0:00

This episode is brought to you

0:02

by Momentus. Momentus offers high quality

0:04

supplements and products across a broad

0:06

spectrum of categories, including sports performance,

0:09

sleep, cognitive health, hormone support, and

0:11

more. I've been testing their products

0:13

for months now, and

0:15

I have a few that I

0:17

use constantly. One of the things

0:19

I love about Momentus is that they offer

0:21

many single ingredient and third party tested formulations.

0:23

I'll come back to the latter part of

0:25

that a little bit later. Personally,

0:27

I've been using Momentus Mag3n8, L-theanine,

0:30

and Apigenin, all of

0:32

which have helped me to improve the

0:35

onset quality and duration of my sleep.

0:37

Now, the Momentus Sleep Pack conveniently delivers

0:39

single servings of all three of these

0:41

ingredients. I've also been using Momentus Creatine,

0:44

which doesn't just help for physical performance,

0:46

but also for cognitive performance. In

0:48

fact, I've been taking it daily,

0:50

typically before podcast recording, as

0:53

there are various studies and reviews and

0:55

meta-analyses pointing to improvements in short-term memory

0:57

and performance under stress. So those are

0:59

some of the products that I've been

1:01

using very consistently. And to give you

1:03

an idea, I'm packing right now for

1:06

an international trip. I tend to be

1:08

very minimalist, and I'm taking these with

1:10

me, nonetheless. Now back

1:12

to the bigger picture. Olympians, Tour de

1:14

France winners, Tour de France winners, the

1:16

US military, and more than 175 college and professional sports

1:20

teams rely on Momentus and their

1:22

products. Momentus also partners with some

1:24

of the best minds in human

1:26

performance to bring world-class products to

1:28

market, including a few you will

1:30

recognize from this podcast, like Dr.

1:32

Andrew Huberman and Dr. Kelly Starrett.

1:34

They also work with Dr. Stacy

1:36

Sims, who assists Momentus in developing

1:38

products specifically for women. Their products

1:40

contain high-quality ingredients that are third-party

1:42

tested, which in this case means

1:45

informed sport and or NSF certified. So you can

1:47

trust that what is on the label is

1:49

in the bottle and nothing else. And

1:51

trust me, as someone who knows the sports nutrition

1:53

and supplement world very well, that

1:55

is a differentiator that you want in

1:58

anything that you consume. in

2:00

this entire sector. So, good news. For

2:02

my non-US listeners, more good news, not to

2:04

worry, Momentus ships internationally, so you have the

2:07

same access that I do. So

2:09

check it out. Visit livemomentus.com/Tim and

2:11

use code TIM at checkout for

2:13

20% off. That's

2:15

livemomentus, L-I-V-E, M-O-M-E-N-T-O-U-S,.com/Tim

2:18

and code TIM

2:20

for 20% off.

2:27

This episode is brought to you by

2:29

Helix Sleep. Helix Sleep is a premium mattress

2:31

brand that provides tailored mattresses based on your

2:33

sleep preferences. Their lineup includes 14 unique

2:36

mattresses, including a collection of luxury models, a

2:38

mattress for big and tall sleepers, that's not

2:40

me, and even a mattress made specifically for

2:42

kids. They have models with memory foam layers

2:44

to provide optimal pressure relief if you sleep

2:46

on your side, as I often do, and

2:48

did last night on one of their beds.

2:51

Models with more responsive foam to cradle

2:53

your body for essential support in stomach

2:55

and back sleeping positions and on and

2:58

on. They have you covered. So how

3:00

will you know which Helix mattress works

3:02

best for you and your baddie? Take

3:04

the Helix Sleep quiz at helixsleep.com/Tim and

3:06

find your perfect mattress in less than

3:08

two minutes. Personally, for the last few

3:11

years, I've been sleeping on a Helix

3:13

Midnight Luxe mattress. I also

3:15

have one of those in the guest bedroom,

3:17

and feedback from friends has always been fantastic.

3:19

They frequently say it's the best night of

3:22

sleep they've had in ages. It's something they

3:24

comment on without any prompting from me whatsoever.

3:26

Helix mattresses are American-made and

3:28

can come with a 10 or 15 year warranty, depending

3:31

on the model. Your mattress will be shipped straight to

3:33

your door, free of charge, and there's no better way

3:35

to test out a new mattress than by sleeping on

3:37

it in your own home. That's why

3:39

they offer a 100 night risk-free trial.

3:41

If you decide it's not the best

3:43

fit, you're welcome to return it for

3:46

a full refund. Helix has been awarded

3:48

number one mattress by both GQ and

3:50

Wired magazines. And now Helix has harnessed

3:52

years of extensive mattress expertise to bring

3:54

you a truly elevated sleep experience. Their

3:56

newest collection of mattresses called Helix

3:59

Elite. Each

4:09

Helix Sleep mattress comes with an extra layer

4:11

of foam for pressure relief and thousands of

4:13

extra micro coils for best in class support

4:16

and durability. Every Helix Sleep mattress also comes

4:18

with a 15 year manufacturer's

4:20

warranty and the same 100

4:22

night trial as the rest of Helix's mattresses.

4:24

And you, my dear listeners, can get 20%

4:26

off of all

4:28

mattress orders plus two free

4:31

pillows. So go to helixsleep.com/Tim

4:33

to learn more. That's Helix

4:35

Sleep, H-E-L-I-X, helixsleep.com.

4:40

This is their best offer to date and

4:42

it will not last long. So

4:44

take a look. With Helix, better

4:46

sleep starts now. Welcome

4:48

to another episode of

4:51

the Tim Ferriss Show. I'm

5:18

very excited about this episode. It is

5:21

incredibly practical, very, very tactical, and

5:23

we answer some questions I have had for

5:25

a very, very long time. What is hypnosis?

5:28

Is it credible? If it is, how do

5:30

you apply it? What is the

5:32

latest and greatest science? For what

5:34

indications is it best applied? How can you use it?

5:37

How can I use it? And

5:39

To separate fact from fiction, I went

5:41

to one of the world's foremost experts.

5:44

His name is Dr. David Spiegel. Dr.

5:46

David Spiegel is Wilson Professor and Associate

5:48

Chair of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, Director

5:51

of the Center on Stress and Health,

5:53

and Medical Director of the Center for

5:55

Integrative Medicine at Stanford University School of

5:57

Medicine, where he's been a member of

6:00

the Academic faculty since Nineteen Seventy Five,

6:02

Stuck to Spiegel has more than forty

6:04

years of clinical and research experience. Has.

6:07

Published thirteen books or hundred and

6:09

four scientific journal articles and his

6:11

work has been supported by the

6:13

National Institute of Mental Health, National

6:15

Cancer Institute, and more. He is

6:17

also the founder of Reverie spelled

6:19

R E V E R I

6:21

It's the world's first interactive self

6:23

hypnosis apps. He has some amazing

6:26

stories, some incredible case studies and

6:28

actually hypnotizes me in the middle

6:30

of this conversation and to a

6:32

and demos which was the first

6:34

for makes the website for every

6:36

is reverie.com. Or he v are

6:38

I.com big find his on Instagram

6:40

stream.com/reverie and we will add more

6:42

links to everything we discuss and

6:45

shown us as always at him

6:47

dot blogs, less podcast. With all

6:49

that said, please enjoy. A

6:51

very wide ranging have recession with

6:53

the one and only Doctor David

6:55

Spiegel. David.

7:00

Sonos have is your thank you for making the time. Thank

7:02

you so much for having meet him. And.

7:05

I want to say up front that your

7:07

man of many talents in this under hypnosis.

7:09

In the other things that people will get

7:11

from your bio you are an expert in

7:13

wordplay. He came up with ostentatious as an

7:16

awesome said he purports to heard recording and

7:18

I had right down as like if there's

7:20

not a retail sale for their name there

7:22

must be I'm going to will lead into

7:24

existence is present there Somebody feel free to

7:26

grab it so bad That will start with

7:28

the question which is not how you are

7:31

exposed to hypnosis but how your father. Was.

7:33

Exposed Hypnosis. Would you mind winding back

7:35

the clock? I'd be glad

7:38

to. It's a good cycling was a

7:40

thing to do such a i'm a

7:42

child does not one but two psychiatrists

7:44

and psychoanalyst Both my parents were and

7:46

they told me that I was free

7:48

to be any kind of psychiatrist I

7:51

wanted to. plus settled best of your

7:53

I am. My father was finishing his

7:55

analytic training just the beginning World War

7:57

Two and so he enlisted in the.

8:00

Army Reserve Battalion surgeon and as

8:02

he was getting off the couch.

8:05

Is. And most actually said something to

8:07

him. He said herb, would you like

8:09

to get a course in hypnosis and

8:11

my father was thinking what was wrong

8:13

with my free associations You notice you

8:15

try to fix me some other way

8:17

or something and his analysts said no

8:19

is a Viennese refugees and good stuff

8:21

on a shelf and birds who was

8:23

a forensic psychiatrist in Austria. He had

8:25

a smallpox car right smack in the

8:28

middle of his forehead and he noticed

8:30

that has he's interviewing these prisoners suddenly

8:32

their heads would sort of not they

8:34

close their eyes. And go into some

8:36

kind of altered states. So he got interested

8:38

in hypnosis and was using it. To.

8:41

Help his prisoners. And

8:43

so he offered to teach army docs

8:45

how to use it. So my father

8:48

took this course from Doctor of It

8:50

on a cellphone bird and he used

8:52

it to help soldiers deal with combat

8:54

stress reactions to deal with pain. The

8:56

dinner table conversations were really interesting. He

8:59

told me a story of one guy

9:01

who developed a historical conversion paralysis you

9:03

couldn't use his legs Iraq Isi, they

9:05

just don't work on a know what

9:07

happened. So my father asked him about

9:10

the context and he said well. We

9:12

were ordered to retreat. And

9:15

I saw my best friend lying on the ground

9:17

and I had to make a choice. To I

9:19

try and save him or do I follow orders?

9:22

So. I followed orders. I feel terrible

9:24

and maybe I could have saved him.

9:26

And so my father. In Hypnosis

9:28

said, I want you to look at your friend

9:30

by now. And I want to

9:32

the notice something. His. Boots are

9:35

facing down. And. And means he's

9:37

already gone. And the

9:39

guy said. thank you doctor and

9:41

he got up and walked by and

9:43

he was telling himself physiologically i should

9:45

not have moved i should not have

9:47

left him and when my father help

9:50

relieve him of the guilt and you

9:52

know most people who have been traumatized

9:54

would rather feel guilty than helpless they'd

9:56

rather find a way to blame themselves

9:58

as though they could retire movie and it

10:00

would come out differently. And he was helping

10:02

him face the fact that his buddy was gone and

10:05

there was likely nothing he could do to

10:07

stop it. So I'd hear those kind of

10:09

conversations at the dinner table and

10:12

they were pretty interesting. I got invited

10:15

once to watch him treat a woman

10:17

who had non-epileptic seizures. So she's your

10:19

father. My father. So he's making

10:21

him a teaching movie and he invited me to

10:23

come and watch and he had

10:26

her go back in hypnosis to the last time

10:28

she had a seizure and her head starts

10:30

to twist and shake and she's starting to have

10:32

these convulsive movements. And

10:35

you know he said to me, it's a

10:37

lot easier to get people to start these symptoms than

10:39

to stop them. You know they've already tried to stop

10:41

them. It didn't work. So the way you teach them

10:43

how to control it is you teach them

10:45

how to bring it on. And then he had her practice

10:48

making them milder and milder and

10:50

milder and he cured

10:52

her of her hysterical seizure. How

10:54

does she make

10:57

them milder if you're triggering

10:59

these events? Had you

11:01

ratchet down the intensity of say

11:04

the convulsions? How does your father coach

11:07

someone through doing that? It was kind

11:09

of an inference. He's basically non-verbally communicating

11:11

that I'm not just gonna put you

11:14

through the same misery over and over

11:16

again. I'm gonna try and show you

11:18

how to manage it better. And so

11:20

he taught her that if you can

11:22

make it happen, you can

11:24

make it happen differently. You can change

11:26

the way it happens and you're not

11:29

going to get all the hysterical reactions

11:31

around it. Her husband had his workbench

11:33

at his factory put near the

11:35

door. So when she had another seizure he could

11:37

rush out the door and go to her apartment

11:39

and help her. That's how much panic it elicited.

11:42

So he taught her that you can have this

11:44

for whatever reason but it doesn't have to be

11:47

as bad. And over time the more she did

11:49

it the more she kind of deconditions the

11:51

intensity of the seizures. So

11:53

we're gonna get to definitions pretty quickly just

11:55

in terms of what hypnosis is, what it

11:57

is not. But first... a

12:00

few follow-up questions. What's

12:18

wrong with them? But it's for the purposes

12:20

of preparing a report. For example, some

12:23

kind of emotional damage that was someone. I

12:25

was evaluating a woman in a

12:27

terrible situation, one of the recent forest

12:30

fires, where she's on the phone with

12:32

her mother as the mother's

12:34

home was burning down in one of

12:36

these fires. And it turned out that the

12:38

community had not been adequately warned how bad

12:40

this was going to be. And even worse,

12:43

her boyfriend didn't want to be bothered to go

12:45

pick up her mother. So it was a very

12:47

complicated emotional situation. So

12:50

I was evaluating what

12:52

the emotional consequences were for her of

12:54

losing her mom. You're being brought in

12:56

as a subject matter expert to determine

12:58

the meritorious nature or

13:01

learner of this

13:03

particular case. Okay, one of my favorite

13:05

moments doing that. I

13:07

like testifying on court because and I was

13:09

being grilled by some attorney one day and

13:11

I'm thinking this, I'm enjoying this. And then

13:13

I thought you're crazy, what do you when

13:15

he's going after you? And

13:17

I said, you know what, compared to academic life,

13:19

this is simple. Your friend is the guy at

13:21

that table and your enemy is the guy that

13:23

did. And in academia, you

13:26

never know where it's coming from. So this

13:28

lawyer is going after it was a case

13:30

that the United Parcel Service where a gunman,

13:32

you know, employee gun, gone

13:34

off, came in with a

13:36

bunch of guns in his pack, got through

13:39

a metal detector, the guard was looking at

13:41

his phone and not paying any attention. And

13:43

he started shooting nine minutes later. And

13:45

I just said, this is a horrible breach of

13:47

protocol. If he's going to be checking people, he

13:49

ought to do something about it. And

13:51

even if he didn't want to confront the guy directly,

13:53

he could have called the police. The police got there

13:55

in three minutes when they were called. It took the

13:58

guy nine minutes to get ready to start. shooting

14:00

was a terrible thing. The lawyer, the defense

14:02

lawyer, did not like what I was saying.

