The Science of Self-Hypnosis | Dr. David Spiegel

27:02That's good. And I'm going to give you this instruction. Your left hand will remain light and in this upright position, even after I give you the signal for your eyes to open. Later, when I ask you to take your right hand and pull your left hand back down and let go, your left hand will float right back up to the upright position. You'll find something pleasant and amusing about this sensation. After that, when I ask you to touch your left elbow with your right hand, your usual sensation and control will return. Each time you go into this state of concentration, you'll find it easier and easier to do, and you can use it to help you concentrate on what's important to you.

27:47Right now, we'll come out of this state of concentration together by counting backwards from three to one. On three, you'll get ready. On two, with your eyelids closed, roll up your eyes, and one, let your eyes open. Ready? Three, two, one. Good. Now you can let your eyes come back down, leave them open, but look straight ahead and describe what physical sensations you are now in your left hand and arm. What physical sensations do I have in my left hand and arm? That's correct. Light and tingly in the hand, some mild distress around the elbow from the discomfort of holding my arm up like this.

28:29All right. Well, you can let it rest closer to your body if you wish, but keep your left hand up. Good. Does your left hand feel as if it's not as much a part of your body as your right hand? Maybe. Well, does it feel as connected to the wrist as your right hand feels connected to the wrist? I think so. Okay. All right. Now, Now please take your right hand, pull your left hand back down to your leg or the arm of the chair, and then let go. Now turn your head, look at your left hand, and watch what's going to happen. And as you look at your left hand, just imagine it to be a big, buoyant balloon.

29:12Can you describe what it's feeling like? I do feel some upward momentum. All right. So as you imagine it to be a balloon, permit it to act out as if it were a balloon. Be big about it. That's good. All the way up. Now, by way of comparison, please raise your right hand. Put your right arm down. Are you aware of a relative difference in sensation in your left hand going up compared to your right? Yes, the left hand does feel more sort of effervescent light floaty good then the right so over which hand would you say you have more control right now maybe the right yeah but i still okay i don't feel like if somebody walked in the room and demanded i use my left hand i would be unable to meet those demands okay but there is a relative difference in your sense of control all right so notice how you're able to change your sensation and control in one hand and arm compared to the other.

30:20Now, please take your right hand and touch your left elbow and then let go. Touch and let go? Mm-hmm. Okay. Are you aware of a difference in sensation and control now in your left hand and arm compared to a moment before? Not massively. Well, does the left hand still feel a bit lighter than the right, or is the control equal no in the two hands yeah i guess it's not as light as it was previously yeah so okay did i do or say anything that would indicate there'd be a change in sensation or controlling your left hand and arm well i think you told me that when i touched my my left elbow with my right arm that you said something would happen at that point something you don't remember quite what it was i can't exactly remember something like the state of hypnosis would be over or something to that effect.

31:13Yeah, that's close to it. Did I do or say anything that would indicate that? So it was the touching of the elbow? Yes. Did you have a sense of floating lightness or buoyancy in your left hand and arm during the test? Yes. Did you have that sense in any other part of your body, head, neck, thighs, abdomen, chest all over, or just in your left hand and arm? Just in the left hand. Okay. All right. That's the end of the test. You can put your left hand down now if you like. your score is 6.5 out of 10 you're moderately hypnotizable could you describe a little bit more about how sensation and control changed in your left hand during the experience well with the caveat that the doubt that was percolating in my mind was that i want this to work sure so i just want to say that but i will say the most striking moment for me was when you said because I had a moment of like, there's nothing happening here because I thought the hand was supposed to naturally rise up and that wasn't happening.

32:16And you said, well, just look at your left hand and imagine it as a balloon. And as I did that, and this is where the doubt creeps in just a little bit because I thought I wondered, oh, maybe it would be cool if I felt that way. And so maybe that's why I'm feeling this way. But I did start to feel a mildly irresistible upward momentum in the hand at that moment. Whether I willed that or not, it was there. It was there. Good. I like that phrase, a mildly irresistible upward momentum. I hope we can continue that mildly irresistible upward momentum, because what you're seeing is that changing the way you think and experience your body through self-hypnosis, which is what you were doing, you can change how your body feels.

