(no music) #18 Relax & Sleep Hypnosis Daily (Jason Newland) (26th July 2019)

Hello, welcome to Sleep Hypnosis Weekly. My name is Jason Newland and please only listen to this when you can safely close your eyes. Now, I suppose I should give you a quick apology for not having made a session for the last couple of weeks.

It's been just, I've been unable to do it. But I am here still and I will continue to make new recordings as well as the other podcasts that Let Me Bore You To Sleep. They're long, about an hour long each.

It's not hypnosis, it's just me just chatting about nonsense really. And there's the other popular sleeps, the most popular podcast I've got is Deep Sleep Whisper Hypnosis. And they last for about 20 minutes each and it's me just whispering.

So, these Sleep Hypnosis Weekly, it's a longer recording, still softly spoken, which pretty much everything I do is. It doesn't seem to be much call for shouty hypnosis, especially for sleeping. It doesn't seem to be shouting to someone, go to sleep, relax.

That wouldn't, that would really work. Although I quite like to make one just for fun. Remember, so this, in a sense, this is going to be a longer version of a Sleep Whisper Hypnosis session I did yesterday.

And the reason is because of time constraints, you know, doing a 20 minute one, there wasn't enough time for me to develop it. So I'd like to develop it now. And the idea behind this is, it's like a technique.

And it's basically talking to yourself, but gently and out loud, but not loud, you know, gently, quietly. In the recording I did, it was about whispering to yourself. So you might choose to do that instead of talking.

But when it's a low level, like how I'm currently verbalizing, it's soft, it's gentle. And although it's not whispering, it's definitely not like loud talking. It's not at that level.

But even if you increased the volume, it still wouldn't sound the same as talking, I don't think. I hope that makes sense. I know it is talking.

You might be thinking, what are you talking about? It's talking. What else would it be? It's not a jam of jar, jam of jar, jar of jam. So I can't even think.

So the idea and the theory behind this is that what we say to ourselves has a huge effect on you, personally. What you say to yourself has a big effect on your mental well-being, on your behavior, on your experience of the world. And I know that this is about sleeping, so I'm going to focus just on the sleeping aspect.

But you could take this broader and start to look at other things that maybe you may say to yourself or maybe could say to yourself that possibly has the ability to improve your life and increase your ability to enjoy certain aspects of your day-to-day living. But as I said, we're going to focus just on the sleeping part. And this is something that I'm going to guide you through it.

And it's not really anything phenomenally inventive or creative and it's kind of not anything that I haven't done before. But I'm explaining it in a way that perhaps I haven't done before, but then I might have done because I never listen back to anything that I do. I hold on to the idea that what I do and what I say comes from my heart, comes from my experience, comes from...

I don't know where it comes from sometimes, but the intention is for it to be useful and for you to be able to have a better night's sleep or day's sleep depending on when you sleep.

I personally sleep during the day, but I know the majority of people would sleep at night. I just, because of making recordings, I can only really make them at night when the world is quiet or quieter. Otherwise you'd have, if I was doing this during the day, you'd have a lot of background music from the gardens and neighbors and people shouting and laughing and basically enjoying themselves, which is lovely, but not the background I really want for a recording.

So the idea behind this is what you say to yourself affects what happens, but not just what you say to yourself in your mind, what you say to yourself out loud. And I've given this example before. Over many years, I've said to people that I'm no good at maths.

Mathematics, it's just, I'm just, I'm no good at doing that stuff. And admittedly, I don't think I'm ever going to have a PhD in algorithms or algebra or anything like that, but saying it to other people, telling people that I'm not very good at something, that repetition of it has not been beneficial to me. It's not been beneficial to my belief because I have that belief and it's very solid and it's very firm and stuck.

And I'm aware of it. And it doesn't bother me as much because I've you know, got a calculator on my phone that I can use. But I realize it's a limitation that I've placed upon myself without realizing that I was doing it because at the time, I was just telling other people what I was being told about myself, what people were saying to me, what the evidence gave me at that time.

But we grow, we develop, we change. It's like expecting to be able to fit into the same trousers or jeans that I was able to get into when I was 16 years old. Well, I could get them probably over my legs, over my ankles, but that's about as far as it would go.

And it's like, why would I get angry about that? Why would I set that limit on myself saying, I have a 27-inch waist when the evidence or the mirror tells me that I don't? My trousers tell me that I don't have a 27-inch waist. It's a 28-inch now, plus a few more. So what we say to ourselves has an effect.

