Dr. David Spiegel: 10-MINUTE Hypnosis Hack to Rewire Your Brain & Reduce Stress 80% Faster

26:59I first found out about my cancer at the age of 45. Anything with cancer, you just think death sentence. In this episode, we'll explore the science behind detection along with the practical steps men can take to protect their health. Listen to Health Discovered on America's number one podcast network, iHeart. Open your free iHeart app, search Health Discovered, and start listening. This is Amy Brown from Feeling Things with Amy and Kat. We've been made to believe that saying yes is a good thing, but I've realized there's a big difference between doing it intentionally and doing it unintentionally.

27:35IsoPure protein helps you focus on more of what matters, like feeling your best every day. With great tasting nutrition that's high protein and also low carb, if you need that, IsoPure fits seamlessly into your lifestyle and that's why I've added it to my daily routine. I use IsoPure unflavored protein in recipes like pasta sauce and guacamole during the week. With 25 grams of ultra filtered protein and zero carbs, plus 20 vitamins and minerals, you can boost nearly any recipe without changing the taste of your favorite foods. I've already restocked four times because I add the IsoPure Unflavored to everything.

28:13You can try the IsoPure Vanilla to blend 25 grams of protein into your smoothies or your oatmeal, or check out IsoPure Clear Protein Water with 15 grams of protein, which supports hydration with electrolytes and a light berry flavor. Enjoy more of what matters today at isopureprotein.com and get 20 % off your order when you use code MINDS20 at checkout? That's a great question. I would say that the state of sinking and being in that state of awake and alert, but also resting is something I feel certain mindfulness practices can allow us to create that state. i've never created it through physical movement it's always created through being present or still or bringing my awareness to a particular object or my breath or whatever it may be but i've never really felt it physically it's probably the best way i could define the difference i felt like i'm floating while meditating or i felt a lightness in my entire body but not in a specific hand or a specific part of my body.

29:25I see. So it's more slipping into the state, but not using it right away to see if you can produce a change. Correct. And, and frankly, when I use hypnosis with subjects and I use this test with every person I use hypnosis with, because it's a way for them to discover what the experience is like and how they feel and to observe it, you know, to see, don't take my word for it, try it out and see what it feels like. and for me to be able to evaluate in what way to work with them because some people can do something like what you did some less some not at all not that many but some people not at all but it becomes a kind of immediate object lesson and how much more control we have over our body and how we react to that than we usually give ourselves credit for what about the the cynical mind that says and that's i'm so glad i'm talking to you about this because you know years of research, Stanford medicine.

30:20It's the cynical mind that I avoided having in this experience, because I generally consider myself someone who wants to be open to experience and curious and open to letting things in to figure it out and see how useful it may be. But the cynical mind that says, well, of course, Jay lifted his hand because David had said that he would lift his hand when he put it back down. But to me, I can genuinely say that, yes, there was an instruction in the brain, but there was also a feeling that was there. And so both those things, and my cynical self, if I was trying to be annoying, which I would never want to in a, you know, I've invited you to be my guest on my show, but the cynical skeptical part of me would have been like, oh, I'm just going to hold my hand down just to make a point.

31:04But I wanted to go with how I was actually feeling and intuitively feeling. So the cynical person that says, well, it's a placebo effect, or it's something that David told you to do, and that's why you did it. How do you process that kind of response or reaction that often I imagine arises? Well, you know, I frankly think the best answer is you are highly experienced in mindfulness, in trying out different ways of being. And yet for you and you're telling, look, I'm a guest on your show. This is your show. It would be fine for you to just say, you know, sorry, doc, nice try. I don't feel it. And I think you would be honest with your audience in doing that.

31:44I would, yes. But you had the experience, you know. Years ago, I don't know if you remember this, but there was a guy named Phil Donahue who had a very popular daytime show. And he invited me as a guest. And it was at a time when it was thought to be dangerous to hypnotize someone in public. You wouldn't do that. Other people might get hypnotized. So this woman I had hypnotized before the show began, and I had her arm up in the air like this. the show opens and I pulled a hand down and it pops back up the way yours did. And the camera comes in closer and Donahue says, look, this is just some doctor.

