Episode 601: Dr. Spiegel: The Science of Hypnosis: How to Rewire Your Brain and Break Bad Habits

We all have habits we want to break, whether it's overthinking, procrastinating, emotional eating, or constantly stressing about things we can't control. But even when we know exactly what we need to change, our brains can make it incredibly difficult to follow through. So how much control do we actually have over our thoughts and behaviors? We dive deeper into this in Habits & Hustle with Dr. David Spiegel. We talk about the science of hypnosis, how it can help people break bad habits, manage anxiety, improve sleep, and even change how they experience pain. We also get into why some people are more hypnotizable than others, the connection between overthinking and self-sabotage, and what happened when Dr. Spiegel actually tried to hypnotize me. Dr. Spiegel is a Stanford psychiatrist, neuroscientist, and one of the world's leading experts on clinical hypnosis. He's published more than 400 scientific papers and spent decades researching how the brain influences our physical and emotional responses. He explains what actually happens in the brain during hypnosis, why our thoughts can keep us stuck in old patterns, and how techniques like self-hypnosis and breathwork can help us better manage stress, focus, and behavior. What's Discussed: (08:02) How hypnosis can help people quit smoking and break long-standing habits. (14:57) How your brain can respond to imaginary meals as though you've actually eaten. (17:02) Why your brain keeps you stuck in old habits and negative thought patterns. (20:24) How to overcome procrastination by changing the way you approach your goals. (22:47) Why high-performing athletes sometimes perform worse under pressure. (35:46) Why overthinkers and highly analytical people may be harder to hypnotize. (44:08) How to calm your racing thoughts and fall asleep more easily. (50:32) How social support and human connection can influence longevity. (55:33) Why people can become addicted to stress without realizing it. (58:40) How hypnosis can change the way your brain processes pain and reality. Thank You to Our Sponsors! Magic Mind: Head over to magicmind.com/jen http://www.magicmind.com/jen and use code JEN at checkout. Momentous: Ready to try supplements that actually do what they claim? Head to livemomentous.com http://livemomentous.com and use code JEN for 35% off your first subscription. Tru Niagen®: For supplements that are rigorously tested, third-party verified, and actually deliver what's on the label, head to truniagen.com http://truniagen.com AirDoctor: Head to AirDoctorPro.com http://airdoctorpro.com and use promo code HUSTLE to get $250 off select AirDoctor air purifiers, including the 3500, 4000, and 5500 models. Plus, you'll receive a free 3 year warranty, an $84 value, and AirDoctor's 30-day money back guarantee. Find more from Jen Cohen: Website: jennifercohen.com https://jennifercohen.com Instagram: @therealjencohen http://instagram.com/therealjencohen Facebook: Jennifer Cohen https://www.facebook.com/therealjencohen/ LinkedIn: Jennifer Cohen https://www.linkedin.com/in/therealjencohen/ Books: jennifercohen.com/books https://jennifercohen.com/books TikTok: @therealjencohen https://www.tiktok.com/@therealjencohen LinkedIn: Jennifer Cohen https://www.linkedin.com/in/therealjencohen/?isSelfProfile=true Speaking: jennifercohen.com/speaking-engagements https://jennifercohen.com/speaking-engagements Find more from Dr. David Spiegel: Website: Stanford Medicine profile https://med.stanford.edu/profiles/david-spiegel App: Reveri https://www.reveri.com/ Reveri Instagram: @reveri https://www.instagram.com/reveri/ Reveri YouTube: @Reverihealth https://www.youtube.com/@Reverihealth Reveri LinkedIn: Reveri https://www.linkedin.com/company/reverihealth Book: Trance and Treatment: Clinical Uses of Hypnosis https://www.amazon.com/Trance-Treatment-Clinical-Uses-Hypnosis-dp-1585621900/dp/1585621900/ LinkedIn: David Spiegel https://www.linkedin.com/in/david-spiegel-a638398

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Speaker 00

  Hi guys, it's Tony Robbins. You're listening to Habits and Hustle. Crush it.

• 0:07Jen Cohen?

  Thanks, Tony. I'll take it from here. I'm Jennifer Cohen, your host, and I'm here to help you build the confidence, discipline, and resilience to create a bigger, bolder, and more successful life. Every week, I sit down with leading experts, entrepreneurs, athletes, and high performers to uncover the habits, strategies, and mindset shifts that lead to real results. This is Habits and Hustle.

• 0:33Jen Cohen?

  We all have habits we want to break, whether it's overthinking, procrastinating, emotional eating, or constantly stressing out over things we can't control. But then, why is it so difficult to change behaviors we know are holding us back? And what if we have more control over our brains than we actually realize? Today, I'm sitting down with Dr. David Spiegel to explore the science of hypnosis and how it can help us change our thoughts, behaviors, and even our physical responses to stress. Dr. Spiegel is a Stanford psychiatrist, neuroscientist, and one of the world's leading researchers in clinical hypnosis. He's published more than 400 scientific papers and spent decades studying the connection between the mind and body. In

• 1:17Jen Cohen?

  this episode, he explains what actually happens in the brain during hypnosis, how it can help with anxiety, sleep, pain, and bad habits, and why some people are more responsive than others. He even tries to hypnotize me, and let's just say the results were pretty revealing. Hope you enjoy this podcast because I sure enjoyed doing it.

• 1:46Jen Cohen?

  Hi, everyone. Welcome to another episode of Habits and Hustle. And today, we have a very special guest. We have Dr. David Spiegel. Dr. Spiegel is a Stanford psychiatrist, neuroscientist, and leading expert on clinical hypnosis. He's a Harvard Medical School graduate and professor of psychiatry and behavioral science at Stanford University. Dr. David Spiegel is one of the world's most prominent researchers studying the connection between the mind, brain, and body, particularly how hypnosis can influence stress, anxiety, pain, and sleep. He is known for clinical hypnosis, stress and longevity, cancer research, sleep, and so much more. He's

• 2:29Jen Cohen?

  also the co-founder of an app called Reverie. Is that the way you pronounce it?

• 2:34Speaker 02

  That's it, yep.

• 2:35Jen Cohen?

  And this man, my God, he has published more than 400 scientific papers, written more than 13, well, written 13 books, and is a member of the National Academy of Medicine. And boy, oh, boy, you've had quite the resume there.

• 2:54Speaker 02

  Thank you. I want to meet this guy.

• 2:55Jen Cohen?

  Yeah, I'm meeting him. It's pretty impressive. Thank you so much for being on the show today.

• 3:01Speaker 02

  You're welcome.

• 3:02Jen Cohen?

  I don't even know where to begin, except I guess at the beginning. There's a lot of, I guess, misconceptions, I think, of hypnosis. And you're obviously extremely educated, and you're, you really are a massive believer in it. So can you kind of just tell us to start? What are the major misconceptions? Because I know there are a lot of hypnosis.

• 3:24Speaker 02

  Well, there are a lot. Hypnosis is simply a naturally occurring state of highly focused attention. Do you ever get so caught up in a good movie that you forget you're watching a movie and enter the imagined world?

• 3:35Jen Cohen?

  Sometimes. It's hard, actually, not as much as I used to, because everyone, my, my attention span has become so limited as like as everybody else's. But it used to be way more that way. Yes.

• 3:47Speaker 02

  So it's, hypnosis has been called believed in imagination. It's where you get so focused on what you're tending to that you're not judging it and evaluating it. You're just experiencing it. And that allows you to make more change than otherwise you might. It allows you to try out being different. And hypnosis is the oldest Western conception of a psychotherapy. It's the first time that a talking interaction between a doctor and a patient was thought to have therapeutic potential, and yet, it's still a sideshow. People don't take it seriously, and that's a big mistake.

• 4:18Jen Cohen?

  Right.

• 4:19Speaker 02

  People are afraid they're going to lose control, you know, the, you know, the, these silly movies about, you know, a social worker tapping a teacup and somebody falls into a trance and all this stuff. It is not like that. It's actually a way of enhancing your control over your mind and body, not losing it.

• 4:36Jen Cohen?

  Really enhancing? Okay, so, you know, when you see those sideshows or stage shows, you go to Vegas and you go to these, you know, hypnotic shows, whatever. You're right, like they're like, they run around, you know, you know, basically meowing like a cat or whatever. So we have, I think my misconception is it's kind of like a side, like a circus show. And I also think it's not real. Like, I think that maybe some people, and you talk about this, that some people are much more likely to be hypnotized than others. So how do people know if they are a candidate for being hypnotized?

