The Hidden Cost of Ignoring Your Body at Work
Our brain's most important job is not thinking...
It is listening closely to the body to keep us alive without spending tons of energy doing so!
Most conversations about performance at work focus on mental capacities, such as better focus, sharper thinking, more effective decision-making, and greater emotional resilience. We invest in training, coaching, and development programs designed to build these capacities.
Yet, we routinely overlook the system that underlies all of them.
That system is called interoception. Interoception is the process by which the brain continuously reads and interprets signals from inside the body: heartbeat, breathing, muscle tension, temperature, the sense of ease or unease that we can't quite name but can feel. This crucial system monitors the state of our body, such as heart rate, gut activity, the metabolic state of our muscles, our immune system's signals, and our hormonal shifts, among many other health- and performance-supporting functions.
There is a compelling, research-grounded argument that interoception may be the most consequential factor in how well any of us function under pressure, one that most organizations have never considered. I am trying to change that.
Our brain is not simply logging data; it is continuously using it to regulate our internal state, anticipate what our body will need next, and allocate resources accordingly. Interoception is, at its core, a regulatory system. The sensing and the managing are two phases of the same continuous loop.
Neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett, whose rigorous and far-reaching research on this topic describes the brain's primary function not as thinking or perceiving but as managing the body's energy resources. She refers to this as the ‘body budget.' To me, this important reframe of what we think the brain's main job is has significant implications for how we think about performance and well-being.
Our brain is extraordinarily energy-expensive to run. It makes up about 2% of our body weight but consumes approximately 20% of our total energy. The brain is very energy hungry, and, like a financial budget, the resources required to run the brain-body system are not infinite. So, the brain has to make continuous decisions about how to do its job—keeping us alive—and allocates resources toward regulation, threat-monitoring, higher-order thinking, sustained attention, creative problem-solving, and social interactions.
If we have a well-calibrated interoceptive system and a body that is not chronically dysregulated by stress, those allocation decisions happen efficiently. The regulatory work runs quietly in the background, and higher-order capacities (clear thinking, sound judgement, flexible response, genuine curiosity) have the resources they need. Here's the catch: under chronic stress the brain's budget more quickly depletes.
When the body is persistently dysregulated—i.e., when the stress response is continuously activated or when it is activated and never fully resolved—the brain's regulatory workload increases substantially. It keeps generating predictions about the body's state, keeps detecting the mismatch between those predictions and what is actually happening, and keeps attempting corrections. If those corrections are not supported by actual physiological recovery, the regulatory loop runs without resolution. It keeps running, which means it keeps drawing on the budget.
The consequence is not dramatic or sudden, but gradual and cumulative. The budget that would otherwise be available for the cognitive capacities we most value at work, such as clear thinking, sound decision-making, emotional regulation, and effective engagement, or other things that matter in life, is being quietly consumed elsewhere.
Chronic stress is a culprit but only part of the story
Most people understand, at least in principle, that chronic stress is often a problem. What is less well understood is that the brain's regulatory burden doesn't require an actively stressful state to accumulate. It can accumulate through something much more mundane: habitual physical tension that has become so familiar it no longer registers as stress at all.
Consider two of the most common sites where people hold tension under pressure: the jaw and the shoulders. Clenching, bracing, and hunching are so prevalent in workplace settings that they have become invisible. People (me included!) often aren't even aware of holding ourselves in these ways. Yet we do, often for hours at a time.
Here is why I try to bring my and others' attention to these unconscious, habitual holding patterns:
Our brain doesn't have independent access to context. It doesn't know that the jaw is clenched because of an old habit rather than because of a genuine threat. It reads muscle tension in areas strongly associated in the brain's learned model with defensive and threat responses and generates a prediction about what that signal means. Chronic tension is processed as evidence. The brain attempts to model what that state requires and what to do about it.
This is not a minor OR a theoretical concern. The brain is continuously receiving these signals, processing them, and attempting regulatory responses. When the tension never fully resolves (because it is habitual rather than a response to actual stress), the regulatory attempt runs in a low-grade, unresolved loop. This is a drain on the brain's budget.
There is a further consequence to think about. Over time, the brain can recalibrate its predictions around a dysregulated baseline, beginning to treat chronic tension as the normal resting state. When that happens, genuine stress signals may need to be considerably stronger before they register consciously. The system has, in effect, raised its own threshold for noticing, which is not the same as having become more resilient.
It's not just about regulating but about interpreting.
There is a second dimension to this that goes beyond the regulatory cost, and it is perhaps the subtler of the two.
When we do turn attention toward the body and notice a signal ("Oh, my chest feels tight" or "My jaw is clenched"), what we make of it is shaped heavily by prior experience. The brain receives the raw signals (tension, e.g.), but interpretation follows so rapidly and so automatically that the two feel like a single event. By the time we are aware of a sensation, the brain has already reached into its history and begun asking, "What does this mean?" “What does this feel like from before?”