And me telling myself I've got a 27-inch waist means that every time I bought trousers, I'd be wasting money. Even if I believed it, I wouldn't make it so unless I did something. In fact, I don't think I'd ever be able to get down to 27 inches, even if I did a million sit-ups a day.

If I did a million sit-ups a day, I probably wouldn't have a spine, would I? I'd just end up being dust. So what you say to yourself in a grand scheme of things has a huge effect on how you experience the world, how you experience your life, and how you experience that part of your life which is devoted to sleeping, which, you know, kind of generally is a third of our life.

We spend a third of our entire life, you know, technically, sleeping.

We sleep a lot more than that when we're babies, and possibly we sleep a lot less of that when we're elderly. Maybe, you know, I've heard that some people in their 60s, 70s, they don't need so much sleep for whatever reason. But then that's just generalizing.

It's about what you need individually, what feels right for you. So as you focus on something that's as important as eating, as important as breathing, you need to sleep. And you will sleep.

Eventually, you will fall asleep. Regardless of what happens, there's only so long that you can stay awake for before you will naturally just fall asleep. But that's not the best technique.

You know, it's it's just being cruel to yourself, to put yourself through that. So how do you overcome the idea of basing what you expect on what has come before, basing what you expect in the future, based on your experiences in the past. And it's really natural to have that.

It's natural to expect what's come before. But it doesn't mean that has to be that way. Some things are set in stone.

You know, like gravity. But even that, you know, so if you chuck a tennis ball up in the air, it's gonna land on the ground. It has to do it every single time.

But what if it lands and someone hits it with a tennis racket, and it lands on a roof of the house next door? Well, it hasn't landed on the ground. Of course, gravity is still involved. So there's those kind of factual things that can be bent in a way if you say, well, what if this happened? What if you chuck something in the air and a seagull grabbed it and flew off?

And then another seagull grabbed it and flew even higher.

And then it got caught onto a spaceship, a space shuttle as it was flying up into space, and it never landed back down, because it's in space with no gravity. So yeah, you could say, well, not everything that goes up always comes down. Because rockets on a space shuttle or whatever, the rockets disintegrate, they don't come back down.

There's lots of bits, satellites end up staying in space forever. So some things can change. And your sleeping patterns can change.

And what you expect for yourself can change. You can expect to have a good night's sleep. Expect to feel relaxed as soon as you lie down.

Expect to wake up feeling refreshed and actually feeling really positive towards the day ahead. Because you feel that you have recharged your batteries, and your body is relaxed. You know, the healing processes of your body and your mind have kicked in and worked its magic.

And maybe during your dreams, your unconscious mind and the things that have been on your mind have kind of processed whatever issues that you were thinking about previously. So you wake up feeling refreshed and kind of like reborn. It's something like being reborn when you wake up after a good night's sleep.

And you have a sense of feeling optimistic, a sense of feeling grateful for being alive, for feeling healthy. And one of the things you can do, which I do myself, is going to sleep. When you just lay down on the bed, don't try and go to sleep.

Just lay there. Just enjoy feeling relaxed. Don't even think about sleeping.

It's not important to think about it. Thinking about it is not going to make it happen. Because it can't be forced.

You know, you can't make cement mix dust. Just, you know, a bag of cement mix and a bucket of water separate, you know, and just look at them and just wish them to become cement. You know, it's working for you.

So it takes something to happen for that to happen. And you could say, well, that's physical labor and you put it into the cement mixer and all that. That's fine.

But when it comes to sleep, you lay down on the bed and you close your eyes. So you lay down on the bed, that's a cement mix, and you close your eyes, that's a water. And your unconscious mind does the rest.

It does the mixing for you. There's nothing for you to do. And maybe that's the problem for some people.

The idea that you don't have to do anything. There is no effort involved at all in sleeping. There are no medals to be won.

There's no certificates. There's no badges, there's no little stars that maybe you get at school. There's no tests, no essays to write.

Maybe in this day of accomplishment and being told that we need to work hard and we need to put effort in and be disciplined and all that stuff. None of that's needed for sleeping. I suppose you only, maybe discipline would be involved in maybe going to bed in the first place.

Maybe you're going, having a regular time to go to bed. Maybe you're not eating just before you go to bed or having, you know, coffee or, you know, that's something you need to work out for yourself because we're all different. But once you lay down in your bed, once you close your eyes, your head touches a pillow, you probably put your head on a pillow first and then close your eyes, your body relaxes.

What else is your body going to do? Your legs are going to move like you're, you know, riding a bicycle. They're not going to do that because you're just laying on a bed. Your hand's going to move like you're typing on a laptop.

