Exteroception vs Interoception: Getting Out of Your Head

Most people are sort of in their head a lot. They’re not really present to what they’re doing, which leads me to the statement that I believe, most people have an interoceptive bias—they’re focused more on what’s going on internally than on what’s happening externally.

I think that this is an issue because we hear so often about the need to do a meditation practice that allows us to focus inward and that we’re getting yanked around by all the stressors of life, etc.

And we are, we’re getting yanked around by all the stressors and demands of life. But as we do that, we tend to be very focused on what’s happening with us.”

Andrew Huberman, The Science of Meditation

With the rise in prominence of vanity-inflating and anxiety-inducing social media channels, I find this claim spot-on—self-absorption and mental affliction are at all-time highs.

These dispositions are characterized by identification with your thoughts or various external social constructs, a trait indicative of low emotional intelligence.

However, a predisposition for internal focus doesn’t necessarily yield self-obsession and mental affliction. In fact, it’s quite the opposite—individuals most attuned to their internal world are less prone to these inclinations, and tend to be more empathetic towards others.

Likewise, the tendency to look internally doesn’t inherently constitute a high aptitude for self-awareness, i.e., keen interpretation of sensations, impulses, thoughts or feelings. For example, a narcissist or someone suffering psychological distress certainly tends towards interoception, but they are generally oblivious to the workings of their mind, which is why they remain the center of their universe.

Self-awareness is the ability to be conscious of your consciousness. And though it is a cognitive process, ironically, the best way to foster it is through mindfulness of the breath or body.

Using the practice, you can train the mind to become self-aware instead of self-involved, achieve this mental stillness, overcome difficult emotions, and free yourself of delusion.

Interoception vs Exteroception

Interoception is the perception of what’s going on at the level of your skin or a deeper internal level. In contrast, exteroception is everything more external than skin deep—essentially, perception of environmental stimuli outside the body using the sense faculties, primarily sight, hearing, and smell, but also touch and taste.

In the Huberman Lab Podcast episode I pulled the introductory quote from, neuroscientist Andrew Huberman says that a good benchmark for gauging interoceptive awareness is the ability to detect your heartbeat and rate without needing to physically take your pulse with your hand.

Well, I used to not be able to do that worth a lick, and I certainly was in my own head most of the time. That’s partly why an interceptive bias and the tendency towards being consumed by your thoughts should not be viewed as synonymous.

While there is definitely overlap, an adept mindfulness practitioner is fine-tuned to their internal world, but is also able to control their mind and “watch their thoughts pass” without getting hung up on them—the former lends itself to the latter.

In the quote above, Huberman says the majority of us should engage in exteroceptive-focused meditation, as we generally are internal-looking. While I agree, he’s mostly referring to this untrained type of looking—one in which we don’t have the capacity to recognize thoughts as something distinct from the self (self-consciousness vs self-awareness.)

Taking this into consideration, again, interception at large is not a parallel to self-awareness. Especially for the untrained mind, focusing on your thoughts will not bring the insights into yourself that being conscious of and focused on your body or breath – i.e., practicing mindfulness meditation – will bring.

The realizations can be basic, like the recognition of your breathing, body or posture, or more astounding, like the understanding of your thought patterns.

Physiological awareness leads to self-awareness. By practicing mindfulness meditation and becoming conscious of the sensations occurring in the body, the mind becomes attuned to the here and now, rather than occupied by past or future occurrences or other abstractions that are disconnected from the present.

When present to our internal world, we first become adept at detecting our nervous system’s level of arousal, and when it shifts. With enough practice, we’re able to become conscious of thoughts and emotions arising, since often they are what leads to this physiological state change.

After establishing that ability, we’re able to see what thoughts and environmental cues make us triggered (angry), fearful, excited, or relaxed, and then if that feeling (experience) is irrational compared to our external environment.

Eventually, we’re able to put a buffer between ourselves and our thoughts and emotions, ridding ourself of immediate identification with them and our conditioned responses. With this separation, we can gauge whether they accurately reflect our circumstance, or are instead baseless.

Cultivating interoception brings this self-awareness. And one of the primary measurements of self-awareness is the ability to have empathy for others and understand your relationship to the external world, qualities that are the antitheses of self-absorption.

Being self–aware also means being able to recognize how other people see you.

Understood.org, The Importance of Self-Awareness

However, you’re unable to do that objectively when self-conscious, seeing yourself as the center of the experience. Mindfulness meditation allows you to realize that there is no center to the experience, much less that you yourself are at the center. And when you rid yourself of this illusion, self-consciousness gives way to self-awareness.

