The Surprising Neuroscience of Hypnosis: Myths, Truths & Use Cases w/ Dr. David Spiegel MD

the brain can really control what's going on in the body even in rather extreme circumstances what comes to mind when I say the word hypnosis if it's spinning pinwheels or swaying pocket watches then you're not alone but clinical hypnosis what today's guest calls transformation t-r-a-n-c-e is no parlor trick people worry hypnosis means losing control it doesn't it means in enhancing control of your brain and of your experience it is a very real and efficacious therapeutic protocol that induces a unique brain state that can be leveraged to improve quite quickly I might add everything from sleep states to high performance it can be a tool Against Addiction and a very effective means to ameliorate symptoms related to trauma anxiety chronic pain and more that's what hypnosis is it's a naturally occurring experience it doesn't just happen when I dangle a watch it's a state of Highly focused attention with reduced peripheral awareness my guess for this exploration is the world's leading researcher and clinician in the field of hypnosis Dr David Spiegel Dr Spiegel is the associate chair of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University of school of medicine Dr Spiegel has published over 480 Journal articles and 13 books like I said he's a World expert and he's here today to share the science and the neurobiology behind hypnosis meaning what exactly transpires in the brain during a hypnotic State as well as the many efficacious use cases for it the main treatment for PTSD is not to have them avoid and run away from it it's to have them face it in a controlled supportive thoughtful way that's the only way we humans are going to survive we have to face our own vulnerabilities we talk about the differences between hypnosis mindfulness visualization and so-called flow States we discuss why some people are more hypnotizable than others and the mind-body connection incident to hypnosis finally Dr Spiegel imparts helpful tools for self-hypnosis including a simple test to gauge your own receptivity to hypnosis as well as reference to the reverie mobile app which is a tool that was developed by Dr Spiegel and his lab at Stanford the app does have a nominal cost but Dr Spiegel and his team were kind enough to offer all of you a special discount on the reverie service which you should see right here on the screen and also in the description below and in the show notes on the episode page at rushroll.com I should add that I received no benefit from this offer it's simply a gift to you for observing this video and perhaps a nudge check it out and with that do me a favor please hit that subscribe button and enjoy what I think you will find to be a truly fascinating conversation with Dr David Spiegel well David it's a it's a delight to meet you I appreciate our mutual friend Dr Andrew huberman introducing us uh I'm really excited to talk to you today before we get into anything though I think it's important to point out uh one specific thing for clarity purposes which is that you are not the psychiatrist David Spiegel who testified for Amber Heard in the Johnny Depp trial correct correct your honor I'm I'm uh I can't help but ask uh were were you confused with him did you end up you know on the receiving end of some nasty threats and such I I um so far not nasty threats I did my my star rating went down temporarily at Stanford because some people pretended that they had seen me clinically and gave me a terrible rating um I was having dinner was we invited some friends over and this one of my friends a very bright woman who says what she thinks she said now David you told me that psychiatrists cannot make render opinions about people they have not examined and yet today you testified in court about him and about his you know how he must have done it because he played a pirate somewhere you know and I said I did not and I should so then she showed me the video and it was the first that I knew of it I didn't know this guy existed David R Spiel I don't have a middle name so I'm not David R and then there have been a couple of things um uh on the on you know in the uh social media space about how apparently her lawyer got advice to hire me and um looked up David Spiegel and found this guy who was in Eastern Virginia medical school and she thought oh well he's nearby won't cost much you know I'll just get him to do it that's great wow the plot thickens so you were actually meant to be the person that's I don't know that for sure I was never called I was never contacted but um apparently several people had got information that the lawyer who made who mentioned the name called her up afterwards and said I told you David Spiegel from Stanford and she said oh [ __ ] you know this is bad news wow well you dodged a bullet not that you would have agreed to do that in the first place but um yeah it was a very interesting kind of social phenomenon the manner in which you know social media bifurcated over that case and armies of people lined up to defend and attack yeah yeah and you happen to be kind of uh collateral damage to some extent well you know I got two kinds of emails one kind said I couldn't possibly be you I know you I know what your work is like I know your research it could that could not you could not have been the David Spiegel and so thanks well a simple sorry to interject a simple cursory Google search you could see the guy there's video in him right now it's easily discernible and I got a couple other emails saying good for you you said exactly what should have been said congratulations I thought okay yeah well that's like a uh you know a psychological experiment unto itself it is this it is yeah you know the I mean we're learning a lot about how people can affiliate with false beliefs of various kinds so yeah well there's a there's a meta conversation to be had around that for sure you bet um perhaps for another day because today we're going to focus on hypnosis the myths the truce the science um and so I think it's important just out of the gate to Define what it is we mean when we say hypnosis the difference between stage hypnosis clinical hypnosis and and perhaps provide kind of a cursory glance at your research and clinical work sure I'd be happy to do that um if you've ever gotten so caught up in a good movie that you forget you're watching a movie you enter the Imagine world you're part of the film not the audience that's a hypnotic like State it's a state of Highly focused attention with reduced peripheral awareness so in order to really engage fully you have to decide you're not going to be worried about what you're have to do later in the day you're not going to pay attention to anything else you're going to narrow your focus and that has a couple of consequences it lets you think very clearly very well it also gives you a kind of cognitive flexibility that used to be called suggestibility you know and people worry about that you know can you make me think I'm a chicken and do all kinds of foolish things and um it that but that also means you're willing to approach uh an Old Situation from a new point of view to see it differently if you intensely Focus if you suspend judgment you can learn and so it's also a very good situation to be in if you're engaging in a good kind of psychotherapy for example you won't immediately dismiss some new idea because it's new or different the third thing so there's this intense absorption there's this uh cognitive flexibility and the third thing is dissociation so you let go of what this means for who you think you are and you just kind of do it you can detach yourself now people spontaneously dissociate in situations of stress or trauma for example this can't be happening to me and you know many uh rape victims uh experience the rape as if they're floating above their bodies feeling sorry for what's happening to the person below and that can be protective it can keep you from having to engage in the worst aspects of a traumatic situation when it's happening but you can induce that with hypnosis now we normally dissociate to a certain extent right now you're having Sensations in your bottom touching the chair across from me but hopefully you were not even aware of that until I mentioned it to you if you were we can stop the interview now and you know yeah um so we do that as a way of allocating our attention resources where we want and not where we don't want and in hypnosis you intensify those three things and that allows you to concentrate intently to have profound effects on mind and body um and and to alter your approach to problems so that's what hypnosis is it's a naturally occurring experience it doesn't just happen when I dangle a watch and find we don't you know digital watches don't dangle very well anyway so we don't do that but um it's a it's a an unusual state that many people can get into and people who are hypnotizable get into naturally so people who are more hypnotizable get lost in sunsets you know they uh get absorbed in movies they miss dinner because they're so busy working on something that capacity to deeply allocate your attentional resources is something that happens in hypnosis yeah I definitely want to put a pen and drill down on this notion of hypnotizability but prior to that sure um as we're kind of defining what we what we mean when we talk about hypnosis what you just described is clinical hypnosis right we're mostly familiar with this idea of of stage hypnosis The Parlor trick version of it that you know is the is the ire of your existence I'm sure um but how are these two things different and you know sort of talk a little bit about maybe that's a a larger discussion about the history of this modality sure well it might be that might be a good way to frame it uh Rich because hypnosis is the oldest western conception of a Psychotherapy it's the first time that a talking interaction uh was thought to have therapeutic potential and it started 250 years ago with Franz Anton Messmer in in Austria he thought that he he would provoke what looked like seizures he would take people next to the what they called packets full of metal filings with a slight magnetic field and they would start to shake and some would faint and he would use it to treat a whole variety of well we would then we would call psychiatric and medical problems he became very popular in Vienna so of course he left his wife and family there and moved to Paris where he started competing with these French Physicians of the day and you know uh Voltaire wrote to his brother when his father was dying we did everything we could to save father's life we even sent the doctors away and the main treatment in France at the time was bloodletting so if you stayed away from a French doctor by going to Mesmer you would do better and he became very popular in Paris but his theory about why it happened was criticized correctly that the the hypnotist doesn't project a magnetic field on someone wasn't it also about moving fluids into balance yes that's right so rearranging the the balance of magnetically charged fluids in the body and it's the hypnosis magnetism could he called it animal magnetism at the time so the theory uh the phenomenon was interesting the theory was wrong he was have examined that King Louie's behest by a French panel of experts that included our own Benjamin Franklin who was having a lot of fun in Paris at the time right the brilliant French chemist laboisier who discovered you know this defined oxygen chemistry and also invented the concept of the gross national product shortly before he was beheaded in the French Revolution hence the term mesmerized mesmerized that's it and the other person on the panel was a guy uh well known for his work on um on separating the Mind from the body Guillotine Dr guillotem Who invented the guillotine was also on this panel wow he created the mind-body problem in a sense and and so that was a damaging blow to hypnosis for for many many decades and was that a scenario in which Mesmer would go to kind of fancy dinner parties and and and do it in you know kind of highfalutin groups of high society Mesmer was not a stage hypnotist he was he was a dedicated healer and one of the things that would notify that was was noted about his offices where that they were cheerful and bright and there would be other patients teaching new patients about what they learned uh unlike French Physicians who had these dark Grim bare offices that you kind of felt like you were going to get sicker there and in Mesmer he created this positive expectation he was not a stage hypnotist but it led his work led to stage hypnosis and these guys one trick that most people don't realize that they do you know they make it seem that they could do this to anybody and they can get the football coach dancing like a ballerina or somebody quacking like a duck or lying between stiff between two chairs they always screen a large number of people and they bring them up they try out a few things most of them go back and sit down or they'll say to somebody in the audience when they give a suggestion to the audience if you noticed your neighbor reacting a lot let me know and so what they do is they go through the large number of people to get to the 10 or 15 percent who are very hypnotizable and that's when the real show begins so the first half of it is just screening for hypnotizability and getting those people up there and then you can do the more extreme things but as you mentioned I don't like it it makes fools out of people um it sometimes can be uh damaging or upsetting um my my late father