#48 Relaxation Hypnosis for Stress, Anxiety & Panic Attacks

Hello and welcome to relaxation hypnosis for stress, anxiety and panic attacks. My name is Jason Newland. Please only listen to this when you can safely close your eyes.

Just one notice, just to let you know that there are no longer adverts on this or any of my podcasts. So you can enjoy the experience without people trying to sell you toothpaste. And it's quite weird actually, as I just about to start this episode, this recording, I'm sitting on my bed, the side of my bed.

And Andre's asleep. And this, and just just let you, I'm not going to be talking about this as a subject, but just a huge spider is crawling up the wall, probably about one and a half arms length from me. And I can honestly say I got zero, zero fear, zero anxiety, zero panic, nothing at all.

So my only real concern about the spider is if Andre eats him. Because first of all, I don't, I never, I never kill spiders or anything like that. But Andre gets a bit ill when he eats.

I found him ages ago. And I didn't know what he was coughing up. And then I went into the bathroom.

There's these like legs on the floor, not his legs, the spider legs. And I like the spiders because they get rid of the flies. And the flies unfortunately do sort of, they do like to land on poo.

And you know, so kind of, but that's not really what this is about. It's not about flies or anything. But it would be interesting maybe to talk about fears, in the sense of phobias, which is a huge cause, cause of anxiety, stress, stress, panic with people.

It can be, well, let's say if anybody's got a phobia, if they come in contact with that thing that they have the phobia about, or even think about it, or see a picture of it, it can be a trigger. So I'm going to talk about spiders, but not in a trying to get rid of a phobia. And I realized that not everybody's going to want to even hear the word.

So if that's the case, I understand if you need to stop the recording. But I'm going to tell you my story of spiders. It's not a horrible story.

Okay, it's nothing bad. It's just how I came about the phobia, because I had a real fear of spiders, and how I overcame it. So this, I would say, is possibly useful for a lot of things.

A lot of stuff in your life and my life that has, has or does or will possibly get in the way of enjoyment, happiness, doing things, traveling. I mean, I've, I think my biggest phobia is probably rejection. So, you know, I haven't perhaps gone and, I don't know what the right word is, but you know, there's a lot of women that I've met in the past, I've not asked out because fear of that rejection.

But I guess that's not a phobia. But it definitely filled me with terror. So spiders.

I remember in 1987, I had my first flat, where I lived on my own. And I lived above a chip shop. Don't worry, it's not a long story.

It doesn't involve chips, or fish. And a chip shop, for those who don't know what it is, it's basically, it's a, like a takeaway, where you get fish and chips, and battered sausages, I don't know, different things. So, it was late at night, about to go to bed, and I see this spider run under the bed.

And I'm in absolute terror. I couldn't go, I couldn't go to sleep until I found it. Completely terrified.

I was 17 at the time. And I didn't know why I was so scared of spiders. It's only when I realized why I was scared of them, that the fear just dropped away, like a, like an overdue fart.

It just squirted the fart out and was gone. Opened the window and never to be seen again. And I just, because in where I come from in England, we don't have dangerous spiders.

We don't have crocodiles or shark, well, we have a few sharks, but not on land. I'm never going to have a shark climb under my bed. So, there wasn't really any logical fear, reason to be fearful.

But I honestly, I was terrified, absolutely terrified. And I spent probably about an hour trying to catch it before I could go to sleep. And I know that if I hadn't caught it, I would have gone into the other room and slept in a different room.

Now, a few years back, I had a memory came to me of my step-mum and my step-mum's mother, who was my nan, my grandmother at the time, and how terrified they were of spiders. And I realized I'd learnt it. And it was a way of being close to them.

It was a way of being close to her, because she left when I was 17. And I kind of, well, 16, 17, yeah, something like that, 16. Yeah.

And I just, it's kind of like that, that part of me I was holding on to, that wasn't really me. I mean, when I was a little kid, I used to eat Daddy Long Legs. I wasn't scared of picking anything up.

I wasn't scared of spiders, or anything like that. I wasn't scared of anything, pretty much. So, it's a learnt thing, something that I learnt, but I didn't know I'd learnt it.

And I didn't even know I was scared of spiders, really, until that happened, until that, you know, that event with that spider going under the bed. But then, many, many years later, I kind of had this realization, and it was a memory, actually, an image, like a little video in my head of my stepmother, screaming and getting all agitated because there was a spider on the floor.

It didn't hurt her, hadn't done anything to her.

She'd never had a bad experience with one, you know, nothing like that. Just, she was petrified. And I learnt from that.

I learnt to be scared of something that I didn't need to be scared of. And when I realized the, kind of the silliness of it, actually, the pointlessness of it, the fact that it's kind of fake. It's not real.

