#53 Relaxation Hypnosis for Stress, Anxiety & Panic Attacks (Jason Newland) (8th September 2019)

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

And I'm going to be talking about trauma in this recording. So if you feel that it might not be something you want to be listening to or thinking about, then maybe just stop listening. Because I will be talking about trauma and possibly about my own, some of my own bits and bobs including, and I won't be going into great detail about anything as far as my own experiences.

But just wanted to give that little warning at the beginning. So, a couple of things I've been thinking, which I thought I'd just share with you. First of all, I just want to thank you for listening to this podcast.

Thank you for listening and downloading these recordings because without you listening, there'd be no point in me making them. And another thing, a reason why I make so many different recordings is because, I can fit into one half hour or hour recording when it's such a big subject as this. And when everyone's so different, we all experience things differently in our own unique way.

And although one recording is definitely better than no recordings, and of course there's people that are famous that do this stuff and they sell them and they might just have like a one hour recording and it can be really valuable. My way of doing it is to try and maybe come at different angles. And those of you that listen to the other recordings that I do, you'll know that's kind of what I do.

I like to, yeah, I like to open it up, open up the subject and actually think about it, really give it some thought whilst I'm talking. And to share some of my experiences. At the same time, some of those things may resonate within you.

And some people might think, well, why is it called hypnosis then if all you're doing is talking?

If you're not sort of counting me down and deepening me, which a lot of hypnosis can be that, you know, I'll get you to think of, focus on each part of your body and then get you relaxed and then deepen that feeling by having you walking down some steps and feeling more relaxed with each step and giving you suggestions and this is how you're going to feel when you wake up, this is how you're going to feel in the future and then counting you back like, you know, ten or one up to ten.

That is a way of doing hypnosis. There's lots of different ways because ultimately, to me, hypnosis is, it is really just wrapping your mind around an idea, which is the explanation that Milton Erickson gave.

And there's lots of different ways to do that, but ultimately you're the one doing it. So instead of me telling you what to do or telling you what to think, which you don't need me to do, I offer suggestions and ideas that may be useful and you can wrap your mind around those ideas and the same ideas will be presented over and over again in different ways, with different wording, at different times, on different recordings.

That's how I work and the aim is ultimately for you to benefit from this and for your stress levels to reduce, the anxiety levels to reduce, panic attacks to reduce to the point where you're no longer having them, you're no longer even thinking about them.

And so that you can feel more relaxed and sleep better, feel physically healthier, feeling more positive towards yourself, towards your life, towards your future, and to not be so affected by the past, something that we can't physically change, but not having the same response to it or reaction to it that you used to in the past, maybe. So there's a lot there to do in one recording, which is why I don't even attempt to try and do it in one recording.

And everything I do fits in with the whole stress, anxiety and panic attacks because it's all connected.

As far as I'm concerned, it's all connected because if someone has a panic attack, anxiety attack, they might think, well, I wasn't stressed, things were going really well. The anxiety, I wasn't anxious, why did I have it? Which is a fair enough question. But someone that's had a few of them experiences huge amounts of anxiety, not knowing when the next one's going to come, perhaps not knowing why it's happening.

When I went to my doctor the first time I had a panic attack, he said it was a panic attack, I didn't know what it was. And he said, what did he call it? Yeah, after I saw him a few times, because I had to keep going back every week to get a sick note for my work. And he said it was trauma.

He said it was trauma from the past. And he asked me a little bit about my past and it kind of made sense. I knew I had issues about the past, but I didn't, I suppose I spent most of my life running away from it.

And not confronting it or not even allowing it to be there. It's kind of, yeah, it's a weird one. So trauma can have a lot to do with anxiety, stress and panic.

Not just from, well, everything's in the past, isn't it? Obviously, yesterday's in the past, but it doesn't have to be from childhood. It could be something that happened last week, a traumatic incident. And the reason why I feel I can talk about trauma to everyone that's listening is, I can't imagine there's one person listening to this that hasn't experienced trauma of some kind.

I can't imagine I've ever met anybody in my life that hasn't experienced trauma of some kind. And one thing I think is important is for it not to turn into a competition. Because that happened once.

