3/31 Interoception Part 2: Occupational Therapy Brainstorm and Practice

One of the most striking things about Mahler's curriculum and Garfinkel et al.'s three-dimensional model is that interoception is different for everyone. The same exercise produces completely different sensations in different bodies. There's no right answer, which is exactly what makes this worth trying together.

How the session works

• Part 1: Try established exercises from Mahler's curriculum We'll work through a set of Interoceptive Awareness Builders from Mahler's occupational therapy curriculum. These are designed to evoke a stronger body signal so it's easier to notice and name. We'll do them together and talk about what we actually experience:

  • Squeezing putty or a stress ball and narrating hand sensations out loud

  • Jumping jacks, then sitting quietly and tracking heart rate, breathing, and muscle fatigue

  • Holding something cold or warm and mapping where you feel the temperature in your body

  • Progressive muscle tensing: clench a fist, release, and notice the difference

• Part 2: Design your own Split into small groups. Each group picks a specific interoceptive signal (hunger, fatigue, temperature, heart rate, anxiety) and designs an original exercise meant to help someone notice that signal more clearly. We present them to the room and try them. This connects directly back to the "design an experiment" question from our Quadt et al. discussion.

Discussion questions we'll be sitting with

• Did you notice what you expected? Where did your confidence about what you felt diverge from what you actually noticed? (That gap is exactly what Garfinkel et al. call the trait prediction error.)

• Were some signals easier to access than others? Why might that be?

• Do exercises like these address the prediction error Garfinkel found, or is building vocabulary a different kind of intervention altogether?

• What would you need to change about these exercises to make them work for someone with muted interoception versus someone with overwhelming interoception?