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Hypnosis, Brain Hacking, & Mental Mastery - Dr David Spiegel

Dr. David Spiegel is a psychiatrist, Stanford professor, and leading authority on hypnosis and stress-related health. What exactly is hypnosis? Most of us picture it as a magician’s trick, when someone dangles a watch, your eyes get heavy, and suddenly you’re suggestible. But that barely scratches the surface. The real question is, what’s the true purpose of hypnosis? And what if we aren’t just hypnotized during those sessions, but in some sense all the time, walking through life under subtle trances we don’t even notice? Expect to learn what Dr. Speigel thinks most people misunderstand about what hypnosis is or how it works, what’s actually happening in the brain when we enter a hypnotic state, if anyone can be hypnotized or is there a specific “profile” of someone more likely to respond, the neurobiological difference between someone pretending to be hypnotized vs. someone actually in a trance state, how effective hypnosis is for improving sleep, the role hypnosis could play in reducing our reliance on pharmaceuticals, and much more… - 0:00 The Biggest Misunderstandings About Hypnosis 6:00 Why Can We Be Hypnotised? 22:44 What is Hypnosis? 25:24 Why are Some People Hypnotisable and Others Not? 34:04 Predicting Hypnotisability Through Genes 38:54 Can You Train Hypnotisability? 41:28 Is In-Person Hypnosis More Effective? 54:21 Training Your Brain to Tolerate Pain 01:04:51 How to Use Self-Hypnosis to Maximum Effect 01:07:08 What Areas Could Hypnosis Be Combined With? 01:11:57 The Positive Effects of Breath Work 01:15:15 David’s Stand Out Hypnosis Cases 01:24:31 Overcoming Resistance with Hypnosis 01:30:29 Why Has Hypnosis Been Sidelined in Modern Medicine? 01:32:42 Find Out More About David - Get 35% off your first subscription on the best supplements from Momentous at https://livemomentous.com/modernwisdom Get $100 off the best bloodwork analysis in America at https://functionhealth.com/modernwisdom Get up to $350 off the Pod 5 at https://eightsleep.com/modernwisdom Get a Free Sample Pack of LMNT’s most popular Flavours with your first purchase at https://drinklmnt.com/modernwisdom - Get access to every episode 10 hours before YouTube by subscribing for free on Spotify - https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn or Apple Podcasts - https://apple.co/2MNqIgw Get my free Reading List of 100 life-changing books here - https://chriswillx.com/books/ Try my productivity energy drink Neutonic here - https://neutonic.com/modernwisdom Get 20% off Reveri's yearly or lifetime membership at https://reverihealth.app.link/modern-wisdom (use code MODERNWISDOM) - Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/

Chris WilliamsonhostDr. David Spiegelguest
Aug 25, 20251h 33mWatch on YouTube ↗

EVERY SPOKEN WORD

  1. 0:00 – 6:00

    The Biggest Misunderstandings About Hypnosis

    1. CW

      What do you think most people misunderstand about hypnosis, what it is, how it works?

    2. DS

      Well, there are sort of offsetting misunderstandings. They either think it's really dangerous or it's useless or maybe it's both.

    3. CW

      (laughs)

    4. DS

      Uh, and the biggest fear and misunderstanding is that it's a- it's losing control, and I'm here to tell you that hypnosis is a way of teaching people how to enhance control of mind and body. And so the very thing that people see, you know, I- I don't like stage hypnosis very much. I don't like making fools out of people. But when you see the football coach dancing like a ballerina and you think, "What the hell's going on here?" You're watching somebody who's willing to let go of his old assumptions of who he is and what he is and should be and trying out being different. And one of the great things about hypnosis is you can try out being different, and sometimes it works in a hurry. And that's what I do with my patients and that's what we do with Reveri.

    5. CW

      Is there a marked difference in what's going on in the brain of somebody who's dancing like a ballerina on stage at a Sandals Resort in, you know, Jamaica-

    6. DS

      Right.

    7. CW

      ... uh, compared with... Is it the same mechanism?

    8. DS

      Yes.

    9. CW

      Right. Okay.

    10. DS

      It- it is the same mechanism. It, it'd be hard to do an MRI scan of the football coach, but, um, we've done it with Stanford students and other volunteers who are high in hypnotizability. I can talk about that later, it makes a difference, um, and when they're going into a hypnotic state, and we see three things going on in their brain using functional MRI. And MRI is a great way to get precise anatomy but also activity in very specific regions of the brain. And what we see is that the more hypnotized they are, the more they turn down activity in a part of the brain called the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex. That's like, the cingulate cortex is like a C on its ends in the middle of the base of your brain, and the front part, the dorsal region, um, is a region that we call part of the salience network. It does pattern matching, and if something goes wrong, the salience network fires off. You hear a loud noise and you get hijacked, your attention gets hijacked.

    11. CW

      Interrupt.

    12. DS

      Right. And that's, that has survival value, you know, sometimes you really need to be interrupted by a sudden event. Um, in hypnosis, you allow yourself to sink more deeply into the focus of your attention because you're turning down the alarm system. You're turning down the part of your brain that would say, "Hey, maybe you ought to be doing something else."

    13. CW

      Not dancing like a ballerina.

    14. DS

      Exactly. And so, uh, that reduction in activity is, uh, also something that has to do with stress and anxiety, that, um, when you're more stressed and anxious, your salience network is hyperactive.

    15. CW

      Mm-hmm.

    16. DS

      So hypnosis is a kind of automatic reduction in stress that you can see in people's brains. The second thing that happens in the brain is you get higher functional connectivity. That means when one brain region's active, the other one is active. When it isn't, the other one isn't. Between the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, that's the, where we, the, the part of my brain I'm hopefully using right now talking to you where you plan and execute activities that you have planned, uh, and a part of the brain called the insula. Insula is Latin for island. It's a little island of tissue in the middle of the front part of the brain. It's the mind/body conduit, and so it allows the brain to have more precise control over things that are going on in the body, and it increases interception, the capacity to, to feel what's going on in your body. So that's the second thing. So less anxiety, less, less, uh, interruption of your concentration, better control over your body, and the third part is inverse functional connectivity between the prefrontal cortex and the back of the cingulate cortex. Uh, the posterior cingulate, that's part of what we call the default mode network. It's what your brain is doing when it isn't doing much else, when you're just sitting around, don't have any work to do and just pondering things like, "Who am I? What am I? Am I as good as, uh, my mother hoped I would be? Am I letting people down or am I pleasing them?" I call it the me fault mode network.

    17. CW

      Mm.

