Hello and welcome to jasonnewland.com. This is Let Me Bore You To Sleep. I would give you the website address to my podcast — do you remember what it is? This podcast is hosted on Podbean.com. Some people may be thinking, why is Jason telling us about where the podcast is hosted? Because those who are listening to the podcast would know where it is, because they too are there. Also, I nearly said "they too are also there" — don't we need both "too" and "also" in the same sentence? I guess not. However, Mr. Clever Clocks — by the way, only listen or watch this when you can safely close your eyes, as this may cause boredom.

So, I actually have these podcast episodes — these Let Me Bore You To Sleep sessions — on a variety of different podcasts. Not only the main one, which as I said is hosted on Podbean, but also on my SoundCloud main podcast, and on my Podomatic Sleep Hypnosis podcast. It's also available as a video on my YouTube channel called Jason Newland's Sleep Hypnosis. And then it expands through — it's also available on Spreaker. This podcast, Let Me Bore You To Sleep, is available all over the place. That's why I'm getting three downloads a day — three listens, three plays, whatever. I'm pleased with that. Three is a really good number. I'm hoping by the end of the year — I'm not going to say four for comedic effect — but I'd be happy with nine. If I can get nine regular people to listen to this, I'd be happy. It'd be good.

So, the point of this podcast is just me talking. And it seems to have turned into a daily thing, which wasn't meant to happen necessarily. It wasn't on my list of things I'd like to accomplish before I'm 48 — because I'm 47 at the moment. And I think instead of having a target of things you'd like to do before you die — I mean, that seems a bit extreme — what happens when you accomplish all those things? I like the idea of maybe things I'd like to accomplish before, I don't know, it could be anything — before I next have to trim my pubes. Just have a shorter target. Things I'd like to accomplish before I next have to visit my family, before I next have to have a bath due to the smell. You know it's bad when you can't even tolerate your own stink and you have to force yourself to have a bath. And as you're filling the bath up, you can hear the bath moaning: "Oh God, no, that thing's going to get in me."

So, the point of these sessions is that there is a point. It might seem that it's just me talking rubbish — and you'd be correct, I guess, in some ways. But there's more to it. There's that connection that you have with my voice, those feelings, those senses of relaxation, that trigger that just causes you to automatically feel tired — it occurs naturally. And there's the benefit. This is something that — okay, I'm going to explain something. And I'm going to be really long-winded and boring with it, because that's my favourite way to explain stuff. I love to just take time and go through all the details. I like that. It suits me. But I know that it doesn't suit everybody to listen. But in this situation, it's good, because it's not really something that you need to listen to. But if you want to, you can.

And the reason you may think — well, you might not think — but what I'm doing is I'm trying to stall myself, because I've actually forgotten what I was going to say. I spent so much time preparing you for the amazingness of what I was going to say that it's gone. Actually, I think it has gone. Let me see if I can retrieve it. Yeah, I've got it. So, no, it's gone again. Yeah, I've got it. I've got it back. So, one of the benefits of doing these sessions — no, it's gone again. Yeah, I've got it. Okay. Is — excuse that, it's my bottle of water — I like the idea of having a variety.

So you could listen to the same session every day, which is okay. But I think sometimes it's nice to have the same, but different. In a sense, if you're listening to the same session every day — the same audio recording — which I did when I stopped smoking years ago, when I first stopped in 1999. I listened to this Progressive Relaxation recording and it was beautiful. I absolutely loved it. I listened to it every day, first thing in the morning. There was music in the background and it was really professional and beautiful. I really liked it. The lady's voice was just — she was American, but she sounded amazing, such an amazing voice. I forget what it was called. So I listened to that every day and I'd start listening to it and straight away I'd feel relaxed and calm. But I would have loved to have listened to her voice every day saying something different — maybe not wildly different. The main session was just her talking about walking through a forest and all that stuff, a bit of visualisation, a bit of this and that. It was really nice. So I would perhaps have been happy with a bit more of that, different things maybe, even without music. That's what I mean — I'm not saying I wanted to hear her doing animal noises, impressions of zoo animals. That's not what I mean. That probably wouldn't have calmed me down. "Now a lion. Now a cheetah. A hyena." No, that wouldn't have really done it.

