How to use self-hypnosis for anxiety, sleep & more: David Spiegel, M.D. | mbg Podcast

people think that the only real treatments are physical ones ingestion injection or incision that you're not doing anything real if you're just talking to people or teaching them how to better manage their pain in their bodies and that's just wrong you know the brain is the master regulator of the body it's connected with every part of the body it controls everything we do but it doesn't come with a user's manual so there are things our brain just like your car can do things that you discover after owning it for three years the brain is the same way we can learn to use it far more effectively than we do foreign David welcome thank you Jason glad to be here it's an honor to have you uh you are a Powerhouse in the field of science specifically in in your field of hypnosis uh and so let's start there can you talk a little bit about your background and and and what you do um well uh Jason I'm happy to be here with you I'm uh Wilson professor and Associate chair of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University where I've been on the faculty since 1975. um and uh I've been studying hypnosis using it clinically doing uh randomized clinical trials uh doing brain Imaging of what happens when people are hypnotized for my entire career um and the way it began is that it's something of a genetic illness in my family since both of my parents were psychiatrists and psychoanalysts and so they told me I was free to be any kind of psychiatrist I wanted to be and here I am um and actually uh you mentioned that you went to Columbia and that you had a terrible hypnosis stage show demonstration when you started yes that rankles a little bit because my father taught a legendary course on hypnosis at Columbia and I for years I've heard people say how much they enjoyed his course even if they didn't use hypnosis in their practice and one day I met a guy who said my biggest regret when I went to Columbia Medical School the College of Physicians and surgeons is that I didn't take your father's course in hypnosis you know I wish I had he was training as an analyst and a Viennese Refugee named Gustav father schoffenberg who was trying to help the American war effort against the Nazis because he'd been chased out of Europe by the Nazis um uh had learned about hypnosis because he was a forensic psychiatrist he had a smallpox scar in the middle of his foret and um he noticed that some of the prisoners he was interviewing would suddenly just sort of turn their heads down and drift off and he got interested in hypnosis he taught my father and a number of other young Army docs about how to use it to help with pain control and would combat stress reactions and my father did that in in North Africa in World War II and when he came back he was going back to being an analyst on one of his supervisors said don't give up on hypnosis you know you're going to teach a course on it and I'm going to take it at the psychoanalytic Institute which was a revolutionary thing since Freud gave up hypnosis early in his career and uh so the dinner table conversations were pretty interesting and when I wound up going to medical school I thought well I'd better take my own course on hypnosis and my first patient who I will never forget was a the the nurse I was on pediatrics at Children's Hospital in Boston and then the nurse says Spiegel your next patient's in room 342. and I was following the sound of her wheezing down the hall she was an asthmatic who for three months in a row had been hospitalized in what we call status asthmaticus where she was wheezing and we couldn't get her to stop we gave her subcutaneous epinephrine didn't work twice and so I'm standing in the room pretty 15 year old girl knuckles white struggling for breath mother standing next to me crying nurse in the room and I didn't know what to do so I said you want to learn a breathing exercise she nods and uh I get her hypnotized and then I break into a sweat because I realized that we hadn't gotten to asthma in the course yet so I said something very sophisticated I said each Breath You Take will be a little deeper and a little easier talking about Richard for and now what you're against and she within five minutes she's lying back in bed and she's a wheezing anymore and mother stops crying nurse runs out of the room in turn comes looking for me and I figure he's going to Pat me on the back and say what the hell did you do Spiegel and he said the nurse has filed a complaint with the nursing supervisor that you violated Massachusetts law by hypnotizing a minor without parental consent now ice fan seven years in Massachusetts in training there are a lot of weird laws in Massachusetts but that is not one of them and uh and her mother was standing next to me while I did it so he said you're going to have to stop doing this and I said why he said it's dangerous I said well you were your next step was general anesthesia and steroids and you're telling me that my talking tour is dangerous I said take me off the case if you want but as long as she's my patient I'm not going to tell her something I know is true so he stops out and the intern the resident the chief resident and the attending had a council of War over the weekend and they came back on Monday with a radical idea they said let's ask the patient well I don't think that had ever been tried before there and she said oh I like this well she had one subsequent hospitalization but went on to study to be a respiratory therapist and I figured that anything that could help a patient that much that fast frustrate the head nurse violate a non-existent Massachusetts law had to be worth looking into um and and so I've been doing it ever since because you know it was the evidence of my eyes right there in the room you could see the change happening and um it it really is a shame that um we have consistently undervalued a technique that is the oldest western conception of a Psychotherapy it's been around for 250 years and we instead overvalue things like incision ingestion or injection you know the physical things treating the body like it's a broken car you know replace the parts and downplay the role of this rebound organ that sits on the top of our bodies and regulates every part of the body connected every part of the body why should it not have an ability to help the body recover from problems like asthma or prevent problems or control pain it does and in the United States we kill 30 000 people a year with opioid overdoses um and hypnosis hasn't killed a single person and it's helped a whole lot of people do a whole lot of things so um I'm sorry you got started with uh a stage show hypnosis and I'm here to tell you there's a hell of a lot more to it than that yes and just to fill in our