Kyle Kingsbury Podcast - #365 Dr. David Spiegel On Hypnosis As A Tool For Mental Health

Episode Date: August 3, 2024

Dr. David Spiegel is a highly respected psychiatrist and expert in the field of hypnosis. With a career spanning several decades, he has made significant contributions to the understanding of how hypn...osis can be used to treat a variety of psychological and physical conditions. As the founder of Reveri, an innovative hypnosis app, Dr. Spiegel continues to push the boundaries of therapeutic practices.   Connect with Dr Spiegel: Website: www.reveri.com   Instagram: @reveri    Reverie has been kind enough to give us a 20% discount on their app.  If you want to explore, use code KYLE20.   Sponsors: Wild Health Head to WildHealth.com/kkp for 20% off your membership cost and make sure you have “KKP” applied at checkout.  Monetary Metals Start investing in your future with Monetary Metals. Head to  https://bit.ly/3zaKcEJ & monetary-metals.com/kkp Organifi Go to organifi.com/kkp to get my favorite way to easily get the most potent blend of high vibration fruits, veggies and other goodies into your diet! Click that link and use code “KKP” at checkout for 20% off your order! Bioptimizers To get the ’Magnesium Breakthrough‘ deal exclusively for fans of the podcast, click the link below and use code word “KINGSBU10” for an additional 10% off. magbreakthrough.com/kingsbu  To Work With Kyle Kingsbury Podcast   Connect with Kyle: Twitter: @KINGSBU  Fit For Service Academy App: Fit For Service App  Instagram: @livingwiththekingsburys - @gardenersofeden.earth  Odysee: odysee.com/@KyleKingsburypod  Youtube: Kyle Kingbury Podcast  Kyles website: www.kingsbu.com - Gardeners of Eden site    Like and subscribe to the podcast anywhere you can find podcasts. Leave a 5-star review and let me know what resonates or doesn’t.

Transcript
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Starting point is 00:00:00 All right, y'all, we have a very, very special guest today, Dr. David Spiegel, who was a Harvard grad, and I'm only going to read part of Dr. Spiegel's bio here from Stanford because it's massive. Dr. David Spiegel is a Wilson professor and associate chair of psychiatry and behavioral sciences, director of the Center on Stress and Health, and medical director of the Center for Integrative Medicine at Stanford University School of Medicine, where he has been a member of the academic faculty since 1975 and was chair of the Stanford University Faculty Senate from 2010 to 2011. Dr. Spiegel has more than 40 years of clinical
Starting point is 00:00:42 and research experience studying psycho-oncology, stress and health, pain control, psycho-neuroendocrinology, sleep hypnosis, hypnosis is going to be a big one, and conducting randomized clinical trials involving psychotherapy for cancer patients. He's been published in 13 books, 404 scientific journal articles, and 170 book chapters on hypnosis, psychosocial oncology, stress physiology, trauma, and psychotherapy. There is a, and the list goes on. Trust me, this is one of the most accredited people that I've had on the show. And I've had many doctors on this podcast over the years and some really awesome high-level folks.
Starting point is 00:01:23 The reason that I love Dr. David Spiegel and his work is because he's realized in order to really affect society and to affect change, he has to be able to reach the lowest common denominator and he has to reach the masses. And what he's done is he's taken hypnosis, a tool that has been used and verifiably so for over a hundred years. And he's actually mapped this through an app to be able to bring this to the public and bring this to as many people as possible. The app is called Reverie. It is out now. I can't wait to start training with this. They have very short ones that are 10 minutes a piece. They have 15 minutes. They make it work for you, right? You can adjust how long you want to sit
Starting point is 00:02:06 with this self-hypnosis app, but it can be used for damn near anything. Anxiety, smoking cessation, how to stay calm in the storm, you name it. So many really cool applications. And this podcast is awesome because Dr. David has been around the block. He lives in Menlo Park right down the street from where I grew up.
Starting point is 00:02:29 But he has some years on him and a lot of freaking experience. And the stories that he tells in here are both heartbreaking and uplifting at the same time. You know, the world can be a very ugly place. And people have gone through shit that we wouldn't, most of us would never hope to dream of. Most of us don't want to look at. Most of us, when we hear things like that, simply turn our heads or plug our ears. But if you can open your heart, open your ears and sit down for this one, it is a powerful episode. And what's great is the fact that we all can benefit from Dr. David Spiegel's work.
Starting point is 00:03:06 And what a great guy. I loved having him here. We had him at my house at the ranch, at the farm, and he went on Aubrey's podcast the next day. Just such a cool human being. And it really has so much great wisdom here. So share this, share this with friends far and wide. Anybody that really is looking to make changes. This is one unique tool. And I've been attracted to hypnosis since, since I was fighting in the UFC because of how many fighters were using it to quiet their nerves before a fight. Obviously if you're alive and you are going to step into the octagon, your nerves can get the best of you, you know, and that certainly was the case for me. My nerves,
Starting point is 00:03:45 damn near, always got the best of me. And it was only if I was winning the fight where they start to calm. If it was a close one or if I was on the losing end, that could snowball in the wrong direction very quickly. But much like many things in life, I have tried to find fixes for old problems, even though I don't necessarily run into them as often now, one of those is remaining calm in the storm. That's always going to be an issue. And I bring up the talk, or I talked with Dr. Spiegel here on the podcast about the fact that now, even though I don't fight anymore, every time I hunt, not every time, but a lot of the times, if I don't have a chance to really quiet my mind and calm myself, I won't take the
Starting point is 00:04:25 shot. If I can't keep my heart steady and calm under pressure while aiming at an animal, I'm not going to take the shot. I've made that mistake before, and I don't want to make that mistake again. I want the most humane kill possible, and that's one of the first ways we honor the animals that we eat. Anywho, I digress. This podcast is awesome. Share it with friends. It's one of my favorites of the year. I would love to have David back on, especially after really diving into reverie and getting some... It would be inauthentic of me to try to rush and hit one session and be like, dude. Although he does have some stories of people who only did hypnosis for one session and made some serious changes. I don't smoke cigarettes, not trying to quit those cigarettes
Starting point is 00:05:08 that I never started. So it doesn't necessarily apply to me, but I hope you guys love this podcast. We will be making clips. Very excited. I'm back on Instagram at Kyle Kingsboo, at Kingsboo was taken, at Kyle Kingsboo, at Kyle Kingsbury was taken as well. So we had to meld the two, the old and part of the new name. So at Kyle, K-Y-L-E-K-I-N-G-S-B-U, reach out to me there,
Starting point is 00:05:32 follow me there, like, comment, do all that stuff. When we throw podcast clips up, tell me what you love about the podcast. Tell me who you want for guests on the podcast. Tell me what you don't like about the podcast. If there's anything that you don't like, I am listening and we're working hard to make the best content possible. And I really have a lot of faith that we are going to continue to move the needle and get some more big guests and do some really cool things. So thank you guys for listening. Support our sponsors. They make this show fiscally possible. Our first sponsor today is Wild Health. Wild Health is generously extending Kyle Kingsbury listeners 20% off the cost of membership with code KKP. Head over to wildhealth.com slash KKP and use code KKP at checkout. Make this commitment to yourself and start taking control of your health today at wildhealth.com slash KKP. All right, people constantly ask me which are the most beneficial supplements or what's the best diet and exercise regimen for
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Starting point is 00:14:55 This is something we deeply care about. We're doing our final summit of all time in Sedona. Final one we're going to have at Aubrey's Ranch, and we will not be going back after that. We're going to be doing a lot of these at the farm. If we do go back to Sedona for some strange reason, it will not be at the ranch in the future. This is the final one. And then that's it. There's no more chance of Sedona. We are done selling for the course. So, but this for five years, this is all we did. We brought people together to build community and really grow and transform together, go through some challenging things and come out on the other side, better people for it.
