Episode 408: Dr. David Spiegel - Hypnosis For Performance

David Spiegel is an American psychiatrist and the Wilson Professor and Associate Chair of Psychiatry at Stanford University School of Medicine, where he is known for his research into psycho-oncology; the neurobiology of therapeutic hypnosis, and the role of the mind-brain-body connection in cancer outcomes and management among other topics.He directs the Stanford Center on Stress and Health and is a recognized authority on hypnosis's clinical utility and neuroscience.

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Chapters:

00:00:00 - Introduction to the Human Performance Outliers Podcast

00:08:19 - The Dangers of Habit-Forming Medications

00:16:25 - The Power of Hypnosis for Sports Performance

00:24:09 - Concentration and Visualization in Training

00:33:56 - The Power of Focus in HypnosisTraining for Ultramarathons

00:42:30 - Achieving Focus through Hypnosis and Brain Changes

00:50:27 - Achieving the Flow State with Mental Preparation and Distraction Management 00:58:29 - Mental States and Hypnosis Success

01:04:35 - How Zach uses the HPO sponsors

Episode Transcript:

Doctor Spiegel, thank you for taking some time out of your day to come and chat with me about, what I think is a really interesting, hopefully topic that gets more and more interesting in the next few years. I hope so. Thanks for having me. Yeah, yeah, we were chatting a little bit right before here, and I was, just mentioning that I'd listened to your episodes on, Doctor Abbott, Andrew Huberman podcast and Tim Ferriss podcast and, you guys definitely all dove into, I would say, like, a lot of different aspects of, like, hypnosis as, like a solution to a variety of different things. And I'm sure a lot of things that both you and they are all interested in. And, you know, one of those topics that kind of caught my ear was just kind of its application within like sports performance and stuff like that. So one of the things I'd love to chat with you about today is just kind of how, how you see or have used that within that world and maybe how it kind of, coincides with other kinds of mental tools that people have used, maybe. Sure. but before we get into that, I think maybe just for the audience, just kind of, maybe a little bit of a general overview of things, around the topic of hypnosis as a solution, because I just find it fascinating when I think about it, because I, I think maybe I'd be curious what you think is, I know you have like, a, you know, decades of work within this topic, but just like what has been kind of maybe one of the bigger barriers for you to kind of introduce hypnosis to king of the average person who maybe doesn't really know much about it or has some preconceived ideas about it and things like that. Well, Zach, thanks for having me here. And, you know, being a high performance athlete, you know how important the mental game is to the physical game. And, hypnosis is actually the oldest Western conception of a psychotherapy. It's the first time a talking interaction was thought to have therapeutic potential. It's been around for 250 years, but we're kind of the Rodney Dangerfield. Remember Rodney Dangerfield. You know I don't get no respect guys. You know people either say it's dangerous or it's worthless or both. You know. And it's neither of those things. You know, they asked him once to leave a bar so they could start happy hour. You know, we just and, you know, part of the problem, Zach, is that there's a prejudice against psychotherapeutic approaches to problems as opposed to drugs and other, somatic treatments. And I do them. I'm a doctor, I prescribe meds, but there's a whole lot of things people can learn to do for themselves, to make their lives a whole lot better. We have tended to systematically underestimate that because we don't understand it. We're afraid of it. We misunderstand it. And I decided as my legacy project in this office here over my career, it's a long career. I've used hypnosis with about 7000 people. It's a lot of people, and I've helped a lot of people. And, there are so many more who could be helped. And I want to find a way to make it available to anyone who wants to use it. And it can be a very helpful tool for controlling pain, enhancing focus, controlling stress, getting to sleep, getting back to sleep, stopping smoking and other bad habits, and eating more sensibly. It's a very rapidly acting tool with no side effects. So the worst thing that happens is it doesn't work and a lot of times it does. Yeah. Yeah, I find that interesting. Is it because, I mean, like you said, it's been around for a long time. So do you find that there are just funding issues with this sort of thing because like you said, it doesn't really have like this tangible or this like physical thing where you're like purchasing or something like that, at least historically. and then like the research behind it maybe doesn't have that sort of kind of capital influx that you would maybe get if there's a profit at the end of the day for, for, for companies and things like that. Or is it more the research is there because it's been around for a long time, but getting the message out to people's difficult because there's not a lot of marketing dollars, maybe to promote something like hypnosis over a drug. Well, you're right. I mean, hypnosis is never going to make as much money as drugs do. And, you know, that's okay with me. There are a lot of treatments that can be highly effective and not very expensive. But you don't have the big companies. we don't have a company around to hire a bunch of cheerleaders to go to doctor's offices and say, use hypnosis with your patients, you know? And, a bigger problem for the kinds of problems I've talked about have it to control, insomnia, anxiety, stress, focus. is that the medications that are often recommended, anti-anxiety drugs, the benzodiazepines, pain control drugs, the opioids, drugs for sleep, which often are habit forming, they're all habit forming. And that means that the more you use it, the more hooked you are, the harder it is to get off. And for example, Zach, it still makes my skin crawl when I remember sitting in my seat in medical school, Harvard Medical School, having professors say that people who use opioids to control pain don't get addicted. It's only the street junkies taking heroin to do. And you know what? The opposite is true, actually. If you have pain and use an opioid, you get withdrawal hypoglycemia. The pain gets worse when you try to get off the drug. And, you know, people say hypnosis is dangerous, right? Well, 88,000 Americans died of opioid overdoses last year in the United States. You know, and we know this sort of horrible thing at Purdue Pharma just made a fortune, advertising people into getting hooked on opioids. And that's just wrong. And when there are so many better ways to control pain, there's a place for opioids, but it's got to be much more limited than it is short term use. And hypnosis is something