Founder's Story - The Stanford Professor Who Uses Hypnosis Over Medication: '15% Less Stress In 10 Minutes' | Ep 292 with Dr. David Spiegel

Episode Date: December 16, 2025

In this episode of Founder’s Story, Daniel sits down with Stanford’s Dr. David Spiegel to unpack hypnosis with a level of clarity most people have never heard. Dr. Spiegel explains why hypnosis is not a loss of control, but an increase in control, and walks through the three core components that make it work. They explore how hypnosis differs from meditation, how it can help with stress and insomnia in real time, and the brain science that shows what changes during hypnosis. Dr. Spiegel also shares the origin story that made him commit his career to hypnosis, including a first patient experience that worked so fast it shocked an entire hospital. Key Discussion Points: Daniel and Dr. Spiegel unpack the biggest misconception about hypnosis, explaining why it is not a loss of control but a way to enhance it through focused attention, dissociation, and the ability to try being different. Dr. Spiegel contrasts hypnosis with meditation, highlighting why hypnosis works faster for people with racing minds and high stress. They explore how hypnosis can help break habits by focusing on what you are for rather than what you are fighting against, including real-world examples with smoking, stress, and eating behaviors. The conversation also dives into sleep, showing how calming the body first can quiet the mind and interrupt anxiety loops. Dr. Spiegel closes by explaining the brain science behind hypnosis, including how it turns down the internal alarm system and restores a sense of control. Takeaways: Hypnosis is not mind control, it is a trainable skill for better self control. The three pillars are focused attention, dissociation from unhelpful sensations and thoughts, and the ability to try being different by quieting rigid self narratives. For habit change, focus on what you are for, not what you are against, and use intermittent positive reinforcement by making choices that create immediate self respect rather than deprivation. For stress and sleep, start from the body up, calm the fight or flight response, and create distance from your worries by placing them on an imaginary screen. Brain imaging supports these experiences by showing reduced threat signaling and increased executive control during hypnosis. Closing Thoughts: This episode reframes hypnosis as a practical tool you can use in minutes, especially when stress is peaking and your mind feels impossible to quiet. Dr. Spiegel’s approach makes the science accessible, the techniques usable, and the impact feel immediate. If you have ever struggled with sleep, anxiety, pain, or habits, this conversation offers a way to regain control using a skill your brain already has. Use code FOUNDER20 for 20% off yearly or lifetime access to Reveri https://reverihealth.app.link/founder Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

So Dr. Spiegel, I'm very excited today. I was telling you right before this that self-hypnosis completely changed my life when I was a teenager. And it's something I've been talking about for so long. But I feel like I've gotten a little bit disconnected from it. And I really wanted to get back because I know how much it helps. I think there's a huge misunderstanding around hypnosis. I think hypnosis people always think of someone on stage and they're hypnotized for a show. But they don't really know what it is and how it works. Can you explain? Sure, Daniel, I'd be happy to do that. The biggest misconception about hypnosis is that it's a loss of control, that the hypnesthetist takes control of your mind and makes you do things. Hypnosis is actually a way of enhancing control because it involves three things. Intensely focused attention. It's like looking through a telephoto lens with a camera, which you see you see with great detail, but you're less aware of the surround.

And that allows you to make your choice about what you want to concentrate. concentrate on and avoid being distracted by other things. Right now, for example, you have sensations in your body touching the chair, but hopefully you weren't even aware of them until I mentioned it to you. If you were, we could stop the interview now. You're already bored. So dissociation is the second part. In order to intensify focus, you put outside of conscious awareness things would ordinarily be

in consciousness. It could be things that make you anxious and make your body tense. It could be aspects of pain, which is a very very important. useful thing, but it allows you to concentrate intently. And the third part of it is an enhanced ability to try out being different. You actually reduce activity in a part of the brain, the default mode network, where you tend to reflect on who you are, what you are, what your mother wanted you to be when you're not doing anything in particular. And when you turn down activity there, you can see what it's like to be different. And as a psychotherapist,

I love working with people who are willing to give it a try to see what it's like to be different. Now, most people think it's like, you know, one of those stage shows with hypnosis, which I don't like, where the football coach danced like a ballerina. And, you know, all right, so he made a fool of himself. But he was willing to try out being different. That's a good thing. And so that's what hypnosis is about. It's a little bit like an underutilized app on your phone.

