Trauma, Dissociation & Hypnosis with Dr. David Spiegel

Dr. David Spiegel, Wilson Professor at Stanford University School of Medicine, brings over 40 years of expertise in trauma, hypnosis, and mind-body medicine to this fascinating conversation. Drawing from decades of scientific research, Dr. Spiegel reveals how hypnosis serves as "controlled dissociation," offering a powerful pathway for trauma recovery by allowing people to revisit difficult experiences while maintaining physical comfort.

The conversation takes us deep into the neuroscience of trauma and healing. Dr. Spiegel shares remarkable findings from brain imaging studies showing how hypnosis actually turns down activity in the brain's alarm system and reduces self-judgment, creating space for new perspectives and healing. Particularly fascinating is his explanation of how hypnosis can reduce pain perception by over 50% - without medication or side effects.

Personal stories bring the science to life, from Dr. Spiegel's first experience using hypnosis with an asthmatic girl in crisis to his wife successfully using hypnosis during childbirth. His genetic "illness" of hypnosis, inherited from his psychiatrist father who used it to treat trauma in World War II veterans, creates a touching through-line in his lifelong dedication to understanding how our minds can heal our bodies.

The conversation bridges clinical approaches with accessible self-help strategies. Dr. Spiegel explains how two-thirds of adults are naturally somewhat hypnotizable, then details how his Reverie app makes these powerful techniques available to anyone dealing with stress, insomnia, or trauma. The discussion reveals fascinating parallels between hypnosis and yoga, showing how both practices engage the brain's natural capacity for healing through focused attention and absorption.

Ready to tap into your brain's natural healing abilities? Discover how hypnosis might serve as an underutilized "app" you already possess, and learn why focusing on what you're for rather than what you're against creates more effective healing. Whether you're a clinician or someone seeking relief from trauma or stress, this episode offers profound insights into our remarkable capacity for transformation.

Episode Transcript

Lisa Danylchuk (00:21):
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Today I want to give a big shoutout and extend a huge thank you
to the International Societyfor the Study of Trauma and

(01:24):
Dissociation, the ISSTD, forsponsoring this episode.
If you've been listening tothis podcast for any amount of
time, you've heard me talk aboutISSTD and the incredible
researchers, clinicians andadvocates I've met during my
time as a member and a volunteerthere.
The ISSTD has been delving intothe science and best practice
of treating trauma anddissociation for over 40 years

(01:45):
now and they have a rich catalogof educational offerings for
both professionals andnon-professionals on their
website that's cfasisst-dorg.
If you're a mental healthprofessional, I highly recommend
you consider becoming a memberof ISSTD.
I'd love to see you during thelive educational offerings and

(02:09):
at the annual conference inPortland, Oregon, in March 2026.
Visit isst-d.
iorg.
org to learn more.
Today, our guest is Dr DavidSpiegel.
Dr David Spiegel is WilsonProfessor and Associate Chair of

(02:30):
Psychiatry and BehavioralSciences, director of the Center
on Stress and Health andMedical Director of the Center
for Integrative Medicine atStanford University School of
Medicine, where he's been amember of the academic faculty
since 1975.
Dr Spiegel has more than 40years of clinical and research
experience studyingpsycho-oncology, stress and

(02:53):
health, pain control,psychoneural endocrinology,
sleep, hypnosis andpsychotherapy for cancer
patients.
He has published 13 books, 404scientific journal articles and
170 book chapters on hypnosis,psychosocial oncology, stress
physiology, trauma andpsychotherapy.

(03:15):
He was a member of the workgroups on stressor and
trauma-related disorders for theDSM-IV and V editions of the
American PsychiatricAssociation's Diagnostic and
Statistical Manual of MentalDisorders.
He's a past president of theAmerican College of
Psychiatrists and the Societyfor Clinical and Experimental
Hypnosis and is a member of theNational Academy of Medicine.

(03:39):
I recently attended Dr Spiegel'splenary address at the
International Society for theStudy of Trauma and
Dissociation's annual conferencein Boston, massachusetts, and
I'm happy that he's able toshare some of the wisdom and
insights from his many studiesof trauma, dissociation and
hypnosis here with us today.
Please join me in welcoming DrDavid Spiegel to the show.

(03:59):
Dr Spiegel, welcome to the howwe Can Know podcast.
Thank you so much for takingthe time to be here today.

Dr. David Spiegel (04:08):
You're welcome, Lisa.
I'm very glad to be here withyou.

