E210 - Dr. David Spiegel: #1 Hypnotism Expert, “Wake Up From The Trance of Your Life”

**David Spiegel** (0:00)
Your personality, it's just a convenient assumption. We are a lot more changeable than we imagine. You ever get so caught up in a good movie that you forget you're watching a movie and enter the imagined world?

**André Duqum** (0:10)
Yeah.

**David Spiegel** (0:11)
Hypnosis is like that. I've done it with 11,000 people in the course of my career. It's a state that many people, not everyone, but many people can enter.

**André Duqum** (0:20)
Could you quickly tell how hypnotizable I am?

**David Spiegel** (0:22)
Sure, I'd be happy to do it.

**André Duqum** (0:25)
It feels like my left hand is kind of just doing it, doing it by itself.

**David Spiegel** (0:29)
You're very hypnotizable. You score nine out of ten.

**André Duqum** (0:32)
Great, I guess.

**David Spiegel** (0:34)
Oh, it is. It can really help you do unusual things. For example, you can handle stress better. You can reduce pain. You can stop smoking. Hypnosis can also help you get a new point of view about an old problem. One of my patients was sexually assaulted as a 12-year-old. She'd been in therapy for more than a decade, and I got her hypnotized. And I said, is that her fault? She said no. She called me a week later. She said, my psychiatrist wants to know what you did to me because I'm not depressed anymore.
That's a tremendous ability to empower their pain. I want to empower people to learn more about their innate abilities. So first look at me and then look up to the top of your head. And as you keep looking up, slowly close your eyes.

**André Duqum** (1:20)
Hey, everyone. Welcome back to the Know Thyself podcast. Our guest today is a Wilson professor and associate chair of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Stanford. He's the co-founder of Reverie, a hypnosis app. He is an author of over 13 books and 400 papers. And over the past 50 years, he's seen thousands of clients in a clinical hypnosis context. Dr. David Spiegel, thank you for being here.

**David Spiegel** (1:46)
Thank you, André. It's a pleasure to be here with you.

**André Duqum** (1:49)
What is hypnosis and why should anyone care about it?

**David Spiegel** (1:53)
Well, given the lovely name of your program, I like to think of hypnosis as knowing thyselves. That hypnosis helps you become and explore things that allow you to try out being different.
It's a state of highly focused attention. Like, you ever get so caught up in a good movie that you forget you're watching a movie and enter the imagined world?

**André Duqum** (2:15)
Yeah.

**David Spiegel** (2:15)
It's called believed in imagination. And our brains have the capacity, and we understand a good deal now about how our brains do these things, to narrow the focus of attention, to dissociate, put outside of conscious awareness things that would ordinarily be in consciousness.
And to have a hyper connection between the brain and the body, to do things to your body and perceive things from your body that ordinarily you wouldn't think you could do. So, it's a form of very rapidly both dividing and experiencing things in a way that is unique and novel and can be very helpful to people.

**André Duqum** (2:57)
You've shared many times, and hopefully it's not beating a dead horse, but most people are familiar with hypnosis in the kind of carnival setting, you know, in the stage hypnosis. And as you so beautifully said, with the many selves and the know thyselves and helping people navigate this complex dynamic in a realm is a completely different thing than what most people are familiar with in the stage hypnosis. What is the difference?

**David Spiegel** (3:27)
Well, you know, stage hypnosis is, I don't like it, you know. But you know, then there are snake oil salesmen for drugs too. I mean, you can find a bad example of a good thing.
And the fact that, you know, the football coach will dance like a ballerina, some football coaches, you know.
The stage hypnotists don't just do what they do with anybody. They search the audience for those 5% of people who are extremely hypnotizable. So it doesn't work with everybody. But what they do is they get people to try out being different, to see what it would be like if the football coach pretended he was a ballerina, without thinking about what's going to happen in the locker room the next day, when the team says, hey, coach, you look pretty funny there. And so I don't like it to make fun of people, to embarrass them. But I do think there's a point. And the point is that if you focus very intently, you can mobilize resources you might not have been able to do otherwise. You can put outside of conscious awareness things that might inhibit you, or fear of failure, or having tried doing something like skiing, or playing tennis, or something that you hadn't done before. And allow yourself to see what it would be like if you could engage with it in an intense way. And hypnosis is like that. It's a state that many people, not everyone, but many people can enter, that allows you to connect in interesting and strong ways with your body, to put outside of conscious awareness things that might haunt you or trouble you, and to try out what it would be like if you were that different person.