Change Your Brain Every Day - Rewire Anxiety in Minutes? The Hypnosis Breakthrough with Dr. David Spiegel

Episode Date: March 2, 2026

Can anxiety really be dialed down in minutes? In this eye-opening conversation, we sit down with Dr. David Spiegel, Stanford psychiatrist and one of the world's leading experts on clinical hypnosis, to uncover how hypnosis is being used to rapidly reduce anxiety, reframe fear, and retrain the brain. Dr. Spiegel breaks down the neuroscience behind hypnosis—what it is, what it isn't, and why it works. You'll learn how focused attention can quiet the brain's stress circuits, how hypnotic techniques differ from meditation, and why anxiety may be more flexible than you think.   We also explore: The biggest myths about hypnosis 2. How anxiety patterns get wired into the brain 3. Simple techniques you can start using immediately 4. Who benefits most from clinical hypnosis   If you've tried everything to calm your mind—or you're curious about science-backed tools for emotional resilience—this episode might change how you think about anxiety forever.       Use the code CHANGEYOURBRAIN20 at reveri.com for 20% off a yearly subscription.

During acute surgical procedures, if you taught people self-hypnosis, their pain reduced to like 10 or 15% left, whereas it was 60% as high in the people who were just getting medication, getting opioids. On half the opioids, the hypnosis group had far less pain and far less anxiety. David Spiegel is a Stanford psychiatrist who has spent his career unlocking the neurobiology of therapeutic hypnosis. Today, he explores the mind-body connection to show us how hypnosis is used in clinical healing. With hypnosis, the more stressed you get, the less control you have over your body. That's what you need for this. You're dealing with your inner mental tension, not with your body, allowing it to do what it needs to do.

What are some daily hypnotic practices people can just put in their lives to make their day better? What are the daily things we can do? Every day you are making your brain better or you are making it worse. Stay with us to learn how you can change your brain for the better every day. Your brain matters. Amen Clinics helps people with brain scans and targeted treatment across 11 cities. Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, D.C., Miami, New York, Seattle, Scottsdale, Los Angeles, Orange County, California, and San Francisco.

Learn more at Amonclinics.com. Tannen and I are so excited to have Dr. David Spiegel with us, who is a professor and associate chair of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Stanford University. Dr. Spiegel is one of the world's most respected and published experts in the field of hypnotherapy. He's also the director of Stanford Center on Stress and Health and the Center for Integrative Medicine, I can already see he and I have so much in common. His contributions encompassed 13 books, 445 scientific journal articles, 175 book chapters, spanning hypnosis, psychosocial oncology, stress physiology, trauma, so many different things.

When his team reached out, I actually saw that. email and went, yes, we would love to have him on the podcast. I don't talk about it much on this podcast, but hypnosis was a huge part of my early career. And Dr. Hal Wayne was my mentor at Walter Reed, who was actually trained by David's father, who was one of the world's most famous hypnotist, hypnith therapist. So, Welcome. Welcome. So it's so exciting. Thank you. Thank you both, Daniel. Yeah, it's really fun. Honored to be here. So there's so many myths and misconceptions about hypnosis. Like, I can't be hypnotized. Mind control. I'll lose control. Especially amongst like religious

communities and Christian communities. I know they're afraid of the mind control aspect. So I would love to hear your take on that. Well, and I was actually, I went to medical school at O'Roberts University, which was a Christian school. I see. Got it. And Stan Wallace, who was the chairman of the Department of Psychiatry, hypnotized us all one day. And he said, this is a tool that can help so many people. Now, what was it like to be raised by one of the world's most famous hypnotherapists? I have no idea.

It was, you know, life was very interesting. You know, the dinner table conversation was fascinating. I got to watch and make videos of patients who had, you know, spontaneous pseudo-seizures and he would treat them with hypnosis, and I got to watch that. Wow. So the discussions were really interesting. And I was intrigued and decided I would try it for myself when I got to that age. And so here I am.

It's sort of a genetic illness in the family. You know, I had my parents were both psychiatrists and psychiatrists. wireless, they told me I was free to be any kind of psychiatrist I wanted to be. I love that. Here I am. I love that. So what do you say about to people who talk about mind control? I say try it, you'll like it, you know. Well, I happen to love it. I'm just curious how you would answer. Here's a thing. Hypnosis, you know, it used to be thought of as being composed of three things, absorption, intense absorption in something so that you, it's like looking through the telephoto lens of a camera, which you see, you see with great.

detail. But to do that, you have to be less aware of context. So that's the dissociation part. You put outside of awareness things would ordinarily be in awareness. The third part is the most misunderstood one. It's suggestibility is what it's called. And that's not what it is. It's cognitive flexibility. And so what's really, so, you know, in these horrible stage shows, which I detest, you see the football coach dancing around like a baller. I don't like making fools out of people. anyway, especially with hypnosis, but there is a point, all right? He's able to try out being different. He's not thinking about the ribbing he's going to get in the locker room on Monday. He's just thinking, gee, what would it be like if I dance like a ballerina? You want people to be in a frame of mind

where they can put aside their normal assumptions about who they are, what they are, and what they should be. And we know now what's going on in the brain when that happens, suppressing activity in the posterior cingulate cortex, in the default mode network, you can just suspend your usual awareness of who you are and what you are. So you're not a sort of brainless, just easily suggestible person. You're one who's open to trying out something different. Would you, are you, or would you or do things that you don't want to do? Or is it, I mean, how does that work?

Can people manipulate you to do something, that you wouldn't normally do. Or that you would normally say absolutely not to. Boy, we're just going after the big questions. You are, you are. Look, we're living in 2026 in the United States. Can people manipulate you? Yes.

Does it have anything to do with hypnosis? Well, I feel like they use NLP and stuff like that on with advertising all the time. I think the point is this. We're social creatures. We are influenced by other people's opinions and attitudes and ways that they try to push us or manipulate us. But it's not particularly because of hypnosis. It's because you can get absorbed in an idea and try out being different and see what it feels like.

Are you able to say no? I know this is one step too far. I'm not going there. Yes, you are. You're just less likely to consider it. It's like being so caught up in a good movie that you forget you're watching a movie. You enter the imagined world. And afterwards you think, you know, that was a kind of stupid premise and the actor wasn't that good.

But at the time, you're in it. That's what it's like. You allow yourself to get immersed in. and experience. And if you like where it's going, you can keep going. If you don't, you can stop. So, because I love hypnosis. And I've used it a lot for a lot of different things. And I think it's amazing. It's super helpful. Actually made you a tape for your black belt test. Yeah. Because I'm always very nice to her. She has two black belts. But the first one, I was a bit afraid of.

