#500 Let me bore you to sleep - 500th EPISODE SPECIAL - Jason Newland (22nd September 2020)

Hello and welcome to Let Me Bore You To Sleep. My name is Jason Newland. Please only listen when you can safely close your eyes.

And Andrei is in the background, making as much noise as he can. So it seems right that he's involved because this is the 500th version, version? Episode. 500th episode of Let Me Bore You To Sleep.

It's pretty good going, isn't it really? 500 episodes and wow, many many hundreds of hours. So I thought this would be a little bit different. I'll make a different type of recording.

So first of all Andrei may be around in the background. Well he is around in the background but he may be making a little bit of sound. Basically what he's done is Ariana sent some tubes, like ferret tubes that he can play in, but he likes to sleep in them as well.

Now he's made one his own. He's made one that's over the other side of the wall, near the wall, and he sleeps in that quite a lot. And I put one the other side of the wall and he's rarely gone near it until today.

And for some reason he seems to like it in there. So he's making his own. So I guess he's scratching or rubbing himself over it and whatever else he does to sort of turn it into a place that he wants to spend time.

So that's his new, that is his new place. He's probably got bits and bobs in there. So he's probably got little bits of food stashed away as well.

He does that. He'll take food out the bowl and run off. So he stashes stuff away for later on.

Biscuits and stuff. So it's kind of like a little nuclear shelter really, in a sense. But without the nuclear bomb, I suppose.

So yeah. But it is quite, it seems to make more noise when I'm recording. It sounds a bit louder.

I think that might be because I've got headphones on. And for this recording, I am quite close to the microphone specifically because I'm going to do something a bit different to celebrate the 500th episode. So I want to first of all thank everybody for listening.

All the people that have been listening. Maybe you've just come across me lately or maybe you found me a year ago. Maybe you've been listening right from the beginning of the podcast back in, I think it's March 2018.

Or perhaps you've been listening to me for years and years and years and years. So for whatever situation you fall into or whatever category, I'd like to say thank you. Thank you very much for being part of this because without you, there'd be no point me doing it.

And I've probably had more feedback on this Let Me Bore You To Sleep podcast than on any other podcast I've done, even though technically it's not the most popular one out of all of them. But it's, so yeah. The Relaxation for Hypnosis, Stress and Anxiety.

Relaxation. The Relaxation Hypnosis for Stress, Anxiety and Panic Attacks podcast is my most popular podcast daily now, on a daily basis. So regardless of that, thank you for listening to this and to all of my podcasts.

But this is the only one I can really, this is the only one of the only ones I actually talk to you, you know, in a sense. There's, uh, really, Andre? That's a lot of noise. That's a lot of noise.

In fact, I even pressed the pause button there because it was so noisy. Anyway, what I thought I would do is, instead of talking about myself, instead of randomly rambling on, thought I'd actually do a, more of a guided sleep thing. So maybe given some ideas, talking some, talking about some ideas that may be useful, okay.

It's still going to be boring because it's still my boring voice talking. But I thought it might be useful. You get me? Okay.

So, uh, here we go. So look, what I'm going to do is, so because this is a sleep session, I'm going to ask you to lie down on your bed, if it's comfortable for you to do so, if it's safe for you to do so. When I say safe, I mean, physically.

So, you know, because not everybody is able to lay down on a bed due to physical limitations, possibly. And so some people may sleep, uh, lying up in bed, you know, sort of lying up, sitting up, or maybe sitting in a chair. But the chair, if you are sitting in a chair, needs to be supportive of your body.

So that if you were to fall asleep, then you wouldn't fall out of the chair because that's, it's not ideal really. If you know what I mean. So, what was I going to say? Yeah.

So what I'm going to do is talk through some stuff and I'll just, uh, I've got the TV on. It's so funny. Sorry.

It's this camera catching people committing crimes and stuff. It's on, on the telly. It's on mute, but the reason I leave the telly on is because if I turn it off, it starts clicking and clocking and making weird noises.

So I just leave it on. So I've got less of those bangy sounds that the TV makes. It might, I don't know what it is.

It's just maybe as it, the heat stops or I don't know, I don't know if TVs have tubes inside them anymore, but yeah. And I just had these, uh, I don't know, I suppose criminals being arrested and their trousers were pretty much down by their knees. It just looked so ridiculous.

