The Self Scan Exercise

Imagine that you are nervous about a big presentation you have to give. You don’t feel prepared – it’s on a topic that you don’t know well, but it’s a presentation that’s important to your organization or to your career. You have thoughts about what might happen if you don’t do well; people might be upset with you. You experience some fear or anxiety, and there’s tension in your shoulders. How do you react?

One possible approach is to go deeper into the scenarios (scripts) offered by your emotions. You feel as though people really are angry at you for failing at the presentation, and you imagine yourself responding to their imaginary comments. It seems to you that the “you” in your imagined scenario is you. That is, the simulated self that’s talking to the simulated others is, for the moment, just as real to you as the flesh-and-blood self that you can see in the mirror. Perhaps it’s more real, because dealing with the imaginary problems of the simulated self seems more important than living in the present moment. This approach has the advantage of fully exploring possible avenues and future possibilities – or does it?

What usually happens, in my experience, is that we think we’ve fully explored these possibilities, but then the future delivers us some other alternative that we hadn’t thought of. Then all of this anxiety was wasted and merely served to suck time and energy away from other tasks that we could have been doing or pastimes we could have been enjoying.

What we need is a scriptless answer to this situation: one that assembles all of the relevant data without having to put it inside a big story. This exercise uses:

Naming emotions – in order to connect to other instances of the same emotion throughout our experience.
Describing a history – in order to further build those connections.
Identifying control vs. non-control – in order to acknowledge how this situation might be different from others with the same emotion.

This exercise:

Is meant to emulate a therapy session. Naming emotions, exploring personal history, and connecting to values are all things that one might encounter in therapy. It is “like therapy” but does not replace therapy. If anything, it likely works best if you are simultaneously engaging in therapy regularly, because the simultaneous therapy provides a pattern of dealing with emotions that you can mirror or emulate in the exercise. However, a therapist cannot be with you in the moment when you are feeling an emotion. You have to be there for yourself at that time.
Encourages self-compassion. Rather than blaming ourselves, we can show ourselves some forgiveness or mercy – as we would with another person who needs our support. Facing emotions involves vulnerability, but this can reduce our anxiety, shame, and impulsive reactions over time.

The essay will walk through each step, show why it matters, and suggest tips for making the exercise work.

The Five Steps in Detail

Step 1: Name your thoughts

Write or speak your thoughts aloud, without judgment. You can find a balance between a too-brief summary (“I’m thinking about my presentation”) and a too-extensive narration (getting sucked into the alternative reality script of what happens if the presentation fails). The goal is not to solve the problem of the potential presentation failure, but just to be aware of what you are thinking about.

This creates distance (also called decentering or dereification) so you can observe thoughts rather than be controlled by them. You recognize that the “you” in the thoughts is not the real you. Dereification occurs at the metanarrative level – that is, it is like a critique or reinterpretation of the “you” story that you are telling.

You can imagine a picture where, in one case, you identify the imaginary person in the thought experiment as yourself; and in another case, you recognize that the real you is the flesh-and-blood self that is imagining this imaginary person. That’s dereification.

(You can then go on to recognize that the flesh-and-blood self you see in the mirror is just an image made of light that is impinging on your visual system – it isn’t yourself either. And your idea of the visual system is just something you learned about in science class. Take this far enough, and perhaps it becomes anatta – the Buddhist idea of non-self, which is also a metanarrative-level idea.)

It is helpful to be able to name the thoughts correctly. Sometimes, we may have difficulty naming the thing we are actually concerned about; this might make it less likely that the exercise will work. Talking to another person can sometimes help us identify the real problem.

Step 2: Name your feelings

Use precise, specific labels to name your feelings. Don’t just say “I am afraid” every time you feel something like fear. Vary your labels as appropriate to the situation – you can say “apprehension,” “anxiety,” “fear,” or “terror” depending on the strength of the feeling.

This step connects your feelings to words in order to reflect on the new data. It also offers dereification and provides you with information about what you are feeling. One purpose of identifying feelings is that the more discrepant data you have, the more easily you can liberate yourself from any script.