And she needs them to keep you nice to her. I'm going to keep her as a bodyguard. It's always very nice for her, but she was very anxious. I was very anxious about the test itself. And so he did some performance hypnosis with me, and it was extremely helpful. Terrific. And I did it again for my second black belt, and it was extremely helpful. So I really like it. But I have never had the experience when I've used hypnosis or had someone hypnotize me

where I was completely unaware of everything. My mother has had that experience where she was just like very in it. I've never felt like, I don't know what's happening around me. Right. So. Well, there are different degrees of hypnotizability. Some people really are not hypnotizable. And it's basically a genetic trait.

People who are heterozygous with the thionine gene in the dopamine pathway are more likely to be more hypnotizable than those who are homozygousygous for methionine or homozygous for valine. Interesting. Interesting. You're more hypnotic. We've actually developed a way of testing that at the bedside with a drop of blood, we can tell. Now, there are historical things you can notice, too.

People who are raised with a lot of imaginative involvements as kids, because most children are highly amitizable. Eight-year-olds are in trances all the time. You call them in for dinner. They don't hear you. They're doing their thing. Work and play is all the same thing for a child. It's a shame we make them into adults where it becomes work. But some retained that high hypnotizability throughout life.

Some lose some or all of it as they become young adults. And you may remember Phil Zimbardo. He was the author of the prison experiment at Stanford. He did a 25-year follow-up on his psych-1 students, blindly retested their hypnotizability 25 years later. There was a 0.7 test-retest correlation on blind retesting. That's as stable as IQ is going to be over a 20-1. year interval. So it becomes a stable trait. So I'm guessing you're more in the mid-range in

hypnotizability where you have the experience, but then you step back and think about it. And then you can get into it again. People who just lose themselves, and we call them the poets, they're just in it, you know. That's your mom. And there are some people that don't know what you're talking about. I had a patient who came in. He had a knee injury. Seven years he's suffering with this. He tried everything. He wanted help with pain control. impotisability was zero. And I had asked, I asked a really tough question before, are you right or left-handed?

That's usually not hard. He said, I'm right-handed, but I try to make sure my left hand gets an opportunity to do just everything that my right hand can do. And I thought this guy is all into his head and not into the experience. And his score was a zero when I measured his hypnotizability. And here's the funny thing.

You think, well, well, he walked out angry. He didn't. I said, you know what, I think, Your problem is not how bad your knee is now. It's how much you worry about it. If it's anything less than perfectly normal, you're miserable. And he said, you know, thank you, doc. You're the first of, like God knows how many doctors I've seen who said that now.

I think you're right. So I said, just stop worrying about whatever discomfort you have and you'll be fine. On the other hand, just the patient before was someone who was a nine out of 10 on the HIV, had migraine headaches forever, was a meditator, 10 years. wouldn't get better. I taught her to just imagine cool, tingling numbness, a pack of ice on her head, and it was gone. And she said, thank you for freeing me to use my intentionality. She was keeping herself from letting herself just lose herself in the experience. So there are these real differences. And it's not that patients are resisting. It's not that doctors aren't good at inducing hypnosis.

People differ in their ability. Interesting. And I always start my treatment sessions with a measure of hypnotizability because it guides me. So how do you do that? It takes about six minutes. I just give them an opportunity to look up, close their eyes, take a deep breath. I tell them their hand will float up in the air. If I pull it down, it will go right back up to the upright position. You'll find something pleasant and amusing about it.

Later, when I touch your left, your elbow, your usual sensation and control will return. And we can score. There are five items to association, the response to the suggestion. for involuntary movement, a cut-off signal, sense of floating lightness or buoyancy, and loss of control of the hand. And you get two points for each of those five items, and that's your score. And it's a very stable measure. So what is the difference between, say, meditation and hypnosis? Like how, tell me the difference. Let me meditate on that. No, I, the difference. The difference is this. Hypnosis has been called believed in imagination, but it's more about doing than about being.

Meditation is about being. You're trying to just be someone different, and you do that half an hour, twice a day. Open presence, body scan, compassion, those are all good things. But they're designed not to change a problem, but to change you, to be different. Don't fight the problem, just be open to it and see what happens. With hypnosis, you're saying, okay, you're stressed like you were before your test. The more stressed you get, the less control you have over your body. And that's what you need for this because you're dealing with your inner mental tension.

Not with your body allowing it to do what it needs to do. And you saw that with this wonderful girl from Oakland who won two gold medals in ice skating, figure skating. She, you know, she had quit. She started when she was 15. She won gold medals and she said, I've had it. I'm not interested. She got banged to it. And she said, I don't care whether I win her loose.

I love doing this. And I just want to show you what it's like. And she just, and that was so different from all the other skaters where she, you enjoyed it because she was enjoying it. You know, you could just see it. And a lot of these others who were very skilled, very highly trained, made some crucial mistake because they were too focused on what this all means. And that makes your body tense. It disconnects your brain from how you can better control your body. So a lot of what I teach people

with for athletic training is to focus on just how you need to communicate with your muscles with your body and enjoying what you're doing, not focusing on the goal or what it means if you do it well or if you don't. Because if you do that, you're already off the track. So it's the chatter. what you do is you calm down their posterior singular. So their posterior default mode network, right. Which is what psilocybin does. I think is so interesting. It is.

I agree with you. Hypnosis, at least in my experience, has zero side effects, where psilocybin can have a whole bunch of side effects. And so before we go wholesale in this country to the psilocybin trip, we should try hypnosis first because that's been my experience with imaging. We've actually imaged people. We do a study called brain-spect imaging. It calms down the posterior singular, but activates your prefrontal cortex.

And in hypnosis, what we actually see with hypnosis is the more active your prefrontal cortex, particularly your left dorsalateral prefrontal cortex, the less active the posterior singular is. So it's literally, when you're engaged in hypnosis, you're inhibiting activity. I'm beginning to think my meditation was actually self-hypnosis because I don't do the think-of-nothing thing. You know, well, maybe that's what you're actually doing. You're sneaking in a little. And it actually really helps me to calm down when I can, but I visualize doing things with my, yeah, and visualizing things. But that's, you know, the whole point is that if you are thinking about the goal or what people expect of you or what you need to do or what will happen if you succeed or fail,

you're inhibiting activity in the prefrontal cortex, you're increasing activity in the salience network, in the dorsal anterior cingulate, and the insular cortex, which is there to help you worry about things. You know, you hear a loud noise at your salience network. It distracts you from your communication with the insula, which is something that prefrontal cortex and insula are highly interconnected in hypnosis.

So you have better control over your body, especially if you're not distracted by your, say your posterior cingulate saying you know you screwed this up the last three times you did it and your mother was always disappointed in you anyway you know i call it the my fault mode network you distract yourself there's a wonderful so the insular cortex goes up with the critic or goes down it goes what what you get is not you you turn down the critic you increase connectivity between the dorsalateral prefrontal cortex and the insula so you're saying just focus on how you want to relate to your body, what you want it to do, how it feels when you do it right.

And you're not worrying about what your mother yelled at you. Right. You're just... It's always no mind is... So Julius Randall, the NBA's All-Star did our podcast. And I have his scans before and after. And he always says he performs the best when he's not thinking. Yeah, exactly, exactly.

