Self-regulation isn't simply about calming yourself down. It's your ability to listen to your inner voice and express your emotions, wants, and needs in an empowered way.

Your inner voice becomes clear when you can accurately tune into your bodily signals. This body awareness forms the foundation of self-regulation - it's known as interoceptive awareness. And it's the recognition of this awareness that forms our emotions. The foundation of our emotions are two or more bodily signals working together.

For instance, you might become aware that you're feeling angry when you notice your heart racing, shoulders tensing, and jaw tightening. These physical sensations are the language your body uses to communicate emotions.

How Trauma Impacts Self-Regulation

Past trauma can significantly alter your body awareness and ability to hear your inner voice accurately. A common adaptation to traumatic stress is dissociation - disconnecting from physical sensations and blocking internal cues from your awareness.

In the short term, this dissociation raises your pain threshold and protects you psychologically. It's less distressing to "not feel" painful events and emotions. However, this protective mechanism can become problematic over time.

Research has found altered body awareness in adults with depression, impacting their ability to make decisions based on bodily signals (Furman 2013). This reduced ability to feel your bodily signals may contribute to exhaustion, disconnection, and emotional numbness - the sense that you can't feel anything at all.

The Consequences of Disconnection

Without noticing subtle emotional states, you may only recognize what's happening when you experience intense emotional reactions. By then, it's often too late to proactively manage your emotions.

You may have already shifted into sympathetic nervous system overload, freeze, or survival mode. For example, you might not notice the early signs of irritation until they've escalated into full-blown anger or rage (Goodall 2020). At this point, emotions are often expressed in disempowered ways.

The Missing Element: Expression

The aspect often overlooked in self-regulation is the need for expression. Expressing emotions may involve communicating with others, but it could also mean changing something in your environment, shifting relationship dynamics, or modifying your work approach.

Without this crucial step of expression, you may feel stuck and unable to process emotions fully, which can lead to repeating the same unhealthy patterns.

The Science of Interoception

Interoception - your ability to notice and understand internal sensations - is the foundation of independent self-regulation. These skills are essential for recognizing when you're becoming angry, anxious, collapsed, or shut down, allowing you to manage emotions proactively.

Healthy interoception enables decision-making based on BOTH logic AND emotions. Without this ability, you may rely solely on logical analysis, having to carefully think through every possible response in each situation. This constant mental processing is exhausting and can contribute to rumination, overload, shutdown, anxiety, and depression.

Building Better Regulation Skills

Practicing interoception engages the brain areas that help you stay connected to your sense of self while activating the vagus nerve, allowing neurological and biological calming. This combination brings true regulation.

Consistent practice guides brain plasticity to create and strengthen interoceptive-aware neural connections (Ahissar 2009) and builds vagal tone. Your ability to accurately read and act on bodily signals has profound implications for how you make decisions and engage with others.

The greater your accuracy in tuning into sensations, the greater agency you have in shaping your life. You feel in charge of your body, feelings, and self. Like other systems, these skills can be retrained and strengthened with practice.