Rewire Anxiety in Minutes? The Hypnosis Breakthrough with Dr. David Spiegel

Summary

Podcast Summary: "Rewire Anxiety in Minutes? The Hypnosis Breakthrough with Dr. David Spiegel"
Change Your Brain Every Day (March 2, 2026)
Hosts: Dr. Daniel Amen & Tana Amen
Guest: Dr. David Spiegel (Stanford Psychiatrist & Renowned Hypnotherapy Researcher)

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Episode Overview

This engaging episode dives deep into the science, practice, and misconceptions of clinical hypnosis—with world-renowned psychiatrist Dr. David Spiegel as the guide. Conversation focuses on the mind-body connection in healing, practical uses of hypnosis for anxiety, stress, pain, and habit change, and how self-hypnosis can enhance daily agency and well-being. The hosts share their personal and clinical experiences with hypnosis, address cultural and religious skepticism, and explore new digital tools like the Reverie app for accessible, evidence-based hypnotherapy.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Clinical Hypnosis: Dispelling Myths and Explaining Mechanisms

• Misconceptions & Mind Control Fears ([03:06]–[04:44])
  • Many see hypnosis as "mind control" or losing agency—Dr. Spiegel stresses it is actually about enhancing control and flexibility.
  • Dr. Spiegel:

    “You want people to be in a frame of mind where they can put aside their normal assumptions about who they are...suppressing activity in the posterior cingulate cortex...you’re not a brainless, just easily suggestible person. You’re one who’s open to trying out something different.” ([05:16])

  • It's less "suggestibility" and more "cognitive flexibility."
• Agency Under Hypnosis ([06:13]–[07:31])
  • Hypnosis does not make people do what they’d never do otherwise; it’s more akin to being absorbed in a movie or losing track of time while driving.
  • Dr. Spiegel:

    “If you like where it’s going, you can keep going. If you don’t, you can stop.” ([07:04])

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2. Hypnotizability: Genetics, Individual Differences, and Stability

• Spectrum of Experience ([08:26]–[11:47])
  • Individual response to hypnosis is genetic and relatively stable across life, much like IQ.
    • Highly hypnotizable people are “poets”—lose themselves entirely.
    • Others, like Tana Amen, notice the process but don’t become totally unaware.
    • Children are naturally highly hypnotizable; some retain this as adults.
  • Hypnotizability testing (brief induction) guides treatment.
  • Notable Study: Phil Zimbardo’s 25-year hypnotizability retest showed a .7 correlation.

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3. Hypnosis vs. Meditation

• Key Differences ([12:35]–[14:58])
  • Meditation is about being, open presence, and acceptance; hypnosis is about doing—using believed-in imagination to actively shift experience or performance.
  • With hypnosis, one changes how the body responds to internal stress (e.g., for athletes, pain, anxiety).
  • Dr. Spiegel:

    “With hypnosis, you’re dealing with your inner mental tension, not with your body allowing it to do what it needs to do.” ([12:45])

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4. Neurobiology: What’s Happening in the Brain

• Specific Brain Circuits ([14:46]–[17:03])
  • Hypnosis calms the default mode network (posterior cingulate), enhances prefrontal control, and quiets the internal critic.
  • Hypnosis and certain psychedelics (e.g., psilocybin) both suppress the posterior cingulate, but hypnosis does so without side effects.
  • Dr. Amen:

    “Hypnosis, at least in my experience, has zero side effects. Where psilocybin can have a whole bunch of side effects...We should try hypnosis first.” ([14:59])

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5. Clinical Applications & Digital Tools

• Major Uses of Hypnosis ([18:37]–[21:01])
  • Most effective for:
    • Stress and anxiety management
    • Pain control (“Forget the opioids. Use hypnosis.”)
    • Insomnia (self-hypnosis for falling back asleep)
    • Habit change (e.g., quitting smoking)
  • Dr. Spiegel’s app: Reverie ([21:01]–[23:29])
    • 8-9 interactive self-hypnosis modules (~10 min each)
    • Over a million downloads, large clinical trial (Nature Digital Medicine: 84,000 users saw average 15% reduction in stress per session)
    • Focus: “What are you for?” (Positive approach over negative commands)

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6. Performance & Sports

• Narrative Applications ([23:29]–[25:43])
  • Hypnosis enhances athletic performance by narrowing focus on the body and process—not external evaluation or outcome.
    • Example: Stanford swim team improved meet performance via self-hypnosis.
    • Personal stories (e.g., Tana’s black belt testing): visualization, selective attention, and a sense of agency are central.
• Dr. Spiegel:

  “With that narrowing of focus in hypnosis, you can really do that...You just put outside of awareness things that are going to be a distraction.” ([24:41])

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7. Natural Trance States

• Everyday Hypnosis ([25:47]–[27:21])
  • Driving, listening to music, watching movies—these are naturally occurring trances (hypnotic-like states).
  • The main neural finding: reduced dorsal anterior cingulate (salience network) activity, the “alarm system” of the brain.
  • Highly hypnotizable people have more GABA in this region, akin to the effect of anti-anxiety drugs but achieved naturally.

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8. Trauma, Agency, and Dissociation

• Powerful Clinical Stories ([29:32]–[31:07])
  • Hypnosis enables separating from shame and reprocessing traumatic memories with self-compassion, leading to profound changes in mood and self-perception.

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9. Medical System, Pain, and The Opioid Crisis

• Critique of Medication-Only Psychiatry ([31:07]–[36:30])
  • Dr. Amen and Dr. Spiegel lament the shift from whole-person psychiatry to “15-minute med checks.”
  • Opioid prescribing for pain—“a complete lie” that people wouldn’t get addicted if used for pain. Hypnosis was shown to effectively reduce pain medication needs post-surgery.
  • Dr. Spiegel:

    “People can learn to do this for themselves...We haven’t succeeded in killing a single person with hypnosis yet, despite using it with many thousands of people.” ([36:30])

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10. Childhood, Education, and Prevention

• Peak Hypnotizability in Children ([40:11]–[41:47])
  • Kids are especially open to hypnosis, suggesting a need for integrating self-hypnosis and agency-skills training in schools.
  • Story: Dr. Amen helps his step-daughter with a burn using hypnosis, relieving both pain and self-criticism.
  • Dr. Spiegel:

    “The problem with her finger was not so much the discomfort, but her reaction to it.” ([43:36])

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11. Social Support and Cancer Outcomes

• Landmark Study ([46:13]–[48:29])

  • Support groups with self-hypnosis nearly doubled the average survival time in women with breast cancer in a randomized trial.
  • Dr. Spiegel:

    “If I had a drug that did that, you know, everybody’d be using it.” ([48:31])

• Meta-analysis: Social support increases cancer survival by 3.9 months—same as many standard chemotherapy drugs. ([50:00]–[50:50])

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12. Hypnosis Assessment and Practice

• The Eye Roll Test ([52:03]–[54:27])
  • Quick clinical assessment for hypnotizability: have a patient look up and close their eyes; degree of sclera visibility correlates with hypnotizability.
• Everyday Self-Hypnosis ([55:36]–[57:31])
  • Acts like visualizing warmth when cold, or reframing perception in pain or stress, are forms of self-hypnosis.
  • Key result: Regular practice increases sense of agency—shifting from “the world happening to me” to “I can shape my response.”

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13. Advanced Techniques—Agency, Dissociation, and Trauma

• Dissociation in Coping and DID ([62:12]–[68:35])
  • Watching one’s experience from the outside, “stepping out of the picture,” is spontaneous dissociation and relates to self-hypnosis.
  • DID explained: not “multiple personalities” but fragmentation of identity—a defensive adaptation to trauma.
  • Diagnostic delays (“disease of hiddenness”), frequent misdiagnosis as borderline.
  • Prevalence likely similar to schizophrenia (~1%).

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14. Religion, Culture, and Community Concerns

• Addressing Faith-Based Anxiety About Hypnosis ([69:34]–[71:13])
  • Dr. Amen notes never seeing negative spiritual experiences in 45 years of using hypnosis.
  • Catholic Church approved hypnosis as medical treatment in 1957; AMA followed in 1961.

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15. Hypnosis in Childbirth and Surgery

• Powerful Anecdotes & Evidence ([71:13]–[73:04])
  • Dr. Spiegel’s wife gave birth to two children with self-hypnosis anesthesia.
  • Randomized trials show hypnosis rivals medical anesthesia for certain procedures.