    18. DS

      Um, but it's the part of the brain that sort of enforces expectations of who you are and what you are, and to the extent that you're engaged in a hypnotic experience, you're turning down activity there. So that's how the football coach can do that. He's just not thinking about the fact that his team would laugh at him if they saw him, you know, that kind of thing. And so that combination, better mind/body control, reduced salience, uh, activation, and suppression of the part of your brain that decides who you should be and what you should be is what helps you do so much in hypnosis, because you're connecting better with your body, you're controlling it better, you're not worried about what the implication might be, and in fact you're interrupting that circuit that, that makes somatic arousal, body arousal increase when you're emotionally aroused so you can cool off your body and then handle stress better.

    19. CW

      Oh, that's so interesting. So your detection of an odd pattern, something that is, uh, out of the ordinary, your adherence to an existing narrative, this is who I am, this is how I should behave, and the warning sign that comes body up of, hey, this is, this- this usually elicits a kind of pretty big emotional response here, you should be stressed, you should be anxious, all of those things get turned down. It sounds an awful lot like, um, kind of shaking an Etch A Sketch-

    20. DS

      (laughs)

    21. CW

      ... you know, there's lots of lines everywhere.

    22. DS

      I like that image. I like that image.

    23. CW

      And, and you go-

    24. DS

      Yeah.

    25. CW

      ... "We got a little bit of a blank slate-"

    26. DS

      Yeah.

    27. CW

      "... that's going on here."

    28. DS

      That's exactly right.

  2. 6:00 – 22:44

    Why Can We Be Hypnotised?

    1. DS

    2. CW

      What is-... the structure of a hypnotic process. Like, what are the stages that people are going through here? Because presumably this has to happen in some kind of a sequence unless all of these three different primary mechanisms are all able to sort of happen together. W- what is it that is occurring in order to take somebody through? I think I've only ever seen stage hypnosis done once when I was a kid. I can still remember it, and I think that the cue was somebody had their hands interwoven in front of them-

    3. DS

      You can't pull 'em apart, no.

    4. CW

      ... and they imagined that there was glue that was sort of seeping around the outside of their hands-

    5. DS

      Right.

    6. CW

      ... and then they came over and did a thing and they, eh, yeah, yeah, we did like that. Um, but I'm interested to know what the slightly more scientific, less-

    7. DS

      (laughs)

    8. CW

      ... package holiday version is.

    9. DS

      Well, what I do in my office happens, first of all, very quickly. If you are hypnotizable, you don't need to count upstairs and downstairs and have some long fancy, uh, i- induction. You can shift gears in seconds. And so what I have people do is look up, close your eyes, take a deep breath, let the breath out slowly through your mouth, let your eyes relax, let your body float, and then let one hand or the other float up in the air like a balloon. And if you're hypnotizable at that point, you're hypnotized. It, it's not a big deal to do it because... And I see you smiling, see, you're hypnotized already.

    10. CW

      (laughs)

    11. DS

      Um, all hypnosis is really self-hypnosis. I'm teaching people how to use their ability. There, there's nothing fancy about the induction, it's just a matter of re- it's... You know, hypnosis is sort of like one of those apps on your phone that you haven't opened and used yet. You know, it's there, you could do stuff with it but you've never done it, and that's what happens with a lot of people. Although hypnotizable people tend to use their hypnotizability even though they're not fully aware of it. So in general, for example, do you ever have the experience of getting so caught up in a good movie that you forget you're watching a movie and-

    12. CW

      Yes.

    13. DS

      ... enter the imagined world?

    14. CW

      Yeah.

    15. DS

      That's a, it's, hypnosis has been thought of as believed in imagination.

    16. CW

      Mm-hmm.

    17. DS

      So you allow yourself to just become a part of the movie instead of part of the audience. You're not judging it, you're not evaluating it, you're just in it.

    18. CW

      Mm-hmm.

    19. DS

      Um, I had a patient the other day who's in a drama, who's a drama expert, and he said, "Well, I can't lose myself that much because I know where they put the lights and why they did this (laughs) and I didn't like the way they did it." So he's always judging and evaluating it, not just immersed in it.

    20. CW

      Mm-hmm.

    21. DS

      So if you have the ability, you're actually doing it all the time, you're not aware of it. And what hypnosis is, is a formal way of tapping and utilizing those special abilities.

    22. CW

      I'm interested about whether this is some adaptive keyhole in the brain that's been left there for hypnosis to slot into-

    23. DS

      Mm-hmm.

    24. CW

      ... or if you are more like a backdoor hacker who has sort of exploited some other process which also happens to work when you do the hypnosis thing. Does this question make sense? Like, why is it that we are hypnotizable? Like, what is going on? Is this, is this because collective effervescence and feeling transcendence when watching music played around a campfire we should be able to be immersed in that, and therefore you've got hypnosis which is kind of like a tuned-up, much more clever domino fall version of that? Or is this, actually, it, it is there, uh, so that people can access a level of, like, what kind of sounds like deep regulation, uh, and, and, uh, deep openness and that's the purpose for it, it's built for that? Are you a, are y- is it a keyhole that you're slotting into or are you a hacker that's managed to reverse engineer the shape of the key?

    25. DS

      No, I'm not, uh... I, I think, uh, the keyhole's there for a reason, and I think there are at least two evolutionary reasons why we have this ability. The positive one is, it enables us to enjoy engaging. You know, we put aside all kinds of other things that could interfere and really get into it. You can really get in- there are, you know, primitive cultures have, you know, music and drumming and all this stuff where they just lose themselves but they have a collective shared experience.

    26. CW

      Mm-hmm.

    27. DS

      We are social animals, you know, our, the ch- the human infant is the most helpless infant of any mammal, and if there is not a social structure around it, the, the child doesn't survive. So from the time we're born, we have to find ways to engage people, and part of that is hypnotic-like. You know, a lot of the music about love and falling in love is, uh, "I was mesmerized by her eyes," you know, that kind of thing. The capacity to connect deeply, forget about everything else and engage, helps us cement social connection. That's the positive part. The negative part is this, you know you can tell the difference between predator and prey animals by the location of their eyes on their head, so you- yours and mine are in front. We can recognize where some object of prey is and, uh, and locate it and chase it if we want to, or escape it if we want to. Prey animals have eyes on the side of their head, rabbits, so they don't have very clear detection but they see more range of movement than we do. If we were not able to survive predation, we wouldn't be here. And we're not very strong, we're not very fast, you know, eagles see better than we do and lions run faster than we do and, you know. So one of our survival abilities is the capacity to modulate fear and pain, because movement, predators detect movement, and if you can freeze when you're hurt or scared you're more likely to evade a predator. And so I think this capacity we have in hypnosis to control anxiety, to change how we feel, to dissociate pain and reduce or eliminate it, is a survival value that allowed us to be where we are because we have big brains and relatively weak bodies in the animal kingdom.

    28. CW

      Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

    29. DS

      And that brain can help us evade detection, respond better to threat, uh, and form social connections that make us feel good and help us procreate.