32:21I'm Phil Donahue. Keep your hand down. And he pulls her hand down and it pops right back up in the air. And she says, I'm starting to feel like a slot machine, you know? So the fun thing about it is, is that if it's the real deal, it wasn't like you were saying, oh, I'll just keep my hand down. Your hand wanted to go up right and that ability to quickly rearrange your mind-body relationship is part of what's so interesting about hypnosis and you experienced it so you know people can fight it if they want or they can misrepresent what their experience is but you didn't you had the experience and that element of surprise that where people can see damn i can look look what's happening in my body look what i can do this quickly that's we're all i'm already starting therapy there you know because i'm showing people that they have more of an ability to control their body than they like to think or than they usually think and that's a tremendous opportunity right even though you're the one giving the instruction you feel that that's showing that i have the power to control my body that's a very important point jay because it's i'm not taking control and i You may have, did you feel like I was taking control of you?

33:35No, no, no, no, at all. No, I thought, I'm a teacher, you know. I'm teaching you how to identify and utilize the abilities you have the way you do when you teach people how to use mindfulness. You know, you're not implanting mindfulness in them. You're showing them, look, you know, you've narrowed your view of who you are and what you are, and I'm going to help you expand it. And I'm going to show you the beauty in everyday experience and how you can reassess what's important to you in life. And people can be open to that and learn from it or not. But you're teaching them how to explore capacities they have that they may not have known about.

34:12And that's what I'm doing with hypnosis. I'm teaching them how to utilize their own ability. You know, our major evolutionary advantage as humans is our brain, this three-pound object on the top of our shoulders. It doesn't come with a user's manual. You know, there are a lot of things our brains can do, and that's what you do, teaching people mindfulness, that you can use your brain in ways you hadn't thought of. And if they didn't have the basic ability to do it, it wouldn't work. And the same is true. That's what I'm doing with hypnosis. I'm not projecting anything onto someone. I'm teaching them how to use what they already know.

34:52When automobiles were invented some hundred and something years ago, there were a bunch of state laws against windshield wipers. Why? Because remember the oldest image of somebody inducing hypnosis was the dangling watch, you know, and it doesn't work very well with electronic watches now. But they thought people would be waving their eyes back and forth with the windshield wipers and going into hypnotic states when they were driving. It doesn't happen. But so it's an ability that people have and we just teach them how to use it. Yeah, that's brilliant. Hey, I'm Jay Shetty and I wanted to invite you to a brand new interactive no charge workshop, Renew You, that I'm eager to share with you.

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36:58Go to www.renewyouworkshop.com to access this at no charge and start building a life that's not just lived, but truly loved. See you there. How can hypnotherapy affect our memory? How does it work with memory? Well, that's a fairly controversial area. And hypnosis, it can be a powerful thing. It can help people relive events and with not just remember, but relive them with the same kind of emotion, sort of like a flashback in PTSD, but under control. And then help people come to a new understanding of what happened. Now, does it mean that the hypnotic, what we call age regression, is an absolute, totally accurate recollection of what happened?

37:52No, but then none of our recollections are. You know, they're a combination of what we experienced and put down in memory stores and what we interpret and what we've learned later. But it can help people in a controlled way to get back to relive and remember things that they previously might not have been able to remember, in part because the emotions are so painful and difficult that one way to protect yourself is to just keep it dissociated just put it away somewhere and not think about it and hypnosis can be a way of cutting through that and helping people come to terms with situations that they previously hadn't thought about or didn't want to think about so what i tell my patients and what is the case is that hypnosis is no true serum.

38:40It's not like, you know, your memory is a tape recorder and you just rewind the tape and look at it. But it can be a way of dealing with the emotional implications of things you're remembering and get a better look at what happened. And one example, I don't know if you remember this, but not far from here, there's a town called Chowchilla, where a school bus full of children was hijacked by two idiots who literally buried the bus underground in an old mining pit. And they finally found the bus and freed the kids. And the bus driver couldn't remember much about the guys who overtook the bus. So he was hypnotized.