• 5:15Speaker 02

  Well, you know, the kind of thing we talked about, do you get so caught up in a movie, you forget you're watching a movie and enter the imagined world? Are you very sensitive to other people? Are you able to put aside your own perspective and see things from their point of view easily? That tends to be what highly hypnotizable people do. The guys in the stage shows do a hustle that you don't realize at the time. There'll be a couple hundred people in the audience. And while they're doing their initial talk, they're moving their heads or their bodies back and forth, and they're looking for people in the audience who are doing the same thing. And they call people up, they try a few things, they send many of them back to sit down, and they call out the five or 10 most hypnotizable people, and then start doing their show with them, giving the impression that they could do that with anyone.

• 5:58Jen Cohen?

  So are there people that, like, so how do you test to see if someone can be hypnotized? Because you can say, the way you just said it, basically, what I heard, and I may have heard wrong, was that people who are empathetic, who are, or, and people who can concentrate for maybe long periods of time, are able to be hypnotized. So does that mean, besides those two character traits, it's hard to get someone to be hypnotized?

• 6:27Speaker 02

  No. About two-thirds of the adult population is at least somewhat hypnotizable.

• 6:32Jen Cohen?

  Okay.

• 6:33Speaker 02

  About a quarter are very hypnotizable. And there's about a quarter at the other end who just are not hypnotizable. They just, they can't do it. They tend to be more rational, structured people who, who don't believe anything, take it on face value. They've got to investigate it for themselves. So there are personality traits like it. But what you can tell, what I have is a test called the hypnotic induction profile. We have it on Reverie. You can do it for yourself and see how hypnotizable you are. And it involves a series of hypnotic instructions. To look up slowly, close your eyes, take a deep breath. And then I give instructions about one hand or the other feeling light and floating up

• 7:13Speaker 02

  in the air. And we can try that and see how, how you do. Some people are very surprised when they're looking at their hand and it just seems to want to float up in the air. Others, doesn't happen.

• 7:25Jen Cohen?

  What is the percentage of people that it works on?

• 7:28Speaker 02

  Well, everybody can benefit. We have studies of thousands of people on Reverie who have gotten 15% reduction in stress levels in 10 minutes doing the exercise. The percentage is a bit higher for people who are highly hypnotizable, but even non-hypnotizable people benefit from the approach, which is just to build a new relationship between your mind and your body, and recognize that you can help your body deal with stress more than you think you could. But about two out of three people have a pretty surprising reaction to their initial experience with hypnosis.

• 8:02Jen Cohen?

  Really?

• 8:03Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 8:03Jen Cohen?

  What are the main things that you've seen hip, being hypnotized or self-hypnosis actually work on? I mean, I know there's overarching things, like you say, stress. But is there some, is there like specific things, like if you're a smoker, if you want to lose weight, if you have OCD, like, are there very specific things?

• 8:27Speaker 02

  Well, the first two for sure. We use hypnosis to help people stop smoking. And we found in our first study of the Reverie app, actually, just to see how well it would work. Because I've used hypnosis with about 7,000 people in my career. It's a lot of people.

• 8:41Jen Cohen?

  It's a lot of people.

• 8:42Speaker 02

  But we've now had, you know, 800,000 downloads of the app, and I decided to spread the wealth. And so we tested it to see whether it would work as well using the app as it would in my office. And we found that we got one out of four people after a single session to stop smoking. And

• 9:01Jen Cohen?

  Really?

• 9:02Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 9:03Jen Cohen?

  After one session?

• 9:04Speaker 02

  One session. Yes.

• 9:05Jen Cohen?

  Have you seen, what's the longevity of that? So like, have they stopped for a week, two weeks, a month, like?

• 9:09Speaker 02

  A year.

• 9:10Jen Cohen?

  Well, how long has the app been around?

• 9:12Speaker 02

  The app has been around for five years.

• 9:14Jen Cohen?

  Oh, five years already?

• 9:15Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 9:15Jen Cohen?

  So people have had like a long, because people can stop, you know, people can be motivated for a little bit, and then they kind of revert back to their old habits.

• 9:25Speaker 02

  We have a saying among people who use hypnosis. The worst thing you can do is tell someone, don't think about purple elephants. You know, that's what you do.

• 9:33Jen Cohen?

  Exactly.

• 9:33Speaker 02

  Instead, we get them to, to focus on what they're for. So the, the intervention for smoking is to tell people, imagine, think of your body as if it were your baby. Would you ever put hot smoke laden with tar and nicotine into your baby's lungs? Hell, no. Your body is as dependent on you as your baby is. It has to take into it anything you put into it, even if it's damaged by it. So focus on respecting and protecting your body. And I had one woman who'd smoked for 25 years. She came to sign up for the study just out of curiosity. First time she tried that, I had her say, for my body, smoking's a poison. I need my body to live. I owe my body respect and protection. And

• 10:17Speaker 02

  she looked at, lit up a cigarette, looked at it and said, fa, who needs this and put it out. She did said, I didn't even want to stop smoking. I've smoked for 25 years. My friends can't believe it. She's now helping her friends stopping smoking. And she said to me, this is some kind of crazy ass voodoo shit. And I mean that in a good way. She surprised herself. And that's one of the cool things. It's one of the things when you look at the stage shows, you know, the football coach is dancing around the stage like a ballerina, making a fool of himself. He's not thinking about what kind of grief he's going to get in the locker room the next morning. And the cool thing about hypnosis is you can try out being different and see what it feels like. And you can make things

• 10:59Speaker 02

  different. And so we find long term, one out of four people after one session will stop smoking. We found in that study that the rest cut down their daily cigarette use by about 50%.

• 11:12Jen Cohen?

  Fifty or 15?

• 11:13Speaker 02

  Fifty.

• 11:13Jen Cohen?

  Okay. So can you walk me through what it is? Like, how do you hypnotize somebody? So if it's someone who's a smoker versus someone who wants to lose weight, like you must have a different script, I would presume.

• 11:26Speaker 02

  We do. And on Reverie, we have different scripts that are interactive. So we use AI. You hear me changing what I say depending on what, how you're reacting, what you're doing.

• 11:36Jen Cohen?

  But how about just you? If I went to see you in your office, what would happen?

• 11:39Speaker 02

  Well.

• 11:40Jen Cohen?

  And then if it's only, if it, would you, if you can, if you can help somebody in one session, what kind of business model is that for you psychiatrist? You know, like you're not making much money as a psychiatrist, I would imagine.

• 11:53Speaker 02

  Well, that's true, but I sleep better at night. I, you know, I, many people I just see once. And they, they learn what to do and they can do it for themselves. And the Reverie app can help them continue to do it. So they can hear my voice anytime they want and get reinforcement. But, you know, I, I feel good about the, the idea that I can sometimes help people make a big change in their life in a hurry. And that's fine. And then teach them how to, how to follow up and do it. I had a woman who was chronically depressed. She came to see me because her psychiatrist was kind of running out of meds to try. And she told me that she had been raped by their landlord when she was 12 years

• 12:33Speaker 02

  old and had been depressed ever since then, struggling through life. And she couldn't stand the way men would treat her and talk to her. And I had her hypnotized and I said, I, I said, I want you to imagine you're seeing yourself as that 12 year old girl right after this happened. And I want you to imagine that you're your own mother. So think about looking at yourself as a child when you're a mother. And she starts to cry. And I said, I want you to, I wanted you to answer one question for me. While she's hypnotized, I said, was this her fault? And she said, no, I'm stroking her hair. I'm stroking her hair. And she was crying harder. And she left the office and she called me

• 13:18Speaker 02

  a week later and she said, Dr. Spiegel, my psychiatrist wants to know what you did to me because I'm not depressed anymore. And so sometimes you can use it to change your perspective on who you are and what you are. And it can be very powerful.

• 13:34Jen Cohen?

  Is it perspective that you're changing? Or are you changing the neural pathways of how you're kind of receiving information and how you're processing information?

• 13:45Speaker 02

  Good question. Both. You are changing the pathways. We've done functional magnetic resonance imaging studies of people high and low in hypnotizability in and out of hypnosis. And we find that three things happen when you go into a hypnotic state. One is you turn down activity in a part of the brain called the anterior cingulate cortex. It's, it's like a C on its end, sitting right in the middle of your, of your, the bottom of your brain. And it's part of the salience network, which is like the brain's alarm system.

• 14:16Jen Cohen?

  Okay.

• 14:16Speaker 02

  And you turn down activity. So it's like turning off the alarm in your house. Things are going on. You don't pay much, as much attention to it. So you, you can, people, there was a point seven correlation. That's a high correlation between how hypnotized they felt and how much they turned down activity in that part of their brain. The second thing that happens is you have higher, what we call functional connectivity between the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. That's part of the executive control network in the brain and the insula. Insula is Latin for island. It's a little island of tissue in the middle of the front of the brain. And it's a mind body conduit. It's how the brain controls the body and how you have interception. You understand, you feel what's going on in your body.

• 14:59Jen Cohen?

  Okay.

