The Surprising Power of Hope & The Science of Your Sixth Sense

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Speaker 1 Today, on something you should know, why don't more cars have those gull wing doors like on a DeLorean in Back to the Future? Then, how hope works and why hope is such a powerful force.

Speaker 2 When you think of the absence of hope, you realize in that moment how powerful hope is because it doesn't solve our problems magically, but it activates the parts of our minds that help us solve them.

Speaker 1 Also, how a single fruit fly can destroy an expensive glass of wine in seconds. And you may not realize it, but you have a sixth sense.
It's called interoception.

Speaker 3 So, our sight and our hearing and our other senses are extraoceptive. They tell us about the external world.
Intraoception tells you what's going on inside your own body.

Speaker 3 So, it's kind of the center of our personal universe.

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Speaker 1 Something you should know, fascinating intel, the world's top experts, and practical advice you can use in your life today.

Speaker 1 Something you should know with Mike Carruthers.

Speaker 1 So one of the cool and notable things about Doc and Marty's flying DeLorean in Back to the Future is the way the doors on the DeLorean open. They open up.
They are gull wing doors.

Speaker 1 But there aren't very many other cars with gull wing doors. Why is that? Well, that's the question we're going to start with on today's episode.

Speaker 1 Hi, I'm Mike Carruthers, and this is something you should know. So over the years, there have been some other cars that have gull wing doors.

Speaker 1 There's a Tesla, there's, I think, a couple of Mercedes, the Aston Martin Bulldog have, like the DeLorean, gull wing doors that open up instead of out, like on most passenger cars.

Speaker 1 But since they do look kind of cool, you wonder, well, why don't more cars have them? Well,

Speaker 1 there are a lot of reasons why more cars don't have them. First of all, they're hard to design well.
A door that opens up defies gravity.

Speaker 1 They tend to leak in the rain, and there are a host of other design challenges. They're not insurmountable, but they are tough to get just right.

Speaker 1 And a traditional hinge door like most of us have gets around all of those problems. Gull wing doors are also annoying to use.

Speaker 1 Unless they're power doors like on the Tesla, you have to reach up and pull them down. If you're a kid or you have short arms, you may not be able to do that, or at least not easily.

Speaker 1 And then there's the safety issue. Federal safety standards mandate that doors be designed in a way that it's feasible to open them after a rollover crash.

Speaker 1 Getting gull wing doors to comply with that mandate is difficult. But the easy solution is don't have gull wing doors, which is why most cars don't.
And that is something you should know.

Speaker 1 Have you ever felt hopeless? It's one of the worst feelings there is, that heavy sense of despair when you can't see a good outcome ahead.

Speaker 1 I think we've all been there, and moments like that show us just how vital hope really is. Hope is what gets you up in the morning and what keeps you moving forward even when things look bleak.

Speaker 1 But what exactly is hope? How does it work? And how can we find hope in those situations when all hope seems to be lost. My guest, Dr.

Speaker 1 Julia Garcia, is a psychologist and a behavioral researcher, and she is the author of the book, The Five Habits of Hope, Stories and Strategies to Help You Find Your Way. Hi, Julia.
Welcome.

Speaker 2 Thank you so much for having me.

Speaker 3 I'm excited to be here.

Speaker 1 Well, this is so interesting because when I think about hope, I don't think about hope.

Speaker 1 The only time I think about hope is when I feel hopeless, when it's gone, like you don't appreciate it until it's not there.

Speaker 1 And I imagine, as I said, that everybody everybody has had that feeling of hopelessness, which feels terrible. And yet when you feel it, you feel like you're all alone.

Speaker 2 Yes, 100%. I, it's like there's a way to get hopeless.
There's things that happen. Sometimes people try and steal our hope, right? Like there are things that happen over time.

Speaker 2 And this compounds, I call these hope blocks. And these things compound over time.
They can be external. They could be internal.

Speaker 2 And when they compound, what happens is it blocks our way to have hope again.

Speaker 2 And so it can, it, and it doesn't really discriminate. It could be any time unplanned.
You could just, just have this feeling of hopelessness. And if we don't have a process to navigate out of it,

Speaker 2 then that's when it can become concerning.

Speaker 1 My sense is that, because I have felt hopeless in my life, and

Speaker 1 But it always passes. Like it, and I don't, it's not that I'm trying to get rid of it.
It's just that, you know,

Speaker 1 you have one of those days where you're feeling hopeless and you're struggling and, you know, life doesn't seem so great. But tomorrow is

Speaker 1 to throw around some cliches. Tomorrow's another day.
And, you know, I may wake up and often do. And the next day,

Speaker 1 it's the same world, but it doesn't look as gray.

