Episode #4: Learning to Listen to Your Body: Interoceptive Awareness

Mastering Momentum

What's the first step towards creating momentum and ultimately, creating change? It sounds simple, yet, in many ways, it is anything but.

The answer is awareness.

Without awareness, you cannot make intentional and deliberate change. Change takes more than awareness. Among other things, it takes acceptance of reality, and it takes values-based action if you're working from an Acceptance and Commitment Coaching perspective.

Still, awareness is the first step.

In this episode, we begin breaking down awareness into multiple types. The ultimate goal is for you to be able to understand and use different types of awareness flexibly depending on the contextual demands in that moment.

Specifically, in this episode, we cover a certain type of awareness called interoceptive awareness. Interoceptive awareness is the ability to identify physiological sensations or signals in your body. For example, your awareness of autonomic arousal or your stress response including increased heart rate, muscle tension, feeling flushed or hot, thirst, etc.

Some scientists consider this skill to be the most critical of mastering self-regulation and behavior change. In this episode, you'll learn why.

What You’ll Learn from this Episode:

• A high-level division of the human nervous system[00:01:06]
• Why awareness is critical to being able to manage or influence our performance or anything that we say or do and a technique on interoceptive awareness [00:02:00]
• How many disorders are associated with impaired interoceptive processing and why starting there when it comes to practicing awareness can be too big of a leap for some people. [00:10:38]
• 3 different interoceptive practices for you to try and that I primarily use with coaching clients who want to work on their awareness skills [00:16:00]
• Why dynamic flexibility in using these awareness skills is really the most important factor and why interoceptive awareness is also important in the performance context of exercise or athletic activity[00:27:41]

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For full show notes and resources visit: https://www.drjannewman.com/podcast/episode4-interoceptive-awareness