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

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.

And the biggest fear and misunderstanding is that 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 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 reverie.

Aaron Powell, Jr.:

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

Jamaica

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 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.

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 cingulate cortex.

That's like the cingulate cortex is like a C on its ends in the middle of the base of your brain.

And the front part, the dorsal region, is a region that we call part of the salience network.

It does pattern matching.

And if something goes wrong, the salience network fires off.

You hear a loud noise and you get hijacked.

Your attention gets hijacked.

Interrupts.

Right.

And that has survival value.

You know, sometimes you really need to be interrupted by a sudden event.

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

that reduction in activity is

also something that has to do with stress and anxiety.

That when you're more stressed and anxious, your salience network is hyperactive.

So hypnosis is a 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 dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, that's 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, 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 interoception, the capacity to feel what's going on in your body.

So that's the second thing.

So less anxiety,

less 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 cingulate cortex, the posterior cingulate.

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, reduced salience 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 makes somatic arousal, body arousal, increase when you're emotionally aroused.

So you can cool off your body and then handle stress better.

Aaron Powell, oh, that's so interesting.

So your

detection of an odd pattern, something

that is 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 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

kind of shaking an etcher sketch.

You know, there's loads of lines everywhere.

I like that.

And you go, we've 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

did like that.

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

induction.

You can shift gears in seconds.

And so what I 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's not a big deal to do it.

Because, and I see you smiling, so you're hypnotized already.

All hypnosis is really self-hypnosis.

I'm teaching people how to use their ability.

There's nothing fancy about the induction.

It's just a matter of,

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?

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.

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's 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

because collective effervescence 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 full version of that.

Or is this

actually

it is there so that people can access a level of like what kind of sounds like deep regulation

and

deep openness?

And that's the purpose for it.

It's built for that.

Is it a keyhole that you're slotting into, or are you a hacker that's managed to reverse engineer the shape of the key?

No, I'm not, 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 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 it.

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,

the human infant is the most helpless infant of any mammal.

And if there is not a social structure around it, 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 yours and mine are in front.

We can recognize where some object of prey is 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, 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 is fucked.

Okay.

Right.

That coordination, social brain hypothesis, Robin Dunbar, 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.

But no, I'm actually going to really slowly go toward this tree because if I get behind this tree, I can get up this tree.

The ability to plan and step in

to our emotional body and be able to interject

there is pretty cool.

I did a

safari in Zambia about three years ago.

I was presenting a mini documentary thing.

And this is a stripped back safari.

So one,

there's kind of a seven-star 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 people, and you'll go and you'll do it on foot.

Anyway,

we were rowing down the Zambezi in between Zambia and Zimbabwe.

Yeah.

I think so, yeah.

And rowing down just a little tributary off the Zambezi, tiny little old school rowboat, two oars.

And the main thing you're thinking about is hippos.

Right.

Because hippos,

whatever, it's second biggest killer after

mosquitoes.

And they really do not like to be scared.

They're quite sort of anxious animals.

Not very hypnotizable.

I imagine no, no, no, no, unfortunately, hippos, despite you'd think given the start of their name, hipponatizable.

There you go.

But so 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 their eyes are super high.

It's really adaptive.

That's right.

so me and the um guy that i'm with like hard south african dude that just runs this thing like digs his oar in we just say just we'll we'll just wait mate we'll just wait for this thing 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 wait up.

All four of them walk along and we go past, no, you know,

300 yards, 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,

just following us around, getting nice shots.

And there's another canoe behind us, which has got the film crew in that are filming us.

And we're chatting, we're mic'd up, and I'm just talking about, isn't it lovely?

You know, oh, the hippo from before, isn't it?

It's 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.

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.

And 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.

Dudes in all they have is camera lenses.

What they're 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, what am I going to do?

I'm holding it like a cricket bat.

Bop this, you know, five ton, 10 ton animal on the nose.

What am I going to do?

Anyway, gets 10, five 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.

