Use The Power of HYPNOSIS to ENHANCE Your Health, Performance & FOCUS! | Dr. David Spiegel

But hypnosis is more problem-focused. It's saying use it to control stress, use it to control pain. You go into a state of self-hypnosis, you're floating in water, you can transform the pain into a sense of cool tingling numbness, and learn to filter the hurt out of the pain. Dr. David Spiegel, welcome to the show. Thank you, Tom. Glad to be here. I'm very excited. So, this is a topic, hypnotism, that I have long been fascinated by, but never met the right person that was taking a serious look at it. So, I've had, obviously, encounters with stage hypnotism, which is fun, but not exactly the kind of thing where I want to rush up on stage and have somebody hypnotize me. And so, in the episode today, I want to really understand what hypnotism is, what it's good for, how it relates to an analytic tradition. You talk about Freud in the book. It was really interesting. You You elevated my thinking around what hypnotism is and what it could be used for. Um and I have a quote from the book that I want to start with, and I thought that this will set the stage well. "If you can measure it, it's science. Everything else is poetry. Yet, assessment techniques have limitations. In the therapeutic odyssey, the clinician is best guided by both the science of Apollo and the poetry of Dionysus. Hypnosis is a fertile phenomenon for exploration by both the researcher and the clinician. It is a style of concentration, not a therapy. A capacity, not just a mystery. When the therapist employs trance and treatment, he is making maximum use of his patient's hypnotic capacity and motivation for change." All right. That's a pretty heady exploration that comes at the end of the book. So, I had had a lot of lead up before I heard that passage. Yeah. But, what does that mean, exactly? Well, Tom, I'm I'm glad you pointed that out, and it is hypnosis is a state of highly focused attention. It's a naturally occurring state. It's an ability that many of us have and we underutilize. You know, we don't Our brains are the most powerful organ in our bodies, uh but they don't come with a user's manual. And so, there are a lot of things that our brains can do that we're not fully aware of. So, when you get so caught up in a good movie or a play that you forget you're watching the movie, you enter the imagined world, not the real world, uh that's a form of self-hypnosis. And one of the things that people misunderstand is because in states like that, you tend to suspend judgment, you have great power to do things you may not have thought you could do. Like what? Well, right now, you have sensations in your bottom is touching the chair and hopefully you weren't aware of that until I mentioned it. If I did, we could stop now. Uh We do it all the time. Your brain has the ability to say, "This sensation is important, that one's irrelevant, don't bother with it." To dissociate aspects of sensory or cognitive experience. And we can learn to employ that and control it. It's where people make a big mistake about hypnosis. They think it's losing control. It's actually a powerful means of gaining control. It doesn't look like that from the outside. I've heard you say that before and later, so you and I checked before we started. I did not think I was hypnotizable. Right. Uh because of an earlier experience that I had and you said that given the real fast test that I actually may be quite hypnotizable. Yes. exciting for me. Yes. But from the outside looking at it, it looks like people are losing control. Like they even talk differently. Like it feels like some part of them is gone. And so, I'm very curious. In what way is it us gaining additional control? Well, it's a way of discovering other aspects of yourself that you may not be fully aware of. If something is gone, something else is there. And what we found is that hypnosis is really a form of cognitive flexibility. Your very ability to take in a different perspective, a different point of view, to experience writing about a rainstorm as if it were raining outside when it isn't, is a skill. It's an ability you can use. It doesn't mean you're weak-minded. It means you're flexibly minded. And so what's good about hypnosis is that you can take on different ways of approaching a problem. You can think of a difficulty like pain in a different way. It's a signal. It's a signal from neurons in your body, but how you interpret the signal is very different depending on whether you're having crushing substernal chest pain and you're having a heart attack, or whether the same old achy back is bothering you again. You can react to that to the same pain signals the same way, but if you're cognitively flexible about it, you can experience them differently. Mhm. Okay. Very interesting. All right, so talk to me about the relationship between hypnosis and therapy. You say it's not a therapy. Right. That it's just focused attention. Right. But you talk a lot about how the the moment that psychoanalysis really first became something that that this could really work was tied to hypnosis. So, if hypnosis is not a therapy unto itself, what is it doing that allows psychoanalysis or other methods to work? Well, hypnosis is a state of open, generally accepting concentration. But it means that you have to have a strategy along with it to have a therapeutic benefit. Now, Freud in his early work, in his studies in hysteria, the first uh book that he wrote, he was he he learned to use hypnosis from the great French hypnotist Jean-Martin Charcot. And he was using it to help patients relive earlier events in their life that he thought might be related to their current symptomatology. And uh he said he says in his autobiography that one moment I was relieved um of of a difficult situation by the entrance of a man servant, my patient threw her arms around my neck during hypnotic trance. And he said I was modest enough not to attribute this to my own irresistible personal attractiveness. I discovered the mysterious element at work beneath hypnosis. So he thought that it was transference. That when you have these intense experiences, you may transfer feelings you have about them to your therapist. Now we know that that happens in therapy all the time. If you see a therapist for post-traumatic stress disorder, you may suddenly become afraid that the therapist is doing something to harm you. So part of the work then is not just using the hypnosis to relive the memories, but therapeutically suggesting to the patient that the feelings that are coming up are related not to the present situation directly, but to the the fears that come up when you think about early traumatic experience. So you're reliving it, but you're restructuring it. And that's where hypnosis can be really helpful. It's to bring up issues, but then see them from a new point of view. So you've done a lot of brain imaging Yes. on people in hypnotic states. Right. I'm I really want to understand that. Are things turning off in the brain when you go into hypnosis or are they turning on? Uh it's not quite that simple, but close. There we found that when people go into a hypnotic state, three things happen. One is you turn down activity in what's in the anterior cingulate cortex. It's this brain structure like this, right down in the middle center of your brain. It's part of the salience network. So if we suddenly heard a loud noise we thought was a gunshot, we'd suddenly change our attention. That's the salience network saying this could be trouble, you better pay attention. It's