#43 Relaxation Hypnosis for Stress, Anxiety & Panic Attacks

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

I do have a new website for this podcast but I can't remember the name of it. Which is terrible isn't it? But hey, it'll be in the description or something. It's weird because I have built I think four websites this week and it's the only one.

I keep forgetting the name of it. It's StressHypnosis.com or something like that. Which is quite unusual because it's actually become quite popular very quickly.

The website's getting quite a bit of traffic for some reason so I'll have to sort of learn it. It's sweet, I've got 11 websites so I don't always remember all the different ones. So thank you for your support by listening to the recordings that I make.

I haven't made one for about a week I think so I'm due a new one and a new recording. So I thought recently I've been working on my... I don't want to say positivity. I've always had this negative image of positivity and it sounds like a really silly sentence when I say it out loud.

But when I was younger I used to hear people and some people would say you should just be positive and pretend and pretend to be in a good mood when you're not. And as I've had bipolar for a long time, I only got diagnosed nine... was it eight years ago? But my moods weren't really dependent upon what was going on around me always. Sometimes they were but I could be at a wedding and be in a horrible mood like a beautiful occasion.

So I used to get a little bit frustrated when I hear people say well just put a smile on your face and you know fake it till you make it and that kind of stuff. But recently I'm looking at it in a different way. I say recently I mean over the last few years really.

Well probably over the last 20 years but yeah more recent I'm 49 so I spent a lot of my life thinking it was silly. But starting to look at it from different ways and you may think well what's this got to do with stress and anxiety and panic and and a lot a real a lot and because because there's a sentence. I've got Andre on my bed.

He's my little boy ferret. I'm going to walk into the living room with you. I don't normally do this.

I normally try and keep everything really quiet in the background. I've got a piece of paper stuck underneath the television. There's a television unit and it's basically taped to the unit in big letters and it says we become what we think about.

We become what we think about. And that might seem like some kind of self-help statement that you would hear from a motivational speaker and that's exactly what it is. And it's they're not my words.

This is uh who was it Bob Proctor is where I got that sentence from. That particular thing. But it just the sentence enough that it's not enough.

Just those words is not enough. It's digging deeper into what it means for us individually. What it means for reducing stress or the creation of those panicky thoughts.

So basically and it is very simple to say it. I understand this. It's very simple just to say something and it's really easy for me just to say well if you do this this will happen.

But I'm not living your life. I'm not living inside your body. I'm not experiencing what you're experiencing.

And I admit that. I admit that I don't know what it feels like to be you. And that's a refreshing thing to hear somebody say.

It's usually the other way around. The amount of times I've heard people say oh I know what you feel. I know what you're going through.

I know what you feel. I know what you feel like. I know.

No you don't know how I feel. Because we're different people. And I know that a lot of it is really well intentioned.

But we are different. And I will never know what it feels like to be you. You will never know what it feels like to be me.

And that's not a bad thing. Because we're all individuals. But the idea is what we think about, and I've mentioned this in the past, what we think about affects our life.

It's just that particular sentence is a much better description than I give with one sentence. It takes me 50 minutes to kind of put what is said in that one sentence. But for me that 50 minutes is needed.

Because I think it's something that needs to be absorbed. But also understood from the various different angles. Connected with reducing your stress.

Connected with how you think. What you expect to happen. The things that you say to yourself.

Your internal dialogue. The things that maybe you've been saying to yourself for many years. The things that you think about.

So I can't mind read you. I can't mind read what you think about. I can make a few guesses.

I can talk about things that I've thought about. In connection with anxiety, stress, and panic. But this is also valid for all aspects of our life.

Because what we spend time doing, what we spend time thinking about, what we spend time saying to others or to ourselves has an impact on us. So I guess from this perspective I'm starting to think, well how can this fit in with looking towards recovery from stress, from anxiety. Because even though it's different for everybody, it's horrible for everybody.

That word's an understatement. And it's horrific. Having extreme anxiety, panic attacks, this is a horrible thing.

And I don't think anybody's going to be jumping up out of their chair saying, wait a minute, I love it. Because of course no one does. How could anyone? So there's that commonality.

So I wonder, what do you do, or what do you do in your life that you could change for you? Something that you could do differently that will improve the way that you think. And by improve, I mean change the balance of negativity and positivity. To be in the positivity favor.

To be more positive, top-heavy positive. Without being fake, without pretending. And I'm not a big fan of pretending.

Just for the simple fact that we have to pretend so much of our lives anyway. You know, if you go to work and you're in a foul mood, and we're all allowed to be in moods, we've all got emotions, we're human beings. If you're going through a difficult time at home, you're a human being, you've got feelings.

