#32 Relax & Sleep Hypnosis Daily (Jason Newland)

Hello, welcome to jasonnewland.com. My name is Jason Newland and this is Sleep Hypnosis Weekly. Please only listen when you can safely close your eyes. Just remember that you can find all of my recordings, not just from this podcast, but also from all of my other podcasts and previous recordings, there's about 1,200 to 1,300 recordings on my website that you can stream and download for free.

If you'd like what I do, leave a review, there's a review page on my website. You can also leave a video if you'd like, a little video review. So I'd like you to get yourself comfortable, ideally lying down on a bed.

And before I go any further, I just want to give you a few little tips, a few little tips that, and these are not my ideas, these are things that specialists and psychologists and doctors who have researched sleep and insomnia and things like that. This is what they say, so I'm just passing on that information to you. One of the things, and this is something that I've done myself naturally, is to keep your bed and your bedroom separate from your living room if you can.

Not everybody has the luxury of having a separate bedroom, I didn't for about 20 years, so I do now, but in the past my bedroom was my living room, it was everything. But if you are able to, and you do have a separate bedroom with a bed in, and you have a separate living room or lounge with a television and all that stuff, keep them separate. So if you have problems with sleeping or if you had issues with insomnia, take the television out of the bedroom, only watch television in your living room.

Again, I realise that's not always practical because for someone who is, maybe has mobility issues or ill health or some other reason, watching television in bed is something that's part of their life. Because they maybe have to spend more time in bed than the average person, so maybe having a television in the room is actually a really good idea. But from a sleep perspective, the idea is to separate sleeping from being awake, and it seems like a really obvious thing, but those things you do when you're awake, watching television, perhaps being on the internet, reading a book, eating, you know all those things, we do out of the bedroom.

And of course, there's other things that you might do in your bed as well, but we're not going to go into that, but I'm just talking as a sleep situation. Keeping the bed and the bedroom for sleeping, and all those other things like watching television, reading, eating, all those things, keeping it away from this room or away from the bedroom and do those things in another room.

In the same way as you have a bath in your bathroom, if you don't have a bath in your living room, I'm guessing, well they used to, didn't they, 70 years ago people used to have baths in the living room, but nowadays, generally, you have a separate bathroom, you've got a toilet, you go into the toilet, you don't do that in the kitchen, you know, so you keep the rooms separate.

And the psychological aspect of that is your brain associates the bed with sleeping. And in a way, this seems so simple that a five year old could have said it. It seems so obvious.

There's actually a psychological thing, there's other examples I could give you, but I won't, to do with other stuff. We associate, we associate things, and I suppose, yeah, another example would be work, you get to work, and something kicks in, doesn't it? Maybe you sit down at your desk, for example, and there's a different, it's like your physiology is different compared to how it was maybe on the journey to work, or when you're at home having your breakfast, or, you know, there's that association with that chair, with that desk.

Or, you know, if you're a bus driver, there's an association with that bus, sitting on that bus.

There's maybe an association with the uniform you're wearing, maybe, or the suit that you wear for work, or the overalls, or, the list is endless. And that's just a psychological thing that happens automatically. So we have that same connection with the bed.

It's just like if you drink coffee, first thing in the morning, maybe you drink coffee with your breakfast. Of course, it's got caffeine in, and maybe you put sugar in the coffee as well, and, you know, also you're eating, so your body's kind of waking up, and all that stuff. But there's a big psychological aspect to that as well, because you're expecting to drink the coffee, you're expecting it to wake you up.

And someone could put in, I don't know how they would do it, I mean, I suppose decaf coffee, but even that does have caffeine in it. But if someone gave you a cup that tasted exactly the same as coffee, exactly the same as the coffee you normally drink, but it wasn't coffee, you know, it had zero caffeine, zero of any of that stuff. Zero sugar, but somehow they were able to make it taste exactly the same.

But they didn't tell you, they didn't say to you, oh, by the way, we're going to give you completely non-caffeine coffee, it's going to taste the same. But it's not going to feel the same, if you get told, possibly. But if they don't tell you, the person, I don't know who they are, but if someone gave you that drink, and it was almost like a placebo test, there's a really good chance that you'll have exactly the same response, physiologically, in your mind, as you do normally with that coffee that you would normally have.

Because that's what we associate, we associate perhaps that coffee with waking up. And the reverse of that, flipping it on its side, we associate the bed with falling asleep. Because regardless of any kind of sleep issues that any of us may have had in our life, the majority of our life we've slept okay.

You know, throughout your life, if you counted all the nights together, the majority of those nights, you did fall asleep. In fact, probably, even the worst nights you've had, you may have fallen asleep eventually. There's not going to be that many nights where you were asleep the whole time, awake, sorry, the whole time, and never fell asleep.