It's funny. Anyway. So here's a few ideas that I've talked about in the past in some of my other recordings, which I don't normally talk about on this recording.

One of the first ideas I'd like to share is, my tummy's rumbling, is the idea that when you're in bed, you can enjoy just lying there. The idea that actually lying on your bed, closing your eyes, your body starts to relax. And when you put your head on a pillow, it sounds like, you know, you actually take your head off your shoulders and put on a pillow.

I mean, when you lay your head down on the pillow, your mind can slow down. I mean, first of all, when you've got your eyes closed, there's less stimulation going on. You can't be distracted by anything you see because you can't see anything.

When you're lying in bed, you're not going to hear that much. At the moment, you're hearing me. But when I lie in bed, I can sometimes I'll hear the weather.

I don't mean the weather forecast, you know, I'm not leaving the TV on for that. But I don't, you know, it's just general background sounds. So when you're in bed, you've got your eyes closed.

And even though you've not got your ears closed, your ears have less stimulation because the television's not on and you're not in having a conversation with anybody. So you don't necessarily have to listen to anything. I mean, even now, if you're lying in bed listening to me, you don't have to listen to me.

You may be so used to pressing the play button and hearing me mumble on and on and on and it just almost zoned me out. And I turn into white noise, which is lovely. What a lovely thought, all this energy and work I put into this and I'm just white noise.

I'm just exactly the same as static. Lovely. Thank you.

And it doesn't matter. It's that's cool. So you can pretty much say that there's not much in the way of auditory stimulation occurring.

Because your ears are not needed. So your eyes are not needed, your ears are not needed. So those two senses are pretty much slowed down to nothing.

I mean, visually, if there's light outside, you know, if you might be sleeping during the day, and there might be a light in another room. So, you know, you might be able to see a little bit of light through your eyelids. But ultimately, it'll be dark.

Your ears, something that I discovered. And I know I can only talk for myself. But since I've been sleeping during the day, the last few years, I've noticed that even if I'm woken up by something like a lawnmower, I want to say woken up by a lawnmower.

It's not a lawnmower knocking at my door saying, Hello, do you want to come out to play? I'm talking that someone is in the garden using the lawnmower or using. It's not only one lawnmower in the world is using a lawnmower, not the lawnmower, the only one. And initially, I'll wake up.

And it's almost as if my ears adjust. And because I've just woken up, I'm not awake. I'm maybe 10% awake.

But my body is still completely relaxed. And the pillow seems to have left the dent of my head. The side of my face, because I sleep on my side, it seems to have just left it there.

So if I do get up, I can just comfortably rest my head back to where it was. And falling back asleep is quite easy. And I've noticed that my ears seem to just switch off.

I think there's something about when you're asleep, your ears notice things that are important, or that might be important to wake you up. For example, a knock at the door, your alarm going off, things like that. And you set your alarm.

So you're wanting to wake up at a specific time. I use the word wanting to very, very lightly there. But you set it for a reason.

If the smoke alarm went off, a fire alarm went off, you would wake up. So if a lawnmower starts in the garden, for me, it wakes me up. But then I realize what it is.

And I realize that all part of my mind realizes that it's not relevant, that it's not important, and that it does not need your attention. And then you just ignore it. Just your mind does it for you.

It's almost like your ears just close up and just stop listening. Because you don't need to. So you're not using your eyes, you're not using your ears, you're not using your speech.

You're not talking. I mean, you might talk in your sleep. I sometimes do.

I'm pretty sure I sing in my sleep. But I'm not sure. But generally, you're not using your voice when you're asleep, or when you're in bed.

You're not using your sense of taste. Unless you're eating your pillow. You're not using your sense of smell.

Well, if you shared a bed with me, you'd definitely be smelling some farts. But apart from that, so you're not using your sense of sight, hearing, smell, taste. There's a weird sound.

What's that? It might be something outside. So you're not using those senses. You're not really using your sense of touch.

You can be aware of how relaxed you feel physically. You can be aware of your muscles relaxing. In a way, that seems to turn into almost kind of a dissociation from your body, from feelings.

