#185 Making friends with stress - Relax & Sleep Hypnosis Daily

Hello and welcome to Relax and Sleep Hypnosis Daily. My name is Jason Newland, please only listen when you can safely close your eyes. My website is jasonnewland.com. Before we start, I'd just like to say a big thank you for all the people that listen to this and any of my other podcasts.

I do appreciate your support and it's an honour to be able to help, hopefully. So I'd like you to get yourself comfortable. Now, it doesn't just mean sitting in a comfortable chair that supports your body or lying down in a comfortable bed.

It also means getting yourself comfortable physically as well, in a sense of maybe adjusting your clothing. So you don't want to be wearing tight clothing when you're relaxing. So it might be worth pausing this recording and putting on something a bit baggy, you know, something that's loose and maybe almost feels like you've not got anything on, just so you can relax and let the muscles just melt.

Of course, you know, you don't want to be wearing a belt or anything that's tight on your stomach. Make sure you've got your shoes off. Another thing is to ideally listen when you are unlikely to be disturbed, although being disturbed is fine, you know, I mean, if you've got children in the house and they need your attention, of course, that's more important than this.

But if you can have a, give yourself 20 minutes, half an hour, where you can just not have to be dealing with anything else, that's kind of an ideal situation. As far as background sounds go, I mean, there's a chance there'll be background sounds here. There's some bloke in the garden fixing his bike.

I mean, you might have similar things where you are. We don't need complete silence in order to relax. I mean, if there was a jumbo jet testing its engine outside, yeah, perhaps that's not the best time to listen.

Or maybe if there's a lawnmower going, that might be a little bit distracting. People trimming the hedges and stuff. Although saying that, I was asleep like yesterday, had a little nap in the daytime and the gardeners were trimming the hedges and I woke up to it and then just went back to sleep.

Yeah, didn't really bother me. So it depends what your level of concern is for that stuff. The more you listen, the more you start to realise that you can pretty much fall asleep in any situation.

And you can definitely 100% relax regardless what's going on. It doesn't have to be quiet to relax. You just need a bit of space, just need to take a step back from whatever's going on.

That may involve taking a five minute break from work, not listening to this, but you know, like in a day to day situation and just maybe going to the toilet, sitting down on the toilet or, you know, just taking a couple of minutes and counting down, count down from 10 down to one slowly and do that a few times. And it can really just something as simple as that really can calm your mind.

It slows your breathing without even focusing on your breathing.

And when your breathing slows down, you can breathe deeper. Something that I notice is when I do these recordings or when I relax myself, I notice that after maybe five minutes, 10 minutes, sometimes, sometimes very quickly, I noticed that first of all, my breathing has slowed down. But then when I do breathe, like not just naturally breathing, but when I focus on my breath, I noticed that it's much deeper.

I can get in the full capacity of my lungs and it feels quite nice. Everything, so I guess the lungs are relaxing, your heart's relaxing, that whole, the wind pipe, the whole process of breathing becomes easier. That's not really what this recording is about.

That's just one of those things that seems to naturally occur when you listen to me talking. Also, there's the slowing down of your mind. Now, you might have pressed play on this recording and already have a calm mind.

On the other hand, you might press play on this recording and your mind may feel like it's overwhelming and it's, you're being bombarded, feel like you're being bombarded with thoughts and what happens when you listen? Is your mind starts to slow down and when that happens, those thoughts don't like it. Those, especially the negative thoughts, they don't like it because they want to harass you almost, you know, like someone's in your face asking loads of questions and expecting you to answer straight away and not many people can deal with that anyway because it's a bombardment and it's not nice.

So, when we're doing it to ourselves in our own mind, you know, it's those, those ones that are really kind of pushing you and maybe making you feel uncomfortable.

Like in real life, when you start to go slow, those thoughts don't like it. Just like if someone's pressuring you to answer and you start saying, I don't know, I don't know. They don't like it.

People don't like it when you do that, especially when they're trying to almost bully you into moving quicker or doing things that perhaps you don't want to do. And when you start pretending you don't understand, what do you mean? Eventually they give up and go elsewhere for their fun, maybe if they call it that. And we tend to do that to ourselves, bombarding ourselves with thoughts, questions.

Why didn't I do this? Why did I do that? Why blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. What's going to happen tomorrow? What's going to happen next week? And just sometimes it really is too much. And it's not helpful.

It's not healthy. And some of those things are really important. It's not like I'm going to dismiss the thoughts you're having.

It might be really important to you. Some of it will be completely irrelevant as well. And, you know, there's no point pretending that all thoughts are negative as well, because they're not.

We have positive thoughts, so you might be bombarded with positive thinking. It doesn't have to be negative. It might be a wedding coming up and you keep thinking about all the things and how you're, you know, how it's going to be great and all that.

So you might be almost overthinking in a really nice way, but it's still maybe overwhelming and getting in the way of you relaxing. So I'm kind of looking at it from a different angle, instead of everything being negative and getting rid of the negative thoughts that are maybe stopping you from relaxing and sleeping. It might be happy thoughts.

It might be something that you're really looking forward to. So this isn't about eliminating those thoughts. It's just about letting them go for now.

It's about slowing your mind down. Naturally, it just slows down. You can't force your mind to slow down.

It just slows down naturally, especially when you hear my boring voice. Your mind slows down. So those thoughts just drop away.

Because you stop caring about them for now. And that's something worth remembering that no matter how often you listen to me and how often you relax your mind, it slows down, thoughts drop away. You're not going to lose anything that's important.

You know, if there's an important thought, you might want to write it down before you continue. But you're not going to lose it. It's going to come back.

