pieces into evidence for what we label an emotion.
The greater our interoception, the more we can influence and control the emotion process – we can create the emotion we experience. For example, we notice our heart beat faster on the start line as a sign not of “fear” but “excitement.” This ‘cognitive reappraisal’ involves sensing and labeling an interoceptive sensation. And this meaning matters. Using our previous example, we can label sweating palms and racing heart as either dread or excitement – these meanings determine our perception and further actions. Harvard researcher Alison Wood Brooks also demonstrated how reappraising the nervousness improved performance; those who convinced themselves they were excited for the challenging task versus telling themselves to calm down performed significantly better.
Awareness and interception can be cultivated; we can become more sensitive to our body’s internal sensations but first must identify them. Be sure to include training with no distractions – no music, groups, or conversation – to develop interoception. Triangulate your perceived exertion with your body’s signals. This is perhaps the ideal partnership between feelings and data. How do you breathe when you’re on the edge? Where do you hold tension? What does your stroke feel like when you’re hold back?
Often this internal work is more challenging than doing the work but its reward is the path to achieving your potential. Interoception is key to accessing flow, that magical state where time slows and your body seems to move on autopilot, everything coming together, a feeling of being one with yourself and the activity. By definition, flow is embodied awareness – a state of fluency of movements and absorption. To get there, you need to be keenly aware of your internal world, and acting from this place of comfort and confidence. Ultimately, flow state is where the best performances happen.
