Change Your Brain Every Day - Myths About Hypnosis: What’s True? with Dr. Jeffrey Zeig

Episode Date: June 18, 2019

There are many misconceptions when it comes to hypnosis. Often the word itself invokes mental images of movie villains forcing innocents to carry out some diabolical plan against their will. But is this level of suggestion scientifically possible? Is it merely a sham? Or can it actually help people? In this episode of The Brain Warrior’s Way Podcast, Dr. Daniel Amen and Tana Amen are again joined by Dr. Jeffrey Zeig to shine some scientific light on some of the common myths surrounding hypnosis.

Welcome to the Brain Warriors Way podcast. I'm Dr. Daniel Amen. And I'm Tana Amen. In our podcast, we provide you with the tools you need to become a warrior for the health of your brain and body. The Brain Warriors Way podcast is brought to you by Amen Clinics, where we have been transforming lives for 30 years using tools like brain spec imaging to personalize treatment to your 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 nutraceuticals to support the health of your brain and body. To learn more, go to brainmd.com. Welcome back. We're here with Dr. Jeffrey Zeig, and we're talking about Milton Erickson and hypnosis. And in this podcast, we're going to talk about some of the myths and misconceptions

about it. So I learned it when I was a second year medical student at Oral Roberts University. So for people who don't know, Oral Roberts is an evangelical Christian university and the chief of psychiatry taught it to us. In fact, put all of us in a trance. I'm like, wow, this is so interesting. And I actually took a month elective with Don Schaefer at UC Irvine when I was a senior medical student, and I've just been in love with it. But at ORU, there were people who said, oh, you shouldn't do do that. It's opening people's minds to the devil and demonic forces. And growing up, my dad's favorite word, we've talked about this, is bullshit. And my second favorite word was no. And having been hypnotizing people for 40 years, it's complete nonsense that you're opening

someone's mind to the devil i mean i suppose if you're a satan worshiper that you know whatever there's probably some personal responsibility for the person being hypnotized to go to someone they trust but i was always curious about that the roman catholic church um approved hypnosis as a medical treatment in 1954, the year I was born, and the American Medical Association, I think it was 1956 or 57, approved it as a standard medical treatment. You know, one could argue that the Catholic Church actually uses some of what they do to induce some kind of – I mean, it's like the beads, focusing meditation on the beads.

It's a meditation-type inducing state, some of the chanting and the beads. And my family was Catholic growing up. I never sort of got it. But anyways, just last week, because I do study NLP and I really like it. It's a great way to coach people because it just induces this change quickly. We mentioned in the last episode. Last week, I read an article about it. I'm like, why do people feel like NLP and hypnosis, which are often, you know, people use them together because people who like NLP often like hypnosis, which I do too. Um, this woman talked about NLP and hypnosis in this

article being of the devil and how you are opening your mind and how, how truly evil it is. This is last week. Now I'm Christian. So I'm a little confused by this. So I, I meditate, I pray. So let's let Jeff answer. Yeah. So let's, let's. We're all suspicious of undue influence and we're all susceptible to undue influence. And, uh And probably the greatest purveyors of undue influence right now are either marketers or the movies. Because the techniques that movie makers use, the techniques that marketers use, influence you in subterranean ways. And this is part of our evolutionary biology that we respond to signals without cognitively processing. We don't need to cognitively process. We respond to signals.

And this is part of our evolution. And we built our verbal communication on top of that. Now, we reject the idea that we are being influenced outside of our awareness. And yet we know from thousands of studies in academic psychology, in social psychology, that we are consistently influenced by factors that are contextual that we don't even realize. We know that if you paint a restaurant wall red in the United States, people will spend more money. We know that if the waitress in a restaurant repeats your order with a smile, you'll tip her more. We know that people are subject and

biologically designed to respond to things, but somehow they're similarly designed to resist influence. If you push on somebody's head, they're going to resist, no matter, even if they're inviting you to push on their head. So we have a natural tendency to honor our autonomy. We try to think that we're the captain of our fate and the master of our soul, and that we do that out of our own design, when the automaticity of everyday life shows us through myriad studies that we are subject to influences that we can't consciously be aware of. Now, hypnosis uses that, but so do movies. Because for example, in a regular movie, you see one cut every 7.8 seconds, but you'll leave that movie never even realizing that you saw a cut. And you won't realize that the editor of that movie is making

the cut when he wants you to blink. Exactly. The movie maker is trying to get you to attune to the movie because a cut is a discontinuous movement. And if you move your head discontinuously, you have to blink. And great editors will be influencing you through directors, through the music, through the design. So we tend to believe that we are autonomous creatures, but we're really not. And modern neuroscience shows us that we respond without necessarily realizing the response or the cue that led to the response.

