David Spiegel and Aubrey Marcus on Self-Hypnosis

I've had a working hypothesis for a long time that I would be unable to be hypnotized today we're going to put that to the test people do really differ in their hypnotizability as adults it's as stable a trait in adult life as IQ is hypnosis used to be thought of as either dangerous or useless or both all the time our brains are helping us to focus on what we want to focus on and put outside of awareness things that are not you can just train your brain to reinterpret the signals and acknowledge them but transform them experience it as something different if you can turn down your reaction to the pain you can turn down how much pain you actually feel wow highly focused attention uh but turned inward the first thing to keep in mind is we're social creatures all right so we are susceptible of influence by other humans this feels like it's part of the the coding in my operating system now I want people to have this available to them and I want to use internet Tech technology use smartphone technology to help people help themselves that's what I'm about so please look at me and ready 3 2 [Music] 1 I was always under the impression that I would be unable to be hypnotized until I met Dr Spiegel one of the preeminent hypnotists and psychotherapists in the world and he brings me through a hypnosis process and it wasn't exactly what I thought it was but the effects were incredibly powerful so in this podcast you'll get to see me get hypnotized and also understand how hypnosis can be used by the self and by a practitioner like Dr Spiegel to help bring you to the highest fruition of whatever your goal might be so this is an incredible podcast that explores this topic that not many of us know much about other than perhaps a stage show we've seen here or there to really understand how the mind works and how we can harness the mind's ability to control our body control our thoughts and control our actions in a way that benefits us for ourselves and for the good of all so I'm incredibly excited to introduce this podcast with Dr Spiegel all right Dr Spiegel I've had a working hypothesis for a long time that I would be unable to be hypnotized and now today we're going to put that to the test and we're going to see if this is possible for me because I've seen it happen on stage and I was like I just don't think it would work because I watched the stage hypnotist which is kind of like a magic show you know they make them do bunch of silly things and I know that's not your line of work you're more on the clinical side and how this can be used beneficially for people's lives but nonetheless I watched them and they would bring up a row of individuals maybe 10 and then they would go through the hypnosis and then they would kick out a couple people who didn't drop in and I was like I would for sure be one of those people I have a kind of busy mind now since College when I saw this happen I've certainly deepened my meditation practice of course my psychotic Journeys the surrender of my mind into more non-conscious States so I'm a little bit more open to the idea that it could be possible that I might be hypnotized and we're going to find out today you've you've hurled The Gauntlet Aubrey we'll see I have and I brought in the expert yeah well here we go that's the challenge but you've already given part of the evidence about why you might be even if you think you're not and that is people do really differ in their hypnotizability as adults it's a stable a trait in adult life as IQ is and about 20% of the population are just not hypnotizable about 60% moderately and 20% extremely hypnotizable and so whatever ever happens happens because of who you are um and all my job is is to help identify and assess how hypnotizable you are well I'll let you know I'm going to be working with you good with full Heart full Spirit full surrender so it's not going to be from lack of intention or or volition on my part that uh that we're going to get this done but so for people who don't really know what hypnosis really is what is hypnosis hypnosis auy is a natural occurring state of Highly focused attention have you ever gotten so caught up in a good movie that you kind of forget you're watching the movie and you enter the imag all the time I get caught up in sex like that basketball like that riding like that lots of things like that nature like that you give yourself to it and you stop being in the audience and you're just in the experience right and that's typical of more highly hypnotizable people so I'm guessing you're you're likely to be um it's a state where you focus your attention it's like looking through the telephoto lens in a camera um what you see you see with great detail and intensity but you dissociate or put outside of conscious awareness things that would ordinarily be in Consciousness and that allows you to focus more intently now let's do a little experiment right now you got Sensations in your body touching these nice chairs you have here right but hopefully you weren't even aware of those Sensations until I mentioned it if you were we could just stop the interview now you know so our brains naturally filter out most of the information we're getting there's a bit of an air conditioner noise here that hopefully neither of us were aware of until I thought about it so all the time our brains are helping us to focus on what we want to focus on and put outside of awareness things that are not so absorption intense Focus dissociation and and the third part is what we call cognitive flexibility used to be called suggestibility so what scares people is oh you can make me cluck like a chicken and all this stuff um what it really is is in ability to try out being different and see what it feels like to not worry about the implications just give it a try and that is uh an the third aspect of hypnosis that from a treatment point of view is really enticing because it's a state in which people can see what it's like to be different in a hurry that's uh my recollection of those states are ecstatic because I've stepped into those I remember I was in theater in college and I was just kind of entering the theater space didn't do in high school but really wanted to give it a go and we had a really great theater program partnered with the city of Richmond and some other professional actors so as part students and part professionals we put on these plays and I was auditioning for a role in a berol bre play called mother courage oh yeah and lots of talent there that was auditioning and I was like I don't necessarily have the the chops an experience to do this but I just let go completely and I gave the wildest audition possible I was jumping on chairs and on tables and I don't even think I said the lines right but I did it with such wild abandon that she was like you're cast and then she's like you know this is a musical and I was like a musical this is a problem she's