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Body scan
Fifteen minutes of moving attention slowly from your feet to your head, without trying to change anything on the way. The oldest and most reliable of the wind-down practices, and the one that most often ends before it finishes because the person doing it fell asleep.
There are no recordings on this page yet. TempoLife does not host narrated audio for these sessions, so rather than show a player with nothing behind it, every session is published in full as a script you can read, follow or record yourself. Audio versions are planned; when a recording exists, a player appears here automatically.
When to use it
In bed, lights off, when the body is tired but the head has not caught up. Also useful in the afternoon when you have been sitting still for hours and cannot work out why you feel restless.
When not to
This is a rest practice, not a treatment. If lying still and paying attention to your body reliably makes you anxious rather than calmer — which happens to some people, and is not a personal failing — do the coherent-breathing session instead, which gives attention something external to hold on to.
The session
Read it through once before you start, so you are not reading while you are doing it. The times on the left are where each instruction lands if you keep an unhurried pace; they are a guide and nothing goes wrong if you are a minute out.
| Time | What to do |
|---|---|
| 0:00 | Lie on your back with your arms a little away from your sides and your palms up or down, whichever is comfortable. A pillow under the knees takes the strain off the lower back and makes fifteen minutes much easier. Close your eyes. |
| 0:30 | Take three slow breaths, letting the out-breath be longer than the in-breath, and then stop managing the breath entirely. From here on the breath is something you notice, not something you do. |
| 1:00 | Feet. Bring your attention to the sole of your left foot. Not to an idea of your foot — to whatever sensation is actually there: pressure, warmth, the seam of a sock, or nothing at all. Nothing at all is a perfectly good answer and you should not go looking for more. Spend about thirty seconds there, then move to the toes, then the top of the foot and the ankle. |
| 2:30 | Left leg. Calf, shin, knee, thigh. Move slowly enough that each part gets a few breaths. If you notice tension somewhere, do not try to release it. Just let your attention rest on it, and move on when you are ready. Half the time it goes on its own; the other half it does not, and that is fine too. |
| 4:00 | Right leg. Foot, ankle, calf, knee, thigh, in the same order and at the same pace. Your attention will wander somewhere in here — into a plan, a conversation, tomorrow. When you notice, note where it went, and return to the last part of the body you remember. There is no penalty and no need to start again. |
| 6:00 | Hips, lower back and stomach. These are the places most people hold tension without knowing it. Let the weight of your hips press into the mattress. Let the stomach be soft, which usually means letting it be rounder than you would choose. |
| 8:00 | Chest and upper back. Feel the ribs move. Notice, in passing, that the breath is doing this without instruction and has been the whole time. |
| 9:30 | Hands and arms. Fingertips first, then palms, wrists, forearms, elbows, upper arms — left and right together is fine here. Hands often turn out to be gripping something that is not there. |
| 11:00 | Shoulders and neck. Do not roll them or stretch. Simply notice how high the shoulders are sitting and let the mattress take them. The neck usually softens a few seconds after the shoulders do. |
| 12:30 | Face. Jaw, tongue, lips, cheeks, the muscles around the eyes, the forehead. The jaw and the space between the eyebrows hold more than anywhere else. Let the tongue rest heavy in the mouth and let the teeth come apart. |
| 14:00 | The whole body at once. Stop travelling and hold everything in one piece: the weight of you on the bed, the air on your skin, the breath moving somewhere in the middle of it. Stay there. |
| 15:00 | If you are going to sleep, do not do anything else. If you are getting up, wiggle your fingers and toes first, then roll onto one side and take your time. |
Notes
The instruction that matters most is the one people ignore: you are not trying to relax. Trying to relax is an effort, and effort is what you are here to put down. Attention without agenda is the whole technique.
Falling asleep partway through is not a failure of the session. If you are doing it at bedtime, it is the session working.
Recording it yourself
Since there is no narration here, the most useful thing many people do with this page is record it. It takes one pass on a phone voice recorder and it works better than you expect, for a reason worth knowing: a familiar voice is less interesting than a stranger's, and less interesting is exactly what you want at bedtime. Read at about two-thirds of your normal speaking speed, leave the pauses longer than feels comfortable, and do not re-record it because you stumbled — the stumble will not matter to you at 23:00.
These are relaxation practices, not treatment, and nothing here diagnoses anything. Do them sitting or lying down — never while driving, cycling or in water. Stop if you feel light-headed. Breath holds in particular are worth checking with a clinician first if you have a heart or lung condition or you are pregnant. Persistent trouble sleeping, loud snoring with pauses, or sleepiness that does not lift after a full night are reasons to see a doctor rather than to try another breathing pattern.
Frequently asked questions
How long does it take?
About 15 minutes as written. The timings in the left column are a guide, not a metronome — running two minutes over is not a mistake.
Do I need the recording?
There is no recording of this session and the page does not pretend otherwise. Read the script once before you start so you are not reading during it, or record it in your own voice, which many people find works better than a stranger's.
When should I do it?
In bed, lights off, when the body is tired but the head has not caught up. Also useful in the afternoon when you have been sitting still for hours and cannot work out why you feel restless.
Other sessions
Coherent breathing, 5.5 breaths a minute
The plainest of the paced-breathing patterns: in for five and a half seconds, out for five and a half, for ten minutes. No holds, no counting past six, nothing to get wrong.
4-7-8 breathing
In for four, hold for seven, out for eight, four times through. A short, deliberately lopsided pattern for the ten minutes after you get into bed and find your mind still running.
Box breathing, four by four
Four seconds in, four held, four out, four held. A square, symmetrical pattern that is easier to hold on to than an uneven one when your attention keeps sliding away.
Non-sleep deep rest, 20 minutes
A longer lie-down that keeps you just the right side of awake: body scan, a little breath work, then a stretch of doing nothing at all. Twenty minutes in the afternoon, or a first-aid session on a day after a bad night.
Sleep story: the night train
A slow, deliberately uneventful story to read — or have read to you — in bed. Nothing happens in it, which is the point: it gives the part of your mind that wants a narrative something dull and pleasant to hold while the rest of you stops.
All sessions · Chronotype questionnaire · Sleep calculator · Sleep results
Source: Zaccaro A, et al. How breath-control can change your life: a systematic review on psycho-physiological correlates of slow breathing. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience 2018;12:353 · checked 2026-09-02
Source: NHS — Breathing exercises for stress · checked 2026-09-02
See whether the wind-down changes the night
TempoLife reads sleep from Health Connect, so a fortnight of doing this before bed becomes a measurable change in when you fall asleep.