Hypno self

Usually when you hear the word hypnosis, the image that instantly pops into your mind is like entirely theatrical.

Oh, yeah. It's the velvet suit. Right. The dark stage, the guy in the crushed velvet suit, swinging a gold pocket watch, and he's just repeating, you know, you are getting sleepy.

It is the ultimate pop culture parlor trick. I mean, it's mind control for entertainment. We walk into a comedy club, and we fully expect a strict football coach to suddenly start dancing like a ballerina just because a guy snapped his fingers.

Yeah, but but if you step inside the modern neuroscience labs at Stanford, that pocket watch is completely gone completely. We aren't looking at parlor tricks anymore. We are looking at functional MRI scans. We're seeing shifting neural networks and really a biological tool that can physically rewrite how humans experience physical pain and even deeply ingrained emotional trauma.

The contrast is just staggering, honestly.

Hypnosis is not some fringe pseudoscience. It's not a cheap magic trick. It is a deeply researched mechanism for profound neurological change, which is wild to think about.

It is. In fact, it is the oldest Western conception of psychotherapy. Long before we had modern pharmacology, it was the very first time a talking interaction between a doctor and a patient was recognized as having legitimate therapeutic potential.

And that is exactly why we are jumping into this deep dive today. We are exploring the extensive work of Dr. David Spiegel.

A true pioneer in this space.

Yeah, he's a Stanford psychiatry professor and arguably one of the world's leading experts on clinical hypnosis. Our mission for you today is to totally shatter those preconceived velvet suit notions.

We want to unpack the hard biology and more importantly reveal how you can use this state to hack your own mind, manage your stress and literally rewire your reality.

It's a huge shift in perspective. It really is. So, okay, let's unpack this. To understand what hypnosis can actually do for you, we first have to unlearn what pop culture claims it is.

What exactly is happening in a clinical setting?

Well, at its core, clinical hypnosis is simply a state of highly focused attention. Dr. Spiegel equates it to getting so incredibly caught up in a great movie that you completely forget you are sitting in a theater watching a screen.

Oh, like when the real world just falls away. Exactly. You entered the imagined world. You aren't asleep. You aren't unconscious. You are just hyper focused. In a therapeutic sense, it operates as a tool for knowing myself.

I imagine it carries a massive amount of historical baggage, though, right? Like, doesn't this go all the way back to physicians claiming they had literal magical powers.

Oh, the history is incredibly colorful. So back in the 18th century, there was this physician named Franz Anton Mesmer, which by the way is where the word mesmerized comes from.

Wait, really? I never put that together.

Yeah. So he called his practice animal magnetism. He actually operated under this belief that he was manipulating invisible magnetic fields in his patient's brains.

And did it work?

Well, he was incredibly successful, securing psychosomatic illnesses. I mean, so successful that a French royal panel of experts was called into investigating. Wow.

And this panel actually included Benjamin Franklin and Dr. Guietan. Wait, Dr. Guietan as in the inventor of the guillotine.

The very same what a bizarre crossover of historical figures. Right. It's like a weird historical Avengers team.

Anyway, the observed mesmer's work and ultimately debunked his magnetic field theory entirely. The panel concluded that hypnosis was nothing more than heated imagination.

He did imagination.

Yeah, but Dr. Spiegel points out that their dismissal phrase heated imagination is actually a remarkably accurate scientific definition.

Because you're heating up your imagination to use it in very intense ways.

Exactly. You're leveraging it.

Okay. So if even Sigmund Freud used it in his early work with hysteria, how did it end up as a punchline in Vegas?

Because I know Freud abandoned it because patients were getting like too emotionally swept up your transference.

Yeah. They were transferring their feelings on to him.

But how did we get from early psychotherapy to stage comedians making people clock like chickens?

It really all stems from the misconception of control.

People watch a stage hypnotist and assume they possess some dark art of mind control.

But in reality, stage hypnotists are just exceptional observers.

What do you mean by observers?

They actively search the audience for the roughly 5% of the population who are extremely highly hypnotizable.

They spot them, bring them on stage, and then they just ask those specific people to try out being different without the fear of judgment.

Oh, so the football coach dances like a ballerina, not because his brain has been hijacked.

Right. He dances because he has temporarily put aside his conscious worry about what his team will say the next day.

He's fully absorbed in the suggestion.

