Sleep & Insomnia · Hypnosis session
Thirty Minutes of Doing Nothing, on Purpose, Well Before You Go Up.
This is the one page here that isn’t about a sleep problem. Your shoulders are up, your jaw is set by four in the afternoon, and you want an evening that isn’t scrolling. Body scans have their own research, separate from hypnosis, and much of it is free.
“It’s for the evening rather than the pillow: thirty minutes of putting tension down on purpose. It won’t treat insomnia — nothing on this page does. Try a free one first, and come back only if the voice is wrong.”
Body Scan Relaxation Technique
US$18.95one-off · no subscription · about A$27
I earn a commission if you buy through this page. It doesn’t change what you pay, and it doesn’t decide what I recommend.
Ninety days to change your mind, nothing to justify. Checkout opens on hypnosisdownloads.com in a new tab; priced in US dollars, and some cards add a foreign-transaction fee.
The publisher reports 1,104 purchases of this title.
Is this where you carry it?
- You notice your jaw only when something makes you unclench it
- Shoulders near your ears, and they drop an inch when you sigh
- A band across the top of the chest that isn’t breathlessness
- Neck and upper back sore by Thursday, and it is not the mattress
- You sat down at eight and your feet still haven’t stopped
Two of those and you are in the right place. If none of it is physical and the trouble is the hour you lie there, start at the other end of the night.
Is this tension, or something a doctor should look at?
Tension explains almost anything, which is why it hides things.
Breathing first, and that is a GP and a sleep studyIf you snore, gasp or choke once you are under, someone has watched your breathing stop, or a full night in bed still leaves you wrung out. Untreated sleep apnoea is a cardiovascular risk, and no recording touches it.
Legs that crawl the moment you settle, thyroid disease, and sleep that went wrong after your mood dropped belong in the same appointment. So does chest tightness on exertion.
On jaws specifically: Manfredini and colleagues put awake clenching at 22.1 to 31 per cent of adults in 2013, on figures they said to read with caution. A worn tooth or a jaw that locks is a dentist.
Where did the body scan actually come from?
Two places, neither of them hypnosis, both older than the app you would otherwise be using. The first is Edmund Jacobson, a Chicago physiologist who spent twenty years measuring muscle tension before publishing Progressive Relaxation in 1929. Effort and worry, he found, always show up as shortened muscle fibres, and lowering the one lowers the nervous system with it. His programme was enormous and everything since abbreviates it. The version nearly every study uses is Bernstein and Borkovec’s 1973 manual: sixteen muscle groups squeezed and released one at a time, condensed to seven and then four as you improve.
The second is the body scan inside mindfulness-based stress reduction, begun by Jon Kabat-Zinn at the University of Massachusetts Medical School in 1979. Nothing is squeezed; attention travels through the body a region at a time and reports what it finds.
Carry away the number in that curriculum. MBSR runs eight weeks and thirty-one hours of class, and for the first fortnight the body scan is the whole of the home practice: forty-five minutes a day, six days a week. Not a track for after a rough one. A course, with homework.
Does any of it show up in the numbers?
More than hypnosis for sleep does, which is not a high bar. A 2026 review in the Journal of Psychosomatic Research pooled 31 randomised trials of progressive muscle relaxation across 2,277 adults. Sleep quality improved by 3.79 points on the Pittsburgh questionnaire, anxiety at a standardised difference of −1.11. Large numbers, with the authors’ caveat on them: heterogeneity of 94.2 per cent, and most of those trials ran in people who were ill or under acute strain rather than people with a sleep disorder.
At the mindfulness end, Black and colleagues randomised 49 older adults with disturbed sleep to six weeks of mindfulness or of sleep hygiene education (JAMA Internal Medicine, 2015). Sleep scores fell from 10.2 to 7.4 against 10.2 to 9.1, an effect size of 0.89 — from twelve hours with a teacher, plus daily homework.
Body Scan Relaxation TechniqueUS$18.95 · instant download · full refund within 90 days if it isn’t right.
Opens the publisher’s checkout in a new tab. Or keep reading — the free techniques below cost nothing.
What can you do this evening, for nothing?
Three, and the second is a free recording, which is an odd thing to put on a page with a checkout. It is still the right order.
- Squeeze and release, in a chair, at nine o’clock
Sit upright, feet flat, not lying down. In order: hands, forearms, upper arms, shoulders, jaw, eyes and forehead, neck, chest, stomach, then each leg to the foot. Tense one group at about seventy per cent of what you could manage — enough to feel, nowhere near a cramp — hold five seconds, drop it, leave it thirty.