you can use all the time. I've used it. I did a study with women with metastatic breast cancer who had pain. It's very common as the disease progresses, and every time they feel a new pain in their chest, they think, oh my God, the disease is progressing, I'm going to die sooner. We taught them self-hypnosis once a week at the end of group therapy. At the end of the year, the women randomized to this kind of support had half the pain the control group did on the same and very low amounts of medication. So we have proven others have proven that it's very possible to teach people to use their brain to control pain, stress and anxiety insomnia. And it's an underutilized resource, these brains of ours. Yeah, yeah, that's really interesting. I think, like the other thing I wanted to ask you about this before we kind of hop into some maybe more specific topics is just is there a is there a have you noticed as you've kind of gotten into the kind of the space of like, I mean, now now you have an app that can help people really understand and unpack this process in a way that's a lot lower friction than what I would imagine it has been historically. But does that alone present a big issue? Do you find for the user in the sense that when I think of just like, oh, well, I have this issue, if I just take a pill, it's pretty easy versus actually having to do anything. How have you seen that from both the willingness of people to prescribe hypnosis, as well as the willingness of people to even engage with it from the first point? Well, I'm glad you asked that. We do have an app that's called reverie or every. You can find it on the web reverie.com, download it from the App Store or Google Play. And so we're trying to make it as easily available as possible. And if you think about it, if you've got pain or anxiety and you take a medication, you still have to visit a doctor, pay for the visit, get a prescription, go to the pharmacy, get the drug, take it, see how well it works, and deal with side effects with hypnosis in ten minutes. On whether you will know whether or not it's going to help you. And we're finding that four out of five people who use it for pain or stress. Feel an immediate reduction of about 15%. and so you'll know, you know, does it work or not? It's a hell of a lot easier. All you need is your smartphone, and you can find the reverie app and, and use it. You can, can't quite show it to you there. It's right there. Just tap the tap the button and you can try it. And if it works. If it works, you got my mellifluous voice coaching you through self-hypnosis. And the fun thing is, it's interactive. So I give you an instruction, I ask how you're doing, you give an answer, and we're programmed to give you a different response depending on how you're responding. So I tried to make it as much like the experience in my office here as I could. And so it's less expensive, it's faster, it's often equally or more effective, and it has no side effects. So I decided, you know, I've helped a lot of people in my career, but I'm not going to be able to do that forever. So it's my legacy project. I want people to have the opportunity to try it out and see how it works. You know, this organ on the top of our bodies, the brain, a £3 organ connected to every part of the body, controls every part of the body. But it doesn't come with a user's manual. And there are a lot of things we can do with our brains that we haven't quite fully discovered. And hypnosis is one of those things. Yeah. You made a great point there. It's like we're in an interesting time now where in the past for you to really kind of get this into the hands of a user. It's a lot of manpower right. Like you almost have to be there or you have to teach a bunch of people to be able to do it and then get them access to that a lot of times, probably in person. Whereas now you can reach a ton of people, with just kind of the process in place through something like an app and all the steps that go along with it. So I think that's cool. yeah. So with hypnosis in general, too. One of my questions, I think, is just what is there from a personality standpoint? Is there something where it kind of works better for some people and worse for others in terms of their just ability to utilize it or resist it or something like that. Right? Right. That's an important question. people do differ in their hypnotize ability, their ability to experience hypnosis. Some people naturally just go for it. They're extremely hypnotized. Their problem is keeping out of trance states more than getting into them. The kind of person who easily slips into a good movie and forgets there. Have you ever had that experience? Forget you're watching a movie. You're entering the imagined world. That's a hypnotic experience that many people have, and some people do that very easily and very naturally and profoundly. That's about 20% of the population. There's another 20% on the other side who just are there, you know, headfirst analyze, study, do research. They don't sort of take in anything that quickly. And those people are not very advertised well, and there's about 60% of us in the middle, as adults who are somewhat hypnotized, who can have an experience, they can use it to stop smoking or control pain, but then they step back and say, wait a minute, what was going on here? What did it mean? You know, should I do it again? And that's fine too. So what we do on reverie is design the interactive intervention so that they match the kind of hypnotized ability you have. And so some people, they just do it, they go for it, they've got it. They're done. Many people, they need to sort of sample it, see what it feels like, discuss it, go back and do more of it. And then there's a few who for whom. It's more just a cognitive experience. Because one of the ways we use hypnosis, which is not the only way people use it, is to focus on what you're for, not what you're against. And that's a good strategy whether or not you're using hypnosis. you. The best way to change human behavior is intermittent positive reinforcement to make people feel good while they're making the change. And so for smoking cessation, for example, we don't say stop smoking or cigarettes will taste, you know, smell terrible. The professor, who taught me hypnosis, had a guy. He hypnotized him and said, your cigarette smoke will smell like horseshit. And he lit up and said, oh God, thank you. Doc and Doctor Hackett got a frantic call. An hour later, the guy said, what's the matter The guy said, my house smells terrible. And Tom said, well, are you smoking? He said, no, but I forgot to tell you that my wife smokes. So he had to hypnotize and say, only your cigarettes. You know, it doesn't work that way. What we focus on is for my body, smoking is a poison. I need my body to live. I owe my body respect and protection. So you focus on what you're for, being a good keeper of your own body, like a good parent to a child. You'd never put tar and nicotine laden smoke into the