Body Scan Meditation

One of the things I tell my patients is that your body is always talking to you — but most of the time, you’re not listening. Anxiety doesn’t just live in your thoughts. It lives in the tightness across your shoulders, the knot in your gut, the shallow breathing you don’t notice until someone points it out.

A body scan meditation is a practice designed to close that gap. It trains you to tune into what your body is actually experiencing, moment by moment, without judgment and without trying to change anything. And that simple skill — noticing what’s happening in your body — turns out to be one of the most powerful tools for working with anxiety and habits.

Why Body Awareness Matters

Here’s something that surprised even me early in my career: many of my patients with anxiety couldn’t tell me what anxiety felt like in their bodies. They could describe their worried thoughts in great detail, but when I asked, “Where do you feel that in your body right now?” they’d go blank.

This isn’t unusual. Most of us spend our lives living from the neck up, completely disconnected from the physical signals our bodies are constantly sending. The scientific term for this internal body awareness is interoception — the ability to perceive what’s happening inside your own body. Research shows that people with better interoceptive awareness tend to have better emotional regulation, less anxiety, and greater overall well-being.

A body scan meditation is essentially interoception training. Each time you bring your attention to a body part and notice what’s there — tension, warmth, numbness, buzzing, nothing at all — you’re strengthening the neural circuits that connect you to your own physical experience.

How Body Scans Help Break Habit Loops

In the context of my work on habit loops, body scans serve a specific and critical function: they help you catch the trigger before the behavior fires.

Every habit loop starts with a trigger. For anxiety, that trigger often shows up in the body first — a flutter in your chest, a clenching in your jaw, a sinking feeling in your stomach. If you can’t feel these signals, you miss the trigger entirely. By the time you notice anything, you’re already deep into the habitual behavior — worrying, scrolling, eating, avoiding.

But if you’ve trained yourself to notice body sensations through a practice like the body scan, you gain an early warning system. You feel the trigger as it arises. And in that gap between trigger and behavior, you have a choice: follow the old pattern, or try something different — like curiosity.

This is exactly the process I describe in Unwinding Anxiety. First gear is mapping the habit loop. A body scan helps you get better at the mapping.

Guided Body Scan Meditation

Follow along with this guided body scan meditation. You can practice sitting in a chair, lying down, or in any comfortable position.

How to Do a Body Scan — Step by Step

Whether you follow the guided video above or practice on your own, here’s the basic structure of a body scan:

1. Find a comfortable position. Sitting or lying down, whatever allows you to be still without too much discomfort. Close your eyes if that feels right, or soften your gaze.

2. Start at your feet. Bring your attention to the soles of your feet. What do you notice? Warmth? Pressure? Tingling? Nothing? Whatever’s there is fine — you’re not looking for anything specific.

3. Move slowly upward. Shift your attention to your ankles, then your lower legs, then your knees. At each area, pause and notice. You’re not trying to relax these areas (though that might happen). You’re just paying attention.

4. Continue through your body. Move through your thighs, hips, belly, lower back, chest, upper back, shoulders, arms, hands, neck, face, and the top of your head. Take a few breaths at each area.

5. Notice without judging. You’ll likely find areas of tension, discomfort, or numbness. The practice is to get curious about these sensations rather than trying to fix them. What does that tightness in your shoulders actually feel like? Is it constant or does it pulse? This is the same curiosity-based awareness that drives lasting change in habit loops.

6. End with a full-body check-in. After scanning all the way through, expand your awareness to hold your whole body at once. Notice how you feel compared to when you started — again, without judgment.

Body Scans and Somatic Anxiety

For people who experience anxiety primarily in their bodies — racing heart, chest pressure, digestive issues, muscle tension, shortness of breath — the body scan is particularly valuable. This kind of somatic anxiety can be confusing because the physical sensations themselves become triggers for more anxiety. You feel your heart racing, you interpret it as something wrong, and that interpretation triggers a wave of worry. The worry creates more physical tension, which your brain interprets as more danger. It’s a classic anxiety habit loop.

The body scan breaks this cycle at the root. When you practice regularly, you develop a different relationship with physical sensations. Chest tightness stops being an alarm bell and becomes just… a sensation. Butterflies in your stomach aren’t a signal of impending doom — they’re just butterflies. This shift from reacting to body sensations to observing them is profound, and it doesn’t require years of practice. Even a few weeks of regular body scans can begin to rewire this response.

Building a Body Scan Practice

I recommend starting with the guided video above 3-4 times per week. As you get more comfortable with the practice, you can do shorter, informal body scans throughout your day — a quick check-in with your body before a meeting, during a lunch break, or when you notice stress building.

The body scan also pairs well with other mindfulness exercises. Try combining it with the RAIN exercise — use the body scan to identify what’s present, then use RAIN to work with whatever you find. Or follow a body scan with a working with stress meditation if you discover significant tension during the scan.

The body scan is a foundational mindfulness practice that helps build the awareness needed to recognize habit loops as they happen. By tuning into physical sensations — tension, restlessness, tightness — you learn to notice cravings and anxiety in your body before they drive automatic behaviors. This is the same kind of curiosity-based awareness that my research has shown to be effective for breaking habits.

Try the RAIN exercise next, or explore all of Dr. Jud’s guided mindfulness exercises.