33:05And your brain has much more flexibility in modulating how you feel and how your body acts than we give ourselves credit for. You've mostly experienced that, from what I understand, in an unpleasant way. That is, you get anxious about something and things start to change in your body that are unpleasant. And then you notice that. Am I right about that? And then you feel worse. Yeah, panic disorder, or I don't know exactly what the right diagnosis is, either claustrophobia or panic disorder or some combination of the two. And it's been a tough couple of years where planes have been very hard for me.

33:45That's what I understand. Well, let's see. I think you can use your ability, your hypnotic ability to help with that, because think of it this way. You were able to very quickly change the way your left arm felt. Your brain can play tricks on you in lots of ways. So a phobia, claustrophobia is a fear of a bad thing happening, which people often then avoid, which only deprives them of experience of dealing with what they're scared of without bad things happening. So it reinforces, the avoidance actually reinforces the phobia. Panic is the psychophysiological reaction to a bad situation. And there you're breathing more rapidly and shallowly and your heart rate goes up and your muscles tense.

34:26But the interesting thing is the snowball effect. And I'm sure you've been through this many times where you start to think, uh-oh, this is getting bad. And then you notice something in your body. Your heart rate goes up a little bit, your muscles tense, you start to sweat. And then you think, oh my God, it's going to be this again. I can't stand it. And I understand if I may say that you've gotten off of airplanes. You've just decided that I can't do with it. But it is a snowball effect. so you get anxious, your body reacts, you notice your body reacting, you get more anxious and on it goes. But you can learn ways to control that.

35:01If your brain can play a bad trick on you by making you feel as though things are more threatening and unpleasant than they are, you can teach your brain to play a good trick on you, which is, you know, things really aren't that bad. And the way I have people do this is to start not with the stressor they're worried about, but with the one thing they can control, which is their body and how it's reacting to the stressor. And once you do that, you're starting to interrupt that snowball effect and teaching your brain how to better manage your physiological reaction to the stress, but also your mental reaction to it.

35:38So if you'd like, we can try doing an exercise like that. And if flying in planes is a primary problem, why don't we start with dealing with that? Yes, I would love to do that. And I appreciate your willingness. Good. Happy to do it. We psychiatrists always appreciate it when people want to hear us better. That's a good thing. All right. So get as comfortable as you can. How would you rate your general level of stress right now? Pretty low. Three. Three? Okay. All right. So get as comfortable as you can. On one, please do one thing. Look up all the way up high as you can. Open your eyes first again and look up and slowly close your eyes while you're looking up.

36:21Close. Good. Now take a deep breath. Breath out slowly through your mouth. Let your eyes relax, but keep them closed and let your body float. Just imagine your body floating somewhere safe and comfortable, like a bath, a lake, a hot tub, or floating in space. Just imagine your body floating safe and comfortable, and then let one hand or the other float up in the air like a balloon. And that'll be your signal again that you're ready to concentrate. Each breath deeper and easier. Good. Now your right hand floating in this upright position is your signal that you are ready to concentrate. I want you to imagine you're floating somewhere you really enjoy, a bath, a lake, a hot tub, or imagine floating in space.

37:13And again, inhale through your nose. and then slow exhale through your mouth. Now with your eyes closed, remaining in this state of concentration, please describe how your body is feeling right now.

37:30Light, tingly, the only source of mild tension is an itch on my face. Okay. You're allowed to scratch if you'd like. Continue to breathe deeply. Breathe deeply, inhale through your nose, and then slow exhale through your mouth. That's good. So just imagine that you're floating safe and comfortable, and notice how quickly and easily you can use your store of memories and your imagination to help yourself and your body feel better. Nice inhale through your nose and then slow exhale through your mouth. How's your body feeling now? Great. Good. All right. So now we're going to work together on how you prepare yourself for flying and what you do when you're in an airplane.

38:29And there are three critical points I want you to remember. The first is when you get on the plane, buckle your seatbelt, go into the state of self-hypnosis, and feel yourself floating with the plane. There's no point physically fighting with the plane, getting tense, struggling with it. Think of the takeoff the way you would feel as a kid on a roller coaster. Just enjoy the movement. So float with the plane. Just feel yourself. Imagine right now you're in the plane. It's moving down the runway faster and faster and then taking off into the air and just feel your body floating with the plane.