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 two 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, 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 typical, I guess, way more typical than downtown Austin,

you know, if you take the span of human development.

And

I just remember thinking,

wow, like this is what your system is built for.

Your system is built for that kind of an interaction because

that

survival or non-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 had highly focused attention.

Your body changed.

You heightened your senses.

You did all the things you needed to do.

You weren't just plodding 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 re-up and adapt your behavior and your emotions 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 understanding.

Oh, well, the way that she moved toward us, she wouldn't have backed up in that way.

The family's over there, you know, whatever it might be.

I can't resist tell, 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 close.

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So when it comes to

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.

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.

Meditation, to some extent.

In meditation, though,

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 were engaging in action in this 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, this is very interesting.

Let's see what the elephant does.

So

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...

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 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.

But he noticed that they were swimming better

in practice than they were in meats, faster.

And he thought, what's that about?

You normally think you're all aroused,

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 meets doing that.

So it's focusing on the process like flow in self-hypnosis rather than the outcome.

Aaron Powell, Jr.: 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

hypnotizability is a very stable trait?

Most eight-year-olds are in trances most of the time.

You know, you call your kid in for dinner, he doesn't hear you.

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 Zimbardo, 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 0.7.

Now, that's as high as IQ in a 25-year interval.

It does not change much.

So, you know, 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 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, I had a woman who was born with esophageal fistula to her trachea.

And so it meant, you know, food would get into her lungs.

And she 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.

And I

had her imagine that she had swallowed some ice water and had soothed 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 lows,

it's much more cognitive.

It's just, you know what,

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 from the message?

For the lows, it's sounding suspiciously close to acceptance and commitment therapy.

There's a bit of that in it, but for highs, ACT is just a diversion.

They can do it in minutes and feel it.

Yeah.

Wow.

What does the assessment look like for that?

How do you work it out?

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,

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-hypnotized hand.

Then response to the cutoff 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 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?

You're right, and there's some truth to that.

I mean, you can miss sometimes.

But yes, in general, people who are organized who

want to have things just the way they need to be tend to be less hypnotizable.

I had a guy recently

who

had bad lower back problems 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

they took x-rays and they didn't see anything definitive, but there may be things wrong.

And routinely I asked,

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 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, and you keep worrying about it.

And he looked sort of relieved.

I thought he'd get mad at me.

You 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 hypnosis.

But it's also, you know, focus on what you're for, not what you're against.

Don't fight it.

You know,

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.

For mid-range people, it's more try it and let's discuss it.

You know, it's kind of they have the, yeah, you know, 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.

A pizza can feed an average family of four.

And so he had to, he had

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

manage the pedals on the piano well and it was really awful for him.

But he was frustrated.

He was mid-range in 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.

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.

She just did it.

She's 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.

I have.

And we found there's one gene that's very interesting.

It's catechol-omethyltransferase.

It's a gene that is in the metabolism of dopamine in the brain.

Dopamine is the feel-good neurotransmitter.

It is involved in hypnotizability.

Okay.

Can you give me the gene?

What's the gene name?

COMT, catechol C-A-T-E-C-T.

I already know that I have this.

O-methyltransmitter.

Just give me.

So it's what are you looking for?

The metabolism of COMT.

If you have

there's one polymorphism where you have either two methionines, two valines, or a methionine and a valine.

And the methionine and valine version has a moderate metabolic rate of COMT.

So it keeps a kind of moderate level.

Can I just give you mine?

Yes, what's yours?

Your COMT gene variant is the VAL158 MET RS4680AA genotype, also written as METMET.

METMET, but you said it was ValMET before.

Let me see.

MetMET.

Oh, so you're METMEV.

If you're METMET, you're likely to be less sympathetizable.

High dopamine in the prefrontal cortex, lower COMT enzyme activity.

Yeah.

So that would make you less sympathetizable.

Interesting.

So ValMet,

the heterozygous polymorphism is more likely to be very hypnotized.

