Dr. David Spiegel: Using Hypnosis to Enhance Mental & Physical Health & Performance
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Welcome to the huberman la podcast, where we discussed science and science space tools for everyday life. I'm Andrew huberman and i'm a professor of neurobiology automotive gy at stanford school of medicine. today.

My guest is doctor David speel. Doctor speaker is the associate chair of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at stanford university school of medicine. He is also the director of the stanford center on stress and health.

dr. Speel is both a researcher and the clinical meaning in a runs a laboratory that studies the brain and the body and neural mechanisms of how the brain body interact. And he sees patients as a psychiatrist at stanford. His work is incredibly unique in that IT bridges mind and body, but IT also has a particular focus on the clinical applications of his nosis.

As you learn today, have nosis is a unique brain state in which neuroplasticity the brain's ability to change in response to experience, maybe heightened and indeed, the use of clinical hit nosis by doctor, speaker and colleagues has been shown to improve symptoms of stress, chronic anxiety, chronic pain and various other illnesses, including many psychiatric illnesses and even outcomes in cancer. Today we discuss hip nosis in the context of what's called self fp nosis to distinguish ship from stage hip nosis. Many of you are probably familiar with stage hip nosis, which is really about a happiness getting a person to do things they would not otherwise do.

In contrast, clinical hip nosis and the use of hypnosis for the treatment of various elements of mining body is vastly different. IT involves getting people to change their brain state and to use that brain state as a portal to make adjustments in their brain and body and other aspects of their biology and psychology that benefit them. And it's been shown over and over again in studies by doctor speaker and colleagues that those changes can occur extremely quickly.

Now not everybody can be hnidy zed as readily as the next. And so today we also discuss a simple test developed by doctors speaker that can help you determine whether not you have a high, medium or low degree of what we call him notice ability. Doctor speaker is truly an expert in this area.

He has published over four hundred and eighty journal articles, one hundred and seventy books, chapters on hypnosis and on things like psychosocial oncology, which is the interaction of mining body in the treatment of cancer and cancer outcomes on stress, physiology, trauma and other aspects of psychotherapy. He's published thirteen books, so he's truly the world expert in hypnosis and clinical applications of hip nosis for minding body. I'm certain that in listening today's episode, you're going to learn a tremendous amount about how the brain and body interact, about various treatments for all sorts of common elements of mining body.

And you are going to get access to tools, in particular a tool that was developed by doctor speel, which is the revery APP R E V E R I. The revery APP is currently only available for apple, but will soon also be available for android. IT does Carry a nominal cost, but there is a seven day free trial.

If you'd like to try IT, we're providing a link in the shown notes, the revery APP especial in that IT is based on clinical studies and research done in the speaker lab at stanford. So unlike a lot of hypnosis apps out there and resources for hip nosis, IT was developed with clinical treatments in mind today. We also discussed the use of breath work, and i'm very fortunate that my research lab, tt stanford, has been collaborating very closely with doctor speaker in testing and developing specific breath work protocols to adjust mine in body for things like anxiety, improving mood and improving sleep.

Based on his incredible and unique expertise and the clarity with which doctor speaker communicates information, I anticipate that you will really enjoy today's episode and that you will come away from IT with a lot of actionable tools. Some of you might be curious what a clinical hip na secession looks like. And for that reason, we had doctor speaker hip notified me a clip of that hip.

No secession is going to be to to the huberman, a eclipse channel, which is available on youtube. Before we begin, i'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at stanford. IT is, however, part of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to consumer information about science and science related tools to the general public.

In keeping with that theme, i'd like to thank the sponsors of today's podcast. Our first sponsor is athletic Greens. Athletic Greens is in all in one vitamin mineral probiotic c drink. I've been taking athletic Greens since two thousand and twelve, so i'm delighted that their sponsor in the podcast, the reason I started taking athletic Greens and the reason I still take athletic gres once or twice a day is that IT helps me cover all of my basic nutritional need to make up for any deficiencies that I might have. In addition, IT has probiotics, which are vital for microbial on health.

I've done a couple of episodes now on the so called gut microbiome and the ways in which the microbiome interacts with your immune system, with your brain to regulate mood, and essentially with every biological system relevant to health throughout your brain and body. With related Greens, I get the vitals I need, the minerals I need and the probiotic to support my microbial. If you'd like to try athletic Greens, you can go to athletic Greens dot com slash huberman and claim a special offer.

We'll give you five free travel packs plus a year. Supply of vitamin three k two are ton of data now showing that vitamin three is essential for various aspects of our brain and body health. Even if we're getting a lot of sunshine, many of us are still efficient in vitamin d three.

And k two is also important because IT regulates things like cardigans, cute function, cause um in the body and so on. Again, go to athletic Greens dcom sash huberman to claim the special offer of the five free travel packs and the year supply of vitamin d three k two. Today's episode is also brought to us by element.

Element is an electoral like drink that has everything you need and nothing you don't. That means the exact ratios of electrolier ts are an element, and those are sodium, magnesium and potassium, but IT has no sugar. I talk many times before in this podcast about the key role of hydration and electoral lights for nerve cell function, neuron function, as well as the function of all the cells and all the tissues in organ systems of the body.

If we have sodium anisim in pattani and present in the proper ratio, all of those cells functioned properly and all our botley systems can be optimized. If the electronics are not present in a hydration is low, we simply can't think as well as we would otherwise. Our mood is off, horn systems go off.

Our ability to get in a physical action, to engage in in dance and strength and all sorts of other things is diminished. So with element, you can make sure that you're staying on top of your hydration and that you're getting the proper ratio of electoral lights. If you d like to try element, you can go to drink element that's element t dot com slash huberman and you'll get a free element sample pack with your purchase.

They're all delicious. So again, if you want to try element, you can go to element, element t docomo slash human. Today's episode is also brought to us by waking up, waking up as a meditation APP that includes hundreds of meditation programs, mindfulness trainings, yogananda sessions and n sdr non sleep depressed protocols.

I started using the waking up up a few years ago because even though i've been doing regular meditation since my teens, and I started doing yoga ea about a decade ago, my dad mentioned to me that he had found an APP turned out to be the waking up APP, which could teach you meditations of different durations. And they had a lot of different types of meditations to place, to bring your body into different states, and that he liked IT very much. So I gave the waking up up a try.

And I too found IT to be extremely useful, because sometimes I only have a few minutes to meditate, other times have longer to meditate. And indeed, I love the fact that I can explore different types of meditation to bring about different levels of understanding about consciousness, but also to place my brain and body into lots of different kinds of states, depending on which meditation I do. I also love that the waking up up has lots of different types of yoga eda sessions, those you don't know.

Yogananda is a process of lying very still, but keeping an active mind is very different than most meditations. And there is excEllent scientific data to show that yogananda and something similar to IT called non sleep deep breast or nsd r, can greatly restore levels of cognitive and physical energy, even, which is to a short ten minute session. If you'd like to try the waking up, you can go to waking up 点 com slash huberman and access a free thirty day trial。 Again, that's waking up dot com slash huberman to access a free thirty day trial. And now for my discussion with doctor David, speaker David, thank you so much .

for being here and my pleasure.

Can you tell us what is hyn? Sis.

I nosis is a state of highly focus attention. A is something like looking through the telephones of a camera in consciousness. What you see you see with great detail, but devoid of context. Um if you've had the experience of getting so caught up in a good movie that you forget your watching the movie and enter the imagine world you part of the movie, not part of the audience experiencing IT, you're not evaluating that's a hypnotic like experience that many people have in their everyday lives.

So is any experience that really draws us in hibernated in that sense? Or let me give a different example. If i'm watching sports game and i'm really wrapped up in the game, but i'm also in touch with how IT makes me feel in my body registering you know the excitement or the anticipation, is that a state of hit nosis also because you mention there's kind of an a narrowing of context but a kind of losing of the self? Or is is to have .

that right? Yes, IT is true that you're to the extent that your tomato, your body experience is a part of sport events you engaged with, I say that is a self altering hypnotic experience. If your physical reactions are distracting you or make you think about something else, that's when it's it's less hipness tic like and more just one of a series of experiences.

okay. So I have to ask how did you get into this business of hip nosis? Because um I think for most people, when they hear hip nosis where they think about noses, they think of a stage ship nosis. I think of somebody with dependent going back and for the people up on a stage and behaving abNormally for the entertainment of others.

How did you get into hip nosis as an interest, as a practice? Um and if you would could you contrast the sort of hip nosis that you do in the clinical setting with the sort of hyper sis that a stage hip notest? sure.

Well, um IT is something of a genetic illness in my family. Both of my parents were schiele and psycho analysts and they told me I was free to be any kind of psychiatrists I wanted to be so here I am um my father I was training to be a analyst in one thousand hundred and forty three and um he ran into a benet's refugee who couldn't serve in the army but who had studied hip nosis and actually IT would interest doing your authentic logical research he had a small pox scar right middle of his forehead and he did forensic examinations and he noticed that some of the prisoners would focus on the spot on his forehead and then closed ze and seem to go asleep but they were in some altered state so he got interested in his nosis he used IT forensically eg his name was cooked up on a shopping and burg and um he offered to teach Young schiehallion to use his nosis when they went off into the war and so he trained my father um and he my father got off the analytic couch and I know the analyst mentioned IT to that's how we found out about IT and my father said.

Did I say something wrong and analysis why is he talking to me now and um he found IT very useful in helping soldiers who had a cute pain when they were wounded and helping people with converging post traumatic stress disorders and when he came back, he went back to his training um but um he still was sort of interested in IT and he he had his one of his supervisors was freed from regiment, was a very famous cycle analyst and he he said that he had been told to stop doing his nose is because he would ruin his reputation as and SHE said and what are you so worried about your reputation for you're going to give a course anthy institute in hypnosis and I know you're going to do IT because i'm going to take IT so he was teaching freed from reg. Man if nosis and he just kept doing that, and after a while, he discovered that he was getting Better results with a few sessions of his nosis, then he was with daily cycle analysis with his patients. And so he switched his his practice.