    30. CW

      I love the...... idea that stepping into our own programming is at least 50% of this, because I think a lot of the time the argument will be made, you know, with a social animal, w- one man versus a gorilla is dead, but a hundred men versus a gorilla, gorilla's fucked. Um, okay. Mm-hmm. Right. That coordination, social brain hypothesis, Robin Dunbar, you know, all of this stuff, fantastic. But to think about y- your ability to use theory of mind not to better work out, "Well, David's friends with Jonathan, but they weren't friends last week. So if I befriend Jonathan, then I'll be able to befriend David," and, you know, bu- so on and so forth. But to say, "Oh, I am able to look at... I'm able to use metacognition to look at my own state of mind and to think about how I can adjust. I'm feeling a thing. What does it mean? Why am I feeling that thing, and should I be? And is it adaptive right now for me to be feeling that thing? And can I step in? Can I slow myself down? There is a line over there, and maybe it... Oh, it hasn't seen me. I should be scared, I should run. I want to run. If I was a gazelle, I might run." Mm-hmm. "But no, I'm actually gonna really slowly go toward this tree, 'cause if I get behind this tree, I can get up this tree." Th- the ability to plan and step in to our emotional body and be able to, uh, interject there, uh, is, is pretty coo- I, I did a, uh, safari in, uh, Zambia about three years ago. I was presenting a, a mini-documentary thing. And this is a stripped back safari. So one, um, there's kind of a seven star glamping world of safari which you may have seen with really nice chefs, and there's wifi and all the rest of it. But this one was, you need to warn them half an hour before you want to shower if you want the water to be warm. You're sleeping underneath the stars, but with a kind of a semi-permanent tent over the top of you. It's kind of nice, but it's not that nice. And much of the safari's done on foot. And you'll get into a Jeep, but then when you're down, you're there with a guide who's got a big elephant rifle and a tracker and a, a couple of, a couple of people, and you'll go and you'll do it on foot. Anyway, we were rowing down the Zambezi in between Zambia and, uh, Zimbabwe? Yeah. I think so, yeah. And, um, rowing down the, just a little tributary off the Zambezi, tiny little old school rowboat, two oars, and the main thing you're thinking about is hippos. Right. Is hippos... They, it's whatever, it's second biggest killer after, um, uh, mosquitoes, uh, and they really do not like to be scared. They're quite sort of anxious animals. And, um- Not very hypnotizable. I imagine... No, no, no, no. Unfortunately, hippos, despite you'd think given the start of their name- Right. ... hippo-netizable. There you go. I like that. Um, but so we're, we're rowing down and we see this hippo sort of toward the end, and it's just got that sort of classic nose and- Right. ... nostrils and eyes above the water, which when you see as well, kind of the same way as an alligator, they're raised up- Yeah. ... like that, so they don't... They can be as low as possible- As possible. ... and their eyes are super high. It's really adaptive. That's right. That's right. So me and the, um, guide I'm with, like hard South African dude that just runs this thing, like digs his oar in. We just said, "Just, we'll, we'll just wait, mate. We'll just wait for this thing." Sure enough, it dips its head down and goes away, and we continue along. Little bit further in front of us, we see four elephants, mother elephant, big adult and two m- adolescents, like smaller sized ones. And they're drinking from the stream that we're gonna go down in a little bit. And he's like, "Okay, we're gonna wait. Wait up." All four of them walk along, and we go past. Now, you know, 300 yard- 200 yards off on our left hand side. Guy with the big elephant rifle's back in the truck, so he's a kilometer away. We've got a radio, but there's a drone overhead like (buzzing) just following us around, getting nice shots. Uh, and there's another canoe behind us, which has got the film crew in that are filming us, and we're chatting, we're mic'd up. "I'm, I'm just talking about, isn't it lovely? Uh, you know, oh, the hippo from before, isn't it, its eyes." Just chatting crap like I usually do. These four elephants walking along next to us. And I'd been told when an elephant is head up, ears out, it's like, "I see you, stop what you're doing." And when it's head down, ears back, it's like, "I'm... This is a real issue and I'm gonna come toward you." Uh, so I've sort of kept this thing... I had a briefing before, kept this thing in my mind. Mm-hmm. Four, family of four, mother at the front, just sort of s- starts veering toward us a little bit, sort of keeps looking, keeps looking, keeps looking like that. And I'm saying, "Mate?" He's like, "Don't worry, mate. Nothing to worry about at all." I'm like, "All right. Okay, no worries." So we keep on gently going, and then starts veering more and more and more towards us. I'm like, "Okay, this is... Either there's something real interesting right next to where we are, or this is to intersect us." And the other three are sort of staying behind. I'm like, "Mate?" He's like, "No, no need to worry, mate. No need to worry at all." "Okay, fair enough." We get 30 yards away and she's now just facing us, head up, ears out. I was like, "Oh, that's not good." Heart rate, like hairs on the back of my neck, everything immediately. Head down, ears back, and like, s- sort of s- goes to start to set off. I'm like, "I am..." Guy with the gun is a kilometer away. Dudes in... All they have is camera lenses. Then what they gonna do? They're not gonna be able to throw anything at her. So she sort of sets off, and then head comes back up, ears go out, and she sort of backs up like that like, a reverse trot. Back, back, back, back, back, back, back. Head down, ears back, just sets off, like full sprint straight toward us. And we're in this canoe, and it's a tiny little canoe. And I'm like, "Mate?" And he's like, "Nothing to worry about, mate." I'm like, "What? What?" (laughs) Like, "How are you able to regulate yourself in this moment?" And I noticed I had my oar like th- what am I gonna do? I'm holding it- Yeah. ... like a cricket bat. I'm like- (laughs) Yeah. ... bop this, you know, five ton, 10 ton animal on the nose? What am I gonna do? Anyway-... gets 10, 5 yards away from the edge of, you know, it's just a classic sort of little bank of a tiny stream, it was nothing, and gets toward the edge and (makes whooshing sound) digs in, kicks up all of this dust. This dust sort of covers over the top of us. Looks at us, turns away, walks back to the family. I was like, "Holy fuck." Like, that was the most extreme thing. That very long story is to say that for probably the next 10 minutes or so, every single sense that I had was superhuman. I could hear what felt like for two miles. I could detect that bird over there is slightly different to that bird over there and there's a little bit of a distance between those. The sharpness that I had in my mind, like even my ability to recall this random story from three years ago, like everything was just embedded and time felt like it slowed down. And it just sort of reminded me when we're talking about that adaptive sense that humans have to be able to step into their own programming. The thing that was really interesting was, you know, I was in an environment that's pretty evolutionarily, uh, typical, I guess.

  3. 22:44 – 25:24

    What is Hypnosis?

    1. CW

      So when it comes to, uh, the overall brain state, you've explained quite nicely, I guess, sort of the neurobiological m- uh, mechanism of what's going on there. Is it closer to sleep, meditation, flow? T- what's the nearest analogous-

    2. DS

      Y- you're getting closer. (laughs)

    3. CW

      Okay.