14:04

And he said, well, Dr. Spiegel, you're not

14:07

a security expert, are you? And I

14:10

said, no, sir, I'm more of an insecurity

14:12

expert. And I

14:14

could hear the judge and the jury laughing and that

14:17

cost him a lot of money. That cost him

14:19

a lot. So I enjoy doing that on

14:21

the side. Was it, I think it was

14:23

Kissinger who said, I left academia

14:25

because I couldn't stand the politics. No,

14:28

he said the reason academics fight so

14:31

bitterly is that the stakes are so

14:33

low. Right. Right. There we go. Thank

14:35

you. Okay. And the other

14:37

question I had was you mentioned this gent.

14:39

I can't remember the, there was a Von

14:41

in there. I can't remember the full name.

14:43

Von Schaffenberg. Von Schaffenberg, who had the smallpox

14:46

scar in the middle of his forehead. And

14:48

I think it was he who, when

14:50

he spoke with his patients noticed they were nodding

14:53

off or transitioning into this altered state. Why

14:56

were they entering that altered state? Was he doing

14:58

it deliberately or was there some manner

15:00

in which he was conducting these sessions that

15:03

he ended up just correlating with that and

15:05

he figured out it was causal? What was

15:07

actually happening? It was more the latter. It was more

15:09

at first. I mean, later on he was

15:11

doing formal inductions, but what hypnosis is

15:13

to him is just a heightened focus

15:15

of attention. It's like looking through a

15:17

telephoto lens with a camera. You get

15:20

fully absorbed in the center of your

15:22

awareness and things that ordinarily

15:24

you'd be conscious of noises on the

15:26

outside. Other things you dissociate, you put

15:28

outside of conscious awareness. So it's a

15:31

kind of self altering, highly focused attention.

15:33

And it was happening at first by chance just

15:35

because instead of looking at him,

15:37

looking at his eyes and listening to his

15:40

words, they just tended to focus

15:42

on the spot in his forehead. And

15:44

many hypnotic inductions involved some kind of

15:46

visual focus to narrow the focus of

15:48

attention. When Andrew Huberman, my friend and

15:50

colleague was on your program, he was

15:52

talking about that. The narrowing

15:54

of attention just as the lens

15:56

of the eye changes and limits the amount of

15:59

information you get get this heightened

16:01

focus on the center of

16:03

attention. So it changes your state of consciousness as

16:05

well. How would you, for people

16:07

who are listening, and for me, I'm listening. Glad to hear

16:09

that. Yeah. Differentiate

16:12

hypnosis from, say,

16:14

meditation, concentration practice meditation, and

16:17

also from what people might consider,

16:20

say, a flow state. And

16:22

maybe they're the same when people

16:24

have this focus to the exclusion of

16:26

much else in these, say, sports

16:28

contexts or other types of contexts. If

16:31

you could just delineate those three, that would

16:33

be very helpful. Sure. So

16:35

hypnosis has three main components.

16:37

I've already mentioned two, highly

16:39

focused attention or absorption, association,

16:41

putting outside conscious awareness things that are in

16:43

consciousness. Right now, for example, hopefully you're so

16:45

interested in what I'm saying that you're not

16:47

aware of the sensations of your feet touching

16:49

the floor right now. If you were, we

16:51

could just stop now. But the

16:54

more intensely focused you are, the more things

16:56

you've got to put outside of awareness to

16:58

keep from distracting you. The third component, and

17:00

in some ways the most interesting in hypnosis,

17:03

is what used to be called suggestibility. You know, you'll

17:05

do anything I say if I tell you to do

17:07

it, which is not exactly true. But

17:10

the truth in it is that you are

17:12

more cognitively flexible. We've done

17:14

some research. I think Fairman, my postdoc,

17:16

and I did a study

17:18

looking at the continuous performance task in

17:21

people who are high and low hypnotizable.

17:23

The task has subtle changes

17:25

in the way you solve the problems you're

17:27

solving, but they don't tell you what it

17:29

is. So people who are

17:31

more cognitively flexible will figure out

17:33

quicker that the rules have changed and

17:36

how you do it. And that highly hypnotizable people are

17:38

very good at that. They're good at letting go of

17:40

the old premise and hooking into the

17:42

new one. So that's a kind

17:45

of cognitive flexibility that is very valuable.

17:47

And I think a key aspect of

17:49

why hypnosis is so helpful in treatment

17:51

and helps people just manage problems better.

17:54

So a question there just in terms of

17:56

the reason that it helps people in a

17:58

clinical context. with

18:00

various issues. Is it

18:02

because the point

18:06

both ways in the sense that it's

18:27

because all hypnosis is

18:29

frankly people

18:36

can shift into this state of there's

18:55

a message there not that hypnosis is

18:59

that people can try out being different and see

19:01

what it feels like. They can let go of

19:04

their usual premises and

19:06

that's where hypnosis is something like flow

19:09

state. Chik-sen Mehi, I knew him and

19:11

his point, you

19:14

know, he calls flow an autotelic

19:16

experience. It's one that is

19:18

self-rewarding. It feels good just to do it

19:20

and hypnosis is like that. When you get

19:22

really absorbed in experience like you ever get

19:25

so caught up in a good movie that

19:27

you forget you're watching a movie. Sure, especially

19:29

all the time just kind

19:31

of vanishes when I'm in that. Exactly.

19:33

That's a self hypnotic state and I'm

19:35

sure you're good at that. And one

19:38

of the ways in which I help athletes for

19:40

example, I was asked to consult with

19:42

the Stanford women's swimming team. They're terrific

19:45

team. A lot of the women went up

19:47

in the Olympics but the coach noticed that

19:49

they were doing better in practice than they

19:51

were in meets. Their time was better and

19:54

thinking what the hell's going on here? Well

19:56

swimming is not a contact sport and

19:58

so the only person you really competing with is yourself.

20:01

And what the hypnosis.

20:35

I've helped golfers do that. There are a

20:37

number of major basketball players

20:39

who do it as well. And

20:42

it's a way of not worrying about whether you're

20:44

gonna hit the basket or not, but what you

20:46

need to do in your body to

20:48

make the connection, to do what you want to

20:50

do. And so hypnosis

20:52

is light flow state. It's something

20:55

that you just get in

20:57

it to enjoy the feeling of doing

20:59

it and how you relate to your

21:01

body. And by the way, good things

21:03

can happen when you do it. If

21:05

you were using, let's just say, a

21:07

concentration practice in meditation, whether that be

21:09

something like transcendental meditation with a mantra

21:11

or thinking of a candle flame or film the

21:13

blank, would that qualify

21:16

as a subset of self hypnosis

21:18

or are there differences that you'd

21:20

want to highlight? They're different, Tim, because

21:22

in mindfulness you're

21:25

engaged in a somewhat different practice.

21:28

It's open presence. You're

21:30

not judging, you're not evaluating, you're just

21:32

letting feelings and thoughts flow through you.

21:35

And people learn to do

21:37

it with great discipline over time, but

21:40

it doesn't come naturally. You don't lose yourself in

21:42

it the way you lose yourself in a movie.

21:44

Now eventually, some people do, but as you know

21:47

from having considerable experience with it, it

21:49

takes training and it's a struggle. Whereas

21:51

the funny thing about hypnosis is, boy,

21:53

if people are hypnotizable, they're in it

21:55

just like that even if they've never

21:57

formally done it before. If you're hypnotizable,

21:59

you just do it. So it's

22:01

a kind of natural shift in

22:04

attention narrowing the focus that

22:06

leads you along and gets you engaged

22:08

in a flow like experience. Whereas with

22:10

meditation you have open

22:12

presence, you do a body scan,

22:14

you cultivate compassion. They're all important

22:17

things but it's about being rather

22:19

than doing. Whereas hypnosis is

22:21

more doing than being. In hypnosis you

22:23

do it for a purpose. You do

22:25

it to control pain, to manage stress,

22:27

you get to sleep, to stop smoking,

22:29

to eat more sensibly. So

22:31

it's more intense, it's briefer and

22:35

it does emphasize the development

22:37

of absorption and flow. If

22:39

someone is highly hypnotizable,

22:41

how do you determine hypnotizability? I have

22:43

the eye roll test in my notes

22:46

which I've never done. So I was

22:49

curious if that is just one of a

22:51

portfolio of techniques that you use or

22:53

if that is a dominant test. How do you

22:55

determine if someone to what degree someone is hypnotizing?

22:58

Hypnotizable is a very stable trait. Most eight-year-olds

23:00

are in trances most of the time. As

23:02

you know if you call your eight-year-old in

23:04

for dinner, he doesn't hear you.

23:06

You know he's doing his thing, working play or all

23:09

the same thing for kids. I don't know why we

23:11

try to train to be little adults because they have

23:13

so much fun. But as

23:15

we go through adolescence, PSJA talked

23:17

about developing formal operations in adolescence

23:19

where you begin to privilege reason

23:22

over experience. Some of us lose

23:24

some of that hypnotizability. You don't

23:26

get as easily absorbed in things. You

23:28

have to think them through logically first. By the time

23:31

you're about 21, your hypnotizability

23:33

becomes as stable a trait as

23:35

IQ. There was a study done

23:37

at Stanford. They did a 25-year

23:39

blind follow-up to former psych 1

23:41

students who had their hypnotizability measured.

23:44

The test-retest correlation was 0.7. Now that's

23:46

better than IQ. I mean that's really

23:49

something. In general, what happens is

23:51

they get divided into one of

23:53

three groups. The people we

23:55

call the poets highly hypnotizable. They

23:58

still get totally absorbed in movies and comics. caught

24:00

up in things. That's about 20%.

24:02

About 60%. We call them the

24:04

diplomats. They'll have the experience and then they'll think about

24:06

it, negotiate it, and then go back and try it

24:08

a little more and go back and forth. And

24:11

there's 20% we call the researchers.

24:13

We just aren't very hypnotized. The

24:15

researchers. Yeah. But they can

24:17

benefit from techniques employing hypnosis because you

24:19

learn to focus on what you're for,

24:21

not what you're against. You don't fight

24:23

a problem. You find a way to

24:26

master it by joining it

24:28

and focusing on a positive

24:30

resolution, a self-reinforcing resolution

24:32

of it. So, hypnotizability. We know

24:35

what's going on in the brain. We've taken

24:37

high and low hypnotizables, put them in the

24:39

functional MRI scanner. And there's an interesting thing

24:41

that happens only in the highly hypnotizable people

24:43

and that is functional connectivity. That

24:45

is when one reason is active, the

24:47

other region is active between the left

24:49

dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, which is part of

24:51

the executive control network, the one I'm

24:53

hopefully using now, talking to you, and

24:56

the dorsal anterior cingulate. Now, the cingulate

24:58

cortex is like the C on its ends in the

25:00

middle of the brain and the dorsal

25:02

front part is part of our

25:05

salience network, the alarm system. It's

25:07

the thing that if you hear a

25:09

loud noise, it distracts you. So, the

25:11

salience network is coordinated in highly hypnotizable

25:14

people with the executive control network. And

25:16

that makes sense. If they're

25:18

working together, it's easy to lose yourself in an

25:20

activity and not worry about whether you should be

25:22

doing something else. We've actually

25:24

found also there's a genetic

25:27

component to that. There's a

25:29

particular polymorphism of the gene

25:31

that metabolizes dopamine, catechol, o-methyltransferase.

25:34

And if you happen to have the

25:36

methionine veiling version of it, you have

25:39

moderate metabolic rate, which keeps pretty high

25:41

and stable levels of dopamine in the

25:43

brain. And those people are

25:45

more hypnotizable than those who are homozygous

25:47

for either methionine or veiling. I

25:50

had a brilliant young graduate student, Dana

25:52

Cortad, who actually developed a point of

25:54

care genetic test for hypnotizability. So,

25:56

you can take a drop of blood and in a

25:58

couple of minutes, we can... tell how imitizable

26:01

you're likely to be. But we also

26:03

have a test called the hypnotic induction

26:05

profile that my late father and I

26:07

developed that gives you a like a

26:09

six-minute hypnotic experience. Have your hand float

26:12

up in the air. If you

26:14

pull it down will it flow right back up?

26:16

Do you experience a loss of control in that hand?

26:18

Do you respond to the signal ending that experience?

26:20

Do you have a sense of floating lightness or point

26:22

C? So you get a score from 0 to 10

26:25

and that is

26:27

likewise a very stable trait. It's something

26:29

I have used with every one

26:31

of the 7,000 people I've used hypnosis

26:33

with in my career and it helps

26:36

me have a sort of common experience

26:38

that is not initially connected to treatment

26:40

but just we both can

26:42

see how much they can respond and

26:44

A it gives me useful information, B

26:46

it gives them useful information and C

26:49

we're not blaming the victim here. If

26:51

somebody is not hypnotizable it's

26:53

not because they're resisting because most

26:55

people aren't they're paying good money to see

26:57

me and get help and it's not because

26:59

I'm not good at what I'm doing because

27:02

I've learned something about it although my first

27:04

psychoanalytic supervisor said yes she didn't go into

27:06

a trance despite having had 200 shock

27:08

treatments because you're a lousy

27:10

hypnotist and I said I don't think so.

