Why You Don't Feel Like Yourself Anymore and How to Reconnect
If you've been catching yourself thinking "I don't feel like myself" and you can't explain exactly why, there's a real, physiological reason for it. It's not only your hormones, and it's not only because you're stretched impossibly thin, though both matter.
There's a third factor called interoception: your ability to sense and interpret what's actually happening inside your body. When it goes offline, you lose your sense of self right along with it.
We’ll cover why we can lose our interoception ability in midlife, how it can make us feel disconnected from ourselves, and how strengthening this function through practices like breathwork can make us feel like ourselves again.
This is for you if you've been thinking:
I feel like I'm running on autopilot most days, getting everything done but feeling nothing.
I don't notice I'm stressed until I'm snapping at my kids over something small.
I used to handle a messy kitchen or a pile of laundry just fine, and now it sends me straight into overwhelm.
I cringe at things that never used to bother me, like the sound of my partner chewing.
I feel emotionally numb some days and completely overwhelmed on others, sometimes both in the same day.
I want to feel like myself again but I don't even know where to start.
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What Is Interoception and Why Does It Matter?
Interoception is your ability to sense and interpret the signals your body is constantly sending you: hunger, thirst, fatigue, tension. Your brain picks up on these physical sensations, connects them to a feeling, and prompts you to do something about it. The simplest example: your stomach rumbles, your brain reads that as hunger, and you go eat.
When interoception is working well, your body stays close to homeostasis, its most balanced, content state. You drink when you're thirsty. You eat when you're hungry. You notice you're stressed and take a walk instead of letting it build. You feel triggered and pause before you respond instead of overreacting.
When interoception is weak, none of that early warning works the way it should. You don't know you're hungry until you're hangry. You don't know you're tired until you're completely wiped out. You don't know you're stressed until you're already yelling. And because you're not catching those signals early, you don't take the small steps that would keep you feeling balanced, which is a big part of why so many women in midlife end up asking themselves "who was that?" after a day that felt nothing like them.
How Chronic Stress Shuts Your Body's Signals Off
So what actually weakens interoception? One of the biggest culprits is living in a state of chronic stress, which is exactly where most women in midlife spend the majority of their day. Your sympathetic nervous system, the "fight or flight" system that's supposed to switch on only when you're in real danger, ends up running far more often than it needs to. It's meant to kick in to help you swerve away from an oncoming car, then hand control back to your parasympathetic system so functions like digestion, immunity, and sleep can come back online. When your body stays stuck in that sympathetic state, those functions stay muted, often without you ever realizing it's happening, because chronic stress has become the baseline you stopped questioning.
Research on interoception and stress points to a few specific ways this plays out. Long-term stress raises the threshold your brain needs before it registers a physical signal at all, so subtle cues get missed entirely. It can also cause a kind of emotional numbing, where you're getting everything done but feeling disconnected from all of it, running the day on autopilot. On the flip side, that same chronic stress can make your nervous system hyperreactive, turning ordinary sensations into panic or overwhelm, which is why something as small as your partner's chewing can suddenly feel unbearable. And underneath all of it, constant stress hormones disrupt the communication line between your brain and your organs, including the vagus nerve, the pathway that carries these signals back and forth. When that line gets crowded, the messages get scrambled.
Why You Might Feel Numb One Day and Overwhelmed the Next
Here's the part that trips a lot of women up: chronic stress doesn't just show up one way. It can make you feel completely numb, running on autopilot, getting through your to-do list without feeling much of anything. Or it can make you hypersensitive, where a mountain of laundry or a cluttered kitchen sends you straight into overwhelm when it never used to faze you. Some days you might feel both, which is exhausting in its own particular way.
A lot of the physical symptoms that come with this get chalked up to something else entirely. Digestion issues, getting sick more often than usual, trouble falling asleep at night, these are all common signs that your body has been stuck in a stress response for too long, even if you've never connected the dots back to stress itself. The good news is that none of this is permanent. Interoception is a skill, and skills can be rebuilt.
How to Strengthen Your Interoception
You can absolutely strengthen your interoception, and the way you do it is through somatic practices that bring your attention back into your body: breathwork, yoga or stretching, and body scans are three of the most effective. Breathwork in particular works because it starts by rooting your body in safety. Stress is triggered by a sense of danger, so the antidote is genuine safety, created through breath patterns, music, visualization, and even small environmental details like a closed door or a cozy blanket.
