Live Like a Girl with Dr. Mindy Pelz - Hypnotherapy for menopausal women: pain, sleep, stress & positive habits with Dr. David Spiegel

Episode Date: October 2, 2023

In this episode, we explore the world of hypnotherapy and hypnosis, focusing on its benefits for menopausal women. Our guest, Dr. Spiegel, shares insights about their app and guides us through a self-hypnosis exercise. We discuss the power of hypnosis in managing pain, improving sleep, reducing stress, and promoting positive habits. Dr. Spiegel's mission is to make hypnosis more accessible and change the perception of this therapeutic technique. Join us as we dive into the fascinating potential of hypnosis. To view full show notes, more information on our guests, resources mentioned in the episode, discount codes, transcripts, and more, visit https://www.drmindypelz.com/ep199. Dr. David Spiegel is Willson Professor and Associate Chair of Psychiatry & Behavioral Sciences, and Director of the Center on Stress and Health and the Center for Integrative Medicine at Stanford University School of Medicine.  He has published thirteen books, 425 scientific journal articles, and 175 book chapters on hypnosis, psychosocial oncology, stress physiology, trauma, and psychotherapy for stress, anxiety, and depression.   His research has been supported by the National Institute of Mental Health, the National Cancer Institute, the National Institute on Aging, the National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health, and a number of foundations.  He is Past President of the American College of Psychiatrists and the Society for Clinical and Experimental Hypnosis, and is a Member of the National Academy of Medicine.  He spoke on hypnosis at the World Economic Forum in Davos in January, 2018.  He is co-founder and scientific director of Reveri Health, the digital interactive hypnosis and breathwork app downloadable from the App Store and Google Play. Check out our fasting membership at resetacademy.drmindypelz.com. Please note our medical disclaimer.

On this episode of the Resedder podcast, I bring you Dr. David Spiegel. Now, not only is Dr. Spiegel, an incredibly brilliant man. Harvard Medical School did his residency at Stanford clinics. I mean, this man is quite brilliant. But he has this huge heart for bringing hypnotherapy to the world. Now, before you click off and you're like, hypnotherapy, oh my gosh. I really am hoping that you are going to see hypnotherapy. from a new light because what Dr. Spiegel is trying to get out to the world is that self-hypnosis,

and I think this is so important that when we learn the techniques of self-hypnosis, we can start to turn everything from chronic pain issues to hot flashes. We talked about that, to anxiety, to depression, to trouble sleeping, just by learning how to train our minds in a new way. So hear me out on this one because this is so important. When we get our looping thoughts of anxiety, when we're struggling with the stressors of life, we are locked into a pattern of thought that may not be serving us. And what you're going to learn in this episode is that self-hypnosis can change and break

that pattern of thought that is no longer serving you. And it can do it in an instant. So you're going to hear him dive into why he's. he's so passionate about hypnotherapy, why he's on a mission to rebrand hypnotherapy. And you're going to hear some examples of what he's seen in clinical practice in just one session of hypnotherapy being able to change traumas that happen to our body, to our mind, and really get us our brains pointed in a real positive direction. So I asked Dr. Spiegel to really explain hypnotherapy, to give us example.

and then, of course, to always put it in the context of what so many of us as, you know, women over 40 are dealing with. And even though this episode is both for men and women, you know, my heart really goes out to those of us that are going through the perimenopause and menopausal experience. And we need more tools to be able to navigate the new symptoms, everything from hot flashes to anxiety to trouble sleeping. We need tools to be able to navigate that moment. And what you're going to learn, is Dr. Spiegel has given us an incredible tool. And stay tuned all the way to the end because he took me through a hypnosis that is not unique to me. You can see how simple self-hypnosis is.

In fact, I'm doing this intro right now after he just hypnotized me. So if I sound a little off, it's because I'm coming out of a hypnotic state. But as you will learn, it's an incredible self-healing tool. And that's what I want to bring you all, is tools that you can do on your own to help yourself. And Dr. Spiegel has given us one. And I am so excited to bring it to you. So as always, I hope this helps. And I hope you enjoy the wisdom of this brilliant man. So enjoy. Hey, Dr. Vindy here. And welcome to season four of the Resetter podcast. Please know that this podcast is all about empowering you to believe in yourself again. If you have a passion for learning, if you're looking to be in control of your health and take your power back, this is the podcast for you. Enjoy.

Okay, well, let's start with this. I just want to welcome you to the Resetter podcast and so grateful for not only you, your brain, your heart, but your mission that you're on. So let me start by just saying thank you for being here, Dr. Spiegel. I really appreciate it. Thank you so much. Thank you for having me. I'm honored and pleased to be here. Let's start with this. Hypnotherapy, I think, is really misunderstood. And this is from a layperson's perspective. So tell us a little bit about what got you excited about hypnotherapy and why you see this is such a useful tool for the world in where their mental state is right now? Well, hypnosis and hypnotherapy is something of a genetic illness in my family because I learned it listening to the dinner table conversation. Both of my

parents were a psychiatrist and phygoanalyst, and they told me I would agree to be any kind of psychiatrist I wanted to be. And so here I am. But I've heard fascinating stories about it. And I was naturally interested in it. When I went to medical school, I took a course in hypnosis, which was fun. And the first patient I ever had doing hypnosis was a 15-year-old girl. The nurse said, Steve, well, your next patient is in room 243, and I could hear the wheezing down the hall. And I walk into the room, and here's this pretty red-headed 15-year-old girl, knuckles white, bolt up right, in bed struggling to breathe.

And she'd been unresponsive to subcutaneous epinephrine times two. They were considering dinner line of seizure and putting her on steroids. And I didn't know what to do. So I said, do you want to learn a breathing exercise? And she nods. And I got her hypnotized. And then I sort of broke out in the sweat when I realized that we hadn't gotten asthma in the course yet.

So I came up with something very clever. I said, each breath you take will be a little deeper and a little easier. and within five minutes she's lying back in bed her knuckles aren't white she's not wheezing anymore her mother stopped crying mother was standing next to me nurse ran out of the room the uh intern comes looking for me and i figure he's going to say hey great seagull what did you do and he said the nurse has filed a complaint with the nursing supervisor that you violated massachusetts law by hypnotizing a minor without parental consent wow and uh Massachusetts that's a lot of weird laws, but that is not on the list.