But you can't necessarily show them when you're at work. Or if you're going to school or college. Or if you're a teacher, for example.

Or if you're a doctor. Imagine if you're a doctor, and you've got, you're seeing 40 people or 50 people, patients a day. And they've all got, you know, well, most people don't go to the doctors because they're feeling well, do they? So, and that doctor's struggling.

But they can't, you know, they can't snap. They can't go in and be grumpy. Thankfully, I mean, that'd be horrible for the patient, wouldn't it? So we all spend time pretending, putting on like a fake smile at times, maybe even a fake sense of humor, or fake courage, or just courage, maybe.

But when you're in your own mind, why be fake? There's no one to lie to. You know, I can tell myself that I'm wearing a suit. I can say to you that I'm sitting there with a suit on, tie, bow tie, bowler hat.

And you may believe that. You've got no reason not to. Probably got no reason to care whether I'm telling the truth or not.

But the fact is, why would I say that to myself? When I know that I'm just wearing some tracksuit bottoms and a t-shirt? What benefit would I get from pretending that I'm wearing a suit? So there's that kind of sense of pushing away the reality. So, which sometimes perhaps we feel we need to do in a situation like work or school, or maybe in front of your children, or in front of your parents.

There's maybe that sense of not wanting to upset anybody, or not wanting to disrupt other people's enjoyment.

But you know if you've got someone that's close to you, a parent, a child, especially like a parent if you're a young person, or if you've got you know a relationship with somebody and you need someone to talk to, then build that honest relationship where you can be honest. Because it took me years to realise that you can actually be in a really bad mood and talk about being in a really bad mood with somebody without being an arsehole to them.

It is possible to be angry, but have a conversation with someone and talk about that anger without being angry at them.

It's possible to feel anxiety and to talk about it with someone without feeling anxious. Because it's a safe space. Because you're talking about something, in a sense, when you talk about something you're outside of it.

You're talking about it as if it's a thing. As if you're kind of observing it. You're kind of stepped away from it.

So that anxiety, that panic, that stress, you're stepped away from it and you're observing it. And that distance that you can have just by that observing, that distance really means a lot. Now, if you think about an electrical current, you know, it could be the most powerful electrical current in the world.

But once it's disconnected, anywhere, any part of it stops touching the other part of the wire. Everything stops. It doesn't have the power anymore.

And it's the same with thoughts. It's the same with emotions, that energy, stress, anxiety. Once you step back and you disconnect just a little bit, that's only got to be an inch.

Disconnect. You've got two batteries, you disconnect those batteries, put an inch between them, they won't work. Whatever it is that's been operated won't work if they're not connected in the right way.

Just like if you've got a hose pipe, it's connected to the tap, maybe in the kitchen or, you know, maybe outside toilet and you're going to, you know, hose the garden or the flowers at the bottom of the garden. And you've got that hose pipe and you're walking to the bottom of the garden and as I remember years ago, when I was a kid, it used to come off the wall, used to come off the tap and the tap would just drip onto the floor or into the basin or whatever it was, you know, the sink and go down the plug hole.

And you can stand there for the next hundred years and nothing's going to come out of the end of that hose until you connect it back.

And literally, it can be, the end can be in the sink still, but still nothing will come out because it hasn't got that pressure from the tap. The water's not coming out. Just taking a little bit of a distance, a few inches, and then the power's gone.

The, you know, it's like I've got, I've got this, I don't say it's a dodgy plug, but it's, whenever I use the toaster and I've got through two toasters in the last couple of years, and it works for a while and then it seems to overload and I put the toast in and it flicks a switch and darkness, unless it's during the day, then it doesn't, it's still light, but everything goes off, the entire flat goes off, all electricity goes.

That one switch gets flicked and everything goes off. And it's a bit like that with, with anxiety and stress and panic.

And if you take one of the components out, you take a, you know, make one of the wires a bit loose, a little bit of dodgy wiring, you know, maybe disconnect one of those wires, you take out that, and it doesn't work anymore. It doesn't, it doesn't function the way that it used to function. I remember years ago when I was in the sea cadets, learn about building fires and about fire safety as well, because we were learning about how to build fires, you know, to cook food and stuff while we were in the wilderness.

But at the same time, how to put fires out. And I always remember this, the triangle, the triangle for fire, you had, you had to have one, you had to have all three. And if one got taken out, the fire would, couldn't work, had to have all three of those things.