And so the dinner table conversations were pretty interesting. And occasionally when he was making a movie of a patient, I would get to watch that. And so when I went to medical school, I figured i'll take a course that was tom hacked.

IT was a chair chic as general was teaching, and I was a very interesting course and the day that converted me was um I was doing my rotation at children's s hospital in boston and the nurse is telling me be your next patient is an asthmatic and room for thirty seven or something and i'm just following the sound of the wise as down the hall I go in the room, this is sixteen year old girl, nuckles White bolt up right in bed, struggling for breath. You can hear the wising SHE twice had subcutaneous up. An effort didn't work.

They we're thinking about general anesthetic and starting around the oes and her mother's, they're crying and um I said I don't know what else to do so I said want to earn a breathing exercise and SHE and um I got to have matiz ed and then I realized we hadn't gone to asthma the course so I made up something very complex. I said each breath you take will be a little deeper and little easier and within five minutes she's lying back in bed. Her nuckles are not White.

She's now using her mother. Stop crying. The nurse ran out of the room and the intern, my intern, comes to find me, and I figure is going to pass me on the back and say, nice jobs speel.

He said, the nurse has filed a complaint with a nursing supervisor that you violated a massachuset law by hip netizen, a minor without parental consent. And I thought, you know, well, that's nice. You know, I doubt there is a lot like this.

So the enter n says you're gonna have to stop doing this weather. And I said why? He said it's dangerous. I said, you're gonna a give general and put on the ods and talking to is dangerous no said while you have to do IT and I said, i'll tell you what, take me off the case if you want, but i'm not gonna teach page in mind. Anything I know is not true.

So there was a battle over the weekend about what to do and the the intern, the chief resident attending, we're all arguing about this. And on monday they came back with a radical idea. They said, let's ask the patient.

I don't think that ever been done at children's hospital before and he said, oh, like this, she'd been hospitalized every months for three months. And statism metics did have one subsequent hospitalization. But after that, went on to study to be a respiratory therapies.

And I thought that anything that can help a patient that much violate and on existing reduces law, frustrate the nursing supervisor had to be worth looking into. So I just kept doing that. I discovered that they were, know, every all of my classroom mates in medical school had just right the new issue, the new england journal, and had some new medication to suggest.

And I would know, surgeons would say, look, if you can help this guy with his pain or his anxiety, anything above the neck that yours do as people. So, you know, I was having fun and being able to learn how to help people in a way that just otherwise was not being done. And so I got me thinking about the fact that, you know, we're born with the sprain, but we don't have a user manual for IT and we don't use IT nearly as well as we can.

And that's something your research is all about two. And and so I thought I want to I want to understand this Better, and I want to see what we can do. Stage shipment has tried mean that know they make fools out of people.

There was one um my my this a case my father is involved, he gotto call from. He was a columbia he gotto call speak you gotto come see this woman inches in the E R inches in some kind of weird upset state that um happened. And I turned out sh'd been on the show with the station test.

Um who and what they do, by the way, is they they cycle around, you know they have the beginning of the show. They don't just grab somebody and say we're doing this. They get a bunch of people up. They do what image dimension, ability testing to see if people and they they get the ones who are the most advertising.

So he was the one, and he said, there is now a little bird in your hand and you're going to play with a bird and SHE starts to cry and scream and he just gets her off the stage because it's very upsetting. And she's wondering around new york city in the middle, the night associated and brought to columbia. And that's where my father saw SHE was still in a kind of uncomfortable translate ate.

And I turned out that SHE was the trophy wife of a very wealthy guy, and he felt like a bird in a guilded cage. And so to her, that image just triggered all of this sense of dissatisfaction, discomfort, fear about her life. And he was able to get her reoriented and talk whether or about what he was going to do with your life.

But I don't like stage of notice. You're make falls out of people um and you're using the fact and that's what scares people about your nosis. They think you're losing control, your gaining control self.

If nosis is a way of enhancing your control over your mind and your body, IT can work very well, but because IT gives you a kind of cognitive flexibility, you are able to shift sets very easily to give up judging and evaluating the way you usually do and see something from a different, different point of you. That's a great therapeutic opportunity. But if misused, IT could be a danger to, and that's what scares people about IT.

IT is that very ability, suspend critical judgment and just have an experience and see what happens that can be a great therapeutic opportunity. Thought if somebody's miss, using IT can be a way to help people. And you know there are plenty of examples of people having fantasies and post on them that they come to thank our reality is not unusual these days. So um it's it's an ability that if people learn to recognize and understand, that can be a tremendous therapy.

I've been stage with matisse and i've been clinically hematite ed many times um through self if noses APP h will talk about later and um and then I know we have plans for you to humanize me today we've done IT once me and i'm very humanized as we both know we will talk about how one can engage their disability but the statement nosis was interesting this was in college you know they brought someone out to the dorma tory and I recall being 我 one of the people that were was selected and and engaging in very bizarre behavior around IT wasn't thoroughly embarrassing but I was pretty embarrassing and then being sent off the stage and as I was exciting， suddenly screaming something out because he had planted a suggestion of some sort um and then I was told to look at my pocket and there was like like A I think a torn up dollar bill there were a bunch of things that I have vogue recollection of but IT raises a settle questions dead really boiled down to you know as a biogas always think that know there no there's no events in the brain.

Their their processes and so hypnosis, we know, has an induction. Then one is hnidy zed, I imagine. And then sounds like this woman in this example of the the bird and being in being destroyed in new york city is a failure to exit the biotic state. Do we know what sorts of brain areas are active during the induction, the what's called the deep nosis, and then what's shutting off for changing as people exit hip nosis?

Yes, yes. We we study that we've been very interested in. And so we did a study where we selected highly and non himage zable people so we could do the comparison.

And then he matis m in the functions of our eyes scanner. And we found three things characterized the entries to. They have not stated. The first is turning down activity in the dorsal interior single cortex. So the the ACC is in the central front middle part of the brain is you will know and it's it's part of what we call the sale's network. It's A A conflict detector.

So if you're you know engaged in work and you hear a loud noise that you think might be a gunshot, that's your entire single that cortex saying he wait him in IT, there's a potential danger over there. You Better pay attention to IT. So IT, a IT compares what you're doing with what else is going on and helps you decide what to do.

And as you can imagine, a turning down activity in that region make IT less likely that you'll be distracted and pulled out of whatever you're in. And in another study we've found that highly matiz able people, even without bill being hyp tizer, have more functional connectivity between the D A C C, the entire single cortex and the left door's a lot of prefrontal cortex. Um so which is part of the a key region in the executive control network.

So when you're engaging and task, you enacting a plan, you're writing a paper, you're doing whatever are doing that's the preferences cortex is doing that. And so if that is coordinated, we found more functional coh connect vly. So when one is up, the others up and one is down, the others down, that coordination ation implies that the brain is saying, okay, go ahead.

I know what you're doing. Carry out that plan and don't worry about other possibilities. So two other things happen when people are hight. Zed, one is that that D, L, P, F, C has higher functional connectivity with the another part of the gala's network is a part of the mind body control system sensitive to is happening in the body, is part of the pain network as well. But it's also a region of the brain where you can control things in your body that you wouldn't think you could.

For example, we did a study years ago where we took people uh highly matiz will help matiz ed them and told them we went on imaginary culture tour so um we would they would eat their favorite foods and we found that they increase their gaster exit secretion like by eighty seven percent. So their stomach was acting as though was about again. I mean, there was one woman I was so vivid for her that halfway through SHE said, let's stop and fall you know, eating these never.

Having, never. No incredible. And then we got them to relax and take of anything but food or drink.

And we got, like forty percent decrease, and guess its decrease. So they could. And that was D, L, P, F, C.

Through the telling the stomach, you're getting footer, you're not getting food. And even we injected them, we paint the gaston, which triggers gas, gas. And even then in the hyn, this condition that had in nineteen percent reduction against gid.

So the brain has this amazing ability to control is going on in the body in ways that we don't think we have a ability to control. That's just one example. So that's the deal.

pfc. Insulated connection. The third thing that happens, and this relates to what you did on the stage, is you have inverse functional connectivity between the D, L, P, F, C and the posterior singular core tex.

The poster is singular, is part of the default more networks in the back of the brain um and it's it's in an area whose activity goes down, for example, in meditators and in meditation. You're supposed to be self less. You're supposed to the self is an illusion.

You're supposed to let IT dissolve and just experience things. And when you're doing that, the poster is single, is decreasing and activity. The inverse connection is i'm doing something, but i'm not thinking about what IT means for me.

I may not even remember much of IT. If I do, I don't care that much about IT. And so that is part of the association that occurs with his nose. So it's how you put things outside of conscious awareness and don't worry about what IT means. IT also adds to cover flexibility. You know, if you're thinking well, people like me don't usually do this that may inhibit you from enacting a new form of psychotherapy, for example, that you've never done before um but if you're having this decreased activity in the party, your brain that reflects on what that means, you are more likely to be cognitive ly flexible and willing to give IT a try and that's one of the theraputics vantages of have noticed as well.

fascinating. And it's really want to put an embarrassing you here a little bit in a positive sense. It's your laboratory is really the one that's pioneer brain imaging of hippos states and um IT sounds like that's my understanding is that is that correct?

Yeah I mean, there are all the people who have an excEllent research too. Sure, but par rain, bolin, monory all in several other people, but we are one of the leading lamps and neuro imaging of his nosis.

I have to ask about attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. I get a lot of questions about this. And I think a lot of people just struggle with holding attention nowadays because of, you know, interference with phones and devices. And and I of course, there is a lot of clinically legitimate A D H D out there.

But the way you described ed, the dorso into singular and the same in network, in this a conflict detector of, you know, my focusing on something, or am I splitting my attention, how distractable M I seems to relate to some extent activity in the door and into single cortex. Uh do people with A D H D um display disruptions in elements of these networks and uh has hit nosis ever been used to uh or self hip nosis I should be to the distinguish from static noses, clinical and self. Have noses been used to enhance people's ability to focus and hold attention um because that such a building component of the hypnotic .

state is a great question there are there of two ways to think about IT in terms of enhancing focus? Yes, IT has been very helpful um in teaching people to just prepare your mind and narrowing and focus on something.

