Hypnosis is a state of highly focused attention.
Have you ever gotten so caught up in a good movie that you kind of forget you're watching a movie?
Absolutely. You become part of the movie instead of part of the audience.
World -renowned psychiatrist, expert on self -hypnosis, Dr.
David Spiegel. How do we change ourselves, deal with the aspect of the threat, and you can control it?
Your boss may have said something awful to you, but your body doesn't have to react that way.
Is it possible to control others with hypnosis?
The number one health and wellness podcast.
Jay Shetty. Jay Shetty.
The one, the only, Jay Shetty.
Hey everyone. Welcome back to On Purpose, the place you come to become happier, healthier, and more healed.
You know that I love sitting down with thought leaders and experts who introduce us to new modalities and ideas and insights that can improve our daily lives.
Today's guest is someone I've been really excited to talk to.
I'm speaking to Dr.
David Spiegel, who's a Wilson professor and associate chair of psychiatry and behavioral sciences, director of the Center on Stress and Health, and medical director of the Center for Integrative Medicine at Stanford University School of Medicine.
Dr. David Spiegel is the founder of Reverie, the world's first interactive self -hypnosis app.
You can download it as soon as you want to while you're listening to this conversation.
Dr. Spiegel has more than 45 years of clinical and research expertise, has published 13 books, 404 scientific journal articles, and his work has been supported by the National Institute of Mental Health, the National Cancer Institute, and so many more.
Please welcome to On Purpose, Dr.
David Spiegel. David, it's great to have you here.
Thank you for being here.
Thank you so much, Jay.
I'm delighted to be here talking with you.
I'm so fascinated by your work, and I'm so excited I get to bring it to my community and audience.
I wanted to start off because I really want to take the audience on a journey today to really understand.
I think hypnotherapy and hypnosis are words and ideas and things that we've heard about for a long period of time, but we have a very limited understanding of what it actually is.
So I'd love to start with, what is hypnosis and what are some of the misconceptions about it?
Hypnosis is, oddly enough, the oldest Western conception of psychotherapy.
The first time a talking interaction was thought to have therapeutic benefit.
I think there's much overlap between some of the things you do and think like a monk, focusing on visualization, on controlling your breathing, on visualizing things that can be ways of being different.
Hypnosis is a state of highly focused attention.
Have you ever gotten so caught up in a good movie that you kind of forget you're watching a movie?
So you become part of the movie instead of part of the audience.
Now what you're doing when you're doing that is using for consciousness what a telephoto lens does for a camera.
You see what you see with great detail, but you're less aware of the context.
You dissociate other things you would ordinarily be aware of.
Our brains are processing thousands of things all the time, what's going on in the body, noises, potential threats, all kinds of things.
But in hypnosis, you narrow the range of focus.
And for example, right now you're having sensations in your body touching these nice chairs, but hopefully you weren't even aware of that.
If you were, we could stop the interview right now.
So we all do that. We can put out of awareness things that would ordinarily be in awareness.
In hypnosis, you focus intently, you dissociate.
And the third thing you do is you disconnect from your ordinary ways of being and thinking.
And this is where I think there's a lot of similarity between meditation, mindfulness, and what you do in hypnosis, which is you kind of get over yourself, but in a somewhat different way.
You suspend your view of yourself and you try out being different.
Now the thing that scares a lot of people is that many people have been to one of these awful stage shows where they've seen the football coach dance like a ballerina.
And I don't like making fun of people.
But at the same time, there is a point.
And the point is for us to change.
And that's what your life's work is about now is how do we change ourselves?
How do we not get trapped in sort of rote desires?
Or I love that there was a quote you had about how life is too short to spend your time living somebody else's life.
And I think what you can do in hypnosis in narrowing your focus of attention, in dissociating, is suspend your usual view feeling about what you're like and try out being different.
Absolutely. Yeah, I believe that was Steve Jobs.
He said that. Yeah, so Steve Jobs.
That's right. Such a powerful message.
And I really appreciate the way you're explaining hypnosis and hypnotherapy.
I find that what would you say are the common uses?
Or because I think, again, like you said, you've seen something on stage, or you've seen it in a movie, and it's used to often manipulate someone, or it's used to extract information.
It's used for some sort of heist, right?
In the movie or entertainment world.
How would you find hypnosis or hypnotherapy being useful as individuals?
Where does it become something that any one of us can access, use, utilize and need?
Well, the thing is that hypnosis is really a naturally occurring ability, that people have to varying degrees.
But it's something that we just don't tap and all hypnosis is really self -hypnosis.
So just like you try to teach people, you do teach people how to meditate, how to be mindful of what they're doing, you're helping them discover a capacity within themselves that they can use.
Hypnosis is very similar in that sense, that most people have some ability to narrow their focus.
And it's not a loss of control, it's a gain of control.
You're learning that you can filter hurt out of pain, that you can get to sleep better, that you can manage stress in a way that doesn't keep it proliferating, but teaches you to control it.
I saw a man yesterday who was a brilliant professor who had radiation to his nose because he had a tumor there that needed to be treated.
And he had terrible sensitivity in his nose and in his mouth.
And he tried everything.
He tried like seven different ways to neutralize the nerves, signals, he took medications, he did all kinds of things and didn't work.
And he was getting more and more frustrated because his life was his words.
And he was a teacher and couldn't stand the thought of not being able to do that because he was so frustrated by it.
And he found with a few minutes of learning self -hypnosis that he could reduce the interference by 50%.
He was amazed. He said, you know, my hand is feeling light and I feel some waves going through it.
And I had him touch his face and kind of spread those waves.
And he felt different right away.
His wife was sitting and watching and she said, I'm not surprised.
But it is a way of altering the way we manage our focus of attention, our processing of sensory input.