27:13

But it's nice because it makes it a

27:15

neutral experience. It's one in which you

27:17

try out and see what it's like and they learn from

27:19

it and I learned from it. Where does

27:21

the eye roll test stand in terms

27:23

of a reliable indicator? Well the eye

27:26

roll test is like a good initial

27:28

guess. It's moderately correlated with formerly measured

27:30

hypnotizability and my father discovered this he

27:32

was using eye fixation on a light

27:34

on the ceiling of his office and

27:37

he noticed that the woman I mentioned

27:39

who you know had the hysterical pseudo

27:41

seizures he noticed that when he asked her

27:43

to look up at that light and then close her eyes all

27:46

he saw was the whites of her eyes. They

27:48

stayed up. After he made

27:50

that movie that day the following Monday

27:52

he had one of the most obsessional men he'd

27:54

ever seen and he had the guy look up

27:56

and he could not keep his eyes up as

27:58

he was closing the eyelids. They

28:00

came down and all he saw was his iris. They

28:02

closed their eyes. So he began measuring

28:05

that. And it turned out you can score

28:07

people from zero to four on how

28:09

much they're able to dissociate lowering the eyelid

28:11

with lowering the eye. And that is an

28:13

initial interesting indication of hematizability. So if you

28:15

want a quick five second test, do it.

28:17

Here it is. Love five seconds. All right.

28:19

So look up past your eyebrows, all the

28:21

way up. Eye way, way up. And as

28:23

you keep looking up slowly, close your eyes.

28:26

Look up. Close. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. You're

28:28

three to four. You're on the upper end.

28:30

Because you keep your eyes way up. And

28:32

I can barely see your iris as you

28:34

start to close your eyes. Great.

28:37

Well, another option on the menu, then.

28:39

Yeah, you bet. And do you have

28:41

any hypothesis for why those are correlated?

28:44

Eye movements are very much related to level

28:46

of consciousness. The obvious thing is you close

28:48

your eyes when you go to sleep. Drugs

28:51

that affect the eye and eye movements

28:53

are related to autonomic arousal. Your pupils

28:56

get big when your sympathetic

28:58

nervous system is going on, small

29:00

when you're on opioids, for example.

29:02

And the third, fourth, and sixth

29:04

cranial nerve nuclei are surrounded in

29:07

the brainstem by the reticular activating system,

29:09

which is part of our arousal network.

29:11

And so things that affect eye movements

29:14

tend to affect arousal as well. And

29:17

so we think it's an ability to

29:19

shift gears, inhibit peripheral

29:21

awareness, and intensify your focus.

29:23

And this is just no

29:26

accident that it's the same parts

29:28

of the brain that regulate arousal and eye movement

29:30

that are associated with this eye roll.

29:34

And this is a side alley question.

29:36

We're going to come back to the mainstream in a

29:38

second. But I'm very curious. Do you have

29:40

an opinion of EMDR? I

29:42

do. And you could just explain for folks

29:44

what that is. I'm

29:46

from New York. I'm not devoid of opinions. Fellow

29:50

New Yorker here. All right. Here we go.

29:52

Here we go. Strap in folks. EMDR

29:56

is Eye Movement Desensitization and

29:59

Reprocessing. Francine. Shapiro developed

30:01

this and it's a widely experience.

30:23

Now the certainly good idea is

30:30

that two traumatic memories isn't

30:35

itself therapeutic. So exposure therapy and cognitive

30:37

restructuring are two very prominent

30:40

ways of helping people deal with trauma and EMDR

30:42

has components of that. But

30:44

anything you think about it,

30:46

if anything like hypnosis, well what

30:48

was the oldest way of

30:50

inducing hypnosis. Remember the dangling watches? What are

30:52

your eyes doing?

30:55

You're moving back and forth.

30:57

So I think there's a lot

30:59

that's the truth. Every study that

31:01

has deconvoluted eye movements from

31:03

everything else that goes on in EMDR has

31:05

shown that the eye movements don't have much

31:07

to do with it. And toward the end

31:09

of her career, for instance, Shapiro stopped. She'd

31:11

been did tapping rather than eye movements and

31:13

other things. But it's not at all clear

31:15

to me that the actual eye movements have

31:17

anything much to do with the outcome. So

31:20

it's another therapeutic technique. But I

31:22

have to say that my overall impression is that what's good

31:24

about it isn't new and what's new about it isn't good.

31:28

So what are the ingredients in

31:30

EMDR aside from discussing

31:32

the traumatic event? Are there other characteristics

31:34

or elements that contribute to outcomes when

31:37

they're good? I don't know if this has been

31:39

studied in any structured way. Yes, it has been

31:42

used. I mean the VA has used it extensively

31:44

in helping combat vets with post-traumatic stress

31:46

disorder. And the fact

31:49

that you summon up a

31:51

traumatic event and then you

31:53

picture it, become aware of the emotions that

31:55

come along with it can

31:57

be a component of effective psychotherapy.

32:00

I think the two things that matter the most and

32:02

what I do when I use hypnosis in treating PTSD

32:04

is Number one

32:07

the control with which you summon it.

32:09

I've always wondered if exposure therapy works

32:11

so well Why don't flashbacks cure PTSD?

32:13

I mean flashbacks are symptoms of PTSD

32:15

you're reliving the event as though we're

32:17

happening again and the difference

32:20

I think is that there's no control you

32:22

feel reattacked by the memory the way you

32:24

did the trauma and So

32:26

I think with the

32:28

MDR like other psychotherapies like

32:31

exposures therapies cognitive reframing therapies

32:33

you In a

32:35

controlled situation bring up a traumatic memory So

32:37

it's not hitting you again from out of

32:40

nowhere. You're saying I'm going to spend some

32:42

time thinking about this now So you're doing

32:44

it in an element of control that was

32:46

completely absent when the trauma happens. That

32:49

was just done to you This is something

32:51

you're doing to yourself in a controlled way

32:53

with the prospect of a direct benefit the

32:55

second thing is Cognitive restructuring

32:58

is helping you to see an old

33:00

problem from a new point of view

33:03

to understand it differently So, you know

33:05

I was treating a California road worker

33:07

who was in a construction zone When

33:10

some idiot went the wrong way and hit him

33:12

with a car. He was taking a rest on

33:14

his break It was two days before his wedding

33:17

and he had bad ankle fracture He had just

33:19

pushed himself out of the way as the car

33:21

was coming and he was miserable, you know And

33:23

his fiance was miserable and he just thought why

33:25

didn't I see this coming and time

33:28

and again? If I had a nickel

33:30

for every traumatized person either sexual assault

33:32

or physical assault that blame

33:34

themselves for events They didn't control, you know,

33:36

what's that guilt versus helplessness guilt versus helplessness.

33:38

That's exactly right And I had him relive

33:40

it in hypnosis. I said let's go through

33:42

this and he said I'm sitting

33:44

on the thing having my lunch and Suddenly

33:47

I realized that he's not going the way all the

33:49

other cars were going He's coming at me and

33:52

I just pushed myself away from a barrier

33:54

next to me and fell forward And

33:56

that's when he hit my leg and I said I want

33:58

you to look at this What would have

34:00

happened if you hadn't done that? He

34:03

said, well, he would have had me dead on.

34:05

And I said, so you saved your life. So

34:08

it's tragic. It's a terrible thing that happened, but it could

34:10

have been so much worse. So think

34:12

about this, not just from what went wrong, but from

34:14

what went right, what you did to

34:16

help yourself. And he felt

34:18

entirely different about the trauma after that. He

34:20

was still unhappy about his leg being injured.

34:23

But it's a way of restructuring

34:25

your point of view about the

34:27

problem. And that's where techniques, including hypnosis

34:30

for trauma, can help people really change

34:32

their perspective. The other thing that happens

34:34

in hypnosis is the more

34:36

you concentrate, use your prefrontal cortex, the

34:39

less activity in the default mode network.

34:41

Now that's the part of the brain, the

34:44

posterior cingulate, that's involved with self-reflection and self-understanding.

34:46

And when you're not doing much, but thinking

34:48

about yourself and who you are, you've

34:51

got a lot of activity going on in the default mode. And

34:54

if you can, in hypnosis, turn

34:57

that down, you can try out

34:59

being different. Instead of seeing this as just

35:01

a total failure and disaster that messed

35:03

up your wedding and all kinds

35:05

of things, you can see it as evidence

35:07

that you had the wherewithal in a matter

35:09

of a split second to do something that

35:11

saved your life. So it changes your view

35:14

of yourself and who you are. And

35:16

that's one of the terrific things about hypnosis is

35:18

it allows you to try out being different, see

35:21

what it feels like. Just

35:25

a quick thanks to one of our sponsors and we'll be right

35:27

back to the show. This episode

35:29

is brought to you by AG1, the

35:31

daily foundational nutritional supplement that supports whole body

35:34

health. I do get asked a lot what

35:36

I would take if I could only

35:38

take one supplement. And the true answer is

35:40

invariably AG1. It simply covers

35:42

a ton of bases. I usually drink it

35:44

in the mornings and frequently take their travel

35:46

packs with me on the road. So what

35:48

is AG1? AG1 is a

35:51

science driven formulation of vitamins, probiotics

35:53

and whole food source nutrients. In

35:55

a single scoop, AG1 gives you

35:57

support for the brain, gut and

35:59

immune system. So take ownership of

36:01

your health and try AG1 today. You will

36:03

get a free one-year supply of vitamin D

36:05

and with

36:09

your first subscription purchase. So learn more,

36:11

check it out. Go

36:14

to drinkag1.com/Tim. That's

36:17

drinkag1, the number

36:20

one. drinkag1.com/Tim. Last

36:22

time, drinkag1.com. Feel

36:29

free to fact check this but I've

36:32

had a lot of involvement with

36:34

say MDMA assisted psychotherapy for P2C

36:36

and all the way through phase 3

36:38

trials and so on. And I've

36:40

also through my foundation funded a

36:42

lot of basic science and

36:44

some clinical work related to different psychedelic

36:46

assisted therapies for say trimmer or assistant

36:49

depression or major depressive disorder in the

36:51

case of psilocybin. And

36:53

a default mode network in this type of

36:56

not quite deactivation but sort of down regulation

36:58

to measure what the proper technical term would

37:01

be is something that Robin Carhart-Harris

37:03

talks a lot about predominantly out of Imperial College

37:05

London and then later at UCSF. And

37:09

it's striking because the subjective reports in

37:11

a lot of these experiences whether it

37:13

be in the MDMA assisted psychotherapy although

37:15

I don't really consider MDMA a psychedelic

37:18

for various reasons but let's just use

37:20

psilocybin or even LSD. The

37:22

ability to take a impartial

37:25

observer status on yourself and

37:28

to assume new perspectives. The

37:30

description that I'm

37:32

paraphrasing here that you just shared is very

37:34

similar to the subjective reports of people who

37:36

have good therapeutic outcomes with these other modalities.

37:38

So it's exciting to me to hear you

37:40

describe it in that way because psychedelics are

37:42

contraindicated for so many people. There are quite

37:44

a few people who should not take psychedelics

37:47

in any form. I do want

37:49

to talk about some of the applications but in

37:51

terms of risk profile usually

37:53

the kind of magnitude of potential

37:56

impact is correlated to some

37:58

type of risk profile. adverse events?

38:00

There are but before I see

39:04

now is what a miracle it is that I PTSD

39:39

is because it's the sort of human

40:00

treated like an object, like a thing is relive

40:06

it in a state

40:08

where you're feeling

40:28

about who they are as people. And

40:31

if you can understand the experience

40:33

but disconnected in some ways from this

40:35

default mode conclusion about what sort of

40:38

a person you are, that can

40:40

be powerfully therapeutic. Absolutely.

40:42

The commonalities are really

40:45

worth highlighting here because certain

40:47

treatments are not accessible to some folks

40:49

which is also part of the reason

40:51

why I'm so interested in the work

40:54

that is being pioneered in

40:56

part by our mutual friend Nolan

40:58

Williams. Yes. Nolan's terrific. And we'll

41:00

probably come back to Nolan and

41:02

accelerate TMS in a second. But

41:05

what are the risks if any?

41:07

There are very few. I'll tell you when we

41:09

started Reverie about three years ago,

41:12

I was kind of worried because 30 years

41:14

ago I would not have

41:16

dared to put an interactive digital hypnosis app

41:18

out there on the web and just see

41:20

what happened to people. I worry that people

41:23

would have all kinds of reactions and dissociative

41:25

reactions and terrible things could happen.

41:27

But I thought what the hell. I want people

41:29

to have access to this and be able to

41:32

try it. And we've had

41:34

like three quarters of a million downloads

41:36

and the number of potential problems we

41:38

have is less than ten and none

41:41

of them are serious. Some of them

41:43

are ecstatic positive experiences kind of like

41:45

psychedelic ones. Most of them

41:47

are periods of anxiety or stress that

41:50

are easily reversible. And so

41:52

the good thing about hypnosis is you can turn

41:54

it on real fast. You can turn it off

41:56

real fast. So the worst thing that happens, most

41:58

of the time is sometimes it's doesn't work. So

42:00

what? So you do something yet

42:19

succeeded in killing anyone. It's just

42:21

not dangerous. And the reason you're

42:23

using that as an example is

42:25

because of the

42:27

intersection with pain management. You bet. Okay.

42:29

So we'll also come back to that.