And you know when you're really engaged in reading something or you're writing A P I think i'll have that sometimes something oh god, I have to do this for another hour, other times an hour, go by and think, hey, great because when you're in IT feels game like to you, you know you're just assembling the parts of the puzzle, putting them together. It's fun. You just get absorb that for me that I have not like experience when i'm having trouble, when i'm struggling.

Sometimes doing things like south of notice can help. I'm not an expert on hd. Um my impression is that you write that these are people who are constantly distracted and rather rigid. The other part of IT is they are easily distractable.

They're very upset when they get distracted and the rather rigid and what they want, what they do and what they can, I think, as a way of controlling this distractingly, Frankly, uh, I my guess is that many people with adhd would not be that advertisers. But I haven't even studied IT. So uh, IT is possible that for some people with that disorder training itself, if nosis might help.

But we'd have to see how have been tisa. They were intake IT. From there.

I want to return to some of the underlying neural networks in the clinical applications. But what sorts of um things aside from the asthma um have you used hip nosis successfully for IT or have others used clinical hip nosis um for and are there any particular areas of of psychiatric chAllenges or illnesses, I guess they're called um that are particularly um amenable to hypnotic .

treatment? Yes there are hypnosis is very good as a problem focused uh treatment um it's really is the oldest western conception of a psychotherapy and IT can be used for specific problems in a way that's very helpful. We ve found a very helpful for stress reduction um for helping people deal.

We're all dealing with stressed these days and it's helpful that my body connection is very helpful because um part of the problem with stress is your perception. You mention IT earlier in a sort of good sense. You you know a football game with something and you feel the physical reaction that can be a reinforcing thing.

Well, this is exciting. Let's do IT IT can also be very distracting. So you're worried about getting covered.

You're worried about um some other physical problem you have. And you you noticed that in your body, you ready tenses up and you start to sweat. The sympathetic nother system goes, your hard rate goes up.

And when you noticed that, you think, oh god, this is really bad and then you feel worse. So it's like a snowball rolling downhill. And and and then you feel worse, and then your body gets worse if nosis can be very helpful and associating systematic reaction from psychological reaction.

So we teach people to imagine their body floating somewhere safe and comfortable, like a battle lake, hot tober floating in space. And then picture the problem that the the stressing them on an imaginary screen with the rule in, no matter which you see on the screen, you keep your body comfortable. So at this point you can you still can control the stress, but you can control your physical reaction to IT.

And that starts you feeling more in control. Least is one thing I can manage and then you can use IT to think through or visualized through one thing you might do about that stressed. So if noses is very helpful and controlling mind body interaction in relation to stress, um it's very helpful for people to get to sleep. We're having a lot of fun with that.

I am getting emails from people who said, you know I haven't slept right in fifteen years and now for the first time um you know i'm listening to a rap and I can sleep at night, you know so it's very helpful and again, you know if you wake up in the middle the night, you know I tell people don't look at the clock that's an of q you know you just you wake up more um but I might picture whatever you're thinking about a worrying about on that imaginary screen while your body's floating. So watch your own movie but keep your body floating. And many people can use that to get back to sleep.

I've been using the self of notices for sleep a long time and now the revery happens, will talk about our relationship to the revery happen its use as I find an incredibly useful for falling back to sleep in the middle the night and IT raises A A question um i've found, and I think I understand this correctly, that one can do self notice in the daytime and then if there's an issue that comes up later, like so for instance, do self if nosis for stressed reduction away from the stressful event to prepare one to deal with stress Better, or do hip nosis for improving the return to sleep. And that can be done when you actually want to go to sleep. But it's it's a kind of a training up of these networks, right? So is there evidence that these brain networks actually form stronger connections when people do self have nosis over time?

Um well well there's a rule in neutral logy as you know, that neurons that fired .

together wired together not Donald there's a widespread myth in the world that are all over the internet which is that that fire together wired together was said by the psychologist Donald Donald had do many important things but IT is the neurobiology .

carner .

chats yes is at stanford but was also at berkely harvard in schools but is that stanford um who said fire together, wired together and so he deserves the the credit for that statement of yes so with repeated use of self if nosis um one could imagine that these networks are getting stronger.

I I I would think so. We don't have evidence of that yet um but um you know long term potential um provides a pathway and you've described them on your program a number of times that allow for repeated activation of the network to actually build new connections that that work and at the least even from a learning and memory point of view, no memory is all a network of associations that's how we remember things.

Um and you know the example i'd like to give us, you go back to your grade school and and you see these little tiny lockers and you know sizes all wrong and you suddenly have a flood of memories that you obviously stored there but you just didn't think of. So context and association is what memories about, if you start to acquire memories about a problem. So one thing we use have noses forest treating phobias, for example.

And the problem with people who have phobias like airplane phobias or, uh, you know, crossing a bridge or being a high is that the more they avoided at, the more the only source of associations and memories is their fear. They don't have any good experiences with that because they are avoided IT. It's like get back on the horse safety of full of kind of thing. And and with hypnosis, if you can start people able to manage their anxiety enough that they can have more a wider array of experiences, they start to have a network of associations that doesn't so negative and may even be positive.

So it's almost like a start interview, but I have to ask, it's almost like a exposure therapy done in the mind. You mean always in the mind, I mean even exposure to if I have a snakephobia, which I I don't I don't like snakes, but I don't think IT qualifies a full blown phobia.

Think of a healthy if you your snake um but if let's say I had a snakephobia, the typical uh approach and would be kind of behavioral approaches right would be to show a picture of a snake than A B per snake and real thing eventually the person is you know holding above construct or something like that with with that all in in the mind because it's all translate into nervous system signals. But with hip sounds like you can give a number of positive experiences without having to use any props, without having to bring any animals into the right. I drive someone across the bridge.

Is that right? Yes, I A woman who is a very successful level in a corporation. I had a terrible dog phobia and um so I had her imagine that somebody brought in a dog to the room and I said, what are you doing and you could see you're getting tense and SHE said, i'm waiting to see what the dog does and I said, if somebody who works for you comes into your office, would you freeze and wait to see what they did and SHE said, of course not.

I tell him what to do, you know and I said, well, so you are mobilizing yourself. The power isn't with the dog, is with you so imagine what you might do to engage the dog and and help control the situation and he said, thanks and and this reminds me one one of my favorite stories about hiping sis, that my father was seeing a woman and who lived in in town and hat and had a horrible dog phobia. You know, she's drop things.

She's spill coffee. Now he saw a dog. SHE would time her trips to the store when he thought I was at least likely that people be walking dogs now possible.

everyone and it's it's like it's like a fleet of french both dogs taking over york city.

So um he taught her to think of a dog as a friend, have a neighbor who had a dog, bring the dog over, but hold the dog by the color and make sure and gradually he was able to stock the dog and say, dog friend, to distinguish between wilentz imala are animals. You should be afraid of this. So SHE seems to be doing Better.

He called back about three months later and ask for her and I said, well, who's calling the sun said he said, doctors, speel. And the boy said, that's weird. And my father said, what's weird? He said, speeches in heat SHE had bought a dog. I love IT and named, we will talk about transferred. I love IT.

but IT really speaks to the power of this and IT IT brings me back to this, uh, issue. So what is different about what your father did in that case with this, with this woman, in terms of what happened in hypnosis that allowed her to go from being completely terrified of dogs to owning a dog and naming IT after your father? What I find amusing, but that's different than just the two of them.

M sitting down talking about IT, right? You know, in therapy, the narrative is a huge component. And in himself, sis narrative is a huge component, right so IT must be that the brain state is what is really different because um we will talk about trauma in a few minutes but you know I think people who have trauma or fob OS certainly could have a conversation about IT that some of them might freeze up, some of them might lose their articulation and so forth.

But what is different about that state that combines with narrative, you think to allow these underlining al networks to to engage her to change because I find this so fascinating because we're every attempt dealing with stress for bia in the clinical settings called some discussion about what IT is. Yes, but here we're not talking about any medication being introduced, at least not in these particular circumstances. So I just I realized this kind of an obvious questioning.

The has to be some difference in brain activity, but I find that to be incredible. The the control variable there is the brain state. It's not what's spoken.

You're raising a couple of very important issues. And do I know we talked earlier about what systematic desensitization where you you know sort of layout of hierarchy of things and do a one at the time, I think of this is unsystematic desensitization because you're changing mental states.

And if and I think there's more and more evidence that mental state change itself has diapered tic potential, we're seeing that with kadee treating depression of the sociology drug. Um we see we know at every morning when we wake up that problem you know you made the mistake of reading an sd email at eleven pm. You don't know what to do.

You wake up in the morning thing oh, that idea. Here's what i'm going to do, you know. So just changing mental state itself has never reputed potential. And I think we underestimate our ability to regulate and change response to be cognitively, emotionally and semantic ally flexible. And so we do things you're write that follow similar principles of facing a problem, seeing IT from a different point of view.

And you've done a really a nice podcast on time and stress and how you have to expose yourself to IT not avoid IT, as we talked about before, and then find some way to reconnect to a to substitutions that can make you feel good rather than bad. Um so that you activate other centers of the brain like miss olympic ward system. And so I do that with hip nosis, and you can do that much faster.

People don't think they can, but they can if you are having right now that physical experience i'm thinking about this but i'm not feeling is bad as I used to um that can be a powerful thing and you can do IT with his nosis. So I had a woman came to see me who had suffered an attempted rape, but was getting dark. SHE was coming back from the grocery store in, this guy grabs her and wants to get her up into her apartment outside the apartment.

And SHE started fighting with them. And SHE winds up with a bazile skulls fracture. He runs away.

The cops come since he hadn't been raped. They left. They weren't interested.

And he wanted to use his nosis to get a Better image of what this guy looked like, which is a painful, upsetting thing. So he was quite advertisement. I got her floating.