And her mother was standing right next to me when I did it. And he said, well, you're going to have to stop doing this. I said, really? Why? He said, well, it might be dangerous. And I said, you're going to give her to anesthesia and put her on steroids and you're telling me, talking to her, it's dangerous, you know? And I'll tell you, that is the problem with hypnotists is people either dismiss it at some weird stage show thing or they say it terribly dangerous.

God forbid you should do it, neither of which is true. So I said, tell you what, I'm not going to, as long as he's my patient, I'm not going to tell her something I know isn't true. So you can take me off the case if you want, but until you do, I'm going to keep helping her like this. And there was a council of war among the intern, the resident, the chief resident, the attending over the weekend. And they came back on Monday with a radical idea. They said, let's ask the patient. I don't think they'd ever done that before. And she said, oh, I liked it.

Now, she'd been hospitalized every month for three months in status as medica. She did have one subsequent re-hospitalization, but she went on to study to be a respiratory therapist. And I thought that anything that could help a patient that much violated non-existent Massachusetts law had to be worth looking into. And it was right before my eyes and in her body I could see the change happening. And so we have this kind of prejudice in medicine that the only real treatments, are incision, ingestion, or injection. You know, treat the body like a broken car, fix the part, do a thing, put a thing in it or do something. And that's, I'm a doctor.

I prescribe meds. We do things like that all the time. But it's only one part of our effective toolkit, as you know so well. And it would be remarkable if this three pound organ that sits on our shoulders that connects with every part of our body, controls every part of our body, controls every part of our body. couldn't be better used to help people deal with all kinds of medical and other problems. And so I've devoted my career to figuring out how to use that organ. You know, it doesn't come with a user's manual. You know, people need to learn things.

No, it doesn't. That's why we're here. And so. Right, exactly. So I devoted my career to demonstrating how it works and understanding better providing evidence that it works and randomized trials. And the other reason I'm sitting here is that we've done it and many other colleagues have done it too, but that hasn't changed the use of it very much at all.

And I'm very frustrated with that because the risk-benefit ratio for hypnosis is so much more favorable than many other things we do, that it's a real shame that people haven't had the opportunity to take full advantage of it. So with that thought in mind, just so we start off this whole conversation with people breaking apart that mental image we have of hypnosis being like a, something you see at a conference where people make you do funny things because they put you in a hypnotic state and now you act a certain way. I am sure that has. has not helped the image of hypnosis. So let's create this new image that you're seeing.

What is hypnosis and why does it work? Thank you, Wendy. There are three critical things that happen in hypnosis. It's a state basically highly focused attention. Have you ever gotten so caught up in a good movie that you forget you're watching a movie and enter the imagined world? Oh, yeah.

So hypnosis is a kind of believed in imagination where you get intensely focused. It's like looking through the telephoto lens and a camera. What you see, you see with great detail, but you're less aware of the context. So that we call the context part we call dissociation, putting outside of conscious awareness, things that would ordinarily be in consciousness. Now, right now, for example, you're so fascinated by what I'm saying that you're hopefully unaware of the sensations and your body touching the chair you're sitting. Am I right about that? That's true.

If you were aware of them, we could stop right here. but so we naturally do it all the time, but in hypnosis you do it more intensely. And the things you can put outside of conscious awareness or transform your perception of include pain, anxiety, compulsive impulses to do things you shouldn't do. And so dissociation is a therapeutic tool as well, putting things outside of conscious awareness that would ordinarily, you would get you preoccupied with it. One of the problems with pain, one of the problems with menopause is not just that there is real discomfort there that you're having hot flashes, but that they really bother and irritate you. And that gets you to pay more attention to them rather than less. So focused attention, dissociation, putting things outside of conscious awareness. And the third thing, which is the thing that I think worries people the most about hypnosis.

It used to be called suggestibility, but it really is his cognitive flexibility. that enables you to see things from a new point of view. And it's what worries people that somebody floats an idea in front of you and you won't be able to resist it. Well, we're social creatures. We do a lot of things at the advice and suggestion of other people.

Some of them good. Some of them not so good. And hypnosis can be one more intent form of doing that. But what's cool about it, it is, is it allows you to try out being different before you have actually even decided that that's the way you want to be. You can just see what it feels like if you imagine the pain was instead of a sense of cool,

tingling numbness, or that the hot flash you're feeling is different if you imagine you're floating in a mountain light. And you would think, you know, because most people feel sort of trapped by their symptoms. I've got it. I've got to suffer with it. And you don't. You form a relationship to the symptom. you have and you can change it.

And so what's cool is that hypnosis puts you in a state where you can try out being different and see what it feels like. When you say try it out, I mean, we're talking about the difference between what I would call looping thoughts. And this is something that I see happen to women as they go through menopause. There's so many different symptoms that hit us that you get attached to those symptoms. And they start looping, you know, whether it's anxiety. or hot flashes or sleep.

I mean, sleep's a big one for metapausal women. And then the brain starts going, why can't I do this? Oh, my God, I can't get to sleep. Why am I anxious? Why do I keep getting? And you can't break that pattern of thought. So what I just heard is when you hypnotize somebody, you're taking some familiar thought,

but you're giving it a different perspective so that the brain can think about it differently. Is that right? That's part of it, Mitty. Absolutely right, but there's another component to that that's very important, and that is we do it from the body up rather than from the brain down. So when you're in bed at three in the morning, frustrated you can't get to sleep, what you're doing is waking yourself up. You're triggering the sympathetic nervous system, the arousal system, you get frustrated, your muscles tense, you start to sweat. Then you notice that and you say, oh my God, I will never get that.

And so that looping is exactly right. I've been there. What you can do with hypnosis is first just get your body calm down. You know, kind of what you would do for a frightened or a hurt child is the first thing you do is soothe and calm them down and then you try and help them with whatever the problem is. So be a good parent to your own body. And imagine your body floating in a mountain lake, cool, tingling, and numb. If you do that, your body starts to feel different.