    4. DS

      Sleep, no. I- you know, they used to say, "You're going to sleep. You're falling asleep," and all. It's not sleep. It's wakefulness. It's highly focused attention. Um, meditation to some extent. Um, in meditation though, um, you're, you have open presence, you know? There are sort of three major components. Just let things flow through you. Don't judge them. So you're, you were engaging in action in this sort of spontaneous hypnotic state. Your action was checking out the guy who was running the expedition and making sure he knew what he was doing. You weren't just saying, "Oh, let's... This is very interesting, let's see what the elephant does." You know, you... So in, in meditation, you do tend to sort of suppress your usual reactions, but you don't reprogram to do something else other than have open presence, check your body, and, and develop compassion, but you were not feeling very compassionate for the elephant at that point.

    5. CW

      Mm-hmm.

    6. DS

      Flow is a little bit more like it, where the process is the experience. You do it not because there's some goal out there you want to accomplish, because it feels so good to be doing what you're doing. And so people who are hypnotizable and are in a hypnotic state tend to feel more like they're in a flow state. They just enjoy whatever they're doing. I was asked to, by the coach of the Stanford Women's Swimming team to s- to talk with the girls because they're a fabulous team. They have a lot of Olympic... We just recruited a new Olympic silver medalist to, as a freshman at Stanford. Um, uh, but they w- he noticed that they were swimming...... better in, in, in, uh, practice than they were in meets, faster. And you thought, "What's that about?" You know, you normally think you're all aroused or, you know, this is important, you're going to do it. And it turned out that what they were doing when I talked to them was, they were paying more attention to the women in the neighboring lane than they were to their own relationship to their body, and they were getting distracted by it. Swimming is not a contact sport. It doesn't matter what your opponent is doing, it just matters what you're doing. So I had them practice doing self-hypnosis to focus on relating to their body, on the process of swimming your best race, how you manage your muscles, which muscles you emphasize, how you regulate your breathing, and they wound up swimming faster in meets doing that.

    7. CW

      Wow.

    8. DS

      So it's focusing on the f- process, like flow, in self-hypnosis rather than the outcome.

  4. 25:24 – 34:04

    Why are Some People Hypnotisable and Others Not?

    1. DS

    2. CW

      Talk to me about this profile of anyone being hypnotizable versus specific people being more or less likely to respond. Are there some total non-responders? Are there some-

    3. DS

      There are.

    4. CW

      Right.

    5. DS

      That's right. There are, uh, hypnotizability is a very stable trait. Um, it, most, most eight-year-olds are in trances most of the time. You know, you call your kid in for dinner, he doesn't hear you, he's... Work and play are all the same thing. It's a wonderful thing about being a child. It's a shame we have to grow up. But as we go through adolescence, we develop what is called formal operations. We begin to value thinking and analysis more than immediate experience, and that's got real advantages. You know, you can judge and evaluate things. But, so, by the time people get to 21 or so, they've settled into a very stable degree of hypnotizability, from low to medium to high, and it, uh... Phil Zimbardo, late psychology professor at Stanford, did an interesting study where he took his former undergrads in Psych 1 who had had their hypnotizability measured and blindly went out and retested them 25 years later. The test retest correlation was 0.7.

    6. CW

      Wow.

    7. DS

      Now that's as high as IQ in a 25-year interval. It does not change much. So, you know, I, I have seen some of the great hypnotists and hypnotic professionals work for a long time with someone who is just not hypnotizable and it doesn't matter, they just cannot respond. And so the way I start every session of about 7,000 people I've used hypnosis within my career with a five-minute evaluation of their hypnotizability and that guides me in how to work with them. So if they're extremely high, we just do it, you know. Um, I had a woman, uh, who was born with esophageal fistula to her trachea, and so it meant, you know, food would get into her lungs and she was painful, she's had multiple surgeries and she's had pain in her throat throughout her life, and she was about 39 and she just had it, and I got her hypnotized. She was 10 on the scale, 10 out of 10, extraordinarily hypnotizable, hands floating up in the air, she's... And I, um, I had her imagine that she had swallowed some ice water and had soothed her, her throat and she opened her eyes and she started to cry and she said, "You're a magician." She said, "I have never been to a doctor where the pain just plain went away," and this was not medication, it wasn't surgery.

    8. CW

      Mm.

    9. DS

      It was just teaching her brain how to respond to those signals differently. So with highs, you can do that dramatic stuff. With mid-range people, you negotiate more. You teach them how to try it out, evaluate how it went, see if there are ways that they can find a better image that might work better for them. So it's a negotiation process. With lows, uh, it's, it's, it's much more cognitive. It's just, you know what? Um, your brain is reacting to this history of discomfort that you've had and, and maybe making it worse instead of better. So if instead of fighting the pain, you take it as a message, you got the message, and what else can you do that will distract you

    10. NA

      Sounding-

    11. DS

      ... from the message?

    12. CW

      For the lows, it's sounding suspiciously close to acceptance and commitment therapy.

    13. DS

      There's a, there's a bit of that in it, but, but for highs, ACT is just a diversion, you know.

    14. CW

      Mm-hmm.

    15. DS

      They c- they can do it in minutes and feel it.

    16. CW

      Yeah. Wow. What, uh, wha- what does the assessment look like, um, for that? How do you work, how do you work it up?

    17. DS

      It, uh, it's, it's a standard hypnotic induction. I have people look up, close their eyes, take a deep breath, let their hand go up in the air, and I give them this instruction. "Your hand will remain light and in this upright position even after you c- open your eyes. If I pull your hand back down, it will float right back up to the upright position. You'll find something pleasant and amusing about this. Later, when I touch your elbow, your usual sensation and control will return." And I see how well then they respond to that and we rate them on the sense of dissociation, does the left hand feel as if it's not as much a part of their body as the right, on their response to a challenge where you pull the hand down and see if it floats up-

    18. CW

      Mm-hmm.

    19. DS

      Uh, on a sense of involuntariness, crucial question, does your left... Do you fe- feel more control over one hand than the other? And if they're hypnotizable, they tend to feel more control in the non-, uh, hypnotized hand. Uh, then response to the cut-off signal when I touch the elbow, and so it's two points for each of these and then two points for whether they had a sense of floating lightness or buoyancy in their hand alone or in their body as well, and so you get a 10-point score and it's a v- it's very stable, reliable measure.

    20. CW

      What I'm interested in is what are the sort of people who tend to be 10s, 6s, 4s and 0s or 1s? Can you see when somebody walks in or if you were given a profile of somebody beforehand, high-powered chief operations officer, very logistical and rational-

    21. DS

      Yeah.

