Anxiety and Bodily Sensations: What’s the Link?

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• A recent study found that state anxiety impairs bodily self-trust—but mainly in women.
• Anxious women showed lower metacognitive insight without any drop in physical detection ability.
• Women and men performed equally well in bodily perception tasks, with gender differences only in self-evaluation.
• Anxiety brain effects may alter how internal body cues are handled cognitively, worsening regulation behaviors.
• Enhancing bodily awareness could significantly improve emotional coping, especially for women with high state anxiety.

Your brain constantly reads signals from your body. It notices your breathing, heartbeat, and muscle tension. This helps you be aware and handle your feelings. This is called interoception, and it’s key for your mental and physical health. A new study in the European Journal of Neuroscience shows something interesting. If you are a woman and you feel anxious right now, you might not judge your body’s signals as well. This can happen even if you still sense them just as strongly.

What Is Interoception?

Interoception is how your brain senses what’s going on inside your body. It’s like knowing if you’re hungry, too hot, thirsty, or out of breath. These feelings are not just there in the background. They are like constant information that your brain watches and uses. Interoception is how your body and mind connect. It’s important for both how your body works and how aware you are of your feelings.

This internal sense helps keep your body in balance. This balance, called homeostasis, keeps all your body systems working smoothly. Your heart rate, hormones, oxygen, and digestion all depend on this constant flow of information.

But interoception is not just about basic survival. It’s also key for other brain functions. It affects

• How you handle and understand emotions.
• How you make choices and see risks.
• How you remember things.
• How aware you are of yourself and your body.

When interoception doesn’t work well, you might not be able to tell what your body and emotions need. This can lead to problems with emotions, panic, or too much worry. This is especially true for people with anxiety problems.

Anxiety and Interoception: The Missing Link

Anxiety that lasts or happens suddenly has long been linked to problems with interoception. Researchers have looked at how anxiety can make you more or less sensitive to body signals like your heart or breathing. But fewer studies have checked how well we understand and trust these signals once we notice them.

This new study points out a key difference. It’s not just about sensing a body change. It’s also about judging how sure you are about what you sense. You might notice your heart is racing, but not know what it means. You might think “I’m having a heart attack,” and panic for no reason.

The link between anxiety and worse interoception might help explain some common anxiety symptoms. These can include chest tightness, dizziness, or stomach issues. But it’s not always the physical feelings themselves that are the problem. It’s often how you understand them and if you trust your understanding.

Decoding the Terminology: Accuracy vs. Insight

The study helps by separating interoception into two types

• Interoceptive accuracy is how well you can actually sense body signals. For example, did you notice your breathing was harder for a moment?
• Metacognitive insight is how well your confidence matches your accuracy. Did you think you were right, and were you actually right?

It’s important to see these as different things. Your ability to sense your body might be fine, but you might not understand it well. You might feel unsure about your body’s signals, or think they are more important than they are. This can cause you to overreact, avoid things, or even ignore real warning signs from your body. For example, you might ignore a symptom that needs medical help.

What Is Metacognitive Insight?

Metacognitive insight is like your internal check on reality. It tells you how reliable your feelings are and how much you should trust them. If you have good metacognitive insight, you react to situations in a balanced way. Not too much, and not too little.

Imagine two people feel chest tightness while speaking in public. One person knows it’s just nerves, takes a breath, and keeps going. The other person doubts themselves, worries it’s a heart attack, and panics. Both felt the same body signal, but they understood and trusted it very differently.

With anxiety, especially when you’re very anxious right now, body signals can become stronger or more noticeable. But how well you understand them might get worse. This is where poor metacognitive insight can cause you to be too alert, think the worst, and act in unhelpful ways.

The Study: How Researchers Examined Bodily Awareness

To look closer at anxiety and body feelings, researchers led by Olivia K. Harrison did a careful study in several places in Europe. It was one of the biggest studies of its kind. They wanted to see how feeling anxious in the moment changes how the brain understands body signals, especially in women.

Methodology Summary

• Participants: 175 healthy adults from different places.
• Task: People wore a breathing mask. Sometimes, the mask made it a little harder to breathe in.
• Goal: People had to say if they felt the breathing get harder and how sure they were.
• Assessments: Questionnaires measured both ongoing anxiety and anxiety at that moment.

With this plan, researchers measured

• Sensitivity: Did people notice when breathing got harder?
• Decision Bias: Were they more likely to say “yes” or “no” in general?
• Metacognitive Bias: How sure were they overall?
• Metacognitive Insight: Did their confidence match how well they actually did?

This setup helped researchers tell the difference between sensing the body and understanding it. This is important for understanding how anxiety affects the brain.

Key Findings: Anxiety Undermines Bodily Insight—In Women

Maybe the most important thing the study found was that feeling anxious right now makes interoceptive metacognitive insight worse. But this was mostly true for women.

Here’s what they saw

• Men and women were equally good at noticing when breathing got harder.
• But women who felt anxious during the test were much worse at knowing how right they were.
• It wasn’t that they sensed things less. It was that their self-judgment got worse.

Simply put, women who were very anxious at that moment felt disconnected from their bodies. What their body was telling them and how much they trusted it didn’t match up. This internal problem can make it harder to handle emotions, cause people to misread symptoms, and make them more likely to panic.

