#172 Separate stress from relaxation - Relax & Sleep Hypnosis Daily

Hello and welcome to jasonnewland.com. My name is Jason Newland and this is Relax and Sleep Hypnosis Daily. Please only listen when you can safely close your eyes. Now I'd like you just to get yourself comfortable sitting or lying down.

If you're going to sit down please make sure you're in a safe comfortable chair that supports your body. What we're going to do, we're going to focus on, you know, basically dividing up the calm part of your mind and the anxious or stressful part of your mind. Okay, so there may be background sounds, my end or your end, and that's absolutely fine because this does not need complete silence.

And what you might find as well if, if you listen to the versions with music then you're less likely to hear the background sounds because the music kind of overtakes that. But hopefully, hopefully there shouldn't be too much other than Horace the pigeon who likes to visit me this time of the day. He likes to fly onto the windowsill and say, hey JJ, how you doing man?

And I'm like, hi Horace, you know, I'm kind of busy at the moment.

Why can't you come when I'm not busy? We can have a chat, cup of coffee, you know, cut the biscuits. He likes the biscuits. And you got no seeds or some worms? No biscuits but lime worms.

Anyway, I won't bore you down with that conversation I'm constantly having with Horace the pigeon. So what we're going to do is I'm going to imagine, I want you to colour coordinate, this is going to sound weird, colour coordinate the calm part of your mind and things in your mind that are stressful, anxious, anxiety causing. Okay, so let's say we give the anxiety, stress, give that a colour red, as if you want to.

Of course, you can use your own colour, but I'm going to say red because that makes, kind of there's that warning red sign, isn't it? Although red's a lovely colour anyway. And we're going to give the nice, peaceful, calm colour yellow. It could be any shade of yellow that you like.

Maybe it could be fluorescent if you want, but why would you want that? I prefer pastels. I'm a pastel kind of guy. Not fruit pastels, but pastel colours.

And so you've got yellow for calm, peaceful, serene, you know, thoughts and ideas in your mind that are either just really calm, peaceful. And you've got red for, not for danger, but just for being aware of stuff that's not useful to you. It's not helpful, not healthy, potentially causing you harm internally because of the negativities, you know, connected to the stress and anxiety and worrying and all that stuff.

And I guess it makes sense to have a neutral colour. A neutral colour, so we say blue, blue for neutral. It can be light blue, dark blue, up to you.

And in that category, the kind of stuff that you, you don't really have any feelings either way. You know, you're not excited about it. You're not bothered about it.

It's just, it's just there. So, for example, maybe if I say to you, what, what breakfast cereal do you have in your cupboard? Chances are, you're not going to get excited about giving me that answer. You might do, so that might be in the yellow.

If there's a worry of, well, I haven't got enough breakfast cereal and I've got, you know, then that might be in the red, that might be in the worry section. But generally, something like that would potentially, or what are you wearing? What socks are you wearing? Or what top are you wearing? It's kind of almost just neutral. I'm wearing an orange top.

I'm wearing, I'm not wearing socks because it's summer and I'm indoors. I don't have to wear socks. I've got no one to complain about my smelly feet.

So it's, you know, it's a neutral thing. Something you're not bothered about. Blue, something like that.

Some people might say, well, surely blue would be stressed because people feel blue in this shirt. No, let's forget about using colours like that to describe a feeling. Just for now.

You can use green if you want, whatever you want to do, but I don't want to make it too complicated. Because if we start making it too complicated by different colours and like choosing your own colours, it can get very mixed up. And then what you might find is the stresses that you had in your mind that we were going to try and concentrate and focus on and move around might just get fed up and leave of their own accord.

And then what are we going to do then? Because, you know, this is no point, there's no use to this recording if there's no, if the stress in your mind just reduces and basically wallows away, waddles away, willows away, disappears, vanishes, then the rest of this recording isn't quite as useful as I'd like it to be. So the idea is you try and hold on to that stuff just for a little bit longer.

And if you want to, of course, but by getting confused or by, and I don't, by confused I mean me confusing you, not purposefully.

But some people would say, well, you're talking about pigeon eating worms, or what's that got to do with the price of stamps? And that's right, it's got nothing to do with the price of stamps. I've never even mentioned stamps. Why would you mention stamps? And then some people say, well, now you're talking about stamps, what's that got to do with relaxing me and reducing the anxiety in my mind and, you know, compartmentalizing them?

It hasn't because I'm not going to try and compartmentalize anything.

I'm just asking that we're going to separate into little groups. So, you know, like a little football team, you know. So you've got one football team on one side, football team on the other side, and the third football team would be maybe the mascots.

So, you know, they can just be, you know, if it was a football team that is. Now the yellow will always win, the red won't win, the red doesn't have a chance. So the yellow is stronger.