The letting go is the exercise; the squeeze exists to give you something to compare it against. Skip anything injured, go gently on the neck and lower back, and stop tensing a muscle that cramps. Once you can find a group without squeezing it, use the four-group version: arms, head and neck, trunk, legs.
- Play a free body scan before you pay for one
UCLA’s Mindful Awareness Research Center publishes a thirteen-minute Body Scan for Sleep, free, in nineteen languages, under a Creative Commons licence. Made by the people who run the research, and there is no version of this page that pretends it doesn’t exist.
Sitting up, fixed hour, phone face down. If it works, you have spent nothing.
- Give it an hour of its own, and treat it as practice
The evidence above is for a daily habit, not an emergency measure. Same time every night, good day or bad. Do it only on the wound-up nights and you teach yourself it is a fire extinguisher, which it isn’t.
Not in bed either. If you are in bed and lying awake, the rule is stimulus control, on the insomnia page.
What if attending to your body makes it worse?
Then you are one of the people this happens to, and it is documented: arousal climbing during a relaxation exercise rather than falling.
Heide and Borkovec put it in the Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology in 1983. Fourteen chronically tense adults were trained in progressive relaxation and in mantra meditation; four showed a clear anxiety reaction. The detail that matters here: the squeezing kind produced less of it than the sitting-still kind. A survey of 300 undergraduates put it near 15 per cent, generalised anxiety raising the odds fourfold — a conference abstract, so an indication.
Michelle Newman’s group at Penn State compared 96 students, 32 with generalised anxiety, and found the anxious unusually sensitive to sharp shifts in feeling. Staying keyed up spares you the drop.
If that is you, don’t push through it. Eyes open, lamp on, sitting up, short, attention outside yourself: the weight of a mug, the noise from the street, a walk to the corner. Squeeze-and-release usually goes down better than pure noticing. If the winding up is the main event, the anxiety guide is the better door.
Does relaxation treat insomnia? No, and here is the number.
Careful here, because relaxation sounds like the answer to a bad night and is the weakest of the standard components.
The American Academy of Sleep Medicine’s 2021 guideline carries one strong recommendation, for multi-component CBT-I. Relaxation therapy earns a conditional one as a single component, beside stimulus control and sleep restriction; sleep hygiene alone earns a recommendation against.
Then somebody took the package apart. Furukawa and colleagues ran a component network meta-analysis for JAMA Psychiatry in 2024 across 241 trials and 31,452 adults, asking what each ingredient adds. Cognitive restructuring came out at an incremental odds ratio of 1.68 for remission, third-wave components and sleep restriction at 1.49, stimulus control 1.43, sleep hygiene 1.01. Relaxation came in at 0.81, and the authors called it possibly counterproductive.
One reading fits everything above. Relaxation is a thing you do; sleep is what happens when you stop doing things. Add a nightly relaxation duty to an insomnia programme and you have handed over one more task to perform in bed.
So if you have lost sleep three nights a week for three months, this is not your page. Australian guidance agrees: the joint position statement of 29 July 2026, from the Australasian Sleep Association, the Sleep Health Foundation, the RACGP and three others, puts CBT-I first. Start at chronic insomnia instead.
Worth keeping hold ofRelaxation is good at lowering how wound up you are and poor at making sleep arrive. Most of this page is the difference between those two.
Why pay for this when free body scans are everywhere?
This page concedes more than the others, because it has to. Of everything I write about, this is the session most easily replaced by something free. Sleep hypnosis is abundant — Michael Sealey is Australian with an enormous following — but body scans go further. Every meditation app ships one. Universities give them away. No research says a paid recording relaxes anybody better.
Try the free ones first, and come back only if the voice is wrong. Voice is the commonest reason one of these fails — pace, accent, pauses in the wrong places — and no description tells you. This title has a free preview, so finding out whether Roger Elliott suits you costs nothing.
What is left to buy is smaller than the usual pitch: one fixed half-hour file, chosen once, playing offline with no advertisement in the middle and nothing queued behind it. Most free ones are shorter, and the researched format ran forty-five minutes.
What is in the Body Scan Relaxation Technique session?
Thirty minutes and twenty-two seconds, the longest session here and nearly double the shortest. The publisher doesn’t file it under sleep problems at all, but in their relaxation range — the right shelf.
The length cuts both ways. For it: half an hour leaves room for an unhurried descent rather than a countdown. Against it: it is a real commitment on a weeknight, far too long to grab as a rescue at eleven, and if ten minutes is all you will manage, a short free one you play beats a long one you own and don’t.
Body Scan Relaxation Technique
US$18.95About A$27 · one-off, no subscription.