lungs of your child. Your body is dependent upon you as your child is, so why not treat it with the same respect? And when you do it that way, you're feeling good from the moment you make that decision to be a better parent to your own body. And that's the way we use hypnosis. And that's something that works very effectively and quickly with people who are highly advisable. But it can even work with people who are not very hypnotized because they get the concept and they can feel good about making that commitment. Yeah. That's interesting. I think one thing that I was thinking about as I was kind of preparing for this interview, and also the timing of it is great because right now the Olympics are occurring. Right. And one thing I always find really interesting about the Olympics is since it's such a diversity of different sports, you have a group of people who we all consider athletes, but each one of these sports have like selective traits that tend to be advantageous for their performance. And a lot of times when you get the competitive pressure of something as grand as the Olympics, you start seeing those traits really kind of get selected for in the populace that's participating in it. So maybe my first question around kind of sports performance and hypnosis is, is there some traits with what we would consider maybe like really strong mental, like game time athletes where they always seem to be able to rise to the occasion in high pressure situations where they are maybe just a little bit more inclined to be able to respond to something like a hypnosis, or I guess we'll get into this maybe a little bit more, but something like a flow state, a little bit easier than average, right? There's definitely a strong mental component and some outstanding athletes. You know Tiger Woods with golf and Michael Jordan with basketball. They used self-hypnosis to prepare, focus and carry out what they're doing and the kind of mental state that good athletes get into. it's not so different from a flow state, but it's focusing more on the process and less on the outcome. you you. And that's what both Jordan and Tiger Woods did and other good athletes do. They don't often talk about it that much. But you focus on what is the relationship I need to have with my body to enable it to do what I want to do. And if you're already worrying about what the outcome is going to be, and will I get a gold or silver, you're in trouble because you're not focusing on what you and your body need to do to perform at the highest level. As you see, these athletes do it. So it's a capacity to choose. What are the things to pay attention to? I was asked years ago to help the Stanford women's swimming team. They're brilliant swimmers. A whole bunch of them get into the Olympics every, every time. And the coach noted that they were swimming faster in practice than they were in meets. And you think what you know, we all think of just get yourself all, you know, juiced up and ready to go and you'll do best. But that's not what was happening. And when I talked to them, they said they were thinking more about the women swimming in the lanes next to them than they were their own. Swimming and swimming is not a contact sport. It really doesn't matter, you know, neither is golf. You know, it doesn't matter what the other person's doing. What matters is what you're doing. So I had them do self-hypnosis and practice swimming their best swim in their lane by themselves. And the coach found that their times in meets got better because they were focusing on what they needed to focus on, which is how they managed and interacted with their bodies, not what is going to win the race or what that would mean for their career and all that. So it's a matter of choosing as an athlete, what are the things you need to focus on and stay with to get the best out of your body? That's interesting. I want to get into kind of just like the actual procedure in place, because I know, like for some people when they listen to this or maybe not this, but when they hear the word hypnosis, hypnosis, they may immediately go to kind of the maybe parlor trick version of this, where it's you have someone up on a stage and a guy with a, with a, with a, with a device waving it back and forth and like, kind of getting into that sort of like a hypnotic state is I'm guessing that's that's what happening with the Stanford women's swimming team. I'm guessing you have like, a set of, kind of practices that they're working on and more or less kind of making part of their toolkit so that when they get there on event day, they're able to kind of get themselves into that same state that they're routinely at, at practice. That's right. You're absolutely right. It's very simple and straightforward. You know, I can try it with you if you want. Hypnosis is actually a naturally occurring state of highly focused attention. What you teach people to do is just how to decide to do it and go there if they've got the capacity. And it's very, it's very. And there are a lot of ways there's no one, you know, sacred way to do it, but it has no dangling watches, none of all that stage show stuff. That's not what's required. so I can show you. I can describe it. I mean, I have people look up, close their eyes, take a deep breath, let the breath out, eyes relax, body float. And then I usually have them concentrate on letting one hand or the other float up in the air like a balloon. There you go. And imagine you're floating in a bath, a lake, a hot tub just floating in space, each breathing deeper and easier. With your eyes closed and remaining in this state of concentration, please describe how your body is feeling right now. Relaxed. Good. Where do you picture your body being right now? Out in the middle of a lake. Good, good. Taking a nice deep breath. Hold. Now fill your lungs completely and slowly exhale through your mouth. How's your body feeling now? I would say it feels like all of it is kind of similar versus feeling varying differences in different areas. Huh. So all the parts of your body are kind of in sync and feeling. Yeah. And still floating in the lake. Is that the feeling? Yeah. Out in the middle, floating on my back. I notice how quickly and easily you can use your stored memories in your imagination to help yourself and your body feel better, and notice how you're feeling, a sense of synchronization and unity within your body that your whole body is enjoying. This sense of being in a place where you naturally feel physically relaxed and comfortable. And if you were to use this state to prepare for your next big run, for example, what would you want to be feeling in your body and instructing your body to do? I would want to have it feel like I am able to just kind of focus narrowly on just the simple, actual aspects of what I'm trying to do versus all the surrounding things that sort of just get in the way that are uncontrollable. Right. Right. So just take yourself through that. And if you want to share with us the planning you