Dr. David Spiegel
Appearances
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Dr. David Spiegel: 10-MINUTE Hypnosis Hack to Rewire Your Brain & Reduce Stress 80% Faster
Hypnosis is a state of highly focused attention. Have you ever gotten so caught up in a good movie that you kind of forget you're watching a movie? Absolutely. You become part of the movie instead of part of the audience. World-renowned psychiatrist, expert on self-hypnosis, Dr. David Spiegel. How do we change ourselves? Deal with the aspect of the threat and you can control it.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Dr. David Spiegel: 10-MINUTE Hypnosis Hack to Rewire Your Brain & Reduce Stress 80% Faster
And it is the case that people in hypnosis, since they're more focused, are more likely to suspend their usual evaluation and judgment of things and see what it would be like if this were true instead of that.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Dr. David Spiegel: 10-MINUTE Hypnosis Hack to Rewire Your Brain & Reduce Stress 80% Faster
and there are people who have been and can be influenced to some extent but you know what people who are highly hypnotizable do that without ever having been formally hypnotized they'll tell you i just you know i the highly hypnotizable people uh tend to be very sensitive to other people they pick up their emotional cues very well um and and they respond often
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Dr. David Spiegel: 10-MINUTE Hypnosis Hack to Rewire Your Brain & Reduce Stress 80% Faster
easily putting somebody else's priorities above their own. So does that mean you're more easily influenced? Perhaps, but frankly, I think you're better protected if you understand more about your tendency to do that and you can defend yourself more. So hypnosis is a way of being influenced by other people, but also being influenced by by your own desires and wishes.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Dr. David Spiegel: 10-MINUTE Hypnosis Hack to Rewire Your Brain & Reduce Stress 80% Faster
So I would say it's there, take full advantage of it.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Dr. David Spiegel: 10-MINUTE Hypnosis Hack to Rewire Your Brain & Reduce Stress 80% Faster
Well, on the Reverie app, we have a six-minute hypnotizability test. It's a standard test. I've used it with about 7,000 patients and research subjects in my career. It can be done very quickly. You give a series of hypnotic instructions and see how the person can respond to them. And if you'd like, Jay, I can test your hypnotizability right now.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Dr. David Spiegel: 10-MINUTE Hypnosis Hack to Rewire Your Brain & Reduce Stress 80% Faster
See how you are. I bet your listeners are placing bets on just how hypnotizable you are. I love it. So get as comfortable as you can. Put one arm on either side of the chair. Okay.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Dr. David Spiegel: 10-MINUTE Hypnosis Hack to Rewire Your Brain & Reduce Stress 80% Faster
and please look up now to the top of your head all the way up high as you can past your eyebrows all the way up way way up good and as you keep looking up slowly close your eyes all right now let your eyes relax but keep them closed take a deep breath in nice slow exhale through your mouth let your eyes relax but keep them closed and let your body float
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Dr. David Spiegel: 10-MINUTE Hypnosis Hack to Rewire Your Brain & Reduce Stress 80% Faster
Just imagine you're floating somewhere safe and comfortable, like a bath, a lake, a hot tub, or floating in space. And while your body's floating, I'm going to ask you to take your right hand and stroke the back of your left middle finger. So let your right hand float over and stroke the back of your left middle finger and stroke backward toward your wrist now. and up your forearm to your elbow.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Dr. David Spiegel: 10-MINUTE Hypnosis Hack to Rewire Your Brain & Reduce Stress 80% Faster
And as you do that, you'll feel a sense of tingling and numbness and lightness. And now put your right hand back down and let your left hand float up in the air like a balloon. Let it float up to a comfortable upright position. You can leave it straight up in the air as it is, or you can rest your elbow on the arm of the chair, whatever feels better to you.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Dr. David Spiegel: 10-MINUTE Hypnosis Hack to Rewire Your Brain & Reduce Stress 80% Faster
It's a show dedicated to helping you figure out the trickiest parts of adulting.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Dr. David Spiegel: 10-MINUTE Hypnosis Hack to Rewire Your Brain & Reduce Stress 80% Faster
Your boss may have said something awful to you, but your body doesn't have to react that way.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Dr. David Spiegel: 10-MINUTE Hypnosis Hack to Rewire Your Brain & Reduce Stress 80% Faster
And I'm going to give you this instruction. Your hand will remain light and in this upright position, even after I give you the signal for your eyes to open. Later, when I ask you to pull your left hand back down to the arm of the chair and then let go, Your left hand will float right back up to the upright position. You'll find something pleasant and amusing about this sensation.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Dr. David Spiegel: 10-MINUTE Hypnosis Hack to Rewire Your Brain & Reduce Stress 80% Faster
After that, when I ask you to touch your left elbow, your usual sensation and control will return. Each time you go into this state of concentration, you'll find it easier and easier to do, and you can use it to help you concentrate on what's important to you. Right now, we'll come out of this state of concentration together by counting backwards from three to one. On three, you'll get ready.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Dr. David Spiegel: 10-MINUTE Hypnosis Hack to Rewire Your Brain & Reduce Stress 80% Faster
On two, with your eyelids closed, roll up your eyes, and one, let your eyes open. Ready? Three, two, one. One. Good. Now stay in this position, please, and describe what physical sensations you're aware of now in your left hand and arm.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Dr. David Spiegel: 10-MINUTE Hypnosis Hack to Rewire Your Brain & Reduce Stress 80% Faster
Tingling? Is it comfortable?
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Dr. David Spiegel: 10-MINUTE Hypnosis Hack to Rewire Your Brain & Reduce Stress 80% Faster
Does your left hand feel as if it's not as much a part of your body as your right hand?
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Dr. David Spiegel: 10-MINUTE Hypnosis Hack to Rewire Your Brain & Reduce Stress 80% Faster
It's lighter. Okay. Does that surprise you at all?
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Dr. David Spiegel: 10-MINUTE Hypnosis Hack to Rewire Your Brain & Reduce Stress 80% Faster
To be aware of it, okay.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Dr. David Spiegel: 10-MINUTE Hypnosis Hack to Rewire Your Brain & Reduce Stress 80% Faster
Okay. Now, please take your right hand, pull your left hand back down to the arm of the chair, and then let go.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Dr. David Spiegel: 10-MINUTE Hypnosis Hack to Rewire Your Brain & Reduce Stress 80% Faster
Can you describe what that felt like?
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Dr. David Spiegel: 10-MINUTE Hypnosis Hack to Rewire Your Brain & Reduce Stress 80% Faster
That you had to lift it up.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Dr. David Spiegel: 10-MINUTE Hypnosis Hack to Rewire Your Brain & Reduce Stress 80% Faster
It felt right. Good. Is that surprising to you? That is very surprising to me, yeah. Good. All right.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Dr. David Spiegel: 10-MINUTE Hypnosis Hack to Rewire Your Brain & Reduce Stress 80% Faster
By way of comparison, please raise your right hand. Put that one down. Any difference in sensation?
