What It Actually Looks Like When You Sit Down to Do It
You set a timer for twelve minutes. Some people use fifteen. I use ten because anything longer and my brain starts looking for exits. You pick a quiet chair, not necessarily a chapel or even a kneeling bench — a kitchen chair at 11pm works fine, which is when I usually do it. You go through five steps roughly in order: thankfulness, a review of the day, an emotion check, a choice you want to make, and a closing prayer. That is the skeleton of it. The Prayer Of Examen has been around since Ignatius wrote it down in the 1500s, originally as a nightly practice for monks, and it moved into general Catholic and even broader Christian use over the centuries. It is not complicated on paper. Step one is gratitude. I list three to five concrete things from the day rather than the vague "thanks for life." A good cup of coffee, a conversation that actually went well, getting home without rain. The specificity matters because it forces you to actually remember something instead of coasting on autopilot. Step two is looking back over your day in reverse order or chronological, doesn't matter much. I tend to do reverse because it is easier to start from the present moment and work backward rather than trying to reconstruct the morning while already mentally exhausted. You notice moments where you felt energy or resistance, where you were helpful or impatient, where something felt meaningful or completely hollow. Step three is the emotional inventory. This is the part most people skip or rush through. You name what came up — frustration, relief, anxiety, a low-grade guilt you cannot quite place. Naming it takes ten seconds and changes the whole texture of the rest of the exercise. Step four is picking one thing. One decision, one attitude, one habit you want to bring into tomorrow. Not everything. One thing. Step five is the closing, which is usually just a short prayer asking for guidance or peace before sleep.
Here is the part nobody tells you about: the first three weeks feel mechanical. You will sit there thinking about dinner while pretending to be contemplative. That is normal. The practice does not become real until around week four, when you catch yourself actually noticing something during the day instead of just during the review. I had been doing it for a month and a half before it clicked, and the click was subtle — I was in a meeting and noticed my shoulders were tight and I was annoyed about something I could not immediately identify. That awareness came directly from the examen routine, not from some mystical intervention. It was just a trained habit of attention. I ran into a specific problem around month three that I did not see coming. I was going through a period of high stress and the examen started producing the same three emotions every single night — anxiety, resentment, fatigue — which turned the practice into a depressing loop. What worked for me was switching to a focused examen format for two weeks instead of the general version. I picked one theme, like "where did I feel trapped today?" or "when did I actually feel helpful?" and narrowed the whole thing down to that question. It broke the cycle and brought the practice back from feeling like a punishment to something useful. I switched back to the general format after that and have kept the focused version as an option for rough periods. The most common mistake beginners make is turning the examen into a moral audit. You are not grading yourself. You are not trying to produce a list of sins or achievements. The whole point is noticing the movement of your attention and emotions without immediate judgment. If you approach it like a performance review, you will stop doing it within a month, which is exactly what happened to someone I know who treated it like a guilt spreadsheet. Another thing people miss is the difference between reflection and rumination. Reflection has a shape and an end point. Rumination is circular and has no structure. The examen gives you the shape. When you feel yourself spiraling during step two, you name the spiral out loud and move to step three anyway. The physical act of continuing the steps often interrupts the loop.
There are honest limitations to this practice. It does not work well during acute crisis when your nervous system is in full survival mode. If you just lost a job, are dealing with active trauma, or are in a genuinely destabilizing situation, sitting quietly and reviewing your day can amplify distress rather than help you process it. In those cases, a guided meditation or working with a therapist or counselor is more appropriate. The examen is a discipline for steady spiritual attention, not a substitute for clinical support. It also requires consistency to produce anything noticeable, and most people who try it three times and quit have not given it enough repetition to see results. Twelve consecutive days is the rough minimum before patterns start showing up. When it works, it works by giving you a structured pause between the chaos of the day and your sleep. That gap matters. I have lost track of how many nights I used to fall asleep replaying conversations from six hours earlier, and the examen practice interrupts that loop by giving your brain a designated time to process the day instead of letting it happen at 2am when you cannot do anything about it anyway. The timer is important for this. Without it, you either rush through it or drag it out until you are too tired to care. You can find written guides and printable versions of the five-step structure by searching for "Examen prayer five steps PDF" on the Jesuit websites or general spiritual formation sites. Many of them are free and basically identical to each other because the core method has not changed. The value is in doing it, not in finding the perfect version of the instructions.
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