what um many um social media um uh approaches use to get your attention. They talk about a threat, you know, and so suddenly you're scared and you pay attention to something else. and leads. Right, exactly. So you turn down activity in that area. You're not worried about the fact that you're narrowing the focus of attention. You then connect the dorsal lateral prefrontal cortex, part of the executive control network, to the insula, which helps to regulate the body and is part of the salience network, and you disconnect the dorsal lateral prefrontal cortex from the posterior cingulate. That's a part of the brain called the default mode, where you just reflect on yourself and who you are. Activity there is turned down during meditation, for example. So, you're you're worrying less about what else you might be thinking about, and you're allowing your executive control network to strong more strongly connect with your body. So, it it's a state of highly focused attention, disassociation of things that ordinarily would be in consciousness, and sensitivity to input that really represents cognitive flexibility. Ooh, okay. So, that's a that's a complex bundle. Let's talk about disassociation. Right. That sounds bad. a negative connotation in my mind. Somebody goes through a traumatic something, they disassociate. Do we have that from an evolutionary standpoint so that we can deal with trauma, or is there a beneficial take to that? You know, Tom, that's a very astute point. You know, I I've sometimes wondered, why did we evolve to have this ability? And if you think about it, we're we're pretty pathetic physical species. You know, we're not that big, we're not that strong. We don't see as well as eagles, we don't smell as well as bears, you know, we don't hear things that well. We see we do see things pretty well, though. That's our major defense. And so, it would it's important uh for us to use the capacities we have to protect ourselves. Now, predators, who usually have eyes in the front of their heads, like tigers and lions, and prey that have eyes on the side of their head, so that they have a wider visual range, um are more keen to picture a predator coming, but predators detect motion. That's how predators find prey. And if you are good at staying very still when you're in danger or when you're hurt, you're more likely to evade a predator. And so there is real adaptive value to being able to inhibit the urge for motion, to control anxiety, and to to reduce your ability to experience pain, to control pain, too. So, I think that this capacity to regulate concentration had real evolutionary adaptive value, and that's why we are this way. But we don't use it nearly as much as we could. All right. So, I'm simultaneously disassociating, but I'm also paying closer attention to my body. Exactly. Yes, maybe your body, it may be something else. So, didn't you say though that part of it is that a region becomes active that is dealing with paying attention to your body or no? Yes, it it Well, it connects your executive control network more strongly to the part of your brain that controls your body. Okay. So, that means you can turn things on there or you can turn them off. in control of my body from an executive level. That's correct. Man, that feels like the opposite of what That is the opposite of what I think about with hypnosis where it's like you're having the person raise their arm. Oh my god, it's like it's working without me. Yes. Help me reconcile that. Well, you're the disassociation of your arm means that you can disconnect control systems that involve your hand floating up in the air and it'll float back up if you pull it down. But it doesn't mean you don't control it, you just control it in a different way. So, you discover that you have two different control systems for your different arms, and one is the usual and the other is the unusual. And that's just enhancing your array of abilities. It's not saying you're really out of control. You're not, you're just have a more complex set of control systems than you realized. That's so intriguing. Do you know what tumo is? Tumo? So, Wim Hof uses tumo so he can heat up like the palm of his hand. Right. And so, there were these monks that were studied because they claimed that they could like melt the snow around them, that they can make one hand warm and the other hand cold. And people like, "There's no way." Yeah. And so, they went and measured it. And they actually can do it. It's really impressive. And then Wim Hof has probably been the one that's been studied the most and they've submerged him in ice and he can maintain his core temperature long past where he should be in hypothermia. I mean, it's really impressive. And it seems like, cuz I know you've studied like if you put somebody in a hypnotic state and then walk them through eating an imaginary meal, that the gastric juices will actually spark as if they have Right. eaten the meal, which is insane. In fact, walk us through that cuz I know there were there was more depth to that study. I know in your career you've been more than a little bit interested in nutrition and how the gastrointestinal system works as Lisa has. And um what we found, we we got people to not eat, you know, to to be without food in the morning. I met with them. Uh we hypnotized them. We had them eat imaginary meals. So, we'd spend an hour. I got hungry just listening to it, you know, but they would uh go to Alice Waters' restaurant and, you know, have a good meal there. And one woman after about 30 minutes said, "Let's stop. I'm full." You know, just eating imaginary meals. And and we had uh a 200% increase in gastric acid secretion. We put down an NG tube and measured their gastric acid secretion. We then did the contrary. We had them eat um uh uh think about anything except food. Um and we had uh 30% decrease in gastric acid secretion. And even if we injected pentagastrin, which stimulates gastric parietal cell output, we still had a significant decrease in uh their gastric acid secretion. So, we could change it in either direction uh in rather remarkable ways. And that suggests that we have a much more detailed control system in our brain about how our body reacts than we give ourselves credit for. All right, my friend. I have a big announcement. My incredible and talented wife Lisa is about to launch her new book, Radical Confidence. In it, she has managed to perfectly capture the process of how to go from feeling lost and insecure to taking control of your life and doing amazing things despite feeling fear, sometimes a lot of fear. Now, let me tell you, nobody knows Lisa better than me, but when I read Radical Confidence for the first time and heard her describe what it was like for her to go from having these big, exciting dreams as a kid to then as an adult scheduling her life around the TV shows that she wanted to watch or how lonely and isolated she felt instead of pursuing her dreams, it was brutal for me. I would never say, though, that it was worth it for her to go through all of that just so that she could write something down that allows others to avoid it, but I will say that at least she was able to capture the strategies that she used to break out of that rut, find her voice, and begin doing incredible things despite her insecurities and fears that she wasn't going to be good enough to achieve great things. So, while it hurts me to know the dark place that Lisa went through, I really am excited for people who are going through something similar right now to read this book. Radical Confidence is