Change Your Brain Every Day - How Your Subconscious Brain Can Change Your Life - Pt. 1 with Dr. Mike Dow

Episode Date: August 27, 2018

The term “hypnosis” may bring about images of psychiatrists who dangle stopwatches in front of their patients to get them sleepy, but in fact, “clinical hypnosis” is a very real thing based on the science of chemical change brought about through mental states. In the first episode of Hypnosis Week, Dr. Daniel Amen is joined by Dr. Mike Dow, and author and clinical hypnosis specialist, for a discussion.

Welcome to the Brain Warriors Way podcast. I'm Dr. Daniel Amen. And I'm Tana Amen. Here we teach you how to win the fight for your brain to defeat anxiety, depression, memory loss, ADHD, and addictions. The Brain Warriors Way podcast is brought to you by Amen Clinics, where we've transformed lives for three decades using brain spec imaging to better target treatment and natural ways to heal the brain. For more information, visit amenclinics.com.

The Brain Warriors Way podcast is also brought to you by BrainMD, where we produce the highest quality nutraceutical products to support the health of your brain and body. For more information, visit brainmdhealth.com. Welcome to the Brain Warriors Way podcast. Hey, everybody. Welcome to Hypnosis Week, going to be one of my favorite weeks. I am here with my friend, Dr. Mike Dow. Welcome. Thank you for having me. Mike is a psychotherapist. He's a best-selling author of a number of books, including The Brain Fog Fix, The Drained Brain.

Heal Your Drained Brain. Heal Your Drained Brain. Heal Your Broken Brain, about his brother who had a stroke. And there's so much you can do. People don't understand that. There's so much. If your brain has gone to the dark place, there's so much you can do to heal it. But you have a new book coming out.

I do. Your subconscious brain can change your life. Your subconscious brain can change your life. So how did you get interested in hypnosis? So Daniel, I obviously am a huge fan of the brain. I'm a huge believer that we all have this inner ability to heal ourselves, to motivate ourselves, to make those everyday changes. And you know, that's why I do what I do.

And then I discovered clinical hypnosis and and to be quite frank with you I went to this to this training partly because I needed some continuing education for my license and and and I was I was fascinated and I was intrigued and like many people maybe somebody watching here today I had I had some of those misconceptions, you know, is this Vegas? Is this going to make me bark like a dog? Or is this, can this really do what they say it can do? Because I'd read some of the literature and I thought, it sounds too good to be true. How does this really work? And then I went into my first

practicum and I remember one of my professors was a dentist and she had this incredible voice and it was about 30 seconds in and I just remember feeling and you know I had done all of these mindfulness meditation workshops with some great MDs and PhDs and I remember in about 30 seconds, 60 seconds going way deeper than I had ever achieved through hundreds of hours of meditation. Just like that, in an effortless way. And meditation is fantastic and it just felt really different. And all of a sudden in that moment, in that experience, I got it. I got it.

And I became a little obsessed. So hypnosis is actually, it's a natural state. It's a state people go in and out of all the time. I think yesterday I saw Mamma Mia 2. So did I. I saw it yesterday as well. It was great. I loved it. And that two-hour movie seemed like it went by in a half an hour.

Yeah. That's a hypnotic state. Yes, it is. Or if you drive, I went to medical school in Oklahoma, so I would go from Southern California to Oklahoma a lot. And there would be whole cities that I don't actually remember driving through. It's like all of a sudden it's four hours later and that's called highway hypnosis so they're natural states that we go in and out of a lot

and it's when time slows down or time speeds up yes and hypnosis is just having a guide to go through those states or to be able to use wow, I just drove home. I don't remember driving home, but sure enough, I pulled into my own driveway that somehow there are all of these things going on in our brains all the time, but we can use them for our own good, whether it's something that's a little bit more medical, something a little bit more psychological, something in your business, all of these goals. And instead of it being something scary or mysterious, to be honest, it is a little mysterious sometimes to me, which I like. Well, one of the reasons you're in the clinic is we did a scan on you today, a baseline scan.

And tomorrow we're going to do one while you're in a hypnotic state so how cool is that and we're going to see there have been a couple of imaging studies um showing it's not what you would expect so what you would expect when you put someone in a trance you know obviously they're very relaxed there you would think their brains settle down but that's actually not what happens I mean we'll see with you but it actually the frontal lobes the most human thoughtful part of the brain fires up yeah meditation does the same thing yeah we just did a prayer study a couple of months ago fascinating yeah so so we will see.

I got interested when I was a second year medical student, which was 40 years ago. Yeah. It's disturbing. But I went, oh, how cool is this? And I watched our professor hypnotize a couple of the other students. And then when he did me, I never felt more peaceful.

I just, I loved, you don't tune out. You actually tune in, but you do it in a very sort of calming, relaxing, wonderful way. And then I took a month elective. And when I was an intern at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center, I virtually hypnotized half of my patients. That's incredible. Everybody wanted a sleeping pill. Yeah, yeah. And I'm like, well, yes, I'll give you a sleeping pill, but can I hypnotize you first? Yeah.