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16. Tips for Daily Hypnotic Practice

• Guided Suggestions ([58:45]–[61:10])
  • Use imagery (body floating in a lake, bath, etc.) to calm the body for sleep/stress.
  • Split-screen technique: visualize the problem on one side, actionable step on the other to build agency.
  • Dr. Spiegel:

    “You can’t control all the other things you’re worried about, but you can control how your body reacts to it.” ([58:45])

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

1. "Try it. You'll like it." – Dr. David Spiegel ([04:38])
2. “It's not mind control; it’s mind flexibility.” – Dr. Spiegel ([05:16])
3. “You’re not a brainless, just easily suggestible person. You’re one who’s open to trying out something different.” – Dr. Spiegel ([05:16])
4. "If you like where it’s going, you can keep going. If you don’t, you can stop.” – Dr. David Spiegel ([07:04])
5. "Hypnosis has been called believed-in imagination, but it's about more about doing than about being." – Dr. Spiegel ([12:45])
6. "You saw that with this wonderful girl...she just wanted to show what it’s like. That was so different from all the other skaters..." – Dr. Spiegel ([13:35])
7. "Forget the opioids. Use hypnosis for pain control." – Dr. Spiegel ([19:07])
8. “You don't lose control, you gain it.” – Dr. Spiegel ([73:55] summary line)
9. Dr. Amen on religious concerns: "In 45 years...the devil has never shown up." ([69:49])
10. Dr. Spiegel: "If I had a drug that did that, everybody’d be using it." (on social support & cancer outcomes) ([48:31])

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Important Timestamps

• [00:00] Hypnosis in surgery: Reduces pain and anxiety
• [03:06] Myths & mind control fears explained
• [05:16] Cognitive flexibility, not suggestibility, in hypnosis
• [08:26] Genes, stability, and variability in hypnotizability
• [12:35] Hypnosis vs. meditation
• [14:46] Neurological circuits changed by hypnosis
• [18:37] Common clinical applications (stress, pain, insomnia, habits)
• [21:01] The Reverie app: Scope, science, and practical self-hypnosis
• [23:29] Athletic performance and focused self-hypnosis
• [25:47] Hypnosis as natural state—trance in daily life
• [29:32] Trauma/agency case study: Overcoming shame with hypnosis
• [31:07] Psychiatry’s move toward medication over therapy
• [36:05] Average 15% stress reduction with Reverie (study on 84,000 people)
• [40:11] Hypnosis and hypnotizability in children
• [46:13] Breast cancer support group study: longer survival with self-hypnosis and group therapy
• [52:03] The eye roll test and rapid hypnotizability assessment
• [58:45] Everyday hypnotic practices for sleep/stress
• [62:12] Dissociation, DID, and trauma
• [69:34] Clarifying hypnosis for religious communities
• [71:13] Hypnosis in childbirth (personal stories & trials)
• [73:12] How to find Dr. Spiegel and the Reverie app

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Practical Takeaways for Listeners

• Hypnosis is a natural, empowering, and scientifically validated tool: It's not about surrendering control, but enhancing your ability to manage stress, pain, habits, insomnia, and performance.
• Anyone can learn self-hypnosis: Through apps (e.g., Reverie), guided imagery, or simple focused exercises, you can make hypnosis part of your daily wellness toolkit.
• Not everyone is equally hypnotizable: Genetics and early life imaginative play play a role, but most people fall somewhere in the mid-range and can benefit.
• Clinical (and everyday) hypnosis is safe: It carries virtually no risks and should be demystified within medicine and society, including among faith-based communities.

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For more, download the Reverie app or check out Dr. Spiegel’s writings and resources.

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Summary prepared for:
Change Your Brain Every Day podcast audience
Missed the episode? Use this summary for actionable insights, science updates, and inspiration to explore hypnosis in your own health and healing journey.

Transcript

[Dr. David Spiegel]

During acute surgical procedures, if you taught people self hypnosis, their pain reduced to like 10 or 15% left, whereas it was 60% as high. In the people who were just getting medication, getting opioids on half the opioids the hypnosis group had far less pain and far less anxiety.

[Daniel Amen]

David Spiegel is a Stanford psychiatrist who

[Co-host or Interviewer (possibly a black belt martial artist)]

has spent his career unlocking the neurobiology of therapeutic hypnosis.

[Dr. David Spiegel]

Today he explores the mind body connection

[Co-host or Interviewer (possibly a black belt martial artist)]

to show us how hypnosis is used in clinical healing.

[Dr. David Spiegel]

With hypnosis, the more stressed you get, the less control you have over your body. That's what you need for this. You're dealing with your inner mental tension, not with your body allowing it to do what it needs to do.

[Daniel Amen]

What are some daily hypnotic practices people can just put in their lives to make their day better?

[Dr. David Spiegel]

What are the daily things we can do? Well,

[Daniel Amen]

every day you are making your brain better or you are making it worse. Stay with us to learn how you can change your brain brain for the better. Every day your brain matters. Amen. Clinics helps people with brain scans and targeted treatment across 11 cities. Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, DC, Miami, New York, Seattle, Scottsdale, Los Angeles, Orange County, California and San Francisco. Learn more at amenclinics.com Tann and I are so excited to have Dr. David Spiegel with us who is a professor and Associate Chair of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University. Dr. Spiegel is one of the world's most respected and published experts in the field of hypnotherapy. He's also the director of Stanford center on Stress at and Health and the center for Integrative Medicine. You can already see he and I have so much in common. His contributions encompass 13 books, 445 scientific journal articles, 175 book chapters spanning hypnosis, psychosocial oncology, stress, physiology, trauma, so many different things. When his team reached out, I actually saw the email and went, yes, we would love to have him on the podcast. I don't talk about it much on this podcast, but hypnosis was a huge part of my early career and Dr. Hal Wayne was my mentor at Walter Reed, who was actually trained by David's father, who was one of the world's most most famous hypnotist hypotherapist.

[Co-host or Interviewer (possibly a black belt martial artist)]

So welcome, welcome. So thank you.

[Dr. David Spiegel]

Thank you both. Daniel.

[Co-host or Interviewer (possibly a black belt martial artist)]

It's really fun.

[Dr. David Spiegel]

Honored to be here.

[Daniel Amen]

And so there's so many myths and misconceptions about hypnosis, like I can't be hypnotized, mind Control. I'll lose control.

[Co-host or Interviewer (possibly a black belt martial artist)]

Especially amongst, like, religious communities and Christian communities. I know they're afraid of the mind control aspect, so I would love to hear your. Your take that.

[Daniel Amen]

Well. And I was actually. I went to medical school at Oral

[Dr. David Spiegel]

Roberts University, and I went to Loma

[Daniel Amen]

School, and Stan Wallace, who was the chairman of the department of psychiatry, hypnotized us all one day. And he said, this is a tool that can help so many people. Now. What was it like to be raised by one of the world's most famous hypnotherapists?

[Dr. David Spiegel]

I have no idea. It was, you know, life was very interesting. You know, the dinner table conversation was fascina. I got to watch him make videos of patients who had spontaneous pseudo seizures, and he would treat them with hypnosis. And I got to watch that.

[Co-host or Interviewer (possibly a black belt martial artist)]

Wow.

[Dr. David Spiegel]

So the discussions were really interesting, and I was intrigued and decided I would try it for myself when I got to that age. And so here I am. It's sort of a genetic illness in the family, you know, I had. My parents were both psychiatrists and psychoanalysts. They told me I was free to be any kind of psychiatrist I wanted to be.

[Co-host or Interviewer (possibly a black belt martial artist)]

I love that.

[Dr. David Spiegel]

Here I am.

[Co-host or Interviewer (possibly a black belt martial artist)]

I love that. So what do you say about. To people who talk about mind control?

[Dr. David Spiegel]

I say, try it. You'll like it, you know.

[Co-host or Interviewer (possibly a black belt martial artist)]

Well, I happen to love it. I'm just curious how you would answer it.

[Dr. David Spiegel]

Here's the thing. Hypnosis, you know, it used to be thought of as being composed of three things. Absorption, intense absorption in something so that you. It's like looking through the telephoto lens of a camera. What you see, you see with great detail. But to do that, you have to be less aware of context. So that's the dissociation part. You put outside of awareness. Things would ordinarily be in awareness. The third part is the most misunderstood one. It's suggestibility is what it's called. And that's not what it is. It's cognitive flexibility.

[Co-host or Interviewer (possibly a black belt martial artist)]

Oh.

[Dr. David Spiegel]

And so what's really so, you know, in these horrible stage shows, which I detest, you see the football coach dancing around like a ballerina. I don't like making fools out of people anyway, especially with hypnosis. But there is a point, all right? He's able to try out being different. He's not thinking about the ribbing. He's going to get in the locker room on Monday. He's just thinking, gee, what would it be like if I dance like a ballerina? You want people to be in A frame of mind where they can put aside their normal assumptions about who they are, what they are and what they should be. And we know now what's going on in the brain when that happens. Suppressing activity in the posterior cingulate cortex in the default mode network, you can just suspend your usual awareness of who you are and what you are. So you're not a sort of brainless, just easily suggestible person. You're one who's open to trying out something different.

[Co-host or Interviewer (possibly a black belt martial artist)]

Or would you. Or do things that you don't want to do? Or is it. I mean, how does that work?

[Daniel Amen]

Can people manipulate you to do something that you wouldn't normally do or that

[Co-host or Interviewer (possibly a black belt martial artist)]

you would normally say, absolutely not to?

[Daniel Amen]

Boy, we're just going after the big questions.

[Dr. David Spiegel]

You are, you are. Look, we're living in 2026 in the United States. Can people manipulate you? Yes. Does it have anything to do with hypnosis?

[Co-host or Interviewer (possibly a black belt martial artist)]

Well, I feel like they use NLP and stuff like that on, well, with advertising all the time.

[Dr. David Spiegel]

I think the point is this. We're social creatures. We are influenced by other people's opinions and attitudes and ways that they try to push us or manipulate us. But it's not particularly because of hypnosis. It's because you can get absorbed in an idea and try out being different and see what it feels like. Are you able to say, no, I know this is one step too far. I'm not going there. Yes, you are. You're just less likely to consider it. It's like being so caught up in a good movie that you forget you're watching a movie. You enter the imagined world and afterwards you think, you know, that was a kind of stupid premise and the actor wasn't that good, you know. But at the time you're in it, that's what it's like. You allow yourself to get immersed in an experience and if you like where it's going, you can keep going. If you don't, you can stop.

[Co-host or Interviewer (possibly a black belt martial artist)]

So when I. Because I love hypnosis and I've used it a lot for a lot of different things, and I think it's amazing. It's super helpful.

[Daniel Amen]

Actually. Made you a tape for your black belt test.

[Co-host or Interviewer (possibly a black belt martial artist)]

Yeah, because I was afraid.

[Daniel Amen]

So I'm always very nice to her. She has two black belts

[Dr. David Spiegel]

and she needs to keep you nice to her.

[Daniel Amen]

I'm going to keep her as a bodyguard. Always very nice to her. But she was very anxious.