If it's important, the thought will return to your mind at a later time. It's not about amnesia. You don't get amnesia from listening to me.

You get bored, but you won't get amnesia. Not as far as what's important to you. That stays with you.

Something that's, you know, so if you're looking forward to going to a wedding, or maybe it's your wedding, or maybe it's your child's wedding or a parent's wedding, you're not going to forget about the wedding just because you've let all the concerns, the excitement, the stresses, the tension go. You're not going to fall asleep and then wake up like, walk around completely oblivious to the wedding, completely forgotten about it.

No, of course not.

But you can let those thoughts go. Just let them drop away for now. Give yourself an opportunity to just get in touch with this moment.

How you feel now, without the past, without the future, but just now. And by now, I mean right now, not 10 minutes ago. Just now, how you're feeling in this moment.

Because that's all that is relevant. At the moment. At this time, all that's relevant is how you're feeling.

And how you're feeling is going to change continuously because it always does. And you can notice that change because it's energy and you can feel the energy. And when you relax, the more you start to notice the difference between the positive energy, the nice energy, the healthy energy, compared to the unhealthy, negative energy.

And they start to separate. Because quite often it's all intermingled, isn't it? When we think about things, sometimes, you know, I know I do. I think about the positives and the negatives and sometimes it gets very muddled.

But now, as you become more relaxed, those two different energies separate. Almost like oil and water, completely separate. And what you can do, here's a few things you can do.

You can be negative towards the negative thoughts and the negative energy. Or you can be gentle and kind towards it. Now, the fact is, there's a good chance that a lot of the negative thoughts and the negative energy actually feels that it's helping you.

It feels that it's there for you. To benefit you and it's on your side. Now, you might not feel that way.

It may not feel to you that the negativity is benefiting you in any way. And it may not be. But it might be a case that that part of you is trying to help but doesn't quite know how.

Perhaps like an overbearing parent or overprotective partner. You know, their intentions are good. Their intentions are genuine and loving.

But maybe they're going around going about it in the wrong way for you. So perhaps by thinking in a different way, focusing on that negative energy, that stress, the tension that's connected to that negative energy, that is also reducing with every second that goes past. You know, it's there but it is sinking, it's going away.

Because the more you relax, it's almost like your body opens up these holes. They're invisible, you can't see them. But they're like these invisible holes that are only, can only be seen by the negativity.

Only be experienced by the negative, the tension, the stress, the anxiety. And it falls out of your body. It just gets released.

Sometimes instantly. I mean, maybe hold on to a little bit of it for now. Just so maybe you can say thank you.

Thank you for your intention. Thank the stress, the anxiety, however weird it may feel to say that, to think that. Because obviously it's horrible, isn't it? Anxiety, panic, all that stuff.

But it's there to protect you. It's there trying to help you. It's just not doing it in a way that is right for you.

And sometimes it's treating you the way that you used to be. And you're not that person anymore. You know, if you met someone that you hadn't met, let's say your nephew, for example, and you hadn't seen, and they lived in the other side of the world, you hadn't seen your nephew since he was five years old, and now he's 19.

Would you treat your nephew exactly the same as you did when he was five? You wouldn't, would you? And that's sometimes how the stress is, the tension, it's treating us like we were in the past, trying to protect us, maybe by stopping us, trying to stop us from doing things. Giving us anxiety to stop us from doing things to protect us, when actually we don't need that anymore.

Maybe we never did.

You're in a different place now. And the idea that things like tension, anxiety, are actually positive things in a way, they're there to protect us, they're just maybe not doing it in the correct way, they don't know how to do it, but the intention, the intention is positive. Which means that when you start to view those feelings of negativity, and tension, and stress, and all the things that naturally we dislike, we move away from, we want to remove from ourselves, we start to view it differently, start to experience those feelings, and those thoughts, and ourselves in a new light.

You open yourself up to new possibilities. Maybe the way we used to think, maybe it wasn't completely 100% correct, and things have changed. Maybe we treat ourselves sometimes like we used to be, not how we are now, and perhaps that can start to be corrected consciously, and unconsciously corrected.

So in a way, making friends with the tension, the stress, any kind of negativity that's in your body, your mind, making friends with that, dilutes it, it can no longer hurt us, it never could hurt us, but now we know it can't do anything, unless we give it permission. Just like giving yourself permission to relax, it's much easier when you realize that you have every right to feel calm, and to feel loose, and to feel peaceful.

You deserve as much as anybody else, that comfort, that relaxation gives you, and that sensation, it's kind of a special sensation that you feel as you focus on your mind, and notice that there's really not much going on, because not much needs to be going on.

Now, I don't know what word you would give to describe the feeling in your mind, some would use the word calm, peaceful, serene, still, maybe no words are needed, and isn't it interesting how when your mind is calm, your body also feels. Karma, there's a real sense of having let go of everything, but without having really done anything, just maybe getting in touch with your, your natural, natural state of comfort, natural state of relaxation, stillness, it's nice isn't it, just being able to be in the moment.

I realize that some of you may have already started to drift, some of you may already have fallen asleep, and of course some of you may be listening solely to relax, and you can enjoy experiencing whatever positive feelings you experience, as that relaxing energy, comfort, peacefulness grows within your body and your mind, very still, it's almost like your mind is immovable, like a mountain, sturdy and peaceful, very, very calm, it's a nice feeling, nice to enjoy the continuous journey of comfort and peace, even though we haven't focused on individual muscles in your body,

or focused on particular parts, however, relaxation has continued to grow, continued to grow, as you focus on your mind, you may even almost be able to see that healing, positive, healthy, relaxing energy, stronger, spreading through your body, healing every part of your body, so relaxing, peaceful.