No, your fingers don't need to move, they don't need to do anything. And maybe that, that's something that, that ability, that natural ability that we are born with, each and every one of us is born with the ability to just close our eyes and fall asleep. It's the most simple thing in the world that we are born to do.

It's one of the only things that we can do when we're born. We can cry. We can wiggle our toes and our fingers.

You know, there's very few things that we can do as a baby when we're first born. Sleeping is one of the main things. It's the most natural thing of anything that we do.

The most natural thing. It's not something that we had to learn. Like so many things in our lives, we had to learn to do.

Even something like going to the toilet, being potty trained, learning to chew our food. You know, learning to brush our teeth and getting dressed and doing shoelaces up, counting to 10, doing the alphabet, A, B, C, D, all that stuff we had to learn. Sleeping, we already know it.

Because it doesn't need knowing. It doesn't need anything. It just needs, well, the only requirement is you just lying down and closing your eyes.

That's it. And having trust in your ability to fall asleep without wanting to fall asleep. Because wanting it makes no difference.

You don't need to want it for it to happen. You don't need to want to feel hungry, to eventually feel hungry. You will feel hungry at some point during the day.

You will need to go to the toilet at some point during the day. More than once. And that's natural.

And need to think about it, it's just there. And feeling tired is also just natural. And of course, we can't always go to sleep when we're tired.

Because you might be at work, you may be doing something important, which really requires you to be fully aware, fully alert, fully awake. But when you're lying down on your bed with your eyes closed, you don't need anything. You don't need to be anywhere.

You don't need to think about anything or anyone. That's your safe space. To be in touch with yourself without thinking about anything.

When you get on a train or a bus or in a taxi or on a plane, whatever form of public transport you may take, or maybe you get chauffeured around, you know, whatever. You don't have to think about driving. You don't have to think about driving the bus.

Don't have to think about piloting the plane or driving the ship or the train. You don't have to think about that stuff. It's just happening naturally.

And you trust it to happen naturally. So if you trust a train driver, a bus to drive, be driven by a driver, a plane to be piloted by a pilot, doesn't it make sense to have trust in your own natural ability that you were born with to just sleep? No one's born with the ability to drive a train. No one's born with the ability to pilot an airline.

That's learnt sleeping. And that's just, it's just there. It's an effortless experience.

Now I know that some people may say, well, if it's effortless, how come I'm putting so much effort to it and I'm not getting anywhere? That's the point. You don't put any effort into it. It's about letting go of putting effort into it.

It's about lying there and not caring if you sleep or not. Because once you stop caring if you fall asleep, that's when you fall asleep, when you really don't care. Because caring about sleeping is not going to force you to sleep in the moment.

And you may say, well, if I didn't care, about sleeping, why would I listen to this recording? That's the difference I'm talking about in the moment. Talking about removing the worry, removing trying to force something. Because you know, you can stand at the edge of the sea on a beach.

All the willpower in the world, you cannot affect the tide. You cannot affect the tide coming in slower or going out slower. You can stand there and get your feet wet.

But you cannot affect the tide by willing it. Just like you cannot affect sleeping by willing it. That's why sailors and captains of ships, you know, in the past, long before engines, you know, when I had to literally go with the tide, use the energy of the wind, use the energy of the tides and the sea and the current and all that stuff that I don't know anything about.

It's like going with the flow. That's that term going with the flow. We're not salmon.

Salmon swim against the tide, against the flow. And I bet they don't sleep very much. How can you sleep if you're swimming that hard? And you think about it, that's what we're doing in our brains.

We may not be physically doing anything, but by going against the tide, going against the flow. In our brains, in our minds, there's too much activity which goes against our natural ability to just sleep easily. And I think that sleeping easily has got to be the best way to do it.

You know, if you had a small child, maybe you do, and you wanted your small child to go to bed and they go to bed and you're thinking, well, I'm reading them a book, you know, a storybook and I'm getting to the end of this chapter, but they're still awake and I want to go downstairs and watch telly. So you start saying to them, come on, go to sleep, go to sleep, go to sleep.

Now just focus, go to sleep.

I start shouting at them, go to sleep. I said, go to sleep. How much do you think that would help? Yeah, isn't that the equivalent of what we do to ourselves? When we're lying in bed saying, go to sleep, I must go to sleep.

I've got to be up in seven hours. I've got a busy day tomorrow. I must get some sleep.

And then visualising not getting any sleep, visualising tossing and turning, visualising waking up feeling groggy, visualising being tired all day the next day. How is that helping? Well, it's not. And you can choose what you visualise.