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Dr. David Spiegel: 10-MINUTE Hypnosis Hack to Rewire Your Brain & Reduce Stress 80% Faster
Well, I'm here to tell you folks, you're no puppets.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Dr. David Spiegel: 10-MINUTE Hypnosis Hack to Rewire Your Brain & Reduce Stress 80% Faster
So you clearly have more control over your right hand than your left. All right. Now, please take your right hand, touch your left elbow, and then let go.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Dr. David Spiegel: 10-MINUTE Hypnosis Hack to Rewire Your Brain & Reduce Stress 80% Faster
Yeah. Now I see that your left hand went back down. Can you describe what that feels like?
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Dr. David Spiegel: 10-MINUTE Hypnosis Hack to Rewire Your Brain & Reduce Stress 80% Faster
So it feels, the sensation is different, but the control is now.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Dr. David Spiegel: 10-MINUTE Hypnosis Hack to Rewire Your Brain & Reduce Stress 80% Faster
All right, well, touch your left elbow again with your right hand. Open. Now shake both hands and tell me when the control becomes the same.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Dr. David Spiegel: 10-MINUTE Hypnosis Hack to Rewire Your Brain & Reduce Stress 80% Faster
Okay, good. Did I do or say anything that would indicate there'd be a change in sensation or control in your left hand and arm?
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Dr. David Spiegel: 10-MINUTE Hypnosis Hack to Rewire Your Brain & Reduce Stress 80% Faster
Did I say anything to you about your elbow or touching your elbow?
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Dr. David Spiegel: 10-MINUTE Hypnosis Hack to Rewire Your Brain & Reduce Stress 80% Faster
Yeah, do you remember what I said?
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Dr. David Spiegel: 10-MINUTE Hypnosis Hack to Rewire Your Brain & Reduce Stress 80% Faster
100%.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Dr. David Spiegel: 10-MINUTE Hypnosis Hack to Rewire Your Brain & Reduce Stress 80% Faster
Did you have that sense in any other part of your body? I don't think so. The neck, thighs, abdomen, chest? No. Okay, so your score is seven out of 10. You're quite hypnotizable.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Dr. David Spiegel: 10-MINUTE Hypnosis Hack to Rewire Your Brain & Reduce Stress 80% Faster
It is really.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Dr. David Spiegel: 10-MINUTE Hypnosis Hack to Rewire Your Brain & Reduce Stress 80% Faster
So your head was drooping forward. It was leaning forward.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Dr. David Spiegel: 10-MINUTE Hypnosis Hack to Rewire Your Brain & Reduce Stress 80% Faster
Yes, sinking into it. So you were elaborating upon the image that you were feeling. And that's, you know, hypnosis is about very rapidly doing things, changing the way your body feels. You have, with all of your experience in mindfulness, this is something different for you. How would you say it's different from the state you get into in mindfulness?
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Dr. David Spiegel: 10-MINUTE Hypnosis Hack to Rewire Your Brain & Reduce Stress 80% Faster
I see, so it's more slipping into the state but not using it right away to see if you can produce a change. Correct. And frankly, when I use hypnosis with subjects, and I use this test with every person I use hypnosis with, because it's a way for them to discover what the experience is like and how they feel and to observe it. Don't take my word for it. Try it out and see what it feels like.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Dr. David Spiegel: 10-MINUTE Hypnosis Hack to Rewire Your Brain & Reduce Stress 80% Faster
And for me to be able to evaluate in what way to work with them, because some people can do something like what you did, some less, some not at all, not that many, but some people not at all. But it becomes a kind of immediate object lesson lesson and how much more control we have over our body and how we react to that than we usually give ourselves credit for.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Dr. David Spiegel: 10-MINUTE Hypnosis Hack to Rewire Your Brain & Reduce Stress 80% Faster
Well, you know, I frankly think the best answer is you are highly experienced in mindfulness, in trying out different ways of being, and yet... For you, and you're telling... Look, I'm a guest on your show. This is your show. It would be fine for you to just say, you know, sorry, Doc, nice try. I don't feel it. And I think you would be honest with your audience in doing that.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Dr. David Spiegel: 10-MINUTE Hypnosis Hack to Rewire Your Brain & Reduce Stress 80% Faster
But you had the experience, you know. Years ago, I don't know if you remember this, but there was a guy named Phil Donahue who had a very popular daytime show. And he invited me as a guest. And it was at a time when it was thought to be dangerous to hypnotize someone in public. You wouldn't do that. Other people might get hypnotized. So this woman I had hypnotized before the show began.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Dr. David Spiegel: 10-MINUTE Hypnosis Hack to Rewire Your Brain & Reduce Stress 80% Faster
And I had her arm up in the air like this. The show opens and I pull the hand down and it pops back up the way yours did. And the camera comes in closer and Donahue says, look, this is just some doctor. I'm Phil Donahue. Keep your hand down. And he pulls her hand down and it pops right back up in the air. And she says, I'm starting to feel like a slot machine, you know?
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Dr. David Spiegel: 10-MINUTE Hypnosis Hack to Rewire Your Brain & Reduce Stress 80% Faster
So the fun thing about it is, is that if it's the real deal, it wasn't like you were saying, oh, I'll just keep my hand down. Your hand wanted to go up, right? And that ability to quickly rearrange your mind-body relationship is part of what's so interesting about hypnosis. And you experienced it. So, you know, people can fight it if they want, or they can misrepresent what their experience is.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Dr. David Spiegel: 10-MINUTE Hypnosis Hack to Rewire Your Brain & Reduce Stress 80% Faster
But you didn't. You had the experience. And That element of surprise that where people can see, damn, look what's happening to my body. Look what I can do this quickly. I'm already starting therapy there, you know, because I'm showing people that they have more of an ability to control their body than they like to think or than they usually think. And that's a tremendous opportunity.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Dr. David Spiegel: 10-MINUTE Hypnosis Hack to Rewire Your Brain & Reduce Stress 80% Faster
That's a very important point, Jay, because I'm not taking control. Did you feel like I was taking control?
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Dr. David Spiegel: 10-MINUTE Hypnosis Hack to Rewire Your Brain & Reduce Stress 80% Faster
No, I thought I'm a teacher. I'm teaching you how to identify and utilize the abilities you have the way you do when you teach people how to use mindfulness. You're not implanting mindfulness in them. You're showing them, look, you've narrowed your view of who you are and what you are, and I'm going to help you expand it, and I'm going to show you –
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Dr. David Spiegel: 10-MINUTE Hypnosis Hack to Rewire Your Brain & Reduce Stress 80% Faster
The beauty in everyday experience and how you can reassess what's important to you in life. And people can be open to that and learn from it or not. But you're teaching them how to explore capacities they have that they may not have known about. And that's what I'm doing with hypnosis. I'm teaching them how to utilize their own ability. You know, we...