    22. CW

      ... is it less likely that that person is going to be high in hypnotizability compared with the-... artsy, creative person who comes in with dyed hair and tattoo- you know what I mean? Like-

    23. DS

      That, you're right, and there's some truth to that. I mean, uh, you, you can miss sometimes. But, um, yes, in general people who are organized, who, you know, want to have things just the way they need to be tend to be less hypnotizable. I had a guy recently, um, who, uh, had, um, a ser- had bad lower back problems and, and pain in his knees and was, but a very sort of rational. He went to a million doctors and nothing seemed to work. And, um, and they took X-rays and they didn't see anything definitive, but there may be things wrong. And routinely, I ask, "What hand- well, what's your handedness? Are you right or left-handed?" Tough question. And he said, "Well, I'm right-handed but I always want my left hand to be equally active. So I always use my left hand the same way just after I use my right hand." So like a real simple question (laughs) you know, "What handedness do you have?" And he had to analyze that too.

    24. CW

      Had to do it with both hands. Yeah, yeah.

    25. DS

      And he was a zero, like flat out zero, and I said that to him. You know, he came to me for hypnosis and I said, "You know, I think your problem is that, that you make everything a problem. You worry about everything, including whether you're right or left-handed, and I think your doctors have been telling you there's nothing that wrong with your bones and your joints, um, and you keep worrying about it." And he looked sort of relieved. I thought he'd get mad at me, you know. He loo- he said, "You know, Doc, all the doctors I've seen, you're the first one who's told me that, and I think you're right." And so I said, "The problem is the signal is weak but your elaboration of the signal is high. So just think about other things than that."

    26. CW

      Mm. So you've had to go top-down not bottom-up with him because he's a zero?

    27. DS

      That's right. That's right.

    28. CW

      So it's much closer to ACT or CBT or something than, than hypnosis.

    29. DS

      Yeah. But it, it's also, you know, focus on what you're for and not what you're against. Don't fight it. You know, we, we, (laughs) we say with hypnosis, uh, the worst thing you can tell someone is "Don't think about purple elephants," you know. What are you gonna think about? So instead you find a strategy that's appealing that they can affiliate with and feel good about from the moment they do it.

    30. CW

      Mm-hmm.

  5. 34:04 – 38:54

    Predicting Hypnotisability Through Genes

    1. DS

    2. CW

      Digging into this sort of profile thing a little bit more. First off, have you ever done any behavioral genetic studies on the heritability? Uh-

    3. DS

      Yes, we have.

    4. CW

      Okay.

    5. DS

      And, uh, we found there's one gene, uh, that's very interesting. It's catechol-O-methyltransferase.

    6. CW

      Okay.

    7. DS

      It's a gene that is in the metabolism of dopamine in the brain. Dopamine is the feel-good neurotransmitter.

    8. CW

      Okay.

    9. DS

      Um, it is involved in hypnotizability.

    10. CW

      Okay. Can you give me the gene? What's the gene name?

    11. DS

      C-O-M-T, catechol C-A-T-E-C-

    12. CW

      I already know, I already know that I have this.

    13. DS

      ... -O-methyltransferase. (laughs) You, yeah, go ahead.

    14. CW

      Just give me, so it's-

    15. DS

      And one variation-

    16. CW

      ... what are you looking for? You're looking-

    17. DS

      ... is the metabolism of COMT.

    18. CW

      Yeah, okay.

    19. DS

      So if you have met- y- there, there's one polymorphism where you have either two methionines, two valines, or a methionine and a valine. Um, and the methionine and valine version has moderate meta- metabolic rate of COMT.

    20. CW

      Yep.

    21. DS

      So it keeps a kind of moderate level.

    22. CW

      Can I just give you mine?

    23. DS

      Yes. What's yours?

    24. CW

      Your COMT gene variant is the Val158MetRS4680AA genotype, also written as Met/Met.

    25. DS

      Met/Met, but you said it was Val/Met before. Let me see. Uh, Met/Met. Oh, so you're Met/Met. Um, if you're Met/Met, you're likely to be less hypnotizable. High dopamine in the prefrontal cortex, lower COMT e- uh, enzyme activity. Yeah. So that would make you less hypnotizable.

    26. CW

      Interesting.

    27. DS

      The Val/Met, the, the, the, the heterozygous polymorphism-

    28. CW

      Mm-hmm.

    29. DS

      ... is more likely to be very hypnoti- it doesn't mean you're not, but it means you're-

    30. CW

      So you want high, fast dopamine clearance.

  6. 38:54 – 41:28

    Can You Train Hypnotisability?

    1. CW

      Is openness to being hypnotized in adulthood a skill that you can train then, like mindfulness?

    2. DS

      Um-

    3. CW

      0.7 is how stable it is, that means 0.3, have you got control of that?

    4. DS

      Not really. We've, we have done one recent study, um, in which we used transcranial magnetic stimulation, you know, it's a magnetic stimulation that's being used very successfully to treat depression and suicidal ideation and obsessive-compulsive disorder now. Very effective.

    5. CW

      Mm-hmm.

    6. DS

      We used it to suppress activity in the dorsal anterior cingulate. We located the connecting pathways and we found that transiently, we could increase hypnotizability with TMS.

    7. CW

      Mm-hmm.

    8. DS

      And the idea would be that perhaps for some people with pain, uh, who aren't that hypnotizable, we could combine TMS with a hypnosis and enhance the response.

    9. CW

      Sounds like a new study, so you may not have-

    10. DS

      Yes. Yeah, we just published it, yeah.

    11. CW

      Okay. You may not have, may not have the answer that, to the question, which is pretty obvious from that, which is, you're talking about a state change there.

    12. DS

      Right.

    13. CW

      How embedded would a hypnosis-induced trait change be if the state change of the person is only acute and not chronic? Like, do you hold onto the gains of hypnosis if you were briefly hypnotizable, but then revert back to being less hypnotizable?

    14. DS

      Well, we don't know. That's a very good question.

    15. CW

      (laughs) Yeah.

    16. DS

      I'd like to find out, but there is a possibility because what we find is with people, even those who are very hypnotizable is, first of all, even those who are not so hypnotizable, with reverie, we've done it with thousands of people now teaching them to reduce their pain levels, their stress levels, to get to sleep, we find that, that, um, four out of five people get significant reduction in pain, 15, 20% reduction in pain and stress in 10 minutes. And even the low hypnotizables get some relief because of the idea that they can do it and the way we approach the problem, focusing on what you're for, what can you control and what can't you control.

    17. CW

      Mm-hmm.

    18. DS

      And so, um, you can get benefit even if you're not that hypnotizable. Use the approach and see if it helps. And the nice thing about hypnosis is the worst thing that happens is it doesn't work. You know, uh, 118,000 Americans died of opioid overdoses last year in the United States. Hypnosis is the oldest conception of psychotherapy, it's been around for 250 years. We haven't succeeded in killing anybody yet.

    19. CW

      (laughs)

    20. DS

      (laughs) So, so you know, try it. The worst thing that happens is it doesn't

  7. 41:28 – 54:21

    Is In-Person Hypnosis More Effective?

