Speaker 1: Well, Hello, they're Healthyish listeners. Thanks for joining us today
Speaker 1: on this Body and Soul podcast. I'm your host, Felicity Halle. Now,
Speaker 1: hypnosis has had a pretty bad rap over the years,
Speaker 1: but my guest today wants to change the public perception
Speaker 1: and he's got the credentials to back it up. Doctor
Speaker 1: David Spiegel is the Associate Chair of Psychiatry and Behavioral
Speaker 1: Sciences at Stanford University School of Medicine, the director of
Speaker 1: Stanford Center of Stress and Health, and has published over
Speaker 1: four hundred and eighty journal articles, written thirteen books. He
Speaker 1: joins us today from the US to discuss the power
Speaker 1: of self hypnosis. Now make sure listening to Extra Healthy
Speaker 1: Ish where we go a bit deeper into the whole
Speaker 1: topic of hypnosis and self hypnosis. I assure you that
Speaker 1: is a very interesting episode. You should listen to it.
Speaker 1: You can catch it wherever you get your podcasts. David,
Speaker 1: thank you for joining us today all the way from
Speaker 1: the US of A.
Speaker 2: How are you.
Speaker 3: I'm fine, Thank you, Felicity. Glad to be here with you.
Speaker 2: Yeah, me too.
Speaker 1: I'm excited to chat to you, particularly about self hypnosis.
Speaker 1: I feel like we, you know, we've all got a
Speaker 1: view of hypnosis, which will talk a bit more about
Speaker 1: in Extra Healthy Ish. But what is self hypnosis?
Speaker 2: Exactly?
Speaker 3: Well, feliciting all hypnosis is really self hypnosis. It's people
Speaker 3: learning to use this shift in consciousness that we're not
Speaker 3: aware that many of us have. You know, we're endowed
Speaker 3: with this remarkable three pound organ on the top of
Speaker 3: our shoulders that is connected every part of the body,
Speaker 3: controls things going on in every part of the body,
Speaker 3: and census things from every part of the body. But
Speaker 3: we don't usually use it to its fullest ability. We
Speaker 3: don't get a user's manual on it. And hypnosis is
Speaker 3: a naturally occurring shift in concentration. Have you ever had
Speaker 3: the experience of getting so caught up in a good
Speaker 3: movie that you forget you're watching a movie and you
Speaker 3: enter the imagined world.
Speaker 2: Oh all the time happened to you all of the time.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and that it enhances your enjoyment of the movie.
Speaker 3: Hypnosis has been called believed in imagination, and what it
Speaker 3: really is is a state of highly focused attention the
Speaker 3: way you feel in a movie, coupled with dissociation. You
Speaker 3: put out of conscious awareness things that would ordinarily be
Speaker 3: in consciousness. Right now. For example, you're sitting in a chair.
Speaker 3: Your body has sensations touching the chair, but hopefully you
Speaker 3: weren't even aware of that until I brought it to
Speaker 3: your attention. If you were, we could just stop the
Speaker 3: interview right now. So in order to focus, we have
Speaker 3: to regulate the amount of input, and we have enormous
Speaker 3: input all the time from our body, from the world
Speaker 3: around us, thoughts about the past, thoughts about the future,
Speaker 3: and to function we have to narrow the attention and
Speaker 3: in hypnosis you do that in a more extreme way.
Speaker 3: And one of the other things you do in hypnosis
Speaker 3: is you disconnect from your usual way of being. One
Speaker 3: of the coolest things about it, one of the things
Speaker 3: that helped people change is that you can try out
Speaker 3: being different and seeing what it feels like. And normally
Speaker 3: people think of that in a bad way. They think
Speaker 3: of some hypnosis show they saw where the football coach
Speaker 3: was made to dance like a ballerina. I don't like
Speaker 3: using hypnosis or anything else to make people feel silly,
Speaker 3: but there is an important message in it. If you
Speaker 3: want to see what it would be like to be different,
Speaker 3: dry being hypnotized and see what happens.
Speaker 2: How is it different?
Speaker 1: You know, your description there is a lot like flow state,
Speaker 1: even visualization.
Speaker 2: You know, and.
Speaker 1: How is it different or is it just semantics? Different
Speaker 1: ways of approaching it.
Speaker 3: Well, for listening, if you kind of combine the two,
Speaker 3: you get close, so you can visualize being somewhere having
Speaker 3: an experience or doing something different. But if you do
Speaker 3: it in a state of flow where doing it is
Speaker 3: its own reward, where you're totally engaged in the experience,
Speaker 3: I knew checks Chick sent me Hi, who wrote the
Speaker 3: book Flow, He called it an auto tel experience, one
Speaker 3: where you naturally you keep doing it just to do
Speaker 3: it because it feels so good to do it. And
Speaker 3: that's one of the cool things about hypnosis is you
Speaker 3: get fully engaged in what you're doing, and you most
Speaker 3: of the time enjoy what you're doing, and so you
Speaker 3: do it more intensely. The intensity helps us in our lives. Now,
Speaker 3: we're so scattered in different directions, fragmented that it's hard
Speaker 3: to enjoy anything because you're always constantly being nagged at
Speaker 3: on the side to pay attention to something else. And
Speaker 3: hypnosis you just allow yourself to be immersed in the
Speaker 3: focus of what you're doing.
Speaker 1: I mean, we generally know hypnosis for things like you know,
Speaker 1: ceasing smoking or losing weight. How can it help, you know,
Speaker 1: talk to us a bit more about how it can
Speaker 1: help us with other areas of our health, you know,
Speaker 1: particularly focus as you just mentioned there.
