Reflect: Learn How to Read Your Body

An experienced athlete can separate pain and injury. A stage performer can distinguish between nervousness and anxiety. An executive understands when her gut is pushing her in the right direction and when she should ignore it.

An expert at reading our body is no different than the veteran pilot who needs to merely glance at a gauge instead of reading the label or manual.

When we aren't able to make sense of our internal world, we turn to external ways to cope.

-- Do Hard Things​

The Hidden Cost of Comfort

In the 1950s, over 90% of toddlers were potty trained by 18 months. Today, that number is about 4%. The average age of potty training has drifted to nearly 37 months.

What in the world is going on with our kids? Their skill and aptitude haven't changed. Neither has biology. The answer applies to so much more than potty training. It helps explain performance, creativity, and maybe even part of our mental health issues. So what is it?

A part of it is that parenting philosophies have changed. In the early 20th century, there was a push to potty train early and often, so much so that many kids were trained before they reached a year old. Starting in the 1970s, we switched to a philosophy where letting the child indicate they're ready became the go-to practice.

But another change had an equally big effect and explains so much more: We moved from cloth to disposable diapers. When you use a cloth diaper, it's not just that mom and dad have to deal with quite a mess; the child actually feels it, too. They feel the wetness. In disposable diapers, not so much. The absorbent material makes it so that there's a disconnect. Little Suzy or Johnny goes pee, but they don't really feel it. We've disrupted the signaling cycle.

A 2021 systematic review by Breinbjerg and colleagues at Aarhus University concluded as much, finding that disposable diapers are associated with delayed continence. By eliminating the sensation of wetness, they disrupt the bladder-brain feedback loop. A 2025 prospective study took it a step further. When kids were diaper-free, they were more likely to give off visible cues that they were about to pee — squirming, wiggling, facial expressions. When they wore a diaper, they didn't react to peeing. The sensation was absorbed before it registered enough to produce a behavioral response.

The bladder still fills, the nerves still send the message. But the diaper removes the consequence of that signal (the feeling of wetness), and without that feedback, the child's brain doesn't learn to connect "this internal sensation" with "something is happening that I need to respond to."

We call this interoception. It's our ability to read our internal signals. And it doesn't just apply to diapers. It's what allows runners to pace and navigate fatigue, it's at the heart of our gut instincts, and it's the thing that helps us stop eating when we're full. Research on everyone from stock traders to elite performers finds that the better we're able to understand our internal signals, the better we perform.

For toddlers, the diaper muffles the response before the kid learns to listen. But we've done the same thing elsewhere: we've engineered away the signal, and lost the capacity to read and respond to it.

The diaper trade-off is small. Your kid potty trains six months later. No real harm done. But the same mechanism plays out in places where the trade-off is much bigger. There are always trade-offs.

Consider the following:

• We don't experience boredom anymore. We have a built-in signal blocker: our phones. You can see it when we're standing in line or sitting at a restaurant waiting for our food — people grab their phones instead of sitting with the discomfort and filling that space. Boredom is a signal to go search for something better to do. It's at the heart of creativity. Just think back to how many games you invented as a kid because you were bored and didn't have a tablet to grab and soothe that feeling.

• Playgrounds and free play are risk calibration tools. Researchers have found that when risk is removed from play, children are more prone to anxiety disorders because they never develop the ability to cope with fear-inducing situations. 74% of kids preferred more challenging equipment when given the choice at a playground. Safetyism and the design constraints that come with it prevent kids from developing the signal and feedback mechanisms that help them learn how to take risks. appropriate risks. When we never have to look at a high platform, feel our stomach tighten, and decide whether to climb anyway, we never calibrate the balance between fear and capability.

• We're never alone in our heads. Go for a walk, listen to a podcast. On a run, fill that space with music or a podcast. When we make our internal world foreign, something to escape from, is it any wonder we treat it as a threat? Headphones are the disposable diaper for our internal monologue, or if we're working out, our effort signals.

• Air conditioning. There's even early research that points to our perfectly temperature-controlled environments contributing to the obesity epidemic. One study found that after just one month of sleeping in cooler conditions, subjects showed a 42% increase in brown fat volume and a 10% improvement in insulin sensitivity. We've muffled our body's internal thermostats, shutting down our thermogenic system because it's not needed anymore. We spend 90% of our time indoors, where it's constantly between 68 and 74 degrees year-round.

• Metrics everywhere. We outsource our pacing to GPS watches, our sense of recovery and readiness to our rings and trackers, and the quality of our sleep to a device on our wrist. Instead of learning to read what fatigue, freshness, and rest actually feel like, we wait to be told.

• Navigation. When GPS does the navigating, your brain stops building the map. Eleanor Maguire's research at University College London found that the hippocampus actually shrinks or grows based on how much navigation we're doing. London taxi drivers, who memorized 25,000 streets, had measurably larger hippocampi than the general population. We don't need to build a mental map when we can outsource it. The cognitive workout that built spatial reasoning was muffled by a device that could tell us precisely where to go.

Every single one follows the same pattern: remove the signal, lose the capacity it was building. I'm not suggesting we throw away GPS, and I'm certainly not getting rid of air conditioning. Lord knows I'd never survive in Houston, Texas, without it.