I say, you're safe and comfortable. Now nothing can happen that will harm your body, but on the left side of the screen, I want you to picture this guy and his approaching and what's happening. And SHE said, I really the light IT was getting dark.

I really can't see much of his facial features, but I do recognize something I had an allowed myself to remember. If he gets me upstairs, he doesn't just want to write me, he's gona kill me. And so in some ways, what he was seeing was even worse.

So, you know, you're thinking, god vele, you made her even more frightened than he was before. But as you had pointed out in your your ptsd stress, like sure you've got to confront the promo to to restructure your understanding of IT. So on the other side of the screen I had her picture um um what what are you doing to protect yourself? And everybody in the trauma situation engages in some strategy of self protection.

You know, that's the sales network kicking in. And SHE said, you know what? He's surprised that i'm fighting their heart. He didn't think I would.

And so SHE realized on the one hand that IT was even worse than he thought I was, but on the other hand, that SHE actually probably saved her life. And so IT was a way of helping her restructure her experience of the trauma and make IT more tolerable so that help with her. SHE didn't rock.

Y SHE could not identify the guy, but he helped her restructure and understand her experience. And that's something that you can do in just talking straight out psychotherapy, but sometimes you can do what hell ble lot faster and more efficiently using his nosis. And there is one randomised trial out of this that shows that ending his nosis to P D S D treatment actually improves outcome. So uh, it's it's a way of accomplishing things that we understand in the broader psychotherapy world. But much more quickly and and sometimes effectively.

sounds are going into somewhat into the state that one is trying to deal with. But then associating from that state is key. And I could imagine, right? I've been open about this on various podcast done a lot of. And analysis over the year. So in but in I experience myself that in in those sessions, depending on how I shop to them, I might just get in kind of a laundry list of what happened as a post actually feeling anything around what happened, right? Um and I think people probably varied in the extent to which they can drop into feeling states and can depend on the day IT can be depend on how well um you sleep the night before and so on.

There's one thing I might end enter and that is you know there's a notion the lake court power he did, we just had a memorial for gordon at stanford. He died about a year ago. Brilliant cognitive systems.

Gy, so when the founders of cog psychology, uh at the and and a great pitch or he almost became a major but he decided to autographed instead and i'm i'm glady did um but gordon, help to establish the concept of state dependent memory that when you're in a certain mental state, you enhance your ability. Remember things about IT and the set of the bad example of that is the drunk who hides the bottle and can't remember where you put IT until you get drunk again. In that same mental state, people go into the soave states when they are traumatized.

So in a way, hypnosis is helping them remember and deal with the memories Better, because they're moral in the mental state that is more like what happened and most rate victims will tell you I was floating above my body feeling sorry for the woman being assaulted below um uh people in traumatic episode they just you know I blank out I don't know what's happy i'm on autopilot and that's a kind of self not state. So when you use hip nosis to help them deal with the traumatic memory, you're making the state there and right there in your office with you more congress to the state they were likely in when the trauma happened. And I think that is part of what helps facilitate treatment of trauma related disorders.

I see, so that we have to ask every question I have to ask, because I really feel IT as almost a compulsion. Then, if association during a traumatic episode is is a part of the adaptive strategy. But IT creates certain issues.

IT creates problems, right? Um why would something like kadee, which crea associate of state, be useful for the treatment of trauma? This is what I am confused about these days because our colleague carl death has also been on this podcast.

His co workers have figured out, okay, there's these layer one networks in court in the neo cortex and those are involved in so they have stayed. And we're starting again, some understanding how kadee in works at a neural level. IT does seem um as if for certain populations is a can be a useful treatment.

I don't know i've never tried. I don't know what the current status so that is but IT is legal. IT is allowed. At least it's F D A approved and IT in use. Why would social states be useful if if some element of association is what gave rise to the traub trauma memory in the first place?

Well, um yeah, the car had a brilliant paper in nature where he was from rat to humans in one paper. And he showed that there's this rythmic discharge in the retro plano that is associated, that is triggered by academy. And and the rats actually showed dissociative like behavior in that they would touch a hot pad that they ordinarily wouldn't, and they didn't seem to have much pain in their power.

And he then had A A male subject who had a implanted electrodes, human, human subject, a human subject and and um the electrodes had picked up this rythmic activity. And when they did, he would report being in a dissociated state. And his description was, it's like being the pilot of an airplane. And then I felt myself walking out of the cockpit and the plane was still flying.

And it's terrifying.

Just, Terry.

I want to be in my body most of the time, you know?

right? But the point is, in a way, the principle and is like the principal, you said that you need to reconfirm a traumatic situation before you can modulate your associations to IT. So you have to accept that, accept the arousal, put some boundaries around IT, and then figure out how you can approach that problem, or how you did approach that problem from a different point of view.

So IT does not surprise. In fact, we've studied, uh, people who associated during the loma creator earthquake and the oakland firestorm. Remember both.

Well, yeah, this quicks follow me. And then I moved south and in the north, rich.

i'm gone later.

This.

i'm starting to associating. So, um association does compartmentalise experience, but that means from the point of view of treating trauma IT, it's an it's an inhibition. You don't engage IT.

It's like that happened over there. And I think what happens is that people are sometimes too good at being able to separate themselves from the recollection. So it's in there somewhere, doesn't it's out of sight but is not out of mind. It's having effects on you, but you can't deal with IT, you can't reprocess IT.

So I do think one reason cademy might work um is is uh that in fact IT allows you to keep to we a approach the social experience in a way that you can then start to think about and do something about IT and just the fact you can turn IT on and off. That's also where self exposes is so helpful. It's not something that just comes over you and happens you with something you can make happen.

You can control IT. You can do something with IT so you feel less helpless and out of control. The essence of trauma, helplessness.

It's not fear. It's not pain. It's helplessness ness. You become an object. You become just your body. You don't control what's going on that we're not used to that. You know i've discussed this this this bringing paper on anticipation of breathing and it's not whether you breathe in hail or x hail or hold your breath is that if you think you can in hail and you can't um that is really upsetting, understandably and so it's the issue is control and hypnosis which has this terrible reputation of taking away control is actually a superb way of enhancing your control over mind and body.

I love that and IT IT reminds me that naming is so important you almost wonder if self hip nosis and clinical hip nosis has been called something else that IT would have been separated out from states ship nosis in a way that would make IT um less less scary, weird um complicate for people to embrace. But you know the part of the reason having this discussion is I i've had great experiences with her.

Notice i've seen the data, know we're talking about a lot of clinical examples. It's incredibly powerful and IT walls right down to neural brain states um and you I think in the years to come, it's going to become more widespread along those lines. How quickly you've describe some um examples of people getting relief very quickly.

How permanent are those changes um is their need for follow up. And related to that, i'm sure a number of people are listening to this inking wonderful. I'd love to get hip ized for any number of different things by doctors speak or somebody else expert in clinical accesses, but they might not have access to you or somebody um with similar training.

So what is the power? So how quickly does that work? How long lasting or those changes? And then is that necessary to work with the clinical himeji? And is IT Better to do that and self IT notice and so on and so forth? Maybe you just give us a control of the of the landscape of directed and and alternative treatment.

Well, typically um most people start by coming to see a clinician like me. It's Better to see someone whose has licensing and training in their professional discipline, medicine, psychology, dentist, whatever .

because there are .

a lot of OK. And the key issue is somebody who can really assess what your problem is and make sure that you're not talking someone into reducing their chest pain rather than getting there coronary artery problem .

because they could have a real issue there. They but if no, this might adjust but wouldn't deal with the deeper underlying that's right.

Uh on the other hand and typically when I use IT with people, I often only see them once, twice or period ally but not every week and certain not every day. If they have a pain problem have notice is very helpful for pain um and and so what i'm doing is identifying how hit metisse they are.

I give them a standard brief test of their ability to experience his notice and then going through a self of nosis exercise with them to deal with the problem, seeing how they respond to IT and then teaching them how to do IT for themselves. And in the old days, I used to have them use their iphone and and record, you know, the that part of the session so they could play back. They have noticed experience. Now we've developed an APP revery that that can teach people and step them through dealing with pain stress, a focus in in soma and help people eat Better and and stop smoking um and but we have elements that take about fifteen minutes and elements that just take one or two minutes that people can .

refreshing reinforce.

So yeah and he is one one where one two minutes now. And we're finding that two thirds of people find that even just the one minute refresher helps them feel Better. They were reporting they feel Better.

So the nice thing is, you know right away whether it's likely to help you or not. And we've found we've done studies looking at hp nosis for pain relief in acute medical procedures. We did a analyzed trial that we published in the asset three conditions, people getting arterial cut downs to uh chem embodied tumors in the liver or visualized we know arteries to nosis.

You don't use general. And a season for this is very uncomfortable and people are anxious. And we had three conditions. One with standard care, they could push a button and get opioid I V.

During the surgery.

during the surgery. The second is they could do that, plus they had a friendly nurse comforting them. So we controlled for pleasant tension and support. And the third west, we taught himself if nosis for paying control. So you're you're feeling and you can change the temperature.

Your your body is cool now you're floating in ice water and feeling comfortable um or go somewhere else, leave your body here and go to a desert island and enjoy yourself um and we found that it's about two and half hour procedure that by the and by an hour and half the hip nosis group had reduced their pain by eighty percent compared to the standard care group using half the amount of oppos. They had fewer complications and the procedure took seventeen minutes less time on average. They get done because not only was the patient more relax, so was the treatment staff.

They could they we're dealing with someone who who's struggling and uncomfortable. We measured their anxiety and same thing they had noticed. I was worried they were all dead.

They had no anxiety. After an hour and a half, they were saying, i'm fine, you know and they were fine. And and the standard care group had five out of ten xiety scores at that point.

So we publish that in the last set. Big grand omissions. Al, if we had a drug that did that, every hospital in the country would be using IT now, you know, but there's no industry to push IT.