- 30 minutes 22 seconds, narrated by Roger Elliott of Uncommon Knowledge, publishing since 1998
- Instant MP3 download plus the publisher’s app — any device, unlimited listens
- A free preview from the publisher — settle the voice question before you spend
- For evening practice in a chair, not a diagnosed sleep disorder
Opens the publisher’s secure checkout · no account needed
Figures the publisher reports about itself: trading since 1998, upwards of 24,000 people trained in person, and 1,104 purchases of this title.
They also report 97% satisfaction from 9,604 customers surveyed — the support desk, not the recording.
Who is this session wrong for?
Anyone whose tension is a symptom of something needing a person rather than a routine. This suits somebody basically well, wound up, wanting an evening practice. If the list below is your week, you need an appointment.
- You snore, gasp or choke, or a full night in bed still leaves you wrung out.
- You have lost sleep three nights a week for three months or more.
- Trying to relax reliably makes you more anxious, not less.
- Your mood dropped before the tension did, or has dropped since.
- You have had thoughts of harming yourself, or of not wanting to be here.
- The tension arrived with something frightening that happened, and comes back with it.
- Pain that is worsening, one-sided or wakes you — that is an examination.
Each is a GP appointment rather than a checkout. The third I would hold you on hardest, minor as it sounds: pushing through relaxation that backfires is how people decide they are bad at relaxing.
Free and confidential, open now. Tap to call.
Common questions about body scans and deep relaxation
Does relaxation actually improve sleep?
In stressed and unwell groups, yes. A 2026 review in the Journal of Psychosomatic Research pooled 31 trials of progressive muscle relaxation across 2,277 adults and found sleep quality better by 3.79 points on the Pittsburgh questionnaire. Heterogeneity was 94.2 per cent, though, and few of those people had a sleep disorder.
Is relaxation enough on its own for chronic insomnia?
No. The 2021 American Academy of Sleep Medicine guideline reserves its one strong recommendation for multi-component CBT-I. When 241 trials and 31,452 adults were taken apart component by component in 2024, relaxation was the only ingredient below neutral, at an odds ratio of 0.81.
Why does trying to relax sometimes make me more anxious?
It is called relaxation-induced anxiety and has been described since 1983. A survey of 300 students put it near 15 per cent, generalised anxiety raising the odds about fourfold. One account is that anxious people are unusually sensitive to sharp drops in arousal, so staying keyed up avoids the fall.
Should I do a body scan lying in bed?
Better in a chair, sitting up, at a set hour in the evening. Practised in bed it becomes one more job to perform there and grade yourself on, which is the opposite of what a bed should mean. If you are in bed and awake, stimulus control is the rule.
Why pay for one when free body scans are everywhere?
Often you should not. UCLA publishes a thirteen-minute Body Scan for Sleep free in nineteen languages, and every meditation app has one. Nothing shows a paid recording relaxes anybody better. Buying makes sense if a free voice grates and this one does not, and the preview settles that for nothing.
What if the session does nothing for me?
You send the publisher your order number inside 90 days and the money comes back in full, no explanation required. One refund per customer. Nobody can say in advance how a voice will sit with a person, and on a session this easily replaced, that window does real work.
Other sessions that may fit you better
- Cure InsomniaIf it has run three nights a week for three months and taken the days too
- Night WorryIf the body is fine and the composing at half past eleven is what costs you
- Fall Asleep FastIf you want something to play lying down that isn’t meant to leave you awake
If none is yours, the sleep guide sorts sessions by what the night does. If the tension runs all day and the evening is where you notice it, try the anxiety guide.
Whatever you decide about buying, do the squeeze-and-release sequence in a chair tonight and play the free thirteen-minute scan tomorrow. Two evenings, no money, and you will know.
Ernest McLeod — clinical hypnotherapist. An Adelaide practice, seeing clients across Australia by video. Fourteen years in practice.
- ICHP
- FELLOW, ASCH
- IICT MEMBER
Half this job is judging when a paid version is worth the gap, and here it is narrow. Naming a free recording twice on a page with a checkout is what I think a recommendation is for. More →
Thirty minutes, and ninety days to send it back
If the free ones were the right idea and the wrong voice, this is a fixed half hour you own.
US$18.95Instant download · 90-day refund · about A$27 · new tab
This is a self-help audio session, not medical treatment, a diagnosis, or a substitute for professional care. Cognitive behavioural therapy for insomnia is first-line in Australian guidelines; relaxation is not. Snoring, gasping, choking or waking unrefreshed needs assessment for sleep apnoea first, and restless legs, thyroid disease and sleep that worsened with your mood belong with a GP. Worsening or one-sided pain, chest tightness on exertion and a jaw that locks need examining, not relaxing. Do not tense an injured muscle. Never listen at the wheel. If symptoms are severe or persistent, speak to a qualified therapist.