#55 Relaxation Hypnosis for Stress, Anxiety & Panic Attacks (Jason Newland) (16th September 2019)

Hello and welcome to jasonnewland.com. This is relaxation hypnosis for stress, anxiety and panic attacks. I need to shorten the title of this thing, it seems a bit too long. Anyway, my name is Jason Newland.

Please only listen to this when you can safely close your eyes. Now, I'll admit to you that I actually give more thought, yeah I probably give more thought before making a recording on this podcast than on any of the other ones that I do. I do a lot of sleep recordings, the Let Me Bore You To Sleep, the sleep hypnosis whisper thing, sleep hypnosis weekly and other things I do.

But for this, because it's so focused, I'll try and give it a bit of thought beforehand. So the topic of this recording is going to be about caring and that's it. So I'm going to continue talking about that and maybe offer some ideas and see what comes up.

And when I say caring, I'm talking about not caring, which might sound like a strange thing to say. But where I'm coming from with this is with anxiety, with stress, with panic attacks, there is possibly way too much energy put into caring about situations, about things. Because in order to worry, you need to care about the thing you're worrying about.

In order to be stressed about something, you need to care about that thing that you're stressed about. With panic attacks, part of the process of having panic attacks and anxiety attacks is to expect to have them. It's one of those weird conundrums, I think, where logically, why would you expect to have something that you don't want to have? Because by expecting to have it, you're giving your unconscious mind, you're kind of giving your unconscious mind the instruction to have a panic attack.

Because that's what you're thinking about. Because your unconscious mind can't really tell the difference between negative and positive. It loves you, wants the best for you, wants to do everything for you, and it does.

Your heart pumps, your blood flows around your body. So much goes on in the unconscious mind. It's all so much.

But when it comes to the stuff that seems unconscious, like panic attacks, it seems like it's coming from your unconscious mind. Because I don't know about you, but anytime I had one, it didn't feel like a conscious thing. It was almost like having a pain in the stomach.

Not something that I caused myself, not something that I could control. Of course, you can take medication to reduce the pain or go and see a doctor or, you know, that kind of stuff. Or go to the toilet sometimes is what's needed.

But all this sort of seems out of my conscious control. And of course, panic attacks are in that category. Yet, yet, yet, yet, this is the the addition to that.

Panic attacks are affected by our conscious thinking. And the first thing I think to say about this is, it's not about blame. So get that right out of your head.

Not a big fan of blame. Not blaming myself or blaming others. Don't see the point in it.

It's just, we can learn to take responsibility for our own actions. But blaming, blaming guilt. I think guilt can be replaced with regret.

We've all done stuff that we're not proud of in the past. Maybe hurt other people, maybe didn't mean to, but the result was the same. So instead of living a life of guilt, you can have regret for what I did.

For example, I can have regret for it and learn, learn from it, to never do that, never to repeat that behavior again. And although this isn't about that, this isn't about regret, I think it's important to nip that stuff in the bud when it comes to feeling guilty about stuff, when it comes to blaming ourselves. Because blaming ourselves or blaming other people, it doesn't help.

It's just, it's just poison. We're just poisoning ourselves, you know, with hatred and anger and all that stuff. But again, I'm not going to go into that either, because that's more, it's a different subject.

But this idea of what our conscious mind, what we think about, has a huge effect on our unconscious mind. And I know I've been giving this a lot of thought, and coming from a hypnosis background, 20, what was it, 21 years now, nearly 22 years that I got involved in hypnosis. And I never before, in the past, I never gave enough credit to the strength and the power and the influence that our conscious mind has on our unconscious mind.

Because you know, when someone's got a, let's say they've got an issue, they go to a hypnotherapist. And they expect the hypnotherapist, or they want the hypnotherapist to talk to their unconscious mind and to make changes, ask the unconscious mind to make changes. They might not kind of know the ins and outs of it, but that's kind of what the process is.

And when you think about it, in reality, we are our own hypnotherapist, always there talking, our mind is always talking to our unconscious mind. But perhaps we've never realised it before. I've been very aware over the years of things I've watched on television, audios I've listened to, things I've read in a newspaper, things that other people say and how I may be influenced by those words that other people say.

But I never thought about what I was saying, outside of self harming internal dialogue. And by that, what I mean is, if it's blatant, if it's something like telling myself that I'm ugly, and no one will ever love me and that kind of stuff, then that's an obvious thing that I need to address. It's like, wait a minute, this is just harmful.