And then you're beginning to break that cycle of, oh, this must be terrible because I'm so tense and aroused and all this stuff. And then you can face the other problem. But for high places, for example, there have been studies, Gary Elkins, a psychologist in Texas who's been studying this very carefully for years. And he finds that the thing that seems to help women with menopause the most using hypnosis is just to imagine being in a place where the body would feel cool and comfortable. And so it's a way of countering the, you know, the psychophysiological impact of the hot flashes. And we have evidence that people using hypnosis

can actually change their physiology somewhat, but at the least, they change their perception of what's going on in their body and can make themselves more comfortable. Yes, so what I just heard in that, and something that I think is really, are starting to get, I hope they're starting to get, is that some of the challenges, mental challenges that we go through are not just brain challenges. It's not just something that's

going on in the brain, but it's information coming from the body to the brain. And, you know, the body keeps the score was a beautiful example of that. Really, I'm sure you get quoted that all the time. But like, that is revolutionary, even though that book has been out for a while. Can you talk a little bit why we, when we're struggling mentally, we go at the brain. And what I just heard is you could actually go at the body to change the brain. What do we need to understand about that? That's well put. Well, Bethel van der Koke and I, who wrote The Body Keeps of Score, were residences together in psychiatry at Harvard a long time ago.

And it's a terrific book. And it's been on the times Bethelho lives for years. So he struck a nerve. There's no question about that. Yes. So, yes, the idea is to focus on what we call interoception. That is, we tend to think of perception, hearing, seeing, you know, smelling, tasting. But there's another kind of perception in which you are processing what's going on in your own body.

That's information for us. And you'll know that you're anxious in part because your gut starts to tighten up and you begin to sweat and your muscles get tight. You perceive that. And then you think, oh, God, this must be really good. And on it goes. So in the reverie app, which we've built to help people do this for themselves, we have instruction in dealing with stress, for example, to start with the physical reaction to the stressor. So before you try to figure out what to do about that nasty comment from your boss or something else,

you imagine your body floating in a bath, a lake, a hot tubber, just floating in space. And if you're lying in bed at night, ruminating about all this stuff, you can't shut it off. You just get your body floating. And then imagine you're watching it as like a home movie. So you get it sort of outside your body. I see it. I see him. I don't like the way he looks.

I don't like what he's saying. But you keep your body floating uncomfortable. And as you do that, you're beginning to allow yourself to face an old problem from a new point of view without the immediate feeling that he's got me. because I'm tense already. And so you can, the thing you can control, before you figure out how to control the stressor, for example, is you can figure out how to control the effect the stress is having on your body. And so that's already the first step to dealing with it.

And then you think, all right, well, you know what? The last time he said something to me, I found a polite way to tell him that I didn't agree with him, and here's what we did X or whatever it is. You can think it through more rationally and without getting so aroused. So the thing about hypnosis is that we know that it actually changes activity in parts of the brain that get us stressed in a route.

And so you can turn that down, face the same problem from a point of view of mastery rather than victimhood. Wow. Okay. So what I just learned in that is if I'm going about my day and stress hits me in that I think what most humans would do is they would try to figure out what, what's why that stressor is there, what they can do to change it, who needs to change. How do you change your reaction?

But what I just heard you say is how about the first thought is you go to how is my body reacting to this right now? And let me deal with the body experience of this stressful moment. And then the brain will change. Right. Exactly. And then I'll be able to address the problem. itself from a novel point of view. I had a patient who was a lovely pregnant mother.

She had very bad lower back disease, and she was seven months pregnant. And as the baby got bigger and bigger, he had more and more pain. She was more frightened and frustrated. They couldn't use meds with her. She was quite hypnotizable. And I had her imagine that she was floating in a lake. mountain light, cool, tingling, and numb. And the pain went from 7 out of 10 to 3 out of 10 in a few minutes.

And she opened her eyes and she looked angry. And I said, what are you angry about? She said, why in the hell are you the last doctor I got sent to instead of the first? I mean, they'd implanted nerve stimulators. They'd done all kinds of stuff that had worked. And so by handling her perceptual, what was happening in her body and seeing it as something that she could actually modulate, it just changed her perspective on the pain and she managed it much better.

And so I think you put your finger on it that start with a thing you can actually do more about than you might think, and that is helping your body handle it better. And that's what we teach people to do in Reverie. And we're finding that nine out of 10 people using the stress app and the pain app report immediate relief within five or 10 minutes. And there aren't many treatments in medicine.

And this isn't a treatment. It's a health and wellness skill. But when I use it in my office as a treatment, same thing. People can tell right away whether or not it's going to help them. And if it doesn't try and go on to something else, but most of the time it does. So it's a way of learning to use a skill. And that's where it frustrates me so much that people say, I'm losing control. You know, the hypnotist will take my control away and all that.

And I was a little nervous at first. We've got many, many thousands of people using reverie now. The number of problems, and they're all minor, I can count on the fingers at one hand. And people are gaining control. That's the thing that's remarkable. All hypnosis is really self-hypnosis. You're just learning to better control your own body. And you feel so much better about yourself when you say, okay, you know, I'm having a hot flash again,

but I can regulate it. I can control it. I can imagine. I'm floating in my favorite mountain lake, cool, tingling numbness. I'm going to filter away that sense of too much heat. And instead of being frustrated about what's going wrong in my body, you think, okay, I know that I can help deal with it just the way you would with a child. You soothe and comfort and help them in the same way.

Do it to your own body. I really love that idea of the child. And I think a lot of women can really grab onto that because what I see a lot of women do, especially as they go through menopause and they lose estradiol and they lose the progesterone that calms the brain is that when stress hits them, it hits them so acutely. And because we don't understand what the changes our brain are going through, we often turn on ourselves and we start to think, oh, whatever X, Y, Z in situation that's going on in my life must be because I did something wrong or I, you know, I'm the one at fault.