So that's part of what helps us decide that we needed to help people, you know do this with with revery and teach them how to do IT and provide interactive support for them to do IT. And doesn't the question, although is does that work long term? Because what we can do acutely doesn't necessarily Carry on.

So we did a animist trial of women with metastatic breast cancer. They had advancing disease. We met with them in a support group once a week and taught himself if nosis for for stress and anxiety and pain control at end.

And by the end of the year of the treatment group had half to pay. The control group t did on the same in very low amounts of medication. So IT last, and they would say, when I felt that pain in my chest and thought I was a metastasis, I just the exercise, I got myself in a warm bath and I felt fine.

So, uh, IT IT works because IT becomes a skill that people acquire, but they can tell right away whether it's likely to help them working with the clinician or now using the upper or other ways of helping them learn to use IT as a skill. So the nice thing is you will know very quickly whether it's likely to help you or none. And if IT is, you can learn to do IT for yourself.

That's great. And we will um again, there will be linked to revery in the caption is available for apple and enjoy Y I think um even though there's a nominal cost there, I think that you know the as you mentioned, medications and other approaches to dealing with these problems are quite expensive and and potential have all the potential for side effects and not that some .

of those aren't useful. Get one thing, we we work very hard on the APP. We have an IOS APP for apple. We decided to the table for a moment redoing the android APP.

So it's not IT was available uh, when we were working through the alexa platform, it's not at the moment, but I will be soon. So I just don't want people to be disappointed if they're looking forward for android. It's it's on our agenda, but we don't have IT at the moment.

great. Thanks for that clarification or fully in time for both. I get asked a lot about obsessive thoughts or intrusive thoughts. Um I also get us a lot about O C D. Um is there any evidence that hip nosis or self p nosis can be used for dealing with obsessive thoughts?

Um IT sometimes there are some very obsessed onal people who just turned out not to be that in additional for yeah and it's not random you know they tend to be so overcontrolling of flight. They're all busy evaluating rather than experiencing .

so many few people like sounds sounds like that sounds like an adaptive mindset for a lot of professions in areas and that we get trained up in that yeah during school, you know how to obsess over the exam, obsess over the .

there .

are social interactions, I mean, part of become functional human being. And yet you can take us down.

We sometimes over, do IT your example from extreme situations because you you know you judging evaluating you're not lighting yourself experience including emotionally. I know somebody um who listens to the tapes from airplanes.

They go down so they get the black box and they listen to me and he said to me, you know, na, and because they're trying to do accidents prevention and how to handle things and he said that, um you worry about people panicking, right? And here these guys know that, you know theyve got thirty seconds or some forty five seconds and they're just going through their checklist. He said, they don't panic enough.

They're taught that this is what you do and there is reason there is good reason for IT. But sometimes they overdo IT. And you know it's it's painful to listen to this because you know what's going to happen.

So it's kind of a baLance we have to hit. And some you know, we sometimes we get too emotional and too absorbed and you don't you're not with IT enough to sort of see other possibilities that can be a problem. But on the other hand, sometimes you're too rigid, controlled and you don't let your emotions guide you to what you need to do to protect yourself or protect others.

So um I would say in general that people with ocd are in the less on the less appetiser beside of the spectrum. They're less likely to allow themselves to engage in any. And you know the typical example is the checking with those C D, for example, they don't remember you know whether they, you know like the door or turn off to get and the, and then they keep going back and they keep checking.

They are the evaluated component of the brain kind of overrides the experiential one. And um sometimes people can get some benefit. But but they're not a group that I would select for being the most likely to respond to itself. Hypnotic approaches.

our superstition, similar .

superstitions there. I think that's more. There are people um who are very him atis able who keep getting caught up in things like superstitions and there the imagination of lens, the reality. And we've seen a lot of that happening recently. And so I I think there um it's possible that they could be held by learning to sort of see IT but put IT in context, you know I feel from from a different point of view.

I developed a pretty vicious superstition when I was in college and I was hard to break. Actually I was feel that when I got to clinicians, I have to reveal certain things .

about my thoo. Gy, and so thank you .

for the reason I am not. I'm just kidding. I I did. I I had A A habit of knocking on wood for things and I noticed I started to, I would, I would um I would sneak knocking on wood.

Everyone's a while because I didn't want people to think I was doing too often. And then I start to realized that I IT was becoming a little bit of a reflex. And then I saw this incredible video um from bsc lab at harvard. He studies motor patterns. He has these rats that press different sequences of of levers and turn dials in order to get a plot of food.

But that as they do that, they'll start to introduce these behaviors that have nothing to do with the actual level pressing like it'll start scratching their and their high quarters and things like that and their hat and their heads, excuse me, don't were hat and flipping the years. And this is just like a picture before drawing A A baseball that we do this, we start to incorporate motor behaviors that are unrelated to the outcome. But we are mine somehow starts to think that they are necessary for the outcome.

And so then you incorporate. So I decided to break IT by simply forcing myself to not do IT for about a week, and then IT just seem like a ridiculous thing to do. Yeah, well.

on what we all response, prevention and IT works because you said what what you do is you set up a new context in your brain where you get the outcome you want devoid of the the extraneous behavior yeah.

and I knew that I was nuts, right? I knew is illogical, right? But somehow these things take on meaning. So we talked about stress reduction, the the utility of hypnosis for stress reduction, phobias, pain um possibly we don't know, but for h things like A D H D N O C D IT just will depend on him notice ability right um you talked about this a beautiful study on the um that a breast cancer um outcome of patients immitigably is clearly a key variable yeah so could you please tell us of what hippos ability is, how it's evaluated and what the speaker iro test is?

Okay, sure. So um hiven tize ability is just A A capacity to have hypnotic experiences. And we have a test called the hiphop conduction profile. We will give a highly structured have native experiences.

And you know the the old tradition in clinical have nosis was that you try a bunch of different things, talking, walking upstairs and downstairs and other images and time, what you say to the breathing of the subject and all that. And the more you change what you do as a clinical, the less you can make a variation and outcome. So and I could take a long time, you know, twenty minutes, thirty minutes.

And I just view that as a kind of complex, not very effective way of assessing the persons of not a capacity. We know that the peak period of of hip notis ability in the human life is the late six years and childhood. So every eight year old is in a trance all the time, you know, you call him in for dinner, they don't hear you.

They are doing their thing. And that's why childhood such a wonderful experience, work and play, or all the same thing, you know. And we try to make them into little adults, which I think is a terrible mistake.

They in everything is fun for that. They enjoy learning. They enjoy everything.

what age is like sixty .

ten to eleven, and they're playful. They enjoy everything. Everything is sort of a game and fun, and we try to make IT miserable for them. But theyve got IT.

And then when what P H J called um you know a more adult cognitive framework where we learn strong concepts, we learned that even if one bottle looks bigger than the other, that can have equal volumes. So we started imposing logic. We're growing our deal pfc at that point and imposing cognitive structure on experience. Um some people start to lose that hignorant ability by the time you're in your early twenties, uh your hip tisbina becomes extremely fixed. And IT was a study done at at stanford the earnest till guard the fills and barto did this looking at um you've track down students who were in psycho had their hometown giblet measured and retesting them blindly twenty five years later and the test retest correlation was you want .

to guess what I was guessing it's a point six something yeah very close. IT was .

point seven. I Q would be point six on the twenty five year interval. So it's more stable than I Q over twenty five interval. so. Once you're at that point, that's where you are.

What are the factors that, that lead to that? Well and and so what that means is that about a third of adults, just not advisable, two thirds are about fifteen percent are extremely immitigable, and we can measure that and give you a number from zero to ten. And that's very useful for some of my patients. When I do IT, I say, look, i'm sorry you're not in the times but we're going to do something else, you know medication, systematic desensitization, mindful of other things um or if they're very advertized, I just go for you know I don't do a lot of explaining people who are load of moderate matisse like explanations about what you're doing but then they can still get the benefit so IT helps me guide my the nature of my treatment with these people. Now the iron is my father used to use an I fixation induction, used to say, look up at the ceiling and and now close your eyes while you looking very .

agreement.

He noticed he had two patients back to back and one was a woman who i'd seen him work with who had historical seizure. You would just suddenly start shaking.

And the optics, ur, no. Da optics, I see.

So ha ha. And although some people have both, that is the for some people, real level apps comes a framework that gets elaborated on for when you stressed you have see SHE just had suitable si no E G Normalize and SHE IT was really something to what her husband had to move his workbench near the door so that if he started have a seizure, he could run home and and try and help her whether IT was not bad.

And he noticed that when he he did, he SHE did what you did when he looked up, when he would have one of her seizure events. All you see is, Clair, you don't see iris anymore, and he would start to see. So he, he did a great thing with her.

He taught her to have seizures. Everybody else telling her to stop. He made her have one. So he happy. Tize you? Let's go back to the last time you had one a turn.

If he started to shade, and gradually he'd make them smaller and smaller so he was learning SHE could control as sh'd have access. It's like with P D S D. You know you can front, you don't avoid that. You don't suppress IT. You confront IT and figure out how to deal with IT. Um the next patient he had with a rigid obsessions business man who wanted to stop you being so controlling all this remind me there was a new york cartoon of a driver who comes to a yield sign and he yells, never you know, it's always .

being new york.

I'm in new york, and so this guy, when he tried to look up, he couldn't keep his eyes up while he closed them. And so my 呃， father started testing people. And IT seems that there is a rough correlation between the capacity to keep your eyes up, why you close them, and measured .

hip tibble so that people who are listening, what might in in watching on video. So the bigger role test involves looking up at the ceiling. It's tilting the head back and tilting my chin back and looking up at the ceiling now. But i'm also to recommend my eyes upward in my eyes are open, and then the the iron tesmans, then closing the eyes while the eyes are open, and whether not the eyes roll back. And as you said, and then you see square or the White.

that means very humanized .

or moderately humanized, where as if the eyes move down and you see irish, the color part of the eye as the eyes closed, less ized. And you can look this up online there you just put special error test and and you'll find IT a and and we are also gonna an actual um example of hit nosis um on video later right?

