#283 Let me bore you to sleep - Jason Newland (22nd December 2019)

Hello and welcome to jasonnewland.com. That's my website. My name is Jason Newland. That's my name.

This is Let Me Bore You to Sleep. That's the title of the podcast. I think it is number 283.

I think. And that squeaky sound in the background is not my hips, it's the chair. Although my hips do squeak.

I don't know if that is squeak, but they feel like they squeak. My lower back, my left part of my lower back definitely clicks at times. Not like, you know, the Addams Family tune.

Not like that. It's more, um, oh, ow, oh. Actually, it's not painful.

Well, it is, but it's not. Not when it clicks. It's more like that.

I don't know if you heard that. That was my toe. Only listen to this when you can safely close your eyes because it's, um, yeah, might cause tiredness.

I suppose, kind of the point though, isn't it really? Tired, tiredness. I feel like I want to give you all the stats again, but that's, there's limits of boredom, isn't there? I feel I can only really get away with talking about the stats maybe once a month, but too much more than that and I think it would be too boring. You know, there is a limit.

Although, I'm just gonna lay down a little bit. I'm not laying down, but I'm gonna stretch now on my big black squeaky chair and, oh, stretching my back. You know, it's really weird.

I've got a bit of problems with my lower back. I went to the doctor. Well, I've spoken to a couple of doctors about it and a nurse and they usually tell me, you know, you need to make an appointment.

And they always seem to say the same thing, like, well, you need to lose some weight. But I had this problem. I've got a bit of a problem with my upper back as well.

I've had that for years and years. My lower back issue, I've had for 20 odd years and it's, and I used to be really slim. So, I think the idea that I've got lower back pain because I've got a beer belly, even though I don't drink beer, but, you know, middle age spread or whatever you want to call it, doesn't make sense to me because I had the same issue when I was slim.

It's just gradually got worse as with age. I saw a chiropodist about it and he said that it was basically down to wear and tear. Well, not tear necessarily, but wear, you know, being at, now that I'm over 30, stone.

And it's just one of those things, you know, I used to be very active physically. And I, during my twenties, just a couple of years back, I had a lot of physical jobs where I was lifting heavy boxes and, you know, stuff like that, just heavy items. But in my thirties, I had quite sedentary jobs in offices.

I had a couple of jobs where I was physically active when I worked in retail, you know, go walking up and down the stairs, carrying stuff, unloading lorries and things like that. So it was fairly active, standing on me, on my feet, which I find is the best way to stand up. And also over the years done quite a lot of, you know, different martial arts, boxing, you know, sort of like quite, going to the gym, you know, stuff like that.

So I've been quite physically active. And a lot of the martial arts has been in my thirties, because I did it when I was a kid. I kind of had quite a big break.

And then that started. And in my thirties, I did Wing Chun Kung Fu. I did that for about a year.

I also did boxing as well. Did that for about a year or so. And when I was, I think I was about 41, I started doing Taekwondo.

I did that for a couple of years. So, and there's a lot of movement, a lot of kicking and all that stuff. But I definitely lost weight when I was doing the boxing.

That's the most intensive workout I've ever done. It's really weird because like in a normal situation, like when I was younger, I could see a punch bag and I could just punch it continuously and, you know, just go crazy on a punch bag. But with the boxing training, after all the circuit training and the skipping, the pushups, the shadow boxing and all that stuff, then I finally get onto the punch bag.

I don't know, I was knackered. And I didn't have that, the energy that I would normally have to, well, I just, I was punching, but I felt like I wasn't punching at all. It was kind of weird.

And then at the end, it was the, because I think each exercise lasted for about five minutes with about a minute break. Or was it three minutes with a minute break? I don't know. Try to sort of, I think they do it to match the ring, you know, when you're in a ring for three minutes and then you have a minute break.

Um, between rounds. And I think the last 30 seconds or two, three minutes on the punch bag, they tell you to go all out. And, you know, it's almost, I don't know, everybody's a fan of boxing, but it's the bit where you, you catch him and you just go all out to knock the person out, to finish the job.

It's that. And it looks easy in the boxing ring. It almost looks easy on a punch bag until you're completely knackered beforehand.

So I've got a lot of respect for well, any athlete really, but boxers, because it's one of the things I like. To be able to do that, I was like, wow. And Taekwondo, that was, I lost weight doing that as well.

When I did the Wing Chun, I lost weight. But because of my lower back, I had to stop doing the Wing Chun, not Wing Chun, um, the Taekwondo. I literally was, I was there.