It's not a real scared. You know, it's, you know, I got, I remember I got mugged at a cashpoint machine 20-odd years ago. So, I'm, you know, I'm wary when I go to a cash machine, and I draw money out.

If it's a nine o'clock at night, I'm wary, make sure there's no one behind me. But that's from learning experience. And that's from, you know, having experienced a situation that I wouldn't want to experience again without being prepared.

But I'm not scared of using cash machines. The, what do you call it, ADM, AMD, whatever they call them, you know, where you get your money out, you put your card in, the bank machines. But that was something that I'd experienced in my life.

So, I had to, at least some legitimate reason to have made some connections. So, if I'd ended up with a phobia of cash machines, then that would have been something to work with. It would have been, although it's not a useful thing, not a useful reaction, especially when it's a place where you get money.

But it's, you know, there's a logical kind of connection with what previously happened, and the response, kind of logic, you know, it made a little bit of sense, sort of understandable. But with the spider, absolutely no reason at all to have any fear of a spider, never. It's just a normal house spider, and some of them are big.

They're not tarantulas, or, you know, they're not like, and it's not, we don't have, like, really bad poisonous ones here. If I was, you know, that's a different thing. So, it's safe, it's not going to harm me.

And in reality, it's the size of the end of my toe, of my big toe. So, I'm basically a giant. I'm absolutely massive compared to that little thing.

And it's weird how it seems to be really big, but it's not really, it's tiny. It's a tiny little thing. So, then I started to think, what other things have I been, like, acting scared about? Because this is acting, for me, it was acting a role.

So, like, I took acting classes and learned how to, you know, be scared of something that wasn't scary. I had no reason to be scared of it, but I'd rehearsed it so well that I actually felt those feelings, really felt them, which I guess is a sign of a really good actor. But when I realized that actually I was just, it's not me, it's just faking.

Not faking in a, um, like, negative, putting myself down kind of way, but just, it's kind of fake, fakery. It's acting, taking on someone else's personality traits, which can be great if you take on the really nice personality traits. I mean, that's what we do as humans, isn't it? When we're kids, we model, we copy.

But then when we're kids, we don't know what to copy. We don't know which bits are the good bits and which bits are the rubbishy bits. So, we might copy the kindness, we might copy the um, the consideration, maybe, that the parents have.

We may copy the wanting to do things for charity or wanting to play a musical instrument. Then we might also copy the political beliefs. We might copy prejudices, we might copy fears, and the limiting thinking that the parents may have.

So, as a child, we don't know. We don't know what, how can we ascertain what is the correct thing to copy? There is no book for children to read, as far as I know, which tells them which parts of their parents' personality is worthy of mimicking. Because as it's kind of common knowledge, if you mimic something and you keep doing something, eventually that will just become you.

So, if you think positively and you think, you think well about yourself and you believe in yourself and you believe that you're worthy of being loved and you believe that you're intelligent and you can learn anything if you put your mind to it and, you know, you really believe that you can be successful in whatever you choose in life. You believe that you can be happy and you believe that whatever difficulties may have arisen recently will subside and you can overcome them.

But then there's the other side, isn't it? There's the other side, the flip side of the coin.

I suppose a good thing about being an adult, or if there's people listening that are teenagers, you're old enough, if you're old enough to press the play button and you're old enough to comprehend and listen to the podcast, then you understand. That you have a choice. You can now choice, you can have choice, you can now choose what personality traits you take on.

Because now if you've met someone that you think, wow, that's an amazing person, you know, maybe you're at work and you've got a manager and you think, I want to be a manager. Or you've got a salesperson and they're the top salesperson, you think, I want to be, I want to just be just like them. Then you're going to maybe start mimicking some of the behaviour.

Perhaps you'll listen to them, maybe they work in a call centre on the phone, you listen to them and maybe copy some of the mannerisms, some of the way that they talk. Maybe use some of their phrases, maybe even dress in a similar kind of a way so that you can feel confident about yourself. So you pick out the good bits, you pick out the useful bits, but you don't copy everything they do.

They might go outside every tea, you know, tea break, coffee break and smoke two cigarettes. You don't need to do that to be really good at what you do. You don't need to copy that behaviour.

You don't need to go to the toilet every time they go to the toilet. You probably end up in a disciplinary if you keep doing that anyway. But if they've got three children, you don't have to have three children.

You don't have to drive the same car that they drive. You know, they might get done for speeding in their car. You don't have to go out and get a speeding ticket in order to be successful like them in the job that they do.

So as adults we have the choice to choose which parts that we copy. When we're children we don't. We don't know.