39:19And he, of course, was traumatized too. And he had to help keep these kids alive in a terrible circumstance. And he recalled seeing this car overtaking the bus. And he remembered in hypnosis, all of the numbers and letters of the license plate correctly. He got the order wrong, but he remembered it all. And that led to the arresting conviction of the two guys who did it. There are times when, yes, you can add new information that is accurate. It doesn't mean it's always accurate, but it's additional and often useful information. I mean, that's so fascinating that sometimes our conscious memory doesn't hold on to these aspects, but the subconscious can.

39:59And so is it that you're able to also relieve past stress and anxiety and overwhelm? Is it by reframing the narrative in hypnosis or hypnotherapy that we're doing? Is that the work that's doing? Could you give some examples? Yes, that's very important. So there's a woman I saw who suffered an attempted rape as she was coming home just at dusk with her arms full of groceries and this guy jumped her. And she starts fighting with him. Eventually she fought him off, actually. He was trying to get her upstairs into her apartment and the police came. She hadn't actually been raped. They thought no big deal.

40:37She then had a full out seizure. She'd had a basilar skull fracture from the fighting with this guy. So it was a terrifying, horrible thing. And she wanted initially to just remember more about what the guy looked like. And she couldn't remember much. It was getting dark. So I said, all right here's how we're going to do this we're going to take you back to this time but your body is floating in a in a bath you're you're safe and comfortable and whatever you see or remember nothing is happening your body is now safe and comfortable so i was reassuring her and and very often when understandably when people remember an event like that they start reacting physically as though what were happening and and and that's that feedback cycle of physical and mental hyper arousal that is very uncomfortable.

41:24So remind yourself at all times, you're safe and comfortable, but I want you to picture him. And she said, you know, I really, it was getting dark. I really can't see much more about his face than I recall. She said, but I see something else. If he gets me upstairs, he's not just going to rape me. He's going to kill me. And, and so you might say, well, thank you, Dr. Spiegel. You've now made her feel even worse than she did before. It was a more horrible experience than even she had imagined. And I said, well, you're looking at this on a split screen. Picture him on one side and what you see about him.

41:59On the other side, I want you to picture something else. What did you do to protect yourself? And I have yet to meet a trauma victim that doesn't engage in some creative strategy to protect themselves. And she said, you know, he's surprised that I'm fighting that hard. He didn't think I would. And she'd been feeling very guilty that she got herself as badly injured as she was. And I said, you know, you saved your life. You know, think about what you did. You know, you just jumped and you defended yourself and you saved your life. So she came away from that. On the one hand, seeing things that you might say are even more upsetting than what she was already living with, but recognizing that she had done something to save her life.

42:40And that changed her reaction to the whole event you know she saw it as uh something that that was um an attribute an aspect of herself that she hadn't recognized and there's i don't remember the name but there's a japanese custom that when some very beautiful precious vase breaks when somebody drops it or something when they glue it back together they don't use glue they use gold and what they're saying is it will now be even more beautiful than it was. And in a sense, it was a terrible thing, but it was also she learned something wonderful about herself. And that's so you can help people relive an event in a very controlled way and at the same time learn something that helps you cope with it a lot better.

43:32Yeah, I believe it's known as kintsugi. Yes, that's right. Yes, they use that gold powder and things like that. And you get these gold veins in the vases that is so beautiful. And thank you for showing that extreme example, because I think it's so interesting because you could do that as a theoretical activity, but it doesn't work like that. You could say, like, what did you learn from this? Or how did you react? And sometimes it can be so painful to reflect on it in such a technical, theoretical way. That's right. and being able to see yourself fighting and being brave and being courageous and how it affects, how does then that work with self-hypnotherapy?

44:15Like when you talk about your app, Brevery, how does that work? Because you're not physically there to guide people. How do then people allow themselves to practice it on their own in a safe way, in a safe environment, in a way that it can help? Parking shouldn't slow you down. ParkWiz gives every driver a shortcut. Book ahead, Save up to 50 % and skip the hassle of circling the block. Park smarter. Park faster. ParkWiz. Download the ParkWiz app today and save every time you park. This week on a very special episode of Health Discovered, we're taking a closer look at a condition that affects hundreds of thousands of men each year, prostate cancer.