And what I'm hearing from you is you're saying, let's just put that aside and let's reprogram the body into feeling more calm without turning on our own selves. Well, yeah, most of it, Mindy would rather feel guilty than helpless, you know. And so we blame ourselves for things that we're not responsible for. The clearest example, I just yesterday got an email back from a patient I've seen about six months ago. A lovely woman from a country which is not well known for treating women well. And when she was a little girl there, she was raped by their landlord when she was 12 years old. And the family was afraid to do anything about it. They were afraid they'd be thrown out.

And she told me, as she was walking on the street as a teenager, she realized her body wasn't her own and could say anything they wanted to her. She finally got out. She got to the U.S. She became a health care professional. But she was chronically depressed, and she retired early, and it was just miserable. And she was very hypnotizable, and it was clear to me that what you were talking about is what was going on, that she was blaming herself.

help for events she didn't control. And that's very common. It's common in people who have been traumatized and what people have been sexually assaulted. I should have known better than to walk to the drugstore three in the afternoon through the park, you know, that kind of thing. And so I said, I want you to picture yourself as your 12-year-old girl fall. And she thought to cry. And it's very intense for her.

and I said, I want you to look at her and tell me something. Was that her fault? Was it her fault? And she cried harder and she said, I'm stroking her hair. Stroking her hair. And she cried for a while. And we came out of the state of self-agnosis. And she said, you know, I have always sort of blame myself somehow.

And, you know, I made trouble for the family. you know, why was I there with him at that moment and all that? And she called me about a week later, and she said, my psychiatrist wants to know what you did to me because I'm not depressed anymore. And I just, yesterday got a six-month follow-up note she sent to me saying, you know, it was a blessing of God that you got to see me and my life has changed. and so we carry this burden that we don't have to carry. And when I said earlier, Mindy, that hypnosis allows you to very quickly try out being someone different.

That's what she did. She could let go of this lifelong burden blaming herself for a rape that he was not responsible for. And so sudden changes like that can happen. And you can try out what it means to be different. and be different. Do you think when you go into hypnosis, you're also going into a different brain pattern that makes you more receptive? Like, my understanding is right now we're operating from a beta wave brain pattern.

But when you go into like meditation or you go into a sleep state, you're going back into alpha and then into theta. And that it's in that moment that you can start to see things in. new. Is that a little bit of what's going on? Absolutely. Your training in neurophysiology is coming out there. Yes. And in fact, there are studies that show that highly hypnotizable people in hypnosis have more left frontal theta in particular left frontal cortex. So you do go into these kind of theta rhythm. But what we've done studies using functional magnetic resonance imaging on what happens with people when they go into

hypnosis. And we find three things happen. One is, that you turn down activity in the dorsal anterior singular cortex. It's part of the salient network. It's the part of the brain that does pattern matching. It says, oh, that loud noise might be a shot. You better do something. Or it's what gets activated on some of these social media when they say, we now know that 12 girls are better looking than you are.

So the threat, you turn down activity in that part of the brain to keep your attention from being hijacked. That's how you get into this state of highly focused attention. The second thing that happens is there's more functional connectivity. So a cooperative activity between the prefrontal cortex, the cognitive executive control network, and the insula. The insular is this little island, that is it's a processor of brain to body and body to brain information. So it's a region through which you can control. what's going on in your body. We've shown that people in hypnosis can control how much

gastric acid they secrete. If they think about eating food, there's an 80% increase in gastric acid secretion. If they think about something other than that, there's a 39% decrease. And so it processes the executive control region does that through the insula, telling the body what to do. But the insula is also presenting to the brain information about how the body is reacting. Interoception. Are you tense? Are you relaxed? And you affiliate with something that makes you more comfortable. So that's the second thing. The third thing is inverse connectivity between the executive control network and a part of the brain, the posterior singular cortex that we call the default mode network. It's when you're just sitting around not doing much ruminating about

who you are, what people think about you, self-reflecting goes on in that area. And so what this means is that when you're doing something in hypnosis, you're turning off the part that says, I can't do that, you know, or I couldn't do that, or my neighbors won't like me if I do, whatever it is. You just turn that off and say, I'm going to be different. That's the cognitive flexibility that comes with hypnosis. So you're turning down distraction, you're focusing intently, you're connecting more intently between your brain and your body, both ways, controlling it and also responding to it. And you're turning off your usual set of, expectations about what you can or should do. That's the state you go into in hypnosis.

And all hypnosis is really self-hypnosis. So this is a state you can control and you can use it to help yourself feel better. So, and I just want to highlight because you've said this a couple of times and I, and my hope is that a podcast like this will help rebrand the way we look at hypnosis. It's all self-hypnosis. You're just accessing your own thoughts in a different way, the person who's putting you into the hypnosis or hypnotic state doesn't have an influence over the control of your brain. It's your, they're teaching you how to better control your brain. So all hypnosis is self-hypnosis, that's right.

You're just learning how to do it better. And if you're not capable of hypnosis, nobody's going to make you do it. Nobody can do it. Now, we are, of course, social creatures. So we take an information from others and we act on it. You act on investment advice. You do all kinds of things, some of which is good, some of which isn't. So are you, can you be influenced by people?

Yes. If you're intensely focused on it and suspending your salient networks activity, watch out what might be happening. So you choose the situation and the information you learn about carefully. You do it as carefully or more when you're going to use it in a hypnotic way because you'll judge it, but you'll judge it later. You'll think about it later. You know what I just thought of is we're in a bit of a hypnotic state when we're watching TV.

And like the news, the way that the news can influence people. I mean, I don't know what the brain pattern is when we're watching the news. Yeah. But I would think you're a little in a maybe an alpha, theta brainwave state that allows that information to get in. Well, look, am I accurate? We have plenty of examples of uncritical acceptance. of things that we just know are not true. You know, there's 70% of Republicans think that Trump won the last election, you know.

It's disturbing how influenceable we are, and the problem isn't hypnosis. It's that people, and you're right, though, that, you know, television, I was once in a vapeful stadium here in San Francisco, and it was one of those things where you could watch the field or you could watch the telemonitor, the shoe, TV screen that showed the game. And so I could feel myself in a different mental state when I was watching the game on the field because I was making all the executive decisions. Do I look at third base?