You don’t have to identify why you are feeling a particular feeling unless you are sure. Try not to invent possible reasons – we are only interested in the why if it is certainly or almost certainly true. In naming why, it is easy to get lost in trying to assign blame for the feeling – it is your fault or someone else’s fault? At this point, we are likely to reinforce rather that interrogate any narrative that we already had. Be careful not to get sucked in.

Step 3: Notice your body

Observe your posture, breath patterns, muscle tension, and other physical sensations. Name these sensations. You may adjust your posture to stand up straight – this alone might make you feel a bit better. You can also try 4-7-8 breathing at this time. This means breathing in to the count of four, holding your breath to the count of seven, then breathing out to the count of eight. The long out-breath can feel good.

Noticing the body can confirm whether we have identified our emotions correctly. It can also distance us or disentangle us from our thoughts, helping with dereification or decentering. In a practice of meditation, our thoughts are a distraction from our body, and this is the best way to think about it. I.e. it is not that our body is used to distract us from our thoughts – this would imply that our thoughts are “real” while our body is some kind of fiction. Instead, our body is what’s real, and our thoughts are the fictions. By noticing our body, we are tuning into something real and becoming physically present.

Step 4: Recall your history

Think about your history with these thoughts, feelings, and bodily sensations. Do you feel them every day? Every week? Rarely? Are they continuous and unrelenting, or do they come and go? This reminds you that your emotions are temporary and impermanent. Nothing lasts forever – not even Ozymandias’ statue from Shelley’s poem. Thinking about your history also helps you to separate present feelings from old baggage. Are you worried about something, in part, because it was harmful in your past? What bearing does this have on whether it is harmful in the present?

Step 5: Identify control vs. non-control

Think about which aspects of the situation you can control – and which aspects you can’t control. If we overestimate our ability to control, it can lead to blaming ourselves. (“Why couldn’t I have done that differently?”) If we underestimate our ability to control, it makes us feel helpless (“There’s nothing I can do.”) In the case of the public speaker, we can control our preparation, but we can’t control audience interactions. It’s important to recognize that control can be partial: maybe there’s a chance that you can control your actions, but it’s not guaranteed. From this point, you can identify the steps you might take to control your situation.

Step 6: Discrepant evidence

Finally, see if your story “hangs together,” describing a single state – where your thoughts, emotions, body language, history, and degree of control all line up to tell a simple script. If they don’t, great! If they do, think of some discrepant evidence where some of your thoughts don’t match your emotions, etc. Was there a time when you had these thoughts – yet the feared outcome didn’t happen? In Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, you’d seek discrepant evidence to counter assertions like:

Catastrophizing: noticing when your thoughts tell a story that is overly severe.
All-or-nothing thinking: either something is not true or it’s completely true.
Mind reading: thinking you can tell what others are thinking.
Overgeneralization: something is always true.
Hopelessness: things couldn’t possible go right.

Afterwards, you can reflect and decide what you learned from the exercise.

Variations and Tips

You can consider fast and slow versions of the exercise. A slow version would be a full journaling session, while a fast version would be a quick check-in during intense moments, perhaps skipping some of the steps.

Remember that you can apply the exercise to cravings and aversions, not just emotions like anxiety and sadness. In this case, there likely will be less of a “thinking” component; and the emotion will just be “craving” or “aversion” and may be subtle and hard to detect in yourself. You may have frequently felt a desire to use social media, but does that feel like anything that you are aware of? It may be challenging to notice it, but it’s possible.

It can be good to view this exercise as preventative: practicing with mild emotions builds skill for harder times. However, it is important that you do the exercise when you need it, not just preventatively.

Keep in mind that the exercise is not primarily about “reducing emotions,” although it can achieve that at times. More importantly, it is about descripting, since taking all of the facts into account will tend to surface discrepant facts that question any given script. This is an information-gathering exercise.

Conclusion

The self scan exercise slows you down and helps you to gather information about your mental and bodily state. It’s recommended that you build the habit during calm moments so that you can have more resilience later. You don’t have to only use this technique when you’re experiencing anxiety or other difficult emotions – just check in with whatever you’re feeling.