44:56I first found out about my cancer on my birthday at the age of 45. I found out my cancer has spread to my pelvic bone. And from there, life just changed. About one in eight men will be diagnosed with prostate cancer during their lifetime. And the risk increases with age. Anything with cancer, you just think death sentence. And the only thing I could think about was, who's going to take care of my family? You have to go out there and build your support system. You got to build your team. In this episode, we'll explore the science behind detection along with the practical steps men can take to protect their health.

45:38Listen to Health Discovered on America's number one podcast network, iHeart. Open your free iHeart app, search Health Discovered, and start listening.

45:50This is Amy Brown from Feeling Things with Amy and Kat. We've been made to believe that saying yes is a good thing, but I've realized there's a big difference between doing it intentionally and doing it unintentionally. IsoPure protein helps you focus on more of what matters, like feeling your best every day. With great tasting nutrition that's high protein and also low carb if you need that, IsoPure fits seamlessly into your lifestyle and that's why I've added it to my daily routine. I use IsoPure unflavored protein in recipes like pasta sauce and guacamole during the week. With 25 grams of ultra-filtered protein and zero carbs, plus 20 vitamins and minerals, you can boost nearly any recipe without changing the taste of your favorite foods.

46:34I've already restocked four times because I add the IsoPure unflavored to everything. You can try the IsoPure vanilla to blend 25 grams of protein into your smoothies or your oatmeal, or check out IsoPure Clear Protein Water with 15 grams of protein, which supports hydration with electrolytes and a light berry flavor. Enjoy more of what matters today at isopureprotein.com and get 20 % off your order when you use code MINES20 at checkout. Well, in many circumstances, Jay, it's pretty easy. That is, you know, there was a reporter for the Times of London who started using reverie. She had metastatic breast cancer and she was dealing with that very openly with her readers and talking about that.

47:25And she tried reverie. She was having trouble sleeping. You know, she just couldn't stay asleep and would wake up anxious and with some discomfort. she said about after about five days she would just listen to my mellifluous voice every night and I you know I used to worry that um the the app wouldn't be nearly as good as being in the office with me but then I thought you know if you wake up at three in the morning you probably don't want me in your bedroom teaching you how to go back to sleep but you've got me there on the app and it's interactive so I ask how are you responding and depending on what you tell the app you get a different instruction so it is as much like well with me as possible um and she said i woke up one morning after about five days of this uh rosamund dean is her name she's a lovely person and uh and great reporter and she said i looked at the clock sort of out of the corner of my eye and i thought oh my god it's 709 a.m it's the first time i've slept through the night in a year And so people can learn to incorporate it into their own practices.

48:33Now, I would say that people dealing with post-traumatic stress disorder and these severe things probably would benefit more from having a trained therapist helping them to do it. But once you sort of set them on that path, they can revisit it having learned what the experience is like and they can help them. But more commonly, we use it for more common problems, for distress, insomnia, pain, focus, things that are widely disseminated mental problems that we don't have nearly enough resources to help people with. So reverie is a great way to say, try it for yourself and see what it feels like.

49:12And if you need the help of a professional along with it, by all means. When you're working directly with a professional, how long have you seen it take for results to start forming in reality? So if someone's struggling with sleep and insomnia, how long does it take the average person to get back to a sense of? Well, I can tell you, I have the most data, Jay, from Reverie. We have people rate their level of stress or their level of pain pre to post within 10 minutes, the beginning of the interactive session to the end. And we find that four out of five of them report improvement of about one and a half to two points on a 10-point scale within 10 minutes.

49:53Wow. So, and reductions in pain, stress management, improving focus. So 80 or 90 % report improvement. And so the great thing about this is you know right away whether you're going to feel better. I had one woman who was pregnant and had terrible lower back disease. and they couldn't give her opioids, thank God, because she was pregnant and they implanted a nerve stimulator. It didn't work. And her pain was seven out of 10. And the bigger the baby got, of course, the worse the pain was because it was pulling more on her spine. And so I had her imagine she was doing something that gives her relief, which is taking a nice warm bath.