But what is clear is that there are always trade-offs to dampening a signal. And too often, we default to whatever feels easier in the moment, not realizing the capacities we're detraining or letting go.

Let's start with the minor ones. It might not feel like a big deal to listen to a podcast on a run or always have music playing. But what happens is that you lose one of the most valuable skills in running: the ability to listen to your body. Your ability to pace by feel declines. Instead of being like the seasoned vet who can lock into a pace by listening to your breathing and feeling your legs turn over, you're lost without that external marker guiding you.

You also can't read and respond to the very things that control your performance. Those with poor interoception mistake early signals of discomfort or unease as signs that they're going far too hard. They have hypersensitive alarms that get triggered at the slightest hint of fatigue. A pro at interoception can slice and dice the signals, understanding what each one means and calibrating it against what they're actually capable of. They can ride the line because they have confidence in knowing how much fatigue they can handle, given the demands they're facing.

We can see the same thing with anxiety. Those with strong interoception can understand what is just pre-race stress — a signal their body is getting ready to do something hard — and what genuine anxiety is, warning of a real danger. And away from the sporting fields, recent research has demonstrated this for generalized anxiety. A 2024 systematic review examined the relationship between interoception and anxiety across 71 studies. They found that anxious individuals don't necessarily feel more; they're just really bad at interpreting and describing the experience. They have what researchers call "high interoceptive attention with low interoceptive accuracy." They notice the heart rate spike but can't tell if it means danger or excitement. They feel the tension in their chest but can't decode whether it's a threat or just being tired.

While the science is still young, interoceptive disruption is being studied in everything from eating disorders to addiction. And so far, a similar pattern emerges. The body is sending information, and the brain doesn't read it correctly. The consequences differ depending on what part of the system breaks down: eating disorders if hunger and satiety signals are misread, anxiety if threat signals are over-amplified, depression if reward signals are dampened, PTSD if all bodily sensations get coded as danger, and so on.

Steven Hayes — the psychologist who developed Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) — coined the term "experiential avoidance." He found that the more you treat your inner world as a threat to be managed, the more it becomes one. Three decades of research have confirmed it: experiential avoidance is one of the strongest predictors of anxiety disorders, depression, PTSD, and substance abuse.

A Disconnected Environment

Too often, we hear the argument that "kids can't handle discomfort anymore." But I think that's the wrong framing. The real piece is this: we've broken the system that lets humans read their internal world, and the consequences show up as anxiety, depression, eating disorders, addiction, and PTSD.

When we put earbuds in for every walk, fill every silence with a podcast, and distract every moment of boredom, we're practicing experiential avoidance. We're training the brain that our internal world is something to escape from. We've put diapers on every sensation we experience. Mostly in the form of phones.

We've engineered away the very signals that help us connect our internal and external worlds, our experience and our response.

The toddler who never feels wet doesn't learn to read their bladder. The driver who never gets lost doesn't build a mental map. The child who never feels afraid on the playground doesn't learn to calibrate risk. The teenager who never sits with boredom doesn't develop sustained attention. The runner who never runs without music doesn't learn to read their effort. The student who gets extended time on every test never builds the ability to perform under the pressure of a clock.

We padded the world. And now we're wondering why nobody can feel anything.

So what do we do? Take the diaper off occasionally on the signals that are important to you.

• Go music and podcast free on some runs, walks, or even commutes. Spend time alone in your head. This is especially true on harder or longer workouts, where you want to be a pro at understanding discomfort. Sure, rocking out to music might help you get through one workout a little better, but it doesn't train the skill that will help you on race day.

• Embrace boredom. Put the phone away. Stand in line without reaching for your pocket. Or pull out a pen and notebook and jot down your thoughts.

• Get a little lost. We may never have the navigation ability of our grandparents' generation, but there's something to taking a new route on a run, or driving across town without relying on navigation. A small workout to remind your brain to have a touch of spatial awareness.

• Have a digital sabbath. Take one day off from technology a week. Or put the tech away a few evenings a week. Whatever it is, reconnect with your body.

• Mindfulness and meditation are interoception trainers. This doesn't have to be some complicated practice — just deliberate time being mindful.

We need to wrestle with discomfort. Whether it's helping your kids with the first sign of struggle on the playground or with their homework, or with yourself in reaching for the quickest solution to the slightest feeling of unease, we need to let folks sit with that experience. We've largely engineered it away. It's time to deliberately bring it back.

--Steve and Brad

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Listen: How to Change, Actually (with Eric Zimmer)

Once an addict, Eric Zimmer is now 26 years sober. He has made that one huge change through a series of many small, daily changes, or what he calls "low resistance actions done consistently over time in the same direction." His theory of behavior change is at the heart of his successful coaching practice, his wonderful podcast, The One You Feed, and his great new book, "How A Little Becomes A Lot: The Art of Small Changes for a More Meaningful Life." On today's episode of "excellence, actually," Eric joins Brad and Clay to share the three practices that have most helped him in 26 years of recovery, how to pursue change without becoming self-obsessed, how to stop looking for answers on how to change and actually get down to the work, advice on updating your limiting stories and beliefs, and what healing from addiction can teach us about smartphone use.

— Clay​

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