(Long Music) Relaxation Techniques Let me bore your pain away #26 Jason Newland 23rd April 2025

Hello and welcome to Jason Newland.com. My name is Jason Newland and this is Let Me Bore Your Pain Away. Please only listen when you can safely close your eyes. This is not a replacement for any kind of therapeutic or medical care and please get permission from your doctor before listening to this so that you can find out the cause of your chronic pain.

So I just let you know I've also got a Facebook group called Jason Newland's Boring Group that you can join. I've got a YouTube channel at Jason Newland where all of my latest recordings all get updated or get released on there. And my my website has all my latest recordings as well where you can listen, stream, download, whatever you want to do.

So thank you, thank you very much. Today is Wednesday the 23rd of April 2025. It's currently 7 minutes past 4pm.

It's quite nice out there now. It was a bit a bit rainy, a bit of a rainy day but now it's quite nice. There's some noise, some background sound from music going from downstairs.

I wanted to wait till it finished but it's been going on for a few hours now so I'm going to just do the recording anyway. Hopefully the microphone doesn't pick up too much of it. It's not as loud as it was earlier so it should be fine.

So what I'm going to do is talk about I'm just going to talk about how chronic pain can be reduced. So I'm going to talk about 20 scientific so these are 20 scientifically supported insights into how relaxation techniques and listening to soft speech can alleviate chronic pain. There's no banging going on downstairs.

If there's too much noise I will just do this without any music in the background but we'll see. I don't know what's going on down there. Sounds like they're rebuilding the place and so I'm just going to go through this so and talk through the different things I've found and give you my perspective on it because ultimately that's what this is.

That's what everything I do is. It's just me talking and hoping that by listening to me yabbering on I can help both distract and also influence how you feel physically and emotionally in a positive way. Whether it's the let me bore you to sleep, whether it's the whatever it is I'm doing that is my hope.

So this is kind of like let me bore you to sleep but it's really focused more on the chronic pain relief. So the first one is relaxation techniques reduce pain intensity. Now I discovered this myself back in 2006 when I used to offer a free pain relief service in my local town and I'll be fair I was I didn't it wasn't I didn't know what I was doing but I was quite new to doing it in person.

I've been studying it since 99 so 2006 was seven years. 2006 was the first time I got to sit down with another person a human being in the same room and looking at ways to change how you feel. Now I really to start with relied on relaxation techniques and then moved into maybe a technique such as changing the color or of the the physical sensation or you know imagining it coming out of the part of your body and changing from different color to a different color then to a different color maybe changing shape and maybe changing to ice and just letting it drop to the floor and smashing and lots of different kind of ways.

But the relaxation part of it was something that on its own without any kind of clever or even non-clever technique was enough to change how someone felt physically. I've got no idea what's going on downstairs there's gonna it's just a lot of banging I don't know maybe we should put in up some furniture you don't know do you it's possible it's possible you never know. So I found in my just I couldn't really give a percentage like but I knew what I felt very definite and I used to have it on my website you know back in that time I used to have a website called freepainrelief.

co. uk I don't have it anymore but it I used to put relaxation reduces chronic pain like as simple as that and I still stick to that it tends to do that.