an instruction manual for how to become the hero of your own life even when you're scared to death. Look, I know better than just about anybody how easy it is to get off track in life or to just not have yet found your calling. And it's even easier for people to feel so insecure and unprepared that they don't even want to pursue the things that they want. But what Lisa shows people in Radical Confidence is that the radical part is that you can accomplish extraordinary things even when you feel fear. That's what radical confidence is. Being afraid and unsure and having a toolkit that allows you to still make massive progress. Pre-order your copy today because if you act now, you can claim the bonuses that Lisa has created for you at radicalconfidence.com. They're only available if you pre-order, so act now. Then, once you're done that, we'll get back to today's episode. All right, guys, read the book and get ready to be the hero of your own life. Peace out. Yeah, that was one of the more surprising things in the book is so anything that gives me the ability to influence my what I think of as my subconscious probably more sophisticated than that, but anything that allows me to do that becomes really um enticing because when I'm anxious I feel completely like I can't get my body to do what I want. And it's it's weird. So, the way that it manifests for me when I feel anxious, it is exactly the way that I feel when I'm cold. So, I feel unmoored is the easiest way to explain it. I just feel like I'm not grounded. I feel a little jittery and it I can feel the blood leaving the prefrontal cortex. You know, it's like I can just I I'm not at my sharpest and I can recreate that feeling by getting cold because I now associate anxiety with that feeling. So, it's really weird that I can in some ways, I suppose, hypnotize myself into thinking I'm anxious when really I'm just cold which is bizarre, but the idea of being able to go in and slow that down, stop it, like get the blood flowing in my brain the right way again, slow my heart rate, slow my breathing that would be incredible. Now, is so your ability to be hypnotized, you said is more consistent throughout your lifetime than even your IQ. That's right. But can I get better at that autonomic regulation over time? Or is that just like, once you're hypnotized, that's sort of it? No, you can use it better. Whatever your level of ability is, you can learn to use it better. So, what you've just described for me, Tom, is a typical thing that happens to people when they get anxious, which is one way they notice it is their body feels more uncomfortable. And you mentioned you feel cold, you may start to shake a little bit, muscles tense up, and then you notice that, and you say, "Oh my god, this is going to be bad, you know, I'm getting anxious again." And what does that make you do? It makes you more anxious. So, your brain is sending you the signal. It's like a snowball rolling downhill. So, the way we use hypnosis for that often is to teach you how to focus first on making your body feel more comfortable, and then on the problem that's making you anxious. But it becomes Why? That's really interesting. Because uh the you may not be able to control what's making you anxious, but you can control how your body's feeling. You can control how your body is reacting to the stressor. And that by itself starts to make you feel better, because what bothers us about stressors is they're threats that we're not sure we can control. And so, you we often start out with this associated learned helplessness, where we feel the signals that come when our bodies are telling us "You're anxious, you're stressed, there's a problem." And so, the way we work at it is to say, "Let's control the thing we know you can learn to control." And that's how your body's reacting. And that gives you a platform on which you can then approach the problem and try to deal with it differently. Yeah, that's really intriguing. Um so, I've always attacked it from the breath perspective. Meditation changed my life because it while not as effective as I would want it to be if I'm in the throes of like a moment, it's not like I can "Hey, just give me a second, let me meditate for, you know, 10 minutes." Right. But, the ability to breathe from my diaphragm, having practiced sort of letting it go, Mhm. um that makes such a big difference. So, anything that gives me this other path to being able to address things that I think of as happening at an autonomic level that should be theoretically outside of my reach, um that gets really intriguing really fast. Sure. Well, autonomic doesn't mean automatic. You can learn to control autonomic uh activity, and breath work can be one way. Without limit? No, not without limit. There are limits, but you can do it. We we tend to think it's something happening to us cuz it's happening to our body. But, our bodies are controlled Every part of our body is controlled by our brain, and there are ways of managing how the body is responding. You know, breath work is a very interesting thing, too, because breathing is normally an automatic function, but we can take it over and do it anytime we want. So, and the control system for it is right uh below the brain stem in the brain stem, and it it it's a place where it's right at the edge of conscious and unconscious control. And so, taking control in breathing can be very helpful. Yeah, no doubt. So, as people begin to explore this, it seems like at least if they fall into the category of people that are able to do it cuz I know about a third of people can't. Right. Um that it it seems to have a pretty profound impact. Why then does hypnosis have the sort of weird reputation that it has? And why is it if it was being used pretty um out in the open, I mean, so you have a guy named Mesmer, which is where we get the phrase mesmerize. That was back in what, the late 1800s? It's been around for a long time. So, why has it struggled to gain, I'll call it legitimacy? Well, hypnosis um is the oldest Western conception of a psychotherapy. It's the first time that a talking interaction between a doctor and a patient was thought to have therapeutic benefit. And and was it? Was that Freud? Um well, it was Mesmer. Mesmer You know, he demonstrated that people could go and to have these pseudo seizures and all kinds of things. He became the go-to physician in Paris uh for a long time until the other physicians got unhappy about how much of their business he was taking. Um and he was discredited because of his theory of why hypnosis worked. He called it animal magnetism. He thought there were magnetic fields in the therapist's body that influenced the magnetic fields in the patient's bodies and corrected them. Um even though he was using hypnotism? Did he understand what he was doing? He he had a theory and he he knew that he was influencing people. He knew it could change things that happened in their bodies. have them stare at a single point or watch a what? He would he would sometimes do that. He would but he also put them next to what they called packays in France. They were uh tubs filled with magnetic filings and the idea was a weak magnetic field and then maybe the magnetism would change the magnetic fields in their bodies. Um that wasn't true. And so, a French commission that included our own Benjamin Franklin who was having fun in Paris, the brilliant chemist Lavoisier, and the doctor well-known for his work in pain control, Dr. Guillotin, the inventor of the guillotine. He kind of created the mind-body problem. Yeah. They were all on