Building Interoception with Children

How often are you really aware of the signals that your body is sharing with you?

What is interoception?

Interoceptive awareness can be broadly defined as the conscious perception of an internal bodily state, for example, one’s heart beating and breathing. It is our eighth sense and a huge part of developing emotional regulation skills. These senses are related to both emotional and lived experiences. It is often something we don't actively think about or consider throughout our day.

Think about it: how often have you paused and noticed what your body was communicating to you?

If I were to ask you how you knew you had to use the restroom, how would you explain that?

There are several benefits of teaching and learning more about interoception. First, this practice helps both adults and children connect to and learn to understand their own bodies and emotions. Second, it is a prerequisite skill for self‐management and self‐regulation. Strong interoceptive awareness provides children with the tools to know when they are developing emotional reactions and the skills to be in control of those reactions.

**It is also important to consider that the awareness of both biological and emotional internal body cues are impacted in individuals who are affected by trauma, including intergenerational trauma, and neurodivergence including the autism spectrum (Schauder, Mash, Bryant, & Cascio, 2015, Mahler, 2016). Often, neurodivergent people can experience something called alexithymia, sometimes referred to as "emotional blindness," and is a decreased capacity to notice and/or differentiate between various body sensations and emotions.

Here are some suggestions of how to improve both your own interoceptive awareness and your child's:

1.     Teach general awareness of the body parts, going through each body part by tensing and relaxing

• Move them in any way that feels good

• Focus on one at a time

• Close your eyes and place items on the body parts. Say which body part that item is on. Notice what you feel in each body part – is there tension, pain, shakiness, numbness?

• Play head, shoulders, knees and toes and notice any sensations

  
  

  2.     Introduce more complex movements

• More intense stretching of each body part – notice what feels good and doesn’t feel good

• Bounce up and down

• Shake your whole body out

• Do whole body scans – starting from your head and going all of the way to your toes

  
  

  3.     Teach body sensation vocabulary

• For example: Tight, stretched, tingly, hot, cold, shaky, jittery, pressure, heavy

• What other words can they come up with?

• Practice using descriptor words with different items on different body parts (for example: place a paperclip, rock, cotton ball and ask them to describe what they feel like)

• Play a game called "how do you know?" Take turns asking one another how they know when they are hungry, thirsty, tired, excited, angry, etc.

  
  

  4. Connect emotions with body sensations

• Anger – tense hands, gritted teeth

• Sadness – body slumped, crying, frowning

• Use books, movies, commercials, advertisements and real-life examples to discuss this further

• Play charades by guessing the body sensations (they have to act out what it would feel like to have that sensation)

• "How do you think ____’s feeling right now? How do we know?"

• "When I feel ____, I _____ in my body."

  
  

  5.     Teach that external things impact internal sensations

• When we are cold, we put a coat on (connect it back to the body sensations that help us know this); when we are thirsty, we get a drink of water

• Connect all the dots

• When you are starting to feel _____ by ______ (body sensations), you can _____ (skill). Use yourself as the model: "phew, I'm out of breath after just running. It feels hard to breathe. I'm going to put my hand on my chest and try to take some deep breaths."

  
  

  6. Teach various regulation skills, consistently practice them in the home

• These skills must be practiced when everyone is in the green (ventral vagal) pathway; consider it like doing reps at the gym. You do not expect someone to be thrown into a weightlifting competition and simply know how to lift heavy weights. They must practice before hand.

• Which regulation skills help us with certain sensations and emotions?

• Pushing up against a wall might be most helpful when we are angry and frustrated, whereas feeling the grass against our bare feet might be helpful when we are zoning out and checking out of our bodies (bored, numb, etc).

• What is everyone's preferred regulation strategies? They may not be the same