Why not think and visualise falling asleep easily? Why not visualise waking up feeling refreshed? Visualise spending the next day feeling awake and being able to complete the tasks that you have in front of you easily and naturally, but without actually having to think about the tasks or be concerned about any individual aspect of the day ahead. Because the day ahead is not important until the day starts.

The only thing that matters is sleeping.

And the only thing in order to fall asleep is to just lay down on your bed, your head touches a pillow, your eyes close, your body relaxes, and your mind slows down. And there's nothing to do. But just enjoy the feeling.

I love the feeling of closing my eyes. Just the feeling of relaxation that comes over my face, the relaxation in my eyes, because I spend all day with my eyes open. Looking at computer screens and watching television, reading, whatever.

It's so beautiful to just close my eyes and to be able to just lay down on the bed. It feels really, really comfortable to not have to do anything and to take my socks off. I love that.

At the moment, I've got no socks on because it's too hot. But, you know, in the winter, I'll take my socks off and just to have, even though it might be a bit cool in the bedroom, to have that cool air on my feet and my toes feels blissful. It's almost like having an invisible foot massage.

Just gentle, but yet stimulating and relaxing at the same time. And it really is kind of like a counting down, leading towards a sense of comfort, relaxation and calmness without needing to do anything at all. So going back to thinking what we think to ourselves, when you start realizing that you can just fall asleep, but it doesn't matter, what happens? You can lie down on your bed, your body relaxes, your head touches the pillow, you close your eyes and your mind naturally starts to slow down.

Your mind unwinds. Those things that are no longer useful to you at this moment can just disappear. Because it's not valid for this particular situation.

Just in the same way as someone that's, say someone's in a swimming competition, you know, doing the breaststroke two laps or whatever. The only thing on their mind is swimming. In that moment, it's swimming and probably winning as well, but swimming as fast as they can.

You're not thinking about what they're going to have to eat in a couple of hours time. Not thinking about what's on television, not thinking about, you know, a relationship from 10 years ago. Not thinking about anything but just that one thing.

And this is a step further. You get to the point where all you're thinking about is how nice it feels. You're not thinking about going to sleep.

You expect to fall asleep, of course, but you're not thinking about it. You don't need to think about it. You can focus on how you feel.

You can focus on how good it feels to just close your eyes, relax, and let your body relax. Because you don't have to do anything for your body to relax, because just by lying there on your bed, head touches a pillow, your eyes close, your body naturally relaxes. It naturally relaxes.

It doesn't mean it's going to happen in an instant. It might happen really quickly. It might take a few seconds before you notice certain parts of your body feeling that sense of pleasure that you get with relaxation.

Because relaxing is a pleasurable experience. And you know, I've done in the past, I did a lot of relaxation group sessions and the amount of people that would fall asleep because they were just relaxed. They weren't thinking about anything.

They were just maybe focusing on their body, on how it feels for each part of their body to relax. And they were just falling asleep. I've seen people meditate.

And again, they're just maybe focusing on their breathing or focusing on their body or focusing on, you know, repeating certain words. And it's so often you hear someone snoring. I've fallen asleep a few times.

I saw a friend of mine, he had about five cushions he was sitting on. He was very tall and he fell asleep and fell off the cushions. And it was very funny.

So you don't have to think about it. And you can say the words out loud if it helps. You can go through your body and say it out loud.

If you're on your own, say, maybe say what you notice. Oh, my neck is feeling relaxed. My stomach is feeling relaxed.

My hands are feeling relaxed. And you can go like a countdown from ten to one. Ten, relax.

Nine, relax. Eight, relax. Seven, relax.

You can just go down further, or you could start at a hundred, one hundred, feeling sleepy. Ninety-nine, feeling sleepy. Ninety-eight, feeling sleepy.

And maybe you choose to say it to yourself inside, which is probably something that I would personally prefer, I think. And then if you get to a number and you, because you're going to drift off doing this. It's practically impossible not to.

And then if you lose track of the number you're at, you start at a hundred again. Ninety-nine, one hundred, sleep. Ninety-nine, sleep.

And so on. There's a few ideas to play with over the next week. But just remember that you don't have to do anything.

You are that which you were born with, that which you were born to naturally do. To just sleep easily and naturally, because it's the most natural thing in the world for you to do. And by just lying down on your bed, your head touches a pillow, your eyes close, your body relaxes, your mind slows down.

You don't have to care about whether you fall asleep or not. Maybe just enjoy the feeling and the sensation of comfort. Enjoy the sensation of relaxation.

Just enjoy being you. And that brings me to the end of this recording. And I will speak to you next week.

Thank you for listening. Lots of love. Bye.