So is IT you're asking the brain to do something difficult to to keep the eyes up while closing the eyelids. And so that's contradictory signals for the third, fourth and six three nuclei that control I movement. He said the third, fourth and six, yeah cranny nuclear and and so there you're suspending one activity, will asking them to do another and I move ents have a lot to do with levels of consciousness.

You know, the paraos cal gray surrounds these cranial nerve nuclei. Ye, and um when we you know we close our eyes when we sleep, we have read I movement when we dream. Most drugs and effect level of consciousness can affect eyes and our movements, either the dillaway or contraction of the pupils, depending on whether it's a stimulant .

and stimulants, make the people's be right. Yeah, this like cocaine and fetched, right?

exactly. And obo s you get constructed. Pupils.

this is what parents, you know, parents looking at their kids coming in the door late at night there for substance abuse. So, so there's something .

about the eyes that has a lot to do, a level of consciousness that I mean, obviously you close your eyes when you go go to sleep, you have a rabbit eye movement when you're dreaming. So it's not surprising. And there's there's an old then practice called looking at the third eye.

And I think part of the reason that this happens is where you're looking up in inside, it's like there's a third ave between the other two and you're for IT. Um and I think it's because we're visual creatures. You know we're we're pretty pathetic from a physical point of view. You know many animals can now run us you know um and or out smell us or see eagles can read, could read the news print to a hundred yard and we can you know it's so um there are major defensive sensory input is vision and that's why you know animals, predator animals have eyes in the front of their head so that they have very good detailed division vision of prey where as prey animals like deer have eyes on the side of their hit so they don't see things that well but they have a much bigger range of a potential to see threat. And we mainly use and in fact, that's interesting.

They're been social throws logy to say, why do we gather where we do, you know on coastlands and you know at the edge of a forest or something? It's because you've got protection in the back, something can attack you from one side, and you have a big vision of what might threaten you. And we tend to, like, be attracted to those kinds of a .

physical situations. Love with love are very calming. They take us into that panoramic vision. That's right. I did this. But IT turns out that most of the scenic spots at any location in national parks and where where people naturally aggregated IT was in, which makes sense, you know, but that those signs and locations were built up around people's tendency and animals tendencies. Agree there yeah there's an interesting book on the history of the national park that that says that they didn't give A A research study to support IT.

But there was no google .

maps yeah pen orams and and visual boundaries are really interesting, I think so that the eyes, as we both know, are two pieces of the central nervous system of the brain. Outside the brain I used to say that dies are outside the skull and and a uh a neurotoxin a said um they are wrote to me and um viewing pointed out that they are outside the cranial volt so you know they're outside the crane IO vote but there are two pieces of brain there out there and so you mention crane owner is three four and the sex this isn't in the anatomy course but um but may week to go a little deeper there so you said there's contradictory activity looking up is controlled by now the one set of crinoid nerves and then the closing the islands is is control bed another cranial nerve?

No it's the same one I think at six that the um you you close when you close your yes, you activate uh no it's the facial. I guess it's the facial nerve. It's seven seven yeah yeah but you're looking up. You're activating the muscles that force your eyes to look up and the the closing your eyelids Normally relaxes those IT relaxes that upper movement because your eyes are closed and you don't need to do IT. So you're breaking A A .

usual customers rabb your tummy and padding your head. It's it's a bit there's a bit of a conflict there. But clinically, it's been a good probe for you and father. So was a big senior .

or or that .

developed.

And um but the key issue is this that Normally when we close our eyes also, we're going to sleep. You know you're you're not worried about what's going on in the world anymore here you're maintaining resting alertness. So you you're focusing but you're turning inward.

That's an unusual stay. Normally we don't we close our eyes periodically. We have to. But um when you close your eyes for some period time, it's Normally to go to sleep and you're not worried about you know detecting risk or threat. So IT is an interesting state because you're turning inward, basically, you're looking up, you're shutting your eyes and you're allowing whatever happens outside you to happen and focusing on what's going on in word. So it's I think it's a signal to your brain to turn in word.

Very interesting. And meditation, of course, could be done with eyes open, but almost always has done with eyes closed. That's right.

Very interesting. So you can very quickly determine whether not someone is highly humites. zable.

Not at all. hibernated. Zed, we are about two thirds of people can be hutin. Ed, right? I will see a third cannot, and but within the two thirds that can, there's a range. And you said fifteen percent of people fall into this highly category that I seem to be a member of. And does repeated use of self help nosis or clinical hip nosis increase or change trip notice ability for those that can access IT in the first place.

I would say, in general, and may increase a little bit, but not a hell of a lot. And it's not worth the effort to increase him that ability at that point. It's worth trying to deal with the problem you dealing with so you can get Better at using IT at the level that you have.

There was a study done in which they try to train people to be more immitigable. And you know obviously, there are subjective and behavioral components to the test you can learn to do a little Better on them. But what we found was when we were analyzed this data that we could account for three times the final score based on the initial hip tisbina measured rather than whether or not they had been trained to do Better. So you can approve IT a little bit is not worth the trouble.

Got IT along the lines of ice and eye movements. A lot of interest out there about emd R I. New dissensions ation reprocessing uh shapia herself was a working not SHE was an outline for directly what was the local to to stanford and how to so what are your thoughts on em? D R? Where's IT useful? Where do you think it's less useful? Um are there things that em D R could be combined with to make IT more useful?

Um you know we get you know the listeners of this podcast come to I think come to the podcast with a range of backgrounds and interest um to me and make sense uh why E M D R I later ized I movements um might work given the newer data that IT can suppress make the activity and some animals and animal models and in humans, well but IT really hasn't been explored much nearly. I've heard things like IT coordinates the two sides of the brain, which to me is is just a throw away. I don't think there's any evidence that cording the two sides of the brain is Better than not coordinating.

I wouldn't be speaking right now. The two sides of my brain were were well correlated because languages lata. So I heard that IT mics rapid eye vegetating sleep but actually IT doesn't so um but I have heard um people talk about their positive experiences with A M D R.

What are you thought? Yeah you had a good comment on recent Parkers and I i'll tell you, you know thank you. One way I sort of think about IT from a amused point of view is the old you mentioned IT earlier.

The oldest sort of idea of a hynd conduction was a dangling watch, right? You know, when to watch um and um in fact, there was enough concern about IT that when automobile iles were invented there was a movement to prevent installing window wipers because people were afraid that they would be hibiya if they watch the window wipers go back and forth on a car. Now IT turns out fortunately, that you tend not to look at the windshields.

You keep looking through the windshield. And so we have the ribs today. But that movement is what exactly used to be a hypnotic induction. I think there is a lot of hype sis in in E M D R.

And I think it's a combination of that with you know exposure based treatments where you use the M B R to think about IT that you tend not to process. The experience is much and just do the physical part of IT, which I personally think is a drawback. And every study i've seen that was a dismantling study.

There's no question that people who go through and you are many of them get Better with trauma related problems in the va has a big program using and so on. But every program that has dismantled going through the treatment with having the lateral movement um has shown that the letter line movement doesn't add anything to IT. And over the end of her career, uh ancon um was doing out control atl touching or something that wasn't I movement anymore with other things.

So I I tend to think that um em D R is another form of exposure based therapy for trauma. But as as you've implied, with the exception of this possible new data, IT certainly doesn't have to do with rapid IBM and sleep. And I I don't think moving the ice is the issue.

I think it's a way of sitting down at confronting trauma. And I would rather that the trauma itself be processed a bit more than often happens in emd r. So a lot of people have gotten therapy.

Some of them have been helped. Francy used to originally claim that just one session would desensitize people and do IT, and that's clearly not true. I see a lot of people who said, yeah, help for a while, but you know, I need more. So I I I think IT IT became a kind of a, you know, overly simply list c approach to understanding brain physiology and that parties wrong and and you know the interesting thing you know you mentioned suppressing and make the activity. It's very interesting that my late friend Allen hopes and with a brilliant sleep search, you know.

well, I don't know, but I I read his book when I was in college about the chemistry of sleep, right? And the similarities between dream states and yeah and one of the reasons i've got into this business.

yes, well, I work with him and Carter, my body network for many years and he was brilliant guy, points out that we need to get into primarily of paris sympathetic state to go to sleep, that we have to shut off, shut off the sympathetic nervous system. And and that's why allowed noise wakes you up and your heart rate goes up and all this. So he was a brilliant documenting what happens in the brain to sleep.

He pointed out something also very interesting about dreams, which is that the stories and dreams, and even the images and dreams, can change all over the place in crazy ways. But usually the effect is constant, said usually, if it's a frustration dream, whatever happens, you won't have frustrated and if it's, you know enjoy my dream, you enjoy what I was going on. So there's a odd consistency and effect and dreams that that you don't have a in other states and the idea of a lateral, I move in suppressing amiga activity would kind of fit with that that you don't allow intrusions of fear and anger and upset in there.

IT may be there all the time, but IT may not be there when you think I should be. So why is IT that you can be falling off a building and somehow not that scared? You know, you're just having this experience of flying in a dream. So I I think there maybe something going on about regulating effect, but there we have a elaborate in Better ways to regulate effect.

right? So E, M, D R might incorporate some elements of hip nosis by the lateralization movements, perhaps by way of suppressing the emil of this fear associated center might bring people into a more person, but that IT comm state so might be suda hypnosis and then exposure therapy through the discussion about the issue right okay. Um more research needed on the M D R out there.

And um obviously something that come up a lot in this discussion and in our discussions that have the great fortune of talking you every week is and working together is this idea of getting close to the phobia, getting close to the trauma we experiencing IT as a porter to then adJusting the response to IT and rewiring something. So the troubling thing where the horrible thing is no longer as horrible to us that but that the the repeating theme is we can expect to get over something without getting really close to IT, maybe even experiencing IT thematically nowaday. We hear a lot about you trigger and trigger warnings and um certainly one can understand why those are why those exist.

