#731: Dr. David Spiegel, Stanford U. — Practical Hypnosis, Meditation vs. Hypnosis, Pain Management Without Drugs, The Neurobiology of Trance, and More

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4:50 At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking. So then I'll see you through some questions. No it is seeming like. Cybernetic organism, living tissue over metal endocrine. No Hello boys and girls, ladies and germs, this is Tim Ferris. Welcome to another episode of the Tim Ferris Show.

5:18 I'm very excited about this episode. It is incredibly practical, very, very tactical. And we answer some questions I've had for a very, very long time. What is hypnosis? Is it credible? If it is, how do you apply it? What is the latest and greatest science?

5:34 For what indications is it best applied? How can you use it? How can I use it? And uh to separate fact from fiction. I went to one of the world's foremost experts. His name is Doctor David Spiegel. Doctor David Spiegel is Wilson Professor and Associate Chair of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences.

5:51 Director of the Center on Stress and Health. and medical director of the Center for Integrative Medicine at Stanford University School of Medicine. Where he's been a member of the academic faculty since nineteen seventy five. Dr. Spiegel has more than forty years of clinical and research experience. has published thirteen books.

6:08 four hundred and four scientific journal articles and his work has been supported by the National Institute of Mental Health. National Cancer Institute. And more. He is also the founder of Reverie, spelled R-E-V-E-R-I, the world's first interactive self-hypnosis app. He has some amazing stories, some incredible case studies. And actually hypnotizes me in the middle of this conversation. And we do a little demo, which was a first for me. The website for Reverie is Reverie.com, R-E-V-R-I.

6:41 dot com slash Reverie. And we will add more links to everything we discuss in the show notes, as always at Tim.blog slash podcast. With all that said. Please enjoy. a very wide ranging conversation with

6:53 The one and only. doctor David Spiegel. David, so nice to have you here. Thank you for making the time. Thank you so much for having me, Tim.

7:04 And I want to say up front that you're a man of many talents in addition to hypnosis and the other things that people will get from your bio. You are an expert in wordplay. You came up with ostentatious As in Austin City before we start recording. And I had to write it down. I was like if there's not a retail shop with that name, there must be. So I'm gonna will that into existence and just put it out there. Somebody feel free to grab it. Okay Well start with a question which is not how you were exposed to hypnosis, but how your father Was exposed to hypnosis. Would you mind winding back the clock?

7:37 I'd be glad to. It's a good psychoanalytic thing to do. I'm the child of not one but two psychiatrists and psychoanalysts. Both of my parents were and they told me that I was free to be any kind of psychiatrist I wanted to be. So here I am. My father was finishing his analytic training Just at the beginning of World War. two and so he enlisted in the army, he was a battalion surgeon, and as he was getting off the couch,

8:05 His analyst actually said something to him. He said, Herb, would you like to get a course in hypnosis and my father was thinking What was wrong with my free associations? You know, is he trying to fix me some other way or something? And his analysts said, No. There's a Viennese refugee named Gustav von Schaffenberg. who was a forensic psychiatrist in Austria.

8:26 He had a smallpox scar right smack in the middle of his forehead. And he noticed that as he's interviewing these prisoners, suddenly their heads would sort of nod, they'd close their eyes and go into some kind of altered state. So he got interested in hypnosis and was using it. To help his prisoners. And so he offered to teach Army Doc how to use it. So my father took this course from Doctor Von a Schaffenberg.

8:50 And He used it to help Soldiers deal with combat stress reactions to deal with pain. the dinner table conversations were really interesting. He told me a story of one guy who developed a hysterical conversion paralysis. He couldn't use his legs.

9:06 The guy said I they just don't work. I don't know what happens. So my father asked him about the context. And he said, Well, We were ordered to retreat. And I saw my best friend lying on the ground, and I had to make a choice. Do I try and save him or do I follow orders? So I followed orders. I feel terrible. And uh, you know, maybe I could have saved him.

9:26 And so my father In hypnosis said, I want you to look at your friend right now. And I want you to notice something. His boots are facing down. And that means he's already gone.

9:38 Mm. And the guy said. Thank you, Doctor, and he got up and walked. Wow. physiologically

9:46 I should not have moved. I should not have left him. And when my father helped relieve him of the guilt, and you know, most people who have been traumatized would rather feel guilty than helpless. They'd rather find a way to blame themselves as though they could replay the movie and it would come out differently. And he was helping him face the fact that his buddy was gone and there was likely nothing he could do to to stop it. So I'd hear those kind of conversations At the dinner table. And they were pretty interesting. I got invited once to watch him treat a woman who had non-epileptic seizures. So she's your father. My father. So he's making a teaching movie and he invited me to come and watch. And he had her go back in hypnosis to the last time she had a seizure. And her head starts to twist and shake and she's starting to have these convulsive movements.

10:35 And you know, he said to me. It's a lot easier to get people to start these symptoms than to stop them. You know, they've already tried to stop'em, it didn't work. So the way you teach them how to control it. Because you teach them how to bring it on. And then he had her practice making them milder and milder and milder. Yeah.

10:51 And he Curred her of her hysterical seizure. How does she Make them milder. If you're triggering these events.

11:00 How do you ratchet down the intensity? of say the convulsions. How does your father Coach someone through doing that. It was kind of an inference. He's basically nonverbally communicating that I'm not just gonna put you through the same misery over and over again. I'm gonna try and show you how to manage it better. And so he taught her that if you can make it happen

11:24 You can make it happen differently. You can change the way it happens. And you're not gonna get all the hysterical reactions around it. Her husband had his workbench at his factory put near the door. So when she had another seizure he could rush out the door and go to her apartment and help her. That's how much panic it elicited. So he taught her That you can have this for whatever reason, but it doesn't have to be as bad. And over time, the more she did it, the more she kind of deconded. The intensity of the seizures.

11:53 So we're gonna get to definitions pretty quickly just in terms of what hypnosis is, what it is not. But first A few follow up questions. Forensic psychiatrist. I've seen these words separately, but what is a forensic psychiatrist. Well I I do that in my copious spare time. Um it's basically in those situations you work for an attorney, not for the patient. So you're you may assess the patient, try and decide what's wrong with them, but it's for the purposes of preparing a report, for example

12:23 Evaluating a woman who uh terrible situation, one of the recent forest fires where she's on the phone with her mother. as the mother's home was burning down uh in one of these fires and it turned out That the community had not been adequately warned. How bad this was gonna be and even worse.

12:43 Her boyfriend didn't want to be bothered to go pick up her mother, so it was a very complicated emotional situation. So I was Evaluating what the emotional consequences were for her of losing her mom. You're being brought in as a subject matter expert to determine the meritorious nature.

13:00 Or lacker of of This particular case. Okay. I kinda have f you know, I like testifying on court because and I was being grilled by some attorney one day and I'm thinking, this I'm enjoying this and then I thought you're crazy speaker, what are you when he's going after you and I said, You know what, compared to academic life, this is simple. Your friend is the guy at that table and your enemy is the guy at that table. And in academia, you never know where it's coming from. So this lawyer is going after it was a case at the the United Parcel Service where a gunman You know, employee gone gone off.

13:35 Came in with a bunch of guns in his pack. Got through a metal detector. The guard was looking at his phone and not paying any attention. And he started shooting nine minutes later. And I just said this is a horrible breach of protocol. If he's gonna be checking people, he ought to do something about it. And even if he didn't want to Confront the guy directly.

13:55 He could have called the police. The police got there in three minutes when they were called it took the guy nine minutes to get ready to start shooting. It was a terrible thing. The lawyer, the defense lawyer, did not like what I was saying. And he said, Well uh Doctor Spiegel, you're not going to be able to do it. A security expert, are you? And I said no, sir, I'm more of an insecurity expert. And I could hear the judge and the jury laughing and That cost him a lot of money. That cost him a lot. So I I enjoy doing that on the side. Was it I think it was Kissinger who said

14:25 I left academia because I couldn't stand the politics. No, he said the reason academics fight so bitterly is that the stakes are so low. Right. Right. There we go. Thank you. Okay. And the other question I had was you mentioned this gen I can't remember the there was a Von in there. I can't remember the full name. Von Aschaffenberg. Von Aschaffenberg. Who had the smallpox scar in the middle of his forehead and I think it was he who when he spoke with his patients noticed they were nodding off or transitioning into this altered state. Why were they

14:57 Entering that altered state. Was he doing it deliberately or was there some manner in which he was conducting these sessions that he ended up just correlating with that and you figured out it was causal. What It was more the latter. It was more at first. I mean later on He was doing formal inductions. But what hypnosis is, Tim, is just a a heightened focus of attention. It's like looking through a telephoto lens with a camera. You get fully absorbed in the center of your awareness and things that ordinarily you'd be conscious of, noises on the outside, other things.

15:26 you dissociate, you put outside of conscious awareness. So mm it's a kind of self altering, highly focused attention. And it was happening at first by chance just because instead of Looking at him, looking at his eyes and listening to his words. They just tended to focus on the spot in his forehead. And many hypnotic inductions involve some kind of visual focus to narrow the focus of attention. When Andrew Huberman My friend and colleague was on your program. He was talking about that, the narrowing of attention just as the lens of the eye changes and limits the amount of information, you get this kind of heightened focus on the center of attention. So it changes your state of consciousness as well.

16:06 How would you for people who are listening and for me, I'm listening. Glad to hear that. Differentiate. Hypnosis. from say meditation, concentration practice meditation. And also from What people might consider, say, a flow state.

16:21 And maybe they're the same when but when people have this Focus to the exclusion of much else in these, say, sports contexts or other types of contexts. If you could just Delineate those three. That would be very hard to do. has three main components. I've already mentioned two. Highly focused attention or absorption.