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 are.

Oh, you want Valmet, you want GA?

Valmet, yes.

Right, okay, interesting.

So yeah, I've got slow dopamine clearance.

It's fantastic for getting me addicted to things.

Yeah, higher baseline dopamine potential, enhanced cognitive performance when working on memory tasks when stress is low.

It can also make you more mentally rigid or over-focused under pressure,

which I imagine is precisely more vulnerable to stress and anxiety, especially social or performance-based stress.

Prefrontal cortex can become impaired under high stress.

Yeah, interesting.

That's fascinating.

Okay.

Sounds like your African journey just a bit.

Exactly.

That's why why I've

been back to see that elephant again.

I've been remembering it.

So 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 COMT variant, want to be an intermediate dopamine clearer.

What are the lifestyle factors that would predict

if you were doing twin studies, where does nurture come into making hypnotizability different?

Important question.

And that makes it

in two opposite ways.

The good news is what's called imaginative involvedness.

So if, you know, when you're putting your kids to sleep, you have them tell them a story and they affiliate with the 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 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,

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Is

openness to being hypnotized in adulthood a skill that you can train then, like mindfulness?

0.7 is how stable it is.

That means 0.3, have you got control of that?

Not really.

We have done one recent study in which we used transcranial magnetic stimulation.

You know, it's a magnetic stimulation that's being used very successfully to treat depression and suicidal ideation and obsessive-compulsive disorder now.

very effective.

We used it to suppress activity in the dorsal anterior cingulate.

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 who aren't that hypnotizable, we could combine TMS with the hypnosis and enhance the response.

Trevor Burrus, Jr.: Sounds like a new study.

So you may not have.

No, we just published it.

You may not have the answer 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 Reverie, 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

four out of five people

get significant reduction in pain, 15, 20 percent 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 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, 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,

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 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, in-person use of hypnosis to help people stop smoking.

We have them

imagine you don't say, oh, I don't like cigarettes.

I had a teacher, and 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 he had to hit.

Bring the wife in.

Or she didn't want to.

So he said, you know, your cigarettes, but not hers.

It doesn't work.

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 tarin-laden heated smoke in their lungs?

Hell no.

Well, your body is as dependent on you as your baby.

You know, you have to take it for

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 built an app after, so we got one out of four people to stop smoking.

Half stopped right away.

One out of two stopped right away.

Half of them had not touched a cigarette in a year.

From how many sessions?

From one session, single session, self-hypnosis.

And that's as good as you'll get with varenicline or bupropion, you know, the medications that are used to get people to self-smoking.

And so.

Well, butrane, yeah, it's an antidepressant that also seems to work.

That's interesting.

And SNRI

interjects for smoking cessation.

Yes.

I didn't know that.

I didn't know that.

I know that I have a few friends that we both are aware of

who are using

micro-dose, low-dose welbutrin as a nootropic,

daily nootropic, like way below the therapeutic threshold that you would be using in order to step in.

We'll see how long that goes for.

I'll have to check in with them and

see if they're still doing it.

But yeah,

so we tested,

we then,

our

hypnosis app company, wherever we got started, at a Stanford Brain Mind Summit about five years ago, when

Ariel Poehler, who's a

graduated Stanford Business School, MIT, and helped to start Strava, you know, 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

Alexa at the time was making it real easy to program things because they wanted to recruit more customers for Alexa.

So we built a smoking app.

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.

You're out of a job.

Well, hopefully I'm in a new one.

Where, you know, my mellifluous 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.

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 Reverie app now.

And my favorite bit of feedback came from a social worker in San Francisco who said, 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 it one more time at home.

I lit up a cigarette.

I looked at it and said, Phew, 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.

So,

yes, it's going to work as well.

Fascinated.

That's a really interesting case study.

Somebody who didn't even want it.

Didn't even want it.

Somebody who didn't even want, well, I suppose, you know,

started this off.

