Sarah Garfinkel

Everyone has this system, but people differ enormously at how accurately and how consciously they can read it.

Research by Sarah Garfinkel and her colleagues at Sussex and UCL found that people with high interoceptive accuracy, a precise, conscious sense of their body's internal signals, experience anxiety differently from people with low interoceptive accuracy.

High interoceptive individuals can detect their own arousal earlier, which gives them more time and more choice about how they respond.

They also tend to be better at distinguishing between different types of arousal, recognizing, for example, whether a racing heart is anxiety or excitement or physical exertion, which reduces malattribution, one of the key drivers of anxiety escalation.