Okay. So it's less like someone hijacking your car and forcing you into the passenger seat.

And more like, I don't know, someone handing you the keys to a sports car you didn't know you owned as long as you're willing to drive it.

That captures the dynamic perfectly. hypnosis requires a collaborative internal state.

It relies on your willingness to focus, not on someone else's external domination over here.

Okay. If this is an entirely internal state, a form of heated imagination, we really need to know what's physically happening inside the skull.

If we hook someone up to a brain scanner while they're in a trance, what are we actually seeing?

Because Dr. Spiegel brings receipts here with FMRI scans.

Oh, he absolutely does.

And this FMRI data is where the topic moves from abstract psychology into hard biology.

The scans reveal three distinct measurable changes in the neural networks during hypnosis.

Let's break those down. What's the first one?

The first major shift happens in the dorsal anterior singulate cortex.

Okay. Let's translate that for someone who isn't a neurobiologist.

What does that specific region do during our normal waking hours?

Think of it as the brain's alarm system.

It's a key part of the salience network, which sires off when you hear loud noise or, you know,

when you suddenly remember you left the stove on or you start worrying about an impending deadline.

So it's the thing constantly scanning for problems.

Exactly. And during hypnosis, activity in that alarm system drops significantly.

The alarms are just turned down.

This allows you to start worrying about external distractions and narrow your focus entirely on the present moment.

So the alarm is silenced.

You aren't getting constantly distracted by the outside world, but you still need to actually do something with that intense focus.

Right. What happens next?

So the second biological shift is increased functional connectivity between the left executive control network,

which is your planning and decision making center and the insula.

And the insula does what exactly?

It acts as a mind-body conduit.

It processes the literal physical sensations coming from your nervous system.

Okay.

So by increasing the connection between these two areas,

you drastically strengthen the ability of your thoughts to influence your physical bodily sensations and vice versa.

All right. So we have a silent alarm and a massive high speed cable connecting our conscious thought directly to our physical feelings.

You got it.

That sounds incredibly powerful, but also kind of dangerous if you're stuck in a negative thought loop, right?

Does hypnosis do anything to quiet our internal critic?

That leads directly to the third and perhaps most vital change.

There is a reduced connectivity, a literal disconnection between the executive control network and the posterior singular cortex.

And why is that important?

Because that region is a major player in what neuroscientists call the default mode network.

But Dr. Spiegel famously renames this the my fault mode network.

The my fault mode.

I love that that label alone explains so much about human anxiety.

Doesn't it? When you are just sitting around not engaged in a specific task, this network activates.

It maintains your rigid assumptions and expectations about who you are.

It's that constant background voice saying, I should be doing more or I am an anxious person or I always mess this up.

Everyone listening knows that exact voice.

Exactly. Well, hypnosis temporarily shuts down that constant self evaluation and those strict rules about who you think you should be.

Okay. Here's where it gets really interesting.

If the brain is a busy corporate office hypnosis essentially unplugged the anxious, micromanaging,

BOT that my fault mode network.

And at the same time, it opens a direct static free intercom line between the creative department and the factory floor.

The corporate office analogy is spot on.

And because you successfully unplugged that micromanaging BOT, you open up this very rare entirely non-judgmental window.

This biological state allows you to safely revisit and rewrite the emotional weight of incredibly painful memories.

Now, this part of the source material was fascinating because, well, we tend to think of memory as a video recording we just play back.

But how does this actually work with deep trauma?

So we have to look at how memory is constructed biologically.

Memories are not filing cabinets filled with objective data.

They are constructed with emotional loading process right next door in the amygdala.

Which handles our fear and emotions.

Right. The amygdala physically stamps emotion onto the raw data of the memory.

So if you remember being humiliated, your body actually feels the physiological sting of that humiliation all over again in the present.

It's like you're living it again.

Yes. And hypnosis allows a person to re-experience a past event without the burden of their current judgment or that my fault network chiming into blame them for it.

The interview shared a heartbreaking but really powerful anecdote about this mechanism.

There was this woman who was sexually assaulted by a landlord when she was just 12 years old.

It's a horrific situation.

And she lived in a culture where the family was afraid to speak up so she just carried the secret and total silence.

Decades later, she was highly functional in society but chronically depressed.

And this was despite like 10 years of traditional talk therapy.

Right. So Dr. Spiegel put her into a hypnotic state and asked her to simply visualize her 12 year old self right after the event.