And so literally we can filter the hurt out of the pain.
We can manage stress better by focusing on the body up rather than the head down.
You know, we often think, well, if I just figure out what's stressing me and, you know, decide it's not important or figure out a better way to do it, I won't be stressed.
But what happens with stress is usually it's from the body up that you see something that threatens you.
We're pretty pathetic physical creatures.
We don't run that fast.
We don't smell that well.
We don't hear that well.
And so normally we have to, we evolved because we treated most stressors as physical threats and you better get your heart rate up and your blood pressure up, be ready to fight or flee.
But most of the stressors we have now are not life threats.
So if you respond physically, your body's telling your brain, oh my God, this is really terrible.
And the brain thinks, oh yeah, this really, I feel bad.
This must be really bad.
And it's like a snowball rolling downhill.
And with hypnosis, you can deal with the aspect of the threat that actually makes you most worried about it.
And you can control it.
You can say, well, your boss may have said something awful to you, but your body doesn't have to react that way.
So imagine you're floating in a bath, a lake, a tub, or floating in space.
And then picture on an imaginary screen, your boss on one side, and what you might say or do on the other in the context of feeling physically more comfortable.
So hypnosis is a way of, in a very focused way, controlling mind and body interactions in a way that helps you handle them better.
And can you walk us through, David, the neurobiology, what's happening to our brain in this period?
Because I think, again, often people have looked at some of these modalities as being woo -woo or being slightly alternative, etc.
But what's actually happening from a neuroscience perspective?
Yeah. Well, I've lived with that for a long time, but we've spent a decade studying what's going on in the brain using functional magnetic resonance imaging with people who are high and low in hypnotizability in and out of hypnotic states.
And we find three things happen in the brain when you go into hypnosis.
The first is you turn down activity in the anterior cingulate cortex.
That's part of what we call the salience network.
It's a thing here. Maybe you better look out.
So you hear a loud noise and you think, is it a threat?
What is it? That's the salience network firing off, saying, there may be trouble here.
You better attend to it.
You turn down activity in that part of the brain.
The cingulate cortex is like an inverted C right in the middle of the brain.
And the front part of it is the salience network.
We found that the more hypnotized people felt, the less activity there was in that part of the brain.
So you're turning off the home alarm system and just letting yourself experience what you experience.
We find actually that the more hypnotizable people are, the more of an inhibitory neurotransmitter, gamma aminobutyric acid they have in the anterior cingulate.
So it's the drug that benzodiazepines, anti -anxiety drugs, actually stimulate GABA receptors.
And so that's how we can control ourselves.
We can reduce anxiety, but you don't need a drug to do it.
You can do it yourself.
The second thing that happens is we have more functional connectivity between the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex on the left and a part of the brain called the insula.
It's Latin for island.
And it's a little island of tissue in the middle of the front part of the brain that is a mind -body conduit.
So when that connection is happening, you have more ability to control what's happening in your body, to control heart rate and blood pressure, your level of arousal, to control the functioning of the gastrointestinal system.
We found that highly hypnotizable people, given a hypnotic instruction to eat an imaginary meal, actually increase their gastric acid secretion by 89%.
We had one subject who was taking a gastronomic tour of the Bay Area, and after about a half an hour of it, she said, let's stop.
I'm full. Just eating imaginary food.
And when they do the opposite, when they relax, but think of anything but food or drink, we got a 39 % decrease in gastric acid.
So the brain has an amazing ability to control what's going on in the body.
That's this prefrontal cortex to insula connection and also to be more aware of what's going on in the body.
We call that interoception.
So you enhance your regulation of the body and perception of it.
The third one, and I think this might be of special interest to you, Jay, in your interest of how we get trapped in notions of ourselves and try to be something we're not and don't focus on the fundamental things.
You get inverse connectivity between the prefrontal cortex and the posterior cingulate cortex.
That's a part of the brain that we call the default mode network, where you contemplate who you are, what you are, instead of what you're doing, when you're not working or doing anything, you're just reflecting.
And it's the part of the brain that is the closest probably to what we call the superego in analytic terms, where you're looking at yourself and saying, who am I?
Who should I be? What do I want to be?
And so to the extent you're engaged in the hypnotic task, you're suppressing activity there.
And that's the football coach dancing like a ballerina.
I don't care. I'll just try it anyway and see what it's like.
Now that's silly, but if you want people to change, it's a great opportunity to say, you know what?
Just try it. See what it feels like to be different.
Can you be in the same situation and react to it differently, not struggle against it, not fight it, see what you can learn from it?
And that's a part of the brain where activity is suppressed in experienced meditators.
The mindfulness tends to inhibit activity in this posterior singular default mode area, or I call it the my fault mode network.
It's when you're reflecting on what's wrong with you.
And so it's a part of the brain that is also affected by psychedelic drugs, that the sort of dissolution of the self comes through disorganization of activity in the posterior singular cortex.
There's a new paper in Nature out with some leading neuroscientists who took psychedelics and scanned their brains 18 times over a couple of weeks, and found disorganization in that region of the brain.
So it's a center for change because you can inhibit your usual views of who you are.
And that's something that hypnosis helps you to do.
Is it possible to control others with hypnosis and hypnotherapy?
Well, Jay, I would say yes and no.
I mean, we're social creatures.
We're susceptible of social influence.
And if you engage in the painful act of paying any attention to recent American politics, you'll see that people are influenced by all kinds of things and believe all kinds of things that just flat out aren't true.
And it is the case that people in hypnosis, since they're more focused, are more likely to suspend their usual evaluation and judgment of things and see what it would be like if this were true instead of that.
And there are people who have been and can be influenced to some extent.
But you know what? People who are highly hypnotizable do that without ever having been formally hypnotized.