16:40 Dissociation, putting outside conscious awareness things that are in consciousness. Right now, for example, hopefully you're so interested in what I'm saying that you're not aware of the sensations of your feet touching the floor right now. If you were, we could just stop now. The more intensely focused you are, the more things you gotta put outside awareness to keep from distracting you. The third component, and in some ways the most interesting in hypnosis, is what used to be called suggestibility. You know, you'll do anything I say if I tell you to do it, which is not exactly true. But the truth in it is that you are more cognitively flexible. We've done some research. I think Fairman might

17:16 Postdoc and I did a study looking at the continuous performance task in people who are high and low hypnotizables. The task has subtle changes in the s way you solve the problems you're solving, but they don't tell you what it is. So people who are more cognitively flexible will figure out quicker. that the rules have changed and how you do it. And that highly hypnotizable people are very good at that. They're good at letting go of the old premise And hooking into the new one.

17:43 So that's a kind of cognitive flexibility that is very valuable and I think a key aspect of why hypnosis is so helpful in treatment and helps people just manage problems better. So a question there just in terms of the reason that it helps people in a clinical Context. with various issues. Is it because the

18:04 In a sense the errors of causality point both ways in the sense that someone with This higher cognitive flexibility. Say one premise and then

18:16 taking on another, but at the same time you can use hypnosis to make someone put someone into a state where they're more cognitively flexible and can kind of overwrite The previous premise. Yes, you're right. And it's because, you know All hypnosis is frankly self hypnosis. That is you don't need to watch somebody dangle a watch or have a develop a smallpox score on their forehead. People can shift into this state of highly focused attention. And when they do, and one of the coolest things about the state is you tend to let go of your ordinary premises, not just about what's going on at that moment.

18:46 But who you are, what kind of a person you are. And that's what scares people, you know, it's the state show thing of the football coach dancing like a ballerina. But There's a message there. Not that hypnosis is good to make people look silly. It's that people can try out being different and see what it feels like. They can let go. of their usual premises.

19:06 And that's where hypnosis is something like uh flow state. Chick sent me hi, I I knew him. No kidding. And and His point, you know, he calls flow An autotelic experience. It's one that It's self rewarding. It feels good just to

19:20 Do it. And hypnosis is like that. When you get really absorbed in experience, like do you ever get so caught up in a good movie that you forget you're watching a movie or drawing, especially all time just kinda vanishes when I'm in that state. Exactly. That's a self hypnotic state. And I'm sure you're good at that. And One of the ways in which I help athletes, for example, I w I was asked to consult with the Stanford women's swimming team. They're a terrific team. A lot of the women wind up in the Olympics. But the coach noticed That they were doing better in practice than they were in meets. Their time was better. And thinking, what the hell's going on here? Well, swimming is not a contact sport.

19:58 And so the only person you're really competing with is yourself. And what the women were doing was distracting themselves by paying attention to the women in the lane on either side. Instead of being in touch with their own bodies, getting into a flow state. By saying, How do I move through the water? How do I connect?

20:15 With my muscles, how do I coordinate them? We were being distracted from that. And so I got them in hypnosis. To get into more of a flow state, to focus not on the outcome but the process. And that's a key thing for athletes in, you know, in golf and basketball. You know, Tiger trained with hypnosis. He had a caddy who was helping him with hypnosis. I've helped golfers do that. You know, there are a number of major basketball players who do it as well.

20:41 And it's a way of not worrying about whether you're gonna hit the basket or not, but what you need to do in your body. to do what you want to do. And so hypnosis is like a flow state. It's something that You just get in it. to enjoy the feeling of doing it and how you relate to your body. And by the way, good things can happen.

21:02 When you do it. If you were using let's just say a concentration practice in meditation, whether that be something like transcendental meditation with a mantra or Thing of a candle flame or fill in the blank. Would that qualify as a subset of self hypnosis or are there Differences that you would want to highlight. They're different, Tim, because

21:23 And mindfulness You're engaged in a somewhat different practice. It's open presence. You're not judging, you're not evaluating, you're just letting feelings and thoughts flow through you. And People learn to do it with great discipline over time.

21:40 But it doesn't come naturally. You don't lose yourself in it the way you lose yourself in a movie. Now eventually Some people do, but as you know from having considerable experience with it, It takes training and it's a struggle. Whereas the funny thing about hypnosis is boy, if people are hypnotizable, they're in it just like that, even if they've never formally done it before. If you're hypnotizable, you just do it. So it's a kind of natural shift in attention, narrowing the focus. that leads you along and gets you engaged in a flow like experience. Whereas with meditation

22:11 You have open presence, you do a body scan. You cultivate compassion, they're all important things. But it's about being rather than doing. Whereas hypnosis is more doing than being. In hypnosis you do it for a purpose. You do it to control pain, to manage stress. to get to sleep, to stop smoking, to eat more sensibly.

22:31 So it's more intense, it's briefer. And It does emphasize the development of absorption and flow. If someone is Highly

22:41 Hypnotizable. How do you determine hypnotizability? And I I do have The eye roll test in my notes, I which I've never done. Yeah. So I was curious if that is just one of a portfolio of techniques that you use. Or if that is a dominant test. How do you determine if someone To what degree someone is

22:58 Hypnotizable. Well hypnotizable is a very stable trait. Most eight year olds are in trances most of the time, as you know, if you call your eight year old in for dinner. He doesn't hear you, you know, he's doing his thing. Work and play are all the same thing for kids. I don't know why we try to train them to be little adults because they have so much fun. But as you we go through adolescence, Piaget talked about developing formal operations in adolescence where you begin to privilege reason over experience. Some of us lose some of that hypnotizability. You don't get as easily absorbed in things. You have to think them through logically first. By the time you're about twenty one, IQ.

23:35 And there was a study done at Stanford. They did a twenty five year blind follow up to former psych one students who'd been had their hypnotizability measured and the test retest correlation was point seven. Now that's that's better than IQ. I mean, that's really something. And in general what happens is they get divided into one of three groups. The people we call the poets highly hypnotizable. They still get totally absorbed in movies and caught up in things. That's about twenty percent. About sixty percent we call them the diplomats. They'll have the experience and then they'll think about it and negotiate it and then go back and try it a little more and go back and forth. And there's twenty percent we call the researchers who just aren't very hypnotizable. The researchers. Yeah. But

24:16 They can benefit from techniques employing hypnosis because you learn to focus on what you're for, not what you're against. You don't fight a problem. You find a way to master it. by joining it and focusing on a w positive resolution, a self reinforcing Uh resolution of it. So hypnotizability, we know what's going on in the brain. We've taken high and low hypnotizables, put them in the functional MRI scanner. And there's an interesting thing that happens only in the highly hypotentizable people, and that is

24:44 functional connectivity. That is when one region is active, the other region is active between the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. Which is part of the executive control network, the one I'm hopefully using now, talking to you. And the dorsal anterior cingulate. Now the cingulate cortex is like the C on its ends in the middle of the brain. And the dorsal front part is part of our salience network, the alarm system. It's the thing that if you hear a loud noise, you know, it distracts you. So the salience network and is coordinated in highly advertisable people with the executive control network. And that makes sense. If they're working together, it's easier to lose yourself in an activity and not worry about whether you should be doing something else. We've actually found also There's a genetic component to that.

25:28 There's a particular polymorphism of the gene that metabolizes dopamine, catecholomethyl transferase. And if you happen to have the methionine veil version of it. You have moderate metabolic rate. Which keeps pretty high and stable levels of dopamine in the brain. And those people are more hypnotizable than those who are

25:47 homozygous for either methione intervaling. I had a brilliant young graduate student, Dana Cortad, who actually developed a point of care Genetic test for immatizability. So you can take a drop of blood and in a couple of minutes we can tell how immatizable you're likely to be. But we also have a test called the hypnotic induction profile that my late father and I developed. That gives you a like a six minute hypnotic experience, have your hand float up in the air.

26:14 If you pull it down, will it flow right back up? Do you f experience a loss of control in that hand? Do you respond to the signal ending that experience? Do you have a sense of floating lightness or buoyancy? So you get a score from zero to ten. And that is likewise a very stable trait. It's something I've have used with every one of the seven thousand people I've used hypnosis with in my career. And it helps me have a sort of common experience that is not Initially connected to treatment, but just We both can see how much they can respond.

26:44 And A it gives me useful information, B it gives them useful information. And C, we're not blaming the victim here. If somebody is not hypnotizable, it's not because They're resisting because most people aren't. They're paying good money to see me and get help. And it's not because I'm not good at what I'm doing, because I've learned something about it, although my first psychoanalytics supervisor said yes, you didn't go into a trance despite having had two hundred shock treatments because you're a lousy hypnotist. And I said, I don't think so. But it's nice because it makes it a neutral experience. It's one in which you try out and see what it's like. And they learn from it and I learn from it. Where does the I roll test stand in terms of a reliable indicator?

27:25 Well, the IRL test is like a good initial guest. It's moderately correlated with formally measured hypnotizability. And and my father discovered this. He was using eye fixation on a light on the ceiling of his office. And he noticed that the woman I mentioned who, you know, had the hysterical pseudo seizures. He noticed that when he asked her to look up at that light and then close her eyes. All he saw was the whites of Rice. It stayed up.

27:49 After he made that movie that day. The following Monday he had one of the most obsessional men he'd ever seen, and he had the guy look up and he could not keep his eyes up as he was closing the eyelids. They came down and all he saw was his iris as they they closed their eyes. So he began measuring that. And it turned out you can score people from zero to four. And how much they're able to dissociate lowering the eyelid with lowering the eye.

28:13 And that is an initial interesting indication of hypnotizability. So if you want a quick five second test do it. There it is. Five seconds. All right. So look up past your eyebrows all the way up. Hi, way, way up. And as you keep looking up, slowly close your eyes. Look up close oh yeah. Oh yeah, yeah. You're a three to four. You're on the upper end,'cause you keep your eyes way up and I can barely see your iris as you start to close your eyes. Great. Well, another option on the menu then. Yeah, you bet.

