Using Hypnosis to Change Your Life I David Spiegel & Ariel Poler DSH #436

The way we work with hypnosis where it's an app, you do it 15 minutes, it either helps you, which it does for most people, but if it doesn't, there's no side effects, there's no cost, there's no risk.

But a lot of it is too money-driven and there's not nearly as much money in teaching people how to use hypnosis as there is in prescribing meds.

Yeah, not even close, probably.

Because when you're on meds, you're getting paid every month.

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And here's the episode.

Welcome back to the show, guys.

I'm your host, as always, Sean Kelly.

We're here on the Digital Social Hour.

Got two very interesting guests for you guys today, David Spiegel and Ariel Poehler.

How's it going?

Going fine.

Thank you.

Awesome.

Thank you for having us.

Absolutely.

Can't wait to dive into hypnosis today, which is what you guys are experts in, right?

That's right.

So how'd you get involved with hypnosis hypnosis in the first place?

Well, it's something of a genetic illness in my family.

My parents were both psychiatrists and psychoanalysts, and they told me I was free to be any kind of psychiatrist I wanted to be, so here I am.

Wow.

My father learned hypnosis when he went off to be a battalion surgeon in World War II in North Africa.

And a Viennese refugee doctor volunteered to teach the U.S.

Army doctors how to use hypnosis because he was an expert in that.

And my father started using it with soldiers who were wounded in combat for pain control and to help them manage post-traumatic stress.

The dinner table conversations were pretty interesting.

I got to watch him record videos of patients he had hypnotized.

And so when I got to medical school I took a course in hypnosis.

And my first patient was the reason I'm sitting here right now.

And that is she was a 15-year-old girl in status asthmaticus at Children's Hospital in Boston.

You could hear the wheezing down the hall.

Her mother's in the room crying.

She's knuckles white, bent over, struggling for breath.

And I didn't know what else to do because she hadn't responded to medication and they were going to give her general anesthesia pretty soon.

And so I just said, you want to learn a breathing exercise?

And she nods.

So I get her hypnotized.

I had learned that much.

And then I thought, we haven't gotten asthma in the course yet.

What do I do?

So I just said to her something very complicated.

I said, each breath you take will be a little deeper and a little easier.

And within five minutes, she's lying back in the bed.

She's not wheezing anymore.

Her Her mother isn't crying.

The nurse ran out of the room.

And the intern comes looking for me, and I figure he'll pat me on the back and say, I know you're just a medical student, but good for you.

Instead, he said, the nurse has filed a complaint with the nursing supervisor that you violated Massachusetts law by hypnotizing a minor without parental consent.

Now, Massachusetts has a lot of weird laws.

That's not on the list.

And her mother was standing next to me when I did it.

She said, well, you've got to stop doing this.

And I said, why?

He said, well, it might be dangerous.

And I said, well, you're going to give her general anesthesia and start her on steroids, and you think my talking to her is dangerous?

Take me off the case if you want, but I'm not going to tell a patient something I know is not true.

So there was a council of war among the attending and the chief residents over the weekend, and they came back with a radical solution.

They said, let's ask the patient.

And they'd never done that before.

And she said, I like this.

So she'd been hospitalized every month for three months in status asthmaticus.

She did have one subsequent hospitalization, but went on to study to be a respiratory therapist.

So I thought, with my own eyes, I saw how quickly a technique like hypnosis can help someone, even in extreme situations,

get better and learn to master a symptom that previously had been terrorizing them.

Wow.

So that was the first of some 7,000 people I've used hypnosis with in my career.

You've done 7,000, you said?

Yeah.

That's fascinating.

And you guys went on to develop an app together, right?

So when you think of hypnosis, you think of someone putting you under hypnosis, but your app is about self-hypnosis, right?

Correct.

And I should add something really exciting, which is that, so David, who is actually, I would call, the foremost expert in the clinical use of hypnosis in the world and has helped thousands of people.

And when we met, he said, Arielle, I can only see so many people here at my office at Stanford.

You're techie, my background is all in technology.

Can you help me build an app so so that we can scale this?

And now we help more people every week that David has helped.

That's amazing.

Over decades, which is incredibly, incredibly satisfying.

Yeah.

And what keeps us motivated

to keep doing this.