So let's get to the myths and misconceptions about hypnosis. And one of them is you can make me do things I don't want to do. Exactly. So there's two myths about hypnosis. You keep trying to do that with me and it hasn't worked yet. Yeah. Except you're married to me and you said the only way you're running is if you're chasing me. Yeah, you did get me to do what you did. Oh, my gosh. You are just an evil person. Did you see that?

Back to Jeff. He got what he wanted. I got what I wanted, which was you and my life forever. He used a robotic-like technique, but not with the necessity of a formal trance. Dear Lord. So you said there are two things, Jeff. Two myths, control and control. Yeah.

So people believe that if they go into trance, they can have incredible control, or they believe that if they go into a trance, they'll lose control. If there's something embarrassing, they'll be forced to do something against their moral spine. We know from social psychology studies that people can be induced to do things that involve moral disengagement, and you don't need to have hypnosis in order to cause people to morally disengage. The social pressures are enough to create moral disengagement. But people are certainly afraid of hypnosis because of the press that hypnosis has gotten about the loss of control or the gain of unreasonable control. Maybe if I go into a trance, I'll remember everything that I've ever read in my entire life.

You know, doctor, can you please hypnotize me so I can find the diamond ring that I've lost 10 years ago? I know it must be in my mind. And if you just hypnotize me, we'll get that information out of my mind. So people come to me with all kinds of distorted myths about what hypnosis can do. And like Tanya was saying, that hypnosis is a state of focused attention. It's a state of focused concentration. And we all have resources, mentally, physically, biology, that we don't necessarily recognize. So the paradox of hypnosis is that it's a way of waking people up, not putting people to sleep. You're waking people up to resources, potentials that they have that they hadn't realized. What's funny to me is you touched

on something really interesting about how people are afraid of losing control and going against their own moral fiber. And yet people all around us, even really good people, go out and engage in drugs and alcohol every weekend, which completely eradicates their free will and causes them to do things that they wish they hadn't done. And that's intentional. But I like what you said. Hypnosis is a state of focus. And the imaging work on hypnotic states shows that the brain actually increases in activity, that it doesn't decrease in activity, especially the front part of the brain, which is the ultimate state in being human. It's having good frontal lobe function. So you're focused and you have more forethought and control.

But you have this tool that you can purposefully use to increase, you know, heighten your awareness to utilize more tools and people, as you stated just a few minutes ago, do things every day that affect how suggestible they are in essence. And like I just said, it's chemicals, taking pills, medications, and they do that willingly. It's just hilarious to me that they can't see it, that people don't see the discrepancy there. So let's talk about some of the uses.

Over the years, what have you found hypnosis to be the most helpful for? Well, hypnosis has been used in every facet of medicine and psychotherapy. So hypnosis has been used with severely disturbed psychiatric patients. Hypnosis has been used gynecologically. Hypnosis has been used dermatologically. It's been used obstetrically to help women deal with childbirth. The literature on hypnosis and the way in which it's been used is massive. If you think about a wart, a virus that you might have on some part of your body, and the fact that somebody could use some suggestive therapy like hypnosis and they could use some mental event that changes a virus that's growing on their skin.

If somebody could think of the mechanism that's involved in that, figure out the mechanism, you'd probably be able to win a Nobel prize. We know that hypnosis can change gastric motility. There are some protocols that are being used right now for people who have irritable bowel syndrome. It's a very difficult thing for GI doctors to treat, but there's protocols that can be used with hypnosis where you go through a series of sessions and you can have adequate control because we know that even gastric motility can respond to suggestion. You know, it's really interesting, you know, Rabbi G with Kids Kicking Cancer. So I have a friend,

Rabbi G, and he started, he's a black belt as well, and he started a nonprofit called Kids Kicking Cancer after his little girl died from leukemia and she was in severe pain. And so he was in the hospital and seeing these kids scream in pain and being tied down. And he just didn't like it. And he started this nonprofit that's now all over the world and they go in now they don't call it hypnosis, right? But he uses essentially uses what we techniques we use in karate, breathing visualization, and he gets these kids to quiet themselves down, take deep breaths, breathe in the light, breathe out the pain. And he does this over and over, breathe in the light, breathe out the pain.