I did a YouTube video talking about my childhood and the trauma I experienced, because I thought it might be useful for people. And I don't know if I've still got the audio, the video's gone, but I might have the audio of it somewhere. And I did another one about panic attacks, my experiences of that as well.

And one of my YouTube friends said a throwaway line, as in, well, you didn't have it as bad as me, to me, so you didn't have it as bad as me. And there was a part of me who wanted to argue it, which would have turned into competition about who suffered the most, which is kind of, well, really ridiculous. It's a ridiculous thing to tell someone that they suffered less, because we don't know how people experience things.

Two people can experience exactly the same thing, different results. One can just walk away, didn't bother them. Another person, severely traumatised.

And there's no judgement in that. It is what it is. We're all different.

We're all different. And I experienced that when I was counselling. And I noticed it, because I was counselling children and adults, and I realised that what we say to children really has an effect on them.

Not just when they're little, but at any age. And how easily, I say easily, but how something that someone else might not think is a particularly bad thing to say, could cause a lot of suffering for somebody. Yet at the same time, we can't go through life tiptoeing around everybody else, in case we say something that upsets them.

So it's a weird one. I've upset enough people over the years, no doubt. I've been upset by enough people, or I've reacted to other people that may or may not have meant to cause that feeling within me.

But with this, I'm talking about trauma, it can be whatever it is. Whatever the traumatic experience from something. And here's the thing, I don't know about you, and I do it myself, I try not to.

I try and catch myself. And I've even heard experts say the same thing, when they've been talking, or lectures, and you know, it's a real sense of grading, grading levels of trauma. When actually, as I said a few minutes ago, it's about our reaction, our response, mentally, emotionally, that has, that is really the decider on whether or not, you know, what level of trauma that was.

And I'm not going to go into details about any traumatic experiences, because we've all got our own stories, we've It's okay. It's okay to have it. It's okay to have these feelings.

It's natural to have been affected by it in the past. But you are not your trauma. Just like you are not your illness.

I am not bipolar. I am bipolar, but I'm not, I am not the bipolar, that's not all I am. If you're diabetic, yeah, you're, you're, we would call ourselves this then, I'm diabetic.

I'm not, but if someone says, yeah, I'm diabetic, as if somehow that's all they are. And they probably don't mean that when they say it. But their unconscious mind is listening to that.

And I'm going back and I'll continuously go back to positive thinking in a sense of what we say to ourselves really, really has an effect, really affects us. And you know, I mess around with some of the other recordings I do, the Let Me Bore You To Sleep ones, I just play around and I rarely say anything serious in that. But this sentence, what you say to yourself, what you think affects you.

What I think about affects me. What I say to myself affects me. What I tell other people about myself affects me.

I've spent 30, I don't know how many years since I left school in 1986, all that time I've been telling people that I'm rubbish at maths. I haven't spent all that time saying, you know, I've done other things, but I must have said it so many thousands of times. I'm rubbish at maths.

I'm crap at that. I can't do that. I'm a level of a, probably a 10 year old level of maths.

I've been saying that for years and years and years, telling myself that, telling other people that, not even attempting to apply myself with some of the most basic arithmetic because I've been telling myself that I can't do it. And I know that that's had an effect. For years and years and years, I was told that I was stupid by some adults, including the teachers actually, they were very quite rude.

I believed it. When I was eight, I was suffering, well about seven, before I was eight, between seven and eight, I was having an earache, really bad earaches regularly. And eventually the doctors sent me to a specialist and it turned out that I was, I had problems with one of my ears and I was partly deaf.

I feel like quite significantly deaf in one of my ears. And they came from that, they came to the conclusion that actually I was behind in school because I wasn't hearing what was being said. I always sat at the back, never liked, didn't like people sitting behind me.

Probably because I couldn't hear what they were doing. At least if you're in front, you can see what people are doing. So I had an operation on my ear and, you know, it's, I think it's okay, I don't know.

I do have to get people to repeat sometimes, but I was told that I was slow, I was told that I was stupid. I believed it, really, really believed it. And it wasn't until I was 40 years old when I got my degree, when I went on stage and got my Bachelor of Arts with Honours degree in counselling, and had my graduation.

40 years old. Because I didn't believe in myself, I didn't believe I could do that. But I could.

