Hypnosis, Brain Hacking, & Mental Mastery - Dr David Spiegel

What do you think most people misunderstand about hypnosis? What it is? How it works? Well, there are sort of offsetting misunderstandings. They either think it's really dangerous or it's useless or maybe it's both. Uh, and the biggest fear and misunderstanding is that it's a it's losing control. And I'm here to tell you that hypnosis is a way of teaching people how to enhance control of mind and body. And so the very thing that people see, you know, I don't like stage hypnosis very much. I don't like making fools out of people. But when you see the football coach dancing like a ballerina and you think, "What the hell's going on here?" You're watching somebody who's willing to let go of his old assumptions of who he is and what he is and should be and trying out being different. And one of the great things about hypnosis is you can try out being different and sometimes it works in a hurry and that's what I do with my patients and that's what we do with Rey. Is there a marked difference in what's going on in the brain of somebody who's dancing like a ballerina on stage at a Sandals resort in you know Jamaica >> right? >> Uh compared with is it the same mechanism? >> Yes. Right. Okay. It is the same mechanism. It'd be hard to do an MRI scan of the football coach, but um we've done it with Stanford students and other volunteers who are high in hypnotizability. I can talk about that later. It makes a difference. Um and when they're going into a hypnotic state and we see three things going on in their brain using functional MRI and MRI is a great way to get precise anatomy, but also activity in very specific regions of the brain. And what we see is that the more hypnotized they are, the more they turn down activity in a part of the brain called the dorsal anterior singulate cortex. That's like the singulate cortex is like a C on its ends in the middle of the base of your brain. And the front part, the dorsal region um is a region that we call part of the salance network. It does pattern matching. And if something goes wrong, the salance network fires off. You hear a loud noise and you get hijacked. your attention gets hijacked, >> interrupts, >> right? And that's that has survival value. You know, sometimes you really need to be interrupted by a sudden event. Um, in hypnosis, you allow yourself to sink more deeply into the focus of your attention because you're turning down the alarm system. You're turning down the part of your brain that would say, "Hey, maybe you ought to be doing something else." >> Not dancing like a ballerina. >> Yeah. Exactly. And so uh that reduction in activity is uh also something that has to do with stress and anxiety that um when you're more stressed and anxious your salance network is hyperactive. >> So hypnosis is an kind of automatic reduction in stress that you can see in people's brains. The second thing that happens in the brain is you get higher functional connectivity. That means when one brain region is active the other one is active. when it isn't, the other one isn't. Between the dorsal lateral prefrontal cortex, that's the where we the part of my brain I'm hopefully using right now talking to you, where you plan and execute activities that you have planned. Uh, and a part of the brain called the insula. Insula is Latin for island. It's a little island of tissue in the middle of the front part of the brain. It's the mind body conduit. And so it allows the brain to have more precise control over things that are going on in the body. And it increases interception, the capacity to to feel what's going on in your body. So that's the second thing. So less anxiety, less less uh interruption of your concentration, better control over your body. And the third part is inverse functional connectivity between the prefrontal cortex and the back of the singulate cortex, the posterior singulate. That's part of what we call the default mode network. It's what your brain is doing when it isn't doing much else. when you're just sitting around, don't have any work to do, and just pondering things like, "Who am I? What am I? Am I as good as my mother hoped I would be? Am I letting people down or am I pleasing them?" I call it the my fault mode network. >> But it's the part of the brain that sort of enforces expectations of who you are and what you are. And to the extent that you're engaged in a hypnotic experience, you're turning down activity there. So that's how the football coach can do that. he's just not thinking about the fact that his team would laugh at him if they saw him. You know, that kind of thing. And so that combination, better mind body control, reduce salience uh activation and suppression of the part of your brain that decides who you should be and what you should be is what helps you do so much in hypnosis because you're connecting better with your body. You're controlling it better. You're not worried about what the implication might be. And in fact, you're interrupting that circuit that that makes somatic arousal, body arousal increase when you're emotionally aroused. So you can cool off your body and then handle stress better. Oh, that's so interesting. And so your detection of an odd pattern, something that is uh out of the ordinary, your adherence to an existing narrative, this is who I am. This is how I should behave. And the warning sign that comes body up of, hey, this is this this usually elicits a kind of pretty big emotional response here. You should be stressed. You should be anxious. All of those things get turned down. It sounds an awful lot like um kind of shaking an etcher sketch. You know, there's loads of lines everywhere. >> I like that. >> And and you go, we got a little bit of a blank slate that's going on here. >> That's exactly right. >> What is the structure of a hypnotic process? Like what are the stages that people are going through here? Because presumably this has to happen in some kind of a sequence unless all of these three different primary mechanisms are all able to sort of happen together. What is it that is occurring in order to take somebody through? I think I've only ever seen stage hypnosis done once and I was a kid. I can still remember it and I think that the cue was somebody had their hands interwoven in front of them. you can't pull them apart. >> And they imagined that there was glue that was sort of seeping around the outside of their hands and then they came over and did a thing and they yeah did like that. Um but I'm interested to know what the slightly more scientific less package holiday version is. >> Well, what I do in my office happens first of all very quickly. If you are hypnotizable, you don't need to count upstairs and downstairs and have some long fancy uh induction. You can shift gears in seconds. And so what I'd have people do is look up, close your eyes, take a deep breath, let the breath out slowly through your mouth, let your eyes relax, let your body float, and then let one hand or the other float up in the air like a balloon. And if you're hypnotizable at that point, you're hypnotized. It It's not a big deal to do it because And I see you smiling. So you're hypnotized already. Um, all hypnosis is really self- hypnosis. I'm teaching people how to use their ability there. There's nothing fancy about the induction. It's just a matter of it's, you know, hypnosis is sort of like one of those apps on your phone that you haven't opened and used yet. You know, it's there. You could do stuff with it, but you've never done it. And that's what happens with a lot of people, although hypnotizable people tend to use their hypnotizability even though they're not fully aware of it. So in general, for example, do you ever have the experience of getting so caught up in a good movie that you forget you're watching a movie and enter the imagined world? >> That's a it's hypnosis has been thought of as believed in imagination. >> So you allow yourself to just become a part of the movie instead of part of the audience. You're not judging it. You're not evaluating it. You're just in it. Uh um I had a patient the other day who's in the drama who's a drama expert and he said, "Well, I can't lose myself that much because I know where they put the lights and why they did this and I didn't like the way they did it." So he's always judging and evaluating it, not just immersed in it. >> So if you have the ability, you're actually doing it all the time. You're not aware of it. And what hypnosis is is a formal way of tapping and utilizing those special abilities. I'm interested about whether this is some adaptive keyhole in the brain that been left there for hypnosis to slot into or if you are more like a backdoor hacker who has sort of exploited some other process which also happens to work when you do the hypnosis thing. Does this question make sense? Like why is it that we are hypnotizable? Like what is going on? Is this is this because collective effvescence and feeling transcendence when watching music played around the campfire? We should be able to be immersed in that and therefore you've got hypnosis which is kind of like a tuned up much more clever domino fall version of that. Or is this actually it it is there uh so that people can access a level of like what kind of sounds like deep regulation uh and and uh deep openness and that's the purpose for it. It's built for that. Are you a is it a keyhole that you're sliding into or are you a hacker that's managed to reverse engineer the shape of the key? >> No, I'm not uh I I think the keyhole is there for a reason and I think there are at least two evolutionary reasons why we have this ability. The positive one is it enables us to enjoy engaging. You know, we put aside all kinds of other things that could interfere and really get into it. You can really get there are, you know, primitive cultures have, you know, music and drumming and all this stuff where they just lose themselves, but they have a collective shared experience. >> We are social animals. You know, our the the human infant is the most helpless infant of any mammal. And if there is not a social structure around it, the the child doesn't survive. So from the time we're born, we have to find ways to engage people. And part of that is hypnotic like. You know, a lot of the music about love and falling in love is I was mesmerized by her eyes, you know, that kind of thing. The capacity to connect deeply, forget about everything else and engage helps us cement social connection. That's the positive part. The negative part is this. You know, you can tell the difference between predator and prey animals by the location of their eyes on their head. So your yours and mine are in front. We can recognize where some object of prey is and uh and locate it and chase it if we want to or escape it if we want to. Prey animals have eyes on the