would have with your body, how you would be preparing your body for a good run. So I would first just concentrate on where I'm at, specific to the event that I'm doing or the workout that I'm doing. And I would want to be focusing on just what are the things that I need to do to reach my full potential versus what are things that I want to be at down the road or what other people are doing, in order to get there? Right. So just take a few more moments to concentrate on this communion with your body. And how you want to feel within your body and what you want your body to be able to do. Because when you're in a competitive sport, what you want to be able to do is have the best possible relationship with your own body. And be clear about how you want it to function, what you want to feel like while you're doing it, and what information you want from your body about how it's doing. So you focus on your plan. For how your body will function and how you will help it function as well as it can. So think of you and your body as a team that are working together to bring out the best. Can take a nice inhale, abdominal breathing at first. Lowering your diaphragm. Now expand your chest, fill your lungs completely through your nose, and slow exhale through your mouth. And please notice how you can be, aroused and ready to go and at the same time relaxed and comfortable. You can be intense without being tense. You still feel like you're floating in the lake there? No, I've actually sort of shifted to kind of where my body would be in like a workout or an event that I've done in the past where things are going really well, great. And the focus has sort of narrowed into maybe just focusing on the things that I did to prepare for the event and sort of leaning on those experiences. Towards what I want to want to kind of use to leverage for the event itself. That's an excellent practice, is that you're tapping into your store of good experiences and what you've done that's worked and reacquainted yourself with the frame of mind and the mind body situation that you created, so that you know what it's like and you can get there again. You can use those past successes as a resource to help you prepare to perform at your highest level again. Anything else you can describe about that kind of situation and how you feel? Yeah, it feels really smooth, almost as if there's not a lot of background noise or things that kind of creep in to distract me from that focus. and also, yeah, not it doesn't feel like there was a lot of energy wasted to get there either. Like I find with racing, a lot of times as the race gets longer and longer and the fatigue sets in, sometimes that's the biggest, the biggest challenge is staying in that kind of present state, right? And not letting those extra things that are either uncontrollable or not, things that are actually going to help you progress. Keeping those out of your mind without having to. You know, constantly think about removing them. Great. That's a very clear description. But keep in mind also that there's a tendency to confound physical fatigue with mental fatigue. And to some extent they go together of course, but they're not the same thing. So if your body is sending you signals that it's getting more tired, you may want to think how what you can do mentally to help your body with its fatigue rather than saying, oh, you know, I'm fatigued, in the kind of competitions you do, your body will inevitably feel fatigued, but that won't be the same as how your mind is feeling. And so you can learn to separate and say, I'm going to just the way I would, you know, help a child who was tired and cranky and help it kind of cheer up and get going again. Think of ways you can encourage your body to make the best use of its resources. And so you know you're part of your body, but you're not the same thing. So think about using these past experiences one of you faced and handled fatigue particularly well. For example, can you relive one of those experiences? Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I think generally speaking, anytime you can lean back on something at a time when you were more successful than maybe you thought you'd be able to be or more successful than where you're currently at. Those sort of experiences can be leveraged. So, having those kinds of things in the process makes sense. Can you think of one of those experiences now? Yeah. specifically for me. I mean, I've had a race. One of my better races ever actually included. Just sort of a back and forth in my mind of thinking, okay, I don't know if I have what it takes today to get to the goal I'm looking for. And then I just kind of narrowed in on the immediate and said, okay, well, let's just get back on track for a little bit of time and sort of just push the decision making of whether I'm capable or not to a later point. And that just sort of spiraled into positivity. So on that particular day, I found that when the inevitable, like seeds of doubt would come, I was able to better push through them. And what that resulted in is I probably just pushed through more of those than I would typically be able to, and reached a bit further than I normally normally could, mentally and then physically as well. So that's the type of experience I think I would want to leverage for big workouts and races in the future. That's a great example, because what you did was you found something you could a do and b feel good about by breaking it down into smaller parts, little pieces, where you knew that you could keep it going for a while anyway. And so you went for something that you had a pretty good reason to think you could do and then feel good about doing it. And that apparently led to the next one and the next one. But rather than worrying about the distant outcome, you were focusing on the parts of the immediate experience that you could do something about. And that's where the intensity of focus and hypnosis helps, because you can limit your awareness to that, focus on that, accomplish it, and then go on to the next one. And that's a very good use of self-hypnosis for situations like that. Yeah. I've got a few follow up questions, if you don't mind. Sure. Well, why do we come out of this state of self-hypnosis now by counting back 3 to 1? On three. Get ready for two. With your eyelids closed. Roll up your eyes. When you let your eyes open your hand. Float back down. Make a fist open. And that'll be the end of the exercise. Ready? Three. Two. One. How are you feeling? Very relaxed. Good, good. Ready to start a race or a workout? All right. I'm sorry, Zach, you've got to finish the podcast. Yeah, well, now I have the procedure so I can do it again, I guess. But also, I don't know, I think that was at least ten minutes. You were holding your right arm up in the air the whole time. Did you notice that? Did it bother you? Did it? you know, not as long or not. Not to the extent that I would have thought it would. I definitely started kind of picking up on it near the end