I think this I'm being distracted by the bloody drills now you think if you're going to drill use a power tool or have loud music don't do both you know I mean do one or the other not both blimey so we'll see how this goes if the music stopped I don't think they can hear me surely no they won't be able to hear me so I was thinking that's kind of how it goes like relaxation when someone feels relaxed it's not just your body that's feeling relaxed it's your mind so your mind and your body obviously is connected so you can't have a relaxed body unless the mind is relaxed and you can't have a relaxed mind unless your body's relaxed and each causes the other to relax more I mean the opposite is also true so one thing I never really got into is breathing techniques and the reason for that is really simply because I was coming from a perspective of extreme anxiety like panic attacks and stuff like that and I tried relaxation techniques when I was going through the panic stuff and it didn't help me it made it wasn't useful for me I'm sure it's useful for a lot of people but for me and the one thing I didn't want to focus on was my breathing so I pretty much most of the time I've got to say during my career of um it's not a career is it but during my last 19 years of doing this stuff I very rarely focus on breathing other than just commenting on my own breathing reducing like slowing down and deepening but naturally you know in its own way not don't generally try and control it because it calms down anyway and even now my breathing's deeper because I'm more relaxed than what I was before I started doing a recording even though there's a lot of noise coming from downstairs just by talking and by focusing on this what I'm talking about it has it's almost like I'm listening to myself so for you it'd be even more beneficial because you're not doing the talking so you know ideally I mean unless you are just talking along and repeating everything I say which I can't imagine would be much fun maybe a bit like that annoying kid at school you know just walking around just repeating everything stop repeating me stop repeating me go away go away when I say that annoying kid I mean me I used to do that I had two older brothers I had no choice it was it was basically something I was born with you know I was a kid I was born and I had these two brothers a lot bigger a lot older than me and I said it's not fair I said it's not fair to my nan it's not fair I can't what am I supposed to do they're bigger than me they're physically a lot bigger and stronger how am I supposed to um match up to them when it comes to arguments and she said oh but grandson something you forget the magic power you have being the smallest I said what she said you get to annoy them constantly I thought yeah she said use your words carelessly like wow she was a bit like Jedi but not at all when I say Jedi I'm talking about Ewok what's the Ewok the Ewok that taught um Luke Skywalker how to um dance oh I forget his name anyway so breathing can I mean I still just think that's a bit weird that when I started I got learnt to meditate back in 2002 onwards for quite a few years so I do incorporate meditation techniques that I've learned in what I do I always find it I always found it a little bit amusing when the meditation teacher would say don't forget to breathe I've never once forgotten to breathe my whole life 54 years I've never forgotten to breathe I never had to remember to breathe because it's a natural thing but I've never got to the end of the day and thought I forgot to breathe today damn it so yeah I think breathing is because it's a natural thing focus on it focus in on it for me made it a bit weird but it's whatever you you like to do I mean I can focus on my breathing now because it has slowed down and because it feels relaxed but if I was focusing on it when it was when it wasn't but if it was sort of a bit too accentuated a bit too fast I would well I'd be focusing on what it was not what it could be potentially now I'm focusing on what it is how it is now and it's slow rhythmic deep and it might get more relaxed but I kind of don't care if it does or if it doesn't I do expect it to become more relaxed but it's okay whatever happens you know so relaxation can significantly signify I can't even say the word significantly today reduce physical intensity you know other outcomes I mean for me anxiety was the reason why I started meditating and why I learnt tried to learn different relaxation techniques there was no other reason that was the main reason for me I do have chronic pain issues in my lower back now from arthritis I didn't have that back then so it was never really an issue so yeah I was interested in helping people with chronic pain right from the late 90s because I thought when I started first I had learned in hypnosis that's the only two things that really jumped out of me was relaxation and chronic pain relief but chronic pain relief was the biggest one out of the two which I mean really that there's this they're too connected to not be the same thing really relaxation is pain relief and pain relief doesn't really happen without relaxation I mean you can get distraction but there's still a degree of relaxation when you're distracted so you can watch a really good movie even if it's like a tense thriller or something you're still you may be focusing on one thing but you're you're not focusing on the part of your body that maybe you were focusing on before and I think it's kind of one of those weird things it's like it just goes back to its normal level of focus instead of so I think sometimes with my lower back in the past when it's if it's like 50% I'm giving it 50% focus it's 50% attention it's not really a problem even 80 90% it I don't think that's the problem even at 100% it's discomfort I my perspective is chronic pain is a problem when it goes above the 100% the intensities are higher than that so it's not like 0 to 10 really it's like 0 to 10 10 plus 1 plus 2 plus 3 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 so it's 18 out of 10 you know I mean it's like so it's it's gone over the edge and when we're distracted sometimes it just goes back it can go back to its normal level because not getting that attention that we were given it before you know it's the old thing isn't it sort of um if you're in a passenger on a in a car and you'll play a like who can spot a red car or who can spot a mini who can spot a white van who can you know or it can be as obscure as you want and before you know it you're seeing nothing but what you're looking for because that's what you're noticing that's what you're aware of that's what your your complete focus is on and without going um into talking about physical adult enjoyment between two adults that's also part of the reason why that can be enjoyable with two two adults together whether it's holding the hands kissing or just just cuddling or being together there's a sense of heightened pleasure because it's a real focus but i'm pretty sure that that would be different in a different situation so you can be on a first date and you've gone back to one of each other's apartments or maybe you're sitting in a cinema and your legs are touching just your legs no other part of your body maybe your shoulders or maybe you've got a bus home because you didn't want to for a taxi just in