Ironically, in my experience, an internally-focused practice lends itself to better understanding of ourselves in relation to the present external environment. We no longer see ourselves as the center of the universe, rather as a part of the continuity of the universe.

Your perception of the present experience becomes accurate, instead of deluded by thoughts and emotions such as fear or insecurity. With nothing contracting your mind, you can achieve pure consciousness, providing a more meaningful connection with the people and objects you interact with.

On the other hand, meditating on the mind, or an externally-focused, concentrative practice may bring benefits like heightened attention and improved sleep quality, but it detaches us from our internal world and feeling state. Thus, we are unable to tap into our self-awareness and gather context of ourself in relation to the surrounding environment.

The Mind: The Interoception Spectrum No-Man’s Land

Again, in my view, mind interoception is more similar to exteroception than it is to body or breath interoception—ruminating on your mental formations by meditating on the third eye, especially without proper training, removes you from your present, internal world, just like focusing on something external does.

By focusing my attention on the one organ for which I have no sensation – that is, my brain – thoughts, feelings (emotions), and memories start to grow in their prominence in my awareness and in my perception.

This is why when you sit down to do a meditative practice where you close your eyes or you’re focused on that third eye center, where you’re focused on your brain as opposed to your bodily surface or something external to you, the thoughts seem to come by in waves, and they can almost be overwhelming. It’s very hard to “just sit back and watch your thoughts go by” because there are so many of them.

Andrew Huberman

This can be a dangerous game for the layman. Though being attentive to the mind is technically interoception, applying attention to your cognitive processes opens the door for racing thoughts, letting them run amok without the capacity to understand the underlying patterns and regulate them accordingly—an ability known as metacognition, i.e., self-awareness.

It’s very clear that for people who do that typical third eye meditation for 13 minutes a day, if they do that too close to when they want to go to sleep, they have a hard time falling asleep, which makes perfect sense because they are becoming more interoceptively aware—they are ramping up their level of focus.

Andrew Huberman

Well, they are focusing on their thoughts, so this outcome does make perfect sense. This instance is another prime example of the divergence between introspection and interoception at large.

In contrast, had they “ramped up” focus on their breath or parts of the body like the dantian (on their sensations instead of thoughts) they would have calmed down the nervous system. Therefore, staunch focus doesn’t inherently equate to alertness (sympathetic nervous system arousal). In fact, focusing on the breath is an excellent technique to calm the nervous system and drift off to sleep.

When you bring your full attention to the body and make it the object of your mind, you can’t help but be mindful, remaining in the present—you are aware of your breathe or body, which are only available in the here and now.

In the words of Thich Nhat Hanh, “When body and mind are together, you are established in the present moment.”

Since focusing on your thoughts is an entirely different practice from applying attention to your internal sensations, the two have different outcomes on the body and the mind. Breath or body awareness brings healing and insight, while for the unqualified mind, mind focus often brings negative emotions like sadness, worry, or fear—primarily because we leave the present when these emotions emerge.

A 2010 Harvard University study found that “Mind-wandering appears to be the human brain’s default mode,” a trait that does not lend itself to wellbeing or self-awareness. Mind-wandering encompasses all forms of not being present, including getting lost in thought during third-eye meditation.

The study showed a negative correlation between daydreaming (being in the past or future instead of the present) and mood, regardless of if the participant found the activity they were doing to be pleasant or not. In other words, the more the subjects’ minds wandered, the less happy they were.

Fortunately, we can improve both our mood and our self-awareness by constantly bringing our focus back to the present moment through body or breath mindfulness. Not by forcing it, but by sitting with our intrusive thoughts, negative emotions and impulses, and letting them dissolve.

Refocusing Practices

The act of refocusing with respect to meditation has been proven to benefit all sorts of mental processes, including concentration, emotion, and perception.

Again, I’d like to look at it from the framework of a distinction between a concentrative meditation and a mindfulness approach.

With a concentrative, object-based meditation like a mantra or visualization, the idea is to bring your focus back to the object of your attention when you notice it has strayed. This type of practice improves concentration, memory and learning.

It’s also can be used to break addictions and bad habits—concentrative meditation allows you to adapt default conditioned responses to internal or eternal stimuli by rewiring cognitive connections.

Getting scientific for a minute, this restructuring of neurons in the brain is known as neuroplasticity. The process involves weakening synaptic connections between neural pathways, through which impulses are sent after being triggered by a given stimulus.