They'll tell you, the highly hypnotizable people tend to be very sensitive to other people.
They pick up their emotional cues very well.
And they respond often easily putting somebody else's priorities above their own.
So does that mean you're more easily influenced perhaps?
But frankly, I think you're better protected if you understand more about your tendency to do that.
And you can defend yourself more.
So hypnosis is a way of being influenced by other people, but also being influenced by your own desires and wishes.
So I would say it's there.
Take full advantage of it.
How does one know if they're hypnotizable?
Because I believe that most people would feel like, oh, I would never work on me.
And I don't think it would work on me like they do with meditation as well.
People always think, oh, that won't work for me.
My mind is everywhere.
How does someone know if they can be hypnotized?
Well, on the Reverie app, we have a six minute hypnotizability test.
It's a standard test.
I've used it with about 7 ,000 patients and research subjects in my career.
It can be done very quickly.
You give a series of hypnotic instructions and see how the person can respond to them.
And if you'd like to, I can test your hypnotizability right now.
I think we should do it.
Yeah. I bet your listeners are placing bets on just how hypnotizable you are.
I love it. So get as comfortable as you can put one arm on either side of the chair.
And please look up now to the top of your head all the way up high as you can past your eyebrows all the way up way way up.
Good. And as you keep looking up slowly, close your eyes.
All right. Now let your eyes relax, but keep them closed.
Take a deep breath in.
Nice, slow exhale through your mouth.
Let your eyes relax, but keep them closed and let your body float.
Just imagine you're floating somewhere safe and comfortable.
Like a bath, a lake, a hot tub, or floating in space.
And while your body's floating, I'm going to ask you to take your right hand and stroke the back of your left middle finger.
So let your right hand float over and stroke the back of your left middle finger and stroke backward toward your wrist now and up your forearm to your elbow.
And as you do that, you'll feel a sense of tingling and numbness and lightness.
And now put your right hand back down and let your left hand float up in the air like a balloon.
Let it float up to a comfortable upright position.
You can leave it straight up in the air as it is, or you can rest your elbow on the arm of the chair, whatever feels better to you.
And I'm going to give you this instruction.
Your hand will remain light and in this upright position, even after I give you the signal for your eyes to open.
Later, when I ask you to pull your left hand back down to the arm of the chair and then let go, your left hand will float right back up to the upright position.
You'll find something pleasant and amusing about this sensation.
After that, when I ask you to touch your left elbow, your usual sensation and control will return.
Each time you go into this state of concentration, you'll find it easier and easier to do, and you can use it to help you concentrate on what's important to you.
Right now, we'll come out of this state of concentration together by counting backwards from three to one.
On three, you'll get ready.
On two, with your eyelids closed, roll up your eyes and one, let your eyes open.
Ready? Three, two, one.
Good. Now stay in this position, please, and describe what physical sensations you are aware of now in your left hand and arm.
There's a tingling in my fingers.
Tingling? Is it comfortable?
Comfortable. Very comfortable.
Does your left hand feel as if it's not as much a part of your body as your right hand?
Agreed. It's lighter.
It's lighter. Okay.
Does that surprise you at all?
It's interesting to perceive the sensation, to be aware of it.
To be aware of it, okay.
It's interesting for sure.
It's curious. Okay.
Now please take your right hand, pull your left hand back down to the arm of the chair and then let go.
Now your left hand just popped up.
Can you describe what that felt like?
It felt like a pull almost like that I had to lift it up.
That you had to lift it up.
Yeah, that it felt like I should.
It felt right to do it.
It felt right. Good.
Is that surprising to you?
That is very surprising to me.
Good. All right. Because I could feel it.
It was a physical sensation.
It was physical. Yeah, it was physical.
It wasn't mental because I know you'd said that in the instructions.
Yeah. And I could feel that in my brain.
So I guess there's something, but it felt physical.
It felt like a force, a physical force.
By way of comparison, please raise your right hand.
Put that one down. Any difference in sensation?
Yeah. There's no feeling of there being any other...
My left hand almost feels like there's puppet strings attached.
Whereas here, I don't feel they're there.
I feel like I can do what I want with this.
Whereas this hand feels very like...
Well, I'm here to tell you folks there are no puppets.
But in that sensation of the idea that, in the sense...
I don't know how to describe that.
This hand feels fully under my control.
Whereas this hand feels like there's a sense of...
I want to nail the expression.
It's this hand I can do whatever I want with it right now.
Whereas this hand feels like that's where it's meant to be.
That's where it's meant to be.
So you clearly have more control over your right hand and left.
All right. Now please take your right hand, touch your left elbow, and then let go.
Let go like this? Yeah.
Now I see that your left hand went back down.
Can you describe what that feels like?
There's still a sensation in my forearm that makes me want to lift it slightly for some comfort.
But when I put it down fully, it's slowly getting more acclimatized, matching with the right.
But it's not there yet.
There's still some sensation there.
So it feels... The sensation is different, but the control is now...
Yeah. I could still want to lift it a little.
There's still that feeling of wanting to lift it.
All right. Well, touch your left elbow again with your right hand.
Open. Now shake both hands and tell me when the control becomes the same.
Slowly getting there.
Getting there. Okay.
Good. Did I do or say anything that would indicate there'd be a change in sensation or control in your left hand and arm?
No. I don't think so.
Did I say anything to you about your elbow or touching your elbow?
I believe so, yes. Yeah.
Do you remember what I said?
Yeah. You said when I would touch my elbow, that it would return back to me.
Oh, you didn't. And you did touch your elbow.
Did you have a sense of floating lightness or buoyancy in your left hand and arm during that?
100%. Did you have that sense in any other part of your body?
I don't think so. And that value is evident in your chest.