Do I look at first base? Whereas there, the director of the show is telling you what to look at. And so you're using less judgment in defining your field of attention. So it did feel like less mental work for me, less fun, but less work to watch the monitor versus watching the field. think you're right that that happens. And it tends to pull for that kind of uncritical acceptance of whatever it is they're presenting to you. Yeah. I mean, it makes you really conscious of where you want to put your brain and what environments you want to put it in and who you're going to let in there

when you realize that we can go into these brain states and absorb this information and start to look at it as truth. That's an example of doing it in a negative way. And what you're saying is let's use hypnosis to do this in a positive way. That's very well put. That's exactly right. If we can respond and respond intensely, let's choose wisely what we pay attention to. And I have a modest proposal where every would be one example,

where you can use it to help yourself get to sleep, control pain, deal better with dress, stop smoking, eat more sensibly. There are all kinds of things you can program your brain to do to help you live better and happier. So if we go back to this woman that you just talked about, because I think this is, I see this so much in our platform. I mean, we get messages from millions of women every month talking about the suffering that they're going through in menopause. And it's multifactorial is the way I always look at it. And yet this thread of hypnosis is something I would be in a thousand percent in agreement with you that we need. new tools. So if we go back to that woman, she had this new understanding that it wasn't her fault. She mothered her own child, her own inner child. Did it stick after that hypnosis? Like,

is now, does she have that conscious change? She just wrote me six months after she'd seen me once. And she said, I still, I feel like a different person. And I thank God. that I got the help that I got from you. And I thank the doctor who referred me to you. And she's still feeling different. And she said, her friends don't recognize her. They just say, you're different. You know, you're happy.

It's crazy. So, yes. So it's not, it lasted. It's lasted half a year so far. So, but that was one hypnosis where she had like a real aha. Yep. And now everything has changed. Right, right, because all the elements were there, you know, and it was partly what I know about how people who have been sexually assaulted tend to respond, but partly what I heard from her.

And given what her life had been like and what she had accomplished in her life, it didn't make sense for her to be as down on herself as she was. But that turned out to be the root cause of it. And she could feel it for herself. It wasn't me telling her it wasn't your fault. It was me asking her to look at herself as that 12-year-old girl and ask yourself, is this her fault? Is this your fault? And she figured it out. You just asked a question.

Yeah, you just reframed it and gave her a new way. So again, another example of where you didn't put something into her brain, you asked a question that got her brain looking in a new direction. That's a very acute observation. That's right. And it stuck because it fit because she did it for herself within her own context and it made sense to her. So let's then go back to the body thing. So the other really interesting piece that I pulled out of the body keeps the score is this escape plan, this alarm system that that happens in the body. And I'll use myself as an example.

I had a near-death experience about 17 years ago. I swam into a pile of Portuguese man-of-war when I was down in Cabo San Lucas. Yeah. It's quite a story. and I had the life review. I went down the tunnel. I was out and I came back. And when ever since that moment, I haven't been able to relax much. And when I read the body keeps the score, there's a story that he tells in there of a couple that watched a very intense car accident. And they could never, after that car accident, they were involved in it. But after that car accident, they could never

sleep because their brain had identified that if I let go, I will die. And when I saw that, my brain went, oh my God, that's me. That's why I can't relax because I had to save myself in that moment. So he goes on to talk about how the amygdala and creates this whole escape plan when we have a trauma. Can you talk a little bit about if there's so many people. And it's, It's everything from major events like what I had to minor events, like a car accident. Like my son was just in a minor car accident. He's so jumpy when he gets in the car now. There's like this body reaction that we have to all these traumas in our life because the amygdala is keeping you trying to still keep you safe.

Right. Does hypnosis break that? And can you speak a little bit to that? Because I think a lot of people are struggling with that escape plan that's still activated. Absolutely. it can help with that. There are two parts of the autonomic nervous system, the primary

stress response system. The sympathetic nervous system, which is mediated by adrenaline, increases heart rate, blood pressure, it prepares you to fight or flee. The parasympathetic system is the rest and digest system. It allows you to soothe yourself, calm

down, slows heart rate, slows blood pressure, lower blood pressure. And when you're in the middle of a real physical trauma, you probably saved your life by struggling to get away from this horrible mess you had swung into. And you needed that to do it. That's what it's there for. The trouble is that then your brain tends to generalize, you know, from the world is generally safe to the world is generally dangerous. And I have to be ready at any moment. And it's understandable that you would feel that way

for a while. But there comes a point where your brain's ability to vividly reenact or relive or remember trauma like this becomes more of a liability than an onset. And to go to sleep, you really have to turn off your sympathetic nervous system. That's what happens when you sleep and turn on the paratynthetic nervous system to allow your body to calm, to self-soothe. And what hypnosis does is it turns down activity in the stress response network, particularly the dorsal anterior singular cortex. And so that's a part of the brain that flags trouble when it's there. It matches patterns.

Most of the time things are quiet, peaceful and safe. But if there's some irregularity and the brain thinks this could be trouble, it will do that. So what happens is you then overgeneralize the sense of threat because of the recollection of the threat that you experience. And it is possible to just soothe your body, to say, yes, that was then, this is now. So it's understandable that your body would be jumping. But at the same time, let's find a way to soothe your body. It's not that you're wrong that that situation was dangerous.

It's just that it is not now dangerous except in how it continues to arouse you. So the idea is put your body to say, I get it, I understand why my body is aroused. But think of your body as if it were an upset child, a young child, who just, you know, just, you know, banged his arm on a door or something, got his finger caught in the door. And you first thing you do is just soothe the child. It's a yes, upsetting. It was a sudden surprising thing. It felt awful.

But the first thing to do is just soothe to get your body imagining it somewhere safe and comfortable. you were at risk, you were in danger, but you're not now. And so you can start out by just saying the body's arousal is understandable. The brain is signaling it to do what it needed to do at one time. But by saying, taking over and saying, I can tell that I'm not in danger again right now. and I'm going to put myself in using self-agnosis as we do on Reverie to pick for yourself being somewhere safe and comfortable. So, okay, so talk a little bit about, because I can tell you that a lot of the women,

specifically, that are listening to this podcast, struggle with sleep. We struggle with menopausal women struggle with anxiety. So what is so intriguing amongst many things about your message is really that there's some way we can do this at home. Right. And so talk a little bit of a difference between like actually sitting in a therapist's office or a practitioner who's hypnotizing you and using an app like yours to start to reprogram the way you think.