side of their head, rabbits. So they don't have very clear detection, but they see more range of movement than we do. If we were not able to survive predation, we wouldn't be here. And we're not very strong. We're not very fast. You know, eagles see better than we do and lions run faster than we do. And you know, so one of our survival abilities is the capacity to modulate fear and pain because movement, predators detect movement. And if you can freeze when you're hurt or scared, you're more likely to evade a predator. And so I think this capacity we have in hypnosis to control anxiety, to change how we feel, to dissociate pain and reduce or eliminate it is a survival value that allowed us to be where we are because we have big brains and relatively weak bodies in the animal kingdom. >> And that brain can help us evade detection, respond better to threat, uh, and form social connections that make us feel good, and help us procreate. I love the idea that stepping into our own programming is at least 50% of this because I think a lot of the time the argument will be made, you know, with a social animal, one man versus a gorilla is dead, but 100 men versus a gorilla, gorilla's [ __ ] Um, okay. >> Right. >> That coordination, social brain hypothesis, Robin Dunar, you know, all of this stuff, fantastic. But to think about your ability to use theory of mind, not to better work out, well, David's friends with Jonathan, but they weren't friends last week. So, if I befriend Jonathan, then I'll be able to befriend David and so on and so forth. But to say, oh, I am able to look at I'm able to use metacognition to look at my own state of mind and to think about how I can adjust. I'm feeling a thing. What does it mean? Why am I feeling that thing? And should I be? And is it adaptive right now for me to be feeling that thing? And can I step in? Can I slow myself down? There is a line over there. And maybe it Oh, it hasn't seen me. I should be scared. I should run. I want to run. If I was a gazelle, I might run. Mhm. But no, I'm actually going to really slowly go toward this tree cuz if I get behind this tree, I can get up this tree. the the ability to plan and step in to our emotional body and be able to uh interject there uh is is pretty cool. I I did a a safari in uh Zambia about 3 years ago. I was presenting a a mini documentary thing and this is a strippedback safari. So, one um there's kind of a sevenstar glamping world of Safari, which you may have seen with really nice chefs and there's Wi-Fi and all the rest of it, but this one was you need to warn them half an hour before you want to shower if you want the water to be warm. You're sleeping underneath the stars, but with a kind of a semi-permanent tent over the top of you. It's kind of nice, but it's not that nice. And much of the safari is done on foot and you'll get into a jeep, but then when you're down, you're there with a guide who's got a big elephant rifle and a tracker and a couple of a couple of people and you'll go and you'll do it on foot. >> Anyway, we were rowing down the Zambesi in between Zambia and uh Zimbabwe. >> Yeah, >> I think so. Yeah. >> And um rowing down just a little tributary off the Zambzi. Tiny little old school rowboat, two oes. And the main thing you're thinking about is hippos, >> right? Is hippos the whatever is second biggest killer after um mosquitoes. Uh and they really do not like to be scared. They're quite sort of anxious animals >> and um >> not very hypnotizable. >> I imagine. No, no, no, no. Unfortunately, hippos despite you'd think given the start of their name hipponetizable. >> There you go. But so we're we're rowing down and we see this hippo sort of toward the end and it's just got that sort of classic nose and nostrils and eyes above the water which when you see as well kind of the same way as an alligator they're raised up like that so they don't they can be as low as possible and the eyes are super high. It's really adaptive. >> That's right. >> So me and the um guy that I'm with hard South African dude that just runs this thing like digs his or we just said we'll we'll just wait mate. We'll just wait for this thing. And sure enough, it dips its head down and goes away. And we continue along. A little bit further in front of us, we see four elephants. Mother elephant, big adult, and two adolescents, like smaller sized ones. And they're drinking from the stream that we're going to go down in a little bit. So he's like, "Okay, we're going to wait up." All four of them walk along and we go past, you know, 300 yard, 200 yards off on our left hand side. guy with the big elephant rifle is back in the truck. So, he's a kilometer away. We've got a radio, but there's a drone overhead like just following us around, getting nice shots. Uh, and there's another canoe behind us which has got the film crew in that are filming us. And we're chatting. We're miked up and I'm just talking about, isn't it lovely? You know, oh, the hippo from before, isn't it? It eyes just chatting crap like I usually do. These four elephants walking along next to us. And I'd been told when an elephant is head up, ears out, it's like, I see you. Stop what you're doing. And when it's head down, ears back, it's like I'm this is a real issue and I'm going to come toward you. So I've sort of kept this thing I had a briefing before. Kept this thing in my mind. >> Four, family of four, mother at the front just sort of starts veering toward us a little bit. Sort of keeps looking, keeps looking, keeps looking like that. And I'm saying, "Mate," he's like, "Don't worry, mate. Nothing to worry about at all." And I'm like, "All right, okay, no worries." So, we keep on gently going and then starts veering more and more and more towards us. I'm like, "Okay, this is either there's something real interesting right next to where we are or this is to intersect us and the other three are sort of staying behind." I'm like, "Mate." He's like, "No, no need to worry, mate. No need to worry at all." Okay, fair enough. We get 30 yards away and she's now just facing us. Head up, ears out. I was like, "Oh, that's not good." Heart rate, like hairs on the back of my neck, everything immediately head down, ears back. And like sort of goes to start to set off. I'm like, I am guy with the gun is a kilometer away. Dude's in all they have is camera lenses. What they going to do? They're not going to be able to throw anything at her. So she sort of sets off and then head comes back up, ears go out and she sort of backs up like that, like a reverse trot. Back, back, back, back, back, back, back. Head down, ears back. Just sets off like full sprint straight toward us. And we're in this canoe. And it's a tiny little canoe. And I'm like, mate. And he's like, nothing to worry about, mate. I'm like, what? How are you able to regulate yourself in this moment? And I noticed I had my awe like that. What am I gonna do? I'm holding it like a cricket bat. I'm like >> bop this, you know, 5 ton, 10 ton animal on the nose. What am I going to do? Anyway, gets 10 5 yards away from the edge of, you know, it's just a classic sort of little bank of a tiny stream. It was nothing. And gets toward the engine, digs in, kicks up all of this dust. This dust sort of covers over the top of us, looks at us, turns away, walks back to the family, and I was like, "Holy fuck." Like that was the most extreme thing. That very long story is to say that for probably the next 10 minutes or so, every single sense that I had was superhuman. I could hear what felt like for 2 miles. I could detect that bird over there is slightly different to that bird over there and there's a little bit of a distance between those. the sharpness that I had in my mind, like even my ability to recall this random story from three years ago, like everything was just embedded and time felt like it slowed down. And it just sort of reminded me when we're talking about that adaptive sense that humans have to be able to step into their own programming. The thing that was really interesting was, you know, I was in an environment that's pretty evolutionarily uh typical, I guess, way more typical than downtown Austin. >> Um, you know, if you take the span of human development >> and um I just remember thinking, wow, like this is what your system is built for, right? Your system is built for that kind of an interaction because that survival or non-s survival of that is the single biggest determinant of whether or not your lineage continues. That's right. Well, I would say that elephant hypnotized you. You you you had highly focused attention. Your body changed. You heightened your senses. You did all the things you needed to do. You weren't just plotting on carrying on as usual. And so you were directing your energy and attention and arousal toward what you thought might be a threat to your survival. >> And that's exactly what you should do. You shouldn't go on as the ability to kind of reup and adapt your behavior and your emotions uh to the situation has tremendous survival value. And the ability to let go and say, "I'm just a cool tourist. That animal wouldn't dare bother me." Uh-uh. you know, you were willing to let go of your usual sense of invulnerability and say, you know what, and you know, yeah, that guy, you know, maybe he knows what he's talking about, but maybe he doesn't. >> No, I think I think I think he definitely did. He was able to detect. And even within that, that was his extra level of of understanding. Oh, well, the way that she moved toward us, she wouldn't have backed up in that way. The family's over there. She, you know, whatever it might be. >> I I can't resist. I I hope I'll get away with this. You know what one elephant said to the other the first time they saw a naked man? >> No. >> How the hell does he eat with that thing? >> Maybe that was the Maybe that was the inquisitiveness. I just need to go and make sure. Are they able to survive? Maybe they need some grass. Maybe they need a little bit of food. I mean, we work. In other news, this episode is brought to you by Momentus. 