who was a Pioneer in hypnosis starting in the middle of the last century um I had a woman a neurologist called him up and said Herbert you are going to see this patient this morning because she was found wandering in the streets of Manhattan at 2 15 in the morning and she's in some kind of weird mental state and I don't know what it is but see her and fix her you know and it turned out that the trick in the stage hypnosis show was that she was holding an imaginary bird cage and it was a little birdie in it and she was reacting just that way and it always going great and then he said now imagine that we're opening the door and the bird will fly away and she stood there and she started to shake I mean it sounds pretty innocent right and she said the bird won't fly away the bird won't fly away and um she got more and more anxious and panicked and was clearly spoiling the show so he just got her off the stage and she's wandering around you know Midtown Manhattan at two o'clock in the morning and it turned out that this apparently innocent suggestion um to her was a reminder of who she was she was the trophy wife of a very wealthy man and she felt like a bird in a gilded cage and so when she decided and people learn things about themselves when they engage in hypnotic experiences like this she sort of visualized that and it was an important thing for her to know but not under those circumstances and and the practitioner didn't exit her out of the hypnotic state so she was in a persistent state of hypnosis wandering around wow coupled with the upset it sort of crystallizing what she kind of knew about herself but hadn't really faced so you know my father was able to bring her out of the hypnotic State and discuss whether what it meant and how to get help for it now I don't I don't you know I don't want to present that as saying this is what happens every time somebody else uses hypnosis it's not dangerous it is hypnosis is just a state of Highly focused attention so things can go wrong in that state but then go wrong in a lot of other states too but it's one reason that I'm not wild about stage hypnosis because these guys have no clinical responsibility at all or something happens so uh I just I think it does give hypnosis in bed I mean people are intrigued by it that's good but it gives it a bad name as it should it does have that veneer of of being some kind of snake oil Carnival Barker type of situation your work is really about disabusing people of that notion and you know not for nothing I mean your dad really was the pioneer of this field and I was looking into him a little bit I know that he treated Sipple and he was kind of the toast of the town and would dinette Elaine's like he seems like he was quite the guy yeah he was he said he didn't go to Broadway Theater because what happens in his office is more interesting you know but most of the theater people came to a Lanes afterwards anyways so he saw him there yeah but interestingly it seems like uh it's not a case in which you grew up uh you know thinking you were gonna pursue this craft as well this science as well especially at least it was interesting I'll tell you a story when I I published a book some years ago living beyond limits that had talked about treating cancer patients and some about hypnosis Terry Gross was interviewing me on fresh air and she said you know I happen to know that your father is a well-known hypnotist um did he ever try to hypnotize you when you were a child you know suddenly she got journalistic on me and I said to her Terry I don't think so she said okay okay we're done with it but well you kind of dodged the question though of um whether or not your dad was hypnotizing you oh no he wasn't he was and you know there are a couple of things at least not that I remember right uh but no but I was very interested in the dinner table conversations I mean it was kind of fun to listen to this and every once in a while when he'd be film making a movie of a patient he had a patient who had what we now called um non-epileptic of epilepsy where you don't actually have a seizure focus in the brain but you act like you're having a seizure and um she was just having these events at any time anywhere her husband's desk at the factory near their home was moved to be near the door so he could run home and help her so they filmed my father hypnotizing her and inducing one of these teachers and you know the the the story is maybe you can't stop it but you can start it and that's the way of teaching you control over this mind-body relationship so he had her do that and I'm watching her you know like a fish flopping um on the on the sofa there I'm thinking this is this is pretty interesting so I was I was attracted to it although of course I tried everything else first but my parents my mother is also a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst um and uh my parents told me that I was free to be any kind of psychiatrist I wanted to be so I took him up on it right here I am right and yeah here you are I mean you you sort of ventured West you started with a focus on philosophy that's right going to medical school you venture to San Francisco thinking it'll be a short-term thing and you've been at Stanford for quite some time that's right yeah I just I couldn't couldn't go back I loved it I loved it out here right so so talk a little bit about um the you mentioned the my mind-body connection and I think that's a really important point in broadening our understanding of this world of hypnosis well you know uh you know you mentioned snakehold earlier and one of the things that really troubles me saddens me about the way hypnosis has been understood and treated is you know there have been a lot of problems with medications too you know we have 60 000 opioid overdose deaths in the United States last year medications have their problems too and I'm a physician I use medications I'm not against that but you know we the major evolutionary Advantage we have as humans is this big brain on the top of our bodies it's connected to every organ in the body and but we it doesn't come with a user's manual and so we don't take full advantage of what it can do and we underestimate we tend to think that the real treatments in medicine are ingestion injection or incision you know that the body is like a broken car you just replace the part and everything will be fine and otherwise you're not really doing anything you're just talking to the person and I'll tell you rich the day that I really that turned me around about this I was a um a third year medical student um at Harvard I was in pediatric rotation the nurse says to me Spiegel your next patient is in room 342 and I'm following the sound of the wheezing down the hall and there's this 15 year old girl redhead bolt upright Knuckles white struggling for breath you could hear the wheezing her mother standing there crying they had tried to use subcutaneous epinephrine twice it didn't work they were thinking about general anesthesia and starting her on steroids and I didn't know what else to do so I said you want to learn a breathing exercise and she nods and I had take started a hypnosis course and so I got her hypnotized and then I realized we hadn't gone to asthma in the course yet so I came up with a very clever idea I said each Breath You Take will be a little deeper and a little easier and within five minutes she's lying back in bed her Knuckles aren't white her mother's not crying she's breathing almost normally and the nurse ran out of the room my intern comes to find me and I figure he's going to Pat me on the back and say good job speaker how would you do you know he said the nurse filed a complaint with the nursing supervisor that you violated Massachusetts law by hypnotizing a minor without parental consent and you know Massachusetts has a lot of weird laws but that's not on the list and her mother was standing next to me when I did it so he says to me you're going to have to stop doing it and so I mean this just observing that I think you know there is something here there's something to this the brain can really control what's going on in the body even in rather extreme circumstances so they told me that it was dangerous and I said you're going to put her on steroids and put her under general anesthesia and am I talking to her is dangerous you know and he said well you may not be able to follow her and I said well I'll you know I'm in Boston I'll follow her as long as it's not necessary and he said you got to stop doing it I said I'll tell you what as long as she's my patient I'm not going to tell her anything I know is not true so if you want to take me off the case go ahead but otherwise I'm not so there was a council of War among the my intern the resident the chief resident and the attending that weekend and they came back on Monday with a radical idea never been tried before they said let's ask the patients she said I like this you know and and that just that observation that just something I said to her that using this simple straightforward undangerous technique could produce such a radical change in such a short time really hooked me I mean I you know I'd learned a lot a fair amount about hypnosis growing up but nothing like this where you see it happen and and that I think is one of the tremendous advantages right now um is that you will know very quickly whether it's going to help you or not doesn't help everybody but it helps a lot of people and you can feel it right away which is unusual among psychotherapies even among medications often takes a while to to feel the effect it's interesting that that breath is such a core critical kind of conduit to achieving these states so talk a little bit about the impact of breath I mean breath is interesting you're talking about voluntary and involuntary actions you know the distinction between the conscious mind and the unconscious mind breath is sort of unique in that we we you know it we breathe no matter what we what you know what we do our body will take care of that but we can kind of override that and control that as well it's one of I don't know how many other kind of physiological you know biomechanical you know things that fall into that category that's exactly right it's a very astute observation and I'm researching that now with my colleague and friend Andrew huberman we've we've got some funding to study breath work and compare it to other forms of uh Mind Body Control and you're exactly right that the interesting thing I mean the centers for breath control are right at the at the tip of the spinal cord so between the brain and the spinal cord so they're also right at the edge of conscious versus unconscious control so as you said we can consciously control our breathing but we usually don't and um it seems to me to be a pathway into this mind-body connection just because it's at that Tipping Point between conscious and unconscious and because also the way we breathe affects our autonomic nervous system so if if you think like your heart for a minute when you inhale you inhale by reducing pressure expanding the diaphragm down expanding the rib cage and so you pull in because you create a bit of a vacuum hair into your lungs that also reduces blood flow um to the heart because it's coming up through the vena cava into the heart and it slows it down a bit so the the sonoatrial node says wait a minute there's less blood coming we better speed up heart rate and blood pressure so you get a bit of a pump of your sympathetic nervous system and then when you exhale you increase pressure you increase return to the heart and so the parasympathetic the self-soothing system that opposes the sympathetic nervous system kicks in and and slows down your heart rate and your blood pressure we do this all the time the it's called respiratory sinus arrhythmia and it is a actually a very good measure of Health the capacity to self-soothe can you turn on that parasympathetic system when you need it and if you breathe in certain ways one is called cyclic sign where if you do this you inhale part way hold it fill your lungs and then slowly exhale what you're doing is privileging your parasympathetic over your sympathetic nervous system and it's a nice natural relaxation experience and Andrew and I have found that it actually improves mood and makes people feel more rested when when they do it so we think there are ways of controlling your breathing that can enhance your capacity to self-soothe and what is it about breath that helps induce this hypnotic State well it's not necessary but typically um when I do a hypnotic induction I combine looking up and closing your eyes with taking a deep breath and slowly exhaling and I think in part it's triggering this self-soothing parasympathetic response because one of the things you can get all aroused in hypnosis but typically the arousal even if it's mental arousal doesn't necessarily bring with it physical arousal and that's how hypnosis is a very good stress reduction technique because you can be facing something that makes you anxious but you can still be having a physical experience of being comfortable you can dissociate your mental from your physiological arousal and so the breath is a way of helping to speed the transition into a state where whatever it is you're focusing on or concentrating on your body can feel relaxed and comfortable and that begins to teach you how to control stress and what do we know and and perhaps uh have yet to learn about what's going on uh neurochemically in the brain when you induce a hypnotic State like what are the brain what aspects of the brain are being turned on turned