Your Anxiety Could Be Making It Harder to Understand Your Body

A recent study found that anxiety in women is linked to decreased perception of bodily states. Particularly, women who experienced greater anxiety tended to have reduced insight into breathing-related bodily sensations. The same pattern was not found in men.

The study, published in the European Journal of Neuroscience, explored how anxiety can impact interoception, or bodily awareness.

Anxiety Could Be Making It Harder to Read Your Body Signals

“Anxiety is one of the most common and debilitating mental health disorders, and is related to changes in interoception (perception of bodily states),” the study reads. “While anxiety is more prevalent in women than men, gender differences in interoception-anxiety associations are often overlooked.”

If you’ve ever experienced extreme anxiety, you might have noticed feeling out of tune with your body. Perhaps you’ve imagined symptoms that weren’t really there, such as feeling like your throat is closing. On the other hand, maybe you’re hyper-aware of subtle changes in your heart rate, causing you to misinterpret normal body sensations. 

Anxiety appears to directly impact interoception in women, who, as an overall group, tend to experience more anxiety than men. 

Study authors compared how anxiety affects interoception in men versus women, as well as potential reasons for these differences. To do so, they had participants breathe through a device that used occasional, barely perceptible resistance. After, they asked participants to report whether they noticed a resistance and how confident they felt in their answer.

The researchers then analyzed sensitivity to the resistance, decision bias, metacognitive bias (i.e., the participant’s confidence level), and metacognitive insight (confidence vs. accuracy).

“One of the main take-home messages of the study is that, on average, men and women have the same levels of interoception and related insight towards breathing perceptions,” study author Olivia Harrison, a Rutherford Discovery Research Fellow and senior lecturer at the University of Otago, told PsyPost in an interview.

“However, the relationship between state anxiety (i.e. in-the-moment anxiety) and interoceptive insight is different between men and women—lower anxiety is related to improved insight while greater anxiety is related to worsened insight only in women, while this relationship did not exist for men.”