I've seen some of these NBA players literally look up, close their eyes before they're going do a foul shot, you know. And they just, they sort of exhale, there's a nice cyclic sigh. And then it just goes, you know, Steph Curry, you know, how he does that, I still don't know. So are there medications or things that people take in their daily life, whether it be caffeine or certain medicines or that make them people, I guess the word is not suggestible, but make them more open to hypnosis? And are there things that make them less open to hypnosis? By and large, there have been a few studies. There's nothing particularly, if anything, if you're sort of down,

a bit of a stimulant might help, but you can get disorganized too. And if you're very anxious, some anti-anxiety drugs will get you into that range where you are more likely to be hypnotizable, but it doesn't work well enough that it's worth bothering with. Okay. So let's talk about what our listeners are thinking about. it's so both of us all three of us think hypnosis can be an incredibly powerful tool what are the common conditions you think it is most helpful for um stress management and i can tell you about a

study we just published on that pain control forget the opioids use hypnosis for pain control insomnia. I have people, you know, I used to worry that maybe, you know, the recording, even though it's interactive and AI structured now so that you get, hear me responding to your questions and all that, I used to think maybe it won't be as good as being in my office with me. And then I thought, if you wake up at 3 in the morning and want to go back to sleep, you probably don't want me in your bedroom telling you what to do. And it's very helpful for people to get back to sleep, it's very helpful for habit control. The first study we did with the Revery app was a technique that my father developed originally to help people stop smoking. Tell them three things. You know,

you don't say cigarettes will taste terrible, you know. I had my hypnosis teacher Tom Hackett at Mass General did that. He would tell people your cigarette will taste like horseshit. Right. Right. He light up and they go, oh, that's terrible. Thank you. He gets this urgent call from one of this patient he just treated and he said, my house smells terrible. Are you smoking? He said, no, I forgot to tell you that my wife smokes. So he had hypnotize him, only your cigarette. You know, forget it.

What we tell people, you focus on what you're for. You know, hypnotists are great at saying, the worst thing you can tell someone is don't think about purple elephants, right? That's what you want. So you say, I want you to focus on three things. For my body, smoking is a poison. I need my body to live. I owe my body respect and protection.

Would you ever put heated smoke full of tar and nickees? in your baby's lungs. No. Well, your body is as innocent as a baby. It has to take into it anything you put into it, even if it's damaged by it. So you focus on what you're for. And this means that the minute you make that decision, you can start feeling good about yourself. Not that you're depriving yourself, but that you're being a better parent. So it's a reward. So now it's a reward instead of a punishment. So we found with the app for the first time. So let's talk about the app because people don't know about it. So the app is called Reverey. Revery.

Revere, yes. That there's eight or nine programs on the app, stress management, pain, sleep, habit control, focus for sports performance, yes. How long are the self-gnosis sessions? By and large, about 10 minutes. So that's easy. And you've had over a million downloads. Right, we have.

And you just published a study. Yes, we just published a study. in Nature's Digital Medicine Journal with 84,000 of our users. Wow. And we teaching them the stress control exercise. And what we did and what I guess you probably did in preparing for your black belt testing is you focus not on, don't be afraid, you focus on helping your body

because you can't, there's a lot of things about stress you cannot control. But the one thing you can is how your body reacts to stress. So you say, imagine your body floating in a bath, the lake, a hot tubber floating in space, and focus on the experience you want to have as you're doing whatever it is you want to be doing, and how good it feels to connect to your body and get your body to do what you're hoping it will do. So it's, you know, Tiger Woods did this with his golf game.

Every shot, he would rehearse the shot in his mind and then just go ahead and do it. And to hell with everything else. You know, one of the big problems in golf is you have a lot of time just wandering around getting nervous, right? You're not in action all the time. And we had the Stanford swim coach. Stanford has a fantastic women swimming team. There are always one or two of them are always in the Olympics. But he found, the coach found, he called me because they're swimming faster in practice than they do in meets.

I don't understand that. And I said, well, I think I do. Because so I talked with the women and they said, when they're, If in a meat, they're worried about what the women and the lames next to them are doing. And swimming is not a contact sport. It doesn't matter what they're doing. Golf isn't a contact sport. So what you wanted to do is focus on your relationship with your body.

So we had them do self-apnosis. Imagine swimming your best race. But just how do you connect with your body? How do you guide your body? What are you sensitive to? And they started swimming faster in meats than they did in practice. So it's really interesting you say that because I remember from my second black belt test, I practiced at a place that was sort of scary.

The people there were scary. I thought of myself as sort of the middle-aged token mom. And so when I was the person I was working with at the time said, well, I would be scared too if that's how I saw myself. Compared to these guys that were, you know, really big and scary and whatever. So that was what I worked on. And I didn't really think about it until later. But when I went in that day for my test, I didn't see anyone.

Like when I tell you, when I first walked in, I did notice it. I noticed like people had come in from all over because of who I trained with and it was very intimidating. And then all of a sudden I felt myself to sort of go to this place. And I didn't, I focused in on my master and I did not notice anyone.

And I just thought about my body performing. And so, you know, I didn't see my fist going through a board. I saw it going through the wall behind the board. I didn't see, you know what I mean, but I just felt my body doing what it needed to do and I did not even acknowledge, I didn't hear what they were saying. I didn't think about anything else going on.

But I never really thought about that, thought about that until just now. Focus on when you said that. On what you're for. And that's what, with that narrowing of focus in hypnosis, you can really do that. You know, we all have sensations and our legs touching the chairs right now,

but hopefully you weren't even aware of it because I'm so interesting that you just didn't pay attention to it. That's what the kind of thing you do in more extreme ways in hypnosis. You just put outside of awareness things, that are going to be a distraction. Yeah, I remember walking in there, and for the first time, I'd never had this thought before when I was practicing.

I thought, I'm only leaving this dojo one of two ways, on a stretcher or with a black belt. And I'd never been that extreme. Like, that was just like I was so single-focused. Like, that was just, that was it. Like, this is happening. This is how it's going to go. And I just blocked everything else out.

But the real issue, I mean, obviously, you had to deal with an opponent, but what matters is how you're relating to your own body. Right. And if you tighten up too much, then you're starting to give control to your opponent. Yeah, and I didn't see myself that way. For the first time I saw myself just very strong and very, you know. And that's what you need to do and you did it.

Yeah. Congratulations. Interesting. So is hypnosis something done to you or is it something you actively participate in? That's a much better way to put it. Yes, you actively participate in and I'm teaching people how to do it. I don't hypnotize people. I show them how to hypnotize themselves.

And that conceptually is what led me do something in starting reverie that 30 years ago, when I was in training and doing this stuff, I would have been afraid to do, just turning it loose. You know that there actually were laws 100 years ago against windshield wipers and automobiles when they started, you know why? Because the people thought that people would get hypnotized

watching the windshield. That is so. It's so funny. Doesn't happen. Doesn't happen. But it is something that you control within yourself. But I mean, to some degree, don't we even get hypnotized by music and by, I mean, to some degree, don't we sort of lose ourselves? But that's the way you lose yourself.

