How Digital Technology Reshapes Embodiment
Invasion of the Body Snatchers
Have you ever set out to complete a simple task online—research an article, purchase supplies, check out an event—only to become derailed by pop-ups, cookie permissions, notifications, and other tasks that you found yourself exhausted before your day even got off the ground? If so, you’re not alone. While we understand these disruptions as attempts to hijack our attention, it turns out that they’re even more insidious than we may have thought.
In 1971, when Herbert A. Simon wrote about the scarcity of attention in a world rich with information, he birthed the idea of an “attention economy.” Thirty years later, smartphone use became mainstream, and scientists began to measure the impact of digital technology on attention.
Gloria Mark, Chancellor’s Professor of Informatics at the University of California, Irvine, led the way. Her research shows that over nearly two decades, our attention spans have declined dramatically. In 2004, the average attention span on any screen was two and a half minutes. By 2012, it had shrunk to 75 seconds and now hovers around a dismal 47 seconds.
Note: Research is my jam, and evidence-based information is critically important in this age of misinformation. You’ll always find sources for the information in these articles below the body of each piece, here.
In 2013, a “Product Philosopher” at Google named Tristan Harris wrote a confessional memo to his colleagues. Titled “A Call to Minimize Distraction & Respect Users’ Attention,” the memo went viral. Harris had been studying the impact of technology on people’s attention, well-being, and behavior. He warned colleagues that tech companies (including his own employer, Google) were deliberately “harvesting” people’s attention. Digital tech, he said, forced our nervous systems into overdrive.
These ideas took hold. For over a decade, scientists, scholars, and laypeople have lamented the impact of social media on attention and emotional health.
Yet there’s more to the dangers of digital tech than the way it hijacks our attention. In my research deep dive for my next book, I found new evidence for what I’d long suspected: One of the most insidious aspects of technology and social media is the way it reshapes and even directs the critical dialogue between body and brain and affects our vital senses of embodiment.
This column will focus on the way digital tech impacts interoception, the foundational sense of embodiment.
What Interoception Is and Why It’s So Important
In its scientific definition, interoception refers to our ability to receive, interpret, respond to, and regulate the body’s internal signals. You can also think of it as inner perception, or mindful awareness of the body. And in some contexts, interoception also connotes a type of attention known as “interoceptive awareness.”
In many ways, interoception serves as a foundation to our other inner senses, including proprioception, body agency, body ownership, and body resonance.
Interoception is functionally distinct from the five outer senses: vision, audition, taste, touch, and smell. Our outer senses are part of exteroception, an externally-directed form of attention. We need both types of attention. Knowing where to direct our attention and when, and being able to switch fluidly between inner-directed and outer-directed attention, is vital to emotional health.
Countless studies link interoception with emotional regulation. In general, people with low levels of interoception (seen particularly in depression and chronic pain) also experience difficulty understanding and identifying emotions.
Sensations are the origins of emotions. And getting better at being with difficult or neutral sensations helps us get better at being with difficult or neutral emotions.
This makes attention to bodily sensation a valuable therapeutic tool in contemplative practice, psychotherapy, and other approaches to well-being.
In fact, digital technology may exert a negative pull on emotional health through the medium of interoception.
The Impact of Digital Technology on Interoception
It makes intuitive sense that when we’re paying visual attention to a stimulus outside us (whether or not a smartphone or computer is in play), we can’t attune to what’s happening inside our bodies. The two forms of attention are largely exclusive. Emerging research has begun to delve deeper into the specific mechanisms by which this happens.
In 2025, a group of researchers from Hakkaido University in Japan published a study in the prestigious journal Nature. The researchers wanted to know how smartphone use impacts interoceptive awareness and physiological reactivity in young adults. They devised a task aligned with the “load theory” of attention, which holds that when perceptual processing demands increase, people focus more on the task at hand and pay less attention to irrelevant stimuli like smartphones. In other words, the more demanding the task, the less susceptible people are to distraction.
They divided fifty-eight participants, aged nineteen on average, into two groups. The first group showed a bias toward smartphone use when the perceptual task demands were low, but not when they were high. The second group showed an attentional bias toward smartphone stimuli no matter what the intensity of the perceptual load. In other words, the smartphone stimuli had a special draw for this group.
The study found a strong link between a consistent attentional bias toward smartphone stimuli and reduced interoceptive awareness. The reduced interoception, in turn, correlated with greater physiological reactivity and emotional distress.
Yet as I reviewed the study, I noticed something significant that wasn’t fully explored. The researchers measured interoception using a self-report questionnaire that participants filled out themselves. The Multidimensional Assessment of Interoceptive Awareness (MAIA) has been translated into more than thirty languages and used in hundreds of scientific studies. The MAIA contains eight different subscales, including noticing sensations, emotional awareness, self-regulation, and body trusting.
The two subscales most affected by smartphone use were noticing sensations and body trusting, which refers to whether people view their bodies as reliable sources for making decisions and supporting health. The scale has three statements with which respondents rate their agreement: “I am at home in my body,” “I feel my body is a safe place,” and “I trust my body sensations.”
Research has shown that lower levels of body trust correlate with mild, moderate, or severe depression and other mental health challenges. Higher scores predict better emotional regulation and psychological resilience.
Importantly, smartphone use doesn’t merely reduce our capacity to receive, interpret, and respond to signals that come from inside our bodies. It impacts the relationship we have with the body and the trust we place in its messages—the marrow of the body-brain dialogue.
Blocking interoception and reducing the trust we place in body sensations may be the mechanism by which digital technology drives depression and anxiety.