We don't have that cognitive ability when we're young children to decipher which is the good stuff and which isn't as far as mimicking behaviour. Which is why some children grow up to be very aggressive. Maybe manipulative.

Maybe drama queens, maybe whatever. Because they weren't able to know which behaviours were the right ones that would benefit them. So when it comes to anxiety and stress, because this all comes back to this, it's a lot of stuff that we do, our behaviours come from when we were younger.

Not all of it. And this isn't a blame situation. It's not like, why are you blaming my parents? It's not their fault.

I'm not blaming anyone. It's not a blame situation at all. I don't think blame has ever helped anybody ever.

The only thing blame does is it helps people to keep the anger going. And again, blaming is something you can probably learn as well when you're a kid. Whose fault is that then? The amount of times I heard that when I was a kid.

So it usually was my fault. So it might be worth thinking. About your own life, your own experiences as a child.

Not all of them. I'm just focusing on the anxiety, stress part of things. And I know we started off talking about phobias, which is another massively anxious, stress-inducing feeling to have.

Emotions and stuff. People crumble emotionally and physically sometimes. I've seen people literally fall to the floor because they couldn't face doing the thing that they were petrified of.

But now I wonder, who have they seen do that? So if you've got a phobia of something, and it's not being caused by a traumatic incident in your life, because I know a lot of phobias can be caused from that. Like one trial learning and maybe bad experiences. But I wonder, is this some stuff that hasn't actually occurred in your life? That you're scared of something, or got a phobia of something, but there's no reason for it.

There's no logical memory within your life. So nothing's actually happened to you for you to feel that way. And if that's the case, then whether you remember it or not, it's probably very, very likely that you've witnessed somebody else act in that way.

The way that maybe you do in those stressful situations. Maybe someone that you cared about, might have just been someone that you saw in a public place once. Because even as a small child, you could be on the beach, and you could see another small child or an adult go absolutely crazy because a seagull comes near them.

And then you're kind of learning that seagulls are bad and scary, and that's how to act when clearly there's no reason for that. But logic doesn't come into it when it comes to emotion. But once logic kicks in, once your thinking changes, the emotion, it kind of drops off.

Like that big smelly wet fart I talked about earlier, opened a window and it just blows away, never to be seen or smelt again. And anyone that gets offended at the idea that I'm calling a phobia a big smelly wet fart. Well, actually phobias are way worse.

A big smelly wet fart has never stopped me from doing anything in life. Of course, I don't always get the job. You know, if it happens in an interview, it's not great at weddings.

But I'm just saying, when you think differently about that thing, that emotional response that you've had in the past about something, which doesn't actually make logical sense, that then may very well mean that you don't need to experience it. And isn't that quite a wonderful thing, really? You think about it. It's kind of like if you've got a door, if your door breaks, your front door breaks, the lock breaks on your front door, whatever, and the door is basically unlocked.

Now, I know if my front door was unlocked, or let's say the door broke, and the door was just, there was no door. It was just an empty, you know, empty door frame. I wouldn't get, I wouldn't be able to sleep until that new front door was put on.

I know that. I'd, I would be, you know, I'd be hyper, hyper stressed, I would, you know, there's no doubt about it. But there's a, I think that's a pretty good reason.

But I'd probably be a little bit more than, I'd very much be anxious about that situation. But just for the duration, as soon as the new door was put on, I could let go of that anxiety, that stress, gone, never to return, never needed. And the chances of that situation ever arising again, it's very unlikely.

That's about a once in a lifetime, probably once in 100 lifetimes, that that would happen, where the whole front door was removed or just fell off. So it wouldn't be needed anymore. Not that it was needed before.

But it would be, it would be unnecessary. Be an unnecessary reaction. A pointless reaction.

Because guaranteed, if you, if every time you think of something that causes your anxiety, whether it's getting on a bus, whether it's public speaking, whatever the thing is, that might be, it might just, it might be lots of things, but you just, a specific thing that really can't get you, you know, just thinking about it, used to have that effect. I really like, oh. So every time you thought about that, you ran around the block, you went outside and you jogged around, you know, your house, all around the roads and all the way back.

So maybe it takes 10 minutes, 20 minutes. Obviously, if you're fit enough to do it, or you'd walk around, or if you was in a wheelchair, you'd wheel yourself around. So if you did that every time you thought about that thing, so let's say you had a anxiety of, it could be anything, I'm not going to name anything, but whatever it is that's, that's causing stress, something that you don't want to do, or something you can't, you know, concerned about doing, worried about doing, or maybe something that you just struggle with when you think about it.