I remember the evening I was there and I had to lay down on the floor. I couldn't do anything else. And I had to go, I had to leave.

And I've never ever walked out of any, um, physical training thing in my life, right from the age of what, 13, 14, when I first started doing it. And the first time doing karate, I just couldn't do it. And I couldn't physically, my body, my lower back wouldn't, wouldn't, wouldn't do what I wanted it to do.

You know, I felt like my back kind of divorced me, you know, seeing someone else. My lower back was cheating on me. So when I went to the dentist and the dentist did the, um, I clicked my back, did this clicking thing and said that I needed to, uh, go, you know, every week or whatever.

And he was going to charge me, I think it was something like 45 pounds for 15 minutes, 45 pounds for 15 minutes. And I had a few sessions because I was just thinking, Oh, please, I've got to do something to help my back. And I had enough money to pay for it because it was just before I moved into this flat.

And the reason I know that is because the, um, I don't know what his name was, the osteopath or whatever, he told me to put some, he told me to rub my back against some balls. And I misunderstood him. He said, no, I don't mean that.

And can you move away from me? He said, get some tennis balls, put them inside a stocking or, uh, you know, a sack, some kind of, and I thought, what, sock? He said, yeah. Well, I said sack, but sock, similar. Similar.

Yeah. It's spelt quite the same, isn't it? Just an O instead of an A. I said, what are you talking about? He said, I don't know. Um, he said, put some tennis balls into a sock.

And when you're sitting down, put them underneath you. So they kind of push against the lower back to massage the lower back. So I did that for about a year because I brought the bag, um, the sock with, I think I had three tennis balls inside the sock.

And, and I tied a hole in the sock to keep the tennis balls in because I didn't want them to fall out. And that was a, that was a boring sentence. And I feel I'm going to put together.

Oh, so tired. So I have to sit up. Otherwise I'm going to fall asleep.

And I get tired when I make recordings, but when I get really tired, it just makes making the recordings a little bit more difficult because I find myself drifting off a little bit. And so I kind of sit here with my eyes closed and I'll just talk. But the thing is, even though I'm talking, my mind starts to drift.

And when I become a bit, a bit more aware that I've been drifting, I'm not sure what I was talking about. So I kind of have to put a fair bit of trust in myself to be mildly sensible. If I was laying down, I would be fast asleep right now.

Oh, fast asleep. Oh, look at Andre. He's cuddling me now.

He's actually fast asleep. He does this sometimes. If I, if I pick him up when he's just like, just ran out from whatever he is, let's say he's jumped off the bed or he's, he's got some old tracksuit bottoms of mine that he sleeps in.

He likes sleeping in the leg. You know, the trousers or whatever they're called. And he'll crawl out and run over to the paper and he'll do a wee.

Well, sometimes he just crawls out and has a scratch. And then he gets back and goes back to sleep. So if I catch him at that point and I just hold him, he goes back to sleep, like instantly.

And if I just stroke his top of his head, like I'm doing now, he's very happy. As long as I do it slowly, I can stroke his body and cuddle him. And he's fine as long as he, he's not disturbed because he's asleep.

And he likes being stroked. I'm now stroking his side near, basically over his ribs to his belly. And he likes that.

He likes being touched. But if he was to wake up, so he's now, yeah, he's gone again. He's gone back to sleep, but he's... Oh, sniffy, sniffy, snuff, snuff.

So my lower back needs some kind of something. And then the top of my back was kind of more shoulder blade kind of area, like upper back kind of area. I've had a, like a pain that I've had for years and years and years, going back to probably about 95 probably.

And Andre, sorry about that, it's Andre. Can't believe he does stuff like that. Oh, dear.

How embarrassing. Shook the whole room. I thought it was a volcano or something, no one sleeps.

Oh, have you been eating cat food? Oh, yeah, you do. Yeah, he is. Anyway, I had this, I used to work for an agency and had this job, put in furniture, bedroom furniture, into student accommodation.

And I think it was nurses accommodation, student nurses. That's what I think it was, because it was just up the road from a hospital. And it was a new building.

And all of the bedrooms, they were, you know, basically identical. And all the furniture was identical. And we, our job, the people that were kind of working, I think it was a two day job.

Maybe three days, I don't know. But our job was to carry the furniture and move it into the each room. And there was a lot of rooms.

And I think each room had, there's a wardrobe, probably a set of drawers. There was a bed. And there was a desk.

I think that was it. That was what each room needed to have, you know, each one. So, and it was snowing.

Not in the rooms, but outside. The weather was snowy. So I get there.

