Every somatic session I run produces a change that the person on the table can feel. What is harder to hand someone is a number, something outside their own perception that shows the shift actually happened. That is the appeal of the MAIA-2, the Multidimensional Assessment of Interoceptive Awareness. It is a validated research questionnaire, originally developed by Dr. Wolf Mehling and colleagues at the University of California, San Francisco, and it does not measure your mood or your stress level directly. It measures something more specific and, I would argue, more useful: how well you actually sense and work with what is happening inside your own body.
I use it with clients for the same reason I use engineering diagnostics on anything else. It gives you a baseline, it gives you a number to check against later, and it takes the conversation out of “I feel a little better, I think” and into something you can actually compare. This article walks through what each of the eight MAIA-2 factors measures, what research says about where most people land, and then a real before-and-after case from one client’s results.
Why does any of this matter?
Here is the part that answers the question you are probably already asking: why does any of this matter beyond curiosity? One of the more striking data points on interoception comes from a 2016 study published in Scientific Reports, which measured heartbeat-counting accuracy, a person’s ability to silently sense their own heartbeat without touching a pulse, in eighteen high-frequency traders on a London trading floor during the European sovereign debt crisis. The traders with the most accurate internal sense of their own heartbeat were also the most profitable. Not only that, but interoceptive accuracy predicted how many years a trader survived in the profession even more strongly than it predicted a single year of profit.
The researchers were direct about the limits of the finding: a field study like this cannot prove that interoception causes better trading, only that the two move together, and the sample was small and specific, eighteen men at one firm during one crisis. It is also worth being precise that this is not the same measure as the MAIA-2, and I do not want to overstate what it shows. But the direction of it lines up with something I see constantly in this work. Under real pressure, with real stakes, a clearer internal signal tends to produce a better decision, not a worse one.
What the MAIA-2 Actually Measures
The MAIA-2 is a 37-item questionnaire. Each item is rated from 0, meaning never, to 5, meaning always, and the items are grouped into eight subscales, each one capturing a different dimension of what researchers call interoceptive awareness: your ability to notice, interpret, and work with signals from inside your own body, things like tension, heart rate, breath, hunger, and discomfort. A quick note on the research itself: there are no universal clinical cutoffs for these scores, no official line where you cross from “bad” to “good.” Scores are meant to be read comparatively, against yourself over time or against published samples, not against a fixed pass or fail threshold. With that in mind, here is what each factor is actually measuring.
Noticing
Noticing is your basic awareness of body sensations, comfortable, uncomfortable, and neutral. A low score here generally means sensations have to get loud before you register them at all, which is common in people who have spent years operating from the neck up. A high score means you have a working sense of what is happening in your body in real time, not just in hindsight.
Not-Distracting
This one measures the opposite of what its name might suggest. It captures your tendency not to distract or push yourself away from pain or discomfort once you notice it. A low score means your default is to override discomfort and keep moving, which looks like resilience on the outside and is often just avoidance wearing a work ethic. A high score means you can stay present with an uncomfortable sensation instead of immediately reaching for a distraction.
Not-Worrying
Not-Worrying measures how much emotional distress gets attached to a physical sensation once you notice it. A low score means discomfort tends to spiral, a tight chest becomes a spiral of worry about what the tight chest means. A high score means you can notice discomfort without your mind immediately building a catastrophe around it.
Attention Regulation
This is your ability to sustain and direct attention toward body sensations on purpose, rather than only noticing them when they force their way in. A low score suggests your attention gets hijacked by sensation instead of being able to work with it deliberately. A high score means you can hold steady, useful attention on what your body is telling you, long enough to actually do something with the information.
Emotional Awareness
Emotional Awareness measures how clearly you can connect a physical sensation to the emotional state underneath it, recognizing that a knot in your stomach is nerves, or that shallow breathing is anxiety rather than just “something physical.” A low score here tends to leave people managing symptoms without ever identifying what they are symptoms of.
Self-Regulation
This is the factor I pay the closest attention to, because it measures your actual capacity to use body awareness to regulate distress, not just notice it. A low score means you can feel exactly what is happening in your body and still have no functional way to bring yourself back down from it. A high score means body awareness is doing real work for you: it is an actual tool for coming back to baseline, not just information you are stuck holding.
Body Listening
Body Listening measures how much you actively listen to your body for insight, using it as a source of information rather than something to manage or override. A low score often shows up in people who treat their body purely as infrastructure, something that should just run without requiring their attention. A high score means you consult your body the way you would consult any other reliable source of information.