Lisa Danylchuk (04:11):
So I'd love to start a little bit with your
beginnings.
I'm curious because I don'tthink I've heard this anywhere
else how you came to specializein stress and pain control and
trauma and dissociation, stressand pain control and trauma and
dissociation.

Dr. David Spiegel (04:25):
Well, it began with an interest in
hypnosis.
That is a bit of a geneticillness in my family.
Both my parents werepsychiatrists and psychoanalysts
and my father got interested inhypnosis just before he shipped
out to World War II.
He met a Viennese psychiatristwho had escaped the Nazis and
had studied hypnosis in hispractice because he had a

(04:48):
smallpox scar right in themiddle of his forehead and
Gustav von Schaffenberg was hisname.
And he noticed that prisonershe was a forensic psychiatrist
who he was interviewing wouldsometimes just sort of look at
that spot on his forehead andkind of nod off.
And he realized they were goinginto some kind of altered
mental state and it turned outit was hypnosis.

(05:09):
So when he got to the US hecouldn't serve in the military
but he wanted to offer to trainarmy doctors in hypnosis.
So he trained my father amongmany others, and my father used
it for trauma, for acute stressreactions, for pain control and
combat.

(05:29):
And when he came back he sort ofwent back to psychoanalysis.
He had a supervisor, frieda vonReichman, who was a famous
interpersonal psychoanalyst, whoasked him why he was going to
stop.
He said, well, freud stopped.
And who am I kind of to do thisand she said what are you being
so precious about yourreputation?
For You're going to teach acourse on hypnosis in the
Analytic Institute.
Because I'm going to take it,so you better do it.

(05:51):
So he started and he noticedover time that he seemed to be
getting better follow-up resultsand he would call up his
patients after he'd seen themand you know some would say,
well, if you need more patients,I'll talk to some of my friends
and that didn't sound verypromising.
But the ones who he'd usedhypnosis was, you know, I
stopped smoking or my anxiety isbetter or I'm controlling my

(06:13):
pain better.
So he gradually shifted hispractice and I you know the
dinner table conversations wereinteresting and you know my
parents told me that I was freeto be any kind of psychiatrist.
I wanted to be, and here I am.
But I took a course in hypnosisat medical school and I'll tell
you, lisa, the first, the firstpatient I ever used it with and

(06:36):
it's now been about 7000, was anasthmatic girl under tremendous
stress.
She was in status asthmaticusin the hospital Children's
Hospital in Boston and I walk inand her mother's standing there
crying.
She'd been unresponsive tosubcutaneous epinephrine times
two and they were thinking aboutgeneral anesthesia and giving

(06:58):
her steroids and I didn't knowwhat else to do.
So I had started the course.
So I said you want to learn abreathing exercise?
She nodded and I said well, Igot her hypnotized and I thought
good, now wait a minute, wehaven't gotten asthma in the
course yet.

Lisa Danylchuk (07:14):
Uh-oh.

Dr. David Spiegel (07:14):
What do I say ?
So I said something veryprofound and clever.
I said each breath you takewill be a little deeper and a
little easier.
And within five minutes shewent from someone with white
knuckles struggling for breath,mother crying, to lying back in
the bed and clearly feeling morecomfortable.
And so the thing is not onlywas it effective, but you could

(07:36):
see it happening, you know.
And so my intern came runningin and I thought he was going to
pat me on the back and he saidI want to inform you that the
nurse has informed the nursingsupervisor that you violated
Massachusetts law by hypnotizinga minor without parental
consent.

Lisa Danylchuk (07:54):
Oh, Massachusetts law.

Dr. David Spiegel (07:56):
Well, this despite the fact that
Massachusetts has a lot of crazylaws.
That is not one of them.
And her mother was standingnext to me when I did it and
this girl had been hospitalizedevery month for three months in
status asthmaticus and he saidwell, you're going to have to
stop.
And I said why.
He said it's dangerous.

(08:17):
And I said you're going to giveher general anesthesia and put
her on steroids.
And you think my talking to heris dangerous?
Take me off the case if youwant, but I'm not going to tell
my patient something I know isnot true.
So he stopped out and they hada council of war over the
weekend with the attending andthe chief resident and they came
back with a radical idea onMonday.
They said why don't we ask thepatient?