39:19Again with your eyes closed and remaining in this state of concentration, please describe how your body's feeling right now body continues to feel good deep breathing always feels nice good and you can imagine your body floating with the plane plane's moving you're just floating with it is that right yes i will say just for mild clarification usually by the time we're taking off, that's not when the fear hits. It's usually as I sit there, buckle my seatbelt, and I'm awaiting them closing the door and the fear that I will feel locked in. Right. Okay. So that's part two. So just get nice and comfortable in the seat.

40:08And the second part of the exercise is to think of the airplane as an extension of your body. If you want to get from one place to the next, the easiest thing to do is walk. If you want to get there a little faster, you might hop on a bicycle and cycle over to your friend's house. Now, in that sense, the bicycle is an extension of your body, allowing you to get from one place to another faster. If it's farther away or you want to get there faster, you might get in a car and drive. The car is an extension of your body. And now I want you to think of the airplane as an extension of your body. It helps you to get from one place to another.

40:52So your brain is deciding that the most efficient way to get from one place to another is to have an airplane as an extension of your body. So rather than being trapped in a can, you're using the airplane to extend your body and get from one place to another faster. and think of the pilot as an extension of your brain. You chose the airline you flew on because they have well-trained pilots and the pilot is an extension of your brain helping you to safely and rapidly get from one place to another. So you're in fact in the driver's seat. You're deciding what to use as an extension of your body and how to use it through the plane and the pilot.

41:40so you're floating with a plane and you're thinking of the plane as an extension of your body and your brain how does that feel it's a nice reframing it's not a prison it's an example of my agency of choosing to get somewhere exactly and outsourcing aspects of my prefrontal cortex to the pilot who's going to operate the controls. Beautifully put. You got it. That's exactly right. And now here's the third part of the exercise, Dan, and that is the difference between a possibility and a probability. It's always possible the plane will crash, although per mile driving in a car is a lot more dangerous than flying in an airplane.

42:31It's possible, but it isn't probable. it's always possible i'm sitting here in california that the great earthquake will happen right now and my house will fall down on top of me but it isn't probable so keep in mind the vividness with which you could picture a bad outcome is totally unrelated to the probability that a bad outcome will happen so there's a big difference between a possibility and a probability oddly enough i'm not actually worried about the plane crashing. I'm worried about my brain and body going into mutiny mode as soon as they lock the door and I'll lose my mind and go insane in front of everybody.

43:12Yeah. But the same logic applies. The probability is low. The probability is low. That's right. So you can worry about it, but you've already exerted your control over your body and your brain by getting your body more comfortable, imagining floating with the plane, reconceptualizing the plane as an extension of your body and the pilot as an extension of your brain. And what pilots tell me in terms of possibility and probability is that at least when something goes wrong on a plane, the pilot has seven or eight minutes to figure it out and fix it, which is not the situation in a car. It's a couple of seconds, one way or the other.

43:51So even that possibility is even less probable in an airplane. So once again, notice how you've been able to keep your body comfortable just imagining being in an airplane and getting ready to take off. And how you can reconceptualize what the plane is, who the pilot is, and how you're using them to do what you want to do and how to think about the difference between a possibility and a probability. How are you feeling now? I feel pretty good. A little bit uncomfortable holding my arm up, but other than that, I feel good. Other than that, good. So can I ask you this, Dan, if you had just spent the last 10 minutes or so just thinking about being in a plane and taking off how would you be feeling normally yeah normally i can get myself to not quite to panic but to reasonably five six seven level of anxiety swarm of bees in the chest type of feeling and i don't feel any of that right now that's terrific so how would you rate your level of anxiety right now on that zero to ten scale if i imagine myself sitting on a plane with the door about to close yeah two or three right and is that how you're feeling now you feeling two or three or more or less that's when i make the imaginative leap but the way i'm actually feeling right now is if i'm not conjuring the image is you know zero to one that's wonderful so notice how much agency you have over how you react to the same potentially stressful situation and how you did it by going into the state of self-hypnosis and starting with your body, the thing you do control and helping your body feel comfortable, and then reconceptualizing what's happening and what's about to happen by using your brain differently, focusing on the realities of the situation and putting them into perspective while your body feels safe and comfortable.