I didn't even know it was possible to put yourself under hypnosis.

Yes, actually, all hypnosis is really self-hypnosis.

If you don't have a hypnotic capacity, you won't go into hypnosis, but you can learn to do it for yourself.

It's an ability that people have.

Some have it to a greater degree than others.

But all I'm doing is showing you how to identify and use your own hypnotic capacity.

I'm not doing anything to you.

And this is so important because people are scared of hypnosis.

They've seen some rotten stage show or the movie Get Out or something where people are taken advantage of.

But hypnosis is a way of enhancing your own control, enhancing your ability to control your body and your mind, the way my asthmatic patient did.

And so

it's a much misunderstood but very old technique, actually.

The oldest Western form of psychotherapy is hypnosis.

And it's underutilized.

And I've been waiting all my career for things to change, and Ariel helped me find a way to make it change by using the modern technology to make it accessible to anybody who wants to give it a try.

I will say I was very skeptical initially.

Yeah.

And then we said, well, let's run some clinical trials.

And I said, can we package David, who

I was convinced was helping people in his office, but can we put him in an app?

So we said, well, let's find out.

And we actually built one first for quitting smoking and run a clinical trial at Stanford Hospital.

And the results were almost as good as David in his office.

We're blown away.

We did one for chronic pain management.

Again, almost as good.

And then as we've been growing ever since, we have found that

we've been able to basically deliver the techniques of self-hypnosis through the app in a way that are almost as beneficial and in some ways better because David jokes about this if somebody needs hypnosis for example to sleep better well David doesn't want to go into the bedroom

with that I do but they won't let me but the app is always there for you boom you use it and it helps it's it's nice it's incredible

so why do you think the health industry is sort of against this you know when you go to a doctor they're never going to recommend you go to a hypnotist

it unfortunately it is relatively uncommon Some dogs do.

I get a lot of referrals, but not nearly enough.

And I think there are a couple things.

There is this prejudice that it's either dangerous or ineffective or both.

Both extremes are wrong.

Also, frankly, there's no money in it.

You know, if you look at the effectiveness, we find with the app that nine out of ten people who use it in the first session feel some reduction in their pain, for example.

Wow.

I had a senior executive at a large health company come see me yesterday who has had pain in his face for five years.

He has tried everything, and I mean everything, neurology, medications of all kinds, and his pain is just driving him nuts.

And I was able to produce a 40 percent reduction in his face pain.

He said it is now at a level that I can handle it.

And yet we lose 30,000 Americans a year in opioid overdoses, not deliberate, but accidental overdoses.

So what is the reason for that?

Well, one reason is if you look at

Purdue Pharma is money.

That is there is not much money in teaching someone techniques like this.

There is a lot of money in selling meds.

For sure.

And I'm a doctor.

I use medication.

I have great respect for it.

Pharmaceutical companies do a great service to us.

But a lot of it is too money driven and there's not nearly as much money in teaching people how to use hypnosis as there is in prescribing meds.

Yeah, not even close probably.

Because when you are on meds, you are getting paid every month.

That's right.

Yeah.

That's right.

Is it true hypnosis can be used to cure fears and phobias?

Absolutely.

Absolutely.

So if you're scared of heights, that could be cured?

Absolutely.

Absolutely.

We do it all the time.

Wow.

I'll tell you a story about my father.

He had a patient who was a woman

married to a very wealthy businessman who had a big fancy dinner party.

She had a terrible dog phobia.

Dog phobia.

And this little poodle is brought into the room, and she screams and jumps up and knocks the whole dinner table down.

And her husband said, I'm getting you fixed, or I'm getting rid of you.

I can't have this.

So he brings her to my father, who hypnotizes her, tells her to get a neighbor

who she trusts, who has a dog, have him hold the dog, and gradually doing self-hypnosis, thinking about the difference between a wild and a tame animal, that your fear is appropriate if it's a wild animal, it's not if it's a tame animal.

Go up, pet the dog.

And so she gradually worked herself up to being able to do this, and she was able to walk out on the streets in Manhattan and not be freaked out when somebody came along with a dog.

Six months later, my father called to just see how she was doing.

And the little boy answers the phone.

And

he says, is your mama there?

And he says, yes.