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Right now, you can get 35% off your first subscription and that 30-day money back guarantee by going to the link in the description below or heading to live momentous.com/modernwisdom using the code modernwisdom at checkout. That's l i v e m o m e n t- o us.com/modern wisdom and modern wisdom a checkout. >> So when it comes to u the overall brain state you've explained quite nicely I guess sort of the neurobiological mechanism of what's going on there. Is it closer to sleep meditation flow? What's the nearest analogous? >> You're getting closer. >> Okay. >> Sleep. No, you know, they used to say you're going to sleep, you're falling asleep and all. It's not sleep. It's wakefulness. It's highly focused attention. Um meditation to some extent. Um in meditation though, um you're you have open presence, you know, there are sort of three major components. Just let things flow through you. Don't judge them. So you're you were engaging in action in this sort of spontaneous hypnotic state. your action was checking out the guy who was running the expedition and making sure he knew what he was doing. You weren't just saying, "Oh, let's this is very interesting. Let's see what the elephant does." You know, you So, in in meditation, you do tend to sort of suppress your usual reactions, but you don't reprogram to do something else other than have open presence, check your body, and and develop compassion. But you were not feeling very compassionate for the elephant at that point. Flow is a little bit more like it where the process is the experience. You do it not because there's some goal out there you want to accomplish because it feels so good to be doing what you're doing. And so people who are hypnotizable and are in a hypnotic state tend to feel more like they're in a flow state. They just enjoy whatever they're doing. I was asked to by the coach of the Stanford women's swimming team to to talk with the girls because they're a fabulous team. They have a lot of Olympic. We just recruited a new Olympic silver medalist as a freshman in Stanford. Um uh but they he noticed that they were swimming better in in in practice than they were in meets faster. And he thought, what's that about? You know, you normally think you're all aroused, you're, you know, this is important. You're going to do it. And it turned out that what they were doing when I talked to them was they were paying more attention to the women in the neighboring lane than they were to their own relationship to their body. And they were getting distracted by it. Swimming is not a contact sport. It doesn't matter what your opponent is doing. It just matters what you're doing. So I had them practice doing self hypnosis to focus on relating to their body, on the process of swimming your best race, how you manage your muscles, which muscles you emphasize, how you regulate your breathing. and they wound up swimming faster in mess doing that. So it's focusing on the process like flow in self- hypnosis rather than the outcome. >> Talk to me about this profile of anyone being hypnotizable versus specific people being more or less likely to respond. Are there some total non-responders? Are there some right? That's right. There hypnotizability is a very stable trait. Um, most most eight-year-olds are in transances most of the time. You know, you call your kid in for dinner, he doesn't hear. He's work and play are all the same thing. It's a wonderful thing about being a child. It's a shame we have to grow up. But as we go through adolescence, we develop what is called formal operations. We begin to value thinking and analysis more than immediate experience. And that's got real advantages. You know, you can judge and evaluate things. But so by the time people get to 21 or so, they've settled into a very stable degree of hypnotizability from low to medium to high. And Phil Zimardo, a late psychology professor at Stanford, did an interesting study where he took his former undergrads in psych 1 who had had their hypnotizability measured and blindly went out and retested them 25 years later. The test retest correlation was.7. Wow. Now, that's as high as IQ in a 25-y year interval. It does not change much. So, you know, I I have seen some of the great hypnotists and hypnotic professionals work for a long time with someone who is just not hypnotizable. And it doesn't matter. They just cannot respond. And so, the way I start every session of about 7,000 people I've used hypnosis with in my career with a five-minute evaluation of their hypnotizability. and that guides me in how to work with them. So if they're extremely high, we just do it, you know. Um I had a woman uh who was born with esophageal fistula to her trachea and so it meant, you know, food would get into her lungs and she it was painful. She's had multiple surgeries and she's had pain in her throat throughout her life and she was about 39 and she just had it. And I got her hypnotized. She was 10 on the scale, 10 out of 10. extraordinarily hypnotizable, hands floating up in the air. She and I um I had her imagine that she had swallowed some ice water and had soothed her her throat and she opened her eyes and she started to cry and she said, "You're a magician." She said, "I have never been to a doctor where the pain just plain went away." And this was not medication. It wasn't surgery. It was just teaching her brain how to respond to those signals differently. So, with highs, you can do that dramatic stuff. With mid-range people, you negotiate more. You teach them how to try it out, evaluate how it went, see if there are ways that they can find a better image that might work better for them. So, it's a negotiation process. With Lowe's, it's it's it's much more cognitive. It's just, you know what, um, your brain is reacting to this history of discomfort that you've had and it may be making it worse instead of better. So, if instead of fighting the pain, you take it as a message, you got the message and what else can you do that will distract you? >> Sounding for the lows, it's sounding suspiciously close to acceptance and commitment therapy. >> There's a there's a bit of that in it, but but for highs, ACT is just a diversion. you know, they can they can do it in minutes and feel it. >> Yeah. Wow. What What does the assessment look like um for that? How do you work it? How do you work it out? >> Uh it's it's a standard hypnotic induction. I have people look up, close their eyes, take a deep breath, let their hand go up in the air, and I give them this instruction. Your hand will remain light and in this upright position. Even after you open your eyes, if I pull your hand back down, it will float right back up to the upright position. You'll find something pleasant and amusing about this. Later, when I touch your elbow, your usual sensation and control will return. And I see how well then they respond to that. And we rate them on the sense of dissociation. Does the left hand feel as if it's not as much a part of their body as the right? On their response to a challenge where you pull the hand down and see if it floats up. >> Uh on a sense of involuntariness. Crucial question does your left do you feel more control over one hand than the other? And if they're hypnotizable, they tend to feel more control in the non uh hypnotized hand. Uh then response to the cut off signal when I touch the elbow and so it's two points for each of these and then two points for whether they had a sense of floating lightness or buoyancy in their hand alone or in their body as well. And so you get a 10-point score and it's a it's very stable, reliable measure. What I'm interested in is what are the sort of people who tend to be tens, sixes, fours, and zeros or ones. Can you see when somebody walks in or if you were given a profile of somebody beforehand, high-powered chief operations officer, very logistical and rational, is it less likely that that person's going to be high in hypnotizability compared with the >> artsy creative person who comes in with dyed hair and tattoo? You know what I mean? Like >> that you're right, and there's some truth to that. I mean you you can miss sometimes but um yes in general people who are organized who you know want to have things just the way they need to be tend to be less hypnotizable. I had a guy recently um who uh had um a ser had bad lower back problems and and pain in his knees and was but a very sort of rational he went to a million doctors and nothing seemed to work and um and they took x-rays and they didn't see anything definitive but there may be things wrong and routinely I asked what h what's your handedness are you right or left-handed tough question and he said well I'm right-handed but I always want my left hand to be equally active. So I always use my left hand the same way just after I use my right hand. So like a real simple question, you know, what handedness do you have? And he had to analyze that too. >> Yeah. Yeah. >> And he was a zero. Like flat out zero. And I said that to him, you know, he came to me for hypnosis and I said, you know, I think your problem is that that you make everything a problem. You worry about everything, including whether you're right or left-handed. and I think your doctors have been telling you there's nothing that wrong with your bones and your joints. Um, and you keep worrying about it and he looked sort of relieved. I thought he'd get mad at me, you know, he look he said, "You know, doc, all the doctors I've seen, you're the first one who's told me that, and I think you're right." And so I said, "The problem is the signal is weak, but your elaboration of the signal is high. So just think about other things than that." >> So you've had to go top down, not bottom up with him because he's a zero. >> That's right. That's right. >> So, it's much closer to actual CBT or something than than to hypnosis. >> But it it's also, you know, focus on what you're for, not what you're against. Don't fight it. You know, we we we say with hypnosis, the worst thing you can tell someone is don't think about purple elephants. You know, what are you going to think about? So, instead, you find a strategy that's appealing that they can affiliate with and feel good about from the moment they do it. >> Um, for mid-range people, it's more try it and let's discuss it. You know, it's kind of they they have the Yeah. You know, I do I do feel somewhat better. You know, I had a pianist, a guy who was a, you know, a professional pianist, but to make a living, you know, the saying about the difference between a musician and a pizza. Um, a pizza can feed an average family of four, you know, and so he had to he had he have a day job in construction and he'd gotten himself injured and had a lot of pain. And it got to where he couldn't um uh you know manage the pedals on the piano well and it was really awful for him. And uh but he was frustrated. He was mid-range and hypnotizability. Frustrated that he kept getting distracted from his favorite thing which was to play. So I had him hypnotized and I said, "Your body is floating cool and comfortable and I want you to play air piano for me." So he's there hypnotized. he's playing and he says, you know, I can actually enjoy this. You know, this is good. I wrote this song. I really like this. And he reduced his pain from five to like two to three. And so it was a sort of negotiation with him, trying out different things and doing it. And with the highs, it's like that lady with the throat and trachea problem. Um, she just did it. She just she cool, tingly, and numb. It's gone. She did it. >> Digging into this sort of profile thing a little bit more. First off, have