The point of this is what we say to ourselves, what we hear other people saying to us, affects us. So if you've got someone that's being negative towards you, telling you you're this or that, and they're being horrible, then that's something that needs a solution. That needs to be stopped in the kindest possible way.

It needs to be stopped. Telling them, asking them, or just removing them from your life is a dramatic possibility if someone's being horrible to you and affecting your self-esteem. We have to take control of our own lives, our own, the input that goes into our minds, because it affects us, really strongly affects us.

Which is why with the panic, the anxiety, when I was going through the worst part of it, all I was thinking about, pretty much all I was thinking about was, when's the next one? But then that's not true, because that's not all I was thinking about. Okay, and I'm telling myself now even, and it's a lie, because I was thinking about other things. When I was eating, when I was watching television, when I was asleep, I wasn't thinking about it.

But I did spend way too much time expecting the next one, the next anxiety attack. That's what I was expecting. And sure enough, I kind of got what I asked for.

Even though I didn't want it, that's what I was thinking about. Now, if we met downstairs in the garden, and I put, and you're standing there, and I put a tray in your hand, and I put, I don't know, lots stacked up with dirty plates. And I just walked to the other side of the garden and I said, right, all you've got to do is just keep thinking, don't drop the plates, don't drop the tray, don't drop the tray, just keep repeating that off in your mind, don't drop the tray.

Just imagine dropping it and you don't want to, just keep saying that. Eventually, you walk back and forward, you're going to drop the tray, the chance of you dropping it is very high. Because that's what you're thinking about.

Even though in your mind, you're thinking, but no, but I was saying not to drop the tray. But were you thinking about, what were you thinking in your mind? What images were you having? Were you walking across there and the tray was fine, and you handed it to me, and everything was intact? Or were you thinking, I don't want to drop it, and you were imagining dropping it.

So therefore your unconscious mind, or your mind, I just call it, so your mind absorbs that, takes that as a request or a command, or that's what you want, because that's what you're thinking about.

It doesn't have the ability to differentiate between positive and negative. The unconscious mind, it just takes what you give it. It loves you, it does everything for you, and it wants to do everything for you.

But it doesn't know what is good for you and what's not good for you. All it knows is what you tell it, what you give it, or what I give it. That's when you can start playing with these things, and start wrapping your mind around the idea of actually imagining a situation tomorrow, for example, or in 10 minutes time, 20 minutes time, an hour, of feeling relaxed, of doing something and having a different result emotionally.

Something that maybe, you know, before when you think about it, you used to have that, you'd expect to have a certain feeling that was horrible, a horrible feeling. And now, you think about it, and you start picturing something, and it doesn't have to be realistic. That's the thing.

It doesn't matter how silly or absurd it is. And trust me, I don't think we could think up anything in our lives that's absurd as what we've already thought up already in our lives, in our mind. I think we've kind of, some of the most ridiculous things that I'm sure you, I know I have, thought up, or this might happen, when there's no way in the world it's going to happen.

Thinking that I know what someone's actually thinking, or what someone's intention is. We don't know what other people's intentions are, or what other people are thinking. We can't read minds.

We just can't. And sometimes, technically, we can't even read our own minds, in the sense of, if we could, and we could say, well, why am I doing this then? Why am I doing this behaviour? But it can be changed, by thinking differently. By thinking, I guess, on purpose.

Not just leaving it to, you know, chance. Preparing. I mean, there's a reason why we have, you know, instructions on the backs of food, cooking instructions, how long to put it into the oven for.

You know, so I'll put it in the oven, 200 degrees for 45 minutes. It doesn't say, just put it in the oven, any temperature, and just leave it in there for however long you want. Something's bound to happen.

So it's about taking a bit more control over the most important thing in our lives, which is our mind. Because that affects every aspect of our life. Your mind affects your body, how you physically feel, how you emotionally feel, how you behave, how you deal with other people's behaviour, and the list goes on.

So with trauma, allowing it to say, you know, it's okay. It's not okay that it happened, whatever it was. But it's okay to have felt and been affected by it.

Because it's normal to be affected by trauma. That's why it's called trauma. It's supposed to be, it's not a nice thing to say, but it's supposed to be a horrible experience.