Starting point is 00:15:29 We've mastered that. And I can guarantee you that if you come to this event, you too will have your life changed, your heart opened, and you're going to know people on a different level. You're going to have people that you can consider a friend for the rest of your life from these five days in Sedona. Check it out at fitforservice.com. And if you're interested in actually taking some coursework, Physically Fit
Starting point is 00:15:48 is the course that I teach. It is a holistic approach to health in a complete way, all the way inside and out. It's about habit change. It's about our relationships with our body and so much more. It's not just strength and conditioning. It's not just diet, but it is those things as well. And we dive deep. We leave no stone unturned. If you're interested in that, you can join us for trimester three in Malibu. Still, head to fitforservice.com and check it out. And I'll be excited to see you in Sedona. Without further ado, my brother, Dr. David Spiegel, welcome to the podcast.
Starting point is 00:16:19 Kyle, I'm delighted to be here. I'm so excited to have you here. It was awesome getting to hear that you were coming to town and then I could piggyback off my brother, Aubrey Marcus, and get to have you out here on the land with us. Happy to be here. So cool. We were talking earlier before the podcast about the stars and how much stuff has changed. Talk about life in Long Island and then what moved you out west and what was life like growing up? Well, I did my training in the east. I grew up on Long Island in Great Neck and went to college at Yale and then medical school at Harvard and did my psychiatry residency there.
Starting point is 00:16:57 And I always thought I'd be an Easterner. I love New York. New Yorkers are actually nicer than most people think they are. And I thought, well, maybe I'll try life out west. And one reason, Kyle, was frankly, and I know you're an exploratory guy. You've studied new things that are kind of on the edge. And I was doing that too. I was studying and using hypnosis, actually.
Starting point is 00:17:31 And where I trained at Harvard, which was a superb place, Massachusetts Mental Health Center, was still psychoanalysis was the predominant belief system. And it was not very empirical. It was interesting, important, but it wasn't my thing. Now, I was the son of two psychiatrists and psychoanalysts. It was sort of a genetic illness in my family. And my parents told me I was free to be any kind of psychiatrist I wanted to be, so here I am. But I found that I was getting a lot of static doing things that I thought really helped people and the way I got into hypnosis was that my father was studying to be an analyst just before World War II broke out
Starting point is 00:18:11 and he enlisted to serve in the army and his analyst at the end of one analytics session said, Herb, would you like to take a course in hypnosis? And my father thought, you know, analysts said almost nothing. So he said, what did I say? And he said, there's a Viennese refugee named Gustav von Aschaffenburg who had to escape the Nazis and came here, couldn't serve in the army himself. He's a forensic psychiatrist. And the funny thing about him is that he had a smallpox scar right in the middle of his forehead. And he noticed when he was interviewing a lot of these prisoners that in the middle of an interview, they would sort of nod off and change their mental state. And he realized that it was an unintended hypnosis.
Starting point is 00:19:03 And there's an important message there, Kyle, and that is hypnosis happens. You don't have to go to a stage show. People who have the ability will go into these states. Have you ever gotten so caught up in a good movie that you forget you're watching a movie and you enter the imagined world? Yeah, you're living the thing.
Starting point is 00:19:18 You're living it. You're in the movie, not in the audience. That capacity for intense focus is a naturally occurring event that some people just stumble into and use without even realizing that's what they're doing and what we found is it's a very powerful thing so he noticed that this was happening he learned about it and he became an expert in using hypnosis with patients so he offered to teach young army doctors how to use it. So my father said, sure,
Starting point is 00:19:46 I'll take that course. He did. And he's out there as a combat surgeon and he starts using it for pain when soldiers are wounded and for combat stress reactions. So he had a guy who suddenly couldn't walk. He lost the use of his legs and he hadn't been wounded in the spine. They didn't quite understand it. It turned out that they were being overrun by Rommel's soldiers and he was ordered to retreat. And he saw a buddy of his on the ground and he's thinking, do I follow orders and save my life or do I save my buddy? And he followed orders and left. And he felt just terribly guilty that he hadn't done something to save his buddy. And my father said, well, I'll try hypnosis with him.
Starting point is 00:20:30 And so he hypnotized him and he said, I want you to look at your buddy. How is he lying? Look at his feet. And the guy's toes were pointing down. My father said, he was probably dead already. So all you would have done was gotten yourself killed and you wouldn't have saved him and what this the message of his physical problem was and we often speak through our bodies in that way uh is uh i shouldn't have been able to walk away from him
Starting point is 00:20:57 and if i hadn't i'd be there with him and recognizing that he had probably already lost his body anyway he comes out of the hypnosis and he starts walking. And so, you know, you remember stuff like that. And so he went back to his analytic training after he got out of the army. He got a purple heart for having been wounded. He took a shell in his ankle and had to recover from that. But he went back to the analytic training, and somebody advised him that it was bad for his reputation if he did hypnosis because Sigmund Freud started his work using hypnosis.
Starting point is 00:21:37 His early patients, he was hypnotizing. I didn't realize that. Yeah, he was hypnotizing them because he thought that there was a relationship between some early childhood trauma and their symptoms, which often, in fact, happens. And he said, I was relieving a patient of her attacks of pain by tracing them back to their traumatic origins. And suddenly, she woke up from the trance and threw her arms around my neck. This is in his autobiography. And he said, I was modest enough not to attribute this event to my own irresistible personal attractiveness. And I discovered the mysterious element beneath hypnosis, which he called transference. That is,
Starting point is 00:22:16 you transfer feelings about earlier people in your life to your therapist. And there is truth to that, but it's unfortunate that he gave up hypnosis. The reason there was a couch in psychoanalysis was that he had people lie down to hypnotize them and he sat next to them. He didn't like patients staring him in the eye when they were now talking to him with their eyes open. So he had his chair moved around behind the couch and started free association and psychoanalysis. So he gave it up and that did hypnosis a fair amount of harm because he was a very prominent figure in psychotherapy. What he was doing was working, correct?