Speaker 2 And that's a power. And that is part of the cognitive science of hope.

Speaker 2 It's building the practice of having hope. So it's something you've already done.
And I think a lot of people who do healing work and working through their emotions can,

Speaker 2 the habits of hope will become something really simple for them to apply. It's really just

Speaker 2 partnering with maybe the foundation they've already established because that's the key is when we build these internal habits, it helps us reduce stress, improve our emotional regulation, bounce back and promote that resilience because it activates this, the brain's goal-directed circus, circuits where our planning and motivation and emotional regulation is.

Speaker 2 And it helps us find a way forward. So it's not saying that

Speaker 2 hope, it's like we can coexist with hopelessness because we know we have a plan to get through it because of the foundation, our internal toolkit, which I believe is

Speaker 2 what you were referring to.

Speaker 1 So what is hope?

Speaker 1 I mean, is it an emotion? And how is it different than, say, you know, wishful thinking or, you know, I mean, I hope I win the lottery, but I mean, I

Speaker 1 is maybe that's not really hope by your definition, but what is it?

Speaker 2 Hope is a cognitive science, but people know it best as a feeling. And that's why I talk so much about feelings and why the habits of hope are based on a feeling framework, because.

Speaker 2 Even if we know the science of it, what matters is how we feel about it. We know when we don't have hope and we know when we have it.
In the absence of hope, we know how dangerous that can be.

Speaker 2 So hopelessness

Speaker 2 can be a really dark place to go, but it's having hope is not wishful thinking.

Speaker 2 And the difference is wishful thinking is maybe having false hope and real hope accepts limits, but doesn't let that be the end of the story.

Speaker 2 It takes knowing that, yeah, things maybe didn't go the way I want or I have no control of the outcome of this, but I can still see what's possible as opposed to just seeing what's gone.

Speaker 1 But hope isn't something that

Speaker 1 it does seem like we're pre-wired for some level of hope. Would you agree that

Speaker 1 there are very hopeful people, and maybe there are some less hopeful people?

Speaker 1 It's kind of maybe a part of your personality that maybe you can move up and down the spectrum, but that you do have like a set point.

Speaker 2 I I believe we're all, we all have the capacity of hope and hopelessness as well, definitely.

Speaker 2 And I think some people have been just through the ring or beat down, beat down, overwhelmed, burnt out, underappreciated, devalued, hit with injustices or really difficult things.

Speaker 2 And to the point where

Speaker 2 it becomes really difficult to have hope no matter what their basis was.

Speaker 2 And that's why I think it's critical for every single person, whether you're lean more you lean more on the I'm positive and hopeful side to

Speaker 2 I'm really hopeless about my entire situation right now, that both situations and every varying degree in between needs to continue having a process to navigate whichever side that they're on because you never know when hopeless is going to hit.

Speaker 1 Is being hopeful or not being hopeful like an on and off switch? Like you're one or the other? Or is there a middle ground?

Speaker 2 One of the worst things that you can become with that hopelessness space is apathetic,

Speaker 2 where you just don't feel anything. And that is a place that is a really challenging place to be.
But when you have hope, it is a predictor of our mental health and well-being.

Speaker 2 And it's also a protective factor in like a crisis, an internal crisis, such as that apathy, where maybe you get to a place where you, you don't feel like your life matters.

Speaker 2 And so hope is a protective factor in that. It's also a predictive, a predictive of success and helping people to cope better and to problem solve and adapt and recover faster.
So

Speaker 2 it's one of the key factors in promoting our healing through any of the things that maybe we're struggling with, anxiety, depression, even substance abuse.

Speaker 2 So it doesn't say, it doesn't erase the pain or the problem. It allows us a pathway to coexist with it and to navigate through it.

Speaker 1 So how do you generate hope out of hopelessness? If you're feeling like, oh, you know, I really blew that job interview. I'm never going to get this job.
I feel totally hopeless about it.

Speaker 1 How do you, from that,

Speaker 1 become hopeful? And maybe you shouldn't because maybe you really did blow the interview and you really don't have a chance.

Speaker 2 I think that's where it goes into the false hope, right? And the wishful thinking. And it always comes back to how do I have a process to navigate through this emotionally? What are my habits of hope?

Speaker 2 What is that toolkit that I can lean back on? And they could be different for that situation.

Speaker 2 So if you're, we'll take this situation, for example, if you just bombed a job interview and you're like, it is not going to happen.