this panel. They decided that he was wrong about magnetic fields, which he was wrong about. But, they kind of threw out the baby with the bathwater and it unfortunately a lot of hypnosis has been associated with stage hypnosis, with uh people who don't know anything about doing psychotherapy or assessing medical problems. And so, it got a bad rap. But then, you know, there have been bad drugs, too. There have been snake oil salesmen forever and somehow we don't see medication as necessarily being bad in the same way that we have with hypnosis. So, it got a bad rap, but it's still around because there's something powerful and helpful about it. Yeah, it's really interesting. So, one thing that stage magicians do that the post-hypnotic suggestion, where it's like, "Hey, you're going to go back to your seat, and when you hear me say chicken, you're going to yell out." Mhm. A, is that real? Does that work? And if it does work, why? Well, it has to do with uh your openness to incorporating novel cues, um and dissociation that you're not know that like if if somebody is hypnotized and you give them a post-hypnotic suggestion, do they know that they're going to have that reaction? Or are they a surprise as well? Well, they know and they don't know. Part of their brain knows cuz some of them do it. Not everybody by any means. You know, the stage hypnotist, the beginning of any of these shows, they'll get people cycling on and off the stage because only about one in 10 people are so hypnotizable that they'll do stuff like that. So, they they filter them around until they get the few who will. But, the ones who do have taken in the information, but don't consciously remember the instruction episode, and so when they hear the cue, they do it. Not everybody does, but some people do. So, the information is there, but the awareness of how and when they got it and what it means is not there for the moment. You know, I think it's one of the things that scares people about hypnosis is that it shows us how susceptible to influence we are. And I wish people in this country were a little more aware of how susceptible to all kinds of strange, weird influences than we are. Tell me more. What do you mean? Well, people are willing to believe just flat-out lies, you know? They're willing to believe stuff that we all know is not themselves because they want to believe it or I think some of them are. I think a lot of the people are just it's they're going with the the content rather than the context of what they should know is going on. So, they're dissociating what they say they think is true from what they know couldn't possibly be true. That's really interesting. So, you've referenced hypnosis being like looking through a telephoto lens. Right. Where you see with more clarity something, but it's completely devoid of context. That's exactly right. And so, if you strip away the context or alter the context, you may think things are true that simply are not. And you know, going back to your your magic thing, you know, there's a magic wand and there is some connection between the magic wand and the hypnosis, you know, the old idea of the dangling watch, which is you get somebody to pay attention to what you want them to pay attention to and not what else is going on around. So, It's like clicks them into that narrowed focus. Exactly right. Okay. And so, simply the act of narrowing one's focus puts you into a hypnotic state if you are hypnotizable, yes. It does. And that's what you do in a hypnotic conduction. You get people to focus on a very narrow set of things, see what you can observe and feel about them. And that can be an induction into a hypnotic state and it can occur in a matter of seconds. It doesn't take minutes or hours to do. Okay, so we get in this hypnotic state. In fact, I this may be interesting to combine these two things. So, you've said basically all kids are hypnotizable and from the ages of 5 to 10, 6 to 11, somewhere around in there, it's just like maximum hypnotizable. You you call your kid into dinner, he doesn't hear you. He's out playing. He's And that's what so wonderful about childhood is work and play are all the same thing. You just get totally absorbed in it. And so, yes, most most 8-year-olds are in trances most of the time. Kids are little sponges. They want to take in everything. They don't judge it and keep it at a distance. They just take in whatever is going on. It's a wonderful learning strategy and children, you know, human children have the most profound periods of dependence of any creature. So, they have to learn how to live and being open and accepting, concentrating very intently, is a good learning strategy. And so, I think that's one reason that children are so much like that. But, as they go through adolescence and they learn what we call formal operations, they learn logic, you know, that a tall skinny jar doesn't hold any more water than a short fat one, they tend to employ critical judgment more. Their prefrontal cortexes are growing at that time. And so, they learn to balance taking in new information with evaluating and thinking about it, which is also a very useful human skill. So, some people retain that kind of more childlike ability to just take it in and go wow and feel and absorbed in it. And other people develop a more logical, orderly, step-by-step process of learning. And that can work, too. Okay, so talk to me about how we go about the reframe, the recontextualization. Hypnosis is used a lot in pain, it's used a lot in trauma. Right. Age regression, like all of this stuff. So, I there might be two things there. So, one, you've got reframing, which I assume would need a therapist. And then, the other one is accessing something in a context-dependent state or a conditionally dependent state. I forget the word they use in the book, but like that you have to re-be in that same disassociative state or whatever to remember. Um Right. What what is that? Well, I think that when many people are traumatized, they will often say that they everything else disappeared. Some many sexual assault victims say they experienced the rape as if they were floating above their bodies feeling sorry for the person who was being assaulted. Um you see pictures of people after 9/11 covering their mouths and unable to say anything. You go into an altered mental state. And so, one reason that hypnosis can be so helpful in with people who have been traumatized is that they can get into the congruent mental state. And they will sometimes tell you that they remember things or aspects of the trauma that they had not thought of in the interim period. And you can also help them see it from a different point of view. So, for example, I I was asked to see a woman who had been through a violent sexual attempted sexual assault. Um she wanted to picture better picture the assailant's face. It was getting dark. And um as we went back and relived it, she's clearly getting upset again the way she was at the time. She said, "You know, I realized something that I didn't let myself see before. He doesn't just want to drag me upstairs and rape me. He's going to kill me." And so, I asked her to just try and stay with that feeling for a little bit. And then I said, "Now, I want you to picture something else on the other side of this imaginary screen. Your body is safe and comfortable. You're not going to be hurt now. I want you to picture what you did to protect yourself." And many assault victims don't think of that, but everybody has a strategy to try and stay alive. And she said, "You know what? He's