How to do an EMDR-style body scan with bilateral stimulation

To do a body scan with bilateral stimulation, slowly scan your attention from your feet to your head, noticing tension without judging it, then spend 30 to 60 seconds on eye movements, tapping, or the butterfly hug wherever you felt the most charge. This pairs body awareness with EMDR’s core technique for easing everyday tension, no therapist or memory required.

Maybe you read that EMDR uses a body scan and wondered if you could try something like it on your own. Or you already do a body scan for stress and want to know if adding bilateral stimulation, the left-right technique behind EMDR, actually does more.

Both are reasonable questions, and the honest answer sits in the middle. You can’t do EMDR’s actual body scan alone; it depends on a memory already processed in therapy. But you can borrow the same underlying habit, checking in with your body, and pair it with bilateral stimulation for a genuinely useful everyday reset. Here’s exactly how.

What is an EMDR-style body scan with bilateral stimulation?

It combines two separate things into one short practice: a body scan, moving your attention slowly through your body to notice tension, and bilateral stimulation (BLS), the rhythmic left-right technique at the center of EMDR therapy.

Neither piece alone is the clinical body scan. Per EMDRIA, the EMDR International Association, the body scan is Phase 6 of EMDR therapy. A client holds an already-processed target memory and a strengthened positive belief in mind while scanning for leftover tension, and a therapist runs more bilateral stimulation on anything that surfaces. That version can’t be done alone, since it depends on memory work completed across several earlier, therapist-guided phases.

It’s also not the same as a body scan meditation, the mindfulness practice that asks you to notice sensations with no memory and no active step afterward. A 2022 systematic review and meta-analysis in Applied Psychology: Health and Well-Being found that a body scan practiced alone has, at best, a small effect on outcomes like stress.

What you’re about to do borrows a piece of each: the noticing habit from a body scan, paired with an active bilateral-stimulation step aimed at calming what you find. No target memory or therapist required.

What do you need before you start?

Nothing but a few quiet minutes. No equipment, no app, and no memory work involved.

Sit or lie down somewhere you won’t be interrupted for three to five minutes, longer if you want to work through more than one tense spot. If you like tracking things numerically, rate your overall tension from 0 to 10 before you start. It gives you something concrete to compare against afterward, though it isn’t required.

How do you do a body scan with bilateral stimulation, step by step?

There are two ways to run this, a quick pass and a more thorough one. Both start the same way.

Step 1: Settle in

Close your eyes, or let your gaze soften on a fixed point. Take three slow breaths, each exhale a little longer than the inhale. You’re not trying to relax fully yet, just signaling to your body that this is a pause.

Step 2: Scan from your feet to your head

Move your attention slowly through each region, pausing a few seconds at each one: feet and legs, stomach and gut, chest, hands and arms, shoulders and neck, jaw and face. Just notice what’s there, tight, warm, numb, heavy, or buzzing, without trying to change it yet.

Step 3: Decide how thorough to go

The quick pass. Pick the single region holding the most tension or charge, and move straight to Step 4 with that one spot in mind. This is the faster route. Our quick body-scan reset walks through this exact version in about five minutes.

The thorough pass. Note every region that felt tight or charged, not just the biggest one. You’ll work through each in turn, giving each its own short round of bilateral stimulation before moving to the next. This takes longer, closer to ten minutes, but it’s worth it when more than one area is holding something.

Step 4: Add 30 to 60 seconds of bilateral stimulation

Keep the spot you’re working with loosely in mind while you pick a method:

• Eye movements. Pick two points about shoulder-width apart and move your gaze steadily between them, or track your own thumb held at arm’s length.
• Tapping or the butterfly hug. Cross your arms and tap left, right, left, right near your collarbones, or tap your knees or thighs instead.
• Alternating audio. Alternating tones through headphones, left ear then right, work the same way if your eyes are tired or you’d rather keep them closed.

Keep the pace slow and steady, roughly one movement per second, closer to a heartbeat than a metronome. This isn’t the faster pace therapists sometimes use to work through a specific painful memory. A 2015 study in Frontiers in Psychiatry found faster eye movements produce a bigger drop in emotional intensity than slower ones. That’s not the effect you want from a calming reset like this one.

Step 5: Re-scan and notice what shifted

Return your attention to the spot you just worked. Most people notice at least a partial change after one round: looser, warmer, or just quieter. Still charged? Run one more round before moving on.