audience the conversation we had before we hit record my experience I think is not uncommon uh the the first experience being like freshman orientation at Columbia and they gathered the group of freshmen and fun activities and then there was a little bit of a stage show where they pulled three people up and they were hypnosized next thing you know they're all doing silly things and then boom they snap out of it they have no idea what happened everyone laughs and and that was it and then the other experience anecdotally I've had friends whose parents and this is 20 30 years ago actually longer than that probably uh lifelong smokers and nothing worked and then hypnosis did and I don't think I'm alone I think people view hypnosis as the stage show or addiction but there's a lot more to it and let's talk about one I think your work is fascinating some something that I did not know was was even a use case is self-hypnosis and can you talk about the the differences between stage hypnosis and self-hypnosis and the use cases I'm glad you raised that question Jason because the biggest fear people have is that they're losing control and they have this image of you know the dangling watch or in that weird movie get out you know the therapist banging her spoon against the coffee cup it is true that somebody can trigger you to narrowly focus your attention hypnosis is like looking through a telephoto lens and a camera what you see you see with great detail but you're less aware of the context it allows you to change how you perceive yourself and what you're doing that's got tremendous therapeutic potential but it's fundamentally an intrinsic ability people differ in their ability to experience hypnosis and if you're not advertisable nobody couldn't get you into a hypnotic State and what the stage show guys do is they filter through the audience first to get the 15 percent who are extremely hypnotized well they're the ones they keep on the stage and everybody else they has to sit down again um and so they they cover up the fact that what he's doing what the the stage show hypnotist is doing is identifying people who have the ability and making them think that he can get them to do anything and making the audience think that what he's doing is identifying a capacity people have to varying degrees and showing them one way to use it but it's not a therapeutically useful way at all that's a way that makes people look silly the the however there's something to unpack in that and that is one of the things that happens in a hypnotic State other than the high focusing of attention is the capacity to try out being different put aside sort of like what people do in meditation get over yourself and try things being a different person what would it be like in the sense of helping people to stop smoking If instead of focusing on my urge to smoke which is a bottomless pit you know the more you focus on it the more you want it you focus on respecting and protecting your body on being your body's keeper thinking of your body as if it were a baby would you ever put tar and nicotine's filled smoke into your baby's lungs would you put it into your dog's life no way so focus on what you're for respecting and protecting your body and when we do that on our reverie app one out of five people stop smoking I wish it were more but that's as good as you get with medication or better I think that's could we just pause on that one I think that's just such an important point that transcends hypnosis this idea of focusing on what you're for instead of what you're against right weight loss smoking athletic performance you name it eat with respect for your body give your body the nourishment it needs um and focus on feeding your body the way you would feed your baby you choose very carefully when you do that but every day I think of the messages the War on Drugs right well one of the sad jokes about the war on and you're right I mean I don't know any wars that uh that don't do a tremendous amount of damage whatever else they accomplished and fighting drugs is not the issue the issue is teaching people to respect and protect their bodies to care for their bodies the way they care for their car or their baby or their dog and to focus on what you're for the National Institute of drug abuse has done some remarkable research funded research showing that the interesting thing when you look at the the in the dopamine-rich medial parts of the brain which is the part of the reward center in the brain that the thing that triggers the reward with drugs like opioids it's not that taking the drug it's the chase the chase gives people more pleasure than the catch and so you're trapped in this cycle where you get so excited by the chase that you're kind of not so interested or worried and what people get some hooked is that the minute they get high on the drug they're ready for the next chase that that's what they're doing that's what keeps them following after the drug and poisoning their body so you're absolutely right that the king the thieving is not just hypnosis but if you're focusing intently on what you're for you'll wind up doing the right thing and just to unpack a bit what's going on in the brain so this is like the broader definition of hypnosis because there's the stage hypnosis this is someone who you're working with hopefully a professional hopefully not on stage in front of an audience uh our dog and pony show hopefully in our practitioners offices officer office excuse me or you're doing this on yourself you can do it on yourself all hypnosis is self-hypnosis I've used hypnosis with some 7 000 people in my career and I know that what I'm doing is identifying their ability to experience it those is teaching them how to use it and then it's up to them they're I'm enhancing their ability to control what they're doing and what's going on in their body I'm not taking control I'm teaching control that's what we do with hypnosis so what's going on in the brain that makes it such an effective practice so we've been very interested in that and we've done a good deal of research on it using functional magnetic resonance imaging and as well as eegs and we see three fundamental things happening in the brain the first thing is that when people go into hypnosis they turn down activity in what we call the salience network it's a part of the brain there's a there's something called the cingulate cortex right in the middle of the brain it's like a c on its edges and the front part is a kind of alarm system it's a pattern matching system in the brain so if you hear suddenly a loud noise you suddenly think oh I better see if there's something going on outside that's dangerous and it disrupts your focus of attention in hypnosis you do the opposite you say I'm I'm going to assume the world's okay for now nobody's