Had to have fuel, had to have oxygen, and had to have, is it heat? I really should remember this stuff. You take the fuel away, the fire's going to go out. Take the heat away, there's no fire.

And take the oxygen away, there's no fire. So you've only got to take one of those away, and it disconnects it. And it's a little bit like that with anxiety, stress, panic, by the way we think.

When you think differently, think differently, it changes that, it disrupts the process. Because that wiring in our mind, you know, it's kind of, it's a well trodden pathway. Because we've got used to it, we've got used to going from here to there quite quickly.

And it feels like it's automatic. When actually, if instead of turning right, you turn left. Instead of thinking of green, you think of blue.

Instead of thinking of what's going to happen if this happens, what's going to happen if that happens. Maybe this will happen. Or maybe it won't feel that way.

What will happen if I feel okay? What will happen if I go a different journey? I take a different, you know, go around a different, few different roads instead of the roads that I normally go down. What happens if I get the petrol from a different petrol station? What happens if you think differently, but purposely? And not just be on automatic, because there's only one way, only one reason to go on automatic.

And that's when that automatic is, you're happy with it.

It's a reason why we have to have driving lessons. And you have driving lessons with a driving instructor, and they only allow you to drive to go and have the driving test when they know that you're capable of driving safely and on your own. Until you get to that point, you can't take the driving test.

Or they won't put you forward for it. And until a driving examiner decides that you're capable of driving on your own safely, you won't get the driving license. But once you get the driving license, you're just sent along and you can, it's like you've got that skill and it's an automatic skill that you've got.

You just go along and do it. But you've had to learn it. Some people learn quicker than others when it comes to driving.

Some people love driving, some people don't. So when it comes to thinking, specific thinking, thinking about how you feel, how you expect to feel, how you want to feel, noticing how, you know, noticing the things you say to yourself, changing the things you say to yourself, correcting yourself, but not in a harsh way. In a gentle way, in a way that you would with a small child that you cared for.

Being gentle with yourself. I know that it might seem a bit all lovey-dovey and fluffy, the idea of, you know, being gentle with ourselves. But I can't think of anything more important than being gentle.

To be fair, being gentle with each other. Imagine what the world would be like if we were just a bit more gentle. We can't control the world, we can't control reality and what goes on outside, can't control other people, but we do have control over our thoughts.

Not necessarily the ones that automatically arise, but we can do something with that. You think of yourself, think of yourself as a tennis player. You've got these balls coming towards you, just knock them back, knock them back, knock them back over the net.

You don't want the ball. And you can imagine you're actually on the, I'm not a tennis player, so I'm not talking about this as like an avid expert or lover of tennis. I just think it's quite a nice analogy because you think if you're playing tennis, the one thing you don't want is the ball.

You don't want it. You want that ball away from you. And there's an area where that ball has to be knocked away.

And the only ball that's okay is if it's out, if it's out of a certain area, and it's okay. But even then, a lot of times you see even the best tennis players going to still knock that ball back just in case it hits the line or it's just inside. So the most important thing is to get rid of that ball.

So you think of that ball as thoughts. Not all thoughts. Some thoughts are beautiful.

You know, if you're thinking about visiting somebody that you care about, you're thinking about what even something like watching a television program that you love watching, or doing something that you enjoy doing. They're lovely thoughts. They're not, they're not balls to knock back.

That's a ball to catch. You know, you want more of those balls knocked at you, knocked at you. But you know, you want to be able to catch as many of those balls as you can, and just embrace it, embrace those nice feelings, because they are there.

When you see a crappy ball come in, and it can come in various different shapes. It can be a It can be, it can even be something that someone wants you to do that you really don't feel comfortable doing. Don't do it.

Knock it back and knock that ball away. Or maybe you've got, you know, someone's got dietary issues. They may want to have the temptation of eating something that's going to make them ill.

A crappy ball, knock it back. Or those thoughts saying, oh, don't do that because you're going to feel crappy, and it's going to be hard. Knock that ball back.

And there may be some balls you want to catch, just to examine. So you've got the ones you can catch, you know, the nice memories, the things you're looking forward to. You know, as far as these are thoughts, and you can catch them.

In fact, you can catch them, just leave them on the floor. And they can stay there with you. And they can become part of the ground you walk on, become part of you.

So those thoughts, those really lovely feelings, those relaxing sensations are always there with you, within you, for you to feel whenever you want. And then sometimes, as I said, you get a ball that maybe you think, well, I don't know about this. Because you're not sure if it's real or not, if it's right or not.

