(music) Altered Sensory Experience Let me bore your pain away #31 Jason Newland 29th April 2025

Hello and welcome to jasonnewland.com. My name is Jason Newland. Please only listen when you can safely close your eyes. This is let me bore your pain away.

So also only listen to this. When first of all you know the cause of your chronic pain condition and also you've been diagnosed by a doctor and a doctor has given you permission to listen to this particular recording. Now what I'll do before we go further just let you know I do have a Facebook page Jason Newland's Boring Group.

I have a YouTube channel which is also got all my podcast episodes on. It's at Jason Newland. You can I basically do six versions of each recording one with music one without music five and ten hours with and without music and the five and ten hours also have like affirmations counting down body scans relaxation.

So it's you know it's you can have 10 hours of me just talking softly with or without music. So today what the main let's give you like a summary of what these podcasts are. Let me bore your pain away is something that I've been doing for a while but I think this is the 31st recording.

I started doing it a bit more regularly and recently. So it's just here I'm here to help to try and what as it says on the tin you know let me bore your pain away. I've actually got a lovely comment on my group my Jason Newland's Boring Group on Facebook from Ali and says not sure the best way to leave your feedback but especially after I I think Friday's recording where you admitted that you have no idea if let me bore your pain away was helping anyone which is true.

I have not really had much feedback on these recordings and Ali goes on to say I've been meaning to say something even before you said that these recordings especially have been helping me enormously this year. I've had multiple health issues since the start of the year and severe nerve pain and I won't go into too much detail but since February so I'm beyond appreciate appreciated for being bored to not feel the pain so intensely and please let you know that you're helping so many people. Thank you and love to Vinny as well so thank you very much Ali.

I mean it's you know for every I kind of figured out years ago that for every one person that does actually say something like say that it's useful there's going to be other people out there that also feel the same way they just haven't got round to leaving a message or sending a message or leaving a comment and a lot of that is possibly due to even not wanting to but also when you're listening to me because I'm guessing a lot of people would be sitting or lying down with their eyes closed you're not going

to want to jump up and say oh let me have a look at the on my phone and post a message because you're relaxing so it's fine but it's lovely to hear messages like that or to read messages like that it does make a big difference to me and gives me more of a I don't know more enthusiasm I guess to keep doing it so yeah this is number 31 so I've been doing it quite regularly recently and what I started and I'm kind of playing around with different ideas and I talk about various different

chronic pain relief techniques so what I started yesterday is looking through lots of different books and so you've got hypnosis for chronic pain management therapist guide by Mark P Jensen an entire book is on hypnosis for chronic pain and it's based on research at the University of Washington Pain Center it's got detailed hypnosis scripts and cognitive behavioral techniques combined with hypnotic methods and there's a few books that have come up so what I'm going to do what I've started doing is just focusing on that book I've got on my bookshelf as well but I've used

chat gpt just to scan through the book and go through various different things so what stuck out mostly was if I can find it is the key techniques so the key techniques of this book pain dissociation altered sensory experience time distortion pain blocking imagery empowerment scripts and post-hypnotic cues so what I'm going to do is talk about each of those one at a time so yesterday I talked about pain dissociation today I'm going to discuss altered sensory experience which is changing the feeling of pain into another sensation like warmth or coolness so that's what I'm

focusing on in this recording so basically altered sensory experiences uses hypnotic suggestions to transform the felt quality of pain into something neutral or even pleasant which dramatically reduces the emotional and sensory intensity of chronic pain so it's changing the feeling ultimately and because our imaginations are so powerful and it's just amazing how powerful our imaginations are you know we think about something and it's almost like our brain doesn't even know the difference between what's real and what's actually being imagined you imagine having your feet in a cold river you're sitting on the edge of a

river bank and just got your feet in the cold river and the more you get into it the cooler your feet become because you know even if you had never done that you've probably done something similar you know what it's like to have your feet in cold water at some point even if it's just stepping into a getting into a swim pool or paddling in the sea or getting into a bath that's a bit cold and you have to wait until it's heated up and it's lots of different scenarios stepping into a puddle so we

know what it feels like and to have cold water on your foot and when you imagine that feeling it's really weird the more you talk about it the more you focus on it the more you start to have that coolness feeling in your feet and it's just weird it's it's weird it's kind of i guess it's obvious that it's going to happen but the same side it might feel a bit strange that it's happening because why would just thinking about something cause the feelings the physical feelings in your feet to change but then it's the