Speaker 3: Well, yes, part of what it does is it teaches
Speaker 3: you to coordinate what's going on in your body with
Speaker 3: what's going on in your mind so that you can
Speaker 3: make the most out of whatever experience you're having. So
Speaker 3: you allow yourself to focus on what matters and put
Speaker 3: aside the things that don't. So, for example, the coach
Speaker 3: of the Stanford women's swimming team, we have a fantastic team.
Speaker 3: Many of the swimmers wind up in the Olympics, but
Speaker 3: the coach noted that they were doing better in practice
Speaker 3: than they were in meats. Their times were quicker, and
Speaker 3: he realized that they were distracting themselves by worrying about
Speaker 3: what the women in the neighboring lanes were doing when
Speaker 3: they were swimming in a meat. Now you'd think being
Speaker 3: in a meat you're at your most, you're at your peak.
Speaker 2: You know, adrenaline's pumping, but it.
Speaker 3: Was actually disrupting their knowledge of their bodies and how
Speaker 3: to best use them to move through the water as
Speaker 3: smoothly and quickly as possible. So I had them practice
Speaker 3: self hypnosis and imagine themselves swimming their best possible race,
Speaker 3: and their times got better because they were ignoring the distraction.
Speaker 3: You don't worry about the goal, you fully engage yourself
Speaker 3: in the process.
Speaker 1: So did you hypnotize them or did they use self
Speaker 1: hypnosis as the tool?
Speaker 3: I taught them self hypnosis. So we all met as
Speaker 3: a group and they learned to practice it for themselves.
Speaker 3: All hypnosis, as I said, is really self hypnosis. It's
Speaker 3: using a skill that you have but may not be
Speaker 3: aware that you have. It's kind of a hidden power
Speaker 3: that people have that they don't often utilize fully.
Speaker 2: Oh we like that. We need any superpower that we've got.
Speaker 3: How do you?
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, do you? How do we actually do it?
Speaker 1: I mean you've developed this app called Reverie. How do
Speaker 1: we actually put ourselves into this state?
Speaker 3: So in Reverie, which is just a simple self hypnosis
Speaker 3: app that you can download from the App store a
Speaker 3: Google Play, and there I instruct you how to go
Speaker 3: into a state of self hypnosis. So if you want
Speaker 3: to try it, all you have to do is look
Speaker 3: up to the top of your head, close your eyes slowly,
Speaker 3: take a deep breath, let the breath out slowly, let
Speaker 3: your eyes relax, let your body float, and if you want,
Speaker 3: you can let one hand or the other float up
Speaker 3: in your laca balloon and picture yourself floating in space
Speaker 3: and a bath, in a lake, a hot and just
Speaker 3: allow your body to experience itself in a state of
Speaker 3: comfort and relaxation. And then you concentrate on what you
Speaker 3: want to concentrate too. You don't have to count upstairs
Speaker 3: and downstairs and take thirty minutes to do it.
Speaker 2: Watch in front of yourself.
Speaker 3: Under a minute.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, I mean that's quite amizing and under a minute.
Speaker 3: Under a minute. And one of the coolest things is
Speaker 3: you will know whether hypnosis will help you with stress,
Speaker 3: for example, or pain. In the first ten minutes of
Speaker 3: the exercise or less. You'll see whether your stress and
Speaker 3: pain is better. I was just with helping a woman
Speaker 3: who I just met for the first time who's having
Speaker 3: trouble getting to sleep, and her stress levels were like
Speaker 3: six out of ten, and within a couple of minutes
Speaker 3: she was down to one. She said, I just feel
Speaker 3: so much better. Now and she pictured it was wonderful.
Speaker 3: She I asked her to think of an image that
Speaker 3: would help her get to sleep. And she has cardiovascular problem,
Speaker 3: she has respiratory problems, she has sleep at me. She
Speaker 3: has all kinds of things that are real reasons for
Speaker 3: having trouble sleeping in addition to the emotional reasons of
Speaker 3: tension and anxiety. And I had her picture. I said,
Speaker 3: what's your favorite image of going to sleep? And she said,
Speaker 3: when I was a kid, my father used to take
Speaker 3: us to Provincetown on Cape Cod in Massachusetts, and he
Speaker 3: would have me picture. He would take his imaginary belt
Speaker 3: and strap me to Joe Fish, and Joe Fish would
Speaker 3: take me for a ride and then take me down
Speaker 3: to where his family where Mama Fish and Whitefish, and
Speaker 3: I would play with them for a while, and then
Speaker 3: I'd come back and I would be asleep. And she said,
Speaker 3: why didn't I think of that? You know I've done
Speaker 3: that all my life. She said, I feel so good
Speaker 3: right now, and her stress level just kind of dissolved.
Speaker 3: So she was trying out being herself as a little
Speaker 3: girl in a situation where her father played a game
Speaker 3: with her that helped her immerse herself in sleep.
Speaker 2: Yeah, what a beautiful ses.
Speaker 3: So that's an ability that many many people have that
Speaker 3: they can learn to use better.
Speaker 2: Yeah, thank you David for joining us on health es today.
Speaker 3: You're most welcome for us.
Speaker 1: Rey, I hope you got a lot of that chat
Speaker 1: with David. I sure did. I just get such a
Speaker 1: kick out of interviewing people with extraordinary credentials. By the way,
Speaker 1: David is offering healthyish listeners. Yes, that's you a special
Speaker 1: offer for his app Reverie. I will leave a link
Speaker 1: to that offer in the show notes. If you didn't
Speaker 1: enjoy this chat, jump on rate and review it, or
Speaker 1: of course, subscribe to this podcast, share this set with
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