Okay. So your score is seven out of 10.
You're quite imitizable.
Which is shocking to me.
It is really wild. I just never thought...
I had this really strange thing happen that when you were talking, and I know we haven't even got into it yet, but when you asked me to roll my head, I think I find myself often to be non -hypnotizable just because I don't know.
I guess I've never opened myself up to it.
But there's... I felt this...
When you were kind of about to count me down, I felt like my head just getting heavier and lowering.
And I felt like I was aware that I was sinking.
But I was like, why am I sinking?
What's going on? And so it was always like my head was straight back because you asked me to be comfortable as if I was floating.
So when you said that, I kind of leaned back and I felt like I was floating in a lake as you said.
But then when you said, we're going to bring back ourselves consciously, my head started to do this.
And it was such a natural heaviness that brought my head down.
But there was a part of me that was going, why are we doing this?
Why am I dropping my head?
But I am dropping my head.
So your head was drooping forward.
My head was leaning forward, but you didn't ask me to do that.
And I didn't know why I was doing it, but it felt natural to kind of feel like I was sinking in.
Yeah, sinking into it.
So you were elaborating upon the image that you were feeling.
And hypnosis is about very rapidly doing things, changing the way your body feels.
You have, with all of your experience and mindfulness, this is something different for you.
How would you say it's different from where this day to get into mindfulness?
That's a great question.
I would say that the state of sinking and being in that state of awake and alert, but also resting is something I feel certain mindfulness practices can allow us to create that state.
I've never created it through physical movement.
It's always created through being present or still or bringing my awareness to a particular object or my breath or whatever it may be, but I've never really felt it physically is probably the best way I could define the difference.
I felt like I'm floating while meditating or I felt a lightness in my entire body, but not in a specific hand or a specific part of my body.
I see. So it's more slipping into the state, but not using it right away to see if you can produce a change.
And frankly, when I use hypnosis with subjects and I use this test with every person I use hypnosis with, because it's a way for them to discover what the experience is like and how they feel and to observe it.
Don't take my word for it, try it out and see what it feels like.
And for me to be able to evaluate in what way to work with them, because some people can do something like what you did, some less, some not at all, not that many, but some people not at all.
But it becomes a kind of immediate object lesson in how much more control we have over our body and how we react to that than we usually give ourselves credit for.
What about the cynical mind that says, and that's, I'm so glad I'm talking to you about this because years of research, Stanford medicine, it's the cynical mind that I avoided having in this experience, because I generally consider myself someone who wants to be open to experience and curious and open
to letting things in to figure it out and see how useful it may be.
But the cynical mind that says, well, of course Jay lifted his hand because David had said that he would lift his hand when he put it back down.
But to me, I can genuinely say that, yes, there was an instruction in the brain, but there was also a feeling that was there.
And so both those things and my cynical self, if I was trying to be annoying, which I would never want to in a, you know, I've invited you to be my guest on my show, but the cynical skeptical part of me would have been like, oh, I'm just going to hold my hand down just to make a point.
But I wanted to go with how I was actually feeling and intuitively feeling.
So the cynical person that says, well, it's a placebo effect, or it's something that David told you to do, and that's why you did it.
How do you process that kind of response or reaction that often I imagine arises?
Well, um, you know, I frankly think the best answer is you are highly experienced in mindfulness and trying out different ways of being.
And yet for you and you're telling, and I, you look, I'm a guest on your show.
This is your show. It would be fine for you to just say, you know, sorry doc, nice try.
I don't feel it. And I think you would be honest with your audience in doing that.
But you had the experience, you know, um, years ago, I don't know if you remember this, but there was a guy named Phil Donahue who had a very popular daytime show and he invited me as a guest.
And it was at a time when it was thought to be dangerous to hypnotize someone in public.
You wouldn't do that.
Other people might get hypnotized.
So I, this woman I had hypnotized before the show began and I had her arm up in the air like this, the show opens and I pull the hand down and it pops back up the way yours did.
And the camera comes in closer and Donahue says, look, this is just some doctor.
I'm Phil Donahue. Keep your hand down.
And he pulls your hand down and it pops right back up in the air.
And she says, I'm starting to feel like a slot machine.
You know, so the fun thing about it is, is that if it's the real deal, it wasn't like you were saying, Oh, I'll just keep my hand down.
Your hand wanted to go up.
Right. And that ability to quickly rearrange your mind -body relationship is part of what's so interesting about hypnosis and you experienced it.
So, you know, people can fight it if they want, or they can misrepresent what their experience is, but you didn't.
You had the experience and that element of surprise that where people can see, damn, I can look, look, what's happening in my body.
Look what I can do this quickly.
That's I'm already starting therapy there, you know, cause I'm showing people that they have more of an ability to control their body than they like to think or than they usually think.
And that's a tremendous opportunity.
Right. Even though you're the one giving the instruction, you feel that that's showing that I have the power to control my body.
That's a very important point, because it's, I'm not taking control and I, you may have, did you feel like I was taking control?
No, no, no, not at all.
I thought I'm a teacher, you know, I'm teaching you how to identify and utilize the abilities you have the way you do when you teach people how to use mindfulness, you know, you're not implanting mindfulness in them.
You're showing them, look, you know, you're, you've, you've narrowed your view of who you are and what you are.
And I'm going to help you expand it.
And I'm going to show you the beauty and everyday experience and how you can reassess what's important to you in life.
And, and people can be open to that and learn from it or not, but you're teaching them how to explore capacities they have that they may not have known about.
And that's what I'm doing with hypnosis.
I'm teaching them how to utilize their own ability.
You know, we, our major evolutionary advantage as humans is, is our brain, this three pound object on the top of our shoulders.
It doesn't come with a user's manual.
You know, there are a lot of things our brains can do.
