Interoceptive exposure

Originating in panic-disorder treatment (Craske et al. 1997) and extended to chronic pain (Boswell et al. 2013; Zaman et al. 2015) in Farb et al. (2015). The technique rests on the idea that some psychosomatic pathology (e.g., chronic pain) involves fear-conditioned interoceptive avoidance — a conditioned withdrawal association that attentional distraction would reinforce rather than challenge, since distraction never disconfirms the feared interoceptive meaning.

Relation to the wiki’s predictive-coding framework

Interoceptive exposure can be read as a structured, clinically supervised form of perceptual-inference: sustained, non-avoidant contact with the feared sensation allows priors (e.g., “this heart-rate sensation means danger”) to update toward the actual, safer outcome, rather than being protected via avoidance (a form of active-inference that entrenches rather than resolves the prediction error). Yoga, which incorporates interoceptive training and is associated with decreased prefrontal activity, is cited as showing similar pain-management benefits (Villemure et al. 2013).