Step 6: Move through any remaining spots (thorough pass only)

If you’re doing the thorough pass, repeat Steps 4 and 5 for each region you flagged. Finish with one full scan, head to toe, to see how the whole picture has changed.

Why does adding bilateral stimulation help more than scanning alone?

A body scan by itself is mostly a noticing tool. The 2022 meta-analysis mentioned above pooled results across multiple studies and found body scan meditation, used alone, has at best a small effect on stress and mindfulness. Noticing tension is a start, not a fix.

Bilateral stimulation is the piece that does more to the underlying alert state. A 2025 study in BJPsych Open found that visual and tactile bilateral stimulation increased brain activity linked to calm, settled states and lowered autonomic arousal, the body’s alert state, in both people with PTSD and healthy volunteers with no trauma history. That’s the same alert state a body scan can only point at.

It’s worth being honest that no study has tested this exact pairing, a body scan followed by bilateral stimulation, as a single combined technique. What you’re doing borrows two separately supported pieces and runs them back to back: a plausible, evidence-informed combination, not a proven protocol of its own.

There’s also a reason scanning inward doesn’t always calm things down. A 2024 meta-analysis in Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, pooling data across multiple studies, found anxiety consistently linked to noticing bodily signals more often and interpreting them more harshly, not to a simple lack of body awareness. If turning your attention inward sometimes turns the volume up instead of down, that’s a documented pattern, not a sign you’re doing this wrong. Giving your body something active to do right after, instead of stopping at noticing, is exactly why the bilateral-stimulation step matters.

Which type of bilateral stimulation should you use?

Any of the three works through the same left-right principle, so the choice comes down to what’s practical in the moment.

Method	Needs	Best when…
Eye movements	Nothing extra	Your eyes aren’t tired and you’re somewhere private
Tapping / butterfly hug	Just your hands	You’d rather keep your eyes closed
Alternating audio	Headphones	You’re somewhere you can’t move or tap

If you’d rather not manage the rhythm yourself, EmEase, a self-guided EMDR app, paces the same left-right technique through an on-screen moving target or alternating tones in the web app. Think of it as the guided version of this technique, useful on days when even keeping your own count feels like one more task. For a fuller comparison of all three methods, see the beginner’s guide to self-guided bilateral stimulation.

What mistakes should you avoid?

A few habits get in the way of this working well.

• Rushing the scan. Moving too fast through each region means you notice less. A few seconds per area is usually enough, but don’t treat it as a race.
• Matching the wrong pace. A fast, intense rhythm belongs to memory reprocessing done with a therapist, not this. Slow and steady is what you want here.
• Holding your breath. It’s easy to forget to breathe while you focus on tapping or tracking. Keep it slow and let your belly move.
• Stopping after one region when more than one is holding something. If several spots feel charged, the thorough pass is worth the extra few minutes.
• Trying to analyze why a spot feels tense. That’s a different kind of work. For this practice, noticing and calming is enough; you don’t need to know why first.

Is this the same as the body scan used in EMDR therapy?

No, and it’s worth being clear about the difference. EMDR’s body scan is Phase 6 of a structured, eight-phase therapy led by a trained clinician. It only happens after a specific target memory has already lost most of its distress and a positive belief has been strengthened in the sessions before it.

What you just did skips all of that. There’s no target memory, no therapist, and no earlier phases to build on. It borrows the underlying habit, checking in with your body and following up with bilateral stimulation, and applies it to everyday tension instead. Useful on its own terms, but a different practice.

When is this not enough, or when should you get more support?

This fits ordinary, everyday tension: a wound-up body before a hard day, a knot that shows up most afternoons, restlessness with no clear cause attached to it.

It’s a lighter tool if tension is constant, tied to a specific memory or event, or affecting your sleep and work most days. A body that stays on edge that often usually has roots reaching back further than today, and our guide to calming anxious feelings goes deeper on that pattern and where a professional fits in.

Pay attention to which direction things move, too. A spot that eases, even slightly, is doing what it’s supposed to. One that gets more intense the longer you focus on it, rather than less, is a different signal. Stop, ground yourself instead (name a few things you can see, feel your feet on the floor), and consider bringing it to a professional rather than continuing to push on it alone.

Most days, this takes less time than it took to read this guide. Scan slowly, pick your bilateral-stimulation method, and give your body an active step to take, not just a mental note that you’re fine.