#38 Relaxation Hypnosis for Stress, Anxiety & Panic Attacks (Jason newland)

Hello and welcome to jasonnewland.com. This is relaxation hypnosis for stress, anxiety and panic attacks. My name is Jason Newland. Please only listen to this when you can safely close your eyes.

Now, I'm trying to make each of these recordings different. However, there is always going to be an overlap, because I'm kind of talking about the same subject each time, kind of. And I may repeat some of the stuff that I say.

And part of the reason for that is because I forget what I've said in previous recordings. So, if I do repeat something, try and pretend that I'm repeating it in order to solidify the idea, you know, so that it goes into your unconscious mind and has a therapeutic reaction. That sounds a bit better than just me repeating because I've forgotten what I previously said.

And before I go further, there's going to be some people listening to this, or listening to me for the very first time. So, just to let you know the reason, I do lots of different podcasts. I've got about 35.

The things that I focus on, mostly, it seems, quite often is sleeping. Quite a few sleep podcasts. Relaxation, chronic pain, things like that.

Yet, although I'm probably very passionate, have been, in helping people with chronic pain, the thing that I've probably been affected by the most in my life is the anxiety, stress, and panic attacks. So, this is much more of a personal project for me. Because although I do a lot of sleep sessions, I generally sleep quite well.

There's been periods in my time, in my life, that I haven't, but I'm generally a sleeper. I can sleep during the day, you know, so I'm pretty good at sleeping. But my life has been transformed by anxiety and panic attacks and stress in the past.

So, as I said, I don't know what it feels like to be you. Nobody knows what it feels like to be you. But I do know what it feels like to be me and experience acute anxiety, stress, and panic.

I thought today I would talk about the physical side of stress. Because there's a lot of, I don't know, I think today's society, in England anyway, there's a lot more publicity around anxiety or mental illness or mental health issues. But now I hear a lot of people, including even famous people and therapists calling it mental health, when they discuss someone that's ill.

Oh, they've got mental health. No, they've got mental illness. You know, someone who's physically sick, you don't say, oh, they've got physical health.

No, they've got physical sickness, they're illness, they're ill. And not everybody that has mental health issues, we use that term, are always ill. Some people, for myself, for example, have bipolar.

I've been diagnosed actually. And also emotionally unstable personality disorder with something else added to it. It's unstable and whatever.

So it's just a bunch of stuff, isn't it? It's a bunch of, it's labels and some psychiatrists don't like to diagnose because they're unsure about whether it's a useful thing for the patient to be given that label. But from a patient's perspective, from my own perspective, rather, I like to know what's going on. So if I've got a broken leg, I want to know that I've got a broken leg.

I don't want it just to be called an injured leg. I want to know exactly what it is. You know, vagueness, I don't think is useful, always, when it comes to medical stuff, personally, for myself.

And I never used to understand that our brain, the brain, can cause physical illness. I didn't know that thinking stress could cause physical illness. I didn't know that was even possible.

Yeah, I'd read studies and years ago, I used to read psychology papers and stuff, but more on how thinking can eradicate illness. But I'd never thought of it the other way around. So thinking can eradicate an illness by thinking in a, maybe using hypnosis, for example, in reducing some of those issues involved in the illness.

And it's illegal to say that hypnosis can cure anything. You know, as far as a physical thing, you can say you can cure insomnia, you can cure, you know, stop smoking and stuff like that. But if someone's got a physical illness, you can't say, not allowed to say that hypnosis can cure that illness.

But there are many cases of hypnosis helping somebody to the point where they no longer suffer from that illness. And it may be a roundabout way, it might be a simple case of reducing the person's stress levels so that the body can heal itself. Or it can be even more focused attention on the healing process itself.

Imagining that the body is doing certain things in order to heal your body, imagining playing a game where, you know, in your mind where you're healing and changing the processes within your body. I won't go into details, but it's quite fascinating some of that stuff. Not necessarily relevant to this, but I didn't realize that at the time I was 24, and I got ill.

Stomach. So my stomach really, really bad stomach pains for about 10 months. September, it was probably October October 94 till maybe August 95.

Something like that. So it was about 10 months. And I had, you know, I won't go into like graphic details, but I had a very, very bad stomach.

Couldn't eat hardly anything. And I was bleeding, I was going to see the doctor regularly. And they couldn't figure out what was wrong with me.

I had scans, ultrasound things, you know, they do for pregnant ladies, more pregnant people. And to see the baby inside, I did that with my kidneys and my internal organs. I had a thin camera down my throat into my stomach.

And then I still couldn't find anything wrong with me. And then they gave me blood tests and they started to look for the more serious stuff. And then I went for the results of the test, the blood tests, and they tested everything.

