#45 Just now - Stress & Pain Relief Podcast (Jason Newland) (14th November 2022)

Hello and welcome to jasonnewland.com. My name is Jason Newland. This is going to be a relaxation session.

Please only listen when you can safely close your eyes. This will be basically a pain and stress relief podcast. And you might wonder, well, why are you doing two? Which is it? Is it a stress relief or is it pain relief? Both of those things are the same thing in the sense that the same techniques offer the same benefits to whether it's reducing stress or whether it's reducing chronic pain.

If you're listening for a chronic pain issue, please make sure you know the reason or the cause for your physical discomfort. See a doctor or a medical specialist and make sure that you have a diagnosis before you listen to this or watch this video. Now, I'm going to start off by asking you to first of all decide which part of your body you're going to focus on.

So as far as the stress goes, you might have a part of your body that is causing you physical discomfort. I, for example, hold stress in the back of my neck, sometimes in my shoulders. I used to hold it in my stomach, but not so much now.

I just generally just use my stomach for chocolate and cakes. That's generally what my stomach holds these days. But sometimes my lower back, because I've got arthritis in my lower back.

So that's chronic pain. But also sometimes I feel stress there as well. You may have stress in your forehead or in your eyes.

So, you know, we're going to focus on a particular part of your body. And if you're listening for chronic pain, we're going to focus on that part of your body. So whether it's your lower back, whether it's your shoulder, your hand, your arm, your jaw, whatever it may be.

Now, if you're listening to relax and you don't have any physical discomfort in any part of your body, then I'm just going to ask you to focus on just one part. Let's say your eyes. OK.

Focus on your eyes and then we'll work from there. So please get yourself comfortable lying down on your bed or maybe sitting in a comfortable chair, making sure that it supports your body. And I think I've already said only listen or watch when you can safely close your eyes.

I hope so. Sometimes I say it twice because I forget I've said it because it's important. You know, I don't want you like fly in a plane listening to me.

You know, that's not good. Fall asleep. If you're going to lie down on your bed, there's a good chance you'll fall asleep because to be honest, I'm not the most exciting person you'll ever listen to.

I don't have the most exciting voice. So even if you're just thinking, well, I'll lie down for a little bit because it's the most comfortable position. Then if you have something to do, you know, in the future, I don't mean in a year's time, but if you have to get up and be somewhere, you have an appointment in a couple of hours or something and set your alarm.

That's my advice. Now. I'm going to assume that you're ready so you can pause this video or the podcast and just to let you know, I've got lots of different podcasts and they're all available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, you name it, all the main podcast apps, as well as being on YouTube.

And if you do like what I do and you'd like to be notified of new episodes, new recordings or new videos, please subscribe. Now, I realize that was a quite a long winded introduction, but it's sometimes necessary to do that, you know, to actually give a more of a detailed introduction, especially when it's things like chronic pain. Because, for example, if someone had a stomach, pain in the stomach, and they thought, well, I want to get rid of this or listen to a video or whatever.

Now, if they've got appendicitis, that's not a good idea. You know, they don't want your pain masked if it needs medical attention. So that's why it's important you find out first.

In reality, if someone had appendicitis, the pain is, you know, acute pain is so sharp that something like this may not actually touch it. Chronic pain is quite often more of a duller pain, more like a toothache, rather than a sharp needle being poked into the skin. When, you know, sometimes people, it's as if they've got chronic pain in their skin, you know, and they might touch the skin and it feels like that.

But when they're not touching their skin, then maybe it's more of an ache. That's going to be different for everyone. So we're all different.

We're all different, aren't we? Let's face it. That's the bottom line. Nothing is the same for everybody.

We've all got our own unique ways of experiencing certain physical sensations. And you may wonder why. By the way, this is no longer the introduction.

This is part of the recording now. You may wonder, why relaxation? What's that got to do with pain, chronic pain? Now, obviously, it's got a lot to do with relaxing. So if you're listening to reduce stress, then yeah, relaxation.

Why for chronic pain? How could that? What's the connection there? Well, I discovered many years ago, when I first started doing this, 2006, that when you reduce the tension and the stress in someone's body and in the mind, when you increase your level of comfort and relaxation, any physical discomfort that was there also reduces. So there's a big, big connection between chronic pain and stress and tension.

Because somebody with chronic pain, and it's kind of obvious, they're going to feel more tension than perhaps the average person.

Because it's perhaps often on their mind, they're thinking about it, they're focusing on it. And it causes emotional distress. I say it's obvious, I think it's quite obvious that it would do.

