In this episode, we talk to Dr. David Spiegel to enlighten us about the many misconceptions about hypnosis and how it is an effective way to help control the effects of stress, anxiety, pain, and other behavioral health challenges. He also delves into a way hypnosis is being disseminated and taught now through an app called Reverie.
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Memorable Moments:
02:51 - Hypnosis is just a state of highly focused attention. It's like when you get so caught up in a good movie that you forget you're watching the movie and you enter the imagined world… It's the ability to narrow the focus of attention and put outside of conscious awareness things that would ordinarily be in consciousness.
03:44 - Shifting mental states has great power. And it's something that we can learn to use better to help us live better.
04:24 - You can start out dealing with stressors on the outside by dealing with the way they affect your body on the inside. That's the way you start to gain control.
06:32 - This is better because [for example] you're trying to get to sleep at three in the morning. I'm not going to be there to hypnotize you back to sleep. But the app is.
07:24 - Hypnosis is the oldest Western conception of Psychotherapy. It started 250 years ago—the first time that talking interaction between the doctor and the patient was thought to have therapeutic value.
10:05 - Just by shifting your focus to how your body feels, you're changing the relationship between external stressors and our normal reaction.
10:43 - Learn to approach stress by first handling the thing you can best handle, which is how your body reacts to it, and then approach the problem and figure out what to do about it.
11:42 - Hypnosis is Western. It's meant to solve a problem… And it's more focused on changing a given problem. You do it not just to be open and to lose yourself but rather to deal with your pain or your stress.
16:05 - We're born with this big brain and a great imagination, but not with a user's manual. We don't use it very well.
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This podcast is hosted by Allison Walsh and Dr. Angela Phillips. It is produced by Allison Walsh, Savannah Eckstrom, and Nicole LaNeve. If you’re interested in being a guest on this podcast, please visit www.therecoveryvillage.com/dearmindyoumatter.
Note: We use AI transcription so there may be some inaccuracies
Allison: 00:02
Hello and welcome to the dear mind, do you matter podcast? My name is Allison Walsh. I'm a longtime mental health advocate and vice president at Advanced Recovery Systems. On each episode I will be joined by my colleague and clinical expert, Dr. Angela Phillips. This show along with our mental health and wellness app, Nobu are just some of the ways we're working to provide you with actionable tips and tools to take really good care of yourself each and every day. So sit back, relax and grab your favorite note taking device, it's time to fill your mind with things that matter.
Angela: 00:35
Welcome to this week's episode of Dear mind, you matter with Dr. David Spiegel. He is a Wilson Professor and Associate Chair of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences and the director of the Center on stress and health and the Center for Integrative Medicine at Stanford University's School of Medicine. He has published 13 books, 409 scientific journal articles, and 175 book chapters on hypnosis, psychosocial oncology, stress, physiology, trauma and psychotherapy for stress, anxiety and depression is research has been supported by the National Institute of Mental Health, the National Cancer Institute, the National Institute on Aging, the National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health, and a number of foundations. He is a past president of the American College of Psychiatrists and the Society for Clinical and experimental hypnosis. And as a member of the National Academy of Medicine. He spoke on hypnosis at the World Economic Forum and Davis in January of 2018. Welcome Dr. Spiegel,
Allison: 01:36
we are so excited to have you on the show today. Would you mind just a brief introduction for our audience?
Dr. Spiegel 01:42
Thank you, Allison. I'm glad to be here. I'm Dr. David Spiegel. I'm a psychiatrist, Wilson Professor and Associate Chair of psychiatry at Stanford University School of Medicine, where I've been on the faculty for a very long time, I run a center on stress and health that studies the relationship between stress and health and how we handle it. And I run the Center for Integrative Medicine at Stanford.
Angela: 02:03
Awesome. Well, Dr. Spiegel, we go back a little bit to Stanford and I had the opportunity of working with you on a couple of research or fairly large research study. But the primary thing that we focused on, which I know you have so much experience in and so I'm really going to tap into that. And we want to pick your brain about this a little bit with our audience too, because it's a little taboo. It's a little bit misunderstood. There's a lot of misconceptions around it. So we want to get at hypnosis, and I'd love for you to just go into explaining how you got into that in the first place, and how it actually works.