Once your body actually feels safe, you can start tuning out the noise of your to-do list and tuning into what's happening inside you, sometimes through a body scan that has you notice sensation in parts of your body you haven't paid attention to in years. For some women, their body's messages come back loud and clear right away. For others it takes a few sessions. Either way, once that connection strengthens, you start hearing things clearly again: that you need rest, that you don't have the capacity to be the parent volunteer this time, that you're ready for a hard conversation, that you want more joy in your life. And once you can hear it, making decisions, holding boundaries, and speaking your truth all get a lot easier, because you know how to feel what's true for you while staying regulated instead of spiraling.
FAQs
What is interoception?
Interoception is your ability to sense and interpret the internal signals your body is constantly sending you, things like hunger, thirst, fatigue, and tension. Your brain picks up on these physical sensations and connects them to feelings, which then prompt you to take action, like eating when your stomach rumbles or taking a walk when you notice you're stressed. When interoception is strong, you catch your body's needs early. When it's weak, you don't notice until you've hit a breaking point, like being hangry, exhausted, or snapping at the people you love.
Can chronic stress affect how you feel physical sensations?
Yes. Chronic stress changes how your brain processes signals from your body. It raises the threshold needed to notice internal sensations at all, which can lead to emotional numbness and a disconnect from your body. At the same time, it can make your nervous system hyperreactive, turning normal sensations into feelings of panic or overwhelm. Many women experience both extremes, sometimes within the same day.
Why don't I feel like myself anymore?
If you don't feel like yourself, weakened interoception combined with chronic stress is often a significant, overlooked factor. When your body's internal signals get muted or scrambled by ongoing stress, you lose the early warning system that normally helps you stay regulated and feel like you. That disconnect is often what's behind the sense that you're on autopilot, more reactive than usual, or simply not yourself.
How does breathwork help with nervous system regulation?
Trauma-informed breathwork helps by rooting your body in a felt sense of safety first, using specific breath patterns, music, visualization, and environmental cues, since safety is the direct antidote to the danger response that keeps your body in chronic stress. Once your body feels safe, it becomes possible to tune out external noise and tune back into internal signals, often through practices like body scans. Over time and with practice, this rebuilds the connection between your brain and body, so your interoception, and your ability to regulate your nervous system, gets stronger.
What are the signs of poor interoception?
Common signs include not realizing you're hungry until you're hangry, not noticing you're tired until you're completely exhausted, and not recognizing stress until it comes out as snapping at your kids or the people you love. It can also show up as physical symptoms not obviously tied to stress, like digestion issues, getting sick more frequently, or trouble falling asleep, along with either emotional numbness or sudden overwhelm at things that didn't used to bother you.
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Jessica Long (00:00.276)
If you are like me or like the vast majority of women over 40 these days, you've caught yourself thinking, I just don't feel like myself more times than you care to count. And it's hard to put your finger on exactly why, because there's a hell of a lot of shit that we're dealing with right now. So we know that fluctuating hormones play a big role. Of course they do. And thankfully, we live in a time when this is being talked about openly and publicly. And there's also the fact that we are being stretched really thin.
The sheer amount of things that we have to keep track of in our brains and make decisions about on a daily basis is totally overwhelming. So, yes, of course, that's a factor too. There's another factor at play that I think is fundamental and directly impacting this loss of sense of self that I just don't hear anyone talking about. So I'm gonna talk about it. And that is this concept of interoception.
Interoception is your ability to sense and feel messages and signals from your body. Your brain then interprets these physical sensations and connects them to emotions and prompts you to respond accordingly. So if we take a very simple physical example, your tummy rumbles. Your brain interprets this as hunger and prompts you to go eat something.
When our interoception is strong, we do a good job of maintaining homeostasis, which is our body's happy place. We drink when we're thirsty, we eat when we're hungry, we're go, we go to the bathroom when we need to. And beyond that, we are aware of our emotional state and respond appropriately. So, for example, when we notice that we feel stressed, we go take a walk. When we notice that we feel triggered, we pause before speaking.