[Co-host or Interviewer (possibly a black belt martial artist)]

I was very anxious about the test itself. And so he. He did some performance hypnosis with me and it was extremely helpful.

[Dr. David Spiegel]

Terrific.

[Co-host or Interviewer (possibly a black belt martial artist)]

I did it again for my second black belt and it was extremely helpful. So I really like it. But I have never had the experience when I've used hypnosis or had someone hypnotize me where I was completely unaware of everything. My mother has had that experience where she was just like very in it. I've never felt like I don't know what's happening around me.

[Dr. David Spiegel]

Well, there are different degrees of hypnotizability. Some people really are not hypnotizable and it's basically a genetic trait. People who are heterozygous with the thymine gene in the dopamine pathway are more likely to be more hypnotizable than those who are zygotes for methionine or homozygous for valine. So if you're, if you've got methionine and valine, you're more hypnotizable. We've actually developed a way of testing that at the bedside with a drop of blood. We can tell. Now there are historical things you can notice too, people who are raised with a lot of imaginative involvements as kids because most children are highly hypnotizable. Eight year olds are in trances all the time. You call them in for dinner, they don't hear you, they're doing their thing. Work and play is all the same thing for a child. It's a shame we make them into adults where it becomes work. But some retain that high hypnotizability throughout life. Some lose some or all of it as they become young adults. And you may remember Phil Zimbardo, he was the author of the prison experiment at Stanford. He did a 25 year follow up on his psych one. Students blindly retested their hypnotizability. 25 years later there was a 0.7 test retest correlation on blind retesting. That's as stable as IQ is going to be over a 25 year interval. So it becomes a stable trait. So I'm guessing you're more in the mid range in hypnotizability where you have the experience but then you step back and think about it and then you can get into it again. People who just lose themselves and we call them the poets, they're just in it.

[Co-host or Interviewer (possibly a black belt martial artist)]

That's my.

[Dr. David Spiegel]

Yeah, that's your mom. And there are some people that don't know what you're talking about. I had a patient who came in, he'd had a knee injury seven years. He's suffering with this. He tried everything. He wanted help with pain control. Hypnotizability was zero. And I had asked him, I asked a really tough question before. Are you right or left handed? That's usually not hard. He said, I'm right handed, but I try to make sure my left hand gets an opportunity to do just everything that my right hand can do. And I thought, this guy is all into his head and not into the experience. And his score was a zero when I measured his hypnotizability. And here's the funny thing. You think, oh, well, he walked out angry. He didn't. I said, you know what? I think your problem is not how bad your knee is now. It's how much you worry about it. If it's anything less than perfectly normal, you're miserable. And he said, you know, thank you, doc. You're the first of, like, God knows how many doctors I've seen who said that. And I think you're right. So I said, just stop worrying about whatever discomfort you have and you'll be fine. On the other hand, just the patient before was someone who was a 9 out of 10 on the hip, had migraine headaches forever, was a meditator 10 years wouldn't get better. I taught her to just imagine cool, tingly numbness, a pack of ice on her head, and it was gone. And she said, thank you for freeing me to use my intentionality. She was keeping herself from letting herself just lose herself in the experience. So there are these real differences. And it's not that patients, patients are resisting. It's not that doctors aren't good at inducing hypnosis. People differ in their ability.

[Co-host or Interviewer (possibly a black belt martial artist)]

Interesting.

[Dr. David Spiegel]

And I always start my treatment sessions with a measure of hypnotizability because it guides me. So how do you do that? How to do takes about six minutes. I just, I give them an opportunity to look up, close their eyes, take a deep breath. I tell them their hand will float up in the air if I pull it down, it will go right back up to the upright position. You'll find something pleasant and amusing about it later. When I touch your left, your elbow, your usual sensation and control will return and we can score. There are five items. Dissociation, the response to the suggestion for involuntary movement, cutoff signal, sense of floating, lightness or buoyancy, and loss of control of the hand. And you get two points for each of those five items. And that's your score. And it's very stable.

[Co-host or Interviewer (possibly a black belt martial artist)]

So what is the difference between, say, meditation and hypnosis? Like How? Tell me the difference.

[Dr. David Spiegel]

Let me meditate on that. No, the difference is this. Hypnosis has been called believed in imagination, but it's about more about doing than about being. Meditation is about being. You're trying to just be someone different. And you do that, you know, half an hour, twice a day. Open presence, body scan, compassion, those are all good things. But they're designed not to change a problem, but to change you to be different. Don't fight the problem. Just be open to it and see what happens. With hypnosis, you're saying, okay, you're stressed like you were before your test. The more stressed you get, the less control you have over your body. And that's what you need for this, because you're dealing with your inner mental tension, not with your body allowing it to do what it needs to do. And you saw that with this wonderful girl from Oakland who won two gold medals in ice skating, figure skating. She had quit. She started when she was 15. She won gold medals, and she said, I've had it. I'm not interested. She got banged into it, and she said, I don't care whether I win or lose. I love doing this, and I just want to show you what it's like. And that was so different from all the other skaters where you enjoyed it because she was enjoying it. You could just see it. And a lot of these others, who were very skilled, very highly trained, made some crucial mistake because they were too focused on what this all means. And that makes your body tense. It disconnects your brain from how you can better control your body. So a lot of what I teach people with for athletic training is to focus on just how you need to communicate with your muscles, with your body, and enjoying what you're doing, not focusing on the goal or what it means if you do it well or if you don't. Because if you do that, you're already off the top. So it's the chatter.

[Daniel Amen]

What you do is you calm down their posterior cingulate. So their posterior default part of it.

[Dr. David Spiegel]

Right.

[Daniel Amen]

Which is what psilocybin does, I think is so interesting.

[Dr. David Spiegel]

It is. I agree with you.

[Daniel Amen]

Hypnosis, at least in my experience, has zero side effects. Where psilocybin can have a whole bunch of side effects, you bet. And so before we go wholesale in this country to the psilocybin trip, we should try hypnosis first, because that's been my experience with imaging. We've actually imaged people. We do a study called Brain SPECT imaging. It calms down the posterior cingulate, but activates your prefrontal cortex.

[Dr. David Spiegel]

And in hypnosis, what we actually see, hypnosis is the more active your prefrontal cortex, particularly your left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, the less active the posterior cingulate is. So it. It literally, when you're engaged in hypnosis, you're inhibiting activity.

[Co-host or Interviewer (possibly a black belt martial artist)]

I'm beginning to think my meditation was actually self hypnosis, because I don't do the think of nothing thing, you know?

[Dr. David Spiegel]

You know, well, maybe that's what you're actually doing. You're sneaking in a little.

[Co-host or Interviewer (possibly a black belt martial artist)]

It actually really helps me to calm down when I can. But I visualize doing things with my. Yeah, and visualizing things.

[Dr. David Spiegel]

But that's, you know, the whole point is that if you are thinking about the goal or what people expect of you or what you need to do or what will happen if you succeed or fail, you're inhibiting activity in the prefrontal cortex. You're increasing activity in the salience network in the dorsal anterior cingulate and the insular cortex, which is there to help you worry about things. You know, you hear a loud noise at your salience network. It distracts you from your communication with the insula, which is something that. Prefrontal cortex and insula are highly interconnected in hypnosis. So you have better control over your body, especially if you're not distracted by your posterior cingulate, saying, you know, you screwed this up the last three times you did it, and your mother was always disappointed in you anyway. You know, I call it the my fault mode network. You distract yourself. There's a wonderful.

[Daniel Amen]

So the insular cortex goes up with the critic or goes down.

[Dr. David Spiegel]

What you get is not. You turn down the critic. You increase connectivity between the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and the insula. So you're saying just focus on how you want to relate to your body, what you want it to do, how it feels when you do it right. And you're not worrying about what your mother yelled at you.

[Daniel Amen]

You're just always. No mind is. So Julius Randle, the NBA all Star, did our podcast, and I have his scans before and after, and he always says he performs the best when he's not thinking.

[Dr. David Spiegel]

Yeah, exactly. Exactly. I've seen. I've seen some of these NBA players literally look up, close their eyes before they're going to do a foul shot, you know, and they just. They sort of exhale. There's a nice cyclic sigh, and then it just goes, you know, Steph Curry you know, he, how he does that I still don't know. But.

[Co-host or Interviewer (possibly a black belt martial artist)]

So are there medications or things that people take in their daily life, whether it be caffeine or certain medicines or that make them people, I guess the word is not suggestible, but make them more open to hypnosis. And are there things that make them less open to hypnosis?

[Dr. David Spiegel]

By and large there have been a few studies. There's nothing particularly if anything, if you're sort of down, a bit of a stimulant might help, but you can get disorganized too. And if you're very anxious, some anti anxiety drugs will get you into that range where you are more likely to be hypnotizable. But it doesn't work well enough that it's worth bothering with.

[Co-host or Interviewer (possibly a black belt martial artist)]

Okay,

[Daniel Amen]

so let's talk about what our listeners are thinking about. So both of us, all three of us think hypnosis can be an incredibly powerful tool. What are the common conditions you think it is most helpful for?