there. but it felt like I was focused on other things or the directives you were giving and the questions you were asking. Yeah. They were stimulating enough cognitively for me to almost ignore a lot of that discomfort. versus if you like if you had told me. All right, we're going to play a game where you hold your arm above your head for ten minutes, and I want you just to focus on doing that. I probably would have noticed the pain or the discomfort of that a lot sooner and a lot more clearly. Exactly. And so you were doing what in a race you could be doing with your body, which is your body is undergoing an unusual amount of pressure, stress. and, and you're able to put that to some extent aside and focus on how you're managing your body to do the best race you can do. So it's an example of that only if it was indirect, but that's what you were doing. So yeah, I was going to ask you, because I think this sort of thing would be just a great way to prepare before a race, just to get yourself kind of in the right headspace. Right. What about or what would you recommend if it's a situation where, like some of the people who listen to this and myself include, do ultramarathons where you might be running all day long, in some cases running, hiking, moving all day long. Is there a way, sort of, to repeat this process or re-engage with this process kind of. During the event if you catch yourself having a hard point? Sure, absolutely. And you don't. I wouldn't advise running with your eyes closed. yeah. Yeah. I don't want to be responsible for any untoward injuries, but you can do it while you keep your eyes open. But say, I want to go and it will help if you have practiced doing it just before the race. And sort of. And you may associate it with imagining that you're in the lake or somewhere else and just say, all right, I'm going to touch base again with that part of me that was, managing my body in this way while planning for the race. And so you can just in your head, eyes open while you're running. Think about how you want your body to feel, how you want to feel and how to deal with things like, you know, an increase in fatigue or something like that. and so just run through it in your head while you're running with your eyes open, but revisit, and you may find some way to label it in your head that it's my, you know, floating in Lake Tahoe experience or something that, gives you, it helps you to reconnect with your brain set. At the time you were preparing, because of, you know, our brains have thousands of memories, experiences, and physiological input to deal with all the time. The thing that keeps us sane is that we have very good ways of putting most of them out of consciousness and focusing on the things that matter. And if you can do that, you can say, well, I just want to be in touch with how my body can feel when I'm relaxed and comfortable and get into that mindset again and then keep it going, keep it going. Or like your idea of, you know, the next few steps, I can do that, you know, and I can acknowledge the fatigue, but I can take it this far and see what happens. So if you can sort of discipline your focus on the parts of your mind body experience that matter, you can make a big difference. Yeah. And it's like you said I wonder. I'd be curious what you've seen with other athletes you've worked with in the past. I'm guessing it's something where if you do it enough, it becomes sort of part of your routine, right? You find yourself sort of just almost intuitively going towards that versus making a conscious decision like a mid hard workout. Oh, I need to re-center myself. you just maybe just do that. That's just kind of the default. It's part of the practice of a good athlete. Joe Montana used to say that he knew when he let go of the football whether Jerry rice was going to catch it or not. You know, he just had that sense of being in that groove. And you don't let anything else bother you, you know? And it's that capacity to acknowledge the stress, focus on it, but not let it, you know, get you scattered and uncomfortable. I remember in Montana, he was in the zone so much that some guy made a really kind of vicious hit on him. And so the reporter after it said, hey, Joe, what did you think when so-and-so, you know, took you down that way? And he said, oh, actually, he kind of lightened up at the end, you know, it wasn't that bad, you know? So he was in that frame of mind where any one of the rest of us would either be in the hospital or we would be really pissed. And he was able to just kind of say, yeah, this is part of the game and I'm taking it. That's why, you know. So, good athletes are able to identify that mental state and just go there and do it. And that's what the women's swimmers did. They just use that frame of mind of, I'm going to swim my best race. I don't care what those girls elsewhere are doing. You know, that allows you to discipline yourself and not get distracted. You know, I, I'm told by pro golfers that sometimes other golfers will try and distract them and make noise, you know, do things to, you know, and so you just want to be in that zone where that's not part of your world, you just focusing on you and your body and how they're working together. Yeah. No, that makes a lot of sense. I remember, since you mentioned Tiger Woods, I remember when, when he was at his prime, he would stand, like, just at the right spot in the green sometimes, where he knew he would kind of be in the peripheral vision of the guy who he was playing against because he. I mean, he knew the gravity of playing with himself if you were the other guy. So it was like one of those things where it's like, it might be a little more pressure having me next to you versus what you would normally experience out on the green. And that's that's where. And he would, you know, mentally practice every swing before he did it, you know. And so what he was doing was saying, I don't care who's over there on the green, I'm going to discipline my focus to me and, and the club and how I swing it. And so if it's not said, you know, if you tell yourself, don't think about those guys, you'll think it's like, don't think about purple elephants. You know. That's right. Yeah. Instead you said, here's what I am going to think about. And you narrow your focus and control it that way. And that's a way of putting those distractions where they belong. You know, just. Ignoring them and focusing on what you want to focus on. and we have evidence that people's brains change when they're in a hypnotic state. So, we've done functional MRI, magnetic resonance imaging, which studies blood oxygenation, showing you where parts of the brain are working harder or not. And, we found when we hypnotize people in the scanner, they turned down activity in a part of the brain called the anterior cingulate cortex. It's like a C in the middle of the brain here. And the anterior, the front part is here. It's part of the salience network. It's part of the brain that tells you, you