42:32

Got it. Marker noted. So

42:34

adverse risk profile pretty low,

42:37

adverse event profile pretty manageable. I want to

42:39

come back to Nolan

42:42

for a second because I'm wondering

42:44

if someone is in the researcher

42:46

20%. So a low

42:49

responder. Is there because

42:51

I do believe that Nolan mentioned this to me,

42:54

the possibility of using something like

42:56

accelerated TMS which is transgranular magnetic

42:58

stimulation, this type of brain stimulation

43:01

to improve trait

43:03

hypnotizability. I don't know what the trait

43:05

as a modifier means, but

43:07

is it possible that one could use a

43:09

tool like accelerated TMS to improve their response

43:12

to hypnosis? The answer is absolutely yes. And

43:14

Nolan and I and a few firemen and

43:16

a number of other members of Nolan's team

43:19

just published a paper in Nature Mental Health in

43:21

which we took hypnotized people who were less

43:24

than highly hypnotizable and we administered to them

43:26

either accelerated TMS

43:29

to the left dorsal lateral prefrontal cortex

43:31

with the idea of regulating activity in

43:33

the dorsal anterior cingulate using real

43:35

versus sham TMS. So we could tell

43:37

whether they got actually got the TMS

43:39

or not. They couldn't tell. The paddle

43:41

made the same noise, but they

43:44

didn't know. And we were able

43:46

to transiently significantly increase hypnotizability in

43:48

the ones who got the real

43:50

TMS and not in the ones who got

43:52

the sham. What was the dosing on that?

43:54

Was it one day? Was it five sessions?

43:56

Yeah, no, it was one day. It was

43:59

just one session. then we measure

44:01

the single session. Oh yeah, it

44:03

was not repeated like the treatment

44:05

of depression or suicidal ideation. Single

44:07

session. Yeah. Okay. So we're

44:10

hoping. That's right. I can see your face lighting

44:12

up. I feel the same way that we may

44:14

be able for people we were

44:16

studying people with fibromyalgia, people with chronic pain

44:19

to enhance their hypnotic ability and

44:21

then use it to treat pain

44:23

which it is very effective for. Okay,

44:26

I'm gonna get to pain quickly folks. I

44:28

promise. The segue is different tools show

44:32

their best results in different contexts. And

44:34

so you might have something like PRP,

44:36

platelet rich plasma for certain types of

44:38

injury repair, surgical recovery. Better

44:40

for some types of surgeries and joints than others.

44:42

You might have fill in the

44:44

blank. MDMA assisted psychotherapy for instance. Better

44:47

for certain indications like complex PTSD

44:49

and others for instance. Other things might

44:51

be better suited to say alcohol use

44:54

disorder. What is hypnosis best

44:56

for? Where have you seen

44:58

the most outstanding results

45:00

compared to other options? We've

45:03

seen excellent results in helping people

45:05

to manage stress. We're

45:07

finding with every that about 80% of

45:10

people within 10 minutes feel a

45:12

significant reduction in their stress levels. It

45:15

helps people focus, intensify their focus

45:17

of attention, plan what they want to do and

45:19

then do it. It's a skill that they

45:21

can learn to use very quickly. It's very

45:24

effective with pain. It's one of

45:26

the oldest uses of hypnosis with pain. In

45:28

fact, there was a British

45:30

surgeon named Hesdale who went to India

45:32

and was using hypnosis. This was pre-ether

45:34

anesthesia. Now they would just get people

45:37

drunk, have them bite on a block

45:39

of wood, hold them down and cut

45:41

on them. Frontier medicine. Frontier medicine, right?

45:43

And he went to India and he

45:45

reported 80% surgical anesthesia

45:48

with hypnosis. And when 10 years

45:50

later at Mass General, he just don't want to be in the

45:52

20%. No, you don't. But

45:54

it's better than being better than what was

45:56

happening before. Better than bourbon in a wallet.

45:59

Right, exactly. When ether

46:01

was first introduced at Mass General ten

46:03

years later, the surgeons strode to the front

46:05

of the amphitheaters and said, gentlemen this is

46:07

no humbug to distinguish

46:10

ether from hypnosis. Well they were getting

46:12

90% anesthesia and so Asdale

46:15

withdrew his paper. He said, well they're doing

46:17

7% better. Ether is getting 90% and hypnosis

46:19

is getting 80%. Yeah. I gotta say he

46:22

withdrew his paper. He withdrew his paper and

46:24

you know it's taken us like a

46:27

century and a half to figure out that

46:29

the brain actually has something to do with

46:31

pain processing. Yeah. And there are studies now

46:33

showing which part of the brain, just changing

46:35

the words you use in hypnosis, which

46:37

part of the brain is involved in the analgesia.

46:39

So you significantly reduce pain in the

46:42

somatosensory cortex if you say the hand that's

46:44

receiving the shocks is cool, tingly and numb,

46:46

filter the hurt out of the pain. You

46:49

get the same reduction in pain response if

46:51

you say, well the pain is there but it won't

46:53

bother you so much, sort of like opioids. Then

46:56

you turn down activity in the dorsal

46:58

anterior cingulate. So you can see different

47:00

parts of the brain involved in pain

47:02

processing and then hypnotic allergies. Depending on

47:04

the language you're using. Depending on the

47:06

language. So if you think that what

47:08

doctors say to patients, right, it is

47:10

spell casting that's right but no pointy

47:12

hats or anything. Yeah. Those

47:15

come in the more advanced language. You've got

47:17

a pair association do is to

47:19

get the hats. Right. So how

47:22

does that affect the treatment?

47:24

If you're looking at say the

47:27

example that you just gave or a different wording is

47:30

affecting different neuroantitomical structures

47:32

and activity. Does that

47:34

then determine your neuro

47:37

targeting for lack of a better term? And

47:39

you're like, okay, we saw A

47:41

instead of B light up. We really want to go after

47:43

A based on what we know. It

47:46

may be for certain kinds of pain or

47:48

certain kinds of problems you want to emphasize

47:50

one or the other but frankly we have

47:52

four different sets of instructions that involve either

47:55

just going somewhere else leaving your

47:57

body here and going to a desert island

47:59

and enjoying things. We're imagining a physical

48:01

remedy that actually reduces pain, a

48:04

warm bath or an ice bath or something

48:06

like that, or move the pain

48:08

around, see what it feels like to do that. And

48:10

one other technique that's very helpful is

48:13

teach people to have compassion for their bodies.

48:15

This is like mindfulness in some ways. But if

48:18

your body were a three-year-old child who'd been

48:20

hurt, would you get frustrated and angry with

48:22

it? Hell no. What would

48:24

you do? Everybody says, I'd give him a hug and I'd stroke

48:26

him and I'd try and make him feel better. So,

48:29

there are different language techniques we can use

48:31

to get the same effect which is

48:33

to significantly reduce pain. We

48:35

have randomized clinical trials that

48:38

prove that hypnotic analgesia works

48:41

at much lower levels of medication too. And

48:43

so, it's an underutilized resource.

48:45

Hypnosis is like an underappreciated company that

48:48

hasn't been managed well and has a

48:50

lot more positive resources. And that's what

48:52

it's like. We just don't take advantage

48:54

of it. So, let's use

48:58

me as a hypothetical intrepid

49:01

user of self-hypnosis. So, I have some

49:03

low back pain. We were chatting about

49:05

this before we started recording. Is

49:07

there a particular approach that you might

49:09

recommend one or in this case, I

49:11

start with in a case like

49:13

this? Sure. We can try it if you want.

49:16

All right. Yeah. I'm a dumb

49:18

game. Your game? I'm an absolutely game. All

49:21

right. I'd say

49:23

it's a two out of ten.

49:25

It's more of a bothersome stimulus.

49:27

And is there a physical remedy that

49:29

helps you with it? A warm bath? There

49:31

are foam rolling, say

49:34

the piriformis and glutes and so on, doesn't

49:36

help. Using psoas release tends

49:38

to help. Just laying on my stomach,

49:41

honestly, with my hands under

49:43

my pelvis to take

49:45

all the activity out of the spinal erectors helps.

49:48

Those are a few things. I'm laying down on

49:50

my stomach and breathing into the back to

49:52

relax the spinal erectors. I would say is one

49:55

thing that seems to help. Well,

49:57

that seems like a vivid image. And temperature things

49:59

don't make sense. most different thing? Temperature,

50:02

if I do say a cold bath and

50:04

then a hot bath, just

50:06

contrast therapy like that, that seems

50:09

to help. Okay. So that feeling

50:11

of cold tissue phasodilating when I

50:13

get into the hot bath, that

50:15

type of like prickly sensation of

50:18

being sort of perfused with blood, that's something I

50:20

associate I would say with feeling better. Feeling better.

50:23

So part of what you're doing is reinterpreting

50:25

the signals you're getting in

50:28

a different way. So let's try

50:30

it if you want and see. Sure. So get as comfortable

50:32

as you can. On one, please

50:34

do one thing. Look up all the way up high.

50:36

You can two do two things. Slowly close your eyes

50:38

and take a deep breath. And

50:42

three do three things. Let the breath out. Let

50:45

your eyes relax to keep them closed and

50:47

let your body float. Imagine

50:51

you're floating somewhere safe and comfortable

50:53

like a bath, a

50:55

lake, a hot tub or

50:57

floating in space. And then take

50:59

your right hand and stroke the back of

51:01

your left hand starting

51:03

with the tip of your left middle finger. Or

51:06

you can put it on the table. That might be

51:09

better. Now stroke the

51:11

back of your left middle finger down

51:14

along the back of your

51:16

left hand, past your wrist to your elbow.

51:18

And as you do that,

51:21

develop a sense of tingling and numbness and

51:23

lightness. And let your

51:25

left hand float up in the air like a balloon. Feel

51:30

the tingling. That's good. And let it float up.

51:32

You bend your elbow and you can rest your

51:34

arm lightly on the table.

51:39

And please describe what physical sensations you're aware of

51:41

now in your left hand and arm. Feel

51:44

my heart beating my palm.

51:46

Mm-hmm. Okay. A

51:48

little bit of I can feel the hair on

51:50

the back of my arm

51:53

touching the sleeve that I rolled

51:55

up. And I'm going to give

51:58

you this instruction. If you pull your hand

52:00

back down to the table with your

52:02

right hand and then let go. It will float

52:04

right back up to the upright position to see

52:06

what happens. That's good.

52:08

So you're putting it down. Now let go. I

52:11

see you smiling. What's happening? There's

52:14

a, I mean, it feels like it's floating. Number one,

52:16

I'm also kind of second guessing myself. Cause I wonder

52:18

if I'm doing this to

52:23

conform to the exercise, if that makes

52:25

sense, but it feels like it's floating.

52:27

Okay. Yeah. And as you do

52:29

that, let your left hand remain upright. Later

52:32

when I ask you to touch your

52:34

left elbow with your right hand and

52:36

let go, your usual sensation and

52:38

control will return. Right now, when

52:41

I ask you to touch your left elbow with

52:43

your right hand and then let go, your

52:46

usual sensation and control will

52:48

return. Okay. Right

52:50

now I want you to notice

52:53

sensations in your back. What

52:55

does your back feel like right now? The

52:57

part that's usually painful. It

53:00

feels relaxed right now. Good. More

53:02

relaxed. Yeah. Good. Good.

53:05

How would you rate the discomfort level right now? And

53:07

that's your, the 10 scale. One

53:10

out of 10. Okay. Good. So

53:14

already notice how you've been

53:16

able to change sensation, not just in a neutral

53:18

part of your body, your left hand and arm,

53:21

but in a part that has

53:23

been problematic. Now

53:25

I want you to imagine now

53:27

that you're lying on your belly, maybe

53:30

with a roll under you and

53:33

feel the pleasant tingling numbness

53:35

in your lower back as

53:39

if it were cooler or warmer or you were changing

53:41

it from warmer to cooler. Feel

53:45

a pleasant tingling numbness and let it filter

53:47

the hurt out of pain. Each

53:50

breath deeper and easier. Now

53:53

again, with your eyes closed and remaining in

53:55

the state of concentration, please describe how your

53:57

body's feeling right now. Thank

53:59

you. It does feel

54:01

cooler than. Feals.

54:07

Little. Dissociate.

54:10

Is makes sense like

54:12

com. Can you describe that a little

54:14

more. See. Like is very

54:16

similar to to to pursue her say

54:18

ago aura or low doses of ketamine

54:21

was a don't recommend but the I

54:23

mean as a decision else that I

54:25

I've always struggled for words to the

54:27

dissociative experience. There's.

54:29

A lightness And there's a

54:31

conscious awareness of. The.

54:33

Body without being as identified

54:35

with the body is. So.

54:39

You can observe it. But. It

54:41

feels different. And

54:43

wouldn't be fair to say that it's

54:45

not as annoying as he usually is.

54:47

This man and nine. So

54:50

notice how you're able to filter a

54:52

lot of the discomfort in this pleasure

54:54

out of. The. Usual

54:56

pain situation. By.

54:58

Detaching from him, By

55:01

experiencing it differently, it's not. A

55:04

since you have to endure. It's

55:07

a sensation your body is giving you that

55:09

you can interpret in different ways. Never

55:12

people who. Might. Wonder if

55:14

this compartmentalizing in a way that has

55:16

long term harmful? I'm

55:18

not saying that's what it is button. Is

55:20

this just a different vantage point? How would

55:23

you can curse on the think about those?

55:25

Yes, I would say it's. Reinterpreting

55:27

the sensations and signals that you're

55:29

getting from that part of your

55:31

body. And. Your uncoupling

55:33

them from the usual sense of annoyance

55:36

and limitation that. Tends. To

55:38

actually make it worse out hundred on

55:40

a source? yeah and instead missing. Okay,

55:42

it's there until like it but it's

55:44

not bad. And that

55:46

capacity to rephrase to reprocess

55:49

the signal. Is

55:51

a powerful way house better managing

55:53

and filtering the heard out of.