you ever done any behavioral genetic studies on the heritability? >> Yes, we have. And uh we found there's one gene uh that's very interesting. It's catacolomethyl transferase. >> It's a gene that is in the metabolism of dopamine in the brain. Dopamine is the feel-good neurotransmitter. >> Um it is involved in hypnotizability. >> Okay. Can you give me the gene? What's the gene name? >> COMT. Catacol. C A T E. >> I already know. I already know that I have this >> oh methyl transfer you >> just give me so it's what are you looking for the metabolism of coomt so okay if you have meth there there's one polymorphism where you have either two methionines two veilings or a methane and a veiling um and the methane and veiling version has moderate meta metabolic rate of coomt so it keeps a kind of moderate level >> can I just give you mine >> yes what's yours >> your coomt gene variant is the val 158 met RS468A genotype also written as metmmet. But you said it was valet before. Let me see. Uh met. Oh, so you're metv. Um if you're met, you're likely to be less sensitizable. High dopamine in the prefrontal cortex, lower cents activity. Yeah. So that would make you less hypnotizable. >> Interesting. >> The valet the the the hetererozygous polymorphism >> is more likely to be very hypot. It doesn't mean you're not, but it means >> so you want high fast dopamine clearance. >> Well, no, you want moderate dopamine. If you clear it too quickly, your levels >> Oh, you want Val. You want Gmet. Yes. >> Right. Okay. Interesting. So, yeah, I've got slow dopamine clearance. It's fantastic for getting me addicted to things. Um, >> uh, yeah. A higher baseline dopamine potential enhanced cognitive performance when working on memory tasks when stress is low can also make you more mentally rigid or overfocused under pressure >> right >> which I imagine is precisely more vulnerable to stress and anxiety especially social or performance-based stress >> uh prefrontal cortex can become impaired under high stress >> uh interesting that fascinating okay >> sounds like your African journey just a bit yes >> exactly that's why I haven't been back to see that elephant again have remembering it. Um, is that was the first thing. Second thing, what are you mentioned by early adulthood, you're kind of locked in to your area of this. What are the lifestyle predictors? We've got at least COOMT variant, want to be an intermediate uh dopamine clearer. What are the lifestyle factors that would predict um if you were doing twin studies, where does nurture come into making hypnotizability different? >> Important question. And that makes it that it does in in two opposite ways. Um the good news is what's called imaginative involvements. Um so if you know when you're putting your kids to sleep, you you have them tell them a story and they affiliate with a story. I used to tell my kids that they were in a raft floating down a river and they'd go floating down the river. If you have a lot of those experiences, you tend to be more hypnotizable. And the other unfortunately is a negative one and that is people who have been abused tend to use dissociative abilities to distance themselves. You got my body but you haven't got me. >> Oh. So, so their trauma response is their way of surviving the situation, but predisposes them to a much more gentle version of that being reinduced. >> Well, yeah, they hang on to it. They just, you know, they just go somewhere else, you know. That said, >> before we continue, if you haven't been feeling as sharp or energized as you'd like, getting your blood work done is the best place to start. Which is why I partnered with Function because they run lab tests twice a year that monitor over 100 biomarkers. They've got a team of expert physicians that take the data, put it in a simple dashboard, and give you actionable insights and recommendations to improve your health and lifespan. They track everything from your heart health to your hormone levels, your thyroid function, and nutrient deficiencies. They even screen for 50 types of cancer at stage one, which is five times more data than you get from an annual physical. Getting your blood work drawn and analyzed like this would usually cost thousands. But with function, it is only $500. And right now, the first thousand people can get an additional $100 off, meaning it's only 400 bucks to get the exact same blood panel that I use. Just go to the link in the description below or head to functionhealth.com/modwisdom. That's functionhealth.com/modwisdom. Is openness to being hypnotized in adulthood a skill that you can train then like mindfulness? >> Um 7 is how stable it is? That means three of you got control of that? >> Not really. We we have done one recent study um in which we use transranial magnetic stimulation. You know it's a magnetic stimulation that's being used very successfully to treat depression and suicidal ideiation and obsessivecompulsive disorder now. very effective. >> We used it to suppress activity in the dorsal anterior singulate. We located the connecting pathways and we found that transiently we could increase hypnotizability with TMS. >> And the idea would be that perhaps for some people with pain uh who aren't that hypnotizable, we could combine TMS with the hypnosis and enhance the response. >> Sounds like a new study. So you may just published it. >> Okay. You may not have may not have the answer that to the question which is pretty obvious from that which is you're talking about a state change there >> right >> how embedded would a hypnosis induced trait change be if the state change of the person is only acute and not chronic like do you hold on to the gains of hypnosis if you were briefly hypnotizable but then revert back to being less hypnotizable >> well we don't know that's a very good question I'd like to find out but There is a possibility because what we find is with people even those who are very hypnotizable is first of all even those who are not so hypnotizable with revery we've done it with thousands of people now teaching them to reduce their pain levels their stress levels to get to sleep we find that that um four out of five people get significant reduction in pain 15 20% reduction in pain and stress in 10 minutes and even the low hypnotizables get some relief because of the idea that they can do it and the way we approach the problem focusing on what you're for. What can you control and what can't you control >> and so um you can get benefit even if you're not that hypnotizable. Use the approach and see if it helps. And the nice thing about hypnosis is the worst thing that happens is it doesn't work. You know uh 118,000 Americans died of opioid overdoses last year in the United States. Hypnosis is the oldest conception of psychotherapy. It's been around for 250 years. We haven't succeeded in killing anybody yet. So, so you know, try it. The worst thing that happens is it doesn't work. >> Is it more effective in person? >> You know what? I would like to think that because I've made my living and I love seeing people and caring for them, but I have to tell you that so far it looks like the the pain and stress reduction rates are about the same. We have one study that really tested that. We published a paper like 30 years ago inerson use of hypnosis to help people stop smoking. we have them um uh imagine you you don't say oh I don't like cigar I had a a a teacher in Tom Hackett was the chair of psychiatry at Mass General and he taught me my first hypnosis course and he said I was teaching people that their cigarettes would taste like horseshit you know and so the guy would light it up say that's terrible thanks two hours later he got a frantic call from the guy and said my house smells terrible and Dr. Hackett said, "Well, are you smoking?" He said, "No, I forgot to tell you that my wife smokes." So, >> so he had to hit the wife in your or she didn't want to. So, he said, "You know, your cigarettes, but not her." It doesn't work. It's It's not a good strategy. So, what we do is we tell people in hypnosis to think about three things. For my body, smoking is a poison. I need my body to live. I owe my body respect and protection. So, you focus on what you're for. I tell them, would you ever take your baby and put tarinladen heated smoke in their lungs? Hell no. Well, your body is as dependent on you as your baby. You know, you got to take anything you put into it, even if it's damaged by it. So, you focus on what you're for. And that way, you don't feel you're depriving yourself of something. You can feel good from the moment you did it. The best way to change human behavior is intermittent positive reinforcement. So you say you can feel good about this. So we we we built an app after. So we got one out of four people to stop. Half stopped right away. One out of two stopped right away. Half of them had had not touched a cigarette in a year. >> And so >> how many sessions >> from one session, single session self hypnosis. And that's as good as you'll get with Verrena or Bupropion. You know the medications that are used to get people to self. >> Okay. >> And and so buproprion to get >> a wellbutrin. Yeah, it's it's an anti-depressant that also seems to work. >> That's interesting. And SNRI >> Yeah. >> interjects for smoking sessation. >> Yes. >> I didn't know that. I didn't know that. I know that I have a few friends uh that we both are aware of um who are using micro do lowd dose wellbutrin as a neutropic >> daily neutropic like way below the therapeutic threshold that you would be using in order to step in. Um we'll see how long that goes for. I'll have to I'll have to check in with them and see see if see if they're still doing it. Um but uh yeah, >> so we we tested uh we we then uh uh our our hypnosis app company got started at a Stanford brain mind summit about 5 years ago when um uh Ariel Polar who's a uh uh graduated Stanford Business School MIT and helped to start Straa you know the the exercise app >> came up to me and he said I gave a talk on hypnosis he said hey you want to try making an app and see if that might work. So I said, "Sure, let's do it." And um it uh we Alexa at the time was making it real easy to program things cuz they wanted to recruit more customers for Alexa. So we built a smoking app. Um same principle for my body. Smoking is a poison. I need my body to live. I owe my body respect and protection. And you know what? We got the same results. It's very frustrating. I didn't have to be there in person, but >> Oh, you're out of a job. >> Well, hopefully I'm in a new one. uh where you know my maleifluous voice saying for my body smoking is a poison. I need my body to live. I owe my body respect and protection. And we got one out of four stop smoking with the app. Um and actually the rest of the people cut their average cigarette consumption by about half which >> for a single session