What Does Self-Awareness Have to Do with Spatial Awareness?
- Jul 23
- 12 min read
For over two decades my work pointed in one direction: inward. Somatic education, neurosomatic practice, teaching people to notice what was happening inside their own bodies and to build the capacity to work with it. I tracked how nervous systems change over time, in real environments, with real people, across thousands of hours.
Now my work points outward. How environments shape the people inside them. How light, sound, proportion, texture, and the presence of other humans alter someone's physiological state before they've formed a single thought about where they are.
I used to think of these as two chapters. But now I think they're the same story approached from opposite ends.
A question that keeps coming up for me when I talk with developers lately is whether how much a space can shift someone is affected by how self-aware they are when they walk in.
And if there’s a positive effect, should that become an integral part of how we design?
Three things we keep collapsing into one
The industry is already having part of this conversation. There's real and growing interest in designing for nervous system regulation, and that's a genuine step forward from designing purely for aesthetics or amenity.
But I think we're collapsing three different things into one word, and they're not the same.
The first is regulation. A space downshifts someone's physiology. Their breathing lengthens, their shoulders drop, their system moves toward something closer to baseline. This can happen entirely without their knowledge. They leave feeling better and couldn't tell you why.
The second is awareness of the shift. The person perceives it while it's happening. They notice the change in themselves, in real time, as the environment does its work, which could garner appreciation and even enhance memorability.
The third is self-knowledge. Whether the person knows what they actually needed in the first place and can help themselves to that end. Do they know why they're really there? Do they know if what they think they want and need and what their system is asking for are the same thing?
These are not degrees of the same phenomenon. They're distinct, and each one changes what a space is capable of doing.
The machinery is shared
Before going further into what any of this means for design, it's worth establishing why self-awareness and spatial awareness are connected at all.
Interoception is the perception of your internal state. Hunger, heart rate, breath pattern, physical or mental tension, the felt sense of your own body’s messages. Exteroception is the perception of everything outside you, through the classical senses (some triggering physiological sequences pre-consciously).
We tend to treat these as separate systems, but research suggests otherwise.
The part of the brain called the insula appears to be where they meet. Studies on interoceptive accuracy have positioned the insula as a common region for the integration of interoception and exteroception, with a hierarchy within it: the posterior insula representing internal states, the anterior insula integrating those states with external sensory information (Koeppel et al.; Nguyen et al.)
What matters most for anyone designing environments, including the experiences within them, is the direction of influence. Exteroceptive cues, including touch, sound, and visual input, modulate interoceptive precision. The environment is not running alongside a person's internal experience. It is actively shaping how clearly they can perceive their own body (Critchley & Garfinkel)
Consider what this looks like in practice. Two people walk into the same lobby after the same long flight. One notices the drop in their shoulders, registers that the light is softer than the terminal they just left, feels their breathing lengthen. The other notices nothing at all, checks their phone, and later describes the place as fine. Both nervous systems responded. One of them had more access to the external information.
We design as though space is the only variable. It isn't. We're designing for a receiver whose sensitivity we’ve never measured and rarely consider.
You can't receive what you can't feel
This is the part where the research thins out, and I want to be honest about where the evidence ends and the open question begins.
What we do know is that people differ measurably in how much they take in from an environment. Environmental sensitivity is a recognized individual difference describing a person's capacity to perceive and process information about their surroundings, and it varies considerably from one person to the next. Some individuals are substantially more affected than others by identical conditions. This has been observed across species, which suggests a real biological basis rather than a matter of preference or temperament (Pluess).
We also know that interoceptive awareness is not fixed. It can be developed. Clinical approaches exist that are explicitly designed to teach it, building a person's ability to notice, tolerate, and interpret internal bodily signals as a trainable skill rather than an innate trait (Price & Hooven).
What we don't have is the study that connects them. Nobody, as far as I can find, has directly tested whether a person's interoceptive capacity predicts how much of an intentionally designed environment they actually receive.
That gap is the reason I'm writing this.
Because if the two are connected, and my experience strongly suggests they are, it changes what we think we're designing. It would mean the space is not the whole experience. It would mean the space is one half of an interaction, and the other half arrives already formed, carrying its own history, its own capacity, and its own level of access to itself.
We already accept this everywhere else. Nobody expects a piece of music to land identically on every listener. But in built environments we still tend to evaluate design as though the outcome lives entirely in the room.
Regulation without awareness
Regulation on its own is real and valuable. If a space reliably lowers physiological stress, that matters, and it matters more than most of what the hospitality industry currently measures.
But something is left unresolved, and I want to be careful here because this is exactly the kind of place where it's easy to overstate.
Someone can experience their nervous system downshift without consciously registering it and still be affected. Subconscious cues in spatial and experiential design can produce moments of awe and shift something in the brain that the person has no direct access to, which can help create memorability (hospitality’s golden ticket). They might sense that something changed without being able to name what. And that shift may move them a few steps along a path they were already trying to walk, toward something they were already reaching for— absolutely.
So it isn't that regulation without awareness does nothing. It clearly does something.