And that's what you do, teaching people mindfulness, that you can use your brain in ways you hadn't thought of.
And if they didn't have the basic ability to do it, it wouldn't work.
And the same is true.
That's what I'm doing with hypnosis.
I'm not projecting anything onto someone.
I'm teaching them how to use what they already know.
When automobiles were invented some hundred and something years ago, there were a bunch of state laws against windshield wipers.
Why? Because remember the oldest image of somebody inducing hypnosis was the dangling watch, you know, and it doesn't work very well with electronic watches now.
But they thought people would be waving their eyes back and forth with the windshield wipers and going into hypnotic states when they were driving.
It doesn't happen. But so it's an ability that people have.
And we just teach them how to use it.
Yeah, that's brilliant.
Hey, I'm Jay Shetty.
And I wanted to invite you to a brand new interactive no charge workshop, Renew You, that I'm eager to share with you.
Over the years, I've worked with thousands of people across the globe.
And I've noticed a common theme.
Many of us are feeling stuck, overwhelmed or disconnected.
We're going through the motions of life, but not really living.
Does that sound familiar?
You feeling burnt out, uninspired, or like life is just passing by without meaning.
Maybe you're struggling to make the impact you know you're capable of, or perhaps you're craving deeper connections with others.
If any of this resonates, then I want you to know that change is possible.
And it starts with the choices you make today.
In this workshop, I'm going to share five simple yet powerful steps that can help you reignite your passion, purpose and joy.
These are the same principles that have helped me and countless others reshape our lives from the inside out.
And I know they can do the same for you.
You'll walk away with actionable strategies to revamp your daily routine, find your true purpose and create meaningful connections.
And the best part, this workshop is completely free.
These changes don't require massive overhauls.
It's about making small intentional shifts that can lead to big results.
This workshop is more than just learning.
It's about doing. I'll be guiding you through reflections and exercises that will help you start creating the life you've always dreamed of right here, right now.
Go to www .renewyouworkshop .com to access this at no charge and start building a life that's not just lived, but truly loved.
See you there. How can hypnotherapy affect our memory?
How does it work with memory?
Well, that's a fairly controversial area.
Hypnosis, it can be a powerful thing.
It can help people relive events and with not just remember, but relive them with the same kind of emotion.
Sort of like a flashback in PTSD, but under control and then help people come to a new understanding of what happened.
Now, does it mean that the hypnotic, what we call age regression, is an absolute, totally accurate recollection of what happened?
No, but then none of our recollections are, you know, they're a combination of what we experienced and put down in memory stores and what we interpret and what we've learned later.
But it can help people in a controlled way to get back to relive and remember things that they previously might not have been able to remember, in part because the emotions are so painful and difficult that one way to protect yourself is to just keep it dissociated.
Just put it away somewhere and not think about it.
And hypnosis can be a way of cutting through that and helping people come to terms with situations that they previously hadn't thought about or didn't want to think about.
So what I tell my patients and what is the case is that hypnosis is no true serum.
It's not like, you know, your memory is a tape recorder and you just rewind the tape and look at it.
But it can be a way of dealing with the emotional implications of things you're remembering and get a better look at what happened.
And one example, I don't know if you remember this, but not far from here.
There's a town called Chow Chilla, where a school bus full of children was hijacked by two idiots who literally buried the bus underground in an old mining pit.
And they finally found the bus and freed the kids.
And the bus driver couldn't remember much about the guys who overtook the bus.
So he was hypnotized and he, of course, was traumatized too.
And he had to help keep these kids alive in a terrible circumstance.
And he recalled seeing this car overtaking the bus.
And he remembered in hypnosis all of the numbers and letters of the license plate correctly.
He got the order wrong, but he remembered it all.
And that led to the arresting conviction of the two guys who did it.
There are times when, yes, you can add new information that is accurate.
It doesn't mean it's always accurate, but it's additional and often useful information.
I mean, that's so fascinating that sometimes our conscious memory doesn't hold on to these aspects, but the subconscious can.
And so is it that you're able to also relieve past stress and anxiety and overwhelm?
Is it by reframing the narrative in hypnosis or hypnotherapy that we do?
Is that the work that's doing?
Could you give some examples?
Yes, that's very important.
So there's a woman I saw who suffered an attempted rape as she was coming home just at dusk with her arms full of groceries and this guy jumped her.
And she starts fighting with him.
Eventually she fought him off, actually.
He was trying to get her upstairs into her apartment.
And the police came, she hadn't actually been raped.
They thought no big deal.
She then had a full -out seizure.
She'd had a basilar skull fracture from the fighting with this guy.
It's always a terrifying, horrible thing.
And she wanted initially to just remember more about what the guy looked like.
And she couldn't remember much.
It was getting dark.
So I said, all right, here's how we're going to do this.
We're going to take you back to this time, but your body is floating in a bath.
You're safe and comfortable.
And whatever you see or remember, nothing has happened.
Your body is now safe and comfortable.
So I was reassuring her.
And very often, understandably, when people remember an event like that, they start reacting physically as though it were happening.
And that's that feedback cycle of physical and mental hyperarousal that is very uncomfortable.
So remind yourself at all times you're safe and comfortable, but I want you to picture him.
And she said, you know, it was getting dark.
I really can't see much more about his face than I recall.
She said, but I see something else.
If he gets me upstairs, he's not just going to rape me.
He's going to kill me.
And so you might say, well, thank you, Dr.
Spiegel. You've now made her feel even worse than she did before.
It was a more horrible experience than even she had imagined.
And I said, well, you're looking at this on a split screen.
Picture him on one side and what you see about him.
On the other side, I want you to picture something else.
What did you do to protect yourself?
And I have yet to meet a trauma victim that doesn't engage in some creative strategy to protect themselves.
