People who are better at sensing and trusting their internal bodily signals experience fewer negative health effects from political stress without losing their drive to participate in democracy. These individuals report lower emotional and physical tolls during heated election cycles, pointing to bodily awareness as a buffer against the harms of extreme polarization. The findings were published in Political Psychology.
Politics can take a literal toll on the human body. In highly polarized environments, political stress has become a major non-medical cause of disease and suffering. Many adults report that modern political climates cause them to lose sleep, experience chronic fatigue, or suffer from damaged social relationships. Understanding how people cope with this specific brand of stress is a pressing question for public health and behavioral science.
Mariana Von Mohr and Manos Tsakiris, researchers at the University of London, conducted the research to see if citizens can protect their health without abandoning their civic engagement. They focused on a concept called interoception. This term refers to how the brain senses, interprets, and regulates signals originating from within the body, such as a racing heartbeat, shallow breathing, or muscle tension.
At a basic physiological level, interoception helps the brain anticipate bodily needs before they arise, a process known as allostasis. For example, a person anticipating a long hike might eat a snack before becoming intensely hungry, preparing the body for an expected energy demand. In a similar way, the allostatic system helps the body maintain stability during stressful social events. At a psychological level, conscious awareness of these internal signals helps people regulate their everyday emotions.
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Individuals differ in their interoceptive sensibility, which is their self-reported tendency to notice and respond to their own physical sensations. People with higher interoceptive sensibility are more likely to notice bodily discomfort without becoming excessively worried by it. They often experience their bodies as safe and trustworthy.
The researchers suspected that this trait might help people manage the emotional and physiological demands of contemporary politics. They hypothesized that noticing early signs of bodily arousal might allow individuals to adjust their emotional responses before distress escalates.
To test this idea, Von Mohr and Tsakiris conducted three separate studies across two major United States election cycles. The first study took place immediately following the 2022 U.S. midterm elections. The researchers recruited 632 participants, split almost evenly between Democrats and Republicans. The participants completed questionnaires designed to measure their interoceptive sensibility and the physical, emotional, behavioral, and social health costs they attributed to politics.
Physical costs might include a racing heart or lost sleep, while social costs might involve strained family ties due to political disagreements. The researchers found that individuals with greater interoceptive sensibility reported lower self-perceived harm across all four health domains. The most protective interoceptive traits were a reduced tendency to worry about bodily sensations and a greater sense of bodily trust. The researchers also checked whether these individuals simply cared less about politics. They found the opposite pattern, as people with higher interoceptive sensibility were actually more likely to be politically engaged.
Building on these initial results, the researchers launched a larger tracking study during the 2024 U.S. presidential election. They surveyed 1,050 participants across three distinct time points. The assessments occurred two weeks before the election, a few days before the election, and a few days after the polls closed. This design allowed the researchers to track how health impacts and election-related emotions changed as the political reality unfolded.
Once again, higher interoceptive sensibility predicted lower harm to physical, emotional, behavioral, and social health. This protective association held up even after adjusting for traditional emotion-regulation strategies, such as suppressing feelings or deliberately reframing negative thoughts. Many psychology studies focus on these mental strategies, but this detail suggests that bodily awareness provides a unique type of physical resilience.
The researchers also examined how voters reacted when their preferred candidate lost. Following the 2024 election, voters who supported Kamala Harris reported worse overall health outcomes and greater health deterioration compared to voters who supported Donald Trump. Independent of the electoral outcome, higher interoceptive sensibility was associated with better health across all measured domains. Among Harris voters with relatively low pre-election health costs, higher interoception was linked to less deterioration in health from the pre-election to the post-election period, but this association weakened as pre-election health costs increased.
Bodily awareness also colored how participants felt about the future of the country. Following the election, Harris voters experienced more intense negative emotions, but those with higher interoceptive sensibility were less distressed and less fearful about the nation’s future. Among Trump supporters, higher interoception predicted greater hopefulness about the future.
The final study took place four months after the 2024 presidential election. The researchers re-contacted all participants who had completed the final wave of the second study and obtained responses from 752 of them to measure their ongoing political habits. Sustained political engagement between elections is necessary for holding leaders accountable and upholding democratic values. The researchers wanted to know if the protective effects of bodily awareness eventually led to political apathy.
Four months post-election, higher interoceptive sensibility continued to predict greater political engagement. It also predicted higher levels of both internal and external political efficacy. Internal efficacy is the belief in one’s own ability to understand and influence politics. External efficacy is the belief that political institutions will actually respond to public input. These findings indicate that sensing internal bodily signals supports both health resilience and meaningful democratic participation.
The research relies on observational data, meaning it cannot prove that bodily awareness directly causes better health outcomes. It only shows that the two traits reliably appear together. The researchers measured interoceptive sensibility using self-reported questionnaires rather than tracking physiological markers like heart rate variability or stress hormones. Additionally, all the data came from adult citizens in the United States during periods of high political polarization.
The results might not translate to countries with different political systems or during less polarized historical periods. Interaction tests comparing specific voter subgroups over time were also not statistically significant in every single instance, meaning the findings are most robust when looking at the overall trends.
While interoceptive sensibility is a relatively stable trait, it is not entirely fixed. Previous research has shown that bodily awareness can be improved through specific training, such as mindfulness practices or biofeedback therapy. Future research could explore whether teaching people to tune into their bodily signals helps them manage the emotional demands of political life. If so, interoception-focused programs could eventually be used to support public health and civic resilience in divided societies.
The study, “Feeling the body politic: Interoception as a mechanism of political stress resilience,” was authored by Mariana Von Mohr and Manos Tsakiris.