And see if you really need it. And everybody, you know, they want more time with their doctor. And so everybody said yes. And I prescribed half the sleeping pills that my fellow interns prescribed because what did they teach us in medical school first do no harm use the least toxic and so if you can heal with words and what is really directed attention yes how cool is that i i I recently was diving into the literature and research and I came across this story of yours that you were used you

you saw people changing really the body really and blood flow which other studies have really shown that people can do this well when I was a medical student and I was taking my elective at uc irvine uh don shaffer was my teacher he was awesome he showed us a video of an indian psychiatrist who put a patient in a trance had them pop up the blood vessels in their hands, so purposefully directed attention to their hand, pop up the blood vessels, and then he put a needle through the blood vessel and he pulled the needle out.

And so it's bleeding on both sides of the blood vessel. And in a trance, he had the woman stop the bleeding on one side while it's going on the other side, then stop it on that side and get it to bleed on the other side. Isn't that incredible? It was like so wild. That boggles my mind. I mean, you would think you had to like set up some illusion and holler to do this. So when I was an intern, my first rotation was in the emergency room.

And at Walter Reed in Washington, D.C., it's a busy emergency room. There's a lot of noise going on. But I walk on the ward. It's like 6.30 in the morning. And there's a woman screaming. And I'm like super curious, which is not always a good thing. And so I pop my head in. And I saw this woman whose leg was swollen she had something

called a dvt or a deep venous thrombosis she had a blood clot in her calf that was preventing blood getting out of her leg and so she has this big swollen leg and the chief resident her name was wendy she was not nice and she's not nice. She was screaming at the patient. Because every time she stuck the patient, the patient screamed louder. And Wendy was getting frustrated. And what happens to blood vessels when you're upset is they clamp down. They're not helping you when the patient's upset. And so I felt so bad for Wendy and for the patient. And I said, do you mind if I try? And she said, I've been starting IVs for years. What makes you think you're so special? But if you want to try hot shot, go ahead and look stupid. And she threw

the IV set at me. The first thing I did was not poke this woman. Yeah. The first thing I did was go around to her head. She was just screaming at her from her feet. And I said, hi, I'm Dr. Amen. I need you to slow your breathing. And I said, when you breathe too fast, all your blood vessels constrict. And there's no way we're going

to start an IV on your foot breathe with me and so I slowed my own breathing thinking Wendy was going to kill me when I fail yeah right because I had no expectation this was actually going to work I just seen the video and then I and and then I had her focus on a spot on the wall. It's the first step. You take outside focus and all the distractions, you bring it to a point, and then you get the focus internally. So I had her count to 10, had her close her eyes, and then had her breathe and then imagine relaxation.

And then while I'm doing the whole induction thing i'm going i bet you didn't know that if you focused on your feet you could actually make a blood vessel appear and really help me in this situation and a blood vessel just popped up as soon as i made this suggestion and i put the the needle in. Isn't that incredible? And then I kept her in the trans just to relax her, and I wheeled her text right. Yeah. But the one mistake I made is when Wendy saw this, and her mouth was like, wow. And I just winked at her. And she never looked at me the same way, and I don't mean that in a good way.

But it's so powerful. It's powerful. And, you know, the story, what I love about that story, Daniel, is it's this integration. Not only is it powerful, it reminds me that our bodies have this ability that our brains can help tap into. But it's also the integration between, you know's not saying you know yes hypnosis by itself was used as anesthesia before modern anesthesia we're not and during the civil war yeah yeah it was used in world war one when they actually ran out of that yeah anesthesia that it was actually brought to the u.s if i remember right by an ob-gyn yeah who helped deliver babies i actually

have a friend who delivered all three of her babies using hypnosis without any epidurals. It was the anesthesia. It was the go-to before. And I think today people are just, maybe they're listening, saying, well, I don't need it. It's out of date. But today they're publishing these trials,

and this one boggled my mind. Of course, Europe, because I think we have Vegas, I think Americans are a little bit less likely to accept hypnosis. We have to backpedal. We have to sort of prove it first, which is why I'm so glad. Thank you for doing this brain scan. We're going to scientifically prove it to, I think, especially Americans who are a little bit apprehensive.

But they did this hypnosedation study first in Europe and now they're using it in the US and they they had there are these subjects in this trial and it was women with breast cancer and they gave them hypnosis first or the same amount of time just relaxing and I believe in the trial they gave them as much pain medication and sedation, local sedating medication as they wanted, as they needed. And then they measured pain and then they also measured inflammation. They found that the hypnosis actually, number one, saved the hospital money.

It decreased the surgery time. It really increased the pain scores, not only in the short term, but also the long-term pain and it decreased inflammation. So it's sort of this, oh, maybe this isn't something that we should just throw out as this outdated model. And maybe there are all these fantastic ways to integrate it with these modern practices, which I think is just really exciting. Well, stay with us. When we come back, we're going to talk about the different uses of hypnosis. And I'm going to tell you a fun story that got me into all sorts of trouble. Stay with us. Use the code podcast 10 to get a 10% discount on a full evaluation at amenclinics.com or on our supplements at brainmdhealth.com. Thank you for listening to the Brain Warriors Way podcast. podcast, go to iTunes and leave a review and you'll automatically be entered into a drawing

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