Sleep & Insomnia · Hypnosis session
Worry Isn’t a Feeling You Have at Night. It’s Something You Do.
Half past eleven, and you are composing. Not panicking — composing: the reply you should have given, the meeting, the thing you said in 2019. The tiredness is real and the head is fluent, and the two have nothing to do with each other. Worry at night behaves like a habit.
“This is for the head that will not stop composing at half past eleven. It won’t do what CBT-I does, and it won’t touch sleep apnoea. There’s a free preview, so you can hear the voice before you spend anything.”
Night Worry
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.
Is this what your head does at lights out?
- The day replays from the top, in order, the bad parts slowed down
- An email you sent at four, redrafted in your head at midnight
- Tomorrow rehearsed twice, including what you say if they ask
- Not upset, exactly — busy. You can feel the difference
- An argument you are winning, with somebody who is asleep
Two or three and this page is yours. Head quiet and the night still refusing to start, that is the front of the night; the same commentary at four in the afternoon, start with the daytime version.
What has to be ruled out before this counts as a thinking problem?
Breathing, and it takes two minutes. A head full of noise is easy to blame: you can hear it. Apnoea is silent to the person having it, and it is the one thing here that shortens a life.
This part is a GP and a sleep study, not a purchaseIf you snore heavily, gasp or choke once you are under, someone has watched your breathing stop, or a full night in bed still leaves you wrung out. The Busselton Health Study in Western Australia recorded 400 adults overnight in 1990 and followed them twenty years: moderate to severe apnoea carried more than four times the risk of dying from any cause. No recording touches it.
Three others go to a doctor first. Legs that crawl or must move the moment you settle. An overactive thyroid, which manufactures a racing head, a racing heart and heat you cannot escape. And sleep that went wrong after your mood dropped, not before.
Why does it start the moment the light goes off?
Because nothing else is asking for you. All day your attention is spoken for: the road, the screen, the person talking, the thing due Thursday. Lie down in the dark and every one of those is withdrawn at once. The worry has not grown. The queue in front of it went home.
Wicklow and Espie put microphones on it. In Behaviour Research and Therapy in 2000 they gave 21 people voice-activated recorders and actigraphs across 63 nights: what was said into the dark, not recalled in the morning. Of eight categories of intrusion, the strongest predictors of how long people took to get under were thoughts about sleep, and general problem-solving.
Problem-solving. Not dread, not catastrophe. Admin, in the dark, at speed.
Lemyre and colleagues reviewed that literature for Sleep Medicine Reviews in 2020. The ordinary slide into sleep runs on drifting sensory imagery and the deactivation of the higher cognitive processes: planning machinery quiet, thought loose and pictorial before it stops. In insomnia it relates to planning and problem-solving instead.
Is worrying something you feel, or something you do?
Mostly the second, and treating it as the first is why people get nowhere. You cannot decide to stop feeling anxious. You can change a behaviour: when, where, what it runs on.
Borkovec and Inz went looking for what worry is made of, in Behaviour Research and Therapy in 1990, sampling minds during relaxation and during deliberate worry. Relaxing, calm controls reported mostly images; asked to worry, they switched to thought. Clients with generalised anxiety ran thought and imagery evenly even while relaxing.
Worry is largely verbal, then. Talking, not seeing. Which is why it feels productive: sentences sound like work.
Night WorryUS$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 about it tonight, for nothing?
Three, aimed at the behaviour rather than the mood. One moves it to an earlier hour, one takes away the equipment, one moves it out of your bed.
- Constructive worry: fifteen minutes at a table, hours before bed
Not a diary and not a vent. Colleen Carney’s worksheet is two columns, done in the early evening, at least two hours before you go up. Left: the things most likely to start talking tonight, a line each. Right: the next physical step and nothing else — the action, or that you will handle it when it happens, or that there is no good answer and you have looked. Fold it, leave it on the bedside table, and at lights out the line is that this was dealt with at the hour you think best in.