Starting point is 00:22:55 So it's kind of an odd thing. Did he just give that up due to peer pressure? No, I don't think it was peer pressure. I mean, psychoanalysis was sort of a revolutionary thing at the time. He was taking some heat for that, and then he had to deal with the Nazis too. He left and ended his life working in London. But he just thought that the therapeutic factor, he thought, was not – he wasn't into changing people in a hurry.
Starting point is 00:23:25 He thought, I want people to understand how they got to be the way they are. And so he thought, I can, rather than using that, I will explore the transference, what I can learn from the distortions that people make in their relationship to me. And so that's what a lot of psychoanalysis is, is helping people unravel their feelings about the way they grew up and their parents and other people in their lives through their relationship with the analyst. And that's interesting. And it's been important in the development of our understanding of how we develop as people in the mind. But it has turned out to be more of an exploration than a treatment. And what's too bad is that he sort of short-circuited away from what we now know about hypnosis, was you can change in a hurry. You can try out being different.
Starting point is 00:24:15 And so a number of us are back there where he left off, using the technique of hypnosis to help people change in a hurry. I feel like now more than ever, people are getting, you know, I mean, when I grew up, I was born in 1982, I'm in my early 40s now. The only thing I understood of hypnosis was like the guy turns into a chicken on the Tonight Show, that kind of thing, right? And which is comical at best, you know, but then I've heard of Dolores Cannon doing everything with past life regression. And a lot of people might table that as woo shit, but you know, she started with smoking cessation and some of these different things that are actually very practical use for a
Starting point is 00:24:54 lot of people. And anybody who's trying to quit cigarettes, you might be like, ah, big deal. Just quit. It's like, no, that's one of my good friends was a heroin addict. He said it was harder to quit nicotine than heroin. Right. That's a big deal. I don't take that statement lightly. And then now, I used to fight in the UFC
Starting point is 00:25:11 and I fought there for eight years. And there was a guy, I'm forgetting his name, but he was from the UK. And all these American fighters were flying him into their camps. He was actually working with a lot of people that were in the very high-end camps on how they would approach and working with nerves and things of that nature because you have
Starting point is 00:25:29 them no matter what. You're just lying to yourself if you don't, right? But the hypnosis was really tracking and a lot of people who went on to become champion had worked with this guy. Look, absolutely. Tiger Woods used hypnosis daily and practiced each swing before he took it. Michael Jordan, you know, the Bulls were all using hypnosis every day before they went out there and they did fairly well, you know. It is a tremendous way of focusing and enhancing control over your body and your mind. So, yes, it's a powerful resource that people can learn to use. I call it working in instead of working out. That it's a way of sort of getting better management over your body. And the chicken jumping around like a chicken, I don't like it.
Starting point is 00:26:16 But there's actually a lesson there, Kyle. And you've worked with situations where people say, ah, come on, what could that be? The lesson is that if a football coach can dance like a ballerina in front of 500 people, he's able to change himself in a hurry, to try out being different in a hurry. And I don't recommend a coach turning into a ballerina. I don't recommend people thinking they're chickens. But there is a lesson there.
Starting point is 00:26:42 If you want to change in a hurry, this is a way to do it. Yeah, I think that's such an important thing to understand when we think of how hard it is for people to break habits. You know, Aubrey and I are big fans of Dr. Joe Dispenza, and it's funny listening to some of his guided meditations because he'll stretch certain words, and we'll come to find out later that he's actually licensed hypnotist and he's actually working with some of these things to draw people into that space. I'm not sure what you'd call that space where you're... It's intense focus. Hypnosis is highly focused attention, like looking through a telephoto lens with a camera. What you see, you see with great detail, but you're less aware of the periphery.
Starting point is 00:27:24 We do it all the time. So right now, a little test here. You've got sensations in your back touching the back of these nice, comfortable chairs. Hopefully, you weren't even aware of that until I mentioned it to you. Because if you were, we could just stop the interview now. So our brain does this all the time. It's how we process pain. You've been injured a lot as a fighter. I'm sure there were times when you discovered later how badly hurt you were, but at the time you were busy fighting and protecting yourself. And so you weren't even aware of it. So our brains are very good at dissociating, at putting outside of conscious awareness things that would ordinarily
Starting point is 00:27:59 be in consciousness. It's tremendous for controlling pain, for example. The strain and pain lies mainly in the brain and you can learn to manage it. And the third thing that hypnosis does is it disconnects you from who you usually are or think you are. And it's that disconnection that allows you to try out being different and see what it feels like. So for example, you mentioned smoking, you know, that how hard it was for your buddy to stop smoking um we don't tell people don't smoke um we tell people think of your role in protecting your body so you know there's this natural thing it was so sweet when i came in your two young kids were showing me their bug collections and all that i get in a mode i'm a parent and a grandparent now i love it i'm a different person when I'm with little kids.
Starting point is 00:28:47 And what we tell people is you can be a different person in thinking about how you're relating to your body. For my body, smoking is a poison. I need my body to live. I owe my body respect and protection. And if you can get in that same frame of mind in relationship to your own body that you do when you're with kids like yours, you can change in a hurry. And you're focusing on what you're for, not what you're against. Protecting and respecting your body. And then it's much easier to stop smoking because you're focusing on what you're for.
Starting point is 00:29:21 You can feel good from the moment you make the decision. It's not, oh, I can't do this and I've got this urge and I need it so much and all that. Sure, we have all kinds of urges we don't act on. But if you focus on respecting and protecting your body, it's not hard. I had a woman who was in one of our early studies on reverie and she said, I didn't even want to stop.
Starting point is 00:29:43 I smoked for 25 years. I'd always get together with my friends and smoke, and I thought, what the hell, I'll try it. And she comes in, and she tries this for my body. Smoking is a poison. I need my body to live. I want my body to respect me. And I said, eh, I don't know.
Starting point is 00:29:57 And she went home and tried it again that night, and she said, I lit up a cigarette. I looked at it, and I said, who needs this? And she put it out, and she hasn't had a cigarette since. And she can't believe it. Her friends can't believe it. And she said, this is kind of bad-ass voodoo shit. And I mean that in a good way, she said, you know.
Starting point is 00:30:19 And so people can surprise themselves. That's one of the things for me as someone, I've used hypnosis with about 7,000 people in my career now. And what I love the most is the sense of surprise. People surprise themselves. I didn't think I could do that and I can. So it's this capacity. The big evolutionary advantage we have as human beings
Starting point is 00:30:41 is this three-pound object sitting on top of our shoulders. It connects with every part of the body. It regulates every part of the body, but it doesn't come with a user's manual. So just like you discover some feature of your car that you bought a year ago that you never used because you didn't know about it, that's the way we are with hypnosis. It's a capacity we have that we underutilize. And what I'm doing with Reverie, our hypnosis app, is making that available to anybody who wants it, anybody who wants to use it. Because Kyle, I've done a lot of work. I love helping people. But at some point, I'm not going to be able to do it anymore. And this is my legacy project. I want people to have access to it
Starting point is 00:31:22 because it can help so many people in so many ways. That's massive. I definitely want to dive into reverie. I think that's incredible. Anytime you think of a legend like Freud or Jung, you know, how many people could they actually sit with and affect? And obviously, you know, the black books are sitting right behind you. There's other ways in which you can translate some of those teachings to the masses.