trying to break into the house I'm going to focus on what I want to focus on and so you turn down activity in the part of the brain that could distract you that allows you to intensify the focus of attention it's like the feeling you have when you're watching a good movie or you're reading a good novel believed in imagination you have those experiences Jason that you sometimes get so caught up that you're just not that so you're turning down activity in this aliens Network the second thing that happens is you increase connectivity between the executive control Network the prefrontal cortex and a little part of the brain right in the middle called the insulin it's Latin for Island it's a part of the brain that is a mind-body conduit so it's a part of the brain where the brain can better control what's going on in the body like the autonomic nervous system and can be more aware of what's happening in the body we call that interoception are you physically comfortable or uncomfortable so you heighten connectivity to control and perceive what's going on in your body and the third thing you do is you disconnect the executive control network from the back part of the singular cortex we call that the default load Network it's a part of the brain where when you're not doing anything much you're reflecting on who you were what kind of a person you are what do people think about you and that's a part of the brain where activity goes down also with mindfulness get over yourself don't think about who you are and that's why the stage hypnosis can make fools of people but there's a tremendous therapeutic opportunity there where you can try out being someone different so when I say to you in hypnosis for my body smoking is a poison I need my body to live I owe my body respect and protection you can say hey what would I be like if I were treating my body as if it were my child and depending on me for everything I put into it how different would I be so rather than forcing yourself to do it or deal with your urges instead you say I'm just going to shift gears and see what it would be like if I took a completely different stance in relationship to my own body and focus on what I'm for so hypnosis is a state where you focus intently and you turn off the part of the brain that kind of keeps you stuck in the old ways you've been doing things and allows you to try out being someone different and see what happens so what are some of the primary use cases we obviously cover an addiction uh smoking to some degree what are some of the primary use use cases um focusing intently so people who have trouble kind of focusing and planning on how they're going to get things done and what they're going to do who find themselves more worried in their focusing on the outcome than they are on the process uh so I I talked with somebody yesterday who has a wonderful podcast who was saying I'm having trouble just getting to where I want to do the hardest part of my work which is editing down the films once we once we've recorded them and I had him get himself prepared feeling physically comfortable taking a cold shower and waking up and then seeing um his his work uh on Adobe uh film editor um as a video game and just enjoying playing the game of moving the images around and reassembling it and he could hardly wait to get started and it's been the part of his work that he dreaded the most so you focus on enjoying immersing yourself in the process rather than on doing something to get to an outcome I worked with the Stanford swim women's swim team some years ago the the swimmers the coach know that they're very good they're terrific yes the best in the country world you bet that their their times were better in practice than they were in meets and he thought well that's weird normally you think you know you get yourself all ribbed up for meat and he realized we realized that they were distracting themselves by worrying about what the woman in the next Lane was doing and you know swimming is not a contact sport and so it really doesn't matter what the person in the next Lane is doing what matters is your relationship to your body so I got them to practice in hypnosis swimming their best race um and their their swim times went up their their their times got better uh uh when they practiced just communing with their own bodies rather than worrying about what was happening in the next light so that sounds like visualization to me it's the difference it's it's intense visualization and it's it's mind-body visualization you're not just picturing it which is helpful and that's part of what we do in hypnosis but it's also reconnecting with your body in a more intense way where you're experiencing it you're not just visualizing it so in other words you're feeling what does your hand feel like cupping the water what do your eyes feel like in your goggles being in tune with your body and helping your body do its best that's exactly right and so athletic performance what what else you mentioned opioids sounds like opioids pain management is tremendously important pain management because you know um uh Jason The Strain in pain lies mainly in the brain um pain is composed of signals that come from the body where there may be tissue damage but it's also how the brain interprets it and to give you a simple example right now I see you're sitting down you've probably got Sensations in your bottom touching the chair but hopefully you weren't even aware of that until I mentioned it if I did we could stop the interview right now um and so the brain all the time is filtering some kinds of information in and most information out so you can do what you want to do so it is entirely possible for people in hypnosis to reduce or even eliminate uh pain I had a a woman who was seven months pregnant had bad lower back pain um they because she was pregnant they couldn't give her opioids thank God and and they had implanted a nerve stimulator that wasn't working the bigger the baby got the more back pain she had and I had her imagine doing the thing that actually gave her the most Comfort during this terribly difficult pregnancy which was taking a warm bath so I said yeah I got her hypnotized I said you're in your bath let the let the warmth of the bats filter the herd out of the paint focus on that sense of floating lightness and warmth and within a few minutes her pain went from seven to eight out of ten to three and and she opened her eyes and she looked angry and I said what's the matter she said why in the hell are you the last doctor I got sent to instead of the first and you know it it it it it makes me alternately sad and angry that people have so much capacity to manage their pain and discomfort that we don't utilize and instead we put them on these drugs we get them hooked on these drugs that addict them and often