• 15:00Speaker 02

  And we have a lot more ability with that than we like to, than we usually think. So for example, we were doing a study on control of gastric acid secretion. And we had people hypnotized. First thing in the morning, they hadn't eaten anything. We had them eat imaginary meals for an hour. They would, in hypnosis, go from one restaurant to another and eat an imaginary meal. And I would get hungry. I hadn't had breakfast either, just listening to them describe it. And halfway through, one woman said, let's stop. I'm full. And their secretion of gastric acid increased by 89%. So their brain was telling their bodies, get ready to handle that food that was eaten in imagination.

• 15:42Jen Cohen?

  It's like a GLP-1.

• 15:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's exactly right.

• 15:45Jen Cohen?

  You know what I mean?

• 15:45Speaker 02

  That's all, that's exactly right. But less expensive and no side effects.

• 15:49Jen Cohen?

  Right. Exactly.

• 15:50Speaker 02

  And people can lose weight. They can, you can teach people to eat like a gourmet, to enjoy, you can eat less and enjoy eating more.

• 15:58Jen Cohen?

  So why is this something like, people talk about it, like in like, kind of the zeitgeist a little bit, but it hasn't really kind of been a trending thing that people are doing for weight loss or, I mean, they, some people do it. So which, is it because it doesn't work on everybody? Like, if you take a GLP-1 injection, it's going to work on you eventually, right?

• 16:18Speaker 02

  Yeah. And it'll, you lose fat and lose muscle.

• 16:21Jen Cohen?

  Yeah, you lose both. I mean, lose muscle, exactly. But what my point is, is it because you don't have the guarantee of it working? Like, it's also maybe because after you get the treat, you're like, you know, as you get hypnotized, is there, you have to be actively changing the behavior, right? People don't want to actively change the behavior.

• 16:41Speaker 02

  Well, you know, if you don't want to do it, don't do anything and live with the consequences.

• 16:45Jen Cohen?

  Right. But what I mean is it's not the easy, you have to be, do you think about it different? Like, I guess this is my question. If our brains are capable of changing, why is it so difficult for people to break patterns and behaviors that are known to be so destructive?

• 16:58Speaker 02

  Well, the third thing that happens in hypnosis is you have inverse connectivity between the executive control network and the posterior cingulate cortex. That's what we call our default mode network. It's what gets activated when you're not doing anything, you're just kind of thinking about who you are and what you are.

• 17:15Jen Cohen?

  Right.

• 17:16Speaker 02

  And that, it, it, it has a value in that it sort of keeps you on track of who you think you should be, what your mother thought you should be, and all kinds of things like that. But it also keeps you kind of stuck because you think, I can't do that. You know, I've been trying to lose weight for 20 years. I haven't. How could I do this now? And you suspend, you suppress activity in the default mode. I call it the my fault mode network, you know, it's what you think is wrong with yourself. And so you don't realize what you can do. And so a lot of people just don't believe it. They think without a drug, you know, there's no way I can get over this anxiety or depression or eating this problem or smoking, you know, do I need to take an antidepressant or something else to stop smoking? And some people may need to. I'm a doc, I prescribe medications. But a lot

• 18:00Speaker 02

  of people don't. They just don't think they can. And the good thing about hypnosis is you suppress that part of your brain that thinks, I can't really do this. The way the football coach didn't think he could dance like a ballerina. Now, it's a silly example, but it makes a point.

• 18:13Jen Cohen?

  Yeah.

• 18:14Speaker 02

  And so people can surprise themselves at what they can do if they intensify their focus and put aside their peripheral awareness, their, that nagging voice that says, you've been doing this for years, you can't change.

• 18:27Jen Cohen?

  Because you're putting them in an alternate state where then their subconscious becomes their conscious, kind of? Because they say most of our behaviors, isn't it 95% of our behavior is subconscious?

• 18:39Speaker 02

  Well, subconscious, yeah. Yes, I suppose. But really, it's sort of what part of your brain do you choose to use? And what do you focus on? And there's a lot of things you can get access to with hypnosis, even without hypnosis, that you tend to just assume you can't. You know, I've, I've been trying for all these years. I just can't do it. But people can actually surprise themselves.

• 19:04Jen Cohen?

  How? If they're not, if they're not going to be hypnotized, what's another way to access that part of your brain?

• 19:09Speaker 02

  There are a lot of times where, where people get absorbed in something, you know, that you just suddenly tune into something that really interests you. And you don't feel like it's a choice. You just allow yourself to immerse yourself in what you're doing. And you can access it just by thinking, determining that you want to do it. You want to lose yourself in something new and different. I think it's why we travel, why we take vacations. We want to explore a different part of ourselves. And that's another way to do it. Or you have a discussion with a friend and you start thinking about things you hadn't thought about in 20 years. And there, there are lots of ways to access what we call the unconscious. You know, the brain is huge and complex organ, three pounds of millions of neurons. There,

• 19:54Speaker 02

  you can't think about everything all the time anyway. So you can make choices about what parts of your memory and experience you want to touch base with. And hypnosis is one good way to do that.

• 20:06Jen Cohen?

  So can hypnosis actually reprogram like deeply ingrained habits? Like emotional eating? Like, okay, procrastination?

• 20:17Speaker 02

  Yes. You, you break things down into small pieces.

• 20:21Jen Cohen?

  Self sabotage.

• 20:22Speaker 02

  One step at a time. Yes, you can, you can recognize it. It's not just self sabotage, but you're mistreating your body. You're getting yourself into situations where you eat more than you should. You stuff more food into your body than it should.

• 20:34Jen Cohen?

  So walk me through this. Okay, let's pick one. That's like, okay, addict, any kind of addict. We talked about smoking, emotional eating, procrastination. How would you use hypnosis to stop procrastination?

• 20:48Speaker 02

  I'll, I'll get to that in a few minutes. No, let's.

• 20:52Speaker 02

  You get people to, you get people to, to think about not so much the goal as the steps toward the goal. What process can I engage in now that is acceptable to me? There's a, there's a Zen, there's a book about Zen and the, called Zen and the Art of Archery. And it says that the Zen archer and Zen, people who practice Zen are very good archers. They, they don't make the mistake of focusing on the target. They focus on their relationship with the bow and arrow. You focus on the process more than on the goal, because that's doable. Anybody can do that. And if you focus on the goal, you're not doing the things in the meantime that actually help you achieve that goal.

• 21:36Jen Cohen?

  Right.

• 21:37Speaker 02

  So what you say is, okay, if I want to get some piece of my work done, I don't want to remind myself that the deadline's coming in a week and I better get it done. That just makes you feel defeated and miserable. You say, you know, let me pick some piece of this that interests me. And it may be step seven out of whatever it is, but I'm just, I'm curious about that now. And you work on that. So you find something that you can immerse yourself in and engage yourself in where the process becomes the experience, not the outcome. You're not saying, I want to be sure I get everything done a month from now. You're saying, here's what I think I could enjoy doing today. And it's that capacity to focus on the process. I'll give you an example. The, Stanford has a wonderful women's swimming team. And a lot of them wind up in the Olympics. They're terrific.

• 22:22Speaker 02

  But the coach noticed that they were swimming faster in practice than they were in meets. And you would think, what the hell is that about? You know, you're got all your adrenaline flowing here. And so I talked to the women on the team and they said, when I'm, when I'm swimming in a meet, I'm finding myself thinking about the women in the lanes on either side of me. And I, so I'm racing them. But what, when I, when I'm practicing, I'm focusing on how I relate to my body, how I want it to move, how coordinated I want my kicking and my arm movements to be. And so they're doing what you really want to do to be a great swimmer, is to relate to your body in a way that you help it and it helps you. And so I had them practice in hypnosis every evening, swimming their

• 23:06Speaker 02

  best race, but swimming it alone. You know, swimming, competitive swimming isn't a contact sport. It doesn't matter what the women in the other lane are doing. And the coach told me they were swimming faster in meets, because they learned to focus on what mattered and something that was manageable and where they got immediate reinforcement that it felt good. And that's the idea, that you focus on the process, not the outcome.

• 23:29Jen Cohen?

  So, okay, so of the people, let's say, not everything, and not, it doesn't always work on the first shot, right?

• 23:36Speaker 02

  Right.

• 23:37Jen Cohen?

  So do you see people sometimes for a long time to, to kind of reprogram? You know what it sounds like to me? You know, have you heard of this drug? It's called Ibogaine?

• 23:47Speaker 02

  Ibogaine.

• 23:48Jen Cohen?

  Ibogaine.

• 23:49Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 23:50Jen Cohen?

  And like, a lot of people were telling me that it's become super popular and trendy.

• 23:55Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 23:56Jen Cohen?

  And there are all these like clinics in like Peru and Cancun and Costa Rica and people are going there all over to basically reprogram their brain. It says I could change, it like, it basically is like it reprograms or your operating system.

• 24:10Speaker 02

  Right.