Let's go into the application of this. Sure. Sure. So you can get to Reverie by downloading it if you have an iOS phone from the app store or if you have an Android from Google Play. we have a website www.griri.com where you get all the information about what we've done

the research behind it and how to get to the downloads that you want to go that way. It's R-E-V-E-R-I, no E at the end. So the idea is you go into an altered, pleasant mental state. And you can measure your hypnotizability. That's one of the first steps in the app if you want to see how hypnotizable you are. And then you can use your particular grade of hypnotizable

ability to hear my molypulous voice guiding you into a state where you imagine that you're floating in a bath, a lake, a hot tub, floating in space. And if you need to picture some chesel situation, but do it after you've gotten your body, calm and comfortable, and for getting to sleep or getting back to sleep. You know, I used to, I used to worry that reverie wouldn't be as good as sitting in my office. But then I thought, if you wake up, at three in the morning and need to get back to sleep. Hopefully I'm not there in your bedroom telling you what to do. But I am on your smartphone, and so you can hear me doing it.

And we actually have structured reveries so that it's interactive. So I'll say at a certain point, it's your hand floating up in the air. It is we go on to the next thing. If not, we help you get to that point in the process. So it tailored the way I actually use it in the office to help move people into the state. And so you can use it to calm yourself to help yourself get to sleep, get back to sleep, deal with stress, deal with pain with menopause. Imagine you're floating in a place that is cool that makes your body feel cool and comfortable. Because a component of problems like anxiety and menopause is all of the associations you have to it.

Just like with trauma, with menopause, their associations down getting older. you know, my body is changing. And, you know, I've decided that the only thing worse than getting older is not getting older. So I voted. Well said. That's a good reframe. So I'm there to help you deal with the stressor at the time, but put it into perspective and just say that part of it is a real, it's a symptom I've got to deal with it. but part of it is all of this other stuff that I'm struggling with mentally,

but I can deal with, you know. And do you find, like, I'm excited to try the app because there's a part of me that is like, well, when I fall asleep, a lot of my busy brain just can't turn off. Right. So if I start using the app, is there a point at which you probably get so used to the messages or the, the relaxation that happens and the visuals that you don't even at some point, need the app, you could just go to that visual and the brain is now trained to be in that state every time you go to sleep. That's exactly right. We did a study in India with women who had

metastatic breast cancer and they would meet once a week in a support group and we'd help them deal with their fears with dying. They helped one another. They became real friends and colleagues in dealing with the stress of growth cancer and they had pain. And so I would teach them at the end of each group, we do itself as notice as exercise, and they would imagine that if pain, there was a sense of cool, thinly numbness. They could rub it with ice or do something else that filtered the hurt out of the pain.

And what they found was that, whereas before, when they get a new pain in their chest, they'd think, oh, my God, it's a new metastasis. You know, the cancer is progressing, it's terrible. So it would make the pain if you hurt more, and it would arouse them more, and it would like the snowball effect, you know, the stress, the body reaction,

the worst stress. and they found that they would just say, oh, that, yes, I know what to do, and they would do it. By the end of a year in this randomized controlled trial, the women who were randomized to the support group had half the pain that the control group did on the same and very low amounts of medication. And they said, I would just do it. So you're exactly right. At first, it's nice to have the app to keep going through it with you and help you through it. But after a while, you just know how to do it. You internalize it and you do it when you need it.

So you've said a couple of times if you're hypnotizable. Right. You can see if you're hip. So are some people not able to go to that state? And what makes you hypnotizable? Well, hypnotizability, it turns out, is a very stable trade in adult life. About at least two-thirds of adults are at least somewhat hypnotizable. About 15% are very hypnotizable.

There's about a quarter to a third who aren't very hypnotizable. They can still benefit from the. approach we take because we teach people how to focus on what you're for rather than what you're against. You know, don't fight the pain, but filter the hurt out of the pain, transform the pain. And so that can help people, even who aren't hypnotizable, but most people are. Hypotizability, I'm increasingly thinking, Wendy, it's a kind of residue of the state we're all in as children. You know, most eight-year-olds are hypnotizable, highly. hypnotizable. That work and play are all the same for them. It's a shame we try to make them

into little adults because they enjoy learning so much. And that a capacity to absorb, I think, is our brain's way of learning maximally when you've got an empty brain that you've got to fill with knowledge and experience. And some of us lose that as we mature through adolescence and start to value reason more than experience. By the time you're 21, your hypnotizability is is as stable a trade as your IQ. And it just doesn't change very much. So what we do is we assess people. We have three groups of people.

The researcher are people who tend to be less hypnotizable and want to judge and evaluate everything all the time. There's the diplomat, the people who are moderately empathizable, who negotiate what it means to be in that state versus whatnot, compare the differences and decide what to do. And then there's the poet, the people who are just highly hypnotizable. And they just get it all. of time. And in fact, their problem is they're sometimes too sensitive to other people's input. They're usually very empathic people. And they see things from the other person's point of view

more than their own, which can be in the vandigora problem sometimes. So, and once you learn that about your style, you can then use the techniques we have in conjunction with your style of responding to it. No. Do you think, something that I'm thinking about when you're talking about the growth of the way that our brain matures with this aspect of being hypnotizable, where in that, like when we're little, our brains are so neuroplastic. That's right. And new neurons are growing all the time and new connections are being made. But one of the challenges for the menopausal woman is when we lose astrodial, we lose BDNF

and we lose acetylcholine. And we start to lose that neuroplastic capability. And so one of the things I've been trying to bring to my community is like there are a lot of different things you can bring the neuroplasticity back like learning something new or even exercise is showing some neuroplastic capabilities. Would doing hypnosis help with neuroplasticity and what if you've got a 65 year old woman where her, you know, those neurons are getting really rigid up there and maybe she's going towards a more state of Alzheimer's or dementia. where does hypnosis fit into that? Well, I would say that, you know, neuroplasticity, we don't have evidence yet about that hypnosis changes hypotizability, although we are actually doing some studies now using transcranial magnetic stimulation to stimulate the dorsal-pulateral prefrontal cortex

and seeing, and we have some preliminary evidence that we're actually able to enhance it to plausibility transiently doing that. So it may well be, and there is. a sort of rule in neurobiology that neurons that fire together wire together. And one reason we need sleep and why it's so frustrating if you don't have it is that sleep is a time when we prune synapses we don't need anymore. If we kept just building new synapses, our brain would burst out of our skull. You know, you have to redefine the brain to keep shaping it and building it. And while there's certainly less of that going on as we age, it isn't none.