kill them it's just wrong why is that I think I think there's a clear understanding that we're we're living in an opioid crisis I don't know what the numbers are but I think it's one of the leading killers in America it's horrifying for for parents thirty thousand deaths a year from opioid overdoses in the United States wow and you are highly credentialed this is real science why aren't more institutions embracing hypnosis as a form of pain management we've got a real crisis Jason this I I you know I lose sleep about this it's just it's terrible the the problem is that people think that the only real treatments are physical ones ingestion injection or incision that you're not doing anything real if you're if you're just talking to people or teaching them how to better manage their their pain and their bodies and that's just raw you know the brain is the master regulator of the body uh it it's connected with every part of the body it controls everything we do you know but it doesn't come with the user's manual and so there are things our brain just like your car can do things that you discover after owning it for three years um the brain is the same way we can learn to use it far more effectively than we do and so we've done randomized controlled trials showing that people undergoing surgical procedures that don't use general anesthesia can reduce their Pain by 80 percent just learning self-hypnosis using fewer opioids and having fewer complications um we published a randomized study with 241 people in the Lancet uh in the year 2000 and showing these huge reductions in pain and complications in anxiety and um if that had been a drug and not hypnosis every hospital in the country would be doing that now but people just don't take it seriously and that's why I built reverie I just thought I'm going direct to Consumers I want people to have access to treatments that are wildly effective and underutilized and I don't have like Pharma you know a bunch of uh you know pretty uh girls going out to doctors offices and convincing them this drug is not really as addicting as we think it is um and and so it's not happening and I want to make it happen well reverie is fantastic and I want to come back to that specifically specifically the self-hypnosis piece but I want to call out you you you mentioned you you lose sleep a lot of people lose sleep a lot of people are stressed that's also a use case it's another use case absolutely insomnia and it's our most popular one actually people love uh doing it so we just get people the way I handle trouble going to sleep as well as stress and stress management is start with your body and work up and it sounds kind of paradoxical because I'm talking about using your brain to do it but when you're having trouble getting to sleep um we usually do the wrong things right away first of all you look at the clock and see how long it's been that you haven't gotten to sleep or what time it is when you woke up and all you're doing is arousing yourself more you're saying oh damn what what does it matter what time it is except to get you all riled up and what happens is your body gets tense your muscles get tight your heart rate and blood pressure go up and you have more trouble sleeping so instead I have people focus on comforting their body as if it were a child imagine you're floating in a bath like a hot tub or floating in space um we do something in addition called cyclic sign we have people in Hell halfway hold their breath and helpfully and slowly exhale through your mouth and as you do that you trigger the the soothing parasympathetic autonomic system and help your body relax so you get your body comfortable and then if you're still having thoughts that arouse you or make you anxious I've got it five meetings tomorrow morning and you know I'm not going to get enough sleep you just project them like you're watching a whole movie out onto an imaginary screen but detached from your body so your body's floating and comfortable and you may even think of something you can do to help with the problem but you're experiencing your thinking as if it were just flowing through you not something you need to act on and that can help people get to sleep so I've read about this idea of you removing yourself from your body you know watching yourself on film taking a step back and kind of zeroing in on on like zooming out if you will uh the numerous places and it's been years I think I think I've read about one of Tony Robbins books I think I've seen some other books on visualization could you walk us through why this idea of kind of trying to get out of your body works well often my body is glad to get rid of me actually so um it works because um there are multiple ways in which the brain in the body can connect to one another and what happens with stress as well as with insomnia is you start this Snowball Effect where you have an interaction with your body that makes things worse rather than better so you worry about something either I can't get to sleep or my boss said something to me that really worries me is he going to fire me or something and your body gets this fight-or-flight reaction where it says oh this is going to be trouble so your muscles tense you start to sweat heart rate goes up and then you notice that and you think oh my God this must be really bad because it might feel so bad physically and it gets worse so you worry some more and it's like a Snowball Effect one feeds into the other if instead you say you know there's one thing I can do about this problem either not getting to sleep or the stressor and that is I can make my body feel better I'll do that first so you say to your body whatever is going on with my boss or getting to sleep just imagine being in a place where your body feels most comfortable like a warm bath or floating in the air or taking a swim in a mountain lake whatever makes you feel good and just affiliate with that feeling and say I'll deal with that stressor in a minute I'll get to sleep a little bit later focus on that and that's an area where you actually have control regardless of how stressful things are you can do that so once you get that sense you've already taken a step toward diffusing the stressor because it's not making your body feel so bad and then you say okay I'm now in a better position to deal with the stressor and it might be if you're trying to get to sleep picturing yourself cruising down a river around a raft trip or something like that just allow give yourself thoughts or thinking about things that actually went well the day before what did you do that helped somebody or made you feel good and so your body is now soothed and your mind is you're taking control of your mind and what your mind focuses on and your body isn't distracting you it's supporting you and doing that so what do