This happens below the threshold of conscious awareness, which is precisely why we rarely catch it in the act.
Because the brain is working with a tight energy budget, it will attach a label to a bodily sensation as quickly as possible (it doesn't have time/energy to search for the truth). The label it attaches can tell us as much about our past as it does about the present moment. In other words, it may interpret a tight chest as anxiety when, in fact, it may be excitement or anticipation...the body's preparation for something that is welcome. It may attach a label of "something is wrong in this situation" when the tight jaw may just be a habit and we're actually not feeling threatened.
The label is a hypothesis. It is not a fact. This is important because we routinely make consequential decisions partly on the basis of how we feel, and so, the accuracy of that hypothesis matters considerably.
This is why simply learning to notice bodily signals is necessary but not sufficient. The more important and more difficult skill is learning to hold the initial interpretation lightly, to notice the sensation and then, with a degree of genuine curiosity, to notice what you are calling it and ask whether those are really the same thing.
Why this matters for organizations
Interoceptive awareness training is highly relevant to organizational performance in several ways:
(1) Cognitive performance and decision quality. If the brain's energy budget is being chronically consumed by unresolved regulatory demands—whether from genuine stress load or from habitual physical tension—the higher-order capacities that drive performance are operating with reduced resources. This is not a motivational or attitudinal problem. It is a physiological one, meaning it responds to physiological intervention.
(2) Emotional regulation and leadership behavior. The quality of interoceptive awareness—the accuracy with which people can read their own internal states—is directly linked to the quality of emotional regulation. People who can detect early, subtle signals of activation have more time and more cognitive resources to work with before the signal becomes overwhelming. They are making regulatory choices from a position of greater capacity. Those who detect the signal only when it is already intense are already operating with reduced prefrontal resources available for response.
(3) Resilience accurately understood. The word "resilience" has been so broadly applied in organizational contexts that it has lost much of its precision. In the framework being described here, genuine resilience is not the capacity to push through regardless. It is the capacity of the brain's predictive regulatory system to accurately model the body's state, respond effectively to demands, and recover efficiently. That capacity is trainable. It is built through developing interoceptive awareness and through the regular practice of actual physiological down-regulation...not through demands to be tougher.
(4) The cost of the push-through habit. Most high-performing organizational cultures implicitly reward the capacity to push through (you know the mantra...to override bodily signals, sustain effort, and maintain output regardless of internal state). There are circumstances where this capacity is genuinely valuable. As a habitual operating mode, however, it carries a cost that rarely appears in performance metrics but shows up reliably over time in decision quality, interpersonal behavior, error rates, and eventually in mental and physical health. The brain can sustain a significant regulatory deficit for a considerable period. It cannot sustain it indefinitely without consequence.
Interoceptive awareness training is an effective way to address this budgeting constraint.
It is important to be clear about what interoceptive awareness training is. What it is not:
It is not meditation, though contemplative practices can support it.
It is not a wellness program in the conventional sense.
It is not about slowing down, becoming more introspective, or developing a particular relationship with relaxation.
What interoceptive awareness training is:
At its core, it is a calibration practice.
The aim is to help people develop a more accurate and more nuanced ability to read their own internal signals—earlier, with greater precision, and with less automatic labeling—so that they can support rather than override the brain's own regulatory work.
The practices themselves can be brief. They do not require extensive time commitment or significant disruption to working patterns. What they do require is enough sustained attention to build a genuine skill rather than a passing familiarity.
The return on that investment is significant. It comes in terms of:
Cognitive resources freed from unnecessary regulatory load
Earlier detection of stress signals before they compound
More accurate emotional reading
And better-calibrated decision-making under pressure
The Bottom Line
We have spent decades developing sophisticated frameworks for organizational performance, such as leadership development, emotional intelligence, psychological safety, and well-being programs of increasing ambition and expense. Most of these frameworks address what people think, how they relate, and what they do.
Very few address what is happening underneath all of that: the continuous, resource-intensive work the brain is doing to manage the body it inhabits, and the degree to which that work either supports or competes with everything we are trying to build.
Interoception is not a new concept. The science underpinning it is robust and growing rapidly. What is new is the recognition that building this capacity in the people leading organizations, managing teams, and making consequential decisions under sustained pressure may be one of the highest-leverage investments an organization can make.
I say this not because it is the latest thing, but because it addresses something fundamental about how human performance actually works.
Colleen Wilson Mizuki is a coach, trainer, and author specializing in interoceptive awareness, autonomic nervous system regulation, and performance under stress. She works with teams and individuals across the globe and is the author of bestseller, The Goldilocks Paradox.