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Dr. David Spiegel: 10-MINUTE Hypnosis Hack to Rewire Your Brain & Reduce Stress 80% Faster
Our major evolutionary advantage as humans is our brain, this three-pound object on the top of our shoulders. It doesn't come with a user's manual. There are a lot of things our brains can do, and that's what you do, teaching people mindfulness, that you can use your brain in ways you hadn't thought of.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Dr. David Spiegel: 10-MINUTE Hypnosis Hack to Rewire Your Brain & Reduce Stress 80% Faster
And if they didn't have the basic ability to do it, it wouldn't work. And the same is true. That's what I'm doing with hypnosis. I'm not projecting anything onto someone. I'm teaching them how to use what they already know. When automobiles were invented some hundred and something years ago, there were a bunch of state laws against windshield wipers. Why?
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Dr. David Spiegel: 10-MINUTE Hypnosis Hack to Rewire Your Brain & Reduce Stress 80% Faster
Because remember the oldest image of somebody inducing hypnosis was the dangling watch, you know, and it doesn't work very well with electronic watches now. But they thought people would be waving their eyes back and forth with the windshield wipers and going into hypnotic states when they were driving. It doesn't happen. But so it's an ability that people have and we just teach them how to use it.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Dr. David Spiegel: 10-MINUTE Hypnosis Hack to Rewire Your Brain & Reduce Stress 80% Faster
Well, that's a fairly controversial area. Hypnosis, it can be a powerful thing. It can help people relive events and with not just remember, but relive them with the same kind of emotion, sort of like a flashback in PTSD, but under control. And then help people come to a new understanding of what happened.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Dr. David Spiegel: 10-MINUTE Hypnosis Hack to Rewire Your Brain & Reduce Stress 80% Faster
Now, does it mean that the hypnotic, what we call age regression, is an absolute, totally accurate recollection of what happened? No, but then none of our recollections are. You know, they're a combination of what we experienced and put down in memory stores and what we interpret and what we've learned later.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Dr. David Spiegel: 10-MINUTE Hypnosis Hack to Rewire Your Brain & Reduce Stress 80% Faster
But it can help people in a controlled way to get back to relive and remember things that they previously might not have been able to remember, in part because the emotions are so painful and difficult that one way to protect yourself is to just keep it dissociated, just put it away somewhere and not think about it. And hypnosis can be a way of cutting through that and helping people understand
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Dr. David Spiegel: 10-MINUTE Hypnosis Hack to Rewire Your Brain & Reduce Stress 80% Faster
come to terms with situations that they previously hadn't thought about or didn't want to think about. So what I tell my patients and what is the case is that hypnosis is no true serum. It's not like your memory is a tape recorder and you just rewind the tape and look at it. But it can be a way of
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Dr. David Spiegel: 10-MINUTE Hypnosis Hack to Rewire Your Brain & Reduce Stress 80% Faster
Let's learn about all of it and then some. Listen to Grown Up Stuff How to Adult on America's number one podcast network, iHeart. Open your free iHeart app and search Grown Up Stuff.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Dr. David Spiegel: 10-MINUTE Hypnosis Hack to Rewire Your Brain & Reduce Stress 80% Faster
dealing with the emotional implications of things you're remembering and get a better look at what happened. One example, I don't know if you remember this, but not far from here, there's a town called Chowchilla, where a school bus full of children was hijacked by two idiots who literally buried the bus underground in an old mining pit. And they finally found the bus and freed the kids.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Dr. David Spiegel: 10-MINUTE Hypnosis Hack to Rewire Your Brain & Reduce Stress 80% Faster
And the bus driver couldn't remember much about the guys who overtook the bus. So he was hypnotized and he of course was traumatized too. And he had to help keep these kids alive in a terrible circumstance. And he recalled seeing this car overtaking the bus. And he remembered in hypnosis all of the numbers and letters of the license plate correctly.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Dr. David Spiegel: 10-MINUTE Hypnosis Hack to Rewire Your Brain & Reduce Stress 80% Faster
He got the order wrong, but he remembered it all. And that led to the arrest and conviction of the two guys who did it. There are times when, yes, you can add new information that is accurate. It doesn't mean it's always accurate, but it's additional and often useful information.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Dr. David Spiegel: 10-MINUTE Hypnosis Hack to Rewire Your Brain & Reduce Stress 80% Faster
Yes, that's very important. So there's a woman I saw who suffered an attempted rape as she was coming home just at dusk with her arms full of groceries and this guy jumped her. And she starts fighting with him. Eventually, she fought him off, actually. He was trying to get her upstairs into her apartment. And the police came. She hadn't actually been raped. They thought no big deal.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Dr. David Spiegel: 10-MINUTE Hypnosis Hack to Rewire Your Brain & Reduce Stress 80% Faster
She then had a full-out seizure. She had a basilar skull fracture from fighting with this guy. It's always a terrifying, horrible thing. And she wanted initially to just remember more about what the guy looked like. And she couldn't remember much. It was getting dark. So I said, all right, here's how we're going to do this. We're going to take you back to this time.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Dr. David Spiegel: 10-MINUTE Hypnosis Hack to Rewire Your Brain & Reduce Stress 80% Faster
Hypnosis is, oddly enough, the oldest Western conception of a psychotherapy. The first time a talking interaction was thought to have therapeutic benefit. And I think there's much overlap between some of the things you do and think like a monk, you know, focusing on visualization, on controlling your breathing, on... on visualizing things that can be ways of being different.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Dr. David Spiegel: 10-MINUTE Hypnosis Hack to Rewire Your Brain & Reduce Stress 80% Faster
But your body is floating in a bath. You're safe and comfortable. And whatever you see or remember, nothing is happening. Your body is now safe and comfortable. So I was reassuring her. And very often, understandably, when people remember an event like that, they start reacting physically as though it were happening.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Dr. David Spiegel: 10-MINUTE Hypnosis Hack to Rewire Your Brain & Reduce Stress 80% Faster
And that's that feedback cycle of physical and mental hyperarousal that is very uncomfortable. So remind yourself at all times you're safe and comfortable, but I want you to picture him. And she said, you know, I really, it was getting dark. I really can't see much more about his face than I recall. She said, but I see something else. If he gets me upstairs, he's not just going to rape me.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Dr. David Spiegel: 10-MINUTE Hypnosis Hack to Rewire Your Brain & Reduce Stress 80% Faster
He's going to kill me. And so you might say, well, thank you, Dr. Spiegel. You've now made her feel even worse than she did before. It was a more horrible experience than even she had imagined. And I said, well, you're looking at this on a split screen. Picture him on one side and what you see about him. On the other side, I want you to picture something else. What did you do to protect yourself?