like sing happy birthday and I was like so I just belted it out I pretty toned deaf as a bit of a problem for the musical but I did it with such you know kind of wild abandoned and uh and just surrendered to the moment not even thinking about what I was going to do do I just did it and I remember that audition it stands out because it was ecstatic it was like I was free I was like fully liberated from the part of my mind that is constantly watching judging Jud the super ego or the coach is what I like to call it that's right that's in in neuros speak it's the default mode Network it's a part of the brain that when you're not doing anything else is evaluating who you are what you are what you were trained to be what people expect of you I call it the my fault mode Network you know where you think about what's wrong with you you could suspend that so I'm I'm guessing you're going to be pretty hypnotizable oh man all right let's go and what you did is What's called the method in acting in acting school they actually train actors to do exactly what you spontaneously did just be that person don't think about what the person is like and imagine how they would say something just become them and many good actors when you say you are fantastic and they say I know what I don't know what you're talking about you know I I just was that person and that's a hypnotic like Stu that's super interesting all right what is the what is the contrast then with Flow State and in a hypnotic State yeah I I knew chick sent Mi High and um I think the flow uh concept is very interesting and the thing about his description that is I think very much like hypnosis and what you just described is he calls it an autotelic experience you do it just because you enjoy doing it not because you're using it to get something done or be a certain way and there's a lot in hypnosis that's like that I think there's tremendous overlap between flow and hypnosis yeah because in the in the Flow State everything else Falls away if I'm playing basketball and I dip into Flow State which is also ecstatic it feels the best what I'm saying what I'm doing it's just all coming naturally I'm not thinking about the last shot that I missed I'm not there's no thought involved in it in in any in any profound way it's like that aspect of the Mind what you're calling the default mode Network or the my fault mode network is it's offline it's offline that's exactly right and it's you and Michael Jordan Michael Jordan used to train I've never been compared and I I probably shouldn't be but but thank you no but not not quite in size and probably not in basketball skill however however in that approach to basketball cuz he and the Bulls used to train using hypnosis every morning and he would use it as a way of focusing his attention and getting into the flow of the game rather than worrying about the outcome yeah that's super uh it's super interesting to see how these things overlap and another overlap I'm that I'm aware of as you're talking about this is there's been a significant amount of research that particularly psilocybin shifts bloodflow in the brain away from the aspects of the mind that are in charge of the default mode Network I think the amydala and again my my Neuroscience isn't is is sharp but it shifts the blood flow away from the default mode Network and to other aspects of the brain so in some ways it's knocking off a little bit of that Network as well well it's it's been called a sort of suspension of self which it is in hypnosis or just um diffusing who you think you are and so it disorganizes activity in the default mode Network particularly the posterior singulate cortex and not so much the amigdala which uh controls anger and fear and things like that but it it disrupts your usual sense of who you are and what you are and that's why people can emerge from these psychedelic experiences feeling like a changed person um that they saw something but they it's sort of like you experience it but not as you you just experience it the sort of P sense of pure experience which can change your perspective on a lot of things yeah and and so yes what you do in hypnosis is you disconnect your executive control network from the posterior singulate cortex the part of the default mode Network so what you do is inhibiting what your the part of your brain that expects what you should be doing or you're allowed to do or you can do uh and that gives you a kind of freedom to be different so four years I watched the stage Hy hypnotist work with and sometimes it was with some of my friends it was a relatively University of Richmond smallest University so I had a couple friends who were up there and did spectacular things hilarious things and one of the things that they said was because they felt like they just got the most restful nap that they ever had like they came out they emerged from it with this interesting sense of restoration is that something that you find in in your practice as well that people feel really relaxed after exper absolutely absolutely and the way we teach people on Riv our hypnosis app to to deal with anxiety and stress is don't try to think your way out of it now just calm your body so I have them imagine their body is floating in a bath a lake a hot tub floating in space and what you can do is you know there's a sort of interaction and Snowball Effect of physical and mental stress so you get anxious about something your body tenses up muscles tighten heart rate goes up start to sweat and then you notice that and you think oh my God this is terrible you know so you feel worse your body reacts to that so what we do is we start from the body up we say get your body floating relaxed and comfortable and then we'll deal with what it is that's making you anxious so you're already a step ahead because even if you can't control the stressor you can start to control how the stressor affects you via your body yeah and you know this is one of the one of the problems we've had with the cartisian dualism that's tried to separate mind and body right and try to say oh those are two vastly different things no they're not they're completely overlap so if you can change the state of your body and that can control your nervous system which will change your thoughts so which is like for me if I'm worried about a lot of things well if I go in the cold plunge I'm GNA have a whole different mindset after after emerging from that water or something else that will radically shift right my physical state a workout whatever well you know one of the things we humans do naturally is try to find ways to change our states of Consciousness and it's necessary you got to sleep every 24 hours um but we look for other ways we look for substances that change our state of consciousness and every culture has some kind of substance they use we go on vacation and some cultures like me borrow all of the substances from all of the cultures and use them all at once