46:04And that's the way in which you can use self-hypnosis to control your agency and manage the anxiety you have felt about flying. So what I'd suggest that you do is anytime you're worried about flying, don't fight it, admit it, go into the state of self-hypnosis, get your body floating and comfortable, and go through these three points. Float with the plane as an extension of your body and the pilot as an extension of your brain and the difference between a possibility and a probability. And do this as often as you need to. Do it when you sit down in an airplane the next time you get into one. And then when you're ready, you'll come out of the state of self-hypnosis by counting backwards from three to one.

46:45On three, you'll get ready. Two, with your eyelids closed, roll up your eyes. One, let your eyes open. Your hand float back down. Make a fist open. And that's the end of exercise. How are you feeling? I feel pretty good. Yeah. Terrific. Not anxious. There you go. It's interesting. Well, I have a million questions, but one question that's of local interest to me, and I don't know how interesting it will be to the audience is I have been doing quite a bit of work with different types of therapists of late to really try to tackle my claustrophobia on planes in part because I'm really tired of taking medication to fly and dealing with a hangover in part because my family finds me very annoying either when I'm on the medication which is Klonopin which is a you know can make you a little goofy and they also find me annoying when I have taken an insufficient amount of Klonopin and have to get off the flight, which has happened a few times recently.

47:48So I'm quite motivated and I'm noticing a real difference between the hypnotic approach or the hypnosis approach, which is to get your body into a relaxed state. And once you're in that relaxed, focused, flow-like state to cognitively reframe the situation so that you recognize you're not in any danger. As compared to exposure therapy, which I've done some where you're gently, consistently, persistently, systematically exposed to that which scares you. And the idea is to actually provoke some degree of panic and teach the brain that the panic is survivable. And so these seem quite different. One, I could imagine a CBT or a exposure therapist saying, you, David Spiegel, are helping me avoid that which I shouldn't be avoiding.

48:50Yeah, well, they might say that, but I would say they're avoiding the remarkable ability you have within yourself to do it a hell of a lot faster and easier. And you're not avoiding it. I experience you now as somebody who will be able to get on an airplane and fly because you know how to manage your psychophysiological reaction to the stress. It's a kind of a psychological shortcut to doing the same thing, accomplishing your goal, but a lot faster and a lot easier. So a couple of practical questions. And again, these are, these are oriented in a selfish way. And then I'm going to ask you some broader questions, but practically speaking, is this something I should be practicing consistently in preparation for my next flight?

49:33Yes, I think at first it would be a good idea because of the history you have of having trouble with it. I would try several times a day to sit down or lie down, go through this little exercise, and anytime you start to get anxious again, say, okay, I am. I'm going to go into this state and reestablish my ability to control my reaction to the idea of flying. And there, you're facing what you're anxious about, but you're experiencing mastery, not submission to or struggle with the psychophysiological anxiety. You're mastering it. Because the cool thing about hypnosis is you can really change how your brain manages your body.

50:11You can make a difference. And that's what you're learning to do. So you come out of it now, I think, feeling good. You feel a little proud. I did this. I feel better, not worse when I'm thinking about it. So rather than chipping away at it and say, oh, I'm still anxious, but a little less. You're saying I can face this and manage it differently. And that makes you feel good. So just to restate it for the purposes of clarity for myself and for the audience, the exercise you're describing of self-hypnosis is as follows, if memory serves, to aim your eyes as high up as you can as toward the top of your head to then close your eyelids while the eyeballs are in that position.

50:52That's correct. Then to start breathing deeply in through the nose, out through the mouth. Right. Relax the eyes once you've started the deep breathing. Right. And so you're in this state with your eyes closed, you're breathing deeply, which can reset the nervous system. And in this state, you then bring to mind a situation that in my case, a phobia might arise and reframe it cognitively. In my case, through the plane of thinking first of myself floating. I skipped a step while I'm deep breathing. I'm imagining myself floating. I pictured myself in a jacuzzi. I have a lot of somatic memories of floating in a jacuzzi as a little boy.

51:42And so then I'm on the plane. I'm imagining that the plane and I are floating together and that the plane is an extension of my body and the pilot an extension of my brain. And so that's the exercise I want to do. Right. And then the difference between a possibility and a probability is the last. Right. But notice how your brain is tuning into this. So like I never mentioned a jacuzzi to you. You summoned up a memory in which you connect your brain state with a comfortable body state. That's great. Your brain is saying, okay, I catch on to this. Here's what I want to do. Instead of thinking about how scared I am about being buried alive in a tin can at 30 ,000 feet, I'm thinking about a time when my body felt really comfortable.

