Sleep & Insomnia
Hypnosis for Sleep: Eight Sessions, Sorted by Which Part of the Night Goes Wrong
Three people can all say “I can’t sleep” and mean three unrelated things: the hour of waiting at eleven, the two hours after surfacing at two, and the evening that never ends because nobody ever goes up. The catalogue files all of them under sleep problems. This page doesn’t.
Eight sessions worth your time
Sleep goes wrong in different places — the hour before you drop off, two in the morning, the head that won’t stop, the tablet you’d rather not take. These eight are sorted by which part of the night is yours.
US$18.95each · one-off · about A$27 · ninety-day refund
Find the one that fits ↓Every session is an instant MP3 from the publisher, with ninety days to change your mind. Checkout opens on hypnosisdownloads.com in a new tab.
Chosen by Ernest McLeodClinical hypnotherapist. An Adelaide practice, seeing clients across Australia by video. Fourteen years in practice. About Ernest →
I earn a commission if you buy through the links on this page. It doesn’t change what you pay, and it doesn’t decide what I recommend. Prices are the publisher’s, in US dollars.
Which part of the night is actually yours?
Start there rather than with the word. In bed at half ten and still turning over at midnight is a sleep onset problem. Under in four minutes and wide awake at two is a maintenance problem. Never going up at all is neither. All three type “insomnia” into a phone and meet the same shelf.
The publisher’s catalogue is arranged that way too, because catalogues are arranged for catalogues. Eight titles, one filed under relaxation where nobody looks, and nothing saying which hour each was built for. That sorting is the job of this page.
One thing has to be settled first, and it is not a formality.
Breathing first: a GP and a sleep study, not a downloadIf you snore heavily, gasp or choke once you are under, someone has watched you stop breathing, or a full night in bed still leaves you wrung out — that needs a doctor and a sleep study first. Untreated sleep apnoea is a cardiovascular risk and no audio touches it. This applies to all eight sessions below, without exception.
It is not a rare thing to have missed. Benjafield and colleagues estimated 936 million adults aged 30 to 69 with obstructive sleep apnoea worldwide (Lancet Respiratory Medicine, 2019), against 8% of Australians reporting a diagnosis in the Sleep Health Foundation’s 2016 survey. Its overlap with insomnia is 30 to 40 per cent.
Four more belong in that appointment. Restless legs. Thyroid disease. A mood that dropped before the sleep did. And perimenopause: Kravitz and colleagues surveyed 12,603 women aged 40 to 55 for Menopause in 2003 and found sleep difficulty peaking at 45.4% in late perimenopause.
| If this is the part that goes wrong… | Start with | Who it is wrong for |
|---|---|---|
| You snore, gasp or choke, or a full night in bed buys you nothing | A GP and a sleep study | Nobody. Nothing below applies until this is settled |
| In bed at a sensible hour, then an hour of turning over before anything starts | Fall Asleep Fast | Wrong if it has run three nights a week for three months. That is a pattern, not a delay |
| Under in minutes, awake at two, then two hours of the clock and the arithmetic | Go Back To Sleep | Wrong if you are up to the toilet twice most nights, or the waking worsens month on month |
| Lights off and the composing starts: the reply, tomorrow, the thing you said in 2019 | Night Worry | Wrong if the commentary also runs at four on a Tuesday. That one is stop worrying |
| You never go to bed at all. Sleep works fine once you are in it | Get to Bed Early | Wrong if you get in on time and lie there, or stay up because the quiet is what you can’t face |
| Months of it now, most nights, and the days have gone with the nights | Cure Insomnia | Wrong as a first move. CBT-I comes first, it is free, and a recording is no substitute |
| The same dream most weeks, and you put off going up because of it | Stop Recurring Nightmares | Wrong if the dream replays an event you were in. That is PTSD, and belongs with a psychologist |
| The tablet, and the certainty the night won’t work without it | Sleeping Pill Addiction | Wrong if you are about to change your own dose. Nothing here tapers you |
| Sleep is fine. Your shoulders are at your ears by four in the afternoon | Body Scan Relaxation | Wrong for chronic insomnia, where relaxation is the weakest component, possibly counterproductive |
| The nights are worry that happens to be horizontal, and the days no better | The anxiety sessions | Wrong door if your days are fine and it starts only when the light goes off |
What does Australia actually recommend, and is it this?