28:40 And Do you have any hypothesis for why those are correlated? Eye movements are very much related to level of consciousness. The obvious thing is you close your eyes when you go to sleep. Drugs that affect the eye and eye movements. are related to autonomic arousal. Your pupils get big when your you know your sympathetic nervous system is going on.

29:00 Small when you're on opioids, for example. And the the third, fourth, and sixth crani nuclei are surrounded In the brainstem by the reticular activating system, which is part of our arousal network. And so things that affect eye movements. tend to affect arousal as well. And so we think it's an ability to shift gears Inhibit. peripheral awareness and intensify your focus and that this is just it's no accident.

29:27 That it's the same parts of the brain that regulate arousal and eye movement. That are associated with uh this high roll. And This is a side alley question. We're gonna come back to the mainstream in a second, but I'm very curious. Do you have an opinion?

29:41 Of EMDR. I do. And if you could just explain for folks what that Is. I'm from New York. I'm I'm not devoid of opinion, so

29:50 Uh Fellow New Yorker here. All right. Here we go. There we go. Strap in, folks. EMDR's eye movement desensitization and reprocessing, Francine Shapiro developed this and it's a widely used technique. VA uses it a lot to help people with trauma and Hypnotic like techniques are very helpful with trauma and I'll be glad to talk about that.

30:11 But Her idea was that somehow you facilitated communication between the hemispheres. If you had people move their eyes back and forth while they were discussing a traumatic experience. Now the certainly good idea in this Is that we now m know more and more that re exposure under controlled conditions to traumatic memories

30:32 is in itself therapeutic. So exposure therapy and Probably going to restructuring. are two very prominent ways of helping people deal with trauma and EMDR has components of that. But And you know, if you think about it, is anything like hypnosis well

30:46 What was the oldest way of inducing hypnosis. Remember the dangling watches? You know, what are your eyes doing when you know you're moving back and forth moving back and forth. So I think there's a lot that's hypnotic in EMDR. But to tell you the truth, every study that has deconvoluted I movements from everything else that goes on in the MDR has shown that the eye movements don't have much to do with it. And toward the end of her career, Francine Shapiro stopped.

31:11 She then did tapping rather than eye movements and other things. But it's not at all clear to me that the actual eye movements have anything much to do with the outcome. So it's another therapeutic technique, but I have to say that my overall impression is that what's good about it isn't new and what's new about it isn't good. So what are the ingredients in EMDR? Aside from discussing the traumatic event.

31:33 Are there other characteristics or elements that contribute to Outcomes when they are good. I don't know if this has been studied in any It it has been used, I mean the VA has used it extensively in helping combat vets with post traumatic stress disorder. And the fact that you summon up

31:50 A traumatic event. And then you picture it. become aware of the emotions that come along with it. can be a component of effective psychotherapy. I think the two things that matter the most, and what I do when I use hypnosis in treating PTSD. Yeah.

32:06 Number one, the control with which you summon it. I've always wondered if exposure therapy works so well, why don't flashbacks cure PTSD? I mean flashbacks are symptoms of PTSD. You're reliving the event as though it were happening again. And the difference, I think, is Th there's no control. You feel reattacked by the memory the way you did the trauma. And so I think with EMDR like other psychotherapies like exposure therapies You

32:34 In a controlled situation, bring up a traumatic memory. So it's not hitting you again from out of nowhere. You're saying, I'm going to spend some time thinking about this now. So you're doing it in an element of control that was completely absent when the trauma happened. That was just done to you. This is something you're doing to yourself in a controlled way. With the prospect of a direct benefit. Cognitive restructuring is helping you to see an old problem from a new point of view.

33:02 To understand it differently. So You know, I was treating a California road worker who was in a construction zone. when some idiot went the wrong way and hit him with a car, he was taking a rest on his break. It was two days before his wedding. He had bad ankle fracture. He had just pushed himself out of the way as the car was coming and he was miserable, you know, and his fiancee was miserable. And he just thought, How why didn't I see this coming? And

33:27 Time and again if I had a nickel for every traumatized person, either sexual assault or physical assault that blame themselves for events they didn't control, you know. It's uh guilt versus helplessness, right? Guilt versus helplessness. That's exactly right. And I I had him relive it in hypnosis. I said, Let's go through this. And he said I'm sitting on the thing having my lunch. And suddenly I realized that he's not going the way all the other cars were going. He's coming at me. And I just pushed myself away from a barrier next to me.

33:55 And fell forward and that's when he hit my leg. And I said, I want you to look at this. What would have happened if you hadn't done that? He said well he would have hit me Dead on. And I said, So you saved your life.

34:07 So it's tragic. It's a terrible thing that happened, but it could have been so much worse. So think about this not just from what went wrong, but from what went right. What you did to help yourself. And he felt entirely different about the trauma after that. He was still unhappy about his leg being injured. But it's a way of restructuring your point of view.

34:27 about the problem. And that's where techniques including hypnosis for trauma. can help people really change their perspective. The other thing that happens in hypnosis is the more you concentrate, use your prefrontal cortex, the less activity in the default mode network. Now that's the part of the brain, the posterior cingulate. that's involved with self reflection and self understanding and when you're not doing much, but thinking about yourself and who you are. you've got a lot of activity going on in the default mode. And if you can

34:55 In hypnosis Turn that down. You can try out being different. Instead of seeing this as just a total failure and disaster that messed up your wedding and all kinds of things.

35:06 That you had the wherewithal in a matter of a split second. to do something that saved your life. So it changes your view of yourself and who you are. And that's one of the terrific things about hypnosis is it allows you to try out being different. See what it feels like.

35:25 Just a quick thanks to one of our sponsors and we'll be right back to the show. This episode is brought to you by AG1, the daily foundational nutritional supplement that supports whole body health. And I do get asked a lot what I would take if I could only take one supplement. And the true answer is invariably AG1. It simply covers a ton of bases. I usually drink it in the mornings and frequently take their travel packs with me. On the road. So what is AG1? AG one is a science driven formulation of vitamins, probiotics, and whole food sourced nutrients. In a single scoop, AG1 gives you support for the brain, gut, and immune system. So take ownership of your health and try AG1 today. You will get a free one year supply of vitamin D and five free AG1 travel packs with your first subscription purchase. So learn more, check it out. go to drinkag one dot com slash Tim. That's drink AG One, the number one. Drink AG One dot com slash Tim. Last time, drink AG One dot com slash Tim.

36:25 Check it out. I Feel free to I've had a lot of involvement with, say, MDMA assisted psychotherapy for PTSC and all the way through phase three trials and so on.

36:39 And of also Through my foundation, funded a lot of Basic science and some clinical work related to different psychedelic assisted therapies for say treatment resistant depression or major depressive disorder in the case of psilocybin and the default mode network in this type of Not quite deactivation, but sort of down regulation. I'm not sure what the proper technical term would be. Is something that Robin Carhart Harris talks a lot about, predominantly out of Imperial College London and then later at UCSF. Right.

37:07 And it's striking because the subjective reports in a lot of these experiences, whether it be in the M D Ma assisted psychotherapy, although I don't really consider MDMA a psychedelic for various reasons, but let's just use psilocybin or even LSD. The ability to take A impartial observer status on yourself and to assume new perspectives.

37:30 The description that you know, I'm paraphrasing here, but that you just share it is very similar to the subjective reports of people who get who have good therapeutic outcomes with these other modalities. So it's exciting to me to hear you describe it in that way because psychedelics are contraindicated for so many people. There are quite a few people who should not take psychedelics in any form. I do want to talk about some of the applications, but In terms of risk profile, Usually the kind of magnitude of potential

37:56 Impact. Is correlated to some type of risk profiling. Are there adverse events? There are, but before I get to that, let me just Backtrack a little bit on MDMA and psilocybin for PTSD because a lot of the things that the psychedelics have in common, although some are more hallucinogenic than others like psilocybin.

38:15 Is what's been called ego dissolution. And that you seem to just suppress activity in the default mode network. And so it becomes a kind of non judgmental awareness. Well, you see it happens. But you're sort of disconnected from it. So

38:29 Breast cancer patients dying of breast cancer. Have done very well with solocybin trips. Now I've for years work with women who are dying of breast cancer. I know what it's like. And what struck me as similar and interesting Is

38:42 One of my Group therapy patients said that looking at death in a group is like looking into the Grand Canyon when you're afraid of heights. You know, if you fell down it would be a disaster, but you feel better about yourself because you're able to look at it. I can't say I feel serene, but I can look at it. So it's this odd kind of detachment where you can see it. And what they think about their death now is I still don't like the idea of dying, but what I can see now is what a miracle it is that I ever got to live at all. And so they see the same thing from two different perspectives. So this ability

39:12 To sort of disconnect yourself with and in hypnosis. It's a rapid suspension of your usual selfhood in psychedelic work. It's more this ego dissolution that kind of dissolves. So it's a quicker Reversible form of something similar which is

39:29 Playing with who you are. And that has Tremendous therapeutic. possibilities. Now I think one reason MDMA works so well with PTSD. Is because it's the sort of

39:41 human connection drug, you know, in these raves and everything, people suddenly feel connected with people they never even know or feel very different about their loved ones and how they connect with them. People who have been traumatized who have PTSD feel deep shame. And it's not because they've done anything wrong, but just to be treated like an object, like a thing. It's humiliating.

40:03 And so To be able to relive it. In a state where you're feeling different about who you are is a way of Reprocessing and disconnecting from the sense of shame. Just saying, yes, uh it happened, I don't like it, but it's not the bottom line about me.

40:20 And that's where Depression with post traumatic stress disorder are so harmful to people because it tarnishes their feeling about who they are as people. And if you can understand the experience, but disconnected in some ways from this default mode conclusion about what sort of a person you are. That can be powerfully therapeutic.