• 24:11Jen Cohen?

  What, what's your take on that?

• 24:13Speaker 02

  I think, I, I've actually co-authored a paper about Ibogaine and my late colleague, Nolan Williams, published a very influential paper in which combat veterans who had been in Afghanistan, some of whom had had traumatic brain injury, some of whom had post-traumatic stress disorder, would stop in Stanford on their way to Mexico to have an Ibogaine treatment. And we measured their physiology before and then after when they came back. And it was remarkable. They, the

• 24:43Jen Cohen?

  Wow.

• 24:44Speaker 02

  Rates of post-traumatic stress disorder, the symptoms were dramatically reduced and stayed reduced. It wasn't like they felt better for a little while and got better. Six months later, way better. And traumatic brain injury. Now, I still don't understand that. But their traumatic brain injury symptoms were also reduced immediately and stayed reduced for six months. And so, um,

• 25:05Jen Cohen?

  Wow.

• 25:05Speaker 02

  I'm convinced that some of these psychedelics, you know, I, I've done work with women with metastatic breast cancer in support groups. And some of them, we, I didn't do this, this study, but they've used psilocybin. And the interesting thing is, it does seem like a brain reset. It isn't like the typical medication strategy where as long as you take it, you know, you feel better sometimes. They would, and I'm, I'm thinking, would I want to take the risk of a bad trip when I'm dying of breast cancer? I don't think so. But they said, you know, I, I came out of it thinking, I can, I could finally look at the idea that I'm going to die, that this is going to kill me. And that was, you know, unpleasant.

• 25:47Speaker 02

  But I could also see how lucky I am to ever have survived at all in the first place, to have been born on this earth and lived the life I've lived. And they, they changed their perspective on it, you know, and they don't have to keep taking psilocybin. These vets didn't have to keep taking Ibogaine. And I do think there is a kind of brain reset. And I think that happens with hypnosis transiently, that you let go of your presumptions about who you are and what you are and what you can do, and just see what it would be like to be different. And in fact, those drugs tend to suppress activity in the posterior cingulate cortex and that same part of the brain that you, we see being suppressed when

• 26:27Speaker 02

  you focus on things in hypnosis. So I think there are, there are both non-pharmacological and pharmacological ways to do some reprogramming of your brain.

• 26:38Jen Cohen?

  Well, because when I'm talking to you, it sounds like a lot of this hypnosis, like what a hypnosis does is it's reprogram your brain. And so there's more levels of like degrees in extremes of what to do, right? You can take a drug, psychedelic, maybe you could do the hypno, hypnosis.

• 26:58Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 26:59Jen Cohen?

  Trend, whatever, or not trend, hypnosis route. And there's a lot of, I guess there's a lot of ways to get to the goal, maybe, you know?

• 27:07Speaker 02

  There are. And, and we build reverie so that people could dip into it anytime they wanted. And so we're finding that tens of thousands of people feel better. Their, their pain levels get reduced. That's another one where hypnosis is very effective. You know, right now, for example, I'm going to bet that you're so interested in what I'm saying, that you're not even aware of the sensations in your body touching these chairs. Is that right, this chair?

• 27:31Jen Cohen?

  Yeah, I'm not paying attention.

• 27:32Speaker 02

  Right. But

• 27:33Jen Cohen?

  Although my leg, now that you mention it, I do have like an ache in my leg a little bit.

• 27:38Speaker 02

  You do?

• 27:38Jen Cohen?

  Yes.

• 27:38Speaker 02

  Oh, well.

• 27:39Jen Cohen?

  I have like, I have some kind of sciatica from like a lot of exercise, like, you know, overtraining. So like, that's why I like shift and move a lot in my chair. Can you help me with that?

• 27:49Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 27:50Jen Cohen?

  Yeah. Can you also help me with overthinking?

• 27:52Speaker 02

  I can try.

• 27:54Jen Cohen?

  Okay.

• 27:55Speaker 02

  Sure. Sure. We can, we can try it. But notice that you, you weren't thinking about your sciatica until we started talking about this.

• 28:03Jen Cohen?

  It was probably in my head. I just wasn't like really focusing on it as, as severely as I would have otherwise.

• 28:11Speaker 02

  But whatever is going on in your lower back and, and that nerve, your sciatic nerve, is one of, you know, thousands of inputs your brain is getting. And you were paying less attention to it. So it felt different, right? Than if you're now thinking about it. Yeah. And so, you know, people have the misapprehension that if you can control something like pain with hypnosis, you made it up and you, you made yourself feel you were in pain. The brain produced this, the discomfort. It doesn't. It handles tons of information and decides what to do with it. And some of it, you really have to pay attention to and others you don't. And hypnosis can help you choose how to attend to it and what to attend to.

• 28:52Jen Cohen?

  Okay. So let me ask you a question. Are we able, like, have you been hypnotized? Can you hypnotize yourself? Can someone hypnotize themselves?

• 29:00Speaker 02

  Yeah, yes, absolutely. That's what I teach people to do.

• 29:03Jen Cohen?

  Right. So like you, so basically, if I wanted to, I can hypnotize myself right now.

• 29:11Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 29:18Jen Cohen?

  Let's take a quick break so I can tell you about this episode's sponsor, Air Doctor. A while back, I went through a stretch where I was waking up super foggy and exhausted every morning, which really made no sense because I'm really particular about my sleep. Cool room, no phone, in bed on time every night. So I thought I had everything dialed in, but the one thing I hadn't touched was the air I was breathing. So that's when I started using an Air Doctor purifier in my room. And to be completely honest, I didn't expect much. I'm a big believer that if you want to feel better, you have to put the work in. So a machine that sits in the corner and makes, you know, a difference never really occurred to me. And I wasn't buying in. But it didn't take long to feel the difference.

• 30:01Jen Cohen?

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• 30:45Jen Cohen?

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• 31:23Jen Cohen?

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• 31:44Jen Cohen?

  Okay, so if you missed, we just did something, I don't know if we're gonna maybe cut that or not, I'm not sure, but so we took a break and Dr. Spiegel tried to hypnotize me and no surprise, but I am not very hypnotizable.

• 32:00Speaker 02

  Right.

• 32:01Jen Cohen?

  He said I'm unhypnotizable because I, tell everybody why.

• 32:05Speaker 02

  Well, people, we call them Apollonians, people who follow the god of reason, you know, and not follow their hearts, they follow their heads. They like to judge and evaluate, they like to read about things, they like to learn about them before they do them. They don't just throw themselves into things, they tend to value evaluating what they're thinking and doing all the time. So.

• 32:27Jen Cohen?

  Right, so basically people, this is where the conundrum comes in.

• 32:31Speaker 02

  Right.

• 32:31Jen Cohen?

  If you're somebody who overthinks and you wanna get hypnotized for people for overthinking, you can't even get into that hypnotic state because you overthink too much.

• 32:41Speaker 02

  Well, not to a great extent, that's right. I mean, you might get some benefit. Your left arm did feel a little lighter than the right arm, you had some little sense of it. But that's right, that you're not somebody for whom hypnosis would help things come particularly easily. It might help somewhat, but you need to do other things as well.

• 32:59Jen Cohen?

  So that's, I guess that is kind of my point, that like, I think we were saying earlier, I think if people are more, you said like more go with the flow, loosey goosey, this can work better. If you're someone who is like me,

• 33:13Speaker 02

  Right.

• 33:14Jen Cohen?

  who is much more analytical and overthinking, it's not as successful. But then I said to you that I'm also really impulsive and I, I'm blunt and you, and you said that, you asked me a question, you said, are you, do you care what people think of you?

• 33:33Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 33:34Jen Cohen?

  And I said, no, absolutely not.

• 33:39Speaker 02

  I love it.

• 33:40Jen Cohen?

  I don't at all. And he's like, well, that's, that's one of the biggest character traits for people who are not hypnotizable.

• 33:46Speaker 02

  And for high hypnotizables, if you say to them, you're looking green today, they'll, they'll check their skin to see if, you know,

• 33:52Jen Cohen?

  Yeah.

• 33:52Speaker 02

  they'll feel that way.

• 33:53Jen Cohen?

  I wouldn't check it, I would be like, okay, it's green, not green, blue, doesn't matter.

• 33:58Speaker 02

  Right.

• 33:59Jen Cohen?

  Okay, so what I'm kind of gleaning from this, if you are somebody who has more high tolerance to caring what people think, it would say like maybe insecure, self-conscious, easygoing, not, you don't have to be all of those things, but one of those things, being hypnotizable is much more possible.

• 34:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, there's a trait called absorption.

• 34:22Jen Cohen?

  Okay.

• 34:23Speaker 02

  People who get so caught up in a good movie, they forget they're watching a movie.

• 34:26Jen Cohen?

  Thing comes in.