know, you hear a loud noise. What was that? I'd better pay attention. He turned that down. So basically, you turn off the alarm system and you just say, I'm going to focus on what I want to focus on. And the more deeply hypnotized our subjects felt, the less activity there was there. So it's not allowing your brain to get distracted by that guy standing and grinning at you, on the, you know, on the side of the green. The second thing that happens is we increase connectivity between the prefrontal cortex, the executive control network, and a part of the brain called the insula. It's a little. It means island in Latin. It's a little island of tissue in the middle of the front part of the brain. It is a mind-body pathway. It's how the brain controls the body. The body reports to the brain. We call it introspection. And so you're more in touch with your body and how to handle things, how to manage things. And, you know, watching those women gymnasts, you know, the incredible things they did at the Olympics, they had to be in a special kind of mental state. and, you know, when I'm just thrilled for Simone Biles, who, you know, clearly overcame something but needed a lot of help to do it. And, you know, it's tragic that, you know, she was one of the women who was abused by that bastard Nassar. And, she was having trouble concentrating. I understand that, but she overcame it, and it's magnificent that she did. I'm just so proud of her and the team for doing it. But there are big distractions in life that sometimes will keep you from focusing. And she learned to overcome that. and so the mind-body connection is stronger. The third thing that happens. Is a disconnection, an inverse connectivity between the executive control network and a part of the brain in the back of the anterior cingulate cortex, the posterior cingulate. It's part of what we call the default mode network. It's a part of the brain that, when you're not doing anything else, kind of reflects on who you are, what you are, what you're expected to be, what people wanted you to be, what your parents told you you should be. I call it the default mode network. You know, it's thinking about yourself and you kind of turn down activity there, and it's a way of being a different self, trying out, being different and seeing what it feels like. And so you can say, if I were the kind of person who really didn't care about some idiot, they're trying to distract me while I'm taking a swing, I would act like this. And so we're freer in hypnosis to just try out being different and see what it feels like. Yeah. I mean I think this is really interesting because most people who've listened to this, they can either go back to probably an experience where they sort of found themselves doing something like this without the actual framework there. And they have this very, very clear experience where it's like, man, when I was playing that game, it was just like, I couldn't miss a shot. And for whatever reason, it just felt great. Everything was working. or they're out on a run. And it was just like. It felt like everything was way more effortless than normal. And then they finished that. And the question they're left with is, well, how did I do that? And how do I replicate it? And if they don't know about what you've been talking about, they maybe just don't have that connection point as to being able to actually engage with that sort of a state on their own command, versus just waiting or hoping for it to happen. So hopefully that's the bridge we're trying to gap here today, at least from the sports side of things. Absolutely, absolutely. Zach, you're exactly right. And it's an ability that our brains have that we often just don't know enough about. But it will happen spontaneously, you know, being in the zone. So you don't have to kind of wait and hope that it'll come. I mean, you summoned it up, you know, you did it here. And so you can, you know, go back again and revisit those states in this state of highly focused attention and kind of reconnect with how your brain felt and how your body felt when you did it. And so, you know, you can do it because you did do it, and you can get there again, and you put it very well that it's, it's a, an ability that people have that they just need to learn to identify and use and use to better advantage. Yeah. And you know one thing I'll tell a lot of my coaching clients when they're preparing for a race is to take inventory of good quality workouts that you do and use those as just evidence that you can bring to the competition itself. So when you do find yourself in a spot, we are like, I'm really struggling right now. I don't know if I can do this. You can call back to those experiences and to some degree, it's like I always see that the more of those experiences you have, the better, because you have like this Rolodex of different ones you can pull from. And if one gets stale, you can go to the next one. Or if one's not convinced, you can go to the next one. But when I think about it, after kind of running me through that exercise you probably just need one. And as long as you kind of tie in to the other aspects of that procedure, yeah, you can kind of keep that one being more impactful than, then it maybe would be if it if you didn't have the other stuff attached to it. That's exactly right. that's well-put because, you know. Yes. You know, they can maybe feel stale, but if you go back and relive them intensely, some of the staleness starts to go away. You know, you can. Oh yeah, I remember what that felt like and it felt really good. And I was pleased with how my body was responding and that kind of thing. You can say, I'm going to focus on this again. This is here. And any time I need it, I can get to it. And it doesn't mean you don't want to collect new ones and keep working out so that you have new examples. But you're exactly right. You don't need to be passive and wait and hope that it's going to revisit you. You can say, as you put it, I got my Rolodex and I'm going to go to this one and do it again, and you'll find that the intensity of it is greater because you're in this state of highly focused attention, and you've turned down activity in a part of the brain that says, yeah, maybe there's something else. It's more important to pay attention to. You say, you know. I'm choosing this. This is what I'm going to focus on. Yeah. The other interesting kind of similarity here that I just have been drawing from my own experiences as we talk here, is like when I've had races where I felt like I've really executed well mentally. The hardest question I get asked to answer is, what were you thinking about during that race? And I'm like, I don't know, I was out there for 100 miles. I imagine. I was thinking about a ton of stuff, and you think I'd have like, this whole book worth of things I could talk about, but it's really just like, very little like. And I'm always wondering, is that because I'm thinking of a ton of stuff, but it's so passive that I don't recall