Speaker 2 It's, it's not denying that that's the reality, but it's saying maybe I'm going to do, I'm going to focus on my emotional habit of risk-taking, an emotional risk where I continue to take risks and push myself and be courageous.

Speaker 2 And that's something that is a risk involved to that. But in today's day and age, a lot of people get discouraged and count themselves out when they supposedly fail.

Speaker 2 So I would say in that specific situation, mustering the courage to take one step to remind yourself, you know, I can take another risk. I'm worth that risk.
And then that, now

Speaker 2 our thought cycles are starting to shift and rebuild.

Speaker 1 So I sometimes look at hope as something

Speaker 1 fairly benign in this sense. So you go on a job interview or something and you...

Speaker 1 you feel hopeful about it or you feel hopeless about it, but afterwards you feel hopeful, but there's nothing you can do, right? It's in their hands. It's nothing.

Speaker 1 the hopefulness doesn't do anything other than, you know, buoy you up until you hear the final decision.

Speaker 1 But as you were saying earlier, hope is also kind of a motivating force, at least before the interview, because if you have hope, then you'll probably prepare better and do a better job.

Speaker 2 Exactly.

Speaker 2 But

Speaker 2 what we can realize is with that, the job, when it's out of our control,

Speaker 2 we still have to live with ourselves. We still have to be in our minds.
And we still have relationships we're going to manage.

Speaker 2 And we want to be in a place, no matter the outcome, where we can emotionally regulate, where we can get to a place where even if we don't get the job, it doesn't take us out and we don't, it doesn't take us to a place of...

Speaker 2 where we associate that so-called failure with who we are, with our sense of self, with our identity.

Speaker 2 And hope is really about honesty and it's being able to build that process to face whatever the honest outcome is so that no matter what happens, we continue to have a way through.

Speaker 2 And I, you know, I can share a couple of examples with this where I was really rocked and devastated in my personal life. My cousin, who was like a brother to me, we grew up together.

Speaker 2 He at 18 years old, I was 19. No, he was 19, I was 18 years old, and he died from an overdose on drugs.
And I couldn't change that outcome. I was devastated.
I still will always be.

Speaker 2 And hope doesn't change that hurt. It doesn't make it any more or less painful, but it's given me a way to repurpose that pain, which is one of the habits of hope.

Speaker 2 And it has inspired a lot of the work I do professionally with prevention programs and having conversations about issues and building awareness around things and giving me hope that maybe in all of that pain, that I can repurpose it and potentially prevent someone else's life from being taken by drugs.

Speaker 2 And so, no, having hope, even after devastation and loss, something that can never be changed, it didn't change the pain, but it gave me a path forward through it.

Speaker 1 Well, that's great. That's a great story.
Well, it's a horrible story, but it's a great story.

Speaker 1 One of the situations that

Speaker 1 I have always had trouble with. So I lost both of my parents and was with both of them when they died.

Speaker 1 I'm sorry.

Speaker 1 And there's that point in the process when someone's dying from a disease where you're hopeful, you're hopeful, maybe this treatment will work, maybe that treatment will work.

Speaker 1 And then there's that point where nothing's going to work. And I can't make that turn.
Like I keep thinking, there's got to be something.

Speaker 1 And everybody else in the room is thinking, no, there really isn't. And I can't do it.
I can't do it.

Speaker 2 You can't not have the hope, is what you're saying.

Speaker 1 Right. I can't not have the hope.
And I cannot join the conversation about, well, he lived a long life. He had a good run.

Speaker 1 It's his time. I can't let go of the hope and kind of hate that everyone else has.

Speaker 2 There's absolutely nothing wrong with that. Because in that, you're still,

Speaker 2 and I think that this goes back to one of the

Speaker 2 like debunking the myths on hope is like, you don't have to have like this insane amount of it. You don't have to have a bunch.
And it doesn't have to make you be happy.

Speaker 2 You don't have to be happy to have hope. And hope is about honesty.
And that's where you're honestly at. And so I think that's just as powerful.

Speaker 1 We're exploring the world of hope with Dr. Julia Garcia.
She's author of the book The Five Habits of Hope, Stories and Strategies to Help You Find Your Way.

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Speaker 1 So Julia, the next time I'm feeling hopeless, what might I do different

Speaker 1 rather than just wait it out and hope it passes?

Speaker 1 What's some advice that people can use to get back hope when it's lost? And you know, you tell such great stories. Maybe a story would help from your life or someone else's.

Speaker 2 What happened was I was in a situation where I was leaving an unhealthy relationship, like physically running away from it. And I get into a car with a friend who's taking me home.