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 they're 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 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 yeah 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 newspapers

or listen to the news to see how people can tune into really crazy ideas and think they're true.

You know, all these conspiracies,

the child abuse in the garage of the

place.

You know, I mean, there's all kinds of crap that people believe.

And so, you know, is hypnosis the 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

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 published on that actually because

we studied the response to the 9-11 World Trade Center bombing, and we evaluated people

within a month after it happened, and then six months later.

And one of the things we found is that people who watched more than three hours of television a day about it were significantly more distressed.

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 encourage suppression of emotion.

Don't talk about it.

So the combination of being overexposed to the stimulus.

Not having an outlet were people who were more distressed at the time and did worse off six months later as well.

So that's absolutely true.

And I did a study of,

we compared two groups of people.

One were reporters who looked at the, who witnessed the execution of Robert Alden 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 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 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 emotional experience just witnessing it is bad enough.

And

we're social creatures.

We identify with people who we see being hurt and victimized.

And

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, or in movies.

These TV series,

internet.

Tell you what, I had a really

phenomenally fascinating conversation earlier on this week.

I learned that a study was done where they put microphones around the necks of kindergartners.

They did it for a full week.

And then they did sentiment analysis on what the microphones picked up.

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 for dinner.

Parents, teachers, coaches,

85% of the language that was delivered.

And the argument being

some parents have a concern around their kids getting out over their skis a little bit too much.

We don't want to give an ego.

We want them to make sure that their feet are on the ground.

It kind of feels a little bit like making every child British.

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, that's 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 asking for trouble because

you're number one, you're belittling them, you're making them feel bad about themselves.

And number two, you're telling them

what not to do, which only focuses their attention more on that and less on what it is they might do.

Our son was a lot of fun.

I would hypnotize him to go to sleep at night.

I mentioned 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 not working.

Sorry.

But he also,

we were talking at a dinner party about

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 that.

And Dan comes padding in in his PJs, his footy PJs and says, Dad, I'll be right back after these messages.

So

he was letting us know that he was going to do it, whether we told him not to or not.

Wow.

But I think you're absolutely right, and it's very disturbing that, you know, I mean, now, and, you know,

what's out there, you know, in Instagram and other things is really disturbing.

What you could see on that

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Yeah, I mean,

I know, I had Dr.

Paul Tuck.

You familiar with him?

No.

Evolutionary pediatrician.

So he looks at pediatrics both clinically

and developmentally from an evolutionary lens, ancestral lens.

So a lot of hunter-gatherer analysis.

He's the guy that found he was the I think his team is the one that looked at the

peanut dust coating on rice puffs, being able to reverse anaphylaxis in toddlers.

So you sort of

do 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

age three or something, they're okay for the rest of time.

But this increase in

helicopter parenting, snowplow parenting, or there might be a little bit of anathla, or there was, and then you avoid exposing the child to that, which makes them more

susceptible to it in future.

Other bits of insights, maybe not directly from him, but are kind of similar.

A house that has a dog in it,

the kids are 50% less likely to have asthma.

Really?

The same thing goes for houses that use dishwashers as opposed to hand washing.

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 like that.

Same thing goes with this peanut dusting.

Anyway.

We also found one in six American adults have flattening of the occipital lobe from how much time they spent laid down as a child.

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.

And again, he's seeing when he looks at

hunter-gatherers, you're permanently in different positions.

A child that's on the floor is a meal without wheels.

It's not even a meal on wheels.

It's a meal that can kind of crawl a tiny little bit.

It's dead.

It's gone.

And yeah,

parents, I understand, I'm getting into parenting territory now.

It's very

passionate.

Parents are worried about what is called co-sleeping, or something where the kids in the bed with them.

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 eight hours or whatever.

And that's just what, because, what's it going to be?

On the floor of the cave?

Like out in the near the, you know, so

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,

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 often did it standing, actually, because you would let gravity help

pull the baby down, and they would push, and they were fine.

