You finish, and before your eyes are properly open the review has already started. Was that vivid enough. Did you feel it or only think it. Should it have been the other method, the one in the post with more upvotes. Were you supposed to let go afterwards, and does reviewing whether you let go count as not letting go.
Ten minutes of practice, forty minutes of audit.
The usual answer is a scolding
Ask this anywhere and you get told the question itself is the problem. Asking means doubting. You have handed your authority to a stranger. There are no rules, you make the rules, stop overthinking and trust yourself.
Under the most confident version of that advice, the reply people upvote hardest is somebody saying, in effect, that it does not work on them. They describe weeks of auditing themselves, an analytical mind, and real difficulty with being told to trust an instinct they do not have. Their words for the gap: they do not know how to know.
Telling a person like that to stop analyzing is asking them to be someone else for twenty minutes a night. It is not advice. It is a personality requirement.
The audit is rational, given the situation
Here is what the scolding misses. You are being handed dozens of techniques, by people who disagree with each other, with no definition of correct execution and no way to check your work for weeks or months.
Under those conditions, checking whether you are doing it right is not a symptom of weak faith. It is what a competent person does with an underspecified task. The anxiety is not coming from your character. It is coming from the missing spec.
So fix the procedure, not the person
The way out is not more conviction. It is a smaller surface. Decide the variables once, in daylight, while you are in the mood to decide things. Then at night there is nothing to assess because there is nothing left to choose.
- One method. Not the best one, just one, chosen and closed.
- One goal, one sentence, unchanged.
- One time of day, so the decision is not remade nightly.
- A defined end. It finishes, then you sleep.
- No reading more about it. Input is what reopens the question.
The last one does most of the work and people hate it. Every further guide adds a variable you did not have before, which is why the person who has read forty posts is more anxious than the one who read two.
What this does not fix
It will still feel like nothing is happening, and you will still doubt it. Belief does not come first, and the doubt is not a verdict on whether you may continue.
If the thing you keep auditing is whether the scene was detailed or long enough, that has a plain answer too, and it is smaller than you think.
If it is whether you were drowsy enough, or started too soon, the state itself is described once and plainly in how to do SATS, the state akin to sleep. Read it once, then close the question.
The honest part
A fixed procedure does not make the outcome more likely in any way anyone can demonstrate to you. Nobody honest can tell you otherwise.
What it removes is the second job. You came here with one thing you wanted. You should not also be running a nightly performance review of your own imagination. Close the variables, do the small fixed thing, and give the question nothing to feed on.