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Dr. David Spiegel: 10-MINUTE Hypnosis Hack to Rewire Your Brain & Reduce Stress 80% Faster
And I have yet to meet a trauma victim that doesn't engage in some creative strategy to protect themselves. And she said, you know, he's surprised that I'm fighting that hard. He didn't think I would. And she'd been feeling very guilty that she got herself as badly injured as she was. And I said, you know, you saved your life. You know, think about what you did.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Dr. David Spiegel: 10-MINUTE Hypnosis Hack to Rewire Your Brain & Reduce Stress 80% Faster
You know, you just jumped and you defended yourself and you saved your life. So she came away from that on the one hand, seeing things that you might say are even more upsetting than what she was already living with, but recognizing that she had done something to save her life. And that changed her reaction to the whole event.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Dr. David Spiegel: 10-MINUTE Hypnosis Hack to Rewire Your Brain & Reduce Stress 80% Faster
She saw it as something that was an attribute, an aspect of herself that she hadn't recognized. And there's, I don't remember the name, but there's a Japanese custom that when some very beautiful precious vase breaks, when somebody drops it or something, when they glue it back together, they don't use glue. They use gold. And what they're saying is it will now be even more beautiful than it was.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Dr. David Spiegel: 10-MINUTE Hypnosis Hack to Rewire Your Brain & Reduce Stress 80% Faster
And in a sense, it was a terrible thing, but it was also she learned something wonderful about herself. And that's so you can help people relive an event in a very controlled way and at the same time learn something that helps you cope with it a lot better.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Dr. David Spiegel: 10-MINUTE Hypnosis Hack to Rewire Your Brain & Reduce Stress 80% Faster
And hypnosis is a state of highly focused attention. It's like getting, have you ever gotten so caught up in a good movie that you kind of forget you're watching a movie?
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Dr. David Spiegel: 10-MINUTE Hypnosis Hack to Rewire Your Brain & Reduce Stress 80% Faster
So you become part of the movie instead of part of the audience. Now what you're doing when you're doing that is using for consciousness what a telephoto lens does for a camera. You see what you see with great detail, but you're less aware of the context. You dissociate other things you would ordinarily be aware of.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Dr. David Spiegel: 10-MINUTE Hypnosis Hack to Rewire Your Brain & Reduce Stress 80% Faster
Well, in many circumstances, Jay, it's pretty easy. There was a reporter for the Times of London who started using Reverie. She had metastatic breast cancer, and she was dealing with that very openly with her readers and talking about that. And she tried Reverie. She was having trouble sleeping. She just... couldn't stay asleep and would wake up anxious and with some discomfort.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Dr. David Spiegel: 10-MINUTE Hypnosis Hack to Rewire Your Brain & Reduce Stress 80% Faster
She said after about five days, she would just listen to my mellifluous voice every night. And I used to worry that the app wouldn't be nearly as good as being in the office with me. But then I thought, if you wake up at three in the morning, you probably don't want me in your bedroom teaching you how to go back to sleep.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Dr. David Spiegel: 10-MINUTE Hypnosis Hack to Rewire Your Brain & Reduce Stress 80% Faster
but you've got me there on the app and it's interactive so I asked how are you responding and depending on what you tell the app you get a different instruction so it is as much like well with me as possible and she said I woke up one morning after about five days of this Rosamund Dean is her name she's a lovely person and a great reporter
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Dr. David Spiegel: 10-MINUTE Hypnosis Hack to Rewire Your Brain & Reduce Stress 80% Faster
And she said, I looked at the clock sort of out of the corner of my eye and I thought, oh my God, it's 7.09 a.m. It's the first time I've slept through the night in a year. And so people can learn to incorporate it into their own practices now.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Dr. David Spiegel: 10-MINUTE Hypnosis Hack to Rewire Your Brain & Reduce Stress 80% Faster
would say that people dealing with post-traumatic stress disorder and these severe things probably would benefit more from having a trained therapist helping them to do it but once you sort of set them on that path they can revisit it having learned what the experience is like and they can help them but more commonly we use it
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Dr. David Spiegel: 10-MINUTE Hypnosis Hack to Rewire Your Brain & Reduce Stress 80% Faster
for more common problems, for distress, insomnia, pain, focus, things that are widely disseminated mental problems that we don't have nearly enough resources to help people with. So Reverie is a great way to say, try it for yourself and see what it feels like. And if you need the help of a professional along with it, by all means.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Dr. David Spiegel: 10-MINUTE Hypnosis Hack to Rewire Your Brain & Reduce Stress 80% Faster
Our brains are processing thousands of things all the time, what's going on in the body, noises, potential threats, all kinds of things. But in hypnosis, you narrow the range of focus. And for example, right now, you're having sensations in your body touching these nice chairs, but hopefully you weren't even aware of that. If you were, we could stop the interview right now. So we all do that.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Dr. David Spiegel: 10-MINUTE Hypnosis Hack to Rewire Your Brain & Reduce Stress 80% Faster
We have people... rate their level of stress or their level of pain pre to post within 10 minutes, the beginning of the interactive session to the end. And we find that four out of five of them report improvement of about one and a half to two points on a 10 point scale within 10 minutes. So, and reductions in pain, stress management, improving focus, So 80 or 90% report improvement.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Dr. David Spiegel: 10-MINUTE Hypnosis Hack to Rewire Your Brain & Reduce Stress 80% Faster
And so the great thing about this is you know right away whether you're going to feel better. I had one woman who was pregnant and had terrible lower back disease. And they couldn't give her opioids, thank God, because she was pregnant. And they implanted a nerve stimulator. It didn't work. And her pain was 7 out of 10.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Dr. David Spiegel: 10-MINUTE Hypnosis Hack to Rewire Your Brain & Reduce Stress 80% Faster
And the bigger the baby got, of course, the worse the pain was because it was pulling more on her spine. And so I had her imagine she was doing something that gives her relief, which is taking a nice warm bath. And if you think about it, so she has the opportunity to put her brain into the state it is in when she's got the pain, but she's in a warm bath. Mm-hmm.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Dr. David Spiegel: 10-MINUTE Hypnosis Hack to Rewire Your Brain & Reduce Stress 80% Faster
And our brain can recall that and see, well, okay, the pain signals are still there, but I can also imagine them being interfered with by this comfort that comes with a warmth. So she did. And she said the pain was down from 7 out of 10 to 3. But she looked angry. And I said, what are you angry about? She said, why in the hell are you the last doctor I got sent to instead of the first?