Say getting on the bus, or traveling, or going to that party. So let's say you've got a wedding that you've got coming up in three months time, and when you think about it, you think, oh, I've got to go there, I want to be with all those people, and you know, maybe it's causing a lot of anxiety. So every time you think of that wedding, you think of that anxiety, every time the anxiety comes up, you run around the block, or walk around the block, no matter what time of the day or night it is, no matter what time of the year, whatever temperature it is.

Of course, you've got to make sure you're safe. So probably not going out at three o'clock in the morning and make sure you're all wrapped up. But you know what I mean, generally.

And if every time you thought about that, and had that anxiety, you ran around the block, and imagine doing that for three months, every time you thought about it, I guarantee, I'm not going to put money on it, but I guarantee that your thought process will change. As long as you stick to it, as long as you stick to running around the block, or walking around the block.

Or it could be something as simple as doing 20 press ups.

Or something really tedious like just standing against the wall, facing the wall for half an hour. But that, that doesn't, that seems a bit punishy for me, you know. So that'd be a bit more like being back at school.

So I think, yeah, I wouldn't really advise that. But, but doing something that maybe isn't particularly pleasant, but also something that doesn't harm you, you know. So it could be, you could have a book, a book that you have no interest in reading.

And you read a chapter every time you think about this thing. Or you clean a toilet every time, clean a bath, you do something, do something that you don't really necessarily want to do in that moment. If you've got a garden, you could have a hole in the garden, you could have a big pile of dirt, and you could just move it from one end of the garden to the other, every time you think about this thing.

Now this might seem a little bit drastic, it might seem a bit, you know, as I said, a little bit punishy, a little bit, you know, not pleasant. But things change, things will change, the way you think will change. And also, if you were doing exercise, actually, there's the, the physiology, physio, I can't say the word, physiological benefit of that, and the mental benefit of the exercise, which could also transform and change the way you feel about that thing.

Because then you've got that connection. So if you go and run in, you then got that connection between thinking about going to the wedding, and that nice feeling of gentle exercise. So you can kind of work both ways.

And you can be creative. This is your life, this is your time, this is your space, this is your effort. This is your well being.

You can choose lots of different ways, and be as creative as you choose to make those changes. So when you think about something, and you think, where did this come from? Where did this fear come from? Where did this behavior come from? Why am I reacting this way, to this stuff, this activity, this thought, why am I reacting this way to this outside stimuli, whether it's something you hear, something you see?

Why am I reacting this way? And where did I learn that? And if it's not based on something from your own life, then it's been learned from observing and copying somebody else's behavior, which means it's not real. It's not yours, it doesn't belong to you.

I've been walking around with someone else's jacket on. It's not your jacket. Give it back.

And maybe that's why it's so uncomfortable. Because the jacket's two sizes too small. And you think about it as well, when we carry this stuff from childhood into adulthood, maybe the reason why it feels so uncomfortable, and so stressful, and so anxiety provoking, is because it is uncomfortable.

Because we've outgrown it. So basically, we're wearing underpants and a t-shirt that are way too small for us, which is causing a lot of discomfort. These clothes, so we're very confined, very limited, and very uncomfortable, but not needing to be.

Because we're trying to still wear those clothes from the childhood. If I tried to fit into the clothes from, well, even 20 years ago, honestly, if I put on some clothes, I'd burst out of them like the Incredible Hulk, with a beer belly. It's interesting, isn't it? You think about it, what are we carrying around with us, that's actually no longer relevant.

And the idea of actually still wearing those clothes that we wore when we were little children, no wonder it feels uncomfortable. Back then, we didn't know any different. It probably didn't feel uncomfortable, because we didn't know any different.

Seeing someone get scared of a seagull made sense. Why wouldn't someone get scared of a seagull? Perhaps we didn't question it. So we had that little t-shirt on, the scared of a seagull t-shirt, as an example.

But as an adult walking around wearing that same t-shirt, constricted, it constricts your movement. In fact, it actually damaged your body. It damaged the growth, it messed up probably your spine, your shoulders, your neck, your posture, if we take it literally.

But worse than damaging your body, it can damage your mind and your life. So we can just get rid of that t-shirt and all those different items of clothing that perhaps we've been wearing since childhood. Let them go, rip them off, get rid of them forever.

You go and buy some new clothes, clothes that you like, clothes that you want to wear, clothes that fit you as you are and how you want to be the relaxed, calm, confident person. You can wear those clothes. Someone that isn't affected by stuff that you don't need to be affected by.

Someone that can enjoy your life. So I'm going to leave you with that thought or those thoughts and I shall speak to you very soon. Thank you for listening.

Remember to be kind to yourself. I mean, be kind, be gentle. Lots of love.

Bye.