it afterwards? Or is it like I have like a very specific thing because I'll remember some things, but when I kind of go through them, I'm like, there's no way that was enough to fill the time. So then I'm thinking like, well, do I just hyper focus on those few things? And those are just kind of running through my mind the majority of the time, and that's why I remember them, because it was such a cyclical rehearsal of that. And then that counters with races where I've had really bad performances. I can often tell you a ton of things. I was thinking about a lot of noise in my head and things that were there that were distracting me from doing what I wanted to do and stuff like that. So it seems like that just really tracks with what you're trying, the message you're sharing with this, that's it's very interesting and that's exactly right. And the difference between a good and a bad race, that when you're in it, you're processing things all the time. But it's mostly about how to best relate to your body and how to summon up experiences that help you do that. And if you're sort of distracted, you've got two different, you know, you're like driving the car with your eyes out the side window. You know, you're not focusing on what you need to be attending to to make it one coherent good experience. And so you remember more stuff because you're thinking about irrelevant things. So that's a good observation that if you're in it, you want to stay in it. You want to be in it. You want the experience to be what has been called autopilot, that it's it's intrinsically rewarding just to be in that state, you know, win, lose or draw. you just like being in that state because you're connecting with your body. You're helping to manage it. It's giving you feedback. You're working together like a team, and that feels good. Yeah. Yeah. This is really interesting. I have a couple questions that I think are just interesting in terms of the application of this. So when I think of like sport I mean you mentioned Simone Biles in gymnastics, I think that was like I love I love that that sport in general because it's just such a it's such a different experience in my mind come from what I do because for my for what I do, it's like I'm sort of like I've got all the time in the world to think. And that is so much different than, like when Simone is lining up to go off that vault. It's like, I'm sure there's a lot of potential thought process, but then it's just like a decision is made and then it's just action and then it's over in a couple of seconds. Right. Is there a variance in how you approach this sort of, hypnotic practice for something like what Simone is doing versus something like what I'm doing? It's a very interesting point. I, I mean, I haven't coached people in gymnastics, although I have a terrific Stanford gymnastics student in my lab now. So we're actually doing a survey of what these athletes do. And, and some people there were some Stanford students on the team that won bronze, yesterday in the Olympics. It's more preparation. That is, you have to be just intensely prepared so that it's just automatic, pretty much to go through these series of very rapid steps together. and I think in the state itself, you want to just be, kind of supervising the orchestra but not playing the instrument. You know, each part of your body knows what it needs to do. And, but it's not like telling you. Now, you twist this way, now you twist that way. It's got to just be doing it. But so a lot of it, I think, is more in the preparation. and I know of injured gymnasts who, if they had an injury, you know, dislocated a shoulder or something, they couldn't work out for a month or two. They would actually go to the gym and sit by, the, the, the equipment. And I just mentally rehearse doing it. And they would, they would have less to make up after a month than the ones who just stayed home and did something else. So, mental preparation is a huge part of the game for them. And obviously their bodies have to be able to do it. But, having the routines so embedded that they just know what to do next is very important. Yeah I think when I think of just the different sports out there, I think gymnastics is just one of them that I think is the best example. And if you want to get into the actual like different disciplines within it, it's like the balance beam and the uneven bars are just so mind boggling to me because there's just you watching them do it. Yeah. The precision is so finely tuned. You just know there's no way they're overthinking anything. There's nothing you can't like. An inch makes the difference between you falling off of that and scoring like or losing enough points to pull your team from first to second place versus, you know, just landing on it the right way or grabbing the bar at the right time. It almost has to just be something that's on cruise control at that point. And like you said, as long as the mind and the body had been thoroughly prepared, you sort of just set it on, set it to go on. It's its journey out there. Somebody, somebody I heard on the radio this morning said that she could do a standing jump and land on a bar that was 12ft high. Think about that. You know, she's not all that tall. Yeah. It's unbelievable. No. So. So, yes, you have to have your body well prepared. And so it's just, you know, well, it's, you know, an astounding set of physical feats. It's an even more astounding set of mental feats, you know, and it just illustrates how coordination between brain and body can do remarkable things. But it's necessary, you know, it's necessary. And so my hope is that for us everyday athletes and for terrific athletes like you, that reverie can help train you to how to shift into the state. Do your preparation. Be in a mental state that allows you to naturally best manage your mind body interaction. And then the other thing that I advise athletes to do is to do a debrief after you do one of these things. So like you have reflections now about, you know, good races you've run. It's good to do it, you know, shortly after the event is over because you can then, you know, reflect on what worked and what didn't and what you want to improve. And it's a sort of golden period when it's all fresh in your mind and you want to kind of help yourself make mental notes about what worked and what didn't, what you can do better. So before, during and after our times when techniques like the things we teach on reverie can be very helpful. Yeah. I did want to ask you just in terms of where something like this differentiates from what I guess maybe they're kind of like cousins where we have like meditation and kind of we talked a little bit about just like the flow state. Right. Are there things that are there? I'm sure there's plenty. But what are some things that you think of that are really unique to hypnosis versus those other tools that people use to try to help kind of get them into a good mental state for whatever it is they're doing. An analogy I use, Zach, is