[Dr. David Spiegel]

Stress management? And I can tell you about a study we just published on that. Pain control. Forget the opioids. Use hypnosis for pain control. Insomnia. I have people, you know, I used to worry that maybe, you know, the recording, even though it's interactive and AI structured now so that you get hear me responding to your questions and all that, I used to think maybe it won't be as good as being in my office with me. And then I thought if you wake up at three in the morning, want to go back to sleep, you probably don't want me in your bedroom telling you what to do. And it's very helpful for people to get back to sleep. It's very helpful for habit control. The first study we did with the Reverie app was a technique that my father developed originally to help people stop smoking. Tell them three things, you know, you don't say, cigarettes will taste terrible. You know, I had my, my hypnosis teacher, Tom Hackett at Mass General did that. He would tell people, your cigarette will take tastes like horseshit. They light up and they go, oh, that's terrible. Thank you. He gets this urgent call from one of this patient he just treated and he said, my house smells terrible. Are you smoking? He said, no, I forgot to tell you that my wife smokes. So he had to hypnotize me. Only your cigarette. You know, forget it. What we tell people, you focus on what you're for. You know, hypnotists are great at saying the worst thing you can tell someone is don't think about purple elephants. Right. That's what we. So you say I want you to focus on three things for my body. Smoking's a poison. I need my body to live. I owe my body respect and protection. Would you ever put heated smoke full of tar and nicotine in your baby's lungs? No. Well, your body is as innocent as a baby. It has to take into it anything you put into it, even if it's damaged by it. So you focus on what you're for. And this means that the minute you make that decision, you can start feeling good about yourself. Not that you're depriving yourself, but that you're being a better parent.

[Co-host or Interviewer (possibly a black belt martial artist)]

So it's a reward. So now it's a reward instead of a punishment.

[Dr. David Spiegel]

So we found with the app for the first time.

[Daniel Amen]

So let's talk about the app because people don't know about it. So the app is called Reverie.

[Dr. David Spiegel]

Reverie. R E V E R I yes.

[Daniel Amen]

That there's eight or nine programs on the app. Stress management, pain control, sleep, habit control,

[Dr. David Spiegel]

focus for sports performance. Yes.

[Co-host or Interviewer (possibly a black belt martial artist)]

How long are the self gnosis?

[Dr. David Spiegel]

By and large, about 10 minutes.

[Co-host or Interviewer (possibly a black belt martial artist)]

So that's easy.

[Daniel Amen]

That's managed over a million downloads.

[Dr. David Spiegel]

Right? We have.

[Daniel Amen]

And you just published a study.

[Dr. David Spiegel]

Yes, we just published a study in Nature's Digital Medicine journal with 84,000 of our users and we teaching them the stress control exercise. And what we did and what I guess you probably did in preparing for your. For your black belt testing is you focus not on don't be afraid. You focus on helping your body because you can't. There's a lot of things about stress you cannot control, but the one thing you can is how your body reacts to stress. So you say, imagine your body floating in a bath, the lake, a hot tub, or floating in space and focus on the experience you want to have as you're doing whatever it is you want to be doing and how good it feels to connect to your body and get your body to do what you're hoping it will do. So it's, you know, Tiger woods did this with his golf game. Every shot he would rehearse the shot in his mind and then just go ahead and do it and to hell with everything else. You know, one of the big problems in golf is you have a lot of time just wandering around getting nervous. Right. You're not in action all the time. And we had the Stanford swim coach. Stanford has a fantastic women's swimming team. They're always, one or two of them are always in the Olympics. But he found, the coach found, he called me because they're swimming faster in practice than they do in meets. I don't understand that. And I said, well, I think I do because so I talked with the women and they said when they're in a meet, they're worried about what the women and the lames next to them are doing. And swimming is not a contact sport. It doesn't matter what they're doing. Golf isn't a contact sport. So what you want to do is focus on your relationship with your body. So we had them do self hypnosis. Imagine swimming your best race, but just how do you connect with your body? How do you guide your body? What are you sensitive to? And they started swimming faster in meets than they did in practice.

[Co-host or Interviewer (possibly a black belt martial artist)]

So it's really interesting you say that because I remember for my second black belt test, I practiced at a place that was sort of scary. The people there were scary. I thought of myself as sort of the middle aged token mom. And so when I was, the person I was working with at the time said, well, I would be scared too if that's how I saw myself compared to these guys that were, you know, really big and scary and whatever. So that was what I, what I worked on and when I. And I didn't really think about it till later, but when I went in that day for my test, I didn't see anyone. Like I want to tell you, when I first walked in, I did notice it. I noticed like people had come in from all over because of who I trained with and it was very intimidating. And then all of a sudden I felt myself just sort of go to this place and I didn't. I focused in on my master and I did not notice anyone. And I just thought about my body performing. And so, you know, I didn't see my fist going through a board. I saw it going through the wall behind the board. I didn't see, you know what I mean? But I just felt my body doing what it needed to do. And I did not even acknowledge I didn't hear what they were saying. I didn't think about, you know, anything else going on, but I never really thought about that, thought about that until just now, focused when you said that

[Dr. David Spiegel]

on what you're for. And that's what, with that narrowing of focus in hypnosis you can really do that. You know, we all have sensations in our legs touching the chairs right now, but hopefully you weren't even aware of it because I'm so interesting that you just didn't Pay attention to it. That's what the kind of thing you do in more. In more extreme ways in hypnosis, you just put outside of awareness, things that are going to be a distraction.

[Co-host or Interviewer (possibly a black belt martial artist)]

Yeah. I remember walking in there, and for the first time, I'd never had this thought before when I was practicing, I thought, there, I'm only leaving this dojo one of two ways. On a stretcher or with a black belt. And I'd never been that extreme, like, with that. Like, that was just. Like I was so single, focused. Like, that was just. That was it. Like, this is happening. This is how it's gonna go. And I just blocked everything else out.

[Dr. David Spiegel]

But the real issue, I mean, obviously you had to deal with an opponent, but what matters is how you're relating to your own body.

[Co-host or Interviewer (possibly a black belt martial artist)]

Right.

[Dr. David Spiegel]

And. And if you tighten up too much, then you're starting to give control to your opponent.

[Co-host or Interviewer (possibly a black belt martial artist)]

Yeah. And I didn't see myself for the first time. I saw myself just very strong and very, you know, and that's.

[Dr. David Spiegel]

That's what you need to do. And you did it.

[Co-host or Interviewer (possibly a black belt martial artist)]

Yeah.

[Dr. David Spiegel]

Congratulations.

[Co-host or Interviewer (possibly a black belt martial artist)]

Interesting.

[Daniel Amen]

So is hypnosis something done to you, or is it something you actively participate in?

[Dr. David Spiegel]

That's a much better way to put it. Yes. You actively participate in it. I'm teaching people how to do it. I don't hypnotize people. I show them how to hypnotize themselves. And that conceptually is what led me do something in starting reverie that 30 years ago when I was in training and doing this stuff, I would have been afraid to do. You know, just turning it loose. You know that there actually were laws 100 years ago against windshield wipers and automobiles when they started. You know why? Because the people thought that people would get hypnotized watching.

[Co-host or Interviewer (possibly a black belt martial artist)]

Oh, interesting.

[Dr. David Spiegel]

The windshield.

[Co-host or Interviewer (possibly a black belt martial artist)]

That is so funny.

[Dr. David Spiegel]

Doesn't happen. Doesn't happen. But it is. It's something that you control within yourself.

[Co-host or Interviewer (possibly a black belt martial artist)]

But I mean, to some degree, don't we even get hypnotized by music? And by. I mean, to some degree, don't we sort of lose ourselves?

[Dr. David Spiegel]

But that's the way you lose yourself. Right. That means you're controlling the transaction.

[Co-host or Interviewer (possibly a black belt martial artist)]

Right.

[Dr. David Spiegel]

And you lose yourself. But you can find yourself if you want again.

[Co-host or Interviewer (possibly a black belt martial artist)]

So you're miss your exit or you do because you're in a trance.

[Daniel Amen]

It's a natural state.

[Dr. David Spiegel]

It is a natural state a lot.

[Daniel Amen]

Like if you go, like I explained to my patients, if you drive for a couple of hours and you miss like half an hour there, but you didn't get in an accident.

[Dr. David Spiegel]

That's exactly right.

[Daniel Amen]

You were in a hypnotic state or you saw a wonderful movie that was two and a half hours long, but it seemed like it went by in 20 minutes.

[Dr. David Spiegel]

That's, it's a natural state. Part of what happens, the, the single brain change that we saw that was most prominent. We took some high and low hypnotizable people in and out of hypnosis in the functional MRI scanner and the main thing we saw was reduced activity in the dorsal anterior cingulate. That's the major part of the Salience network and that's the alarm system in the brain. You hear a loud noise, that's your Salience network saying hey wait a minute, maybe there's something you gotta pay attention to. You turn down activity there so you're less worried. So like when you're driving down the freeway, you know that you've got a command system working and that if something bad starts to happen on the road, you'll do something about it, but you just want to focus on something else. So you're in a sort of anti anxiety state. And it's interesting that there's actually more gamma aminobutyric acid in the dorsal anterior cingulates of highly hypnotizable people than of low hypnotizable people.

[Daniel Amen]

Say that again.

[Dr. David Spiegel]

There's more GABA gamma aminobutyric acid in the dorsal anterior cingulate region of highly hypnotizable people.

[Co-host or Interviewer (possibly a black belt martial artist)]

Interesting.

[Daniel Amen]

So it can turn a down, just turn it down. Because that's also the part of the brain that detects errors.

[Dr. David Spiegel]

That's right. And that's exactly right.

[Daniel Amen]

You're and you are either detecting errors in your partner or in yourself. So people who have high anterior cingulate, dorsal anterior cingulate are critical.

[Dr. David Spiegel]

Right.

[Daniel Amen]

Often of themselves or of other people. And if they're hypnotizable, you can help them with that. You can help them with it, soothe

[Dr. David Spiegel]

that turn down activity there. And you know it's the same neurotransmitter that anti anxiety drugs that sedative hypnotics stimulate. So you know you can do your own pharmacologic treatment without going to the drugstore by just learning to mobilize activity in your anterior cingulate. It's self soothing. It calms you down.

[Co-host or Interviewer (possibly a black belt martial artist)]

What are some of your favorite stories of hypnosis? Like extreme things that people have been able to do or maybe not so extreme, but just really cool things.