off Etc we've been studying that for the past decade and um we've discovered some things that that really begin to make a lot of sense uh and one of them I'll talk first about neural function in the brain and then neurochemistry one of the things that happens when somebody goes into a hypnotic state is that they turn down activity in the dorsal anterior cingulate the salience network the way to think about the Cingular gyrus is it's a bundle of nerves that looks like a c on its end here and it it goes under this arable cortex and over the limbic system and this part here in the front the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex is part of the salience network it's part of the brain that is a context detector and it tells you should I pay attention or not and so if a loud noise suddenly happens you startle and you go turn your attention to where it is social media is very good at using this you know they they'll float something by you that sounds a little scary or threatening and you suddenly you know detach from what you were paying attention to and do that's the salience network in hypnosis you turn down activity in that brain region and in fact in another study we looked at the prevalence of neurotransmitter activity in those regions and you see more Gaba activity in the anterior cingulate of people who were very hypnotizable so they they have more ability to inhibit it's an inhibitory neurotransmitter it's one that is activated by anti-anxiety drugs um and there's greater ability there because of the higher prevalence of this inhibitory neurotransmitter to inhibit the salience activity so it's one thing that helps you concentrate intently you're less likely to worry about what else you might be thinking of or are thinking about the second thing that happens is hire what we call functional connectivity that's if one region is active the other region is active that region is inactive the other region tends to be inactive between the dorsal lateral prefrontal cortex on the left which is part of the executive control Network it's the part of my brain I'm hopefully using now as I'm describing this to you and the insula that's another part of the salience network that's a major mind-body pathway so it helps your brain control what's happening in your body control gastrointestinal function control autonomic activity and so you have a greater ability in hypnosis to control what's happening in your body like that 15 year old girl with her asthma attack the third thing that happens is you have inverse functional connectivity so when one region is active the other is inactive between the executive control Network and the posterior part of the cingulate cortex that's what we have called the default mode Network and it's a part of the brain that's active when you're thinking about yourself when you're reflecting on who you are and what it means it's a part of the brains that where activity goes down in experienced meditators and of course part of meditation is to sort of detach from your selfness you know to just experience things and not judge them or see what they mean for you and that's a mechanism of dissociation in hypnosis so we found that a lot of things that we know from the phenomenology of hypnosis are actually happening in specific regions of the brain that should control that kind of activity and is this the result of fmri testing that you've been able to discern all of this yeah we've screened hundreds and hundreds of uh thank the fully Cooperative Stanford students and picked out the ones who on formal testing are very high and very low in hepatizability we get put them in the scanner the highs and the lows we give them hypnotic instructions and we see what happens in the brains only of the high hypnotizables and only when they're in the hypnotic conditions and that's what enabled us to observe what's going on in the brain and on that subject of hypnotizability uh let's talk a little bit more about that I mean first how do you determine whether somebody has a high receptivity to it and secondarily to that like is that sort of a pre a preset that people come into the world with is it malleable is it something that can be shifted with technique um we're doing some research now that that adds to another body of research over the last decade or so showing that there does seem to be a genetic component to hypnotizability um that particularly people with a certain um uh polymorphism um of uh the the production of dopamine a neurotransmitter that's prominent in the prefrontal cortex and throughout the brain um uh if they produce just enough so this is an enzyme catecholomethyl transferase it's an enzyme that metabolizes dopamine and if you if you're at a point where you don't metabolize it too quickly or too slowly those people seem to be more highly hypnotizable and related people people with in general genetic commonalities tend to be more similarly hypnotizable than people who are unrelated and so there is some evidence that it may have to do with this genetic variation in neurotransmitter metabolism but um there's also evidence um Josephine Hilgard published a book called personality hypnosis where she looked at the early life histories of former Stanford students of Stanford students and found that higher hypnotizability was associated with one positive and one negative thing imaginative involvements children who had been raised to have imaginative involvements their parents read stories to them every night they played games in their imagination turn out to be more highly advertisable but sadly also children who have been physically and sexually abused are more highly hypnotizable and it may be that it's a kind of protective defense mechanism if you're going through terrible experiences right because they developed the ability to disassociate when their brain was still malleable that's exactly right I had one patient who said I just go to a mountain Meadow full of wildflowers when my father and his friends were abusing me you know that's the way she did with it and so uh there's a developmental part of it but the other part of the story is that most children are highly hypnotizable right that's what I was thinking because they're less calcified in their neural Pathways that's that's part of it and because they're for children you know knowledge and emotion and experience are all kind of one thing you know it's why work is play for kids you know it's a shame that we make them into little adults because they love doing whatever it is they're doing they just get fully engaged hypnotically in a way and whatever they're doing and you call your eight-year-old in for dinner and she doesn't hear you she's out doing whatever she does in adolescence when we develop what the psychologist Piaget used to call formal operations where you kind of privilege logic over experience many people lose to some degree that hypnotizability and by the time you're 20 21 the level you have is what you're going to have 25 years later and um they did a study at Stanford in which they blindly retested students um and at 25 years after they've taken their psych one class and found that there was a 0.7 correlation between their original hypnotizability and the one they had at age 45 or 46. is that zimbardo yeah did you really I was not part of that code you weren't part of that cohort did he did he read the his I mean remember yes that's right you were there in the 80s you were uh at Stanford well you know so what it suggests is that once you get into early adulthood it's a very stable trait it just doesn't change very much and and so some people who retain it I think have brains that have been um uh have grown into a a relationship particularly between and we've done some neuroimaging on this too the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and the anterior cingulate and people the students we studied who were more highly hypnotizable had more functional connective activity between the executive control and the salience networks than the low hypnotizables so when they thought about something they tended to coordinate that with the part of the brain that says is this worth thinking about or not whereas and it's interesting if you see really low hypnotizable people as adults and I see a lot of them they come to me they want to be hypnotized and they're not hypnotizable they're very critical and and they evaluate things carefully and they argue and they raise questions which is all good but it's a kind of non-hypnotic way of responding right it's it's sort of an external external evidence of uh non-hypnotizability through character traits right just being kind of skeptical and defensive perhaps a little bit that's yeah that's exactly right but you've developed this test the Spiegel test right to kind of easily in a facile way determine uh hypnotizability will you indulge me in taking me through this sure I'd be glad to well the first part um my father observed he used to have people um you know look up at the ceiling get a light on the ceiling and close their eyes and actually he noticed that the woman I mentioned earlier who was extremely hypnotizable and having these seizures these pseudoseizures that when she looked up he noticed that all he could see was the sclera the whites of her eyes he couldn't see her Iris or her pupil at all and his next patient the following Monday was a very rigid obsessional lawyer who just you know fought him every bit of the way he had him look up and the guy had to bring his eyes back down and he was not at all hypnotizable so my father started measuring and and there seemed to be a a modest but real correlation between this measurement that he called the eye roll and and the rest of the test which only takes about five minutes but measures hypnotic experience and behavior so I do the whole test with every patient that I see um to determine how hypnotizable they are so I can I can see for a start if you want to see what you're gonna take my glasses off or I can leave it on oh you can leave them on it all right so look up all the way up past your eyebrows keep looking up and slowly close your eyes close so you would be open you would be about a two out of four I can see about half Iris and he has Clara and but there's a bit of a convergence that usually adds a point your your left eye tends to to converge to the middle when you yeah I have a weak left eye yeah I could see that but um so you're you'd be a two or three so you'd be in a sort of mineral to high but not extremely high range would be my guess just from that now there's the rest of the test I can do it if you want to see formally how hypnotizable you are right interesting what is it about the the optic nerve I mean obviously the optic nerve is part of the brain but you know that test on a surface level feels very you know kind of correlative but not necessarily you know causative right right so how you know what what is that relationship between site seems to be very important Well site is important and I think you know part of why I ask people to look up and close their eyes is I want them to be alert and awake but turning inward we're used to going to sleep when we close our eyes so the idea that you can be reflective and intensely concentrating but your eyes are closed means that you're cutting off your scanning awareness you know as we're pretty pathetic creatures in in the in the animal world and one way that we keep our ourselves alive is by scanning the visual environment to see if there are any threats and with hypnosis you're kind of trusting the outside world to leave you alone and turning inwards so part of it is that just closing your eye looking up closing your eyes and there's an old zen practice called looking at the third eye where it's part of meditation and you look up and close your eyes but there are other things about the neurophysiology of eye movement the third fourth and sixth cranial nerve nuclei the control eye movement and control the lowering of the eyelid and that are involved in the the exercise that I did with you just now are also surrounded by the reticular activating system which is a part of the brain stem and the lower part of the brain that it modulates arousal and drugs that affect um level of arousal also affect eye movement so if you take barbiturates you get nystagmus your eyes move back and forth like this they control the size of the pupils so stimulates enhance the size of the pupil opioids constrict the pupil and so there's a lot about arousal that is very closely linked to eye movement and that I think is one reason that these two may be connected with respect to the other senses though and and thinking about hypnosis in terms of absorption and suggestibility uh I can't help but think about sense memory and how powerful things like smell or hearing a song that you haven't heard for a very long time that can evoke a very specific vivid memory like how do those other senses play into this kind of personality well what they show is that they can't you know what we're doing with this eye movement test is just seeing what it tells us about your ability to manipulate these other things but we have plenty of evidence that hypnosis can be used to alter perception somatosensory perception visual perception auditory perception and we did one study where we um showed a group of Highly hypnotizable people a color grid like a Mondrian painting and had them in hypnosis drain the color out of the color grid and after a while they said yeah it looks black white and gray to me and then we showed them some black white and gray grids and said make them colorful and they did that and they could