55:57

Now. Please take you right in in touch her left

55:59

elbow and. let go and see

56:02

what happens to your left hand and arm. Yeah,

56:05

just more movement.

56:07

There's more forthcoming. Uh-huh. Good.

56:10

That's surprising. Yeah, I was

56:14

noticing how like my fingers kind

56:16

of got frozen in

56:18

this position. I thought that was interesting. I'm

56:21

not making too much out of it. But I was

56:23

saying... Hmm. Alright, you can

56:25

let it float back down now. And

56:29

how's your left hand and arm feeling now? Normal.

56:32

Normal. So you were

56:35

able to change sensation in both directions and

56:37

how's your how's your lower back feeling now? Feels

56:41

really good, actually. Yeah, so.

56:43

Terrific. That's remarkable. I'm

56:45

very glad. That's great. So

56:48

thank you for that. You're welcome. Where do you get my

56:50

bill? You

56:54

have my email. I'm really glad. Facebook's

56:58

$1,000. What

57:02

happened to the first one's always free? Oh wait,

57:04

no. That's not dealing. Not

57:07

hypnosis. Yeah, exactly. And if

57:09

someone's inducing that from a

57:12

self-hypnosis perspective, well let's just talk about it could

57:15

be in the context of reverie, it could be

57:17

in a different context. What are the steps that

57:19

they take or how do they self-induce

57:21

for something like that? Let's try that. If I wanted

57:23

to do that five minutes a day. If I wanted

57:25

to do it five minutes a day, you could remember

57:28

what I told you or you

57:30

could queue up the pain control app on

57:32

reverie and you get to hear my mellifluous

57:34

voice teaching you and

57:36

exercise. This, this. Yeah.

57:38

This dulcet tone. Dulcet tone. There you are. To

57:41

teach you how to do this and you could follow

57:43

along and it's interactive. So I'll ask

57:45

you is your hand floating? If it is, I'll tell you

57:47

one thing. If not, it's something else. So it's a branch

57:49

chain kind of response that I

57:52

tried to make as much like being across

57:54

the table or in my office as

57:56

I could. And not to beat the

57:58

dead horse of neurobiology but... just

58:00

to reinforce my understanding

58:02

from a neurobiological or

58:05

neuroanatomical perspective, what

58:07

is happening? So what's

58:09

happening is and we've got EEG studies,

58:11

we've got fMRI studies, we've got PET

58:13

studies showing that what's happening if you

58:15

think about it, that

58:17

pain is always a combination of

58:20

peripheral input through the lateral spinothalamic

58:22

tract, through the thalamus, to

58:24

the periacoductal gray and up to

58:27

the somatosensory cortex with input from

58:29

the salience network. So if

58:31

you just broke your arm, the salience

58:33

network's going, God, you're in trouble, you

58:36

better do something. But the problem is

58:38

because we're fairly pathetic physical creatures, we

58:41

have to take very good care of our

58:43

fragile bodies and so we have a brain

58:46

that is designed to help you recognize when

58:48

you're hurt and get help and

58:50

manage the pain. But for example, freeze,

58:52

not necessarily move so a predator could

58:54

detect you more easily. So

58:57

pain is a combination of those peripheral signals

58:59

coming in and what your brain decides is

59:02

wrong and what to do about it. And

59:04

so very often chronic pain is

59:07

really not anything you need to do anything about but

59:09

your brain often treats it as if it were acute

59:11

pain. Here I am and so it derails you and

59:13

it annoys you and it keeps you from doing what

59:16

you want to do and the more annoying it is,

59:18

the more attention you pay to it. It's like the

59:20

noisy kid in the classroom. And

59:23

so you can learn to modulate that. So

59:25

we showed in one experiment with Stanford students,

59:27

we gave them electric shocks, we

59:30

measured somatosensory of oat responses. So

59:32

you can see waveforms coming out

59:34

up to a second after the

59:36

shocks are administered. And in the

59:38

hypnosis condition, we were able

59:40

to stop the P100, the first response

59:43

cold. There was no response of the

59:45

brain when they were in hypnosis in

59:48

the first tenth of a second. And the

59:50

P200 and P300 were half as

59:52

big as ordinarily. So within a

59:54

fraction of a second, the brain

59:56

is processing the signals differently. And

59:59

as I mentioned, there studies that show you can turn

1:00:01

out pain

1:00:18

rather than diminish it by being so

1:00:20

annoyed that it's happening. Another thing that we

1:00:23

know is going on in the brain is

1:00:25

the anterior cingulate is rich in

1:00:27

GABA receptors, gamma-amino-butyric acid,

1:00:30

their inhibitory neurotransmitter. Highly

1:00:32

imitizable people have more binding of

1:00:35

GABA in the anterior cingulate

1:00:37

than low imitizable people. So they can

1:00:39

use it to be their own little

1:00:41

drug dispensaries to inhibit the

1:00:43

anxiety reaction in the dorsal

1:00:46

anterior cingulate cortex. So there

1:00:48

are many understandable neurophysiological ways by

1:00:51

which the brain can literally take

1:00:53

the strain out of pain. Also

1:00:56

wondering, I mean you'd have

1:00:58

to test this of course, but if hypnotizability

1:01:00

as assessed by various

1:01:03

means, whether it's the

1:01:05

eye roll test or a drop of blood

1:01:08

and looking at the

1:01:10

genetic profile, if there might

1:01:12

be some correlation to high

1:01:14

response, baseline response, low response

1:01:17

for psychedelic-assisted treatments as

1:01:19

well. Because as it stands

1:01:21

currently, there's a lot of

1:01:23

shooting in the dark. I'm not aware of

1:01:25

any assessment that determines if someone is likely

1:01:27

to be a high-responder to psychedelic disease. But

1:01:30

as we're talking about it, there seem to be a lot

1:01:33

of parallels. I think there

1:01:35

are. It wouldn't be that hard to test. I mean, somebody has

1:01:37

to fund it of course, but science takes money. But I

1:01:39

mean, there are lots of assessments for,

1:01:41

let's just say, determining the strength

1:01:43

of a mystical experience and how

1:01:45

that's correlated to therapeutic outcomes. Highly

1:01:48

correlated, it turns out, at least to psilocybin and so

1:01:50

on and so forth, there are all the standard assessments

1:01:52

that you might have for depression

1:01:54

and Hamdi and so on or GID

1:01:57

or whatever, all these various things. But

1:01:59

in terms of... determining in

1:02:01

the process of patient disorder

1:02:34

and blocking serotonin and uptake

1:02:38

and all this stuff. It's just once or

1:02:40

twice and the brain is like reset, it's

1:02:42

rebooted. That's where I

1:02:44

think this interaction with the default mode

1:02:46

network activity is very interesting because I

1:02:48

think people reset their expectations

1:02:51

of who they are, what they are and

1:02:53

what their symptoms mean in a way that

1:02:55

lasts. There's now a

1:02:57

lot of, of course there's often psychotherapeutic

1:02:59

assistance with the psychedelic tissues which is

1:03:02

important but some of that could be

1:03:04

hypnotic instruction too and I don't think much of that

1:03:06

has been done but it would

1:03:08

be very interesting to do. I agree with

1:03:10

you. It would be super interesting. Yeah, there's

1:03:12

a broad canvas still

1:03:14

remaining for all sorts of research. I'm

1:03:17

glad to hear that. So let

1:03:19

me ask about a few things. First,

1:03:21

you used wording that was along the lines of,

1:03:24

I heard you mentioned at least twice, filtering the

1:03:27

hurt from the pain, am I getting this right? Right.

1:03:30

Could you elaborate on that and

1:03:33

then the second

1:03:35

piece is much earlier you were

1:03:38

referring to the say, I don't want to

1:03:40

call them below hypnotizable

1:03:43

people who fall into this category, nicknamed the researcher,

1:03:45

who could still use it and I

1:03:48

thought I heard you say something like framing

1:03:50

issues is for us not against us, something

1:03:52

like that. Right. So could you

1:03:54

first talk about filtering the hurt from the pain and

1:03:56

then this for us versus

1:03:58

against us? Well, the

1:04:00

filter that hurt from the pain is, you know,

1:04:02

it sounds kind of paradoxical. What are you talking

1:04:05

about pain hurts? You know, but

1:04:07

the degree which it hurts has to do with

1:04:09

more than just The signal traveling

1:04:11

through the lateral spinal thalamic tract. It

1:04:13

has to do with how you interpret

1:04:15

that signal We have all kinds

1:04:17

of somatic signals Some of which could

1:04:19

be on the verge of discomfort some of which aren't

1:04:22

and our brains job is to interpret them and

1:04:24

decide what To do about them. Yep, and

1:04:26

so you can have a signal That

1:04:29

doesn't necessarily automatically convey that something

1:04:31

is wrong with the body It

1:04:34

may be just an intense ceiling,

1:04:36

you know It's like the difference between you

1:04:38

know An enthusiastic hug and a

1:04:40

squeeze that hurts and there's a line in

1:04:42

there somewhere where that you cross and it's

1:04:44

pretty obvious But there's also an area of

1:04:46

interpretation or the ostentatious long hug There are

1:04:48

a lot of guys here who do long hugs.

1:04:50

They say I'm a hugger when you stretch

1:04:52

your hands Yeah, you have 20 second hug.

1:04:54

There's a point where it gets uncomfortable. It

1:04:56

gets uncomfortable. That's right and it's usually after the

1:04:58

first second or two, but That's

1:05:01

right And so the brain is doing its

1:05:04

interpretive job of making meaning out of

1:05:06

the sensory experience One of

1:05:08

the other things that we know happens in

1:05:10

the brain with hypnosis is higher functional connectivity

1:05:12

between the dorsal Lateral prefrontal cortex and the

1:05:14

insula This is this little island that means

1:05:17

island inland and the mid front part of

1:05:19

the brain that is a mind-body conduit So

1:05:21

it's a place where the brain controls what's

1:05:23

happening in the body How much

1:05:25

gastric acid you secrete your autonomic

1:05:28

arousal for example and also

1:05:30

it receives information Interoception from

1:05:32

the body. How is the body reacting

1:05:34

to things and hypnosis?

1:05:36

intensifies disconnection and intensifies

1:05:39

coordinated activity between the

1:05:42

executive control network and the insula and

1:05:44

so it's a way in which the

1:05:47

brain can Intensify its reading and understanding

1:05:49

and interpretation of what's happening in the

1:05:51

body And so, you know athletes who

1:05:53

are pushing their bodies to do things that most

1:05:55

of the rest of us would say ouch You

1:05:57

know, I can't do this interpreting

1:06:00

that as I'm pushing my body as

1:06:02

hard and as far as I can

1:06:04

to get what I want. So

1:06:07

they will interpret things that everyday people

1:06:09

would interpret as putting yourself through pain

1:06:12

as training, doing what you

1:06:14

need to do. That runner's

1:06:16

high is in part composed of signals

1:06:18

that many of us would just consider

1:06:20

painful. So that's part of

1:06:23

what the brain does and that's part of

1:06:25

what hypnosis helps us to regulate and control.

1:06:28

How much of it is pain and how much it is

1:06:30

not. The

1:06:32

interpretation of pain, the meaning of it has a

1:06:34

lot to do with how much it hurts. What

1:06:38

about before us versus against us?

1:06:41

People who are experienced with hypnosis, that is people

1:06:43

who know that people actually listen and respond to

1:06:45

what you say, will say the dumbest thing you

1:06:47

can say to somebody is don't think about purple

1:06:49

elephants. What are you going to think about? The

1:06:52

best way to change behavior is

1:06:54

intermittent positive reinforcement. You

1:06:57

want the process of change to

1:06:59

be what Chik-Shen-Mei called autotelic. You

1:07:01

want to feel good about doing

1:07:03

it. So an example where

1:07:05

we do that in hypnosis and

1:07:07

where even non-hypnotizable people can respond

1:07:09

is when I try to

1:07:11

teach someone how to stop smoking, which was

1:07:13

the first experiment we did with reverie, I

1:07:16

don't say cigarettes will

1:07:18

taste terrible. My professor at medical school

1:07:20

did that. He said your

1:07:22

cigarettes will taste like horseshit and the guy lit up

1:07:24

the cigarettes. So thank you doctor. And

1:07:27

he got a frantic hold two hours later.

1:07:29

He said, doc, my house smells terrible. My

1:07:32

house smells like horseshit. Right. And

1:07:34

Hackett said, while you're smoking, he said, no, but I forgot to

1:07:36

tell you that my wife is a smoker. So

1:07:38

he had to hypnotize him and saying that only

1:07:41

your cigarette, you know, it doesn't work. You

1:07:43

focus on what you're for, respect

1:07:46

and protect your body. For my body,

1:07:48

smoking is a poison. I

1:07:50

need my body to live. I owe my

1:07:52

body respect and protection. You would never put

1:07:54

tar and nicotine filled smoke in your baby's

1:07:56

lungs. Your Body is as dependent

1:07:58

on you as your baby. The was so treat

1:08:01

your body with the same respect to give

1:08:03

a child and so you're focusing on on

1:08:05

with you have an urge to smoke and

1:08:07

I was you feel better of with on

1:08:09

nicotine or nights but whether you are going

1:08:11

to commit to respect and protect your body

1:08:13

and that way you can feel good from

1:08:15

the moment you make the commitment to do

1:08:17

and I'm being a good parent to my

1:08:19

own body so even people who aren't him

1:08:21

the ties of or and get that concept

1:08:24

and say I'm not going to worry about

1:08:26

mired. I have lots of urges I

1:08:28

don't act on. I don't have to act

1:08:30

on this one just as I have a

1:08:32

So I had one alcoholic. The way I

1:08:34

was trying to use that to help them

1:08:36

stopped his drinking. He said oh you mean

1:08:38

sorta like the Bodies to Temple of the

1:08:41

Soul. And I said yes, you

1:08:43

got. A son and he stopped

1:08:45

drinking. He is. so it's It's a matter

1:08:47

of finding a way to formulate the resolution

1:08:49

of a problem so that you start feeling

1:08:51

good from the moment you commit to doing.