And I've said in the past, in other recordings that I've done over the years, and I've said it to clients when I was a counsellor, these things that you say to yourself, would you say that to a small child? Would you say that to your little baby, your little child, your niece, your grandson, you know, whoever? And everyone says no, because it would be abusive, it would be cruel, it would be horrible.

So why would you say it to yourself? Because by saying it to yourself, you're having more of an effect than you would on that child. Because it goes in.

There's nothing blocking it. Although it could have a really bad effect on the child as well, of course, if it was repeated and stuff. And that's where it comes in, isn't it? Where people, if they hear something over and over again, they start to believe it.

Which is the benefit of this, these recordings, the relaxation, the sleep sessions, whatever it is that I'm doing, this repetitiveness of it. And there's also the variety, if I can say the word. So it's not just listening to the same recording.

It's lots of different recordings with, I guess the same message, just presented in a different way. It's what we say to ourselves inside our mind, what we think about. It's not even so much about saying it as in a sentence, like internal dialogue.

It's what we think about, what we are expecting to happen. And in my last recording, I talked about the going to an appointment and expecting it to be terrible. And it was terrible.

I expected myself to get stressed and I got stressed. And some of you may think, well, why am I listening to you then? If you got stressed at this appointment, and this is a, you know, an audio podcast to help me to reduce my stress and anxiety. Well, the answer to that is, I'm a human being.

That's the first kind of quick answer. Doesn't matter how, how old you get, how well you get, you're still allowed to feel stressed sometimes. It's natural.

You're still allowed to feel anxious sometimes, it's natural. Nobody would be listening to this, if occasionally they felt a little bit anxious, or they had an anxious, had a job interview, and after the job interview, they thought, oh, that was, that was a very anxious situation. But if they don't normally feel anxious, they probably potentially wouldn't be listening to an anxiety or a stress relief session, recording, podcast, whatever you want to call this.

So, just reminds me when I had, I had an ear operation when I was very young. It's about eight, just before I was eight years old. And I was partly deaf in one of my ears, and I kept having earaches.

And then they tested my ears eventually, and I was, I had partly deaf. I don't know what level of deafness, but it was, there was deafness there anyway. I had hard, harder hearing in one of my ears.

So I had an operation. And after the operation, I remember it was for about a year later, I was sitting there and my dad said something. And I said, sorry, what? Or pardon? I thought he said, pardon, pardon, sir? I said to my dad, because I didn't hear, I didn't catch what he said.

I was watching television or doing something else. I wasn't, you know, I wasn't listening to what he was saying. I didn't know he wasn't talking.

He just said something. Didn't know he was talking to me, so I wasn't listening. And straight away, he said, that's it, we're taking you back to the hospital to get your ears tested.

We are allowed to mishear things, because we're human. You know, if you've had appendicitis and had your appendix out, it doesn't mean you're never going to have a pain in the stomach in that area again. It means it's got nothing to do with your appendix, because your appendix aren't in there anymore.

Even people that have, I'm sure we've all heard of phantom limb pain. People can have their leg amputated and still feel pain in their feet. Doesn't mean the leg's there.

I actually saw someone years and years ago. I realize I'm going off topic a little bit, but this is about, the whole point of this is accepting what is. And this person came to me, been in a motorbike accident seven years before.

This is back in 2007, I think. So they'd had an accident seven years before that. Came to me, had his leg amputated.

And he said he still felt that his leg was in the same position as it was after the crash, which was very badly, badly, badly damaged. Because he had probably, I think he had a couple of weeks or maybe a few months where his leg was still on. And they were hoping to do operations and fix it, but they couldn't.

He still felt that pain in his leg. Now, I could have said to him, you don't have a leg. He didn't need me to tell him that.

I could have got him into a trance and do some hypnosis with him and said to his unconscious mind, you don't have a leg anymore. But that seemed to be, I didn't want to dismiss how he was feeling. Because with hypnosis, he's still listening.

His conscious mind is still listening. Sometimes he can go very deep and the person can be completely zonked out and not remember what's happened. But I was getting him involved in the process.

So what I did is, unlike everyone they'd seen previously that were telling him, you don't have a leg. It's just phantom pain, limb pain, limb pain or whatever. It's just a memory.

It's not real. Which for some reason didn't help him, weird enough. So instead of dismissing him, dismissing his discomfort, what I did is I relaxed his leg.