You know, it's there. It's an ability you have to do something. stuff, but if you don't open it and use it, you don't get the benefit of that. And hypnosis is an opportunity to use your brain differently. So how do you see this? I know you brought up stress, anxiety. How is it different from meditation? And do you think that it's being integrated more so now with alongside therapy? I think so. I hope so. And to make sure that that happens, We've built an app called Reverie, which is available from the app store, Google Play. You can hear my molyfluous voice and try using hypnosis for problems like stress, pain, anxiety, to stop smoking, to eat more sensibly.

It's a way of learning quickly how to tune in change gears and do things that you maybe didn't think you could do. So hypnosis is being used more, although, you know, the weird thing is it's the old. oldest Western conception of a psychotherapy, and yet it's underutilized. People either think it's dangerous or useless or both. It's, it's, you know, it's like the Rodney Dangerfield of psychotherapies that doesn't get no respect. You know, he said they asked him to leave a bar so they could start happy hour, you know, it's, and, and yet, despite being around for 250 years, it's underutilized. It's a tremendous tool that many people can use to help themselves, live better and deal with problems they didn't think they could deal with. And I love your story about

how you tried a lot of other things. And this helped you do something that previously you'd been unable to do. And I'm just delighted to hear that because that's what hypnosis can do. Yeah. And I love your analogies, by the way, how you have your humor. You mix humor into the analogies. You told me one earlier. That was fantastic as well. Obviously, we're going to going to this new year, you have this app. I can't wait to hear your voice. By the way, I want to be hypnotized alongside your voice. People are going to be looking to break habits.

You said earlier about smoking or maybe eating differently. How can this help somebody do this? Everyone has a New Year's resolution, and normally it's to stop some sort of bad habit. I'd be glad to do that. In fact, about five years ago, I was speaking at a Brainwine Summit at Stanford about hypnosis.

And Ariel Polar, who's an MIT grad, Stanford Business School grad, who helped to start Strava, the very successful cycling app, came up to me and said, you want to build a hypnosis app? And I said, sure. He said, well, we can utilize the Alexa platform.

They want people to be using it. They're making it easy to record. So he said, let's build one. And I said, you're on. And we did a stop smoking up. That was the first thing we tried. We've used hypnosis to help people stop smoking for like 50 years, but we incorporated the technique we use, and here's what we do.

We say to people, we don't say stop smoking. People who use hypnosis know better than to say, don't think about purple elephants. You do that. That's what people will think about. So instead, we ask them, I tell people when I get them hypnotized to say, I want you to think about three things. One, for my body, smoking's a poison.

Two, I need my body to live. And three, I owe my body respect and protection. So what you do is you focus on what you're for, not what you're against. I say to them, you know, would you ever put heated tar and nicotine smoke into your baby's lungs? And they say, well, of course not. I wouldn't do that to my dog. And I say, well, you know what? Your body is as innocent and dependent on you as your baby was.

because it has to take into it anything you put into it, even if it's damaged by it. So I'm asking you to be a good parent to your own body. So we ask people to focus on what they're for, respecting and protecting their body, when they have an urge to smoke. Don't fight the urge. Admit it, but say, you know what, I'm going to do what I would do as a good parent and respect and protect my body. And, you know, the most important thing about changing human behavior

is intermittent positive reinforcement. You know, if you tell people don't smoke, they think, oh, I have an urge, I need to, you know, I'm restless, I'm fidgety, I have to do it. But if instead you focus on what you're for, which is taking better care of your body the way you would of your child, you can immediately feel good. You're not depriving yourself with something. You're saying, yeah, maybe I wanted it, but I'm going to prioritize respecting and protecting my body. So we did that with the Alexa app, and we found that one out of four people stopped smoking right away. And the rest reduced their cigarette use by about 50%. And that's about what we got doing it face to face in person.

So I thought, you know, it's working. I can do it. I can do it remotely. And we're now using it for a lot of other things as well. We use it to help people eat with respect for their body, to not put more food into it than it needs or wants. And so you have them practice thinking about what constitutes eating with respect, what kind of food they like, and do it. and we find that people are able to lose 20 pounds in three months and keep it off.