    1. DS

      work.

    2. CW

      Is it more effective in person?

    3. DS

      You know what, I would like to think that because I've made my living and I love seeing people and caring for them, but I have to tell you that it, so far, it looks like the, the pain and stress reduction rates are about the same. We have one study that really tested that. We published a paper like 30 years ago, in-person use of hypnosis to help people stop smoking. We have them, um, uh, imagine... You, you don't say, "Oh, I don't like cig..." I had a, a, a teacher and, uh, Tom Hackett was the chair of psychiatry at Mass General and he taught me my first hypnosis course and he said, "I was teaching people that their cigarettes would taste like horse shit," you know? And so the guy would light it up, say, "Ugh, that's terrible, thanks." Two hours later, he got a frantic call from the guy and said, "My house smells terrible." And Dr. Hackett said, "Well, are you smoking?" He said, "No, I forgot to tell you that my wife smokes, so..." (laughs) So he had to hit-

    4. CW

      Oh. Bring the wife in.

    5. DS

      ...the hypno- You're, or... Uh, she didn't want to, so he said, you know, "Your cigarettes but not her." It doesn't work. It, it's not a good strategy. So what we do is we tell people in hypnosis to think about three things, for my body, smoking's a poison, I need my body to live, I owe my body respect and protection. So you focus on what you're for. I tell them, "Would you ever...... take your baby and put tar-and-laden heated smoke in their lungs. Hell no. Well, your body is as dependent on you as your baby, you know? You-

    6. CW

      You are the caretaker for your self.

    7. DS

      ... has to take into it anything you put into it, even if it's damaged by it. So you focus on what you're for and that way, you don't feel you're depriving yourself of something. You can feel good from the moment you did it. The best way to change human behavior is intermittent positive reinforcement. So you say, "You can feel good about this." So we, we, we built an app after... So we got one out of four people to stop sm- Half stopped right away. One out of two stopped right away. Half of them had, had not touched a cigarette in a year. And so-

    8. CW

      From how many sessions?

    9. DS

      From one session, single session of hypnosis. And that's as good as you'll get with Varenicline or Bupropion, you know, the medications that are used to get people to stop smoking.

    10. CW

      Right. Okay.

    11. DS

      And, and so-

    12. CW

      Is Bup- Bupropion to get

    13. DS

      people to stop smoking? It's a Wellbutrin. Yeah. It's a, it's an antidepressant that also seems to work.

    14. CW

      Ah, that's interesting. An SNRI-

    15. DS

      Yeah.

    16. CW

      ... interjects for smoking cessation.

    17. DS

      Yes.

    18. CW

      I didn't know that.

    19. DS

      Yeah.

    20. CW

      I didn't know that. I know that... I have a few friends, uh, that we both are aware of, um, who are using m- m- microdose, low-dose Wellbutrin as a nootropic.

    21. DS

      Oh.

    22. CW

      Daily nootropic. Like-

    23. DS

      Oh.

    24. CW

      ... w- w- way below the therapeutic threshold that you would be using in order to step in. Um, we'll see how long that goes for. I'll have to, I'll have to check in with them and see-

    25. DS

      Yeah. Yeah.

    26. CW

      ... see if, see if they're still doing it. Um, but, uh, yeah, you, you, you-

    27. DS

      Right. So we, we tested... Uh, we, we then, uh, uh, our, our, uh, uh, Hypnosis app company, Reveri, got started at a Stanford Brain Mind Summit about five years ago when, um, uh, Ariel Polar, who's a, uh, uh, graduated Stanford Business School, MIT, and helped to start Strava, you know, the, the exercise app-

    28. CW

      Hmm.

    29. DS

      ... came up to me and he said... I gave a talk on hypnosis. He said, "Hey, you want to try making an app and see if that might work?" So I said, "Sure, let's do it." And, um, it, uh, we... Alexa at the time was making it real easy to program things 'cause they wanted to cre- recruit more customers for Alexa. So we built a smoking app. Um, same principle. "For my body, smoking is a poison. I need my body to live. I owe my body respect and protection." And you know what? We got the same results. It's very frustrating. I didn't have to be there in person, but we did-

    30. CW

      Oh, you're out of a job.

  8. 54:21 – 1:04:51

    Training Your Brain to Tolerate Pain

    1. CW

      (sighs) I know, I had, um, Dr. Paul Turk, you familiar with him?

    2. DS

      No.

    3. CW

      Evolutionary pediatrician.

    4. DS

      Mm-hmm.

    5. CW

      So he looks at, um, pediatrics, uh, both clinically, uh, and developmentally-

    6. DS

      Mm-hmm.

    7. CW

      ... uh, from an evolutionary lens, ancestral lens, so a lot of hunter-gatherer analysis. He's the guy that found, he was the, I think his team is the one that looked at the, um, peanut dust coating on rice puffs being able to reverse anaphylaxis in toddlers. So you sort of-

    8. DS

      Oh, yeah.

    9. CW

      ... uh, do, uh, controlled exposure over time.

    10. DS

      Controlled exposure.

    11. CW

      I think you can do the same thing with lactose as well-

    12. DS

      Yeah, yeah.

    13. CW

      ... to be able to get kids to... And if you do it by age five, then they're...... they're, they're age three or something. They're, they're okay for the rest of time and... But this increase in, uh, uh, helicopter parenting, snowplow parenting, or there, there might be a little bit of anaphylactic... Or there was, and then you avoid exposing the child to that-

    14. DS

      Oh, I see.

    15. CW

      ... which makes them more-

    16. DS

      Yeah.

    17. CW

      ... uh, susceptible to it in future. Other, uh, bits of insights, maybe not directly from him but they're kind of similar, uh, a house that's has a dog in it, um, the kids are 50% less likely to have, uh, asthma.

    18. DS

      Really?

    19. CW

      Um, the same thing goes for houses that use dishwashers as opposed to hand-washing. Uh, if you use a h- if you're in a house with a dishwasher, you have higher rates of asthma, higher rates of-

    20. DS

      Yeah, you're not exposed.

    21. CW

      Yeah. You want this tiny-

    22. DS

      You don't get that low-level exposure.

    23. CW

      Yep, exactly, and the dog, the dog's coming in. It's t- it's just enough, it's just enough of a dose.

    24. DS

      Right.

    25. CW

      Like that same thing goes for this peanut dusting. Anyway-

    26. DS

      Yeah.

    27. CW

      ... we also found, uh, one in six American adults have flattening of the occipital lobe from how much time they spent laid down as a child. Like, so you literally have the imprint of your baby bed on the back of your head when you're a 50-year-old man or whatever.

    28. DS

      (laughs)

    29. CW

      Um, and again, he's seeing when he looks at, uh, hunter-gatherers, you're permanently in different positions. You're... A, a child that's on the floor is a meal without wheels, right? It's not even a meal on wheels. It's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a meal that can kind of crawl a tiny little bit. It's dead. It's gone. Um, and yeah, it, you know, it... Parents, I understand I'm getting into parenting territory now. It's very, you know-

    30. DS

      Mm-hmm.