right not all at once I'm a wild ma --- ection Frank fretta is an iconic artist and it's for this new kind of gold times art company we have coming out called metal Mark uh that's a totally different subject but I found myself at Robert Rodriguez's house and I was a huge fan of the movie Dust Till Dawn that's one of his Classic Movies I think kind of broke into the mainstream and there's probably the most famous scene from that I don't know if have you seen the movie no I haven't so there's this scene where SEL mahek who is kind of the one of the main characters in the prime of her beauty I mean I think she's always beautiful but it was like whoa she's doing a kind of burlesque dance with a python now she was terribly afraid of snakes and so she was going to be dancing with virtually you know no scantily clad with a python giant python around her and so what they did is they brought in a hypnotist and they hypnotized her and she was still apprehensive of Frid but then they put it on and Camera started rolling and she delivered one of like the Great Performances of all time I mean and at one point Robert was he was said he was holding the steady Cam and the python went and it moved its head up into her hair like behind her head and he was like oh no this is really pushing it she just stayed locked in like somehow she had been able through hypnosis and through that kind of spark that actors I think have to step in so it was a combination of both but she was able to move through that and at one point the snake moved in such a way that it actually brought her down to the ground and she had to get stand back up and finish the dance and she just stayed calm and collected through that whole process well it's interesting you knew the fear was there but she held it at paay she dissociated it in hypnosis and you know Shan uh did the hypnosis so well um that he finally managed to leave the house to manage his fears and he's now a public speaker and he's out so after three years in the house he just used the app managed to control his stress and like I mean it wasn't his fears weren't as bad as having a snake around his neck but um he was able to to overcome it so people can do remarkable things and the sort of fun thing about it is unlike you know phys IAL training um uh working out where you have to build your muscle mass over time you know a lot about that um this is a something you can discover in yourself so you're working in you're learning how to better utilize your own resources and you can do it very quickly surprisingly quickly so we've talked a lot of about psychological conditions what about physical conditions what about chronic pain what about you know Rehabilitation of injury you know these different practices I think obviously Joe despenza has his own way of dropping into a meditative State and helping you visualize and utilize our own in innate ability to trigger the placebo effect right to to Signal the healing Cascade that's available to us it's even more than the placebo effect hypnotic analgesia is stronger than Placebo analgesia Placebo is just an expectation that you will get better so there's something more benign about whatever it is you're going through and your doctor there wants to help you this is a way of actually altering perceptions so we've been able to show that you give a bunch of Stanford students who are highly hypnotizable hypnotic suggestion that the shocks you're delivering to their wrist the electric shocks are are different because your arm is in ice water cool tingling and numb filter the hurt out of the pain and we reduce the brain's electrical response to the stimuli by 50% wow so starting with a tenth of a second after the shocks are administered so you literally change what you feel you can also change how you react to what you feel but you reduce the pain literally so the strain and pain lies mainly in the brain and a big part of pain experience is the experien part not the stimulus coming from your body so hypnosis is a tremendously effective we we published a study Aubrey in in uh leading British medical journal called the lanet in 2000 yeah um we had um 140 patients in three conditions 40 of them got um standard care they were having arterial cutdowns where you don't use general anesthesia but it's painful you're winding a catheter through the arteries to chemo embolize tumors in the liver and things like that and one group could push a button and give themselves opioids IV the second group had a friendly nurse just comforting them and the third group were taught self hypnosis filter the hurt out of the pain and by the end of filter the hurt out of the pain sounds funny but that's that's a key phrase It's a key phrase I use it all the time and so for the standard Care Group after an hour and a half um their pain was like five out of 10 um for the friendly nurse support group it was three out of 10 um for the hypnosis group it was one out of 10 wow and the hypnosis group and the and the support group were were using half the amount of opioids that the standard Care Group were so they had half the opioids on board they had fewer complications um fewer side effects from the treatment and they got done 17 minutes quicker um their anxiety levels were zero I thought they had died or something they by an hour and a half so they were less anxious had less pain got done quicker and and now we published that in a leading medical journal a randomized clinical trial you would think that everybody would a revolution it absolutely and I'm sitting there I'm waiting for the revolution to still waiting uh hypnosis is the oldest western conception of a psychotherapy but where there any danger field of treatments we don't get no respect because people have you know they once asked him to leave a bar so they could start happy hour you know and I don't understand it because people don't take seriously talking interventions it's not real well I'm here to tell you it's real and if we got the same results with a drug every hospital would be using it now and they're not and that's exactly therein lies the problem you got it you got it is because it's not a drug I had a a young woman came to see me she was 7 months pregnant she had really bad lower back pain and um of course as the baby grew the pain got worse they couldn't give her opioids or because she was pregnant and uh they implanted a nerve stimulator in her back that didn't work and so she comes to see me uh I had her imagine the thing that gave her the best relief which was floating in a warm bath and her pain went from 7 to 3 in about in a couple of minutes and if you think of it now why could that happen well you know the brain is in a certain kind of state when you're comfortable and happy and it's in another kind of state when you're suffering with pain and you maybe can't fix her back then but you can fix the way her brain is reacting to what's happening in her back and that's what I did so I she told