intervention remote is not bad. And that's on the Revery app now. And my favorite bit of feedback came from a social worker in San Francisco who who said um you know I didn't even want to stop smoking. I got in your study. I tried it the first time. I didn't like it. I've been smoking for 25 years. All my friends smoke. I didn't want to stop. And that night I tried it one more time at home. I lit up a cigarette. I looked at it and said, "Who needs that? I haven't smoked a cigarette since." She said, "My friends can't believe it and I'm helping them to stop smoking." And then she said, "This is some kind of crazy ass voodoo shit." And I mean that in a good way. >> Mhm. >> So, um, yes, it seems to work as well. >> Fascinating. That's a really interesting case study. Somebody who didn't even want it. >> Didn't even want. >> So, somebody who didn't even want but I suppose, you know, >> started this off. There is some concern that people have over a loss of control in some ways. Now, this is a loss of control because your team are responsible and are telling people to move their body in a direction that is objectively better for them regardless of whether or not subjectively they actually want to change. Um, but you can see with that a potential vector for uh something that maybe I don't want to do this. Well, I've been convinced of doing it through hypnosis. And perhaps that's that you could have a a real nefarious evil person who wanted everybody to smoke. you know, the smoking companies released their own version. Obviously, wouldn't be allowed, but you know what I mean? You have I don't want to smoke more. And yet, I've been convinced to do it. I wonder I wonder maybe deep down she did want to stop smoking. Maybe that was her. I don't know. >> Oh, yeah. I I think she she may have. But, you know, look, Chris, we're social creatures, right? You know, we're susceptible of social influence. And you know, all you have to do is read the newspapers and, you know, or listen to the to the news to see how people can tune in to really crazy ideas and think they're true. You know, all these conspiracies of the, you know, the child abuse under the in the garage of the pizza place, you know, I mean, >> there's all kinds of crap that people believe. And so, you know, is hypnosis a problem? I think it's the fact that we are social creatures and we accept information and don't always judge it very carefully. >> My favorite study on that was Boston marathon bombing. >> So there was a study done around the level of uh post-traumatic stress that people felt. Individuals who had watched more than 90 minutes of news coverage about the Boston Marathon bombing showed higher levels of post-traumatic stress than people who were actually there at the event and lived through it. You know, we've we've published on that actually because your study >> we studied uh the response to the 9/11 World Trade Center bombing and we evaluated people within a month after it happened and then 6 months later and one of the things we found is that people who watch more than 3 hours of television a day about it were significantly more distressed. um they had uh it it did you know and there comes a point where you know all you can know about it and it didn't help and also people who lived in social networks that that encourage suppression of emotion don't talk about it. So the combination of being overexposed to the stimulus >> and not having an outlet >> not having an outlet where people were more distressed at the time and did worse off six months later as well. Uh so that's absolutely true and we I did a study of uh we compared two groups of people. One were reporters who looked at the who witnessed the execution of Robert Alton Harris, a serial killer in California. >> And they had very high levels of PTSD even though they were in no personal danger themselves. They were there because they wanted to be there to cover it as as a news story. And we compared that with the levels of PTSD in people who were in a law office at 101 California Street where a a disgruntled client came in and shot a bunch of people there. And the levels of PTSD symptoms were about the same in the two groups. So the the emotional experience just witnessing it is bad enough. And we identif we're social creatures. We identify with people who we see being hurt and victimized. And it's it's deeply upsetting. So, you know, and it troubles me, frankly, that, you know, the average kid by the time they're 20 has watched like 18,000 murders on television. You know, you or in movies, >> these TV series, internet. >> Tell you what, I had a really phenomenally fascinating conversation. Earlier on this week, I learned that uh a study was done where they put microphones around the necks of uh kindergarteners. They did it for a full week >> and then they did sentiment analysis on what what the microphones picked up. What were what were these young kids being told? 85% of the language that was being told to them was negative. Don't do that. You can't go there. Get down from that. You're too late. Stop talking. Get to the You need to sit down in class. No, you're going to be late for dinner. parents, teachers, coaches, 85% of the language. Yeah. >> That was delivered. And uh the the argument being um some parents have a concern around their kids getting out over their skis a little bit too much. We don't want to give them an ego, want them to make sure that their feet are on the ground. Uh it kind of feels a little bit like making every child British, but uh you know, don't get too big for your boots. >> Right. Right. And you think you as the parent parents if every single word that you said to your kid was positive unless you're with them more than 50% of the time they're still going to be on the scales are going to be balanced in weight of negative language from what they're hearing from parents from coaches from you know everybody else. >> It's just siblings. >> It's a very bad way to raise children. It's just uh it's just asking for trouble cuz you're you're number one, you're belittling them. You're making them feel bad about themselves and and number two, you're telling them not what to do, what not to do, which only focuses their attention more on that and less on what what it is they they might do. Our >> our our son was a lot of fun. He I would hypnotize them to go to sleep at night. I mentioned they you know, floating down a river. And one night, apparently it didn't work. He came out looking for me and said, "Dad, I need a professional. This is this is not working." >> Sorry. >> But he also, we were we were talking at a dinner party about um uh television and what a bad influence it was on children and all that. We said, "Oh, yes, we don't let them watch from this hour to then." And Dan comes padding in in his PJs, his footy PJs, and says, "Dad, I'll be right back after these messages." you know, so he was letting us know that he was going to do it whether we told him not to or not. >> Wow. >> So, but I think you're absolutely right and it's very disturbing that uh you know I mean now and you know what's what's out there you know in Instagram and other things is really disturbing what kids see on that. >> Mhm. >> Is uh >> I've been using eight for years and I genuinely can't imagine life without it. Having a mattress that actively cools and heats each side of the bed is a total game changer. 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Right now, you can get up to $350 off the Pod 5 by going to the link in the description below by heading to eight.com/modernwisdom and using the code modernwisdom a checkout. That's ei.com/modern wisdom and modern wisdom at checkout. Yeah, I mean I know I had um Dr. Paul Turk, you familiar with him? >> No. >> Evolutionary pediatrician. So he looks at um pediatrics both clinically uh and developmentally >> from an evolutionary lens, ancestral lens. So a lot of huntergatherer analysis. He's the guy that found he was the I think his team is the one that looked at the um peanut dust coating on rice puffs being able to reverse anaphilaxis in toddlers. So you sort of do uh controlled exposure over time. I think you can do the same thing with lactose as well to be able to get kids to and if you do it by age five then they're they're age three or something that they're okay for the rest of time and but this increase in uh uh helicopter parenting snowplow parenting or there might be a little bit of an or there was and then you avoid exposing the child to that which makes them more >> uh susceptible to it in future. other uh bits of insights, maybe not directly from him, but kind of similar. Uh a house that's has a dog in it. Um the kids are 50% less likely to have uh asthma. >> Really? >> Um the same thing goes for houses that use dishwashers as opposed to handwashing. Uh if you use a if you're in a house with a dishwasher, you have higher rates of asthma, higher rates of >> Yeah. You're not exposed. >> Yeah. You want this tiny Exactly. And the dog The dog's coming in. It's just enough. It's just enough of a dose. It's like that. Same thing goes with this peanut dusting. Anyway, >> yeah, >> he also found one in six American adults have flattening of the occipital lobe from how much time they spent laid down as a child. Like, so you literally have the imprint of your baby bed on the back of your head when you're a 50-year-old man or whatever. Um, and again, he's seeing when he looks at uh hunter gatherers, you're permanently in different positions. your a child that's on the floor is a meal without wheels, right? It's not even a meal on wheels. It's a it's a it's it's a it's a meal that can kind of crawl a tiny little bit. It's dead. It's gone. Um and yeah, it you know, parents I understand I'm getting into parenting territory now. It's very passionate. >> Uh parents are worried about what is called co-sleeping or something where the the kids in the bed with them. Um that's a concern. It's like maybe there's some mechanical reasons why you should be concerned about that, but for all of human history, the baby used you as a bed. Forget the baby being in the bed. You were the bed. It was on you for 8 hours or whatever. And that's just what because the it's what's it going to be on the floor of the cave like out in the near the, you know? So, >> um, >> looking at >> the levels of exposure, what it is that kids are exposed to. Don't do that. Don't go there. you shouldn't do this. Plus, we roll on top of it. Social media, um, extreme amounts of news. I have a couple of, you know, another example of what you're saying. I'm thinking about how children were born throughout human evolutionary history. You know, no nerve blocks, no anesthesia. Women did it differently. They they often did it standing, actually, because you would let gravity help >> pull the baby down and they would push and they were fine. M >> um my lovely