Dr. David Spiegel

Pain is a good example of that.

Obviously, you need to pay attention.

If you just broke your ankle, you better pay attention to it and get help.

Or you're having crushing substernal chest pain, you better do something about it.

But our brain is sort of programmed to treat all pain signals as if they were novel pain signals, if it's a sudden new problem that needs to be attended to.

I teach people to think of the pain and categorize it.

Does the pain mean that if you put weight on this, you're going to...

re-injure your ankle, for example, or does it simply mean that your body is healing and the pain is a sign that gradually things are getting back to normal?

And so you can modify the way you process pain based on what your brain tells you

pain means.

And that's true for emotional pain as well.

And particularly where I think a strategy that really helps is if you think of an interpersonal problem or a threat of something coming as an opportunity to do something to ameliorate the situation.

So it's not just it's happening to you, but something that you can influence and do something about.

so it's blending the receptive with the active response that i think can make a difference so you try and process it in a way that gives you a deeper understanding of what's happening you face it but you also say this is an opportunity for me to do something about it and the minute you realistically enhance and this doesn't mean imagine a way a heart attack it means

figure out how to rehabilitate from a heart attack or a broken leg or something like that in a way that you get as much control into the situation as you can.

It's sometimes harder for them to do self-hypnosis.

They need more structure to do it.

You've got to share your dorsolateral prefrontal cortex with them a little bit.

But yes, absolutely, children can be very hypnotizable.

And I know pediatricians who use it wonderfully all the time.