04/09/2026
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Your body is constantly sending you signals - your heart beating faster, your stomach churning, your muscles tensing.
"Interoception" is the fancy word for how well you notice and interpret those internal body signals.
This recent study asked: in autistic teenagers, what's actually driving their anxiety? Is it how accurately they can detect those body signals, or is it what they believe about those signals?
They studied 37 autistic adolescents. The teens filled out questionnaires measuring their autism traits, anxiety levels, alexithymia (difficulty identifying your own emotions), and their beliefs about their body signals. They also did heartbeat-counting tasks where they tried to count their own heartbeats without touching their pulse to measure how objectively accurate their interoception was.
Then they ran statistical analyses to see which of these factors actually predicted anxiety.
What they found: The only interoceptive variable that significantly predicted anxiety was something called BPQ-ANSR — basically, the teens' beliefs about how reactive their body is.
It didn't matter whether a kid could actually feel their heart beating accurately. What mattered was whether the kid THOUGHT their body was going haywire all the time - "my heart races, my stomach drops, I get sweaty." Those beliefs about body chaos predicted anxiety.
They also found that autism traits amplified that effect. The more autistic traits a teen had, the stronger the link between those distressing body beliefs and anxiety.
The third finding: Alexithymia (trouble naming emotions) was connected to interoceptive insight and heartbeat accuracy, but alexithymia itself didn't predict anxiety and didn't act as a middleman between interoception and anxiety.
The researchers suggest something really interesting: the mismatch between what your body is actually doing and what you think it's doing might show up first as alexithymia in adolescence and could be a precursor to anxiety developing later.
A lot of interoception work focuses on improving accuracy, things like "can you feel your heartbeat? can you notice when you're hungry?"
This study says that's NOT where the anxiety lives. The anxiety lives in the story the kid tells themselves about their body signals.
A kid who believes "my body is always doing something scary and out of control" is the kid who develops anxiety, regardless of whether they're actually good at detecting those signals.
So therapeutic work should also target those beliefs, not just accuracy.
For example, if your kid says things like "my heart is pounding" or "I feel sick" or "something feels wrong in my body" before anxious moments, the instinct might be to say "you're fine, nothing is wrong." But this research suggests they genuinely experience their body as reactive and overwhelming. The more useful approach is helping them reframe what those signals mean honestly.
For example "Your heart beats faster for tons of reasons.. when you move, when you're warm, when you're thinking hard, when you're mad, or worried or excited...It speeds up and slows down all day. The feeling isn't dangerous, it's just... noticeable. And maybe uncomfortable. I wonder what else you notice right now"
If a kid can start to recognize "oh, my heart is doing the fast thing and I also have a math test today... so maybe this is the nervous feeling," that's interoceptive-emotional linking happening in real time.
You're not just normalizing the body signal, you're helping them label what's behind it without making the signal itself the scary part.
There are several other much larger studies that converge on this same core idea.
The overall picture from the larger body of research is: it's not that autistic people can't feel their body signals (the findings on that are genuinely mixed - can some autistic individuals not feel their body signals or do they experience and communicate their body signals differently than neurotypical benchmarks so have had them dismissed their whole lives?)
What's more consistent in research is that the way they interpret, evaluate, and respond to those signals is what connects to anxiety. And consider where those beliefs may come from... a lifetime of 'you're fine, nothing is wrong' doesn't teach a kid their body is safe. It teaches them not to trust what they feel.
**Note: This graphic is a screenshot of recently published research. It shows the title of the study, the authors' names, and the DOI link. The caption summarizes the research and the researchers' findings and conclusions. This is shared strictly as information to our audience and is not intended as an endorsement or a claim that the research findings are definitive.**
[ Image description: A screenshot of a research article from ScienceDirect. The journal is Research in Autism, Volume 132, April 2026. The article title is 'Understanding anxiety in autistic adolescents: The predictive role of interoceptive beliefs and insight' by Lauren Craik, Lisa Quadt, Matt Garner, and Gaby Pfeifer. The Think Sensory logo appears at the bottom of the image. ]