me she' had this pain relief and I said but you look angry what's the matter and she said why in the hell are you the last doctor I got sent to instead of the first and she's right she had reason to be angry yeah yeah for sure all right there's a lot of directions I want to go with this I'll start with the first one so I one of the most profound books that I've ever read is aldus huxley's Island I don't know if you're familiar with that work but I don't know that it's about his it's a utopian uh imagining of what the world could be like in a clash with a dystopian society and he reconstructs the nature of this society which is isolated on an island away from kind of mainstream contact one of the parts that stands out to me is there was a an accident that occurred I think a rock climbing accident or something that happened in the in the plot and they didn't have anesthesia and they didn't have opioids or anything else like that this was a you know I wouldn't say primitive they were psychologically evolved spiritually evolved Society but without the trappings of Western allopathic medicine so they went into Hypno surgery in the in the book and so he they go through and he describes the process of dropping into this deep hyp and then they go while he's in the hypnotized State into a complex a complex surgical process that's spelled c a l m p l x is that right yeah yeah and uh and so and then I you know looking up the research as I Was preparing for this like this is real like hypnos surgery is is actually really effective and and Huxley was pointing to this in this you know novel he wrote I think in the 50s or 60s and uh and so it's a it's a real it's a real phenomenon we're just not utilizing it I'll tell you another story today is actually my wife Helen's and I's uh 48th anniversary um and thank you and uh we're we're very happy uh together but when our children were born uh Dan was 10 lbs first child and she wanted to be in control of the delivery she didn't want to you know have uh an epidural block and so we practice self hypnosis I had her imagin she was floating in Lake Tahoe cool tingling and numb filtered the hurt out of the pain the first labor was was 10 hours Dan was 10 pounds when he was born that's big for a baby and she would say from time to time you know uh David I teach um pharmacology at Stanford um there are drugs for this and I said you're floating in Lake Tahoe tingly and numb and at the end Dan was delivered fine and I had no pain at all and she did very well and she was proud of it she felt that it was something that she wanted and look that's what women have done for most of human history right is they're in a field somewhere they usually don't lie down they Squat and just allow you know cuz part of it is you know with pain you tend to tighten up and you do need to do a certain amount of pushing from the uterus but actually muscle tension can make a delivery work because you're making it harder for the baby's head to get out yeah and so she did it the second time our daughter Julia was born Julie was a mirr of 6 and2 pounds and uh the labor took four hours and she delivered her the same way so yes absolutely those things can be done there are times when you want general anesthesia sure but um you know in the history of hypnosis uh there were there was a James braid who went to India and did hypnosis as a sole anesthesia for you know they were doing limb amputations all kinds of things just holding someone down and giving them alcohol to drink and was horrifying and he got 80% surgical anesthesia using hypnosis and the first time ether was introduced at Mass General Hospital in Boston um a surgeon stro to the front of the amphitheater to say gentlemen this is no humbug to distinguish ether because they were getting 90% so uh braid withdrew his uh no uh his um report and said well they're getting 10% more than I am I give up you know kind of thing but it's a shame because um people like Brad and esdale who also did it um didn't recognize that they had really identified a genuine anesthesia that could have been much more useful for a long time there are times when you need general anesthesia but not all the time so I'm gonna give you uh I'm gonna give you an example of a time where I I think practiced to form of self hypnosis I wouldn't have called it that so I read the book uh The Princess Bride and I think that's it's a famous movie and but it actually has a book and the book actually tracks very well with the movie even the dialogue for it um what's the author of Princess Bride William gold goldsman or something like that um but ultimately so I read the book because I was such a fan of the movie huge fan of the movie and an one of the things that happens in the movie is the protagonist the hero Wesley he gets captured by the by the villain and thrown in this place called the pit of despair and the pit of despair is a torture chamber underneath this tree and in the movie there's no mention of his process of how he managed the torture in the pit of despair and it was a fancy machine it wasn't gruesome but it was a fancy machine that increased pain and sucked years out of your life it was this whole thing but it was supposed to be this extraordinary extraordinarily painful but fictional way to torture somebody and what it talked about was that Wesley the hero he put his Consciousness in a different room he put his Consciousness in a in a room that was next door and then he could hear and he knew what was happening in the room where he was being tortured but he wasn't in that room he was in a different room so I read that and I was like that's really really interesting I wonder if that works works and then so I got my first major tattoo which is this giant rib piece yes indeed so tattoos on the ribs are particularly painful I have tattoos in my arms I have tattoos there's some painful spots and but nothing like the ribs at least in my experience right so when I was doing that this was after having read read you know having read that book I practiced that so as the tattoo artist who had a pretty heavy hand was going over my ribs I imagined myself and I placed my Consciousness in another the room cuz you're just lying there in an exposed position I mean every Instinct of your body is to protect your ribs when something's hurting drop your hand and go into a guard position but I was able to move my Consciousness into another room and it really really helped and the reason why I know it helped is I thought that the artist was finished cuz we like he like you know scrubbed me off with all the soap and water and take a look at it and I was like I let all of it go and I got out of the state and I was like okay were done and he's like okay now I got to go do the double outline around the outside I was like oh and then then my mind started getting really active and I wasn't able to get back to that former State and the amount of pain that I experienced then was at