My lovely wife, Helen, had both of our children without anesthesia.

She did self-hypnosis the whole time.

And

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 I wanted, needed to go

and open myself up and do it.

And,

you know, there are some advantages, advantages, but more and more there's evidence of some cognitive brain problems with general anesthesia in general

and even local blocks sometimes.

And so there's a place for it.

I've had general anesthesia.

You know, one does it.

I'm a doctor.

Yeah, me too.

But we overdo it.

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.

What does it say

that

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 analogy.

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

that the sensations in your bottom touch in the chair we're sitting in

is not in part of your consciousness, right?

Now, is that hypnosis?

Well, maybe, but 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, we connected them to a little device that would send electric shocks and measured their evoked responses, their brain's response,

some metasensory 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 hypnotized 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.

Oh, P numbers.

So

the evoked response looks like just a waveform.

And there are standard parts.

So the first, the early response is a little peak of

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's the way the brain receives sensory information and responds to it.

But what happened was 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 analgesia condition.

So the brain has to process huge amounts of information and decide what's worth paying attention to and what is.

Is it the salience coming back to the anesthesis?

Is it salient or not?

And so the brain can substantially control responses like pain.

We did a randomized controlled trial of people having surgery through their femoral artery, threading catheters up, doing chemoambolization of tumors in the liver,

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 randomized 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 learnt training in self-hypnosis.

And at the end, and this is like 120 subjects,

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 ten with the nurse, and one out of ten in the hypnosis condition.

And we looked at how anxious they were.

Five out of ten in standard care, three out of ten with the nurse, and zero in the hypnosis group.

I thought they died or something.

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 opioids.

So they had fewer procedural complications.

Yeah, less constipation.

Right.

Exactly.

And they got done 17 minutes faster.

Because 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 cajole or make them feel okay.

So

hypnosis is an absolutely effective analgesic, even in extreme circumstances.

And you know, 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 Reverie.

We're seeing people getting immediate reductions in pain response

just with that.

Where should people go if they want to get a hold of Reverie?

Just you can download it, www.reverie.com from the web or from the App Store or Google Play.

That's R-E-V-E-R-I-E.

No E at the end.

No, Reverai.

Reverai.

Reverai.

Re-V-E-R-I.

Okay.

And try it.

You know, you get the first week's free.

You 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 a 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 per smoking cessation, one session and 20% production.

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.

One in four.

No, no, no, no.

No, that's not what the data are.

The data are it is

80%

get some kind of positive response.

Oh, okay.

And the rest either get no change or a few get worse.

Right.

But they get the actual reduction, the percent reduction in their total stress level

is like 15 or 20%.

Understood.

Understood.

That wasn't the response.

Right, right.

So most of them, four out of five, get better.

Right.

Understood.

Let's say that you wanted to get it from a 20% reduction to 30 or to 40.

What's the gold standard when it comes to this kind of

to using reverie or to doing self-hypnosis for maximum effect?

Well, what we're seeing with reverie is that the baseline levels don't change over time, but each time they do it, they get the same level of improvement.

So it means you've got it when you need it.

You know, it's sort of like taking the pill, you know,

except you don't get addicted or habituated to like you do to benzodazepines.

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, oh, I have pain in my chest, there's a pneumatastasis.

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.

Aaron Powell, Jr.: What

have you

or what are you excited about stacking hypnosis with in terms of multiple modalities?

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 hypnosis finisher?

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,

turning off of the default mode network,

increasing levels of connectivity in areas that wouldn't typically be, et cetera, et cetera, increased interoception.

Are there any areas that you think this would be a really interesting combination or stack to have hypnosis be built into?

Well, one other thing, you're right.

And 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:

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 breathwork exercises, cyclic sighing and box breathing,

in the Reverie app now.

Because part of what you can do to help your body relax quickly is not just just shift into this highly focused but relaxed state, but also breathe differently.