And a lot of it is also how you use whatever you've got, whatever. wiring you got, how did that abuse it? And so I think the issue is to sort of not be trapped in your old assumptions about what you can do and what you can't. And I think even as we get older, we retain the capacity to learn. We create new synapses

and get rid of old ones that we don't need, maybe certainly not at the rate you do when you're eight years old or 12 years old. But the process doesn't just stop. So I would say even if you're driving an old car, drive it well, use it well. You can get the brain to do things.

It's not just fixed and stopped in shaping itself and growing. With dementia, it's a bit of a different problem because there it's harder to just recall what you've done and what you need to do and how to do it. And so, although the interesting, it's actually a good argument, frankly, for laying down the pathways while you can. Yeah, that's what I'm thinking. And so, you know, menopause is a perfect example. It's a kind of warning of, you know, what's ahead, your body's changing. It's a good time to get into new health practices of the kind that you teach people. So that even if your capacity to reshape your synapses, your neuroplasticity decreases,

you've built a better structure for the time when you're going to have more difficulty changing it. Yeah. I mean, that's what I hear is for the women out there that are losing, word recall or they walk into a room and they're like, why did I go in here? Like, to me, that would be like an initial warning sign that we've got to keep that neuroplastic capability up. And learning new ways to use your brain would be a really smart thing to do when those subtle cues are showing up. Would you agree? Absolutely. Absolutely. As you mentioned earlier, these self-regulation skills are things that as you learn them, they become sort of second nature,

that you start to react, instead of reacting to menopause as a sign that my meaningful life is over, you say it's a time when my body is changing and I want to live the best life I can given the changes that are occurring. And I'm going to learn how to do that and I'm going to program my brain to help me continue to do that. So, you know, I would take it as a sort of an opportunity to get yourself through the transition as well as you can because you're laying down abilities that you will continue to be able to use even if your ability to create them declines over time. Yeah, that's beautiful. So again, this is what one of the big things I'm trying to help women with is that we go rushing into the perimenopausal years and we have all

these body and brain changes. And the only discussion that we're having in our culture is HRT or no HRT. Women don't understand themselves. They don't know how to read their symptoms. That's why I look at a podcast like this as being life-saving, literally, if we can give a tool to a woman who's really struggling. And now it's on an app. She can go and use it in her own bed and start to create some new patterns of thought. Like, I get why you're so excited about the hypnotherapy because there's no other tool that I see that can work that quickly. Well, I'm very glad to hear you say that. And yes, that's why I want to do it. And I think, you know, for people going through menopausal issues, there's no time like the present. So it's a

challenge you're facing, deal with it. And, you know, you can look back on your near-death experience that it was horrible and I wish it hadn't happened. But, you know, you saved your life. you know give yourself so and that can be a way of kind of restructuring that experience that you fought for your life and you won and so you can see not just the terrible thing that happened but also how determined and strong you were in saving your own life it was just you and if you hadn't done it you might not be here interviewing me now and i would really miss that so i'm thank you You're so kind. I would miss it, too.

There's a lot of things I would have missed. That wouldn't have been a lot of love. Yeah, exactly. But it's another way. It's a way of using this fifting in your capacity to comprehend and approach problems in a way that may be surprising, but helps you focus on some aspect of yourself that is really positive that you wouldn't have known if you hadn't. been through that. And so, you know, you'd rather not have had the lesson, but you can profit from it.

Yeah, that's so beautiful. So can you take me through a hypnosis just so everybody can kind of see what it is? And I don't know if you can make it general. I don't know how we do that, just so people can understand what this might feel like for them. Sure. And that it's not completely about me. Yeah, sure. I'll do that. All right. So get as comfortable as you can. On one, do one thing. Look up all the way up high as you can. Two do two things. Slowly, close your eyes and take a deep breath.

And three, do three think. Let the breath out slowly. Let your eyes relax. We keep them closed and let your body float. Imagine you're floating in a bath, a lake, a hot tub, or just floating in space. Take another breath in halfway. Hold. Now fill your lungs completely.

And then slowly exhale through your mouth. Good. One more halfway breath in through your belly and then expand your chest fill your lung and slowly exhale through your mouth.

Imagine you're floating in a bath to lay the hot tubbers floating in space. With your eyes closed and remaining in the state of concentration please describe how your body's feeling right now. Calm and heavy. Good, good. So notice how quickly and easily

you can use your stored memories and your imagination to help yourself and your body feel better. Now please take your right hand and let it float over and touch the back of your left hand and stroke from the tip of your middle left middle finger all the way back along the back of your hand over your wrist to your elbow and let your left hand float up in the air like a balloon. Your hand will remain light and in this upright position even after I give you. you instructing to concentrate on other things. Please describe now how your left hand is feeling. Airy.

Airy, all right. Now, if I ask you to pull your left hand back down, it will float right back up to the upright position. You'll find something pleasant and amusing about the sensation. Later, when I ask you to touch the left elbow, your usual sensation and control will return. So right now, take your right hand and pull. your left hand back down and then let go of it and tell me what happens to your left hand.

Well, there's, there's a lot more awareness in my left hand. I feel like I, I feel, I sense it. It does want to float back up. All right. Well, let it float back up. Good. Now raise your right hand, put your right arm back down. Are you aware of a relative difference in sensation in your left hand going up compared to your right? Yeah, the right felt harder to lift. Harder. Does your left hand feel as if it's not as much a part of your body as your right hand? Yes. Good. Yeah, it doesn't feel like it's part of my body.

