“Just tune into your body.” Nowadays, it’s everywhere- therapy worksheets, mindfulness apps, wellness newsletters, even workplace wellbeing schemes. The message is simple: your body holds signals and if you learn to listen inwardly, you can regulate, cope, and feel better. This version of mindfulness, which is packaged, standardised, and widely distributed, rests on a big assumption that tuning into the body is helpful for everyone and available to everyone.
But what happens when your body doesn’t feel like a safe place, or when you don’t feel able to trust it?
As a PhD student in psychology, I spend a lot of time thinking critically about how knowledge is produced, packaged, and circulated. As someone with lived experience of mental ill-health, I’ve also been on the receiving end of that knowledge in its most distilled form: advice. “Just tune into your body,” my therapist once said gently. I remember giving a hesitant nod. Their advice sounded reasonable and compassionate, grounding even. But underneath that nod was a quieter, more complicated truth. I didn’t know how to do that. And more than that, I wasn’t sure I wanted to. At the time, my body did not feel like a source of calm or wisdom. It felt loud, unpredictable, and overwhelming. Turning inward did not soothe me, it intensified things.
That experience pushed me towards questions I now study through research on interoception – the sensing of signals from inside the body, such as heartbeat, breath, hunger, pain, nausea, fatigue, and temperature. These signals can be useful, helping us recognise when we need rest, food, movement, or safety. But they do not arrive with clear meanings attached. They have to be interpreted.
Research often distinguishes between interoceptive attention and interoceptive accuracy. Interoceptive attention refers to how much we notice bodily sensations. Interoceptive accuracy refers to how precisely we detect those sensations. These two things do not always go together. Someone can be highly attentive to their body while struggling to understand what signals mean. For example, a racing heart may be read as catastrophe rather than excitement, exertion, caffeine, or temporary anxiety.
This distinction matters because many mindfulness practices often focus on attention. They ask us to notice breath, observe sensations, and scan the body. Sometimes this can be genuinely helpful. But noticing more does not automatically mean understanding better. For people living with anxiety, trauma, dissociation, chronic stress, eating disorders, or other forms of distress, turning inwards can sometimes heighten discomfort rather than alleviate it. And yet mindfulness is increasingly promoted as though it works for everyone.
This is where the commodification of mindfulness becomes important. Practices with complex philosophical and therapeutic roots have increasingly been repackaged into purchasable calm: subscription apps, lunchtime workplace meditation sessions, productivity-focused wellbeing packages, and generic programmes designed to be scalable and cost-effective.
In that process, the nuance disappears. Mindfulness becomes a one-size-fits-all solution: something anyone can do, anywhere, to manage their own distress. Structural causes of poor mental health, such as poverty, racism, transphobia, insecure housing, discrimination, and overwork, are pushed into the background. The burden shifts back onto individuals to self-regulate within harmful conditions rather than asking why those conditions exist in the first place. This one-size-fits-all framing can leave people blaming themselves when mindfulness does not help. If mindfulness works for others, why not me? But sometimes the issue is not personal failure. Sometimes the practice is simply the wrong fit, at that time, in that context.
This process also simplifies interoception. Indeed, interoception is not a single, simple ability. It is shaped by context, history, and neurobiology. Learning to engage with bodily signals often requires careful, supported, and highly individualised work; not something that can be downloaded, streamed, or subscribed to.
None of this is to say that interoceptive or mindfulness-based approaches are exclusively ineffective or harmful. For many people, they are genuinely helpful. But the way they are currently circulated in a simplified, commodified, and universalised way can obscure the line between the conditions under which they may help, and the situations where they may not.
Looking back, I can read that moment in therapy more generously. “Just tune into your body” wasn’t meant as a dismissal; it was an invitation. But invitations must account for each individual’s starting point. For some of us, the first step isn’t tuning in. It is in building enough safety – through relationships, housing, support, medication, or community – that tuning in becomes possible, and even desirable.
If mindfulness is going to remain as central to mental health care, we need to talk more openly about its limits. That means resisting one-size-fits-all advice, being transparent about who these approaches work for, and moving away from the idea that wellbeing can be neatly packaged and sold. Because “just tune into your body” is not a neutral suggestion. For some it is helpful, for others it is harmful. For many it is something in between- messy, contextual, and far more complicated than the wellness industry would have us believe.