Expanding Your Emotional Palate for a Tastier Life

An Exploration of Interoception

Have you ever felt disconnected from your body or unsure about your physical or emotional state? Do you struggle with managing stress or emotions in your daily life? Are you interested in improving your overall physical and mental health? If you answered yes to any of these questions, keep reading.

Some of you might say, “Oh, I don’t have any feelings. Everything I do is based on logic.” By the end of this article, you might think, or more aptly, feel differently.

Just as tasting flavors can be developed by chefs or sommeliers, so can this sensory system. It can make a huge difference in almost every aspect of your life. What is it? It’s interoception, or how we feel inside our bodies.

Awareness of these sensations is crucial as they cue us into our emotional and physical state.

The Two Flavors of?Emotions

Emotions come in two flavors: homeostatic and affective.

Homeostatic emotions are the body’s way of keeping us in balance. For instance, if we’re low on water, we feel thirsty; if we lack energy, we feel hungry; if we’re tired, we need sleep. These feelings are produced by the brain to keep us alive and healthy.

Then there are the more familiar affective emotions, like love, hate, sadness, joy, anger, and contentment. In his book “Understanding Emotion at Work,” Stephen Fineman explains that these feelings are “crucial for prioritizing, sorting, and filtering possibilities. They guide us on what matters and what is relevant, not just what makes sense. They provide personal feedback on what is significant, irrelevant, dangerous, or desirable in what we see, touch, smell, or think about.”

Everything we experience, think, and act upon is flavored by our emotions. That includes our decisions. Despite our belief in the supremacy of logic, our decisions are often influenced by how we feel about a situation.

When your awareness of these interoceptive sensations is low, you might not connect to the feelings of hunger, tiredness, or thirst until they’re loud and overwhelming. The same is true of how we feel emotionally: sad, happy, angry, or content.

Emotion Recipes

We know why we feel hungry or tired, but what triggers the brain to activate our other emotions?

I call them “recipes.” They are the combination of ingredients from the outside and inside world—the perceptive ingredients that form an emotional recipe. These recipes are stored in our brains, along with the context of what was happening at the time. The brain uses these recipes to recognize similar situations in the future and predict a best guess of what emotion to launch. This is how the brain constantly processes information and decides what to do with it.

Consider if you had a bad experience with your math teacher as a child, making math difficult and frustrating. You’ll likely dislike math unless you have another experience that changes this perspective. That experience changes the emotional recipe for math. Otherwise, you go through life with a bad taste in your mouth for anything related to numbers.

Interoceptive Awareness: Connecting to those internal?feelings

We don’t notice our stomach working all day until the brain makes us aware. The interoceptive signals sent to the body result in a grumbling stomach. We can get something to eat or ignore those feelings. The same is true with our affective emotions.

By connecting to our emotions as they arise, instead of waiting for them to become overwhelming, we have a better chance of identifying, processing, and even pivoting from them. Returning to the math example, recognizing that you don’t like math might actually stem from disliking your math teacher, not the subject itself. When we identify our feelings with more distinction, knowing such details can help us move forward.

I wrote my book, Yucky Yummy Savory Sweet: Understanding the Flavors of Emotions because I had been the person who spent too much time pushing feelings down, unable to recognize them. The tools in my book have made a huge difference for me emotionally and physically because I developed my emotional palate, or to put it another way, my interoceptive awareness. This is a skill that can be developed, just like a chef develops their palate to taste the flavors of their creations.

My chiropractor once told me he didn’t know anyone who understood their body as well as I did. I can tell exactly what I need and if something is slightly out of place because I’m connected to how I feel in my body. I pay attention to the signals my brain sends me to determine why I feel the way I do.

Increased Awareness Makes for a Better?You

Understanding what you want and don’t want is fundamental because it drives your decisions, actions, and feelings. Knowing yourself this well leads to better, more aligned decisions. This is about getting to know YOU?—?the evolving, refined, and unique person you are.

Increasing our interoceptive awareness helps us develop a better connection to our feelings. The more connected you are to yourself, the greater connections you can make with others.

I’d say that is a recipe for wellbeing!