So I think that's partly why I do these sessions and continue to do more and more of them, when I suppose a lot of people would just do one — they'd just do one really good one. And I'm kind of going in the opposite direction. I'm doing lots and lots of really rubbish ones. So I'm hoping that collectively, in a few years' time, maybe after a couple of thousand of these, they'll make one really good one. Or at least one average one. It's good to have goals sometimes.

I have this story. It's about Milton Erickson — he was kind of like the Bruce Lee of hypnosis. Pretty much the king of hypnosis. There have been a lot of hypnotherapists and hypnotists around, but Milton H. Erickson is just in a different league. He's like a superhero — an absolutely phenomenal person. And when he was elderly, I think in his 80s, he got ill, as people do at different times in their lives. But he kept planning things years ahead. Because he was so popular, people used to book him to come and see him, or book him to go and do talks in different parts of America. I'm not sure if he could travel abroad — because of his extensive criminal record. I'm joking. No, because he was unwell. But his diary was full of appointments, sort of two years ahead or something like that.

And someone asked him — he said, why, if you're so ill — you've already had two heart attacks at this point — why do you still book appointments two years ahead? And Milton Erickson said to this person — I think it was one of his students — he said, "What's it got to do with you? It's my diary. People are paying me ahead of time. So if I die before the work gets done, I'm in profit. Get out of my house." I made that bit up. It didn't really happen. But he did have a full diary, a full calendar. And he did get asked why. And he said: we all need something to look forward to.

And I think over the years we get a little bit lost with our words. I know that there are a few people listening to this — I'm on my podcast, the SoundCloud one. How many of these have I done? Eight. I think I've done eight Let Me Bore You To Sleep sessions. So I've had over 1,000, maybe 1,200 downloads and plays between the eight of them. So it's not too bad, because I've only been doing this for just over a week. But hopefully that will grow. I know that people from other countries listen, so some of the things I say may not translate, but I'll say them anyway.

The words, the phrases — "looking forward to something" now seems to mean being all excited about something. You know, like looking forward to a holiday — somebody jumping up and down, getting all excited, going, "Ooh, and eee, and yay, I can't wait for my holiday!" That kind of excited voice. Looking forward to Christmas, or Diwali, or whatever religious thing you celebrate. Maybe you celebrate the date of Walt Disney's first film release. Who knows what things you celebrate. "Oh, I'm looking forward to that event!" But with excitement.

I quite like the idea of the literal term — you're looking forward. You're not looking back, you're looking forward. You're not looking sideways, which doesn't make sense. You're looking forward. So you've got things booked and planned in the future. And it's not necessarily about some kind of giggle-biggle excitement. Giggle-biggle — that could be my new term. I'm talking about laughing and jiggling and giggling and dancing and stripping off on top of a water tower. You know, I'm not just basically getting my friends together and saying, "Let's go mining. Let's dig up some coal for old times' sake."

For me, looking forward to something has both meanings, but I like the meaning of feeling — feeling that there is a future, creating a future. Because in a sense, we all know that the future doesn't exist. What exists is now. And there are a lot of people who for some reason seem to be walking backwards, constantly looking at the past. And it's a good analogy, because anyone constantly looking at the past will be walking backwards and will invariably keep tripping up and banging into things and possibly even hurting themselves. Not necessarily going to enjoy the present. And anyone staring back at the past the whole time — you can't see a future. How are they going to see a future? You need to be facing towards the future.

I love these little genius pearls that I squirt into the sessions. It's good though, it's true, isn't it? You can't see the future if you're always staring at the past. Walking backwards. Walking into the future but backwards, tripping over. Because when you walk backwards and you're staring into the past, that's all you ever see. At least when you walk forward and you're facing forward, you can see the present and you can plan the future. Of course you can't 100% know what's going to happen, because the future has not happened yet and your future isn't just dependent upon you — there are outside effects, other people, the world. I live my life as if the world really does revolve around me, but that's not necessarily healthy and it's definitely not true.

I can plan — I'm going to go and have a picnic. Me and Andre, we're going to go and sit in the park and lay around in the sun. Well, I can only do it for about 20 minutes before I burn, so maybe sit under a tree. Hopefully the birds don't do poos on us. And while we're sitting under the tree, try and forget the fact that the amount of dog stuff urinated up that tree throughout the years is probably thousands and thousands of urinations. But forget about that when we're laying under the tree and plan all that. But what happens if it snows? That's going to put a little bit of a dampener on that. So we are affected by external circumstances. We don't have to be emotionally affected by it necessarily. You may say, well, perhaps I shouldn't plan a sunny picnic with Andre in December — which is a pretty good argument. But we're not here to argue. I'm just here to talk at you. At you. Yeah.