Scullin and colleagues tested the writing half for the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General in 2018. Fifty-seven adults wrote for five minutes before an overnight sleep study: half listed what they still had to do, half what they had finished. The to-do list group was asleep in about sixteen minutes against about twenty-five, and the more specific the list the faster they went. Carney wants the gap before bed, Scullin’s worked at the bedside; use whichever you will do.
- Give the talking part of your head one job it cannot share
If worry is verbal it needs the inner voice, and that voice runs one thing at a time. So occupy it. Mouth a neutral word — “the” will do — about three times a second, silently or on the lips, with no rhythm settled enough to drift on. It must mean nothing to you: not “calm”, not anybody’s name. You will lose it inside a minute and surface mid-sentence; starting again is the exercise.
The evidence is old and thin and I would rather say so. Levey, Aldaz, Watts and Coyle set it out in Behaviour Research and Therapy in 1991, from the MRC Applied Psychology Unit, on an uncontrolled case series and one single-case experiment. Lemyre’s review finds strategies of this kind beneficial, negligible or detrimental depending which. The one that reliably backfires is plain thought suppression — ordering yourself to stop.
- If it starts anyway, get out of bed and do it properly
Composing at one in the morning is a behaviour with a location, and locations are learnable. Light on, out of the room, table, four words an item, five minutes, stop. You are not solving it; you are moving where it happens. No phone. Back to bed when you are bored. The sleep-side version of the rule is stimulus control on the insomnia page.
How big is any of it? Dippel, Brosschot and Verkuil pooled seven randomised trials and 999 people in the International Journal of Cognitive Therapy in 2023: moving worry to a set time beat simply writing it down, at a standardised difference of 0.31 for how long people worried. Small, self-reported, no follow-up. The daytime protocol is on the stop worrying page.
What does Australia recommend if this has run for months?
Not a recording, and better said before your card comes out. On 29 July 2026 six organisations — the Australasian Sleep Association, the Sleep Health Foundation and the RACGP among them — published a joint position statement in SLEEP Advances naming multi-component cognitive behavioural therapy for insomnia as first-line.
Hypnosis is not in it. The cognitive half of CBT-I is aimed squarely at this page and you can have it free; the routes, including the hospital-run online course, are on the insomnia page. Anything you take nightly is a conversation with your prescriber.
Does hypnosis do anything for a head that will not stop?
Less than the people selling it suggest. Mamoune and colleagues reviewed the field for Complementary Therapies in Medicine in 2022: 25 studies of hypnosis for insomnia — 10 case studies, 11 randomised trials, 4 before-and-after designs. Techniques were described too loosely to compare, most measures were not quantifiable, samples were too small, and they found no double-blind study at all.
Not a reason to avoid it. A reason not to buy it as a treatment: set against the techniques above, the recording is the least evidenced thing here. What it can fairly be asked to do follows from the diagram. If nothing else competes for your attention, twenty-two minutes of somebody else’s sentences is a competing demand you did not have to generate.
The line worth rememberingYou cannot stop thinking to order. You can give the thinking an earlier hour, a different room, and something duller to say.
Why pay for this when YouTube is free?
You can have a competent sleep hypnosis track in a minute, for nothing. Michael Sealey’s catalogue is Australian, vast and costs nothing, and if one of those already gets you under then keep your money. No evidence says a paid file hypnotises better than a free one.
The argument belonging to this page is the searching. Streaming means a lit phone in your hand, reading titles, choosing, then not settling for the first one — ten minutes of decisions handed to the part of you already too busy. A file you own was chosen once, in daylight, and starts on a dark screen with nothing queued behind it.
If none of that describes your bedroom, use the free one.
What is in the Night Worry session?
Twenty-two minutes, built for most nights across a fortnight rather than one hopeful listen. It works on the charge attached to the thoughts rather than their content, which is the right target: nobody argues their way out of anything at midnight.
One thing this one has that most do not: the publisher puts a free preview online, and you should play it before spending anything. Voice is the commonest reason a session fails for somebody — not the technique, not the script. If a narrator’s pace irritates you, no amount of good suggestion survives it.
Night Worry
US$18.95About A$27 · one-off, no subscription.