[Dr. David Spiegel]

Well, I had a woman who came, who was born in another country and had been sexually abused by the landlord in their apartment. The family was afraid to allow, you know, to do anything about it because they, you know, were afraid they'd be evicted. She noticed as she grew up as a teenager that men would say things on the street that were horrible. She said, my body wasn't my own. And she came here, she worked in healthcare. She was doing okay, but was always chronically depressed. And she came to see me because she was so frustrated. She's been on antidepressants for 15 years. Helped some, but not a lot. And I said, I want you to go back and I want you to pretend you're your own mother in hypnosis, seeing yourself as that 12 year old girl after you had been assaulted. And she starts to cry. And I said, I want you to answer one question for me. Is this her fault? And she said no, I'm stroking her hair, I'm stroking her hair and she starts crying harder. And I said, well, I just want you to think about that. And she called me a week later and she said, my psychiatrist wants to know what you did to me because I'm not depressed anymore. My friends don't recognize me. And it's the dissociation here is the capacity to separate yourself enough from the sort of shame and guilt that any woman would feel, but particularly any child would feel after something like this happens and see it for what it is. And she, it changed her.

[Daniel Amen]

What if the key to overcoming your pain isn't just in your body, but in your brain? My new book, Change your Brain, Change your Pain offers strategies I've used with thousands of patients to break free from physical and emotional pain and reclaim focus, energy and peace. Healing is possible. And it starts with your brain. Pre order my new book now and receive special bonus gifts at Change youe brain brain changeyourpainbook.com so why I'm so unhappy with how what's happened to psychiatry? Like I'm so unhappy. So I trained at WALTER Reed in 1982 and we were really taught to be whole person physicians that yes, we did medication, but we also did therapy. I did a lot of hypnosis. And then in the early 1990s managed care took over psychiatry. And psychiatrists were so expensive they made us the prescribers. And I think the whole thing went to hell after that to the 15 minute med check. And this art of hypnosis and science is just not found in very many medical schools. Now what can we do, do you think, to bring that back? I mean, do you think that's accurate.

[Dr. David Spiegel]

Yeah, I think there was a period where we kind of went astray in the other direction of my mentor and colleague. Rav yalam, who's now 94 years old. Describe psychoanalysis as the process of adding insight to injury. And sometimes.

[Daniel Amen]

I love his books.

[Dr. David Spiegel]

Oh, aren't they wonderful loves.

[Daniel Amen]

Executioner is one of my favorite books.

[Dr. David Spiegel]

And he gives you the feeling what it's like to be a psychotherapist better than anything I've ever seen. But simply understanding, learning more about how you got there is not enough. You need to do more than that. So I think we need to be more active and directive and use the information we get from people to help them change their point of view about what happened and see themselves from a different point of view. But I agree with you that just pushing drugs. I get angry every time I think about this. Amphitheater D at Harvard Medical School, second year psychopharmacology course, and they're telling us about how to prescribe opioids. And I'm saying, I asked a question. I said, well, won't people get addicted if you keep them on these opioids? And they said, the professor said, no, if you're using it for pain control, you're not just a street junkie looking to score heroin. You won't get addicted because there's a difference. It's a complete lie, total lie. In fact, it's the opposite. That is because you get withdrawal, hyperalgesia when you've been on it. You get it after surgery for three days. That's okay. You can get off it, but you have a month's supply. That's the surgeons usually give people. And by then you are hooked. And 118,000Americans died of opioid overdoses last year alone.

[Co-host or Interviewer (possibly a black belt martial artist)]

In New York, I was a nurse when it was the fifth vital sign. And you had to treat pain because if you didn't, you would get written like, you would get in trouble for not treating pain. So you had to ask and you had to push it like it was.

[Dr. David Spiegel]

You were pushers. And I remember that. You know, at first blush, it seems like a good idea. You know, you measure their blood pressure, and sometimes we don't ask. We don't want to know how much pain people are in. And I could sort of get the idea, but it was clearly turning nurses and doctors into recruiters for drug companies. You know, that's what it was. And you look at Purdue Pharma and the catastrophe that, that, well, we stopped

[Co-host or Interviewer (possibly a black belt martial artist)]

doing anything else for pain.

[Dr. David Spiegel]

It was yeah, that's exactly right.

[Daniel Amen]

So Dr. Wayne, actually, when we were at Walter Reed, did a study on hypnotizing people before their surgery and then teaching them how to get in a hypnotic state afterwards, significantly cut amount of pain medication they were on. It's the better thing if you have a panic attack and you go to the emergency room, the emergency room doctor is not trained. Will give you a benzo, which you may never stop after.

[Dr. David Spiegel]

That's exactly right.

[Daniel Amen]

As opposed to a simple hypnotic trance or even doing breathing. Four seconds in, eight seconds out.

[Dr. David Spiegel]

Cyclic sighing can be so helpful.

[Daniel Amen]

Along with, of course, learning now to not believe every stupid thing you think can be so helpful.

[Dr. David Spiegel]

You're absolutely right. And it's a shame. And what we saw in this study of 84,000 people with Reverie is they got a pill like effect without the pill. So each time they did it, they got at least on average a 15% reduction in their stress levels. And that can be a big deal. You realize you have some control over what's going on. It's not just going to.

[Co-host or Interviewer (possibly a black belt martial artist)]

Well, and if you're decreasing cortisol, that alone is going to decrease pain over time.

[Dr. David Spiegel]

That's right. And so you can. It's like the pill, all the good sides of the pill, without the addiction risk, without the habituation, without the withdrawal intensification of symptoms. And so absolutely, people can learn to do this for themselves. And that's one reason it irritates me that people are so hostile or dismissive of hypnosis, because we haven't succeeded in killing a single person with hypnosis yet, despite using it with many thousands of people. You know, so I have a fun story.

[Daniel Amen]

So when I was. I have so many fun hypnosis stories. When I was an intern at Walter Reed, I had a patient with Parkinson's disease. And I loved him. He wrote a famous book called the Forefront War. He helped get Jews out of Germany during World War II. And he's just fascinating. And he's like, will you give me a sleeping pill? Like, everybody in the hospital, they want sleeping pills. And I'm like, I'll leave you in order, but can I hypnotize you first and see if that won't work? And I hypnotized him. But what I noticed before I suggested he goes to sleep, his Parkinsonian tremor went away in a trance. And then I put him to sleep. And I thought about that all night. And until rounds the next morning, I told the neurologist, Dr. Jabbari that I hypnotized Him. And his tremor went away while he was awake. And Dr. Jabbarri rolled his eyes at me, and you could just hear him, you know, his thoughts. Stupid psychiatric interns. Why do I have to deal with this? And I went, no, watch. And then in front of, like, eight people, I hypnotized him again. And his tremor went away.

[Dr. David Spiegel]

Yes.

[Daniel Amen]

And then we did an EEG on him later that day, put him in a trance. Dr. Wayne and Dr. Jabari and I. That was my first published paper.

[Dr. David Spiegel]

Congratulations.

[Daniel Amen]

That's so powerful.

[Dr. David Spiegel]

Look, you know, the brain controls every part of the body. You know, it's this little, you know, two and a half pound organ in a box up here. And it's communicating constantly, and it can do that. I have a videotape of a guy. They had a skull flap open. They were trying to locate where to insert an electrode to inhibit his movements. And he stopped halfway in the middle of the procedure. I can't stand this. You can't use general anesthesia. So the surgeon sends him to me and says, fix him so that he can get through the surgery. So I'm hypnotizing him, and I notice when I do it that this constant tremor in his hand stops. And I asked him if I could film it. I did. He said okay. He imagined he was in Hawaii with his two little girls, and one was running too close to the water, and it was hot and sweaty, and, you know, there were insects flying by. And he's in his whole scene. And he still had the procedure, but this time he tolerated the whole thing. And the worst part was that the anesthesiologist is sitting there. They had him there because they were sure I couldn't keep him calm enough to do it. And he's reading a golf magazine. You know, he wasn't even interested enough to look at what was happening. Happening while the guy's tremor was going down. That's exactly right. But why shouldn't it? You know, level of arousal alone, the degree of control, but also attempts to suppress movement can actually intensify it. And why shouldn't the brain continue to be able to regulate movements? Even if there's some basal ganglia problem? It doesn't mean that accounts for 100% of the problem. Do you think.

[Daniel Amen]

Think apps like Reverie can help this mental health epidemic in kids? Because you had said that. I'm also a child psychiatrist. And who is it? Karen. I'm trying to. She wrote a wonderful textbook on hypnosis in children. Ulnar oldness. Yes. The Hypnotizability peaks at 11.

[Dr. David Spiegel]

Yeah.

[Daniel Amen]

And given the mental health epidemic in children, partly because of COVID because Covid actually causes this inflammatory bomb to go off in the brain, and partly because of social media and the constant comparison and all of that, I think in schools we should teach kids skills like self hypnosis, like not believing every stupid thing you think, like diaphragmatic breathing.

[Dr. David Spiegel]

Right.

[Daniel Amen]

As a baseline of you have to learn math. It's like, why shouldn't you learn to manage your mind?

[Dr. David Spiegel]

Absolutely. I know of schools where there's like an imaginary screen on top of the blackboard, the upper left and the upper right corner. And if you want to think through a problem they have, the kids just go and stare at that space and see how if your brain tells you something. So they're doing things like that. You're absolutely right that children are extremely hypnotizable. Why not teach them to take better advantage of it?

[Co-host or Interviewer (possibly a black belt martial artist)]

Well, it seems to me like you'd have to work on the general fear that that sort of society and parents have or the misconceptions that they might have if you're going to be able to do that, because it seems like there's still a lot of misconceptions about it.

[Daniel Amen]

You should tell the story of Chloe.