52:27And your brain can just as easily get into that positive mental state as it can a negative one. And you can control it. And that's what you're doing. The one thing, as I recapitulated the basic steps of the exercise, the one thing I left out was the lifting of the arm. How important is that? Well, it's not necessary, but what I think that the arm taught both of us is that your brain has this ability to change the way a part of your body feels. So before we started this, you might say, come on, every time I think about getting in an airplane, I get tense and this happens. And I'm showing you in a neutral way that you can change the way your body feels.

53:07You can make your left arm feel different from your right arm. One feels lighter than the other. And so you're showing yourself that when you go into this state of self-hypnosis, you're enhancing your ability to control how your body feels. And you don't have to automatically go on a downhill spiral where you get more anxious and your body gets more tense. You can go in the other direction. And that's what you're seeing there is what do you know? This hand feels different from that one. Okay. So that makes sense. And it doesn't seem like a non-negotiable part of the self-hypnosis process. No, you can do it without it, but it's a, I think it's a useful entry into your understanding and deepening of your ability to do this, to just have a neutral test case.

53:51I'm not trying to loosen my gut. I'm just trying to see how my arm feels this one compared to that one. Yes. So it's not necessary, but it's a good start. And just to say for people who want to try this at home, we've described the practice and so people can just go do it, but you also have an app, R-E-V-E-R-I, Reverie, which gives guided instructions for doing this. Right. And this is one of the exercises in Reverie. We have exercises for stress and insomnia and pain, but we also have this flying phobia program in the app. And so you get to hear my mellifluous voice giving you the same instructions on Reverie that I've just given you.

54:31You can download it from reverie.com from the app store and from Google play. And the first week is free. You can try it out and see what it feels like. I hope it will help lots of people. It's accessible. It's easy to use. And I hope people will, more people will get on planes. It's about 10 % of Americans are afraid to fly. They just don't fly. And so it's a lot of people who could potentially be helped. Coming up, Dr. Spiegel talks about the connection between hypnosis and meditation, the importance of the eyes in hypnosis and other therapies, how you can rely on deep breathing, even if nothing else lands.

55:09And just out of curiosity, we talk about how stage hypnotists can figure out who in the audience is most hypnotizable.

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56:06You can join Wayfair Rewards today to get 5 % back on every purchase and start saving on your next home upgrade. Head to wayfair.com to shop all things home. That's W-A-Y-F-A-I-R.com. Wayfair. Every style, every home. this is a show that concerns itself quite frequently with mindfulness meditation yes what is the connection between the hypnotic state and a meditative state in your mind well they're similar but they're not the same uh meditation involves open presence you know just not trying to control your thoughts and experiences but just letting yourself feel that things flow through you like wind blowing by.

56:50It's different in that it is not designed to help you change something or change who you are, but just experience things differently. It involves developing compassion. It involves a body scan too, seeing how your body is feeling. But hypnosis is more directed at solving a problem, whereas meditation is more directed at being different. And it's a powerful, interesting technique, but from an American point of view, it's not as efficient. I had a woman who called me, she had migraine headaches, and she said, Doc, I've been doing meditation twice a day for 10 years, and I still have my migraines.

57:29Can you help me? So I had her in hypnosis. Imagine she had a cap of ice on her head, cool, tingly numbness. People with migraines often feel their heads are hot. They have vasodilatation around the head. She called me a week later, and she said, my migraines are gone thank you and thank you for freeing me to use my intentionality because with meditation you're not supposed to be intentional you're supposed to be experiential and with hypnosis it's fine to be intentional so we found that in people who've done research on meditation in the brain show reduced activity back in that same region the posterior cingulate cortex the default mode network so experienced meditators tend to reduce that they think less about who they are and what they are.

58:12And that's part of the idea of meditation too, is to kind of let go of your clinging to a certain identity of who you are. So they're overlapping, they're similar, but hypnosis is much more problem focused. Let me give you my take on what you just said, because I think there's a lot to it. Meditation, and I've come out of a Buddhist context, so even within Buddhist meditation, there's a pretty wide variety. There are practices that actually are quite, to use the word you used before, intentional. Like, for example, loving kindness practice, where you're envisioning a variety of beings and then sending them phrases like, may you be happy, may you be safe.