- 22 minutes 4 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 you can hear first — the publisher’s own sample, before any money changes hands
- For someone with apnoea ruled out whose nights go on thinking, not dread
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 867 purchases of this title — a fraction of what their best-selling sleep sessions do, which says more about the search term than the session.
They also report 97% satisfaction from 9,604 customers surveyed. That rates the people who answer the email, not the session.
Who is this session wrong for?
Anyone whose thinking has stopped keeping to the night. A file suits somebody fine by day and unstoppable at eleven. If the list below is your week, what you need is an appointment with someone who can adjust as the months go. A download instead usually buys a delay.
- You snore, gasp or choke, or a full night in bed still leaves you wrung out.
- The worrying runs most days, not just at night, and has for six months.
- Your mood dropped before the nights did, or has dropped since.
- You have had thoughts of harming yourself, or of not wanting to be here.
- What you cannot put down is something frightening that happened.
- The nights go on checking rather than worrying: the door, the numbers.
- You are nodding off at the wheel or at your desk.
Each is a GP appointment rather than a purchase. The first has a sleep study behind it, the second a treatment.
Free and confidential, open now. Tap to call.
Common questions about a racing mind at night
Why does my mind start racing the moment I lie down?
Because everything that was competing for your attention has just stopped. The road, the screen, the people, the work: all withdrawn at once, leaving one channel open and one occupant for it. The worry did not get bigger at bedtime. It stopped having to share.
Is a racing mind at night the same thing as anxiety?
Not necessarily. Plenty of people who would never call themselves anxious lie there rehearsing tomorrow. It becomes a clinical question when the worrying runs most days rather than most nights, has done for six months, and is costing you work or patience. That is a GP conversation.
What is constructive worry, and when should I do it?
It is a two-column worksheet done in the early evening, at least two hours before bed, for about fifteen minutes. Left column, the concerns most likely to start talking tonight. Right column, the next physical step and nothing else. Then you fold it and treat the matter as handled until morning.
Does writing a to-do list at bedtime actually help?
In one laboratory study it did. Fifty-seven adults wrote for five minutes before an overnight sleep study in 2018: those listing what they still had to do fell asleep in about sixteen minutes, against about twenty-five for those writing about finished tasks. The more specific the list, the faster.
Can I hear the session before I buy it?
Yes, and I would. The publisher puts a free preview of this one online, which not all of their titles have. Voice is the commonest reason a hypnosis recording fails for a particular person, and a few minutes of listening settles that better than any description of the contents.
What happens if it does nothing for me?
You send the publisher your order number within 90 days and they return the money in full, with no explanation asked for. One refund per customer. Nobody can say in advance how a recording will sit with a given person, which is what the window is there to cover.
Other sessions that may fit you better
- Fall Asleep FastIf the head is quiet and the night still takes an hour to start
- Go Back To SleepIf the composing begins at two rather than at lights out
- Stop Thinking About SomeoneIf the composing at night is always about one person
- Stop WorryingIf the same commentary runs through Tuesday afternoon as well
If none is yours, the sleep guide sorts sessions by what the night does. Months of it with your days gone too, start with the pattern; the anxiety guide is the other door.
Whatever you decide about buying, do the two columns tonight at the kitchen table, hours before you go up. One sheet of paper, aimed at exactly what this page is about.
Ernest McLeod — clinical hypnotherapist. An Adelaide practice, seeing clients across Australia by video. Fourteen years in practice.
- ICHP
- FELLOW, ASCH
- IICT MEMBER
Where a session has a preview I say so and tell you to play it. A page that keeps you from the sample until checkout is an advertisement. My job is the smaller one: reading the evidence and saying where it stops. More →
Twenty-two minutes, and ninety days to send it back
If the paper and the earlier hour helped and the head still starts at lights out, this is a small thing to have ready.
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; this recording is not. Snoring, gasping, choking or waking unrefreshed needs assessment for sleep apnoea first, and restless legs, thyroid disease and sleep that worsened alongside your mood belong with a GP. Worry running most days for six months is a reason to see a doctor, not to buy a download. Never listen at the wheel.