convincingly to themselves see it differently and what we found using pet was that there was when they were draining the color they turned down activity in the lingual infusiform gyride in the occipital cortex that process color vision and when they were adding color to the black and white grid they increased activity in those same regions so they could change it in both directions and I call that my believing a seeing experiment you know that with hypnosis you can get highly hypnotizable people to literally change their perception of color right and it's not just the reporting it looks different they see it differently yeah and we've seen the same thing using EEG on on pain perception and others uh at the University of Montreal there's a very good research group here rainville that has taught people to use hypnosis to reduce pain so you administer some shocks and you say your hand is an ice water in hypnosis and they turn down activity in the somatosensory cortex where you process ultimately sensation and if you use different words in hypnosis you say well the Pain's here but it won't bother you which is sort of what people on opioids feel you turn down activity in the anterior cingulate cortex and you still get analgesia so you can use hypnosis to change not just how the brain reacts to things but how the brain processes things you experience them differently prophets Walk Among Us as a writer and podcaster for nearly 10 years I've become more convinced than ever that our world is populated by scores of beautiful and brilliant people who have amazing stories to share those that we don't know who can teach us something new and leave us all the better for the experience of their sharing and so I've dedicated my career to tracking down the most compelling profits on the planet going deep with each of them on my podcast to elucidate the best of what they have to offer and to sharing the insights gleaned for the benefit of all but the podcast is not the only medium by which to share their stories which is why I'm proud to announce the release of my new book voicing change volume 2. more than mere words on paper voicing change is a physical manifestation of the magic inspiration and Timeless wisdom that transpires each week on the ritual podcast the first edition of voicing change was a beautifully rendered book worthy of display on any coffee table and volume 2 follows in that tradition by showcasing even more of my favorite conversations in an elegant publication replete with interview excerpts essays and stunning photography making for an Exquisite companion to the first volume or a satisfying Standalone work picking up this book allows you to revisit the wisdom of your favorite everyday Prophets physically interact with the life-changing ideas contained with that voicing change volume 2 available now while supplies last for a limited time order your copy today only at richroll.com it's utterly fascinating and of course the the dark side of my personality can't help but think about The Manchurian Candidate you know example of how this could be you know weaponized for nefarious means um you know I I you know the the sort of what you're what you're taught in you know grade one hypnosis training is oh no people would never do anything that they otherwise wouldn't do I would like to think that but look you know we live in a country where you know a substantial minority of the population actually thinks that Trump won the presidential election you know um so it is entirely possible for us human beings to succumb to social influence and believe things that are just flat out not true um that's a little scary it goes beyond hypnosis but if you know it does suggest that it's a mass hypnosis of sorts I think I think so I think it was I pay attention to something else it's like a giant you know big stage stage hypnosis you know and you look at what happens in those rallies and what people will go for you know when somebody tells them this is the right thing to do and this is what must happen and all this it's a little scary but it's not hypnosis fault you know leave my specialty out of this but I I do think um so is there a Manchurian Candidate thing possible sure do um I don't think it happens very often and I do think people are capable of resisting um even in a hypnotic circumstance um doing something that they feel deeply is wrong but on the other hand we all get you know we've all had that it seemed like a good idea at the time experience you know and you wonder what the hell was I thinking when I did that and so I I think anything that has the power to help has the power to hurt in a clinical hypnosis setting is there a sense of how long you can create a persistent hypnotic state does it wear off with time or can somebody kind of remain in that state indefinitely well I know a few people may have but I um let me put it this way um I I have to I can answer that question in two ways typically in in the sort of formal sense if I hypnotize somebody in my office they were very hypnotizable they're in a trance and I get called away and forget to come back or something usually the worst thing will happen is they'll eventually fall asleep and when they wake up they'll be out of the state some people can begin to wonder what's going on and bring themselves out but the other side of that coin is look what I do to put someone into a hypnotic state if they're hypnotizable is pretty straightforward very fast easy to do and so that means that people who have that ability go into those States like that all the time anyway and they come out of them so uh there's a great psychologist at University of Minnesota called Rocky telegan who developed an absorption scale it's a measure of how often you get caught up in sunsets or movies you forget to come home for dinner you just get totally engaged and absorbed and those people when they're tested formally are more hypnotizable than those who don't have these high absorption scores so what it suggest is you know what it's happening all the time anyway people who are hypnotizable are going into hypnotic-like States getting absorbed and engaged and then coming out of them again we we associate hypnosis with pinwheels and you know watches swaying back and forth and all the like I feel like hypnosis needs clinical hypnosis needs a bit of a rebranding to bring it into the 21st century like if you called it something else like the neuro-absorption protocol or something like that I feel like it would it would it would have attraction that uh it it kind of is in need of you know you're really good at this rich and if you have some good advice um like beating the dead horse of this term hypnosis well here's the thing though I I mean I'm the term I'm playing around with in my head is transformation but with a c not with an S I like that that it's a it's a way of of making transforming yourself making changes in a hurry and using the state um and I on the other hand there's a sort of a impish part of me that is saying you know maybe we ought to just say folks hypnosis dangerously effective you know that uh if people are a little you know a little bit scared of it they might actually pay more attention to it so and I've tried using other terms but you know when I do it everybody says come on you're talking about hypnosis give me a break you know so I I hear what you're saying and I I think we have a problem but I don't know whether we make the problem better by trying to call it something else or by acknowledging what it is but expanding upon what it is yeah interesting transformation I like that you like it well let's talk about use cases uh you mentioned pain management opioid addiction there are you know I think most people associate hypnosis or at least the efficacy of it with smoking cessation you know we're in Los Angeles there's lots of kind of quote unquote like celebrity hypnotists people pay in unbelievable amount of money to go see these people to quit smoking I don't know whether those people fall into the category of of being legitimate clinical hypnotists but there are you know there's a wide spectrum of use cases here so let's talk about that for a few sure I'd be glad to well certainly uh I I can save some of these wealthy people in La a lot of money by saying you know we we do this on reverie our hypnosis happened there we did choose a different name by the way we didn't call it a hypnosis app but it's you know r-e-v-e-r-i and we have interactive digital hypnosis there where we treat pain we treat stress we help people focus their attention more we help them control um uh trouble sleeping insomnia trouble eating um and smoking control we help people stop smoking we get one out of five people just using the app stop smoking now it's not everybody but that's definitive sounds pretty good it compares favorably with a lot of other things I I had one we're doing a number of studies on this now and I had one uh woman came in we do a careful evaluation in the study and she sort of at first didn't like it when we taught it to her but she went home and she did the exercise and she said cigarette who wants that and she said I haven't smoked a cigarette since and she said this is some crazy ass Voodoo [ __ ] and I mean that in a good way she said you know that's amazing and she she said her friends are amazed that she stopped and she's helping her friend stop so it can be a place where you turn a corner where you can just because you concentrate intently you're cognitively flexible you're dissociating from your usual pattern of associations that lead you to have another cigarette that you can focus on respecting and protecting your body rather than fighting smoking um one of one of the strategies that hypnotists are pretty good at is saying to patients the worst thing I could do is tell you don't think about purple elephants right what are you thinking about so if you tell yourself don't smoke what do you want to do you want to smoke but if I tell you to think about your body as if it were a trusting innocent child that had to take into it anything you put into it even if it were damaged by it um that's a whole different way of thinking about it and you can feel good about yourself right away you're not depriving yourself you're protecting and respecting your body and that's something you can be for and that's something you've written about and talked about a lot that you you know came to a turning point about how you were treating your body and how your body was treating you and everything changed when you did that yeah the the solution's a little bit different though but I think what's interesting about addiction and perhaps this is related to pain management is there is a physiological thing occurring in your body that's creating discomfort right whether it's the the chemical craving for the substance or the the you know neural impulse that's creating the pain um that somehow is being overridden by this hypnotic practice well you know part of it is that for pain for example our brains are used to treating all pain as if it were acute pain you know if you've just broken your ankle you better know about it and do something about it but after a while you know even as it's healed and moving it doesn't necessarily do any damage your brain tends to react in the same way it learns that something really bad happened to your ankle and you better do something about it um and so it's partly learning teaching your brain how to reinterpret the peripheral input so that you're it's not you know it becomes like the you know the the loudest kid in the classroom you know you just pay more attention to them even though you don't want to I saw a lovely woman yesterday I hadn't met before who had a terrible car accident like 30 years ago has had 10 surgeries on her legs as a result has back pain and it's just frustrated beyond words and his is on a bunch of um uh you know oxycodone and other opioid treatments why they're telling or get off them because you're going to get addicted which happens and she herself was a clinical hypnotist and she said I help a lot of other people but I can't seem to help myself and I she was moderately hypnotizable when we started her pain was six out of ten which she said I can sort of tolerate but if it gets to seven or eight I can't and she has a bath her insurance company gave her a walk-in bath because she has to get around with a walker now I said you're in your bath you're warm tingling numb feel your body floating and um and I said there's one other thing I want you to think about I'm suspecting that you're pretty angry at your body and she said you bet I am and I said well you know she had actually two new grandchildren and I said if your little granddaughter were in pain and we're crying what would you do would you get angry at her she said hell no I'd you know hug her and comfort her and soothe her until she felt better and I said good that's what you're going to do for your body and so I want you to imagine comforting your body the way you comfort your great granddaughter and within a few minutes like 10 minutes the pain was down to two and she said I can live with that wow and and she you know she was sort of surprised but she wasn't I mean she does hypnosis for a living but she couldn't do it for herself right right right and but part of it is also the strategy it's not just you know can you change it but how do you approach the problem and again I want it to be what you're for not what you're against so she was she was able to do it and and felt you know much better than she had a few minutes earlier and it seems like a big piece in that strategy is this idea of