It's trauma. It's horrible. It's not a nice thing to go through.

Whether it's something you've witnessed, something you've been through yourself, something, you know, whatever it is, it's natural to be affected by it. And then you can think to yourself, how long do I need to be affected by this? What's the cutoff point? Because you could ask yourself, do you deserve to be punished for what happened in that situation? And in most cases, I imagine the answer would be no.

So something bad has happened, a traumatic incident, you didn't deserve that.

So do you deserve to still feel the pain from that? The answer again, I imagine, is no. And this is where logic and emotions come together. Because emotions are way more powerful than logic.

Emotions just beat logic every time, always will. However, emotions can work with logic, which makes it even more powerful and more flexible, because you've got both logic and emotions in your mind. So by listening to this, and wrapping your mind around the ideas, and thinking, well, I've got this emotion, and now we're going to talk logically about this emotion.

So you're mixing logic and emotion together. They're not separate. It's not oil and water.

This is one liquid mixed together, dancing in harmony with each other, both with your well-being in mind. And when you start to realise that actually that situation that we call trauma has happened, it's gone now, and you deserve to be happy. You deserve to feel relaxed when you wish to feel relaxed.

You deserve to be happy, which means you need to give yourself that opportunity to be happy. Give yourself permission to let go of some of those feelings from the past. Maybe connect more with the physical side and the emotional side, because physical pain gets forgotten.

Otherwise, our population would go down very rapidly. There'd never been more than one baby born per human. People that had car crashes would never get back into a car.

People who had sporting injuries would never go and do that sport again if they could remember the pain. If they can't, we can't physically remember pain. We can experience it at the time.

That's the definite. But afterwards, years later, there's no physical, no memory of the physical pain. So if someone's had a car accident, they can't remember the physical pain no matter how much they were in.

They might have the emotional pain, the trauma from that situation, but not the physical. So maybe we can start mixing them together and taking from that something that's useful. It's horrible to be in physical pain.

I don't like it. I've broken a few bones over the years. I've had appendicitis.

I'm just a human being. We've all experienced physical pain of some kind, and it's not pleasant. It's horrible.

But it never lasts generally, not acute pain anyway. Chronic pain's a different situation. But acute pain never lasts.

It does diminish. It has to, just as emotional pain also can diminish. At the moment, it doesn't have to diminish.

With the pain, the acute pain, we've got no choice in it. It just, the memory goes. We can't remember physical pain of an acute variety.

As I said, chronic pain is a different matter altogether, separate thing. I broke my hand a couple of years ago. I can't remember how I felt.

I've got a good memory about stuff like that. I can't get my head into that physical feeling, and it was very painful. But something that someone said to me a couple of weeks ago, I can get in touch with that, the emotional pain of that.

And I wonder what possible use is that? I wonder what use is it? If someone offered us the opportunity to be able to remember physical pain the way we can emotional pain, would anybody sign on to that? Would anybody say, yeah, I'll have that, please? That's a lovely skill to have. Yeah, brilliant. And the thing is, in a lot of ways, emotional pain is way worse than physical pain when it comes to acute pain.

It's almost like we're causing it ourselves, like this emotional trauma, where it's reenacting it, thinking about the thing. But why do it? Because if you hurt your hand, you avoid bashing it. I'm a little bit clumsy sometimes and I'll bang into things.

But when I broke my hand or when I broke my wrist, I didn't lift stuff up because I knew that it would hurt, and it could potentially cause the bones not to heal properly. So I didn't pick anything up with that hand. It didn't take a lot of brain power to do that.

I always knew it wasn't a genius for realising that. So wouldn't it make sense to have that mindset when it comes to emotional pain, to not be thinking about stuff that's happened a long time ago that we can't change? It's happened. It's horrible that it happened.

It's out of your control. It was more than likely out of your control at the time. It's now done.

Is there any point in keep pulling a scab off a wound when you know that it's never going to heal if you do that? It's never going to heal. Keep pulling the scab off. It's just going to be one continuous wound.

I suppose that's one way of keeping pain continuous, isn't it? If you hurt yourself and you just keep pulling the scab off, it keeps the pain going. And why would anyone want to do that? Because it's horrible when actually you can feel good. You actually can feel relaxed.