No, and better said before your card comes out than after. On 29 July 2026 six organisations published a joint position statement on adult insomnia in SLEEP Advances: the Australasian Sleep Association, the Sleep Health Foundation, the RACGP, the Australian Psychological Society and two others. It names multi-component cognitive behavioural therapy for insomnia — CBT-I — as first-line, says medicines are not, and calls sleep-hygiene advice inadequate alone.
The American Academy of Sleep Medicine’s 2021 guideline lands in the same place. One strong recommendation, for multi-component CBT-I. Stimulus control and sleep restriction earn conditional ones alone. Sleep hygiene earns a recommendation against being used by itself.
Hypnosis appears in neither document. Not as second-line, not as an adjunct, not in a footnote. That is the honest headline of this whole cluster, and all eight pages underneath say it too.
So how do you get CBT-I in this country?
Cheapest route first, because it is also the fastest. THIS WAY UP, the digital clinic run by St Vincent’s Hospital in Sydney, publishes an Insomnia Program: four online modules, self-paced across ninety days, funded by the Curran Foundation. Free, no referral, proper CBT-I rather than a list of tips. You can enrol tonight.
Then your GP, and ask for CBT-I by name rather than for something to help you sleep. A GP can also start a Mental Health Treatment Plan: Medicare rebates for up to ten psychology sessions a year, partial, so ask about the gap. Ask too whether the psychologist delivers CBT-I — the Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine describes it reaching only a minority of Australians with insomnia.
On medication it is specific: benzodiazepines and z-drugs at two to four weeks, melatonin up to thirteen. Nightly for a year puts you outside that, and in company — Woods and colleagues found long-term prescribing in 5.8% of Australian general practice patients across 1,414,593 records in 2022. Stopping is a conversation with your prescriber, and the tablets page has the taper rates.
The order this site puts things inThe guideline, then the free hospital course, then the free techniques, then — if you still want it — a recording underneath. Rearranging that to suit a checkout would make this page worthless.
Why does sorting by the word “insomnia” go wrong?
Because a night is not uniform, and the word treats it as though it were. Sleep is assembled from cycles of about ninety minutes, and the ingredients are spread unevenly. Deep sleep is front-loaded, held mostly in the early cycles. Dreaming is back-loaded, REM lengthening towards morning.
Which is why the surfacing between cycles passes unnoticed at eleven and wakes you at three: by then there is little deep sleep left to hold you under. Boselli and colleagues counted them in Sleep in 1998, in forty overnight recordings of sound sleepers. Young adults averaged 14.7 brief arousals an hour — roughly a hundred a night, in people who would say they slept straight through. It is also why the same nightmare arrives near five, and why a session built for the front of the night says nothing at two.
The eight sessions, and what they cost
Each is US$18.95, an instant MP3 inside a ninety-day refund window, narrated by Roger Elliott, a co-founder of the publisher and a practising therapist. On each page the free work for that hour comes first, in more detail than the session gets.
Fall Asleep Fast
For the hour of waiting at the front of the night. The one here that deliberately doesn’t bring you back at the end.
Go Back To Sleep
For what you do after waking at two — the clock, the sum, the bracing — not for the waking.
Night Worry
For the head that starts composing at half eleven. There’s a free preview; play it first.
Cure Insomnia
For the dread attached to your own bedroom after months of bad nights. Beside CBT-I, not instead of it.
Get to Bed Early
For the evening where going up stops being a decision. Short on purpose: it is meant to be the nightly cue.
Stop Recurring Nightmares
Aimed at the dread of going up to bed. The free rewriting on that page handles the dream itself.
Sleeping Pill Addiction
For the belief that the night is unsurvivable without the tablet. It cannot taper you; that is your prescriber’s job.
Body Scan Relaxation Technique
An evening practice in a chair, not a sleep disorder. Filed under relaxation, which is why nobody finds it.
Figures the publisher reports about itself, which I cannot audit: Uncommon Knowledge has traded since 1998 and trained upwards of 24,000 people in person. Self-reported purchase counts across these eight run from 183 for the sleeping-tablet session to 5,915 for the falling-asleep one.
A count records what sold, not what worked, and mostly what people type into a search box.
What can you do tonight for nothing?
Four things that cut across every row of the table, which is why they sit here rather than on one page. Each of the eight carries the technique built for its own hour.
- Enrol in the free course before you buy anything here
THIS WAY UP’s Insomnia Program: four modules, ninety days, no referral, no fee. Signing up takes about as long as reading this step. If it settles the nights on its own, nothing below this needs buying.