Who's calling?

And he says, Dr.

Spiegel.

And the boy said, that's funny.

Spiegel's in heat.

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She got a dog and named it Spiegel.

Wow.

That's crazy.

The number of things for which we find people

benefit from it.

Addiction, we do vaping, alcohol, smoking.

I mean, the smoking is fantastic.

Focus to perform better, performance.

Athletes use it a lot.

So, yeah, it's almost so many things that are

determined by our brain

can be helped.

Ben Simmons, if you're watching this, I think you might need to check this out.

You got some mental blockages.

A lot of athletes, though, because I think they get in their own head once they don't perform at their peak, right?

Right.

From an injury or whatever.

Yeah.

And they can become their own worst enemy because

you fight the limitation rather than acknowledge it and work around it.

And

there are many examples of athletes.

You've worked with some athletes at Stanford.

I have.

The coach of the Stanford women's swimming team is an incredible team.

But the coach some years ago

realized that his swimmers were swimming faster in practice than they were in beats.

And you'd think it'd be the opposite.

You think I got the adrenaline going and all that.

But what they were doing was distracting themselves because they were paying more attention to the woman swimming in the next lane than they were to their own swimming.

And you know, swimming is not a contact sport.

It doesn't matter what the woman in the next lane is doing.

So I got them to use self-hypnosis and imagine themselves swimming their best race, their best swim.

How would you relate to your body?

How would you want your body to coordinate?

Just focus on yourself and being in flow in your body.

And

their speeds went up

in the meets.

So there's some similarities with manifestation almost.

I guess so.

I don't know that much about manifestation, but so maybe you can teach me about it.

But it sounds like...

Yeah, manifestation, you basically try to put yourself in that feeling, try to feel what it feels like, taste what it tastes like, all that stuff.

Try to manifest it, you know?

Yeah.

Well, I urge athletes before a workout, too, to do a mental prep, to say, what do I want to do?

How do I want to feel in my body?

How do I want my body to work?

And you focus not on the outcome.

Can I do it faster or whatever?

You focus on the process, on what it feels like in your body to do it.

And then you review it at the end to decide what worked and what you could do better.

Interesting.

What about in business?

Because a lot of people kind of sabotage themselves, like their mindset in business, right?

Does this help with that?

Well, I think in an odd way, the paradigm is similar for business as it is for exercise.

And that is We focus, I think, sometimes too much on outcome.

Outcome is important, ultimately, but not enough on process.

So if you have an organization that is working well together and that has finite goals that are meetable by people,

the outcome will turn out to be better.

But there's an old Zen parable Zen in the art of archery, and that is that if you want to be a good archer, you don't focus on the target.

You focus on your relationship with the bow and arrow.

And if the relationship is right, the arrow will go where it needs to go.

Interesting.

And I think that's a big problem in some businesses, is there's so much push that people don't realize that the coordination and function of the parts of the effort are not what they ought to be.

There are also some areas where you, by getting better indirectly, end up helping in business or anything else.

For example, if somebody's anxious, they're not going to perform as well in business, and we have exercises for anxiety.

If someone is not sleeping well, not eating well, those are all areas that we help with.

So

getting the person into a better place holistically is something that also helps no matter what their focus is.

How do you guys feel about psychedelics?

There's a lot of new studies coming out about the benefits.

They're very interesting studies.

We're doing some at Stanford now and a number of leading universities, Johns Hopkins and UCSF and

NYU are doing studies on them.

And the results are very interesting.

And I think there is an overlap with hypnosis actually.

That is, in both cases, you feel yourself as a different person.

You kind of let go of yourself in the usual way.

So in hypnosis, what scares people, the idea they could turn into someone different and act differently, is actually an opportunity.

See what it feels like from the bottom up to be different, to respond to pain not by fighting it, but by transforming it, filtering the hurt out of the pain.

And in the same way, psychedelics

work on a part of the brain called the default mode network in the back of the brain where it's where you do self-reflection.

And many people who take psilocybin or MDMA or other of these psychedelic drugs feel

their own ordinary view of themselves as slipping away and more open to other kinds of experiences.

And the fascinating thing about them, for example, psilocybin for dying cancer patients, you know, I would have thought initially, the last thing I'd want is to have a bad trip when I'm facing death.