40:41 Absolutely. The commonalities are really Worth Highlighting here. Because certain treatments are not accessible to some folks, which is also part of the reason why

40:52 I'm so interested in the work that is being Pioneered in part by our mutual friend Nolan Williams. Yes. At Stanford. Nolan's terrific. And uh we'll probably come back to Nolan and accelerate TMS in in a second, but what are the risks, if any? There are very few. I'll tell you, when we started Reverie About three years ago, I was kinda worried'cause you know, thirty years ago

41:15 I would not have dared. to uh put an interactive digital hypnosis app out there on the web and just see what happened to people. I worry that people would have all kinds of ab reactions and dissociative reactions and terrible things could happen. But I thought what the hell I want people to have access to this and be able to try it. And we've had like three quarters of a million downloads and the number of potential problems we've had is less than ten, and none of them are serious.

41:41 you know, some of them are the ecstatic positive experiences kind of like, you know, psychedelic ones. Most of them are, you know, periods of anxiety or stress that are easily reversible. And so the good thing about hypnosis is You can turn it on real fast, you can turn it off real fast. So the worst thing that happens most of the time is sometimes it doesn't work. So what? So you do something else. So compared to the side effects Of drugs. Like let's take Opioids, for example, where last year Eighty eight thousand Americans died of opioid overdoses, and almost all of them were not

42:14 Suicides. They were just inadvertent overdoses of opioids. Hypnosis has not yet succeeded in killing anyone. It's just not dangerous. And the reason you're using that as example is Because of The intersection with pain management.

42:29 You bet. Okay, so we'll we'll we'll also come back to that. Got it. Marker noted. So adverse Risk profile pretty low. Adverse event profile, pretty manageable.

42:39 I want to Come back to Nolan for a second because I'm wondering if Someone is in the researcher twenty percent. So low responder. Is there because I do believe that Nolan mentioned this to me

42:54 the possibility of using something like accelerated TMS, which is transcranial magnetic stimulations as a type of brain stimulation. To improve Trait hypnotizability. I don't know what Yeah. But is it possible that one could use a tool like Accelerate TMS to improve their response to hypnosis?

43:13 The answer is absolutely yes, and Nolan and I and a Feek Fireman and a number of other members of Nolan's team just published a paper in Nature Mental Health. In which we took hypnotized people who were less than highly hypnotizable and we administered to them either Accelerated TMS. to the left dorsal lateral prefrontal cortex with the idea of regulating activity in the dorsal anterior cingulate. Using real versus sham TMS. So we could tell whether they got actually got the TMS or not. They couldn't tell. The paddle made the same noise.

43:43 But They didn't know. And we were able to transiently significantly increase hypnotizability in the ones who got the real TMS and not in the ones who got the sham. What was the dosing on that? Was it one day? Was it five sessions? Yeah, no, it w it was one day. It was just one session and then we moved it into single session. Oh yeah. It was not repeated. Like the treatment of depression or suicide ideas. Single session. Okay. Single session. So we're hoping that's right. I can see your face lighting up. I feel the same way. That we may be able

44:15 for people we were studying people with fibromyalgia, people with chronic pain. To Enhance their hypnotizability and then use it. To treat pain, which it is very effective for. Okay. I'm gonna get to pay quickly, folks, I promise.

44:28 The segue is Different tools. show their best results in different contexts. So you might have something like PRP, P plately rich plasma, for certain types of injury repair, surgical recovery. Better for some types of surgeries and joints than others. You might have Fill in the blank. MDMA assisted psychotherapy, for instance.

44:46 Better for certain indications like complex PTSD. than others, for instance. Other things might be better suited to say alcohol use disorder. What is hypnosis? Best for Where have you seen the most

44:58 Outstanding. Results compared to other options. We've seen excellent results in helping people to manage stress. We're finding with Reverie that about eighty percent of people within ten minutes. feel a significant reduction in their stress levels.

45:14 It helps people focus, intensify their focus of attention, plan what they want to do. And then do it. It's a skill that they can learn to use very quickly. It's very effective with pain. It's one of the oldest uses of hypnosis with pain. In fact, there was a British surgeon named Hesdale who went to India and was using hypnosis. This was pre ether anesthesia. They would just, you know, get people drunk, have them bite on a block of wood, hold them down and

45:40 I don't know. Frontier medicine. Frontier medicine, right. And he went to India and he reported Eighty percent surgical anesthesia. With hypnosis. And when ten years later at Mass General You just don't want to be in the twenty percent No, you don't, but it's better than zero. Better than bourbon and a wallet. Right, exactly.

45:59 And when Ether was first introduced at Mass General. Ten years later. the surgeon strode to the front of the amphitheater to say, gentlemen, this is no humbug. Ether.

46:11 From hypnosis. Well, they were getting ninety percent. Anesthesia. And so Ezel withdrew his paper, he said, Well they're doing ten percent better. Ether is getting ninety and hypnosis was getting eighty. Yeah. I gotta say he withdrew his paper, okay. He withdrew his paper. And you know, it's taken us like And century and a half to figure out that the brain actually has something to do with pain processing. Yeah.

46:31 And there are studies now showing Which part of the brain just changing the words you use in hypnosis. Which part of the brain is involved in the analgesis. So you significantly reduce pain. In the somaticensory cortex, if you say the hand that's receiving the shocks is cool, tingling and numb filter the hurt out of the pain. you get the same reduction in pain response

46:51 If you say, Well the pain is there but it won't bother you so much, sort of like opioids, then you're Turn down activity in the dorsal anterior cingulate. So you can see different parts of the brain involved in pain processing and then hypnotic analogy. Depending on the language you're using. So if you think that what doctors say to patients right. But no pointy hats or anything. Those come at the more advanced levels. Gotta pay your association dues to get the hats. So how does that affect the Treatment. If you're looking at say The example that you just gave where different wording.

47:29 is affecting different neuroanatomical structures and activity. Does that then determine your Neurotargeting for lack of a better term, and you're like, Okay. We saw A instead of B light up. We really want to go after A.

47:44 Based on what we know. It may be for certain kinds of pain or certain kinds of problems you wanna emphasize one or the other, but frankly, we have four different Sets of instructions that involve either just Going somewhere else, leaving your body here and going to a desert island and enjoying things. We're imagining a physical remedy that actually reduces pain. A warm bath or an ice bath or something like that.

48:07 Or move the pain around, see what it feels like to do that. And one other technique that's very helpful is teach people to have compassion for their bodies. This is like mindfulness in some ways. But you know, if your body were a three year old child who'd been hurt, Would you get frustrated and angry with it? Hell no. What would you do? They everybody says I'd give'em a hug and I'd stroke'em and I'd try and make'em feel better. So There are different language techniques we can use to get the same effect, which is to significantly reduce pain. We have randomized clinical trials. That prove that hypnotic analgesia works.

48:41 And much lower levels of medication too. And so It's an underutilized resource. Hypnosis is like an underappreciated company that hasn't been managed well and has a lot more positive resources. And that's what it's like. We just don't take advantage of it. So let's Use

48:58 Me as a hypothetical Intrepid. user of self hypnosis. So I have some low back pain. We we were chatting about this before we started recording. Is there a particular approach that you might recommend one or in this case? I start with

49:12 In a case like this? Sure. Uh we can try it if you want. Oh yeah, I'm a game. Your game? I'm absolutely game. All right. How would you rate your pain right now on a zero to thank scale? I'd say it's a two out of ten. It's more of a bothersome. Yeah.

49:27 And is there a physical remedy that helps you with it? Warm bath. Foam rolling. Say the like pure formus and glutes and so on does help using so as release. Tends to help just laying on my stomach, honestly, with my

49:42 Hands under my pelvis. Mm-hmm. Take. All the activity out of the spinal erectors helps. Those are a few things, like laying down on my stomach and breathing into the back.

49:52 To relax the spinal rectars. I would say is one thing that Seems to help. Well that seems like a vivid image. And temperature things don't make much difference, the Temperature if I do say a cold bath and then a hot bath. Just contrast therapy like that. That seems to help. Okay.

50:09 So that feeling of cold tissue phasodilating when I get into the hot bath. That type of like prickly sensation of being sort of perfused with blood, that's something I associate, I would say, with feeling better. Feeling better. So part of what you're doing is

50:25 Reinterpreting the signals you're getting. In a different way. So let's try it if you want. See so get as comfortable as you can. On one, please do one thing, look up. All the way up high as you can. Two do two things, slowly close your eyes and take a deep breath.

50:42 And three do three things. Let the breath out. Let your eyes relax, but keep them closed and let your body float. Imagine you're floating somewhere safe and comfortable like a bath A lake a hot tub or floating in space. And then take your right hand and stroke the back of your left

51:02 And Starting with the tip of your left middle finger. Or you can put it on the table, that might be better. That's true. The back of your left middle finger.

51:13 Down. Along the back of your left hand. Past your wrist, your elbow. And as you do that. Develop a sense of tingling and numbness and lightness.

51:25 And let your left hand float up in the air like a balloon. Feel the tingling. That's good. And let it float up. You bend your elbow and you can rest your arm. Lightly on the table. And please describe what physical sensations you're aware of now in your left hand and arm. Feel my heart beat in my palm.

51:46 Mm-hmm. Okay. Mm, little bit of I can feel the hair on the back of my arm touching the sleeve that I Well done.

51:56 And I'm gonna give you this instruction. If you pull your hand back down to the table with your right hand and then let go, it will float right back up to the upright position to see what happens. That's good. So you're putting it down, now let go. I see you smiling, what's happening? There's uh I mean it feels like it's floating, number one. I'm also kinda second guessing myself'cause I wonder if I'm doing this.

52:21 Two. Conform to the exercise, if that makes sense, but it feels like it's floating. Okay. Yeah. And as you do that, let your left hand Rain upright later when I ask you to touch your left elbow.