Right. That means you're controlling the transaction. Right. And you lose yourself, but you can find yourself if you want again. So you're allowing yourself. You miss your exit or you do because you're in a trans. That's right. It's a natural state.

It is a natural state. In a lot. Like if you go. I explain it to my patients if you drive for a couple of hours. Right. And you miss like half an hour there. Yep. But you didn't get in an accident.

That's exactly right. You were in a hypnotic state. Or you saw a wonderful movie that was two and a half hours long, but it seemed like it went by in 20 minutes. That's... It's a natural state. Part of what happens, the single brain change that we saw that was most prominent, we took some high. and low-hymetizable people in and out of hypnosis in the functional MRI scanner. And the main thing we saw was reduced activity in the dorsal anterior cingula.

That's the major part of the salience network. And that's the alarm system in the brain. You hear a loud noise. That's your salience network saying, hey, wait a minute, maybe there's something you've got to pay attention to. You turn down activity there. So you're less worried. So like when you're driving down the freeway, you know that you've got a command system working and that if something bad starts to happen on the road, you'll do something about it,

but you just want to focus on something else. So you're in a sort of anti-anxiety state. And it's interesting that there's actually more gamma-amino-butyric acid in the dorsal anterior singulates of highly hypnotizable people than of low-hypnotizedable people. Say that again? There's more GABA, gamma-amine amino-butteric acid in the dorsal anterior cingulate region of highly hematimitizable people. So it can turn it down. Just turn it down. Because that's also the part of the brain that detects errors.

That's right. That's exactly right. And you're either detecting errors in your partner or in yourself. So people who have high anterior cingulate, dorsal anterior cingulate, are critical. Right. Often of themselves or of other people. And if they're hypnotizably, you can help them with that.

You can help you. Soothe that. Just turn down activity there. And, you know, it's the same neurotransmitter that anti-anxiety drugs that sedative hypnotics stimulate. So, you know, you can do your own pharmacologic treatment without going to the drugstore by just learning to mobilize activity in your anterior cingulate. It's self-soothing.

It calms you now. What are some of your favorite stories of hypnosis? like extreme things that people have been able to do, or maybe not so extreme, but just really cool things. Well, I had a woman who came, who was born in another country and had been sexually abused by the landlord in their apartment. The family was afraid to allow, you know,

to do anything about it because they, you know, were afraid they'd be evicted. She noticed that she grew up as a teenager that men would say things on the street that were horrible. She said my body wasn't my own. And she came here. She worked in health care. She was doing okay, but was always chronically depressed.

And I, she came to see me because she, you know, was so frustrated. She's been on antidepressants for 15 years. Helped some, but not a lot. And I said, I want you to go back and I want you to pretend you're your own mother in hypnosis, seeing yourself as that 12-year-old girl after you had been assaulted. And she starts to cry. And I said, I want you to. answer one question for me. Is this her fault? And she said, no, I'm stroking her hair. I'm stroking her

hair. And she starts crying harder. And I said, well, I just want you to think about that. And she called me a week later. And she said, my psychiatrist wants to know what you did to me because I'm not depressed anymore. My friends don't recognize me. And it's the dissociation here is the capacity to separate yourself enough from this sort of shame and guilt that any woman would feel, but particularly any child would feel after something like this happens, and see it for what it is. And she, it changed her. What if the key to overcoming your pain isn't just in your body, but in your brain? My new book, Change Your Brain, Change Your Pain, Offer Strategies I've Used with Thousands of Patients to break free from physical and emotional pain and reclaim focus, energy, and peace.

Healing is possible, and it starts with your brain. Pre-order my new book now and receive special bonus gifts at change-your-brain, change-your-painbook.com. So why? I'm so unhappy with what's happened to psychiatry. I'm so unhappy. So I trained at Walter Reed in 1982. And we were really taught to be whole person physicians that, yes, we did medication, but we also did therapy.

I did a lot of hypnosis. And then in the early 1990s, managed care took over psychiatry. And psychiatrists were so expensive. they made us the prescribers. And I think the whole thing went to hell after that to the 15-minute med check. And this art of hypnosis and science is just not found in very many medical schools now. What can we do, do you think, to bring that back? I mean, do you think that's accurate?

I think there was a period where we kind of went astray in the other direction of my mentor and colleague Ravialam, who's now 94 years old, described psychoanalysis as the process of adding insight to injury. I love his books. He loves executioner. He's one of my favorite books. And he gives you the feeling of what it's like to be a psychotherapist better than anything I've ever. seen. But, you know, simply understanding, you know, learning more about how you got there is not enough. You need to do more than that. So I think we need to be more active and directive and use the information we get from people to help them change their point of view about what

happened and see themselves from a different point of view. But I agree with you that just pushing drugs, you know, I get angry every time I think about this. Amphitheater, D. Harvard Medical School, second year's pharmacology course, and they're telling us about how to prescribe opioids. And I'm saying, I asked the question. I said, well, won't people get addicted if you keep them on these opioids? And they said, the professor said, no, if you're using it for pain control, you're not just a street chunky, you're looking to score heroin. You won't get addicted.

Because there's a difference. That's a complete lie. Total lie. In fact, it's the opposite. Right. That is because you get withdrawal hyperalgy easier when you've been on it. You know, you get it after surgery for three days. That's okay.

You can get off it. But you have a month's supply. That's the surgeons usually give people. And by then you are hooked, you know. And 118,000 Americans died of opioid overdoses last year alone in the U.S. I was a nurse when it was the vital sign. And you had to treat pain because if you didn't, you would get ridden. You were getting trouble for not treating pain.

So you had to ask and you had to push it. Like it was. You were pushers. And I remember that. And, you know, at first brush, blush, it seems like a good idea. You know, you measure their blood pressure, and sometimes we don't ask, we don't want to know how much pain people are in. I could sort of get the idea, but it was clearly turning nurses and doctors into recruiters for drug companies. You know, that's what it was.

And you look at Purdue Pharma and the catastrophe that that created. Well, we stopped doing anything else for pain. It was. Yeah, that's exactly right. So Dr. Wayne, actually, when we were at Walter Reed, did a study on hypnotizing, people before their surgery and then teaching them how to get in a hypnotic state afterwards significantly cut the amount of pain medication they were on it's the better thing if you have a panic attack and you go to the emergency room the emergency room doctor is not trained will give you a

Benzo, which you may never stop after that, as opposed to a simple hypnotic trans, or even doing breathing four seconds in, eight seconds out. Cyclic sighing. Can be so helpful, along with, of course, learning now to not believe every stupid thing you think, can be so helpful. You're absolutely right, and it's a shame. And what we saw in this study of 84,000 people, with reverie is they got a pill-like effect without the pill. So each time they did it, they got at least

on average of 15% reduction in their stress levels. And that can be a big deal. You realize you have you have some control over what's going on. It's not just going to go about that. Well, and if you're decreasing cortisol, that alone is going to decrease pain over time. That's right. And so you can, it's like the pill, all the good sides of the pill without the addiction risk, without the habituation, without the withdrawal intensification of symptoms. And so absolutely, people can learn to do this for themselves. And that's one reason. It irritates me that people are so hostile or dismissive of hypnosis

because we haven't succeeded in killing a single person with hypnosis yet, despite using it with many thousands of people, you know. So I have a fun story. So when I was, I have so many fun hypnosis stories. When I was an intern at Walter Reed, I had a patient with Parkinson's disease. And I loved him. He wrote a famous book called The Forefront War.