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Dr. David Spiegel: 10-MINUTE Hypnosis Hack to Rewire Your Brain & Reduce Stress 80% Faster
It doesn't seem real. If there isn't incision, ingestion or injection, you're not doing anything real. I'm a doctor. I use medications. I do a lot of other treatment techniques. But our brains are powerful things. And if we learn to use them better, we can be a lot more comfortable.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Dr. David Spiegel: 10-MINUTE Hypnosis Hack to Rewire Your Brain & Reduce Stress 80% Faster
And unlike opioids, which killed 88,000 Americans last year alone, the worst thing that happens with hypnosis is it doesn't work. So we're finding from people using Reverie, and this is thousands of people, we have one study with stress reduction, 33,000 people get an average reduction of one and a half points in 10 minutes just using the app. So it's worth a try.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Dr. David Spiegel: 10-MINUTE Hypnosis Hack to Rewire Your Brain & Reduce Stress 80% Faster
I worked with a Vietnam veteran who had been, he had just kind of gone berserk in Vietnam and nobody quite knew why, but he hijacked an ambulance and went out in the jungle and started shooting at people he thought were Viet Cong. And he wound up being hospitalized in a state mental hospital for a year because he was picked up in a drug bust. He was taking psychedelics.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Dr. David Spiegel: 10-MINUTE Hypnosis Hack to Rewire Your Brain & Reduce Stress 80% Faster
And a social worker interviewed him and said, he doesn't look like our typical chronic patient in a state mental hospital. And so I got to see him and he was very hypnotizable. And I said, I'd like to relive with you what happened before this event. So we went back and he was extremely hypnotizable. He was even higher score than you, Jay. And he relived the Tet Offensive in Vietnam.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Dr. David Spiegel: 10-MINUTE Hypnosis Hack to Rewire Your Brain & Reduce Stress 80% Faster
We can put out of awareness things that would ordinarily be in awareness. In hypnosis, you focus intently, you dissociate. And the third thing you do is you disconnect from your ordinary ways of being and thinking. And this is where I think there's a lot of similarity between meditation, mindfulness, and what you do in hypnosis, which is you kind of get over yourself and
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Dr. David Spiegel: 10-MINUTE Hypnosis Hack to Rewire Your Brain & Reduce Stress 80% Faster
And he comes back to the hospital where he worked. He was a cook in the army. long-standing, highly regarded cook in the army. And he comes upon the body of a little boy. He called him Chi-Town because he came from Chicago, who he had informally adopted. The boy was an orphan. He was badly wounded in a
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Dr. David Spiegel: 10-MINUTE Hypnosis Hack to Rewire Your Brain & Reduce Stress 80% Faster
and bombing and had burns and walked with a crutch and he just became his dad and they hung out together and slept together and and he started crying he's looking at the boy's body there he's saying they ain't got to kill kids you know we got the geneva convention they can't do this they can't bomb hospitals they they can't kill kids
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Dr. David Spiegel: 10-MINUTE Hypnosis Hack to Rewire Your Brain & Reduce Stress 80% Faster
And he just takes off, commandeers his ambulance and starts yelling in Vietnamese, you know, he's angry at these people and shooting at them. And I said, all right, I want to remember now one happier time you had with Chi-Town.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Dr. David Spiegel: 10-MINUTE Hypnosis Hack to Rewire Your Brain & Reduce Stress 80% Faster
And instantly, and see, the nice thing about hypnosis is the control you have, that he's one minute grieving and angry at himself for not having somehow known he could, you know, thinking he could have saved the boy. And I said, picture one time you were happy with him and a smile comes on his face. And he says, you remember your birthday party?
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Dr. David Spiegel: 10-MINUTE Hypnosis Hack to Rewire Your Brain & Reduce Stress 80% Faster
You know, the donut dollies gave us some food for this party. And my sister Josie sent an electric train set from Chicago. The joke was it was from the Spiegel Brothers company. You know, what are the odds? And he said, you ain't never seen an electric train before. And they were, you know, just he was suddenly happy. And I said, all right, I want you to remember two things.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Dr. David Spiegel: 10-MINUTE Hypnosis Hack to Rewire Your Brain & Reduce Stress 80% Faster
On one side of the screen, I want you to picture Chi-Town's grave. And as he looked at it, he held out his hand and said, ashes to ashes, dust to dust, I guess. And I said, on the other side, I want you to picture that time when you were really happy with him. And I do this in helping people grieve using hypnosis, I said, because you're facing and dealing with the grief and the loss.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Dr. David Spiegel: 10-MINUTE Hypnosis Hack to Rewire Your Brain & Reduce Stress 80% Faster
But you're also remembering something different about it, that the reason it's so painful is how much joy you had together. So I want you to remember both the loss and you're having to bury Chi-Town. And at the same time, I want you to picture those times you were happy with him because that's still true. You still have the joy that you shared together.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Dr. David Spiegel: 10-MINUTE Hypnosis Hack to Rewire Your Brain & Reduce Stress 80% Faster
Then I said, all right, so let's come out of the hypnosis now. And he had tears down his cheeks. He was really upset. And I said, what do you remember? And he looked a little puzzled and dazed. And he said, I remember a grave and a cake.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Dr. David Spiegel: 10-MINUTE Hypnosis Hack to Rewire Your Brain & Reduce Stress 80% Faster
wow that was it that was all he remembered and he practiced this exercise he was in the ward of the hospital doing the self-hypnosis after that grieving the boy he you know he told me later he said he knew he was going to die he was crippled he had arthritis he didn't think he was going to survive the war and i said and you gave he did die but you gave him a period of happiness and feeling loved before he died and that's not going to go away
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Dr. David Spiegel: 10-MINUTE Hypnosis Hack to Rewire Your Brain & Reduce Stress 80% Faster
and he had one subsequent rehospitalization one one of his brothers who was a chicago police officer was killed in the line of duty and we had to kind of piece them back together and help him grieve that loss but he went on to to uh teach uh adolescent boys how to do long distance cycling and he was you know he was out of the hospital no meds and he was he was doing fine so
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Dr. David Spiegel: 10-MINUTE Hypnosis Hack to Rewire Your Brain & Reduce Stress 80% Faster
You know, that's an experience I will not forget. And it shows you how the interesting thing about hypnosis is how much, you know, people think you're losing control. You watch this guy doing this. And I was reassuring myself. I was holding on to his arm while I was doing this.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Dr. David Spiegel: 10-MINUTE Hypnosis Hack to Rewire Your Brain & Reduce Stress 80% Faster
But I was struck by how much control we both had over these extreme emotional states he was in and shifting from one to another, despite how intense they were. And that's one of the really cool things about hypnosis, is that you can be very intense, deal with intense emotions, but help people feel themselves as different people. So he was dissociated in the sense that he was two different guys.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Dr. David Spiegel: 10-MINUTE Hypnosis Hack to Rewire Your Brain & Reduce Stress 80% Faster
but in a somewhat different way. You suspend your view of yourself and you try out being different. Now, the thing that scares a lot of people is that many people have been to one of these awful stage shows, you know, where they've seen the football coach dance like a ballerina. And I don't like making fun of people. But at the same time, there is a point.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Dr. David Spiegel: 10-MINUTE Hypnosis Hack to Rewire Your Brain & Reduce Stress 80% Faster
He was, on the one hand...