52:35 With your right hand and let go, your usual sensation and control will return. Right now. When I ask you to touch your left elbow with your right hand and then let go. Your usual sensation and control will return. Yeah. Right now I want you to notice sensations.

52:54 In your back. What does your back feel like right now? part that's usually uh painful. Yeah. Uh it feels relaxed right now. Usually more relaxed, yeah. Good.

53:04 But how would you rate the discomfort level right now on that zero to ten scale? Point five, one out of ten. One out of ten. Point five to one. Okay, good. So already Notice how

53:16 you've been able to change sensation not just in a neutral part of your body, your left hand and arm, but in a part It has been problematic. I want you to imagine now. That you're lying on your belly. Maybe with a

53:31 Roll under you. Tingling numbness in your lower back. As if it were cooler or warmer. Or you were changing it.

53:42 From warmer to cooler. Feel a pleasant tingling numbness and let it filter the hurt out of the pain. Each breath deeper and easier. Now again with your eyes closed and remaining in the state of concentration, please describe how your body's feeling right now. It does feel

54:01 Cooler. Right. Feels Little Dissociated

54:10 Mm-hmm. Makes sense. Like um Can you describe that a little more? feel like it's very similar to two tequila's or there you go or uh or a low dose of of ketamine, which I don't recommend, but I mean as a dissociative anesthetic. Mm-hmm. I've always struggled to put words to the dissociative experience. There's a lightness and there's a conscious awareness of

54:33 The body without being as identified with the body. Exactly. So you can observe it. But it feels different. Mm-hmm. And

54:44 Uh would it be fair to say that it's not as annoying as it usually is? It's not as annoying. But So notice how you're able to filter a lot of the discomfort and displeasure out of The usual pain situation.

54:58 By detaching. Probably. Mm-hmm. By experiencing it differently. It's not Uh Sentence you have to endure.

55:07 It's a sensation your body is giving you that you can interpret in different ways. Now for people who Might wonder if this is compartmentalizing in a way that is long term harmful. I'm not saying that's what it is, but Is this just taking a different vantage point? How would you encourage them to think about this? Yes, I would say it's

55:27 Reinterpreting. The sensations and signals. That you're getting from that part of your body. And you're uncoupling them from the usual sense of annoyance and limitation that Tends to actually make it worse.

55:39 Oh, it a hundred percent makes it worse. Yeah. And instead you're saying Okay, it's there, I don't like it, but it's not bad. And that capacity to reframe, to reprocess the signal. Is a powerful way of Better managing pain.

55:54 Filtering the hurt out of the pain. Now please take your right hand and touch your left elbow and then let go. And see what happens to your left hand and arm. Yeah, just more. Movement is more forthcoming. Uh-huh. Good.

56:10 That's surprising, isn't it? Yeah. I was noticing how like me. Fingers go kinda. Frozen in this position. I thought that was interesting.

56:21 Not making too much out of it, but I was saying Yeah. Alright, you can let it float back down now. And How's your left hand and arm feeling now?

56:32 Normal. Normal. Good. So you're able to change sensation in both directions. And how's your how's your lower back feeling now? Feels really good. Actually.

56:42 Yeah. So Terrific. That's remarkable. I'm very glad. Uh That's great. So thank you for that. You're welcome. Where do you get my bill? You have my email. Fish books. Six thousand dollars.

57:02 What happened to the first one's always free? Oh wait, no, that's drug dealing. Not hypnosis. Yeah. Uh and if someone's inducing that From a self hypnosis perspective. Well let's just talk about it could be i in the context of reverie, it could be in a different context.

57:18 What are the steps that they take? Or how do they Self induce. For something like that. Let's just say if I wanted to do that five minutes a day wanted to do it five minutes a day, you could remember what I told you or You could queue up the pain control app.

57:31 On wherever you And you get to hear my mellifluous voice teaching you an exercise. Millifluous dulcet tone. Dulcet tone, there you are. To to teach you how to do this and you could follow along. And it's interactive. So I'll ask you, is your hand floating? If it is, I'll tell you one thing. If not, it's something else. So it's a branch chain kind of response that I tried to make as much like being across the table or in my office.

57:56 It's like And not to beat The dead horse of neurobiology, but Just to reinforce my understanding. From a neurobiological or neuroanatomical perspective.

58:06 What is happening? So what's happening is and we've d got EEG studies, we've got F MRI studies, we've got Pet studies showing But what's happening, if you think about it That pain is a always a combination of peripheral input through the lateral spinothalamic tract, through the thalamus. to the uh periaqued gray and up to the cementosensory cortex.

58:28 with input from the salience network. So If you just broke your arm. The salient never was going, God, you're in trouble, you better do something. But the problem is because we're fairly pathetic physical creatures. we have to take very good care of our fragile bodies. And so we have a brain

58:46 that is designed to help you recognize when you're hurt and get help. And and manage the pain. But for example, freeze, not necessarily move so a predator could So Pain is a combination of those peripheral signals coming in and what

59:01 Your brain decides is wrong and what to do about it. And so very often chronic pain. is really not anything you need to do anything about, but your brain often treats it as if it were acute pain. Here I am. And so it derails you and it annoys you and it keeps you from doing what you want to do. And the more annoying it is the more attention you pay to it. It's like the noisy kid in the classroom, you know. And so you can learn to modulate that. So we showed in one experiment with Stanford students

59:27 We gave them electric shocks, we measured somatisensory evoked responses, so you can see waveforms coming out up to A second after the shocks are administered, and in the hypnosis condition. We were able to stop the P one hundred the first response. Cold.

59:47 In the first Tenth of a second. And the P two hundred and P three hundred were half as big as ordinarily. So within a fraction of a second, the brain is processing the signals differently. And as I mentioned, there are studies that show you can turn down activity in the anterior cingulate, you can turn down activity in some other sensory cortex. So the brain is saying This is not as bad.

1:00:09 as I initially thought it was, and I don't have to pay as much attention to it. It doesn't have to hurt me as much. Because very often We amplify pain rather than diminish it. By being so annoyed. That it's happening. And another thing that we know is going on in the brain is

1:00:25 The interior cingulate is rich in GABA receptors, GABA amino glutyric acid, they're an inhibitory neurotransmitter. Highly hematizable people have more binding of GABA in the anterior cingulate than low hematizable people. So they can use it to be their own little drug dispensaries. Two Inhibit.

1:00:43 The anxiety reaction. in the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex. So there are many understandable neurophysiological ways by which the brain can literally Take the strain out of paint. Also wondering

1:00:57 I mean you'd have to test this, of course, but if Hypnotizability as assessed by various means, whether it's the eye roll test or a drop of blood and looking at The genetic profile.

1:01:11 If there might be some correlation to High response. Baseline response, low response for psychedelic assisted treatments as well. Because as it stands currently There's a lot of shooting in the dark. I'm not aware of any assessment that determines if someone is likely to be a high responder to psychedelic space. But

1:01:30 As we're talking about it, there seemed to be a A lot of parallels. Well I think there are. Science takes money, but I mean there are lots of Assessments for

1:01:42 Let's just say determining the strength of a mystical experience and how that's correlated to therapeutic outcomes. Right. Highly correlated, it turns out, at least with psilocybin. And so on and so forth. They're all the standard assessments that you might have for Depression and Ham D and so on, or G A D or whatever, all these various things but In terms of determining

1:02:01 in the process of patient recruitment. Who might be your high responder. That's a huge deficit in the system right now. I agree with you. I think it'd be a terrific thing to do, and maybe in Nolan's next day he just published a paper on um I Ibergain with astounding results. I mean just astonishing. Not just improving PTSD, which I kind of expected, but TBI. TBI, traumatic brain injuries. And it stays down. Goes down and it stays down. Yeah, it's very durable. And and that's one of the things about a lot of these psychedelic studies is that it breaks the whole the whole model of She occupying that receptor and you know, blocking serotonin uptake and all this stuff. And it's just once or twice and the brain is like reset. It's rebooted.

1:02:43 Yeah. And that's where I think this interaction with the default mode network activity is very interesting because I think people reset their expectations of who they are, what they are, and what their symptoms mean. In a way that lasts. And there's now a lot of interest. Of course, there's often psychotherapeutic assistance with the psychedelectricians, which is important. But some of that could be hypnotic construction too. And I don't think much of that has been done. But it would be very interesting to do, I agree with you. Super interesting. Yeah, there's a

1:03:13 Broad canvas still remaining for all sorts of research. So let me ask about a few things. First. You used wording that was along the lines of I heard you mentioned at least twice filtering.

1:03:27 hurt from the pain, am I getting this right? Right. Could you elaborate on that? And then The second piece is much earlier. you were referring to the say, I don't want to call them

1:03:41 Below hypnotizable. People who fall into this category nickname the researcher. Who could still use it. And I thought I heard you say something like framing issues is for us, not against us. Something like that. So could you first talk about Filtering the hurt from the pain and then

1:03:57 is for us versus against us. Well, The filter to hurt from the pain is you know, it sounds kinda paradoxical. What are you talking about? Pain hurts, you know. But the degree to which it hurts has to do with more than just The signal traveling through the lateral spinothalamic tract, it has to do with how you interpret that signal.

1:04:16 We have all kinds of somatic signals. Some of which could be on the verge of discomfort, some of which aren't. And our brain's job is to interpret them and decide what to do about them. Yeah. And so you can have a signal That doesn't necessarily automatically convey that something is wrong with the body. It may be

1:04:35 Just an intense ceiling, you know, it's like the difference between, you know an enthusiastic hug and a squeeze that hurts. And there's a line in there somewhere where that you cross and it's pretty obvious, but there's also an area of interpretation. Or the ostentatious long hug. There are a lot of guys here who do long hugs. They say, I'm a hugger when you sh try to shake hands. Yeah. And it's like a twenty second hug. There's a point where it gets uncomfortable. It gets uncomfortable, that's right. And it's usually after the first second or two, but That's right. And so the brain is doing its interpretive job of making meaning out of the sensory experience. One of the other things that we know happens in the brain with hypnosis is higher functional connectivity between the dorsal lateral prefrontal cortex and the insula.