Almost as if you stop noticing your body. As if you kind of move away. Because when you drift to sleep, you're not aware of your body in that time, necessarily.

Not aware of what you smell, or what you taste, or what you feel, what you can hear. So it's almost like all of your senses are either switched off, or damped down, turned down, reduced gradually and naturally. Which is just something that happens in its own time.

So that's one of the things that I've noticed. One of the things that I talk about when I do sleep sessions. And there's that feeling, that release, that, I suppose, a letting go.

When you do lie down in your bed, or you sit down in your chair, or you sit up in your bed, whatever it is, there's a real release of tension. I kind of liken it to having been shopping. And I'm a walker.

I said walker. And so I get the bus, or I walk to the shops. So I'm walking back with shopping.

That's when I'm, unless I get a delivery. But you know, I still have to go and get a few bits down in. And sometimes I'll be carrying stuff that's, you know, fairly heavy.

And the carrier bags, maybe digging into my hands, and especially when it's cold, like, oh, I don't like this. And then I get home, dump the bags on the floor. Oh, that's such a relief.

Just, first of all, to probably be indoors. But just to relax my hands and my arms and my shoulders. And then when I sit down, oh, such a relief.

For my legs and my feet. I notice my feet, especially if I've been walking a long distance. Oh, my feet feel so relaxed.

It's just really pleasant. So that's kind of how I would class lying down in your bed. As you lie down on a comfortable bed that supports your body.

There's nothing for you to do. There's no agenda. There's nothing for you to say.

There's nothing for you to remember. This has turned into a poem. You close your eyes.

There's nothing to look at. So you close your eyes. And closing your eyes is in itself so relaxing.

And I've got my eyes closed now. It genuinely feels nice just to have my eyes closed. It feels really good.

It's almost like it's a trigger for the rest of my body to start to relax. Because when you've got your eyes closed, generally, for people with sight, generally closing your eyes means you can't do anything else. It means that you're not able to walk around because you'd have to open your eyes to do that stuff.

So when you've got your eyes closed, it's very limiting to people that are able sighted. When we close our eyes, it's a trigger to the rest of the body that it's time to relax. Your legs are not needed.

Your muscles are not needed. No thinking really is required. And you can feel safe to just let go of everything.

So that's one of the things I quite like about just lying in bed. Just taking the weight off my feet. You know, as I used to say, just take the weight off and relax.

And the relaxation happens naturally. It literally cannot be forced. You can't force yourself to feel hungry.

You can't force yourself to want to go to the toilet. You can't force yourself to feel relaxed. Can't force yourself to fall in love with someone.

You know, these are natural processes that happen in their own time naturally. You can definitely give it a nice little bit of a shove, a little bit of a push. Just by lying on your bed, closing your eyes or sitting in a chair, closing your eyes.

Of course, you can feel relaxed without closing your eyes. You can walk down the street feeling relaxed. Noticing your shoulders are loose.

Noticing that you feel quite light on your feet. Noticing that your jaw is loose. Your body generally is just kind of elastic, you know, as a train goes past.

It's a train or a plane. So that's one of the things I talk about, you know, feeling tired or closing your eyes and relaxing naturally. But what I like to talk about is actually enjoying it.

So instead of going to bed lying down thinking, oh, you know, like it's a chore. Like it's something that you're not looking forward to doing. Because you're thinking of the outcome.

That's all you're thinking about is the outcome. The thing that you want, but possibly don't expect. Which again is going to have an effect.

Maybe what you can do is lie down and just enjoy the feeling of comfort as your body is supported by the bed. And without wanting or expecting or anything. Just enjoying the feeling of being comfortable and perhaps wanting that feeling to continue.

And to enjoy just lying there, feeling so relaxed. And the more you enjoy that feeling, the more likely you'll just drift into a natural sleep. And you'll start to drift anyway, because drifting doesn't just have to be one thing.

You know, you're awake, you lie down, you drift, you're asleep. Yeah, some people can do that. Some people do it naturally.

But drifting can be something that happens. And then you come back, you drift again. And then you come back.

And every time you notice that you've drifted is proof to you that you can drift to sleep easily and naturally. Andres snoring. Can you hear him? Andres, dear Jason, it's really nice that you're doing this relaxation session.