Now, individually, sometimes it can feel like the stress and anxiety is the strongest feeling. But actually, in reality, it's the comfort, it's the relaxation that's stronger, because that's what we're born with. And my example of that would be, look at any baby, falling asleep is pretty much the easiest thing in the world for a baby to do.

Now, I'm not saying when you want them to fall asleep, because some parents will say, well, my baby hasn't fallen asleep, and I want to go to bed with you. Yeah, maybe not when you want them to go to sleep, but when they are ready to go to sleep, they can fall asleep eating. A small child can fall asleep standing up, dancing.

You know, it's, you know, when they're trying to keep themselves awake. And I do this myself sometimes when I'm trying to stay up late to watch boxing. And it's on at three o'clock or four o'clock in the morning, and I want to watch it because it's in America, and it's a big fight.

And I'm just almost trying to force my eyes to stay awake, to stay open, but they won't do what I tell them to do. And I used to be like that when I was a kid, you know, try and stay awake because I wanted to dance all night, you know, at a disco, a wedding or whatever, not my wedding, because I was five. But then my eyes would get tired, and I just, I'd almost be like a zombie dancing, but asleep at the same time.

And I know technically that's not what a zombie is. But you know what I mean when I say that it's almost like you're there, but you're not there. And again, you might say, well, you're talking about dancing now at five years old, trying to stay awake, but you can't because you're so tired.

What's that got to do with releasing anxiety and tension and stress? Well, sometimes remembering nice things can be useful. And also remembering reality, the reality that we are all born with very little natural ability to do very little. It's not much that we can actually do when we're first born.

We're one of the few creatures in the world that has to be looked after for years and years and years. You know, we're an anomaly in the world for that. So we can't, we can't walk when we're born.

We can't talk when we're born. We can't break dance when we're born. We can't feed ourselves.

We can't do pretty much hardly anything at all. We can't play chess, can't ride a bike, all the things, can't read, all the things that we kind of just are used to be able to do. Can't even think, really make any kind of logical thinking processes because our brains are not developed.

We can do very little. We can suck on a nipple or a bottle or whatever. That's a natural instinct.

That's just a natural instinct that we're born with. And we can sleep. We can cry.

You know, we can, we've got emotions going on. We don't understand the emotions, but we let you know. Child lets you know when they need something.

They don't always know what it is they need, perhaps. But if they're uncomfortable, they'll let you know and they'll cry. And there's very little else a baby can do.

They're pretty boring, really, if you think about it. They're not a very brilliant Christmas present, but then they get more interesting, you know, very quickly. But they get sleep so easily.

So people that have issues with insomnia, sleep issues, somehow forgotten that most of their life, most of all of our lives, we have slept fairly easily. Now, you know, especially if you're young, because for the first, I don't know how many years, when you're a child sleeping is quite often very easy. But when you're a baby, it's very easy.

It's just natural, most natural thing in the world. So we're born with that. We're also born with the ability to just smile.

We're born with the ability to appreciate the simple things. You know, a funny expression from a person, a smile from another person, you know, we're very simple creatures. And we're born with that ability to relax.

It's not just falling asleep. If you look at a baby, like a toddler in a pram or a push chair, and the way they're looking around with big alien eyes, you know, just like huge eyes looking around and just really peaceful, happy just to watch and observe and very relaxed, very relaxed. And somewhere along the line, perhaps we forget that we have that ability to relax deeply.

And a baby doesn't do it because they choose to do it, it just naturally happens. So maybe we can allow ourselves to get back in touch with that natural ability that we were born with to allow ourself, allow yourself to just let go of everything, just relax, because you can, because you've always been able to. I know that some people say, well, that's easier said than done.

Not always. Sometimes it's easier to do it than to say it. Sometimes just thinking of a nice memory or remembering a time when you have felt completely relaxed, or just lying down on the grass on a nice day, just looking up at the sky, the stars or looking up at the clouds going by, and your body just literally releases every piece of tension almost instantly.

And you can feel it, you can feel it almost soaking into the ground like the earth is draining you of that tension. And I've experienced that a few times over the years, and it's one of the most amazing experiences. I've also had that when I've not been lying down on the grass.

Maybe years ago, I was going through a very, very tense time. I was being made homeless, being evicted from where I was living and everything was kind of up in the air. And I was actually a counsellor at the time as well.

So I was dealing with people's issues. And between clients, I had about an hour and I remember I sat down on this kind of reclining chair in the kitchen of the building that I was working. And every bit of tension left my body.

It just drained away. It was almost like I just got out of the shower, or out of the bath, or out of the sea. And I just laid down and all the water was just dripping off me onto the floor.