1:05:15 This little island. It means island in Latin in the mid front part of the brain. That is a mind body conduit. So it's a place where the brain controls what's happening in the body. How much gastric acid you secrete, your autonomic arousal, for example. And also it receives information into roception from the body. How is the body reacting to things? And hypnosis intensifies this connection and intensifies coordinated activity. between the executive control network and the insular.

1:05:44 And so it's a way in which the brain can intensify It's reading and understanding and interpretation of what's happening in the body. And so You know, athletes who are pushing their bodies to do things that most of the rest of us would say, ouch, you know, I can't do this. I'm pushing my body as hard and as far as I can to get what I want. And this so they will interpret things that

1:06:08 Everyday people would interpret as putting yourself through pain. as training. Doing what you need to do. And you know, that runner's high is in part composed of signals. then many of us would just consider painful. And so That's part of what the brain does and that's part of what hypnosis helps us to regulate and control. How much of it is pain and how much it's

1:06:30 Is not. And so The interpretation of pain, the meaning of it. has a lot to do with how much it hurts. And what about the for us versus against us?

1:06:40 People who are experienced with hypnosis, that is people who know that people actually listen and respond to what you say, will say the dumbest thing you can say to somebody is don't think about purple elephants. What are you gonna think about? And the best way to change behavior is intermittent positive reinforcement. So you want the process of change to be What chick sent me high cold autotelic. You want to feel good about doing it. So an example where we do that in hypnosis. And where even non-hypnotizable people can respond is

1:07:10 When I try to teach someone how to stop smoking Which was the first experiment we did with Reverie. I don't say you know, Ugh cigarettes will taste terrible. My my professor at medical school did that. He you know, your cigarettes will taste like horse shit and the guy lit up the cigarette and said, Oh thank you, doctor. It's And he got a frantic call two hours later. He says, Doc, my house smells terrible. My house smells like horse. Right. And and Hackett said, Well are you smoking? He said, No, but I forgot to tell you that my wife is a smoker. So we had to hypnotize him and say, Only your cigarette you know, it doesn't work. You focus on what you're for.

1:07:45 Respect and protect your body, for my body smoking is a poison. I need my body to live. I owe my body respect and protection. You would never put tar nicotine filled smoke in your baby's lungs. Your body is as dependent on you as your baby was. So treat your body with the same respect you give a child. And so you're focusing not on whether you have an urge to smoke or not, whether you feel better or be on nicotine or not, but whether you are going to commit to respect and protect your body.

1:08:14 And that way you can feel good from the moment you make the commitment to do it. I'm being a good parent to my own body. So even people who aren't hypnotizable can get that concept. And say I'm not gonna worry about my urgent. I have lots of urges I don't act on. I don't have to act on this one, just'cause I have it. So I had one alcoholic who w I was trying to use that to help him stop his drinking.

1:08:38 He said, Oh, you mean sort of like the body is the temple of the soul? And I said, Yes, you got it. That's it. And he stopped drinking. He so it's a matter of finding a way to formulate the resolution of a problem. So that you start feeling good from the moment you commit to doing it. Before you know that you're gonna stop smoking.

1:08:57 And we're we're getting one out of five people stopped just like that. And they surprise themselves. That's one of the things I love. about working with hypnosis is people are surprised at what they can do. Because they're trying out being different and seeing what it feels like. What do you think is happening with the addiction specifically, whether it's nicotine? Alcohol.

1:09:17 Or other. Why does this work where other things fail? And I should ask actually Just so you can set the table for this. How does Hypnosis comparing, I'm sure it depends on the practitioner and so on, which kind of gets into a whole separate question I wanted to ask about just schools of hypnosis. I don't know how standardized things are, like CBT, for instance.

1:09:39 But Not that that's hypnosis, I'm just saying they've tried to standardize so they can track things. How does hypnosis compare to other types of interventions for addiction? Well, the results we get with hypnosis is about one in four, one out of five people just flat out stop and the rest That's roughly comparable to the same thing.

1:09:58 to the use of Verenicle, buproprion, or Nicarette patches. It's not very different. Depends on the population. But it's about as good. Is it the same people? I don't know for sure,'cause they're done in different contexts. But it's not bad. And I have people who are surprised by how easy it they said like A lever was pulled. And I just don't worry about it anymore. I just don't think about it. Now does it have with everyone no.

1:10:23 But every time we feel good any time we get anybody to stop the most reversible cause of cancer in in the world. This is cigarette smoking. So anybody you get That's a good thing. And even people who are it is correlated with hypnotizability. So more hypnotizable people are more likely to stop Using this approach.

1:10:43 But there are some non hypnotizable people who do too, because they get the concept even if they don't get the feeling. That comes along with it. And the other thing that keeps in mind in addiction medicine Is that the odd thing is that it's not actually the high from the drug that hooks people. It the chase is better than the catch.

1:11:03 So you get more mesolimbic dopamine secreted. When you're going through a scenario of scoring a drug than when you're actually taking the drug. So it's the anticipation of pleasure that really gets to people. And from my point of view, using hypnosis, that's fertile ground for intervention. Where you just say, I can make you feel good.

1:11:23 Without chasing after the drug, I can make you feel good the way you felt when you hugged your six month old child. Because you're doing the same thing with your body now. And that's a good thing. So Helping people

1:11:35 to focus on what they're for. is a crucial part of the therapeutic strategy and makes it work. What is the oldest That you're aware of. Documentation of hypnosis or something resembling hypnosis.

1:11:48 You know, I was in Bali watching Trance Healers and the difference in Bali, and this has gone on for thousands of years. They go into a trance and their patients watch them. So they kind of go into this altered state and start chanting and singing and the idea is if you watch it it's kinda hypnotic and you'll kind of Go along with them. But from a Western point of view it started in the late eighteenth century.

1:12:10 With France Anton Mesmer. Who was a Viennese physician. Hence mesmerized. And he called it. Animal magnetism. And he thought it actually had to do with

1:12:22 Changing the magnetic field in a patient's body. And he had them look at tubs filled with iron filings and he had a magnet. In fact, the magic wand and magic shows comes originally from a magnetic rod that was used. Yeah, that's right. That's right. From animal magnetism to transcranial magnetic stimulation. That's right. And he was very popular. He left his wife and family in Vienna. He moved to Paris. He was out competing the leading French physicians of the day. Voltaire wrote to his brother, We did everything we could to save father's life. We even sent the doctors away. And if you think about the major treatment at the time in France, it was What I mean. France was the world's leading exporter of leeches.

1:13:04 Unless you happen to have congestive hearts there. Leeches, because that's how they didn't. And they still in some like hand damage things. They use leeches to suck blood out of certain regions in the hand and all that. But At the time that was the major treatment and He was so popular and the cool thing I if you read about what his office was like, it was cheerful, it was brightly lit. Patients would hang around all day boasting about what they'd done with animal magnetism. And the typical French physician's office was truly grim. It was dark.

1:13:37 No decorations on the walls, patients were getting bad news from doctors. I once had the opportunity to visit Anna Freud when I was a medical student in London, and she asked me If I was gonna become an analyst. And I tried to be diplomatic and say, Well, I'm not sure she said, So you're not gonna be you know, she wasn't messing around, you know. Why? And I said, Well I don't like the passivity. I don't like Not

1:14:00 Offering something, trying to help fix things with people. And she said, You need to understand something. When my father Was training as a doctor. It was considered a waste of time for a doctor to listen to a patient. Patients were there to listen to doctors.

1:14:14 And I was humbled by that. I thought, you know, it was a very it was a very good point. And she said. It's hard to be analyzed because analysis is a liberation from your parents and that's difficult if your parents are analysts. And she knew better than anyone'cause her father was her analyst, actually. Oh boy. But so doctor's done back there. Yeah, there was a lot in the doctor patient relationship in that time that was pretty grim.

1:14:38 And so was talking to patients and listening to them made him very popular. So they got King Louis to convene a panel of to investigate That's right.

1:14:49 The panel was very interesting. Our own Benjamin Franklin was on it. He was having a lot of fun with it. Because he was competing so successfully French doctors. They didn't like the French doctor. The French doctor lobby. The French doctor lobby. That was it. They said that his theory was all wrong, that he wasn't really changing magnetic fields. Which is Correct. That's true. He they they concluded and another member of the panel was Levoisier, the brilliant French chemist who developed oxygen chemistry, and who six months before he was beheaded in the French Revolution, discovered the idea of the gross national product. He was a genius. And one of the third Other panel members.

1:15:29 Was a doctor named Doctor Guin? the inventor of the guillotine. He kind of created the mind body problem. What a panel. Yeah, what a panel. So like the setup for a joke. Yeah, it is it is, but it wasn't, unfortunately. They concluded that hypnosis was nothing but heated imagination. And you know what? I've heard worse definitions than hypnosis. But that was it for Mesmer. Yeah. And so, you know, it's set In motion a pattern of why

1:15:56 Hypnosis is just an underdeveloped resource. Is that people think it's either dangerous Or it's ridiculous. And it's neither. It's a valuable, effective treatment that we have under utilized for Decades for centuries. What is

1:16:11 If you had to pick one or two, anything that comes to mind. Some of the more surprising patient outcomes or changes that you've seen. There are cases where I'm sure you could have predicted the outcomes like I have a fifty percent chance this person has a thirty percent reduction in A, B, and C symptoms. But were there any that really stand out to you as

1:16:31 Surprising. The first one was the one that got me to decide That yes, and this happens to be member my father's interest, but I'm not gonna let that deter me from something I'm interested in. And it was the first patient I ever use diagnosis with. It was on my pediatrics rotation at children's hospital in Boston. The nurse says

1:16:49 Spiegel, your patient is in room three forty two. She's in status asthmaticus. She's been hospitalized every month for three months and she's back again. And she hasn't responded depinephrine. twice and we're gonna maybe give her general anesthesia. And put her on steroids.