[Co-host or Interviewer (possibly a black belt martial artist)]

Oh, with. When she burned her finger. My daughter was 7. She was 7 and she burned her finger pretty bad. It was 4th of July and she was put something. She was trying to make something for herself and she. Oh, maybe she was nine. Anyway, she burned herself. She poured like hot chocolate was melted on her finger. And so she was crying and she couldn't settle down. She was like screaming and crying. And I was trying to, like, soothe her and I was trying to put her to bed and I was trying to read to her and do all these things. I had, you know, ice on it. And we were trying to the whole thing and finally she was like, I need Daniel. And so Daniel comes in the room and he starts talking to her and he's got this very soothing voice. Anyways, but he starts talking to her and he starts telling her a story. And as he's telling her the story, he's. He's hypnotizing her and he's, you know, then you tell him. You can say what you said.

[Daniel Amen]

Well, and then I said, didn't everybody makes mistakes and you don't have.

[Co-host or Interviewer (possibly a black belt martial artist)]

Because she kept saying, I'm so stupid. She kept saying, I'm so stupid. I'm so stupid.

[Daniel Amen]

You'll drift nicely off to sleep. And in the morning Your hand will be fine. And she runs into our room, and then she went to sleep, and she runs into our room in the morning, and she goes, my hand doesn't hurt. And everybody makes mistakes.

[Dr. David Spiegel]

I love it. You got it. You got it. You know, it's the secondary loss that comes. It's not just that she felt her finger hurt, but she was ashamed and embarrassed and thought you'd be angry at her for.

[Co-host or Interviewer (possibly a black belt martial artist)]

She's always been very hard on herself.

[Dr. David Spiegel]

Yes, exactly. So you put your finger on the problem with her finger, which was not so much the discomfort, but her reaction to it. We did a study years ago in which I was told that there were these physical struggles with. With kids having to have voiding cystourethrograms. Kids grow up. Some of them have a ureter that goes horizontally into the side of the bladder. And so what happens when the bladder contracts is that it pushes the urine back up into the kidney, but the normal connection is at an angle. So when the bladder contracts, it just seals it off. So that can't happen. Some kids outgrow it, but if they don't, they have to have major surgery to have it corrected. So every year, you know, you're a little girl, your mom says, we're going out for ice cream. And you wind up in the hospital on this cold, hard bed, spreading your legs and sticking this thing into your urethra. And, you know, they have horrible struggles with the kids. And they asked me, is there anything you could do with hypnosis? So I trained the mothers to teach them to just go somewhere else, go to your friend's party, go to Disneyland, and use hypnosis with them. And on average, the procedures got done 17 minutes faster. And the techs who had the big problem with it said, it's so much easier when these kids do this. And I was proud. My late sister was a pediatrician, and I published an article in her journal, Pediatrics, showing that there was significantly reduced distress and procedure time teaching them self hypnosis.

[Co-host or Interviewer (possibly a black belt martial artist)]

Do you remember, Rabbi G. With kids kicking cancer? So one of my friends, he's also a black belt and. And teaches karate, but he would. Not only was he teaching these kids karate, his little girl died of cancer. And it just devastated him. So he started a foundation and started a whole mission with teaching kids with cancer to do karate because it was empowering to them. But when they were going through their very, very painful procedures, he was doing hypnosis with them, and he was having them visualize, and he was having them do a Very empowering. Very. They would see themselves in very, you know, positions of strength and doing their breathing and doing different things that they would do as a black belt.

[Dr. David Spiegel]

Exactly. Well, you know, it's. You're giving them a sense of being in active control of powerful not.

[Co-host or Interviewer (possibly a black belt martial artist)]

And they would do it without anesthesia and they would do it without pain medicine.

[Daniel Amen]

Some of your really important work is around cancer and social support. Talk about that.

[Dr. David Spiegel]

Well, Irv Yalom, we talked about before, recruited me to Stanford. I had an interest in philosophical aspects of psychiatry and psychotherapy. And he heard me and my father give a talk at an APA meeting and said, why don't you come out here and come work at Stanford? And I wound up doing it after a year or two. And he called me up one day in my first year as an assistant professor and said, david, I'm running a group of women who are dying of breast cancer. Would you like to co lead it with me? Now, when the world's authority on group psychotherapy asks you to co lead a group with them, you think a long time, yeah, you say, yes, I'll do it. And so you had me at hello. We. Right. And you know, we were warned that we would demoralize these women. They'd see one another die. How could you do this? How terrible it would be as though death is a novel concept to a cancer patient. And what we found was that they found a source of strength, that, you know what, this miserable experience I've gone through enables me to help other people with the same problem. So it gives them the sense of agency. They didn't feel as alone. They didn't feel ashamed about their symptoms or their fears, and they were able to face death. You know, one of them said that being in the group is like looking into the Grand Canyon when you're afraid of heights. You know, it'd be a disaster if you fell. But you feel better about yourself because you're able to look at it. I can't say I feel serene, but I can look at it. And so we ran these groups for years. It was a randomized controlled trial. 50 treatment women, 36 controls. We found that over the initial year, we significantly reduced their anxiety and depression and we reduced their pain. They had half the pain the control group did on the same and very low amounts of medications. And a few years later, we pub published those studies. And they're interesting, you know, but it was at a time when people thought if you just could visualize your white cells killing your cancer cells, you'd be Better. And I never believed that for a minute, but I thought, well, you know, we have an interesting study here. Let's see what happened with survival. And on average, the women randomized to the treatment group lived 18 months longer than the control group.

[Co-host or Interviewer (possibly a black belt martial artist)]

Interesting.

[Dr. David Spiegel]

And, you know, boy, we published that in the Lancet, got a lot of attention. But, you know, if I had a drug that did that, you know, you know, everybody'd be using.

[Co-host or Interviewer (possibly a black belt martial artist)]

Absolutely. You know, that'd be a big deal.

[Dr. David Spiegel]

And we published another article in the Lancet showing that during acute surgical procedures, if you taught people self hypnosis, their pain reduced to like 10 or 15% left, whereas it was 60% as high in the people who were just getting medication, getting opioids. And on half the opioids, the hypnosis group had far less pain and far less anxiety and got done 17 minutes quicker again. But people were very skeptical about this. And there were people in the psycho oncology field who felt that I was undermining the field by claiming that we could do things that we can't do. We don't treat the illness.

[Co-host or Interviewer (possibly a black belt martial artist)]

Giving people empowerment and giving them peace is. I don't understand.

[Daniel Amen]

Well, and someone always has to complain, no matter what you do. It's what. What I've learned when I was doing hypnosis, it's like some people would call you.

[Co-host or Interviewer (possibly a black belt martial artist)]

Well, you weren't forcing them into this.

[Daniel Amen]

Other people would say, you were amazing. You give them medicine. Some people call you a quack, and other people would say it's. It's like you. You do what you. What works.

[Co-host or Interviewer (possibly a black belt martial artist)]

Yeah, people want to do it, and

[Dr. David Spiegel]

they want to do it because ultimately

[Daniel Amen]

that's why we became doctors. Well, you're absolutely right to be helpful. What do you think about the eye roll?

[Dr. David Spiegel]

Was that. Before we get to the eye roll, though, let me just say one other thing. We have a paper in press now in a Nature Medicine, Psychology Communications. It's a very elaborate meta analysis of all the studies that have been done on the effects of social support on cancer survival. And the conclusion is that there is a small but significant effect on average people who are given social support live 3.9 months longer than control patients. And that may not sound like much, but you know what? That's the average survival advantage of cancer patients who get chemotherapy or radiotherapy or hormonal treatments. And so the paper is just coming out now.

[Co-host or Interviewer (possibly a black belt martial artist)]

That's interesting.

[Dr. David Spiegel]

People got very angry at me for claiming that and that we're antagonizing our colleagues follows. I don't care I am totally convinced that it makes a difference.

[Daniel Amen]

People become psychiatrists. Half of us are crazy, and the other half are just curious. I mean, I've been brutalized because I think, why are psychiatrists the only medical doctors who never look at the organ they treat? And it's like, we fly blind. And now 25% of the American adult population is on psychiatric drugs. Huge win for the pharmaceutical industry, huge loss for our psychiatry, because our meds don't cure anybody. Right? It's not a cure. It's not like an antibiotic. It's. Once you start, they change your brain to need them in order for you to be okay. And I use them when it's appropriate, but it's never the first thing I think about. We can do so much better. So let's go to the eye roll. So when I was. I took a whole month elective in hypnosis at UC Irvine when I was a medical student. And they taught it to me as a sign of hypnotizability. But then it sort of fell out of favor.

[Dr. David Spiegel]

It did. My father was the one who came up with this. And the way it happened was he had two, you know, a couple of extreme different cases. So one was one of these women who had these hysterical pseudo seizures. And he noticed, and I noticed when I watched him make the movie of her, that he asked her. He would ask her to look at a spot on the ceiling. And he noticed that as she did it, her irises disappeared. All you saw was a sclera that was. And she was profoundly hypnotizable. And he could teach her to bring on the seizures, but then control them, reduce them over time, less and less and less. And so the next Monday, he had this really obsessional businessman, and he had him look up at the ceiling. And the guy could not keep his eyes up while he did it. And there is something about dissociating the. Lowering the lid from lowering the eyes. You know, it's the third, fourth, and sixth cranial nerves that control eye movement. And you have to inhibit activity in one, but allow yourself to close your eyelids. And that's a difficult thing to do. And so he started looking at it among a lot of his patients. And it's a routine measurement in the hypnotic induction profile. And there's about a 0.4 correlation between measured hypnotizability in the eye roll. It isn't per se, the measure of hypnotizability, but if you're in the hospital and the surgeon says, I got this patient over here, you Think hypnosis would help? You can get a snapshot guess in about 10 seconds if you just have them look up and close their eyes.

[Co-host or Interviewer (possibly a black belt martial artist)]

So if they can roll their eyes.