Trusting
Trusting measures whether you experience your body as safe, not something working against you. A low score is common after periods of chronic stress or illness, when the body has spent long enough sending distress signals that it starts to feel like the enemy. A high score means there is a baseline sense of safety in your own skin, even when things are hard.
Where Research Says Most People Land
Because there is no fixed clinical cutoff, the most useful reference point is published research on general, non-clinical adult samples. One of the larger studies, a validation sample of over 1,000 non-clinical adults, found average scores clustering well below the ceiling of 5 across the board: Trusting around 3.6, Emotional Awareness around 3.5, Noticing around 3.4, and Not-Worrying around 3.4 on the higher end, with Attention Regulation around 2.9, Self-Regulation around 2.7, and Body Listening around 2.4 on the lower end. Not-Distracting came in lowest of all, around 2.2, which tracks with how common it is for people to override discomfort rather than sit with it.
The pattern worth watching for is not any single low number. It is the combination. Research on the measure notes that high scores on the pure awareness factors, Noticing, Emotional Awareness, and Body Listening, paired with low scores on the regulation and tolerance factors, Not-Distracting, Not-Worrying, and Self-Regulation, can mean something specific: a person who senses a great deal happening inside their body but has no functional way to work with what they are sensing. That combination tends to make body awareness feel like a liability instead of an asset. It is close to the exact pattern in the case below.
A Case Study: Five Sessions, One Dramatic Shift
One client came to Table Work in a high-commission exotic car sales role, the kind of job that runs entirely on adrenaline, performance, and constant pressure. The stress of it had gotten severe enough that he was checking himself into the emergency room nearly every week. He eventually stepped away from the job entirely and took eight months off. Before starting a new role, he came in for Table Work, five sessions total, and took the MAIA-2 both before we started and again afterward.
His first assessment told a clear story. His awareness scores were already relatively strong: Attention Regulation at 4.00, Emotional Awareness at 4.00, Noticing at 3.75, Trusting at 4.33. He could sense what was happening in his body, and clearly, but his regulation and tolerance scores told a very different story. Not-Distracting sat at 1.17, meaning his default under pressure was to override and push through physical warning signs rather than stay with them. Not-Worrying sat at 1.80, meaning that once discomfort broke through, it spiraled fast. And Self-Regulation sat at 0.25, just above the absolute floor of the scale, meaning he had almost no functional way to bring his body back down once it activated. He could feel everything and regulate almost none of it. That combination is, physiologically, a plausible way to end up in an emergency room on a regular basis.
His second assessment, taken after five sessions, showed a different pattern entirely. Self-Regulation moved from 0.25 to 5.00, the full range of the scale. Not-Distracting moved from 1.17 to 3.33. Not-Worrying moved from 1.80 to 4.20. His already-strong awareness scores held steady or improved further: Attention Regulation and Emotional Awareness both reached 5.00, Noticing rose to 4.50, Trusting rose to 4.67, and Body Listening rose from 2.67 to 3.00. In plain terms, the part of him that could sense his own stress did not change much, because it was already working. What changed was his capacity to actually do something with what he was sensing, instead of either overriding it or being flooded by it.
I want to be direct about what this is and is not. This is one person’s self-reported data from a single case, not a controlled study, and I am not claiming Table Work treats, cures, or prevents anything. What I can say plainly is that his numbers moved, by a wide margin, in the direction every one of the regulation-related factors is designed to measure, and he described himself as doing well heading into his new role. That is the kind of shift I want to be able to point to something concrete for, instead of just a feeling.
Frequently Asked Questions
- Is the MAIA-2 a diagnostic test? No. It does not diagnose any condition. It is a self-report research questionnaire measuring interoceptive awareness, your relationship to signals from inside your own body, not a clinical or medical assessment.
- Is a low score a bad sign? Not on its own. There are no fixed cutoffs for this measure, and scores are most useful compared against your own results over time rather than against some universal standard. A low score in one factor paired with high scores elsewhere, like the pattern in the case study above, tells you more than any single number does.
- Can this change quickly, or does it take years? It varies by person and by which factor you are looking at. The case above showed a large shift after five sessions, but that is one person’s result, not a guaranteed timeline for anyone else.
Curious Where You Land?
You can take the MAIA-2 assessment yourself and see your own eight scores. If you want to work through what they mean the way the client above did, hands-on, one session at a time, that is exactly what Table Work is built for. If you would rather build regulation on your own schedule first, Mindworx is the self-guided version of the same underlying work.