She immediately began to cry.

See, wait. If you are treating someone for chronic depression, isn't making them physically re-experience their deepest trauma inherently dangerous?

I mean, aren't you just re-traumatizing them?

Traditional thinking might totally assume that.

But the vital difference here is the absence of the my fault network.

Dr. Spiegel asked her one crucial question while she was visualizing that terrified 12 year old.

He said, is that her fault?

Wow.

And under hypnosis, without her normal defense mechanisms blaming her, she could finally see the objective truth.

She said no. She imagines stroking her younger self's hair to comfort her.

And that changed things.

Completely. A week later, her psychiatrist called Dr. Spiegel asking what on earth he did because her decade-long chronic depression had completely vanished.

That is just, I mean, how does acknowledging it wasn't her fault cured the depression so rapidly? It seems like magic.

It's biology and psychology combined.

Severe trauma strips you of your agency, right? It makes you feel like an object.

Yeah.

And as children, we often unconsciously prefer to feel guilty rather than helplessly out of control.

Wait, we prefer guilt.

Yeah, because if a child decides the abuse is their fault, it creates a twisted kind of fantasy that they could have controlled it or prevented it.

It gives them a false sense of agency.

Hypnosis allowed her to bypass that childhood defense mechanism, view the memory without self-blame, and see the event for the tragedy it actually was.

He also detailed another case that blew my mind.

It was about a man with chronic back pain who obsessively tended the grave of his wildly abusive alcoholic father.

Yes. The patient felt it was his unbreakable duty as a son.

Even though the father had basically made his entire childhood a living hell.

So how did hypnosis help him?

So under hypnosis, Dr. Spiegel directly challenged that deeply ingrained assumption.

He just asked, why do you owe a miserable abuser anything?

Which normally would make someone incredibly defensive.

Exactly. But because the patient was in that highly focused non-judge middle state, the question jared him without triggering his defenses.

He was able to shift his perspective.

And it worked.

He later called Dr. Spiegel and said, for the very first time in his life, he looked in a mirror and actually liked the person staring back at him.

By releasing the obligation to his abuser, he finally felt self-worth.

I want to clarify the mechanics here for you listening because this is so important.

Is this process erasing the actual traumatic memory or is it just acting like a software update for the emotional tag attached to the file?

It's a great way to put it. It is entirely a software update for the emotional tag.

You are not deleting the factual memory of the event.

You can't just erase the past. You are altering the emotional physiological response that your amygdala triggers every time you access that file.

You still remember the event, but you no longer feel the crushing shame or terror associated with it.

These emotional breakthroughs sound literally like a superpower.

But it brings up a very practical hurdle for anyone listening.

We mentioned earlier that stage hypnotists can only use about 5% of the population for their shows.

Right. The highly hypnotizable ones.

So the million dollar question is, how effectively can the average person actually utilize this tool in their own life?

Well, hypnotizability is a very stable neurological trait. It's actually remarkably similar to your IQ.

It is generally locked in by your early 20s as your brain finishes maturing.

Interestingly though, young children are almost universally highly hypnotizable.

That makes total sense. They live constantly in trances of play where the physical world and their imagination are basically the exact same thing.

Precisely.

Like if you tell a kid the floor is lava, they don't pretend. They literally inhabit a reality where stepping on the carpet means burning alive.

Exactly. Their brain just fully accepts the reality.

But adolescents introduces logic, reason, and a desire to evaluate experiences rather than just blindly absorb them.

So by adulthood, we all fall somewhere onto a spectrum of hypnotizability.

And how do we know where we fall?

Dr. Spiegel measures this in his clinic using what he calls the hypnotic induction profile, which is a 0-10 scale.

It involves having a patient roll their eyes up while closing their eyelids and then visualizing their arm floating like a balloon.

Oh, in the source interview, Dr. Spiegel actually tests this live on the host of the show.

He has him roll his eyes up and visualize a balloon tied to his wrist and you can literally see the guy's hand start floating against his own conscious.

It's amazing to watch.

He looked genuinely shocked that his body was moving on its own. He scored a 9 out of 10, I think.

Yeah, that host is a classic high on the spectrum.

Dr. Spiegel categorizes people into three main types based on their neurobiology.

The highs, like that host, easily lose themselves in experiences. They are highly cooperative, deeply empathetic, and very creative.