I think I'm late because it's really out of the way from where I was living. And so I didn't really know where I was going, which I'm going to lay down. Just spreading myself out.

Hopefully you can still hear me. Oh, I'm so tired. And the heaviest things to carry was the desks.

Because wardrobes, they weren't like really heavy. And also wardrobes are empty, aren't they? They're kind of, it might be, you know, six foot tall and, I don't know, three foot wide. That's, it's three foot times six foot of air.

There's nothing. It's just empty space with wood surrounding it. So they weren't particularly heavy.

They were just, it was a two man job or two person job to, you know, because of the awkwardness of them. But the desks were heavy. I didn't realize this to be a fact until I went to lift one up.

And I heard a rip in my back, like a tear or something. And it was very painful. So basically I hadn't warmed up and I just started lifting in the cold.

And this was, I'm trying to think, 1995. Probably maybe January time. Perhaps.

Yeah, probably. Yeah, most possibly. And I couldn't go home because I needed the day's work.

I needed the money. So I, I mean, the person there in charge said, you might need to go to the hospital or something. I said, no, I'm fine.

I'll be okay. And he said, well, if you can't do the job, you're gonna, we'll let you go because you don't, we need people that are capable of doing the work. Because there's a deadline and it has to all be done by a certain time.

I said, I understand what deadline means. He said, okay, I realize that you're in pain. So I'll give that one, let you have that one.

But please, in future, show a bit more respect. I said, respect? You don't know what the word means. He said, yeah, I'll do it.

I said, oh, fair enough. And I carried on. Ever since then, I've had this, like left, it's on the left side as well.

Left kind of shoulder blade, underneath the shoulder blade, kind of, I don't know what it is. The only way I can kind of, I need to stretch it. So sometimes what I'll do is I'll push myself against like a door frame or something to massage the area.

And that seems to have done the job really. What was I talking about? Oh yeah, I remember when I was doing security, I used to lean with my back against. If I could find a knob, I'd like to rub it against it, like a door knob or a door handle or just anything sticking out.

Anything that I could push my upper back against to massage it. Because it felt, I felt a degree of relief from that. But the lower back, that seems to have, the first time I remember having any issues with my lower back was 1947.

No, I think it's, I don't know. I'll keep nodding off. I'll try and keep awake.

I'm not normally like this when I make a recording. I do get tired. I'm practically asleep.

All day, although it's two, 27 minutes past two in the morning, Sunday the 22nd of December. All day during Saturday, for some reason, don't ask me why, for some reason I felt like it was later in the day. I don't mean like Wednesday or Thursday and not like later in the week.

It just seems later in the day and that might be partly because of it being dark outside by four o'clock in the afternoon. But it really, even I think at five o'clock, it felt like it was more like nine o'clock or ten in my mind. It's almost like my internal clock has gone a bit haywire.

I wonder where that came from. Haywire, like haze where you can feed camels and wire. It's what dentists use to catch fish or something, I don't know.

Who knows? Who knows? Someone knows, somewhere. I don't know who. I don't know who.

I can't believe, what is it? 22nd today, so tomorrow would be Monday 23rd, Sunday 24th, no, Tuesday 24th. Got to remember for most people, time goes forward. So, Sunday 22nd today, Monday 23rd, Tuesday, Christmas Eve 24th and Wednesday, Christmas day, the 25th.

I can't even remember last year. I don't mean the whole year. But Christmas, I don't really recall much about it.

Probably just the same as any other Christmas, I suppose. I don't, don't recall. I was here with Andre.

I don't recall doing anything spandaculous. I'm just looking at my book collection. I've got quite a few books on therapy.

Shall I read them to you? Shall I tell you? Or, it's going to get up and... Walking on paper. I can't believe my big black squeaky chair squeaks even when I'm not sitting in it. I wonder how many books I've got all together.

1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19.

So, 19 for the first shelf, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 59, 60, 61, 62, 63, 64, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 72, 73, 74, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 86, 87, 88, 89, 90, 91, 92, 93, 94, 95, 96, 97, 98, 99, 100, 101, 102, 103, 104, 105, 106, 107, 108, 109, 110, 111, 112, 113,

114, 115, 116, 117, 118, 119, 120, 121, 122, 123, 124, 125, 126, 127, 128, 129, 130, 131, 132, 133, 134, 135, 136, 137, 138, 139, 140, 141, 142, 143, 144, 145, 146, 147, 148, 149, 150, 151, 152, 153, 154, 155, 156, 157, 158, 159, 160, 161, 162, 163, 164, 165, 156, 157, 158, 159, 160, 161, 162, 163, 164, 165, 166, 167, 168, 169, 170, 171, 172, 173, 174, 175, 176, 177, 178, 179, 180, 181, 182, 183, 184, 185, 186, 187, 188, 189, 190, 191, 192, 193, 194, 195, 196, 197, 198, 199, 200, 201, 202, 203,

204, 205, 206, 207, 208, 209, 210, 211, 212, 213, 214, 215, 216, 217, 218, 219, 220, 221, 222, 223, 224, 225, 226, 227, 228, 229, 230, 231, 232, 233, 234.