1:08:54

Before. You know that you're going To stop

1:08:57

smoking. And we're getting ratify people

1:08:59

stop just like that and the surprise

1:09:01

themselves as one things I love about

1:09:03

working with hypnosis is people are surprised

1:09:05

at what they can do because they're

1:09:08

trying out being different and see what

1:09:10

it feels like. Would.

1:09:12

You think is happening with

1:09:14

the addiction specifically whether it's

1:09:16

nicotine, alcohol or other. Why

1:09:18

does this work where others

1:09:20

things sale and I should

1:09:22

ask? actually. Just seat and

1:09:25

said table for this. How

1:09:27

does. He have

1:09:29

no says compare am shirt, a practitioner

1:09:31

and so on which can. Ask

1:09:35

about scoring. Standardized

1:09:37

things are like Cbt for instance,

1:09:39

but. Nothingness. Saying

1:09:41

they were the standard I so they can

1:09:43

track. Thanks! How does hypnosis compared to other

1:09:46

types of interventions for addiction? Well.

1:09:48

The results we get was it does. This

1:09:50

is about one in four, one out of

1:09:52

five people just flat out stop and the

1:09:54

rest her down by about fifty percent. And

1:09:56

how much the smoking? That's roughly comparable. To

1:09:59

the use of or. The cleaner be properly

1:10:01

on or Nicorette patches it's not very

1:10:03

different, depends on the population but is

1:10:05

about as good his at the same.

1:10:07

people I know know for sure as

1:10:09

they're done in different contexts, but it's

1:10:12

not. Ben and I have people who

1:10:14

are surprised by how easy they said

1:10:16

like a lever was pulled. And

1:10:18

I just don't worry about anymore, I

1:10:20

just don't think about now doesn't have

1:10:22

with everyone know but every time we

1:10:24

feel good any time we can anybody

1:10:26

to stop. The. Most reversible cause

1:10:29

of cancer in in the world. Is.

1:10:31

Cigarette smoking. So anybody you

1:10:33

get. That's. A good thing and even

1:10:36

people were as it is currently with hypnotize ability

1:10:38

so or him it as or people are more

1:10:40

likely to stop. using. This approach.

1:10:43

But. There are some non him at eyes

1:10:45

or people who do too because they get

1:10:47

the concept even if they don't get the

1:10:49

feeling. That. Comes along with it. And

1:10:51

the other thing that keeps him mine in

1:10:53

addiction medicine. Is. That the

1:10:56

odd thing is that it's not actually the high

1:10:58

from the drug that hooks people. It's

1:11:00

is a chase is better than the

1:11:02

catch so you get more Me: The

1:11:05

limbic opening secreted. When. You're going

1:11:07

through a scenario of scoring a drugs.

1:11:10

And when you're actually taking the drug. So

1:11:12

it's the anticipation of pleasure that

1:11:14

really gets to people and from my

1:11:16

point of view, using hypnosis that fertile

1:11:19

ground for intervention. We're just I can

1:11:21

make you feel good. Without.

1:11:23

Chasing after the drug I can make you feel

1:11:25

good to a you felt when you hide years

1:11:27

six month old child because you doing the same

1:11:29

thing with your body now. And that's

1:11:32

a good thing. So helping people.

1:11:34

To. Focus on with their for. Is.

1:11:37

A crucial part of the therapeutic strategies

1:11:39

and makes it work. What?

1:11:41

Is the oldest that you're

1:11:44

aware of Documentation of hypnosis

1:11:46

or something resembling hypnosis. In.

1:11:48

i was in bali watching translators and

1:11:50

the difference in bali and this has

1:11:52

gone on for thousands of years they

1:11:54

go into a trance and their patients

1:11:56

watch them so they can of go

1:11:59

into the soldiers and start chanting

1:12:01

and singing. The idea is if you watch it

1:12:03

as kind of hypnotic and you'll kind of go

1:12:05

along with them. But from a Western point of

1:12:07

view, it started in the late 18th century

1:12:10

with Franz Anton Mesmer, who

1:12:12

was a Viennese physician. Hence

1:12:15

Mesmerized. Mesmerized, that's right. And

1:12:17

he called it animal

1:12:19

magnetism. And he thought it

1:12:21

actually had to do with changing the magnetic

1:12:23

field in a patient's body. And he

1:12:25

had to look at tubs filled with iron

1:12:28

filings. And he had a magnet. In fact,

1:12:30

the magic wand in magic shows comes

1:12:32

originally from a magnetic rod that

1:12:34

was used to hypnotize people. Yeah, that's 1.0.

1:12:36

Yeah, that's right. That's right. From

1:12:39

animal magnetism to transcranial magnetic

1:12:41

stimulation. That's right. And

1:12:43

he was very popular. He left his wife

1:12:45

and family in Vienna. He moved to Paris.

1:12:48

He was out competing the leading French physicians of

1:12:50

the day. Voltaire wrote to his brother, we

1:12:52

did everything we could to save father's life.

1:12:54

We even sent the doctors away. And

1:12:57

if you think about the major treatment at the

1:12:59

time in France, it was bloodletting. France

1:13:01

was the world's leading exporter of leeches. And

1:13:04

unless you happen to have congestive heart failure.

1:13:06

France was the world's leading exporter of leeches.

1:13:08

Leeches, because that's how they didn't. And

1:13:11

they still in some like hand damage things,

1:13:13

they use leeches to suck blood

1:13:15

out of certain regions in the hand and all that.

1:13:17

But at the time that was the major

1:13:20

treatment. And he was so popular. And

1:13:22

the cool thing, if you read about

1:13:24

what his office was like, he was

1:13:26

cheerful. It was brightly lit. Patients would

1:13:28

hang around all day boasting about what

1:13:30

they'd done with animal magnetism. And

1:13:32

the typical French physician's office was

1:13:34

truly grim. It was dark, no

1:13:37

decorations on the walls. Patients were

1:13:39

getting bad news from doctors. I once

1:13:41

had the opportunity to visit Anna Freud when I

1:13:44

was a medical student in London. And

1:13:46

she asked me if I was going to

1:13:48

become an analyst. And I tried to

1:13:50

be diplomatic and say, well, I'm

1:13:52

not sure. She said, so you're not going to be an

1:13:54

analyst. She wasn't messing around. You know, why?

1:13:56

And I said, well, I don't like the passivity.

1:13:58

I don't like. not offering help,

1:14:00

trying to help fix things with people. And

1:14:03

she said, you need to understand something. When

1:14:05

my father was training as a doctor, it

1:14:08

was considered a waste of time for a doctor to

1:14:10

listen to a patient. Patients were there

1:14:13

to listen to doctors. And I was humbled by

1:14:15

that. I thought, you know, it was a very

1:14:17

good point. And she said, it's

1:14:19

hard to be analyzed because

1:14:21

analysis is a liberation from your parents.

1:14:23

And that's difficult if your parents are

1:14:25

analysts. And she knew better

1:14:28

than anyone, because her father was her

1:14:30

analyst, actually. Oh, boy. But

1:14:32

so doctors. There's a lot to unpack there.

1:14:34

Yeah, there was a lot in the doctor-patient

1:14:36

relationship in that time that was pretty grim.

1:14:39

And so the fact that Mesmer was talking

1:14:41

to patients and listening to them made

1:14:43

him very popular. So they got

1:14:45

King Louie to convene a panel

1:14:47

to investigate Mesmer. The

1:14:49

panel was very interesting. Our own Benjamin Franklin

1:14:51

was on it. He was having a lot

1:14:53

of fun. Why was Mesmer being investigated? Because

1:14:55

he was competing so successfully for his doctors.

1:14:59

The French doctor lobby. The French

1:15:01

doctor lobby. Pulled out

1:15:03

the stops. They said that his theory was

1:15:05

all wrong, that he wasn't really changing magnetic

1:15:07

fields, which is correct.

1:15:10

It's true. They concluded. And

1:15:12

another member of the panel was

1:15:14

Lavoisier, the brilliant French chemist

1:15:16

who developed oxygen chemistry and

1:15:18

who, six months before he was beheaded in

1:15:21

the French Revolution, discovered the

1:15:23

idea of the Gross National Product. He was

1:15:25

a genius. And one

1:15:27

of the third other panel members

1:15:29

was a doctor named Dr. Guillotin,

1:15:32

the inventor of the Guillotine. He

1:15:35

kind of created the mind body problem. What

1:15:37

a panel. Yeah, what a panel. So.

1:15:40

Like the setup for a joke. Yeah, it is, but it

1:15:42

wasn't, unfortunately. They concluded that hypnosis

1:15:45

was nothing but heated imagination. And

1:15:47

you know what? I've heard worse

1:15:49

definitions than hypnosis. But that

1:15:51

was it for Mesmer. And so,

1:15:53

you know, it set in motion a

1:15:55

pattern of why hypnosis

1:15:57

is just an underdeveloped resource, is that

1:15:59

people. think it's either dangerous or

1:16:02

it's valuable

1:16:04

effective treatment that we what

1:16:11

is if you had to pick one or two

1:16:15

surprising patient

1:16:17

outcomes or changes you

1:16:21

could have predicted the outcomes? I have 50% chance this person has a

1:16:23

3% reduction in A, B and C symptoms. But

1:16:28

were there any that really stand out to you

1:16:30

as surprising? The first one

1:16:32

was the one that got me to decide

1:16:34

that yes, this happens to me. My father's interest,

1:16:36

but I'm not going to let that deter me

1:16:39

from something I'm interested in. And

1:16:41

it was the first patient I ever used to have noticed

1:16:43

with. It was on my pediatrics

1:16:45

rotation at Children's Hospital in Boston. The

1:16:48

nurse says, Spiegel, your patient is in

1:16:50

room 342. She's in

1:16:52

status asthmaticus. She's been hospitalized

1:16:54

every month for three months and she's back again.

1:16:57

And she hasn't responded to epinephrine twice

1:17:00

and we're going to maybe give her

1:17:02

general anesthesia and put her on

1:17:04

steroids. So I walk in the room following

1:17:07

the sound of the wheezes down the hall.

1:17:09

Pretty 15-year-old girl bolt upright in bed, struggling

1:17:11

for breath. Knuckles white, mother standing

1:17:13

there crying. I didn't know what to

1:17:15

do, but I had taken a hypnosis

1:17:17

course. So I said, well, would

1:17:19

you like to learn a breathing exercise? And she

1:17:21

nods. So I get her hypnotized and then

1:17:23

I break into a sweat and I think, wait a minute, we

1:17:25

haven't gotten a hassling of course. So

1:17:28

I said something very subtle and

1:17:30

clever. I said, each breath you take will be

1:17:32

a little deeper and a little easier. And

1:17:35

within five minutes, she's lying back in bed. She's

1:17:37

not wheezing anymore. Her mother stopped crying. Nurse

1:17:40

runs out of the room. And if

1:17:42

you think about the dynamic of that, I mean, it

1:17:44

was stunning to me. I couldn't believe it. Each

1:17:48

time she tried to breathe and had trouble, she

1:17:50

got more and more anxious because she thinks I'm

1:17:52

going to not be able to breathe. It's very

1:17:54

frightening. So you have her

1:17:56

anxiety building like a snowball rolling

1:17:58

downhill on top of the physical.

1:18:00

sensations. So in comes my intern.

1:18:03

I know

1:18:37

isn't true. So take me off the case if

1:18:39

you want. So he storms out of the room.

1:18:41

He finds the chief resident and the attending and

1:18:43

they have a council of war. And

1:18:45

they came back with a radical solution. They said let's ask the patient. You know,

1:18:47

I don't think they'd ever thought of that. Breakthrough. Yeah,

1:18:54

breakthrough. And she said, oh, I like this. I want

1:18:56

to keep doing this. And she was

1:18:58

hospitalized one month after that a month later

1:19:00

and went on to study to be a

1:19:02

respiratory therapist. And I thought that anything that

1:19:05

could help the patient that much that fast

1:19:08

frustrate the head nurse violated non-existent Massachusetts law had to be worth looking into. And

1:19:10

I've been doing it ever since. But you know, the nice thing is you can

1:19:12

see it in front of your eyes. You see whether it's going to be a

1:19:14

respiratory therapy. And

1:19:19

I think that's going to help, you know, just like you

1:19:21

with your pain, you know, it's the same thing. If it's

1:19:23

going to happen, your brain is wired to every part

1:19:26

of the body to make it happen

1:19:28

quickly. And it doesn't always happen, but

1:19:30

it often does. I'd say the next

1:19:32

major patient that really struck me when

1:19:34

I first got to Stanford, I was

1:19:36

assigned to the Palo Alto VA Medical

1:19:38

Center. And there was

1:19:40

an army cook who had been mustered

1:19:42

out of the army because after

1:19:44

19 years of good service, something

1:19:47

happened during the Tet Offensive. And he just grabbed

1:19:49

an ambulance and some guns and ran out in

1:19:52

the jungle and started shooting at what he thought

1:19:54

were Viet Cong. And he

1:19:56

seemed psychotic. They couldn't contain him.