For example, each time you bring your attention back to the object of focus after realizing your mind was wandering, the association between your brain and the stimulus is weakened a little bit.

Through functional neuroplasticity, eventually these connections are adapted to create new default responses (physical and emotional reactions) to those same triggers.

However, though it can improve focus and rid you of bad habits, an object-based practice isn’t much of a boon to wellbeing, because you’re not sorting your issues. As I’ve discussed before, any mental affliction that arises and causes the mind to drift while in this state of intense focus is simply struck down when you get the insight that it has manifested.

So while it may weaken the synaptic connection between an emotional trigger and your default response, it doesn’t bring the reason for that trigger to the forefront of your awareness—essentially, you’re just deflecting.

On the other hand, mindfulness meditation improves your ability to stay present, thus becoming conscious of the exact moment when thoughts, impulses, and emotions manifest in your mind, and potentially revealing their trigger.

The ‘Sky-Like’ Mind

However, this ability to be attentive to everything rising in your consciousness is the end goal—at first you won’t be able to recognize it emerging. But by not shutting out these mental conditions when they come into your awareness, with time you can.

Ironically, though developing this self-awareness is a cognitive process, it becomes much easier to recognize mental conditions manifesting when you have sharpened your ability to be conscious of your consciousness in the way I outlined earlier—through mindfulness of bodily sensations.

To me, interoception is like the stepping stone between an object-based meditation (exteroception) and the non-dual view, i.e., pure, objective consciousness. You’re still contracting your attention down to something, and are liable to get lost in thought. But instead of suppressing it, let it float by, as if they were clouds passing in the sky. Sometimes the wind blows them past faster than other times, but clouds always pass, no matter how slowly.

You let things come, but you also let them go. It’s a grounding exercise to establish yourself in the present. By just becoming conscious of your intrusive thoughts and emotions but not obliging them or distancing yourself from them, they lose their power over you.

Its non-reactivity component is kind of like a form of sensory deprivation, which is another way to break your attachments.

Much like refocusing the mind on an object after your concentration has been broken by a thought or an impulse, bringing your attention back to the breath or body loosens your mental circuitry. The more you don’t give into it, the more its grasp on you is weakened.

However, with a mindfulness practice, instead of reacting to a wandering mind, you’re “not giving in” in the sense that you’re not letting thoughts, impulses and emotions control you. Simply let them come and let them go on the exhale, as you bring your attention back to the breathe, relaxing your body in the areas where the mental impression had created tension.

One particular approach is Thich Nhat Hahn’s telephone meditation, in which he likens the sound of a phone dinging to a gong or “the bell of mindfulness.” Instead of being slave to dopamine and immediately succumbing to your urge to grasp for your phone, exercise restraint and demonstrate your willpower by first bringing your attention back to the breath.

The same principle applies for nicotine, junk food, an identity, material possessions, and all sorts of other craving. You can use the breath as an anchor and are thus less pulled around by the waves of attachment that dictate your course.

While this can be seen as delayed gratification, it is also a powerful exercise in mindfulness. At the very least, this practice puts a buffer between the trigger and your emotional response. At best, you can sit with these difficult thoughts and feelings, doing the work to objectively reflect on what they are grounded in.

Eventually, you’re able to get to a place in which the self is synonymous with the experience.

Of course, it may be difficult to not get frustrated when you notice your mind wandering, especially when just starting out. However, with each additional realization, your ability to recognize the tendency is improved, as is your understanding of the underlying thought process.

Rather than think about your ability to focus, think about your ability to refocus, and the more number of times you have to refocus, the better training you’re getting.

Andrew Huberman

…and the better your self-awareness is becoming.

Wrapping Up

Our thoughts can swallow us whole when we identify with them, or just as quickly if we try to resist them. The perception of our mental formations can have devastating effects on us if we view them from an improper vantage point, or even merely take a dualistic approach, i.e., subject and object, as so many rudimentary meditators do.

Attempting to suppress thoughts can paradoxically ramify our sense of self or self-involvement. However, instead of meditating on the mind, bringing awareness to the breath or the body allows us to be far enough removed from our mental impressions to see them as “emerging objects in consciousness” distinct from the self.

When we put all of our perception into our thoughts, we see how disorganized, how wandering they are and, in fact, how random and intrusive those can be.”

Andrew Huberman

But we’re only able to do that after we’ve done the work to distance ourselves from our thoughts. When we become mindful of them, we see that often they are deluded, gain insight into what is causing them, and hopefully the motivation to do something about those afflictions.

– CC