same thing with emotions isn't it when we focus on something the feelings get stronger if you focus on how much you care about someone or you focus about something that you're angry about those emotions increase because you're focused on it so if you focus on just like how you feel now emotionally and now focus on someone that you absolutely adore it could be your grandchild it could be your parent it could be your partner it could be your own child it could be your dog or your cat or your ferret or your goldfish it could

be anything any any kind of person and focus on them just focus on that person you might be able to see their face in your mind in your imagination maybe you can kind of hear their voice their smile maybe it's just a feeling you have a really strong feeling and maybe that feeling causes you to smile because it's pleasurable and maybe you're thinking about something funny that they did something cute that they did and it feels nice i mean technically you could perhaps move that feeling into the body part that you've been having problems with

and notice what happens there i guess that's uh i'm going to move it into my lower back at the moment it's kind of in my head and my chest i'm going to move it into my lower back it's strange it's just weird the way it's kind of just moved so it's changed and it's weird because it's not a feeling that i can actually really verbalize as in you know you've comfort discomfort hot cold this is an emotion but it's also a feeling i suppose i'd describe it as a kind of a lightness cool uplifting gentle

very gentle and it's also a feeling of comfort somewhere that only comfort could be sometimes i think comfort can can only be comfortable when that comfort's there nothing else can really be there i'm just trying to think of like a little little child's hands you know like a two-year-old's child hands put their hands together and you can maybe put a grape or maybe maybe like a little pear can put in their hands and they can hold it but you put a watermelon in their hands and they're probably going to drop it because their hands aren't

really suitable for holding watermelons weird analogy i just realized that's quite a strange thing to say but at the same time the hands are not suited for that the suit for suited for small gentle things and when you got a nice emotion moves into a part of your body then it feels different the weird thing though i find with nice feelings is even when it moves it's spread to my lower back but it's spread to all of my body my whole body's feeling quite good right now oh that's nice yeah that's nice it's nice sometimes

just to take some time to relax you know take some time to just let go i got the window open there's the birdies singing downstairs they're having their bathroom refitted so it's been it's been a fair bit of noise down there there's proper building work going on i'm hoping that it will be fairly calm because it has been for the last hour or so i'm hoping it's going to be calm but even if there is background sound it doesn't really matter because this is not a sleep recording although you may find yourself drifting off and

if you don't like the sounds of birds in the background then you need to have a word with the birds because even if the window is closed i'd still hear them they're very loud sometimes but i'm a big fan of birds singing it's beautiful i think i did have someone complain once saying uh i like your recordings this is a sleep recordings and i like the recordings but will you shut them bloody birds up like how am i supposed to shut that it's hard because they're up at like three in the morning in the summer

the peak the peak hours you know they're up really early until really late and that tree was there long before i was here and i'm guessing that tree was possibly there before this building was even here this build has been here since about 1978 so basically you've got altered sensory experience also known as sensory substitution or transformation so there's different ways of doing this really i mean it's going to list some ways to do it from the book but i know about this anyway so this here's something i used to do so i used to

let's say someone's got a problem in their left you know one part of their body so for example the left side of my right if i focus i can get the pain back in my chronic my in my lower back i focus on it yeah it's arthritis it's kind of it's there but i can like manipulate it a bit it's okay right so i can't get it to be when i'm doing these recordings no vinnie don't bark please when i do these recordings i can't get it to be high because it just won't because when

i'm making these recordings i'm in a certain state of mind a very peaceful calm relaxed mode you know mentally physically as well actually to be fair and there's very limited yeah not much in a way of stress going on in my body or my mind my mind does slow down but it's also operating in you know in a way that that allows me to work to talk so if i focus on my left side of my back this is something you can do if you've got like a mirror to where you say it's your left

hand this was the problem or your left knee was a problem or one of your shoulders or whatever as an example doesn't have to be the other side doesn't have to be like your right knee your left knee like that but it can be useful i mean you can just do a completely different part of your body if you want so if someone had a bad like a wrist problems with their left wrist they could focus on um i don't know you could focus on your shoulder you could focus on your lower back or you

could focus on your jaw doesn't really matter so you focus on the first part of your body the part that was problematic to start with before you started listening to this and then choose another part of your body to focus on a part that feels absolutely fine and this is a way where you can maybe start to neutralize that physical sensation so if i focus on on my lower back and then focus in i'm going to do with my hands i focus on my lower back then focus on my right hand okay focus on my

lower back focus on my right hand and i'm not trying to do anything with my right hand i'm not trying to do anything with my left with my lower back either it's a technique with an outcome you don't really need to focus on the outcome not really although you know there's the the benefits of expectation when you expect it to be useful and to work and let's say i focus on my left side of my lower back and then i focus on the right side of my lower back and i expect that by doing that