least double the pain t --- you know disambiguating the hurt from the pain right the response from the stimulus right do you see the actual stimulus itself change and transform when your response to it change changes sometimes or sometimes I mean it's hard to know sometimes and hard to measure but in the studies we've done of what's going on in the brain when people experience hypnosis we one one we there was that pain study I mentioned where we just reduced the size of the EEG signal in response to a painful stimulus by at least 50% um there are studies of what you tell people in hypnosis about pain and uh if you tell them that the pain is there but it won't bother you you reduce activity in the anterior singulate cortex which is a part of the brain that is like our it's called our salience mode uh it's our alarm system you know you hear a loud noise and you your brain tells you what the hell is that you know you better pay attention to it that's the salience network flying you can turn down activity you do when you go into a state of hypnosis and so you're less on Earth on edge for what's going on MH you can if if you tell them um the the the the pain is there but it won't bother you that's where you turn down activity in the brain you can literally see on pet scans activity going down if you tell them it's you you can filter the herd out of the pain that the signal is there but you can feel the hurt you turn down activity in the somata sensory cortex that registers the actual sensation so you can do both you can turn down your reaction to the pain you can turn down how much pain you actually feel wow now a lot of people I think imagine that you can do hypnosis let's say for smoking sensation you want to quit smoking cigarettes you could go to one hypnotherapy session they are going to somehow fuse the idea of smoking a cigarette with something you know really disgusting or distasteful and and and then permanently forever every time you see a cigarette it'll be like ah spider you know and it'll work forever but it seems like what you're talking about is the method of yes maybe there the clinical sessions and the guided sessions that you provide but this is actually a personal practice as well absolutely it's a personal practice and I'll tell you an example of that first approach my in my first hypnosis course I took at Medical School um Tom Hackett who was the chair of Psychiatry at Mass General said that he was teaching a guy that's exactly what you said that my cigarette will smell like horseshit and he you lit up a cigarette after the hypnosis oh that's terrible put it out and about an hour later Dr had got a frantic call from the guy he said my house smells terrible and Tom said what are you are you smoking he said no I forgot to tell you my wife smokes so so he had to reh hypnotize him and say only your cigarettes will smell like horseshit it's not a good approach but but how long lasting is that will that that last for a while or do it it fade away it can but it's it's aversive you know and there's you know there have been attempts to make people you know inhale more cigarette smoke and make it worse I think it's the wrong approach if you want the best way to change human behavior is intermittent positive reinforcement have them do something that they feel good about now so you might ask me Aubrey well what makes you feel good about thinking about smoking so what we tell people in hypnosis is remember three things for my body smoking is a poison I need my body to live I owe my body respect and protection you focus on what you're for and the I say look and I tell them this in hypnosis imagine putting heated tar and nicotine smoke into the lungs of your baby or your pet dog would you ever do that and they say of course not and I say well then why not give your body as much respect as you give your child or your dog wow and it seems kind of strange but it's true you focus on respecting and protecting your body because your body is as dependent on you and what you do as your dog or your child so why not give it the same respect people say well I'm doing it to myself S I say oh no it'll affect you eventually but you're doing it to your body and by the time you get around to protecting it it may be too late so think about your body as if it were your child so that's what they practice every 1 to two hours anytime they have an urge to smoke and we had a woman who used it on Ry uh who had been she tried five different hypnosis types to do it she'd been trying she' smoked for 18 years she was going to have a baby she didn't want to do this to her her baby and um she listened to this approach for my body smoking a poison I need my body to live I owe my body respect and protection she said for the first time I stopped and you know what I don't even want a cigarette I went to the airport and I smelled some smoke and I thought that smells terrible now I didn't tell her smoke would smell terrible I told her to respect and protect her body and she told me my husband just forced himself to quit he didn't try hypnosis and still when he smell smoke he thinks oh God I need to smoke again he's suffering with it she said I feel like I never smoked you know because it just doesn't make sense to me anymore and the good thing about this if you focus on what you're for is you're connecting with something that has ongoing legs it'll keep you doing it because it makes sense right right because as soon as the veneer of that aversion technique kind of softens a little bit and it doesn't have the it doesn't have the bite anymore doesn't have the internal reinforcement and it's the same way to coach a coach a child or coach and athlete or whatever it's just like positive affirmation is so much more powerful than you know more suicides you know and give me 20 you know I mean there's a there's a place someplace for that type of but for the most part you get the best performance not when you're linking things to fear but when you're linking things to People's Natural desire that's exactly right and we've studied how the rivy app works and we have one out of uh four people just playing stop and they don't have a cigarette in a year um and the rest to even my surprise reduce the amount of cigarette they're smoking by about half per day um so it works it's it uh and and that's as effective as many of the other niced gum and the buproprion and other drugs that are used uh to help people stop smoking so um it's highly effective and no side effects all right well I think it's time to move into act two here and see if I can get hypnotized I'm going to use the restroom real quick I'll I'll do that after you go ahead yeah all right okay so get as comfortable as you can I'm going to give you some instructions about your eyes and then your left hand and arm okay so please look at me and now look up to the top of your head all the way up high as you can and as you look up keep looking up slowly close your eyes take