50:36And if you think about it, so she has the opportunity to put her brain into the state it is in when she's got the pain, but she's in a warm bath. And our brain can recall that and see, well, okay, the pain signals are still there, but I can also imagine them being interfered with by this comfort that comes with a warmth. So she did. And she said the pain was down from seven out of 10 to three, but she looked angry. And I said, what are you angry about? She said, why in the hell are you the last doctor I got sent to instead of the first? It doesn't seem real. If there isn't incision, ingestion, or injection, you're not doing anything real.

51:14I'm a doctor. I use medications. I do a lot of other treatment techniques. But our brains are powerful things. And if we learn to use them better, we can be a lot more comfortable. And unlike opioids, which killed 88 ,000 Americans last year alone, the worst thing that happens with hypnosis is it doesn't work. So we're finding from people using Reverie, and this is thousands of people, We have one study with stress reduction, 33 ,000 people get an average reduction of one and a half points in 10 minutes just using the app. So it's worth a try. What's the most extreme case or unique case where you've used hypnotherapy that you remember that you think would be really powerful for the audience to hear about?

51:59I worked with a Vietnam veteran who had been, he had just kind of gone berserk in Vietnam. And nobody quite knew why, but he hijacked an ambulance and went out in the jungle and started shooting at people he thought were Viet Cong. And he wound up being hospitalized in a state mental hospital for a year because he was picked up in a drug bust. He was using, taking psychedelics. And a social worker interviewed him and said, he doesn't look like our typical chronic patient in a state mental hospital. And so I got to see him and he was very hypnotizable. And I said, I'd like to relive with you what happened before this event.

52:49So we went back and he was extremely hypnotizable. He was even higher score than you, Jay. and he relived the Tet Offensive in Vietnam and he comes back to the hospital where he worked. He was a cook in the army. He was a longstanding, highly regarded cook in the army and he comes upon the body of a little boy. He called him Chi-Town because he came from Chicago who he had informally adopted. The boy was an orphan. He was badly wounded in a bombing and had burns and walked with a crutch. And he just became his dad. And they hung out together and slept together. And he started crying. He's looking at the boy's body there.

53:42He's saying, they ain't got to kill kids. You know, we got the Geneva Convention. They can't do this. They can't bomb hospitals. They can't kill kids. and he just takes off, commandeers his ambulance and starts yelling in Vietnamese, you know, he's angry at these people and shooting at them. And I said, all right, I want to remember now one happier time you had with Chi-Town. And instantly, and see, the nice thing about hypnosis is the control you have, that he's one minute grieving and angry at himself for not having somehow known he could, you know, thinking he could have saved the boy. And he, I said, picture one time you were happy with him and a smile comes on his face.

54:29And he says, you remember your birthday party? You know, the donut dollies gave us some food for, for this party. And my sister Josie sent a, an electric train set from Chicago. The joke was, it was from the Spiegel brothers company. I, you know, what, what are the odds? And he said, you ain't never seen an electric train before. And they were, you know, just, he was suddenly happy. And I said, all right, I want you to remember two things. On one side of the screen, I want you to picture Chi-town's grave. And he, as he looked at it, he held out his hand and said, ashes to ashes, dust to dust, I guess.

55:10And I said, on the other side, I want you to picture that time when you were really happy with him. And I do this in helping people grieve using hypnosis, I said, because you're facing and dealing with the grief and the loss, but you're also remembering something different about it, that the reason it's so painful is how much joy you had together. So I want you to remember both the loss and your having to bury Chi-Town. And at the same time, I want you to picture those times you were happy with him because that's still true. You still have the joy that you share together. He then, I said, all right, so let's come out of the hypnosis now.

55:50And he, you know, he had tears down his cheeks. He was really upset. And I said, what do you remember? And he looked a little puzzled and dazed. And he said, I remember a grave and a cake. Wow. That was it. That was all he remembered. And he practiced this exercise. He was in the ward of the hospital doing the self-hypnosis after that, grieving the boy. You know, he told me later, he said he knew he was going to die. He was crippled. He had arthritis. He didn't think he was going to survive the war. And I said, and you gave, he did die, but you gave him a period of happiness and feeling loved before he died.