Dr. Spiegel 02:37
Thank you, Angela, I remember you well, we miss you. But I'm glad to see you prospering here. And you worked with us at the beginning of a major study we're doing on hypnosis and transcranial magnetic stimulation. So you helped us with that quite a bit. Hypnosis is just a state of highly focused attention. It's like that experience you may have when you get so caught up in a good movie that you forget, you're watching the movie and you enter the imagined world, or when you're listening to get so absorbed in our discussion that they are late for an appointment or somebody it's the ability to narrow the focus of attention and put outside of conscious awareness, things that would ordinarily be in consciousness. And it's an everyday experience for many people. It happens all the time you get so caught up in a sunset that you get, you're late for dinner or something like that. So it's a natural experience. People do think it's strange and weird. And the memory most people have is going to some cheesy hypnosis performance where the football coach dance like a ballerina and things like that. But that's not really what it is. What it is, is something that in the service of controlling stress, anxiety, pain, getting to sleep controlling habits, it's dangerously effective. It really works. Shifting mental states has great power. And it's something that we can learn to use better to help live better.
Allison: 03:50
I love this. And I'm fascinated by it. And I hope our listeners are getting so entrenched in our conversation that they're losing track of time. That's what we hope for too. So
Dr. Spiegel 04:00
Allison noticed your hand floated up in the air and you're already hypnotized. It's
Allison: 04:03
very, there we go. I'm already gone.
Dr. Spiegel 04:05
You're enjoying it.
Allison: 04:06
I was I was perfect. So I'm curious about how it's being utilized really leveraged for those that are struggling with maybe some behavioral health challenges.
Dr. Spiegel 04:17
Well, I've used hypnosis with about 7000 people in my career. We use it for things like stress management, you can start out dealing with stressors on the outside by dealing with the way they affect your body on the inside. That's the way you start to gain control is very useful for pain control. 55,000 Americans died of opioid overdoses last year more than shot gun deaths, more than auto accidents, and yet we are overusing medication for chronic pain and under using techniques like hypnosis, which are very effective, it's helpful in just enhancing your focus and concentrating better and programming yourself for your day and what you're going to get accomplished. It's useful for stopping smoking, we get one out of five people to stop smoking right away. A teaching them self hypnosis. And one way I'm trying to disseminate it Allison and Angela is with an app called reverie, our Evie ri, you hear my mellifluous voice taking you through the same kind of self hypnosis, exercise, and all hypnosis is really self hypnosis, the same kind you would be doing in my office are at the other end of my Zoom link. So we're trying to make as available as possible, the power of learning to do self hypnosis to live better.
Angela: 05:28
You just read my mind, I wanted to ask you about self hypnosis. So say a little bit about when it's more beneficial to maybe see someone in person or have you talked them through it, make it a little bit more customized, things like that, versus maybe using an app or looking at hypnosis scripts.
Dr. Spiegel 05:44
Sure, Angela? Well, actually one of the inspirations for this app. I started about three years ago, I was giving a talk at the brain mind summit at Stanford, perhaps when you were still there. This guy comes up to me afterwards, he was a Stanford Business to MIT grad, Ariel Poehler and said, Would you like to try to build something that is interactive? Because Alexa is making it very easy. Now you interact with Alexa all the time, whether you want to or not, but we could build an app that would use that interactivity, you ask them a question, they give you an answer, and you give a different instruction, depending on what their answer is. That's what wherever he is, we've built it. Now. We've enrolled 170,000 People with the app. And so you don't have to give up the interactivity. I started out thinking I want to make something that's sort of close to being as good as what would happen with a patient in the office. But in many ways, this is better because you're trying to get to sleep at three in the morning. I'm not going to be there to hypnotize you back to sleep, but the app is so it's possible now to deselect out the parts of hypnosis and all hypnosis, really self hypnosis and make it available to people in an app.
Allison: 06:48
If you or someone you know is struggling with addiction or mental health issues, we encourage you to reach out to us today. Advanced Recovery Systems is a leading behavioral health care company with locations across this country. Don't hesitate, call us today at 855-409-1753. That's 855-409-1753 help is just a phone call away. Where else do you see there being an opportunity in the field to continue to share about this? Or where else should it be that it's not already?
