On August 25, a science-news headline landed in the middle of a few years of "listen to your body" content and sat there a little awkwardly: "Internal body awareness does not predict mental health, study finds." If you've been told that anxiety lives in the body and the exit is feeling it more precisely, that reads like a plot twist.
The twist is narrower than it sounds. On interoception and anxiety, the short answer from this research is that how accurately you can detect your own heartbeat or breathing does not appear to track anxiety at all. What does track it is how you believe your body feels: the story, the interpretation, the felt sense of whether your insides are on your side. That points body-based work toward relating differently, rather than sensing better.
What the Aarhus study actually measured
The paper, led by Leah Banellis at Aarhus University and published in Nature Mental Health, used carefully designed lab tasks with 456 people for cardiac interoception (sensing the heartbeat) and 245 for respiratory interoception (sensing changes in breathing). Interoception is the sensing of signals from inside the body; the team measured sensitivity, precision, and metacognition (how well confidence matched performance).
Across several statistical models, those objective scores were largely unrelated to depression, anxiety, ADHD or autism traits. Self-report questionnaires about body awareness did show moderate links with symptoms, but they barely tracked actual task performance, and a language analysis suggested they overlapped with body image, health anxiety and general distress. As Banellis put it in the Medical Xpress coverage, "what we believe about our bodily sensing may have little to do with how we sense it."
The limits matter: the press coverage reports no effect sizes, people were tested at rest rather than mid-panic, and the sample was a general population rather than people in treatment. The authors plan to study interoception under stress next.
This isn't the first time accuracy came up empty
A 2022 meta-analysis in Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews pooled 55 studies on anxiety and heartbeat-detection accuracy and found no evidence of an association, regardless of age, gender, diagnosis or how anxiety was measured. Other work points the same way: anxiety seems tied to how people appraise bodily signals and how threatening those signals feel, more than to detection.
Plenty of anxious people are acutely tuned in to their bodies. They notice the skipped beat, the tight throat, the shallow breath, and fast. The detection works fine. The problem shows up one step later, in what the signal gets read as.
A racing heart, two readings
Picture the same sensation in two people. A pounding heart on the walk into a hard conversation. One person registers it as "I care about this, and my body is getting ready." The other registers it as "something is wrong with me, and everyone can tell." The heartbeat is identical. The detection is identical. The experience is completely different, and the second reading tends to bring more scanning and more evidence for the original fear.
Belief about the body, whether it feels trustworthy or dangerous, appears to be where anxiety and body awareness actually meet. That also explains a common frustration with somatic work: some people find that "tune into your body" makes things worse at first, because tuning in without changing the relationship just hands a vigilant mind more data to worry about.
We've written about how people can name every feeling and still not feel a single one. This is its cousin: feeling every flutter in your chest and trusting none of them.
Does that mean somatic work is pointless?
No. What the study complicates is one popular story: that anxiety comes from poor body sensing, so training sharper sensing should calm it down. If accuracy isn't the bottleneck, then drills aimed purely at accuracy are aiming at the wrong layer. It may explain why body scans can feel technically successful and emotionally pointless.
Our post on heart rate variability and interoception looked at whether training the heart could sharpen how you feel your body. This research adds a caveat: even if you get sharper, that alone may not touch the anxiety. The more promising target is your relationship with sensation: whether a tight chest can be noticed without becoming an emergency.
For the women who think their way through everything, this is a useful distinction. More precise data won't settle a mind that reads the body as a threat; what shifts things, slowly, is repeated experience of a sensation arriving, peaking and passing without the catastrophe it predicted. Insight alone rarely builds that.
Relating to sensation instead of auditing it
If you want a small experiment, here is one, and you can stop at any point. The next time a familiar anxious sensation shows up, such as a fluttery stomach or a fast pulse, notice it without trying to measure it. Instead of asking how fast or how bad, ask: what am I telling myself this means? Then, if it feels okay, offer one alternative reading, even if you don't fully believe it yet. "This is my body taking the moment seriously." If attending to the sensation makes things sharper rather than softer, it's reasonable to shift attention outward instead, to your feet or a sound in the room.
This post isn't therapy and isn't a substitute for professional care, and if anxiety is running your days, a therapist or doctor is the right first call. Within Restore, the aim is that the body becomes a place you can be in, rather than a monitor you have to watch.
Scanning your body for danger was a reasonable strategy once, and the vigilance makes sense. The study suggests scanning harder isn't where relief lives.
Frequently asked questions
Is interoception linked to anxiety?
Objective interoception, meaning how accurately you detect signals like your heartbeat, does not appear to be linked to anxiety in recent large studies. A 2026 Aarhus study and a 2022 meta-analysis of 55 studies found no clear association. Self-reported body awareness and negative beliefs about bodily signals do show links with anxiety.
What is the difference between interoceptive accuracy and interoceptive sensibility?
Interoceptive accuracy is how correctly you can detect internal signals on an objective test, such as counting heartbeats. Interoceptive sensibility is how you believe you sense your body, usually measured with questionnaires. New research suggests the two are largely separate.
Can paying attention to your body make anxiety worse?
For some people, focusing on bodily sensations can increase anxiety, especially when those sensations are read as threats. Changing how the sensation is interpreted often helps more than closer monitoring.
Does this mean somatic work doesn't help anxiety?
The study doesn't test somatic therapies, so it can't say whether they help. It does suggest that improving pure sensing accuracy is unlikely to be the active ingredient. Approaches that change your relationship to bodily sensations are a more plausible target.
What are the limits of the Aarhus interoception study?
The study measured interoception at rest, in a general-population sample, so it may not reflect what happens during stress or in clinical anxiety. The press coverage didn't report effect sizes.