[Daniel Amen]

Look at my finger.

[Dr. David Spiegel]

Yeah. And close, close. Now, while looking up close, keep looking up close. So you're. Yeah, it's hard, isn't it? Yeah, there you go. So you're like a three out of four. And that would make sense. Yeah, that's right. So it's a good way to get an initial guess. It's intriguing. And there is something, I mean, I think there is an old Zen practice called looking at the third eye. And normally when we close our eyelids, we're going to sleep. Right. So what's different is you're telling someone you're going to close your eyes, but you're going to keep thinking and doing things by keeping your eye up.

[Co-host or Interviewer (possibly a black belt martial artist)]

Interesting.

[Dr. David Spiegel]

And closing your eyes. So it's a message. Keep your eyes closed. But you're not going to sleep. You're going to be afraid.

[Co-host or Interviewer (possibly a black belt martial artist)]

The third eye, that's easy. Yeah, that part I can.

[Dr. David Spiegel]

Yeah.

[Daniel Amen]

So have you ever looked at QEEG or EEG with hypnosis?

[Dr. David Spiegel]

Yes, we have, and there's some studies that show you see more left frontal theta in people during hypnosis. The thing that we've noted most with eeg, we've done somatosensory EEG with pain control. And what we see is you take high hypnotizables and you tell them their hand, you give them shocks, electric shocks on the forearm. And you tell them in one condition, just it's there, haven't let it happen. In another, you say your hands in circulating ice water, cool, tingling and numb, filter their head out of the pain, the P100 disappears, it evaporates. So this means within a tenth of a second, the brain has already filtered out the first part of the pain stimulus. The P200 and the P300 are half as big. So the brain has made a decision that this sensation is not worth feeling too uncomfortable about. And it happens just like that. And as soon as you end the hypnotic experience, the P12 and 3 go back to normal.

[Co-host or Interviewer (possibly a black belt martial artist)]

So for the average person listening, I'm just curious if these types of things would be considered sort of self hypnosis. So, for example, you're in the snow.

[Dr. David Spiegel]

Snow.

[Co-host or Interviewer (possibly a black belt martial artist)]

You're freezing, your fingertips are cold. I often think of like, oh, I've. I'm dipping my fingers in warm water. And many people do that. Is that a form of self hypnosis?

[Dr. David Spiegel]

Yes, it is it's a mind body connection. You're telling your brain to experience things differently. You know, the brain's making choices all the times. It's very helpful, you know, because a lot of the discomfort of being injured or being in a scary situation like that is you're thinking, when the fingers feel bad, you're thinking, oh, my God, I'm going to lose my fingers if this keeps happening. So you get more anxious, you pay more attention to it. It gets worse. On the other hand, if you can say, I can warm them, I can imagine them warm and comfortable, you're not triggering all that extra anxiety about what this whole situation really means. And you know, from the kind of sports you do that people can get through really threatening situations and maintain control and not suffer that much if you're managing the way your mind body relationship is happening. And that's what hypnosis, so many things

[Co-host or Interviewer (possibly a black belt martial artist)]

we do throughout the day, I guess that's my point. Are sort of forms of self hypnosis. If we're telling our body to behave in a way that's not necessarily what we're doing.

[Daniel Amen]

And if you make it part of your everyday life, your sense of agency or control goes up as opposed to the world happening.

[Dr. David Spiegel]

To me, it's all about agency. And, you know, that's the story in trauma. You know that you're made. The worst thing about trauma isn't fear, it isn't pain. It's being made into an object.

[Co-host or Interviewer (possibly a black belt martial artist)]

Oh, for sure. And the lack of any sort of control.

[Dr. David Spiegel]

Lack of any control. That's it. So to the extent that you can use your brain to see how much control you have or to enhance your level of control.

[Co-host or Interviewer (possibly a black belt martial artist)]

Absolutely.

[Dr. David Spiegel]

You can change the experience. That's absolutely right. And you know, to some extent, we do it all. There are athletes who, you know, break their ankle, football players in a game and don't even notice it.

[Co-host or Interviewer (possibly a black belt martial artist)]

Until I broke my rib and didn't know it for several hours, I kept practicing.

[Dr. David Spiegel]

Yep.

[Co-host or Interviewer (possibly a black belt martial artist)]

Had no idea. Do you remember that? Yes, you do.

[Dr. David Spiegel]

You better remember that.

[Co-host or Interviewer (possibly a black belt martial artist)]

I used to come home so bruised

[Dr. David Spiegel]

up, you didn't even like, I'll bet.

[Co-host or Interviewer (possibly a black belt martial artist)]

But I didn't know for a couple of hours because I was like. And then all of a sudden when I left, I'm like, why does that hurt when I breathe? I had to postpone my test because I was like, why does that hurt when I breathe? The guy fell on me and I didn't even know it.

[Dr. David Spiegel]

Yep, that's right. You know, but you know that our major, you know, evolutionary advantage is this big brain that can modulate perception, modulate, make choices about activity. And why shouldn't we use it that way?

[Daniel Amen]

So along with Reverie that people can sign up for and listen to, what are some daily hypnotic practices people can just put in their lives to make their day better?

[Dr. David Spiegel]

Well, certainly. And if people want to sign up with Reverie, you can download from the App Store or Google Play or from the website www.reverie.com. and we welcome people giving it a try. The first week's free. See what it's like. I want as many people as possible to be able to use it. What are the daily things we can do? Well, for sleep, for example, and sleep and stress. What happens when you're trying to go to sleep and you can't? You're worried about things, your body gets tense, you know, you need mostly parasympathetic dominance to go to sleep. You have to slow your heart rate, reduce your respiratory rate. And the more anxious you get, the more you're doing. Sympathetic drive, and it keeps you. And then the more frustrated you get. God, I gotta get to sleep. I've gotta work tomorrow. You know, it just builds on itself. So instead of attacking what you're worried about, you just say, I want you to learn to change your relationship to your body. So imagine your body floating, safe and comfortable in a bath, a lake, a hot tub, or just floating in space. You can't control all the other things that you're worried about, but you can control how your body reacts to it. So your first task is taking better care of your body, helping your body. And then, by the way, you may find yourself waking up in the morning having gone to sleep. So with stress also, you know, I have people soothe their bodies. Put your body somewhere it feels comfortable. Picture an imaginary screen in your mind's eye. Might be a bath, a lake, a hot tub, floating in space on a desert island, whatever. And just see if you don't start to feel better just picturing that. And then divide the screen in half.

[Co-host or Interviewer (possibly a black belt martial artist)]

Half.

[Dr. David Spiegel]

Picture one thing that is troubling you. Just one, not five, not 20. And on the other side, picture one thing you could do about that. And it doesn't mean it's the best answer, the only answer, but you're giving yourself a sense of agency. You're saying, okay, I think here's what I could say to my boss when he yells at me in the office tomorrow morning, or whatever it is. And so people learn to master the psychological anxiety by starting with a physical reaction. To it because there's a snowball effect. You know, the more you notice your body tensing up, the more you think, oh my God, this must be really bad. And so you get more worried about it and then your body reacts to that. So instead you disconnect, you dissociate the mental concern from the physical one and start with the one you can do something about, which is your body.

[Daniel Amen]

Well, I love the split screen. So we have a brand new study coming out on hope. And what is hope? Hope it's tomorrow can be better and I have a role in it. It's agency.

[Dr. David Spiegel]

Yes.

[Daniel Amen]

On 6,408 patients. And wow, Significantly low activity with low hope in the insular cortex. It was the most striking finding. And in their prefrontal cortex. And we have another study we published on, on negativity bias. And the more negative you are, the lower activity in your frontal lobes you had so negativity and low hope. And both of those can be trained

[Dr. David Spiegel]

to be better, to be better. That's what so.

[Co-host or Interviewer (possibly a black belt martial artist)]

So one thing I learned many years ago, I'm just wondering if this is sort of a form of hypnosis as well. That was so helpful to me because I, a lot of anxiety grew up in this sort of crazy childhood.

[Daniel Amen]

Her a score is 8.

[Co-host or Interviewer (possibly a black belt martial artist)]

So sorry. But I learned a lot of skills because of it. So, you know, there's, there's the upside. Yeah, but I, one of the techniques I learned when I would get really stressed out about something and very anxious about things is to step outside of the picture. Like step outside of the environment I'm in and look at it like a movie and watch it as a movie and, or I can look at it as though it's someone else's story. And what, what advice, advice would I give that person but disconnect from it. And then, then I learned another to disconnect from that and watch the watcher. And so it was very weird feeling, but it taught me to sort of like, oh, it's one thing to watch the image, it's another thing to watch the watcher. And so it was very interesting the advice you would give those people. And suddenly I was not in it and it was very, very different feeling. So I don't know if that's a form of self hypnosis, but it was a very interesting way to handle things.

[Dr. David Spiegel]

It's, it's a certainly spontaneous dissociation and it's likely a form of hypnosis. You're dissociating already, you're focusing more Intently. So that means you're keeping outside of conscious awareness a lot of your somatic reactions. For example, so I know people who, as children were physically or sexually abused. They just go somewhere else. They go to. One of my patients said, I go to a mountain meadow full of wildfire flowers. And so he's got my body, but he hasn't got me. And you can literally disconnect from not just the somatic sensations, but from the humiliation and degradation that happens, too. Or more pathologically, one part will blame the other, say, well, you should have run away from home. You know, you shouldn't have let this happen. And that's the problem. You have this imagination of agency that you don't have as a child.

[Co-host or Interviewer (possibly a black belt martial artist)]

And you said, I didn't. I wasn't unaware of it. I'm still aware of it, but I now am in. I wasn't feeling the stress of it, if that makes sense. And I was able to give myself

[Daniel Amen]

dissociation like you talk. And we actually talked this morning about multiple personality disorder.