Even if you think that's the case. Because sometimes we fall asleep, we don't even realise we've fallen asleep. And we wake up, and we don't realise we've woken up.

We just assume we're still laying there. Because there's no stimulus, there's no stimuli, there's no light, there's no television, there's no communication, there's no verbal stuff. There's probably limited things that you're hearing.

There's not much in the way of physical movement. Perhaps just a bit of moving around in the bed to make yourself feel more comfortable. So that association that you have with your bed is sleep.

You already have that association. Because that's what bed is. When people say, I'm going to bed, it means I'm going to sleep.

That's what the term means, doesn't it? Going to bed means going to sleep. The two are connected, bed and sleep. So even if you lie down on your bed, and you do nothing, which is kind of the obvious thing to do really.

I think starting to juggle fish or bananas isn't really ideal if you're trying to sleep. But if you're lying down on your bed, and you just lie in there, there's only one thing that's going to happen. One thing's guaranteed, is eventually you're going to fall asleep.

Eventually. You're just going to fall asleep, just through boredom if nothing else. Because your mind does start to slow down.

And I realise that your mind, that association that you have if you listen to me regularly will be, especially if it's the sleep sessions you listen to, there's an association with me and my voice. Your mind slows down when you hear my voice. Your body relaxes when you hear my voice.

And if it wasn't before, you'll notice it is now. You'll notice your shoulders are a lot more relaxed. You'll notice your eyes are a lot more relaxed.

And your jaw, your forehead, the back of your neck, your chest, your stomach, your arms and your hands and your fingers. You can actually move your fingers around, provided you're physically able to do that, and it's okay. Just move your fingers gently.

Notice how more relaxed they were. It's like a sense of gentleness and calmness spreads through your body. Without even being aware of it.

And then there's that feeling that spreads down your body, down your legs, into your feet, your toes. Your hips, of course, really relaxed. And you can feel your body, when you're lying down, you can, I know it's strange, I quite like it because I'm not particularly tall, but when I'm lying down, I feel taller.

I feel my body stretching, I feel my spine stretching out, my legs stretching out, and all the muscles in my body relaxing. And I have some lower back issues, and they all seem to just drift away when I'm lying down. And my mind just, it's not that my mind feels empty, it just feels relaxed.

It's kind of on par with the rest of my body. And one way I notice that my body's relaxed is when I move a part of my body. So maybe just move my toes, move my hands, maybe move my arm, maybe just twist my body a little bit, gently.

And I can feel that relaxation spreading, continuing to spread. Continuing to feel more relaxed. And it's almost like I've started to remember that actually my head and my body are connected.

They're not separate entities. There's that little bridge, that little connection called the neck, the spinal cord. You know, it's all connected.

So your mind and your brain is relaxed. Your mind feels relaxed. Because you're lying down, it's not just about comfort, calmness, feeling sleepy.

It's also about feeling safe, about feeling secure. You're in your safe bed, it's a safe place, a safe space to feel safe, to feel calm and to just let go completely. Because you choose to let go.

It's a choice. You choose to just relax and feel calm and to go with that feeling. And as I've probably mentioned many times before, maybe instead of trying to force sleep, which is an impossible thing, perhaps welcome the pleasure.

Just in the same way as carrying heavy shopping from the grocery store or maybe from the back of your car into your house and you put the bags onto the floor. Just that comfort, it's a kind of pleasure, it's a physical pleasure that you feel. Maybe you've just been out, it's been a long walk or you just get home, take your shoes off and you just sit down in a chair.

You just feel so comfortable and it's pleasant. It is pleasure, but natural pleasure. You didn't need to drink alcohol, you didn't need to do anything to get that physical and emotional pleasure.

It's happened naturally. Maybe you get home and it's been particularly cold outside and you get into the warm. It might not be your house, it might just be as you get onto a warm bus or you get into a warm shop and it just feels nice.

Maybe you walk into a supermarket and they've got that heater that's just blowing hot air as you walk in. And you just stand there for a couple of seconds and it feels really pleasant. And if you know that heater's there, maybe you go there regularly, you know that that pleasure is coming.

You know that you're going to walk in nice just to get in the warmth. And you know that when you get home from a long day and you sit down in your favourite chair, you're going to feel so relaxed and that pleasure that you get is just going to be really, really lovely. And you expect that.

You expect to have that feeling because that's what normally happens. So you expect it to happen, which means it does happen. Just like laying down on your bed.

You expect to feel relaxed and calm and feel completely relaxed throughout your body the second you lay down. The head touches the pillow, your mind starts to slow down. It's almost like the bed is magical.

Like the mattress has got some kind of magic power. And it's that pleasure that's there. It's actual pleasure.