On Interoception: How Connecting to Your Internal State Can Reduce Anxiety and Depression

Published on Dec 06, 2023

Updated on Feb 13, 2026

If you struggle with anxiety and depression, it can be a quietly exhausting experience. Even when life looks functional on the outside, internal stress patterns can keep your nervous system locked in survival mode, making relief feel frustratingly out of reach.

Understanding your internal state can help you interrupt automatic stress responses that fuel anxiety and depression. This article focuses specifically on interoception—the skill of noticing internal signals—and how strengthening it can support lasting emotional regulation.

The Mind-Body Connection

One of the most practical steps in working with anxiety or depression is learning to notice how your body responds before your thoughts take over. This awareness makes neuroplastic change experiential rather than conceptual. For example, how do you respond when you are in the presence of something that triggers you? Are you able to influence your mental / physical responses?

When you look deeper at the root of anxiety and depression, you begin to have more sympathy for yourself. Your ability to perceive your internal state is commonly referred to as interoception ^[1]—the moment-to-moment awareness of internal sensations like tension, heaviness, or activation.

This is significant because it can show you the root of your mental, emotional and behavioral patterns, which determine how you respond to the world around you.

Finding Cause for Your Responses

First, it’s important to recognize that not every anxious or low state needs to be eliminated—some internal activation is appropriate to real-world demands. The problem arises when these states persist beyond the situation that triggered them. However, there are some forms of stress that are beyond normal levels. If you do some introspection, you can understand and even learn to regulate your internal levels of stress or anxiety. The more you practice this, the more control you will have over your internal state and subconscious behaviors.

For example, let’s say you have agoraphobia. You know that every time you go out into public, you will be facing the same fears. Depending on the intensity of your anxiety, you can take a minute, take some deep breaths, and realize some specifics about your situation. You might suffer when you are around a dozen people or only be affected if you are in front of one hundred.

With interoception, you can discover how anxiety or depression reflects a temporary internal state rather than a permanent condition—and learn to work with it until the pattern softens. ^[2]

Self-Awareness is the Key to Resolution

We all have our struggles, but we can learn to confront them and become stronger as individuals. If you recognize what specific situations might trigger your reactions, you can begin to lessen their occurrence.

When you pause and recognize how you’re responding, you create a small but powerful gap—one that allows the stress cycle to lose momentum instead of repeating automatically.

Through proper neuroplasticity training, you can become more in tune with your internal state. Over time, as you recognize your patterns and how they affect you, paying attention to your internal state can really help resolve or alleviate anxiety or depression that may have felt crippling in the past.

Making Interoception a Habit

Like most things that can help us change, they work best when done consistently as opposed to whenever we happen to remember. Making interoception a habitual practice is the surest way to reap the best benefits and experience enduring change.

To support this practice, re-origin’s neuroplasticity program integrates interoception into short, daily exercises, helping you build awareness without overanalyzing symptoms.

The program itself was created taking into account the latest research into habit design, and with the help of top neuroscientists and cognitive behavioral therapists. At re-origin, we recognize that it isn’t just about the information in a program, but the accessibility and usability. That’s why we’ve made it easy for all participants to follow a simple 5 step process, involving interoception, specifically made to break out of vicious cycles of anxiety, depression or chronic self-perpetuating inflammatory cycles.

For the Future

You don’t have to stay stuck in the same internal cycles. As interoceptive awareness improves, many people notice that their emotional responses become less intense, shorter-lived, and easier to recover from.

When you learn to become more aware of your internal state, you may be surprised at how rapidly things begin to change. Click here to learn about our evidence-based neuroplasticity program and supporting community.

Somatics