you recommend when anxiety strikes because it always will and for some people I'd say all people at certain times they can spiral is there a hate to say hack but I'll say hack or a trick or a practice where someone notices okay something's going I'm starting to spiral I can do something immediately to try to stop it yes well the first step is to get your body comfortable to take care of the physical part of the anxiety and then think about a way of dealing with the problem so I'll give you an example we have a flying phobia app on on February and what we tell people to do is get their bodies comfortable when they're worried about being in a getting onto a plane or being on a plane and then we give them three things to think about to help restructure their experience the thing that's scaring them and and this is not an uncommon problem it's like you know 15 to 20 percent of people don't fly because they're that scared of it and if you really want to have a sensible phobia don't get in a car because it's a lot more dangerous than than flying in an airplane um but I tell them focus on three things so get in the body get in the plane buckle your seatbelt and Float with the plane think of yourself not as a container that's controlling you but as a comfortable uh uh experience where you feel your body the Motions of the plane are things that you can just float with float with the plane enjoy it like you're taking a ride in an amusement park the second thing is think of the plane as an extension of your body like a bicycle if you want to get from one place to another faster then walking you take a bite and you the bike becomes an extension of your body that helps you do what you want to do and the pilot of the plane is an extension of your line you're you're choosing an airline not for some you know uh you know back back Bush Airline but uh but as an airline that actually trains its pilots and supervises them the pilot is the extension of your brain to help you control the plan and get what you want to go and you think also about the difference between a possibility and a probability it's always possible the plane will crash it's always possible um there'll be another Wildfire right around us it'll be horrible but it's not probable so the fact that you can you know sharply picture a bad outcome doesn't mean that makes it more likely so you give people things to reach restructure their fears at the same time as you're helping them make their bodies more comfortable when you're in that situation what about I think this is a cousin of uh flying phobia uh I I fall in this category I don't love elevators I get in them but if it's too crowded a little claustrophobic I get out well um you know that's fine you're taking control of the situation in that way um it can be very uncomfortable but have you had similar experiences um to being in an elevator that don't make you uncomfortable Bob Solo in an elevator I'm fine or with my family but I just I generally don't like crowded spaces and like a crowded elevator I usually just popped out well of course you're taking control in a way that gives you some comfort but if you think about it if you think about all of your experiences even uncomfortable ones in elevators as anything bad actually happened you know has anybody deliberately bumped into or made done something I almost almost got stuck in I was stuck in one for about a minute once which uh with a profound impact on me well you know but what you can do there again look up close your eyes um imagine that you're somewhere else just say okay I don't like this I'm going to wait till it's over um and I'm gonna imagine being in another space that where I felt more comfortable that is you can you don't have to intensify your perception of a space where there's no actual physical danger where you're not going to have to physically protect yourself but it makes you uncomfortable the problem is you're fighting the discomfort you're saying oh my God there's all these people around me what's going to happen how will I get out of here but in in a sense if you just say you know what I'm going to give myself a break here and be somewhere in my imagination I'd rather be until this thing gets fixed I'm going to segue to cold plunging because I think it's somewhat related in this idea of I'm gonna get in this cold body of water which makes me very uncomfortable but I'm gonna or my heart rate spikes but I'm gonna breathe through it and be okay is that in the same ballpark of what we're talking about here well one of the things in the cold plunge experience and I've done it um is the interesting thing is the transition time so the toughest time and often we find reasons to delay actually taking the plunge you know you're there I'm going to do this you know and you and uh but you think of a few other things you got to do first you know um but there's a very rapid transition where the the first part where you're changing from ambient temperature to the water is a shock and particularly around your chest you know you feel it a lot uh but it doesn't last that long and you quickly habituate to the new environment and so if you think of it in terms of what I'm going to do is give my body this dog you know hold my breath for a few seconds and then begin to accustom myself to the new environment and the cooler temperature and you know until it gets to the point you know a half an hour later where your body temperature is really plunging don't do a half hour too long no no it's too long right but think of it as getting yourself through the transition period and let your body accustom itself to the new environment and it'll do that you know it will close down peripheral blood vessels to conserve body temperature in the core it'll do a lot of things like that so trust your body to a quickly a climate you to the new environment and think of yourself as getting through a transition not as having to suffer endless Discovery to me it's also this idea of you're what you're you're knowingly walking into stress right and but you're you're saying I'm going to breed myself through this and comes back to what are you for versus what are you against so like you you are willingly walking into something that you know is going to be painful but you're going to breathe does that make in my view makes one a little bit more resilient yes you're you're saying well what's the reason that I'm doing this am I doing it because I'm masochistic no I'm I'm doing it because I either want to you know use it as a kind of alerting thing the way Andrew huberman does in the morning when he gets his day going or is it um that I just want to prove to myself that I can be resilient that I can handle discomfort um and and not shake from it so I'm less afraid of things that could go on in the world um think about again what