Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Hey there, welcome to Chasing Life. You know, most people think of hypnosis as stage tricks and swinging watches, maybe even people clucking like chickens. And you know what? I thought that too.
Chapter 2: What common misconceptions exist about hypnosis?
But I got to tell you, my views have changed on this. In medicine, clinical hypnosis is something very different than what you might think. New research is showing they can actually show how the brain processes pain, can reduce stress and anxiety, help break bad habits, and even enhance performance. Some Olympians are now using self-hypnosis to sharpen their focus and improve their results.
Now, this part may surprise you, but roughly two-thirds of adults are actually hypnotizable. And the percentage for children is even higher than that. I've seen the impact of this up close. I wrote an entire book about pain, and I was so struck by the evidence for hypnosis that I devoted a whole section to how it can help people reframe and reduce their pain experience.
Now, to be clear, it doesn't magically erase pain, but it can significantly change the way your brain interprets those pain signals and help you feel more in control. And that's the key. Now, part of the reason I wanted to talk about this today is that despite decades of research, I think hypnosis remains underutilized and misunderstood. So what exactly is hypnosis?
what exactly is happening in your brain during hypnosis who can benefit and can you safely try some of this yourself today on chasing life i'm going to talk to dr david spiegel he's associate chair of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at stanford university school of medicine and he's one of the world's leading researchers on clinical hypnosis he's going to explain the science behind hypnosis who it works for and why this particular way of focusing your attention might be a powerful tool
Chapter 3: How does clinical hypnosis differ from stage hypnosis?
you can use in your own life. I'm Dr. Sanjay Gupta, CNN's chief medical correspondent, and this is Chasing Life. I'm curious, the first time for you, I think you were in medical school. Yes. This is what sort of launched you into this career of hypnosis.
Chapter 4: What scientific evidence supports the effectiveness of hypnosis?
Tell me what happened.
Yeah, I took a hypnosis course, and I was on my pediatric rotation at Children's Hospital. And the nurse says, Spiegel, your next patient's in room 133. She's in status asthmaticus. And I'm hearing the wheezing down the hall as I'm walking into the room. Bad asthma attack. Bad asthma attack. 15-year-old girl.
In bed, leaning forward, knuckles white, struggling for breath, her mother standing there crying.
Chapter 5: What role does hypnosis play in enhancing athletic performance?
They had tried subcutaneous epi times two. It didn't work. They were next going to give her general anesthesia and start her on steroids. And I didn't know what to do, but I had taken my hypnosis course. So I said, well, do you want to learn a breathing exercise? And she nods. She could barely talk. And so I get her hypnotized.
And then I started, broke into a sweat because we hadn't gotten asthma to the course yet. So I came up with something very 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, and she isn't wheezing anymore. Her mother stopped crying. The nurse ran out of the room.
My intern came into the room looking for me, and I thought he was going to pat me on the back. He said, I need to inform you that the nurse has informed the nursing supervisor that you violated Massachusetts law by hypnotizing a minor without parental consent. Now, two things about that. Massachusetts has a lot of weird laws, but that is not one of them.
Chapter 6: How can hypnosis help with pain management?
And her mother was standing right next to me when I did it. So he said, you have to stop doing this. And I said, oh, really? Why? He said, well, it could be dangerous.
Really?
And I thought that anything that could help a patient that much that fast and violate a non-existent Massachusetts law had to be worth looking into. And I've been doing it ever since. And the thing is, it was like right in front of my eyes. There's no other explanation. You could see it happening.
Yeah, I mean, I can't imagine that someone who's having an asthmatic attack who can't breathe to have that degree of relief so quickly through hypnosis. That's got to be very, very gratifying. Let's start with some basics here. What is hypnosis? How do you define it?
Hypnosis is a state of highly focused attention, Sanjay. Have you ever gotten so caught up in a good movie that you forget you're watching a movie and you enter the imagined world? That's what hypnosis is. It's believed in imagination. You don't judge it. You don't evaluate it. You just experience it.
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Chapter 7: Can hypnosis be used for anxiety and stress relief?
Right now, for example, you're sitting in a chair. You have sensations in parts of your body touching the chair, but I'm hoping that you weren't even aware of that until I mentioned it to you. Am I right about that? Yeah, you're right. If I was wrong, we could just stop the interview now. You'd be already bored. So we naturally do it. We dissociate. That's the second part.
So there's absorption in the focus of attention. To do that, you dissociate. You put outside of conscious awareness things that would ordinarily be in consciousness to allow yourself to fully immerse yourself in the focus of your attention. And the third thing is that you tend to disconnect from your usual way of thinking about things.
And we've seen this in the functional neuroimaging that we do. where three things happen in the brain when you go into a hypnotic state. The first is you reduce activity in the salience network. So you're just turning off the alarm and allowing yourself to experience things.
You increase functional connectivity between the prefrontal cortex, particularly on the left, and the insula, you know, the little island of tissue in the frontal lobe that has to do with mind-body connection. So you intensify your ability to control and perceive your body.
And the third is inverse functional connectivity between the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and the posterior cingulate, part of the default mode network. That's, you know, the part of your brain when you're not thinking or doing anything in particular, you're just kind of ruminating. And it tends to keep you on track sometimes, but it also can inhibit you.
And so you're disconnecting from the part of your brain that says, you should be doing this, things ought to go like that, and allowing yourself to try out being different.
You just drew a distinction, I think, between hypnosis and meditation. Yes, yes, right. Talk about that a little bit. These are two different things.
They are. I mean, they're not unrelated. And there's neuroimaging evidence, for example, that meditators over time reduce activity in the posterior cingulate cortex and part of the default mode network, which is where in hypnosis you can also inhibit activity. But meditation is about being and hypnosis is about doing.
So in meditation, you're taught to have open presence, to just don't try to change anything, just allow feelings, thoughts and feelings flow through you like a storm passing by. It's a way of being, which I admire. I think it's a wonderful tradition, but it's not a problem-solving tradition. By definition, it isn't. With hypnosis, you're altering your state of focused attention, turning off your
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