Content note: this post discusses hunger, fullness, restriction and overeating as forms of regulation, and touches on eating disorders. Please read with care, and skip if you need to.
There is a particular kind of afternoon I know well; the room is too bright, someone two desks over is tapping a pen, the fridge in the kitchen hums at a pitch that sits right behind my eyes, and my thoughts have started to splinter. Then I notice something strange.
I have not eaten since breakfast, the hunger has become a hollow, insistent ache, and somehow that ache is the only thing in the room that feels clear.
Other days run the opposite way. Everything is flat and grey, my body feels like it belongs to someone else, and I find myself eating well past comfort; not because I am hungry, but because the heavy, stretched pressure of fullness is the first thing in hours that tells me I am here.
For a long time I filed both of these under “bad habits”. However, through my work with Tanya Adkin on interoception and Autistic regulation, I have come to understand them differently. They are a form of interoceptive stimming; using a loud internal signal to turn the volume down on an overwhelming world, or to turn the volume up on a body that has gone quiet. This post is an attempt to interogate that pattern. What it does for me, why it makes sense, and why it can also quietly hurt people like me.
What We Mean By Interoceptive Stimming
Interoception is our sense of the inside of the body; heartbeat, breath, temperature, pain, the need for the toilet, thirst, hunger and fullness. It is often described as the eighth sense, and for many Autistic people it does not behave the way textbooks assume. Some of us feel internal signals faintly or late; some of us feel them like a fire alarm; many of us swing between the two depending on the day, the environment and how much capacity we have left.
When most people think about stimming, they picture the visible stims; rocking, flapping, spinning, humming, chewing. Tanya and I have spent a lot of time talking about the stims nobody sees. Interoceptive stimming is the deliberate, or half-deliberate, seeking out of internal sensations because of what they do for regulation.
- Holding a breath until the chest burns.
- Drinking ice water to feel the cold travel down. Waiting until the bladder is almost painful.
- Letting hunger build, or eating until the stomach is tight.
Like any stim, these are not random. They are the bodymind doing what it can to find a stable signal in a chaotic system. The difference is that interoceptive stims work with the body’s own survival signals, and that gives them both their power and their risk.
Hunger And Fullness As Loud Signals
Hunger and fullness are among the loudest messages the body can send. They are built to interrupt us; to pull attention away from whatever else is happening and towards survival. For a nervous system that is drowning in input, or starved of it, that interruption can feel like rescue.
Hunger Against Overstimulation
When the world is too much, everything competes for attention at once. Intense hunger cuts through that noise with a single, sharp, internal point of focus. It narrows the field. Many of us describe a strange clarity in it; the lights and sounds recede because the body has something more urgent to say. In monotropic terms, hunger becomes an attention tunnel we did not have to build ourselves.
Fullness Against Understimulation
When the world goes flat, or we drift into shutdown and disconnection, the opposite happens. Nothing lands, the body feels far away. Fullness offers weight, pressure and warmth from the inside; a kind of internal deep pressure, not unlike a weighted blanket. It tells us where our edges are. For some of us it is one of the few sensations strong enough to bring us back into the body at all.
| State | What it can feel like | Signal reached for | What it seems to do |
|---|---|---|---|
| Overstimulated | Too loud, too bright, thoughts splintering | Hunger | Narrows attention to one internal point; drowns out the external |
| Understimulated | Flat, foggy, far from the body | Fullness | Adds weight and pressure; anchors us back in the body |
None of this is a choice made in a vacuum. It is usually learned quietly, over years, often long before anyone had words for sensory overwhelm or interoception. It works, at least in the short term. It deserves understanding rather than shame.
Reading It Through Existing Frameworks
Monotropism
Monotropic minds pour attention into a few channels at a time. When that attention is scattered across too many demands, we lose our footing; when it has nowhere to go, we lose our sense of self. A strong internal signal solves both problems crudely. It hands attention a single, unavoidable channel. It is no coincidence that many of us also forget to eat entirely when we are deep in flow; the same attention system that can drown hunger out can also use it as an anchor.