• 34:27Speaker 02

  Who, who work, you know, find themselves working two hours past dinner because they got so caught up in the work. You're someone who structures your day and how you think and what you wanna do and.

• 34:36Jen Cohen?

  And I don't miss a meal.

• 34:38Speaker 02

  Right, there you go. So you tend to impose structure, not accept structure from other.

• 34:43Jen Cohen?

  That's, okay, that's actually, yes, I do impose structure on myself. I'm not somebody though, who takes authority well, and I don't want someone else to give me the structure.

• 34:53Speaker 02

  Exactly. Because you say, I know how things ought to be and I'm not gonna take your orders about how to do it. Whereas highly hypnotizable people are very good at trying out other points of view. Saying, oh, that's an interesting way to do it, maybe I'll do that, you know, they, they, they go with that flow.

• 35:09Jen Cohen?

  I would, I would go with that flow, but I would tend to resort back to my flow.

• 35:14Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 35:14Jen Cohen?

  You know, because, not because I think I'm right all the time, it's because I.

• 35:19Speaker 02

  Just most of the time.

• 35:19Jen Cohen?

  It's most of the time, no.

• 35:22Jen Cohen?

  No, mostly because I've done so much trial and error on what I think that works for me, that I'm pretty like dialed in on a lot of things.

• 35:31Speaker 02

  Right.

• 35:31Jen Cohen?

  But I'm also super impulsive, which is why I'd want, I would go see you for the impulsivity. But then I can't get hypnotized to help it, so that's the irony.

• 35:40Speaker 02

  It might give you a bit of an edge, but, but probably not a lot, because you're just not very hypnotizable.

• 35:46Jen Cohen?

  So then again, it brings me back to my first question, which is, what is the percentage of people that actually, that they can be hypnotized?

• 35:54Speaker 02

  Two thirds.

• 35:55Jen Cohen?

  Really?

• 35:55Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 35:56Jen Cohen?

  So only one quarter are like me?

• 35:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's right.

• 36:00Jen Cohen?

  Okay, so why is this? Why the minute we, we lie down to sleep, our brains suddenly want to replay every problem in our lives? And how do we shut off our brain?

• 36:10Speaker 02

  Well, that's, it's not always the case, the brains do a lot of things and reviewing problems is one of them. But the way that I help people with hypnosis actually is to start from the body up rather than from the brain down.

• 36:24Jen Cohen?

  Okay.

• 36:25Speaker 02

  Because when you're tense about something, notice that your, your body tenses up, you know, your heart rate goes up a bit, your muscles tense, start to sweat. And then you notice that and you say, oh my God, you know, this must be really bad. So you get more anxious and your body reacts to that, it's like a snowball rolling downhill. So what I do is I have people in hypnosis, look up, close their eyes and imagine they're somewhere safe and comfortable, a bath, a lake, a hot tub floating in space, taking a nice deep breath. And there are some breathing exercises that even if you're not very hypnotizable can help you. So one that I would teach you to do when you're trying to go to sleep is take in a breath about halfway through your nose, just inhale through your nose, hold, now fill your lungs completely.

• 37:11Speaker 02

  All the way, fill your lungs, and now slowly exhale through your mouth.

• 37:19Speaker 02

  Try it again, inhale through your nose halfway, hold, fill your lungs,

• 37:25Speaker 02

  and then slow exhale through your mouth.

• 37:29Speaker 02

  How's your body feeling now?

• 37:31Jen Cohen?

  Better.

• 37:32Speaker 02

  Better.

• 37:33Jen Cohen?

  That's breathwork, right?

• 37:34Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's breathwork. And, and that, that's called cyclic sighing. And it's a way of getting your body comfortable first. And once you've done that, you can think a little more clearly about whatever it is that's troubling you, even if you're going to sleep or something else. The idea is, the one thing about things that worry you, you can control is how your body reacts to it, even if you can't control the problem. So get your body more comfortable first and then you can think about or imagine what you might do to deal with the problem.

• 38:02Jen Cohen?

  Right. Where does breathwork meditation fall into this whole camp?

• 38:06Speaker 02

  Well, breathwork can, can go either way, there, there's, there's box breathing, which is something the Navy SEALs do before they go in and fight with someone. It's a way of getting you aroused, so you inhale, one, two, three, hold, one, two, three, exhale, one, two, three, hold, one, two, three. So you're disciplining your breathing to arouse yourself, not to soothe yourself the way you do with cyclic sighing. Meditation is different in that it's about being more than doing. You do hypnosis to try and solve a problem, stop smoking, deal with stress, control pain. With meditation, you're just supposed to have open presence, you know, you just kind of let whatever's happening flow through you,

• 38:50Speaker 02

  don't react to it, just experience it. I had a woman who was a 10-year meditator, twice a day, 30 minutes each time. She said, I love meditating, but I have terrible migraine headaches and they're driving me nuts and they're not any better. So I taught her, she was quite hypnotizable, and I taught her to imagine her, her, her head felt hot, and people who have migraines often have vasodilatation in the scalp. And I said, imagine a bag of ice on your head, cool, tingly and numb, filter the hurt out of the pain. And she called me a week later and she said, thank you, doctor, my migraines are gone. And thank you for freeing me to use my intentionality. Because you're not supposed to be intentional when you meditate, you're supposed to just be with things.

• 39:35Speaker 02

  And this was something where she was intentional and it worked.

• 39:38Jen Cohen?

  So let me ask you a question, besides hypnosis, do you do any other modality in your practice, in your business?

• 39:46Speaker 02

  Well, sure, I do psychotherapy, I treat anxiety and depression, I use medication sometimes too, I'm a physician, I do that as well. But I help people like with post-traumatic stress disorder, sometimes as quickly as that lady I told you about earlier. But sometimes it takes a lot more time to help people work through what they've been through in their lives, and I'll do that.

• 40:07Jen Cohen?

  Because you have like, you're back, like honestly, you're, you're pedigree background, Harvard Medical School, Stanford University, like you have written more papers than anybody else I've seen and 13 books. I mean, they can't all be on hypnosis, are they?

• 40:24Speaker 02

  No, no, they're not all.

• 40:26Jen Cohen?

  So you must be an expert on more than just that, like.

• 40:30Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 40:30Jen Cohen?

  So what else are you, like, what other modalities do you think are extremely helpful that can help people who otherwise can't get help by hypnosis?

• 40:41Speaker 02

  Well, I've run support groups for women with metastatic breast cancer. We tried to help them face and deal with the illness. And we started this like, you know, 45 years ago, where it was thought, oncologists were telling me it was a bad idea that they would see one another die and you'd demoralize them. And, and we would meet for an hour and a half once a week, deal with their fears of dying and death. And it could be very upsetting, you know, we had one woman who said, you know, I've gotten bad news, that, you know, the disease is progressing and maybe I shouldn't come to the group anymore. And she said, my husband is a banker, but he's not a teller, he doesn't talk, and I think maybe he's had enough. And I asked the group to discuss it, say, well, is, would the group like you not to come anymore?

• 41:26Speaker 02

  And she got this wonderful feedback about how, you know, what a model she is, and she always, sick as she was, makeup perfect, you know, hair done just right, you know, dressed beautifully. And they admired how, how she kept up her appearance and claimed herself. And she died about four months later, and the whole group got a note from her, that she'd arranged for a limousine to come and pick everybody up and take us to her memorial service.

• 41:54Jen Cohen?

  Oh my gosh.

• 41:55Speaker 02

  We found that far from demoralizing people, we strengthen them. That just helping to face these existential issues made a big difference for them. And we found that it was a randomized clinical trial, so 50 were randomized to the support groups, and we did hypnosis at the end of the group too, 36 had standard care. And at the end of the year, the hypnosis group was less anxious and depressed, more comfortable with their emotions, had better relationships with their families, and had half the pain the control group did on the same amounts of medication. And then the big surprise, so we published that, I don't know, in the 90s. And I, there was a lot of talk about how you could wish away your cancer, you know,

• 42:39Jen Cohen?

  Yeah.

• 42:39Speaker 02

  you know, in your mind, just make it go away. So I thought it'd be interesting to see if we did all that for them and it had no effect on the disease. It turned out that the women randomized to the groups lived 18 months longer than the control group.

• 42:54Jen Cohen?

  Really?

• 42:55Speaker 02

  Yeah, and we published that in The Lancet. And it got a lot of attention. And we helped to discover that that social support affects not only your mood, but your survival. There was a paper in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute. No, it was the Journal of Clinical Oncology, showing that married cancer patients live on average four months longer than unmarried cancer patients. And it would not surprise you to know that that effect is stronger for men than for women.

• 43:24Jen Cohen?

  Wow, yeah, not surprised, not at all.