Speaker 2 And they didn't say anything in the car ride, but when they got to my house, they just looked at me and they said, you know, you could be anything you want to be.

Speaker 2 In that moment, so I'm escaping like an unhealthy relationship. And someone looks at me and says, I could be anything I want to be.
That's the last thing I'm thinking about.

Speaker 2 It's the middle of the night. I'm probably like close to being blackout wasted at this point.

Speaker 2 And I, but I remember what they said, and it didn't change the situation. It didn't change really anything at the time, but I put a marker in it in my heart that said maybe.

Speaker 2 And that maybe moment really helped shift the trajectory of my life.

Speaker 2 I soon later thought, maybe I can get out of this relationship. I had dropped out of school and I thought, maybe I can go back to school.
I'm a three-time dropout.

Speaker 2 And then I thought, started to think, maybe there is purpose to my life. Maybe there's purpose to the pain I felt.
Maybe I can follow a dream. Maybe I can, you know, and the maybes started to put

Speaker 2 where those hope blocks were. It started to break them.

Speaker 2 My thought processes started to get in a different trajectory of maybe what's possible, how to believe again.

Speaker 2 And it started changing my mindset because when we practice habits of hope daily, it's like we're giving ourselves the opportunity to say, maybe we can heal.

Speaker 2 Maybe things are possible, even in spite of what we're up against.

Speaker 1 That example illustrates something I was going to ask you about is hopelessness probably thrives in a vacuum.

Speaker 1 And that if you bring in other people when you're feeling hopeless, it's going to get a lot less hopeless.

Speaker 2 Yes. And that is our human nature to isolate, even when we feel alone.
And we're like, we like to isolate when we have struggles.

Speaker 2 And there's three actual main reasons why we do this, why we kind of struggle and keep it in that vacuum, keep it to ourselves.

Speaker 2 And the three main reasons are: we don't want to look weak, we don't want to burden anyone, and we don't think anyone cares.

Speaker 2 And again, I want to share a quick story This past weekend at my book launch, I had another person come up to me and they told me that it was really hard for them to be in social spaces that they had been isolating in their bedroom for a really long time.

Speaker 2 And this plays on so many different things that I see on a weekly basis of people of all ages and demographics really in this isolation state. And there's a lot of reasons I could say

Speaker 2 for that, that being in the digital era is a huge, huge reason why people are isolating more. They're isolating in this comfort,

Speaker 2 even if they have this innate desire to connect. And that what we can do when we are feeling that way is do basically the hardest thing possible.

Speaker 2 And it's to have that courageous connection with someone, to tap in support, to build our pillars of support around us. And it doesn't have to be a ton of people.
It could be like one or two people.

Speaker 2 But when we have hope besides each other, it strengthens it and it also keeps us accountable. And we enjoy the journey a lot more when we can build the relationships that we innately desire.

Speaker 1 You know what's interesting about this is, you know, hope is one of those things, like you can't argue with it. Hope is wonderful.
It's great to have hope,

Speaker 1 but I don't think people see much power in it in the sense that it can't affect the outcome. You can hope something happens.
You can hope something changes, but hoping doesn't make it so.

Speaker 1 And so people think, well, you know, it's kind of nice. But

Speaker 1 as I said in the beginning, I notice the power of hope when it's gone. When you feel hopeless, then you realize how powerful hope is.

Speaker 2 And I didn't think it was a serious, substantial thing

Speaker 2 at all. I was like, this is a fluffy concept.
I couldn't even get behind it at first. But when you think of the absence of hope,

Speaker 2 you realize in that moment how powerful and important and critical hope is because it doesn't solve our problems magically, but it activates the parts of our minds that help us solve them.

Speaker 2 It fuels our motivation, our emotional regulation, our ability to plan and strategize and find a way through.

Speaker 2 It strengthens our emotional habits that make healing possible.

Speaker 1 Well, that's brilliant. You said it all right there.

Speaker 1 So in the final moments here, what's one last thing you want to leave people with about hope?

Speaker 2 You know, there have been many times in my life where there's an opportunity for me to not just be hopeless, but to stay there.

Speaker 2 So my hope is that wherever you're listening from right now, that wherever you're on your journey, that you keep going and you keep growing.

Speaker 2 and you keep building the emotional habits that help you to heal. Maybe that means picking picking up the phone and calling someone and being honest with them.
Maybe it means forgiving yourself.

Speaker 2 Maybe it means taking a chance and being courageous on something that you've wanted to do for a long time. But allowing yourself those maybe moments, maybe it is possible, maybe I can accept real love

Speaker 2 because at the end of the day, no matter the outcome, I truly believe that we will like who we're becoming when we're courageous and brave and when we have hope.