What's missing is the conscious authority to work with it during and afterward. Heightened awareness is what gives a person the ability to recognize state shifts, and what triggered them, and perhaps consciously return, deliberately ready to do something with the awareness once they're no longer in the space that produced it.
And here’s the honest limit of what we know. We can't objectively observe when new neural pathways form (not easily anyway). We can observe behavior changing in someone's daily life, later, when they're far away from the environment that started it. So what we can measure and what might actually be happening are not the same thing yet. That uncertainty is precisely why I'm interested in it.
Attention is the gate
Awareness is largely a question of where attention is directed.
Most people arrive somewhere with their attention still elsewhere. The last conversation, the commute, the unresolved thing from that morning. They walk through a door physically while cognitively still in a different room.
And most spaces meet that scattered attention with more demand. Wayfinding. Transactions to complete. Immediate preferences to decide on. Distracting sounds or lighting. Decisions about where to go, what to do with luggage, whether to sit or wait or ask. Each of these is small. Together they constitute a load, placed on someone at the exact moment they have the least capacity to carry it.
Attention Restoration Theory is useful here. Kaplan's distinction is between directed attention, which is effortful and depletes, and involuntary attention, which is effortless and lets the attentional system recover. Prolonged directed attention produces genuine mental fatigue. Experimental work has shown that exposure to restorative environments improves performance on sustained attention tasks afterward, while non-restorative environments do not (Kaplan, S.; Berto, R.)
The distinction matters because it separates two things that look similar from outside. A space can hold someone's attention by demanding it, or by offering something that requires no effort to take in. Both are engagement. Only one leaves the person’s nervous system better than when they arrived.
Which reframes what arrival actually is, and how much weight is truly on it. The first question a space asks is whether it will compete for a person's attention or gather it.
Sometimes a person is the threshold
Not all of this is architectural.
Human nervous systems synchronize. Heart rate, respiration, and heart rate variability spontaneously align between people, reflecting coupled autonomic activity that can buffer stress responses. Skin conductance synchrony has been linked to cooperative outcomes in real interactions. And emotional contagion is real. These transmissions happen through microexpressions, vocal prosody, and posture, all of it residing below conscious awareness and either disorienting or attuning us faster than thought (Behrens et al.; Hatfield et al.)
This means the person who greets someone at a door is not only delivering a service. They’re an integral part of the sensory environment, and their own regulatory state is being transmitted whether anyone intends it or not.
I've spent years training people in exactly this capacity, and I want to be clear about what it actually requires. It is not just warmth. It’s not friendliness or a scripted greeting or emotional labor performed on demand. It’s a genuine physiological state that another person's system can detect and, in the best cases, borrow from. Someone who is depleted, rushed, or braced can perform warmth flawlessly while transmitting something entirely different underneath it. The body reads what lies beneath.
This is where a great deal of otherwise thoughtful design falls apart. Warmth without infrastructure doesn't hold. Staff cannot transmit a regulated state they haven’t been supported to nurture or maintain. If nervous system attunement is going to function as a design element, it has to be trained, resourced, and built into operations rather than left to individual temperament or daily chance.
That means considering what the staff environment does to the people in it, what recovery is available to them, if they’re trained in self awareness and have tools for interoception, and whether the pace of the operation makes the state we're asking them to hold physiologically possible.
The part nobody is asking
Everything so far assumes we know what the individual needs.
We usually don't. And more often than anyone in this industry acknowledges, neither do they.
After twenty-five years of working with people’s bodies, minds and emotions, in private practice, in retreats, in five star hotels and jungle sanctuaries across multiple countries, the thing I know with the most certainty is that most people do not arrive knowing what state they're in. They might know what they think they want. They might even know what they think they need. But unless someone is unusually self-aware, those answers are rarely the same as what their system is actually asking for.
Someone exhausted may be convinced they need stimulation. Someone in chronic activation may simply call it stress and book something that will activate them further. Someone lonely may reach for productivity. And even when a person does arrive with genuine clarity, it can change completely after one good night of sleep, one honest conversation, one moment where they finally feel safe enough to exhale.
So here is the question I keep returning to, and the one I find genuinely unresolved.
If the individual doesn't know what shift they need, then who decides?
Because someone does. Either the brand decides, through the outcome it has designed for. Or the space decides, through whatever it happens to do to people regardless of intention. Or nobody decides and the person receives whatever they happen to receive.
This is a question about authority and agency in neuroarchitectural and experience design.
Designing toward a specific transformation is legitimate. A recovery-focused retreat is promising one thing. An adventure brand is promising another. Guests self-select, and there's real integrity in delivering on that promise consistently. But it's still a decision made on someone's behalf, about what they need, before they arrive.
The alternative, designing purely for the individual, sounds better until you sit with it. If a guest doesn't know what they need, designing around their stated preferences may just deliver them more of what they already have.
Which points toward a third possibility, and it's the one I'm most interested in.
Not designing an environment that regulates someone and hoping awareness follows from the calm. That may help. I suspect it does. But it's passive, and I don't think it goes far enough.