self-love and self-respect that's right yeah that's right you know you know I I had a cancer patient who said you know I used to treat my body like it was my dog you know sit here go over there do this do that you know and when I got cancer I realized it wasn't listening to me anymore and one you know you you feel frustrated anxious but you know we'd rather mostly be mad than said we'd rather you know be angry at something that should be better or different than than realistically assess what's going on and part of what we don't fully live as if we understood is that we are in full charge of our bodies and they'll do things they'll the body can make you feel bad but you can make the body feel bad and if you can learn to treat it with respect the way you would any other creature that depended upon you you'll live better within your body and your body will help you live better too and does that strategy hold true for other use cases like you mentioned the asthma story or uh you know Sleep Disorders what about you know obsessive thoughts OCD trauma um with trauma for sure that's um uh in part because people are in dissociative States when they're traumatized and when you get things like post-traumatic stress disorder and this is not a sort of One-Shot pure situation but one that I use in in treatment um is you get people to think about their traumatic experience from a different point of view we know that most of the treatments for PTSD involve what's called exposure-based therapy or cognitive restructuring about the trauma or some combination of the two but you have to reapproach the trauma and given that flashbacks are a symptom of PTSD I've often wondered why not why doesn't the cure itself you know okay you're getting the exposure why aren't you feeling better because you're not in control you're feeling re-attacked by the memory or the flashback the way you were when the trauma happened and so what you need to do is approach it in a way that helps you take control of what you can control and give up the fantasy of control where you can't most people would rather feel guilty than helpless they'd rather blame themselves with the fantasy that somehow I could have prevented it from happening it might not have happened again and and if you can get them to face it but see it from a different point of view while they control their physical reaction they don't feel reassaulted by the memory because they're bringing it on so I had a woman come to see me to use hypnosis because she it was an attempted rape if she was getting dark she was coming home from the store this guy jumped her and wanted to drag her up into her apartment and she couldn't really see his face and she was hoping the hypnosis would help revivify her image of the face and occasionally that can happen but she said I still can't see much but she said you know what I do see and I said your body is safe and comfortable you know you may be remembering this but your body is protected you're not going to be harmed now and she said you know what he didn't just want to rape me he wanted to kill me if he got me up to my apartment and he she followed him so hard he gave her a basil or skull fracture she actually had a seizure and was taken to the hospital afterwards and I said all right now your body is safe I want you to picture on the other side of the screen uh what you did to protect yourself everybody who's in a situation like that comes up with some strategy maybe freeze don't say anything don't antagonize him it may be fighting but they do something but they often don't appreciate what they did and she said you know what he's surprised that I'm fighting so hard he didn't think I would so she came away from that experience with a completely different view of what had happened that not that she got herself hurt and shouldn't have but that she probably saved her own life right and that's the kind of thing you can do with hypnosis you can hold those two thoughts in your mind look at what happened and see it from a new point of view but the key piece being here is is volition right if you're going to revisit trauma PTSD you know without your volition you're being visited by these traumatic events that are kind of enhancing the traumatic experience versus uh you know getting into a state where you can welcome some aspect of that experience in a in a safe environment so that you can work through it yes that's well put and that's uh but you know people worry hypnosis means losing control it doesn't it means enhancing control of your brain end up your experience so part of what gives truth to what they're experiencing is they're feeling in control when they're doing it and they're saying you know I know what I could control I can I have to face what I couldn't control and part of what is so damaging about trauma why people have post-traumatic stress disorder why one out of four combat veterans comes back with PTSD is that you feel trauma is the experience of being made into an object a thing the victim of Nature's indifference somebody else's rage um and so that means you're stuck in one view of who you are and the minute you think about it you feel like you are once again an object with no control and with hypnosis and in Psychotherapy you're parsing that experience to say yes there were aspects you did not control but there were aspects you did and here's what you did I know you talked about this with Andrew but I think it brings up an interesting discussion in a broader context around how we think about our own exposure to things that perhaps could traumatize us you know we're in a culture of trigger warnings and safe spaces and things like that I just saw it wasn't a Spiegel eye roll but it was a bit of an eye roll um you know and and as a psychiatrist understanding that we have to kind of annure ourselves to exposure on some level as a means of strengthening our resilience our emotional resilience to things that might disturb us I I completely agree with you and I I just think this whole trigger warning thing his his misguided um that is you have to you know life is full of tragedy and misery you know as we know all too well if you just you know gaze at a newspaper listen to the news every once in a while people are suffering you know lethal assaults on their countries all kinds of horrible things are happening a million Americans died of covid in the last couple of years I mean there were terrible things happening and you can't just have live in this happy fantasy that things aren't happening it's a matter of how you face it and if you think about the fact that what we've just discussed that the main treatment for PTSD so these are people who have been traumatized who are very symptomatic is not to have them avoid and run away from it get a trigger warning don't think about this it's to have them face it in a controlled supportive thoughtful way and frankly that's the only way we humans are going to survive we have to face our own vulnerabilities and you know the term trigger warning is an unfortunate one because you know triggers are causing a lot of the trauma uh that we're facing now by the time an American child has grown up they've seen 20 000 people killed mostly with guns on television um and uh yet they're desensitized to it because almost all of those situations are ones in which you don't care about the person who's killed you know the cops got the bad guy kind of thing so we desensitize people to real tragic horrifying trauma uh and you know there's a big debate now about should we show these poor children who have been killed show what's left of their bodies after one of these exploding bullets hits them and I think we're sanitizing it too much you know it's painful to see it but we damn well ought to know what's happening to people and the fact that there are 400 million firearms in this country and 330 million people um and that it's a leading cause of death among young people now is gun deaths we've got to face that we've got to do something about it yeah perhaps it's a different form of of psyop or mass hypnosis the extent to which we we've been you know kind of inoculated against the horrors of of that type of activity you're exactly right we're sanitizing it and we shouldn't you know at least face it see what you're doing let's talk about Amnesia I think there's an interesting discussion to be had around memory and and hypnosis people that you know perhaps they've they've gone through some sort of traumatic experience they can't remember it and hypnosis being a vehicle for recapturing lost memory yes it's um that's the dissociative part of hypnosis where you can sort of disconnect your memory of a certain experience particularly and often because it arouses very strong emotion that you have trouble understandably dealing with and so one form of emotion regulation is to just keep the content out of Consciousness so that you don't get so upset when you when you remember it and you know to some extent we all have you know um uh dissociation or loss of memory of things you know you you may have had the experience of going back you go back to Stanford and you look around the buildings you were in and you may start remembering things that you hadn't thought of sure you know why do we do that why do we go back for reunions you know to to see people but also to stir up memories again so that isn't formal dissociative Amnesia but it is the case that the sort of lack of cues that would link you to a given memory may make the memory harder to recover on the other hand there are situations where people literally lose recollection for hours or days people who are in the World Trade Center attack many of them couldn't recall events that happened and it was probably a good thing because at the time they also narrowed the focus of attention I treated one woman who was getting out of the the second tower that fell and she's telling herself I just want to put one foot in front of the other and if I get to the ground floor I'll be okay and when she did the other building collapsed and she was blown through a window but managed to survive wow and she was angry at herself she said I lied to myself I wasn't really safe well of course she wasn't really safe but the best thing she could do her survival technique was to just focus on what she could do and that's one step in front of the other going down the stairs and so we do that so the experience was encoded in this in this way there's been research for example about people who are the victims of shootings or armed robberies and the cops asked them um what did the guy they give a brilliant description of the gun you know it was a black revolver and it was you know eight inches long whatever it was and they said what'd the guy look like they said I don't know because they're in a hypnotic-like state they're so focused on what's likely to kill them that's all they're paying attention to so some of the Amnesia is you really didn't acquire much information at that right it just didn't imprint right the get-go but in other cases There Was You may remember down not far from here Chowchilla California there was a school bus um uh kidnapping these guys overtook a school bus buried the whole bus with the kids in it in some trench somewhere I don't remember that two days and they fight so they found they they managed to dig their way out and fortunately the kids were okay physically um the bus driver couldn't remember much about the guys the car that overtook the bus he was hypnotized and they asked him to look at the front of the car that was overtaking the bus and say what he could remember about the license plate and only under hypnosis he recalled all of the correct numbers and letters of the license plate in the wrong order wow but that was enough and that led the police to find and arrest the guys and they're running in jail somewhere for having done it so there are times when you know the intensity of the experience will tend to compartmentalize your memories make it harder to access them but not impossible and hypnosis particularly done in a way that reassures people about their current comfort and safety can sometimes help with that yeah there's some debate it seems uh as to the efficacy of of using hypnosis in a court context right you can see you can foresee many situations in which this would be powerful for either the prosecution or the the defense to you know have a hypnotic uh you know induce a witness into a hypnotic state to remember these things or to have them testify as to what occurred during a hypnotic date and introduce that in court is that a state by state thing or what is the court system yeah in most States now California has a decision called people versus Shirley where it was a situation that was the worst possible use of hypnosis this was some guy brought a woman home um uh they they were starting to flirt with one another he goes out and gets them and they had they had sex with one another he goes out to get some more beer uh when he comes back uh she decides that she's been raped I mean it was not a good you know story for a rape conviction the night before she was to go on the stand the assistant district attorney hypnotized her and her story got better that's a textbook case of how not to use him using it to just suggest to people things not to help them recover things and so that's a precedent that's a presence people versus Shirley right so California now the law is that if a witness or victim has been hypnotized they may not testify now I frankly think that's too Draconian because you know if somebody threatens to kill your family if you testify that will influence what you say but