interoception

Spontaneity is great but life is just easier and everything goes far better when we have protocols.

When you're busy enough, "boredom" isn't a thing - it just feels like a break. It's fantastic and rare. A chance to think, to put things together in your head, be intentional with moves forward, and actually really wonderful.

For instance, studies on meditators have shown that their somatosensory perception is more sensitive to subtle internal sensations, potentially leading to both enhanced detection of bodily signals and misinterpretation of these signals (Mylius et al., 2023).

Decades later, scientists are starting to unravel how our wet, spongy, slippery organs talk to the brain and how the brain talks back. That two-way communication, known as interoception, encompasses a complex, bodywide system of nerves and hormones. Much recent exploration has focused on the vagus nerve: a massive, meandering network of more than 1... See more

"Nobody is normal. What we call 'normal' is people whose collections of traits are statistically closest to what we've decided counts as desirable and healthy. There's no normal out there that you're failing to live up to." — Robert Sapolsky