Starting point is 00:31:41 But getting to work with the master is so much different than just trying to absorb from their lessons and learning about their lives. And that's really cool that now through technology, you have the ability to reach people. I'd love for you to talk a little bit more. I mean, you've talked about this hyper-focus. What's happening in the brain when you take someone into hypnosis that allows them to zoom in and actually shift what they consider to be themselves? We got really interested in this. And fortunately, at Stanford, we have the resources to study it.
Starting point is 00:32:11 So we use functional magnetic resonance imaging. And what fMRI does, everybody has heard about it by now, but it gives you very detailed and accurate anatomical pictures of the brain. But you can also use it in a way that tells you which parts of the brain are functioning more. So activity and connectivity that you can see looking at just levels of oxygenation of blood in different parts of the brain using fMRI.
Starting point is 00:32:36 So we hypnotize people in the scanner, believe it or not, so that things click in a way, but they're able to go into a hypnotic state. And we found three major things that happen. One is you turn down activity in a part of the brain called the anterior cingulate cortex. The cingulate cortex is like a C on its ends right smack in the middle of your brain. And the anterior region is your kind of alarm system. It does pattern matching,
Starting point is 00:33:06 and it fires when there's something going on that maybe you should pay attention to. Is this similar to or different from the default mode network? Yeah, it's different, and I'll get to the default mode. That's the back part of the cingulate cortex. This is the front part. So first, you have the salience network. The salience network is a warning system.
Starting point is 00:33:25 It's the alarm system like the one in your house that tells you something's happened. You better do something about it. And so it's related to your level of arousal. And the more the salience network is firing, the more likely you are to be distracted to say, hey, wait a minute. I better find out what's going on out there and do something about it. In hypnosis, you turn down activity in the salience network. So it allows you to focus attention. And we find that more hypnotizable people have more coordination between the salience network
Starting point is 00:33:56 and the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. That's our executive control network. That's the one, hopefully, we're both using now, talking to each other, planning what to say and so on. And so in hypnosis, you get coordination between what you're planning to do and what the salience network is telling you you ought to be doing so that you're more relaxed, more focused, and less distracted. So that's the first big thing. The more hypnotized people were in our study, the less activity there was in the salience network. The second thing is you get more functional connectivity. That is when one region is firing, the other one is between the prefrontal cortex and a little piece of neural tissue in the middle of the front part of the brain called the insula. Insula is Latin for island. It's an island of tissue that is a major mind-body conduit.
Starting point is 00:34:43 So it's a part of the brain that's working when you're telling a part of the body what to do and also when you're receiving information from a part of the body. And it turns out in hypnosis that you can really make that network work. You're more tightly connected to your body. You can control it. So we did a study some years ago with a friend of mine who was a gastroenterologist, Ken Klein, and he wanted to study whether we could control gastric acid secretion because, in fact, you get your stomach ready when you're salivating over a meal. You salivate, but you also get your stomach secreting acid to digest what's coming down
Starting point is 00:35:19 the pipe. And so I had people at first thing in the morning, none of us had eaten breakfast with a nasogastric tube down in their stomach. And I had them take hypnotic tours of their favorite restaurants. So people would go to the best places in the Bay Area. And after a half an hour, one woman said, let's stop, I'm full. Just eating imaginary food. It was that real for her. We then compared that with a situation in which they were relaxing, going to a desert or island, doing anything they wanted, but no food or drink. And then we gave them a shot of pentagasterin,
Starting point is 00:35:54 which stimulates parietal cell output, more gastric acid. And what we found was that we got a 39% decrease in gastric acid secretion when they were in the imaginary island mode and an 89% increase when they were eating an imaginary meal. So we could change it either way. The brain could tell the stomach in hypnosis that get ready, the food's coming, or no, just enjoy yourself, relax, no food.
Starting point is 00:36:20 And we got a 19% reduction even when we injected the pentagastrin. It was reduced. So hypnosis has a powerful control over how the body works. You're in a state where you can intensify your focus. Now you mentioned the default mode network. That's the third thing, and this is really interesting about hypnosis. You have an inverse functional connectivity between the executive control network, the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, and the posterior part of the cingulate cortex that you brought up before. That's part of what we call the default mode network. It's the part of the brain that when you're not doing anything else, you start thinking about who you are, where you are, what you are, what you should be, what people think you are. I sometimes call it the my fault mode network.
Starting point is 00:37:08 You know, it's where you think about all the things you did wrong and stuff like that. So the more you're active in hypnosis, the more you're shutting off the part of your brain that tells you who you are and who you ought to be. And that's the football coach dancing like a ballerina. It's also my patient saying, you know what, I'm a smoker, but I'm going to try out what it would be like not to be a smoker. Try out being different. And one of the most exciting things about hypnosis is rather than thinking you have to analyze yourself and understand why you got to be this way and what your mother did to you when you were growing up and all this, you can just shut that off and say, well, suppose I were different. Suppose my mother had been different. Suppose I could not focus on cigarette smoke, but focus on respecting and protecting my body instead. Suppose I could be a different kind of person who can handle anxiety when I go in a
Starting point is 00:37:57 situation that makes me feel threatened or nervous and I have to perform. So you can just try out being different and see what it feels like. And that's a perfect situation for therapeutic change, for people being different because they can see what it feels like. And so it's more like trying out a new car and seeing what it feels like to drive it. You can try out a new you and see what it feels like. And not everybody, but a lot of people can. People differ in their ability to use hypnosis, but the majority of people have some ability to do it. And so it's a wonderful opportunity to give it a try
Starting point is 00:38:32 and work in instead of work out. That's so cool. I mean, I think of the, you know, looking at all the stuff in the world and you're older than I am. So you've seen a lot change, you know, like I've seen a lot change around before, you know, I was still around for corded phones and shit like that, you know, these kids, you know, for sure. And it's changed so
Starting point is 00:38:54 rapidly, but also, you know, our first understandings of, of post-traumatic stress and how many people, you know, with the suicides of the military and so many friends there. And, and even if, you know, post-traumatic stress, you can, you can at least say like, yeah, you went to war, some really mad, bad stuff happened. And how do you cope with that? Right. And so we have a whole category of millions of people that are in that category, even car accidents, you know, assault victims, right. That don't want to leave their house. Right. We've met plenty of them through, through the people that we work with. And then aside from that, we've got your everyday Joe who has all these patterns, you know, like Bruce Lipton talked about your first seven years, you're just absorbing everything.