What's the downside to being a high, though?

The danger for highs is that they can easily adopt other people's perspectives and lose their own boundaries.

They really have to actively remember who they are in a situation.

Okay, so that's the highs. On the opposite end, you have the lows. Here first to them is Apollonians.

Right. Apollonians value reason and data over pure experience.

They must analyze, evaluate, and argue the merits of a concept before they allow themselves to accept it.

And the people who fall in the middle, like most of us,

the mid-range are the Odysseans. Think of the Greek myth of Odysseus tied to the mast of his ship.

Oh, right, with sirens.

Exactly. They want to hear the sirens. They desire the intense emotional experience.

But they still want to critically think it over and maintain a safe analytical distance from it.

Now, there is a wild story from the clinic that perfectly illustrates why understanding your type really matters.

Dr. Spiegel was treating two different women for trickle-tillomania.

Yes, that's a severe disorder where people compulsively pull out their own hair.

Right. So the first woman was a high.

She was deeply empathetic, like the kind of person who would pull her car over in traffic to save a wounded animal.

So Dr. Spiegel put her under hypnosis and told her,

treat your body like a wounded animal.

You would never pull the hair out of an injured dog, so don't do it to yourself.

And because she was a high, her brain just immediately absorbed the emotional logic of that.

She stopped pulling her hair instantly.

It just clicked for her.

But the second woman was a low.

She was a professional accountant, an Apollonian, and she fought the entire process tooth and nail.

She wouldn't even let him conduct the initial assessment without arguing right?

She demanded data, peer-reviewed studies, and a strict rationale for everything they were doing.

She even went home and literally charted her own daily hair pulling on spreadsheets,

just to prove her points to the doctor.

It was so funny, but I would assume hypnosis wouldn't work at all on someone that resistant, yet she still got cured.

How did an accountant get the exact same result as the highly empathetic woman?

Well, what's fascinating here is she arrived at the exact same cure.

She just used her logic to get there.

By charting her behavior, she realized the compulsion was incredibly inefficient and illogical.

Neither end of the spectrum is better.

The method of healing just has to be tailored to how your specific brain processes reality.

So, if shutting down this MyFault network is powerful enough to cure decades of depression and physical compulsions,

it really makes me wonder what else we are accidentally telling our bodies to feel.

Like, if our perception of reality is this malleable, can we use this state to alter literal physical reality like pain and performance?

Absolutely. This is where the mind-body connection gets undeniably physical.

Dr. Spiel conducted this fascinating, believing a scene color grid study.

They put hypnotized patients into a peat scanner, which tracks metabolic activity in the brain to see exactly whose parts are firing.

Right. And they show them a grid of bright colors, similar to a Mondrian painting.

And as expected, the peat he scanned showed the lingo gyris, which is the specific chunk of tissue in the back of the brain that processes color lighting up like a Christmas tree.

Exactly. But then, the researchers told the hypnotized patients that the image was actually just black and white.

And what happened?

The lingo gyris powered down, blood flow decreased, the brain physically stopped processing the color, even though the vibrant image was right in front of their white open eyes.

And conversely, when shown a black and white grid and told it was full of color, the color center lit up.

That is insane. The brain is prioritizing belief over literal photon data hitting the retina.

That is mind-bending, but I guess it perfectly explains the pain control studies they ran.

The pain studies are incredible. They took highly hypnotizable Stanford students and gave them minor electrical shocks to the arm.

They measured their P100 waves, which is basically the electrical signature your brain makes the exact millisecond it registers physical pain.

Then they hypnotized the students and told them your hand is resting and circulating ice water.

Yes. And when I talk them again, the physical reaction, the actual P100 waves in the brain, dropped by 50 to 100%.

The brain simply stopped registering the electrical current as a painful sensation.

It just highlights the vital difference between hypnosis and meditation.

Meditation is often about maintaining open presence, letting thoughts pass like clouds without judgment.

But hypnosis is about doing. It is a highly targeted flow state designed to solve a specific problem.

Exactly. When Tiger Woods does his pre-shot golf routine, he isn't just focusing.

He is actively suppressing his My Fault Network and turning down his dorsal anterior singulate cortex.

He is biologically shutting off his brain's ability to worry about the crowd or the water hazard.

Right. Zen Arters do the exact same thing, focusing entirely on the feeling of the bow rather than the target itself.

