The idea of a calming meditation can be overwhelming to many. Sitting still with your thoughts is intimidating, especially in a world that glorifies being busy and hustling non-stop.

But with the immense physical and mental health benefits of meditation, it’s worth a shot.

Maybe you’ve tried meditation before but haven’t found it helpful or thought it just wasn’t for you. But maybe, you just need to try a different approach to meditating. Enter the body scan meditation.

What is a Body Scan Meditation?

A body scan meditation is a fantastic type of mindfulness practice that helps bring awareness to different parts of your body.

In a full body scan, you pay specific attention or “bring awareness” to every single part of your body, from your head to your toes.

The goal is to be able to notice how each part of your body is feeling without judgment.

Benefits of a Body Scan Meditation

Feel like you’re spending most of the day on auto-pilot, ignoring mental and physical cues from your body that you’re tired or stressed?

We’ve all been there. Body scans are beneficial for bringing yourself back to the present moment. They also have multiple physical and mental health benefits.

Lower Stress Levels

It helps people manage negative emotional feelings (like sadness, anger, and stress). This is important because if you're constantly stressed, cortisol, the stress hormone, stays critically high.

This can lead to various problems such as weight gain, poor sleep health, difficulty focusing, high blood pressure, and a weak immune system. High levels of cortisol keep you in a state where you feel like you can't relax.

Regular body scan meditation helps lower cortisol levels, bringing you back to a better state of health.

Decrease Anxiety

You may not even know you're holding onto anxiety until you start paying attention to your body during a body scan meditation.

Once you find an area of tension, you can learn how to release it and work on dealing with anxiety better moving forward.

Promotes Better Sleep

Getting a good night's sleep is essential for physical and mental health. Not getting enough can lead to health complications such as high blood pressure, diabetes, anxiety, and depression.

Body scan meditation can help reduce tension and anxiety that may keep you awake. Lying awake at night is often caused by racing thoughts and worries, and body scan meditation is a way to relax as part of a healthy bedtime routine.

Increased Self-Awareness

One great benefit of mindfulness meditation is becoming more aware. Body scan meditation is mindfulness that makes you notice what you're feeling instead of pushing those thoughts deep down.

If you're anxious, you may notice your heart beating rapidly, have an upset stomach, or feel restless.

Body scans help you realize why you have these symptoms, so you can improve your overall well-being.

Reduce Chronic Pain

If you experience pain in the body that lasts longer than three months, this is called chronic pain. While the pain is felt physically, it can also have psychological complications, such as being more likely to suffer depression, anxiety, and even suicide.

This is why managing chronic pain as soon as possible is critical. While body scan meditation will not stop the pain, it can relieve chronic pain in some people and help you deal with anxiety and depression symptoms.

Improve Focus

Body scan meditation encourages you to pay attention to your bodily sensations, focus on each body part, and become more aware of what's happening in your mind and body.

This form of mindfulness will greatly improve your attention and focusing skills, which is extremely helpful when dealing with situations in the future.

Aids Relaxation

One of the greatest benefits of body scan meditation is that it helps you to relax. Whether you suffer chronic stress or just feel general stress day to day, holding in tension and anxiety can lead to heightened cortisol levels.

This can lead to pain, insomnia, inflammation, gastrointestinal issues, and many other health problems. Many types of mindfulness meditation, including body scan meditation, wake up the parasympathetic nervous system which helps you to relax.

Taking a few deep breaths, like you're encouraged to during a body scan, will help decrease tension and promote a feeling of calm.

How Do I Practice Body Scan Meditation?

Like other forms of meditation, you can easily customize body scan meditation to make it work for you. Some people prefer self-guided meditations, focusing on how each part of their body feels.

How quickly you go through your body parts and the specificity with which you do so is up to you.

Some people prefer to do a quick five-minute meditation, and others prefer to spend longer tuning into specific parts of their body (for example, not only the feet but each toe).

If you don’t know where to start or how to do a body scan meditation, it’s helpful to try a guided body scan meditation.

Someone is telling you what part of your body to focus on and when it’s time to move on to the next. Try this approach if you find your thoughts wandering all over the place.

Tip: look up body scan scripts to find the best one that works for you!