Might be true, might not be true. You might actually believe the thought, the thought might be, you know, or I can't go to, can't go to a party I've been invited to because this will happen. I'll feel this particular way.

And you might need to catch that ball and examine it and think, well, okay. It's happened before. I've felt, I've had difficult times, maybe at a family gathering.

But also I've had really good times as well. And then you can look at the ball. And I know it's an old, not cliche, but I don't know what the word is, but look at the ball.

And it's just an idea. That's all it is in your mind. All these thoughts.

It's just a thought. And look at that ball. Is it made of stone? Is that ball made of stone? And when you realize it's not, when you realize it's not actually a ball, it's just a thought.

And thoughts are movable. Thoughts are not stuck. They only stick if we allow them to stick.

But they're fluid. Always moving. Just like how we feel.

We're changing. The way we feel is different. The way you feel now will be different to how you felt before you pressed the play button on this recording.

The way I feel is different to how I felt before I sat on this bed with my little Andre on the bed over there asleep. Thankfully not making lots of noise. It's okay.

And that's another thing. I know I've jumped from subject to subject, but this is a really important thing, I think. It's okay to feel.

It's okay to feel. Whatever it is you feel, it's okay. It's okay to feel angry sometimes.

It's okay to feel that you're super sexy sometimes. Okay to feel really low. It's okay to feel any feeling at all.

It's okay because it's just a feeling. Because if I said to you that sometimes I feel like I'm really hot, I'm really like super attractive to women, and you know I'm a proper catch, and you might look at my picture and you think, hmm, a bit deluded possibly, and my thoughts don't really fit in with reality. Well, it's fun.

It's fun to have thoughts like that. If you feel that way, you're going to be more attractive to somebody else because of the confidence. You know, it's a standard psychological thing.

You'll probably feel happier in that moment, but in the same way, it's just a thought. So if I'm thinking another thought that, oh, I'm so ugly and no woman would ever look at me, and I love to, I don't know why I like to say this, but I like to tell people that I'm becoming invisible to women, and even though I say it as a joke, it's not helping me.

And sometimes I put in quite, you know, people laugh and that, but like, it's not helpful.

It's not real. It's not true either. If I was invisible, I could go shoplifting, but I can't because they can see me.

So if we're going to criticize a super over-exaggerated positive perspective about ourselves, surely shouldn't we also give the same attention, the same amount of judgment? I don't know if judgment's the right word, but maybe not take it too seriously. Maybe not take any feelings and thoughts too seriously. Because I know years, I keep talking about years ago, but when I first had the panic attacks and stuff, I had a period when I felt that I shouldn't be feeling this way, and I didn't want to feel anything, and I tried to block off all feelings so that I could block off the unpleasant feelings.

And I didn't want to feel anything, and I tried to block off the unpleasant feelings, which is something that a lot of people do, whether anxious or not. You know, I can't be hurt. I put the big bridge up so I can't be hurt.

The thing is, if the bridge is up, you can't be happy either. You know, you can't experience, you have to have it open. You have to experience the rubbish as well as the nice stuff.

But what I discovered is, and it's not something that I've created, it's just, I would say this is probably a fact, is when you drop that drawbridge, knock down that wall, allow feelings to emerge, and just allow them to be there. Don't cling onto them, just notice them, and if you're in a bad mood, just that's how you're feeling. If you're feeling wonderful, that's how you're feeling.

But when you allow the feelings to arise, they lose the strength, just loses its strength to how it was before when you were trying to push it away. And it's, as I said, it's just kind of a standard theory within emotions and thinking and feeling. It's also really important, I think, to kind of remember that when it comes to the feelings, whether it's physical or emotional, or whatever it is connected with anxiety, stress, panic, because by allowing those feelings to just be there, it means that you're no longer powerless, or you're never powerless, but you don't, you no longer feel powerless.

Because that's the one thing about anxiety and stress. It can be a sense of something's being done to you by an outside source. Something's causing this.

Something's, you know, something's being done to you, which it isn't. So, having physical and emotional reactions to life, and life's events, and the way we think, is the most natural thing in the world. Because, you know, if you won the lottery, or someone gave you a hundred thousand pound or dollars right now, I can pretty much guarantee that most people would have a really good day.

I know that life isn't all about money, but that day would be all about money. That day would be a good day. Even if it was a case of, here's a hundred grand, you have to spend it today.

You don't get to keep anything. You can just do whatever you want with a hundred grand. You can give it away, but you have to, at the end of the day, with no cash in your pocket, out of the hundred thousand, and you don't have anything, any physical goods left.