And she said, you know, he's surprised that I'm fighting that hard.
He didn't think I would.
And she'd been feeling very guilty that she got herself as badly injured as she was.
And I said, you know, you saved your life.
You know, think about what you did.
You know, you just jumped and you defended yourself and you saved your life.
So she came away from that on the one hand, seeing things that you might say are even more upsetting than what she was already living with, but recognizing that she had done something to save her life.
And that changed her reaction to the whole event.
You know, she saw it as something that was an attribute, an aspect of herself that she hadn't recognized.
And there's, I don't remember the name, but there's a Japanese custom that when some very beautiful precious vase breaks, when somebody drops it or something, when they glue it back together, they don't use glue.
They use gold. And what they're saying is, it will now be even more beautiful than it was.
And in a sense, it was a terrible thing, but it was also she learned something wonderful about herself.
And that's so you can help people relive an event in a very controlled way.
And at the same time learn something that helps you cope with it a lot better.
Yeah, I believe it's known as Kintsugi.
Yes, that's right. Yes, they use that gold powder and things like that.
And you get these gold veins.
Yes. In the vases that is so beautiful.
And thank you for sharing that extreme example, because I think it's so interesting because you could do that as a theoretical activity, but it doesn't work like that.
You could say, like, what did you learn from this?
Or how did you react?
And sometimes it can be so painful to reflect on it in such a technical theoretical way.
That's right. And being able to see yourself fighting and being brave and being courageous and how it affects.
How does then that work with self -hypnotherapy?
Like when you talk about your app Reverie, how does that work?
Because you're not physically there to guide people.
How do them people allow themselves to practice it on their own in a safe way, in a safe environment, in a way that it can help?
Well, in many circumstances, Jay, it's pretty easy.
There was a reporter for the Times of London who started using Reverie.
She had metastatic breast cancer, and she was dealing with that very openly with her readers and talking about that.
And she tried Reverie.
She was having trouble sleeping.
She just couldn't stay asleep and would wake up anxious and with some discomfort.
She said after about five days, she would just listen to my mellifluous voice every night.
And I used to worry that the app wouldn't be nearly as good as being in the office with me.
But then I thought, if you wake up at three in the morning, you probably don't want me in your bedroom teaching you how to go back to sleep.
But you've got me there on the app, and it's interactive.
So I ask how are you responding, and depending on what you tell the app, you get a different instruction.
So it is as much like being with me as possible.
And she said, I woke up one morning after about five days of this.
Rosamond Dean is her name.
She's a lovely person and a great reporter.
And she said, I looked at the clock sort of out of the corner of my eye, and I thought, oh my god, it's 709 a .m.
It's the first time I've slept through the night in a year.
And so people can learn to incorporate it into their own practices.
Now, I would say that people dealing with post -traumatic stress disorder and these severe things probably would benefit more from having a trained therapist helping them to do it.
But once you sort of set them on that path, they can revisit it having learned what the experience is like, and they can help them.
But more commonly, we use it for more common problems, for distress, insomnia, pain, focus, things that are widely disseminated mental problems that we don't have nearly enough resources to help people with.
So Reverie is a great way to say, try it for yourself and see what it feels like.
And if you need the help of a professional along with it, by all means.
When you're working directly with a professional, how long have you seen it take for results to start forming in reality?
So if someone's struggling with sleep and insomnia, how long does it take the average person to get back to a sense of...
Well, I can tell you, I have the most data, Jay, from Reverie.
We have people rate their level of stress or their level of pain pre to post within 10 minutes, the beginning of the interactive session to the end.
And we find that four out of five of them report improvement of about one and a half to two points on a 10 point scale within 10 minutes.
So and reductions in pain, stress management, improving focus.
So 80 or 90 % report improvement.
And so the great thing about this is you know right away whether you're going to feel better.
I had one woman who was pregnant and had terrible lower back disease, and they couldn't give her opioids, thank God, because she was pregnant and they implanted a nerve stimulator, it didn't work.
And her pain was seven out of 10.
And the bigger the baby got, of course, the worse the pain was because it was pulling more on her spine.
And so I had her imagine she was doing something that gives her relief, which is taking a nice warm bath.
And if you think about it, so she has the opportunity to put her brain into the state it is in when she's got the pain, but she's in a warm bath.
And our brain can recall that and see well, okay, the pain signals are still there.
But I can also imagine them being interfered with by this comfort that comes with a warmth.
So she did, and she said the pain was down from seven out of 10 to three.
But she looked angry.
And I said, What are you angry about?
She said, Why in the hell are you the last doctor I got sent to instead of the first?
It doesn't seem real.
If there isn't an incision, ingestion or injection, you're not doing anything real.
I'm a doctor, I use medications, I do a lot of other treatment techniques, but our brains are powerful things.
And if we learn to use them better, we can be a lot more comfortable.
And unlike opioids, which killed 88 ,000 Americans last year alone, the worst thing that happens with hypnosis is it doesn't work.
So we're finding from people using reverie, and this is thousands of people, we have one study with stress reduction, 33 ,000 people get an average reduction of one and a half points in 10 minutes just using the app.
So it's worth a try.
What's the most extreme case or unique case where you've used hypnotherapy that you remember that you think would be really powerful for the audience to hear about?
I worked with a Vietnam veteran who had just kind of gone berserk in Vietnam.
And nobody quite knew why, but he hijacked an ambulance and went out into the jungle and started shooting at people he thought were Viet Cong.
And he wound up being hospitalized in a state mental hospital for a year because he was picked up in a drug bust.
He was using, taking psychedelics and a social worker interviewed him and said, he doesn't look like our typical chronic patient in a state mental hospital.
And so I got to see him and he was very hypnotizable.
