Neurodivergent glossary
Interoception
The sense that detects internal body signals like hunger, thirst, temperature, pain, and heart rate—often unreliable in neurodivergent people, leading to missed cues the body is sending.
What it means
Interoception is your body's internal sensing system. It's how you know you're hungry, thirsty, too hot, in pain, need the bathroom, or are becoming emotionally activated. Most people take these signals for granted—hunger builds gradually, you notice, you eat. For many neurodivergent people, interoceptive signals are muted, delayed, or confusingly intense.
Poor interoception can look like forgetting to eat until you're shaking, not noticing you need the bathroom until it's urgent, wearing a coat in summer because you can't gauge your body temperature, or not realizing you're stressed until you're already in a meltdown. The signals aren't absent—they're just harder to detect and interpret.
This has ripple effects across daily life. If you can't reliably sense hunger, you eat erratically. If you can't feel fatigue building, you crash instead of resting. If you can't identify the early signs of emotional overwhelm, you skip the window where coping strategies would have helped. Understanding interoception is often a missing piece for people who've struggled with self-regulation their whole lives.
In practice
What this can look like
- You've been working for six hours and suddenly realize you're starving, freezing, and desperately need the bathroom—all at once. None of those signals registered until they became emergencies.
- Someone asks if you're anxious and you say no. Ten minutes later you notice your heart is racing, your jaw is clenched, and your stomach is in knots. Your body knew. You just couldn't read it.
Context
Clinical context
A. D. Craig's foundational 2002 paper in Nature Reviews Neuroscience established the neuroscience of interoception. Sarah Garfinkel and colleagues have researched interoceptive differences in autism specifically.
Community note
Kelly Mahler, an occupational therapist and author of Interoception: The Eighth Sensory System, has been instrumental in bringing interoception awareness to clinical practice and everyday understanding. Her work helps people develop strategies for reading their body's signals.
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