you're for what's the reason you're doing it and focus on it being as an experience that teaches you how to strengthen yourself and your control of your mind and body rather than just something that's making you suffer and you know this one I definitely another 180 I'm cold I hate cold plunges my wife and I live in Miami we moved from New York we don't like the cold we don't ski don't like cold showers none of it so for a while and I believe in bringing doing things that bring you Joy so it's like I'm not going to do this and then there was a coal plunge that was you know conveniently located in the gym I go to and I was like you know what I'll I'll try this a couple times and I'm a couple weeks in and now I can't get enough of it I've done a 180. so that's interesting so how did you do that how did you transform yourself in that way I just said I'm gonna try it good and you know I watch my heart rate I wear wear a whoop so I would see it Spike exactly what you said and then about 45 seconds to a minute later boom came all the way down I'd see how I felt energetic so I'll do it in the morning now and I I love it but I said yeah I'll try this for a couple days and if it sticks great if it doesn't no big deal but I'm gonna give it a whirl and so other than just trying it what was the aspect of it that you were for so I I think it's interesting because of the longevity benefits uh cellular resilience testosterone not a lot of studies there but there's some interesting chatter about the benefits there I'm 40 48 I'm a man so you know that's top of mind for me as I age uh and then energy Clarity there you go so you found all these other goals and and uh reasons to put your body through this and so you saw it not just as plunging into discomfort but as a way of keeping young strengthening your body and feeling better about yourself because you're able to take on something that you previously avoided but with that said if I didn't like it I still wouldn't there are some things that there are a lot of great longevity benefits running for example I just don't like running last time I ran was the last college basketball game I played in 1998. I've done this show if you see me running call the police I'm in trouble I love it all these great benefits for running I'm just not going to do it okay well that's good so so you chose your poison you know there you go so you know something you touched on earlier is this idea that some people are more hypnotizable than others can can you speak to that I'm guessing kids are probably the the best here that's exactly right all eight-year-olds are on trances all the time you know you call your kid in for dinner he doesn't hear you he's out playing basketball or whatever um and it's one of the joys of childhood actually is that work and play are all the same thing for them it's a shame that we make them into little grown-ups in school because they just in they love learning they soak up information they get engaged with everything in their world that's a hypnotic-like state if you want a person to learn a foreign language get them doing it when they're seven years old you know because and they'll they'll come out of it fluently speaking the language with a better accent than you'll ever achieve I discovered that with our kids when we did a sabbatical in Paris and they wound up speaking better French than I do um and so it's a period of time uh in life when you can get fully absorbed in whatever you're learning as we age and we go through adolescence and you know come are taught to Value reason over experience and emotion um some people lose that hypnotic ability to some extent so by the time you're 21 your degree of hypnotizability becomes as stable a trade as your IQ over a 25-year interval and we studied that it's nitrogen the follow-up shows it's a very stable trait and about two-thirds of the adult population are somewhat hypnotizable about 15 20 are extremely possible so most most adults are to some degree and enough to use it uh and even even people who are inhibitizable can learn this technique of focusing on what you're for we had a woman on every whose score was two out of ten on the hypnotic induction profile which you can take as part of reverie she stopped smoking uh because she was focusing on this issue of focusing on what you're for here we had another woman who was moderately hypnotizable who didn't want to stop smoking and and uh she the first time she tried our exercise she didn't like it that much she went home tried it again that night she lit up a cigarette she'd smoked for 25 years had never even tried to stop she looked at it she said fat who needs this and she hasn't smoked a cigarette since and she said you know Dr Spiegel this is some crazy ass Voodoo and I mean that in a good way on that note it seems like people going through really rough treatments I think of cancer for example someone going through the ringer with chemo and everything else immune therapy whatever whatever they're doing it's it's a hall not only physically but mentally and we know that one's mindset plays significant role in the outcome are you working in that capacity alongside people in treatment because in my view that's probably invaluable for for someone you're helping someone uh you know fight through the pain uh maintain their will to live that's difficult yeah it is difficult but actually a big part of my research has involved weekly meetings with women with metastatic breast cancer so women who are facing mortality and when we started that group therapy in the 70s we were warned that we demoralized them because they'd see one another die you know the at the time the average to your survival it was 50 and they would see one another die as though cancer patients don't immediately think that's what's going to kill them although half of all people diagnosed with cancer or ellip to die of something else um we help them face that work it through grief losses when they happened encourage one another feel like experts in dealing with cancer and we'd end each group meeting with uh with a self-hypnosis exercise and we tended to do two things summarize some major thing that they have learned in the group that week and it might be if someone had died grieving the loss but also thinking what has she left with me that has enriched my life but we also taught themselves hypnosis for pain control filter their hurt out of the pain imagine you're floating in a bath or or an icy lake filter the herd out of the pain and we found in a randomized trial that F over the course of the year the women who were taught self-hypnosis actually had half the pain the control group did on the same and very low amounts of medication because when they would get a new pain in their chest they wouldn't immediately leap to the idea that they had new metastases and