i keep moving between the different sides that the left side will start to become almost neutral so there's that expectation but i think that even without the expectation even without expecting what i talk about to work really well for you it can still be useful because you're learning and finding out for yourself what is useful for you because we're all different aren't we and one thing might be more helpful than another thing you may find that as soon as you start listening to my voice that something changes within your mind and your body and the

more often you listen to me whether it's to let me bore you to sleep or let me bore your pain away whether it's whatever it is you might find that you just automatically feel more relaxed and when you feel relaxed those parts of your body that maybe had a degree of discomfort before you started listening to me start to automatically neutralize in their own time without any effort on your part but for the sake of this recording that's probably worth maybe focusing on doing some of the exercises but it's i'm not gonna ask you to

do anything difficult and i'm not even gonna ask you to necessarily do anything it's just about imagining if you were to do it i'm gonna do it and i'll talk you through how it feels for me and if you want to join in and participate then of course you can but it's up to you you may just decide to listen wrap your mind around the ideas and some of these ideas may stay with you so you can change i mean it's that's different ways of doing this you can change how it feels by not even

trying to change how it feels so with that technique it's time for bed i think so for that technique i'll just focus in on different parts of your body like you know let's say for me my lower back left side then my right side then my left side then my right foot side left side right side and what tends to happen is changes occur naturally automatically without really i mean you could say well i was gonna say without doing anything you are focusing so i guess you are doing something and maybe the fact that you're

expecting changes to occur is also having a positive effect on how you feel differently now it's not like we're trying to eliminate the physical discomfort directly instead when you even focus on changing the sensory qualities and so you're focusing on maybe changing or imagining just imagining it's changing so you can focus on things like temperature changing hot to cool or cold to warm you know whichever suits you then this texture changing sharp to smooth and color this is something that i've done one of my earliest things i used to do with helping people with chronic

pain is changing the color so i would start off with the color that the person has already so i just get the person and get you to imagine that part of your body just moving it out of your body like it was a circle like it was an object just moving out in front of you and just noticing what color it is naturally as the bathroom continues to be built i hope you can't hear that too much there's not a lot i can do about it it's either do this or watch television and i think

this is a bit more useful of my time so you can imagine this thing moving out of your body the part of the body that physical sensation you can give it a color you could call it angry red and then change it or you can just what color is already naturally in your mind so you do this with your eyes closed if you can visualize with your eyes open you could do it with your eyes open it's up to you and then just change the color change it from red to blue then maybe change it

for blue to yellow change it from yellow to green green to orange and just changing it all the time moving around just you know playing with the different colors but there's more you can do with that so you've got it in front of you you've got this image in front of you you can change the shape so if it comes out and it's a triangle or if it's spiky spiky you can change that shape so it's a soft circle and then turns into a triangle or a rectangle or just a blob maybe it becomes fainter

so not quite as clear like you've changed the focus on the lens and then you can perhaps move it away so it's further away and distance as we all know can have a big impact on how you feel differently from how you did before when that feeling is pushed away and then you can move it you can turn it around if it's already spinning in a certain direction stop it and turn it around and spin it the other way and notice how that feels because that can reverse the way you were feeling before so you

can actually start by imagining there's a spinning wheel it's a spinning wheel and stopping it and spinning it the other way just notice how that feels differently and you spin it the opposite way you could even speed up the spinning in the opposite way so the feeling turns from neutral to even pleasurable you can move it even further away to the point where you can you can nail it against the wall far away so it can't move nail it in so it's in the wall can't move maybe add some super glue to the back of

it first and then you can turn around in your mind and look at something else focusing on something different noticing feeling relaxed maybe there's a sound connected to it maybe you can hear buzzing or humming so perhaps you can just turn that volume down so it's silent or maybe change it from buzzing to humming maybe even give that image a silly tune so when you focus on that image that you've pushed out of your body or whenever you think about that part of your body where that discomfort used to be you have a silly tune

i always like to think of the benny hill theme tune you know that one but it can be anything it can be the most sticky barbie girl it could be a song that you find silly so this tricks the brain into reinterpreting the signal which reduces stress and often the physical intensity itself it's like you're telling the brain this is not dangerous this is something different now it's a different feeling it's a different sensation and meaning it's not a fixed experience and we're always changing anyway how we feel is changing all the way through the

day how you felt at the beginning of this recording or before you started listening to my squeaky voice it's going to feel different to how you feel now it's saying that about my voice i feel like i might my voice is getting a little bit i don't know maybe need some water it does feel a little bit just a little bit i feel like i'm turning into a dalek wonder what yeah you can relax relax that's that would be would it work come so i'll calm yourself down focus on your mind focus on your brain