[Dr. David Spiegel]

Did you? Yeah.

[Daniel Amen]

Dissociative identity disorder.

[Dr. David Spiegel]

Right. I'm responsible for that name.

[Co-host or Interviewer (possibly a black belt martial artist)]

What is that? Right?

[Daniel Amen]

Oh, yeah.

[Dr. David Spiegel]

Because you don't really have multiple personalities. You know, we're all. You're different people at a party than you are talking to me, but you're aware of it. There's continuity of memory and experience, but. So there aren't. With multiple personalities, you don't really have 12 personalities. You have fragments of your identity. And the problem is the inability to integrate the identity. It's the fragmentation, not the proliferation of personality. So I felt that calling is a dissociation of identity. And it can be so profound. I had one patient with. Did I treat it for years, who. One day, one of the angry alters came up with a really scary suicide plan. And I said, well, you know, I'm going to have to talk to the other parts of you about this. And she said, you can't do that. And I said, really? Why not? She said, doctor patient confidentiality.

[Daniel Amen]

That is so funny.

[Co-host or Interviewer (possibly a black belt martial artist)]

That's actually funny.

[Dr. David Spiegel]

And we laughed. Okay. I got. Got it. I'm telling her, you know, but so.

[Daniel Amen]

So what do you think about that? Because a lot of people don't believe it. They think it's an excuse. I've seen it multiple times in my practice.

[Dr. David Spiegel]

Only once. But you think it's multiple? No, I. I have to. I. You know, I don't know what to say. I. I either get angry or I think they're pathetic. But there are people who part of it is there's a lot of defensiveness that you'll notice in the media now about sexual abuse, abusive children and people, you know, if it's true, it's pretty awful. And so the people who are accused of doing it don't like it. And if you're willing to torture a young child, you're willing to lie about what happened and say, you know, so. Or attack the people who are trying to help them. And so, you know, have there been cases where, you know, it may not have been what the child's name may be, but we know that, you know, child sexual abuse is a very common.

[Co-host or Interviewer (possibly a black belt martial artist)]

It's rampant.

[Dr. David Spiegel]

And as you can see if you read the newspapers. And so people will do anything to attack, you know, counterattack. It's called Darvo Deny attack, Reverse victim and offender. You know, you say, oh, no, it's you. You know, and we're seeing that all the time in the papers today.

[Co-host or Interviewer (possibly a black belt martial artist)]

Special place in hell for these people.

[Dr. David Spiegel]

Yeah, boy, I'm with you on that. That's right. And lock the door. So I don't believe for one minute I've treated lots of these people. I've diagnosed and seen a lot of them. It happens, and it's a defensive reaction to an environment that is threatening and damaging.

[Daniel Amen]

Do you think what percentage of people with DID are actually never diagnosed and misdiagnosed is borderline?

[Dr. David Spiegel]

Oh, that's right. Borderline. Borderline is a female patient the staff doesn't like, you know. Yeah, absolutely. I don't know how many. I know that there are studies done by good people that think that the actual prevalence rate of DID is 1%, which is the same as the prevalence rate of schizophrenia. You know, it's not that rare, and yet it's. Often it go. It's Richard Kluft, who's done a lot of very good work on multiple person did, calls it a disease of hiddenness. Because part of it is you're hiding inside you all these experiences you don't want people to see, you don't want to see it yourself. So the average time from initial symptom to diagnosis is six years with the disorder. And they have a delusion, right? There's a delusion, there's another little girl inside of her. They put them on antipsychotics. Well, that's great. That really helps.

[Co-host or Interviewer (possibly a black belt martial artist)]

Else.

[Dr. David Spiegel]

So it just dampens down what they can do and think, and it doesn't treat the problem. So, yeah, I think it's. It's often misdiagnosed or underdiagnosed.

[Daniel Amen]

And I imagine the higher your ACE score, the more you're likely to have that as a diagnosis.

[Dr. David Spiegel]

Absolutely. Well, that's what causes it.

[Daniel Amen]

We did a study on 75. We give everybody the ACE questionnaire. And so we published a paper for year before last on 7,500 patients.

[Dr. David Spiegel]

Wow.

[Daniel Amen]

Brain imaging paper. And it activates the emotional circuits in the brain. Very interesting.

[Dr. David Spiegel]

Amygdala and hippocampus. Yeah.

[Daniel Amen]

Single.

[Dr. David Spiegel]

It was up, I'll bet. Yeah, I'll bet. Yeah. So.

[Daniel Amen]

Well, this has just been so, so interesting. Fun.

[Co-host or Interviewer (possibly a black belt martial artist)]

Yeah. I have so many questions. I could keep going.

[Daniel Amen]

Asked you that we. I didn't.

[Dr. David Spiegel]

Well, I think, you know, if we can circle back to sort of where we started. The biggest misconception about hypnosis, the thing people fear the most is loss of control. And what we have all been talking about is ways that either spontaneously or with professional help, people enhance their control. That's how I feel over pain, stress, insomnia, habit problems. They feel they can't stop.

[Daniel Amen]

None of my patients have lost control. And we do a lot of work in the Christian community. And I have a new program that's. We have 77 church pilots going on now called the Amen.

[Dr. David Spiegel]

Whole four.

[Daniel Amen]

And in some Christian communities, they worry the devil's gonna show up or you're opening your mind to the devil. But in 45 years I've been doing it, the devil has never shown up.

[Dr. David Spiegel]

Up. I have a psychiatrist friend who is Cuban, and he was doing hypnosis in Cuba, pre communist era, when the Catholic Church had tremendous power and somebody got wind of what he was doing and just exactly what you said. And they called him into the College of Cardinals of Cuba to grill him on what he was doing.

[Co-host or Interviewer (possibly a black belt martial artist)]

Yeah, I. I just feel more focused, like I've never felt like anything. I actually.

[Daniel Amen]

Well, wasn't the Catholic Church approved hypnosis diagnosis of medical treatment in 1957?

[Dr. David Spiegel]

I think they did. Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

[Daniel Amen]

And the American Medical association was later. It was like 1961.

[Co-host or Interviewer (possibly a black belt martial artist)]

Oh, that's so interesting.

[Dr. David Spiegel]

And the APA has done it. I wrote the guidelines for it. But so he gets called in before the cardinals and they're grilling him about what a terrible, irreligious, horrible thing it is. And he says, don't you fellows read the Bible? And what the hell are you talking about?

[Daniel Amen]

About?

[Dr. David Spiegel]

And he said, well, when. When God put Adam to sleep to take a rib and make Eve, what do you think he was doing to Adam? He was hypnotizing him.

[Co-host or Interviewer (possibly a black belt martial artist)]

That's so interesting.

[Daniel Amen]

And hypnosis has been used for surgery.

[Dr. David Spiegel]

Oh, yeah.

[Daniel Amen]

And for anesthesia when there's no childbirth, for sure.

[Dr. David Spiegel]

My wife, who's a stem cell biology professor, is a member of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, just won the National Medal of Science at the end of Biden's term, she had both of our children with hypnosis as the anesthesia. Brilliant woman. She wanted to be in control of what happened. My son was 10 pounds. He was big, he was in a little distress and she wanted to control it and she did. I had her imagine she was floating in Lake Tahoe and she said, you know, I'm a pharmacology professor and this is after like six hours of labor. And she says, you know, there are drugs for this. You're floating in Lake Tahoe. Cool thing. And Daniel, ten pound was fine. Our daughter is only six and a half pounds, and we had breakfast before and lunch after and she did fine. So, yes, it can be done for all of that. And we've done randomized trials showing it works. You know, think about it. How have women given birth to people for the last hundred thousand years? You know, not with, you know, medication. You know, they've learned to do it and they do it and so. And they can do it. And there are some advantages to doing it. You know, one thing is women were not in this sort of supine position. They would be squatting, which allows gravity to help you, actually, and knowing when to push and when not to. You don't want to push too early, but when you do, then you have to relax. It's not pushing, it's relaxation. And you can. Women can learn that and make giving birth a much more pleasant experience. So, yeah, thank you so much.

[Co-host or Interviewer (possibly a black belt martial artist)]

Such a fascinating.

[Dr. David Spiegel]

Thank you. Well, thank you.

[Daniel Amen]

Change your brain every day. Hypnosis. Dr. David Spiegel. How can people learn more about you?

[Dr. David Spiegel]

They can go download the app, they can download Reverie. That would be the best thing. And I have discussions of what hypnosis is like. We have interactions with our users and we have a staff that help respond to people's questions and things like that. So that's probably the best way to do it. I mean, I have published a lot. I've got book I wrote with my father, Trans and Treatment Clinical Uses of Hypnosis. I don't want to get into the serious parts of it, but I would be delighted if people try it out, download reveries, see what it's like and learn how quickly and easily you can control your body. You don't lose control, you gain it.

[Amen University Promoter]

Are you excited to optimize your brain and help the brains of those you love love? Do you want to prevent or treat memory problems, anxiety or depression? Do you want to be happier? That's why I created Amen University to take what I've learned over the last 45 years and help you have a better brain, a better mind and a better body. You can take courses like our 30 day happiness check challenge, which was shown in research to increase happiness by 32% in just 30 days, or memory Rescue or Overcoming Anxiety, Depression, Trauma and Grief or Healing Add at home in 30 days and much more. We also have professional courses and courses for kids, including brain thrive by 25, which was found in independent research to decrease depression and improve self esteem. And as a special offer just for our listeners, you can save 20% on your next course. Visit amenuniversity.com and use the code podcast20

[Co-host or Interviewer (possibly a black belt martial artist)]

that's so interesting.

[Daniel Amen]

Love this so much. You're listening Watching Change your Brain every day. Leave us a comment Question a review we'd love if you'd subscribe. See you next time.