surprised that I'm fighting that hard. He didn't think I would." Now, she wound up with a basilar skull fracture as a result of fighting him off. But, she realized, "You know, I may have saved my life." And so, it gave her a different perspective on the traumatic experience. And hypnosis can help you do that in a hurry to get allow yourself to be aware in a controlled way where you know it it you can turn it on, but you can turn it off. And then picture also a different aspect of the traumatic experience. We call that restructuring, cognitive restructuring of what the event is. And that's a way to help people deal with trauma. So, what do people mostly come to you or any clinician that uses hypnosis for? And is it something they have to keep coming back, or how does that Well, what I try to do, Tom, is uh they come for problems like pain, uh stress, anxiety, insomnia, difficulty sleeping. Uh they they come to stop smoking, uh to eat better, to to lose weight, um and eat more more healthily. Uh, and, um, I assess their hypnotizability, teach them how to use self-hypnosis. I will sometimes see them several times. For people with complex trauma histories, I'll often see them many times to try and help them work through the trauma. But, what we tried to do is come up with a way that they could still get much of the benefit of working through the experience, but not have to keep come seeing me or another clinician. So, with the Reverie app, they can hear my voice, go through the same procedure, but modified depending on how they're reacting to it, and put themselves to sleep. Um, we we had one woman who said she was a little upset with how the app was working, but she said, "I want to tell you that's the first time I've slept in 15 years, so I really want to make sure that this works as best as possible." So, it it's a kind of compromise where they can get the benefit of the expertise without having to keep going to and paying, uh, a clinician to do it time and again, because it really is learning to use your own internal ability. And once you've learned that, people do it for themselves. I have cancer patients whose pain over a period of a year got reduced by 50% on the same medications. Just when they feel that pain in their chest and they think it's another tumor, they just go into a state of self-hypnosis, imagine they're floating in a bath, a lake, a hot tub, or floating in space. It, you know what? It's just a it I I've known a few people who don't like it, but most people have pleasant associations. They take a bath, they get in a hot tub. You do too? when I have trouble falling asleep, and this is without ever being prompted, I imagine myself floating in the ocean, sinking. I don't know why sinking, but I imagine myself floating to the bottom of the Marianas Trench. And that should be terrifying, Yeah. but I imagine the water is warm, and there's just something so enveloping. I don't know if it's like a womb thing. That's sort of what I've always Yeah. read out of like my own desire to imagine myself completely encased in water and just sinking, sinking, sinking. Of course, I have to tell myself before I start this is weird, but I have to tell myself you can breathe underwater. No, that's so that I feel completely relaxed as I'm sinking, so it's not a threatening feeling. It's just Anyway, it just you you always mention this idea of floating, floating, floating. I was just curious because that resonates with me so well. I just didn't know why it's so universal. So, listen, folks, you know, he you'd be a really good hypnotist because you give a very nice description and the fact that you think about that concrete potential problem. You know, how could you be floating down under the ocean and still breathing and you take care of that is exactly what is needed for people who are letting themselves go and allowing themselves to feel this alteration in sensation. So, that's that's good hypnotic instruction and it obviously works for you. Yeah, it's interesting. It It works sometimes, but I would really like to get way better at it. Sure. Hello, my friend. You know that I believe success requires you to see failure as the ultimate learning tool. Success requires you to be disciplined and gritty and to never ever quit on your dreams. I say all of that because one thing is certain, the road to achieving your goal is not smooth or linear. I wish it was, but it's not. It's going to be bumpy, sometimes scary, some days you'll take two steps forward and slide 10 steps back. And that's why success also requires you to know how to pull yourself out of a rut and get unstuck fast. Life is short. You can't be messing around with your goals. You've got to make progress every single day. So, I've pulled a class from Impact Theory University called how to get unstuck, which you can watch for free with the link on your screen or by clicking below. When you join me for that free preview of that workshop from Impact Theory University, I'm going to teach you my strategy for how to understand exactly where you need to be going, how to identify the obstacle that's blocking you, and the best way to make the most progress towards that goal, and keep your momentum. All right, click that link and let's get to work. All right, I'll see you on the inside. All right, so going back, people come in, they come in for all these things, you tell them to imagine themselves floating, and then we were just about to get into how that helps. Well, that's one of the things. I mean, it depends on what the problem is, but typically, um, for stress management, for example, I'll say, "Imagine you're floating in a bath like a hot tub or floating in space." Now, notice how quickly and easily you can use your store of memories and your imagination to help yourself and your body feel better. So, we get them immediately, and one of the wonderful things about hypnosis, when it works, is it works right away. You know, you don't have to wait, you don't have to take it on faith that if you keep doing this for 3 weeks, you know, you'll start to feel better. Um, you can see whether or not it's helping you. And if you feel that sense in your body, you say, "You know, if I can make my body feel better in this way, sometimes the way I'm approaching problems may make it feel worse." So, you're learning that there are ways that you can control your body, and then I have people picture on an imaginary screen, on the one side, something that's stressing them out right now. But, with this rule, keep your body floating. So, you're floating at the bottom of the ocean, but you're picturing this problem. Your body's feeling better now, and then I say, "On the other side of the screen, picture one thing you can do to help with that stressor." It may not be the perfect thing, but it's something. So, you're beginning to control how your body reacts, and you're beginning to control your mental strategy for dealing with whatever the stressor is. And so, it's teaching you to step-by-step enhance control, take stock of it, how well you're doing, and then continue to use it to better solve the problem. Yeah, it's so interesting to be methodical, to just keep coming back to it. It reminds me so much of meditation. In fact, what what are the differences between meditation and hypnosis? And are they the same? Well, they're similar and there's something about changing mental states by itself that can be therapeutic. So, you know, if you make the mistake of reading a really nasty email at 11:00 p.m. Have you think, "Oh God, what am I going to do?" You have trouble going to