But IT seems like there is a in the general population. There's this idea that we want to move away from anything that upsets us. And yeah, I think it's fair to save now having gathers the statistics that on the hall that the the human beings are becoming more and more anxious and more and more stressed perhaps a because of, but certainly in parallel with the fact that we're trying to move away from troubling things, troubling things.

So i've heard you say before that it's in terms of therapeutic approaches. It's not just about the state you get into, but whether or not you brought yourself there voluntarily. So this element of deliberate self exposure, deciding i'm going to confront the trauma, i'm going to confront the pain, i'm going to confront the insomnia, i'm going to confront that, you know, and fill in the black.

And then we, adJusting one's emotional response, ride up next to that troubling thing that seems to be the hallmark of this treatment. And um if I am thinking about IT correctly, of pretty much all treatments for getting over stuff, if people don't have access to a really good clinical like yourself, how should they Carry these thoughts in these ideas? I mean, I think almost everybody of any reasonable age has memories or things that upset them, but we learn to suppress them.

What does one do? Obviously the revery APP has approached to dealing with some of this um inside of the APP um but how does one start to think about actually dealing with something like this and avoiding the hazards of just kind of reactivating a lot of painful experiences because a lot of being a functional human being is also going to work each day interacting with people and not bringing once trauma you on dumping IT at all on the table or or being able to this function is so crucial. So how do you think about this .

as a clinical um well, you know the image comes to mind is the great miss of pandora box that is opened and the furies got out and you couldn't him back in and we have this kind of fanta sy that once you get into these memories and they'll take you over and you'll never get them back in the box. And I think that's wrong.

You know we people who use their noses say that there are ways to presenting to people that will be helpful in ways that won't. And one real mistake is to tell someone, don't think about purple elephants. You know, what do you thinking about? Know he doesn't work.

So you want to find a way to feel in control of the access and to define what happened on your own terms. And so i'm not a big fan of trigger warnings. I think we're going crazy over, you know, this could be upsetting.

That could be upsetting. Yeah, there are a lots of things are upsetting. You know, the average kid has watched twenty thousand murder in by the time he's twenty years old watching television and movies these days.

So you know we see terrible things and and it's not a matter of are you exposed to something that's upsetting but how do you handle IT? What do you make of IT and are you feeling in control? Is not like, you know what what putin is doing to his his rival in russia.

You know, forcing him to watch propagate movies ten hours a day while is in prison. It's a matter of thinking um uh uh about a problem in a way that leaves you feeling you understand IT Better. You're in more control.

You can turn that off when you when you want. You can turn them on when you want. And so we have to in life deal with dressing things.

There are studies Karen Parker navid has done some wonderful studies with primates about stress inoculation, that if you separate A A baby monkey from his mother for two hours a day and then reunite them, and then you stress that baby monkey later, they actually handle stress Better. There's less cortisol arousal in the face of the stress. Stress and accusation has been called.

So mere exposure to trauma stress is a part of living anyway. We can't avoid that even if we d like to. And um it's not pleasant, it's not great, but it's sometimes things you need to learn about life.

And if you can find an algorithm for facing IT, putting in IT into perspective, dealing with IT, you become a stronger person, not a weaker person. So this idea that college students are such fragile flowers that if you talk about a sexual assault or something, you know, you're doing something terrible to them is just wrong. And and I think we need to build our ability to recognize and manage stress.

And you can't do that without doing that. You can learn you can ride a bicycle without taking the risk of fall and off IT. You know so I think that's the way I think of dealing with the .

stress yeah I really appreciate you saying that I was you know both at gathering, let's say where um this issue was being discussed in around the issue of a of a policies sexual trauma and um you made an excEllent case for why this stuff can be pushed under the rug um and that actually, in my observation, LED to a lot of healing for the people that and the famous of people that suffered from us and the um I do think uh, people are resilient.

They uh but we don't really teach how how think about feelings. We don't you know we're told that we need to feel our feelings but then again, we are also told that feelings don't hold all the information. And so I think as you mention, there's no Operating our users manual for this nervous system thing brings me to another issue, which is the my body connection, something that we we're very interested in and you'd have extensive work on.

We all like to think that getting more in touch with our body would be a great thing. Learning to into accept paying attention to our internal landscape would be a great thing. But as we often discuss, um when we're feeling lousy, then being really in touched with that loud feeling mayor may not be a good thing.

I um so how should we think about mind body? And I can see examples in hypnosis from your descriptions of hippos is where um you want to unify the mind, body connection, feel what you're thinking, think what you're feeling at a but I could also um point to elements within the hiphop process in which you are actively on trying to uncouple of those. So IT sounds to me like this whole my body thing is a bit more like A A car.

You you can't say that forty miles per hour is the optimal speed IT kind to s on the the road iron and the the turn may may not be taking um how should we think about mind body in terms of, uh you know navigating daily life? What what do you think is the adaptive way to to concept ze the mind body? The big question .

is is a very interesting one. Um I I guess I think um that is a matter not of you know absolute control but more control that that um we need to think of our brain as a tool and and our body signals as tools as well to help us understand um what's going on in the world, what we need, what matters, what's important, what isn't um but also something that can be managed, not simply you absorbed.

And so if noses, I think, is a kind of limiting case where you can push IT about as far as we can push IT, uh, in terms of regulating pain, pain is, you know is a good example of that. You know, obviously, you need to pay attention. If you just broke your ankle, you Better pay attention to IT and get help, or you're having crushing substance al chep.

You Better do something about IT. But our brain is out of program to treat all pain signals as if they were novel pain signals. If it's a sudden new problem that needs to be attended to, I teach people to to think of the pain and categorized is IT.

Does does the pain mean that if you put weight on this, you're gonna a reinjure your ankle, for example? Or does IT simply mean that your body is healing and the pain is a sign that gradually things are getting back to Normal and and so you can modify the way you process pain based on what your brain tells you the pain means. And that's true for emotional pain as well.

And particularly where I think a strategy that really helps is if you think of uh an interpersonal problem or threat of something coming um as as a an opportunity to do something to a militate the situation. So it's not just is happening to you, but something that you can influence and do something about. So it's blending the receptive with the active response that I think can make a difference.

So you try and process that in a way that gives you a deeper understanding what's happening. You face IT. But you also say this is an opportunity for me to do something about IT. And the minute you realistically in hand, and this doesn't mean, imagine a way, art attack IT means figure out how to rehabilitate from heart attack, or a broken leg, or something like that, in a way that you get as much control into the situation as you can.

I love IT grief. Grief is one of those states that is very hard to removal self from you know and a lot of people asked me how do I deal with grief and i'm not a clinician so i'm deferring to you on the one actually someone to at stanford recently um came to me and said, you know my my mother passed away and I had a sibling that passed away. There were the only people that I had and i'm also living alone and I chAllenge you with a number of things and they looked like they were holding IT together very well in fact, given what they were describing um and on the one hand, I I well, I certainly point out that our clinic, but I said on the one hand, you could imagine that I would be necessary and useful to go into the grief state if you .

want to transition .

through IT um on the other hand um there i've heard before that the cathartic model of just really diving into an emotion can also be potentially hazard this if you don't have any anchors um to uh crap onto a what what is the view of psychiatry or your view of grief and how to deal with grief because I think grief is is one of those all encompassing emotions for many people .

IT IT is and it's a very important, natural, necessary stage of life in the reason we have all these great for itunes know from barrios and memorials and headstones and sitting shiver and other things that people do, it's a way of making IT real, that an incomprehensible loss has to be comprehended. You know, you have to realize that you are not gonna have to live life without your loved one, your parents, your sibling, whoever.

And we've all go gone through this at one time or another. I certainly have, and it's very hard to just come to terms with. But one principal is to sort of say it's not it's never all or none. It's more or less.

So yes, it's all or none that you've lost a loved one but I ask people as part of their grieving to say to themselves and I do this in hynes sometimes too um you've lost them but what have they left you with? What what have they been quiz to you even though they're gone? And i'll sometimes ask them to say, if your mother could be here right now, what would you say to you? How would you feel about your life now? What would you advise you to do so in our support groups for women with advanced breast cancer, we, we lost people, and and I gotto tell you that we were warned by oncologists that we demoralize people, that, I mean, there are wonderful oncologists, but there are some that we're very afraid that that we would harm them in some way, because they know the mortality rate is fairly high with metastatic breast cancer, they're going to watch people die the same disease, and you're demoralize them.

And I so we actually measured, there are emotion and the content of speech every five minutes throughout a bunch of groups to make sure that wasn't happening. What we found was that they talked about more serious issues, but the mood didn't actually get worse. And we found in general that expressing negative emotion on the log and helps people be less anxious and depressed over time. And we've shown this in anomie ed clinical trial. So it's not just my clinical impression and and um what we what we try to get them to do is to face the laws, live with the emotion that comes with IT, but also see that the reason that hurts so much is how much that person gave you.

So we would do self if noses exercise that the only gram say, I want you to get your body floating safe and comfortable now picks your mary and and um sit with the feeling of sadness that she's no longer with this and we do that for a few minutes and then we'd say, on the other side picture, one thing SHE left with you that you still have, that you Carry on in your heart her tradition at what he gave to you. And so just seeing IT not as a complete loss, but as a real loss, a painful loss, but one that helps you to reflect on what you gained from her. And knowing her, I think, can be very helpful in the .

grieving process. It's very helpful the way to conceptualize IT couple quick questions, can children be safely matiz? Ed, reduce self nosis.

They is sometimes harder for them to do self. If notices, they need more structure to do that. You ve got up, share your dorm.

We find a cortex with them a little bit. But yes, absolutely. Children can be very advertiser. And I know pediatricians who use IT wonderfully all the time.

They get them to focus on something else so they're gonna to give them a shot t or draw blood der something and they'll say, i'm going to press your happy button and presses their Billy button and they started to go go away. Kids do. And meanwhile, the nurses drawing the blood and they don't even notice.

IT dentist, good dentist, can use that to help kids with fear and pain. So yes, I can be very effective for children. We did a analyzed trial.

