Sleep & Insomnia · Hypnosis session
Insomnia Isn’t Last Night. It’s the Six Months Behind It.
Months of it now, not a rough patch. The bed has become the place you go to fail at something, and “have you tried a warm bath” stopped being advice long ago. The treatment Australian guidelines put first is not this recording, and you should hear that before anything is for sale.
Cure Insomnia
Twenty-three minutes, aimed at the dread that has attached itself to your own bedroom after months of bad nights, and built for nightly use beside CBT-I rather than instead of it.
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.
Checkout opens on hypnosisdownloads.com in a new tab. Priced in US dollars; some cards add a foreign-transaction fee. Ninety days to change your mind, nothing to justify.
The publisher reports 3,778 purchases of this title.
Chosen by Ernest McLeodClinical hypnotherapist. An Adelaide practice, seeing clients across Australia by video. Fourteen years in practice. About Ernest →
Is this the version you have?
- Lights off, and the arithmetic starts: if I go under now, that’s five hours
- Gone at nine on the couch, wide awake the second you’re in bed
- A drawer with melatonin, an antihistamine and something a friend swore by
- You’ve stopped mentioning it, because the answer is always a hot bath
- You can name the month it started, and it was not this month
Three or more and you are on the right page. One of them after a hard fortnight is a different job, and so is losing only the small hours.
What has to be ruled out before a recording is even reasonable?
Sleep apnoea, and not as a footnote. The Sleep Health Foundation puts the overlap at 30 to 40 per cent: three or four in ten people with insomnia also have obstructive sleep apnoea.
A GP and a sleep study, not a downloadIf you snore heavily, gasp or choke in the night, wake with a dry mouth or a morning headache, someone has watched you stop breathing, or you get enough hours and still wake wrung out. Untreated sleep apnoea is a cardiovascular risk, and no audio touches it.
Three more go to a GP first. Legs that crawl or must move the moment you sit still: restless legs has its own treatments. Thyroid disease, which does bad sleep alongside a racing heart and heat you cannot shake. And insomnia that began when your mood dropped, rather than the other way round.
What does Australia actually recommend for chronic insomnia?
Not this. In July 2026 six organisations published a joint position statement on adult insomnia in Australia: 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 “not an adequate stand-alone treatment”.
The American Academy of Sleep Medicine’s 2021 guideline agrees. It carries one strong recommendation, for multi-component CBT-I. Stimulus control and sleep restriction each earn a conditional one alone. Sleep hygiene earns a recommendation against being used by itself.
Hypnosis is on neither list. I am not going to build a page that implies otherwise.
How do you actually get CBT-I in this country?
Cheapest first. THIS WAY UP, the digital clinic run by St Vincent’s Hospital in Sydney, has an Insomnia Program: four online modules, self-paced across ninety days, free, funded by the Curran Foundation. No referral, and it is proper CBT-I rather than a list of tips.
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. Two caveats: whether your insomnia qualifies is your GP’s judgement, and the rebate covers part of the fee, not all, so ask about the gap. Ask whether the psychologist delivers CBT-I: work in the Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine describes it as reaching a minority of Australians with insomnia.
On medication the statement is specific: benzodiazepines and z-drugs may be indicated for two to four weeks at the lowest effective dose, melatonin for up to thirteen weeks. If you have taken something nightly for a year, that is not a failing of yours — and not a thing to stop alone because a website suggested it.
Why does the bedroom itself set you off now?
One bad night is arithmetic. A hundred is learning. Every hour spent lying in the dark being annoyed has paired that room with effort, and pairing is what brains do best. It is why you go under on the couch at nine and wake crossing the bedroom doorway. Trying makes it worse: sleep will not respond to effort.
And it does not reliably wear off. Morin and colleagues followed 388 adults with insomnia for three years in Archives of Internal Medicine: 46% still had it at every annual assessment, three-quarters for at least a year running. Waiting has published results, and they are poor. The 2019 Reynolds report to the Sleep Health Foundation put 14.8% of Australian adults at the criteria for chronic insomnia disorder.