Yeah, yeah.

But they say, you know, I could, it was like looking into the Grand Canyon.

You know, if you fell down, it'd be a disaster, but you feel better about yourself because you're able to look.

So I feel, on the one hand, scared of death, and on the other hand, very grateful for the opportunity to be alive.

And so the thing, unlike usual pharmacology, and this is done in conjunction with psychotherapy, but you don't have to occupy the receptor every day.

One or two of these experiences often results in lasting change.

Wow.

And that's what we're seeing with hypnosis too, that you just try out being different, see what it feels like, let go of your usual expectations of who you are and how you have to react, and you can be permanently changed.

You know, I've been a supporter of the psychedelics renaissance, investor in some psychedelic startups, backer of some psychedelics nonprofits from before I got involved with David, and there's some great analogies.

And in some ways, the way that psychedelics have now been

accepted to a certain extent and become more mainstream and now are going to clinical trials and so on.

I feel there's a similar, but in in many ways, greater opportunity for hypnosis to also

get beyond the stigma, be more broadly accepted, even though psychedelics could be more intense, if you will, and be more for things like addiction, maybe work even more quickly, more effectively.

But on the other hand, you have the side effects, the concerns, the risk, and all those issues that you need, the cost of handling the sessions, the integration.

as opposed to the way we work with hypnosis where it's an app, you do it, 15 minutes, it either helps you, which it does for most people,

but if it doesn't, there's no side effect, there's no cost, there's no risk.

So a lot of similarities and part of our hope is to help people

understand all the benefits of hypnosis in a similar way in which others have done it for psychedelics.

Yeah, seems like a very effective method.

So you do 15 minutes a day?

It depends on the condition.

For some people, for example, for smoking, we've had users who do it once and quit smoking for months.

What?

It's incredible.

It's truly incredible.

Now, if it's something like maybe stress, where there's stressors that you get every day,

then you might need to do it every day or you might need to do it when you have a stressor.

So the use is very personalized.

But what's key is that the typical session is 10, 12 minutes, and the majority of the users feel significantly better after a single session.

Amazing.

What about drinking?

Can you share that?

Alcoholism?

It can help people with drinking too.

Alcoholism is a complex problem.

And of course, part of the problem is you've got to be sober when you do the hypnotism.

You know, it's funny, but it's not.

I mean, there are people who try when they're intoxicated, and it just won't work.

But

it can be helpful.

I remember one young man with a pretty bad drinking problem.

And

the thing I asked him to think about is your respect and protection for your body.

You may enjoy drinking, that's fine.

But would you put alcohol into the body of an eight-month-old baby?

Or would you put it in your dog's food?

No, because you know what damage it would do to the baby or the dog.

You are your body's keeper.

So think about respect and protection of your body before you put this stuff into it.

And he looked a little puzzled and he said, oh, you mean sort of like the body's the temple of the soul.

I said, exactly, you got it.

And I don't know who was more surprised, him or me, but he stopped drinking.

Wow.

And part of what we do with reverie is we focus on what you're for, not what you're against.

You know, if you tell yourself, you know, are you dying for a smoke?

Most smokers say, yeah, I am, and they, you know, they don't get the irony there.

Right.

But if you say, I may want to smoke, but for my body it's damaging.

So respect and protect my body.

You can feel good about that right away.

You're not depriving yourself.

You're helping yourself by helping your body.

Interesting.

You know, there's something that you just made me think of, which is entering a state of hypnosis is not that difficult.

But the state of hypnosis, what it does is it opens the mind to letting that message go in very deeply.

The difficult part and the area where David's expertise is so important is for that message to be the right message, delivered in the right way, so that it's really going to make a difference.

So that's what we work very hard to do at Reverie.

So we have, for example, the alcohol-specific exercise, like many of the others, is to leverage David's decades of refinement of how is that message delivered, what words, in what tone, in what way, so that it really has the effect that it needs to have.

We had one woman who was in that early smoking study that you mentioned, and she, first time she tried it, she didn't like it that much, but she went home that night, tried it, told her, for my body, smoking is a poison.

I need my body to live.

I owe my body respect and protection.

And she looked at a cigarette and said, Phew, who needs this?

And she put it out.

