The body scan, rebuilt for sleep

Part of our guide to self-hypnosis for sleep.

The body scan is the most widely recommended technique for falling asleep, and the most widely abandoned. People try it, find themselves lying there cataloguing their left ankle at one in the morning, and conclude it doesn't work for them.

Usually the technique isn't the problem. The version they were given is.

Why the meditation version keeps you awake

The body scan comes from mindfulness practice, where the goal is sustained, non-judgemental awareness. In that setting the instructions make sense: notice each region precisely, observe without changing anything, and if you drift off, gently return.

Read those three instructions again with sleep in mind.

Notice precisely is a demand for attention — a task with a standard to meet. Observe without changing keeps you in the position of an examiner watching a subject, which is a form of alertness. And if you drift, return explicitly treats falling asleep as an error to be corrected.

A meditation body scan is doing exactly what it was built to do: keeping you awake and aware. It is an excellent practice. It is simply pointed the other way.

For sleep, drifting off is not the failure. It is the outcome.

The four changes that make it a sleep technique

One direction, downward. Meditation scans often travel up from the feet, or up and back down. For sleep, go from the head to the feet and stop. The direction reinforces the sense of descending, and there is no second half waiting to pull you back.

Release, don't observe. Instead of notice the sensation in your shoulders, use let the shoulders go. You are not gathering information about your body; you are handing weight over to the bed, region by region.

Nothing to report. Drop the instruction to notice what you find. If a region feels like nothing at all, that is a perfectly good result — move on. Hunting for a sensation that isn't there is the single most common way this technique turns into work.

Permission to leave early. Begin by telling yourself you don't need to reach your feet. Most nights you won't, and that is the point. A scan you must complete is a task; a scan you may abandon is a slope.

The sequence

Roughly twelve regions, one slow out-breath each. Read it once now so you don't have to remember it later — the order matters less than the direction.

1. Forehead and eyes. Let the space between the eyebrows widen. Let the eyes rest heavily in their sockets rather than holding themselves closed.
2. Jaw. Let the teeth come apart, just slightly. Most people hold more here than anywhere else and never notice.
3. Throat and neck. Let the head be fully carried by the pillow. Nothing to hold up.
4. Shoulders. Let them fall away from the ears — and then a little further than you expected.
5. Upper arms, forearms, hands. Down the whole arm in one movement. Let the fingers curl however they want to.
6. Chest. Don't manage the breathing. Just let the ribs be moved by it.
7. Stomach. Let it be soft. Almost everyone holds this one slightly in, all day.
8. Lower back and hips. Let the weight sink into the mattress rather than resting on it.
9. Thighs. Heavy, and warm.
10. Knees and calves. Nothing to do here. Let them be dead weight.
11. Ankles and feet. Let them fall outward, the way they do in sleep.
12. The whole body at once. One long out-breath, and everything at the same time.

If you are still awake after the twelfth, don't start again from the top. Stay with the last one — the whole body, heavy, one slow exhale at a time — and let it become repetitive enough to be boring.

If you feel nothing when you get there

A large number of people arrive at "notice your left foot" and find an unremarkable blank. This is normal, and it is not a deficiency.

Interoception — the sense of your own internal state — varies enormously between people, in the same way that visual imagery does. If nothing comes, use one of these instead of hunting.

Move it slightly, then stop. Tense the region for two seconds, release, and follow what happens as it settles. The contrast creates a sensation where stillness gave you none.

Use touch instead of sensation. Rather than the inside of the calf, attend to where the calf meets the mattress. Contact is easier to locate than internal state.

Use words instead of feeling. Simply saying heavy internally as you pass each region does much of the work, even if no sensation arrives to confirm it. The instruction alone shifts muscle tone slightly, and that is enough.

Two common problems

Thoughts arrive and you lose your place. They will, several times. Don't restart — carry on from wherever you noticed you'd left. Restarting turns the scan into something with a correct execution, and correctness is arousing. Losing your place and continuing anyway is the practice.

You reach your feet fully awake. Then the scan did its job on tension and something else is keeping you up — usually thoughts rather than muscle. Switch tools rather than repeating this one. If you are still awake twenty minutes later, get out of bed rather than lying there accumulating frustration.

Where it fits, and where it doesn't

The body scan is the best tool in this cluster when the problem is physical: a body still braced from the day, restless legs that are simply tense, that wired feeling after a late finish. It is the weakest tool when the problem is a mind rehearsing a conversation — for that, something with a rhythm to follow works better.

And as always: this is a technique for ordinary bad nights. Three months of poor sleep, waking unrefreshed after enough hours, or waking gasping are medical questions, and a relaxation exercise will only postpone the answer.

You'll find this scan, written out in full to record in the script library.

Keep reading

Breathing for sleep: 4-7-8 or 4-6? — pair the descent with a longer out-breath.

A sleep script to record in your own voice — the full text of a session, including this sequence.