sleep. And the next morning you've got a night's sleep. You say, "Oh, that that guy again. I can deal with that, you know." And so, changing mental states changes your perspective on situations. So, that by itself is good. Hypnosis is more Western. It's problem-solving. You know, it's done for a purpose. Whereas mindfulness is meant to be a way of being, training your brain to have open presence, to just experience things without judging them, uh to develop a sense of compassion for other people, to do a body scan and check out different parts of your body. But, it's it's not per se designed to solve problems. It's designed to just be differently and then if you are, you may solve problems. I have great regard for that. But, hypnosis is more problem-focused. It's saying, "Use it to control stress. Use it to control pain." You go into a state of self-hypnosis, you're floating in water. You can transform the pain into a sense of cool tingling numbness and learn to filter the hurt out of the pain. Um or you can say, "You know, I'm going to use dissociation. I'm going to leave my body here floating and I'm going to go somewhere else I'd rather be." And and you find that that's another way that you can disconnect yourself from the pain sensation. So, it's it's similar, but it's not the same and different parts of the brain to some extent are involved. Mindfulness is more turning down activity in the posterior cingulate cortex, turning down your awareness of self and what it means. Whereas hypnosis is more turning down that salience alarm network uh and saying, "Yes, it may be there, but it's not going to bother me as much as it did before. All right, let's talk about the three personality types cuz it has pretty big implication into who's hypnotizable, some potential pathologies that people might have. So you've got the Apollonian, Right. the Dionysian, and the Odyssean. Odyssean. Yeah. Uh, what's the difference? So the Dionysian, Dionysus was the god of pleasure and celebration in Greece and I like him already. There you go, you're there. And and the idea is these are people who lead with their feelings, who have experiences, who can fully absorb themselves in experiences, and that's like people who are very hypnotizable. They just get totally engaged in engrossed in the experience, and just the experience itself is its own reward. It's an autotelic or self-rewarding experience. People like being there cuz it just feels good to do it. On the other extreme, you have the the Apollonians. Apollo was the god of reason. They value rationality over all else. They don't believe anything they haven't read somewhere, and they think through everything logically and have trouble allowing themselves to put feelings first and just think things through. And those people tend not to be very hypnotizable, and I approach I treat them but I in a much more step-by-step, logical, linear way. The Odysseans, for Odysseus, who would have these grand adventures and then come back and reflect on what they meant, um are sort of more in between, where they'll allow themselves to feel but then pull back and wonder, feel bad about it. Uh, they can be prone to depression, you know, they reflect on what happened and they're unhappy about it. So those tend to be the three personality types that we identify with uh the the Odysseans are mid-range in hypnotizability, the Dionysians are high, and the Apollonians are low. Okay, and so where does this start to get into pathology? Well, we find that people who are mid-range, the the Odeans tend to be more vulnerable to depression, if anything. Uh the the Because they ruminate? Yeah, because they ruminate about that. They have the experiences, but then they ruminate about them and go over and over and sometimes have a lot of negative self-talk about why did I let myself do this? What kind of person am I? They overgeneralize bad experience to be a judgment about who they are and they start to feel hopeless, helpless, and worthless. So, it can degenerate into a kind of depression. The Dionysians are more prone to um psychosomatic disorders, to what we used to call hysteria, the conversion disorders. They'll have Conversion disorders non-epileptic. It's now called functional neurological disorders where they'll they may be people who have a seizure disorder, but they'll have non-epileptic seizures where they're they suddenly start to shake as if they're having a seizure and it becomes a dramatic expression of a conflict. So, I had a patient who was a member of a very fancy wine family in in the Napa Valley and she was the only one in the two generations that would talk to both sides because the fathers and the sons were in court fighting with each other all the time. And she started to develop these seizures. She was trying to just make peace and get everybody together for Thanksgiving dinner and people were everybody was yelling at her and she decided she had to do something when her daughter had a baby and they wouldn't let her hold the baby because they were afraid she'd have a seizure. So, I did two things. She was very hypnotizable. I had her bring on a seizure. She made it happen and then I taught her to make it weaker and weaker. So, you can you can't stop it right now, but you can start it. And that's a way of teaching you control. And I said, "The other thing is when your father calls you and starts yelling at you on the phone, hang up on him." She was calling him every day and he'd always yell at her. and "You don't have to take that." So, teach him a lesson and just don't talk to him till he stops doing it. And she's now holding the baby, the kids are growing up, and she's doing fine. So, she could express herself more in action than in words, and I was trying to help her learn to provide structure uh to that situation. All right, we get our hooks into this through different means. So, could be meditation, it could be hypnosis, it could be uh psychoanalytic tradition, but finding ways to acknowledge. I'm putting that I You never said that, so I'm putting those words in your mouth, but that seems like you can get on board with that. Uh and then reframing it. And that hypnosis is a great way to get us into a hyper sense of concentration, but with some disassociation in there, so that we're altering the way that we perceive things. Um and then we can reinforce this in ourselves, and we can get better at doing this, whether it's reducing pain, reducing anxiety, reducing the tremors, whatever the case may be, by practicing this. Now, when we're in self-hypnosis, would we be repeating in our heads the kind of thing that you say, like, "I'm floating. I'm going down. Um I'm feeling calm and safe, and on this side of the screen I'm going to imagine this, and over here." Is that what you're doing, or is it once it becomes the self-reinforcing part, does it take on a different approach? Well, it it's good to have a structure like that to start with and to start out doing. And again, we can allow people to hear that again and again if they want using the Reverie app. Um or seeing other people who practice hypnosis if they want. Um but yes, it is it's a starting point. If you have a structure, you can learn how to get there, you can see what you can do, and then you can develop on it. You can say, "Well, you know, I feel better rather than floating, I like to imagine not being in the ocean, but floating in space. Or I can be somewhere else like lying on the beach in the sun where I feel comfortable." So, they can elaborate on it and and use it in a different way that they begin to