All right. Good. Now, are you aware of a difference in your sense of control over your left hand going up compared to your right? It actually feels really comfortable up. Yeah. Is that surprised you? Yes. So this is...

Go ahead, yeah. Yeah, no, because I would think my muscles would be tired. All right, good. All right, so now I want you to imagine that you're lying in bed, you're floating, comfortable,

and I want you to picture an imaginary screen. It could be a movie screen, a TV screen, a piece of clear blue sky. Picture a pleasant scene somewhere you enjoy being. What do you picture now? A beach in Kauai. Terrific.

All right, now notice again how quickly and easily you can change the way your body feel. You can picture being somewhere that makes you feel comfortable. But let's suppose for a moment, while your body is floating and comfortable, your left hand floating in the air, picture something that would make it harder for you to sleep. Yeah. My hand wants to come down.

Come down now. All right. Yeah, no, but I, no, I pictured it and then I could feel my whole. You felt the change in your body, you see? Yeah. I could feel the change in my body when I thought of something agitating. Get the floating back. And now I want you to keep your body floating because it's your body's response to this image.

So you can go back to the beach in Kauai if you want. And now put that image, the troubling image on the left side of the screen, but try to keep your body floating. And on the other side of the screen, picture one thing you did or could do. to help deal with that stressor. Okay. How's your body feeling now? Well, when I thought of the one thing I could do, I actually wasn't really thinking of my body.

My brain went somewhere else. I kind of forgot about my body. That's fine. And what did you picture? I pictured myself sitting and relaxing. Okay. Good. Yeah.

It was more just relaxing and pausing, pausing, pausing something. pausing something I'm working on in my life right now and not reacting to stress. Good, okay. And you could feel that in your body too. Yes. Good. How's your left hand and arm feeling now? The hand feels like it's air.

Mm-hmm. The right arm is a bit fatigued. Sure. Okay. All right. Well, now take your right hand and touch your left elbow and now let go. And what does your left arm want to do now? It wanted to go up.

Still? Okay. Yeah, now it's like going higher. Now the elbow wants higher than the hand. All right. Once again, take your right hand, touch your left elbow, let go, and now shake both hands and tell me, now I want to go down when the control becomes your hand. Yeah, no, it wants to go down.

So how's your body feeling now? I feel centered, is how I feel. Good. Good. So the state that you're in now is different from the way you felt just a few moments ago when you were thinking about something stressful. And you see also how your body react to your thoughts, and your thoughts react to your body.

And you can learn to control that. So right now we're going to come out of the state of self-hypnosis together by counting backwards from three to one. Three, you'll get ready. Two, with your eyelids closed. You roll with your eyes. One, let your eyes open. Ready?

three, two, one. Yeah. I definitely feel, I definitely feel calmer. Do you? I definitely feel calm. Yeah. Good. Yeah, you know, it, you know what?

It kind of reminds me of like the athletic part of my brain. I was a competitive tennis player as a child, as a young adult. And, you know, if you were working out and you're thinking negative thoughts, the workout is much harder. Right, right. Because you're fighting Whereas if you could think about positive That's exactly right

You focus on what you're for Yeah People who use hypnosis like to say That the worst thing you can tell someone Is don't think about purple elephants You know that that's what you're going to say Yeah So as you say with a workout

If you're focusing positively on what you're training your body to do It'll be much easier than if you're in a struggle About what to do you're not biting it. Yeah. Yeah. Amazing. Yeah, you sound calm.

Yeah. Right? I feel calmer. Great. What would you? I can't even ask you a question now. That was so good. I can't even think.

I'm too calm. I must be highly a hypniport. You are pretty hypnotizable. You are pretty. I figured as such. What would you say as we finish up, you would want the world to know about hypnotherapy? It is safe, effective.

Try it. You like it. And Reverie is a place to go. I poured my career along with this fabulous team we have at Reverie to create an app that will help you help yourself. That will help you deal with stress, pain, mental focus, eating well, stopping smoking. It's a tool for you to use to expand your toolkit of ability. to control your brain and your body. And so give a little cry, I think it can be very helpful.

That's amazing. Well, I just appreciate you. And I, you know, I love chatting with mission, heart-based people that have found a healing modality that can help the world. And for someone like you who makes a decision to, how do we bring this to the masses? Yep. That is so, we need more doctor.

like that. I need more people showing up to really think outside of the clinical box. So I really appreciate everything that you've done for that. Okay. Thank you. Thank you. Yeah. And again, now I'm going to try to bring my brain back online. But I want to finish with this question that I ask every, every guest. There are actually two questions. One is, do you have a self-care practice? And if so, what is it? And then What do you feel like your superpower is that you bring the world? Well, the self-care practice is part of, you know, walking to walk, not just talking to talk. So I do take care of my body.

I exercise. I connect with the people I love and care about and who love and care about me, and that means the world to me. And I guess the superpower, if I have one, is maybe the capacity. to connect with people quickly and help them quickly to sort of see what an issue is and be able to feel what they're probably feeling and thinking and then use that to help them. If I've got one, I guess that would be it. That is a heck of a superpower. So own it. That's why I ask the question. I think we all have superpowers and we don't always step into those. and embrace it. So I think that was really well said. Where do people find you? How do they find the app?

Yeah. I just want to make sure they know. So you can download the app, the Reverie app from the App Store or from Google Play if you have an Android phone, the app store if you have an iOS. Or go to www. www.reverry, r-e-e-e-e-e-R-E-E-R-I-I-com. And there's a lot more information about the app, and that's the way you can get to it. Amazing. Yeah. Dr. Spiegel, I appreciate you. Keep screaming from the rooftops. I hope that my audience grabs on to this, uses it, shares it. So I hope so, too. Just grateful for your wisdom. Thank you very much.

Thank you for joining us. Thank you very much for having me on. Take care. My pleasure. Thank you. Thank you so much for joining me in today's episode. I love bringing thoughtful discussions about all things health to you. If you enjoy, it, we'd love to know about it, so please leave us a review, share it with your friends, and let me know what your biggest takeaway is.