Speaker 2 And when we have hope, we can really see what humanity would look like if it heals and what's possible. And that's a journey I feel like would be much more fun to be on.

Speaker 1 You know, in all the episodes that we've done on Something You Should Know, I don't think we've ever talked about, just isolated and talked about the topic of hope.

Speaker 1 And now I kind of wonder why, because it's fascinating. I've been talking with Dr.
Julia Garcia. She is a psychologist and behavioral researcher.

Speaker 1 And her book is called The Five Habits of Hope: Stories and Strategies to Help You Find Your Way. And there's a link to her book in the show notes.
Julia, thanks for sharing all this.

Speaker 2 Thank you so much.

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Speaker 1 You are obviously aware of your five senses. Sight, sound, touch, taste, and smell.
But there's another sense, a hidden sense that may be just as important. It's called interoception.

Speaker 1 It's your sense of what's happening inside you. It's the the subtle signals of your heart, your hunger, your stress levels, even your emotions.

Speaker 1 They're all shaped by this internal sense called interoception. Researchers are now finding that understanding and tuning into your interoception can profoundly improve your health and well-being.

Speaker 1 My guest, Caroline Williams, is a well-respected science journalist and podcaster, and she's author of a book called Inner Sense, How the New Science of Interoception Can Revolutionize Your Health.

Speaker 1 Hi, Caroline. Welcome back to Something You Should Know.

Speaker 3 Hello, thanks for having me back. It's been a while.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 So first I guess we need to define what we're talking about here and what interoception, am I saying it right? Interoception is.

Speaker 3 Interoception. Yeah, so it's a

Speaker 3 bit of a horrible word, really, and I think it's one that we'll have to get more familiar with in years to come.

Speaker 3 It's going to be one of those things like the microbiome, which once sounded something kind of crazy and out there and now everyone knows about it so intraoception is quite simple really it's the way we detect and interpret signals from within our own bodies so it's kind of a sense that's unlike all our others so our sight and our hearing and our other senses tell us they are extraoceptive they tell us about the external world the world outside of our bodies intraoception tells you what's going on inside your own body so it's kind of the center of our personal universe, really.

Speaker 3 And there's a good reason why the brain cares an awful lot about this sense of intraception, because these are sensations that tell you something about how you're faring in the world and whether you need to do something to increase your chances of survival.

Speaker 3 So, you know, are you hungry? Is your heart bursting out of your chest because, you know, you're scared?

Speaker 3 Is there something you need to do? Are you in pain? Do you feel fatigued and need to take a rest?

Speaker 3 So these senses are becoming clear that they are very much the basis of pretty much everything we ever think, feel,

Speaker 3 our motivations, our mood, our energy levels. And so they're very, very important in the basis of our mind, which hasn't really been considered before.

Speaker 3 It's all been sort of neck up until fairly recently.

Speaker 1 So everyone has had those experiences of feeling hungry or hot or fatigued or whatever. And all it tells me is if I'm hungry, I should go eat.
If I'm fatigued, maybe I need to take a nap.

Speaker 1 But what's the big so what? I mean, it seems pretty self-evident.

Speaker 3 Yeah, I think the so what is that we haven't really been factoring this in when we think about the mind and things that go wrong with our physical health and our mental health that are usually quite difficult to treat.

Speaker 3 So a lot of mental health issues that have normally been thought of as brain issues, for example, anxiety, panic disorder, eating disorders, addictions, all of these have very strong physical components and what is now becoming clear is that what's happening in a lot of those disorders is that the interpretation and the detection of these internal signals can get out of balance and we all vary a lot anyway just naturally in our ability and our tendency to use these sensations and so by understanding these sort of body-brain connections and finding ways to tweak them, scientists are finding new treatments for lots of difficult things, you know, things like IBS, where, yeah, it's a physical problem, but it's also exacerbated by stress.

Speaker 3 And so a lot of things where

Speaker 3 they are not necessarily all in the brain or all in the body, they're in the interaction between both. And that's kind of quite a new way of looking at health.

Speaker 1 So I want to get a better feel for this interaction between brain and body. Because I get that we have those feelings of you're hungry, so you need to eat something.

Speaker 1 but I want to understand more the importance of this.

Speaker 3 Yeah, well, the way I think of it really is it's kind of like a

Speaker 3 background track to our lives. So,

Speaker 3 you know, like when you're watching a movie and suddenly the mood will shift and you feel a little bit on edge, but you're not quite sure why that is.