I straightened his leg out so that it went back to its normal shape. So it's no longer twisted. So even though obviously he didn't have a leg, he knew that.

He didn't need me to tell him that. But in his unconscious mind, the leg went back to its normal shape and was completely relaxed. And he came, after about 20 minutes, half an hour of talking to him, he opened his eyes and said, I feel so relaxed and the pain's gone.

So this pain that he'd had for seven years, he went away. I said, come back next week and see how you're getting on. He came back and he said, I don't need anything else.

But I just came back to thank you. It's, I don't need, it's fine. And he sent me a letter probably a couple of months later to say that it was still fine.

So there's something about not dismissing how we feel and accepting that we're humans and we are allowed to still feel anxious sometimes. It doesn't mean that we're going backwards to where we were before. You know, I'll be sitting down sometimes and I'll get that exact same feeling that I used to get at the beginning of a panic attack.

It goes nowhere. It doesn't go anywhere now, usually. And I find it interesting just to observe it because it's just a feeling.

It's literally, it's just a feeling. It's not a nice feeling. You don't enjoy it, but it's just a feeling.

And it's almost like the signal from my body doesn't go to my brain to start that loop. That continuous loop that seems to almost used to feel like my adrenaline was being kick-started like a boat engine. You know, those ones that you pull the lever and it kind of gets the engine started or a chainsaw or something like that.

That's what I used to feel that my adrenaline was doing. But I got tested. I got tested by the doctors in the hospitals.

My adrenal gland, everything was absolutely normal level. My blood pressure was normal. In fact, my blood pressure has always been really, really good.

My cholesterol, that's a different subject, but that's just because I'm not as fit as I used to be. So this recording wasn't just about acceptance. It's also about how we care about things.

So the first thing, and I think it's so important, is to just accept what's going on. Accept that you're human and accept that you can feel, have different feelings. Just because you might be walking through the park or walking to work or it could be anything, sitting on a toilet, having a sandwich, sitting on a bus, watching television.

You might be with your grandchildren or with your loved one or it could be absolutely anything. And you get a feeling of real well-being, a feeling of absolute bliss for no reason, seemingly, just it feels wonderful. You can feel it across your chest, across your face, your body.

It's almost like you're just filled with this, like the sunshine has just filled your body and your mind. And it almost goes to a level where you think, wow, this is amazing. Now, when that happens, we don't worry to ourselves, don't think, oh God, this is going to happen too often.

I hope this doesn't happen again. Because in reality, you wouldn't want to feel like that all the time. You might initially think, well, yeah, I would.

I actually, I would. Not if you're going to a funeral. Not if you had to concentrate on something.

Not if someone was upset and they wanted to talk to you and they needed your attention. How are you going to be able to focus if you're just blissed out? So it'd be a lovely feeling, but it's not always, it's just a feeling. It's just, just a feeling.

And there's something about seeing the feelings, all feelings in that way that may be useful. Whether it's anger, whether it's physical pain, whether it's joy, happiness, disappointment, anxiety, stress, worry, whatever it might be, it's a feeling. And I know the feelings are connected to thoughts, but that feeling of like complete bliss, I've had that in the past.

And it's, it doesn't feel like it's connected to anything. It's almost like it just arose by itself. And I used to feel that way with the panic as well.

Not always, sometimes there was an obvious trigger. It was obvious sometimes at the time, sometimes not until afterwards when I looked back at it and thought, ah, there's another thing, blind spots, we've all got them. They're called blind spots for a reason.

And I think it's important, really, really important not to beat ourselves up for not seeing our own blind spots, because they're blind. But they're not always blind, they do become available at some point. An example of that was a client I had, and she said, this was about anxiety.

She wasn't scared of getting on a plane. The actual plane bit wasn't an issue. It was the journey to to the airport, which used to cause her panic attacks and anxiety.

And this is someone that I saw in person as a client, counselling her. And I think it was only the third session, or was it the second session, after telling me about it and we're talking, I actually did help her with some of that. But there's still something missing.

And then she said, oh, yeah, and I don't know how it came up, but she said, yeah, I was in a car crash on the way five years ago. Because I think we're talking about traumatic stuff. I was in a car crash five years ago.

What was that? What was that? And she said, I was on the way to the airport. Now that seems so obvious when you hear it. But she hadn't made that connection because it was a blind spot.

