‘Listen to your body’ is the most repeated and least useful phrase in wellness. In this episode, certified health coach Noemie Mooney explains interoception, the science of reading your own body signals, why type A overachievers get it wrong, and the 60-second check-in that rebuilds the skill.
What does ‘listen to your body’ actually mean?? Nobody tells you.
The skill has a name: interoception.
It’s how your body communicates through sensations, and a study in Biological Psychology found it breaks down into three things:
how well you detect signals
how good you think you are at it
and the gap between those two
In this episode, I’m sharing how I ignored every signal my body was sending in a hotel gym in Panama City, what a researcher at the University of Washington found after 20 years of studying this skill, and the 60-second check-in that rebuilds the connection.
In this episode:
00:00 Intro
01:59 Why this episode is late
03:44 The Panama City gym story
04:57 What interoception is
06:29 The confidence-accuracy gap
08:35 When stress scrambles your signals
10:02 The 60-second check-in
Your experiment for this week: Before your next workout, pause for 60 seconds. Ask: how does my body feel right now? Not what the plan says. What is my body actually telling me? You don’t skip the workout. You just notice what’s there before you start. The noticing is the practice.
“The body doesn’t shout. It’s more like a very patient colleague you keep putting on mute.”
What signal has your body been sending that you keep overriding?
Noemie x
Noemie Mooney is an ACE Certified Health Coach, ICF-trained Behaviour Change Specialist, podcast host and the creator of the MAKE SPACE Method™, a science-backed framework for sustainable habits and mental health. She writes on Substack about burnout, habit formation, and evidence-based behaviour change psychology for people who want practical tools without the self-help BS.