wife Helen had both of our children without anesthesia. She she did self hypnosis the whole time and um she wanted to be in control. And I've talked with other women who said I wanted to control the process. I wanted to get the baby out when it needed to go >> and open myself up and do it. And um you know there are some advantages but more and more there's evidence of some cognitive brain problems with general anesthesia in general >> and even local blocks sometimes. Uh and so there's a place for it. I've had general anesthesia. You know one does it. I'm a doctor. Me too. >> But we overdo it. and uh and the idea that people can't learn to handle pain that pain is this sort of unexpected intrusion on my life that I don't want rather than it's a part of life and a part of managing your body and you can learn to manage your pain better if you can train your brain to be in a different state than the one it is when you're in pain because >> what does it say that um interventions that do not change the mechanics of somebody's lower back >> can change their interpretation of the discomfort. What does that say about the way that pain, discomfort, the story we tell or even emotional pain? What does that say about the way that that works within the human system? >> The strain and pain lies mainly in the brain. If you'll forgive a British uh analogy, the think about it, the brain is this control center in the skull. It gets and interprets information from the body, from the world around it, and makes sense of it and decides what to pay attention to and what to ignore right now. Hopefully, you're so fascinated by what I'm saying, beguiled, that the sensations in your bottom touching the chair we're sitting in, um uh is not in part of your consciousness right now. Is that hypnosis? Well, maybe, but it's it's part of the way the brain works. It decides what's worth paying attention to and what isn't. And that has survival value. It has comfort value. And we can train our brain to be different about it. So, I had a group of Stanford students. Um, we connected them to a a little device that would send electric shocks and measured their evoked responses, their brain's response, sata sensory evoked response to these shocks. And in the normal condition, they had a pretty substantial P100, P200, P300 EEG response to this series of shocks. We hypnotize them, gave them exactly the same shocks, but said, "Your arm is in circulating ice water. Cool, tingly, and numb." The P100 disappeared. So within a tenth of a second after the shocks were delivered, the brain is acting like >> I don't know these P numbers. Sorry. >> Oh, P numbers. you the the evoked response is like looks like a just a wave form. >> Okay. >> And there are standard parts. So the first the early response is a little peak of uh activation in the brain. The P200 is usually about twice as big and the P300 about three times as big, a third of a second after. And it it's the way the brain receives sensory information and responds to it. M >> but what happened was this first response within a tenth of a second just disappeared. The brain acted like the same signals weren't there. >> And the P300 is usually a reaction to whether something is either pleasant and interesting or unpleasant or necessary to do something. So the more you have to act on it, the bigger the P300 is that was half as big. So basically same signals the brain was making less of them >> in the hypnotic analesia condition. So the brain has to process huge amounts of information and decide what's worth paying attention to and what >> is it the salience coming back. >> Yeah that's is it salient or not and so the brain can substantially control responses like like pain. We did a randomized control trial of people having surgery through their femoral artery, threading catheterss up, doing chemo emulization of tumors in the liver, uh look trying to expand arterial constrictions near the kidney and all that. It's not pleasant. Takes about two and a half hours. You don't use general anesthesia. And we randomize subjects into three conditions. Standard care, which meant press a button, you'll get opioids in your bloodstream. That plus a friendly nurse or that plus learn training in self-hypnosis. And at the end uh and this is like 120 subjects. Um at the end of an hour and a half the average pain levels for the standard care group were five out of 10, three out of 10 with the nurse and one out of 10 in the hypnosis condition. >> And we looked at how anxious they were. Five out of 10 in standard care, three out of 10 with the nurse, and zero in the hypnosis group. I thought they died or something. They they were all fine. >> I bet they used less of the opioids as well. Exactly. Half as much. >> Yeah. >> Half as much opioids. So half as much opioid. So they had fewer procedural complications. >> Yeah. Less constipation. >> Exactly. And they got done 17 minutes faster cuz the fact that they had a comfortable patient made the surgical team more efficient. >> Shifting around. They're not having to mediate. They're not having to cajul or make them feel okay. >> So hypnosis is an absolutely effective analesic even in extreme circumstances. And and you know, you you'll see people in, you know, in combat or something who are very badly injured, >> but they're busy trying to help a buddy and somebody has to say, "Hey, wait a minute." You know, >> looks like you've been shot as well. >> Yeah. Exactly. So that's what the brain does. It decides what's important and what isn't. And hypnosis is a powerful way of taking full advantage of that ability. And so that's why we built Revery. We're seeing people getting immediate reductions in pain response. M >> um just with that and >> where should people go if they want to get a hold of Revery? >> Um just you can download it www.reie.com from the web or from the app store or Google play. >> That's re e v e r i e. >> I no e at the end. >> No, reai. >> Rey v i. >> Okay. >> And try it. You know, you get a the first week's free. You uh can see if it helps with your pain or your stress levels. What we do with stress is we say we're going to start from the bottom up. You mentioned this before. Rather than saying figure out how to handle the problem and you'll feel better. We say start out feeling better. Imagine your body's floating in a bath, a lake, a hot tub, or floating in space. Control your body's reaction and then picture on an imaginary screen the problem on one side and what one thing you can do about it on the other. So you start out doing something by reducing your somatic overreaction to the stressor >> and then you can think more clearly about what to do about it and we get uh 20% reduction in stress levels in 10 minutes just teaching people to do that. What's the gold standard intervention? A lot of this is very impressive because it's single session, right? You go, "Oh my god, one session as opposed to smoking sensation, one session at 20% reduction." >> Um, by design that is either 75% or 80% of people who don't get that within a single session, right? It's one in four. >> No, no, no, no, no. That's not what the data are. The data are it is um 80% get some kind of positive response. >> Oh, okay. >> The rest either get no change or a few get worse. >> Right. >> Um but they get the actual reduction the percent reduction in their total stress level >> understood >> is like 15 or 20. >> Understood. Understood. That wasn't the response. No. So most of them four out of five get better. Right. >> Understood. Um, let's say that you wanted to get it from a 20% reduction to 30 or to 40. Um, what's the gold standard when it comes to this kind of to using Rey or to to doing self-hypnosis for maximum effect? >> Well, what we're seeing with Revery is um that the baseline levels don't change over time, but each time they do it, they get the same level of improvement. Um, so it means you've got it when you need it. You know, it's sort of like taking the pill. you know if you except you don't get addicted habituated to like you do to benzoazipines you just do it when you want to do it so the nice thing is you've got the ability I think the best example is a randomized study we did with women with metastatic breast cancer we would meet with them once a week we talk about their fear pain and anxiety help them deal with that and at the end of the session we teach them to do self hypnosis >> and what we found over the course of the year was that the women in the randomized to the treatment group had half the pain the control group did on the same and very low amounts of medication. And so what they would tell us was it's not that I never had pain. It's that I always knew that if I had it or it bothered me or it got worse, I could do the self hypnosis. >> I was in control. >> So instead of thinking, oh, I have pain in my chest, there's a new metastasis, I'm going to die in a month, they would say, "Oh yeah, I know what this is. I can deal with it." And they would be able to control the pain. What have you or what are you excited about stacking hypnosis with in terms of multiple modalities? Um, is is it a one-stop shop that this is all It sounds like that's kind of a psychotherapy, a little bit of a psychotherapy with a a hypnosis finisher. Um, but is there something where you think, huh, this is an area of the modality that we've said a bunch of stuff today that sounds kind of psychedelic adjacent. Uh, turning off of the default mode network, increasing levels of connectivity in areas that wouldn't typically be, etc., etc., increased interception. Um, >> are there any areas that you think this would be a really interesting combination or stack to uh have hypnosis be built into? Well, one other thing you're right and the the reduction in default mode network activity happens with psychedelics. It happens with meditation too actually. So there is that common ground there. One thing we've been looking at is breath work is is how to help people control their breathing in ways that can help them relax. And that combines very nicely with self-hypnosis. And actually we have several breath work exercises, cyclic sighing and box breathing >> uh in the Revery app now because part of what you can do to help your body relax quickly is not just you know shift into this uh highly focused but relaxed state but also breathe differently. So you know if you do so cyclic sawing is an an interesting practice where >> can you explain what that is? >> You do sure you just do and you can try it if you want. It's really simple. You just do a an abdominal inhale. Start with your belly through your nose about halfway. Now fill your lungs completely and then slowly exhale through your mouth. Good. And try one more time. Inhale through your nose quickly. Fill your lungs. Now slow exhale through your mouth. How's your body feeling? >> Pretty regulated. Pretty nice. It's pretty floaty. >> Very quick floaty. Right. And what you're doing, we think, is you know the standard thing when somebody's anxious say take a deep breath. That's actually not a good idea because when you how do you take a deep breath? You reduce pressure in the chest. You suck air into your lungs, but you also reduce blood return to the heart. You know, veins don't have muscles in the wall. Arteries do. And so that tends to slow the return of blood just a bit. But that sends a signal through the sinoatrial node to the heart to increase heart rate. Yeah. >> To keep blood pressure up and keep blood flowing. Whereas when you exhale, you're increasing pressure in the chest. You're increasing Venus return to the heart and that triggers parasympathetic activity, the rest and digest system. So it's a very rapid way to invoke this self soothing and combining that with hypnosis we think can be very helpful. And we found that people who do cyclic sighing uh like 5 minutes a day for a month >> wind up being happier and less anxious uh and breathing one breath a minute more slowly. >> Wow. >> Um and we we tend to over breathe. We we we breathe too rapidly. And so it's a very quick way of helping your body feel better and relax. And it combines very nicely with hypnosis. We'll get back to talking in just a minute, but first, some things are built for summer. Sunburns, hot girl walks, your ex posting their Euro road trip, and now lemonade and salt. Huh? Element just dropped their brand new lemonade salt flavor. And it's everything that you want on a hot day. Tart, salty, and stupidly refreshing. 