case didn't go well that's terrible um but just that human contact of your shoulder or your your knee against their knee because you're noticing it maybe they're noticing it i don't know it feels more it physically that sensation that physical feeling is heightened like to a much higher level so but if that was just you know once you've been dating a while or you know if you were just sitting having a conversation with someone else and your legs and you know even if you completely love the person but you're talking to someone else you're not going to have that feeling because you're focusing on what you're doing there and maybe during a movie you know the movie starts and when you focus on the movie that physical feeling reduces a bit and then you focus on it and you get it all right it arouses that feeling arouses i'm trying to be careful with the word arouses but now i'm thinking of arousing stuff so i'll stop so i think maybe with the the physical discomfort it's because i tend to go like zero to ten where is it but actually i think ten is still manageable i don't think ten is the problem it's when it goes above ten that's when it's a problem in my perspective of looking at the gauge obviously if it's only between zero and ten then ten is the highest but i think that's that's not what happens with it's the same with relaxation it goes down to zero but zero is just feeling relaxed but when you feel really relaxed that's way below ten that way below zero sorry that's minus minus minus minus minus five minus six minus seven complete comfort where you almost feel like you're floating and you're heavy at the same time maybe like that body parts not even there so instead of feeling calm and comfortable and like a zero which would be just like maybe it feels exactly how the rest of your body feels you go below that it might feel way more relaxed than the rest of your body it might feel like almost there's a breeze blowing through that part of your body as you go minus three minus four minus five and the rest of your body of course will follow because that's just a natural thing to do but that part seems to be as you're focusing on it seems to be much more reduced much more relaxed than just being a zero and it can go down there's no ending really this is an endless drop it's an endless feeling of comfort i guess you can put your own number on what it is whether it's minus 12 minus 30 minus 100 we just it goes beyond a feeling anymore it's almost it may almost feel spiritual you know everyone's got their own idea of what that is but it's very calming and as you go down you also feel that in your mind as well as your mind not only slows down as it goes down from like 10 down to zero your mind slows down and then your mind empties and then when you go below zero it's something else happens it's as your mind switched off perhaps you're getting that feeling of pleasure in your mind that you would get from years of meditating something that maybe it could take someone a long time to you know in through meditation to get to this point but you've got to this point because you've just allowed yourself to relax because ultimately you're not trying to get anything for it because sometimes with meditation it can be almost an achievement to i don't know like trying to get something not everyone not everywhere not every meditation technique but you know whether it's trying to create loving kindness towards other people whether it's trying to calm your breath or calm your mind to relax your body whether it's just focusing on now there's a degree of focus with meditation but this goes beyond focus it's almost when it goes below zero it's kind of like there's no focus anymore you know in a way it might seem weird it's almost like you've given me the focus to take care of and you just left you've gone down and you're relaxed and you're calm you're peaceful and you don't need anything at all you know that you're safe you know that you're healthy you know you're fine and you can just allow yourself and the rest of your body to catch up if you want to or you may just enjoy having this feeling without any expectations whatsoever nothing that you need to do nothing that you need to say or think you just are in this moment how you are without any judgment any opinions so yeah it can be quite nice so listening to soft sounds it's really good for the brain whether it's listening to me just talking whether it's listening to soft music it's all about engaging your brain regions which are associated with that physical sensation modulation that that part of your brain your really just your your system the various nerves in your body helps to just calm everything down it's almost i think with something very powerful about sound whether it's a soft voice whether you're taking in positive words or positive ideas they're actually soaking into your mind and your body but it or whether it's music it seems to reach more than just your ears it's almost like the music or the sound or the voice is physically reaching the parts of your body which i think is quite nice i mean studies have been done where demonstrations demonstrations we've done with a 12-week program incorporated singing and breathing exercises can improve how someone feels and overall well-being with people with physical issues and then you've got this fine line really with like guided imagery guided imagery is pretty much taken from hypnosis they call it guided imagery because not everyone liked the idea of hypnosis in the past but visualizing something is when you don't need hypnosis to do this and i think that's what it is people you know 30 40 years ago whenever they started doing guided imagery realized that just by imagining yourself being in a place like a calm place some people that would be lying on a beach listening to the waves on the shore other people that might be sitting lying in a tent with the rain falling on the tent making that lovely sound and it could be different for everyone some people it could be cycling in the mountains you know everyone's different and by imagining these visual mental experiences and the more vivid they are your mind doesn't seem to know the difference between what you're thinking and what's really happening as far as how it responds and sometimes it can be nice just to close your eyes and just imagine yourself relaxing imagine yourself feeling really really calm imagine your body just melting away and then you've got progressive muscle relaxation pmr i'm not very good with the whole pmr and whatever i'll just say the whole word it's easy for me and this is something that is that i kind of started doing many years ago it's just a standard kind of start out really you know focusing and there's two different ways of doing it i would suppose probably more than two ways but you can do a body scan where you focus on the different parts of your body without doing anything just you know focusing on your forehead focusing on your eyes focusing on your jaw not trying to relax your forehead not trying to relax your eyes and not trying to relax your jaw focusing on the back of your neck your shoulders but not trying to relax the back of your neck or your shoulders, and your arms, your hands, your fingers, your legs, feet, toes, chest, stomach and back, not trying to relax all those parts, but just being aware of them, just noticing them.