They don't just sort of slip back. They can learn to practice and use it. So it's the way we structure it, but also in hypnosis, you can try out being different, be a different person. I had one woman, a social worker here, who was in the study we did about the Rivary app, and she said, you know, I didn't even want to stop smoking. I'd smoke for 25 years. my friends at all got together and smoked.

And the first time I tried it, I didn't like it. The second time I looked at the cigarette I lit and I said, who needs this? And I put it out and I haven't had a cigarette since. And she said, this is some kind of crazy-ass voodoo shit. And I mean that in a good way. And she's helping her friends stop smoking now. So you can use the intensity of focus,

the dissociation of things you don't want to be thinking about very much. and the capacity to trial being different and really make it a radical and important change in your behavior in a hurry. I've never heard that before about the... How do you say intermittent... Intermittent positive reinforcement. Yes, intermittent positive reinforcement.

I like that. While you were talking, I started doing it to myself. I'm not even kidding. I felt better. I've been crazy stressed, doctors. I had all these health issues this last month, So it's an up and down. So after this, I literally need to go to the hospital.

But I told myself to calm down, like you said, I felt so calm. I feel like I was hypnotized. And I can't wait to use this app. This app is going to, I could see how you're going to make a lot of impact with this. What was the story for you, though? Like, why are you so passionate about this? What made you get into this? Well, I'm a good hypnotic subject.

And actually, it's sort of a genetic inheritance in my family. Both of my parents were psychiatrists and psychoanalysts. And my father, and they told me I was free to be any kind of psychiatrist I wanted to be, so here I am. And my father was when he was going off to World War II, he served in North Africa. His analyst one day said to him, hey, Herb, you want to learn how to use hypnosis? And my father thought, what did I say wrong in my analytic session? And he said, no, there's a Viennese psychiatrist who escaped the Nazis, can't serve in the military, but knows a lot about hypnosis, and he wants to teach young army doctors.

So he taught my father how to use hypnosis, and he used it in combat to help soldiers who were wounded with pain to deal with combat stress reactions. He came back and he was going back into his analytic training in practice, but he found that, you know, he kept doing some hypnosis. And over time, when he followed up with patients, they would tell him, you know, those couple of sessions did more for me than years of psychoanalysis. So he started doing more and more hypnosis. So the dinner table conversations were interesting. And my first, I took a course in medical school on it to learn more about it.

My first patient ever, I was in the Children's Hospital in Boston. The nurse said, your patient is a girl in status as naticus, room 324. And I'm following the sound of her wheezing down the hall. And I get in the room, she's sitting there struggling for breath, knuckles white. She'd been unresponsive to subcutaneous epinephrine. Her mother was standing there crying. And I didn't know what to do. So I said, well, would you like to learn a breathing exercise?

And she nods. And I got her hypnotized. And I said, I didn't know what else is that. Each breath you take will be a little deeper and a little easier. And within five minutes, she's lying back in bed. She isn't wheezing anymore. Her mother stopped crying. The nurse ran out of the room.

My intern came looking for me. me. And I thought he was going to pat me on the back and say, good job, Spiegel. He said, you need to be informed that the nurse has filed a complaint with the nursing supervisor that you violated Massachusetts law by hypnotizing a minor without parental consent. I kid you not. Now, Massachusetts has a lot of weird laws, but that is not among them. And her mother was standing next to me when I did it. So the intern said, well, you're going to have to stop using it. And I said, why? He said, it's dangerous. I said, you're about to give her general anesthesia and put her on steroids. Am I talking to her is dangerous? I don't think so.

So take me off the case if you want. So he stormed off. And he and the attending had a council of war, and they decided, they had a radical idea. They said, let's ask the patient. And this girl said, I like this. I'm going to keep doing it. So she did. She had been hospitalized monthly for three months.

She had one subsequent hospitalization, but went on to study to be a respiratory therapist. So this is like my first exposure of what I could do with hypnosis. And it was just so in my face about how effective. and rapidly it could be used to help people that I just kept doing it. And I've now used it with about 7,000 people in my career. And I've convinced myself that we've got something here that people can use for themselves, help themselves enhance control over their body and their brain, and feel better. And, you know, I do, you asked about meditation.