You know, they tested all of my bodily functions. And I went into the hospital, into the, the office, and there was two specialists there. And I was worried, I was thinking, oh, especially as my doctor told me what they were looking for, which was a serious, serious illness, which worried me.

And they said to me, we can't find anything wrong with you. There's nothing wrong with you. And I think in their words, it was, it must just be stress.

Those, those words always kind of stick with me. Just, must just be stress. But stress was nothing.

And I couldn't believe it. I started laughing. I said, what do you mean stress? How can stress, what am I stressed about? I haven't worked for, you know, the whole time I've been ill.

I haven't, what have I got to be stressed about? How can stress make me ill? And they didn't have an answer for that. And they said, we're going to give you some antidepressants. And I said, all right, and I took, took them.

And we, by two weeks, the pains had stopped. I put on half a stone in weight, not within two weeks, but over like a month, I put on half a stone in weight. Well, the bleeding had stopped, the pains had stopped, everything, everything kind of went back to normal.

Just for these little pills. They're quite big pills, but, and I've only taken one a day. Wasn't, they weren't even big, you know, I take four tablets a day at the moment, which is still quite, not a lot really now, but I used to take more.

And that's when I realized that stress can have a huge effect on our physical well-being, without even seeming like a stressful situation. Well, I did suffer depression during that time, but I was depressed because of being ill. If I'm honest with you, that was the thing that was upsetting me the most, not being able to sort of go outside the house without needing to get to the toilet, or the embarrassment of going to the doctors and being examined intimately.

And, you know, I hated it. And feeling ill all the time. Well, a lot of the time, wasn't all the time, but it felt like it.

And I couldn't work it out. How could I be ill with stress when I wasn't stressed? In my idea, a stress, it would be something like being a policeman, or being a firefighter, or as I say, being married. But, you know, just being in a stressful environment, I wasn't married, didn't have children, you know, I didn't have really anything to worry about.

Yet, my body, or my mind was creating this stress in my body, which caused my body to be ill, physically. It wasn't just a feeling, it was, as I said, it was bleeding. It was, I thought maybe I had an ulcer or something like that, which I didn't.

And it didn't make sense to me. It didn't make sense to the doctors or the specialists either. So being at home, eating whenever I want, sleeping whenever I wanted to, watching television whenever I wanted, having enough money to live on, not being, it was just benefits, but it was still, I wasn't like struggling, struggling, it was, I still had to, had enough to get by.

Yet my body was reacting to my mind, and I couldn't figure it out, because it didn't just, it didn't fit together properly. It just was like, how can I be ill, physically, physically ill, when I didn't have anything to worry about, didn't have anything to be stressed about. And at that time, there was no help other than just, here's the tablets, and go away.

That was it. I wasn't offered counselling, or anything. It was really a case of just, there you go, bye, good luck, come, it was a case of come back if they don't work, really.

And I took them for, yeah, I took them for, what is it, September, October, I took them for about two and a half months, I think. And then I stopped taking them, because I didn't like the slowness that it made me feel. I felt really lethargic, and, and I put weight on, which I was kind of glad about, because I was very slim in them days, very skinny, actually.

And, but I found that my thinking had slowed down a lot, which I didn't like. So I stopped taking them. And then I was back on them again, in January, 96.

So I was off them for about three months, and then I was back on them. And the reason I'm mentioning this is because firstly, I think it's important that that loud bird goes away until I finish this recording. It's important that we're useful, that we recognise that actually mental ill health is not necessary, doesn't just stay in the brain, it's not just about thoughts, doesn't just stay there.

Which is evident to anybody that's ever had an anxiety attack, or panic attack, because that's a physical thing, as well as a mental thing. And it seemed that I really didn't look into this until late 1997 onwards, I started to kind of look into my own processes, my own bouts of depression and stress, anxiety over the years. And realised that even as a small child, I used to get really stressed.

But as a small child, I was able to kind of bounce back from it quickly. Doesn't mean that it wasn't serious, or needed attention, but I was able to sort of keep going. But as I got older, I found it less easy to bounce back.

And when I hit my 30s, when I was 32, when I had my first full blown panic attack, that's when I realised that I didn't seem to have the ability to bounce back as quickly as I used to from these things. So it would take something more than that, something more than just willpower, something more than just telling myself to man up, and I should be able to do more, and I should be able to just move on and ignore it and get on with stuff regardless.

Because I found out that actually telling ourselves things like that, it's not useful in a lot of situations.

It's useful in some situations. You know, if you're being chased by a bear, then the voice inside you saying keep running is a good idea. Or if you're in the army and you know, there are things you have to do and you have to keep going.

But if you're working in an office, or working in a shop, or maybe you're not working, and you have these fight or flight feelings, it's a different situation. And telling yourself, just pull your socks up and keep going. Having a go at yourself, being cruel and nasty to yourself verbally inside your own head is the opposite to helpful.