So, you know, if you do cyclic sighing is an interesting practice where

you do, sure, you just do, and you can try it if you want, it's really simple.

You just do 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

Pretty floaty very quick floaty right and what you're doing we think

is, you know,

the standard thing when somebody's anxious, they take a deep breath.

That's actually not a good idea.

Because 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 to keep blood pressure up and keep blood flowing.

flowing.

Whereas when you exhale,

you're increasing pressure in the chest, you're increasing venous 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

like five minutes a day for a month

wind up being happier and less anxious and breathing one breath a minute more slowly.

Wow.

And we tend to over-breathe.

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.

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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.

Yeah, the slow exhale.

Yeah, yeah.

Also,

James Nest has been on, who wrote breath, Brian McKenzie's been on,

guys from the state app.

Who's the lady that did the bioresonance

HRV training?

Dang.

Anyway,

Dr.

Lady, a lot of stuff around that.

One of the things that I've always been a little bit uncertain about is how much a state change coming from 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 have a paper in Soul Reports Medicine that shows that it it seems to have lasting effects, that mood is better, anxiety is reduced, positive affect 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 take

neurons that fire together wire together.

You keep doing it, and um, it tends to change your pattern over time.

Have you looked into bioresonance breathing?

No, I haven't.

It's an interesting one.

So

you're trying to create the

you find a breath rate

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 resonance, and what you end up doing if you wear a little wearable,

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 in 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 huge, you know, if you saw someone with this on a EKG, you'd think they're having like some AFib

catastrophe.

But it's the biggest swings 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, light-headed, depersonalization, nitrous oxide type scenario.

But as I've got better at it, and you have, they've gamified it, obviously.

So there's a little zone that you're supposed to stay in and stuff.

And

as I've got better at it, the felt sense of that is really, really fascinating.

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 the fancy stuff.

I'm interested in what the most

some of your favorite standout extreme

responses have been.

You've 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 painkillers.

I remember reading in Johann Hari's book

about this guy who had

maybe 1800s, a famous wand that was attached to some electrical

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 got rid of the box, they got rid of the metal, 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

who have dealt with just horrible, horrifying, traumatic experiences,

you know, sexual abuse in childhood or, you know, assault, injury.

And

one technique that I used that I borrowed in a way from mindfulness, which is compassion, is the issue of having compassion for your own body.

And so I've had a woman who was sexually abused by a landlord when she was 12 years old and was chronically depressed and miserable and

came to see me.

She'd been on antidepressants for 15 years.

And she had an okay career,

but she, you know, as a teenager, she said, you know, men could say anything they wanted to me in the streets.

I was ashamed.

It was just terrible.

And I had her in hypnosis picture herself

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 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 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.

She just felt humiliated.

And she was blaming herself.

Why didn't I scream?

Why didn't I do that?

Why didn't I do that?

And I said,

you were not in control of the situation.

Look at yourself now and picture what it meant to go through that.

And so

you can, this capacity in hypnosis to help people change their point of view

is something that's powerful.

I have a video of a Vietnam vet

who was hospitalized for a year in a state mental hospital.

He went crazy over in Vietnam.

He went running through the jungle, shooting at what he thought were Viet Cong.

And I found out that what had happened was he had informally adopted a Vietnamese child.

And

he just took care of the kid.

The kid 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

after the

there was a major assault in Vietnam.

And he found the boy dead, lying dead on the street.

And he just

went nuts.

He just couldn't stand it.

And he got out of the Army after 15 years in the Army.

He was discharged

dishonorably and was getting psychiatric care.

And I had him picture that

in hypnosis, go back and relive what had happened.

And I said,

and I then had him go to the burial.

And, you know, he's saying ashes to ashes and dust to dust.

And

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 Shi-Town say to you if he were here?

And he'd say,

you're my number one cook, my number one Sargee, you know.

And he just, so I said, I want you to picture two things about this.

I want you to picture you're 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.

He had got a cake and 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 sergeant number one cook.