And it is, there are things that it has in common with meditation, but there are differences too. Hypnosis is a focused attention. It's about doing. Using this, I don't want to get a bunch of people walking around all the time, hypnotized. I wanted them to have a tool to use when they need it for a purpose. I had a woman who had meditated for 10 years, twice a day for 10 years. She said, I love it, but, and there were wonderful things about meditation, open presence, just calming yourself. But she said, I still have my migraine headaches, and they're driving me crazy.

So I hypnotized her and had her imagine a bag of eye. on her head, pool, tingling numbness, filtered, hurt out of the pain. And she called me a week later and she said, doctor, my migraines are gone, thank you. And thank you for freeing me to use my intentionality. Because with meditation, you're not supposed to be. It's the intention is the opposite of meditation. It's open presence, just to let thoughts and feelings flow through you. Hypnosis, you do it for a purpose. Try it out and make it work. So they're related. They both do tend to suppress activity in the part of the brain, what we call the default mode network, where you have these expectations of who you are and what you are. I call it the my fault

mode network. But in hypnosis, to the extent that you're actively working on something in hypnosis, you're suppressing activity there. Whereas with meditation, after months or years of doing it, there tends to be less activity in that region. So you do become different, but it's not a rapid and sudden thing. It's a longer process. I think, I mean, I don't know if it's just when you're a high achiever. I don't know if it's just entrepreneurship or maybe even when I worked a corporate job. Meditation was hard because I feel like my mind is always racing. And it was so hard for me to like shut that off and kind of transition over, which is why I feel like hypnosis is probably easier and maybe better for somebody like myself.

I think a lot of people struggle when you're trying, like you're saying, it's like you're forcing yourself to do something that is very challenging, unless I'm like about to go to sleep. When it comes to sleep, though, I also think many people like myself have problems with sleep. I might sleep like four or five hours a night, which I know is bad. So I'm trying to do different habits. I'm trying to make myself go to sleep earlier.

But it's like my mind is always racing. You know, I wake up in the. middle of the night, I checked my phone, which is terrible. So how can hypnosis help people like myself asleep? Sleep is the most popular use we have of every. And in fact, we collect pre and post information about how stress people seem to be. We find people can reduce their stress levels by 15% in 10 minutes. They can feel it. They can tangibly feel it different. We get less, we have more use, but get less information about insomnia because people tell us, I didn't want to tell you how sleepy I was, I just wanted to go to sleep. So that's what I did. What we do is we start from the body

up rather than the head down. We say, imagine in hypnosis, your body is floating somewhere safe and comfortable like a bath, a lake, a hot tub, or floating in space. And just the way you mentioned earlier, that just thinking about things differently in it knows, you started to feel calmer. It's not a matter of thinking, well, I shouldn't be worried about this or it's not as bad as I thought. you can think it through, but first start from the body up, getting your physical reaction to the stressor under control, because it's like a snowball rolling downhill. You know, you get tense about something, you think about it, you notice your muscles tight and you start to sweat, your heart rate goes up, you breathe more rapidly, and then you think, oh, this must be really bad, and you get more anxious, and it just builds on itself. So instead with hypnosis, you start with the one thing about stresses you can control. maybe not your job, maybe not your boss,

maybe not what you have to do in the next week, but you can control how your body reacts to that. And you'll find that if you can just calm that physical fight or flight reaction first, you can then start to think more clearly. I encourage people when they're going to sleep, don't try to solve your problems then, but just project them onto an imaginary screen in your head

like you're watching a movie. So, you know, you can see a movie about all kinds of terrible things happening to people, but it's a movie. And so you detach yourself from the implications of it personally. And that's what you can learn to do with hypnosis. You can dissociate the physical experience from the psychological one. And that can allow you to go to sleep.