a deep breath hold ready exhale let the breath out let your eyes relax but keep them closed and let your body float just imagine that you're floating somewhere safe and comfortable like a bath a lake a hot tub or floating in space and while you concentrate on your body floating in space I'm going to concentrate on your left hand and arm in a moment I'm going to stroke the middle finger of your left hand when I do you'll develop a sense of tingling and numbness and lightness and you'll let it float upwards ready first you may notice some restless movement Sensations in your fingers which will spread to your hand and arm and you may get the sense of a magnetic pull on the back of your hand as your elbow bends and your forearm floats into the upright position that's good all the way up higher and higher good now I'm going to position your arm like so and give you this instruction your hand will remain light and in this UPR position even after I give you the signal for your eyes to open later if I pull your hand back down to the chair arm it will float right back up to the upright position you'll find something pleasant and amusing about this sensation after that when I touch your left elbow your usual sensation and control will return each time you go into this state of concentration you'll find it easier and easier to do when you can use it to help you concentrate on what's important to you right now we'll come out of the state of concentration together by counting backwards from 3 to one on Three you'll get ready on two with your eyelids closed roll up your eyes and one let your eyes open ready three 2 one good now stay in this position please and describe what physical Sensations you're aware of now in your left hand and R I'm aware of uh a kind of a slight chill in my fingers actually like I'm aware of the temperature um my hand is in this position with virtually no effort no effort and uh there's occasionally Little Wiggles in my fingers okay in your right hand or your left hand no my left hand in your left hand uh is it comfortable it is any tingling sensation no does your left hand feel as if it's not as much a part of your body body is your right hand yes yes okay now please note this yeah I can feel uh I can feel a a pull for it to go back up but it feels like I still have to do it but I can feel like the subtleness of that of that draw back up and if I just allow myself to do what I want to do MH it will return but it's still required my valtion well by way of comparison please raise your right hand put your right arm down are you aware of a relative difference in sensation or control in your left hand going up compared to your right totally over which hand do you have more control right now my right hand does that surprise you yeah actually yeah yeah for sure can you describe the difference uh it's like there's invisible Marionette strings on my left hand and arm and they're not enough to coers me to move it up but it's an it's like a gentle pull that feels senseless to resist but still not enough to pull it up in its on its own right senseless to resist all right now make a f with his hand tide fist now open are you aware of a difference in sensation and control now in your left-handed arm compared to a moment before no it's back to normal back to normal so before you had less control now it's the same mhm uh did I do or say anything that would indicate there'd be a change in sensation or control in your left-handed or yes what was that I'm gonna feel the desire I forget the exact wording but the desire for it to float upward right ran did I say anything to you about your elbow or touching your elbow yes what was that that when you touch my elbow I would want to raise my arm or lower my arm okay did I for I forget did I touch your elbow I think so yeah okay did you have am I supposed to be tracking that more close somehow iow I wasn't your your brain registered it but you don't quite remember it right um did you have a sense of floating lightness or buoyancy in your left handed arm totally did you have that sense in any other part of your body no just your left hand well when I was inv envisioning myself in a float tank I did feel my whole body actually float a little bit more a little bit during the during the exercise right right when we started particularly well your score is 10 out of 10 you're very hypnotized yes yes you are and what I actually said was when I touch your left elbow your usual sensation and control were returned you remember that now mhm yeah and and that's what happened but you didn't quite remember what the instruction was consciously so your brain registered it and reacted to it but you didn't quite remember which is typical of people who are very hypnotizable cool so you are yeah wow all right so if we wanted to so now that we got the groundwork laid and that this is a possible viable outlet for me what if we wanted to work on something specific that would be like really productive for my life and could we uh could we do something like that absolutely all right I think the thing that would be the most beneficial to me is not exactly super specific but it is specific to me I have a a voice that will come in my head and it will know what the right thing to do is whether or not I should eat something whether or not I should do something what type of thing that I should do and I should you know Loosely in the best sense like this would be the highest path for me to take and what I would really like is to have a more impeccable adherence to that voice that Whisper of my soul and distinguishing from the voice of my mind or social pressure or anything like that but like to really listen to my soul's instructions and do what is best for me in those circumstances rather than reaching for some distraction instant gratification anything else like that but actually to do what I know would be best for me to do is that possible to work on yes it is it's a good it's an interesting problem and it has to do with maintaining focus on what you want to focus on and not on distractions which is more of a challenge for everybody and the resistance to The Lure of instant gratification right potato chip I know it's going to taste good but I'm like I'm it's I don't want those fried seed oils and all that crap in my body and I'm pretty good but I would love to be able to be and not crazy about it but but I just love to and that's a silly example but I'd love to just sure listen to what I know is best and sometimes it includes sitting down and writing so you know as all writers experience there's periods of resistance oh let me open up chess.com and I'll see if I can beat the 1700 bot today yeah got it but like that's not the I mean it's better than Doom scrolling on Instagram but it's still not exactly what I should do in that in that moment right right right and I'm sure a lot of your listeners are struggling with similar kinds of problems so let's see what we can