When our interoception is not strong, we don't know we're hungry until we're hangry. We don't know we're tired until we're exhausted. We don't know we're stressed until we're yelling at our kids. We have a harder time regulating our emotions. And because we are not attuned enough to our bodies to notice these physical signals when our interoception is not strong, we don't then take the steps that are necessary to
Jessica Long (02:21.496)
Help us feel well and balanced. We act in ways that make us think, my God, who was that? And we start to say, I don't feel like myself. So what exactly makes interoception get weaker or go offline? How do we lose this ability to hear what our body is telling us? Well, one major way is
Living in a state of chronic stress. And unless you're living under a rock, which if you are, invite me, I'd love to join you. Then you are aware of how common it is for modern day people in our culture to live in a state of chronic stress, for our sympathetic nervous system to be turned on way more often than it really needs to be. We need this state to kick in to save us from danger, to swerve to avoid an oncoming car.
Then we need our body to return to a parasympathetic state so that our regular body functions can come back online. Because when our body is simply trying to keep us alive, it turns off functions that are not essential to our short-term survival, like digestion, like immunity, like sleep. The last thing you want to do is fall asleep if there's a tiger that's about to eat you. Those functions.
Are not needed in the few moments when you're swerving from the car, but we do need them the rest of the time. When your body is chronically in this sympathetic nervous system state, those functions are chronically muted. And this can happen without us even noticing because we have normalized this stress state. We have convinced ourselves that this is our baseline. This is life. This is what every day feels like when in reality.
It is nothing of the sort as far as your body's concerned. And you might even feel symptoms of chronic stress that you don't necessarily tie back to that root cause, like digestion issues. You know, you have an upset tummy or constipation or getting sick really frequently or not being able to fall asleep at night. So let's talk.
Jessica Long (04:46.154)
Specifically about how chronic stress negatively impacts our interoception skills. So, according to a PubMed article entitled Interoception and Stress, that I will link to in the show notes, chronic stress alters how the brain processes internal bodily signals. And it gives four ways how this happens. The first one is it says long-term activation of stress systems raises the threshold.
For noticing internal sensations. So it makes it harder for you to perceive some of the subtle physical cues that your body's giving you. And this makes sense. When your brain thinks you are in danger, it really needs to focus on only what will keep you alive. Whether you're hungry or tired is totally irrelevant in those moments. So your brain effectively figures out how to tune out what isn't mission critical.
Okay, the second one is hyposensitivity or like emotional numbness. So prolonged stress can cause a disconnect from the body, leading to emotional numbing or even missing physical signs of distress and fatigue. And this makes sense too. Your brain has been tuning out so many of the messages coming from your body for so long that you may stop feeling anything at all. And just think about when you have crazy busy days, right?
Drop off, work meetings, shuttling kids from here to there, dinner to make, things to prep for tomorrow. You're getting everything done, but you're feeling kind of meh, or like you're on autopilot. All of your focus is outward on the things that have to get done. How many times have you had a day like this where not once did you stop and check in with yourself and just notice how am I feeling? Or
Take a few deep breaths or notice what you're seeing, what you're hearing, what you're smelling. And even if you're thinking, no, I pause, I take breaks from my overproductivity, and I check Instagram, right? That's like a quick dopamine hit that's disguised as giving yourself a break, but actually keeps your focus outward and keeps you in your stress state. And it's this emotionalness.
Jessica Long (07:12.674)
Numbness, the feeling of nothing that makes us feel disconnected from ourselves because we're not feeling anything. Okay, but on the flip side of this, this is interesting. Chronic stress can also make the nervous system hyperreactive, where our brains start to translate normal internal signals into feelings of panic, anxiety, sensory overload, or overwhelm.
So, if you're experiencing more anxious thoughts now than you ever have before, maybe this is why. Or things that you used to handle so well, like that mountain of laundry or the clutter in your kitchen can now send you straight to overwhelm. Or you notice, I at the end of the day, I just don't want to be touched by anyone, or you cringe at the sound of your partners chewing. These somewhat innocuous.
Parts of our daily lives that used to just not seem like a big deal can all of a sudden feel really big. And then the last way they describe in this study is constant flooding of stress hormones, dysregulates the communication pathways between peripheral organs in the brain. So on this show, we've talked about the vagus nerve before, the cranial nerve that connects the brain to the major organs in your body.
This is the pathway your body uses to send messages to your brain about what it is sensing, and your body sends messages or sorry, your brain sends messages back to your body. Think of it like a bi-directional communication superhighway. If there is traffic on this highway, the messages are going to get disrupted and all heck can break loose that. So, all this to say that chronic stress can have a major impact on your ability to feel what is going on in your body.