But can you just stick to it? Because if you keep interrupting it by talking to Andres, it's disturbing. Stop it. Okay.

Well, another thing I mentioned in my recordings is that we were born, we were all born with the ability to sleep easily. And naturally, we were all born able to fall asleep. All of us.

And things like insomnia quite often need to be learnt. You know that layin' there? Yeah, thanks Andres. Layin' there, overthinking.

It can also, I guess, become a habit. Because sometimes lying, you know, thinking about things could be really nice. Depending upon what it is you're thinking about.

So, remembering that falling asleep is the most easiest thing in the world. In a sense of, one of the only things that we were born able to do right from the age of day one. In fact, before we were even born, you were able to sleep easily and naturally.

And let's face it, if you were able to be, to fall asleep, and to stay asleep when you're inside a human being before you're born, you're able to be asleep with all that walking around, you'd be banging around, you know, it wouldn't be a nice, smooth, relaxing bed like what we have now. There'd be noises, all kind of physical, inside bodily noises, as well as all the noises outside. Yeah, we were able to sleep through that.

And babies are able to sleep so easily. In fact, sleeping is so important to a baby. When babies grow, it's part of the healing process, part of the brain growing and the body growing development.

But when babies can't sleep, when they have a little bit of problems, they scream, they don't like it, because they know that there's something wrong. It's not natural not to be able to sleep. For a baby, it doesn't make sense, because normally they can just lay down, close their eyes and fall asleep instantly.

And somewhere along the line, we sometimes forget that we have that inbuilt system within us. We get so caught up in being adults and so caught up in limiting thinking towards ourselves. And there's also, you know, potential for, you know, people to start to think of themselves as maybe their illness.

So someone has a physical or mental illness, start to start thinking themselves as that, associating themselves as that. And that is not them. It's part of them.

It's not the whole picture. No one is their illness. We're more than that.

Other things that I've talked about are things, I mean, there's little techniques you can do, counting down, you know, from maybe 200 down to one. You can focus on different parts of your body. So I'll give you an example.

I suppose it's like a body scan, really. So you can lie in your bed and you can, first of all, just focus on your forehead, just being aware of it. And you're not trying to cause your forehead to relax.

You're just noticing how your forehead looks. And then you move down to your eyelids. Again, you're just noticing how your eyelids feel.

Maybe noticing how relaxed your eyelids feel now that they are closed. But not trying to even encourage relaxation, just accepting how you feel in this moment. Then moving down, perhaps to your jaw, which can be a place that sometimes, you know, tension can be held.

And you can notice your jaw and notice if there is any tension there. You're not trying to get rid of the tension. You're just acknowledging it.

Just acknowledging how your jaw feels in this moment. And then you can focus on your mouth, you know, your tongue, maybe your teeth, your gums. Again, you're just noticing how your tongue feels.

And this is about acceptance. It's all about just acceptance. It's not about judging.

It's not about, you know, thinking, I wish this, this, this, this, and I wish that and that. And, you know, I should feel this way, not this way. It's not about that.

It's about just focusing on the different parts, because your mind is not really needed while you do this. It's just about giving all your focus to the different parts of your body. As you move down to your neck, your throat, maybe the sides of your neck as well.

And just being aware of that feeling. And although you may be used to, maybe the feelings of your front of your neck, the sides of your neck, maybe a part of you that you don't normally pay any attention to, unless there's an ache or something like that. So you're just noticing how your neck feels.

And now as you focus on the back of your neck, and this seems to be sometimes a fair bit of pressure on the back of my neck. That's what I notice. So as I focus on the back of my neck now, I can definitely feel the muscles.

It's not because there's lots of muscles. It's not. It's just, I sometimes feel the weight of my head is on the back of my neck.

And perhaps there's a lot of truth in that. As I focus on the back of my neck, I notice the things start to just ease. Even though I'm not trying to cause the muscles in the back of your neck to relax.

It's interesting how that reaction tends to occur naturally. Now you can focus on your shoulders. Now, if you choose, you can allow your shoulders just to drop.

You know, although we're not really trying to manipulate how we feel, you might feel like doing that because whenever I focus on my shoulders and if I notice that they're tense, I naturally untense them. I naturally let them just drop so they're more relaxed. It just, it feels like the right thing to do.