  9. 1:04:51 – 1:07:08

    How to Use Self-Hypnosis to Maximum Effect

    1. DS

      do that.

    2. CW

      What's the gold standard intervention? And a lot of this is very impressive because it's single session, right? You go, "Oh, my God, one session-"

    3. DS

      Yeah.

    4. CW

      "... as opposed to smoking cessation. One session and 20% reduction." Um, by design, that is either 75% or 80% of people who don't get that within a single session, right? It's one in four. Uh, one in four did.

    5. DS

      No, no, no, no, no, uh, no, that's not what the data are. The data are, it is, um, uh, 80% get some kind of positive response.

    6. CW

      Oh, okay.

    7. DS

      And the rest either get no change or a few get worse.

    8. CW

      Right.

    9. DS

      Um, but they get the actual reduction, the percent reduction in their total stress level-

    10. CW

      Understood.

    11. DS

      ... is like 15 or 20%.

    12. CW

      Understood, understood, that wasn't the response, right, yeah, yeah, yeah.

    13. DS

      Right, no, so most of them, four out of five get better right away.

    14. CW

      Understood. Um, let's say that you wanted to get it from a 20% reduction to 30 or to 40, um, what's the gold standard when it comes to this kind of, uh, to, to using Reverie or to, to doing self-hypnosis for maximum effect?

    15. DS

      Well, well, what we're seeing with Reverie is, um, that the baseline levels don't change over time, but each time they do it, they get the same level of improvement, um, so it means you've got it when you need it, you know, it's sort of like taking the pill, you know, if you, except you don't get addicted or habituated to, like you do to benzodiazepines, you just do it when you want to do it. So the nice thing is you've got the ability. I think the best example is a randomized study we did with women with metastatic breast cancer. We would meet with them once a week, we'd talk about their fear, pain, and anxiety, help them deal with that, and at the end of the session, we teached them to do self-hypnosis.

    16. CW

      Mm-hmm.

    17. DS

      And what we found over the course of the year was that the women in the, randomized to the treatment group had half the pain the control group did on the same and very low amounts of medication. And so what they would tell us was, "It's not that I never had pain. It's that I always knew that if I had it or it bothered me or it got worse, I could do the self-hypnosis."

    18. CW

      "I was in control."

    19. DS

      So instead of thinking, "Uh-oh, I have pain in my chest, there's a pneumatosis, I'm gonna die in a month," they would say, "Oh, yeah, I know what this is. I can deal with it," and they would be able to control the pain.

  10. 1:07:08 – 1:11:57

    What Areas Could Hypnosis Be Combined With?

    1. DS

    2. CW

      What have you-... or what are you excited about stacking hypnosis with in terms of multiple modalities? Um, is, is it a one-stop shop that this is all... It sounds like that's kind of a psychotherapy, a little bit of a psychotherapy-

    3. DS

      Mm-hmm.

    4. CW

      ... with a, a hypnosis finisher. Um, but is there something where you think, "Ha, this is an area of the modality that..." Uh, we've said a bunch of stuff today that sounds kind of psychedelic adjacent. Uh-

    5. DS

      Yeah.

    6. CW

      ... turning off of the default-mode network, uh, in- increasing levels of connectivity in areas that wouldn't typically be, etc., etc., increased interoception. Um, are there any areas that you think, "Oh, this would be a really interesting combination or stack to, uh, have hypnosis be built into?"

    7. DS

      Well, one other thing... You're right, and the, the reduction in default-mode network activity happens with psychedelics, it happens with meditation too actually, so there is that common ground there. One thing we've been looking at is breathwork, is, is how to help people control their breathing in ways that can help them relax, and that combines very nicely with self-hypnosis, and actually, we have several breathwork exercises, uh, cyclic sighing and box breathing-

    8. CW

      Mm.

    9. DS

      ... uh, in the Reveri app now. Because part of what you can do to help your body relax quickly is not just, you know, shift into this, uh, highly focused but relaxed state, but also breathe differently. So, you know, if you do... So cyclic sighing is an, an interesting practice, where-

    10. CW

      Can you explain what that-

    11. DS

      You do... Sure, you just do... And you can try it if you want, it's really simple. You just do a he- an abdominal inhale, start with your belly, through your nose about halfway, now fill your lungs completely, and then slowly exhale through your mouth. Good. And try one more time, inhale through your nose quickly. Fill your lungs now. Slow exhale through your mouth. How's your body feeling?

    12. CW

      Pretty regulated. Pretty nice.

    13. DS

      It's, it-

    14. CW

      Pretty floaty.

    15. DS

      Very quick. Floaty, right. And what you're doing, we think, is... You know, w- you... The standard thing when somebody's anxious, they take a deep breath. That's actually not a good idea. Because when you... How do you take a deep breath? You reduce pressure in the chest, you suck air into your lungs, but you also reduce blood return to the heart. You know, veins don't have muscles in the wall, arteries do.

    16. CW

      Mm-hmm.

    17. DS

      And so, that tends to slow the return of blood just a bit, but that sends a signal through the sinoatrial node to the heart to increase heart rate-

    18. CW

      Yep.

    19. DS

      ... to keep blood pressure up and keep blood flowing. Whereas when you exhale, you're increasing pressure in the chest, you're increasing venous return to the heart, and that triggers parasympathetic activity, the rest-and-digest system. So it's a very rapid way to invoke this self-soothing, and combining that with hypnosis, we think can be very helpful, and we found that people who do cyclic sighing, uh, like five minutes a day for a month-

    20. CW

      Mm.

    21. DS

      ... wind up being happier and less anxious, uh, and breathing one breath a minute more slowly.

    22. CW

      Wow.

    23. DS

      Um, and we all... We tend to over-breathe. We, we, we breathe too rapidly. And so, it's a very quick way of helping your body feel better and relax, and it combines very nicely with hypnosis.

    24. CW

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  11. 1:11:57 – 1:15:15

    The Positive Effects of Breath Work

    1. CW

      I've done a good bit of breathwork. There's some great classes here in Austin (clears throat) that I do that use that two... What they would call a two-part breath. Uh... (inhales and exhales through closed lips)

    2. DS

      Yeah. The slow exhale, yeah.

    3. CW

      Yeah, yeah. Um, also, James Nestor has been on, who wrote Breath.

    4. DS

      Mm-hmm.

    5. CW

      Brian Mackenzie's been on.

    6. DS

      Right.

    7. CW

      Uh, guys from the State app. Uh, um-

    8. DS

      Ah, okay.

    9. CW

      Who's the lady that did-

    10. DS

      Mm-hmm.

    11. CW

      ... the bioresonance, um, uh, HRV training? Dang. Uh, anyway, d- Dr. Lady.