56:26And that's not going to go away. And he had one subsequent rehospitalization. One of his brothers, who was a Chicago police officer, was killed in the line of duty. And we had to kind of piece them back together and help him grieve that loss. but he went on to to uh teach uh adolescent boys how to do long distance cycling and he was you know he was out of the hospital no meds and he was he was doing fine so you know i that's an experience i will i will not forget and um it shows you how the interesting thing about hypnosis is how much you know people think you're losing control you watch this guy doing this and i was i was reassuring myself i was holding on to his arm while i was doing this but i was struck by how much control we both had over the mental these extreme emotional states he was in and shifting from one to another despite how intense they were and that's one of the really cool things about hypnosis is that you can be very intense deal with intense emotions but help people feel themselves as different people.

57:34So he was dissociated in the sense that he was two different guys. He was, on the one hand, terribly upset and angry about the loss and angry at himself for somehow not having been able to prevent this in the middle of a war. But at the same time, he could be the loving guy who grieved this boy and who recognized the gift they had given to one another in forming the relationship that they formed. so the capacity to focus intently uh to control what's going on in mind and body but also to be comfortable with the idea that you can be two different people in a sense that you can be this horribly angry uh furious guy at himself and everyone else about what happened and at the same time this warm loving parent to this poor little kid um is is something that is a real strength of of hypnosis.

58:30What, I mean, thank you for sharing that story. Super fascinating. I hope there's somewhere we can read and learn about all of these. Yes. Please let us know where I will, where the audience can go to learn more, but what makes someone unhypnotizable? And when someone isn't open to it and it doesn't work on them, what do they do about it? Can they develop the ability to become more hypnotizable, what can they do to open themselves up to if they feel it's a modality that could help them? Well, Jay, there's good news and bad news about this. The good news is that most children are in trance states most of the time.

59:10You know, all eight-year-olds, you know, they're out playing, you call them in for dinner, they don't hear you, they're doing their thing. Work and play is all the same thing for kids. They live in their imagination, so they live hypnotic-like experiences all the time, and they can change all the time and be different and play at being different. And so it's one of the wonderful things about childhood is that you're in a more of a hypnotic consciousness state more of the time. But as we go through adolescence, we go through what the famous psychologist Piaget called formal consciousness in which you evaluate more and experiencing is less a part of that.

59:50So you learn to try to be more logical and analyze more and just let yourself feel things less. So some people lose some of that hypnotic ability when they acquire these formal operations. And there are about 20 % of the population who, by the time they're 21, just are not very hypnotizable. They're very logical. And in Reverie, where we have the hypnotizability test, we call them the researchers. They want to examine and evaluate everything. At the other extreme, some people retain extremely high hypnotizability, and we call them the poets. They just get into it. They just absorb themselves in anything.

1:00:33I had one guy recently who gets, he loved getting lost in movies. You know, he just enters another world. He becomes an actor in the movie and part of it. And he decided he loved it so much that he went to film school to learn how to make movies. And he said, you know what? it was spoiling my experience of movies because I started thinking, well, why did they put the camera over here and the lighting isn't right and all this? And he said, so I quit film school because I was losing that ability. About 60 % of the adult population, they're moderately hypnotizable. They have an experience, then they step back and reflect on it, and then they try it again.

1:01:10Most of them can benefit to some extent from reverie, from other hypnotic techniques, because even if you're not in it all the time, if you can dip into it and have the experience, you can change. And part of what we offer with reverie is not just hypnosis, but the way we use hypnosis. And I think there's some of this in, you know, thinking like a monk, where you talk about, you know, the value of positivity, of having a, finding a positive aspect of even the most menial things that you have to do. And with hypnosis, we try to use it in a way that you focus on what you're for. so when people want to stop smoking i don't say oh cigarettes smell terrible you know they're awful things to do look at what you're doing to your body i say have them recite this to yourself for my body smoking is a poison i need my body to live i owe my body respect and protection so you're being a better parent to your own body you'd never put you know tar and nicotine laden smoke into your baby's lungs or your pet's lungs why would you do it to your own body it depends on you.

