Interoception, the perception of signals arising from within the body, is an underappreciated health skill. Research by Sarah Garfinkel and Hugo Critchley at the University of Sussex has found that interoceptive accuracy, the ability to accurately perceive physiological body states, is associated with better emotional regulation, better decision-making under physiological arousal, and better recovery from physical and psychological stress. Body literacy, the ability to interpret these signals accurately, is foundational to both health behaviour and healthcare engagement.
What Body Literacy Includes
Body literacy includes: the ability to distinguish hunger from thirst, boredom, or anxiety; the ability to identify early physical warning signs of overtraining, illness, or stress before they become problems; the ability to notice the physiological correlates of emotional states, including the muscular tension of anxiety, the energetic drop of low mood, or the physiological arousal of fear; and the ability to track changes in physical function over time that provide early information about health trajectory. These are learnable skills, not fixed capacities, and they improve with deliberate practice.
The Costs of Poor Body Literacy
Poor interoceptive accuracy is associated with a range of health consequences. People who cannot accurately perceive hunger and satiety are more susceptible to both overeating and under-fuelling during exercise. People who cannot recognise the early physical signs of stress or anxiety are more likely to reach crisis point before seeking help. People who cannot distinguish physical symptoms of significance from benign bodily sensations are more likely to either catastrophise normal sensations or dismiss symptoms that warrant attention. Both over and under-responsiveness to body signals carry health costs.
Practices That Develop Body Literacy
Body literacy develops through practices that direct sustained attention to physiological experience. Regular body scan practices, developed in Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction, systematically direct attention through different body regions and train the discrimination of subtle physiological differences. Movement-based practices including yoga, tai chi, and somatic movement that emphasise proprioceptive awareness develop the attentional habits needed for interoceptive accuracy. Simply pausing before eating to assess actual hunger, or during stress to notice where physical tension is held, builds the habit of internal attention that underlies body literacy.
Body Literacy and Healthcare Engagement
People with better body literacy engage with healthcare systems more appropriately: they seek help earlier when symptoms warrant it, provide more accurate symptom descriptions, and recover more effectively because they can monitor their own response to treatment. Research on patient activation, the degree to which patients are engaged and informed participants in their own care, consistently finds that activated patients have better health outcomes and lower healthcare costs than less activated patients. Body literacy is a foundational component of patient activation.