Let’s begin with a kind-of-unsettling approach: you, the reader (yes, you, with the dishes half-finished, the therapy appointment buzzing in your mind, the tenderness and fatigue both humming like twin metronomes), may well believe you are feeling. That when your heart fluttered, or your stomach lurched, or your breath caught, you knew.

But brace yourself.

Neuroscience suggests that what we think of as awareness of feeling is murky, often opaque, frequently inaccurate.

That is the strange marvel of interoception.

The word literally means “inner reception,” but the process is so much more complex, and perversely, so much less accessible than it sounds.

At its simplest, interoception is the sense that answers the question: How do I feel right now? Emotion, yes, but literally insofar as your brain interprets physical signals from within your body.

You are hungry.

You are anxious.

You are not sure.

That uncertainty is the entire point.

Our brains gather internal data from a dizzying number of sources: the cardiovascular system, respiration, digestion, immune signals, temperature, pain, even feelings of fullness or muscle tension.

The brain stitches all this mess into a subjective sense—your “I’m fine,” your “I’m exhausted,” your “I can’t do this.” And yet this stitching is flawed, unreliable, sometimes misleading.

Here is where the vagus nerve comes in.

The word “vagus” in Latin means wandering. And that is exactly what it does.

This nerve wanders through your body like a great river system, moving from the brainstem down through your throat, heart, lungs, and gut. It is the main communication highway of interoception.

What is awesome is that 80 percent of the vagus nerve’s traffic flows upward, from body to brain. Only 20 percent travels downward. In other words, we were meant to build our reality with 20 percent, but to know ourselves with the other 80.

That means most of what the vagus nerve does is not commanding, but reporting. It is your body speaking to your brain. We tend to imagine the brain is in charge, but in truth our reality is built from the bottom up.

If we ignore those eighty percent of signals, we cut ourselves off from the very data that was meant to make us feel connected, whole, and alive.

When that 80 percent is muted, we feel emotional numbness. We feel disconnected from the body. We say “I feel down” but cannot explain why. We live outside ourselves, cut off from the signals that were meant to ground us.

Why This Matters to You, the Impossible-To-Put-Down, Time-Deprived Mother

You are orchestrating therapies, schedules, caregiving, surviving—and your internal experience is the raw material for how you react, how you rest, how you reconnect. But what if that raw material feels erratic, muted, pounding too loud or too soft? What if your body’s signals are there, but you are not listening, or you are listening too well?

Recognizing that interoception is not just a vague “gut feeling” but a brain-sensed signal gives you radical leverage.

We are not just guessing what our body is telling us. We can learn to tune in carefully, learn when to turn up the volume and when to dial it down.

A Tiny Practice You Can Fit In (Because I Know You Will Want One)

Three Mini-Moments of Interoception

Mid-morning pause (30 seconds, yes, just 30). Pause. Notice your breath. Notice your belly. No judgment, just noticing: “My belly is gentle. My heartbeat steady.”

Lunchtime check-in (as you eat, or after). Whisper to yourself, “Am I thirsty? Are hunger signals different now, maybe dull or anxious?”

End-of-day rewind (lit by the soft glow of bedtime). Think of one moment when your body felt a release, a sigh, a stretch. Even if it was five seconds of ease.

These micro-practices are not magic, but they are the screws of calibration.

Over time, they help your brain reduce noise, strengthen signal, and remind you: you do feel. Or maybe you are learning how to feel again with kindness.

Here’s What’s Most Impressive—and Maybe Most Reassuring

Despite centuries of philosophy and millennia of intuition, how to feel—not just emotionally, but physically—remains a frontier.

Scientists still bicker over definitions, measure signals via heartbeat tasks or float-tank experiments, yet the inner world remains elusive, poetic, scientifically provisional.

But here is the real WONDER. Caregiver mothers like you are already practicing raw interoception every single day. You sense when enough is enough, when a moment of tenderness restores everything, when exhaustion is not just mental—it is visceral. You are learning to feel, even in the places where it seems impossible.

In the spirit of being both sincere and perplexed: the art of learning to feel is one of the most radical, subversive acts of self-care there is. It is not about self-help hypnosis or affirmations.

It is about rediscovering what you already know beneath numbness, fatigue, and numb-struck hope. Your body is not just surviving. You can begin tuning it toward thriving.

You do that with: small tune-ups, steady curiosity, and compassionate recalibration.