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Right now, you can get a free sample pack of Element's most popular flavors with your first purchase by going to the link in the description below or heading to drinklnt.com/modernwisdom. That's drinklnt.com/modernwisdom. I've done a good bit of breath work. There's some great classes here in Austin that I do that use that two what they would call a two-part breath. Uh >> yeah, the slow exhale. Yeah. Yeah. >> Um also James Nester has been on who wrote Breath. Ryan McKenzie's been on uh guys from the state app. Uh um who's the lady that did >> the bio resonance um HRV training? Dang. Uh anyway, Dr. Lady. >> Lot of stuff around that. One of the things I've always been a little bit uncertain about is how much a state change coming from uh breath work >> expands out into a trait change that impacts the way that you breathe throughout the day. Is this simply me giving myself a 10-minute salve from my sympathetic nervous system being tuned up or is this the sort of thing that after 30 days does result in lower breath rate across the night or whatever it might be? Well, we we have a paper in self-reports medicine that shows that it it seems to have lasting effects that mood is better, anxiety is reduced, positive a effect is higher and um and you're breathing less rapidly. >> Presumably the mechanism for that is just regulation of the nervous system. >> Yeah, you're just you get you know you neurons that fire together wire together. You keep doing it and um it tends to change your pattern over time. >> Have you looked into bio-ressonance breathing? >> No, I haven't. >> It's an interesting one. So, um, you're trying to create the, uh, you you find a breath rate, uh, of, I think you start off, you do an assessment 7, 6.5, 6, 5.5 down to 3.5 breaths per minute >> and it tends to be around about 60% out versus 30% in in terms of the ratio that expands or contracts. Mine's 4.5. >> So, my resonant and what you end up doing if you wear a a little wearable um >> Mhm. and that's built to detect HRV and you can watch it on the screen and you've got this screen. You're doing a session of 10 minutes or whatever and you see these huge peaks and valleys. So for me, if I'm doing it during the day, I'll get swings from 80 down to 71, up to 79, back down to 69, >> up to 78, back down to 69, and you get these hu, you know, if you saw someone with this on a EKG, you'd think they're having like some AIB, right, catastrophe, but it's the biggest swings that you can get. And that is especially given that I'm breathing at 4.5 breaths a minute. There's no >> like it's not I shouldn't get that sort of floaty lightaded depersonalization nitrous oxide type scenario. >> Um but as I've got better at it and you have they've gified it obviously so there's a little zone that you're supposed to stay in and stuff >> and um >> the as I've got better at it the felt sense of that is is really really fascinating. Um, so the resonance feedback, I get the sense that that will be a modality that people are going to think about more. It's less accessible because you don't know. I mean, you could do it and just say that one felt right >> to me. You know, you don't necessarily need to have all the wearables and and the fancy stuff. I'm interested in what the most some of your favorite standout extreme uh responses have been. you mentioned about people being able to go through surgical procedures that would typically be very uncomfortable with minimal levels of sedation or minimal levels of of painkillers. Um, I remember reading in Johan Har's book um about this guy who had a maybe 1800s a famous wand that was attached to some electrical uh system and he could wave it over people and get rid of all of their pain. And there was another study that was done where they recreated it even though they didn't have access to the technology and they slowly removed each of the different components. They unplugged it. They to they got rid of the box. They got rid of the metal. They got rid of the wire. And then they got rid of the actual stick that it was attached to. And I imagine that what we're seeing with some of those modalities is that you're allowing people to tap into it. But some of those stories were people that had this chronic pain. They've been catatonic for years, etc. I'm interested what across a pretty broad career some of your standout cases of almost unbelievable responses to hypnosis were. >> Well, you know, I've had people um uh who have dealt with just horrible, horrifying, traumatic experiences, um you know, sexual abuse in childhood or you know, assault injury. And um one technique that I used that I borrowed in a way from mindfulness which is compassion is is the issue of having compassion for your own body. And so I've had a woman who um was sexually abused by a landlord when she was 12 years old and was chronically depressed and miserable and um uh came to see me. She'd been on anti-depressants for 15 years and she had an okay career. Um but she, you know, as a teenager, she said, you know, men could say anything they wanted to me on the streets. Uh I was ashamed. It was just terrible. And um I had her in hypnosis picture herself um as that 12-year-old just after she had been assaulted. And I said, "I want you to just answer one question for me. And I want you to imagine that you're her mother. So I get people to sort of develop a use their knowledge and and compassion as parents with themselves. And I said, "I want you to answer one question for me. Is this her fault?" And she started to cry harder and she said, "No, I'm stroking her hair. I'm stroking her hair." And she came out of it and she left. She she was moved by it. And I've had a lot of patients who just when you have them use their well-developed parental skills on themselves, you know, >> and she said, "My doctor wants me to ask you what you did because I'm not depressed anymore and my friends don't recognize me, you know." So, and I've had other people who have it's the shame, you know, that we'd rather feel guilty than helpless. And I found that hypnosis >> can help people recognize, you know, another one was a woman who was, you know, groped in a bus. Her mother was a few seats away. It was a very crowded bus and she didn't say anything. But it changed her. You know, she just felt humiliated and she was blaming herself. Why didn't I scream? Why didn't I do Why didn't I do that? And I said, you were you were not in control of the situation. You know, look at yourself now and picture what it meant to go through that. And so um you can this capacity in hypnosis to help people change their point of view um uh is is something that's powerful. I I I have a video of a Vietnam vet um who was hospitalized for a year in a state mental hospital. Um just he went crazy in over in Vietnam. He went running through the jungle shooting at what he thought were Vietkong. And I found out that what had happened was he had informally adopted a Vietnamese child. Um and uh he just took care of the kid. The kid was had been burned and was badly injured and he just kind of took over and was his father. He was the youngest of like 13 kids in his family. He liked being in this role of caring for somebody else. and he comes back in the after the um uh there was a major assault in in Vietnam >> and he found the boy dead lying dead on the on the street >> and um he just went he went nuts. He just couldn't stand it and he got out of the army after 15 years in the army. He he was discharged un you know dishonorably and was getting psychiatric care and I had him picture that and in hypnosis go back and relive what had happened and I said um and and I then had him go to the to the burial and you know he's saying ashes to ashes and dust to dust and um he said if I'd only been there with you man you wouldn't be there now it's all my fault. And I said to him, "What would Shytown say to you if he were here?" And he'd say, "You're you're my number one cook, my number one sargy, you know." And he just so I said, "I want you to picture two things about this. I want you to picture your putting him in the ground, and I want you to picture one time you were really happy." And he remembered a birthday party that he threw for him. his his he had got a cake and he his sister sent the toy train to the kid and you know and I said I want you to remember that every time you grieve his loss I want you to remember the good times you had together he said you number one Sargi number one cook and so he comes out of the hypnosis and I I said do you remember anything and he said Joey oh yeah I remember a grave and a cake and that was it all the other stuff He didn't even consciously remember >> and he got off meds. He got out of the hospital. Um, and he was training kids to do long-distance cycling, you know. So there are times when you can use hypnosis to change people's perspective in a hurry to just try out being different seeing the same situation from a different point of view and hopefully a more honest full >> compassionate >> compassionate situation including compassion for yourself. What does it say again about the way that the human mind, the human system works that somebody can go through that probably very emotionally activated during that hypnosis session, you