And so he comes out of the hypnosis.

And I said, do you remember anything?

And he said, yo, 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,

and he was training kids to do long-distance cycling.

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 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.

You know, we have this sense, I think, almost a kind of solipsism 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'm just interested what that says about

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, the rules by which you regulate yourself change

because

you give up, and a lot of people who are traumatized do this, you give up the fantasy that you control everything that happened, especially at moments when you had zero control.

You 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 were not in control of what happened.

And it was that sense of

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

the other.

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 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.

It seems like resistance, or some version of resistance as a word,

is

typically

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.

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 friction that we have between what's happening

and the story and the shame and the blame and the resistance, it feels like

which is in some ways is very liberating.

Yes, it is.

I think you're right.

It's a matter of accepting the inevitable, you know, and

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 pathological.

Aaron Powell, which is also, I think, what

MDMA psychotherapy is useful for doing, for creating that degree of distance, although

maybe a little different of a delivery mechanism than 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 reverie and have, you know, we've had more than a million downloads and virtually no problems with it, is that people

learn something about themselves and they don't lose control.

You know, they're if you send MDMA to a million people, you might have some problems

that could be a bit of a problem, yeah.

I think so.

But, you know, I've studied 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,

odd awareness but disconnection at the same time.

So people who are scared to death

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 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

I certainly learned this through acceptance and commitment therapy.

I was struggling to sleep this year.

I've had

been kicked in the nut so many times that two-dimensional

over the last 12 to 18 months.

And

one of the side effects of that is my nervous system basically got turned upside down.

So

cortisol was low in the morning and at its highest at night.

Wow.

DHEA also declined throughout the day.

And melatonin release was basically no so tired but wide, the classic tired but wide, like burnout type thing.

And living in a house with mold, ton of, you know, like autoimmune, just complex illness stuff, the same thing that a lot of people that are

sad, brain fog and tired a lot uh end up dealing with.

And I did some CBTI and some ACT I as well 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 don't have control.

One of the lines that I said to my sleep coach was,

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 your sky hides, even though you're still terrified.

The story you tell yourself about doing it.

And I think that that's 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 pushing away of thoughts.

There is

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 cyclically 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 reverie to go to sleep.

We find a lot, you know, we get feedback on pre- and post-pain and anxiety.

The most use of reverie is for insomnia,

but we had very little data from it.

You know, we've got thousands of people using it.

And it turned out that when we asked them why didn't you give us the follow-up, they said they fell asleep.

We fell asleep.

That's exactly right.

I can take that.

Fantastic.

What we do

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 energic 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.

Aaron Powell, Jr.: Why do you think hypnosis has sort of been sidelined in mainstream medicine despite decades of evidence?

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 terribly dangerous or it doesn't do anything, both of which are wrong.

And

I'll tell you another reason.

Big pharma, you know,

anything that's effective, they don't want it.

I don't have a team of ex-cheerleaders going around telling doctors that hypnosis is great.

Pharma spends more money on advertising than they do on drug development.

And it's a product.

And

I think

there's big money in doing that.

And I prescribe drugs.

Drugs can be very helpful, but not always.

Many of them are overutilized.

And 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 interventions are

injection or incision

or ingestion.

It's not talking to people.

Is that a real treatment?

Is that really doing anything?

And the answer is yes, it does.

It is.

But people, it takes a bit of a leap of the imagination to get that.

It 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 don't get no respect with the Rodney Danger field of treatments.

We don't get no respect.

You know, I don't know if you remember him.

He said, they asked me to leave a bar so they could start happy hour.

You know,

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.

we've got thousands of people, tens of thousands of people, hundreds of thousands who have had that experience now.

So

it's a leap of the imagination, but that can be a powerful thing.

Dr.

David Spiegel, ladies and gentlemen, David, you're fantastic.

I feel

even if we haven't done the hypnosis today, I'm certainly feeling much more regulated.

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 trying my best does a lot of good thank you chris

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