And then that makes sense. It makes it worse. And having tension in a part of the body where there's already issues, like physical issues, increases the physical discomfort.

So when you, for example, I'm focused on my left shoulder now. When that relaxes, there's a sense of comfort. There's a sense of release, which gives you a sense of relief from that physical, whether it's pain, whether it's tension, whatever you want to name that feeling, it starts to change.

You start to feel differently. And once your mind slows down, and you're no longer focusing on that one part of your body, to the exclusion of everything else, and you're not only concentrating on how it feels now, you may be remembering how it felt yesterday. And planning for how it's obviously going to feel tomorrow, because of how it feels now, and how it felt yesterday.

There's a lot of logic to that. If it felt that way yesterday, and it feels that way now, then obviously it's going to feel that way tomorrow. That's logic.

But logic isn't always necessary. And just because we felt something yesterday, and we feel it today, doesn't mean we're going to feel it tomorrow. I'll give an example, a headache, or I had two teeth extracted three weeks ago.

Now, it was painful the day I had them out. It was painful the next day. It was painful the next day.

But day by day, it became less. Now, you could go by logic saying it was painful yesterday. It was painful the day before.

It's painful today. Therefore, it's going to be painful tomorrow. Well, that logic didn't hold up, because there came a time when the next day, which was tomorrow, it had reduced to a level of not really bothering me anymore.

And I realized that is acute pain. Acute pain caused by trauma to the mouth, having the teeth taken out. But still, there's something about acute pain which, once you know the cause, it's no longer worrying so much.

So, you know, if I go to, when I was having pains in my back, I was, it came on over years and years and years. So, but then it got to a point where it was very, very painful. And I was concerned.

Once I was diagnosed, and once they told me what it was, the doctors, specialists, whatever, I was no longer worried by it, because I knew what it was. And I also knew that by relaxing, by doing the exercises that I needed to do, by, you know, doing some physical exercise helps to keep the unpleasant feelings at bay to a degree. So sometimes there's more needed than just relaxing or lying down.

Just like with stress, there may be a reason, a really, really good reason why someone is having excess tension and stress. And that might require attention, like it might be a lifestyle change required, needed. It might be a relationship issue that basically has to be addressed.

It could be all kinds of things like physical pain. If I lose a bit of weight, I'll have less pain in my back, likely. If I do weights and I do exercise and I walk regularly, I have less pain in my back.

So I can sit here all day long, meditating or doing hypnosis or doing relaxation techniques, and it will help. But there's also other things that may be necessary. So that's worth looking into because, you know, if you've got a bad hand and you can relax and you can focus on your hand and a relaxation technique or listening to a boring voice like mine can help to relax your whole body and you slow down your mind and your hand feels better than it did before.

But then if you go and start punching a punch bag, your hand will probably start hurting again. So sometimes lifestyle changes are required. And I can't tell you what those are because, first of all, I don't know your situation.

And secondly, I'm not in a position to tell anyone what to do or what they should do. That's for you to find out and to figure out for yourself and to get professional advice. What I can say is, by listening to a relaxation session regularly every day, and I don't mean mine, you can listen to someone else's if that's better, just find a relaxation video or podcast that suits you, that you like.

I mean, some people find that I talk too slowly. This is how I talk, you know, I can, I do end up talking even slower, probably, you know, during the recording. And some people won't like the accent, some people will only like, well, I want to listen to someone, an American accent, or I want to listen to a Spanish accent, you know, everyone's got their own personal needs.

But my advice is find someone that you can feel comfortable listening to, and listen every day. I mean, one of the advantages of what I do is, I do a lot of a lot of different recordings. I've got thousands of podcast episodes.

So this choice, so you don't, you know, you're not kind of stuck, limited to listening to the same recording over and over again. Although there is benefit to that. Yeah, maybe for 30 days, but after 30 days, it can get a bit a bit more boring than that is necessary.

But you might find that that you find one particular recording or video that really does it for you, that really sort of either send you to sleep if that's what you're looking for, almost instantly, or relaxes you deeply. Just maybe if you're watching me on YouTube, just by looking at my funny face, my funny round face, like a big football with glasses, you might in a beard, you might think and just feel relaxed.

You might look at a video and just feel grateful that you're not me.

I mean, whatever, wherever you get the positive feelings from, it doesn't matter if you feel more relaxed. It's not important how you get to that feeling. It's just, for me, it's important that you get there, that you can enjoy feeling karma.