Meerkat Mode And Atypical Burnout
In the burnout-to-psychosis cycle Tanya and I developed, meerkat mode describes the hyperactivated, hypervigilant state of atypical burnout; scanning, alert, unable to settle. This is exactly where I use hunger most often. Food becomes one more demand that the system cannot spare capacity for, and the hunger that follows becomes a strange source of focus in an otherwise frantic mind. It can look like coping, it can also be a sign that the spiral is gathering pace.
On the other side, the flat, depleted phases of burnout are where I see fullness reached for; an attempt to feel something solid when capacity has collapsed.
The Nested Environment
We never regulate in isolation. These patterns grow in response to environments; bright offices, chaotic households, sensory-hostile schools, systems that demand masking all day. If someone is using hunger to survive the workplace, the first question is not “how do we fix their eating?” but “what is this environment changing their relationship with food?” Changing the ecosystem often loosens the need for the override.
Where It Tips Into Harm
Naming a pattern as regulation is not the same as saying it is safe. Hunger and fullness are survival signals; when we repeatedly use them as stims, we are borrowing from the body’s emergency systems, and that loan has interest.
The Link With Eating Disorders
Eating disorders are significantly more common in Autistic people, and they often look different in us. ARFID is driven by sensory experience rather than body image. Restriction may be driven less by appearance and more by the appeal of rules, control, or the sensory state of hunger itself. Binge eating may be less about emotion in the conventional sense and more about chasing an internal signal strong enough to feel. The interoceptive override I am describing can sit right at the doorway to these patterns, and it can walk through without anyone noticing, including us.
The Substance Use Parallel
Much of my work has been about how Autistic people use substances to manage an unmanageable sensory world. The logic is the same; find something powerful enough to override the noise or fill the silence. And the risk is the same; tolerance builds, the override needs to be stronger, and the thing that once helped starts to cost more than it gives. Harm reduction thinking is useful here; the aim is not to shame the strategy away, but to understand what it is doing and widen the options.
Signs It May Be Tipping
- You need longer gaps or bigger portions to get the same effect
- Rules are forming around it that feel hard to break
- Not being able to do it causes real distress
- It is affecting your energy, sleep, digestion or health
- People around you have started to notice or worry
- You find yourself hiding it
If any of this resonates, please talk to someone you trust, and consider reaching out for support. In England, Beat runs a free helpline on 0808 801 0677, with separate lines for Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. If you can, look for practitioners who understand Autistic interoception; a support plan that ignores sensory needs is unlikely to hold.
Widening The Toolkit
The goal is not to take the override away. It is to give the bodymind more ways to get what it is looking for, so that hunger and fullness do not have to carry the whole load.
When The World Is Too Loud
Look for other strong, focusing internal signals that do not draw on the body’s reserves; eg; a very cold drink, strong mint or crunchy food, slow deliberate breathing you can feel in the ribs, heavy work like pushing against a wall, or deep pressure from a weighted lap pad. Pair these with turning the environment down wherever possible; ear defenders, dimmer light, a quieter room.
When The World Goes Flat
Look for weight, warmth and pressure from the outside rather than the inside; eg; a weighted blanket, compression clothing, a warm bath, a hot drink held in both hands, rhythmic movement, or a familiar texture. These can offer the same “here are my edges” message that fullness gives.
Scaffolding The Basics
Tanya’s concept of lilipadding is helpful here; rather than leaping abruptly from overwhelm to “go and eat a proper meal”, we can move attention back towards food in small, associative steps. My own practice of nesting helps too; keeping food and drink within reach of wherever our monotropic flow happens, so eating does not demand a split in attention. When the basics are scaffolded, the body is less likely to reach for its emergency signals.
Closing Thoughts
Our bodies are ecosystems, not machines. When the external world floods us or drains us, the internal world finds ways to rebalance; sometimes elegant, sometimes costly. Interoceptive stimming with hunger and fullness is one of those ways. It deserves curiosity, not shame, and it deserves honest conversation about the price it can carry.
If this post has resonated, I would love to hear how you experience interoceptive stimming, and what has helped. You can join the conversation in NeuroHub Connect, or submit your own writing to NeuroHub Zine.
Further reading
- Interoception: Knowing Yourself Inside and Out, Reframing Autism
- Beat: eating disorder support