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Dr. David Spiegel: 10-MINUTE Hypnosis Hack to Rewire Your Brain & Reduce Stress 80% Faster
uh terribly upset and angry about the loss and angry at himself for somehow not having been able to prevent this in the middle of a war but at the same time he could be the loving guy who grieved this boy and who recognized the gift he had they had given to one another in forming the relationship that they formed so the capacity to focus intently uh to control what's going on in mind and body but also
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Dr. David Spiegel: 10-MINUTE Hypnosis Hack to Rewire Your Brain & Reduce Stress 80% Faster
to be comfortable with the idea that you can be two different people in a sense that you can be this horribly angry uh furious guy at himself and everyone else about what happened and at the same time this warm loving parent to this poor little kid um is is something that is a real strength of hypnosis
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Dr. David Spiegel: 10-MINUTE Hypnosis Hack to Rewire Your Brain & Reduce Stress 80% Faster
Well, Jay, there's good news and bad news about this. The good news is that most children are in trance states most of the time. All eight-year-olds, they're out playing. You call them in for dinner. They don't hear you. They're doing their thing. Work and play is all the same thing for kids. They live in their imagination. So they live hypnotic-like experiences all the time.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Dr. David Spiegel: 10-MINUTE Hypnosis Hack to Rewire Your Brain & Reduce Stress 80% Faster
And they can change all the time and be different and play at being different. And so it's one of the wonderful things about childhood is that you're in a more of a hypnotic consciousness state more of the time. But as we go through adolescence, we go through what the famous psychologist Piaget called formal consciousness in which you evaluate more and experiencing is less a part of that.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Dr. David Spiegel: 10-MINUTE Hypnosis Hack to Rewire Your Brain & Reduce Stress 80% Faster
So you learn to... Try to be more logical and analyze more and just let yourself feel things less. So some people lose some of that hypnotic ability when they acquire these formal operations. And there are about 20% of the population who, by the time they're 21, just are not very hypnotizable. They're very logical. And in Reverie, where we have the hypnotizability test,
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Dr. David Spiegel: 10-MINUTE Hypnosis Hack to Rewire Your Brain & Reduce Stress 80% Faster
We call them the researchers. They want to examine and evaluate everything. At the other extreme, some people retain extremely high hypnotizability, and we call them the poets. They just get into it. They just absorb themselves in anything. I had one guy recently who gets, he loved getting lost in movies. You know, he just enters another world. He becomes an actor in the movie and part of it.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Dr. David Spiegel: 10-MINUTE Hypnosis Hack to Rewire Your Brain & Reduce Stress 80% Faster
And the point is for us to change, and that's what your life's work is about now, is how do we change ourselves? How do we not get trapped in sort of rote desires? Or I love that there was a quote, You had about how life is too short to spend your time living somebody else's life, you know.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Dr. David Spiegel: 10-MINUTE Hypnosis Hack to Rewire Your Brain & Reduce Stress 80% Faster
And he decided he loved it so much that he went to film school to learn how to make movies. And he said, you know what? It was spoiling my experience of movies because I started thinking, well, why did they put the camera over here and the lighting isn't right and all this? And he said, so I quit film school because I was losing that ability.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Dr. David Spiegel: 10-MINUTE Hypnosis Hack to Rewire Your Brain & Reduce Stress 80% Faster
About 60% of the adult population, they're moderately hypnotized. Well, they haven't experienced and they step back and reflect on it and then they try it again. Most of them can benefit to some extent from Reverie, from other hypnotic techniques, because even if you're not in it all the time, if you can dip into it and have the experience, you can change.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Dr. David Spiegel: 10-MINUTE Hypnosis Hack to Rewire Your Brain & Reduce Stress 80% Faster
And part of what we offer with Reverie is not just hypnosis, but the way we use hypnosis. And I think there's some of this in thinking like a monk where you talk about the value of positivity, of finding a positive aspect of even the most menial things that you have to do. And with hypnosis, we try to use it in a way that you focus on what you're for.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Dr. David Spiegel: 10-MINUTE Hypnosis Hack to Rewire Your Brain & Reduce Stress 80% Faster
So when people want to stop smoking, I don't say, oh, cigarettes smell terrible. You know, they're awful things to do. Look at what you're doing to your body. I say, have them recite this to yourself. For my body, smoking is a poison. I need my body to live. I owe my body respect and protection. So you're being a better parent to your own body.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Dr. David Spiegel: 10-MINUTE Hypnosis Hack to Rewire Your Brain & Reduce Stress 80% Faster
You'd never put tar and nicotine-laden smoke into your baby's lungs or your pet's lungs. Why would you do it to your own body? It depends on you. So people can get with that approach to the problem even if they're not that hypnotizable, focusing on what you're for. So can you change it? It's a remarkably stable trait, Jay. I didn't, but colleagues of mine at Stanford,
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Dr. David Spiegel: 10-MINUTE Hypnosis Hack to Rewire Your Brain & Reduce Stress 80% Faster
did a 25-year follow-up on former students who in Psych 1 had had their hypnotizability measured, and they blindly retested them 25 years later. The test-retest reliability was 0.7. Now, that's as reliable as IQ is over that interval. And so it's an extremely stable trait.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Dr. David Spiegel: 10-MINUTE Hypnosis Hack to Rewire Your Brain & Reduce Stress 80% Faster
We just published a paper recently in which we used a technique called transcranial magnetic stimulation, in which you apply magnetic activity to the surface of the skull. And if you line it up in the right place, you can connect between the prefrontal cortex to deeper components of the brain, like the dorsal anterior cingulate.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Dr. David Spiegel: 10-MINUTE Hypnosis Hack to Rewire Your Brain & Reduce Stress 80% Faster
And we found that we could transiently increase hypnotizability a bit. And we're hoping that we can expand upon that and maybe find ways to increase hypnotizability. But I'd say for most people, just make good use of what you've got. The odds are that you will be able to benefit. And we're struck by the fact that at least four out of five people who use Reverie feel immediate improvement.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Dr. David Spiegel: 10-MINUTE Hypnosis Hack to Rewire Your Brain & Reduce Stress 80% Faster
And that's a whole, it is correlated with their hypnotizability. We looked at that. The more hypnotizable ones were more likely to respond, but most people responded to some extent anyway.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Dr. David Spiegel: 10-MINUTE Hypnosis Hack to Rewire Your Brain & Reduce Stress 80% Faster
And I think what you can do in hypnosis in narrowing your focus of attention, in dissociating, is suspend your usual view, feeling about what you're like and try out being different.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Dr. David Spiegel: 10-MINUTE Hypnosis Hack to Rewire Your Brain & Reduce Stress 80% Faster
Well, thank you. I certainly, you know, I want to kind of...
