“One of the things I love about working with hypnosis is people are surprised at what they can do because they’re trying out being different and seeing what it feels like.” — Dr. David Spiegel

Dr. David Spiegel is Willson Professor and Associate Chair of Psychiatry & Behavioral Sciences, Director of the Center on Stress and Health, and Medical Director of the Center for Integrative Medicine at Stanford University School of Medicine, where he has been a member of the academic faculty since 1975.

Dr. Spiegel has more than 40 years of clinical and research experience, has published thirteen books, 404 scientific journal articles, and his work has been supported by the National Institute of Mental Health, the National Cancer Institute, and more.

He is the founder of Reveri, the world’s first interactive self-hypnosis app.

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What was your favorite quote or lesson from this episode? Please let me know in the comments.

Want to hear another episode with someone who takes hypnosis seriously? Listen to my conversation with Loonshots author Safi Bahcall in which we discussed using hypnosis for insomnia relief, common relaxation trance induction techniques, the most effective applications of hypnosis, how hypnosis compares to meditation for self-control, understanding anger as a gift, effective and non-effective ways of helping someone cope with depression, and much more.

SELECTED LINKS FROM THE EPISODE

• Connect with Dr. David Spiegel:

LinkedIn | Stanford Medicine

Website | LinkedIn | YouTube | Instagram

• Digital Hypnosis | Reveri
• Conversion Disorder | Cleveland Clinic
• The Truth About Psychogenic Nonepileptic Seizures | Epilepsy Foundation
• Forensic Psychiatry | Wikipedia
• Academic Politics Are So Vicious Because the Stakes Are So Small | Quote Investigator
• Dr. Andrew Huberman — A Neurobiologist on Optimizing Sleep, Enhancing Performance, Reducing Anxiety, Increasing Testosterone, and Using the Body to Control the Mind | The Tim Ferriss Show #521
• How Does Hypnosis Work? Here’s What the Science Says | Time
• Shared Cognitive Mechanisms of Hypnotizability with Executive Functioning and Information Salience | Scientific Reports
• Uncovering the New Science of Clinical Hypnosis | APA
• Mihály Csíkszentmihályi on the Autotelic Experience | Goodreads
• Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience by Mihály Csíkszentmihályi | Amazon
• Women’s Swimming & Diving | Stanford University Athletics
• Tiger’s Psychologist: The Use of Hypnosis to Create a Champion | Golf Viral
• Meditation, Mindset, and Mastery | The Tim Ferriss Show #201
• How to Know If You Can Be Hypnotized with Andrew Huberman | JRE Clips
• Piaget’s Theory of Childhood Development | Child & Family Blog
• Test–Retest Reliability of the Stanford Hypnotic Susceptibility Scale, Form C, and the Elkins Hypnotizability Scale | International Journal of Clinical and Experimental Hypnosis
• Point-of-Care Testing of Enzyme Polymorphisms for Predicting Hypnotizability and Postoperative Pain | The Journal of Molecular Diagnostics
• The Hypnotic Induction Profile (HIP) in Clinical Practice and Research | International Journal of Clinical and Experimental Hypnosis
• The Eye-Roll Hypnosis Test: How to Measure Your Susceptibility with Dr. David Spiegel (Clip) | The Align Podcast
• What Is Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR)? | EMDR Institute
• “One Foot in the Present, One Foot in the Past:” Understanding EMDR | The New York Times
• We’d Rather Feel Guilty Than Helpless | Live Oak Unitarian Universalist Church
• LSD May Chip Away at the Brain’s “Sense of Self” Network | Scientific American
• MDMA-Assisted Psychotherapy | MAPS
• The World’s Largest Psychedelic Research Center | The Tim Ferriss Show #385
• Psychedelics Open Your Brain. You Might Not like What Falls In. | The Atlantic
• Psychedelics Aren’t For Everyone | Green Market Report
• Research Takes a Closer Look at the Experience of Ego Dissolution | Binghamton News
• Nolan Williams — A Glimpse of the Future: Electroceuticals for 70%–90% Remission of Depression, Brain Stimulation for Sports Performance, and De-risking Ibogaine for TBI/PTSD | The Tim Ferriss Show #714
• Accelerated TMS: Moving Quickly into the Future of Depression Treatment | Neuropsychopharmacology
• Scientists Use High-Tech Brain Stimulation to Make People More Hypnotizable | Stanford Medicine
• Stanford Hypnosis Integrated with Functional Connectivity-Targeted Transcranial Stimulation (Shift): A Preregistered Randomized Controlled Trial | Nature Mental Health
• Dr. James Esdaile and Deep Hypnosis | Institute of Interpersonal Hypnotherapy
• A Randomized Controlled Trial of Clinical Hypnosis as an Opioid-Sparing Adjunct Treatment for Pain Relief in Adults Undergoing Major Oncologic Surgery | Journal of Pain Research
• Vasodilation: What Causes Blood Vessels to Widen | Cleveland Clinic
• What Is Dissociation? | Mind
• What Is Pain? | National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke
• Dr. David Spiegel: Can You Control Pain with Your Mind? (Clip) | The Proof #297
• Hypnotic Alteration of Somatosensory Perception | American Journal of Psychiatry
• How Hypnosis Can Alter the Brain’s Perception of Pain | Scope
• What Is Interoception, and How Does It Affect Mental Health? Five Questions for April Smith | APA
• Brain Activity and Functional Connectivity Associated with Hypnosis | Cerebral Cortex
• The Pink Elephant Problem | Psychology Today
• Hypnotherapy Compared to Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy for Smoking Cessation in a Randomized Controlled Trial | Frontiers in Psychology
• Trance and Dance in Bali | Wikipedia
• From Magic Power to Everyday Trance | The History of Hypnosis
• Re-Imagining Bleeders: The Medical Leech in the Nineteenth Century Bloodletting Encounter | Medical History
• Mesmeromania, or, the Tale of the Tub | Cabinet
• Recognizing and Treating Status Asthmaticus | Healthline
• US Involvement in the Vietnam War: The Tet Offensive, 1968 | Office of the Historian
• Floating in the Dead Sea | Dead Sea
• The Secret of How Hypnosis Really Works | Time
• The Society for Clinical and Experimental Hypnosis | SCEH
• American Society of Clinical Hypnosis | ASCH
• The International Society for Hypnosis | ISH
• Trance and Treatment: Clinical Uses of Hypnosis by Herbert Spiegel and David Spiegel | Amazon
• Self-Hypnosis for Major Wellness Issues | Oneleaf
• Fix the Miscommunication between Your Gut and Brain | Nerva
• Boiling Energy: Community Healing Among the Kalahari Kung by Richard Katz | Amazon
• Rodney Dangerfield Quotes | IMDb

SHOW NOTES

• [07:00] How Herbert Spiegel was exposed to hypnosis.
• [10:14] Using hypnosis to cure non-epileptic seizures.
• [11:53] What is a forensic psychiatrist?
• [14:43] How hypnosis works.
• [17:54] Hypnosis and the flow state.
• [21:03] How hypnosis differs from meditation.
• [22:38] Determining one’s susceptibility to hypnosis.
• [27:21] I take the eye-roll test.
• [29:33] Thoughts on EMDR.
• [36:29] Therapeutic psychedelics and ego dissolution.
• [41:05] Potential adverse effects of hypnosis?
• [42:34] Accelerated TMS improves response to hypnosis.
• [44:25] Hypnosis as a tool for stress and pain relief.
• [48:56] David treats my back pain with hypnosis.
• [57:09] Replicating this effect with self-hypnosis.
• [57:57] Understanding the science of pain relief.
• [1:03:18] Filtering the hurt from the pain.
• [1:06:37] For us, not against us.
• [1:09:12] Hypnosis vs. other addiction interventions.
• [1:11:41] A mesmerizing tale of hypnotic history.
• [1:16:10] Most surprising patient outcomes.
• [1:24:53] Finding connection to treat the agitated.
• [1:28:40] Who is Reveri designed for?
• [1:31:15] Hypnosis as a first rather than last resort.
• [1:35:02] Further resources and final thoughts.

MORE DR. DAVID SPIEGEL QUOTES FROM THE INTERVIEW

“One of the coolest things about the [hypnotic] state is you tend to let go of your ordinary premises — not just about what’s going on at that moment, but who you are, what kind of a person you are. … People can try out being different and see what it feels like. They can let go of their usual premises, and that’s where hypnosis is something like flow state.”
— Dr. David Spiegel

“Most eight-year-olds are in trances most of the time. As you know, if you call your eight-year-old in for dinner, he doesn’t hear you. He’s doing his thing — work and play are all the same thing for kids. I don’t know why we try to train them to be little adults, because they have so much fun.”
— Dr. David Spiegel

“By the time you’re about 21, your hypnotizability becomes as stable a trait as IQ.”
— Dr. David Spiegel

“[EMDR is] another therapeutic technique, but I have to say that my overall impression is what’s good about it isn’t new, and what’s new about it isn’t good.”
— Dr. David Spiegel

“Depression with post-traumatic stress disorder is so harmful to people because it tarnishes their feelings about who they are as people. And if you can understand the experience, but disconnect it in some ways from this default mode conclusion about what sort of a person you are, that can be powerfully therapeutic.”
— Dr. David Spiegel

“The good thing about hypnosis is you can turn it on real fast, you can turn it off real fast. So the worst thing that happens most of the time is, sometimes it doesn’t work, so what? So you do something else. … Hypnosis has not yet succeeded in killing anyone. It’s just not dangerous.”
— Dr. David Spiegel

“Hypnosis is like an underappreciated company that hasn’t been managed well and has a lot more positive resources, and that’s what it’s like. We just don’t take advantage of it.”
— Dr. David Spiegel

“One of the things I love about working with hypnosis is people are surprised at what they can do because they’re trying out being different and seeing what it feels like.”
— Dr. David Spiegel

“I’d love to see [hypnosis] integrated better with people’s overall health and wellness care. I think it’s been sort of the Rodney Dangerfield of psychotherapies.”
— Dr. David Spiegel

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