Dr. Spiegel 07:23
Allison hypnosis is the oldest Western conception of psychotherapy it started 250 years ago, the first time that talking interaction between the doctor and the patient was thought to have therapeutic value. And yet it has always been left on the fringe. In fact, all hypnosis is self hypnosis. What you get with a trained clinician, and I am one and I have high regard for them is a careful assessment of what your problem is and how to approach it. There are different ways to use this state of hypnosis, and some are better than others. We hypnotist, tell one another, don't tell someone not to think about purple elephants. That's what they'll do. Instead, focus on what you're for. You're protecting your body, you're not dying for smoke, you're protecting your body from poison. So there are ways of using the same altered mental state, the intense focus that can be much more productive. And a good clinician can help you with that. But as we're learning with CBT, which is going online, there are apps like woebot and things like that, as we're learning with mindfulness where millions of people are becoming mindful, listening to headspace or calm. There are aspects of hypnosis that can easily and effectively be disseminated to millions of people.
Angela: 08:31
Absolutely. We love that and actually in our app Nobu. We've really tried to focus on various aspects of pulling CBT DBT a lot of other amazing tools. But I think it's fantastic that hypnosis is even gone that direction. I did not realize this. And so I can't wait to try the reverie app as well. But Dr. Spiegel, can you tell us a little bit about what would someone expect if they're trying to say for example, learn how to control stress better, like you mentioned, you know, have issues with pain or focus, like what would they expect if they're downloading the app? And they might want to walk through or have that experience? First of all, what to experience with the app itself? But then the timeline when they start to see the effects of that? What does that look like?
Dr. Spiegel 09:14
That's a terrific question, Angela. Because that's one of the coolest things about hypnosis. In particular, if you're doing CBT, you got to practice it for a while. We need to get somewhere mindfulness. Headspace says that after three weeks of mindfulness, our users feel 16% happier. That's terrific. But we did a study with 15,000 people who use reverie and in 15 minutes they had a 35% decrease in their self reported stress levels. So the cool thing is, you will know right away whether it's going to help you and you can feel it. What do we do? I tell someone to do what you were doing a minute ago. Look up close your eyes slowly. Take a deep breath, let your body float and then the one hand or the other float up in the air like a balloon. So you begin to feel that your mind is changing the way a certain part of your body feels. And then you imagine being some were safe and comfortable like a bath, the lake hot tub or floating in space. So you notice that just by shifting your focus to how your body feels, you're changing the relationship between external stressors and our normal reaction. We're pretty pathetic physical creatures. So we're used to having to fight or flee if a predator comes after us. And we tend to treat all stressors as if they were immediate physical stressors, and that's often productive, because then you just get worried about how bad your body's feeling. And you're worse off at dealing with whatever the stressor is, like your boss said, something you didn't like. So you get your body comfortable. And then you picture the problem on one side of an imaginary screen, and what you can do about the problem on the other while you maintain this sense of comfort in your body, so it's learning to approach stress by first handling the thing you can best handle, which is how your body reacts to it, and then approach the problem and figure out what to do about it. We do that within 12 to 15 minutes on the rubber. Yeah, that's remarkable.
Allison: 10:57
As you're speaking about this, I think there's probably a lot of us, myself included, that are thinking there sounds like there's a lot of similarities between what you're explaining with hypnosis, but also with meditation and mindfulness. So if somebody's sitting there going, like, what's the big difference? How would you explain that?
Dr. Spiegel 11:15
I'm commonly asked this question, Allison and I have great respect for mindfulness. Jon Kabat Zinn is a good friend of mine, I respect what people have done, but it's Eastern, it's different. In Eastern, you don't do something to solve a problem, you do it because it's a better way of being. And so people are supposed to meditate half an hour twice a day, and just let feelings flow through them. So open presents, do a body scan, check out your body and feel compassion for others. Those are all wonderful things. Hypnosis is Western, it's meant to solve a problem, we want to be efficient, we want to handle things. Hypnosis is faster. And it's more focused on changing a given problem, you do it not to just be open and to lose yourself would but rather to deal with your pain or your stress or sleep better. For example, we've seen that there's a difference in what happens in the brain. So in hypnosis, when you get hypnotized, you turn down activity in a part of the brain that's called the salience network. It's in the middle of the front part of the brain, there's like this inverted. See here, if you turn down that activity in this alien, the salience network is what fires off when you hear a loud noise, and you think, Oh, my God, what happened, or it's what social media uses to get you to switch to pay attention to them, there's some threat you hadn't thought of, and they'll tell you about it. If you turn down activity in that region, you can narrow your focus of attention and not worry about what else you should be attending to. In meditation, you decrease activity in a posterior part of that same region. But in the back of the brain, it's called the default mode network. It's the part of the brain where you just reflect on who you are and what you're doing when you're not doing anything in particular. And that's what you're supposed to do with meditation to sort of be selfless, just experience things that worry about consolidating who you are. So they're similar, but they are not the same.