I think that's all of them.

So that's 234 books. And there's actually more than I realized. This is not, it's not like a tiny amount, is it? It's a lot smaller than I used to have.

I used to have a much bigger collection. But 234. So out of that, the therapy books, this would include counseling, psychotherapy, various different forms of therapy, including, I suppose, NLP as well, but excluding hypnosis.

So 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38. So 38 therapy books. And I would probably class just as psychotherapy slash counseling.

And then the NLP books, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19. And the hypnosis books are 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 59, 60, 61, 62, 63, 64. I'm just going to move off of there.

So 64 books on specifically hypnosis. I've also got some novels as well. And other ones that would kind of fit into Buddhism and I suppose spirituality and stuff.

And I've got other ones that I like would be classed as self-help, like Chicken Soup for the Soul, Men are from Mars and Women are Perfect, that one. There's the Sophie's World by Justine Gardner. Brilliant book.

It's really good for the history of philosophy. I love philosophy, but I don't know, it's hard to, it's a big subject, but I do, I'm very interested in it. And what have I got? The Motor, The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, and Pelo, what's his name? Kolo, whatever, The Alchemist.

If you've never read that, try it, you could, I listened to the audio recording about 22 years ago. It's really good. And I've got quite a few, well, I've got a few biographies, a few comedy books from Tom Sharp.

I recommend Tom Sharp, The Wilt Books, W-I-L-T. Very funny. And I've got a few books, Charles Bukowski's one of my favourite authors.

And I've got a few classics, you know, Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar, The Time Machine, Room with a View. What's the other one? War of the Worlds, The Great Gatsby, um, To Kill a Mockingbird, Good Girls Do Swallow, um, The Casebook of Sherlock Holmes, Ernest Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls, and Adrian Mole, 13 and a half years old or whatever. That's good.

I've got some books by Pima Chodron, what other stuff? I've got books on bipolar, books on sleeping, books on anxiety, books on, yeah, a few different things actually. But I'm a collector, or I used to be. I'm not so much now, because if I was how I used to be, I'd probably have over a thousand books by now since I've moved in here, because I've got the space.

As it is, I've got four bookcases. They're taller than me, so I'm about six foot six, so they're about six foot, so they're taller than me. And one, two, three, three quarters of three of them are kind of nearly full.

But I can't have the bottom rows filled, the bottom shelves, because Andre just knocks stuff off. So I have to have a big gap. But I'd like to have my book collection back.

That's what I'd like. That's my little dream, and I can eventually do that. Although I did used to have some quite rare ones that I'd got off of eBay, maybe back in 2005 time, and whether or not I'd be able to get hold of them again.

And some books I've got in the early 2000s, and some in 98, 99, that might not be available. And some are available, but they're really expensive now. Books that I paid maybe 9.99 in, I don't know, 20 years ago, now maybe cost 35, 40 pound.

So because they're quite, I suppose because they're not popular books, they're quite specialised, so they don't have a big market. So I guess I have to charge more to keep, to, in order to print them. Although some places online, you can basically order a book and they print it for you.

So it won't be an original cover. And I used to have quite a few of those books. It'll be the same content, but it'll just be like a plain cover.

And it's just, it's just as professional as any other book maker. They just make the book to order. So I'll probably look at, and I got, I don't have them anymore, but I had books from like 200 years ago.

And they were sort of well out of print and out of copyright or whatever, but they'd just print it for you. It's great. I think one was, it's Ezdal, he was a surgeon, went over to India and he did hypnosis with people.

He did operations just with hypnosis, with no chemical anaesthesia, which was like mind blowing really. I think I'll stick to just boring people to sleep. I think that's where my thing lies.

But I've got quite a few hypnosis books for sleep as well. So I do, you know, I do study, do, I've got a few, quite a few textbooks. But I think over the next year, I'm going to try and like buy one book a week, maybe, and just sort of build the collection up a bit.

And something that I can learn from, you know, to study. Because a lot of the books are not kind of the ones you just read, like a novel, you'd read all the way through, though I have on quite a few of them. They're more kind of like dipping into it, to get an idea or to cross reference.

