Mindfulness/contemplative interoceptive training for well-being

The wellbeing-dimension application at the center of Farb et al. (2015): cultivating interoceptive awareness and perceptual (rather than exclusively active) inference as a route to psychological well-being in non-clinical populations. See mindfulness-meditation for the underlying method and its seven proposed mechanisms.

Proposed benefits

• Granularity: increased ability to notice subtle, temporally extended dynamics of physiological arousal rather than reacting to early perturbations via reflexive appraisal.
• Decentering/reperceiving: viewing thoughts as transient mental events rather than as immediate cues to action, associated with increased cognitive flexibility.
• Upward spirals: positive reappraisal and reduced catastrophic interpretation feeding back into further well-being gains (Garland et al. 2010, 2011).
• Embodied physiology: increased heart-rate variability (parasympathetic activation), and — in a study of experienced meditators — decreased pain unpleasantness despite similar perceived intensity, linked to increased posterior insula (bottom-up) and decreased lateral prefrontal (top-down/appraisal) activity (Farb et al. 2013).
• Decoupled hedonic response: reduced automatic aversion→avoidance and pleasure→approach arcs, hypothesized to optimize allostasis as a self-reinforcing process.

Explicit caveat

The paper stresses this is not intended as a claim that continual, total interoceptive awareness is desirable or achievable. Skillful, selective attention to interoceptive sensation — not maximal attention — is the proposed target, restoring balance between “doing” (active inference/problem-solving) and “being” (perceptual inference/acceptance) rather than replacing one with the other.