You can feel happy. You can focus on the things that you enjoy in life. You can focus on the things that you want to experience in the future.

And if you're going to think about the past, you can think about the good times that you had in the past. Because you do have a choice about what you think about. We're not slaves to our thoughts.

I know it's really easy to get into that mentality. And trust me, I know. I really do know.

Especially, you know, I struggle with it with a bipolar. Sometimes, you know, it's like, oh, what's going on here? There's stinking patterns going on. But we do have some control.

And you know what? Even if there's moments when you can't, it doesn't mean that you need to give up. You just take control when you can. There are times when I can't even get out of bed, when I don't want to do anything, don't want to see anyone, don't want to do anything at all.

But when I am feeling okay, I try and make an effort to fill my mind with positivity. I make an effort to make recordings, which I really believe that helping other people helps me. Not financially, but emotionally.

And I've been doing this since 2006. And for me, it's transformed my life in a way that I don't think anything else would have done in this, the way this has. That hasn't stopped me being having mental illness, hasn't stopped me having this hereditary brain dysfunction, or whatever you want to call it, bipolar, with emotionally unstable personality traits, which is what I've diagnosed as.

But you can work around it, whatever the situation you're in. I really believe that. And I think it's never, ever to give up, ever, ever.

I know I've kind of perhaps gone off on a tangent here a bit. But it's so important, so important to remember that each day is a new day, it's a new opportunity. So okay, if I spend two days in bed, and I don't do anything, perhaps have a little bit to eat, and I just lay here feeling sorry for myself.

But in two days' time, I might be up, feeling really good, or feeling okay, and able to do a few recordings maybe, able to work on the website, able to make a phone call to someone, a friend. It's remembering. Because why remember, why, if we're going to remember stuff, then why not choose some of those things to remember? So instead of remembering trauma from the past, why not use that skill of the memory to remember some of the nice things that happened.

To remember times when you felt relaxed, and really, really chilled out. For no reason, you just felt really good. Or looking forward, you know things when I was a child, I used to, I absolutely didn't, I didn't like school at all.

I liked some of the friends and stuff, and I was cheeky, and I used to get into trouble and stuff, but I didn't like school. Sitting in the classroom bored me completely. And the teachers gave up on me after the first year, and I was the high school, so I had four years where I was just left alone to just do whatever I wanted to do.

It didn't bother me, even with homework, it didn't even bother, you know, worrying about if I did it or not, because I didn't bother. But I had, you know, that was a horrible time, part of it, but there were some really good times. There was times at school that I had the best laugh ever, that I had the most fun.

Just the little things, walking around the playground or around the field. I was always a little bit of a loner, I'd go through periods when I'd be really sociable, and boyish, and very loud and whatever, and other times when I just didn't want to be around anybody. And I used to walk around and I'd sing, and one of my favourite things was singing the songs from Grease, you know, Grease the movie.

And that's a happy memory. I can't say that I enjoyed a lot of my home life, but I remember one day coming home and my dad had, we had a snooker table in the playroom, he actually got us, it wasn't a full-size one, but it was a big, nice big one, snooker table and tennis table. And part of the reason that was such a good experience is because I was used to coming home and my dad would be at work and he'd come home later, he was already there and he was in a really good mood, and my brothers were there, and it was kind of magical, a magical moment.

So I'll always remember that, but I went years where I didn't think about it, where I'd think about the stuff I didn't like. And that's never been useful, ever. It's never been useful.

Not once, not one little bit, not even slightly. No benefit can be gained from focusing or thinking about the past, the horrible things, whether it's stuff you're expecting in the future or in the past. And I'm not talking about never addressing it, because counselling may well require focusing on that and other therapies and dealing with it.

But constantly thinking about it is of no benefit. It only causes harm. So it's kind of the middle way.

I know some people would say, don't ever think about the past, think about the future only, think talking about the past is no good to you. Well, I'm not in that ballpark. Talking about the past to somebody who can help you to process the past may be useful.

Or talking to a loved one about something that you've been through may really be useful and helpful and therapeutic. It's what you're thinking about when you're on your own, what you're thinking about in your mind, that's the thing that has the effect. So with things like trauma, it's happened.

