Interoception: Get To Know Your Body's Internal Dashboard For Better Regulation with Alyssa Chang

And I named the word predictability.

And for me, I grew up in an environment that was emotionally very unpredictable.

My mother has schizophrenia.

So I woke up to like, I don't know what mood she's going to be in.

Was there going to be a lot of like chaos or instability? And so, you know, knowing the brain needs predictability, it will naturally start looking for the things that it can predict.

And that's why food is something that we end up coping with is because it is predictable.

right i know exactly what you know i'm going to eat i know exactly how many chronical calories might be in it i know what i might need to avoid and so it creates like a sense of order in our brain and from the outside it can look like oh all this is super disciplined but like underneath that my nerve system was trying to create safety through predictability that's you know very different than someone who's making like intentional choices to feel good in their body and

Yeah, thanks for naming that too.

That again, if you're someone who has found yourself in like what would be called chronic dieting, there's a predictability to dieting where you know what you're going to do.

It gives you a plan, there's structure, there's order, there's control in it.

And what you're naming is it gives your brain that predictability that it needs when maybe you're going through times of your life that feel very unpredictable.

And a body that might feel very unpredictable too.

Like, I don't know if I'm going to get anxious.

I don't know if my pain is going to take over today, if I'm going to get a migraine.

And it's like, okay, well, let me hone in and focus on the one thing that I feel I have some semblance of control over.

Yeah, you know, I've seen the same thing with binge eating too.

And I feel like even in my experience of when I was binge eating, that it got to a point where I realized I didn't want to be doing it anymore.

But the predictability of it and knowing how I would feel, how I would feel through it, how I'd feel the next morning was so... safety producing, to know what I was about to experience rather than the unknown of I've been binge eating in the evenings for so long, I don't even know how to navigate an evening without it anymore.

Yes, 100%.

Yeah.

And I want to come back around to the other thing that you mentioned, which I love and I do also so much is know what's different.

Like so often I feel like we're pointing out what's the same, what's not changing, where we feel stuck.

And I don't know from maybe you can name like what parts of our brain actually are looking out for that, like looking out for the known rather than the like, but there are things that you're doing that are different that are leading potentially to different results.

But I know, I think it might be the reticular activating system that like, filters out anything that's not within our blueprint of like what we know or what we expect to happen.

Yeah, yeah.