those people can testify if somebody's a known liar has lied 15 times like certain prominent politicians we know um they can testify but someone's been you know somebody's dangle a watch in front of them they can't I've testified in a couple of appeals cases in Texas uh in which Witnesses of uh accessories to murder or are of you know somebody outside a house just before somebody was murdered you know she was across the street looking in we're hypnotized and what I found in cases like that is they don't change their story very much and they don't change their conviction all that much and the fact facts tend to support them and I said look you know it could have contaminated the witness but I don't think it did and in most of those cases we've sustained the convictions so it's a difficult area but and where where it's problematic rich is that sometimes police get lazy they say well we don't need to do the Dirty Work of you know getting you know concrete evidence we'll just get somebody hypnotized and that'll take care of it and that's not good right and I I suppose the fear would also be that if you had a witness who is highly hypnotizable and you had a clinical hypnotist with an agenda trying to drive a certain result that that person could push that witness in a certain direction to derive a result that's absolutely right and and the California legislature passed a law that said there were circumstances under which a hypnotized victim or witness May testify and that's if it's done by an independent licensed professional so it's not a member of the police or the uh District Attorney's office if you video record everything that's happened including knowing what the hypnotist knew before um they they conducted the interrogation um that those people may testify if it's done properly interesting um I want to talk about perhaps my favorite use case which is high performance States I know that you worked at some point with the Stanford women's swimming team so I want to hear a little bit about that and have a discussion around kind of enhancing our ability to perform under duress yes sure and I know you're you're good at that stuff so you can tell me what your perspective on it is uh Richard quick who is the coach of the Stanford women's swimming team which is a very good team has been he's one of the all-time greats yeah Richard he passed away but yeah yeah yeah um uh he he called me up and he said look I got a problem um my swimmers are swimming better in practice than they are in Meats their times are better and that tells me that there's some kind of competitive anxiety that's interfering with their performance so what I did was I got together with him and I had them go into a state of hypnosis and imagine swimming your best race you know just doing and you're a swimmer so you know what that's like but the interesting thing about swimming unlike other sports is it's not a contact sport in a sense it doesn't really matter what the person in the next Lane is doing what matters is what you're doing and they got distracted by it they were not so they got out of touch with their body they got out of touch with how they could in fact enact their best strategy to perform at their best and from what I heard they were they were doing better that it helped them refocus on their relationship with their body and their swimming plan not on whatever the girl on the next Lane was doing so did you do that like you performed uh hypnosis in a group setting for them yeah I did how many times did you do that uh I don't remember I think two or three not a whole lot but they said I taught them to do it for themselves right so yeah and we're going to get into self-hypnosis in a bit but just to kind of stay on this for a little bit what's interesting about this foreign the difference between doing this through the modality of hypnosis versus what we would consider to be visualization like I I kind of learned a version of this in high school as a swimmer like you lay down you know and for 10 or 15 minutes you just visualize every piece of the race going you know in in the minutest detail slowing down time so that you can anticipate everything so how is that different qualitatively from uh inducing a hypnotic state to do the same thing essentially to be honest with you I don't think it's all that different I think if you're hypnotizable that kind of relaxed visualization excuse me is a kind of hypnotic experience sorry I'm inside um it um because what you're doing is first of all dissociating your imagery about a very vigorous physical activity from your current physical state right so you're you're dissociating the content from the physical experience of it and you're picturing and I like the sort of time Distortion and other things you did to kind of allow yourself to to micromanage what you would be doing and um so to be honest with you I don't think there's a whole lot of difference between that kind of relaxed imagery that you were doing and hypnosis if you're hypnotizable and what is the relationship between what you just described and and what would be considered like a quote unquote Flow State like talk about marketing they you know who I don't know who came up with the the term Flow State but chick sent me high yeah it's a that's a genius because people love that right it's not a new idea but it's been kind of um uh encapsulated in a notion that's very modern and appealing yeah he did and you know I read the book I like I've heard him talk I I like what he says um he has there are a couple things that are a little different he calls the flow state autotelic that is you you just being in it is enough to make you feel good so it's not just what you do with it but just being there and there's a sense in which that's a component of mindfulness too that you just you know get to a point where you allow yourself to experience things non-judgmentally and you just feel good because you're doing it not because you're doing anything in particular with it um and he he he talks about absorption so that you're totally engaged in what you're doing you're not worried about consequences or outcomes you're just in the experience which shares something with meditation too and but it is true that in hypnosis particularly if you're moderately to highly hypnotizable you do have this sense of just going along with things and enjoying the ride you know you're just letting it happen but you're in control of what's happening I mean that's where people worry about loss of control but you're really enjoying it and controlling it we tend to use hypnosis more to sort of problem solve and flow is meant to be about you know getting engaged in work or pleasurable like experiential experiential yeah um so they're they're related but they're not exactly the same thing in my experience as an endurance athlete uh when I was you know really training hard for some of these crazy long races there would be days where I would literally be out all day like I'd be on my bike for eight or nine hours and the fitter that I got um my relationship with time would change like I would build up to a place where that type of activity didn't seem to be that daunting and didn't seem like it took all day like there was this relationship with time that was very different and I don't know whether it's because of the manner in which breath Works in an elevated kind of aerobic heart rate zone of activity but my experience was that of of a hypnotic State like you could call it a flow state but to me it did feel more hypnotic because of that timepiece there and I'm interested as to whether you've thought a little bit about or whether you've done any work around like endurance activity or physical activity in general and the extent to which that alters your brain State and whether or not that could be considered hypnotic oh I absolutely think it could be considered hypnotic but I'm interested in your language you're very accomplished at these extreme athletic performances but you're still I hear you sort of describing it as though it were I finally got my body to the point where it let me do this where it let me have be able to compress time and see it in another way and I would I'm a psychiatrist this is the clinical psychiatrist coming out I know I love it it's free no no choice um that your brain got to the point where it allowed your body to do what it was doing interesting and you were focusing more on you got to the point and this is where your body lets you do it but you got to the point where even though your body was forming at very high and unusual levels you were able to experience the sort of accomplishment and pleasure of your body in this new kind of motion rather than your body got to the point where you could enjoy it right the relationship with the discomfort changed and that that that state changed in the brain that's not in the body yes yes that's what I would so but what do you think about that I'd be interested in your I mean I think that's that's super interesting of course there's the physical capacity to do the work sure but it's your relationship with that work are you dreading it are you enjoying it are you in a in a kind of relaxed State while you're doing it that's all signaling that's occurring you know between the two ears right right exactly and you know part of it's I mean I'm not saying your body had nothing to do with it had plenty to do with it and your body was by that time well enough trained that you it could allow you to think about what was happening in a different way and not just feeling in pain and I can't do this and I'm out of breath you know you you so you got to a point where you could begin to develop the way your brain managed this transformed body and but it was partly your brain was you know our brains grow and reconfigure every night when we when we go to sleep we you know cut off certain synapses and add others and so our brains change too and so I'm guessing that your your body was in training but so is your brain yeah well I would I would characterize it as being a heightened state of absorption being very absorbed in the activity but perhaps not necessarily disassociated so I mean maybe this is semantics and it gets into a a conversation around the differences between hypnosis Flow State and and also something I want to talk about which is mindfulness okay being present with the state that you're in sure and that's that's different I've heard you characterize the differences being that mindfulness is a practice whereas hypnosis is a tool to solve a problem so talk a little bit about that yes yeah I think it is and I I think um uh partly you got to a point where it was very difficult but it wasn't a struggle you know you weren't worried that your body was going to let you down you're going to get hurt um uh but you also um could kind of you know be the conductor of the symphony not you know and you knew that the players were able to play their pieces properly so it was I it it allowed you to have a certain level of comfort and then impose that level of comfort on your body so it became coordinated not a struggle you're you know you knew your the parts of your body could do what they had to do and you're like and I I've talked to concert pianists who said when I'm if if I actually start thinking well I'm playing about what which finger is going to do what I'm screwed of course right I said so I'm thinking about the tone and the pacing and a lot of and the you know the emotion going along with it that's what I'm thinking about so you've got to have a well-oiled machine that lets you do that you have to be experienced enough with it but you also have to in your brain be in that role of managing it at that level right you know it's not a little struggle it's not you know the first time you're out training it's uh kind of coordinating the symphony in your body um mindfulness um I think is meant to be there's less focus on control and more on sort of lack of control you know just the way you experience emotion is you don't fight it and I think this is a good idea you just let the emotions flow like a storm blowing by and see what happens because very often we create more trouble by fighting negative feelings than by just having them saying Oh yeah now how do I put that in perspective and so I do think that mindfulness is meant to be more of a way of being you do this sort of body scan where you check out different parts of your body and how they're feeling and cultivating compassion which is an important part of mindfulness that you try to think about situations or people who may irritate you or make you angry or something and develop compassion for them and that's a very important practice too that in in hypnosis that's not you know a major feature although your openness to accepting new input from the hypnotist is a kind of compassion for them you're saying I know this isn't me and I'm going to trust that he or she is doing something that will help me not hurt me yeah it does it does feel like there is some shared DNA there uh and and and there is a sense that mindfulness can be used as a tool to solve a problem I mean I had Judd Brewer in here I know that you know him and he's got a whole thing about mindfulness in the context of of habit formation smoking cessation he's got his own app for that and it seems like it could be applied towards the same ends that hypnosis can be but you're getting there through different routes well yes I think that's true Judd Brewer's study is the one I talked about mindfulness turning down activity in the posterior cingulate cortex that's his work it's very good work um I think you know mindfulness is