that hypnosis is a tool. It's not, you know, meditation, it's a practice. And so, you know, you're supposed to do it twice a day for 30 minutes, just. And you're not supposed to try to solve a problem. You're just supposed to have open presents. Just let these things flow through you. Not judge them, not struggle with them. Just have that experience. Hypnosis. You've got this pain. I want to experience this pain differently. And here's how. Here's how I'm going to do it. and so you use it in a much more focused, rapid way not to establish a practice. So it's more like an antibiotic. And mindfulness is more like a vitamin, you know, it's something you do all the time and hopefully you will become better. You'll be different. You won't struggle and fight against things. You will allow feelings to flow through you. That's a good thing too. But it is different. So here you're shifting your mental state. You're reducing your level of tension about it. you're enhancing your connection with your body, and you're disconnecting from what your usual expectations of yourself are. So it can be a very useful and rapidly effective tool in changing your state of consciousness so that you can perform differently and perform better. Do you find that people who've engaged in things like meditation or like flow state practices and things like that tend to respond more positively or maybe more quickly to hypnosis? I think it's possible, but there are, you know, there are some meditators who just aren't very advisable and wounded. so, but I think people who are used to the idea of a disciplined mental practice that changes how well you function would take to something like hypnosis as well. better just because, you know, there's some people who think it's all, you know, bodybuilding and physical. And that discipline is obviously crucial, but it's not the only part. So I think it helps in the sense that you're open to the idea that there are different mental states you can attain, and that they may help you with your physical practice as well. And so people with experience in meditation or trying to attain flow states could be more open to self-hypnosis as well. Yeah. Yeah. Well this has been really interesting. I've learned a lot myself and I did a little bit of homework beforehand. So I felt like I came in knowing some stuff, but it's always kind of fun to kind of narrow in on maybe an interest that I have versus some of the stuff that you've been online with before. Sure. Before. Before, before I let you go, though, I would I do want to let you kind of let the listeners know where they can find you, where they can check out the app, if there are other podcasts or like areas that you've, kind of shared some of the stuff that we've talked about today or things that are like relative to hypnosis that we didn't touch on today, that are still kind of important aspects of, of that practice. I want to give you a chance to do that as well. Thank you. Sure. Well, I was just on Aubrey Marcus podcast. That'll be coming out in a couple of weeks. And he's a formidable, interesting guy. It's a lot of fun. And Jay Shetty, I'll be recording in LA on Friday, so I'll be on his podcast. and I hope people will visit the best way to learn about it and learn about what I've been doing and what we've been doing. Summaries of our research, what it shows, and you can see some of the images that we have developed in our research is reverie.com reverie. Com you're welcome to the site. The first week is free. You can try it and see if you like it. If you do, Good. Sign up for more. If not, it doesn't cost anything. You can download it from the App Store or Google Play. we've been in about 160 countries now, about 800,000 downloads. And in general, people find that four out of five of them experienced some immediate reduction in their level of stress and their pain. They said, we have trouble getting feedback from the people going to sleep because instead of giving us the follow up feedback, they go to sleep. So we know we don't get the numbers. But, we're finding that it can be very effective in a hurry. And the nice thing is you try it, you know, if it works, great. If it doesn't, you haven't lost anything. So, it's worth a try with everyone. And I hope that more and more people can benefit. You know, we're finding there's a huge amount of mental distress in the world. In the United States now, 25% of the US population has an anxiety disorder, 10% of depressive disorder. Insomnia is rampant. And, this is a simple, low cost, easily accessible way of helping yourself and your body feel better. So I hope that it will be something that will address these widespread mental health problems that people are suffering with and help them feel better. Yeah. Thanks for sharing that. Cause I think like the sleep application for something like this is going to be something that just pays, pays off big time if you're able to improve your sleep because that just feeds into everything else. And for listeners here, it's you know, I talk about in some of the podcast episodes is like, if you take care of the big levers, one of them being recovery, you have to be thinking about sleep. And you know, if you're having a hard time turning your brain off at night and falling asleep, then, you know, maybe, maybe some hypnosis, a few minutes of hypnosis before will help you kind of get that spot where you're now kind of getting a little more quality out of the whole the whole deal. Well, that's an important thing that you mentioned, Zach, because obviously, to be a good, effective athlete, you have to be able to turn it up and, you know, get your adrenaline flowing and move and act, but at the same time, to do that. Well, during the day, you've got to get a good night's sleep or your body won't be able to do it. And so many athletes are really good at turning it on, but are not so good at turning it off. And the nice thing about hypnosis. And that exercise we did, we call it cyclic sawing, where you take two full inhales rapidly, and then a very slow exhale helps you to get into the parasympathetic mode where you're slowing your heart rate, lowering your blood pressure and ready to go to sleep. So it's good to be able to turn it on. But it's equally important to be able to turn it off. And good athletes have to get prepared by getting a good night's sleep, or they just will not be able to function. So, hypnosis can be very helpful for that too. You can turn it on, you can manage your body well at the peak of performance, but you can also the other side of that coin is you can turn it off and let your body get to sleep. It is needed. Excellent. Well, Doctor Spiegel, thank you so much for taking some time. I will put links to the stuff you mentioned in the show notes, and hopefully the listeners go and check out some of the other podcast interviews you've done, because I know there's a ton of information on those as well. but yeah, thanks again for spending some time with me today. It's been my pleasure, Zach.