develop. But, it helps like with any practice to begin with a concrete example so you can see what it feels like and then you can start to uh amplify it in various ways. And a key part of this is the sense of feeling safe, I imagine, having to get people into that state where they're calm, they're relaxed. Right. And then you pull in that idea. Now, one thing that that makes me think of is doing treatment with drugs. So, MDMA is something that I've long promised myself that I would try. Mhm. Uh I'm super in like if I were going to do a drug, it would definitely be MDMA, at least from what I hear. Mhm. It sounds pretty extraordinary and the way that I explained it to my wife is imagine if I put you in a state where you're just a wash in serotonin, everything feels good and okay and embraced with love, and now I have you in that state revisit a trauma. And now it's Mhm. you know, whether it's a deeper empathy for yourself, if it's something you blame yourself for, or uh a greater understanding that you're going to be okay now and that you can move forward sort of in this light and love. Um I know you've looked at psilocybin and the way that it can change people's sense of what dying means. Mhm. Have you seen a similar kind of effect from hypnosis? Um yes, hypnosis can be helpful uh in teaching people how to change their both the their physical state, how they feel physically, to control it even without the drug, but also the effect of the drug. So, one of the things that MDMA does, you know, it's called ecstasy, it's the sort of interpersonal connection drug, you know, it helps you feel more connected with other people. Now, many people who've been traumatized feel ashamed of what happened. They feel guilty, we'd rather feel guilty than helpless. And there was Oh, that's a statement. Yeah, and it's people blame themselves for events they had no control over. Why on earth would we rather feel guilty than helpless? That's interesting. Because you think if you're if it was your fault, you could replay the the movie and make it come out differently. Trauma is in essence the experience of being made into an object, a thing. You have no control over what's happening to your body. And so you'd rather feel you're in a situation where you were still in control, you could have made it come out differently, but you didn't do the right thing. Part of it is to detach yourself enough, but approach it so that you can get a truer perspective on what happened and what you could do and what you couldn't do. So you don't blame yourself for things you don't control. And there's a sense of shame that comes with that. So many people are ashamed of whatever trauma was done to them. Many sexual assault victims are ashamed about it even though they have nothing to be ashamed about. And so a drug that helps you feel you can reconnect with people can help to counter that sense of shame and isolation that many people who have been traumatized have. Yeah, MDMA is intriguing. Now psilocybin though is a totally different trip. And you said something that really resonated with me, which is if I were dying, the last thing I would think to do is take something that I know could give me a bad trip cuz I'm already freaking out. And yet people that do it say, you know, this is one of the four or five most profound experiences of my life. It's helped me completely reshape this. Do they have a bad trip though and it just ends up being worth it or Well, now the way the psilocybin studies have been done and they've been done very well at Hopkins and NYU and elsewhere is they couple the drug with four or five hours of supportive psychotherapy. So they try and keep people from having a bad trip, but the interesting thing is most of them don't anyway. And part of it I think is and I've worked a lot with dying breast cancer patients without drugs. And we were told when we started this that we'd give them and what amounts to a bad trip. They'd watch other people die of the same disease and that they would freak out. But you know what? Death isn't a novel concept. It's just having the ability to face it. One of my patients said, "It's like looking into the Grand Canyon when you were afraid of heights. You knew if you fell you'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 I think people thinking about it on psilocybin say, "You know, this is a terrible thing, but part of what I'm experiencing is the preciousness of the moment. I can have this negative feeling. I'm still alive. Uh I have the people that I've loved in my life. And the fact that that happened isn't going to go away even when I go away. So, they see their death from a different perspective and the capacity to see it differently makes it less overwhelming. That made me really emotional. That's interesting. Man, that's heavy. Yeah. That's so heavy. Why do you deal with breast cancer patients? Um I was a philosophy major in college and believed what the existential philosophers said that you don't really live authentically until you face the possibility of non-being. And so, I started with help of Irvin Yalom, who was a mentor of mine, a support group for women who were dying of breast cancer. And we were told that we'd make them worse, we'd demoralize them. But we wanted to see if it would be a way to actually enrich their lives as they were facing the end of their lives. And that's what we found. And we found that they were less anxious and depressed, they had less pain. And in fact, in the first study we did, we found that the ones who were randomly assigned to the group therapy actually lived 18 months longer than the control patients. Now, they weren't cured of breast cancer, but they lived longer. So, providing intense emotional support can help people help their bodies cope with a even a very serious illness. Wow. Okay. With that, you ready to try this? Okay, I'm so curious to see. All right, how do I like orient myself emotionally to maximize the likelihood that this will Just get as comfortable as you can and be open to what you feel. Put one arm on either leg like that. Do I need to lean forward? No, you can just get comfortable as you can. You might take off your eyeglasses if you don't mind. I don't mind. One second. All right, so now Please look straight ahead. And now look up to the top of your head, all the way up high as you can. And as you look up, slowly close your eyes. Good. Take a deep breath. Let the breath out. Let your eyes relax, but keep them closed and let your body float. Now as you concentrate on your body floating into the chair, I'm going to concentrate on your left hand and arm. Oops. In a moment, I'm going to stroke the middle of your left hand, middle finger of your left hand. When I do, you'll develop a sense of tingling and numbness and lightness. And you'll let it float upwards. Ready? This is an exercise in your imagination. Just imagine your hand to be a big buoyant balloon and let it float upwards in the air, higher and higher as the rest of your body feels heavy and relaxed. That's good. All the way up. Higher and higher. Each breath deeper and easier, hand floating higher and higher as the rest of your body feels heavy and relaxed. That's good. All the way up. The higher it goes, the lighter it'll feel. Each breath deeper and easier. That's good. All the way up. The higher it goes, the lighter it will feel. Good. Now, I'm going to position your arm like so and give you this instruction. Your hand will remain light and in this upright position even after I give you the signal for your eyes to open. If I pull your hand back down to your