My Bad Interoception Hides My Own Body From Me

Since I discovered I have bad interoception last year I have kind of got to know more about my body including the fact that I don't consciously perceive all of what's going on in it. I had a really long day yesterday and as a result I am very much in a low spoons day today. Part of that is my senses are more sensitive and I'm more dysregulated. My tummy has been un-settled all day. And I feel quite hot and muggy even though it's only 24C and 52% humidity in my office. My body just feels wrong, like it's overreacting to the temperature. When I had my normal 11:00am nap today I didn't sleep a wink, I just couldn't get into any kind of sleep state.

This morning I saw a brief video about autism and how some autistic people can find certain senses, such as a desk lamp,  actually physically painful. To me that means that the light from the desk lamp causes them physical pain in some manner, for example such as that one might perceive from being pricked by a pin. I don't mean it would feel like being pricked like a pin but rather it's a very real physical pain that they experience. This also means that the sensory experience of looking at the desk light is probably causing some internal distress to the person's body as well.

Right now, I don't even want to see my desk lamp bulb, even seeing it out of the corner of my vision is unpleasant and all I want to do is get away from it or turn it off. But what I am wondering is this: is my body experiencing the same level of internal distress as I mentioned above, the only difference being that my bad interoception is preventing me from perceiving that internal distress my body is experiencing? 

In a sense it's like the difference between being hit and getting a bruise and feeling the pain versus just seeing the bruise but having no pain. In both cases the body is under stress or dealing with the effects of what happened, even if the pain isn’t consciously felt.

I'm not sure what the answer is but I would love to know.

It's almost as if my bad interoception hides the stress my body is under from my conscious mind and as a result my conscious system doesn't do anything about relieving the stress or letting me know about it in the first place. So as a result I'm in a continual state of stress, and in a sympathetic nervous system state (an involuntary state of high arousal and alertness triggered by stress, danger, or intense physical demand. Often called fight or flight)  without knowing it at the time. Interestingly being in a sympathetic state isn't always consciously perceptible even in neurotypical people, I guess I'm an overachiever in this respect.

It's only the next day, when my system feels safe again, that it decides to register the sympathetic nervous system state it's currently in and starts doing something about it. In the meantime my bad interoception is still giving me few or wrong signals, such as an upset tummy, light sensitivity, my body temperature feeling all wrong along with dysregulation. It felt like my body decided to realise and deal with yesterday's stress today, long after the source of the original stress had stopped. I'm also imagining that any new stress or elevated sensory input I get today is only going to help make matters worse.

So in summary, yesterday my system was under serious stress but because of my poor interoception my conscious mind wasn't getting the signals so it didn't perceive what was happening to me at the time, it just hid it. Now today, with the source of the stress long gone, my body finally feels safe enough to let it start dealing with yesterday's stress that it's been holding onto all this time. This is a form of delayed processing and can be very confusing because of the apparent disconnection from the original cause. 

Which can lead to questions like: "why am I feeling this way today when nothing is happening?" When in reality it’s actually my body finally doing the work it couldn’t do when it was still in survival mode yesterday.

For me this is the first time I realised what might be happening with my autistic nervous system in these situations. I always knew that the day after a big day is usually a low spoons day but I hadn't realized the extent to which the stressful experiences from one day may spill over into the next in terms of processing fight or flight situations.

While many may see this as being a negative experience, for me this is another piece of this new puzzle I've been presented with and I'm just really happy I found some more pieces that fit the end result that is me.