• 43:27Speaker 02

  And we just published a paper doing a meta-analysis of all the published papers on social support and survival, groups of various kinds. And it shows that on average, there's a four-month life extension for participating in social support. So this was, we used hypnosis and we helped them with pain, but it was more than that. It was helping them cope with their fears of dying and death, how to live your life even as your life is getting shorter. And so that kind of psychotherapy is something that I've enjoyed doing and I think has helped to change the amount of emotional support we give to cancer patients.

• 44:04Jen Cohen?

  You know what I, what I, what I also just thought of when you were talking about the fact that we, that we can live 18 months longer if we have the support, the community. I actually was going to ask you in the next question, but then you just answered it, kind of, that I actually thought it'd be longer, given all the research that people have done on how community connection, social connections, human connection, really change someone's like longevity and lifespan. Like, I thought it'd be years. I didn't think it would only be months.

• 44:40Speaker 02

  Well, it was a year and a half. It was 18 months.

• 44:43Jen Cohen?

  Well, yeah.

• 44:43Speaker 02

  Oh, but you're talking about them being married four months.

• 44:46Jen Cohen?

  Four months, the four months. I mean, it was a bad marriage, but it's still a marriage. No, but even 18 months. So, because my, I have a question, because what I was going to say is, can we think ourselves sick or think ourselves better?

• 45:01Speaker 02

  Well, you know, there are a lot of things we can do to make ourselves sick. You know, we can not exercise, we can eat badly.

• 45:08Jen Cohen?

  Besides the habitual things.

• 45:09Speaker 02

  Besides the habit stuff.

• 45:10Jen Cohen?

  Yeah.

• 45:11Speaker 02

  Sleep is very important, too. And if you're anxious and not dealing with problems well, you tend not to sleep very well. And there are studies that suggest that poor sleep is also a contributor to shorter survival. But there's something about social connection that makes people feel that they have value even if their bodies are not being the way they were, if you're not able to do what you used to be able to do.

• 45:35Jen Cohen?

  But can we use our brain? Like, if, I guess my question is, I guess, if we have, it's such a strong, powerful muscle, right? Like, we can stop or start so many different behavioral patterns, according to what you're saying, except if you're like me, in the one quarter of the population. Can we actually think ourselves out of sickness? Because you hear these things all the time, like, oh, I had cancer and then my positive attitude cured me. Is that actually possible?

• 46:08Speaker 02

  I don't, I don't think you can wish away cancer. I, you know, I think.

• 46:11Jen Cohen?

  Right? Like, that to me seems a little bit Pollyanna.

• 46:14Speaker 02

  There are, there are things you can do. You know, the brain can influence the immune system, for example. So that when you're more anxious, your, your, your natural killer cells, which kill cancer, tend to stick more to the sides of the arteries and get less into the tissue where it could do some good.

• 46:32Jen Cohen?

  Okay.

• 46:33Speaker 02

  So there are ways in which psychoneuroimmune effects could make a difference. Can you just, you know, make a tumor go away? You know, probably not. But can you help your immune system deal better with what it's dealing with? Yeah, I think that's entirely possible.

• 46:49Jen Cohen?

  Can we be addicted to stress and not even know it?

• 46:52Speaker 02

  Sure. Look at how we live. I mean, you know, we, we did a study after the 9/11 attack, in which we got a thousand or so people on the internet to tell us how they reacted and how much news they watched after the attack. And it was a horrible, stressful thing.

• 47:10Jen Cohen?

  Hmm.

• 47:11Speaker 02

  And we found that people who spent more than two hours a day watching the news reports were more anxious and depressed six months later than the ones.

• 47:20Jen Cohen?

  Absolutely.

• 47:20Speaker 02

  Who didn't. And, you know, there comes a point where it's bad news, you know, watching it again and again is not going to help you deal with it. People who had less emotional support from their families were doing worse. So, yeah, I think we do get addicted to stress. We, you know, just people who are doom scrolling all the time on their smartphones are over immersing themselves in things that aren't providing any comfort and, in fact, are keeping them from social support. There's studies that show that a lot of teenagers now, like a quarter of teenagers, would rather talk with their chatbot friend than actually with real friends.

• 47:57Jen Cohen?

  Oh, yeah, this is a major epidemic. I talk about this a lot on the show.

• 48:01Speaker 02

  Oh, it's terrible.

• 48:02Jen Cohen?

  Like, all of that stuff. Um, we have been unable to even socialize at such a level. And it's just getting worse and worse. I mean, there's like all these stats on, um, there's like, was it like a psychiatrist that's actually telling me, for the first time, they actually had a session between them, like, this, like a real human, and they brought their chatbot, like whatever they have, like their AI bot. And these are becoming like real relationships that people are doing as opposed to like real life.

• 48:33Speaker 02

  Right, and with this.

• 48:34Jen Cohen?

  Have you seen one like those yet?

• 48:35Speaker 02

  Doing is isolating, yeah. And they're, and they're isolating themselves from real friends, you know, because.

• 48:40Jen Cohen?

  Really? Well, wait, hold on, they're for sure isolating themselves. But have you actually had a session or seen a patient that brought their AI agent?

• 48:49Speaker 02

  No, I haven't, haven't.

• 48:51Jen Cohen?

  Would you ever do that?

• 48:53Speaker 02

  No.

• 48:53Jen Cohen?

  Yeah.

• 48:54Speaker 02

  I don't think so. But I, I have become an AI agent in reverie.

• 48:58Jen Cohen?

  Yeah.

• 48:59Speaker 02

  So, so we've built reveries so that people can talk to me and they, and I can remember what they said last time and how well they controlled their pain or their anxiety or their smoking, uh, and say, hey, here's what you did last week, let's see what we can do now. So you can use AI in a way that reinforces human contact or in a way that distracts people from.

• 49:20Jen Cohen?

  Right, like anything in life, right?

• 49:21Speaker 02

  Yeah, right.

• 49:22Jen Cohen?

  It's not the tool, it's how you use it.

• 49:23Speaker 02

  That's exactly right.

• 49:25Jen Cohen?

  Can someone become good at suppressing their emotions that they genuinely believe that, like, they can actually believe that they're fine, but their body is telling them a completely different story?

• 49:34Speaker 02

  Yeah, there are people who deny, you know, symptoms, who don't go to the doctor when they really got symptoms that can do them harm. Absolutely, they, they can. I mean, the brain process is a signal processor, you know? We, we did one experiment in which we had people look at color and black and white images on a screen and we, they had them in the PET scanner. And when they were, we identified the part of the brain that responds to color, the lingual gyrus and the occipital lobe. And they would get the response, and when they were looking at black and white, they didn't. And then we told them in hypnosis that the color screen was really a black and white screen. And they said, yeah, it looks black and white.

• 50:17Speaker 02

  And the color region stopped responding to the image of color that was coming in.

• 50:22Jen Cohen?

  Really?

• 50:23Speaker 02

  Yeah. So believing is seeing, I called that experiment, that that's, people saw something different and their brain reacted as if it were different. The same is true, we would give, our, some Stanford students volunteered for a study in which we gave them electric shocks on the wrist and used sensory evoked response, electrical activity on the scalp. And when they were told that the painful signals, um, your, their arm was in ice water and it couldn't feel it, the brain reacted half as much to the same signals.

• 50:55Jen Cohen?

  Really?

• 50:56Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 50:56Jen Cohen?

  That's crazy.

• 50:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, it is, but it's true. So people can increase or decrease their response to the same stimuli.

• 51:05Jen Cohen?

  What about performance, like athletic performance? Can breathing, well, not breathing, because breathing, we know, but can hypnosis actually improve athletic performance?

• 51:15Speaker 02

  Well, I, I just saw a fabulous movie, you should see it, it's about Rory McIlroy, you know, the.

• 51:20Jen Cohen?

  Yeah, the.

• 51:21Speaker 02

  The Masters champ.

• 51:22Jen Cohen?

  The golfer, the golfer, yeah.

• 51:24Speaker 02

  Now, he, he was a really interesting guy who, from the time he was seven, was practicing playing golf all the time. And they had images of him as a seven-year-old bouncing the ball on his golf club and then going out and practicing. And he determined he wanted to win the Big Four golf. That was his goal in life. His parents took extra jobs so that they could support his.

• 51:44Jen Cohen?

  Yeah.

• 51:45Speaker 02

  His habit. And he initially was doing very well and he had a wonderful long swing. I'm not a golfer, but I, you know. But in, in the Masters tournament, which was the fourth one, the big one, you know, he won three. I mean, he was, you know, he was no Piker, he was a superb golfer.

• 52:00Jen Cohen?

  Yeah, amazing, yeah.