And he visualizes themselves being warriors and going through this process with strength and doesn't call it hypnosis, but essentially that's what you're doing is getting these kids- It's a suggestive therapy. Exactly. Yeah. And maybe better not to call it hypnosis because when you call something hypnosis, you activate those two myths about control and control,

and you activate more resistance. But these kids end up not needing to be tied down. They end up feeling good about their – like they wake up and they're like, wait, is it done? I mean – Well, guided imagery is often a part of hypnosis. So when I think of the stages, it's often focused attention. So I'll have someone focus on a spot on the wall above their eye level.

Learn that from Dr. Erickson. Get their eyes to naturally be tired. And when you suggest they are tired, that sort of works and it helps. So focus on a spot, progressive relaxation, something he called deepening techniques, and then guided imagery. And I know you've worked with a lot of experts. Martin Rossi is also an expert in guided imagery, if I remember right. And the imagery is so important. But some of the hallmarks of hypnosis is time becomes distorted. And I

actually use that, you know, a minute here in the office will seem like an hour in the park or the mountains or wherever you use the imagery. And lessening pain is another one that I've... I used it a lot in medical procedures. And my favorite, when I was an intern at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center, Hal Wayne was one of my teachers. And we used it... I remember my first professional paper, I had a Parkinsonian patient. His name was Fritz Perls. He was actually a World War

II hero and wrote a book called The Forefront War about how he helped Jewish people escape the Nazis. But he had terrible Parkinson's. And I'm on the neurology service and unlike my neurology colleagues as a psychiatry intern, I like talking to my patients. And so I actually have a very good relationship with Mr. Pearls. And all of my patients, when I was an intern, wanted me to give them sleeping pills. And I'm like, yeah, the hospital's a hard place to sleep, but would you mind if I hypnotize you first? And he thought that was just a wonderful idea and he has this terrible

tremor and when I start to hypnotize him his tremor goes away before he went to sleep and the little four-year-old in me is jumping up and down like oh my god the drummer went away before he went to sleep. So next morning on Grand Rounds, I told my attending, his name was Dr. Jabari, and he rolled his eyes at me like, I can't believe I have to deal with these idiot psychiatric interns. And like I said, my dad's favorite word was bullshit. And I'm like, no, watch. and so in front of eight of my other colleagues residents and interns i hypnotized him and he's fully awake and in a trance his tremor went away and dr jabari started paying attention and then we did a qeeg not a qeg a regular eeg

resting and then when he was in a trance, and we videotaped it, and it became my first paper. It's so powerful if you can get a person into a trance and then direct their mind in healing ways. It's wild. Absolutely. And the same thing, you reminded me of a stuttering patient, and you couldn't make much sense of what he was trying to speak about. But in a trance, he was speaking fluently, like sometimes stuttering patients will sing and be able to sing fluidly. So we all have hidden potentials. And the purpose of the trance is to awaken people to the potentials that have previously been dormant. Right. And it's not stage hypnosis, which is very different. Stage hypnosis often is about entertaining and control. This medical hypnosis, psychological hypnosis is really about teaching

patients about their own personal power and control. That you can control things like pain to decrease the amount of medication you have or sleep. When I was on the cardiology ward as an intern, it was an ICU cardiology where I was freaked out the whole time because people were dying and I never wanted to be responsible for anybody dying. And so I couldn't sleep. And then one night I'm like, I can't sleep. I'm so anxious. And I'm like, well, what do you do with your patients when they want a sleeping pill? Because obviously I was on call. I couldn't take a sleeping pill. I'm like, oh, you put them in a trance. And I became so good, I could put myself to sleep in under two minutes just by directing my attention to not to the worries, but to the things that help me sleep.

That's one of the things that helped me when I was going through all my medical treatments was doing self-hypnosis with guided imagery. So when we come back, we're going to talk about more of the clinical uses of hypnosis, how you can use this in your life to be healthier, happier, more empowered. And whatever you've learned from this podcast, write it down, post it, and then send us a copy. We would love to hear from you. Even if you still have concerns about it or controversial thoughts, send them to us. We'd love to address them.

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