Take a look at these basic steps to perform a body scan meditation:

• Sit on a chair or lie down in a comfortable position
• Take a deep breath into your belly while keeping your shoulders relaxed
• With each breath, let your belly expand and contract.
• Start to bring awareness to your body. Do a quick body scan from your feet up to your head.
• Notice how your toes feel, then your feet and ankles. If you feel any tension or pain, accept the pain and your thoughts toward the pain, and continue to breathe through it
• Continue your body scan upwards through the whole body. Pay attention to where you notice pain or tension
• The goal of body scan meditation is not to eliminate the pain but to send a breath to those tight areas to relieve tension and help to improve overall well being
• By bringing awareness to where you hold pain and tension and observing thoughts, you can send a breath to that area, even when you're not meditating

Types of Body Scan Meditations

One of the best parts about body scans is that you can customize the length and content of each meditation.

You can do a self-guided or guided meditation (following a video, audio, or written script), and there are even meditations specifically for kids.

You can even find specific relaxing body scan meditations to help you sleep better. Whatever you need help with, there is a type of mindfulness meditation to suit you.

How Do You Do a Body Scan for Anxiety?

Anxiety is your body getting overwhelmed with too much stress all at once. It can happen to the best of us at some point in our lives. But, if anxiety is starting to affect your everyday life, a mindfulness meditation practice, including a body scan, can help.

Various mindfulness techniques help relieve anxiety because they teach you to be aware and not overly reactive to what's happening around you.

This helps to reduce stress and steady out your emotional state, allowing you to deal with what is thrown at you with a calmer approach.

Follow this simple body scan meditation for stress and anxiety:

• Take a few moments to be grateful for being here
• Perform a mindful check-in with the body, taking note of any sensations and any areas of tightness
• Now bring your attention back to the breath. Focus on the inhale and exhale, feeling the abdomen rise and fall
• On the next breath, direct your focus to scan the body. With each breath, notice any physical sensations, as well as feeling into your mood and emotions
• Notice how your entire body feels from the toes up to the head and facial muscles
• Whatever emotions you feel, good and bad, aim to acknowledge them and let them be
• Be kind to anxious thoughts and know they will pass. Know that you will experience worries and fears, and the practice of mindfulness is here not to try and bury the feelings but to let things be and potentially find the underlying cause
• Don't try to overanalyze. Just notice what's there and let it be with compassion. If your attention wanders, gently bring it back to the present moment
• After a mindful inquiry, gently bring your attention back to your breath. When you feel ready, slowly open your eyes and thank yourself for gently facing your anxiety as best, you can

How Do You Feel After a Body Scan?

Regular body scan meditation can help you feel better connected to your body and have greater self-awareness.

You should feel more relaxed and better focused and see an improvement in your general mental health. You will see improved wellness quite quickly, even if you only practice for a few minutes daily.

Can Body Scan Meditation Help with Post Traumatic stress disorder?

Randomized controlled trials have shown that mindful breathing and body scans positively affect veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

While the study showed increased psychological well-being in the mindfulness group, more detailed tests must be undertaken to determine what works best for different people.

While mindfulness-based stress reduction is safe, if you have PTSD or generalized anxiety disorder, it's advised to seek professional medical advice before taking part in any meditation programs.

Tips for Body Scan Meditations

The thought of regular mindfulness meditation practice may seem daunting to begin with. But studies suggest that it has huge benefits for the body and mind. Here are a few simple tips on making body scan meditation a part of your life without getting overwhelmed.

Create a Routine

The more you practice body scan meditation, the easier it will be to get back to a calm state when stressed. Set a time and place for your meditation practice that works with your schedule. Over time, your body and mind will become conditioned to the routine.

Don't Worry About Perfection

Don’t worry about doing it perfectly; remember to be non-judgemental about what comes up during a body scan. There is no “right” way to do it; find the length/type that works for you.

Choose a Time That Works for You

Some people like to meditate in the morning and others in the afternoon. Some people get the most benefit before bed because it improves sleep quality. Try out different times and see which you prefer.

Aim for a Few Minutes Initially and Build Up

Body scan meditation has many physical benefits, including stress reduction. To help release tension, start with a minute scanning your body and build up the length of your practice when it feels right. If you force yourself to do too much before you're ready, this may have the opposite effect and increase your stress levels.

Use a Guided Meditation to Start

We often have deep-set judgments about our physical selves, making it hard to relax when mentally scanning ourselves. To stay in the present moment, it's often helpful to use a meditation app, a podcast, or a YouTube video to guide the way.

The best thing about body scan meditation is that you can make it work for you. Start with mini body scans and build up to 30-minute sessions if that feels right. The important thing to remember is that each session is about you and your needs, whatever they may be.

Try out a body scan meditation or any other of our helpful meditations on Better Sleep today.