1:02:14So you, people can get with that approach to the problem, even if they're, they're not that hypnotizable, focusing on what you're for. So can you change it? It's remarkably stable trait, Jay. We, we, I didn't, but colleagues of mine at Stanford did a 25 year follow up on former students who in psych one had had their hypnotizability measured and they blindly retested them 25 years later the test retest reliability was 0.7 now that's as that's as reliable as iq is over that interval and and so um it's an extremely stable trait there are we we just uh published a paper recently in which we used a technique called transcranial magnetic stimulation in which you apply magnetic activity to the surface of the skull and if you if you line it up in the right place, you can connect between the prefrontal cortex to deeper components of the brain, like the dorsal anterior cingulate.

1:03:20And we found that we could transiently increase hypnotizability a bit. And we're hoping that we can expand upon that and maybe find ways to increase hypnotizability. But I'd say for most people, just make good use of what you've got. The odds are that you will be able to benefit. And we're struck by the fact that at least four out of five people who use reverie uh feel immediate improvement and that's a whole it is correlated with their hypnotized ability we looked at that the more hypnotizable ones were more likely to respond but but most people responded to some extent anyway david is anything i didn't ask you that you really feel is on your heart and mind that you want to share that's intuitively something you'd like to share well thank you i i certainly um you know i i want to kind of banish the fear that people have about hypnosis and the misunderstanding you know we're we're sort of you remember rodney dangerfield you know he was the comedian who said i don't get no respect and he said they asked me to leave a bar so they could start happy hour you know it's people don't see hypnosis as the tool that it is and they see it as some weird thing that you know people do on stage or something it's it's an aspect of our brains that allows us to take control of things it's not it's not losing control it's gaining control that you can modulate pain you can control your sense of relaxation so you can get to sleep or get back to sleep you can focus intently on your work there are athletes who who who use it you know tiger woods is one well-known example of an athlete who Adele the singer uses it to to sing it can really help people focus their attention and and get in a better relationship with their own bodies control what's going on in their bodies and react better to their bodies there's so much possibility that people can have from learning to identify it and use it that that's why I built Reverie as a kind of legacy project i'm not going to be able to do this forever i love helping the people i'm help i have helped and still help but i just want it to be out there and available for people to use it for themselves and just explore it it's it's it's uh it's an opportunity for people to make better use of their brains and their bodies absolutely thank you so much you're welcome and uh we end every episode of On Purpose for the final five.

1:05:57These have to be answered in one word to one sentence. Dr. David Spiegel, these are your fast five, your final five. Question number one is, what is the best advice you've ever heard or received? I would say the best advice came from reading Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, which is that what we are is about relationships and relating to ourselves that don't get stuck in any one image of who you are, which is not so different from what you write about with mindfulness. Second, what is the worst advice you've ever had or received? Don't think about purple elephants. Question number three, which you can expand on, is how do we get over our fear of revisiting the past, hypnotherapy, opening up to new modalities that aren't as familiar.

1:06:56We're almost not scared to put a pill in our body or injection, as you said, or sometimes have a surgery, but these things feel scarier. Well, try it, you'll like it. I think that's the nice thing about it. The biggest risk is it might not work. there are no side effects you know opioids killed 88 000 americans last year hypnosis has not succeeded yet in killing anybody it's a say so i think try it you know we tend we our our culture is so over processed you know it's all you know big companies things uh processing and a lot of times what we do with our food and our medications and other things make us worse rather than better.

1:07:47So this is a do-it-yourself approach with some training, and that's what I want people to do. Amazing. And question number four, how would you define your current purpose? My current purpose is helping people help themselves. That's what I want to do. And that's why I say all hypnosis, self-hypnosis. I'm not a magician. I'm not doing anything to you. And my purpose is to just spread it as widely as we can, as quick as we can. Amazing. And fifth and final question, if you could create one law that everyone in the world had to follow, what would it be? It would be that a Supreme Court judge could last no longer than 15 years.

1:08:28We need the rule of law and we're losing it. Absolutely. Dr. David Spiegel, thank you so much for joining. I hope that our audience will practice along with me, join Reverie and continue to connect with Dr. David Spiegel's work. Such a joy and honor to be with you today and so grateful for you making the trip over and I look forward to reconnecting very soon. Thank you. I hope so. And I so admire what you're doing and helping people discover what they can do for themselves within themselves. Thank you. Thank you so much. If you love this episode, you'll love my interview with Dr. Gabor Mate on understanding your trauma and how to heal emotional wounds to start moving on from the past.

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