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Dr. David Spiegel: 10-MINUTE Hypnosis Hack to Rewire Your Brain & Reduce Stress 80% Faster
banish the fear that people have about hypnosis and the misunderstanding you know we're we're sort of you remember rodney dangerfield you know he was the comedian who said i don't get no respect and he said they asked me to leave a bar so they could start happy hour you know it's people don't see hypnosis as the tool that it is and they see it as some weird thing that
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Dr. David Spiegel: 10-MINUTE Hypnosis Hack to Rewire Your Brain & Reduce Stress 80% Faster
you know, people do on stage or something. It's, it's an aspect of our brains that allows us to take control of things. It's not, it's not losing control. It's gaining control that you can modulate pain. You can control your sense of
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Dr. David Spiegel: 10-MINUTE Hypnosis Hack to Rewire Your Brain & Reduce Stress 80% Faster
relaxation so you can get to sleep or get back to sleep you can focus intently on your work there are athletes who who who use it you know tiger woods is one well-known example of an athlete who adele the singer uses it to to sing it can really help people focus their attention and and get in a better relationship with their own bodies control what's going on in their bodies and react better
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Dr. David Spiegel: 10-MINUTE Hypnosis Hack to Rewire Your Brain & Reduce Stress 80% Faster
to their bodies there's so much possibility that people can have from learning to identify it and use it that that's why i built reverie as a kind of legacy project i'm not going to be able to do this forever i love helping the people i'm have i have helped and still help but i just want it to be out there and available for people to use it for themselves i'm just explore it.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Dr. David Spiegel: 10-MINUTE Hypnosis Hack to Rewire Your Brain & Reduce Stress 80% Faster
It's an opportunity for people to make better use of their brains and their bodies.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Dr. David Spiegel: 10-MINUTE Hypnosis Hack to Rewire Your Brain & Reduce Stress 80% Faster
I would say the best advice came from reading Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, which is that what we are is about relationships and relating to ourselves, that don't get stuck in any one image of who you are, which is not so different from what you write about with mindfulness.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Dr. David Spiegel: 10-MINUTE Hypnosis Hack to Rewire Your Brain & Reduce Stress 80% Faster
Don't think about purple elephants.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Dr. David Spiegel: 10-MINUTE Hypnosis Hack to Rewire Your Brain & Reduce Stress 80% Faster
Well, try it. You'll like it. I think that's the nice thing about it. The biggest risk is it might not work. There are no side effects. Opioids killed 88,000 Americans last year. Hypnosis has not succeeded yet in killing anybody. So I think try it. Our culture is so over-processed.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Dr. David Spiegel: 10-MINUTE Hypnosis Hack to Rewire Your Brain & Reduce Stress 80% Faster
It's all big companies, things, processing, and a lot of times what we do with our food and our medications and other things make us worse rather than better. So this is a do-it-yourself approach with some training, and that's what I want people to do.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Dr. David Spiegel: 10-MINUTE Hypnosis Hack to Rewire Your Brain & Reduce Stress 80% Faster
My current purpose is helping people help themselves. That's what I want to do. And that's why I say all hypnosis is self-hypnosis. I'm not a magician. I'm not doing anything to you. And my purpose is to just spread it as widely as we can, as quick as we can.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Dr. David Spiegel: 10-MINUTE Hypnosis Hack to Rewire Your Brain & Reduce Stress 80% Faster
It would be that a Supreme Court judge could last no longer than 15 years. We need the rule of law, and we're losing it.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Dr. David Spiegel: 10-MINUTE Hypnosis Hack to Rewire Your Brain & Reduce Stress 80% Faster
Thank you. I hope so. And I so admire what you're doing and helping people discover what they can do for themselves within themselves.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Dr. David Spiegel: 10-MINUTE Hypnosis Hack to Rewire Your Brain & Reduce Stress 80% Faster
Well, the thing is that hypnosis is really a naturally occurring ability that people have to varying degrees, but it's something that we just don't tap. And all hypnosis is really self-hypnosis. So just like you try to teach people, you do teach people how to meditate, how to be mindful of what they're doing. You're helping them discover a capacity within themselves that they can use.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Dr. David Spiegel: 10-MINUTE Hypnosis Hack to Rewire Your Brain & Reduce Stress 80% Faster
Hypnosis is very similar in that sense, that most people have some ability to narrow their focus. And it's not a loss of control, it's a gain of control. You're learning that you can filter hurt out of pain, that you can get to sleep better, that you can manage stress in a way that doesn't keep it proliferating but teaches you to control it. I saw a man yesterday, a brilliant professor who...