And I said, I'd like to relive with you what happened before this event.
So we went back and he was extremely hypnotizable.
He was even higher score than you Jay.
And he relived the TED offensive in Vietnam.
And he comes back to the hospital we worked.
He was a cook in the army.
He was a, you know, longstanding, highly regarded cook in the army.
And he comes upon the body of a little boy.
He called him Chi -town because he came from Chicago who he had informally adopted.
The boy was an orphan.
He was badly wounded in a bombing and had burns and walked with a crutch.
And he just became his dad.
And they hung out together and slept together.
And he started crying.
He's looking at the boy's body there.
He's saying, they ain't got to kill kids.
You know, we got the Geneva Convention.
They can't do this.
They can't bomb hospitals.
They can't kill kids.
And he just takes off, commandeers his ambulance, and starts yelling at Vietnamese.
He's angry at these people and shooting at them.
And I said, all right, I want to remember now one happier time you had with Chi -town.
And instantly, and see the nice thing about hypnosis is the control you have, that he's one minute grieving and angry at himself for not having somehow known he could, you know, thinking he could have saved the boy.
And he, I said picture one time you were happy with him and a smile comes on his face.
And he says, you remember your birthday party?
You know, the Donut Dolly's gave us some food for this party.
And my sister Josie sent an electric train set from Chicago.
The joke was it was from the Spiegel Brothers company either.
You know, what are the odds?
And he said, you ain't never seen an electric train before.
And they were, you know, just, he was suddenly happy.
And I said, all right, I want you to remember two things.
On one side of the screen, I want you to picture Chi -town's grave.
And he, as he looked at it, he held out his hand and said, ashes to ashes, dust to dust, I guess.
And I said, on the other side, I want you to picture that time when you were really happy with him.
And I do this in helping people grief using hypnosis, I said, because you're facing and dealing with the grief and the loss.
But you're also remembering something different about it, that the reason it's so painful is how much joy you had together.
So I want you to remember both the loss and you're having the very Chi -town.
And at the same time, I want you to picture those times you were happy with him, because that's still true.
You still have the joy that you shared together.
He then I said, all right, so let's come out of the hypnosis now.
And he you know, he had tears down his cheeks.
He was really upset.
And I said, what do you remember?
And he looked a little puzzled and dazed.
And he said, I remember a grave and a cake.
Wow, that was it. That was all he remembered.
And he practiced this exercise.
He was in the ward of the hospital doing the self -hypnosis after that, grieving the boy, you know, he told me later, he said he knew he was going to die.
He was crippled, he had arthritis, he didn't think he was going to survive the war.
And I said, and you gave, he did die.
But you gave him a period of happiness and feeling loved before he died.
And that's not going to go away.
And he had one subsequent rehospitalization when one of his brothers, who was a Chicago police officer, was killed in a line of duty.
And we had to kind of piece them back together and help him grieve that loss.
But he went on to to teach adolescent boys how to do long distance cycling.
And he was, you know, he was out of the hospital, nomads, and he was he was doing fine.
So, you know, I that's an experience I will I will not forget.
And it shows you how the interesting thing about hypnosis is how much you know, people think you're losing control.
You watch this guy doing this.
I was, I was reassuring myself.
I was holding onto his arm while I was doing this.
But I was struck by how much control we both had over the mental these extreme emotional states he was in and shifting from one to another, despite how intense they were.
And that's one of the really cool things about hypnosis is that you can be very intense deal with intense emotions, but help people feel themselves as different people.
So he was dissociated in the sense that he was two different guys.
He was on the one hand, a terribly upset and angry about the loss and angry at himself for somehow not having been able to prevent this in the middle of a war.
But at the same time, he could be the loving guy who grieved this boy and who recognized the gift he they had given to one another informing the relationship that they formed.
So the capacity to focus intently to control what's going on in mind and body, but also to be comfortable with the idea that you can be two different people in a sense.
You can be this horribly angry, furious guy at himself and everyone else about what happened.
And at the same time, this warm loving parent to this poor little kid is something that is a real strength of hypnosis.
Thank you for sharing that story.
Super fascinating. I hope there's somewhere we can read and learn about all of these.
Please let us know where the audience can go to learn more.
But what makes someone un -hypnotizable and when someone isn't open to it and it doesn't work on them, what do they do about it?
Can they develop the ability to become more hypnotizable?
What can they do to open themselves up to if they feel it's a modality that could help them?
Well, Jay, there's good news and bad news about this.
The good news is that most children are in Trans States most of the time.
All eight year olds, they're out playing, you call them in for dinner, they don't hear you, they're doing anything.
Work and play is all the same thing for kids.
They live in their imagination.
So they live hypnotic like experiences all the time and they can change all the time and be different and play at being different.
And so it's one of the wonderful things about childhood is that you're in a more of a hypnotic consciousness state more of the time.
But as we go through adolescence, we go through what the famous psychologist Piaget called formal consciousness in which you evaluate more and experiencing is less a part of that.
So you learn to try to be more logical and analyze more and just let yourself feel things less.
So some people lose some of that hypnotic ability when they acquire these formal operations.
And there are about 20 percent of the population who by the time they're 21 just are not very hypnotizable.
They're very logical.
And in Reverie where we have the hypnotizability test, we call them the researchers.
They want to examine and evaluate everything.
At the other extreme, some people retain extremely high hypnotizability.
And we call them the poets.
They just get into it.
They just absorb themselves in anything.
I had one guy recently who gets he loved getting lost in movies.
He just enters another world.
He becomes an actor in the movie and part of it.
And he decided he loved it so much that he went to film school to learn how to make movies.
And he said, you know what?
It was spoiling my experience of movies because I started thinking, well, why did they put the camera over here and the lighting isn't right in all this?