58:52And there's a lot of busyness in the mind. There's a lot of business you are conducting in the mind and it produces concentration. It is classically referred to as a concentration technique because it focuses the mind. It gives the mind a lot to do and gets quite focused. And that to me feels at least like a cousin to what you were having me do, which is simultaneously deep breathing, conjuring a felt sense of floating, and then cognitively reframing the thing that I'm worried about. Meanwhile, there's another form of meditation that is much more commonly taught, which is mindfulness meditation, where it really is about feeling whatever you're feeling, noticing physical sensations, thoughts, emotions, and not getting attached to them, letting them go.

59:47So having done for 16 years, both loving kindness and mindfulness, I actually found them both useful in the process of self-hypnosis first because I have enough practice now doing a bunch of things in the mind at the same time in an intentional way. And second, because there were intrusive thoughts, is this bullshit? Am I fucking this up? You know, like, uh, is this a boring podcast, whatever those thoughts were coming through, but I was actually, I was able to handle them in a reasonably supple manner by just noticing, Oh, that's a thought. I'm going to let it go and go back to what the doctor is asking me to do.

1:00:28So that's a long response to your answer. Does any of that land for you? Yeah, absolutely. And I do think in both cases, there's a kind of focus on the one hand in mindfulness less than in other meditative practices, but you are directing your thoughts in some ways, but also letting go of traditional distractions and things that might keep you stuck in the same rut that you're in. I think it is no accident that different cultures around the world have different practices of altering your state of mind. But I think what they have in common is this capacity to be different mentally, to experience yourself as a different kind of person than you thought you were, and to try things you might never have tried before and feel different when you do it.

1:01:16And I think hypnosis is about 250 years old. It's a short Western tradition compared to meditation in the East. but they're both mental practices that help you expand your array of abilities to use this machine in your head. So they have things in common, but there are differences too. What is the importance of the eyes? You had me look up toward the top of my head. The caricature version of hypnosis is watch this, keep your eyes on this, watch swinging, pendulating back and forth. Why are the eyes so important in this process? Well, the eyes are, you know, we're visual creatures primarily. The whole back of our brain is devoted to processing visual signals.

1:02:03It's the main way we protect ourselves. We see things. There are animals that can hear better and smell better than us. We see extremely well to perceive threat. And when you're ready to go to sleep, to shut down consciousness to a large extent, you close your eyes. What you're doing with the upward gaze is you're saying, I'm going to close my eyes, but I'm not going to just stop concentrating and thinking. I'm going to turn inward. And there is actually an old Zen practice called looking at the third eye, where you do exactly the same thing. You look up and close your eyes. And drugs that affect levels of consciousness, like the meds you used to take for flying, affect eye movement.

1:02:41Opioids give you pinpoint pupils, and stimulants give you large, expanded pupils. The eyes are in the middle of the motor nuclei of the eyes, third, fourth, and sixth cranial nerves are in the middle of the reticular activating system in the brainstem, which adjusts level of arousal. So eye movement and arousal are very much connected in our brains. And so controlling your eye movements in a certain way, that means I'm closing my eyes, but I'm not going to sleep, I'm doing something different, is a helpful way into an altered state of consciousness. And that's part of the meditation tradition as well as the hypnotic tradition it got me thinking because one of the other therapy i've been trying a bunch of stuff recently and one of the other therapies i've been trying is called brain spotting which is evolution of something called emdr eye movement desensitization reprogramming yes so both emdr and brain spotting involve using your eyes to look in a certain place and then enter into a, well, I can only speak to brain spotting.

1:03:44You look in a spot that is somewhat triggering, and then you let your mind rest and relax. And you let the subconscious mind go to work to find the root memory that is causing your phobia. I don't need you to comment on whatever you think about brain spotting, although you can if you want. I'm only bringing it up to say that a lot of these therapies implicate the eyes. Yeah, they do. And that seems interesting to me. Yes, they do. And I think that's right. And the eyes have a lot to do with our level of arousal and how we manage it. I would say in general, the funny thing about a lot of people with phobias, some have had horrible experiences that are tied to their phobias, but a lot of people haven't.

