Why You Feel Too Much or Not Enough: Trauma, Sensitivity, and the Interoception Skills Yoga Therapy Restores

By Christine Saari, MA, C-IAYT

Sensitivity and Trauma: A Nervous System That Learned to Survive

Many people living with trauma or chronic stress quietly wonder why ordinary life feels harder than it should. Why a sudden noise feels like an explosion. Why certain smells send the body into panic. Why hunger goes unnoticed until dizziness sets in, or why pain only registers when it is severe. Some describe themselves as “too sensitive” or “too much.” Others say, “I don’t feel anything until it’s too late.”

Both experiences are far more common than most people realize, and neither is a character flaw. From a nervous system perspective, feeling too much or not enough is simply a learned survival strategy.

Hypersensitivity: When Sensation Feels Like Threat

When the body has lived through overwhelming experiences, whether a single terrifying moment or years of chronic pressure, it reorganizes itself around protection. For many people, the brain turns the sensory volume up. Touch startles. Sound overwhelms. A tone of voice feels dangerous. The scent of fertilizer, fuel, or burning food can send the body into panic before any conscious thought.

This is not imagination. In one early study of trauma survivors, Bessel van der Kolk described how the nervous system becomes highly reactive to sensory input, especially touch and sound (1994). Later research showed that people with PTSD react intensely to threat-linked smells while barely noticing neutral ones (Cortese et al., 2015). 

From this perspective, hypersensitivity to light and sound can be understood as another expression of the same dysregulated threat-detection system: when breathing becomes disordered and the nervous system shifts toward chronic hyperarousal, sensory gating narrows and normal environmental input begins to feel overwhelming (Gilbert and Chaitow, 2014).

The system learns that certain sensations might predict danger, and it stays alert to survive.

Hyposensitivity: When the Body Goes Quiet

For others, the opposite happens. Sensation becomes faint, unreliable, or silent. Hunger and thirst appear only when the body is already crashing. Emotions show up as logic rather than feeling. Pain is dismissed or unnoticed until it becomes urgent. Briere and Runtz (1987) described this pattern decades ago: trauma can lead to reduced emotional and sensory sensitivity as a protective mechanism. 

Turning signals down is not denial or avoidance. It is physiology doing its best to protect a nervous system that has already been overwhelmed.

A common, socially rewarded version of this pattern is achievement as safety. When a person learns that being useful, high-performing, or indispensable keeps them safe, the nervous system prioritizes goals over bodily signals. Drive drowns out “slow down.” Accolades function like proof of worth or protection.

Several studies support this link. Haver et al. (2019) found that adverse childhood experiences predicted workaholism partly through perfectionism. Egan et al. (2011) showed strong associations between trauma histories and perfectionistic overcontrol. In clinical psychology, this coping style is well-described as “overcontrol,” a pattern targeted in Radically Open Dialectical Behavior Therapy (RO-DBT), which was developed for individuals who cope by suppressing emotional expression and pushing through internal distress (Lynch et al., 2013).

The physiology matches. Trauma survivors with high achievement patterns often show reduced interoceptive awareness and higher rates of alexithymia, meaning internal cues are hard to detect and easier to ignore (Füstös et al., 2013; Badura-Brack et al., 2015). If you cannot feel hunger, exhaustion, or tension, you can override it. 

The body learns that limits do not matter if survival requires performance.

Many people move between both extremes. A person may be highly reactive to loud noise yet disconnected from their own exhaustion. Someone may shut down emotionally but feel every shift in another person’s tone of voice. These patterns are not random. The body is deciding what to pay attention to, and what to ignore, in order to keep going.

Sensitivity Does Not Mean Brokenness

There is another piece rarely discussed in trauma recovery. About a quarter of people have a natural temperament called sensory processing sensitivity (SPS). Research by Black and Kern in 2020 found that highly sensitive individuals process information more deeply and notice subtleties others miss. 

In supportive environments, this trait is linked to creativity, empathy, and wellbeing. In overstimulating environments, it can feel like a problem. The issue is not sensitivity itself, but whether the nervous system can return to baseline. 

Sensitivity becomes problematic only when it is paired with a nervous system stuck on high alert or shut-down, and the person experiencing it identifies that the pattern is not serving them.

Interoception: The Skill Trauma Interrupts

This is where interoception becomes central. Interoception is the way the brain senses the inside of the body. This includes sensing the heartbeat, breath, temperature, muscle tension, fullness, pain, and the first stirrings of emotion.

But restoring that connection has to be done gently. For many trauma survivors, the body has been a frightening place to live. Sensation is not neutral. It has been paired with danger. For people with hypersensitivity, sensation is already turned up too loud. Forcing someone to feel their body too quickly can be overwhelming, even retraumatizing. Trauma-informed work means going slowly, at the person’s pace, with choice and consent at every step.