the cancer was progressing they'd say oh this is more or less discomfort and I can filter the dirt out of the pain so they stopped fighting the pain or letting it be a trigger for their anxiety and instead saw it as an occasion an opportunity for Mastery and they would learn to control the pain perception you know it seems to me that some of the best athletes in the world have this superpower where you know there's an injury and it happens in the Heat of the Moment in the third quarter or the fourth quarter uh of using basketball and they just fight through it and there it is oh that after the game you find out you know they broke their like a devastating injury but for somehow they just fought through it they temporarily suspended time and space and pain yeah do athletes have what are they is is it same protocols and practices or do you think some people are gifted here there well some more than others but there are some major athletes who are who've actually used hypnosis as as part of their training and you're absolutely right that happens that there are you know football players who you know the coach sees that is ago is swollen after he comes off the field and said you know you may have broken your ankle well that can happen Tiger Woods used hypnosis to train to play golf he had this glacial calm uh in these very you know high stress moments and you know where even the slightest Tremor physically you can screw up your Putt and um he was able to just keep his focus on his connection with his body and where he was for what he needed to do um Michael Jordan um trained using hypnosis and uh you know other than the fact that he looked like a man twice the size and proportions of an ordinary mortal um but he also had this incredible common ability in the face of you know you know six foot six people you know trying to mess with him he could just keep his focus on the shooting um and he he formally trained using hypnosis so yes I think people there are some great athletes who in addition to their physical skill have this mental control where they can just stay in that zone focus on what they're for and not let themselves get distracted by um uh by the opposition in fact I in our in our every app we teach athletes who are training to focus on your opponents you know the the goalie or the defending player as your coach they're teaching you what you need to learn to do to be better at this game and so it's not just an annoyance it's an opportunity to learn so I don't bring it back to kids uh I have two little girls age six and and four and great ages yeah they're they're lovely and they're also a handful yep depending on the moment uh how should parents think about hypnosis with their children in terms of you know helping our kids be resilient happy strong kids well you know a part of what you can do with hypnosis doesn't always have to be formal but certainly you know if they have to get a shot or have some kind of medical procedure you can Comfort them through that you know I there was one pediatrician I know who whose way of hypnotizing a kid was to say now I'm going to give you this shot but don't worry about that he said because you're going to tell me that your body is ready when I press the button and then he presses their belly button and gets them to giggle with that and meanwhile he's also given them a shot so he's get them to misdirect their attention to something else when might you know getting these kids that age to sleep they don't want to sleep in fact when they when the more tired they are the more agitated they get because they're fighting being sleepy and being tired and so I would have my son uh and daughter picture going down a river on a river raft and seeing the animals along the coast of the river and just letting them Drift Off to Sleep one night one night I didn't do that enough and my son came out looking for me you know at 8 30 or 9 when you should have been asleep for a while and he said dad I need a professional you say you know so what about the specific example where I think every parent struggles with you know getting your kid to you know eat a piece of broccoli or or now in our household you know get our daughter to take her uh her gummy vitamin in the morning right right well I would say the way to do it is to kind of gamify it to to redirect it and so in many patients parents do this instinctively anyway but just say you know uh there's a hungry uh little part of your body that can't wait until it gets to eat that gummy and it'll feel so much better and you can picture your stomach smiling or something like that you know something that makes it a kind of fun game uh and gives them something that they they want to do rather than something they're fighting you about because the minute it gets into that power struggle you both lose I lost this morning I lost I got it but just say you know that there there's a hungry little animal inside you that can't wait until it sees that gummy or something like that and and and try and make it a game that they can enjoy rather than a fight so it sounds like there are a ton of benefits many use cases I'm not I think a large large portion of the population can benefit from the hypnosis are there people who should not consider hypnosis well um you know there are people you know for example with serious mental disorders who are sort of paranoid and and are afraid that anybody trying to do anything to them is is literally trying to harm them and so certainly if anybody is you know uh sort of pathologically suspicious or defensive don't Don't Force It don't push it um and there are people who have serious other illnesses who are very depressed and may be suicidal who need professional help and that's the first thing in hypnosis is not going to be the answer to that so they need someone who will help protect them and keep them safe but other than that I'll tell you that I have been shocked and surprised at how little uh troubles we've had with people who have used Reverend we've had many thousands of people using it and the number of complications I've had has been like less than the number of fingers I have on my right hand and we've dealt with those pretty easily so uh it's surprisingly safe so let's talk about that it's fantastic reverie so talk about where people can find it and the use cases and all the good stuff you have going on there the reverie app is available we uh on if you're if you have an iOS phone uh from the App Store Rivery r e the ERI no e at the end um it's at Google Play if you have an Android you can learn more about it and get to those points if you go to www.rivery.com um and it we've decided we have a wonderful design team who have made it very efficient and effective and enjoyable to use and you can choose from a number of things which includes testing your