He helped get Jews out of Germany during World War II. And he's just fascinating. And he's like, well, you give me a sleeping pill. Like everybody in the hospital, they want sleeping pills. And I'm like, I'll leave you in order. But can I hypnotize you first and see if that won't work? And I hypnotized him. But what I noticed before I suggested he goes to sleep,

his Parkinsonian tremor went away in a trance. And then I put him to sleep. And I thought about that all night. And then rounds the next morning, I told the neurologist, Dr. Jabari, that I hypnotized him and his tremor went away while he was awake. And Dr. Jabari rolled his eyes at me. And you could just hear him, you know, his thoughts, stupid psychiatric interns.

Why do I have to deal with this? And I went, no, watch. And then in front of like eight people, I hypnotized him again. And his tremor went away. Yes. And then we did an EEG on him later that day, put him in a trance, Dr. Wayne and Dr. Jabari. And that was my first published paper.

Congratulations. It's so powerful. Well, look, you know, the brain control. every part of the body. You know, it's this little, you know, two and a half pound organ in a box up here, and it's communicating constantly, and it can do that. I have a videotape of it. He had, they had a skull flap open. They were trying to locate where to insert an electrode to inhibit his movements, and he stopped halfway in the middle of procedure. I can't stand this, you know, you can't use general anesthesia. So the surgeon sends him to me and says, fix him so that he can get

through the surgery. So I'm hypnotizing him and I notice when I do it that this constant tremor his hand stops. And I said, I asked him if I could film it. I did. He said, okay. He imagined he was in Hawaii with his two little girls and one was running too close to the water and it was hot and sweaty and, you know, there were insects flying by and he's in his whole scene. And he that he still had the procedure, but this time he tolerated the whole thing. And the worst part was that the anesthesiologist is sitting there. They had him there because they were sure I couldn't keep him calm enough to do it. And he's reading a golf magazine.

You know, he wasn't even interested enough to look at what was happening while the guy's tremor was going down. That's exactly right. But why shouldn't it? You know, level of arousal alone, the degree of control but also attempts to suppress movement can actually intensify it. And why shouldn't the brain continue to be able to regulate movements, even if there's some basal ganglia problem? It doesn't mean that accounts for 100% of the problem.

Do you think apps like reverie can help this mental health epidemic in kids? Because you had said that I'm also child psychiatrist. And who is it? Karen, I'm trying to, she wrote a wonderful textbook on hypnosis and children. Olner. Oleness. Yes. The hypnotizability peaks at 11.

Yeah. And given the mental health epidemic and children, partly because of COVID, because COVID actually causes this inflammatory bomb to go off in the brain and partly because of social media and the constant comparison and all of that, I think in schools we should teach kids skills like self-hypnosis, like not believing every stupid thing you think, like diaphragmatic breathing. Right. As a baseline of you have to learn math, it's like, well, why shouldn't you learn to manage your mind? Absolutely. I know of schools where there's like an imaginary screen on top of the blackboard,

the upper left and the upper right corner. And if you want to think through a problem, they have the kids just go and stare at that space and see if your brain tells you something. So they're doing things like that. You're absolutely right that children are extremely hypnotizable. Why not teach them to take better advantage of us? Well, it seems to me like you'd have to work on the general fear that sort of society and parents have or the misconceptions that they might have if you're going to be able to do that. Because it seems like there's still a lot of misconceptions about it. You should tell the story of Chloe.

Oh, when she burned her finger. My daughter was seven. She was seven. And she burned her finger pretty bad. It was 4th of July. And she was put something, she's trying to make something for herself. And she, maybe she was nine. Anyway, she burned herself.

She poured like hot chocolate, was melted on her finger. and so she was crying and she couldn't settle down. She was like screaming and crying and I was trying to like soothe her and I was trying to put her to bed and I was trying to redo her and do all these things. I had, you know, ice on it and we were trying to, the whole thing. And finally she was like, I need Daniel. And so Daniel comes in the room and he starts talking to her

and he's got this very soothing voice anyways. But he starts talking to her and he starts telling her a story. And as he's telling her the story, he's hypnotizing her. And he's, you know, then you tell him, you can say what you said. Well, and then I said, everybody makes mistakes and you don't have to be hard on yourself. She kept saying, I'm so stupid. She kept saying, I'm so stupid, I'm so stupid. You'll drift nicely off to sleep.

And then the morning your hand will be fine. And she runs into our room. And then she went to sleep. And she runs into our room in the morning. And she goes, my hand doesn't hurt. and everybody makes mistakes. I love it. You got it.

You know, it's the secondary loss that comes. It's not just that she felt her finger hurt, but she was ashamed and embarrassed and thought you'd be angry at her. She's always been very hard on herself. Yes, exactly. So you put your finger on the problem with her finger, which was not so much to discomfort,

but her reaction to it. We did a study years ago in which I was told that there were these physical struggles with kids having to have voiding cysto-urithrograms. You know, if you kids grow up, some of them have a urator that goes horizontally into the side of the bladder. And so what happens when the bladder contracts is that it pushes the urine back up into the kidney.

But the normal connection is at an angle. So when the bladder contracts, it just seals it off so that can't happen. Some kids outgrow it, but if they don't, they have to have major surgery to have it corrected. So every year, you know, you're a little girl. Your mom says we're going out for ice cream and you wind up in the hospital on this cold heart bed, spreading your legs and sticking this thing into your urethra. And, you know, they have horrible struggles with the kids. And they asked me, is there anything you could do with hypnosis? So I trained the mothers to teach them to just go somewhere else. Go to your friend's party, go to Disneyland, and use

hypnosis with them. And on average, the procedures got done 17 minutes faster. And the text, who had the big problem with it, said it's so much easier when these kids do this. And I was proud my late sister was a pediatrician. And I published an article in her journal, Pediatrics, showing that there was significantly reduced distress and procedure time teaching himself hypnosis. Do you remember Rabbi G with kids kicking cancer? So one of my friends, he's also a black belt and teaches karate. But he would, not only did he was, was he teaching these kids karate, his little girl died of cancer and it just devastated him. So he started a foundation and started a whole mission with teaching kids with cancer to do karate because it was empowering to them.