Yeah, thank you for sharing that. You basically explain my life where I get stressed about something and my stress amplifies times 1,000. But my wife is the opposite. She can totally detach. It doesn't affect her. So I'm excited. I think it's something she's wanted me to work on, and I've wanted to work on myself. So I can't wait to use reverie and we can dive in more in a minute. But do you have anything where you've actually studied the effects of hypnosis on the brain? Yes, we have. We've taken high and low hypnotizable people. We measure people different. Their degree of hypnotizability. Your wife may be more hypnotizable than you are, but maybe we can help you catch up with or low. And we put them in. the MRI scanner, which gives you beautiful images of both brain structure and function, which

parts of the brain are working at that moment. And what we found was that the high hypnotizable in hypnosis in the scanner, reduced activity in a part of the brain called the anterior cingulate cortex. The singly cortex is like a C on its ends in the middle of your brain. And the front part, the anterior part is part of the salience network. It helps you decide whether you're under threat. you hear a loud noise, you know, that's your anterior cingulate saying something incompatible just happened. It might be dangerous. You better pay attention. In hypnosis, you turn down

activity. So it's like you're turning off the alarm system when you enter your house. And you can respond to things in a less acute and physiologically arousing way. You increase the prefrontal cortex, the executive control region of the brain ability to control what's going on in the body through what's called the insula, the insula, the insular's little island of tissue in the middle of the frontal cortex that helps you regulate what's happening in your body and also perceive what's happening in your body. So people can do in hypnosis things that ordinarily they couldn't do because it enhances their control of their body and how they perceive it. You can turn out that down activity there and turn down your response to pain because the insula is part of the

pain network and you're just paying, you're filtering the hurt out of the pain. You can do that. third thing is you have inverse connectivity between the executive control region and the posterior singulate. So you're literally inhibiting your customary way of thinking about yourself who you are and what you can do. So those brain activities match very nicely what you're able to do in hypnosis. Well, Dr. Spiegel, I'm more and more excited to try reverie. The fact that I can do something on an app in my phone. I think the hardest part about for me, like therapy and such is I normally need it at a certain time, but it's like I have to schedule it at a later time. And it's like I can do it in the moment. And normally for, you know, when there's when you have that moment,

you need something right there, then and there. That's why I've always tried, you know, meditation, but it's so hard when you're in that moment to try and calm yourself. So for somebody like me, how do you think the Revery app could help when I'm in those moments? When you're in those moments, sit down or lie down, get the app, the app store or Google Play, set it up. And if you're dealing with stress, for example, we have a stress program that you can do that will help you calm your body first. And then picture in your mind's eye once you've done that, an imaginary screen and divide it in half. Picture the problem on one side of the screen, but keep your body floating and cut it. comfortable. And then try out a resolution to the problem on the other side. It may not be the best

or the only one. But you're starting to get control now by helping your body be more comfortable, but also thinking through one thing you can do to ameliorate the problem on the left. So it gives you something you can do right then at the moment to prepare for a talk or prepare for meeting with your boss or whatever it is. And come up with a plan may not be the best or the only one, but you've got something you can do. And usually once you've got a way of addressing it, it and your body's feeling better, you feel better and you can handle it better. Dr. Spiegel, this has been amazing. Literally, I've been thinking about hypnosis for over 25 years.

And I'm almost sad that I kind of fell off, but I'm happy that I heard you speak somewhere, and then I saw this app, and I know it's going to change the world. I mean, what better legacy that we leave is, you know, you've already impacted thousands of people. Now you can impact potentially millions of people. if somebody once again touch with you and they want to download the app, how can they do so? Well, the app they can download from the app store or Google Play or from our website, www.ri, reveri, r-e-v-e-e-e-R-I-R-I-R-I-com, and they can learn about it and download the app.

And I would be delighted for people to do it. And you can send messages to me through the app and we will respond to them. Oh, that's amazing. I love how you're really listening to the people. I can tell just how genuine, like this is. isn't just a business for you. This is a legacy, and that's amazing. But thank you so much for joining us today. I learned, I was hypnotizing myself while we were talking. I really, I thought about a lot during this conversation. And typically, you know, I don't get the opportunity to really, you know,

ponder about what the person is saying until after. So thank you so much. I already feel better. So I'm in now on the app right now. I'm going to use this. And thank you so much for joining us today. You're most welcome. Thank you. I'm feeling better. Thanks very much.