But maybe we can just allow it to be like the physical trauma of giving birth. It's forgotten. And it's not even because of the reward at the end of it.

It's the same with broken bones and all kinds of other things. We can't remember physical pain. So why put all that effort into remembering emotional pain? Because it takes effort.

It takes work. It takes a lot of rethinking and rethinking and programming our brains to keep thinking about stuff. And of course, it's going to be stuff that we're all not maybe aware of.

We've all got blind spots. And nobody can, you can't ever go at anyone for their blind spots, not even yourself. That's why they're called blind spots, because we can't see them.

It doesn't mean that we won't get to see them in the future. And counselling can bring that out. Being in a relationship with someone that's understanding and caring and loving can bring that out.

You get to know, just with age even, over time you get to notice things about yourself. I'd say every day is a new day to maybe discover something new about yourself. But then when you're thinking in that positive way, in a way of, what do you like about yourself? What do you value about yourself? What are your good qualities? So these can be broken into two.

The qualities, the good qualities that other people tell you or have told you about yourself. And also those good qualities, or the qualities that you feel are good. We might use a different word from good.

Those special qualities, those wonderful qualities that you value about yourself, something that you may never tell another person. And you don't need to tell other people if you don't want to. But you do need to tell yourself.

You do need to tell yourself about your good qualities. You do need to remind yourself about the good times that you've experienced. You do need to think about those things that you want to happen in the future.

Those are the things you need to do and you don't have to share that with anybody else because that's your personal mind. What's in your mind is your business. If you choose to share, that's also your business.

But you do need to tell yourself regularly, every day, more than once a day, that you deserve to be happy, that you deserve to feel relaxed. You need to tell yourself and remind yourself that you have many years of being able to do things that maybe you've struggled with a little bit recently, or maybe a lot. But you used to be able to do those things and you will be able to do those things again.

Feeling relaxed, feeling confident, feeling peaceful and feeling that love, that love for yourself. And this isn't about walking around telling everyone, I love myself. It's about feeling it.

This is private stuff for you. It's about feeling it, feeling that kindness towards yourself. Having as much love for yourself as you would for a newborn baby in your arms.

I've heard people say that, even people that didn't perhaps even want to have kids, that as soon as that baby, their son or daughter, was handed to them, and they looked at that baby's face and looked into their... Very large eyes babies have, don't they? But looking into their eyes, that love that they instantly felt for that newborn baby was off the charts. It was something that they'd never experienced before, didn't realise that they could experience that.

Well, I say that you can experience that towards yourself.

You can experience that towards yourself. How about when you finish this recording, you go and look in the mirror. You've got the same eyes as you had when you were a baby.

How about looking in your own eyes and realising that you're the most special person in your life. Realise that you're going to, from this moment onwards, take care of that person in the mirror. To love that person in the mirror.

And to make sure that you're happy and safe. So that's, I'm going to kind of bring this to an end on that note. I could keep talking for hours.

So these are a few ideas, a few things to think about. It's really, really important that you remember that you are precious. That very, very likely at some point when you were a tiny little baby, somebody looked at you and thought that you were the most precious person in the world at that moment.

Regardless of what happened afterwards, I'm not discounting what happened afterwards, but I'm just saying somebody, whether it was a parent, a brother, a sister, grandparents, uncles, cousins, it might have been a nurse, a doctor, it could have been the person in the next bed. Someone's going to look, would have looked at you, probably more than one person and just thought, wow, it's the most perfect, perfect thing in the whole world.

This is just perfection.

So precious, worthy of loving and treating really, really well and treating with respect and being kind too. So you deserve to be able to do that to yourself every day. When you wake up in the morning, look in the mirror.

Before you go to sleep, look in the mirror and remind yourself just how precious you are and how you deserve to be loved, you deserve to be happy and you deserve to plan for that happiness by thinking in your mind about your future and how you want things to be wonderful and how you expect things to be wonderful. And when you think about the past, you think about the good times from the past because you deserve to be happy and you deserve to feel loved by yourself, loved by you because you are special.

So thank you for listening and I'll speak to you next time and remember to be kind to yourself.

Lots of love. Bye.