But when they were going through their very, very painful procedures, he was doing hypnosis with them. And he was having them visualize and he was having them do a very empowering, very, very, they would see themselves in very, you know, positions of strength and doing their breathing and doing different things that they would do as a black belt. Exactly. Well, you know, you're giving them a sense of being an active control of what's happening. And powerful, not, you know, to help you speak. And they would do it without anesthesia.

And they would do it without pain medicine. Some of your really important work is around cancer and social support. Yes. Talk about that. Well, Irv Yalom, we talked about before, recruited me to Stanford. I had an interest in philosophical aspects of psychiatry and psychotherapy and he heard me and my father give a talk at an APA meeting and said, why don't you come out here and come work at Stanford and I wound up doing it after a year or two.

And he called me up one day in my first year as an assistant professor and said, David, I'm running a group of women who were dying of breast cancer, would you like to co-lead it with me? Now, when the world's authority on group psychotherapy has you to co-lead a group of them, you think a long time, yeah, you say, yes, I'll do it. And so, you know, you know, you had me at hello. We, right. And, you know, we were warned that we would demoralize these women. They'd see one another die. How could you do this? How terrible it would be? As though death is a novel concept of a cancer patient. Right. And what we found was that they found a source of strength, that you know what, this miserable experience I've gone through enables me to help other people

with the same problem. So it gives them the sense of agency. They didn't feel as alone. They didn't feel ashamed about their symptoms or their fears. And they were able to face death. You know, one of them said that being in the group is 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 at it. I can't say I feel serene, but I can look at it. And so we ran these groups for years. It was a randomized controlled trial, 50 treatment women, 36 controls. We found that over the initial year, we significantly reduced their anxiety and depression. And we reduced their pain. They had half the pain the control group did on the same and very low amounts of medications. And a few years later, we published those studies, and they're interesting, you know.

And but it was at a time when people thought if you just could visualize your white cells killing your cancer cells, you'd be better. And I never believe that for a minute. But I thought, well, you know, we have an interesting study here. Let's see what happened with survival. And on average, the women randomized to the treatment group lived 18 months longer than the control group. Interesting. And, you know, boy, we published that in the Lancet. got a lot of attention.

But, you know, if I had a drug that did that, you know, you know, everybody would be using the drug, you know. That would be a big deal. And we published another article in The Lancet showing that during acute surgical procedures, if you taught people self-hypnosis, their pain reduced to like 10 or 15% left, whereas it was 60% as high in the people who were just getting medication, getting opioids, And on half the opioids, the hypnosis group had far less pain and far less anxiety and got done 17 minutes quickly again.

So, but people were very skeptical about this. And there were people in the psychoancology field who felt that I was undermining the field by claiming that we could do things that we can't do. We don't treat the illness. But giving people empowerment and giving them peace is, I don't understand. Well, then someone always has to complain. No matter what you do. It's what I've learned when I was doing. hypnosis it's like some people would call you well you were forcing them into this other people would say you were amazing you give the medicine some people

call you a quack other people would say it's it's like you you do what you what works yeah people want to do it they want to do it they don't because ultimately that's why we became doctors well you're absolutely right to be helpful what do you think about the I roll was that before we get to the I roll though let me just say one of the things We have a paper in press now in a nature, medicine, psychology, communications. It's a very elaborate meta-analysis of all the studies have been done on the effects of social support on cancer survival. And the conclusion is that there is a small but significant effect.

On average, people who are given social support live 3.9 months longer than control patients. And that may not sound like much, but you know what? That's the average survival advantage of cancer patients who get chemotherapy or radiotherapy or hormonal treatment. And so the paper is just coming out now. That's interesting. People got very angry at me for claiming that and that we're antagonizing our colleagues. I don't care. I am totally convinced that it makes a difference.

When you said, people become psychiatrists, half of us are crazy and the other half are just curious. I mean, I've been brutalized because I think why are psychiatrists, the only medical doctors, who never look at the organ they treat. And it's like we fly blind, and now 25% of the American adult population is on psychiatric drugs. Huge win for the pharmaceutical industry. Huge loss for our psychiatry

because our meds don't cure anybody, right? It's not a cure. It's not like an antibiotic. It's once you start, they change your brain to need them in order for you to be okay. And I use them when it's appropriate, but it's never the first thing I think about.

We can do so much better. So let's go to the eye roll. So when I was, I took a whole month elective in hypnosis at UC Irvine when I was a medical student. And they taught it to me as a sign of hypnotizability. but then it sort of fell out a favor. It did. My father is the one who came up with us,

and the way it happened was he had two, you know, a couple of extreme different cases. So one was one of these women who had these historical pseudo-seizures, and I noticed when I watched him make the movie of her, that he would ask you to look at a spot on the ceiling. And he noticed that as she did it, her irises disappeared, All you saw was a sclera. That was it.

And she was profoundly hypnotizable. And he could teach her to bring on the seizures, but then control them, reduce them over time, less and less and less. And so the next Monday, he had this really obsessional businessman. And he had him look up at the ceiling. And the guy could not keep his eyes up while he did it. And there is something about dissociating the lowering the lid from lowering the eyes. It's the third, fourth, and sixth cranial nerves that control eye movement, and you have to inhibit activity in one, but allow yourself to close your eyelids, and that's a difficult thing to do.

And so he started looking at it among a lot of his patients, and it's a routine measurement in the hypnotic conduction profile. And there's about a point four correlation between measured hypnotizability in the eye roll. It isn't per se the measure of hypnotizability, but, you know, if you're a point-four correlation, you're in the hospital and the surgeon says, I got this patient over here, you think hypnosis would help. You can get a snapshot guess in about 10 seconds if you just have them look up and close their eyes. So if they can, if they can roll their eye. Look at my phone.

Yeah. And close. Close. Now while looking up closed. Keep looking up closed. So you, yeah. It's hard, isn't it? Yeah.

There you go. So you're like a three out of four. That would make sense. Yeah. That's right. It's a good way to get an initial guess. It's intriguing. And there is something, I mean, I think there is an old Zen practice called looking at the third eye.

Uh-huh. Yeah. You know, where you just, and normally when we close our eyelids, we're going to sleep, right? Right. So what's different is you're telling someone, you're going to close your eyes, but you're going to keep thinking and doing things by keeping your eye up. Interesting. And closing your eyes. So it's a message, keep your eyes closed, but you're not going to sleep.

You're going to concentrate. That's easy. Yeah. That part I can. Yeah. So have you ever looked at QEG or EEG with hypnosis? Yes, we have. And there are some studies that show you see more left frontal theta in people during hypnosis.

The thing that we've noted most with EEG, we've done somatosensory EEG with pain control. And what we see is you take high hypnotizables and you tell them their hand, you give them shocks, electric shocks on the forearm. And you tell them in one condition, just, it's there, haven't let it happen. And another, you say, your hands in circulating ice water, cool, tingling, and numb, filter their head out of the pain.