Eastern and hypnosis is Western that is you know it's not meant to be there to do to accomplish something to solve a problem that's kind of an unmindful thing to do it's meant to just be an experience that will help you and you know in the Buddhist thinking detach from this sort of transitory connection to a Persona that we have from time to time that's the way the Buddhists think about it uh whereas hypnosis is very much this is you this is your life this is what you got this is your body figure out how to use it as well as you can and it's more you know problem oriented you're right it's it do it for a purpose which is a typical Western way to approach things whereas the Eastern people would say that's your problem yeah you've got to let go of it yeah it's really a philosophical distinction yes it is and but it means a respect for different traditions and and you know I'm very impressed and glad that mindfulness has has achieved so much attention and popularity in this country we associate uh hypnosis uh with you know the idea that you need a guide and certainly a guide is important but um we do have the capacity to induce this state ourselves so let's talk about self-hypnosis and maybe we can do that in the context of reverie or app and and how we should be thinking about how we can incorporate this into our own lives thanks well that's what I hope to do you know I began to realize uh rich and I think that you know there were things I I think unfortunately the pandemic has forced us into this you know we have to we we used to think that doing good Psychotherapy is all about um you know person to person you know looking at one another across the room and having feelings and correcting distortions and I do that I think it's important but I I think there are elements of various psychotherapies that are much more disseminable than we than we think and that's what we're that's the challenge now and I thought you know I've used hypnosis with about 7 000 people in my career that's a lot of people but I've learned things that I'm convinced can help a lot more people than that and I want sort of my legacy to be to spread the wealth to help people get what they can even if they're not sitting in the office with me and so we designed reverie to be interactive um so that it's not simply listened to a recording and do something but rather I suggest you do something I ask you know are you is your left hand feeling lighter than your right or not they give an answer we analyze it with AI and then they get a different suggestion based on what they just told that's interesting so it is it it changes each person's experience is different depending on how they responded to us and so I tried to make it as much like what happens in my office as I could but also share the strategies you know focus on what you're for now what you're against recognize your ability to transform perception and make your body comfortable and so the the apps are each about 12 to 15 minutes long interactive we ask you to rate before and after how your level of stress is or your level of pain is we're getting a 35 reduction in stress in the first 15 minutes after people do that and we're getting a 25 reduction in pain um we get one out of five people stop smoking so people and people can tell right away I mean what I really am happy about is they'll know is this helping me or not if it is good keep doing it if it's not maybe try some more but if you don't want to that's fine too so and we have some hypnotic minutes too we have some things where people um uh just take a minute or two to reinforce what they've learned before and a minute isn't too long to do that and we're finding that like 40 of people with the hypnotic minutes feel better just after a minute of re-engaging in that state you know and we we find you mentioned earlier that you know people um if they just have a memory or a smell or a sound of something an old song or something it changes their mental state and they kind of get back in that mode and that's what we're finding with reverie too that people can just dip back into the experience and get a lot of the benefit from it very quickly so I hope it will help spread the wealth help people learn from it try it out see what it feels like and uh and hopefully feel better yeah the that's fascinating and and and quite a service so I I commend you for that um and you know and you describing that I can't help but think about the induction phase we talked a bit a bit about like breath work and how that can help induce the state but I also assume that the choice of words is very important and there's a lot of Science and and your experience that's gone into we say this at this point and now we say this so talk a little bit about like how you make those choices and how that you know what that's doing to our brains and our bodies to kind of create the the preferred receptivity sure well I try to make the language simple clear I want people to feel when they're going into their State feel what they're doing when they're in it and feel what it means to come out of it so I want to be clear about that I want to use language that um focuses more on what people are for than what they're against that tends to stir engagement rather than rejection or a sense of failure I want people to have an experience that allows them to get the best of whatever their ability is and see how they how they respond to it so I I try to be positive clear simple and straightforward about about the way I tell people what to do and I think in the hypnosis there has been a lot of sort of mystification of what you have to say and how long it has to take you know I used to be taught early on you have to take 20 25 minutes to get people counting upstairs and downstairs and all kinds of stuff and my I myself wouldn't want to devote that much time to that you know and it's not necessary so the other thing is I try to make it fairly rapid and efficient you know you do it here if you've got the ability do it see what it feels like and then come out of it and be clear with yourself when you're doing it and when you've stopped right and if you're somebody who has a a low receptivity to hypnosis can you get a refund like if you're just somebody who can't be hypnotized and you're like this is not working for me listen this caused so little again with it we and by the way the the app can be downloaded from the App Store reveri uh we're building it it's an IOS app now we're building an Android app and then you can send to our website www.rivery.com a request that you'll be notified when the Android app is up and running it isn't yet um so um we try to use it in a way that makes it accessible to people but also we accept and they accept if it's helping them good if it's not do something else that's fine and and the one other thing I'd mention is the book I wrote with my father was called trans and treatment clinical users of hypnosis and the idea is that they're related but they're separate things so what you do people because when people are in a trance they concentrate intently they reduce their critical judgment um you want to be sure that the therapeutic strategy you're using is pretty good uh you don't want um you know to suggest to them something in that receptive attentive state that maybe is a bad idea to begin with and so I would say that even for some people who aren't hypnotizable at all they can benefit from the strategy from the way we're approaching the problem and and so there are some people who aren't advertisable but if you just sit there and listen to me for a few minutes you may take on a new point of view about how to deal with an old problem so rather than fighting food you eat with respect for your body you focus on feeding your body the way you would feed your baby or your dog or cat you know put in it what's good for it and that makes you feel good about it you can eat like a gourmet you can eat less but enjoy eating more that seems paradoxical but it really isn't you know most of the time when we were watching television or playing with our phone or something I had a a friend who who started the reverie app he said he uh he felt terrible when he looked at a picture of a party and somebody was wearing the same shirt he was only he had this huge belly and he said I realized it was me you know yeah so he started he'd use the app he started eating with respect he lost 40 pounds he's now walking to work from Palo Alto to Mountain View and back he doesn't ride in a car anymore and he's kept the weight off and he's going around proselytizing about it now and he he wasn't that hypnotizable but the approach was something that appealed to him cognitively and he's using it cognitively and changing a whole bunch of aspects of his behavior yeah reverie reverence self-reverence I like that um you know I can't help but think about uh the similarities between that notion of self-care self-love and loving-kindness meditation right like you're you're you're practicing a form of meditation that is is is sort of thinking about or or or wishing for or or practicing loving kindness towards others but also towards yourself right with reverence I I love that connection with reverence I hadn't thought of it but I believe me oh really so where does the name come from assume that it's more revery like a dream oh I got you yes well here you have the double on top yeah I like it um but you know I think um the difference is that in mindfulness you learn to be compassionate for yourself through contemplating compassion for others and with the technique we use in hypnosis is having compassion for yourself and for your own body and thinking of your body the way you would think of some other trusting innocent creature that depends upon you and so it is more you know if you think about it Eastern cultures are more sociocentric that you know they are their social environment you know they they don't separate themselves in the same way that we do here we're Splendid individuals you know and freedom is everything God forbid you should wear a mask you know um and and that's not I mean people were wearing masks in Japan you know 10 years before it was covet so um I do think they reflect cultural differences that that in in eastern cultures having a they don't value individually the individuality in the same way we do but B um it is more natural to cultivate compassion for your community for people around you here it's more natural to cultivate compassion for yourself for individuals and so you learn to be more compassionate to yourself and to your body with hypnosis but uh so it's the the the notion of compassion is very important but it's sort of implemented in a different way that is I think culturally appropriate yeah yeah that that cultural distinction I mean the idea that you know we would never treat we would never treat other people the way that we treat ourselves right is right you know there's something kind of inherently American about that I think you're right I'm afraid I have to confess yes that's true um I want to talk a little bit about uh your lab I mean in addition to being a clinic a clinician you're also a researcher right you referenced some of the work that you're doing with huberman lab around breath um what are what are some of the other studies that you're involved in right now and and also like what are what are some of the studies that you you you wish to see performed that would um give us a lot more clarity and kind of uh uh you know help with a mass adoption of this modality well uh there are a couple of things we're we are doing some studies on the effects of the reverie app um because we need to provide an Evidence base sure you're getting all these data sets works that's right I mean we have one study of 15 900 people showing a reduction of uh you know 35 in stress in the first 15 minutes that's you know and we're doing more of that we need to do studies with control conditions which were always hard to come up with but we'll find a way so I want to do more studies on what the actual effect of using reverie is compared with other things like meditation we're comparing meditation and breath work with Andrew and uh finding some very interesting things that breath work in very short pieces of breath work like five minutes a day for a month are having pretty big effects on people's anxiety and stress and sleep as well so that's one thing we're doing I'm collaborating um with a wonderful young colleague at Stanford Nolan Williams who's doing transcranial magnetic stimulation and so we're actually he loved the idea of taking on the challenge can we change a fixed neural trait like hypnotizability and so we're using TMS he was just on the Today Show the other day showing how is using it for depression and suicidal thinking actually very effectively what's TMS I'm sorry transcranial magnetic stimulation got it so you know hypnosis with animal magnetism 250 years ago this is real magnetism applied locally to the brain and if you know you know that electric current when it flows through a wire or a nerve generates a magnetic field around it that circumvents circles the wire in the perpendicular Direction um conversely a magnetic field induces changes in the electrical current in the neuron and so you can activate or inhibit a brain region very precisely using these transcranial magnetic stimulators and he's been very effective in treating depression I've seen patients say I feel like my old self after two years not that I feel better I feel like my own that's super interesting and and we're stimulating the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and we've got some