Speaker 3 And it's because the backing track to the movie has suddenly shifted. And so intraceptive feelings aren't necessarily always in your face and always obvious, but they can just shift.

Speaker 3 And if you don't necessarily have the ability to tune in and see what they mean and interpret those correctly that can sort of sometimes lead you astray and one of the reasons why now is

Speaker 3 an important time to understand this is not just because it's an area of science that's really booming but also because our lifestyles work against our ability to make sense of what's going on with our bodies.

Speaker 3 So we spend a lot of time sedentary and so when we're sitting still all the time and just all up in our heads, we're not getting very much change in those messages from our bodies.

Speaker 3 And so we can just sort of tune them out. And then we don't really know what's going on.
Are we hungry? Are we tired? Are we bored? You know, what's going on?

Speaker 3 And then we have ultra-processed foods, which make up a huge proportion of the diet, which mess with the signals of when we're full and when we're hungry.

Speaker 3 And then we have sort of sensory overload from the outside world. We've got, you know, these distracting screens in our pockets at all times.
We've got 24-hour rolling news. Everything's going on.

Speaker 3 We've got all these things that are going around, which is overwhelming.

Speaker 1 So, in order to become aware of of and tune into these feelings coming from within, what is it you do to tap into it?

Speaker 3 Well, I think that the first and easiest thing to do is to sort of notice more.

Speaker 3 So there's been a lot of talk about mindfulness over the last few years and everyone's familiar with mindfulness, but what are you being mindful of?

Speaker 3 And there are fewer of them, but there are some guided meditations available that sort of take you inside your body and say, you know, where are you feeling? Are you feeling any pain?

Speaker 3 Are you feeling tension? Are you feeling ease? You know, and sort of getting used to those sensations. So that's one way of doing it.

Speaker 3 There's also a lot of work using flotation tanks, which is, you know, known as sensory deprivation tanks, where people are in very salty water, which holds you up.

Speaker 3 entirely you know without any effort it's body temperature the air is body temperature and it's in the dark your ear plugs in so there's no there's no information from the outside world and that really enhances these um these messages from inside of the body and that's been used to help people with with anxiety it's it's incredibly relaxing and so there's all kinds of things that go on where you are able to feel things like your heartbeat and your breathing sensations and that helps people to feel their body as a safe place to be in ways that can calm you know in the longer term and it's been used for eating disorders as well so people have a lot of issues with body image

Speaker 3 and people who who have better have used these techniques to tune into their inside of their bodies tend to start seeing their body as me rather than it and having a better relationship with their body image.

Speaker 1 So we have these obvious signals that come from within, from the body. Like when you're hungry, you're hungry and it doesn't go away.
You can maybe distract yourself a little bit.

Speaker 1 But you always feel the hunger. Same thing if you're tired.
If you're tired, you're tired and you can not think about it, but it's always there.

Speaker 1 But it seems if I'm getting what you're saying, there are other signals that we're not aware of.

Speaker 1 And I had this one experience, I had a conversation, I think it was an interview, where somebody said, you know, people are so unaware of how they grip the steering wheel in their car when they're driving.

Speaker 1 And if you ever think to notice while you're driving, notice how you're gripping the steering wheel. And I did.

Speaker 1 And I was gripping it really tight, really tight, for no reason, or no seemingly for no reason. And I thought, wow,

Speaker 1 I wasn't getting the message from my body. My brain wasn't getting the message.
You're gripping this way too tight.

Speaker 1 But once I figured it out, once I thought about it, then I loosened my grip and it felt much better. But is that what we're talking about?

Speaker 3 Absolutely. And so this is something that I brought in when I started getting interested in interception.
I was thinking the exact thing, well, how can I use this in my everyday life?

Speaker 3 And one of the things I did is set an alarm to go off three times a day at random intervals. There's an app, it was called the Random Reminders app.
And so there's various ones out there.

Speaker 3 And it would just ping and it would just say,

Speaker 3 just reminder, check in.

Speaker 3 And then just simply just having a little, you know, a brief, almost like a body scan where you think, am I clenching my jaw? Am I feeling irritable? Is that because I'm hungry?

Speaker 3 Is it because I'm stressed? You know, what do I need to do? Do I need to walk around the block? Do we need a stack? Do I need a break?

Speaker 3 And just having like a regular reminder to check in, as you say, am I really tense right now? Do I need to be holding my shoulders up around my ears can just really change the tone of the day.

Speaker 3 So I think it's something that we can all do just to help ourselves get through the day a little bit easier.

