The Feeling of Being Alive

As a boy, I would feel excitement about, say, Christmas morning or an upcoming family vacation. My heart would beat a little faster in anticipation. My thoughts would race ahead, attempting to live the moment, and all its possible permutations, before it had arrived. As the day approached, it could be hard to sleep or eat or do much of anything else. Sometimes my whole body would tense up with the excitement, unable to contain it as I squealed, "I can't waaaaaait!" 

Today, a couple times a month, I find myself in front of an audience of early childhood educators. In the days and minutes leading up to these events, I find my heart beating a little faster. My thoughts race ahead to all the possible permutations. I often toss and turn the night before, my appetite tends to shrink, and as the moment approaches, I can't really focus on anything else. Sometimes, often just before taking the stage, the feeling fills my entire body and the only way to release it is to tense all my muscles, then release them all at once with an explosive expulsion of breath.

Somewhere along the line, I've learned to interpret this collection of bodily experiences as nervousness or even anxiety. Psychologists call this phenomenon "cognitive reappraisal," although they are most commonly talking about it going in the opposite direction, as they help their patients recognize and label sensations in order to reinterpret them in an adaptive way. A typical example might be to reappraise nervousness as excitement, although it appears that as I've aged I've gone the opposite direction. 

Over the past several years, however, as I've become increasingly aware of how human minds work, I've tried to be more aware of my "interoceptive sensations," which is to say the feelings that come from my bodily organs and extremities. This, new research tells us, is where our emotions begin, in our bodies, and our brains then construct our emotions. Our bodies are not subject to cognitive bias the way our brains are, which means that our bodies are often more rational than our brains.

When I'm aware of my interoceptive self, I'm better able get in on the ground floor of the emotion being constructed and have found that I can more often than not reappraise my feelings as excitement instead of nervousness. 

"Common sense," writes psychologist and philosopher William James, "says, we lose our fortune, are sorry and weep; we meet a bear, are frightened and run; we are insulted by a rival, are angry and strike. (But) this order of sequence is incorrect . . . (W)e feel sorry because we cry, angry because we strike, afraid because we tremble." Our organs and extremities are always a few milliseconds (even as long as two full seconds) ahead of our brains: that's the raw material from which our emotions are constructed.

Interoceptive awareness is how we can take control (sometimes) of our emotions. As early childhood educators, we take advantage of this every time we encourage a child to take deep breathes, to pause and notice their bodies. We are doing this when we stop coaching and distracting and instead allow a child to fully feel their strong emotion. So often we're coached to "help" them by labeling their emotion (e.g., "You're feeling sad," or "You're feeling frustrated"), but I wonder, given the latest research, that maybe we're better served to allow them to first tell us what they feel. Our suggestions may turn out to be spot on, but they're more likely to be simplifications or even misappraisals. Worse, our words can even become self-fulfilling prophesies in which we rob them of the opportunity to construct their own emotion from the sensations their body is experiencing. For all we know, they were on their way to constructing excitement and instead we construct anxiety on their behalf.

René Descartes famously declared, "I think therefore I am," but maybe it's time to reevaluate that. For her book The Extended Mind, science journalist Annie Murphy Paul interviews neuroanatomist and interception expert A.D. Craig: 

(I)t would be more accurate to say, "I feel, therefore I am." Craig maintains that interoceptive awareness is the basis of the "material me," the source of our most fundamental knowledge of ourselves. Because our hearts beat, because our lungs expand, because our muscles stretch and our organs rumble -- and because all these sensations, unique to us, have carried on without interruption since the day of our birth -- we know what it is to be one continuous self, to be ourselves and no other. Interoception, says Craig, is nothing less than "the feeling of being alive."

And that is the greatest gift we can give a child -- or anyone -- the feeling of being alive.

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