1:17:05 So I walk in the room. Following the sound of the wheezes down the hall, pretty fifteen year old girl bolt upright in bed, struggling for breath. Knuckles white, mother standing there crying. I didn't know what to do, but I had taken a hypnosis course, so I said, Well, would you like to learn a breathing exercise? And she nods.

1:17:22 So I get her hypnotized and then I break into a sweat and I think, wait a minute, we haven't gotten to Hasmont, of course yet. So I said Something very subtle and clever. I said each breath you take will be a little deeper and a little easier. And within five minutes she's lying back in bed. She's not wheezing anymore. Her mother stopped crying. Nurse runs out of the room. And if you think about the dynamic of that, I mean it was stunning to me. I couldn't believe it. But

1:17:47 Each times she tried to breathe and had trouble, she got more and more anxious because she thinks, I'm gonna not be able to breathe. It's very frightening. So you have her anxiety building like a snowball rolling downhill. on top of the physical sensations. So In comes my intern. I thought he was gonna pat me on the back and say, Good for you, you know.

1:18:06 He said the nurse has filed a complaint with the nursing supervisor that you violated Massachusetts law by hypnotizing a minor without parental consent. Could you not? And Massachusetts has a lot of dumb laws, but that is not on the list. And furthermore, her mother was standing next to me when I did it. She said, Well, you're gonna have to stop doing this. And I said, Oh really? Why? He said, because it could be dangerous. And I said, You're gonna give her general anesthesia and put her on steroids, and my talking to her is dangerous? I don't think so. So I said, Tell you what. As long as she's my patient, I'm not telling her something I know isn't true. So take me off the case if you want. So he storms out of the room, he finds the chief resident and the attending, and they have a council of war, and they came back with a radical solution. They said let's ask the patient.

1:18:50 You know I don't think they'd ever thought of that. Break through. Yeah, breakthrough. And she said, Oh, I like this. I want to keep doing this. And she was hospitalized one month after that, a month later. And went on to study to be a respiratory therapist. And I thought that anything that could help a patient that much that fast

1:19:08 Frustrate the head nurse violate a non existent Massachusetts law had to be worth looking into. And I've been doing it ever since. But you know, the nice thing is you can see it. In front of your eyes you see whether it's gonna help. You know, just like you with your pain, you know, it's the same thing. It if it's gonna happen, your brain is wired. Every part of the body. And make it happen quickly. And it doesn't always happen, but it often does.

1:19:30 I'd say the next major patient that really struck me when I first got to Stanford I was assigned to the Palo Alto VA Medical Center. And there was an army cook who had been mustered out of the army because after nineteen years of good service Something happened during the Tet Offensive and he just grabbed an ambulance and some guns and w ran out in the jungle and started shooting at

1:19:53 What do you thought were Viet Cong? And he seemed psychotic, they couldn't contain him, he was agitated, he was emotionally uncontrolled, he wasn't responding to meds. And he wound up Being discharged from the army. And spending eleven months in a state.

1:20:09 Mental hospital in California and a social worker there. Interviewed him and said, I he's not a drug user. He's you know, he doesn't seem psychotic to me. There's something wrong, but I think it's post traumatic. So I saw him at the VA. And he told me that something happened during the dead offensive, and it had something to do with a Vietnamese child that he had informally adopted. He was like the youngest of thirteen children he identified with young kids. This kid had been badly burned.

1:20:38 Was on a crutch. nobody seemed to claim him and so he just kinda took over and they became buddies. Mm-hmm. During the Tet Offensive. I find out in hypnosis he comes upon

1:20:51 And he realized he's been killed. and in reliving this in hypnosis and he was very hypnotizable. He says, Oh my God, they hit G Wing. Oh my God, they ain't gotta kill kids. They ain't gotta kill kids. So he's screaming and crying and then he's going into setting up Defenses on a water tower because he thinks they're gonna be overrun by Viet Cong and he's going through all of that. Yeah.

1:21:14 And I move him then the remarkable thing was he was very intensely involved in all this. But very malleable. So I'd say okay, we're gonna change times now. And we're going to go to the time when you collected his body and buried him. And so he does that and he says, Ashes to ashes and dust to dust, I guess that's it. And then he starts banging on the arm of his chair and he says, If I'd only taken you over to G Wing, man, you wouldn't be there. It's all my fault. And I said, Tell me something.

1:21:41 With this boy Blame you for what happened. And he starts to smile. He says, No, no. He said, You're number one cook. You're my number one cook. Number one cook. He knew he was gonna die.

1:21:53 He was crippled, he looked like he had arthritis. And so I said, Okay, we're gonna go to his Funeral now. No, we're gonna go to a different time. We're gonna go to a time Before the funeral when you had a party for him.

1:22:06 A happy memory. Because you know, often with grief The reason it hurts so much. is that you loved and cared about each other so much. So there's something positive behind Mm-hmm. The grief.

1:22:17 Right. And so he says, Oh, you look so happy and The donut dollies. Brought a cake. My sister

1:22:26 Send a an electric train for a present for you. You never seen electric train before, have you? You know, Vietnam didn't got no railroads and and it turned out later that the train was actually from Spiegel Brothers Department store in Chicago. And he said he's so happy. You're nine number one folks. So I said okay. We're gonna put as much of this as you don't wanna think about now behind a filter.

1:22:50 Be there if you need it. But you're gonna remember two things about this. You're gonna remember Burying him and you're gonna remember that birthday party. And so he's you know, he's sweating, he's Tears going down his cheeks.

1:23:03 And I wrote him out of the hypnosis. And he looked a little sort of dazed, he looked a little confused. And I said. What do you remember? And he said, Doc, I remember a grave and a cake.

1:23:16 That was it. Braven and cake. So it was a way of helping him Acknowledge his grief. begin to go through a process of grieving, but see it from two points of view.

1:23:27 If he had this time with this kid. He made the boy happy, the boy made him happy, and that can't be taken away even though he died. And he was in the hospital for a while longer. He practiced it every day sitting in the ward. He was doing his self hypnosis and he was discharged. Uh he was upset he couldn't get back in the army. He wanted to, but he'd been discharged. His brother, who was a police officer in Chicago, was killed in the line of duty and he decompensated again. But we

1:23:53 Process compensated me. He started to look like he was hearing voices, although he wasn't but Discontrol of emotion. And so I had him grieve his brother's death in the same way. And he got discharged. He was spending his time training teenagers how to do long distance cycling and he was

1:24:14 Out of the hospital and doing fine. So you know, I thought that Anything that can help people in these rather extreme situations. Come to a new point of view in a hurry. About that.

1:24:26 was worth pursuing and I've been doing it ever since. And we've had people in in Rivery, a guy who was in his home for three years. He had the social phobia, you know, where he just couldn't stand to leave his house. He was there for three years and we taught him to use self hypnosis to deal with his anxiety. And he's out in the world again. He's living a normal life. So It is surprising how much it can help people in our

1:24:52 What a remarkable story. I wanna ask you to just describe reverie for folks in a minute, but first I wanna ask, in that circumstance where you have This veteran who some Think psychotic. Who is getting really animated, heated, sweating.

1:25:09 To maintain your composure. And direct that environment, that person in that state. What does it take to get to that point where you're comfortable? Doing that.

1:25:22 That's a very astute question because it it I mean the intensity of it is remarkable. We actually have a grainy old video of it. But uh I sometimes get surprised myself. I was actually holding onto his arm the whole time. I didn't even realize it at the time, but I was like trying to connect with him. So that whatever else was going on. He knew I was there with him.

1:25:42 And I guess two things and one was That they can be. having intense experiences and yet

1:25:55 Be connected and contained. That is they're absorbed in it, but they're not just out of control. They're not just wild, you know. They're expressing their emo, but they're also able to modulate and control it and focus on This sort of narrow container of being in Tense in reliving.

1:26:12 But also somehow aware that it is a reliving of the event. It isn't actually happening. And so I figured You gotta have the reins of the horse when you're riding fast. But it was clear to me that he was listening to me. And what struck me the most and what reassured me, frankly, was that he could change times very easily, he could change mood. So literally transition from Screaming, I should have taken you over the hooch, man. It's all my fault.

1:26:39 to ashes to ashes and dust to dust was a few seconds, you know, but he was following me. And you know, if I saw that he wasn't, I'd spend more time on the control issue. But it's also because The intensity had to do with something we were meaningfully working on. That is, I wasn't doing it just to have him show off how emotional he could be. I was doing it to help him Q up into perspective the thing that was upsetting him so much.

1:27:04 That made him feel better about it. So I knew I was doing something that I thought could help him. And I'll tell you that in some of these intense kinds of hypnotic therapies I'm a little dissociated too, you know, just saying it's a smart hypnotist that knows who is hypnotizing whom. Um but I'm kinda listening to my own mind saying

1:27:26 What's the next step? What do we need to do here? And I'm thinking about it for a second and saying, Is this really the right thing? Well, let's try it out and see. And so I'm also testing his response. And if I see that we're not getting anywhere, then I'll Change course. And it takes some time and training to just sort of know the direction you want to go in and why you're doing this. And is it really going to help him or is it just putting on a show? And it was clear to me that's what he needed to do. And you get this sort of deep connection with somebody. They they can feel you and you can feel them. You know, that he knows what I'm trying to do and I know what he's

1:28:00 needs to do. I think there might be Something to the correspondence of trait hypnotizability and good candidacy for psychedelic assistant therapies. I really do, because that way you just described also I think would be mirrored in many

1:28:15 Patient reports who exhibit strong durable outcomes, they're able to Switch from one thing to the next very quickly. from one maybe very positive emotional valence to one very negative emotional valence and then back and forth while still maintaining some semblance of

1:28:35 Observer awareness, if that makes sense. Mm-hmm. So very, very Curious. Yeah. Who Is Reverie designed for? Wherever is designed for anybody who's curious about dealing with their problems. If you just want to learn something about your ability to

1:28:51 Explore and change your mental states. It's useful. It's a tool. An antibiotic than a vitamin. It's if you've got a problem You can try and see if it'll help. So people with pain Stress, insomnia, that's our most popular use, people getting to sleep or getting back to sleep. I used to worry the reverie wasn't quite as good as being in my office with me. And then I thought if you wake up at three in the morning and need to get back to sleep, you probably don't want me in your bedroom helping you do it. You probably don't want to be in the bed. I don't either. That's exactly right.

