#83 Relaxation Hypnosis for Stress, Anxiety & Panic Attacks - BALL or SOCK - (Jason Newland) (29th January 2020)

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

If you like what I do, please leave a review. Please subscribe to this podcast and if you'd like to support this free service which costs me quite a bit of money to provide, then please go to paypal.me forward slash Jason Newland and the link is on my website. Now a second ago I said only listen when you can safely close your eyes.

However, I'm going to ask you to do something which revolves, revolves? Involves you having your eyes open. So you may need to pause the recording for a minute. Not right now, wait till I finish talking.

I'm going to ask you to get a hold of some kind of ball that you can hold in your hand like a you know like a tennis ball or if you don't have a tennis ball because I don't actually have a tennis ball because I don't play tennis. And what I've done is rolled two socks together. Okay so I'll take my glasses off so I can actually see what I'm doing.

So if you press pause, get get hold of something like that. Just something that you can hold in your hand and it's comfortable. I say comfortable, it doesn't have to necessarily feel blissful, just you know, it fits in your hand.

Not something that's too big for your hand or something that is so small you can't actually see where it is. Just a nice size, a couple of socks rolled together. Or a tennis ball or you know something similar.

So press the pause button and then come back when you're ready. Now I'm going to assume that you're you're ready. So what we're going to do basically this is an exercise and it's very very simple.

It has to be for me to do it so I like simplicity. It's not my idea. And it's something I came across a few years ago.

But the idea behind it is that when you're stressed, anxious, panicky, tense, whatever is going on, one part of your brain is more stimulated than the other part. That's the probably the most simplistic term I can give without going into the whole right hemisphere, left hemisphere. And therefore, in order to reduce the stress, you need to have both sides stimulated.

Now there's a number of ways to do it. A number of ways. This is just one simple way.

And you can do at home Another way would be to learn to play the piano or to play the piano if you know how to play the piano.

It's a little bit different because well first of all we need to play learn how to play the piano which is probably not that wouldn't reduce my stress having to learn to play an instrument you know but playing the piano has a similar effect but it's also a very distractive and focused thing playing the piano is very focused and this is another focused thing but different just very different but the process is basically activating both sides of your brain both hemispheres of your brain the right and the left so instead

of just one being um perhaps overly stimulated let's say the right side of your brain over stimulated with emotion then you can even it out and start activating the other side and the other side gets a little bit activated and then you activate the right side again and then you activate the left side again and bit by bit the other side gets more activated but only takes the activation away from the other side so it just disperses it does that make sense disperses the activation and the stimulation between both sides

so that everything's more even everything's more relaxed and how it should be really in a sense of feeling calm i say should be there is no should be really but it definitely evens it out it's a bit like if you think you're sitting on a seesaw do you remember seesaws i don't know if they even have them in playgrounds anymore but seesaws used to be you'd sit on one side your friend would sit on the other side and you'd jump up and you'd like push your legs up and down and

you'd see saw up and down it worked fine if you were someone the same size as you when you were a kid most kids generally kind of roughly the same if you're someone at eight they're generally about the same weight size-ish i mean some a lot bigger some a bit smaller but if you get an adult and you're sort of five years old an adult sits on it or a 14 year old sits on it they have complete control over the seesaw you don't have a say in it you might

as well not even be there because you can't do anything they decide when it goes down they decide when it goes up but when you were someone the same weight as you you push up and then they push up but neither of you has control of the seesaw it's a mutual exchange of energy it's fun you're playing with each other it's fun and you both got the same amount of leverage so that's kind of what this is doing this little exercise it takes away the power from one side all that

energy that's in one part of your brain which is focusing on the stress and maybe causing that stress and that panic and the anxiety it starts to let's say you basically you've got a big person there and you've got a small person on the other side of the seesaw and the other side has no control so the logic you know the logical part which says you know what there's nothing to be stressed about we don't need to be all you know hit up and sweaty and stressy and anxiety we don't

need this we don't have to be because everything's going to be okay but because all the weights on the other side of the seesaw or you could say the other side of the scales if you look at it that way so what we do is we even it out so that both sides of the seesaw have the same weight both sides of your brain have the same amount of stimulation and activity which then evens it out gently and then there's that stimulation you can just have it balanced or you can

go up and down this you know our minds change all the time standard stuff but if you look at it from a scale perspective scales are then balanced and in order to do this if you look at the the fact that the left side of your brain operates the right side of your body the right side of your brain operates operates operates or is in charge of the left side of your body which means when you you when you move the right side of your body it stimulates the left side

of your brain when you move the left side of your body did i say you if you i'm gonna get it right in a minute if you move the right side of your body it stimulates the left side of your brain if you move the left side of your body it stimulates the right side of your brain because those are the two so if you think of it like a cross crossover which means when you move your right hand your left leg your toes your shoulders it stimulates the other side

of the brain so what we do i mean it's different ways you could do dancing dancing can reduce stress that's why sometimes i think people go running it has lots of different effects uh health-wise but also you're moving both sides of your body you're stimulating both sides of your brain so same as with uh playing a piano you're using left and right sides yeah both you know both your hands and you know for someone that maybe has a missing limb use the other limb you know so um obviously if someone's