So that's a little bit different from the progressive muscle relaxation, and I learned actually the progressive muscle relaxation from an audio I used to listen to in about 1999 or 98, and it was a meditation, but it was also, there was a muscle relaxation part of it, and I liked that, because back in them days, I was a little bit, I wasn't the most relaxed person in my 20s, so I used to just listen to this guided relaxation session, and I used to enjoy the progressive muscle relaxation, starting from my head, going all the way down, and it was, I mean it was easier back then, because I had some muscles as well, I mean I don't know if they can do progressive fatty tissue relaxation for people like me, but I find it helps, you can do both, as long as you're careful with it, you know, don't, it's because what I mean is if you can tense the muscles and just let it go, or you don't even have to do that, you can just focus on a part of your body, so if there's a part maybe that's injured, then just focus on it, there's no tense or tension or anything like that required, but then you can focus on the different parts of your body, and instead of actually just saying to yourself or thinking to yourself, don't try and change it, just allow it to be how it is, which in itself creates relaxation, you can be a bit more proactive and say, well, okay, I'd like my eyes to relax more, and your jaw is relaxing more, your forehead relaxes more, the back of your neck and your shoulders relaxes more, the whole of your back, from the top of your back all the way down to your lower back, relaxes more, your chest and your stomach relaxes more, your arms, hands and fingers relaxes more, your hips, your buttocks and your groin relaxes more, your thighs, knees, calves, shins, ankles, feet and toes relaxes more, so that's kind of something that I might have done, and it's pretty much a suggestion, you could do it, you could just say, I'd like my whole body, or my whole body is going to relax, you can do it as a question, please relax my whole body, please slow down your mind, say it, whatever, and you can just ask your brain to do this for you, and it's not like you're asking for anything weird, you're asking for things that are good for you, you're asking for things that are useful for you, so there's other things, mindfulness based stress reduction, so there's something quite, I mean I've learned this as well, I actually went on a course once, it was a meditation, mindfulness based, chronic pain relief course, and it was about teaching people, but also for people with chronic pain as well, and it was all based on mindfulness and that meditation, and it was part of a Buddhist, it was coming from a Buddhist perspective, but not just for Buddhists, so it was a corporate meditation, they didn't have any yoga, I tried yoga once, and I didn't realize that being stretched out on a floor and bending over in a room full of other people, I really didn't, I underestimated the amount of noise my bum would make, I did, I let out some wind, and weirdly enough, because it was quite a small room, there wasn't a lot of air in there, there was no windows, it wasn't as funny as you'd imagine, and my little idea of maybe, you never know, I mean I go to yoga, I might, because there's a few people that I knew, I might get to talk to them, go for a tea or coffee afterwards, yeah that option wasn't available after that, and in fact I had to move town, I had to move, but other than that it's good, but I didn't, yoga wasn't really for my body or my bum, but the meditation very much, I mean yoga is meditation, it's just physically, it's a physical meditation, so it's with the mindfulness based thing, very much focused on just being in the moment, but also realising that you can focus on your whole body, instead of just focusing on one part of your body, or you know, those parts that maybe you've not felt very kindly towards, and there's also a little, you know, there's something to be said for making friends with your body, being grateful, saying thank you to the different parts of your body for everything they do for you, because let's face it, our bodies are pretty amazing, I mean mine doesn't look very amazing anymore, but I'm not sure if it ever really did, but it's still amazing what it does, so there's something about saying thank you, or making friends, because it can seem, I'm pretty sure, and there has been times in the past, Vinny's trying to get my attention, if I ignore him he'll stop hopefully, and there were times with my lower back, when I did not like, I did not like that part of my body, did you hear, can you hear him going, that's Vinny, so he's at the side of me, because I'm not looking at him, if I looked at him, he'd start jumping up at me, because I'm not looking at him, he's thinking how can I get hold of him, it's like he's not hearing me, what's going on, so with the, I kind of felt that I had to, I needed to make friends with my lower back, because it seemed to be turning into an enemy, and that's not