Allison: 12:58
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Angela: 13:26
So I remember when we were working on the study that you referenced, Dr. Spiegel, that there was a specific assessment that we can do to kind of tap into whether or not hypnosis is going to be something that might work for someone, is there something that folks listening might be able to do to kind of test that out for them or assess whether or not this might be more or less a better option or something that maybe they're inherently able to benefit from compared to the next person?
Dr. Spiegel 13:52
Actually, we're actively You read my mind, we're working on that. Now we're building that test that hypnotic induction profile into reverie. And so we're hoping to have a self assessment tool ready, it'll take just about five minutes, it involves getting a suggestion Your hand will be lightened buoyant float up in the air, and if you pull it down, it'll float right back up in the air. And you feel this sense of in voluntariness, when you do it, I've seen people like Andrew Guberman, who is a YouTube of doing this with him. And he's a brilliant guy. And he's looking at his hand and saying, What the hell's going on here. So that sense of surprise, and the ability to dissociate control of one hand from the other is part of the test, about two thirds of adults are at least somewhat hypnotizable and about 15 to 20% are very hypnotizable and can use it is about 1/3 who probably aren't and might try doing something else. Although just the way we approach a problem might be helpful from a cognitive point of view. And one interesting side note is most children are in trances. Most of the time, kids are all very hypnotizable until the age of about 10. That's why work and play are all the same thing for kids. They just get into it, whatever it is, and as we go through adolescence, some of us lose that ability. Piaget talked about Formula preparations, you're thinking about things in a logical rather than an experiential way. And some people lose some of their hypnotized ability, but what you've got when you're 21 is what you're going to have when you're 60. And so we will be able to test that. But one simple thing your listeners could do now is just think, do I ever have the experience of getting so caught up in a good movie that I forget? I'm watching the movie and enter the Imagine world. If you do, the odds are that you're pretty
Allison: 15:23
hypnotizable. And do that all the time. You're ready to be hypnotized? For all of this question. I mean, have you noticed that maybe there's some controversy around hypnosis? I'm sure you've got some naysayers out there, too. Not everybody buys into this. But what do you say to those that maybe are skeptical? Or maybe think of this as a controversial way?
Dr. Spiegel 15:45
You know, try it, you'll like it. The discussion whether it exists or not, was kind of settled in the 18th century when King Louis commissioned the panel that included Benjamin Franklin, and weirdly enough, Dr. Vu Thanh, the inventor of the GI a team was on this commission. And they just thought hypnosis was nothing but he did imagination. Well, I think that's not a bad definition. But there's nothing wrong with that. We're born with this big brain and a great imagination, but not a user's manual. We don't use it very well. So it's just using a resource we have, but we often don't pay much attention to it. If people don't like it, don't use it. But I have to tell you, after a career of doing this, I thought build it and they will come do enough research that proves how valuable it is and how it works in the brain. And people will come around, we've done all of that. And so I'm going DTC direct to consumer here. And that's how integrative medicine grew so much in the United States. It wasn't from Medical Referrals, and I'm a physician, it was from people saying I'd rather spend my money and my time on a treatment that I control and where the risk benefit ratio is more favorable. So there are integrative medicine techniques that don't work, but you don't die in overdose and you don't get rashes and there are times when the problem is better handled this way and I want people to understand I'm tired of waiting for approval. I want people to understand and see for themselves how much it can help them.