Because it's time to get rid of those old fashioned ideas that, you know, we shouldn't have these feelings. Well, it's too late once you've got the feeling you've got it. Doesn't mean it has to continue or grow in strength, but it's there and you experienced it.

Like telling yourself I should not be jealous when you're feeling jealous. Well, you just felt jealous. It doesn't mean you have to feel jealous in the future.

You've caught yourself feeling that way. Maybe it doesn't really fit with how you feel about yourself. But you're a human being, and it's natural to sometimes feel jealous.

Maybe just being kind to yourself and accepting that that's how you felt and moving on. Without being horrible to yourself. Just always remember, I don't know why I remember this, but if you remember those Breville sandwich toaster things, sandwich makers, and you put in the bread, put a filling in and pull the handle down in it, they were beautiful.

Tasted so good. You'd fill them with cheese and tomato or whatever you wanted really. And we got one, my family got one when I was a kid, and it was like the craze everyone had them.

I don't mean like Ronnie and Reggie craze, but the craze as in popular. And so we got them, and he, my dad, me, three, four brothers, I think, yeah, three brothers and me, we were all having these toasted sandwiches. And one of my older brothers, he had, I think we all had like cheese, but apart from being like mini volcanoes, because it was so hot, the cheese was really, really, really runny and stringy.

So my brother started choking on the cheese. And he was choking and choking, and my dad was saying, what's wrong? What's wrong? If you saw this as a sketch, you'd laugh because it's ridiculous. But I suppose in the moment, it was just two people doing what came natural to them at that time.

My brother couldn't really do anything but just turn a bit blue at the time. He was okay. He did survive.

Nothing bad happened, but he was choking for a good 30 seconds. And my dad was shouting, what's wrong? What's wrong? And I found it funny. And not so much that my brother was choking, although I'll be honest, I probably didn't care that much about him choking, because he used to annoy me.

But I just found it funny that my dad was asking what's wrong, when it's obvious what's wrong. That seems to be what we do to ourselves. That kind of inability to understand what's going on, but demanding to know, instead of just dealing with what's happening, what's going on.

So with an anxiety attack, for example. I don't like the word attack, because it sounds very violent, doesn't it? A panic attack. It sounds, it's a lot of aggression, as if it's being done to you.

It's, yeah, it's not a nice, not a nice word, not a nice phrase. I don't know what a better one would be though. So, in the midst of an anxiety episode, instead of just dealing with it, in a sense of, let's just calm down, focus, and just realise that you're going to be okay.

And concentrate on the mind, concentrate the mind on the fact that you're going to be okay. But when the mind starts shouting at you, which feels a little bit like what's going on, because that itself would cause me anxiety. Someone's shouting at me.

Even if they were just shouting about something that had nothing to do with me. I find those situations stress inducing, personally, for me. So I, you can make decisions.

Do you want to be around people that do that? Or do you keep away from people or keep a little bit of a distance from people that do that? Or do you explain to that person, that when they do that, you have a reaction, which is very, very uncomfortable. So it's this choices, and this is choices, that I think sometimes can be forgotten, or not realised to start with, that we do have choices about what we do.

And maybe those choices don't seem available in the moment.

And maybe in the moment isn't the time to be making lots of choices or to be thinking about any specific thing, other than just relaxing. And relaxing is something that can happen just by asking yourself to relax. If you ask yourself now to relax, just say, please relax.

Or, I'd like myself to relax. I'd like my mind to relax. I want my body to relax.

You give yourself those, you could say commands, but it's a command in a sense of, you're telling yourself what you wish to happen next. You're not being bossy. You're just telling yourself what you need.

And I think, maybe you can use the word, please. Because if you, if you've been brought up in a community, in a society where they use the word, please, and that's what you would expect or are affected by when someone else talks to you, then maybe you'll be affected by that when you talk to yourself. And once you ask yourself to just relax, your mind listens to that.

It follows that command, just in the way that if you say to yourself, I'm going to feel more of this discomfort. And you start thinking to yourself and imagining being anxious or more anxious. And you're given those suggestions and that command to your mind.

And your mind, your unconscious mind doesn't understand the difference between what's good for you and what's not good for you when it comes to what you ask of it. Doesn't differentiate between negatives or positives. So what you focus on, you get more of.

If you focus on relaxation, having a relaxed body and a relaxed mind, you're going to have more of a relaxed body and a relaxed mind. Someone that focuses on expecting to feel anxious every time they get on a bus, and imagining getting on a bus and feeling anxious. Then basically, when they get on the bus, the chance of them feeling anxious is very high because they planned it, not only planned it in their timeline, planned for that to happen.

They've given that command to their unconscious mind. The unconscious mind doesn't differentiate between that, I know the differentiate wasn't pronounced right then, but it doesn't differentiate between that and thinking when you get on the bus next, you're going to feel relaxed and calm and confident. Whatever you give it, it accepts.