I mean building something into the experience that actively develops a person's capacity to sense themselves while they're in it. Deliberately heightening interoceptive awareness, not as a vague notion of mindfulness but as a real and specific skill: the ability to notice what's happening in your own body and to read what it's asking for.
And not as a single question at check-in. The answer keeps moving. What do I need right now, on arrival. What do I need after my state has shifted once. What do I need on the third day, after two shifts occur. What do I need if nothing has moved at all and I'm still carrying what I came with.Some properties already have a version of an answer to this. Wellness guides, in-house psychologists, daily check-ins with someone who assesses you and directs you toward what you should be doing. There's real value in that, and I don't want to dismiss it.
But it's a different thing than what I'm describing. In that model, the knowledge sits with the expert. The guest receives a directive, follows it, and leaves without any more ability to read themselves than when they arrived.
What I'm interested in is autonomy. Building the person's own capacity to sense what's happening in them, so the authority stays where it belongs, and so it doesn't disappear at checkout.
If a person's ability to receive is a variable in the outcome, then developing that ability during the stay isn't an add-on to the design. It's part of what makes everything else work.
That's a different design problem than regulation. It may be a harder one.
The question I keep handing to people
None of this is solved. These are questions the field hasn't fully asked yet, and I've started asking them out loud in conversations with developers and operators because I want to know what other people think.
The reaction is usually the same. A pause, and then: wait, who does decide that? Because someone is deciding, in every project, whether anyone has named it or not.
A resort programs a schedule of activities that assumes guests arrive depleted and need restoration. Some of them arrive numb and need activation. The schedule decides.
A wellness property builds its entire arrival sequence around calm. Low light, soft sound, minimal stimulation. For the guest who has been under-stimulated and disconnected for months, that arrival confirms the state they came to escape. The sequence decides.
A residential development designs common areas to encourage social connection. For a resident whose system needs solitude before it can tolerate company, the design has made a choice on their behalf about what they need first. The layout decides.
None of these are failures of intention. They're all reasonable decisions made by thoughtful people. But each one is an answer to a question about someone else's internal state, made in advance, without the person present, and often without anyone acknowledging that a question was being answered at all.
If self-awareness determines how much a person can actually receive, then this stops being philosophical. It becomes a design decision sitting inside every project, made consciously or by default.
The possibility I keep returning to is that part of the design brief is helping the person arrive at their own answer. Not through instruction, not by asking someone to set an intention at check-in, not by handing them to an expert who will assess them and direct them. Through the environment itself, and through the people in it, and maybe even building experience protocol that helps build the person's own capacity to sense what they need, and to keep sensing it as it changes over the course of a stay.
Twenty-five years spent teaching people to notice themselves from the inside. And I’m now asking whether a space or experience design can do some of that work from the outside.
I don't think it's one or the other. I honestly think both are required. And I think the relationship between them is where the most interesting work in this field is going to happen.
So I'll ask it the way I've been asking it: who really decides what a person needs, and how they're going to get it?
References
Behrens, F., Snijdewint, J. A., Moulder, R. G., et al. (2020). Physiological synchrony is associated with cooperative success in real-life interactions. Scientific Reports, 10, 19609. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-76539-8
Berto, R. (2005). Exposure to restorative environments helps restore attentional capacity. Journal of Environmental Psychology, 25(3)https://www.researchgate.net/publication/301842468_Exposure_to_restorative_environments_helps_restore_attentional_capacityCritchley, H. D., & Garfinkel, S. N. (2017). Interoception and emotion. Current Opinion in Psychology, 17, 7–14.https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28950976/
Hatfield, E., Cacioppo, J. T., & Rapson, R. L. (1993). Emotional contagion. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 2(3)https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1111/1467-8721.ep10770953
Kaplan, S. (1995). The restorative benefits of nature: Toward an integrative framework. Journal of Environmental Psychology, 15(3)https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0272494495900012
Koeppel, C. J., Ruser, P., Kitzler, H., Hummel, T., & Croy, I. (2020). Interoceptive accuracy and its impact on neuronal responses to olfactory stimulation in the insular cortex. Human Brain Mapping, 41(11).https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32216126/
Nguyen, V. T., Breakspear, M., Hu, X., & Guo, C. C. (2015). Hierarchical integration of interoception and exteroception in the anterior insula during naturalistic emotional experience. Autonomic Neuroscience, 192.https://www.researchgate.net/publication/282841378_Hierarchical_integration_of_interoception_and_exteroception_in_the_anterior_insula_during_naturalistic_emotional_experience
Pluess, M. (2015). Individual differences in environmental sensitivity. Child Development Perspectives, 9(3)https://www.researchgate.net/publication/275367963_Individual_Differences_in_Environmental_Sensitivity
Price, C. J., & Hooven, C. (2018). Interoceptive awareness skills for emotion regulation: Theory and approach of Mindful Awareness in Body-Oriented Therapy (MABT). Frontiers in Psychology, 9, 798.https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.00798/full
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