hypnotizability takes about 5 minutes and you'll learn how hypnotizable you are and therefore what sort of Mind style you have that can make the most use of what the apps teach you to do and then we have apps for getting to sleep getting back to sleep you know I used to worry I we made it interactive one of the cool things about the app is I'll stop periodically you get to hear my mellifluous voice and um uh the the app will stop I'll say is your hand floating in the air you're feeling like buoyant if you say yes we go on to something else if you say no I help you with that part of it and so periodically uh it's more interactive I like the experience of being in my office I used to worry about whether it was almost as good and we get we're finding for example we get about the same rate of smoking cessation from the app as we do when people see me but then it occurred to me that one of the uses of the app is to help people get back to sleep um uh if they wake up during the night and I'm thinking you know it's better because hopefully I'm not actually in in your bedroom at three in the morning helping you back to sleep but you've got my voice on your smartphone so it's there whenever and wherever uh you need it we do it for pain control and it's very helpful for people in controlling pain so before you reach for some opioid or some other medication do the self-hypnosis exercise as many times as you need to help you get control of the pain and maintain control and it's better to do it before the pain gets really bad do it when it's just wrapping up and you can usually manage it well dealing with Stress and Anxiety and phobias driving phobias airplane phobias we have it for stopping smoking for dealing with the impulse to drink for other kinds of drug addiction problems it can help you handle it better it's not a treatment but it's a health and wellness uh skill that we're teaching people to get to the point where they need help you know there are a quarter of the American population has an anxiety disorder you know about 8 percent has has depression there are huge amounts of phobias and the majority of people with these kinds of problems never get to a mental health professional and so what we want to do is make it available to anybody who wants to try this out and see if it can help them uh manage these problems like pain stress anxiety and habit problems we get one out of five people to stop smoking I wish it were more but that's not bad it's it's as good as other treatment approaches to to smoking control so um we welcome people to come give reverie a try and and see how you feel but we get a lot of people who say they has helped them a great deal to live better that's incredible so I'm curious you you've mentioned a number of success stories you you've seen personally is there one that just clearly stands Above the Rest of all the people you've worked with over the decades I I had a uh recently a woman who has metastatic breast cancer you mentioned that and she had bilateral mastectomy she's having trouble healing from the surgery because there's still some uh to wear in her chest and she said I'm so anxious and I have terrible pain I don't know what to do and she was pretty hypnotizable she was eight out of ten and I got her hypnotized and she said she was talking about her anxiety she has a loving husband and a 24 year old son both of him care about her but she's anxious because she feels like she's spoiling their lives and so her anxiety so the symptoms the pain made her feel worse and worse because she's not only felt bad for herself but she felt bad for the effects on her family and so I got her hypnotized and I said picture where you'd like to be right now so she put herself on a beach uh on a on an island somewhere and the wind and the Sun and all that and she said I feel better that's nice to be there and I said I want you to invite your son and your husband to join you on the beach and she said okay they're there now I said well have them turn around and look at you and now you look at them and I want you to look in their eyes and tell me what you see and she said I see their love I see that they really care about me and want to help me and I said do you see any frustration or anger that you're messing up their lives she said no they just love me and I said well I your job is to recognize that and thank them for the help they're offering you and accept it and she came out of the hypnosis a few minutes later and she said you know my pain is gone her pain was eight out of ten she said it's gone and my anxiety is gone I don't feel anxious anymore um and she was making it harder for herself than she needed to because she was blaming herself for something she didn't control and B that wasn't a problem uh but she was keeping herself at a distance from the love and support her her family wanted to give her remarkable it is there for for someone listening she was thinking I wonder how hypnotizable I am I'm assuming there's a series of questions one could ask to kind of gauge yes um now we have the the full hypnotic induction profile that I use every with every one of my patients on the app you can do it that way but one question would be something like are you the kind of person who gets so caught up in a good movie or reading a novel that you forget you're watching a movie and you entered the imagined world and those kinds of people tend to be more hypnotizable than those who say no I don't know what you're talking about uh is there anything we haven't touched on today that you'd like to touch on or if not any pointing words of wisdom for the audience thank you will I would just like to reinforce the idea that what we've been talking about Jason is that hypnosis is in no way a loss of control it's a way of enhancing your control over your mind and your body so people who are afraid of it for fear of losing control this is a great opportunity to enhance it to learn how to better manage your body take better care of it make better use of it live more comfortably um and if you're having a problem with pain or anxiety or habits this is a way to approach it where very quickly you can see the extent to which you can make a difference and the nice thing about reverie is you don't have to take my word for it just try it and see how you feel and we find that nine out of 10 people find that in the first session their stress levels are lower their pain levels are lower one out of five people who use it stop smoking right away so it's worth it you know the downside is nil and the upside is tremendous fantastic David thank you so much thank you Jason it's been a real pleasure

Channel: the mindbodygreen podcast

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Id: SWIcEY9u1xE

Length: 56min 50sec (3410 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 11 2023