Starting point is 00:39:34 Right, right. And it seems like so much to track backwards, to try to remember the way that, you know, the first time mommy said, you don't have a good voice. And so now you don't sing. Whatever that is, to find that seems like a very long, a 10-year process of uncovering. Whereas what you're teaching now is we have this ability to shift gears rapidly and that we don't have to uncover the deep mystery of what life brought to us, but we can simply say, why don't I just change lanes here and try being this person now? And I won't worry about that stuff and see what that does for me. Or there's something more. You're absolutely right, Kyle, but there's something else to it. You can actually go back
Starting point is 00:40:16 and readdress pieces of your history and reflect on them from a different point of view. So try out not necessarily being, not being different in the present, but being different in the past that saying, or recognizing that you were different in the past. So I had a guy that I saw, I worked at the Palo Alto VA hospital for five years when I got to Stanford. And there was this really nice guy who was the youngest of like 15 children from a Chicago family, African-American cook in the army in Vietnam. And he'd been, he had excellent service records for like 15 years in the army. And all of a sudden he just went off on a tear. He grabbed an ambulance, he rode off into the jungle, he started shooting at Viet Cong, and he just was incoherent and upset, and eventually got mustered out of the army. And he spent a year in a state
Starting point is 00:41:14 mental hospital in California because he was busted on a drug bust. They were picking up people on heroin, and he was taking LSD, and he got caught up in it. And a social worker interviewed him and said, I don't know what this guy, they said he was chronic schizophrenic. He was on meds. It wasn't helping. And she, I don't know what he is, but he's not that. And so he got to me at the VA and I heard from him about this sudden turnaround when he was in Vietnam. And it turns out that he had informally adopted a Vietnamese child whom he called Chi-town for Chicago, for his hometown. And the kid had been wounded, had been burned, walked on a crutch. But he just took care of him.
Starting point is 00:42:03 So that wonderful parenting side of him came out with this boy and he comes back one day after the ted offensive had begun and found that the boy had been killed in a bombing of the hospital that he was working at and he that's when he lost it so i had him go back in hypnosis and relive this and he And he's standing there over the boy's body in hypnosis, reliving it, crying, saying, if I'd just taken you over to the hooch, you wouldn't be there, man. It's all my fault. It's all my fault. And this is the common denominator for people who've been traumatized, for sexual assault victims, for trauma like this. They blame themselves for events they didn't control.
Starting point is 00:42:49 You know, you'd rather feel guilty than helpless, you know, because you figure I could replay the movie and it would turn out different, you know. And trauma is, it's not about pain or fear. It's about the loss of control. It's the being treated like an object, the loss of agency. And so people rewrite the story as though somehow they were responsible for what happened. And I had him relive in hypnosis what happened afterwards. He was running off screaming, you know, I read tight truck, you know, yelling at the Vietnamese about what had happened. I had him then relive burying the body of this boy. And he's crying and he's saying, I should have taken you over to the hooch. And then I said, I want you to remember a happy time you had with him. And suddenly a big smile comes out on his face.
Starting point is 00:43:36 And he says, oh, it's a birthday party for him. The donut dollies got us a cake and a uh and a train came a toy train came from chicago my uh my sister sent it and the funny thing is what came from spiegel brothers the uh the mail order place in chicago ironically um and and he just lights up and i said would how would what would shytown tell you now if he could talk to you now would he want you to be so torn up about this and he'd say no he knew he was going to die he was he was on crutches he knew he wasn't going to live very long and so I said I want you to remember two things now I want you to remember burying him so come to terms with the fact that he's died but I want you to remember burying him so come to terms with the fact that he's died but I want
Starting point is 00:44:26 you to remember that that doesn't eliminate all the happy times you had together that was real too and I think Chi-Town would want you to remember that you know and so he came out of the hypnosis and I said what do you remember and this had been going on for like 45 minutes it was a long thing he said i just remember two things i remember a grave and a cake and he settled down after that i had him practice the self-hypnosis and he would sit there in the in the ward of the hospital with his hand up in the air going through this and he got out of the hospital he was re-hospitalized once a few months later when one of his brothers who was a police officer in chicago was killed in the line of duty rehospitalized briefly and then he went on to he was very sorry he couldn't get back in the military but he was training teenagers to become
Starting point is 00:45:17 long-distance cyclers and he was he was doing that so it was it was not a slow you know painful process it was upsetting in some ways but he was able to put into a different perspective who he was what he'd done and what this poor little boy would have wanted for him and that helped him change who he was in relationship to the boy's death and that's the kind of thing that you can sometimes do with hypnosis. You can say, can you be different about this? And he was. That's a massive story. And I think that the stories
Starting point is 00:45:53 that you're bringing up to speak to some of the hardest things people could go through. And if you can change some of the hardest things people could go through, it seems like the potential for healing is there. What disqualifies somebody? Is it a belief system? You know, I've heard in the past that some people,
Starting point is 00:46:11 you know, you just can't hypnotize. Rogan talks about it. I don't know how much science he's dropping in on that. But some people, you just, you can't get through. I'm wondering if their own personal belief system around that is affecting it, or what does that actually look like? Usually not, but in this case, Rogan is right.
Starting point is 00:46:27 There are some people who are just not hypnotizable. And we have some information about why that is. Some of it is genetic, and some of it is developmental. But there's about 20% of the population just aren't hypnotizable and it's they're interesting kinds of people actually there you know you're you're the kind of guy who likes to delve into things get absorbed in them you're open to new experiences and you try them and you do them and you're sound like you're at least moderately to highly hypnotizable it's a very stable
Starting point is 00:47:01 trait in life but there's about 20 percent who we call the researcher type who don't believe anything they haven't read uh who want to experiment with anything who are skeptical about everything and and so they're not likely to let themselves get so caught up in a good movie they forget they're watching a movie and it's a part of their identity it's a part of who they are they just want to think things through, not let themselves get taken in by things. And it turns out that in the brain, there is less functional connectivity between the prefrontal cortex and the salience network. And so the dorsal anterior cingulate doesn't coordinate with activity in the DLPFC for them. And so they can't let themselves go and do it. And it turns out that people who are low in hypnotizability
Starting point is 00:47:52 have a genetic difference too. That is, there's a gene that helps us metabolize dopamine, which is the feel-good neurotransmitter in the brain. And if you have the right balance of metabolism, where you have not too much but not too little, you have a particular polymorphism in the gene, methionine and valine, in the two parts of the gene. And so you metabolize it at about the right speed.