- Two weeks of a paper sleep diary, before you change a thing
Five lines each morning: lights out, roughly when you went under, how long you were awake, final wake time, out of bed. Guessing is fine — it is an average, not a measurement. Every technique worth running is built on it.
- Take the clock and the phone out of the bedroom
Face down is not enough, because you will turn it over, and the screen gives you the time before you decide to look. In two 2007 experiments in the Journal of Behavior Therapy and Experimental Psychiatry, people told to watch a clock while trying to sleep worried more and took longer to get under — good sleepers included. Random digits did not.
- Get out of bed when you have stopped resting and started trying
Bootzin’s stimulus control, unchanged since 1972 and carrying its own recommendation in the 2021 American guideline. Out of the room, low light, something dull on paper, back only when sleepy. You are unpicking a learned pairing between a room and an activity. It is on the insomnia page, with a version for people who can’t get up.
Give those a fortnight before you spend anything. Sleep restriction, the other with good evidence, carries real cautions — bipolar disorder and epilepsy among them — so it lives on the insomnia page.
Does hypnosis actually do anything for sleep?
A little, measured against nothing. Rather less, measured against a convincing fake. Those are two different findings, and the second never makes the sales copy.
The most cited review is Chamine, Atchley and Oken in the Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine in 2018: 139 abstracts screened, 24 papers included, 58.3% reporting some benefit on sleep, 12.5% mixed and 29.2% nothing. Their word for it was “promising”, which is what researchers write when a literature is too thin to say more. They named the weaknesses: small samples, low quality, few studies enrolling anyone with a sleep complaint.
Then the sham comparison. Lam and colleagues pooled thirteen randomised trials and 502 people for Complementary Therapies in Medicine in 2015. Hypnotherapy shortened the time to fall asleep against a waiting list, at a standardised mean difference of 0.88. Against a sham recording the difference disappeared, and eleven of the thirteen studies were low quality. Mamoune and colleagues revisited it in 2022 and found no double-blind study at all.
One line of laboratory work does point somewhere real. Cordi, Schlarb and Rasch had seventy healthy young women hear either a suggestion to sleep more deeply or a control recording before a ninety-minute nap (Sleep, 2014). Slow-wave sleep came out 81% higher, time awake 67% lower — only in highly suggestible people, strongest early in the night, in healthy volunteers rather than poor sleepers.
So the fair claim is narrow, and identical on all eight pages. A recording works on the arousal you carry into the room — the bracing, the hour count — not on sleep. Nobody has tested a downloaded MP3 against a diagnosed sleep disorder.
Why pay for any of this when YouTube is free?
Because you may well not need to, and this is the section all eight pages defer to. A competent sleep hypnosis recording is ninety seconds away for nothing. Michael Sealey is Australian, and his channel has passed two million subscribers and 450 million views. If one of his already sees you off most nights, this page has nothing to sell you.
No evidence anywhere says a paid file hypnotises better than a free one, and you should distrust a page implying otherwise without a citation.
What money buys, if it buys anything, is the listening conditions rather than the hypnosis. No advertisement at minute nine. It plays offline, on a plane and in a house with bad wifi. Nothing autoplays behind it at three. And it is one fixed session made for nightly use, which matters when the thing runs on repetition.
A smaller argument changes by page: at the front of the night streaming means a lit screen undoing an evening of lowered lights; at two it means waking the phone, which hands you the time. If that is not your bedroom, use the free one.
Is this a sleep problem or an anxiety problem?
The rule is about the daytime. If the sleeplessness is anxiety that happens to show up at night — the days hard too, the nights only where it gets loudest — start at the anxiety guide, because treating the night treats the symptom. If the night itself is the problem, you are in the right place. Both guides point back here on the same rule reversed.
Stop Worrying and Night Worry are deliberately close neighbours, and the overlap is worth explaining rather than hiding. Both work on overthinking as a behaviour, not a mood, so the difference is the hour. Same commentary at four on a Tuesday as at half eleven: take the daytime one and the nights follow. Fine all day, unstoppable once you lie down: take the night one.
The fears and phobias guide is the third door, for one thing in particular. Waking in a surge of fear with no dream attached, certain something physical is happening, is nocturnal panic, not a sleep problem, and none of the eight reaches it.
When should you see someone instead of buying a recording?
When the night has a cause a recording cannot reach, and there are more of those than a shopping page usually admits. A file is reasonable while the shape of your week holds. Once it doesn’t, you need a person.
