Dr. David Spiegel

So, hypnosis is very helpful in controlling mind-body interaction in relation to stress.

it's very helpful for people to get to sleep.

I'm getting emails from people who said, you know, I haven't slept right in 15 years.

And now for the first time, you know, I'm listening to your app and I can sleep at night.

I would think so.

We don't have evidence of that yet, but long-term potentiation provides a pathway, and you've described them on your program a number of times, that allow for repeated activation of a network to actually build new connections that work.

And at the least, even from a learning and memory point of view, if you start to acquire memories about a problem, so one thing we use hypnosis for is treating phobias, for example.

And the problem with people who have phobias like airplane phobias or, you know, crossing a bridge or being up high is that the more they avoid it, the more the only source of associations and memories is their fear.

They don't have any good experiences with it because they avoid it.

You know, it's like get back on the horse after you fall off kind of thing.

And with hypnosis, if you can start people able to manage their anxiety enough that they can have more, a wider array of experiences, they start to have a network of associations that isn't so negative and may even be positive.

In therapy,

I think of this as unsystematic desensitization.

because you're changing mental states.

And I think there's more and more evidence that mental state change itself has therapeutic potential.

We're seeing that with ketamine, treating depression as a sociogenic drug.

We know it every morning when we wake up, that problem, you know, you made the mistake of reading a nasty email at 11 p.m., you didn't know what to do.

You wake up in the morning, you think, oh, that idiot, yeah, here's what I'm going to do.

So just changing mental state

itself has therapeutic potential and i think we underestimate our ability to regulate and and change responses to be cognitively emotionally and somatically flexible and so we do things you're right that follow similar principles of facing a problem seeing it from a different point of view and then find some way to reconnect to it to substitute something that can make you feel good rather than bad