Just, you know, if I catch myself with tense shoulders, I just let them, or sometimes I push them back a little bit just to just to stretch them. But this isn't really about stretching or tensing them or anything like that. The main thing is just to notice how your shoulders feel in this moment.

And then you can move your focus down your arms, tops of your arms, your elbows. You can do all these bits separately if you choose. I'm just going to focus on the arm as a total object.

So all the way down from the tops of your arms, your shoulders, forearms and wrists. And just being aware of both of them. You may need to alternate your attention from one to the other, or you may be able to focus on both at the same time.

Sometimes I find that by moving the part of the body that I'm focusing on, it helps me to zero in the focus. And again, you're not trying to relax your body or your arms, you're not trying to cause changes to occur. You're just accepting how your arms feel in this moment.

And then you can focus on your hands and your fingers. Now again, sometimes I like to move my fingers around. I don't mean generally in life, I walk around flapping my fingers around, but just almost to get in touch with my hands and my fingers.

Because the more naturally I become relaxed, it seems, it can feel like parts of my body are disappearing. So by moving my fingers, I can really get in touch with how my fingers and my hands feel. And then by letting them just be still, I can get a sense of the natural state of my fingers and hands, as they do feel different now to how they did before.

They do feel more relaxed, even though I'm not trying to cause them to feel relaxed. Now you can focus on your chest, just being aware of your chest. And it's not just your chest, but it's the area that moves around your sides, maybe underneath your arms.

Because those muscles also connect to your back. So the chest still continues around your back, and just being aware. See what I'm doing now is I'm moving my arms just a little way away from my body.

And I can feel the connection between my chest and my back. And every time you breathe in, and every time you exhale, your back and your chest gets a stretch. Might just be a small stretch.

It's a nice feeling when you just focus on your chest without expecting anything and accepting everything. As you move down to your stomach, noticing the feelings in your stomach. Again, when you breathe, your stomach moves and stretches.

The more you focus on your stomach, the more you may notice the muscles in your lower back as well. It's almost as if those, that whole area is connected. And I suppose that does make sense when you think that whenever we turn, we're using your lower back and your stomach at the same time.

Whenever you pick something up, basically whenever you move your hips, you're using your stomach muscles and your lower back muscles. So there is that connection in movement. And as you just accept exactly how your stomach feels, without trying to cause your stomach to feel more relaxed and loose, you can just allow yourself to be however you are in this moment.

As you move to your back, from the top of your back all the way down to your lower back, just being aware of the feelings in your back and accepting how you feel. Totally accepting every sensation. Not just in your body, even in your mind, just accepting how you are in this moment.

As you just scan your back, in your mind, just noticing any feelings, as you now focus on your hips and that whole area from your lower back, oops, of your thighs, the whole area, your buttocks, your groin, just being aware of how it feels, that part of you that is very likely used a lot during the day, for getting around, we use our hips a lot to be able to just be lying down and taking all pressure off of your hips, knowing that you don't need to use them at this moment, gives you the opportunity

to just accept how your hips feel right now, as you focus on your thighs, moving all the way down, your knees, your shins and your calf muscles into your ankles, from your thighs all the way down, your knees, shins, calves and ankles, being aware of the heaviness of your legs, being aware that you don't need, you don't need them at this moment, you can just be aware of how they feel without any judgement, without needing anything, just acceptance and lastly, you focus on your feet and your toes, noticing how it feels to not need to

use your feet or your toes, you may choose to just move your toes around, just to get in touch with how they feel, whatever you find useful as you realise that you can truly just accept how your feet and toes feel without judgement, without wanting them to do anything or to feel any way, just allowing yourself to feel the way that you do right now, in this moment, so sometimes doing a body scan like that can not just naturally lead into a sense of deep relaxation and comfort, but also a sense of deep healing sleep,

deep healing sleep, and there's so many other things I could talk about, that I talk about in my sleep sessions, but what I'm going to do is leave you with a counting down from 20 down to 1, like I do quite often in the sleep sessions that I do, and with every number you hear me say, you can feel twice as relaxed and twice as sleepy, twice as relaxed and twice as sleepy, now 20, 19, 18, 17, 16, 15, 10, 14, 13, 12, 11, 10, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1,