relax i tell you it's weird because i've done i've been doing body scans for years and years and years and someone found out my telephone number somehow and they left me a message on my phone on my answer machine and the message was this relax your face relax your hands relax and they started going through body parts that i wouldn't normally talk about in a body scan and they started laughing hysterically and hung up to this day i still do not know who it was that was about wow 13 years ago so physical sensations as

i said it's always changing always changing and it involves multiple pain areas brain areas the pain involves multiple pain brain areas as done all other feelings always it's not just one particular part of your brain so you've got the sensory cortex the emotion center attention networks so there's a lot more going on but again down to what are you focusing on as well and also by changing how or telling how the brain how to label the feelings such as when you're changing it to warmth or tingling or vibration it then downgrades or down regulates that

physical perception changes how you feel now you are retraining the brain to reinterpret the signal and it's a little bit like i talked about this thing maybe yesterday or the day before it's not my story it's just a story that i've heard multiple times about a man on a building site and he stands on a nail goes through his boot he's screaming in agony gets taken to the hospital and you know they expect to find basically like his his boot filled with blood because they had to remove the it was a really big one those

big spiky nails that you get on building sites wasn't a small nail anyway when they actually cut his shoe off or his boot off the nail had gone through his between his big toe and his and his first thing um yeah the first finger the first toe hadn't even touched his toes so in that second his brain retrained so his brain was being retrained to reinterpret the signal like like instantly and the weird thing about it is it's interesting i find that interesting as soon as he saw with his own eyes that there was no

damage his foot had not even been touched and i don't know if he was wearing clown shoes or something but he it's like didn't hurt anymore which just goes to show that our brain is responsible and it still blows my mind really the fact that all physical sensations come from the brain but the brain has no physical sensations in it there are no nerve endings in the brain which has feeling people can have brain surgery while they're awake as long as i have locan anesthetic they don't feel a single thing when the brain's being whatever

i was gonna say scooped out but you know whatever they do with the brain no physical discomfort no physical feelings they'll have emotions they'll have smells they'll have sensations caused by the different parts of the body being different parts of the brain activating different you know things in the body but there's no pain sensation in the brain so the part of the brain the part of the body is causes the pain but there's no pain in the brain even though the brain causes the pain there's no pain in the brain just it's a weird concept

and i still struggle with that one it's not that difficult i suppose to understand but it still seems like weird it's it's just strange so retraining the brain that's kind of a supposed part of what we do here what we're doing and also our opinions can change in an instant our feelings our thoughts our interpretations of something can change so quickly you know if you sometimes just one little bit of information can transform um the situation i remember big brother i was watching big brother years ago and they're all in the garden if you haven't

seen it it's a tv show like a reality show with cameras and stuff so they're all there was loads of them in the garden this is right right at the early i think phoenix just farted it could be me but hopefully not and they're all in the garden and they're talking about loss it was getting a quite a heavy conversation and one of the the ladies said um my you know my child drowned and they were all like cuddling her and like you know just she was crying and everyone was like upset and crying and

then when all that finished she started saying about uh she's looking forward to seeing her daughter again when she gets out and i said what how many daughters you got just one but you said that she drowned said oh yeah she did but she got resuscitated instantly and i'm talking within a second with an instant less than a second all those people that were around her comforting her that had all this emotion it turned to anger because they felt misled or manipulated or whatever they turned to anger because they felt that she had just blatantly

lied she didn't start you know i mean it's a heavy subject i know but it was so interesting to see because i drowned i drowned in a swimming pool but i got resuscitated so technically i did drown but i didn't die but you know it's it's a big difference isn't there if you get saved i imagine there's millions of people that have been saved over the years and but and i wasn't in hospital i just got resuscitated it was in the 70s that this uh a new new fad we had wave machines in swimming pools

and i couldn't swim anyway so i was always at the side but i got pulled away from the side by the wave machine and i just went to the bottom of the just basically luckily there's someone i don't know but i guess it's probably the swimming guard or whatever came and saved me and i've never really been able to i've never felt comfortable in water since really above my chest like i'm okay i'm good at paddling so if i was really tall i'd be okay if i was about i don't know 20 foot tall i'd

love a swimming pool because still be you know above my chest wouldn't it be above my knees i suppose to be fair or below my knees below my chest one of them but they changed instantly that extra little bit of information so i'm just looking what else so you've got different things you can choose like thermal shift um which we kind of talked about earlier imagining applying cool gel water ice or warmth so i do this sometimes when it's hot i imagine getting because you can get those cool gel masks can't you that you can