Cure InsomniaUS$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 run tonight for nothing?
Three, in order. The first is admin. The other two are the single components with real evidence behind them, and the free course above sequences both if you would rather not run them alone.
- Two weeks of a paper sleep diary, before you change anything
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.
You want one number at the end: your real sleep on a typical night, usually four to six hours. Everything below is built on it. Turn the clock to the wall.
- Stimulus control: the bed is for sleeping, and nothing else
Bootzin’s rules, unchanged since 1972 and carrying a recommendation of their own in the 2021 guideline. Go to bed when you are sleepy, not when it is bedtime. Still awake after what feels like a quarter of an hour, get up: out of the room, low light, something dull to read, no screen brighter than a lamp. Back only when sleepy, out again if it doesn’t take, as often as that needs.
Same wake time every morning, Sunday included. No naps. Nothing in bed but sleep and sex.
It is not discipline for its own sake. You are unpicking a pairing between a room and an activity, and every night lying awake there stitches it back.
- Sleep restriction: spend less time in bed than you want to
Take the diary average and add half an hour. That is your time in bed, and never below five hours whatever the average says. Fix the wake time first, then count backwards for a bedtime. Five hours of sleep inside five and a half, rather than five scattered through eight.
Once a week, work out what fraction of your time in bed you were asleep. Above about 85 per cent, add fifteen minutes. Below 80, take fifteen off. The window grows back slowly, and earned.
The part most pages leave out is that it gets worse before better. In a 2014 study in the journal Sleep, Kyle and colleagues ran sixteen people with insomnia through it in a laboratory: measured sleep fell by an average of 91 minutes on the first night, and daytime sleepiness and reaction-time lapses rose across the first three weeks, returning to baseline by three months. Don’t start it before a week that matters, and take the driving seriously.
Skip sleep restriction altogether if you have bipolar disorder or epilepsy, since deliberate sleep loss can trigger mania and lower the seizure threshold. The same caution goes for untreated sleep apnoea, for parasomnias like sleepwalking, and for anyone unsteady on their feet. There it is supervised or not done.
So where does hypnosis fit, if it isn’t first?
Underneath, and only if you want it there. In 2018 the Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine published a systematic review by Chamine, Atchley and Oken: 139 abstracts screened, 24 papers included, of which 58.3% reported benefit on sleep, 12.5% mixed results and 29.2% nothing. Their conclusion was that hypnosis for sleep is “promising” and merits further investigation, 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.
So what a recording can plausibly be asked to do is lower the arousal you carry into the room: the bracing, the hour count, the readiness for another bad one. That is the part of chronic insomnia that behaves like anxiety.
The line worth rememberingCBT-I fixes the pattern. A recording, at best, makes the room less hostile while you do it.
Why pay for this when YouTube is free?
You can have a decent sleep hypnosis recording in ninety seconds, for nothing. Michael Sealey is Australian, and his channel has passed two million subscribers and 450 million views. Plenty of people in your position already fall asleep to him, and no evidence says a paid file hypnotises better. I am not going to invent some.
What you would be paying for is the listening conditions. No advertisement at minute nine. It plays on a plane and in a house with bad wifi, and does not autoplay into a documentary about volcanoes at three in the morning. It is one fixed session made for nightly use, which matters when the approach depends on repetition.
If none of that matters to you, use the free one. That is not a rhetorical concession.
What is in the Cure Insomnia session?
One guided session of twenty-three minutes, made for repeated use, not one desperate listen. It works on what you bring into the room, and belongs beside the diary and the free course rather than instead of them. You stay awake and in control throughout. It is also the one thing here you may do lying in bed — though if you are still awake at the end, get up anyway.
Cure Insomnia
US$18.95About A$27 · one-off, no subscription.