The most practical example of this was the Stanford Women's Swim Team.

They had this bizarre problem where they were swimming significantly faster in practice than they were in actual meets.

Because in competitions, the stakes were high and their alarm systems were going off.

They were getting totally distracted by the swimmers in the adjacent lanes.

Right. So Dr. Spiegel used hypnosis to teach them to completely tune out the other lanes.

Because swimming is not a contact sport, what the person next you does literally has no bearing on your physics in the water.

And once they use self hypnosis to lower their external alarm system and focus solely on the sensation of their own muscles moving through the water,

their competition times dropped and they started winning.

So what does this whole mean if I can visualize the mechanics of everything we've discussed today?

Our brain is basically a CEO locked in a dark windowless skull.

I love this analogy.

It has no literal idea what is happening outside.

It only knows what's going on based on the memos it received from the nerve endings in the eyes, ears, and skin.

If no system lets us act as the executive assistant, deciding which memos get shredded before the CEO ever sees them,

and which ones get placed right on the center of the desk.

That analogy perfectly captures the biology.

And armed with the knowledge that our brain selectively filter reality every single second, we really have a profound choice to make.

We can either deliberately harness this power as an executive assistant for self improvement,

or we just go on autopilot and fall victim to the accidental group transes happening out in society.

Let's talk about deliberately harnessing it first.

Dr. Spiegel actually created an app called Revery, which offers a specific protocol for everyday stress called the split screen technique.

Let's say you listening have a terrifying public speaking event at work tomorrow.

How do you use this?

So the absolute key to the split screen technique is that you must get the body comfortable first before you try to fix the mind.

Okay, so physical first.

Yes, you close your eyes and imagine floating in a warm bath or floating in space.

Once your physical body is profoundly relaxed, you picture an imaginary screen in your mind.

On the left side of the screen you place the stressor, the terrifying presentation.

And on the right side, you picture a potential solution or a positive outcome.

So by calming the body first, you prevent that vicious snowball effect where a mental worry causes your shoulders to tense up,

which sends a memo to the brain that you're in physical danger, which then just causes more mental panic.

Exactly. You are actively choosing your reality.

This split screen technique works because it forces you to consciously control your own trans.

Because if you don't, society is more than happy to provide a trans for you.

Oh, absolutely.

Dr. Spiegel connects this personal hypnosis directly to macro societal behavior.

He specifically cites Leon Festinger's famous cognitive dissonance study on Doomsday cults.

Right. Festinger studied a cult that genuinely believed aliens were coming on a spaceship to rescue them right before the world ended on a very specific Tuesday.

Yes. And when the spaceship inevitably didn't arrive and the world didn't end, logic dictates that the followers would say,

well, we were wrong tied to pack up and go home.

But they did the exact opposite.

They doubled down. They convinced themselves that their intense devotion had actually saved the world from destruction

and they aggressively went out to recruit more followers because facing the truth was too painful.

Exactly. When undeniable facts conflict with deeply held beliefs, people will often try to change reality rather than suffer the ego damage of changing their minds.

Cognitive dissonance is essentially a self-imposed trans.

Which is a terrifying lens through which to view modern societal and political beliefs.

If we connect this to the bigger picture, it raises an important question.

Are you controlling your own trans or is society controlling it for you?

The beliefs we hold about our capabilities, our intelligence and our personalities are often just convenient assumptions we adopted years ago.

When we let go of the rigid idea of a permanent unchanging self, we discover tremendous freedom.

This has been such a journey. Your personality is not a fixed concrete object. It is a malleable ongoing process.

We have far more agency over our physical pain, our past traumas, and our daily stress than we realize.

We really do. The CEO in the dark room can be reasoned with, provided you just speak the right biological language.

You do not have to be limited by a story you have told yourself for decades.

The brain's plasticity is available to you right now today.

So we let go of the velvet suit and the pocket watch today and hopefully replace them with a much sharper, scientifically backed tool for you.

And as we wrap up, I want to leave you with one final thought to ponder after this audio stocks.

Think about the one unshakable fact you believe about your own limitations.

Whether it is, I'm just an anxious person or I'm not creative or I will always have this back pain.

If your brain can literally drain the color out of a vibrant image just by choosing to believe it's black and white, what vibrant parts of your own potential have you accidentally hypnotize yourself into not seeing?