put on your eyes and stuff that you put in the freezer or fridge or whatever i used to use them years ago and sometimes i just imagine it on my forehead or on my eyes a nice cool towel like a wet towel or something like that or imagine ice melting on my forehead something i do like to imagine is standing under a waterfall but not like a really big waterfall just one that's um feels really nice to stand under now i don't you know i'm not talking about niagara falls or anything that'd be harder just

to stand on my under niagara falls you'd need some kind of a safety net i suppose but just having that water falling on top of your head gentle enough to be the most amazing scalp massage that's really nice you can use different textures you know because if you imagine sort of a part of your body feeling like let's say like sandpaper you can imagine it changing into a much a much softer material like silk or i suppose gentle rubber if you like rubber or just a smooth surface maybe like leather leather can be quite smooth

because you know if you're wearing uncomfortable shoes when you take those shoes off it feels so nice doesn't it or even if you're wearing comfortable shoes and you've been walking around for ages or been wearing the shoes for a long time you get home or wherever you are you just take the shoes off and you sit down in a comfortable chair it's a feeling it's a real lovely feeling and your feet feel so relaxed in the same way as maybe you've got trousers on and they're a little bit tight and you take the trousers off

or you undo your belt undo the top button of the trousers i've done that sometimes after i've been eating just undo the trousers a little bit just at the top two or three buttons undo the zip definitely get rid of the belt but just you know just pull my underpants you know pull them out a little bit just a little bit of air get into the the belly region and it can make such a difference for comfort you can get your band from restaurants but other than that it's pretty good but it's a nice feeling

just you know like getting home from work and taking your tie off if you if you wear a tie undoing the top button of your shirt or getting home taking your bra off i know i don't wear a bra anymore anymore i don't wear a bra but i know a lot of people have told me that it's one of the favorite parts of the day getting home and taking that thing off so there's certain parts of all of our days where we we can experience you can experience a sense of comfort a sense of relief

a sense of you know sense of just that's nice even if it's only for a short period of time and that goes back to the fact that our feelings our and the way we feel is always changing always it's not a fixed experience and maybe sometimes it feels that every time you focus on that nice feeling of comfort relaxation letting go the more you focus on those feelings the more you're going to notice those feelings of comfort and the more you're going to expect to experience more comfort and relaxation and sense of peace of mind

and as you know the more you expect something to happen the more likely it is going to happen because we get what we focus on we get more of what we focus on which then makes you wonder okay what am i focusing on or what do you want more of so instead of focusing on what you don't want focus on what you do want it's quite i find it quite interesting i don't know about you but it's uh it's an interesting old thing very it's quite a powerful concept you know being able to alter how

you feel in your mind just imagining it so imagine that you know you focus on the part of your body imagine that that warm a warm hidden light begins to surround that area slowly and as that light blends in the sharpness starts to soften the heat fades the sensation becomes cooler calmer more like a gentle breeze or a soft vibration so you can almost like introduce a feeling and then change that feeling and test out the different feelings and it's all imagination but as you imagine your hands become heavier you imagine your hands becoming more

relaxed that's what happens to them especially when you've got a calm mind you're relaxed and you're not fighting against yourself you're you're traveling in the right all in the right direction the same direction your mind your brain your emotions your unconscious mind everything's traveling in the same direction wanting the same thing which is comfort peace the sound of vinny chewing on a bone in the background something we all want i don't know why he has to do it during a recording you can change sharpness to smoothness heat to coolness pressure to floating burning feelings to

cool waves or tingling sparks you can imagine things like a cool mountain stream flowing through the area that we've been focusing on so that cool mountain stream flowing gently through that area soothing each nerve it touches and continues to flow cleaning cleansing healing and you can visualize it you can if you want to you can see it in your mind flowing through that part of your body or you could imagine someone's wrapped that part of your body in a soft blue cloud of comfort you can imagine spreading honey over that part of your body and

just imagine that honey soaking in deeply into that part of your body slowly changing everything it touches healing relaxing so how do you feel now how does that part of your body feel now what's changed and the good thing about it honey can you make more noise please vinny the good thing about it is the more often you play around with this stuff the easier it becomes and then it starts to become automatic because your brain starts to know that when you have certain feelings it's time to change them time to change those feelings transforming

that quality that physical quality into something neutral or even pleasant reducing the emotional and physical intensity leaving you feeling calm loose and peaceful and that brings me to the end of this recording i hope it's been mildly useful and i wish you well thank you for listening sorry if there's been a bit of background sound with i can't do a lot about that as for vinny well he's the boss so thank you for listening remember to be kind to yourself because you do deserve to be happy and be gentle with yourself you deserve to feel

safe lots of love bye