1:29:23 It's very useful for Dealing with phobias like airplane phobias. Claustrophobia. had a lovely woman who had an obsessive compulsive disorder all her life and claustrophobia diagnosed recently with cancer and had to have

1:29:38 A scan in an enclosed Two. And just was freaked out about doing it. And I had her Picture Doing two things that made her

1:29:47 Feel better. One It's just floating somewhere she felt comfortable and she said, I remember floating in the dead sea. I thought for a cancer patient it might not be the ideal image, but The intense salinity of the sea makes you float like a cork. And so she liked it. So I said, Okay, we'll do that. And she had a very loving sister in New York who would come out to visit her and I said, And I want you to imagine that your sister is standing next to that scanner giving you a hug.

1:30:13 And reassuring you. And she came out of it and she started to cry and she said For the first time I think I can do this. No, I can actually do this. I mean she was afraid to go in an elevator by herself, who was too scary. She'd wait in the hospital. I know multiple people who have this issue with elevators, airplanes. And with airplanes, I have people

1:30:33 Imagine they're floating with the plane. The way you take a roller coaster ride. Don't fight the plane, float with it. And see the plane is an extension of your body like a bicycle. Wanna get somewhere faster. You're using the plane as an extension of your body, the pilot is an extension of your mind.

1:30:48 You chose an airline that has good pilots and He's or she is an extension of your mind. So concepts like that can help people. Do self hypnosis and get from it play point A to point B. So that's good. And then for habit problems like

1:31:04 Smoking or drinking. Or Eating badly. You know, you can learn to eat like a gourmet. You can Enjoy eating more while you eat healthier food.

1:31:13 By using the self hypnosis to do that. What have you used to do? If anything, self hypnosis for On yourself. I had um recurrent on my shoulder and I realized I needed surgery done.

1:31:26 It's a three hour operation, it's it's a big deal. It's a lot of fun, isn't it? Yeah. So I use general anesthesia for the surgery itself, but afterwards I just did self hypnosis for the pain control. You know, and It was a mass general and I wasn't supposed to read my record, but I worked there, so The nurse kinda looks at me like and the resident wrote in my record

1:31:49 Patient using very little pain medication, we mustn't have cut many nerves. Yeah. No, you know. I've got a scar from here to here, I can tell you they cut nerves. But it's this misunderstanding that, you know, the body is just a like a broken car. You just gotta re you know, incision ingestion or injection, you know, you gotta do something to the body. Rather than teach the person to use the control system that we're all born with, this three pound object that

1:32:15 top of our shoulders that is connected to every part of the body and helps to control it. And why on earth Shouldn't we be able to use that better? You know, it doesn't come with a user's manual, you know, so you gotta figure out how to do it, but it makes a huge difference. And so you know Hypnosis is not a commodity, it's a skill to be shared. And that's one reason actually it's underutilized. As you know.

1:32:39 I don't have a bunch of ex cheerleaders going to doctor's offices telling them use hypnosis, but drug companies do. And you know, I'm a doctor, I prescribe meds, but there are many times when doing something like this is much better and safer. And more effective. Could also be the

1:32:57 Given the Very favorable risk profile, something that you at least attempt before moving on to more severe interventions. That's exactly right. You know, why not try this first? I had a young woman, seven months pregnant, very bad lower back disease. And of course, as the baby grew, you know, it got worse. They put in a nerve stimulator, didn't help. And they couldn't give her opioids because she was, you know, had it pregnant. And so I have her imagine she's floating in a nice warm bath, filtered her out of the pain. Her pain went from seven to three in a couple of minutes.

1:33:30 Yeah. But she looked angry. And I said, What's the matter? She said, Why in the hell are you the last doctor I got sent to instead of the first? That's exactly right, Tim. I don't

1:33:41 Get it. You know, it's Inexpensive, it's effective. Why not try that first? And then if that doesn't work. Do something else. It's really a shame. It's a disservice to people who can help themselves.

1:33:54 It's excessively expensive to do Use medications or procedures when some people may not need it. Some do, but a lot don't. And so I would like to see River used As a kind of placeholder while people are getting evaluated and Getting appointments.

1:34:09 with people who can help them deal with whatever their pain or other problem is. Can take forever to find a good specialist. Meaning outside of hypnosis. I have a friend who's dealing with A very unpredictable onset of what he describes as overwhelm. that seemed to begin after he had a pretty bad neck injury. He was constantly in this

1:34:32 flexed position while he was working on his laptop and then he went to play tennis one day, went into a serve, bent his head back and had some type of Structural. event that then precipitated this onset of what he would call sort of overwhelm where he goes into fight or flight and really can't focus or work. And it's taken many, many, many, many months to find.

1:34:55 specialist to work with just to begin the trial and error. So in the meantime I could see something like this being Incredibly valuable. Aside from Reverie, and people can find Reverie at Reverie.com. Great name, by the way. R-E-V-E-R-I. dot com and on all the socials we'll link to that in the show notes as well, but Reverie.com and I would imagine That can be found in the app store as well, but R E V E R I. R. I. In addition to that, are there any

1:35:22 resources because I'm sure there's the good, the bad and the ugly when it comes to hypnosis resources, whether those are books, documentaries, or otherwise. Are there any particular resources for those who would like to try to educate themselves more, explore this more? You know, there are a number of good professional hypnosis societies that have members who are professionally trained in use hypnosis, the Society for Clinical Experimental Hypnosis, S C E H dot U S. The American Society of Clinical Hypnosis A S C H dot N E T. There's an international society of hypnosis for your listeners who are elsewhere. There are

1:35:57 Good textbooks on hypnosis. We've written one of them called Transcent Treatment, my late father and I read treatment. That's available. There are other good Yeah. There's

1:36:08 One leaf? Which is a French app that uh the French government has invested in that has excellent recordings to help people use hypnosis. There's one called Nerva out of Australia that helps people with irritable bowel syndrome and hypnosis can be very effective. For that as well. So there are more and more of those apps.

1:36:27 Coming as well that seem to help people. Manage with hypnosis. So it it's growing, the list is growing. We'll link to all those. And Trance and treatment, I must ask, since you mentioned Bali, and I've seen various types of I I think what we would consider trance, whether that's Sufis

1:36:46 Spinning or Hm. Various types of repetitive singing, droning. Do you have any particular longstanding type of trance that you find most interesting or appealing. There's a a sociologist book called Boiling Energy.

1:37:03 About the use of drumming, actually. That's a kind of France inducing experience in Africa. And there's no question that people use that kind of rhythmic activity as a way of socially connecting and soothing themselves. You know, and there's something about being in that rhythm and afraid that

1:37:21 It's usually roughly the rate of heartbeat, you know, about one a second that helps people. And that's why people like to dance and sing and things like that. I think we coordinated social activity that gets the body involved. It can be very soothing. Actually. And so I think a lot of our healing rituals involve

1:37:40 Repetitive movement. That people find soothing. David, thank you for what a What a fantastic wine ranging conversation this became. And is there anything else you'd like to mention? Of course people can find Reverie at Reverie dot com R A V E R I dot com. Is there anything else you'd like to

1:37:57 Thank you. Point people too. It's from the App Store and Google Play as well has it. People have Android phones. I would say I think we've talked about the major Uses of it.

1:38:09 I would love it if people Give it a try, see it as a first recourse, not a last recourse. And I'd love to see it integrated better with people's overall Health and wellness care. I think it's

1:38:23 Been sort of the Rodney Dangerfield of uh psychotherapies. Yeah. It uh after having done this my entire career, this is a legacy project for me. I you know, a time will come when I'm not available to keep doing this for people. It warms my heart that while we've been talking, I've helped more people than I used to in months of person to person clinical activity. And I want people to have it as a resource for helping themselves feel better and function better. And I think it can. So thank you for helping me do that,'cause that's the same kind of thing you're doing with your show and

1:39:04 I'm honored to be a part of it. My pleasure entirely. What fun. This is Best job on earth as far as I'm concerned. And to everybody listening, we will have links to All things discussed in the show notes as per usual at Tim.blog slash podcast.

1:39:20 Spiegel, S P I E G E L, you can just search it there and it'll pop right up. And until next time, as always, just be a little kinder than is necessary to others and to yourself. Thank you for tuning in. Hey guys, this is Tim again, just one more thing before you take off, and that is Five Bullet Friday. Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday provides a little fun before the weekend? Between one and a half and two million people subscribe to my free newsletter, my super short newsletter called Five Bold Friday. Easy to sign up, easy to cancel. It is basically a half page that I send out every Friday to share the coolest things I've found or discovered or have started exploring over that week. It's kind of like my diary of cool things. It often includes articles I'm reading, books I'm reading, albums perhaps, gadgets, gizmas, all sorts of tech tricks and so on that get sent to me by my friends, including a lot of podcast guests, and these strange esoteric things end up in my field, and then I test them and then I share them with you. So if that sounds fun, again, it's very short, a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend, something to think about. If you'd like to try it out, just go to Tim.blog slash Friday. Type that into your browser, Tim.blog slash.

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