She just hadn't made the connection. And once that connection was made, I was able to do something pretty quickly to change that and to work with that trauma of that event, which then took away the panic of future journeys. So I think it's important.

Perhaps I should have just had this recording about this about acceptance. I'm also going to add the other bit that I was going to talk about. And maybe I can elaborate on that another time.

But there's something about not caring that can be really useful when it comes to anxiety, especially extreme anxiety like OCD, where perhaps, I'm talking about clients now, but I had another client that had OCD and they'd turn the tap off to the point where their hands would be bleeding, literally would damage their hand to keep going back and keep trying to turn the tap off, even though it was already turned off.

And I said to this person, what's the worst that could happen if the tap was dripping in reality, you know, bring some reality into it, some logic, because obviously emotions are not logical. Emotions are way more stronger than logic.

But if you think about, as we're talking about, you know, baths, although we weren't, but the tap on a bath, if you've got a bath full of hot water, way too hot to get in. So you turn the cold tap on. So that hot water is the emotion.

Very, you know, it's like, it's way much stronger than the cold. And you'd think that you'd need an equal amount of cold, if not more, to overcome it, to change that temperature in any kind of a big way. But what's weird that happens is, and I'm not an expert on baths, but if you could smell me now, you'd realize that.

Just kidding. Or am I? But if you've ever done this, you put the cold water in and you have to watch the cold water. Be careful because it cools the water down really quickly.

And then if the water is going for more than like a few minutes more than it should do, the water is no longer a bath, it's too cold to have a bath in. It's just lukewarm. Then you have to put the hot water in again.

And it just takes forever to get that lukewarm water back to bath temperature. No matter how much hot water you put in, I end up having to like empty half the bath in order to fill it back up, which is a very big waste of water. And that seems to be what logic, logical thinking does to emotional thinking.

So the emotional thinking has a lot of power, a lot of power. And it seems to, I think with logic, it's almost I don't want to think of it in an army combative way, because that's that like that kind of idea. But if it was an arm missile, let's say, it's almost like the logic has got one arm, but emotions an octopus.

So it kind of has the advantage. However, it doesn't take too much logic to change the emotion. Gradually, it changes it.

But then when it has changed it, like with the bath water, it stays changed, it's really difficult to get it back to that emotion that it was before, to get it back to that heat of the water that it was before. And I'm not talking about emotion as if it's a negative thing, because emotion is it's just a factual thing, we have emotion, and it can be used to your benefit.

And to my benefit.

And the more emotion you've got connected to your thoughts, and to, you know, something that you want to do something that you want to accomplish a change that you are going to be making, like feeling more relaxed, feeling happier in your life, feeling more acceptance towards yourself. Have an emotion behind that. Let your unconscious mind know that you mean business, and to take notice, to give it priority.

It's almost like you're let at the front of the queue of the nightclub, don't have to queue up and wait, you just get through straight away. Because that emotion gives you priority, gives those thoughts priority. And it can go either way.

Panic, thinking about having panic attacks, anxiety, so much emotion connect to those thoughts, goes into unconscious mind, goes to the front of the queue, gets to go ahead pretty much straight away. Because of the emotion behind it. And your unconscious mind doesn't discriminate.

So if you have that emotion behind wanting to feel well, wanting to feel relaxed, expecting to feel calm and loose, expecting to feel well. And again, those thoughts with that emotion, go through into your unconscious mind to the front of the queue, and go straight in. Which allows you to make changes yourself, because what you're thinking affects how you feel anyway.

Always has, always will. Which means by making changes to how you're thinking, or thinking, I think someone says, sometimes says, thinking on purpose. Which means you decide what you think.

And that's very easy to get caught up in the mentality of, not, you know, I've got no control over what I think about and stuff like that. And there are times that I feel that way as well. But most of the time, we do have control.

We have an option to think about stuff. To think consciously about what we want, not what we don't want. If you think about what you want with emotion, again, that will go into your unconscious mind, the front of the queue, straight in.

The same as if you focus on what you don't want, with that emotion, straight front of the queue, straight in. And your unconscious mind puts it into action. Because if you're thinking, like last week, I was probably, well, I say probably, I was thinking that when I got into this meeting, feeling in the form, I was going to feel anxious.

I pretty much had that emotion behind it, went to the front of the queue, straight in to my unconscious mind. And my unconscious mind saw that as a request. Oh, so you want to feel anxious when you're sitting there feeling this forming at this meeting.