Speaker 1 It's really a matter of awareness. It's really being

Speaker 1 more deliberate in paying attention. And the more you do it deliberately, then the more you do it not so deliberately.

Speaker 3 Absolutely. Yeah.
Yeah. Half the battle sort of knowing it's there.

Speaker 3 And also, but I think the thing that's quite important to mention as well is that, you know, in wellness circles, you often hear people say, oh, you should always pay attention to the wisdom of your body and your body knows best and all that sort of thing.

Speaker 3 And yes, you know, there is a lot going on that we do ignore in our being up in our head society and world, but we should always be curious about what the body is saying because sometimes it leads us astray.

Speaker 3 Just as your eyes can deceive you and your ears can deceive you, sometimes your internal feelings, so your gut feelings, for example, these are some of the sort of subtle changes.

Speaker 3 And you might think, oh, this person gives me a bad feeling. And you might be right.
They might be, you know, trying to do you harm. But it might be

Speaker 3 maybe they just remind you of somebody who did you wrong in the past. And so just having those feelings, noticing them, and then being curious, okay, what...

Speaker 3 what's actually this telling me I think is a really important thing otherwise you can end up being blindly saying okay I feel bad about this so therefore I'm not going to do it so it has to be a source of information that's in the the mix.

Speaker 3 We definitely need to, I think most of us need to pay more attention to it.

Speaker 1 So here's something I bet is partly responsible anyway, for why people don't pay such close attention to these bodily sensations, these bodily messages coming from within, because how often have you had like just a shooting pain?

Speaker 1 or a funny sensation in your shoulder or you get a pain in your gut or and it comes and it goes and it's gone in a second and you don't pay much attention to it because you have learned that this doesn't really mean much.

Speaker 1 It's probably just if it happens over and over, maybe you go see a doctor. But we all get those weird sensations, strange itches, and we end up ignoring them.

Speaker 1 So then we end up ignoring other things as well.

Speaker 3 Yeah, I think you can definitely be too highly focused on some things that are going on in your body. And so scientists are trying to work out what it means to have the perfect level of intraception.

Speaker 3 And I think, so, for example, when people have been diagnosed with a cardiac arrhythmia that they didn't know they had, some people get so intensely focused on their heartbeat that they can end up sort of not being able to leave the house just in case something happens because every little sensation must be bad and causes panic.

Speaker 3 And some kind of things like IBS and some pain disorders, the body-brain can actually

Speaker 3 can get out of whack where they get sensitized. And so, there's definitely a middle ground where you can kind of tune in.
Well, that's probably nothing. Tune out again.

Speaker 3 Yeah, but there's definitely a balance to be struck, I would say.

Speaker 1 So help me understand the connection, though, between

Speaker 1 how the brain and the mind play into this. Because I understand if,

Speaker 1 you know, I'm...

Speaker 1 something feels funny or if I'm tired or if I'm hungry, I can solve that.

Speaker 1 But that's not my mind so much as my body. So bring the brain into it a little more.

Speaker 3 Yeah, so the brain is a hugely important part of this. So what I'm not saying is that like, oh yeah,

Speaker 3 the mind is all in the body. Forget the brain.
It's very much

Speaker 3 a joint effort between the body and the brain. And so

Speaker 3 this idea of the body's role in our emotions isn't entirely new.

Speaker 3 William James was saying in the 1880s that

Speaker 3 the body...

Speaker 3 changes in our body affect our emotions.

Speaker 3 But why it didn't really take off is because everyone thought that, well, these changes in the body, they're too slow to have anything to do with what the brain's doing and there's been a shift in neuroscience in recent years where to understand that the brain predicts what it expects to have come in from all the senses including the internal senses including our intraceptive ones and so the brain is constantly predicting what it expects to come from the body and then updating that prediction based on what's actually coming in and then there's some sort of interaction between the two where these things are turned up or turned down depending on what is most important at the time and it's this interaction that can go wrong in these various disorders.

Speaker 3 But yeah, the brain is very much involved in this. In fact, there's a huge area of the brain called the insula.

Speaker 3 We have one on each side of the head, which is known as the intraceptive cortex, where all the body signals come up from the body and are put together with the predictions coming down from the kind of more cognitive areas of the brain.

Speaker 3 And what comes out of that is the sensation of how I feel right now, right here.

Speaker 1 But how much time am I supposed to devote to this? Because I can imagine getting too wrapped up in it,

Speaker 1 but like, I mean, how much, how often should I stop and pause and think during the day of, you know, what am I feeling? What am I thinking?