know, the keystone memory in this man's life, come out and be able to recall two things and then have a big lifestyle change. Yeah, >> you know, we have this sense, I think, almost a kind of soypism thing about >> I know me and I know what drives me and if it's not there in consciousness, it probably doesn't matter all that much. It just seems, you know, fascinating that you can have state change leading to trait change even though after the state change, you can't recall most of the stuff that happened. and then this guy's transformed. I I'm just interested what what that says about >> Yeah, he remembered enough of it. So, I would say, you know, >> if you think about what we're doing, you know, it's sort of like updating an operating system. You know, you're the rules by which you regulate yourself change because you you give up and a lot of people who are traumatized to you give up the fantasy that you control everything that happened, especially at moments when you had zero control. He had no control. So, you know, he was in the middle of a horrifying war. You know, half a million Vietnamese were killed, 54,000 Americans were killed. You know, so you're going to keep this poor injured child alive in the middle of a combat zone. You know, sooner or later something is likely to go wrong. You tried as well as you could and you should recognize that. And you gave him periods of happiness. He gave you periods of happiness, but you you were not in control of what happened. And it was that sense of it his ability to accept the fact >> that this had happened but it was a loss but not a total loss because they had a time when together >> so it changes your perspective on it. It changes your perspective on who you are what you can do and what you can't do >> and I find that it even if they don't remember all the details they remember some of it but it gives them a sense of relief. They accept something very sad, but it makes them feel different about themselves. >> Seems like resistance or some version of resistance as a word >> uh is typically a a big contributing factor to some of the challenges that people are facing that you're overcoming >> with hypnosis. I should have been different. I shouldn't feel this pain. Um this is because there is something that is wrong. It's not so much to do with the thing. It's to do with the story that we're telling ourselves about the thing and the story that we're telling ourselves that we should be able to be in control and that we should be able to overcome. So this this friction that we have between what's happening, >> right, >> and the story and the shame and the blame and and the resistance it feels like which is which is in some ways is very liberating. >> Yes, it is. I think you're right that it's a matter of accepting the inevitable, you know, and and um seeing the role you played in it, but seeing it objectively as if you were watching yourself and that's where the dissociation can be helpful, not not pathological, >> which is also, I think, what um MDMA psychotherapy is is useful for doing for creating that degree of distance, although >> uh maybe a little different of a delivery mechanism than the the hypnosis. >> Yeah. Yeah, it is. And there's less control. I mean, the nice thing for me as a psychiatrist and psychotherapist is that what people experience with hypnosis and why we can put it out there in revery and have, you know, we've had more than a million downloads and virtually no problems with it is that people um learn something about themselves and they don't lose control. You know, >> if you sent MDMA to a million people, you might have different could be a bit of a problem. Yeah, I think so. But you know I've I've studied you know the use of psilocybin with dying cancer patients. I've worked for decades with dying cancer patients. And one of the interesting things about that perspective is this sort of oddly you know aware odd awareness but disconnection at the same time. So people who are scared to death in in a psilocybin trip can look at it and they could see you know what that will be the end of me. you know, I can accept that, but I can also see that it's a miracle that I ever got to exist in the first place, you know, and so they kind of face it, but they come out different. One of them said, "It's like looking into the Grand Canyon when you're afraid of heights." You know, you know, it would be a disaster if you fell, but you feel better about yourself because you're able to look and >> say, "I feel serene, but I can look at it." >> Well, think about how much Yeah, I've certainly learned this through acceptance and commitment therapy. I was struggling to sleep this year. I've had a >> been kicked in the nuts so many times that two-dimensional uh over the over the the last 12 to 18 months. And um uh uh one of the side effects of that is my um nervous system basically got turned upside down. So >> uh cortisol was low in the morning and at its highest at night. >> DHEA also declined throughout the day and melatonin release was basically no. So tide but white the classic tide but wide like burnout type thing >> and um living in a house with mold ton of you know like autoimmunity just complex illness stuff the same thing that a lot of people that are >> sad brain fog and tired a lot end up >> dealing with and I did some CBTI uh and some act eye as well for for trying to sort of deal with that and so much when it sort of actually comes down to it so much of it is in the story that we tell ourselves about I I don't have control. One of the lines that I said to my sleep coach was um I don't feel like I own the pillow. I feel like the pillow owns me. And it's kind of the same with this the end of life owns me. I don't own the end of my life thing that this thing is going to come. And >> it's interesting to say it's like looking into the Grand Canyon when you're scared of heights. Mhm. >> Even though you're still terrified, the story you tell yourself about doing it. >> And I think that that's the one of the key differences, total bro science here, between ACT and CBT being that with acceptance and commitment therapy, you're not reframing. I think one of the issues that the ACT guys have with the CBT guys is that there is a a pushing away of thoughts. There is a a dealing with the thoughts as opposed to sort of allowing it to move through you a little bit more. And that's the kind of staring into the abyss or the Grand Canyon thing. And then, okay, well, what does this cycllically mean? >> Oh, that means that I'm brave enough to be able to face the thing. Oh, well, maybe that means I'm brave enough to be able to overcome. Oh, well, maybe I can actually take a little bit of action with this. Perhaps I do have a bit more agency than I might have thought. >> And again, we get into this sort of recursive story that we tell ourselves, the subconscious, and stuff like that. >> Well, people fear hypnosis as a loss of agency, but it's an enhancement of agency. you can face things see them differently and please try revery to go to sleep. We we find a lot you know we get feedback on pre and post pain and anxiety we the most use of reus for insomnia >> but we had very little data from it you know we've got thousands of people using it but and it turned out that when we asked them why didn't you give us the followup they said they fell asleep we fell asleep that's exactly right >> I can take that you know fantastic >> what we do you know to go to sleep is just focus on not turning off the thoughts in your head, but getting your body comfortable, floating, safe and comfortable. Imagine you're in a bath, a lake, a hot tub, and then project the thoughts as if you're watching a movie. So, it's not inside your body. It's not stirring up all that adrenic arousal. It's just a scene that you're watching. You don't have to or want to do anything about it. You just picture it and let it flow through you. >> Why do you think hypnosis has sort of been sidelined in mainstream medicine despite decades of evidence? >> I Well, I don't know. It frustrates the hell out of me. I think some people are afraid of it. They don't understand it. They either think it's it's terribly dangerous or it doesn't do anything. Both of which are wrong. >> Um and um I'll tell you another reason. Um big pharma, you know, >> anything that's effective, they don't want >> I don't I don't have a I don't have a team of ex- cheerleaders going around telling doctors that hypnosis is great. You know, pharma spends more money on advertising than they do on drug development. and it's a product and I uh I think um uh there's big money in doing that and I prescribe drugs there drugs can be very helpful but not always there many of them are overutilized and um I think it's because also you know you have a real appreciation of the brain and what it does and how it works but for most many people many doctors the real intervention ions are insertion in injection uh or incision, you know, or ingestion. It's not it's not talking to people. Is that a real treatment? Is that really doing anything, you know, and the answer is yes, it does. It is. But people it takes a bit of a leap of the imagination to get that. But breaks the current model. >> It does. It does. And there's a lot of economic forces pushing the current model. And so I think we, you know, we we don't get no with the Rodney Dangerfield of treatments. We don't get no respect. You know, he I don't know if you remember him. He was a comedian. He said, "They asked me to leave a bar so they could start happy hour." You know, it's it's one of those things where people have trouble believing that just talking to someone, just them listening to an app can actually make a real change in their life. And we've got thousands of people, tens of thousands of people, hundreds of thousands who have had that experience now. So, uh, it's a leap of the imagination, but that can be a powerful thing. >> Dr. David Spiegel, ladies and gentlemen, you David, you're fantastic. I feel, uh, even if we haven't done the hypnosis today, I'm certainly feeling much more regulated. you have a I I wonder how much your demeanor and your sort of speaking cadence and your nature has been influenced by doing thousands of sessions of hypnosis and how much you just brought into it and that was like you know like being a very tall basketball player you were already sort of built for this sport but it really does feel like you're in a sort of genius zone with with what you're doing. So >> thank you very much. >> Thank you for contributing to making the world a better place. >> Well thank you and thank you for doing that for informing people about these kinds of things. It >> try my best does a lot of good. Thank you Chris. Thank you very much for tuning in. If you enjoyed that episode, you will love this one with Mr. Nal Ravakhan. It's first episode in six years.