preliminary evidence that we can enhance hypnotizability at least transiently wow so it's the first time we've been able to change a neural trait and the idea is we've been studying it with fibromyalgia we've got support from the national Center for complementary and Integrative Health and we're hoping that it could be an augmentation to a hypnotic treatment for fibromyalgia and other kinds of treatment resistant pain so we're exploring that both to understand better the the brain mechanism but also as a potential new treatment uh for that wow that's amazing and and I like the kind of connective tissue dating all the way back back to Mesmer right like Mesmer almost had it right oh he just you know he's a little bit off on part of it a little fluid thing but like here we are that's right a little ahead of his time but not in a way that always helped um in addition to reverie if somebody is is inspired or intrigued by everything that that you've shared today and thank you for that uh how does one go about finding a you know an appropriate clinical hypnotist so they're not you know falling under the prey of some stage hypnotist if they want to explore this right we'll stay out of theaters but the the I would say the the important thing is um to find somebody who is trained and licensed in a clinical discipline so clinical psychologist physician dentist uh social worker with marriage and family counseling credentials um find someone whose primary thing is that they're a trained clinician and who also was trained in hypnosis there are uh there's two good professionals assigned three good professional societies the society for clinical and experimental hypnosis you can look up sceh.us the American Society for clinical hypnosis uh uh as ch.net I think and there's a division 31 of the American Psychological Association they're all licensed and trained psychologists who use hypnosis so your primary search should be for a good licensed and trained professional and then someone who knows something about hypnosis and there are now websites that can help you identify those people Psychology today has one and others who can help you find someone who has and you'll see what kind of Professional Training they have yeah that's great we'll put those links up in the show notes of course and before I let you go I was remiss in not asking you about the work that you've done with breast cancer patients I mean cancer is really you know that was that was you know really has been I don't know if it still is but initially was a big part of your focus right that's right so I you know I wanted to give you the opportunity to talk a little bit about that because I think that's that's really powerful well thank you when I when I came to Stanford um I was recruited in part by Europe yallum who is you know the leading figure in group Psychotherapy and who was working on a book on existential Psychotherapy and he said to me you know the existential philosophers have read written that you don't really live authentically until you face the possibility of non-being and if that's true um then perhaps a period of facing your death could be a period of growth so you know that maybe we've been approaching this from the wrong way just make them less anxious and depressed but help them grow and um uh he said would you like to co-lead a group with me so this is like my first year as an assistant professor and the world's Authority in group therapy says would you co-lead a group you think for a second and you say yes so I did and I love this group you know these women were dealing with very difficult things but they weren't getting demoralized you know they were getting remoralized they would grieve when somebody from the group died and we were warned by some oncologists that you know you demoralize them because you know the the two years arrival was 50 they were going to see other people die as though cancer patients you know don't understand that they could die from their kids the first thing everybody thinks half of all people diagnosed with cancer live to die of something else more women with breast cancer die of heart disease than breast cancer so you know it's it's not a great thing but you know uh people can deal with it and I was so impressed at how women faced their own mortality but differently by seeing it in someone else you know you can see things in somebody else that you're going through but you can't see for yourself we had one woman who came in and said you know I think it's time for me to sort of hasten my exit you know she was talking about assisted suicide because my husband's a banker but he's not a teller he doesn't talk and I think he's had it with me it's just too much now his husband wasn't in the room and one of the rules of says is you know here and now in the room so I said I wonder if she's asking us a question are we tired of her are we wishing she weren't here and she just got you know covered with praise she was always beautifully dressed even though she was clearly very sick she was getting closer to death matched accessories make up everything and they admired how well she looked after herself in her body even though she was that sick so they they made it clear to her they wanted her to live as long as possible and she did not shorten her life she died about four months later and in her will it was written that they sent a bus to take us all from the building where the group met to her memorial service wow and another woman in the group said you know looking being in this group is like looking into the Grand Canyon when you're afraid of heights you know if you fell down it'd be a disaster but you feel better about yourself because you're able to look I can't say I feel Serene but I can look at it and um it was very touching to hear her say that and to recognize that that's what was going on that they were feeling like experts in living and experts in dealing with the disease they felt better about themselves because they could help other people you know we do that in medicine all the time when I was training at Boston City Hospital and learning to do lumbar punctures and things are what we used to joke with one another is it's C1 screw one do one teach one you know that that's the progression you feel better about yourself because you've learned something you can use to help someone else and that's what they were learning and that's what they were doing so we found at the end of a year in this random trial that the women in our weekly support groups that ended with self-hypnosis by the way we taught them to grieve losses to picture the loss of someone who died and at the same time picture on the other side of the screen one thing she left with you that's still within you and and they were half as anxious and depressed by the end of the year as the control group they had half the pain the control group from doing the self-hypnosis exercises on very low amounts of medication and the big surprise was that I got the idea because people were talking about wishing while your cancer and we weren't wishing it away at all we were saying you've got to deal with it um that they lived 18 months longer on average than the control and we have replicated we tried to replicate that study at a time when the hormonal treatments got to be a lot better than they were originally we found that women with non-hormonally responsive cancer lived longer in the treatment group but overall we did not replicate that but we've seen we've done our meta-analysis recently of all the studies on Psychotherapy and survival and find a significant survival advantage for cancer patients randomized to various kinds of supportive Psychotherapy and there's one published in the New England Journal recently with dying patients patients entering palliative care with lung cancer who live four months longer if they got this palliative care support facing their death than if they didn't so you know and we know married cancer patients overall live four months longer than unmarried cancer patients yeah what's interesting about that for me and it goes back to what we were talking about earlier about trauma and and volition like the the kind of welcoming into the experience a level of acceptance and that this idea that you know we think that if we if we deny it or we pretend it doesn't exist or we ignore it that that will reduce our anxiety but in truth it's quite the opposite right like in in kind of embracing the you know the the harsh reality of the circumstances ends up reducing the anxiety because you're you learn to be in a in a place of cohabitation with it I guess right you can face it the devil you know is better than the devil you don't know you know at least you can see aspects of it and put it into perspective uh there have been some interesting recent studies of people dying of cancer taking psilocybin in the couple of psychotherapy and it kind of surprises me to tell you the truth you know I wouldn't want to have a bad trip when I was you know facing immunity and the majority of them and they get careful Psychotherapy as well during this report I could just see it from a different point of view and it helped me feel that my capacity to live to experience things was so precious and I still have it and I'm going to lose it but I still have it and they found it reassuring so I think you're absolutely right that having the strength and ability to face it strengthens you it doesn't weaken you um I wonder if there is a is there is there a sense of enhanced receptivity to hypnosis uh when somebody has undergone some kind of psychedelic experience and we I don't want to do a whole podcast on psychedelics we're rounding this out now and that's a whole other discussion but I know there's a lot of emerging science here and and some interesting things that are happening there is and there's more interest in we're building a program at Stanford to do it and there are a number of other excellent places that have programs and they're taking it seriously I think there is one message though that is pretty strong and that is that changing mental states can in and of itself be therapeutic you see things from a different point of view you know you make the mistake of reading your email at 11 o'clock at night and you get some nasty email and they think oh God what am I going to do and the next morning after a night of sleep you say oh that like him again you know I'll deal with that um just being able to see the same problem from a different mental perspective in and of itself helps enhance your coping ability which is what hypnosis is and and which is what a psychedelic experience induces Bingo and and sleep too you know absolutely same thing so I mean we can't live without sleep so we our brains are constructed to experience different states of Consciousness and there's a reason for it it helps us it helps us deal with stress it doesn't it's not a problem it's a potential solution yeah well it'll be interesting to see uh to kind of pay attention to the research that's it's interesting that Stanford's doing that now I mean I know Johns Hopkins is associated with that that's right you know this is now becoming more mainstream it is yeah well I hope hypnosis will too yeah so on that note as we kind of end this thing um you know leave us with some parting thoughts about uh hypnosis self-hypnosis for the person who's listening or watching who's interested in this um what would be a good way for them to begin or wrap their heads around how this might benefit their lives well you know consider the kind of problem you have and whether it's something you're you're itching to do something about um think about situations in your life already where a change in state of consciousness has had some beneficial effects so you may have some experience already that you could see an old problem from a new point of view and then find a way to give it a try you know it's one of these things where there really aren't any side effects the way there are with meds and um we're just taking a little bit of time to try out transforming your experience of a problem might make a difference and reverie is one there are other there are many good professionals who can help you with it there are things to read as well about hypnosis there's our book trance and treatment but there are others too and I think you sort of put yourself in in experimental it's a low-cost rapid experimental experience that could make a big difference well I appreciate you coming here to talk to me uh a lot of respect for the work that you're doing I think it's super important and it's been a privilege to hear about this world and and learn about your world so thank you thank you very much well you've set an example for personal transformation that a lot of people have followed and I really appreciate that yeah through my own version of self-hypnosis but anyway um I'd love to talk to you more and learn more about this so uh perhaps uh part two at some point when it works out for you so thank you thank you all right peace foreign [Music]

Channel: Rich Roll

Views: 250,436

Keywords: rich roll, rich roll podcast, self-improvement podcasts, education podcasts, health podcasts, wellness podcasts, fitness podcasts, spirituality podcasts, mindfulness podcasts, mindset podcast, hypnosis for sleep, hypnosis for weight loss, hypnosis for anxiety, self-hypnosis, david spiegel hypnosis, neuroscience, neuroscience podcast, what is hypnosis, breathwork, flow state, rich roll david spiegel, huberman lab spiegel, huberman lab hypnosis, reveri app

Id: O8fPExRLX2s

Length: 112min 29sec (6749 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 17 2022