Speaker 3 Making time, you know, initially to just kind of notice these things, maybe, you know,

Speaker 3 once a day, even, you know, like I did it three times a day and I found it was really, really helpful to kind of just remember that there's more going on than what's going on round and round in in my head as I sit at my desk.

Speaker 3 So yeah, just I think the more, the more the better. And

Speaker 3 just understanding that this is an aspect of life, that your body is sending messages which they're sort of coloured with information, which is basically, is what's happening good or bad or indifferent?

Speaker 3 And is it urgent or less so? And on that scale, then you'll know what... what to do.

Speaker 3 And I think just a little bit of time each day will pay dividends, I think.

Speaker 1 What if anything about this whole interoception thing has been researched a lot and given us some real data?

Speaker 3 The gut-brain connection has been a lot more discussed than most of intraceptive research and there's some really interesting stuff that's coming out of a lab I visited in Tulsa in Oklahoma so

Speaker 3 where they have been using vibrating pills.

Speaker 3 So if you think of like a quite a large capsule about the size of a sort of fish oil capsule or something, with a little battery inside and a motor, and they activate this.

Speaker 3 I actually tried it, you sort of swallow it, and it feels a little bit like a phone on vibrate, and someone just keeps calling, and they won't take no for an answer, they just keep calling, keep calling.

Speaker 3 And so, what they're using this for is to try and understand how we differ in our sensitivity to gut sensations to do with fullness, to do with pain, to do with bloating, all these things that affect whether we eat or whether we don't eat.

Speaker 3 And also, gut sensations have a lot of a role to play in emotions and how we feel and disgust and all these kinds of things. And so, by using these kind of

Speaker 3 vibrating capsules and also capturing data from the brain and seeing what the brain is making of all these changes and sensations, whether it's high vibration or low vibration, the hope is that we can maybe come up with some ways to retrain people who have problems with gut-brain interactions.

Speaker 3 So you might be oversensitive to sensations from the gut in terms of IBS or maybe anorexia or people with binge induced eating disorder may have been able to shut down sensations from the gut or don't feel them at all for

Speaker 3 whatever reason.

Speaker 3 And then maybe you can use that as a tool to help people tune back into their stomach in a way that could be really useful as a new tool to rewire the gut-brain connection in a much healthier way.

Speaker 1 Well, as you explain it, it really is this kind of sixth sense that most people don't even think about, but you have these internal sensations that influence your thoughts and actions, and it seems like it's important to understand them and learn how to harness them.

Speaker 1 I've been speaking with Caroline Williams. She is a science journalist and podcaster, and she's author of the book Inner Sense.

Speaker 1 How the new science of interoception can revolutionize your health. There's a link to that book in the show notes.
Caroline, thank you for being here and explaining it all.

Speaker 3 Thank you very much.

Speaker 1 Have you ever poured yourself a glass of wine only to seconds later see a fruit fly swimming around on the surface?

Speaker 1 Well that tiny little intruder, that fruit fly, isn't just annoying, it can actually ruin the taste of the wine. Fruit flies are drawn from hundreds of yards away.

Speaker 1 They can come from all over your neighborhood and find your glass of wine. And here's the wild part.

Speaker 1 Research from the Journal of Chemical Ecology shows that one, just one female fruit fly in a glass of wine can emit a pheromone that humans can smell in concentrations as small as parts per trillion.

Speaker 1 The result is that your wine suddenly smells musty and tastes terrible. So the next time a fruit fly lands in your glass, scoop it out quick, or better yet, just pour yourself another glass.

Speaker 1 And that is something you should know.

Speaker 1 You know, one of the hardest parts of, well, it's not a hard part.

Speaker 1 One of the challenges of doing this podcast is coming up with a different way to ask you to please help us grow our audience by sharing an episode with someone you know.

Speaker 1 And so I'll just ask you like the normal way. Could you please share this podcast, this episode, with someone you know?

Speaker 1 You can just use the share button on whatever player you're using to listen to this on right now. Send it to someone you know, ask them to listen, and it really does help us.
I'm Mike Carruthers.

Speaker 1 Thanks for listening today to something you should know.

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Speaker 1 The Infinite Monkey Cage returns imminently. I am Robin Ince and I've sat next to Brian Cox who has so much to tell you about what's on the new series.
Primarily eels. And what else?

Speaker 1 It was fascinating though. The eels.
But we're not just doing eels, are we? We're doing a bit.

Speaker 1 Brain-computer interfaces, timekeeping, fusion, monkey business, cloud, size of the North Pole, and eels. Did I mention the eels? Is this ever since you bought that timeshare underneath the Sagas OC?

Speaker 1 Listen on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts.