Well, Hello, they're Healthyish listeners. Thanks for joining us today on this Body and Soul podcast. I'm your host, Felicity Halle. Now, hypnosis has had a pretty bad rap over the years, but my guest today wants to change the public perception and he's got the credentials to back it up. Doctor David Spiegel is the Associate Chair of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University School of Medicine, the director of Stanford Center of Stress and Health, and has published over
four hundred and eighty journal articles, written thirteen books. He joins us today from the US to discuss the power of self hypnosis. Now make sure listening to Extra Healthy Ish where we go a bit deeper into the whole topic of hypnosis and self hypnosis. I assure you that is a very interesting episode. You should listen to it. You can catch it wherever you get your podcasts. David, thank you for joining us today all the way from the US of A.
How are you.
I'm fine, Thank you, Felicity. Glad to be here with you.
Yeah, me too.
I'm excited to chat to you, particularly about self hypnosis. I feel like we, you know, we've all got a view of hypnosis, which will talk a bit more about in Extra Healthy Ish. But what is self hypnosis?
Exactly?
Well, feliciting all hypnosis is really self hypnosis. It's people learning to use this shift in consciousness that we're not aware that many of us have. You know, we're endowed with this remarkable three pound organ on the top of our shoulders that is connected every part of the body, controls things going on in every part of the body, and census things from every part of the body. But we don't usually use it to its fullest ability. We don't get a user's manual on it. And hypnosis is
a naturally occurring shift in concentration. Have you ever had the experience of getting so caught up in a good movie that you forget you're watching a movie and you enter the imagined world.
Oh all the time happened to you all of the time.
Yeah, and that it enhances your enjoyment of the movie. Hypnosis has been called believed in imagination, and what it really is is a state of highly focused attention the way you feel in a movie, coupled with dissociation. You put out of conscious awareness things that would ordinarily be in consciousness. Right now. For example, you're sitting in a chair. Your body has sensations touching the chair, but hopefully you weren't even aware of that until I brought it to
your attention. If you were, we could just stop the interview right now. So in order to focus, we have to regulate the amount of input, and we have enormous input all the time from our body, from the world around us, thoughts about the past, thoughts about the future, and to function we have to narrow the attention and in hypnosis you do that in a more extreme way. And one of the other things you do in hypnosis
is you disconnect from your usual way of being. One of the coolest things about it, one of the things that helped people change is that you can try out being different and seeing what it feels like. And normally people think of that in a bad way. They think of some hypnosis show they saw where the football coach was made to dance like a ballerina. I don't like using hypnosis or anything else to make people feel silly,
but there is an important message in it. If you want to see what it would be like to be different, dry being hypnotized and see what happens.
How is it different?
You know, your description there is a lot like flow state, even visualization.
You know, and.
How is it different or is it just semantics? Different ways of approaching it.
Well, for listening, if you kind of combine the two, you get close, so you can visualize being somewhere having an experience or doing something different. But if you do it in a state of flow where doing it is its own reward, where you're totally engaged in the experience, I knew checks Chick sent me Hi, who wrote the book Flow, He called it an auto tel experience, one where you naturally you keep doing it just to do
it because it feels so good to do it. And that's one of the cool things about hypnosis is you get fully engaged in what you're doing, and you most of the time enjoy what you're doing, and so you do it more intensely. The intensity helps us in our lives. Now, we're so scattered in different directions, fragmented that it's hard to enjoy anything because you're always constantly being nagged at
on the side to pay attention to something else. And hypnosis you just allow yourself to be immersed in the focus of what you're doing.
I mean, we generally know hypnosis for things like you know, ceasing smoking or losing weight. How can it help, you know, talk to us a bit more about how it can help us with other areas of our health, you know, particularly focus as you just mentioned there.
Well, yes, part of what it does is it teaches you to coordinate what's going on in your body with what's going on in your mind so that you can make the most out of whatever experience you're having. So you allow yourself to focus on what matters and put aside the things that don't. So, for example, the coach of the Stanford women's swimming team, we have a fantastic team. Many of the swimmers wind up in the Olympics, but the coach noted that they were doing better in practice
than they were in meats. Their times were quicker, and he realized that they were distracting themselves by worrying about what the women in the neighboring lanes were doing when they were swimming in a meat. Now you'd think being in a meat you're at your most, you're at your peak.
You know, adrenaline's pumping, but it.
Was actually disrupting their knowledge of their bodies and how to best use them to move through the water as smoothly and quickly as possible. So I had them practice self hypnosis and imagine themselves swimming their best possible race, and their times got better because they were ignoring the distraction. You don't worry about the goal, you fully engage yourself in the process.
So did you hypnotize them or did they use self hypnosis as the tool?
I taught them self hypnosis. So we all met as a group and they learned to practice it for themselves. All hypnosis, as I said, is really self hypnosis. It's using a skill that you have but may not be aware that you have. It's kind of a hidden power that people have that they don't often utilize fully.
Oh we like that. We need any superpower that we've got.
How do you?
Oh yeah, do you? How do we actually do it?
I mean you've developed this app called Reverie. How do we actually put ourselves into this state?
So in Reverie, which is just a simple self hypnosis app that you can download from the App store a Google Play, and there I instruct you how to go
into a state of self hypnosis. So if you want to try it, all you have to do is look up to the top of your head, close your eyes slowly, take a deep breath, let the breath out slowly, let your eyes relax, let your body float, and if you want, you can let one hand or the other float up in your laca balloon and picture yourself floating in space and a bath, in a lake, a hot and just allow your body to experience itself in a state of comfort and relaxation. And then you concentrate on what you
want to concentrate too. You don't have to count upstairs and downstairs and take thirty minutes to do it.
Watch in front of yourself.
Under a minute.
Yeah, yeah, I mean that's quite amizing and under a minute.
Under a minute. And one of the coolest things is you will know whether hypnosis will help you with stress, for example, or pain. In the first ten minutes of the exercise or less. You'll see whether your stress and pain is better. I was just with helping a woman who I just met for the first time who's having trouble getting to sleep, and her stress levels were like six out of ten, and within a couple of minutes she was down to one. She said, I just feel
so much better. Now and she pictured it was wonderful. She I asked her to think of an image that would help her get to sleep. And she has cardiovascular problem, she has respiratory problems, she has sleep at me. She has all kinds of things that are real reasons for having trouble sleeping in addition to the emotional reasons of tension and anxiety. And I had her picture. I said,
what's your favorite image of going to sleep? And she said, when I was a kid, my father used to take us to Provincetown on Cape Cod in Massachusetts, and he would have me picture. He would take his imaginary belt and strap me to Joe Fish, and Joe Fish would take me for a ride and then take me down to where his family where Mama Fish and Whitefish, and I would play with them for a while, and then I'd come back and I would be asleep. And she said, why didn't I think of that? You know I've done
that all my life. She said, I feel so good right now, and her stress level just kind of dissolved. So she was trying out being herself as a little girl in a situation where her father played a game with her that helped her immerse herself in sleep.
Yeah, what a beautiful ses.
So that's an ability that many many people have that they can learn to use better.
Yeah, thank you David for joining us on health es today.
You're most welcome for us.
Rey, I hope you got a lot of that chat with David. I sure did. I just get such a kick out of interviewing people with extraordinary credentials. By the way, David is offering healthyish listeners. Yes, that's you a special offer for his app Reverie. I will leave a link
to that offer in the show notes. If you didn't enjoy this chat, jump on rate and review it, or of course, subscribe to this podcast, share this set with a friend, anything else, head to body insoul dot com dot you for us on socials, grab our print edition, which is out in your local Sunday paper, and until tomorrow stay help you