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Dr. David Spiegel: 10-MINUTE Hypnosis Hack to Rewire Your Brain & Reduce Stress 80% Faster
had radiation to his nose because he had a tumor there that needed to be treated. And he had terrible sensitivity in his nose and in his mouth. And he tried everything. He tried like seven different ways to neutralize the nerve signals. He took medications. He did all kinds of things. It didn't work. And he was getting more and more frustrated because his life was his words.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Dr. David Spiegel: 10-MINUTE Hypnosis Hack to Rewire Your Brain & Reduce Stress 80% Faster
And he was a teacher and couldn't stand the thought of not being able to do that because he was so frustrated by it. And he found with a few minutes of learning self-hypnosis that he could reduce the interference by 50%. He was amazed. He said, you know, my hand is feeling light and I feel some waves going through it. And I had him touch his face and kind of spread those waves.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Dr. David Spiegel: 10-MINUTE Hypnosis Hack to Rewire Your Brain & Reduce Stress 80% Faster
And he felt different right away. He was amazed. His wife was sitting and watching and she said, I'm not surprised. But It is a way of altering the way we manage our focus of attention, our processing of sensory input. And so literally we can filter the hurt out of the pain. We can manage stress better by focusing on the body up rather than the head down.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Dr. David Spiegel: 10-MINUTE Hypnosis Hack to Rewire Your Brain & Reduce Stress 80% Faster
We often think, well, if I just figure out what's stressing me and decide it's not important or figure out a better way to do it, I won't be stressed. But what happens with stress is usually it's from the body up, that you see something that threatens you. We're pretty pathetic physical creatures. We don't run that fast. We don't smell that well. We don't hear that well.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Dr. David Spiegel: 10-MINUTE Hypnosis Hack to Rewire Your Brain & Reduce Stress 80% Faster
And so normally we evolve because we treated most stressors as physical threats and you better get your heart rate up and your blood pressure up, be ready to fight or flee. But most of the stressors we have now are not life threats. So if you respond physically, Your body's telling your brain, oh my God, this is really terrible. And the brain thinks, oh yeah, this really, I feel bad.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Dr. David Spiegel: 10-MINUTE Hypnosis Hack to Rewire Your Brain & Reduce Stress 80% Faster
This must be really bad. And it's like a snowball rolling downhill. And with hypnosis, you can deal with the aspect of the threat that actually makes you most worried about it. And you can control it. You can say, well, your boss may have said something awful to you, but your body doesn't have to react that way. So imagine you're floating in a bath, a lake, a tub, or floating in space.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Dr. David Spiegel: 10-MINUTE Hypnosis Hack to Rewire Your Brain & Reduce Stress 80% Faster
And then picture on an imaginary screen your boss on one side and what you might say or do on the other in the context of feeling physically more comfortable. So hypnosis is a way of, in a very focused way, controlling mind and body interactions in a way that helps you handle them better.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Dr. David Spiegel: 10-MINUTE Hypnosis Hack to Rewire Your Brain & Reduce Stress 80% Faster
Yeah, well, I've lived with it for a long time. But we've spent a decade studying what's going on in the brain using functional magnetic resonance imaging techniques. with people who are high and low in hypnotizability in and out of hypnotic states. And we find three things happen in the brain when you go into hypnosis. The first is you turn down activity in the anterior cingulate cortex.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Dr. David Spiegel: 10-MINUTE Hypnosis Hack to Rewire Your Brain & Reduce Stress 80% Faster
That's part of what we call the salience network. It's a pattern matching region of the brain that says there's something different going on here. Maybe you better look out. So you hear a loud noise and you think, is it a threat? What is it? That's the salience network firing off saying, there may be trouble here, you better attend to it. You turn down activity in that part of the brain.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Dr. David Spiegel: 10-MINUTE Hypnosis Hack to Rewire Your Brain & Reduce Stress 80% Faster
The cingulate cortex is like an inverted C right in the middle of the brain, and the front part of it is the salience network. We found that the more hypnotized people felt, the less activity there was in that part of the brain. So you're turning off the home alarm system and just letting yourself experience what you experience.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Dr. David Spiegel: 10-MINUTE Hypnosis Hack to Rewire Your Brain & Reduce Stress 80% Faster
we find actually that the more hypnotizable people are, the more of an inhibitory neurotransmitter, gamma-aminobutyric acid, they have in the anterior cingulate. So it's the drug that benzodiazepines, anti-anxiety drugs, actually stimulate GABA receptors. And so that's how we can control ourselves. We can reduce anxiety, but you don't need a drug to do it. You can do it yourself.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Dr. David Spiegel: 10-MINUTE Hypnosis Hack to Rewire Your Brain & Reduce Stress 80% Faster
The second thing that happens is we have more functional connectivity between the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex on the left and a part of the brain called the insula. It's Latin for island. And it's a little island of tissue in the middle of the front part of the brain that is a mind-body conduit.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Dr. David Spiegel: 10-MINUTE Hypnosis Hack to Rewire Your Brain & Reduce Stress 80% Faster
So when that connection is happening, you have more ability to control what's happening in your body, to control heart rate and blood pressure, your level of arousal, to control the functioning of the gastrointestinal system. We found that highly hypnotizable people, given a hypnotic instruction to eat an imaginary meal, actually increased their gastric acid secretion by 89%.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Dr. David Spiegel: 10-MINUTE Hypnosis Hack to Rewire Your Brain & Reduce Stress 80% Faster
We had one subject who was taking a gastronomic tour of the Bay Area, and after about a half an hour of it, she said, let's stop, I'm full, you know, just eating imaginary food. And when they do the opposite, when they relax but think of anything but food or drink, we got a 39% decrease in gastric acid. So the brain has an amazing ability to control what's going on in the body.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Dr. David Spiegel: 10-MINUTE Hypnosis Hack to Rewire Your Brain & Reduce Stress 80% Faster
That's this prefrontal cortex to insula connection. And also to be more aware of what's going on in the body. We call that interoception. So you enhance your regulation of the body and perception of it.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Dr. David Spiegel: 10-MINUTE Hypnosis Hack to Rewire Your Brain & Reduce Stress 80% Faster
The third one, and I think this might be of special interest to you, Jay, in view of your interest of how we get trapped in notions of ourselves and try to be something we're not and don't focus on the fundamental things. You get inverse connectivity between the prefrontal cortex and the posterior cingulate cortex.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Dr. David Spiegel: 10-MINUTE Hypnosis Hack to Rewire Your Brain & Reduce Stress 80% Faster
That's a part of the brain that we call the default mode network, where you contemplate who you are, what you are. Instead of what you're doing, when you're not working or doing anything, you're just reflecting. And it's the part of the brain that is the closest probably to what we call the superego in analytic terms, where you're looking at yourself and saying, who am I? Who should I be?
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Dr. David Spiegel: 10-MINUTE Hypnosis Hack to Rewire Your Brain & Reduce Stress 80% Faster
What do I want to be? and so you're to the extent you're engaged in the hypnotic task you're suppressing activity there and that's the football coach dancing like a ballerina you know i don't care i'll just try it anyway and see what it's like now that's silly but if you want people to change
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Dr. David Spiegel: 10-MINUTE Hypnosis Hack to Rewire Your Brain & Reduce Stress 80% Faster
it's a great opportunity to say you know what just try it see what it feels like to be different yeah can you be in the same situation and react to it differently not struggle against it not fight it see what you can learn from it um and so that and that's a part of the brain where activity is suppressed in experienced meditators too that
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Dr. David Spiegel: 10-MINUTE Hypnosis Hack to Rewire Your Brain & Reduce Stress 80% Faster
The mindfulness tends to inhibit activity in this posterior cingulate default mode area, or I call it the my fault mode network. It's when you're reflecting on what's wrong with you. And so it's a part of the brain that is also affected by psychedelic drugs, this sort of dissolution of the self. comes through disorganization of activity in the posterior cingulate cortex.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Dr. David Spiegel: 10-MINUTE Hypnosis Hack to Rewire Your Brain & Reduce Stress 80% Faster
There's a new paper in Nature out with some leading neuroscientists who took psychedelics and scanned their brains 18 times over a couple of weeks and found disorganization in that region of the brain. So it's a center for change because you can inhibit your usual views of who you are. And that's something that hypnosis helps you to do.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Dr. David Spiegel: 10-MINUTE Hypnosis Hack to Rewire Your Brain & Reduce Stress 80% Faster
Well, Jay, I would say yes and no. I mean, we're social creatures. We're susceptible of social influence. And, you know, if you engage in the painful act of paying any attention to recent American politics, you'll see that people are influenced by all kinds of things and believe all kinds of things that just flat out aren't true.