do that tha --- ith neural linguistic programming yeah so it seems like in this scapegoating what what matius desmat was saying was that there's this free floating anxiety and then in NLP they would call it anchoring they basically anchor the free floating anxiety that's in this sense of uneasiness and fear and uncertainty about what's going to happen and they place it on an external object group of people Etc and then so it anchors that feeling to that and so if you just are able to destroy that external group of people or whatever it is then all of you believe that all of your anxiety will go away but it's just like this kind of tricky fusing and and anchoring of of a certain feeling or emotion with an external object well it's it's horrifying um uh it's horrifying dangerous and destructive and we've seen it you know just in the last few years but we've seen it all around the world throughout human history and you know I please don't blame it on hypnosis that's you know but do humans do that yes do they bind their anxiety by blaming someone else yes um there's no question about it um you know in in hillbilly elogy JD Vance wrote about an uncle of his who sat on a porch drunk every day of his life whining about how immigrants were stealing the his jobs from him you know and he could barely get up out of his chair um we do that all the time you know it's a it's a terrible destructive awful thing and you know hypnosis is kind of an object lesson and how you can alter your perception of reality there was a wonderful uh Stanford philosopher Renee Gerard who said There are two fundamental problems with human beings uh one one of them is that allow other people to Define what gives us pleasure and so there's a lot of the power of religion is in telling you what you should enjoy and what you shouldn't enjoy and people buy it and the other he says is we blame scapegoating we blame other people for what's wrong with us and he said if we can only fix those two things Humanity would be doing fine he wasn't optimistic but um um so I think you're raising a very serious problem I think it's important for us to recognize our vulnerability to that to see that we can you know it can be a good thing that you can distort your perception of pain it can be a bad thing if you think your pain is caused by somebody who's perfectly innocent and hasn't done it right and so it's a it's an object lesson that we can change perceptions of fundamental things about ourselves and our bodies but about other people too yeah yeah what is uh you know in this I think so one one step is be aware of your vulnerability abilities right and uh and you know Huxley again in his book Island which was formative for me he talked about a certain percentage of people who he called them somnambulists which were basically easily suggestible Sleepwalkers Sleep Walkers right so like whatever was imprinted you know from and now part of the dangerous environment we're in is that there's a big collusion and cohesion between mass media to be able to deliver in many cases identical messages from multiple different channels and kind of bombard and so he he said it was 20% Which was interesting because you were saying that there's 20% of people who are my my memory is correct 20% of people who are highly hypnotizable right and so it seems like there's some correlation between those who are highly hypnotizable potentially and there's also aberration I was highly hypnotizable but I you know don't fall for any of that at least I don't think I do but uh but ultimately like it seems like there's a certain percentage of people and and his Viewpoint was that the society that he created they understood that and so they were they took Extra Care to program the best information possible and these people were actually some of the most Blissful people because they absorbed this kind of positive encouraging programming they even programmed the talking birds and parrots on the island to say like attention here and now you know so it was like constant so they didn't have broadcast stations but the birds themselves would out you know attention here and now and so those people were actually you know real Treasures in society because they'd been they'd absorbed the very best information from the most benevolent teachers and and people and now we have social media saying attention there and then not here and now you know yeah and you know the pro I I'm so deeply troubled about what's happened with with social media and other things because I I thought as you know the web- based world and the internet and and uh social media were being developed that we would have this profusion of different points of view and so we wouldn't have it controlled by just a few news channels that told you this and that and what we're getting is exactly the opposite we can't focus because we're being told how to focus the algorithms are constantly sidetracking our attention and giving us one story that doesn't get contradicted because you don't tune into that version of Instagram your Fe it doesn't show up in your feed and that's really scary that we are literally being programmed to be distracted and one of the things that I hope people will learn to do is use this inner ability to focus attention to make a choice the way you did about this part of you that's pulling you back in the wrong direction and one where you want to go and use it to disconnect from the this constant barrage of distracting information and get clear for yourself be like those birds in that story about here now and allow yourself time every day to be where you are you know I I was once we were in a beautiful city in in Japan and we it was a special Sunday when all the women dressed up in their traditional kimonos and they were just so beautiful and we were in a wonderful Museum there and there were seven of these girls dressed beautifully in a room full of beautiful Japanese paintings and they were all sitting there scrolling on their iPhones you know so even when they'd gone to all this trouble to be here and now they were there and then they were somewhere else so I hope people will learn to give themselves a time every day when they can practice things like self- hypnosis and just get in touch with what Val you value the way you did when we were doing that exercise and when we're when you're doing self hypnosis would you follow the same kind of one two three kind of methodology basically what you led me through yeah sure there's nothing sacred about it but it's quick it works it's effective and if you want to modulate it by by all means do but it's if the the thing is people used to think you know when they used to think hypnosis was sleep they think you have to take a long time and count upstairs and downstairs and bore yourself into something when really you shifted gears within less than a minute you were there right and people can do that and so what what I like about this approach is that it's