Starting point is 00:48:19 So you have enough, not too much, not too little. If you're homozygous for methionine or for valine, you tend to have either too little or too much dopamine, and you're less hypnotizable. And this brilliant grad student at Stanford, we have these wonderful students there, Dana Cortad, along with Jesse Markovitz, who does the clinical research with me, found she developed a point-of-care test
Starting point is 00:48:43 where you can actually determine that polymorphism. And so you could tell at the bedside whether someone is likely to be more hypnotizable or not. And there are some people that just aren't. They have the kind of genetics that makes it harder for them to use their brain in that way. There's also a developmental part of it, that people who had used their imagination as children,
Starting point is 00:49:08 whose parents read them stories every night, engaged in that, tend to be more hypnotizable. But the other and sadder side, there's a bad way to be more hypnotizable, and that is children who have been physically or sexually abused tend to use self-hypnosis as a way of just detaching themselves i had a patient who said i just went to a mountain meadow full of wildflowers when my father and his friends were assaulting me and it's a survival mechanism it's sort of just saying it's happening to her it's not happening to me and so there are a variety of ways in which you can wind up being
Starting point is 00:49:41 more hypnotizable but it's as stable a trait as iq by the time you're 21 it just it's 0.7 test retest reliability which is amazing for any kind of a trait and so some people have it some don't but the majority of people two-thirds are somewhat hypnotizable and then about 20% of the upper end are very hypnotizable. Most people can learn to use hypnosis to help themselves. And the approach we take with hypnosis can even help people who aren't hypnotizable because you think about things differently. So even if you can't go into hypnosis, if you think, I'm my body's keeper, I want to respect and protect my body, that might work to get you to stop smoking even without hypnosis. But we find all in all, all comers, that we get one out of four people, half of them stop right away, half of them won't touch a cigarette in two years.
Starting point is 00:50:34 So we get one out of four with just a single session of self-hypnosis or on reverie. And that's not bad. We'll take that. Yeah, that's incredible. What are some of the way i mean you've covered so many different avenues but but speak to the applications because you've been in this for such a long time and you know like as i mentioned your father was probably one of the first to stumble upon you know it's it's application and more and and with uh the service men and women
Starting point is 00:50:59 that we have all over the world where do you where do you have you guys really found great success with this and where do you see it going as potential? It is very helpful for dealing with stress and anxiety, dealing with phobias, for example. We have a guy, Sean, who lives not far from here actually, who was so phobic that eventually he was pretty much confined to his home for three years. And when you're out here in your home, you're out here. But he would get anxious. He'd have panic attacks. He was afraid that if he went outside, something awful would happen. And he thought, at least if I have all these awful feelings,
Starting point is 00:51:37 if I'm in my home, I'll somehow feel safer. But of course, the way phobias and panic build is the more you avoid the thing, the more dangerous it seems. And you don't have any good experience of dealing with it. So it reinforces the fear and the anxiety. And it was ruining his life. He had taken his girlfriend at the time out to dinner. And he asked whether anyone had touched the mangoes that were in the dessert. And the waiter
Starting point is 00:52:05 didn't know and he got more and more anxious about you know and his girlfriend let's leave you know enough of this and he started using reverie and he learned one of the ways we help people deal with anxiety stress and fear is to start out controlling your body first the thing about the threat that you can actually do something about. So I'd have them in hypnosis, imagine you're floating in a bath, a lake, a hot tub, or floating in space. And so he learned that he could start out just making his body feel more comfortable. Because what happens with stress, and you know plenty about stress, is that there's just feedback between mind and body. So you get about something your body tenses up heart rate goes up you start to sweat and then your your brain thinks
Starting point is 00:52:49 oh my god this must be really bad so you get more anxious and then your body reacts to that and it's like a snowball rolling downhill so what we do is we teach people to start out saying i know i can calm my body i'll start with that i'm still of that thing, but I'm going to get my body comfortable. And then figure out what the threat really is, what the odds are that that mango really is contaminated. And even if it is, what would happen? And so gradually you learn to control it from the body up rather than from the brain down. And we find that it's very helpful. So Sean is now out and about in the world giving talks.
Starting point is 00:53:28 And what he did was he transformed those occasions of threat where he just felt helpless into an opportunity to feel good about himself. You know, this is a chance for me to handle this better. And this intermittent positive reinforcement is the best way for people to change. So he turned it into a situation where he could feel a sense of mastery rather than just scared and threatened and have to retreat. And he's out giving lectures now, doing well, and he did it with Reverie. We're finding that four out of five people with stress and anxiety feel better in the first 10 minutes using Reverie. And if you think about it, even with anti-anxiety drugs and all that,
Starting point is 00:54:07 and I'm a doctor, I prescribe that sometimes, but you still got to get the prescription filled, take the drug and see what effect it has, and you got to deal with side effects. The nice thing about this is you will know within 10 minutes whether it's likely to help you or not. And if it is, just keep using it. And there are no side effects. Yeah, that's incredible.
Starting point is 00:54:28 I mean, I had a pretty deep bout of depression when I was in college at Arizona State. And for better or worse, had a naturopath that prescribed me pretty much anything I wanted. So I had Valium, Xanax, Vicodin, you name it. And of course, Arizona State was the number one party school in the nation. So he had all the illegal drugs as well.
Starting point is 00:54:47 But Valium worked. The problem is it worked so well that I never did address the thing that was making me anxious in the first place. It was always there. It was always looming over me. And that in and of itself, drug effects aside, that causes habituation just not wanting to look at it.
Starting point is 00:55:06 It does. And did you have some trouble getting off it and some kind of rebound anxiety when you stopped? Well, I hit rock bottom. I attempted suicide with every pill in my cabinet. Oh, I'm sorry. Thankfully, no, it's the best rebound. Didn't die. I woke up in a hospital 36 hours later.
Starting point is 00:55:22 My family had thrown in from the Bay Area. And so many things popped in my head. Everything that I had told was necessary. You have to finish college. You have to get a job doing this. All the bubble of what I should do vanished for the first time in my life. And I had about a week there to make sure that there was no side effects from jumping off. And they bridge, as you know, with medication like that, you can't just come cold turkey. And so I had to take a thing, a Kalana pen or something like that for a few days to wind down. But that's what allowed me to go into MMA. That's what allowed me to really take care of my body. And just because I was in the sport, I knew now I had to take care of myself. Football, I could party on the weekend and play like a madman on Monday,
Starting point is 00:56:05 especially as a 20-year-old, right? It wasn't that taxing. But fighting, if I drank on a Saturday, my cardio would be shot through Friday. You know, that's how, at least the toll that it took on my body. So for the first time in my life, I really did take care of myself.
Starting point is 00:56:19 And then I could feel what those felt like. I also had a boxing coach who was a medicine man, Mestizo Aztec, who would bring me out for sweat lodge and eventually work with plant medicines that really allowed me to see that from a completely different angle. When I was looking to party, I was really covering shit up and not facing it. And that shifted so much. And I have utmost gratitude for the fact that I'm still alive. Well, I hate to tell you this, Carl, but I think one part of that picture that really troubles me is that a lot of chronic use of anti-anxiety drugs makes depression
Starting point is 00:56:54 worse. That is because they calm you down. That's cool. But also the lack of energy inhibits your sense that you can do anything about the situation you're in. So you're in a kind of a trap where the reasons you're depressed, I'm not doing the things I should be doing, you know, and I'm not getting out there, I'm not being prepared for the athletic events I'm engaging in, just contribute understandably to your depression. Because these are all the reasons I feel bad about myself, and I'm not digging myself out of the ditch. I'm sinking deeper. And so I fear that some of what led you to the suicide attempt was the fact that you were on these anti-anxiety drugs. And that's a problem.
