Hypnosis for Better Sleep
The issues with not getting enough sleep have been known for thousands of years. This is not a new issue we grapple with. At least in our modern times our stresses tend to be about our nasty co-worker, and not about bandits coming out of the forest and burning down our homes :) Still, that's little consolation when we toss and turn at night. Maybe the dark shades, the noise machine, and the chamomile tea are not enough to reduce the thoughts racing through our brains. We need something more hard core. That's where the many sleep CDs on the market come in. They have a person actually "talking us through" the process of relaxing and unstressing. Steven A. Leinweber is an entry into this field.To go on a tangent for a moment, every person has different reactions to voices and accents. They've done amazing studies with GPSs that talked in different accents. An accent that one group would adore, another group would hate and find annoying. So it's important to realize that we are all different in how we react to accents and that that is normal and OK. So that being said, I did not find Steven's voice to be soothing. I found it sharp and staccato and fast. I'm from New England, too, so I'm not a Southern Drawl person. But I *would* want someone who was speaking on a hypnosis tape to have a gentle, round, soothing voice. I did not find this voice to be soothing. I played the tape for several other people without any preamble to bias them, and they all had that reaction as well. I think he should have found someone else to read his track for him, someone with a more soft, smooth vocal pattern.
I own a number of audio books and production quality can make a substantial difference as to how well the information is imparted. Audio book producers do take after take until they get their vocal material to be perfect. It's clear Steven did not put in that effort. There are numerous hesitations and stammers and restatements which all take away from the smoothness of the material. It might be fine if a friend as a favor did a tape for you, but it isn't what you expect from a professionally presented product.
The background track also needs some tweaking. It aims to be the traditional new-age-style soft, flowing material, but it is not mixed well. It can overwhelm the vocal track at times. Its purpose is supposed to be a gentle background swelling that draws you along into relaxation. It becomes too intrusive occasionally.
Certainly you can say that listening to ANYTHING that's relatively quiet can put you to sleep. Look at all the people who fall asleep in front of the TV. Just the fact that you are focusing fairly mindlessly on something else, not thinking about your stresses, not worrying about anything, will help you sleep. Your mind tunes out, drifts along, and off you go. So certainly if you're laying in bed and need to sleep, listening to these tracks is better than having your mind free to focus on stress factors and circle around and around with them. The voice on this track does what pretty much every meditation track does - has you focus on relaxing various parts of your body, has you visualize being relaxed. That's how meditation and relaxation work.
So in that sense it is certainly not BAD to listen to this MP3. It is providing helpful information, and it is keeping your mind occupied so it can't fall back into its stress cycles. With a full hour of length, it can wear down even the serious stresser who after a while will get sucked into the "story", listening to the person who is talking to them. It is our brain's nature to do that.
But I also think that there is a LOT of room for improvement on this CD to even bring it up to the standards of the many other products out there. To me it feels like a first attempt at doing this, where the person was not top notch with mixing software or with doing re-takes until something is perfect. A future version that didn't have errors in it and that was better mixed would be more up to the standards of the industry in my opinion.
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