1:04:28They just develop the phobia because it becomes a kind of feedback loop. You get a little anxious, something bad happened, you get more anxious. You notice your body. It's that snowball effect. And sometimes people are phobic with no historical event. And I treat a lot of people with trauma, so I'm attuned to that. But there are a lot of people who haven't had any original trauma. They just have, over time, had this kind of layering on of psychological and physiological distress that winds up being a phobia or a panic state. It doesn't have to be that way. And the idea of EMDR was that if you cross the midline and you focus things on the left and the right, that will have some magical effect.

1:05:10It doesn't. So I think it's more having an experience in which you can, from the bottom up, control how your body's reacting and then how your brain is reacting to a stressful situation. So it sounds like you're pretty skeptical about EMDR. I am. You know, a lot of people have used it. It does help people deal with traumatic events. there's no question but i think it's not the moving back now you know they've given up on the eye movements it's now tapping one side of the body or the other i just think that's the wrong mechanism i don't think that's what's going on so can it help people yes but not for the reasons i think they think one other thing i would mention while we have a few minutes is that you know if people get into a panic state even if they are not up to using hypnosis just that breath work the cyclic sighing that we did can be very helpful to people in a panic state.

1:06:02You know, they tell people, take a deep breath. That's actually something that arouses you. Because when you inhale, you drop pressure in the chest, you reduce blood flow to the heart a little bit, and your sympathetic nervous system takes off and says, uh-oh, we need more blood to the heart. Whereas a slow exhale increases pressure in the chest, increases blood flow to the heart, and the parasympathetic, the anti-arousal part of the autonomic nervous system takes over. And so you may have just felt like in your legs a little bit. Did you, when you exhale slowly through your mouth, did you feel a little bit of more physical relaxation when you did that?

1:06:37Yes, just for the listener, cyclic sighing is the term of art that Dr. Spiegel is using for deep breathing. And I do, almost every time I sit to meditate, I do a minute or two, sometimes more of straw breathing, which is a deep in-breath through the nose and then a much longer, three or four times longer out-breath through a pursed lips as if you're blowing through a straw. It is very much physically feels very good. Yes, exactly. I'm glad to hear that. That's right. And you're helping inhibit your sympathetic nervous system and stimulate the parasympathetic system. And we found that when people do this regularly, just five minutes a day, their average respiratory rate per hour goes down by one breath a minute.

1:07:26And we all tend to breathe too fast and too shallowly. So when people start to have a panic attack, just that straw breathing or cyclic sighing that you talk about can sometimes be very helpful. Interesting. One last question. I hope it's the last. It might not be, but I do have my eyes on the clock because I know you have to leave soon. But another question about hypnosis itself is Is your experience that this can be for some people a one and done? You get them into a deep hypnotic state and get them to reframe, you know, their desire for a cigarette or whatever it is, and then it's over? Or is your experience, is it more common that this is a thing people need to practice?

1:08:05And like for me, for example, I'll need to do this every time I get on a plane indefinitely. Well, you might. It can be either one. If you've got it solved and you don't need to think about it anymore, fine. But the nice thing is you've learned a skill that you can use anytime you need it. And if you're just thinking about the flight next week and you're getting a little anxious, you can do it. And you can queue up Reverie and have me give you instructions. And it's interactive. So you give an answer. I'll give you a different type of instruction each time you do it. But it can be one and done.

1:08:34We found that one out of four people that use the app just once stop smoking. You know, it's not everybody, but it's as good or better than the medications that are We use Vareniclean and Bupropion and Nicorette. So people can sometimes just get it and move on. And that's what's cool. You're really resetting the clock. You're changing the way you think about yourself and what you can do. And once you've done it, you're pulling yourself out of that cycle of frustration and disappointment and anxiety and body tension and so on. You can just disrupt that and handle it differently. So yeah, some people can just do it.

1:09:09Other people need to refresh themselves, but that's fine. It's easy. this is really the last question i think okay you said something yeah a million years ago that at the beginning of this conversation that just caught my attention you were talking about stage hypnotists and you said that they often figure out who's hypnotizable before they do their thing right how can you quickly test if somebody's super hypnotizable if you want to know for yourself they often don't do this but you know you ask somebody do you ever get so caught up in a good movie that you forget you're watching a movie and enter the imagined world People who do that tend to be more hypnotizable.