leg, it will float right back up to the upright position. You'll find something pleasant and amusing about this sensation. Later, when I touch your left elbow, your usual sensation and control will return. Each time you go into this state of concentration, you'll find it easier and easier to do and you can use it to help you concentrate on what's important to you. Right now, we'll come out of this state of concentration together by counting backwards from three to one. On three, you'll get ready. On two, with your eyelids closed, roll up your eyes. On one, let your eyes open. Ready? Three, two, one. Good. Now, stand in this position, please, and describe what physical sensations you're aware of now in your left hand and arm. It feels light. Light? And weird. It changed while it was moving. At first, I felt it was really subtle. Real It just really But now it actually feels buoyant. It feels buoyant? Yeah. Uh is it um Does your left hand feel as if it's not as much a part of your body as your right hand? It feels the same, but it feels like it's being altered by something. It feels buoyant. Does feels like mine. Yeah. But it feels like I don't feel like I'm holding it up. Good. All right. Well, now note this. See, it feels like it wants to move, but not enough to actually lift. Well, turn your head, look at your left hand, and watch what's going to happen. See, now now it doesn't feel like my hand, which is weird. Like looking at it does not feel like mine. That's super bizarre. And while you're looking at your hand, just imagine it to be a big buoyant balloon. Yeah, that's it. And while you imagine it to be a balloon, permit it to act out as if it were a balloon. Be big about it. Can you describe what that feels like? Feels like it's just lightening. Good. Now, as your left hand continues to go up by way of comparison, Tom, raise your right hand. Put your right arm down. Are you aware of a relative difference in sensation in your left hand going up? Yes. Is one arm lighter or heavier than the other? This one's light It's it feels buoyant. Like it feels like it's in water. Like I don't feel like I'm holding it up. It's great. Which is super weird. Good. So, that's that's an an experience of dissociation. The two hands feel very different. All right, now make a fist with this hand, tight fist. Ready, open. Are you aware of a difference in sensation and control now in your left hand and arm compared to a moment before? It doesn't feel buoyant, and it feels like my hand again. Good. But it's really subtle. And did you have a sense of floating lightness or buoyancy in your left hand and arm during the test? Yes, very much so. Did you have that sense in any other part of your body? Head, neck, thighs, abdomen, chest, or No. No. No. No. I tried to imagine myself floating, so I felt very calm and relaxed. But that was the only part that felt Like when it was up here, like right now I feel like I'm holding it there. Right. Right. But when it was there before, I didn't feel like I was holding it. Well, your score is 7 out of 10. You're quite hypnotizable. Um That was really interesting. But that was A more subtle than I expected it to be. Uh-huh. And B that once I was in that position, it was then it really felt strange. I felt like I could leave it like that forever. Yeah. And I would have no sense of effort. Right. Which was unexpected. able to do it without effort, and that's exactly what you can feel with hypnosis. That you can learn to change the way you experience parts of your body. Um and I could see how that would have tremendous implications for pain. Yeah. To your point about focus, like at one point, the only thing I was thinking about was my hand. Right. Or my arm. Right. Exactly. Exactly. Narrowing your focus, disconnecting the way it felt from the way the rest of your body felt. That's what you can do in hypnosis, and very quickly. And what would you say your level of tension, overall physical tension, is right now? Uh well, it's back to normal. So, now I'm aware that I'm on camera, that I'm being watched. Whereas when we were doing that, I at one point when my hand was up, I was completely focused on that. And forgot that I was in front of camera. I felt way more relaxed. Exactly. Exactly. So, you can see that you can reduce that level of tension very rapidly. And then it it may come back, but you can do it again. You've learned that you can do that again. And so, that's one of the advantages is you have a an in vivo experience of how quickly and profoundly you can change the way parts of your body feel or your whole body feels. What's interesting though, and you talked about this in the book, I wanted it and this is weird and a little uncomfortable, I wanted it to come from you and not from me. Like I was so aware of like don't move it if it feels like you're moving it, you know what I mean? Like that sort of Ouija board thing where it's like I'm not going to move it. So if this thing moves, it's cuz somebody else is moving this thing. Um and so that was I was almost too aware of that. So I wanted it to be external. I didn't want it to be something that I was faking. Right. But it's it it's a learning experience and one that you can learn to to benefit from and yes, it helps to have guidance into it to see what the phenomenon is, to see how capable you are of experiencing it, but once you've learned that you can increase your capacity. it again. That's so weird. Like I can now now that I'm thinking about it, I've got that tingling sensation on my arm again. It's starting to feel light. That's really trippy. It's really interesting. Good. Good. Dr. Spiegel, thank you so much for coming on the show. Where can people connect with you? you. They can connect with us on Reveri. You can go to the App Store and download the Reveri r e v e r i app. Um and uh we have a a website www.reveri.com where you can also sign up for the Android version. We're developing that and it should be out in a few months. So people who have Android phones, but if you have iOS phones now, you can download the app and try it out. Try it free for a week. See what it's like and um we hope that it will help a lot of people control pain, help manage their sleeping better, control stress, um eat better, learn to stop smoking, um and find their focus the way the the way you talked about. And that's what we want to help people do and use it to help better manage these problems. I can say from a sleep perspective, I downloaded it last night and tried the sleep thing and I was falling asleep so fast. I was like, okay, whoa, whoa, whoa, I have to stop. I'm not done researching yet. So, yeah, but it was certainly certainly effective for falling asleep. I'm really glad. That's great. Yeah, for sure. Guys, uh this is something that intrigues me. I think that hypnosis is another tool in your toolkit. I highly encourage you to try the app. Definitely read the book. It's all amazing. He's also got a lot of other incredible interviews. Check them out. I think this is something that could be transformational for a lot of people. Speaking of things that could be transformational, if you haven't already, be sure to subscribe. And until next time, my friends, be legendary. Take care. Peace. Then what you realize is your capacity to tap into dopamine as a motivator, not just seeking dopamine rewards, that is infinite. And I I can say with with great certainty that this is how you were able to build a big company and sell it, how you've been able to build a successful podcast and sell it, how you're constantly seeking, because seeking is the