Maybe You’re TOO Self-Aware

Very honest, a little bit embarrassing admission: I’ve been to therapy a few times, with different therapists. And every single time, I would leave feeling more frustrated than when I arrived — not because the therapist wasn’t good, but because I felt like I was the one explaining the links and associations between things, rather than getting those insights fed back to me.

In short, I felt like I already knew all the answers. Not because I’m smugly arrogant or think I’m smarter than the therapist. On the contrary, it was actually a pretty depressing feeling. Having someone explain something I was already very aware of just left me feeling like no one would ever be able to help me.

I had already read the books, done the research, understood the frameworks. I could identify my attachment style, trace my anxiety back to its origins, and articulate the cognitive distortions I was running in real time while experiencing them.

And yet. None of that information was making me feel any better.

This, I have come to understand, is something that a certain cohort of people experience. And I want to talk about how it relates to your nervous system, and, ultimately, what you can do about it.

There is a specific kind of high-achieving person — women in particular — who is extraordinarily self-aware and almost completely disconnected from her body at the same time. She lives almost entirely in her head. She processes everything cognitively — emotions, sensations, stress, relationships — before they have a chance to land anywhere in her physical experience.

You already know all your shortcomings. You already understand how it’s all linked to something deeper. You know you’re probably in fight-or-flight; you can even name all the key mechanisms.

But knowing this doesn’t mean you’re able to shift away from it. And that gap — between understanding your nervous system and actually being able to regulate it — is exactly what I want to talk about.

And btw, it is a detrimental baseline. Research shows that people (particularly women) who are more type A have higher neuroception/interoception, which is also linked with higher rates of depression and anxiety.

What is neuroception you ask? Coined by Stephen Porges as part of polyvagal theory [I talk about it here]. Neuroception is your nervous system’s automatic, subconscious scanning of the environment for cues of safety or threat. It happens below conscious awareness.

Your body is constantly asking: am I safe? Is this person safe? Is this environment safe? And it is answering that question through physiological responses — heart rate, muscle tension, breath pattern, gut sensation — before your thinking brain has registered anything at all.

Type A women are weirdly aware of all of that. I can feel when my muscles tighten, when my gut motility slows, when my cortisol rises. Not just like “Oh I feel stressed,” it’s a super intricate, visceral feeling. Interoception.

Interoception is your ability to perceive those internal signals. To notice what your body is communicating. To feel, from the inside, what your nervous system is experiencing.

A 2026 review published in Brain Sciences — titled “Feeling Like a Woman: Interoception and the Objectified Body” argues that interoception is not simply a detection skill. It is a constructed perceptual process — shaped by attention, by context, and critically, by where your attentional resources are being directed.

And for women who have spent years — often decades — in their heads, analyzing, monitoring, achieving, performing — the attentional resources required to actually feel internal bodily signals have often been co-opted by the cognitive overhead of all that self-monitoring.

You are so busy thinking about how you feel that you cannot actually feel it.

This is the paradox in question: In research, type-A, high-achieving women often report the highest levels of body awareness — and simultaneously show some of the poorest ability to accurately detect and respond to what their bodies are actually communicating.

The Brain Sciences review touches on this directly — noting that women report noticing bodily sensations more often and show better understanding of the relationship between bodily sensations and emotional states, while simultaneously showing lower accuracy on objective interoceptive tasks.

IIn other words: you think you know what your body is telling you. But what you’re actually detecting is your interpretation of what your body is telling you — filtered through a cognitive framework built from years of self-analysis, therapy, reading, and intellectualizing.

Wait before you move on, read that again. It’s really important to understand.

Us hypervigilant folk don’t just say ah my heart is beating fast before this public speaking thing! We jump to: I have anxiety, this dates back to 2007 when I was humiliated on stage. That event led to my avoidant attachment wound. I now have performance anxiety, and subconscious shame.

You don’t actually FEEL your higher heart rate. You’re not present with it. You’re in your head.

Having such high neuroception is a super effective coping strategy that has most likely served you extraordinarily well. The problem is that understanding something intellectually and processing it somatically — in the body, where the nervous system actually lives — are not the same thing. And the former does not substitute for the latter.

Here’s the thing nobody tells you after years of therapy, self-help books, and nervous system education: at some point, more information becomes the problem, not the solution.

Your brain has become so good at intercepting your body’s signals and translating them into narrative that the raw, physical experience of your nervous system barely gets a look in. The sensation arrives. The brain immediately explains it. And you never actually FEEL IT — you just think about it. On a loop, usually.

This is why so much conventional nervous system advice fails this particular woman. It’s why I hate meditating as a way to regulate my nervous system [and why I gave 18 alternatives for people like me!]. When I slow down too much, it basically just gives my analytical brain a megaphone. It’s why talk therapy makes me feel WORSE and why something like power yoga or just jumping up and down makes me feel infinitely BETTER.

What I don’t need: thinking, explaining, contextualizing, understanding. What I do need: RELEASE, FEELING, GROUNDING, FLOW.

Somatic work — body-based practices that bypass the thinking mind — is effective for this specific reason. It doesn’t give your brain anywhere to go. There is no framework to apply. There is no insight to extract. There is just the physical experience of your body, in real time, which you have to be present for because your cognitive commentary cannot keep up.

I started offering a somatic movement class at my fitness studio in Lisbon, the class is called FLOW STATE and I’m gassed about it. It’s so insanely powerful. You fully get out of your head and just experience. And no not experience something in particular. You just experience. SOmetimes you feel happy, sometimes you feel sad, sometimes you feel nothing, sometimes you feel EVERYTHING. And that’s the point!

Final thing I gotta add in here too, it’s why I hate people who say cold plunging is bad for women. Like who are you referring to exactly? Because for me, and other women like me, cold plunging can be transformative. For a woman who has been cognitively managing her emotional life for years, the “activation” is not the problem. The activation is the access point. The one way in that her brain cannot intercept.

The nervous system does not learn through understanding. It learns through experience. Repeated, embodied, somatic experience of activation followed by recovery — that is what builds genuine regulation.

If you recognized yourself in any of this, hi! My invitation to you is not more reading or self-analysis.

My recommendation is to put it all down. Get up. Start moving, start jumping up and down, close your eyes. Feel the energy building in your body. Stop labeling it. Don’t set a timer. Just move.

This is a good entry point. After that, you can start doing more movement practices with greater presence, less optimization. Go for a jog. Not a run. A JOG. Don’t distract yourself with music or self-help podcasts. Listen to the noises of the world, feel the energy circulating in your body. When you’re tired, stop. Feel the energy vibrating around your body.

Less labels, more feeling.

In general, I want you to put down the frameworks. The protocols. The regimens. Tolerate the discomfort of not knowing.

You have built an extraordinary intellectual relationship with your own inner world. But your nervous system needs something your brain cannot provide — and it has been waiting, patiently, for you to figure that out.

Now you have :) Do the other thing. 🫶

All of the protocols, tools, and practices that support this — the somatic inputs, the supplement stack, the morning and evening rituals, the 4-week implementation plan — are in REGULATED.

Drop comments or thoughts below :) It’s Virgo season aka my time to shine xox any other virgos?? comment belooowww

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