Including physical sensations and emotions. And when you can't feel what's going on in your body, you feel disconnected from yourself. And this might show up as emotional numbness, or it might show up as much stronger emotions than usual. And you might have both of those extremes on the same day. Good times, right? And it is those extremes that make us say, I don't feel like myself.
Jessica Long (09:35.983)
So now the question is can I strengthen my interoception skills? The answer is yes. You can strengthen your interoception skills through somatic practices that help you tune back into your body, like breath work, yoga, stretching, body scans as a few examples. Let's talk about breath work, since that's my favorite one and how it helps. So when you practice breath work with a trauma informed facilitator, you root the body in safety first. This means you
Practice letting your body feel completely safe, which might feel foreign to you if you are usually in a state of stress. And it might even be hard to get there. That's where we start. Why do we do this? To move you out of that state of chronic stress into your parasympathetic rest and digest state. The stress response is triggered by danger. So the antidote to that is safety. We root in safety through.
Certain breath patterns through music, visualizations, but also your environment, how the room is set up for you. Maybe you feel like you need the door closed because you don't want someone to walk by and peek in on you. Or maybe you want to have a blanket or socks nearby. You just feel safer when you're cozy and covered up. When your body feels safe, then we start practicing tuning out the external world, quieting.
The noise. Just giving your to-do list, your email inbox, your calendar, a break, a pause. Then we can practice tuning in. And we might even do a body scan, one of those other options to encourage you to give every part of your body a little bit of your attention. Like when was the last time you noticed how it feels right behind your eyes? Long time, probably, huh? And it's
Primarily through safety and tuning in, that you start to hear your body's messages again. And maybe you'll hear them loud and clear right away. Or maybe you need several sessions before this function really comes back online for you. It's fine either way. Once it does, you hear and you feel what's true for you. You might hear.
Jessica Long (11:59.671)
I'm really tired. I just I need a break. I need some rest. Or you might hear, I really don't want to be the parent volunteer for that event. That feels like too much right now. Or you might hear, I'm needing some more joy, sister. Let's sign up for that art class. Or you might hear, we need to have that hard conversation with that person. I'm feeling ready.
Whatever it is, it's what your body is ready to work on, ready to process, ready to move through. And once you know what that is, and it might be more than one thing, that is totally fine. It becomes so much easier to make decisions, hold boundaries, speak your truth, say no to the parent event, say yes to the new experience, tell the person how you're really feeling. Because you now know how to feel these truths in your body.
While feeling safe. So you know that the feeling, your truth, and safety can coexist. And you know how to return to a felt sense of safety through breath work, through body scans, and therefore out of chronic stress mode when you need to.
And you'll know when you need to because your interoception skills will be sharper. Do you see how this is becoming this beautiful balanced cycle? Exactly. So if this is landing and you're seeing yourself in any of this, I want to invite you to try Breathwork with me for free. I have two virtual breathwork events coming up so you can feel how breathwork can make you feel. Because I can tell you all day long, it will help you stay calm and not yell.
It will snap you out of autopilot and emotional numbness, and that it will help you stop saying, I don't feel like myself. But I can't feel that for you. Only you can. So click the link in the show notes and sign up for the session on Thursday, September 24th at 12 p.m. Pacific, or Friday, October 2nd at 12 p.m. Pacific, or both. Yes. The positive effects of breath work are compounding. So the more you practice, the better.
Jessica Long (14:14.904)
I would be so thrilled to see you there. After all this connection through the podcast, through your headphones or your speakers, it would be so fun to connect live and actually get to see each other. So don't wait around, don't think about it. Just go click that link and sign up. And then guard that calendar appointment with your life. Because what is more important than feeling like yourself again? Okay, my friend, I cannot wait to breathe with you.
Thank you so much for listening as always, and I can't wait to see you next time. Bye for now.
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Disclaimer:
Belong Wellness and its members, managers, employees, contractors, and other agents or representatives are not licensed medical care providers and do not provide medical services or advice, including without limitation diagnosing, examining, preventing, treating, or curing any medical conditions. The information shared in this podcast is meant to be educational, not prescriptive. Please consult your medical doctor before making any changes to your diet or lifestyle. Further, the opinions of guests on this show do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Jessica or anyone affiliated with Belong Wellness.