1:09:46But what the stage hypnotists do is they'll be up there doing an initial spiel about what hypnosis is and what it isn't. And they'll be swaying back and forth. And they're looking for people in the audience who are swaying with them. And then they'll invite them to come up and they'll try a few hypnotic tricks. And if they respond, they keep them. If not, they say, thank you very much. And look at somebody else. So they go through the audience to find the most hypnotizable people before they stretch them between two chairs and sit on them and stuff like that. So yes, that's the trick. Got it. How did you come to the number 6.5 for me on the hypnotic scale?

1:10:23You had some, when I asked, is the left hand not as connected to the wrist as the right, does it feel not as much a part of your body? You weren't so sure about that. You said, maybe it's a little less connected. So that was one out of two points. The challenge where I had you put the hand down and bring it back up, you did, it floated up, but I had to give you several verbal reinforcements. So you lost a point and a half out of two for that. You did have a sense of control differential that you felt less control over the left hand than the right. That was two points. You responded to the signal touching your elbow and you got the control back.

1:10:58You said, oh yeah, it feels like the way it was. That was two points. And you had a sense of floating lightness or buoyancy in your left hand and arm, but not anywhere else in your body. So you lost three and a half points out of 10. That's how it works. And it's a reliable measure. It's as reliable as IQ over a 25-year interval. It's very stable. But it is self-report. That was kind of one of the things I was starting to doubt is like, I want this to work. So how much am I? Do you see where I'm going? And does that even matter? Dan, I've used this with about 7 ,000 people in my career. And there are a lot of people who pay good money to see me and they want help and they just can't respond.

1:11:40So my experience is that people are not afraid to disappoint me if they're not feeling, I mean, there may be some, but it's not in their interest either because I can help you even if you're not extremely hypnotizable. It's a different way I approach it. So it's helping teaching me what's the best channel to get to you. And people who are very hypnotizable, it's easier to just say, you'll do this, you'll feel different. Nice seeing you. For less hypnotizable people, you've got to explain it and have them do it their way and try it in a couple of different ways. And so it's more of a negotiation, but you can help people too.

1:12:15And just at our reverie team meeting this morning, there was somebody who said, I'm not hypnotizable at all, but I've used it to help myself get to sleep and deal with anxiety. And thank you. So it's a combination of the way we approach the problem. Focus on what you're for, not what you're against, and going into this altered state, and the combination seems to work pretty well. Dr. David Spiegel, I want to thank you for your time, for your willingness to treat this difficult patient. I want to remind everybody that Dr. Spiegel's written a book called Trance and Treatment, Trance and Treatment, that I will put a link to in the show notes.

1:12:53He's also the founder of the Reverie app, that's R-E-V-E-R-I. I'll put a link to that in the show notes as well. Doctor, thank you again. Been a pleasure. Thank you for articulating it and being so open to have the experience and show so many people how it can work. And you'll get my bill in the morning. Awesome. I look forward to it. Take care.

1:13:18Thanks again to Dr. David Spiegel. Don't forget, there's a companion guided meditation that goes with this episode. It's all about how to deal with stress and anxiety, which is one of the use cases for self-hypnosis. It comes from our Teacher of the Month, Kyra Juulingo. It's available for paying subscribers over on danharris.com. Also, starting on September 2nd, we're going to be doing live guided meditation sessions on video weekly, every Tuesday afternoon. This month, it's Kyra Juulingo. Next month, in September, it's Vinny Ferraro, who, as I often say, is a fan favorite and a personal favorite.

1:13:53He and I will be doing a live guided meditation sesh on video on September 2nd, Tuesday afternoon. And like I say, if you sign up at danharris.com, you can come to all of these weekly. It really is designed to help you start or boot up or boost your meditation practice. And finally, don't forget to sign up for the live meditation party we're doing the weekend of October 24th 24th at the Omega Institute north of NYC in Rhinebeck, New York. You can get a link in the show notes. Finally, I want to thank everybody who worked so hard to make this show. Our producers are Tara Anderson, Caroline Keenan, and Eleanor Vasili.

1:14:31Our recording and engineering is handled by the great folks over at Pod People. Lauren Smith is our production manager. Marissa Schneiderman is our senior producer. DJ Kashmir is our executive producer. And Nick Thorburn of the band Islands wrote our theme.

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