Starting point is 00:57:35 You know, a quarter of the American population is anxious. Ten percent are depressed. And sometimes these medications really help, and sometimes the antidepressants help with anxiety as well. But sometimes they contribute to it. They make it worse. And that's a real problem. And the cool thing about techniques like self-hypnosis is the worst thing that happens is they don't work. They don't make you worse.
Starting point is 00:58:02 They may not make you better, but they don't make you worse they may not make you better but they don't make you worse and and so uh it's one of the things that troubles me about why you know people say hypnosis is worthless or a stage party trick or something else but we have people on vast quantities of medication which sometimes help but sometimes make people worse you know, pain is just a horrifying problem. You know, 88,000 Americans died of opioid overdoses last year. You know, hypnosis has not succeeded in killing a single person yet. You know, despite being the oldest form of psychotherapy, it's been around for 250 years. And yet, we go for these pharma fixes that can sometimes be helpful. I use them, but often do more harm than good. And simple techniques that people can use, they don't think they're real.
Starting point is 00:58:54 If it's this easy, it can't be real. Well, I'm here to tell you what it is. Yeah, I couldn't agree more with those statements. I still, one thing I never mastered in mixed martial arts was the ability to stay kind of calm in the storm, you know, and to have, I could either shut it off entirely and not care, which was just disassociating from what was about to happen, or not a good look, I did that for my last fight,
Starting point is 00:59:21 or, you know, pure panic. And it was only when I, you know, if I was fortunate enough to be winning the fight where I could let that build momentum so that it's like if I got hit or taken down, it didn't matter because I had already built this momentum for myself mentally. And, you know, never leading into the UFC, never had a problem like that. But on the big stage, always had a problem with that. And even though I don't plan on ever fighting again and getting, letting my brain take a knock to it, there's still situations where I find myself like that in particular with hunting, you know, and I, and I, I love meat and fully believe that, you know, you should at least be a part of a field harvest. If you're going to eat meat, you know, to respect and give reverie to the animal, you know, to really honor it. And, you know, we farm here, we do regenerative agriculture. The only time I've been able to hunt where I was able to calm the nerves was when I had enough time
Starting point is 01:00:18 to slow everything down. So when we harvested, we harvest a ram every year here. And so we harvested this ram. It's in a little, you know, it's in the every year here. And so we harvested this ram. It's in a little, you know, it's in the mobile fencing. I could take my time. I took like 40 minutes to calm myself before taking the shot. And it was a perfect shot. And I've had, you know, archery hunts where I went a little quick, you know, and then a sow got plugged right in the stomach. And it's like, I'll never, never want to do that again.
Starting point is 01:00:43 I refuse to take the shot if I can't do it well yet, you know, especially with archery, if I can't find that quiet zone to enter into my hands moving all over the place, you know, and it just, and it's, it's a, it's a real issue. You know, I know part of it is if I do it more often, I can explore that, but it doesn't matter whether, you know, if I'm in Hawaii or anywhere hunting axis, like the heart rate goes through the fucking roof. And it's like, all right, let me see. And hopefully the animal can stay there and I don't spook it until I can quiet my mind and calm myself down before taking the shot. But, um, there's a book called Zen and the art of archery. And, uh, this, british anthropologist was studying what zen teachers
Starting point is 01:01:27 taught and he said the mistake people make is that they focus on the target rather than their relationship with the bow and arrow and you don't want to focus on the outcome you want to focus on the process on your engagement with what matters because that's what really matters i mean it's how you connect with a bow and arrow it's not you know where the where the arrow goes and it was recently i was just in london and there was uh you know in the playoff for the euro uh soccer championship the pre the the game that the brits won before they lost the final championship this guy got called in off the bench and he he took a shot that was an amazing shot because it very nearly hit the pole on the side. But he said, I didn't look at the goal.
Starting point is 01:02:14 Now you think about it, you're in the middle of a game. It's a very tight shot, you know, one foot to the left and the ball's out. And he said, I just knew what my leg needed to do and I was relating my leg to the ball, and it was a perfect shot. And so the same is true with sports like this, and it's that what really matters
Starting point is 01:02:35 is you're allowing yourself to get into the zone of how you're relating to your body, what you're getting your body to do. I was asked years ago to consult to the Stanford women's swimming team, and they're really good, and a lot of those women are in the Olympics. But the coach noted that they were doing better swim times in practice than they were in meets. Now, you'd think you got, you know, you're all juiced up, you're competing and all this stuff, you do your best there. But what it turned out they were doing was focusing more on the women in the neighboring lanes and not on uh on their swimming their own
Starting point is 01:03:11 best race and you know swimming is not a contact sport you know it really doesn't matter what the woman in the next lane is doing it matters what you're doing so i had them practice feeling the way they swam their best race how how you're relating to your body, how you're making it move through the water as quickly as possible, what the exact position of your hands and feet are as you're swimming. And they started swimming faster in meets. And so I think one lesson is that we use self-hypnosis to focus on what you want to focus on. And so what I want to focus on is how I'm relating to my body and making it do what it needs to do. I'm helping my body do what it needs to do,
Starting point is 01:03:53 and I'm listening to my body and finding out how it's reacting to it. And if you do that, you're disconnecting from your concern about the outcome, from that bad shot instead of a good shot that's more merciful to the animal. And that's important that you're concerned about that. But the more, in a way, you focus on that goal,
Starting point is 01:04:13 the more anxious you get about am I going to meet the goal or not? And the less you're focusing on managing your body in a way that it can do what it needs to do. And most good athletes, Joe Montana, I remember, when he would make these
Starting point is 01:04:25 passes, he would say, I would know as soon as the ball left my hand, whether it was going to be caught or not. That he had this sense of just, he'd done it right and it was going to happen. And he did these amazing passes. And so I think that's part of what you can do with hypnosis. You can say here, I'm going to decide what I focus on. And it's not the outcome. It's the process. That's beautiful. And yeah, it's bringing back a lot of memories.
Starting point is 01:04:50 Growing up in the Bay watching Joe Montana. It's so good. Yep, yep. So cool. So you guys, talk about Reverie. You guys created this app for obvious reasons. You want this to be able to go out to the masses and affect as many people as possible.