So I quite like the analogy of walking facing the future, walking forward facing the future. Because that way you can kind of base next week on now. I think what I mean by that is, some people are constantly looking at the past. I've got a really good analogy now. Are you waiting for this? Are you ready for this? This is going to be called my Wonder Woman analogy. And it's got nothing to do with wobbly bosoms.

This is about the idea of somebody who's constantly looking at the past, but also looking at the future — looking at the past, looking at the future, and basing the future upon the past. Because they're constantly spinning round and round between the past and the future, they seem to get a bit muddled up between which is which, and what they expect to happen based on what's happened in the past. And they manage to hold on to past behaviours, past repressions, past limiting thinking — like racism and homophobia and sexism — not able to believe in themselves, because they're looking at the past and then looking at the future and spinning around so fast, which is chaotic, causes chaos. And how can the future be steady if the past is unsteady?

And because they're looking at the future — and this is a maybe, just a possibility of what's going on — the future is flexible. The future is what could be. But because the person's spinning so fast between the past and the future, they seem to begin to make the past also flexible. So the past may be changing, and the person may sound like they're lying a lot, because they contradict themselves. They tell a story of the past and it might be a different story from the one they told last week. But it's not their fault — it's because they're spinning around looking at both and maybe can't differentiate between the past and the future. It's so difficult for that person, possibly, to have made plans for the future, because they might assume what's happened previously will therefore happen again. Which isn't really the rule of life. Behaviour can repeat, but it's not definitely going to. We do have a say in this stuff.

Admittedly, you can't stand on the side of a bubbling, erupting volcano and ask it to stop erupting and expect it to say, "Oh, okay then," and just stop doing what it's doing. However, when you have a thought or feeling that's not useful, maybe you can stand there and say, "No, I don't want this, thanks. This isn't useful. Is this useful for my life? Is this useful for happiness? Is this useful for those that I care about? Is this behaviour helpful to them?" So we can ask ourselves: is this behaviour useful for me? And how does it affect you? So I'm trying to make these sessions boring, but I think this was really exciting, this one.

Oh, I slept quite well last night. So the thing that I'm doing — well, I didn't do it yesterday because I was up all night and just wasn't able to do it. But my routine is to go to bed at night and then when I wake up, I'll do this session. And that might seem weird to do it then, but if I do it late at night, I might just fall asleep. But I am still in bed — I'm sitting up in bed doing this, because again, if I lay down, chances are I'll just drift off. Because my voice — it does bore me. I hope that your body and mind has calmed down during the period of this session. I hope that you've relaxed and feel loose and happy.

I just want you to know that you're not alone. It might sound like a silly statement. You may be sitting there with your wife, husband, boyfriend, girlfriend, giraffe, or whatever, and be thinking, "Well, of course I'm not alone." But I can't know that, can I? My nan used to say something to me years ago. She used to say — "Jason, what are you doing under my bed?" No, she didn't say that. She said that she could feel lonely even in a crowd. And I remember the time she said it to me because — she was shaving my back. No, she wasn't shaving my back — we were walking down to the seafront to some kind of carnival thing going on. So I guess it was in the summer. It might have been in the winter, it might have been a Christmas thing. And we were just walking towards a big crowd, and she said that sometimes she could feel alone even when in a crowd.

So I think I could understand that. When I say you're not alone, it's from different angles — there are people like you. There are people that have similar experiences to you, that you can relate to. There are other people. Also, to remember — this is something that Boston Chickie reminded me of. I'm going to cough. Oh, blow me. She didn't say "I'm going to cough" — that wasn't some dramatic version of something Boston Chickie said. I can imagine everyone moaning: "He bored me to sleep and I actually did fall asleep, and I woke up and he was coughing. How dare he be ill! I'll put him in a coffin if he does that again."

What she said is — she reminded me — we've all helped people during our lives, and we may not even be aware of those people that we've helped. We might have said something, might have offered what we thought was a meaningless or seemingly standard greeting or gesture to that person, and it could have changed their life. And I could talk about this forever. I might actually write a book about this, because I've got so many different examples. Just remember that you have had a great effect on the world. And on that, I'm going. Stay safe. Bye.