On the other hand, anxious men didn’t have this problem with self-insight. Their metacognitive accuracy stayed the same, no matter how anxious they felt.

State Anxiety vs. Trait Anxiety: Why the Moment Matters

The difference between state and trait anxiety is important

• State Anxiety: Feeling anxious right now, in a specific situation.
• Trait Anxiety: Being the kind of person who often feels anxious over time.

Researchers found that state anxiety was more likely to mess up body understanding. Women feeling very anxious at that moment were less sure and less accurate about their body feelings. Trait anxiety and feeling down also affected insight a bit, but not as much. And they didn’t cause the difference between men and women.

This suggests that feeling very anxious in the moment has strong, specific effects on how women understand their bodies. This makes state anxiety a key thing to address when helping women with their mental health.

No Performance Gap Between Men and Women

It’s important to note that men and women were equally good at sensing body changes. Both groups did about the same on tasks that tested interoceptive accuracy. For example, feeling the breathing resistance. This means that the basic way we sense our bodies is probably not causing the anxiety differences.

The difference was in how they judged their own sensing. This finding changes the focus from just sensing to understanding. And it has big implications for how anxiety in women is treated.

Gender and Mental Health: Broader Implications

Women are almost twice as likely to be diagnosed with anxiety problems. This difference between sexes has been explained by many things: biology, psychology, and society.

• Hormones can change how sensitive the brain is to chemicals.
• Society may put more pressure on women to focus on emotions and their bodies.
• Women may have experienced more trauma or have more caregiving responsibilities.

This study adds another piece: anxious women might not just feel more. They might also doubt what they feel more often. This constant self-doubt, especially about body feelings, might make anxiety worse. It could also increase physical complaints and make it harder to handle emotions well.

Cognitive Consequences of Disrupted Interoception

Let’s put it all together. Worse metacognitive insight doesn’t just change how you sense your body. It changes how you think and act. If you don’t trust your internal signals, you might

• Misunderstand harmless symptoms as dangerous. For example, thinking a fast heart rate is a heart attack.
• Have trouble calming yourself down or handling emotions.
• Avoid things or check things too much to feel sure.
• Be more likely to have panic attacks or health anxiety.

Basically, anxiety changes how the brain works. It doesn’t just make you more afraid. It changes how you understand your own body and reality.

Why Confidence Matters: From Therapy to Real Life

Trusting your body awareness is not just nice to have. It’s essential. From being less nervous when speaking in public to knowing when you’re working too hard, trusting your body’s signals is key.

For people with anxiety, especially women with state anxiety, learning to trust their bodies again could be a main goal in therapy. Some helpful methods include

• Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR): Helps you become aware of body feelings without judgment.
• Biofeedback: Helps you learn to control body processes by seeing real-time information.
• Breath-focused CBT: Teaches breathing methods and ways of thinking to better understand body feelings.
• Yoga and somatic therapies: Help you safely reconnect with your physical self.

Teaching people to notice, trust, and respond well to body signals can make anxiety less severe and improve emotional strength.

Mind-Body Alignment in Treatment Approaches

These findings suggest treatments should be more focused on gender and the type of anxiety. For example

• Therapy could include exercises to train interoception for women with high state anxiety.
• Mental health checks could ask about confidence in body feelings and understanding them.
• Prevention plans could be adjusted for different times in a woman’s cycle or times of more stress due to hormones.

Basically, adjusting treatments to address anxiety and body feelings – considering gender and current mood – could lead to better mental health results.

Limitations and Future Research

Even though it’s important, the study has some limits

• Different equipment and ways of doing things at different study sites might have caused some changes in results.
• The study only looked at one point in time, so it can’t fully prove cause and effect.
• It only focused on breathing-related interoception. Other signals like hunger, heartbeat, temperature, or pain might work differently.

Future studies should also look at

• The role of hormones like estrogen or progesterone.
• If treatments to improve metacognitive insight can reduce anxiety symptoms over time.
• How early life experiences change body trust differently in men and women.

Real-World Applications: How Awareness Can Help

The main point is: you can train your interoceptive system, like a muscle. These simple actions can help

• Mindful Breathing: Spend 5 minutes just focusing on your breath going in and out.
• Body Scan: Each day, mentally check in with each part of your body, from toes to head.
• Emotion Journaling: Write down physical symptoms and your mood to see patterns.
• Pause Points: During the day, take short breaks to check in with how you feel inside.

Doing these things regularly can help you sense your body better and trust those feelings more.

From Research to Empowerment

Understanding how anxiety affects body sensing, especially in women, is not just for science. It has real effects on how we handle anxiety, diagnose it correctly, and design treatments.

Rebuilding trust with your body’s messages doesn’t have to be perfect. Just slowly reconnect with your inner world. Whether you’re dealing with panic, stress, or everyday problems, improving interoceptive insight can make you emotionally stronger and clearer.

In the end, the brain and body work together. They are connected. And understanding this connection is key to mental well-being.

Citations

• Harrison, O. K., Köchli, L., Marino, S., Marlow, L., Finnegan, S. L., Ainsworth, B., Talks, B. J., Russell, B. R., Harrison, S. J.,
• Pattinson, K. T. S., Fleming, S. M., & Stephan, K. E. (2024). Gender Differences in the Association Between Anxiety and
• Interoceptive Insight. European Journal of Neuroscience. https://doi.org/10.1111/ejn.16672