And even though technically, you could say, well, I've been listening to this for 20 minutes, and he hasn't even asked me to close my eyes. He hasn't even started the recording. Well, I have, I have started.

But it's not always going to be presented in a way that's obvious, or in a way that maybe makes sense completely. But you need to do the taste test, in a sense. Notice how you feel.

Do you feel more relaxed than you did before you decided to listen to this? Or watch this video? Do you feel more comfortable in your body? Does your mind feel calmer? Like maybe your thoughts are not so fast, not so racing around, like maybe they were before? I'm just guessing, but that might be in the case. How is your mind now? That you're focusing just really on my voice, noticing that there isn't really anything for you to think about.

There's nothing for you to do.

You can allow yourself to continue to experience this gradual sense of comfort in all the different parts of your body. And even though the standard way to do something like this is to get you to focus on different parts, I'd like to go back and focus on that original part that we mentioned right at the beginning. Whether it's your eyes, whether it's your back, whether it's your shoulders, your chest, your knees, wherever.

Notice how different that part of your body feels, whether that part was originally that you wanted to relax yourself or reduce any physical discomfort. And just noticing it. Because when you're listening to my voice, the only part of that physical feeling that you can focus on is how it feels now, not how it felt yesterday or how it might feel tomorrow, but how it feels now.

So already you have reduced the physical discomfort by one or two-thirds, in fact. You've only got one-third left of it, because tomorrow hasn't happened. That doesn't exist.

Yesterday's gone. It doesn't exist. The feeling is only for now.

And then you take away the worry that you had, the concern, because you may find that actually, as you listen, as you watch, as you focus on that part of your body, you may notice that you're not that bothered about it. You can feel that part of your body, but you're not worried. You're not particularly concerned the way you were before.

Something's changed, and you may not be able to put your finger on it. You might not be able to really explain what's changed. And it may not even feel any different yet.

It does feel different, even though that sounds like a weird statement. It feels different, but it doesn't feel different. It's almost unimportant to you at the moment.

And it's not because I've told you or tried to get you to think of it as being unimportant. It's because that's happened naturally. As you focused on my voice, you have maybe my boring voice is just almost dissolved.

A lot of that stress that you had before is dissolved. My words are creating an opening where your tension can be released out of your brain, out of your mind, and out of your body. In a way that your body almost becomes transparent, and the wind could just blow right through you.

Imagine you're just standing there in your garden or in a field or in a park, and the wind is blowing through you, through the front of you and out the back, removing all traces of stress or tension or discomfort through your head, through your face, your shoulders, through your chest, through your arms and hands and fingers, through your stomach, through your hips, your buttocks, your groin, your thighs and knees.

The rest of your legs, ankles, feet and toes, your face, your eyes, your jaw, your nose, your ears, your forehead. The wind blowing through your brain, just blowing through one end and out the other.

Out the ever, out the other. I don't know what the ever is. Releasing that tension.

Letting it go. Loose. And there's a certain sense of peacefulness that you can experience and enjoy.

Letting it go. Just allowing yourself to enjoy feeling more comfort. To enjoy noticing how easily you can reduce those physical feelings that you wanted to reduce.

And encourage and raise those pleasant, calm, relaxing sensations. Filling your body with healing energy. Because you can't have both at the same time.

You can't feel tense and relaxed at the same time. So it's about choosing one over the other. And I know sometimes it really doesn't feel like a choice.

But you can choose to override the physical sensations that you're not appreciating and you don't want. Weird feelings that you do want. Which then pushes away those physical as well as emotional sensations.

Filling you with calmness, tranquility. Your mind slows down. It's like you've just been in a really deep meditation.

And your mind feels lighter, rejuvenated, more peaceful, very calm. And when your mind is calm, your body follows and becomes calmer. And the calmer your body is, the calmer your mind is.

The calmer your mind is. You know where I'm going with this. So your body follows your mind, your mind follows your body.

And when you've got a sense of relaxation and calmness, letting go of all of those feelings that are no longer necessary to you in this moment, you can really enjoy feeling relaxed, peaceful in all the muscles of your body. Your bones. That healing energy moving through your veins, in your blood, to every part.

Moving through your nervous system, down your spine, again into every part of your body. Sending those peace, calm, relaxing messages from your brain. Relaxing you naturally.

Feeling so calm. Feeling really peaceful. Letting go.

Letting go. And you can just continue with this feeling as long as you choose. And when you do decide to get up and move along with your day, you can keep these feelings of calmness.

Relaxation. Feeling peaceful. Feeling deeply relaxed.