a good, it's not a good way to view a part of your body, and my hostility towards my lower back, seemed to be mirroring towards me, so when I started to think kindly towards my lower back, especially, you know, in a sense of all it does for me, all it has done for me for over a half a century, you know, it's done a pretty good job, done a very good job, and that hostility reduced, and in the same way, the physical sensations change as well, so you've got different guided relaxation, there's different things you can do, I mean there's these biofeedback machines, where you can actually control your pulse rate, and you can control things by seeing it, if you see the number, you know, pulse rate, whatever, just by focusing on it going down, it can go down, it's pretty powerful stuff, so we do have a lot more control over some of those automatic things, and once we let the automatic system, that part of our brain and body that does its thing, if we let it know that maybe you would like more comfort, more relaxation, a more peaceful mind, a slow down thoughts, then it, maybe it will listen and give that to you, I tell you what I like to do, I like to think this way, is when I talk to people, it's not just your mind I'm talking to, it's also your body, and your body hears my words, your body, maybe it's not the words so much, maybe it's the tone, maybe it's, because there are vibrations that go through, and you know, through the air, you know, with sound in there obviously, I said the word obviously there twice for some reason, but obviously, and perhaps that's what it is, that vibration that travels not just to your ears, but also to the different parts of your body, and because it's positive words, it has a positive effect on the different parts of your body, and because we've been talking about relaxing and all that stuff, it's kind of, it'd be difficult, I think it'd be quite difficult not to relax, you know, if you talk about, and you know what else, I noticed that I feel more relaxed, and my lower back feels more relaxed, even though the only time I focus on my lower back is when I mention it, the rest of the time I'm focusing on what I'm saying, or I'm focusing, you know, if I talk about my eyes, or if I talk about relaxing your feet, I'm focusing on my feet, so there's lots of different ways, I think in a way, the more often we think about something, it changes the neural pathways, I mean, this is just a, just a scientific fact, so the more you imagine the, let's say listening to me, well, the more often you listen to me, the more relaxed you feel, and the more comfort you feel, and then the more often you listen to me, it's like you're, you're kind of cutting your way through a, through a forest, you know, and making the pathway to the point where it's so clear, and you can get to where you want to go really quickly, you can go from where you are to feeling, or where you were to feeling completely relaxed, where you are now, in an instant, because you've made that pathway, and each way, each time you travel that pathway, it gets wider, the ground gets more trampled down, so, and you get to see more things, to the point where it's almost a huge pathway, really wide, really just great, so that seems to be the way it is with the brain, with neural pathways, so it's quite nice, I quite like the idea of that, I mean, it is how it works, but isn't it nice to know that there's some benefit to putting up with me waffling on, because you know, it's like, I know some people maybe think, well, who is this bloke, he just keeps talking, I don't know what he's talking about, he's just talking about stuff, but when you think it's actually helping, it's beneficial, and it's useful, it's not so bad, not so bad, in fact, it's probably better than that, I've actually started listening to my own recordings recently, very relaxing, it's weird, I mean, I know you think, well, yeah, surely you should know it's relaxing, yeah, I mean, I listen occasionally anyway, because I have to when I'm doing the editing, and every now and then I listen just to sort of see where the vibe is, and how I am, and how I sound, but I've been listening probably a few times a week now to the different recordings, and it's always felt, I always fall asleep, always feel relaxed, yeah, anyway, that's the end of this, let me bore your pain away, it's been a little bit different from some of the others, everything I do is going to be different, it's, I think it's been a little bit more focused than sometimes how I do stuff, it's almost felt a little bit like a relaxation session, which it wasn't supposed to be, I mean, it's good, I always, I like to think that everything I do is ultimately a relaxation session, but this, yeah, it's felt nice, I feel relaxed, I feel calm, I hope that you do too, maybe let me know how you feel, so I'm going to go now, thank you for listening, remember to be kind to yourself, because you do deserve to be happy, and be gentle with yourself, because you deserve to feel safe, lots of love, bye