fast and it gets you there fast you don't have to take a whole chunk out of your day you can just take 10 minutes or five minutes and reorient yourself what what about the kind of lore around hypnosis where you see someone swinging a pendulum in front of somebody's eyes is that just a folk tale or is that a method well you know it doesn't work with digital watches I tried to get but yeah no it's there's nothing sacred about moving your eyes by it's just a way of getting your attention getting you to calm down and disconnect from other things around you it might amuse you to know that you know automobiles were invented 120 years ago or something like that there were a lot of state laws initially outlawing windshield wipers you know why because they were afraid that people drivers would be hypnotized if they followed the windshield wipers moving I kid you not and I i' I've heard of one case of someone who was very hypnotizable who thought maybe she was headed that way but it doesn't happen you know right you look through the windshield wipers you don't look at them so so in that in that you're actually moving your eyes back and forth to follow the Follow The Swinging object that's the idea see what what hypnosis is it's it's highly focused attention uh but turned inward you know in evolution we're pretty pathetic creatures we're not that big we're not that strong we don't smell or hear that or that or see that well um but vision is our best protection we have a very well-developed visual system whole occipital cortex processes Vision so our main safety protection is scanning our visual environment so the one thing that hypnosis allows you to do is you're closing your eyes but you're actively conscious most of the time when we close our eyes we're going to sleep and so that's one reason the looking up and closing our eyes is a way of turning inward there's an old zen practice called looking at the third eye which is looking up the middle of your forehead so what you're trying to do is be alert but not pay attention to your immediate environment visually which is what we mostly do so it's it's a it's a way of maintaining intensity of focus but turning inward but there's nothing sacred about the eye movements it's just a way of eventually closing your eyes cutting off visual input but remaining alert wow well this has been an absolute treat to dive in here with you is uh is there anything else that you're working on any other kind of Frontiers that you have your your eyes or your heart on that you want to share well sure we are actually uh working with a colleague of M Nolan Williams and neik Fairman uh in my lab on finding ways to enhance hypnotizability using transcranial magnetic stimulation um we are stimulating a particular part of the prefrontal cortex that we think can supress activity in the dorsal anterior single gyus and we have some initial uh results that we published recently that we've been able to at least transiently increase hypnotizability so that's one of the things we're working on we're we're also studying breath work like the thing I taught you cyclic sighing which is a very did you feel a quick reduction in your stress yeah I mean it's something the huberman also talks about is doubling the length of your exhale to your inhale but this was like I think we call it two chambered breathing in in breath work where the first through the belly the second one through the chest well we published a paper on that um about a year ago showing that uh just doing that 5 minutes a day reduces the average respiratory rate and it reduces anxiety and improves mood so just 5 minutes of practice like that a day can help people calm themselves get better control of their body and the other thing is Ry itself um you know I've used hypnosis with about 7,000 people in my career um that's a lot of people I hope I've helped a lot of people but you know there are a lot more people out there who can benefit and hypnosis used to be thought of as either dangerous or useless or both uh but God forbid you would actually just teach people to do it you know and we've had you know some 800,000 downloads the number of problems we've had with this is is less than 10 and most of them um were not serious one guy's migraines got worse instead of better well and some woman was having strange sexual feelings on her balcony every day which doesn't sound like a problem to me and so people are benefiting from it we're finding that four out of five people who use rivy feel better within 10 minutes they feel less stress um four out of five are sleeping better they're getting to sleep more quickly uh people are using it to control Habits Like You know um uh you know the tendency to use pornography on on the internet um to get distracted rather than carry on with their work and uh control pain um and so four out of five people in general are feeling better and they know right away so even where people use medications for anxiety or sleep which have complications like getting you habituated to them and have trouble getting off struggle well um even with even when they work you got to get a prescription go to a pharmacy get the drug take it see what happens to you and see if you have trouble withdrawing from it later on with hypnosis with revery you'll know right away you know it works for me or it doesn't so you got whole Suite of sleep programs on there yes we have a bunch of sleep prr getting to sleep and staying to sleep uh there's a wonderful uh journalist in the times of of London who tried it she had breast cancer and was having great trouble sleeping and she tried Ry for seven days and um she said at first couple nights I didn't feel much better but uh I woke up one morning and I looked at the clock and it was 7:06 a.m. I couldn't believe it was the first time I'd slept through the night in a year so people are using it for that so I just want people to use it it's a legacy project for me you know I I'm I'm going to keep doing this as long as I can but at some point I won't be able to and I want people to have this available to them and I want to use internet technology use smartphone technology to help people help themselves that's what I'm about incredible incredible well this has been a been a real pleasure and I think people are going to really get a lot out of this and the people who take that next step further I know that I did but people who take that next step further um I'm excited excited to share this with I hope so and people can try it as free for the first week if you don't like it doesn't cost you anything but go to Ry and give it a try beautiful all right thank you so much thanks everybody for tuning in much love thanks for tuning in to this video make sure you hit subscribe follow me at Aubrey Marcus check out the aubre Marcus podcast available everywhere and leave a comment let me know if this video resonated or what else you would like to hear from me in the future thank you so much