Other studies corroborate these findings. In 2024, a large collaborative study conducted by researchers from Rome and the U.S. measured the relationship between problematic use of the internet (PUI) and interoception. Participants with PUI demonstrated a diminished awareness of bodily sensations and struggled to differentiate between comfortable, uncomfortable, and neutral bodily sensations, suggesting a form of “divorce” from their bodies.
This particular group exhibited particular difficulty with identifying sensations and, in a harbinger of the 2025 study, in body trusting.
These studies confirm what we intuitively know to be true: digital technology attacks our capacity to receive, interpret, and regulate signals that come from our bodies and also undermines the relationship we have with our bodies. The studies also point to the antidote: developing interoception.
Cultivating the Antidote: Interoception
There are several nodes of interoception. You can cultivate any one of these, particularly if you’ve just had a bout of extended digital immersion:
cardiovascular, such as heartbeat
gastrointestinal, including from the esophagus, stomach, small intestine, and colon (these are also part of our enteric nervous system, also known as our “second brain”)
distention of the abdomen, bladder, or rectum
hunger, thirst, and fullness
sensations of breath, including shortness of breath, or “air hunger”
temperature (warmth or coolness)
pricking pain or burning pain
itch, shudder, or tickle
vasomotor flushing (aka hot flashes)
muscular sensations, e.g. tension, soreness, and isometric or dynamic exercise
bone bruising, fracture, joint ache
nausea or cramps or illness
headache + migraine
fatigue, including chronic fatigue
sensual touch, also referred to as social or affective (emotional) touch
sexual arousal, touch, and orgasm
wine-tasting (in sommeliers)
acute or systemic inflammation and inflammatory metabolites
Pick any sensation (of course, you can pick more than one) such as your breathing, your heartbeat, gastrointestinal sensations, and track it for the next several months.
It’s super cool to use several tracking “modalities,” such as contemplative practices, check-ins throughout the day, or movement. (Feel free to be creative; it’s your sensation, after all, and it’s fun to find myriad ways to follow it!)
Say, for example, that you decide to follow and become more aware of your breathing, and in particular, the sensations of breathing. You can track these sensations in a meditation, becoming aware of the fullness, shape, and location of your breath. You can do the same in an embodied check-in for a minute or two as you’re going about your day. And you can do it during any form of movement.
When you’ve chosen the sensation you’d like to track, you can record your observations in your Body Journal.
Tip: All of us have sensations that are more “elusive” or quiet than others. If you’re not receiving data on a sensation over a long period of time, feel free to choose another one.
Sources:
Her work shows that over nearly two decades, our attention spans have declined: Why our attention spans are shrinking, with Gloria Mark, PhD. (n.d.). Https://Www.Apa.Org. Retrieved February 12, 2026, from https://www.apa.org/news/podcasts/speaking-of-psychology/attention-spans
In 2013, a “Product Philosopher” at Google named Tristan Harris: Haselton, T. (2018, May 10). Google employee warned in 2013 about five psychological vulnerabilities that could be used to hook users. CNBC. https://www.cnbc.com/2018/05/10/google-employee-tristan-harris-internal-2013-presentation-warnings.html
In its scientific definition, interoception refers to our ability to: Farb, N., Daubenmeier, J., Price, C. J., Gard, T., Kerr, C., Dunn, B. D., Klein, A. C., Paulus, M. P., & Mehling, W. E. (2015). Interoception, contemplative practice, and health. Frontiers in psychology, 6, 763. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00763
In 2025, a group of researchers from Hakkaido University in Japan published a study: Haruki, Y., Miyahara, K., Ogawa, K., & Suzuki, K. (2025). Attentional bias towards smartphone stimuli is associated with decreased interoceptive awareness and increased physiological reactivity. Communications Psychology, 3(1), 42. https://doi.org/10.1038/s44271-025-00225-6
The Multidimensional Assessment of Interoceptive Awareness (MAIA) has been translated into: W. E. Mehling et al., “The Multidimensional Assessment of Interoceptive Awareness, Version 2 (MAIA-2),” PLoS ONE 13, no. 12 (2018): e0208034, https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0208034
Research has shown that lower levels of body trust correlate with mild, moderate, or severe depression: J. Dunne et al., “Losing Trust in Body Sensations: Interoceptive Awareness and Depression Symptom Severity Among Primary Care Patients,” Journal of Affective Disorders 282 (2021): 1210–19, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jad.2020.12.092.; M. Datko et al., “Increased Insula Response to Interoceptive Attention Following Mindfulness Training Is Associated with Increased Body Trusting Among Patients with Depression,” Psychiatry Research: Neuroimaging 327 (2022): 111559, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pscychresns.2022.111559
Higher scores predict better emotional regulation and psychological resilience: M. Rütgen and C. Lamm, “Dissecting Shared Pain Representations to Understand Their Behavioral and Clinical Relevance,” Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews 163 (August 2024): 105769, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neubiorev.2024.105769.
[1] W. E. Mehling et al., “The Multidimensional Assessment of Interoceptive Awareness, Version 2 (MAIA-2),” PLoS ONE 13, no. 12 (2018): e0208034, https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0208034
In 2024, a large collaborative study conducted by researchers from Rome and the U.S. measured: Connected minds in disconnected bodies: Exploring the role of interoceptive sensibility and alexithymia in problematic use of the internet. (2024). Comprehensive Psychiatry, 129, 152446. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.comppsych.2023.152446 See also: Leave the screen: The influence of everyday behaviors on self-reported interoception. (2023). Biological Psychology, 181, 108600. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biopsycho.2023.108600