Starting point is 01:05:05 That's right. What is available in there, and what do you find people are using it for? So we have specific programs for stress management, for pain control, learning to manage pain better, to help people get to sleep or get back to sleep for insomnia. That's our most popular use of the app. We get people to report pre and post, what's your stress level now from 1 to 10, and then what is it afterwards? And we find that 4 out of 5 show a reduction of at least a point and a half within the first 10 minutes for stress.
Starting point is 01:05:42 Similar kind of reaction for pain. For insomnia, we found it was the highest use of the app, but we got very little feedback from people about it. And then we realized that by the time they got to the post-insomnia thing, they just fell asleep. They didn't want to say, oh, I'll tell you how sleepy I feel now. So insomnia, it's very useful we use it for um stopping smoking and dealing with other habits vaping and uh dealing with alcohol um so it's for habit stress pain um and focus that's another one that's very popular getting people to just intensify their focus and decide here's what i'm going to pay attention to. And along with that, deal with procrastination, finding ways of taking small steps,
Starting point is 01:06:29 focusing on giving yourself credit for whatever progress you make in dealing with the problem. So those are the major things that we have available on Reverie. Yeah, those are incredible. I think small steps is such an important piece. I teach on the body, on the physical body and holistic health in Fit for Service. And I think of the book Atomic Habits by James Clear. He came on the podcast right after he wrote it and talked about Charlie Francis, Ben Johnson's
Starting point is 01:06:58 coach in the 88 Olympics, said if you're not getting 1% to 3% better every time you step up on the track or step in the gym, you're doing something wrong. Just 1% to 3%. better every time you step up on the track or step in the gym, you're doing something wrong. Just one to 3%. That's it. And Pat Riley with the 80s Lakers, he said, I don't care for the best at shooting or the best at passing or the best defense. I want us each to get 2% better in each of these five categories. And Magic Johnson was required to get 2% better at passing. Whoever they were, they had to get just 2% better at each thing right and i think that's such a so much more achievable when we frame things in that way to actually start to make shifts and changes well and it invites ongoing improvement and engagement because each time you have reason to feel good about something so you know even if
Starting point is 01:07:39 passing is not my thing shooting is um but you can't get better at the same one thing all the time. And what it means is you can choose a way to make each practice session something you can feel good about. And that will foster more engagement. You're focusing on not on being the best at one thing, but being really good and better at each thing. And that gives you ongoing positive reinforcement. That's beautiful. Well, is there anything left unsaid? Do you have anything coming up?
Starting point is 01:08:11 Are you doing lectures and things? We are now, we're setting up what we call master classes in Reverie now, where we're teaching people how to take it step by step. We have six or seven sessions that are longer sessions than the self-hypnosis sessions, which are about eight to 10 minutes.
Starting point is 01:08:34 We have some very short ones, just a minute to kind of refresh yourself. But we also have some longer ones now. So if people want to engage in it step by step and take a week or two to do a 15-minute session every day and repeat them if they want to engage in it step by step and take a week or two to do a 15-minute session every day and repeat them if they want to. So we're doing that for focus and smoking, and we'll do it for other of the reverie exercises as well. So we have different amounts of engagement that you want to select, and you can take the longer way, medium way way or a short way just to see what fits your
Starting point is 01:09:06 your own style um and and so we're hoping that uh people will find that they can really take full advantage of it and we're finding a lot of people can we we're also doing one for eating control and weight control. We had this guy who I know pretty well, Adam, who told us that he was looking at a picture of a party he was at. And he said, that's funny, that guy's wearing the same shirt I wore. And his son said, no, dad, that's you. That belly is yours. And he felt terrible. So he started with the concept of eating with respect, eating like a gourmet. And you wouldn't stuff your dog or your baby full of more food than it needed or wanted. So treat your body that way and eat like a gourmet. You can enjoy eating more even while you eat less. He also went on an exercise regimen that you would
Starting point is 01:10:05 like kyle he started walking from palo alto to mountain view instead of riding his car and he used to be the kind of guy who would circle the parking lot to get 10 feet closer you know and and he had he lost 33 pounds he looks great he's slim as a rail and he did it with reverie. So people can learn to control their eating problems as well. And insomnia, there was an article in the London Times by a journalist, Nora Dora Mund, who said that she was diagnosed with breast cancer a few years ago and was having terrible trouble sleeping, was very anxious and was being treated successfully, but was miserable. And she started using Reverie and she said, you know, for the first couple of days, I
Starting point is 01:11:03 didn't think anything much was happening and I was having terrible trouble sleeping. I just, you know, was miserable and then I felt lousy the next day. And that's one thing to keep in mind, that how they feed into one another. You're anxious during the day, you don't sleep well at night, you have less ability and strength to deal with what's making you anxious. And so it's like a another snowball rolling downhill and um she said i woke
Starting point is 01:11:27 up one morning after a few days of this and i looked at the clock and i said my god it's 708 i haven't slept through the night in a year and so she found that she could just um use the self-hypnosis and slept like a log. And we're seeing a lot of that too. So dealing with insomnia and eating problems as well seems to be very helpful. And we also, in the future, I hope more people, and this sometimes goes beyond what we can do with an app,
Starting point is 01:12:03 but people with post-traumatic stress disorder can also benefit substantially. Often they need good psychotherapy as well. But I had a patient who had been sexually abused by somebody who lived in their apartment building and the family was afraid to do anything about it. And she got she she said, I began to realize that men could say anything they wanted to about me. And I just she kind of withdrew into herself. She became a professional. She did OK, but was chronically depressed.
Starting point is 01:12:41 And I had her in hypnosis go back and look at herself as that 12 yearyear-old. Pretend you're your own mother, I said. And she starts to cry. And I said, I want you to answer one question for me. Is this her fault? And she said, I'm stroking her hair. I'm stroking her hair. And she cried for a while and just realized that, you know, she had been living with this idea that somehow she deserved it. She invited it, you know. And she called me a week later, and she said, Dr. Spiegel, my doctor wants to know what you did to me because I'm not depressed anymore.
Starting point is 01:13:26 And she said, my friends don't recognize me. So it doesn't always happen that fast, but sometimes it can. Just being able to see an old problem from a new point of view can help you feel like a different person. And so I'm hoping that we will find ways to help more people deal with those kinds of stresses as well. Absolutely. Well, it's been excellent having you on the podcast. It's a true pleasure. I'm excited to show you the land here before you take off.
Starting point is 01:13:53 I'm looking forward to it. Also excited to hear you on my brother Aubrey's podcast. Where can people find you online and where can people find Reverie? Thank you. We have a website, www.revery.com, where we'll explain about the app and all the questions you have. And you can download from there or from the App Store or from Google Play. And the first week is free, so you can try it out, see if it feels like it's for you. And if it is good, if not, it doesn't cost you anything.
Starting point is 01:14:21 And it's not very expensive even if you do but we have monthly and three monthly and and and yearly but also a lifetime subscription that isn't that expensive if you want to try it that way very cool it's been excellent having you on we'll do it again thank you very much i'd love that my pleasure all right Thank you. you

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