Guide: Fully in your body

Some days happen entirely in your head. Organising, remembering, thinking ahead, cushioning, and by the evening you notice: you don't even know how your own feet feel. Your body has been carrying you all day and has become invisible in the process.

The body scan reverses that. In the app, Fully in your body guides you with a calm voice through eight stations, from your feet to your face, at your own pace or a set one. Here is the exercise to read up on, so you can do it entirely without guidance too.

Why it works

The exercise trains exactly the ability that goes first under ongoing stress: sensing your own body from the inside. Experts call this interoception. If you only notice tension, hunger and exhaustion once they're huge, you always react too late, both with yourself and with your child.

Two things happen as you move through it. Your attention gets a slow, fixed route and stops jumping around. And every station is only noticed, never judged or fixed: cold feet are allowed to just be cold feet. It is exactly this intentionless noticing that lets the body switch from alarm mode into calm. Not as a trick, but because nothing more is being asked of it.

What it gives you

Done regularly, your body starts reporting back earlier: you notice rising tension in the afternoon instead of only at the blow-up in the evening. Many people also use the body scan as a falling-asleep exercise, because it replaces circling thoughts with a fixed route. And it is the quietest exercise in the collection: nothing to do, only to feel.

Here is how

1. Lie down and arrive

Lie on your back, bed, sofa or floor, arms resting loosely beside your body. Eyes closed or gazing softly at the ceiling. Two calm breaths, without steering anything. There is nothing to achieve here.