- 23 minutes 2 seconds, narrated by Roger Elliott of Uncommon Knowledge, publishing these since 1998
- Instant MP3 download plus the publisher’s app — any device, unlimited listens
- Built for most nights across a fortnight, not one listen
- Suited to someone who has ruled out apnoea and is doing the free work
Opens the publisher’s secure checkout · no account needed
Figures the publisher reports about itself: Uncommon Knowledge has traded since 1998, trained upwards of 24,000 people in person, worked individually with over 5,000 clients, and reports 3,778 purchases of this title.
They also report that of 9,604 customers surveyed, 97% were happy with their support. That rates their service, not this recording.
Who is this session wrong for?
Anyone whose nights have moved past a habit into something that needs assessing. If the list below has your name on it, what you need is an appointment with someone who can adjust as you go, and buying a file instead postpones that until autumn.
- You snore, gasp, or wake unrefreshed after enough hours in bed.
- It has run most nights for months and is still worsening.
- 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.
- It started after a frightening event and the nights bring it back.
- You are falling asleep at the wheel or at your desk.
Any of those is a GP appointment rather than a purchase. And if you take something nightly, take that to the prescriber: the guideline’s two-to-four-week window is about starting a tablet, not coming off one.
Free and confidential, open now. Tap to call.
Common questions about long-term insomnia
When does insomnia count as chronic?
The usual threshold is trouble falling or staying asleep on three or more nights a week, for three months or longer, with daytime consequences. Below that it is short-term insomnia, and often settles once whatever caused it does. Above it, the problem tends to maintain itself.
What is the first-line treatment for insomnia in Australia?
Cognitive behavioural therapy for insomnia. The 2026 joint position statement from the Australasian Sleep Association, the Sleep Health Foundation, the RACGP and three other bodies names multi-component CBT-I as first-line and says medicines are not. Hypnosis is not named in it, and a recording does not stand in for it.
What is the difference between stimulus control and sleep restriction?
Stimulus control changes what the bed means: you get in only when sleepy and get out when you are not, so the room stops being paired with lying awake. Sleep restriction changes how long you are in it, cutting time in bed to the sleep you actually get. They are usually run together.
Why does sleep restriction make things worse at first?
Because you are deliberately short of sleep while the pressure rebuilds. In a 2014 study in Sleep, measured sleep time dropped by an average of 91 minutes on the first night, and daytime sleepiness and reaction-time lapses rose across the first three weeks before returning to baseline by three months. Be careful driving.
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 without a referral. A GP can also start a Mental Health Treatment Plan for up to ten subsidised psychology sessions a year, though eligibility is a clinical judgement and there is usually a gap.
What if the session does nothing for me?
You email the publisher with your order number and they refund you in full inside 90 days, without asking why. One refund per customer. Nobody can tell in advance whether a recording will suit a particular person, which is what makes the refund window the difference between a trial and a gamble.
Other sessions that may fit you better
- Fall Asleep FastIf it is tonight’s sleep onset rather than a pattern going back months
- Go Back To SleepIf you go under fine and lose the second half of the night
- Sleeping Pill AddictionIf the tablets are now the thing you are worried about
Not sure which is yours? The sleep guide sorts sessions by what the night does rather than by label. If the nights are mostly worry that happens to be horizontal, the anxiety guide is the door.
Whatever you decide about buying, start the diary tonight and enrol in the free course tomorrow. Neither costs anything, and the second is the actual treatment.
Ernest McLeod — clinical hypnotherapist. An Adelaide practice, seeing clients across Australia by video. Fourteen years in practice.
- ICHP
- FELLOW, ASCH
- IICT MEMBER
Most of the useful advice here is free and none of it is mine to sell. I put the guideline and the hospital course first because that is the order the evidence puts them in. A recommendation that hides the better option is an advertisement. More →
Twenty-three minutes, and three months to change your mind
If you are already doing the harder work and want the room less hostile meanwhile, this is a small, private thing to try.
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. Do not attempt sleep restriction if you have bipolar disorder or epilepsy, and take advice first with untreated sleep apnoea, a parasomnia or a falls risk. Sleeping medication is a conversation with your prescriber. Never listen at the wheel. If symptoms are severe or persistent, speak to a qualified therapist.