The P-100 disappears. It evaporates. So this means within a tenth of a second, the brain has already filtered out the first part of the pain stimulus. The P-200 and the P-300 are half as big. So the brain has made a decision that this sensation is not worth feeling too uncomfortable about,

it happens just like that. And as soon as you, in the hypnotic experience, the P1, two, and three go back to normal. So for the average person listening, I'm just curious if these types of things would be considered sort of self-hypnosis. So, for example, you're in the snow. You're freezing. Your fingertips are cold. I often think of like, oh, I'm dipping my fingers in warm water. And many people do that. Is that a form of self-hypnosis? Yes, it is. It's a mind-body connection, you're telling your brain to experience things differently. You know, the brain's making choices all the times. It's very helpful, you know, because a lot of the discomfort of being injured or being in a

scary situation like that is, you know, you're thinking when the fingers feel bad, you're thinking, oh my God, I'm going to lose my fingers, you know, if this keeps happening. So you get more anxious, you pay more attention to it. It gets worse. On the other hand, if you can say, I can warm them, I can imagine them warm and comfortable, you're not triggering all that extra anxiety about what this whole situation really means. Right. And you know from the kind of sports you do that people can get through really threatening

situations and maintain control and not suffer that much if you're managing the way your mind-body relationship is happening. And that's what hypnosis is. So many things we do throughout the day, I guess that's my point, are sort of forms of self-hypnosis if we're telling our body to behave in a way that's not necessarily what we're And if you make it part of your everyday life, your sense of agency or control goes up, as opposed to the world happening to me. It's all about agency.

And that's the story in trauma, you know, that you're made in, the worst thing about trauma isn't fear, it isn't pain, it's being made into an object. Oh, for sure. And the lack of, the lack of any sort of control. Lack of any control, that's it. So to the extent that you can use your brain to see how much control you have or to enhance your level of control. Absolutely.

You can change the experience. That's absolutely right. And to some extent, we do it all. There are athletes who, you know, break their ankle football players in a game and don't even notice it. I broke my ribbon, didn't know it for several hours. I kept practicing. Yep. Had no idea.

Do you remember that? Yes, you do. You better remember that. I used to come home so bruised up either. Yeah, yeah. I'll bet. But I didn't know for a couple of hours because I was like, and then all of a sudden when I left, I'm like,

why does that hurt when I breathe? I had to postpone my test because I was like, why does that hurt when I breathe? The guy fell on me. I didn't even know it. Yeah. It's, that's right. You know, but that our major, you know,

evolutionary advantage is this big brain that can modulate perception, modulate, make choices about activity. And why shouldn't we use it that way? So along with reverie that people can sign up for and listen to, what are some daily hypnotic practices people can just put in their lives to make their day better? Well, certainly, and if people want to sign up with Revery, you can download from the App Store or Google Play. or from the website www.revri.com and we welcome people giving it a try the first week's free see what it's like i want as many people as possible to be able to use it um what are the daily things we can do well

for sleep for example and sleep and stress what happens when you're trying to go to sleep and you can't you're worried about things your body gets tense you know you need mostly parasympathetic dominance to go to sleep you have to slow your heart rate reduce your respiratory rate and the more anxious you get, the more you're doing sympathetic drive and it keeps you. And then the more frustrated you get, God, I got to get to sleep. I've got to work tomorrow. You know, it just builds on itself. So instead of attacking what you're worried about, you just say, I want you to learn to change your relationship to your body. So imagine your body floating safe and comfortable in a bath, the lake hot tubber just floating in space. You can't control all the other things that you're worried about,

but you can control how your body reacts to it. So your first task is taking better care of your body, helping your body do that. And then, by the way, you may find yourself waking up in the morning, having gotten to sleep. So with stress also, you know, I have people soothe their bodies, put your body somewhere it feels comfortable. Picture an imaginary screen in your mind's eye.

Might be a bath, a lake, a hot tub, floating in space, on a desert island, whatever. And just see if you don't start to feel better. just picturing that and then divide the screen in half. Picture one thing that is troubling you, just one, not five, not 20. And on the other side, picture one thing you could do about that. And it doesn't mean it's the best answer or the only answer, but you're giving yourself a sense of agency. You're saying, okay, I think here's what I could say to my boss when he yells at me in the office tomorrow morning, whatever it is. And so people learn to master the psychological

anxiety by starting with a physical reaction to it because there's a snowball effect. You know, the more you notice your body tensing up, the more you think, oh my God, this must be really bad. And so you get more worried about it. And then your body reacts to that. So instead, you disconnect, you dissociate the mental concern from the physical one and start with the one you can do something about, which is your body. Well, I love the split screen.

So we have a brand new study coming out on hope. And what is hope? It's tomorrow can be better. And I have a role in it. It's agency. Yes. And on 6,408 patients and significantly low activity with low hope in the insular cortex, it was the most striking finding. And in their prefrontal cortex.

And we have another study we published on negativity. bias and the more negative you are, the lower activity in your frontal lobes you had. And so negativity and low hope, and both of those can be trained to be better. To be better. That's what. So one thing I learned many years ago, I'm just wondering if this is sort of a form of hypnosis as well, that was so helpful to me because a lot of anxiety grew up in a sort of crazy childhood.

Her A score is eight. So, but I learned a lot of skills because of it. So, you know, there's the upside. Yeah. But one of the techniques I learned when I would get really stressed out about something and very anxious about things is to step outside of the picture, like step outside of the environment I'm in and look at it like a movie and watch it as a movie and or I can look at it as though it's someone else's story and what advice would I give that person, but disconnect

from it. Dissociation. Then I learned another, to disconnect from that and watch the watcher. And so it was very weird feeling, but it taught me to sort of like, oh, it's one thing to watch the image. It's another thing to watch the watcher. And so it was very interesting the advice you would give those people. And suddenly I was not in it. And it was very, very different feeling.

So I don't know if that's a form of self-hypnosis, but it was a very interesting way to handle things. It's a certainly spontaneous association. And it's likely a form of a note that you're dissociating already. You're focusing more intently. So that means you're keeping outside of conscious awareness a lot of your somatic reactions, for example. So I know people who as children were physically or sexually abused, they just go somewhere else. They go to one of my patients that I go to a mountain meadow full of wildflowers. And so he's got my body, but he hasn't got me.

And you can literally disconnect from not just the somatic. sensations but from the humiliation and degradation yeah that happens to or more pathologically one part will blame the other say well you should have run away from home you know you shouldn't have let this happen it's in a and that's the problem you have this imagination of agency that you don't have right as a child and I didn't I didn't I wasn't unaware of it I'm still aware of it but I now and then I wasn't feeling the stress of it if that makes sense and I was able to give myself

Dissociation like you talk. And we actually talked this morning about multiple personality disorder. Did you? Yeah. Dissociative identity disorder. Right. I'm responsible for that name. What?