So you could say your unconscious mind is like Aladdin's genie in a sense, but without the restrictions or the conditions. The conditions you could say would be, choose carefully what you wish for, what you ask your unconscious mind for. Maybe word it in a positive way.

For example, if you say to your unconscious mind, I don't want to feel stressed. What your unconscious mind hears the words feel stressed, instead of, I want to feel more relaxed, more relaxed. This is something that you can play with and you can plan ahead on your timeline.

When I talk about your timeline, I'm talking about the future, talking about events that haven't happened yet. So of course you can influence them. If you see someone at a party and you've never met them before, you can influence how that conversation goes.

You know, if you see a man and you go up to them, never met him before, and you say to him, I don't like your shirt. Where did you find it? You find it in a rubbish tip somewhere and decided to wear it in public. I can guarantee you that conversation's not going to go very well.

And you can plan ahead of time what you're going to say. So if you plan to say that to that person, you've planned for that conversation to be problematic. Plus it'd be, it'd be cruel to say something like that.

Especially if they have found the shirt in a rubbish tip. So these things that haven't happened yet, you can plan how it goes. Doesn't mean it's going to go exactly how you want it to go when it involves another human being because they have free will when it comes to how you feel.

For example, if you've got somebody that you work with, maybe it's your boss, colleague that may be you struggle a little bit with, maybe they're, you don't always feel great when you're around them. Perhaps it's not about changing them because that can only be up to them. Of course, there's things you can do to modify their behaviour.

There's things you can do to influence their behaviour. But this isn't about that. That's a different subject.

This is about changing how you feel. And you can plan that. Plan that when you get to work and you sit next to that person or have a conversation with that person.

You're going to feel relaxed. You're going to feel confident and that that person doesn't have any power over how you feel. And you can even rehearse it in your own mind, feeling relaxed in that situation before that situation arrives.

It's something I used to do years ago. I'm talking 20, over 20 years ago. I had this job where I was, it was quite pressurised.

And the first part of the evening, I was very, very busy, full on for about two hours. And the rest of the evening was quite nice. But it's the first two hours was the hard part of the job.

So I'd sit on the tube on the train. And I'd have about 20 minutes on the train getting from Stratford to Liverpool Street. Maybe it was 15 minutes, I don't know.

But I'd sit there. And what I would do is I would rehearse in my mind feeling relaxed. First of all, I'd get relaxed, feel relaxed.

And I'd skip through the whole of the evening. In quick time, really, the whole process of I'd stop at the chip shop and get myself a chip roll or whatever, something like that. And yeah, because I think I'd go to Old Street and then I'd walk that way.

And then I'd walk up to work and then I'd get in there and I'd do the bit at the beginning, go through those two hours. But I'd feel relaxed in myself the whole time I was doing it, just visualising doing it, but in fast time. And then going through the whole evening until the end when I get back home in the taxi.

And then I'd rewind the whole thing. Rewind all the way back, feeling relaxed, all the way back to sitting there in the tube on the train. So I'd rehearsed the whole evening, feeling relaxed, feeling positive, feeling confident that the whole evening will be fine.

And I'd kind of already lived the evening before it had even started. So it's almost like I'd cut a path through the forest before I even got to the forest. I'd already made that pathway in my mind.

So all I needed to do, I didn't need any cutting to do, I just walked through it. The pathway was already made for me. And it was easy, it was smooth.

And it worked. Because if you think about it, how often, when I've done this myself, how often in the past have we planned in the same way, but planned for something unpleasant to happen, expecting something unpleasant to happen, and then it does. And then we say, well, I knew that was going to happen.

Well, yeah, you planned for it. You rehearsed for it. You asked your unconscious mind for it, even though you didn't realize.

So maybe as you think about the day ahead, imagine a situation that maybe in the past has been stressful, or you felt stressed about it, or anxious or anything like that. And it's a situation that you're going to do, you know, you're not so much you can't avoid, but you choose not to avoid it. And you can think about that situation that hasn't happened yet.

And imagine it going well. And when you imagine it going well, it's not dependent upon the other person acting or behaving in any particular way. That person can still say and do whatever they want to do.

But your response changes. Your emotional response changes, feels different. When you rehearse that, you notice how you feel different.

You realize that that person is responsible for their own behavior and thoughts, not you. And you can feel relaxed and calm, because you deserve to feel relaxed and calm. So I'll leave you with those thoughts.

And I'll be back again very soon, making another recording, possibly repeating myself, I don't know. So I've got no idea what I spoke about today, but I do, but I won't remember it next time. So I do hope it's useful.

And please let me know, maybe, you know, if you're listening to this on the podcast, maybe give it a review, subscribe. And I'll speak to you very soon. And remember to be kind to yourself.

Bye.