Breaking the Scan Cycle

I’ve spent a lot of my life scanning. Much like a radio sweeping through frequencies and channels, but in my case, it was mental, looping through my to-do list, forecasting possible conversations and potential outcomes, or rehearsing scenarios that might never happen. It’s a habit I picked up through repeated practice; it took many years, but eventually it was a well-established and quite unhealthy pattern. As an engineer, anticipating problems feels like part of the job. As a human, it became a way to manage and feed my anxiety.

But somewhere along the way, my brain got stuck in an endless scan cycle. Endlessly sweeping frequencies and never landing on a channel long enough to hear anything clearly. It would kick in first thing in the morning and continue throughout the day. I’d wake at 3 a.m., and my mind would go into overdrive, looping once again, ensuring I would not be falling back to sleep anytime soon. The goal was, in a general sense, always the same: make sure nothing goes wrong. An impossible task to control every variable and foresee every eventuality, so I am never caught off guard.

It worked sometimes. It helped me with planning and being prepared. However, without intention or oversight, it quickly became the tail wagging the dog. Instead of serving me, it ran me into the ground and kept me from being present.

Worse than the exhaustion was the disconnection. I wasn’t really present with the people I cared about. Instead of responding to life, I was reacting to imagined futures. The constant scanning took me out of my body, out of the moment, and into a kind of cognitive prison. I was trying to manage my life entirely in my head. It was too much to manage in the long term and not sustainable.

That said, it's not inherently a bad thing to plan ahead or mentally simulate different outcomes. There's a lot of value in being proactive and prepared. The problem is when this mental planning becomes a substitute for actual planning. Like writing things down, using a calendar, and organizing tasks intentionally. Without those external anchors, I relied too heavily on mental loops. I wasn't truly taking ownership of my responsibilities; I was just reacting to whatever floated to the top of my mind. Without structure, even the most well-meaning thought patterns can spiral into anxiety. That's when the scanning turns from helpful to harmful, and it stops serving us and starts running us. Fortunately, there are many ways to break the cycle while preserving the value-added elements of this kind of thinking.

One method I found helpful was journaling in the morning and avoiding my phone for the first 45 minutes after waking. Meditation, just 10 minutes at a time, twice a day, helped me cultivate intention and create space from destructive patterns. Long walks, usually 3 to 4 miles, became some of the best medicine I could give myself, and I would crave them deeply. But even then, I had to be careful. Once the mental fog cleared, work thoughts would start to creep in. Not always bad, but a slippery slope. Suddenly, I’d find myself making a call or trying to get ahead of something, and just like that, the walk's benefit of presence and distance from looping would vanish.

Another practice that worked for me, though it’s not for everyone, was breathwork. Deep, fast-paced breathing followed by long holds (like in the Wim Hof method) brought me back to my body and helped interrupt anxious patterns.

All of these tools helped reduce the scanning and its feedback loop of anxiety. What I struggled with, though, was maintaining a disciplined routine. I had all these strategies, but lacked the framework to integrate them consistently. Ironically, I could build rigid, exacting systems for my professional life, but rarely applied that same clarity to my personal life.

Fortunately, I’m still a work in progress. As we all are. And it’s getting better. I practice these healthier patterns more often now. I do wish I’d invested in this kind of discipline earlier, but I’m grateful for the chance to change my ways today, and again tomorrow, and the day after that. It really does help to take it one day at a time.

That’s why I’m pursuing community building through MindfulEE. Because I know I’m not the only one. If you’ve ever felt trapped in your own head, feeling overloaded, overstimulated, and under-resourced, you’re not broken. You might just be stuck in a loop, and it can be broken to begin your redesign.

Let’s build better ones.

Author: Nathan B.