1:19:58

He was agitated. He

1:20:00

was emotionally uncontrolled. He wasn't responding to

1:20:02

meds and He wound

1:20:05

up being discharged from the army and

1:20:07

spending 11 months in a state

1:20:09

mental hospital in California and a social

1:20:12

worker there Interviewed him

1:20:14

and said he's not a drug user. He's you

1:20:16

know, he doesn't seem psychotic to me There's something

1:20:18

wrong, but I think it's post-traumatic So

1:20:21

I saw him at the VA and

1:20:24

he told me that something happened during the

1:20:26

dead offensive And it had something to do

1:20:28

with a Vietnamese child that he had informally

1:20:30

adopted He was like the youngest of 13

1:20:33

children. He identified with young kids.

1:20:35

This kid had been badly burned

1:20:38

was on a crunch Nobody

1:20:40

seemed to claim him and so he just

1:20:42

kind of took over and they became buddies

1:20:44

and During the dead

1:20:46

offensive. I Find out

1:20:49

in hypnosis. He comes upon Boy's

1:20:52

body and he realized he's been killed and

1:20:54

in reliving this in hypnosis and he was very

1:20:56

hypnotizable He says oh my god,

1:20:59

they hit G wing. Oh

1:21:01

my god. They ain't gotta kill kids They

1:21:03

ain't gotta kill kids So he's screaming and

1:21:05

crying and then he's going into setting up

1:21:08

defenses on a water tower because he thinks we're going

1:21:10

to be overrun by the at Kong and he's going

1:21:12

through all of that and I

1:21:14

move him then the remarkable thing was he

1:21:16

was very intensely involved in all this but

1:21:19

very malleable So I'd say okay we're gonna

1:21:21

change times now and we're gonna go

1:21:23

to the time when you collected his body and buried him and

1:21:26

So he does that and he says ashes

1:21:28

to ashes and dust to dust I guess

1:21:30

that's it and then he starts banging on

1:21:32

the arm of his chair And he says

1:21:34

if I'd only taken you over to G

1:21:36

wing man, you wouldn't be there It's all

1:21:38

my fault and I said tell me

1:21:40

something would this boy? Blame

1:21:43

you for what happened and

1:21:45

he starts to smile. He says no. No,

1:21:47

he said you're number one cook You're my

1:21:49

number one cook number one cook. He knew

1:21:51

he was gonna die that he

1:21:54

was crippled He looked like he had arthritis and

1:21:57

so I said, okay, we're gonna go to his

1:21:59

funeral Now. I know we're going

1:22:01

to go to a different time. We're gonna retire. Before.

1:22:04

The funeral when you had a party

1:22:06

form a happy memory because he often

1:22:08

with Greece. The. Reason: it hurts

1:22:10

so much. Is. That you loved

1:22:12

and cared about each other. So much

1:22:15

so there's something positive behind. The

1:22:17

grease face and so he says

1:22:19

are you look so happy It's

1:22:21

the donor Dollies product tastes and

1:22:24

my sister said i like to

1:22:26

train for a present for you.

1:22:28

You never seen electric food before

1:22:30

have you know Vietnam and found

1:22:32

nowhere roads and and turned out

1:22:34

later that the train was actually

1:22:37

some Spiegel Brothers. Apartments.

1:22:40

Or ago. And. He says

1:22:42

so happy you know number One foot

1:22:44

So I said okay. We're. Gonna

1:22:47

put as much of this as you don't want

1:22:49

to think about now behind a filter to be

1:22:51

there she needed that. You're going to remember two

1:22:53

things about this you're going to remember. Hearing.

1:22:56

Him and you're going to remember that birthday. And

1:22:59

so he synergy sweating his shoes going

1:23:01

down his cheeks and I run him

1:23:03

out of the hypnosis and he looked

1:23:06

a little sort of days to looks

1:23:08

a little confused and I said. Where.

1:23:11

Do you remember. And he said doc.

1:23:13

I remember a grave and. I

1:23:16

was it. A so he

1:23:18

was a way of helping him. he

1:23:20

knowledge is Greece. Begin. To

1:23:22

go through a process of building a see

1:23:24

it from two points of view. If

1:23:27

he had this time with this kid he made

1:23:29

a boy have these were made him happy and

1:23:31

that can be taken away even though he died

1:23:33

and he was in the hustle for while longer.

1:23:36

He practiced at every day. Sydney Lord he

1:23:38

was doing yourself a those just ten he

1:23:41

was discharged he was upset he couldn't get

1:23:43

back in the army he on a to

1:23:45

but he'd been discharged. His brother,

1:23:47

who is a police officer in Chicago

1:23:49

is counting on. a

1:23:53

week process degree compensate me it

1:23:55

just cuts oliver him as started

1:23:57

to look like use her voice

1:24:00

although he wasn't, but dis-control of emotion.

1:24:02

And so I had him grieve his

1:24:04

brother's death in the same way. And

1:24:06

he got discharged. He was

1:24:09

spending his time training teenagers how

1:24:11

to do long-distance cycling. And he was out

1:24:14

of the hospital and doing fine. So I

1:24:17

thought that anything that

1:24:19

can help people in these rather extreme

1:24:21

situations come to a

1:24:23

new point of view in a hurry about that

1:24:26

was worth pursuing. And I've been doing

1:24:28

it ever since. And we've

1:24:30

had people in Rovary, a guy who

1:24:32

was in his home for three years.

1:24:34

He had the social phobia where he

1:24:36

just couldn't stand to leave his house.

1:24:38

He was there for three years. And

1:24:40

we taught him to use self-hypnosis to

1:24:42

deal with his anxiety. And

1:24:44

he's out in the world again. He's living a normal

1:24:46

life. So it is

1:24:49

surprising how much it can help people in our

1:24:51

hurry. What a remarkable story. I

1:24:54

want to ask you to just describe Rovary

1:24:56

for folks in a minute. But first I

1:24:58

want to ask, in that circumstance where you

1:25:00

have this veteran

1:25:02

who some think

1:25:05

psychotic, who is getting

1:25:07

really animated, heated, sweating, to

1:25:10

maintain your composure and

1:25:13

direct that environment, that person

1:25:15

in that state, what

1:25:18

does it take to get to that point where you're comfortable doing

1:25:21

that? That's a

1:25:23

very astute question because the

1:25:25

intensity of it is remarkable. We actually have a

1:25:27

grainy old video of it. But I

1:25:30

sometimes get surprised myself. I

1:25:32

was actually holding onto his arm the whole time.

1:25:35

I didn't even realize it at the time. But

1:25:37

I was trying to connect with him so that

1:25:39

whatever else was going on, he knew I was

1:25:41

there with him. And

1:25:43

I guess two things. And

1:25:45

one was it's a

1:25:47

characteristic of highly empathizable people

1:25:50

that they can be having intense

1:25:53

experiences and yet be

1:25:55

connected and contained. That is, they're absorbed in

1:25:57

it, but they're not just out of control.

1:26:00

not just wild. You know, they're

1:26:02

expressing their emotion but they're also able to

1:26:04

modulate and control it and focus on this

1:26:07

sort of narrow container of being

1:26:09

intense in reliving what happened but

1:26:12

also somehow aware that it is a

1:26:14

reliving of the event that isn't actually

1:26:16

happening. And so I figured

1:26:18

you got to have the reins of the

1:26:20

horse when you're riding fast but it was

1:26:23

clear to me that he was listening to

1:26:25

me and what struck me

1:26:27

the most and what reassured me frankly was

1:26:30

that he could change times very

1:26:32

easily, he could change mood. So

1:26:34

literally transitioned from screaming,

1:26:36

I should have taken you over the hooch man, it's

1:26:38

all my fault, to ashes

1:26:40

to ashes and dust to dust was a few seconds,

1:26:42

you know, but he was following me and you know

1:26:44

if I saw that he wasn't I'd

1:26:47

spend more time on the control issue.

1:26:49

But it's also because the intensity had

1:26:51

to do with something we were meaningfully

1:26:54

working on. That is I wasn't

1:26:56

doing it just to have him show off how emotional he

1:26:58

could be. I was doing it to help him cue up

1:27:01

into perspective the thing that was upsetting him

1:27:03

so much and help him to

1:27:05

process it in a way that made him feel

1:27:08

better about it. So I knew I was doing

1:27:10

something that I thought could help him. And

1:27:12

I'll tell you that in some of these intense

1:27:15

kinds of hypnotic therapies, I'm a

1:27:17

little dissociated too, you know, just saying it's a

1:27:19

smart hypothesis that knows who is hypnotizing whom. But

1:27:21

I'm kind of listening

1:27:23

to my own mind saying, what's

1:27:26

the next step? What do we need to do here? And

1:27:28

I'm thinking about it for a second and saying, is this

1:27:30

really the right thing? Well, let's try it out and see.

1:27:33

And so I'm also testing his response and

1:27:35

if I see that we're not getting anywhere,

1:27:37

then I'll change course. And

1:27:40

it takes some time in training to just sort of know

1:27:42

the direction you want to go in and why you're doing

1:27:44

this. And is it really going to

1:27:46

help him or is it just putting on a show?

1:27:48

And it was clear to me that's what he needed

1:27:50

to do. And you get this sort of deep connection

1:27:54

with somebody that they can feel you and you can

1:27:56

feel them, you know, that he knows what I'm trying

1:27:58

to do and I know what he's... needs to

1:28:00

do? I think there might be

1:28:03

something to the correspondence

1:28:05

of trait hypnotizability and good

1:28:07

candidacy for psychedelic assisted

1:28:10

therapies. I really do because that way

1:28:12

you just described also I think would be

1:28:14

mirrored in many patient reports

1:28:16

who exhibit strong

1:28:19

durable outcomes. They're able to switch

1:28:21

from one thing to the next very quickly from

1:28:25

one maybe very positive emotional valence to

1:28:27

one very negative emotional valence and then

1:28:29

back and forth while still maintaining

1:28:32

some semblance of observer

1:28:35

awareness. Does that make sense?

1:28:37

It is very very curious.

1:28:40

Who is Reverie designed

1:28:42

for? Reverie is

1:28:44

designed for anybody who's curious about dealing

1:28:47

with their problems. If you just want to

1:28:49

learn something about your ability to explore and

1:28:51

change your mental states it's useful. It's

1:28:54

a tool. It's more like an antibiotic

1:28:56

than a vitamin. If you've got a

1:28:58

problem you can try and see if

1:29:01

it'll help. People with pain, stress,

1:29:03

insomnia that's our most popular use people getting to sleep

1:29:05

or getting back to sleep. I used to worry that

1:29:07

Reverie wasn't quite as good as being in my office

1:29:09

with me and then I thought if you wake up

1:29:12

at 3 in the morning and need to get back

1:29:14

to sleep you probably don't want me in your bedroom

1:29:17

helping you do it. You probably don't want to

1:29:19

be in the bedroom at 3 in the morning.

1:29:21

That's exactly right. It's

1:29:23

very useful for dealing with

1:29:26

phobias like airplane phobias, claustrophobia.

1:29:28

I had a lovely

1:29:30

woman who had an obsessive compulsive

1:29:32

disorder oral life and claustrophobia. I

1:29:35

was diagnosed recently with cancer and had to have

1:29:37

a scan in an

1:29:39

enclosed tube and just was

1:29:42

freaked out about doing it. I had her picture

1:29:45

doing two things that made her feel

1:29:48

better. One is just floating somewhere

1:29:50

she felt comfortable and she said, I remember

1:29:52

floating in the Dead Sea. I

1:29:54

thought for a cancer patient that might not be

1:29:56

the ideal image but the intense

1:29:59

salinity of the it, he makes you float

1:30:01

like a cork and so she liked it. So

1:30:03

I said okay we'll do that and

1:30:05

she had a very loving sister in New York who would come

1:30:07

out to visit her and I said and I

1:30:09

want you to imagine that your sister is standing next

1:30:11

to that scanner giving you a hug and

1:30:14

reassuring you and she came out of it

1:30:16

and she started to cry and she said for

1:30:18

the first time I think I can do this you

1:30:20

know I can actually do this. I mean she was

1:30:22

afraid to go in an elevator by

1:30:25

herself who was too scary she'd wait in the

1:30:27

house. I know multiple people who have this issue

1:30:29

of elevators airplanes. And with airplanes

1:30:31

I have people imagine they're floating

1:30:33

with the plane the way you take a roller coaster

1:30:36

ride don't fight the plane float with it and

1:30:38

see the plane is an extension of your body like

1:30:41

a bicycle. If you want to get somewhere faster you're

1:30:43

using the plane as an extension of your body

1:30:45

the pilot is an extension of your mind. You

1:30:48

chose an airline that has good pilots and

1:30:51

he's or she is an extension of your

1:30:53

mind. So concepts like that

1:30:55

can help people do self-hypnosis and

1:30:57

get from a play point A to point B.