For people with hyposensitivity, the opposite problem appears. The body goes quiet. Signals that should say slow down or you are reaching your limit never show up. In both cases, it is more like letting the air out of a balloon slowly than popping it open. The nervous system needs time to learn that nothing bad will happen when sensation returns.

When interoception is intact, the body offers early warning signs: I need water, I am getting overwhelmed, I should rest. When it is disrupted, there is no warning at all. Stress shows up as collapse. Emotion appears as explosion. Exhaustion is felt only after the crash.

Interoception is not abstract. A 2024 review in Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews notes that disrupted interoception is common across many psychiatric and trauma-related conditions, and that interoceptive training may be a key mechanism for improving emotional regulation and symptom recovery (Schoeller et al., 2024). Researchers describe interoception as a “hierarchical predictive processing” system. The brain is constantly checking the body for signals and adjusting behavior based on what it senses. When trauma disrupts this loop, emotions become harder to track, regulate, or name.

Why Yoga Therapy for Trauma Works When Talking Doesn’t

Most trauma treatments aim at thoughts, memories, or emotions. But trauma also lives in muscle tone, breath pattern, sensory gating, startle response, and the brain’s interpretation of internal signals. 

Yoga therapy works directly with these systems. Slow, rhythmic movement gives the brain accurate information about where the body is. Gentle breathwork creates steady internal rhythms the nervous system can predict. When offered without force, stillness lets the body feel again without being overwhelmed. Over time, sensation becomes more tolerable, then familiar, and eventually useful.

Recent research supports this. In a 2023 study, trauma-exposed women practiced breath-focused mindfulness either alone or with gentle somatic input synced to their breathing. Those who received tactile feedback showed greater improvements in interoception, attention, and autonomic regulation, along with stronger connectivity in brain regions that track internal sensation (Fani et al., 2023). In other words, when the body receives steady, predictable sensory input, the nervous system learns to trust its internal signals again.

Interoception improves not because someone talks about their body, but because they learn to sense it. A racing heartbeat becomes information rather than danger. A tight jaw becomes a cue to soften. Hunger shows up before irritability. Rest feels restorative instead of feeling like a failure for shutting down. The nervous system learns that it can feel without being attacked from within. That shift is what makes trauma recovery possible.

Why Trauma-Informed Yoga Therapy Is Not Forced “Trauma Release”

Because “being in your body” has become a wellness trend, many trauma survivors have been told to meditate, sit with sensation, or “release” stored emotions. But forcing presence is not trauma healing; it is exposure without consent. 

In trauma survivors, rapid or intense sensory attention can trigger panic, dissociation, resurfacing traumatic memories, and in some cases psychosis-like symptoms. Research shows that up to 60 percent of meditators report at least one adverse effect, and those who attend intensive meditation retreats are more likely to experience distress or functional impairment (Van Dam et al., 2025; Britton et al., 2021; Wong et al., 2018).

These reactions do not happen because meditation is bad. They happen because the nervous system has learned to survive by disconnecting. Opening sensation too fast is like taking the cast off a broken bone and going for a sprint. The injury needs slow loading, not shock or force.

Trauma-informed yoga therapy works differently. The client is in charge of pace. Interoception is introduced gradually and only in tolerable doses. There is no goal of “release.” There is no forced catharsis. The yoga therapist offers choices, consent, and regulation strategies at every step. The nervous system learns safety because it stays in control, not because it is overwhelmed. Over time, sensation becomes something the client can approach, notice, and trust again.

This is why yoga therapy often succeeds where unstructured mindfulness fails. The work is not about feeling everything. It is about feeling just enough to rebuild interoception without going over the edge.

Reclaiming Comfort in Your Own Body

When sensation becomes safe again, sensitivity no longer controls life. It guides it. People do not become less sensitive; they become accurately sensitive. Sound is just sound. Other people’s emotions are readable without being overwhelming. Pain is less amplified because the brain is no longer interpreting every signal as threat.

Yoga therapy is not about forcing catharsis or reliving trauma. It is about literacy. It’s about teaching the body a language it once had to forget. It rebuilds trust, one sensation at a time, until living inside a body feels tolerable, then familiar, then trustworthy and safe.

That is the quiet, practical heart of trauma recovery. Not the absence of sensation, but the return of sensation that makes sense.

Are you or a loved one looking for support on the path to trauma recovery? Our certified yoga therapists specialize in working with trauma. Learn more about our yoga therapists, schedule an intake, or book a complimentary and confidential phone consultation. We’re here to help.

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References

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