Angela: 17:02
Take it to the masses. Yep. Dr. Spiegel, can you share what brought you are connected you with it in the first place with hypnosis,
Dr. Spiegel 17:10
it's a bit of a genetic disease in my family. Both of my parents were psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, my father learned to do hypnosis when he was sent off to combat in World War Two as a medic and he was battalion surgeon and he used hypnosis to help people with pain and with occasional conversion disorders, people who couldn't walk but should have been able to, you know, the dinner table conversations were pretty interesting. And I got to occasionally watch him treat a patient. I walked into the room I was at medical school at Harvard and pediatrics and the nurse says Spiegel, your patient is in room 332 And I'm following the sound of the wheezing down the hall and there she is both upright in bed pretty 15 year old girl knuckles white struggling for breath. They trice injected epinephrine it didn't work. Her mother was crying. I just taken hypnosis course. And I said, Would you like to learn a breathing exercise? She nods. So I got her hypnotized. And then I realized we hadn't gotten to asthma in the course. 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 knuckles aren't white, her mother stopped crying. The nurse ran out of the room. My intern came to look for me and I thought he's gonna pat me on the back. He said the nurse filed a complaint with the chief of nursing that you violated a Massachusetts law by hypnotizing a minor without parental consent. Now, Massachusetts has a lot of weird laws, but that is not one of them. So he says you're gonna have to stop doing this. And I said, why? He said, It's dangerous. I said, Are you kidding? You were gonna give her general anesthesia is the next step and put her on steroids. And she'd been hospitalized every month for three months. And I said, Well, you take me off the case if you want. But I'm not going to tell her something I know is not true. So over the weekend, there was a council of war between the intern the attending the chief resident, and they came back on Monday with a radical idea. They said, let's ask the patient I don't think that had ever been done before. It's so exhausting. And she said, Oh, I like this. So she did have one subsequent hospitalization but went on to study to be a respiratory therapist. And I thought that anything that can help a patient that much that fast violate a non existent law in Massachusetts has to be worth looking into and I never stopped.
Allison: 19:13
I love that story. Thank you for sharing that. And I think that's just such a cool way to show how you lead into something that you truly believed in and how it's just been your life's work. So thank you so much for that. We do love to ask everybody that comes on this show one question, and it is at this point in your life. What matters most to you right now.
Dr. Spiegel 19:37
My family, my wife, my grandkids are a source of endless joy and I love watching them grow and develop. This reverie is a legacy project for me. I've treated a lot of people I think I've helped a lot of people I know I've helped a bunch of people but I would not rest comfortably without having done everything I can do to spread the wealth to help people benefit from what we've learned about how to help them. So Doing that is very important to me. And the other thing is our country returning to sanity. And I was glad to see last Tuesday that it began to look like we were over the mass psychosis we've been immersed in. I want a world to be better, both helping people. But also, I'm hoping that what's good in this country's traditions will continue to flourish.
Angela: 20:20
Thank you so much, Dr. Spiegel. And I know and having worked with just even a few of your patients and your clients that you're doing such great work, and you touch so many people. So there's so much to be proud of there. And I love that this is your legacy project that's so exciting to be able to pass that along. So thank you so much, again, for joining us, I just want to make sure to give you a platform to just share with our listeners, how they can follow you either on social media or where they can find you online.
Dr. Spiegel 20:46
Sure, they can find me online, the reverie app is www.graebert.com. You can there learn how to download the app and hear me do the hypnosis either at the App Store. If you have an iPhone or a Google Play, if you have an Android, we can handle both. Now, stress health center.stanford.edu is where you can learn on the web about what we're doing at these people, David, although I'm not sure I want to give a Twitter handle these days, given who's running it, but
Allison: 21:13
I love this. That's great. I love it. tweet at you.
Dr. Spiegel 21:19
I was afraid of that. But it's got to be really you Allison,
Allison: 21:25
don't worry, no boss over yours. So anyways, it has been great. And I have loved this conversation. And you are brilliant. And thank you for sharing your gifts with the world and your legacy project like this is what the world needs and you're making it really easy for us to be able to access it. So thank you for doing what you do. And thank you for coming on our show.
Dr. Spiegel 21:45
My pleasure. And thank you for doing what you're doing. I admire it.
Angela: 21:50
Thank you so much for listening to today's episode. If you're not already subscribed, we hope you join us regularly. And please leave us a five star review wherever you get your podcasts if you enjoyed the show. We hope that this podcast is beneficial to you and your wellness journey. Dear mind you matter is brought to you by Nobu, a new mental health and wellness app. You can download it today using the link in our show notes. We will talk to you next time and until then remember you and your mind matter