Is that right? Yeah. Talk to us about that. Because you don't really have multiple personalities. You know, you're all, you're different people at a party than you are talking to me, but you're aware of it. There's continuity of memory and experience. But so there aren't with multiple personality.

don't really have 12 personalities. You have fragments of your identity. And the problem is the inability to integrate the identity. It's the fragmentation, not the proliferation of personalities. So I felt that calling it to dissociate, it is a dissociation of identities. And it can be so profound. I had one patient with the idea I treated for years who one day, one of the angry altars came up with a really scary suicide plan. And I said, well, you know, I'm going to have to talk to. the other parts of you about this. And she said, you can't do that. And I said, really, why not?

She said, Dr. Patient Confidentiality. That is so funny. That's actually funny. And we laughed. I said, okay, I got it. I'm telling her, you know. So what do you think about that? Because a lot of people don't believe it.

They think it's an excuse. I've seen it multiple times in my practice. Only once, but you think it's multiple. No, I have to, you know, I don't know what to say. I either get angry or I think they're pathetic, but there are people who, part of it is there's a lot of defensiveness that you'll notice in the media now about sexual abuse, abusive children. And people, you know, if it's true, it's pretty awful. And so the people who are accused of doing it don't like it. And if you're willing to torture a young child, you're willing to lie about what happened and say, you know, or attack the people.

people who are trying to help them. And so, you know, have there been cases where, you know, it may not have been what the child name, maybe, but we know that, you know, child sexual abuse is a very common event. It's rampant. And as you can see, if you read the newspapers. And so people will do anything to attack, you know, counterattack. It's called Darvo. Deny attack, reverse victim and offender.

You know, you say, oh, no, it's you. You know, and we're seeing that all the time in the papers today. Special place in hell for these people. Yeah, boy, I'm with you on that. That's right. And lock the door, you know. So I don't believe for one minute, I've treated lots of these people. I've diagnosed and seen a lot of them.

It happens. And it's a defensive reaction to an environment that is threatening and damaging. Do you think what percentage of people, with DID are actually never diagnosed and misdiagnosed is borderline. Oh, that's right. Borderline is a female patient the staff doesn't like. You know, it's, yeah, absolutely. I don't know how many. I know that there are studies in by good people that think that the actual prevalence rate of DID is 1%,

which is the same as the prevalence rate. of schizophrenia. You know, it's not that rare. And yet it's often, it goes, it's Richard Kloft, who's done a lot of very good work on multiple prison, D.I.D. calls it a disease of hiddenness because part of it is you're hiding inside you, all these experiences you don't want people to see. You don't want to see it yourself. So the average time from initial symptom to diagnosis is six years with a disorder and they have a delusion, right? There's a delusion. there's another little girl inside of her. They put them on antipsychotics.

Well, that's great. That really helps. So it just dampens down what they can do and think, and it doesn't treat the problem. So yeah, I think it's often misdiagnosed or underdiagnosed. And I imagine the higher your ACE score, the more you're likely to have that is a diagnosis. Absolutely. Well, that's what causes it. We did a study on 75.

We have everybody the ACE. questionnaire and so we published a paper year before last on 7,500 patients. Wow. Brain imaging paper and it activates the emotional circuits in the brain. It's very interesting. Amigula and hippocampus, yeah. Well, that means. The anterior singular was up.

I'll bet. Yeah. So it makes not work. Well, this has just been so. So interesting. Fun. Yeah. So many questions I could keep going.

asked you that we didn't? Well, I think, you know, if we can circle back to sort of where we started, the biggest misconception about hypnosis, the things people fear the most is loss of control. And what we have all been talking about is ways that either spontaneously or with professional help, people enhance their control. That's how I feel. Over pain, stress, insomnia, habit problems, they feel it is not. None of my patients have lost control.

And we do a lot of. of work in the Christian community. And I have a new program that's, we have 77 church pilots going on now called the Amen Hole 4. And in some Christian communities, they worry the devil's going to show up. You're opening your mind to the devil. But in 45 years I've been doing it, the devil has never shown up. I have a psychiatrist friend who is Cuban.

And he was doing hypnosis in Cuba pre-communist era when the Catholic Church had tremendous power. And somebody got wind of what he was doing and just exactly what you said. And they called him into the College of Cardinals of Cuba to grill him on what he was doing. Yeah, I just feel more focus. Like, I've never felt like anything. I actually... Well, wasn't the Catholic Church approved hypnosis as a medical treatment in 1957? I think they did.

Oh, interesting. Yeah. Yeah. And the American Medical Association was later. Later, right. It was like 1960. Oh, that's so interesting. And the APA has done it.

I wrote the guidelines for it. But so he gets called in before the Cardinals. And they're grilling him about what a terrible, irreligious, horrible thing it is. And he says, don't you fellows read the Bible? Well, they said, what the hell are you talking about? And he said, well, when God put Adam to sleep to take a rib and make Eve, what do you think he was doing?

to Adam, he was hypnotizing him. That's so interesting. And hypnosis has been used for surgery. Oh, yeah. And for anesthesia. When there's no anesthesia. For sure. My wife, who's a stem cell biology professor, is a member of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences,

just won the National Medal of Science at the end of Biden's turn. term. She had both of our children with hypnosis as the anesthesia. A brilliant woman. She wanted to be in control of what happened. My son was 10 pounds. He was big. He was in a little distress. And she wanted to control it. And she did. I had her imagine she was floating in Lake Tahoe. And she said, you know, I'm a pharmacology professor. This is after like six hours of labor. And she says, you know, there are drugs for this. You're floating in. Lake Tahoe cool thing. That is so funny.

And Daniel 10 pound was fine. Our daughter is only six and a half pounds. And we had breakfast before and lunch after and she did fine. So yes, it can be done for all of that. And we've done randomized trials showing it works. You know, think about it. How have women given birth to people for the last, you know, 100,000 years? You know, not with, you know, medication, you know.

They've learned to do it and they do it. And so, and they can do it. And there are some advantages to doing it. You know, one thing is women were not in this sort of supine position. They would be squatting, which allows gravity to help you actually. And knowing when to push and when not do, you don't want to push too early. But when you do, then you have to relax. It's not pushing.

It's relaxation. And women can learn that and make giving birth a much more pleasant experience. So, yeah. Thank you so much. much. Yeah, it's fascinating. Thank you. Well, thank you.

Change your brain every day, hypnosis, Dr. David Spiegel. How can people learn more about you? They can go download the app, Revereux. Yeah, they can download Revery. That would be the best thing. And I have discussions of what hypnosis is like. We have interactions with our users, and we have a staff that help respond to people's questions and things like that.

So that's probably the best way to do it. I mean, I have published a lot. I've got a book I wrote with my father trans in treatment, clinical uses of hypnosis. Oh, love that. I want to get into the serious parts of it. And but I would be delighted if people try it out, download reveries, see what it's like, and learn how quickly and easily you can control your body. You don't lose control, you gain it.

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