got a missing hand you can't do the ball thing but you could move your hand you can move your um your feet so tapping your feet your right foot then your left foot your right foot then your left foot you can imagine in fact what you could do is the equivalent of this what i'm going to do is first of all i'll show you how you can do it with your hands and then i'll show you how you can do it with your feet some people don't have the use of

their hands some people don't have the use of their feet you know we've all all different kinds of people so this gives you the option to do sort of whatever your situation is also if you can't physically do it for whatever reason you can imagine it because your imagination is just as powerful actually it's more powerful than physically doing it there's nothing more powerful than your imagination it's the most powerful thing the most powerful tool that you have anyway we're going to focus on the ball which is going to be

a sock um it could be a clean sock i've got a clean sock two clean socks here but it doesn't matter anything that you can roll into a ball or if you've got a handy a tennis ball or something like that all you're going to do is just hold it in one hand so i've got mine in my right hand and i'm just i'm going to imagine there's a line going down the middle of my body all the way down from the top of my head between my eyes all the

way down the middle of my chest or stomach and pretty much get into my groin and then moving down to the floor so both legs arms are either side of the body either side of that line what all i'm going to do is imagine it's like maybe a little net i'm going to just chuck the ball or the sock in this case over the little net the imaginary net to the other hand and do it again and i'm doing this standing up but it might be easier to do it on

the table because at least then if it falls you haven't got to pick it up off the floor but that's all i'm doing and as you do it imagine it's moving over the little net but just focus move don't move your head just move your eyes so have your head you can look down obviously you don't have to do anything but my suggestion is you can look down sort of in the middle where the net would be and you can see your hands and you can see them in the peripheral

but also you can see they're there anyway because they're not that far apart you don't have to have them spread right out you can have them as close as you want but just enough apart to be either side of that line and then just pass the ball or the sock to each hand that's it and just follow with your eyes as it goes your side and i just dropped it on the floor so that's might be a good way good reason to do it whilst maybe sitting down and doing it

over a table and that way you don't it doesn't fall on the floor however that's one part of the exercise that you can do the other part is you can do it with your feet and i'm gonna do it with my feet now because it's on the floor and it saves me bending over and picking it up so i'm gonna take my shoes off and the same way as before you've got that line down your body you move have it with your right foot you just kick it over to left

foot and then kick it over from left foot to the right foot across that line so you're not trying to get it oh like over the net or anything just passing it across the line to the other foot and you can do this sitting down as well it doesn't have to be standing up i mean the point with what i do i think it's very important actually is to make things comfortable because then you're kind of going to want to do it aren't you if something's really difficult if i'm going

to start saying right now you need to get yourself a climbing frame and a parachute and you're like no no no thanks you know i'm just going to make it simple so it's just moving kicking it from one foot to the other or shunting it it doesn't it's not really a kick it's just a moving it with your foot apart from anything else it feels quite nice the movement and if you can do it without any shoes on if you can because then you've got you've got the feeling the floor

underneath your feet and it does stimulate you at the bottoms of your feet a little bit and you get i don't know it's really weird even though i'm on the first floor of a building so nowhere near the earth i feel almost kind of connected to the ground i know it is the ground but it's not the ground is it it's not you know in the garden but it still feels like there's a feels more connected than when i've got shoes on that might just be a personal thing but then

when you do an issue you can move your toes and just just be gentle whatever you do just be gentle moving from one side to the other kicking that ball or that sock from the left foot over that little invisible line to your right foot and then again from your right foot over to your left foot or with your right hand just passing it over to the left hand and you know even if the idea of like sort of uh throwing it to the other hand doesn't feel it might not

feel very comfortable it might not fit with your uh a way of doing things it might not be you might think oh this is this is don't like it you could just pass the ball and just drop it from your right hand down into your left hand and then put your right hand back where it was and then you could move your other left hand over to the right hand and just drop it into your right hand and move your left hand where it was and i'm just doing that actually

and the movement feels really nice so in a way that is a different way of doing it but it's also more physical movement with your upper body because you do that your shoulders moving your hands are moving your arms are moving the muscles in your upper body are moving and even your hips are moving which in a sense maybe even more stimulating to the other part of the brain even it out quicker so just give it a go give it a go there's nothing to lose worst case scenario it's it

maybe it's a bit silly and it'll make you laugh and you'll be thinking what am i do what am i doing with this sock in my hand and that's it probably not something you can do in public maybe with a ball you know tennis ball maybe um but probably i don't know taking this if you're at work and you pull a pull a sock out of your drawer it might come across a little bit weird or funny but you know what the humor of it can release tension just the idea

of having all your work colleagues there and you pull out a dirty sock in a ball and you start passing it to your hands from one hand to the other and the looks on their faces like what on earth what are they doing that in itself can actually give you a little boost of um calmness and relaxation even just thinking about doing something like that so i'll leave it with you i hope that it's useful and i'll speak to you again tomorrow so thank you for listening remember remember to be kind to yourself because you deserve to be happy lots of love bye