And I think that's one of the benefits I got from getting a degree is I kind of learn how to study. I learned how to find information, which I think is quite a useful skill. It's not unique to me, obviously, millions of people do it.

But it's something that I don't think I necessarily had before. I did, but it helped me to be more focused with it. So yeah, I want to get, I'll take a photograph one day of my little book collection and stick it on Facebook or something.

But I used to have so many books. I think my book collection would be three times what it is now, before. So I'd like to, I had a lot of psychology books, lots of psychology books.

I also probably had about 100, 100 plus Buddhist books, maybe 150, but I gave them all to the Buddhist Center. I had loads of books on philosophy and that kind of stuff that I gave away to charity shops. Because I was living in this tiny room when I was at college, and there was just no room for my books.

So I ended up giving probably a third of my collection away, apart from the hypnosis stuff and the counseling stuff, because I needed that for the course I was doing, the degree. But even then I still got probably less counseling stuff than I had then. I had a, you know, I'd go through periods.

So when I was doing a reflexology course, I'd buy every single reflexology book I could get. So I'd end up with like 20 books on anatomy and reflexology, or if I did maths, you know, whatever I was studying. I went through a period when I was studying Asperger's, and I bought every single book I could get, read everything about it.

I've still got a couple of books now, but I just really got into it and studied it. Just like when I first got into hypnosis, I just consumed it, you know, just like I do a big chocolate ghetto. Yeah, big chocolate ghetto.

So what I'm going to do, yeah, I think next year, which starts in just over a week, I'm going to try and build a book collection, try and build up my book collection, more hypnosis stuff. And I'm going to try, try to make three recordings a day, three different recordings. One, let me bore you to sleep.

One deep sleep whisper hypnosis, and one relaxation for stress and anxiety. I want to try and do one per day throughout the whole of 2020. But in order to do that, I'm going to have to put a bit of planning in, not for these ones, but for the deep sleep whisper, I'd have to put a little bit of a bit more energy into it to sort of plan kind of an outline of what perhaps I'm going to talk about.

And for the sleep relaxation ones, I'm again, need to sort of be doing more studying and finding out new ideas and new techniques and things like that. So it won't be as simple as just talking into the microphone. I need a little bit of, a little bit of, I don't know, I don't want to use the word study, but probably a little bit of preparation or that word preparation.

Just saying the word preparation, it just feels wrong. Oh, the idea of being prepared. Oh, no.

But it might be useful. The thing is, I want to do that, but also, I want to write a book next year. I'd really like to maybe tell my story or part of my story of my life and just, just call it, Let Me Bore You To Sleep.

That just could be the title. Let Me Bore You About My Life or something. But just sort of tell, tell it, but have humor as well.

I don't want it to be all serious and but also have, you know, be genuine at the same time. So I don't quite know how to do it. I've attempted it many times over the years.

I must have started writing probably about 30 times. I've started to write a book, probably more than that actually. Sometimes I get a page done.

Sometimes I managed to get 10 or 15, 20 pages and I forget about it and I end up chucking away the pad. So it's about the momentum about sort of, I suppose, planning it, planning what I'm going to do, planning how the book's going to be. My ideal situation really would be for somebody who really loves what I do, but has kind of the talent to transcribe my work, the audios, and then take out of the audios the good stuff, the the useful information that might be useful to people and then format into some kind of a book.

That would be good. But yeah, I don't fancy doing it myself. You know, just transcribing.

I had to do that at university and it's like, oh, it just for every minute took me about 10 minutes to edit and transcribe. Every minute of audio, hours and hours. But yeah, that'd be quite cool if I had it all transcribed.

I could probably then go through it and say, well, that was good, that's good. That's not, you know, and sort of divide everything into subjects. Okay, so I've been talking for 14 years about relaxing.

What techniques have I kind of mentioned? And just list them all. Some will just be ones that anyone else could have thought of and that might have already been used and I've just read somewhere else. Some might be ones that I've thought of myself.

And so, yeah, it's kind of be interesting to go through and also ideas regarding sleeping and yeah. Because I don't write scripts, I don't really kind of know what I'm going to say before I say it. So it'd be interesting to kind of find out what I said, which sounds a bit weird, doesn't it? But when your hair are out loud, it sounds a bit strange.

Anyway, I'm going to go to the toilet. So thank you for listening. I'll speak to you tomorrow.

Remember to be kind to yourself, because you deserve to be happy. Do something nice for yourself today. Lots of love.

Bye.