I have a publication in pediatrics, my late sister, who was a pediatric and who always used to joke that he was the only one in our family who was a real doctor you know um I said I got I got a paper and and and the paper was children having to undergo avoiding system reprogram so the the anatomy, the kidney, if you forgive me a sort of interesting and in that the the error that goes into the batter Normally goes into the bladder and an angle. And so that means that when the bladder contracts to excel, urine IT automatically closes off the atr. Because IT sideways to the batter, some kids are born with a perpendicular and then you'll get reflects into the kidney.

And some children outgrow at some need, pretty complicated surgery to fix that. And so you you image them every year so to see whether they're getting kidney damage or not. And it's a pretty miserable experience. You're a nine year old girl.

You have to go line on a hard cold table, have strangers pull your legs, apartments, take a consider into your uh you retha and hold in the bladder and then expelled yarn and so you get in to these struggling fights. And of course, the more they struggle, the more they construct and IT makes IT harder to do IT. So um I was asked if we could test this.

So we did a analyze trial at children's hospital. Uh they either got training itself if noses, I would have meet with them on the mother the week before we find out from the kids where they like to be. And I said, you're going to play a trick on your doctors, your bodies there you're somewhere else.

Go visit your friend, go to disney and do something else. And the mother would work on this with me at the head of the table. And we found that these children were much easier to image.

One got so relaxed. So you guy with easy, Normally IT takes us ten minutes to get them to P E. After they're doing this. SHE was so relax. You started paying before I could even get the bed pen under her.

And I had to clean up the table, you know? And they also seventeen minutes shorter procedures, and that's a long seventeen minutes for a little kid. So IT can be very effective with children. They are less anxious, they have less pain and get through these difficult very well.

That's a great has hip notice ever been done in for couples that couples therapy? I'm thinking pretty every clinical setting here, both people have to be his enticement, of course. Yeah, the reason I asked about this is next time i'm going to ask about psychiatrically.

And there's a lot of interest in coordinating states through the use of drugs of different kinds. We actually do this when we treat depression, right? You have a depressed person with the family members who are not depressing.

You say, well, let's make them all a not depressed, right? I mean but but in and i'm Normally half kidding there because that is kind of the underlying logic in some sense. But um are you aware of any um of any coordinated hyn?

Sis, that's interesting. I i've done .

plenty of IT in groups. Yeah I .

been enjoying. Uh I but the the the many study breast cancer, there was a group of like ten women who would meet once a week and we were all going to have no together.

I did realize elect right fascinate .

and and .

that you .

know if anything, I think IT brings out the best in people's abilities because it's a shared social experience and and they would talk about IT afterwards. And so yes, that's absolutely doable.

And I don't want to focus on psychedelic specifically. Maybe that's a topic for a future episode, but is there any basis for combining his nosis with drug therapies inside of the hypnotic episode? So I realized that some patients of years might be prescribe, bed, enter the present to our medication for for some purpose, maybe same different than the hype sis is being directed toward. But is there any evidence that if people are relaxed through the use of a um proper all or some you know one of these many things in the psychiatrist st kit, that hip nosis can be more effective?

Well interestingly, one study that I haven't mentioned as we did uh spectrography on people who were imai zed and we found um that there was a correlation between himself ze ability and gaba activity in the um interior single cortex, which fits with turning down activity. So to the extent that we can self medicate and gaba receptors basically are doing what ends the asia pines due to the brain that can happen when people are humanized.

So you're saying inside of the hip noses you have neural evidence that there is a kind of a um sensitive, effective of nosis at the chemical .

level yeah people who are more possible have more of those gaber. Receptivity is related to the degree of their immitigable .

in terms .

of there have been studies where they try to give people medications as well. And the interesting thing with bends of the asia pins, which activate in habitable activity in the brain, um if you're very anxious, IT might improve you have not responsible bit if you're just so anxious and you can do IT, if you're not very access that actually inhibits have not a activity because you get sort of the dated and just out of IT and you can't focus your attention as well.

So by and large, we don't use drugs as an adjuvant to hypnotic experience. Most of the time you don't need to. And sometimes I can make IT worse rather than Better. Some there's some evidence that mild stimulus might enhance sive not a responsibility a little reliably, but too much well again, scattered attention in your highness control over so they might be edge of that. But I Frankly think his nosis is more over replacement than in need of supplementation.

Your laboratory, my laboratory have um well sort of snuck into your lab in trying to and emerged that you have been a lot of fun and if learning a lot about the power of resprayed breathing to shift brain states not just during breathing protocols but um at all times and we will do an entire episode about those protocols, I think after um those are published and and and so on but breathing itself is um you've described as a bridge between conscious and unconscious states and um so I have to ask how how important is the patients breathing pattern? How closely are you monitoring their breathing pattern? How closely do you monitor your own breathing pattern as your inducing hip nosis? Put simply, what is the role of aspiration in shifting the brains state during a hypnotic protocol?

Yeah that's very interesting. You had a great show with the jack a jack elman and he he is and and the the issue um I I watch IT um I try IT. The work that we're enjoying doing together shows that there are breathing patterns that may increase sympathetic arousal um or may decrease that may have no sign c sign seems to actually where you have more time spent exhaling than inhaling seen and there's reason to believe that IT induces paris sympathetic activity because your increasing pressure in the chest and therefore um allowing the heart to slow down because blood is being returned to the atrium um more easily.

Um I do use that I ask people to take a the breath as part of the induction and and slowly x hail and partly as a result of our research together I am emphasizing the slow x hail more as part of in some to enhance the idea in the induction that this is a period of relaxation because I think the are inducing that and perhaps perceiving IT as well so there there is no, you're absolutely right that breathing is very interesting because it's right at the edge of conscious. And jack talked about that two of conscious and unconscious control that IT will go on automatically, but we can control IT. And so it's a kind of way for us to demonstrate to ourselves, uh, in greater ways of an of modulating or internal state.

Uh, so you can either do IT thinking about that the way we do with pain control and dipnote is, or you can do IT to some extent by taking charge of your breathing and doing things that will produce a change that you want to see happen in your body. So I I like IT because it's right at that margin where you can enhance for me. I like that as a way of augmenting. He notices more than medication. I think this is A A powerful way of doing that.

great. I'm really excited to see where all of this goes. Breathing, vision, bodily states are clearly that and directed mental um focus seem to be the the key elements of hip nosis. Am I missing any any other ingredients?

Yeah it's I think that's right. Reading vision, breathing vision, how you change your vision um and you don't you know if you typically you're in a physically relaxed date, but Frankly, there are people at the peak of performance, including physical athletic performance or musical performance when they are in hypnotic states too.

You know i've talked to classical P, N, S, who say, i'm not think if I start thinking about what my fingers are doing now, I scare up you. I'm floating about the piano, thinking about the night, the tone that I want to feel exit from instrument. So that's a hippos like state too.

And and many athletes in who are in peak performance are just flowing with that. They are they're not. They're not thinking step by step. What am I doing? And that's when you're doing your best or you know when when we're working or uh giving a talk and doing IT well, we're in a hegner tic like state so IT IT doesn't IT usually requires but doesn't necessarily requires physical comfort or quiet ness that can sometimes be .

intense activity credible well um this has been an amazing discussion. I've learned so much that I always do from you. Um where can people learn more about how they can get him notified?

Uh, we mentioned revery. We will put a link to its R E V E R I dot com. Is the the way to access that?

Or is the revery APP from the APP stories the other way? Every dot com is the website. You can get to IT through that or download the revery APP from .

the APP store. great. Um so currently on apple, hopefully soon also on android. But in the meantime um what what if people are interested in expLoring clinical hip nosis working with you or or somebody similar. There are essentially zed resource that people can go to to find um really well train happiness. There are two .

good professional organizations ah that will help you with that. One is the society for clinical and experiment hip nosis and I think that's seage dius is there will look IT up .

and provide and the american .

society for clinical hippos is and they both provide referral services for professionals. Um you can look at up, I would just say in general, look for someone who is licensed and trained in a primary professional discipline, schisti psychology, medicine industry and who has training and interest in using his nosis is a way to do IT.

great. Then one more question and then um a comment um the question .

is will you be my I D .

it's A I might be the the most of in patient.

I think the work already been done. Thank you and that .

well um in the final thing is a comment. Um first of all, thank you so much for being here today for sharing your knowledge. I hope we can do IT again and again.

I hope I love working with your laboratory and with you because when you speak, I learn and I learned and I know others do as well. We will put resources to get to you. But I also just want say thank you for doing the work that you do.

It's an incredible thing that in this world, where we are discovering so much about how the body works in on the mind is still rather mysterious, and people are struggling with a lot of things. But also, I think people are really excited about applying tools like hip nosis to perform Better, feel Better mentally and physically. And see, you've pointed us to a tremendous amount of resources and how these tools work and where they've already been demonstrated to work, such as thank you. I know this is your your life's professional commitment in life and and we all benefits so thank you.

It's been a real joy for me to be collaborating with you and for you to be using your precision and knowledge about nor anatomy, nor biology, to address problems that often people who are that disciplined in in the primary or gal end aren't as interested in as you are. And so it's really been a pleasure to try and you bring together what we both know from these different perspectives to build something that neither of us could do alone. And so it's been a real joy for me.

Thank you. I'm honored. Thank you. Thank you very much, David. Thank you for joining me today for my discussion with doctor David speel. I hope you found IT as fascinating as I did. And if you'd like to see the video of doctor people hip note zing me in what constitutes a abbreviated clinical hipness session, you can go to the huberman lab clipsed channel on youtube.

Also, if you d like to check out the revery APP for self fit nosis designed by doctor people and colleagues, you can go to revery that's R E V E R I dot com to see the revery APP. There's also other information there about the scientific studies that support the revery APP. If you're enjoying and or learning from this podcast, please subscribe our youtube channel.

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It's huberman lab on both instagram and twitter and at those channels, I cover science and science related tools, some of which overlap with the content of this podcast, other of which does not in a unique content. So once again, thank you for joining me for my discussion with doctor David speel. And last but certainly not least, thank you for your interest in science.