She said, I am amazed myself.

I didn't even even want to stop smoking.

I've smoked for 25 years.

My friends can't believe that I've stopped, and I'm helping them to stop smoking now.

And so she said, You know, Dr.

Spiegel, this is some crazy voodoo.

And I mean that in a good way.

And that's one of the cool things about hypnosis.

People surprise themselves.

Yeah.

I didn't know I could do that.

And that moment of surprise is a peak opportunity to learn and to change.

Yeah.

Well, the power of the mind is incredible.

I mean, Joe Dispensa has proven that with being able to treat cancer just through the power of the mind.

Well, there's a lot that goes into that.

I've worked a lot with cancer patients, and there are ways of coping with cancer that can be of help psychologically as well as potentially physically.

Right.

So I'm about to get all four of my wisdom teeth out.

Now you guys got me thinking: instead of being on painkillers, just do some hypnosis instead for the pain.

David, didn't your wife give birth just with hypnosis?

No way.

My wife, Helen Blau, is a stem cell biologist, professor at Stanford.

And she wanted to be in control.

Our son was rather large.

He wound up being a 10-pound baby.

Wow.

And he was in a little bit of distress.

So she wanted to be able to fully control.

the process of delivery.

So I had her to imagine she was floating in Lake Tahoe, cool, tingling, and numb, filtered the hurt out of the pain.

It was a 12-hour labor.

I had no pain at all.

And in the middle of it, she would say, you know, there are drugs for this.

And I said, you're floating in Lake Tahoe, cool, tingling, and Daniel was born fine.

And Julia was born three years later, and

she was delivered in like three and a half hours, again with hypnosis as the original.

Wow.

So no drugs or anything?

No, no, no.

No, no epidural, no drugs.

Wow, that's incredible.

And no pain after?

She did very well.

I mean, you know, she had some discomfort, but she managed that the same way.

Wow.

So I used to sleepwalk sleepwalk a lot as a kid.

So I'd wake up in the basement, I'd wake up outside, I'd lock myself out the house sometimes.

Is that a form of hypnosis?

It sure is.

So you are hypnotizable.

I'm sure you are.

It is.

What happens with sleepwalking is you go from being in sleep, sometimes in REM sleep,

to

a trance-like state, a hypnotic state, without going through ordinary consciousness first.

And so people are in a kind of walking, hypnotic state when they're doing this.

And

our sleep Stanford has a world-renowned sleep clinic.

They send me these people with parasomnias.

And I

hypnotize them and say, when your feet touch the ground, you will wake up.

So they have a body signal that this is about to happen.

And

I love the surprise for my colleagues in the sleep clinic who never think it's going to work, and it does much of the time.

That's crazy.

Yeah, it used to be scary because I'd wake up outside sometimes in the winter in New Jersey, locked out of my house.

I'd wake up, there'd be food missing from tables.

So I was eating in my sleep, too.

Yes, there is a sleep eating.

That's right.

It is.

Yeah.

Well, guys, it's been a pleasure.

I've learned a lot.

Anything you want to promote or close off with?

Well,

we would

recommend Reverie.

The website is www.reveri.com.

You can download it from the App Store or Google Play, depending on the kind of phone you have.

We welcome you to give it a try.

And I think you can learn to help yourself using it and we hope you will.

Love it.

Yeah, no, just stressing this is something that literally the majority of the population of the world could benefit from and it's totally underutilized and we get so many people who just, like David said, try it and are blown away.

And it's such a, you know, there's a free trial, you try it.

For those who doesn't work, it doesn't work.

For those for whom it works, we get so many support messages that that say thank you you changed my life whether it was for sleeping for eating for chronic pain for addiction so for anyone who has any one of those conditions the other thing that david often tells me his patients tell tell him is why was this the last thing i try why did i not start with this as opposed to the the med and the and the therapies and the all these other things or the fancy metrics whatever it's going to be So yeah, encouraging people to give it a try because we're seeing so many people get so much benefit.

Amazing.

Guys, try out Reverie if you're watching this.

We'll put a link in the description.

Comment below if it helps as well.

I'd love to see some comments.

Otherwise, thanks for coming on, gentlemen.

Thank you very much for having me.

I'll see you guys next time.

Peace.