I suppose some people would go and have plastic surgery and stuff like that, wouldn't they? But imagine how much fun that would be. Everyone would have a great day. Whether you're giving the money away to people, whether you hired a helicopter or private jet to take you to New York, or decided to hire out a pop star to sing in your living room for you and your family, and say, I'd give them 90 grand to do that, and just to sing one song.

It'd be a great day. Then you may think, well, why am I talking about the lottery? Why's he talking about the lottery, and why's he talking about getting a hundred grand? What's that got to do with anything? It's got to do with feelings, emotions. Because you know, there's times when, in the past, I have felt that there's no way I could have any pleasure.

There's no way, no way that I was ever going to feel anything but how I was feeling at that moment. And I was always wrong. Always, always wrong.

So whenever you think that the way you feel is never going to change, you're wrong. And I don't think it's a great thing to tell people that they're wrong, generally. It's, in most terms, it would be classed as a negative thing.

But in this situation, it's a positive thing. Whenever you tell yourself that you're less than what you could be, you're wrong. Whenever you tell yourself, in your mind, or think that things are always going to be the way they are now, you're wrong.

They won't be. That's the same as eating a huge pizza, unbuttoning your top button and your trousers or jeans, sitting back in your chair and saying, that's it, I'm never eating again. You're wrong.

You will eat again. I'm never going to feel hungry again. You're wrong, you will feel hungry again, just perhaps not for a little while.

And you may say, yeah, but what's eating a huge pizza got to do with having chronic anxiety? It's about change. It's about realising that what's happening now, it's just now, and now is in this moment. Doesn't mean in five minutes, it means right now.

Because guaranteed, no matter how you're feeling right now, if suddenly, a helicopter, a helicopter, a helicopter, landed in the road outside your house, like safely landed, a big helicopter. And all the neighbours will be coming out, looking and everyone will be in the hallways, you know, so what's going on? And, you know, everyone will be in the street, what's going on there? Why is there a big helicopter?

And then the president, or a prime minister, or, you know, someone really famous got out of the helicopter, maybe Bono from U2, whatever, whoever it is, someone that you really like, a celebrity that you really like, got out of that helicopter. The way you feel will change instantly.

And you may say, well, that's obvious, but it doesn't take a helicopter to change how you feel. Just walking into a different room, moving your body, thinking about something different, observing how you feel, noticing the things that you are thinking, realising that what you think about affects your life. What you think about now affects what you think about next, affects what you think about next.

And all those thoughts have an effect on how you feel, which then affect what you think about next. But instead of being like a big domino effect, you know, those big long trail of dominoes, all standing up, stacked together, you press one and they all fall down, and one by one. Well, thoughts aren't like that.

They seem like that, but they're not. Because if you look for the angle, from a certain angle of, I've got no control and thoughts just happen and that's how it looks. But when you actually look correctly, you see that the gap between each domino is quite wide.

It's actually wider than each domino. So one gets knocked down, it lands on the floor. The one next to it is still standing up.

It has to be pushed over by you. And that's the next thought. And then you have to go and push the next one over.

So there is a gap between each domino. Instead of being automatic, like we seem to think sometimes, it seems like that. It's actually not.

Those dominoes are individually spaced too wide to knock each other down, to have that domino effect. So you're the one, and I'm the one, we're all the one, that knocks the next domino over. Which means it gives you the opportunity to look at the domino.

Do you want to knock it over? Or you just want to get rid of it? Maybe replace it with something else. Maybe you don't like it. Perhaps you want to put a sort of having that one.

Maybe you want something that's pink, a pink domino. Maybe you want one with more dots on or less dots on. Maybe you want a little one with a little hat on top.

You know, it can be silly, do whatever you want, it's your mind. These are your dominoes. These are your thoughts.

You don't have to knock the next domino down. You can just get rid of it. You can bypass it all together.

So that brings me to the end of this recording. And I've talked for longer than I thought I was going to. I thought it was going to be a 30 minute one, but it's now 53 minutes.

So thank you for listening. And I will speak to you next time. And remember, be gentle with yourself.

Genuinely, be gentle. Even if it sounds a bit goofy and a bit, a bit like, eww, might sound weird. What do you mean be gentle? You know what it means.

You know what it means to be gentle with a child. You know what it means to be gentle with a parent, with an elderly person. You know what it means to be gentle with someone you love and care about.

You know what it feels to be gentle with a puppy or a little kitten. We all know what it means to be gentle. So it's time for you to be gentle with yourself.

From now onwards, be gentle with yourself. Speak to you next time. Lots of love.

Bye.