• 52:01Speaker 02

  But he just took a bad swing and the ball wound up off the course in, near some cabins, near the thing. It was humiliation. And so he had to, he said, I didn't even know where to go to look for the ball to get it back. And of course, then, time and again, when he'd get to a situation like that, he did the same thing. And he was undermining himself. And so for like 10 years, he just wasn't winning anything. He was feeling terrible. So he actually, he, he, he tried reverie at first to get an idea, but he decided he wanted a coach to help him. And so he saw, he met this coach. And the coach said to him, you know what? Your problem is that you're disconnecting yourself from the thing that made you love golfing.

• 52:43Speaker 02

  So it has now become a problem for you and you're focusing on the frustrated goal, not on the joy you have in taking a good swing.

• 52:51Jen Cohen?

  Mm-hmm.

• 52:52Speaker 02

  And so he used hypnosis with him to help him just focus on the process, not the outcome, which we talked about earlier. And so the film beautifully depicts it, and it's the real stuff. It isn't, they're not reenacting it, it's him talking about it. He was, he was this close to winning, he just had to get a three-foot putt. And he says, I don't like putting, I like the long drives. I don't like, I don't like it at the end because it's too obvious, you know, if you've succeeded or failed. Before, it's better or worse, you know?

• 53:22Jen Cohen?

  Right.

• 53:22Speaker 02

  But he was really frustrated because he was this close. And so they had to do a playoff round. And, and his coach had been telling him, just imagine how much you enjoy swinging the club, you know, how you feel. And, um, his caddie said something very clever to him. He said, look, it's frustrating, you know, you were this close and you, you didn't do it. But imagine if two days ago, when the tournament started, I told you we would be at this point in the tournament now, how would you feel? And he said, oh, I'd be excited, you know, that I had a chance. And he said, suddenly the sky looked really pretty and I had a nice ride in the cart back to the beginning, to the beginning hole. And, and he won it.

• 54:05Speaker 02

  And it was that capacity to focus on what you wanted to focus on and reconnecting with that sense of joy that he had from playing the game, rather than worrying about whether he was gonna make the putt or not. And he won the Masters. He won that big, big four. And so that idea of seeing, using your imagination and self-hypnosis.

• 54:28Jen Cohen?

  Right.

• 54:28Speaker 02

  To focus on the things you do control, which is how you relate to your body, how you feel while you're performing, rather than, am I gonna get this, another trophy and a green jacket, you know? Tiger Woods did hypnosis, he trained with hypnosis. Before every shot, he would do a little self-hypnosis exercise about how his body was gonna move when he took the shot.

• 54:50Jen Cohen?

  Well, that sounds a lot like also visualization.

• 54:53Speaker 02

  It can be.

• 54:54Jen Cohen?

  So what's the difference between hypnosis and visualization?

• 54:57Speaker 02

  Well, if you're hypnotizable.

• 54:59Jen Cohen?

  Right.

• 55:00Speaker 02

  And you're visualizing, you're probably in a hypnotic state, you know, it doesn't.

• 55:04Jen Cohen?

  Okay, so it doesn't have to be this like really, like, do people know they're in a hypnosis when they are in a hypnosis?

• 55:11Speaker 02

  Not necessarily, no.

• 55:13Jen Cohen?

  Oh, they don't?

• 55:13Speaker 02

  You lose yourself in things.

• 55:14Jen Cohen?

  Okay.

• 55:15Speaker 02

  You know, I mean, how would you not be hypnotized, you know, if you're hypnotizable, and many people are, and you're focusing intently, you get lost in a sunset, you're in a hypnotic-like state, it's believed in imagination, you're doing it, you may not call it that. And that's part of our problem is that it's a naturally occurring phenomenon to some extent, more in people who are more hypnotizable, and less in people who aren't. But it's involved in things that we do, you know, guys who get the, you know, the Congressional Medal of Honor for doing these heroic things in combat, a lot of them will say, I don't even remember doing it.

• 55:51Jen Cohen?

  Right.

• 55:52Speaker 02

  You know, I don't know what I did. And that's a self-hypnotic state, for sure.

• 55:57Jen Cohen?

  How about, how does hypnosis compare to EMDR for treating trauma?

• 56:02Speaker 02

  EMDR has gotten a lot of attention.

• 56:07Jen Cohen?

  Yeah.

• 56:08Speaker 02

  I think there's a lot that is hypnotic-like in it, but I don't think wiggling your eyes back and forth has anything to do with it. And there have been studies where they, dismantling studies, where you get a result with EMDR, and then you do everything except the eye movements, you get the same result, doesn't make any difference. So I think the EMDR itself is kind of a gimmick.

• 56:28Jen Cohen?

  What is it? Can you explain what it is to people who don't know?

• 56:31Speaker 02

  Oh, it's just that you're supposed to do, you bring a traumatic memory to mind, and then think of it while you're moving your eyes from left to right. And the idea is that somehow transferring the, you know, input, sensory input, from the left side of your brain, when you're looking right, to the right side of your brain when you're looking left, it makes some difference in the emotional response to it. And I don't buy it. I think it's, if you can face and deal with things that happen, and see them from a different point of view, that can help you. And that's a kind of self-hypnotic treatment. And I think EMDR is one kind of awkward use of hypnosis, frankly.

• 57:13Jen Cohen?

  Right. And then, because it's very, very popular, you know?

• 57:16Speaker 02

  I've noticed, yeah.

• 57:17Jen Cohen?

  Like, it's like, it's, everyone's talking about it.

• 57:20Speaker 02

  Right. So I'm glad we're here talking about something.

• 57:24Jen Cohen?

  Yes, I do, too. What does, okay, I guess I should have asked this at the beginning, but what does happen to your brain when you are hypnotized?

• 57:33Speaker 02

  Your turned-down activity in the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex. So the alarm system in the brain, the thing that, when you hear a loud noise and suddenly, what was that? That's your, your, the alarm system in the brain, the anterior cingulate, the insula, parts of the brain called the salience network, get activated. In hypnosis, you turn it down. I'm not gonna let things get to me. You have higher functional connectivity between the executive control network and the insula, the part of the brain that regulates mind-body activity.

• 58:08Jen Cohen?

  Okay.

• 58:09Speaker 02

  And the third thing is you disconnect the posterior cingulate cortex, the part of the brain in the default mode, that tells you, you should be doing this, you shouldn't be doing that. It kind of cuts you loose from your usual expectations of who you are and what you are. So it allows you to get absorbed, because you're not thinking, I shouldn't be doing this, I should be doing something more productive or something like that. You just let yourself try out being different.

• 58:34Jen Cohen?

  My, why not, like, one last question. Why can two people experience the same trauma, and one move forward and the other one be stuck and trapped for decades?

• 58:47Speaker 02

  Well, there can be a lot of reasons. You know, one thing that happens to people who have been traumatized, first of all, if you look at, you know, it's about one out of four combat veterans who get post-traumatic stress disorder, more than that are traumatized. And one of the things that makes you more vulnerable is a history of childhood trauma or abuse. So you're more vulnerable to getting it with a reemergence of a traumatic situation, because it brings you back to experiences you might have had before.

• 59:19Jen Cohen?

  Right.

• 59:19Speaker 02

  And so part of it is life experience, life history. But in general, and the other thing is that, as I mentioned, a lot of people who've been traumatized blame themselves for events they didn't control. And so it's, it gets them set on a path where they find themselves, once again, not saying, this is a terrible situation, you know, soldiers, you know, I've only gone to my, you know, I've seen guys who said, you know, that he was lying there, and I, we were told to retreat, and I retreated, and if only I hadn't, you know, he'd be alive. And so sometimes you can use hypnosis to say, well, take a look at him, you know, are his feet pointing down or up? You know, because if they're pointing

• 1:00:03Speaker 02

  down, he's probably lying on his face dead. And if they're up or moving, then maybe he was alive, you know? So examine the question, don't make an assumption that you could have saved him and you didn't.

• 1:00:14Jen Cohen?

  So, but that still doesn't really answer my question. So is it just because we're all wired differently, I guess, would be the most basic answer, right? Like, why you would be stuck in trauma, why I wouldn't be? Is that it's basically based on our trauma from our past, our family trauma, abuse, whatever, and how we process it? Is that more or less what you're saying?

• 1:00:36Speaker 02

  About why we get trauma later.

• 1:00:39Jen Cohen?

  Well, like, why is it, like, you and I could have the same situation happen?

• 1:00:42Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:00:43Jen Cohen?

  Okay, but I go on and like, move past it, and you're stuck in the trauma and trapped in it, and it kind of just takes over your entire life?

• 1:00:52Speaker 02

  Well, there can be lots of reasons. It can have to do with an earlier experience of trauma, mistreatment. It's like, oh, here it goes again, you know, and blaming yourself for something that you weren't responsible.

• 1:01:02Jen Cohen?

  Self-blame.

• 1:01:03Speaker 02

  Self-blame that's inappropriate is part of it. There are some people who are just tougher and see it differently. Don't get so caught up in it, you know, like you, less hypnotizable, just kind of, oh, yeah, that happened, you know, okay.