1:31:00

So that's good and

1:31:02

then for habit problems like smoking

1:31:05

or drinking or eating badly

1:31:07

you know you can learn to eat like a

1:31:09

gourmet you can enjoy eating more

1:31:11

while you eat healthier food by using

1:31:14

self-hypnosis to do that. What have you

1:31:16

used if anything self-hypnosis for

1:31:18

on yourself? I

1:31:20

had recurrent dislocation on my

1:31:23

shoulder and I realized I needed surgery

1:31:25

done. It's a three-hour operation

1:31:27

it's a big deal. My left shoulder

1:31:29

reconstructed. It's a lot of fun isn't

1:31:31

it? Yeah so I use general anesthesia

1:31:33

for the surgery itself but afterwards I

1:31:36

just did self-hypnosis for the pain control you

1:31:39

know and it was a mass

1:31:41

general and I wasn't supposed to read my record

1:31:43

but I worked there. The nurse

1:31:45

kind of looks at me like and the

1:31:47

rest wrote in my record patient

1:31:50

using very little pain medication we

1:31:52

mustn't have cut any nerves. Now

1:31:55

you know I've got a scar from here to

1:31:57

here I can tell you they cut nerves but it's just

1:31:59

me. misunderstanding that the body is just

1:32:01

like a broken car. You just gotta

1:32:04

incision, ingestion, or injection. You

1:32:07

gotta do something to the body. Rather

1:32:09

than teach the person to use the control

1:32:11

system that we're all born with, this three

1:32:13

pound object at the top of

1:32:15

our shoulders, that is connected to

1:32:18

every part of the body and helps to control

1:32:20

it. And why on earth shouldn't

1:32:22

we be able to use that better? It doesn't

1:32:24

come with a user's manual. So

1:32:26

you gotta figure out how to do it, but

1:32:28

it makes a huge difference. And

1:32:30

so, you know, hypnosis is not

1:32:33

a commodity, it's a skill to be

1:32:35

shared. And that's one reason actually it's

1:32:37

underutilized. As you know, I

1:32:39

don't have a bunch of ex cheerleaders going

1:32:41

to doctor's offices telling them use hypnosis, but

1:32:44

drug companies do. And

1:32:46

you know, I'm a doctor, I prescribe meds, but

1:32:48

there are many times when doing something like this

1:32:51

is much better and safer and

1:32:53

more effective. Could

1:32:55

also be given

1:32:57

the very favorable risk

1:33:00

profile, something that you at

1:33:02

least attempt before moving on to more severe

1:33:04

interventions. That's exactly right. You know, why not

1:33:06

try this first? I had a young woman,

1:33:08

seven months pregnant, very bad lower back disease.

1:33:10

And of course, as the baby grew, you

1:33:13

know, it got worse. They put in a

1:33:15

nerve stimulator, it didn't help. And

1:33:17

they couldn't give her opioids because she was,

1:33:19

you know, had a pregnant. And

1:33:22

so I have her imagine she's floating in an

1:33:24

ice warm bath, filter the hurt out of the

1:33:26

pain. Her pain went from seven to

1:33:28

three in a couple of minutes. But

1:33:30

she looked angry. And I said, what's the matter?

1:33:33

She said, why in the hell are you the

1:33:35

last doctor I got sent to instead of the

1:33:38

first? And that's exactly right,

1:33:40

Tim. I don't get it. You know, it's

1:33:42

inexpensive, it's effective. Why

1:33:45

not try that first? And then if

1:33:47

that doesn't work, do something else.

1:33:50

It's really a shame. It's a disservice to people

1:33:52

who can help themselves. It's

1:33:54

excessively expensive to do use medications or

1:33:56

procedures when some people may not need

1:33:59

it, some do. but a lot don't.

1:34:01

And so I would like to take

1:34:05

forever to find a good specialist, meaning outside of hypnosis. I have a

1:34:07

friend who is dealing with a very

1:34:09

unpredictable onset of what he describes as overwhelm that

1:34:11

seemed to begin after he had a pretty bad neck injury.

1:34:14

He was constantly in this flexed position while he was working

1:34:16

at his laptop and then he went to his place. He

1:34:35

went into a serve, bent his head

1:34:37

back and had some type of structural

1:34:41

event that then precipitated this onset

1:34:44

of what he would call sort of overwhelm where

1:34:46

he goes into fight or flight and really can't

1:34:48

focus or work. And it's

1:34:51

taken many, many, many, many

1:34:53

months to find specialists

1:34:55

to work with just to begin the trial and error. So

1:34:58

in the meantime, I could see something like

1:35:00

this being incredibly valuable

1:35:02

aside from Reverie and people

1:35:05

can find Reverie at reverie.com

1:35:07

great name by the way,

1:35:09

reverie.com and on all the socials will

1:35:11

link to that in the show notes as well. But

1:35:13

reverie.com and I would imagine that

1:35:16

can be found in the app store as

1:35:18

well. But Reverie. In

1:35:20

addition to that, are there any resources

1:35:23

because I'm sure there's the good, the bad

1:35:25

and the ugly when it comes to hypnosis

1:35:27

resources, whether those are books, documentaries or otherwise.

1:35:29

Are there any particular resources for those who

1:35:32

would like to try to educate themselves more

1:35:34

explore this more? You

1:35:36

know, there are a number of good

1:35:38

professional hypnosis societies that have members who

1:35:40

are professionally trained in use hypnosis, the

1:35:42

Society for Clinical Experimental Hypnosis, SCEH.US,

1:35:47

the American Society of Clinical

1:35:49

Hypnosis, asch.net. There's an

1:35:51

international society of hypnosis for your

1:35:53

listeners who are elsewhere. There

1:35:56

are good textbooks on hypnosis.

1:35:58

We've written one. of them

1:36:00

called Trans and Treatment. My Australia

1:36:19

that helps people irritable bowel syndrome and

1:36:21

hypnosis can be very effective for

1:36:24

that as well. So there are more and more

1:36:26

of those apps coming as well

1:36:28

that seem to help people manage

1:36:30

with hypnosis. So it's growing, the

1:36:32

list is growing. So I'll link to

1:36:34

all those and Trans and

1:36:37

Treatment I must ask since you mentioned

1:36:39

Bali and I've seen various types of

1:36:41

I think what we would consider

1:36:43

trans whether that's Sufi's

1:36:46

spinning or various

1:36:48

types of repetitive singing,

1:36:51

droning. Do you have any particular

1:36:54

long-standing type of trans that you

1:36:56

find most interesting or appealing? There's

1:36:59

a sociologist book called Boiling

1:37:01

Energy about the use

1:37:04

of drumming actually as a kind

1:37:06

of trans-inducing experience in Africa and

1:37:09

there's no question that people use

1:37:12

that kind of rhythmic activity as a

1:37:14

way of socially connecting

1:37:16

and soothing themselves. And

1:37:18

there's something about being in that rhythm and of

1:37:20

rate that is usually roughly the

1:37:22

rate of heartbeat about one a second

1:37:25

that helps people and that's why

1:37:27

people like to dance and sing and things

1:37:29

like that. I think we coordinated social activity

1:37:31

that gets the body involved but can

1:37:34

be very soothing actually. And

1:37:36

so I think a lot of

1:37:38

our healing rituals involve repetitive movement

1:37:41

that people find soothing. David

1:37:43

thank you for what a what

1:37:46

a fantastic wide-ranging conversation this became

1:37:48

and is there anything else you'd

1:37:50

like to mention? Of course people

1:37:52

can find RevRae at revrae.com or

1:37:54

a-v-e-r-i.com. Is there anything else you'd

1:37:56

like to mention

1:37:58

or point people to? It's

1:38:00

from the App Store and Google Play

1:38:05

I would say I think we've talked about the

1:38:07

major uses of it. I would

1:38:10

love it if people give

1:38:12

it a try, see it as a first

1:38:14

recourse not a last recourse and

1:38:16

I'd love to see it integrated better

1:38:19

with people's overall health and

1:38:21

wellness care. I think it's been

1:38:23

sort of the Rodney Dangerfield of psychotherapies.

1:38:28

Got no respect. Yeah. He said they asked

1:38:30

me to leave a bar so they could

1:38:32

start happy arguing. After

1:38:36

having done this my entire career, this is a

1:38:38

legacy project for me. You know a time will

1:38:40

come when I'm not available to keep doing this

1:38:42

for people. It warms my

1:38:45

heart that while we've been talking I've

1:38:47

helped more people than I used to

1:38:49

in months of person-to-person clinical activity and

1:38:51

I want people to have it as

1:38:53

a resource for helping themselves feel better and

1:38:56

function better and I think it can. So

1:38:58

thank you for helping me do that because

1:39:00

that's the same kind of thing you're doing

1:39:02

with your show and I'm

1:39:04

honored to be a part of it. My

1:39:07

pleasure entirely. What fun. This is the

1:39:09

best job on Earth as far as I'm concerned and to

1:39:12

everybody listening we will have links to

1:39:15

all things discussed in the show notes

1:39:17

as per usual at tim.blog slash podcast

1:39:20

Spiegel, S-P-I-E-G-E-L.

1:39:22

You can search it there and they'll pop

1:39:24

right up and until next time as always

1:39:27

just be a little kinder than is necessary

1:39:29

to others and to yourself. Thank you for

1:39:31

tuning in. Hey

1:39:33

guys, this is Tim again. Just one more

1:39:35

thing before you take off and that is

1:39:37

Five Bullet Friday. Would you enjoy

1:39:39

getting a short email from me every Friday that

1:39:42

provides a little fun before the weekend? Between

1:39:44

one and a half and two million

1:39:46

people subscribe to my free newsletter, my

1:39:48

super short newsletter called Five Bullet Friday.

1:39:50

Easy to sign up, easy to cancel.

1:39:53

It is basically a half page that

1:39:55

I send out every Friday to share

1:39:57

the coolest things I've found or discovered

1:39:59

or have have started exploring over that

1:40:01

week. Kind of like my diary of cool

1:40:03

things. It often includes articles I'm reading, books

1:40:05

I'm reading, albums perhaps, gadgets,

1:40:08

gizmos, all sorts of tech tricks and

1:40:10

so on that get sent to me

1:40:12

by my friends, including a lot of

1:40:14

podcasts, guests, and these strange

1:40:16

esoteric things end up in my field

1:40:19

and then I test them and then

1:40:21

I share them with you. So

1:40:23

if that sounds fun, again, it's very short,

1:40:25

a little tiny bite of goodness before you

1:40:27

head off to the weekend, something to think

1:40:30

about. If you'd like to

1:40:32

try it out, just go to tim.blog

1:40:34

slash friday, type that into your browser,

1:40:36

tim.blog slash friday, drop in your email

1:40:38

and you'll get the very next one. Thanks

1:40:40

for listening. This

1:40:42

episode is brought to you by Helix Sleep.

1:40:45

Helix Sleep is a premium mattress brand that

1:40:47

provides tailored mattresses based on your sleep

1:40:49

preferences. Their lineup includes 14 unique

1:40:51

mattresses, including a collection of luxury models, a

1:40:53

mattress with big and tall sleepers, that's not

1:40:55

me, and even a mattress made specifically for

1:40:57

kids. They have models with memory foam layers

1:40:59

to provide optimal pressure relief if you sleep

1:41:01

on your side, as I often do, and

1:41:03

did last night on one of their beds.

1:41:06

Models with more responsive foam to cradle your

1:41:09

body for essential support in stomach and back

1:41:11

sleeping positions and on and on, they

1:41:13

have you covered. So how will you

1:41:15

know which Helix mattress works best for

1:41:17

you and your body? Take the Helix

1:41:20

Sleep quiz at helixsleep.com/tim and find your

1:41:22

perfect mattress in less than two minutes.

1:41:24

Personally, for the last few years, I've

1:41:26

been sleeping on a Helix Midnight Luxe

1:41:29

mattress. I also have one

1:41:31

of those in the guest bedroom, and feedback

1:41:33

from friends has always been fantastic. They frequently

1:41:35

say it's the best night of sleep they've

1:41:38

had in ages. It's something they comment on

1:41:40

without any prompting from me whatsoever. Helix mattresses

1:41:42

are American-made and come with a 10 or 15

1:41:44

year warranty, depending on the model. Your mattress will

1:41:46

be shipped straight to your door free of charge,

1:41:48

and there's no better way to test out a

1:41:51

new mattress than by sleeping on it in your

1:41:53

own home. That's why they offer a 100 night

1:41:55

risk-free trial. If you decide it's not the best

1:41:57

fit, you're welcome to return it for a full.

1:42:00

Refund. Helix has been awarded number

1:42:02

one mattress by both GQ and

1:42:04

Wired magazine. And now Helix has

1:42:06

harnessed years of extensive mattress expertise

1:42:08

to bring you a truly elevated

1:42:11

sleep experience. Their newest collection of

1:42:13

mattresses called Helix Elite includes six

1:42:15

different mattress models, each tailored for

1:42:17

specific sleep positions and firmness preferences.

1:42:19

You can get exactly what your

1:42:21

body needs. Each Helix Elite mattress

1:42:24

comes with an extra layer of

1:42:26

foam for pressure relief and thousands

1:42:28

of extra micro coils for best

1:42:30

in class support and durability. Every

1:42:32

Helix Elite mattress also comes with

1:42:34

a 15-year manufacturer's warranty and

1:42:36

the same 100-night trial as the rest

1:42:38

of Helix's mattresses. And you, my dear

1:42:40

listeners, can get 20% off

1:42:43

of all mattress orders plus two

1:42:45

free pillows. So go to helixsleep.com

1:42:48

slash Tim to learn more.

1:42:51

That's Helix Sleep, H-E-L-I-X, helixsleep.com/Tim.

1:42:53

This is their best offer

1:42:55

to date and it will

1:42:57

not last long. So

1:43:00

take a look with Helix Better

1:43:02

Sleep Start Now. This

1:43:05

episode is brought to you by

1:43:07

Mementus. Mementus offers high quality supplements

1:43:09

and products across a broad spectrum

1:43:12

of categories, including sports performance, sleep,

1:43:14

cognitive health, hormone support, and more.

1:43:16

I've been testing their products for

1:43:18

months now and I

1:43:20

have a few that I use constantly.

1:43:23

One of the things I love about Mementus

1:43:25

is that they offer many single ingredient and

1:43:27

third-party tested formulations. I'll come back to the

1:43:30

latter part of that a little bit later.

1:43:32

Personally, I've been using Mementus MAG 3 and

1:43:34

8, L-Theanine, and Apigenin, all

1:43:36

of which have helped me to

1:43:38

improve the onset quality and duration

1:43:40

of my sleep. Now, the Mementus

1:43:42

Sleep Pack conveniently delivers single servings

1:43:45

of all three of these ingredients.

1:43:47

I've also been using Mementus Creatine,

1:43:49