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Your 6th sense: The key to mastering your emotions

Written by Michael Mantz, M.D.

Article Snapshot

• Our 6th sense, interoception, is our ability to take in information from our body signals and feeling states to help create how we experience our bodies.
• Our body sensations form the heart of our emotions.
• Recent neuroscience provides evidence that enhancing your interoceptive sense can improve decision-making capacity, creative problem solving, empathy, and social intelligence.
• Interoception signals are often vague and ill-defined. Learn how to translate these signals by building your interoceptive vocabulary.
• Learn tips on how to improve your interoceptive practices.

Most of us are familiar with the 5 basic senses: sight, sound, smell, taste and touch. As a group they are known as our exteroceptive senses – they take in information from our external environment to help create our experience of the external world. 

Our 6th sense, interoception (intero = internal and ception = receiving), takes in information from our internal environment (body signals and internal feeling states) to help create the experience of our body. 

In my last article, I discussed a 3-element model that deconstructs our emotions and provides a map to help you better understand them and how to work with them in a constructive way In my last article,. The 3rd element in this model – body sensations – form the heart of our emotions. 

Recent neuroscience provides powerful evidence that becoming more adept at sensing your body sensations (interoception) improves your ability to make complex decisions, creatively problem-solve, empathize, and socialize. (I will discuss the scientific studies about this in an upcoming article.)

In this article we will break the ice into the interesting inner world of interoception and provide basic interoceptive practices to help you get started in developing this powerful 6th sense. 

Translating your 6th Sense 

Our 6th sense usually presents itself as diffuse signals with ill-defined boundaries. When you have indigestion you can feel unpleasant sensations in your abdomen but you will have difficulty knowing exactly where you feel your discomfort. This vagueness quality makes it difficult for many of us to learn how to describe what we feel when we sense our bodies. 

In order to make it easier for you to translate your 6th sense, here is a partial list of descriptors to start building your interoceptive vocabulary:

• Sensations: buzzing, tingling, numbing, dull, pulsating, warming – cooling, tightening/constricting – loosening/opening
• Localization: expanding – shrinking, shifting, surfacing – deepening
• Movement: twisting, unwinding, fluttering, vibrating, spiraling, tunneling, intermittent, constant, clockwise and counterclockwise
• Intensity: 0-10

Tips for Interoceptive Practices

1. Do not TRY to sense your body.  Sensing is neurological. Your conscious will has control over your skeletal muscles and partial control over your breathing and attention. Precise manipulation of your neurological functions like sensing, however, is not within your conscious control. Any effort to make yourself feel your body more will usually have the opposite impact you intend. Conscious effort will add muscular tension into sensing which either dampens your ability to sense or adds noise to the sensing signal. 

The feedback signal that you get from your body when you’re trying to do something that you cannot do is frustration and irritation.  Use any frustration or irritation you may experience as an alarm clock to check-in with your body and let go of any attempts to fish for your body sensations and try to feel them more.  

2. Remind yourself to let go and receive. The key to maximizing your sensing capacity is to enter into a state of open receptivity. A state of open receptivity can be tricky for those of us who are compulsive doers. For those of us who can visualize, imagining that you’re a giant antenna or receiver taking in the signals from your body can be helpful. Also, reminding yourself periodically by saying the following words in your mind can be helpful in breaking the habit of trying to do sensing rather than opening yourself to it: allowing, receiving, tuning in, welcoming, opening, noticing, and observing. 

3. Take advantage of the fact that body sensations generally last longer than thoughts do. The main distraction when you are engaging in body sensing practices is your thoughts. Most of us are thought addicts – frequently bewitched by the seductive force that thinking has over our attention. One advantage that sensations have over thoughts is that they generally last longer. Treat your body sensations like anchors within your current experience and let gravity help you by bringing your attention gently away from thinking (generally felt up in and around the head) and down into the body within the more stable domain of sensations. Over time and with practice it will get easier and easier to decouple your attention from thinking and allow it to go into sensing. 

Note: Recent experiments have demonstrated that one of the most significant factors contributing to anxiety is the lack of ability to disengage one’s attention from unhelpful scary thoughts about the future and bringing it towards experiencing the present moment directly. 

Here are some beginning exercises to help you build your 6th sense and to learn to harness one of the most powerful capacities to make sense of and act wisely on your emotions and what is going on in your life. 

Enjoy!