And he said, so I quit film school.
I was losing that ability.
About 60 percent of the adult population are they're moderately hypnotizable.
They haven't experienced and they step back and reflect on it and they try it again.
Most of them can benefit to some extent from from Reverie, from other hypnotic techniques.
Because even if you you're not in it all the time, if you can dip into it and have the experience, you can change.
And part of what we offer with Reverie is not just hypnosis, but the way we use hypnosis.
And I think there's some of this in thinking like a monk where you talk about the value of positivity, of finding a positive aspect of even the most menial things that you have to do.
And with hypnosis, we try to use it in a way that you focus on what you're for.
So when people want to stop smoking, I don't say, oh, cigarettes smell terrible.
You know, there are awful things to do.
Look at what you're doing to your body.
I say, have them recite this yourself for my body.
Smoking is a poison.
I need my body to live.
I owe my body respect and protection.
So you're being a better parent to your own body.
You'd never put, you know, tar and nicotine laden smoke into your baby's lungs or your pet's lungs.
Why would you do it to your own body?
It depends on you. So people can get with that approach to the problem, even if they're not that hypnotizable, focusing on what you're for.
So can you change it?
It's remarkably stable trade.
I didn't, but colleagues of mine at Stanford did a 25 -year follow -up on former students who in psych one had had their hypnotizability measured, and they blindly retested them 25 years later.
The test retest reliability was 0 .7.
Now, that's as reliable as IQ is over that interval.
And so it's an extremely stable trade.
We just published a paper recently in which we used a technique called transcranial magnetic stimulation, in which you apply magnetic activity to the surface of the skull, and if you line it up in the right place, you can connect between the prefrontal cortex to deeper components of the brain, like
the dorsal anterior cingulate.
And we found that we could transiently increase hypnotizability a bit, and we're hoping that we can expand upon that and maybe find ways to increase hypnotizability.
But I'd say for most people, just make good use of what you've got.
The odds are that you will be able to benefit, and we're struck by the fact that at least four out of five people who use Reverie feel immediate improvement.
And that's a whole, it is correlated with their hypnotizability.
We looked at that. The more hypnotizable ones were likely to respond, but most people responded to some extent anyway.
David, is there anything I didn't ask you that you really feel is on your heart and mind that you want to share that's intuitively something you'd like to share?
Well, thank you. I certainly want to banish the fear that people have about hypnosis and the misunderstanding.
Remember Rodney Dangerfield?
He was the comedian who said, I don't get no respect.
And he said, they asked me to leave a bar so they could start Happy Hour.
People don't see hypnosis as the tool that it is.
And they see it as some weird thing that people do on stage or something.
It's an aspect of our brains that allows us to take control of things.
It's not losing control.
It's gaining control that you can modulate pain.
You can control your sense of relaxation so you can get to sleep or get back to sleep.
You can focus intently on your work.
There are athletes who use it.
Tiger Woods is one well -known example of an athlete who Adele the singer uses it to sing.
It can really help people focus their attention and get in a better relationship with their own bodies, control what's going on in their bodies and react better to their bodies.
There's so much possibility that people can have from learning to identify it and use it, that that's why I built Revery as a kind of legacy project.
I'm not going to be able to do this forever.
I love helping the people.
I have helped and still help but I just want it to be out there and available for people to use it for themselves and just explore it.
It's an opportunity for people to make better use of their brains and their bodies.
Absolutely. Thank you so much.
You're welcome. And we end every episode of On Purpose with a Final Five.
These have to be answered in one word to one sentence.
Dr. David Spiegel, these are your final five.
Question number one is what is the best advice you've ever heard or received?
I would say the best advice came from reading Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, which is that what we are is about relationships and relating to ourselves that don't get stuck in any one image of who you are, which is not so different from from what you write about with mindfulness.
Second, what is the worst advice you've ever heard or received?
Don't think about purple elephants.
Question number three, which you can expand on, is how do we get over our fear of revisiting the past, hypnotherapy, opening up to new modalities that aren't as familiar even.
We're almost not scared to put a pill in our body or injection, as you said, or sometimes have a surgery, but these things feel scarier.
Well, try it. You'll like it.
I think that's the nice thing about it.
The biggest risk is it might not work.
There are no side effects.
Opioids killed 88 ,000 Americans last year.
Hypnosis has not succeeded yet in killing anybody, you see.
So, I think, try it.
Our culture is so over -processed.
It's all big companies, things, processing, and a lot of times what we do with our food and our medications and other things make us worse rather than better.
This is a do -it -yourself approach with some training and that's what I want people to do.
Amazing. Question number four, how would you define your current purpose?
My current purpose is helping people help themselves.
That's what I want to do.
That's why I say, all hypnosis is self -hypnosis.
I'm not a magician.
I'm not doing anything to you.
My purpose is to just spread it as widely as we can, as quick as we can.
Amazing. Fifth and final question, if you could create one law that everyone in the world had to follow, what would it be?
It would be that a Supreme Court judge could last no longer than 15 years.
We need the rule of law and we're losing it.
Absolutely. Dr. David Spiegel, thank you so much for joining.
I hope that our audience will practice along with me, join Reverie and continue to connect with Dr.
David Spiegel's work.
Such a joy and honor to be with you today and so grateful for you making the trip over and I look forward to reconnecting very soon.
Thank you. I hope so and I so admire what you're doing and helping people discover what they can do for themselves within themselves.
Thank you. Thank you so much.
If you love this episode, you'll love my interview with Dr.
Gabo Mate on understanding your trauma and how to emotional wounds to start moving on from the past.
Everything in nature grows only where it's vulnerable so a tree doesn't grow where it's hard and thick does it?
It goes where it's soft and green and vulnerable.