And it felt so good. It felt so freeing. Because the body does what it needs to do.

And it will do that. And maybe sometimes it does it when you're not aware of it. Maybe when you're asleep, your body, or pretty often your body will relax so thoroughly.

But because you're asleep, you don't maybe consciously get to appreciate or experience the pleasure of that release. So you've got these colours, you've got red for stress, anxiety, whatever's left in your mind. You've got yellow for nice, pleasant, positive, relaxing thoughts.

Because our minds are never all one thing, generally. Although whatever you focus on is what you think about. And that's an obvious thing.

It's like saying, well, whatever you put in your mouth, that's what you're going to taste. Kind of, yeah. So if you want to eat porridge, don't make yourself toast, because you're not going to taste porridge if you put toast in your mouth.

We know that, Jason. This is about as silly as the worm story earlier with Horace the pigeon. Yeah, but it's not about that.

It's what you focus on. If you want to feel relaxed, you want to feel calm, you want to feel loose, you want to let go of everything, then it makes sense, just obvious sense, to then focus on that feeling. Because if you focus on something else, it's the opposite to that.

What are you going to experience? You're going to experience something different. So if you focus on what you want to focus on, that's what you're going to experience. And sometimes people may find it a little bit difficult to transfer from one way of thinking to another way of thinking instantly.

It might take a little bit of time, a little bit of effort, a little bit of work, a little bit of just a little bit of practice. But it's worth it, isn't it? If it means that you get to experience more of a sense of deep relaxation, calmness, peace in your mind, deep relaxation throughout your body, and a sense of focus towards the positive in life, then it's worth changing the way that you think.

It's worth choosing that from now on you will decide for yourself what you focus on.

Because you do have control of that. You have complete control of that. You just think of something.

For example, if I ask you to think about, think of a banana. Think of a banana. What are you thinking about? You're thinking of a banana.

You're not thinking of a hosepipe, you know, a garden hosepipe, where you are now because I've mentioned it. You chose to think about the banana. So you've now got the hosepipe or the banana.

Which do you want to focus on? You can choose. You can choose to focus on a hosepipe and from that focus you might have memories of a hosepipe or you might think of the banana and maybe start to think, I quite like a banana. A toasted peanut and banana sandwich.

I don't have that. I like toasted banana sandwich, but I don't do the peanut butter. Each to their own.

So what you choose to think about is your choice. Literally is your choice. And when you think about feeling relaxed, when you think about letting go of all the tension from your body, that's what's likely to occur because that's what you're focusing on.

So now as we break up the things, I want you just to allow all of those, whatever's left in your mind, any emotions, all of the pleasant emotions, just to drop of their own accord into the yellow section. All of the neutral stuff that really, you know, evil does not bother either way, just to drop into the blue section. And or any negative stuff, any things you're worried about, any stresses, tensions that's remaining in your mind or your body, just allow them to just drop into the red section.

Okay, now that's done. I want you just to move the red section over the bridge. This is a little wooden bridge.

It's safe. It can hold everyone's fine. Just let them just all move over over the bridge.

Right now all over the bridge. So the only way back is over that bridge. Now you can choose what you do next.

Okay. You can let that bridge collapse. Okay.

Or what you could do is you can allow that bridge to blow up. You can allow the bridge to disappear. Whatever you want to happen, just have that happen.

So that bridge is destroyed. So those red sections, that red section can no longer get over that gap between the two bits of land. Can't get over the bridge because the bridge is gone.

Can't get back. So it has to just move away. Keep moving away.

And what I'll do is I'll count from five down to one when I get to one. And you choose what to do. I'll just say the word now.

And you choose what you do with that bridge now. Okay. Five, four, three, two, one.

Ready? Now. Just notice how you feel as you watch that bridge just disintegrate basically. No longer usable.

It's gone. So what you've got left is the really lovely feelings, the pleasant positive feelings. The neutral feelings are just there.

They don't really affect you either way. Just notice how you feel. Notice the calmness in your mind and your body.

The calmness, the feeling of looseness and maybe pleasure. Just being aware of how you feel in this moment right now. Just being aware and allowing that feeling to grow.

The feeling of comfort and peacefulness, relaxation. Allow that to grow. Continue to grow.

So peaceful. So peaceful. And as I count from five down to one, you can become twice as relaxed and peaceful with each number that I read out.

Each number that I say, twice as relaxed. And if you choose, you can drift off to sleep if you haven't done already. Or you can just become twice as relaxed with each number for as long as you choose.

And that feeling of comfort, deep relaxation will continue to be with you. And every time during the day or night that you even think about me, think about my voice, think about this recording, think about some of the things that I've said, you'll instantly feel relaxed, both physically and in your mind. Now, five, four, three, two, one.