• 1:01:15Jen Cohen?

  So is life easier or harder for people like that, who are more, like, I guess, tough, mentally tough?

• 1:01:24Speaker 02

  I think it can be either. I think they can either handle stress and trauma and sort of see it in perspective, or they can fail to engage in situations where it might be a good idea to get more connected with it. And so I don't think there's any one answer to that. I think people are tougher than others. There's actually a genetic difference in people who are more hypnotizable. They actually have a different variant of a gene that metabolizes dopamine in the brain.

• 1:01:50Jen Cohen?

  Like, tell me about it.

• 1:01:51Speaker 02

  It's a gene called catecholomethyltransferase, COMT.

• 1:01:55Jen Cohen?

  In layman's terms for us.

• 1:01:57Speaker 02

  In layman's terms.

• 1:01:58Jen Cohen?

  Dum-dum, sure.

• 1:01:59Speaker 02

  It's just, so this gene metabolizes dopamine, which is a major neurotransmitter in the brain, brain activity, particularly in the frontal cortex and the basal ganglia, as in many important parts of the brain. And if you have a variant, methionine valine, the speed with which you metabolize dopamine is in the middle, it's about right. With one kind, and with another variant, you metabolize it too quickly and you reduce the levels too much. And with another, you don't produce enough to begin with. So it turns out that people with that nice, moderate level of metabolizing dopamine have brains that are

• 1:02:37Speaker 02

  more likely to allow you to experience hypnosis. So that's part of it. The other part of why you're hypnotizable and why you aren't is one of two, either good or bad things. If you have parents, if you had imaginative involvements as a child, because most children are very hypnotizable. All eight-year-olds are in trances all the time, they don't hear you when you call them in for dinner, you know, they're.

• 1:02:59Jen Cohen?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:00Speaker 02

  And when you, as a teenager, you begin to think about things more analytically, and you tend to become somewhat less hypnotizable. But once you're in your twenties, your hypnotizability is the same as it's gonna be when you're in your fifties. It just doesn't change very much at all.

• 1:03:17Jen Cohen?

  Right.

• 1:03:17Speaker 02

  So people who have imaginative involvements as children tend to wind up being more hypnotizable as adults. But unfortunately, also, kids who have been abused are more hypnotizable. And because they'll like, they'll use it, you know? I had a patient who was sexually abused by her father and his friends, and she said, I would just go to a mountain meadow full of wildflowers. I just went, so they got my body, they haven't got me.

• 1:03:39Jen Cohen?

  Right.

• 1:03:40Speaker 02

  So that capacity to dissociate can be protective, too.

• 1:03:44Jen Cohen?

  Absolutely. Is there anything specific that I didn't ask you that is important that people should know?

• 1:03:51Speaker 02

  Well, I'd say, why not give Reverie a try?

• 1:03:54Jen Cohen?

  You've said that a hundred times. People are gonna think this was a sponsored app, uh, uh, episode. It wasn't, by the way. He just was talking about Reverie.

• 1:04:02Speaker 02

  I, but I'll tell you, I'll tell you why. I, I was thinking at this point in my career, you know, I'm, there's only so many more people I can do hypnosis with personally. I know now how helpful it can be. I know it can help people with stress and pain and habit problems and getting to sleep and getting back to sleep. And I wouldn't rest comfortably, not knowing I'd done everything I could to make this available to everybody. And, you know, there, there are a lot-

• 1:04:31Jen Cohen?

  Who'd you do it with?

• 1:04:32Speaker 02

  Ariel Poller is a wonderful guy who went to Stanford Business School, MIT undergrad. I started a number of, he does startups, um, uh, and, uh, he came up to me after I gave a talk about five years ago at Stanford on hypnosis. And he said, we remember this differently. My memory is that he came up to me and said, hey, would you like to build a Reverie app, build a hypnosis app, you know? And I said, sure, that's a cool idea. Let's do it. Uh, he thinks that I came to him and said, would you help me start a Reverie? I don't know which it is, but in any event, he has helped us start this company. We have seven people working with us. They're terrific, hardworking, bright people.

• 1:05:17Speaker 02

  And, um, we just thought if we can make this widely available, we can help so many more people than I've been able to in my life.

• 1:05:24Jen Cohen?

  I'll, I'll check it out. Do I just go download it?

• 1:05:27Speaker 02

  Please do. You can download it from the App Store, Google Play.

• 1:05:29Jen Cohen?

  Okay.

• 1:05:30Speaker 02

  Uh, and I'd love to know what you think about it because-

• 1:05:33Jen Cohen?

  Well, I'm not very hypnotizable.

• 1:05:36Speaker 02

  But see, just see what it feels like to you because there are some ways to approach things-

• 1:05:40Jen Cohen?

  Okay.

• 1:05:41Speaker 02

  That might help you, even though you're not hypnotized.

• 1:05:42Jen Cohen?

  Maybe it'll be easier when there's not like people around me or something.

• 1:05:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, all these people watching us.

• 1:05:48Jen Cohen?

  Yeah, or like a camera or whatever, right?

• 1:05:50Speaker 02

  That could be, but, um, I, I suspect, Jim, what we've said, that you're on the, you're on the low side, you know, you, you're somewhat, but not very hypnotizable. But try it out because our studies show that even people who are on the low side of hypnotizability get some benefit because of the way we approach problems.

• 1:06:07Jen Cohen?

  Okay.

• 1:06:07Speaker 02

  We said, focus on what you're for. Find a way to resolve this problem that's an affirmation, not a struggle.

• 1:06:14Jen Cohen?

  Can I ask you a question? It sounds, kind of maybe sounds weird or personal, but I'm so impressed that you have a practice and you've been doing this for how many years? Forty-five years?

• 1:06:21Speaker 02

  Fifty.

• 1:06:22Jen Cohen?

  Fifty? How old are you?

• 1:06:23Speaker 02

  I'm eighty.

• 1:06:25Jen Cohen?

  And you're still practicing and doing all of the things?

• 1:06:28Speaker 02

  If you keep practicing, you'll get it right sometime.

• 1:06:33Speaker 02

  I, I love my work, you know, I love what I'm doing. I love helping people.

• 1:06:37Jen Cohen?

  Yeah, and by the way, it keeps you like, like youthful and young, you know? There's a purpose behind it. I'm, I'm impressed. So you flew all the way here?

• 1:06:46Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:06:46Jen Cohen?

  I love it. Just for the podcast.

• 1:06:48Speaker 02

  Sure. Well, it was faster than walking.

• 1:06:50Jen Cohen?

  Yeah. That's true. Um, where else can people find more about what you, all your, I guess they can read all of your papers?

• 1:06:59Speaker 02

  Yeah, we have papers, um-

• 1:07:01Jen Cohen?

  And books?

• 1:07:01Speaker 02

  And books.

• 1:07:03Jen Cohen?

  Do you write those, like, I mean, no, no, no. Do you, you're, when was the last time you wrote a book?

• 1:07:08Speaker 02

  That was probably about eight or nine years ago was the last one.

• 1:07:12Jen Cohen?

  Do you work with Andrew Huberman at this?

• 1:07:13Speaker 02

  I do.

• 1:07:14Jen Cohen?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:14Speaker 02

  I do.

• 1:07:15Jen Cohen?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:15Speaker 02

  Yeah, he's a friend and I'll, I'll tell you, there's, if you want to kick, uh, a lot of times people we interview on podcasts ask me to see how hypnotizable they are.

• 1:07:24Jen Cohen?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:25Speaker 02

  And Andrew, you know, is a big, tough, smart guy.

• 1:07:30Speaker 02

  And on YouTube, they have my testing his hypnotizability from, from the show. And he's looking at his hand, you know, and he thought it was kind of, ah, come on, you know?

• 1:07:39Jen Cohen?

  Right.

• 1:07:40Speaker 02

  But he's looking at his hand and saying, what happened to my hand? I mean, he couldn't believe it.

• 1:07:44Jen Cohen?

  And he's hypnotizable.

• 1:07:45Speaker 02

  He's very hypnotizable. Yep, yep.

• 1:07:48Jen Cohen?

  Isn't that interesting?

• 1:07:49Speaker 02

  So it's fun. It's fun to see what the differences are, but he's very hypnotizable. Yeah.

• 1:07:53Jen Cohen?

  That's very funny. Well, I, I appreciate you coming on the show and, um-

• 1:07:58Speaker 02

  Delighted to do it.

• 1:07:59Jen Cohen?

  I'm definitely going to check out the app and I, I really, like, again, thank you for coming all the way here from San Francisco.

• 1:08:06Speaker 02

  You're welcome. It was my pleasure. Thanks for having me.

• 1:08:08Jen Cohen?

  Thank you. Goodbye, everyone.