There you go. That's what you wanted. That's what you asked for.

It's almost like your unconscious mind is literal. No irony, no sarcasm. It doesn't understand that, doesn't have anything to do with that stuff.

It just does what it's asked to do, what it thinks you're asking it to do for you. It's on your side. After all, it is you.

And your unconscious mind is mostly affected by your conscious mind, by what we think about, what we expect to happen, especially when it's something important. And although I haven't really gone into depth about the not caring about stuff, it fits into this in a sense of, you can go either way. There's three ways of looking at something, I suppose, when it comes to a situation that may be challenging.

Things don't have to stop being challenging. Just because you've, there's no reason why going to that meeting and feeling that forming should be a really pleasurable, wonderful experience. You know, there's no reason why I should have done that, come home and written a poem about it, about how wonderful it was.

But on the other side, there was no reason why I needed to put myself through the emotional and turmoil that I put myself through. And there's a medium bit, there's another thing I could have done, where just saying, I don't care. I'll just go and do it.

I don't care what the result is. Maybe limiting yourself to the things that you're willing to have to, you know, sometimes there's emotion, things need a huge amount of emotion. And some things perhaps don't deserve the attention we give it.

Just like some people that don't deserve the attention. There's lots of thoughts that don't deserve our attention. So we can just say, I don't care, and dismiss those thoughts without dismissing ourselves.

But I do have a lot more to say about the not caring bit. But I seem to have gone in a different direction with this, which is something that I do. I should just not mention what I'm going to talk about at the beginning.

And then just see what happens. But I do believe this is really, really important to remember that what you think about, especially those things that has the strong emotion. So generally what you think about goes into the queue to your unconscious mind.

It might be something like you're thinking about going on holiday. You know, any year, two years time, or wouldn't it be nice to, I don't know, anything wouldn't be nice to get a new car. Or yeah, it could be just fantasy stuff.

And it just goes, just goes into your unconscious mind and queues up. But the stuff with the real emotion behind it, whether it's negative or positive, goes straight to the front of the queue and gets into that, like into a nightclub, you know, like a VIP. Just trying to think, VIP, very important person, could be a very important problem that needs solution, that needs a bit of gentle unfolding by your unconscious mind and your conscious mind together, maybe.

So I guess the message for this is, notice what you're thinking about. As I will also do that myself. And notice what emotions behind it, because even those things that don't have strong emotions are still going to be going into your unconscious mind.

Whatever it is you're thinking about, whatever it is you expect to happen, whatever it is you want or wish for, it's all going into your unconscious mind. And your unconscious mind thinks that that's what you want. And that stuff with the really strong emotions behind it, that's the stuff that goes in at the front of the queue.

And your unconscious mind tries to give you what you are asking for, because that's what your unconscious mind thinks it is, it's a request, even though it may well not be. When I had that meeting last week, I didn't want to feel crappy and feel anxious. I didn't want to feel that I needed to walk out.

I didn't want to feel those things. But that's the message I gave to my unconscious mind before going, and during as well. Because actually, during the meeting, I was imagining myself walking out, which actually was a suggestion to my unconscious mind to have that feeling of wanting to walk out, which increased the anxiety levels.

So these are just a few ideas. How changes are literally not in your hands, but in your mind, yet in your control. Because some things don't seem like they're in your control.

We have blind spots, like I said, and some things are perhaps a bit too overwhelming at the moment. In time, that will change. So what you can do is, like with a hot bath, you can just leave the hot bath there, let it wait for it to cool down, which it always does eventually.

Just like anxiety and stress always reduces. Or you can start filling it with cold water, which would be putting positive things into your mind, things that you'd like to experience, how you'd like to feel, thinking about nice memories, and all those little bits, even though they might not have the same emotion behind them as the other stuff that's at the hot water, the panic, the anxiety. It gets to a point where there's enough of them to cool that water down, so it's very hard for it to get hot again.

So that's really the end of this recording. And I want to thank you for listening. I hope that it's useful.

And I hope you perhaps understand more of where I'm coming from with this, and realize that I'm trying to help, and you can do more for yourself than I can ever do for you. Just by the way you think, just by changing the way you think, by thinking on purpose, I think is the, that's not my saying, it's a saying that I've heard somewhere, thinking on purpose.

And it's not about taking control, that almost seems aggressive, but it's about gently, gently being kind to yourself, because you deserve to be happy.

Take care, and I'll speak to you soon. Bye.