- You snore, gasp or choke, or a full night in bed leaves you wrung out.
- It has run three nights a week for three months and taken the days too.
- Your mood dropped before the sleep did, or has dropped since.
- You have had thoughts of harming yourself, or of not wanting to be here.
- You are falling asleep at the wheel or at your desk.
- The nights bring back something frightening that happened.
- You are thinking of cutting a prescribed sleeping tablet alone.
- Somebody describes screaming, sleepwalking, or dreams acted out.
That last one is why sleepwalking, sleep talking and the CPAP titles are absent from this site, and why children’s sleep is too. Parasomnias have their own management and safety questions. Any of the list is an appointment, not a purchase, the first two most of all.
Free and confidential, open now. Tap to call.
Common questions about hypnosis for sleep
Is sleep hypnotherapy the same as a sleep hypnosis recording?
Not quite, and the difference is who is in the room. Sleep hypnotherapy usually means a practitioner working with you over several appointments and adapting as they go. A recording is the same technique, fixed, delivered once and replayed. The two studies that put a recording head to head with a clinician both found the recording came out lower. What a recording has instead is that it costs about a hundredth as much and is available at two in the morning, which is when this problem usually needs something.
How do I work out which session is mine?
By the hour rather than the label. Losing the front of the night, the middle of it, or the evening before it are three different problems with three different mechanisms. Find the row above that matches an ordinary week of yours, and if two fit, take the one costing you most.
Is hypnosis a treatment for insomnia in Australia?
No. The joint position statement published on 29 July 2026 by the Australasian Sleep Association, the Sleep Health Foundation, the RACGP and three other bodies names multi-component cognitive behavioural therapy for insomnia as first-line. Hypnosis is not mentioned in it, nor in the 2021 American guideline.
Can I get CBT-I free in Australia?
Yes. THIS WAY UP, run by St Vincent’s Hospital in Sydney, offers an Insomnia Program of four online modules, self-paced over ninety days, free and needing no referral. A GP can also start a Mental Health Treatment Plan for up to ten subsidised psychology sessions a year.
Do I need to be checked for sleep apnoea first?
If you snore heavily, gasp or choke in your sleep, someone has watched you stop breathing, or a full night in bed leaves you wrung out, then yes, before anything else. The Sleep Health Foundation puts the overlap between insomnia and obstructive sleep apnoea at 30 to 40 per cent.
Is my sleep problem really an anxiety problem?
Check the daytime. If the worry keeps office hours and the nights are simply where it gets loudest, start with the anxiety sessions, because the night is the symptom. If your days are unremarkable and the trouble starts when the light goes off, this page is the closer fit.
Should I choose Night Worry or Stop Worrying?
Both work on overthinking as a behaviour rather than a mood, so the difference is the hour. If the commentary also runs at four on a Tuesday, take Stop Worrying and the nights usually follow. If you are fine all day and unstoppable at night, take Night Worry.
What if a session does nothing for me?
Send the publisher your order number inside 90 days and the money comes back in full, no reason required, one refund per customer. Nobody can predict which recording suits which person, so that window carries more weight than any claim on this page, mine included.
Related categories
- AnxietyIf the worry keeps office hours and the nights are only where it gets loudest, start there.
- Fears and PhobiasFor fear with a name — and for waking in a surge with no dream, which is nocturnal panic.
Ernest McLeod — clinical hypnotherapist. An Adelaide practice, seeing clients across Australia by video. Fourteen years in practice.
- ICHP
- FELLOW, ASCH
- IICT MEMBER
I made none of these recordings and I don’t sell them. My part is working out which hour each was built for, and putting the guideline and the free course above them. More →
Whatever you decide about buying, enrol in the free course tonight and put the clock outside the bedroom door. Neither costs anything, and one is the actual treatment.
Ninety days to change your mind. If a session doesn’t do what you wanted, email the publisher your order number and they’ll refund you in full, one refund per customer. I have no more say over that window than you do.
These are self-help audio sessions, not medical treatment, a diagnosis, or a substitute for professional care. Cognitive behavioural therapy for insomnia is first-line in Australian guidelines; hypnosis is not named in them. Snoring, gasping, choking or waking unrefreshed needs assessment for sleep apnoea first. Restless legs, thyroid disease, perimenopausal symptoms and sleep that worsened alongside your mood belong with a GP. Do not stop or alter a prescribed sleeping tablet because of anything here: sudden benzodiazepine withdrawal can cause seizures. Never listen at the wheel.