    12. DS

      Mm-hmm.

    13. CW

      Lot of stuff around that. One of the things that I've always been a little bit uncertain about is how much a state change coming from, uh, breathwork-

    14. DS

      Mm-hmm.

    15. CW

      ... expands out into a trait change that impacts the way that you breathe throughout the day.

    16. DS

      Mm-hmm.

    17. CW

      Is this simply me giving myself a 10-minute salve from my sympathetic nervous system being tuned up? Or is this the sort of thing that after 30 days does result in lower breath rate across the night or whatever it might be?

    18. DS

      Well, we, we have a paper in Cell Reports Medicine that shows that it, it seems to have lasting effects, that mood is better, anxiety is reduced, positive affect is higher, and-

    19. CW

      Oh.

    20. DS

      ... um, and you're breathing less rapidly.

    21. CW

      Presumably the mechanism for that-

    22. DS

      Or the-

    23. CW

      ... is just regulation of the nervous system?

    24. DS

      Yeah. You just... You get... You know, you take... Uh, uh, neurons that fire together wire together. You keep doing it, and, um, it tends to change your pattern over time.

    25. CW

      Have you looked into bioresonance breathing?

    26. DS

      No, I haven't.

    27. CW

      It's an interesting one. So, um, you're trying to create the, uh, you- you find a breath rate, uh, of, I think you start off, you do an assessment, 7, 6.5, 6, 5.5, down to 3.5 breaths per minute.

    28. DS

      Hmm.

    29. CW

      And it tends to be around about 60% out versus 30% in, in terms of the ratio. That expands or contracts. Mine's 4.5. So my, uh, resonant... Uh, and what you end up doing, if you wear a- a- a little wearable, um-

    30. DS

      Mm-hmm.

  12. 1:15:15 – 1:24:31

    David’s Stand Out Hypnosis Cases

    1. CW

      fancy stuff. I'm interested in what the most, uh, some of your favorite standout extreme, uh, responses have been. You've mentioned about people being able to go through, uh, surgical procedures that would typically be very uncomfortable with, uh, minimal levels of sedation or minimal levels of- of painkillers. Um, I remember reading in Johann Hari's book, um, about this guy who had a f- a f-, uh, maybe 1800s, a famous wand that was attached to some electrical, uh, system, and he could wave it over people and get rid of all of their pain. And there was another study that was done where they recreated it even though they didn't have access to the technology, and they slowly removed each of the different components. They unplugged it, they to- they got rid of the box, they got rid of the metal, they got rid of the wire, and then they got rid of the actual stick that it was attached to. And I imagine that what we're seeing with some of those modalities is that you're allowing people to tap into it. But some of those stories were people that had this chronic pain, they'd been catatonic for years, et cetera. I'm interested what, across a pretty broad career, some of your standout cases of, uh, almost unbelievable responses to hypnosis were.

    2. DS

      Um, well, you know, I've had people, um, uh, who have dealt with just horrible, horrifying traumatic experiences, um, you know, sexual abuse in childhood or, you know, assault, injury. And, um, one technique that I used that I borrowed in a way from mindfulness, which is, uh, compassion, is- is the issue of having compassion for your own body. And so I've had a woman who, um, was sexually abused by a landlord when she was 12 years old and was de- chronically depressed and miserable and, um, uh, came to see me. She'd been on antidepressants for 15 years, and she had an okay career, um, but she, you know, as a teenager, she said, you know, "Men could say anything they wanted to me in the streets. Uh, I was ashamed, it was just terrible." And, um, I had her in hypnosis picture herself, um, as that 12-year-old just after she had been assaulted, and I said, "I want you to just answer one question for me, and I want you to imagine that you're her mother." So I get people to sort of develop a, use their knowledge and- and compassion as parents with themselves. And I said, "I want you to answer one question for me. Is this her fault?" And she started to cry harder, and she said, "No, I'm stroking her hair. I'm stroking her hair." And she came out of it, and she left. She- she was moved by it. And I've had a lot of patients who just, when you have them use their well-developed parental skills on themselves (laughs) , you know?

    3. CW

      Mm.

    4. DS

      And she said, "Uh, my doctor wants me to ask you what you did because I'm not depressed anymore, and my friends don't recognize me," you know? So, uh, and- and I've had other people who have, it- it's the shame, you know, that you, we- we'd rather feel guilty than helpless. And I found that hypnosis-

    5. CW

      Mmm.

    6. DS

      ... can help people recognize. You know, another one was a woman who was, you know, groped in a bus. Her mother was a few seats away, it was a very crowded bus, and she didn't say anything, but it changed her, you know? She just felt humiliated, and she was blaming herself. "Why didn't I scream? Why didn't I do, why didn't I do that?" And I said, "You were- you were not in control of the situation," you know? Look at yourself now and picture what it meant to go through that. And so, um, you can, th- this capacity in hypnosis to help people change their point of view, um, uh, is- is something that's powerful. I- I- I have a video of a Vietnam vet, um, who was hospitalized for a year in a state mental hospital. Um, just, he went crazy in, over in Vietnam. He went running through the jungle, shooting at what he thought were Viet Cong. And I found out that what had happened was he had informally adopted a Vietnamese child-Um, and, uh, he just took care of the kid. The kid was- had been burned and was badly injured, and he just kind of took over and with his father. He was the youngest of, like, 13 kids in his family. He liked being in this role of caring for somebody else. And he comes back, uh, and- and the- after the, um, uh, what was it? There was a major assault in- in Vietnam.

    7. CW

      Mm.

    8. DS

      And he found the boy dead, lying dead on the- on the street.

    9. CW

      Yeah.

    10. DS

      And, um, he just went- he went nuts. He just couldn't stand it. And he got out of the Army after 15 years in the Army. He- he was discharged on, you know, dishonorably and was getting psychiatric care. And I had him picture that and in hypnosis go back and relive what had happened. And I said, um, uh, and- and I then had him go to the- to the burial and, you know, he's saying, "Ashes to ashes and dust to dust." And, um, he said, "If I'd only been there with you, man, you wouldn't be there now. It's all my fault." And I said to him, "What would Shy Town say to you if he were here?" And he'd say, "You're- you're my number one cook, my number one sargey," you know? And he just- so I said, "I want you to picture two things about this. I want you to picture you're putting him in the ground, and I want you to picture one time you were really happy." And he remembered a birthday party that he threw for him. His- his- he had got a cake and he- his sister sent a toy train to the kid and, you know. And I said, "I want you to remember that every time you grieve his loss, I want you to remember the good times you had together." He said, "You number one sargey, number one cook." And so he comes out of the hypnosis and I- I said, "Do you remember anything?" And he said, "Joey, oh yeah, I remember a grave and a cake," and that was it. All the other stuff he didn't even re- consciously remember.

Episode duration: 1:33:31

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