Essentials: Using Hypnosis to Enhance Mental & Physical Health & Performance | Dr. David Spiegel

(soft rock music) Welcome to Huberman Lab Essentials, where we revisit past episodes for the most potent and actionable science-based tools for mental health, physical health and performance. I'm Andrew Huberman, and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. And now for my discussion with Dr. David Spiegel. David, thank you so much for being here.

Andrew, my pleasure.

Can you tell us what is hypnosis?

Hypnosis is a state of highly focused attention. Uh, it's something like looking through the telephoto lens of a camera in consciousness. What you see, you see with great detail but devoid of context. If you've had the experience of getting so caught up in a good movie that you forget you're watching a movie and enter the imagined world, you're part of the movie, not part of the audience, you're experiencing it, you're not evaluating it, that's a hypnotic-like experience that many people have in their everyday lives.

If I'm watching a sports game and I'm really wrapped up in the game, but I'm also in touch with how it makes me feel in my body, kind of registering, or the excitement, or the anticipation, is that a state of hypnosis also?

To the extent that your somatic, your body experience, is a part of the, the sport event that you're engaged with, I'd say that is a self-altering hypnotic experience. If your physical reactions are distracting you or, uh, make you think about something else, that's when, uh, it's, it's less hypnotic-like and more just one of a series of experiences.

I think for most people, when they hear hypnosis or they think about hypnosis, they think of stage hypnosis.

Right.

They think of somebody with a pendant going back and forth. Could you contrast the sort of hypnosis that you do in the clinical setting, with the sort of hypnosis that a stage hypnotist does?

I don't like stage hypnosis. You're making fools out of people, um, and you're using the fact ... And that's what scares people about hypnosis, they think you're losing control. You're gaining control. Self-hypnosis is a way of enhancing your control over your mind and your body. It can work very well, but because it gives you a kind of cognitive flexibility, you're able to shift sets very easily, y- to give up judging and evaluating the way you usually do, and see something from a d- dif- different point of view. That's a great therapeutic opportunity, but if misused, it could be a danger too, and that's what scares people about it. It's, it is that very ability to suspend critical judgment and just have an experience and see what happens. It's an ability that if people learn to recognize and understand it, can be a tremendous therapeutic tool.

Do we know what sorts of brain areas are active during the induction? The, let's call it the deep hypnosis, and then what's shutting off or changing as people exit hypnosis?