(08:38):
And she said I like this.
So she kept doing it.
She did have one subsequentrehospitalization but went on to
study to be a respiratorytherapist and I thought that
anything that could help apatient that much, that fast,
that safely, and violate anon-existent Massachusetts law

(08:58):
and piss off the head nurse andyou know the attending had to be
worth looking into.
And so I've been doing it eversince and I just I realized that
there are ways that just wepeople can make these rapid
shifts in mental state and rapidshifts in physical state and
their perception of pain andtheir stress, anxiety, because

(09:23):
there's this kind of feedbackinteraction between mental
stress as you know so well, lisaand physical reactivity, and
then you notice the physicalreactivity and you get more
anxious and then your bodyreacts to the increased anxiety
and it's like a snowball rollingdownhill.
And there are things we can doabout that in a hurry and you

(09:44):
know, with the kinds of thingsyou do too with yoga and and
dealing with trauma, it's, it'snot real.
Treatments are not justmedication, and I'm a physician,
I use meds, but there are a lotof other things we can do to
teach people to better managetheir bodies, and one of the key
things how I got into trauma inpart was hypnosis is a kind of

(10:07):
controlled dissociation.
People who have beentraumatized dissociate.
They separate part ofthemselves to sort of maintain
some sense of sanity from what'shappening to their body, and
it's a way of taking control inresponse to a situation in which
you lost control.
The essence of trauma ishelplessness and so if you can

(10:30):
use techniques like hypnosis,like yoga, to take, to reassume
control of your body.
That's a step toward healing.

Lisa Danylchuk (10:40):
Yeah, and when you can use things that are so
readily available and whenmedication isn't working, it's
great that we have those toolsand we have pharmacology.
But if you're givingsubcutaneous epinephrine and
it's not working and talking is,or a calm, engaging presence
asking questions or offeringsuggestions if that's working,

(11:04):
great.
I mean it's cheaper.
There's so many potentialreasons why we might go that
direction.

Dr. David Spiegel (11:13):
Well, you know, lisa, it actually.
It alternatively angers andsaddens me that one reason that
it's not more widely used isthat it's cheaper.
There's not a hell of a lot ofmoney to be made, you know, and
so I'm competing against, youknow, big pharma, and that's a
tough, that's a tough battle,you know.

(11:35):
So it troubles me that, youknow, I don't have a team of ex
cheerleaders to go around todoctor's offices convincing them
that hypnosis is the besttreatment for their problem, and
so that's actually our part of.
Our difficulty is that it isnot expensive, and so there
isn't a whole lot of money to bemade doing it.

Lisa Danylchuk (11:59):
Yeah, you do have a long career and a lot of
research and experience, and Imean even status being at
Stanford right, like you, have aposition to share with
consumers directly.
In the climate we have now, wecan do that a little bit more so

(12:21):
that people know okay, I dohave choices, I could take
medication.
Maybe that works.
If it, especially if it doesn't, here's this other choice right
, here's something I canpractice in minutes a day.
Or here's something and not tomake it sound like a miracle,
but it is something that can bepowerful and we can talk a
little bit about.
You know how people responddifferently to it, but it's an

(12:45):
option and I think it'simportant for people to know
these things are an option.
It's really common for people tothink of hypnosis as I'm going
to go on stage and click like achicken, or for people to think
of trauma as only pertaining towar veterans, and you and I are
both children of therapists.
My parents are both apsychologist and an LMFT and my

(13:07):
dad was a war veteran.
I get that kind of trauma, butthere's so much more and that's
becoming commonplace now.
So I'm curious for you, as youspeak to this wider span of
people who've experienced trauma.
What do you see in hypnosisthat can benefit them?

Dr. David Spiegel (13:27):
Well, you've stated the problem very well,
lisa, and what I see is a way tohelp people in a hurry, to help
them get in touch with some oftheir own inner resources, to
manage stressful experiences andreactions to them better many
times, you know, the irony isthat because you go into some

(13:51):
kind of altered mental state andmost people who are traumatized
will tell you that they, youknow, they may not remember
parts of what happened, thatthey were conscious, for during
that they somehow detachedthemselves.
They did things that may havesaved their life that they
didn't think they could do.
That they didn't think theycould do.
And so hypnosis has value inthat it may help you, in a

(14:12):
controlled way, enter the kindof mental state that is not too
dissimilar from the one you werein when you were experiencing
trauma.
And so the worst thing abouttrauma is helplessness, and if
you can reenter yourrecollection of this in a
controlled way and experience itdifferently, it can have

(14:35):
profound effects because it'ssalient to trauma.
It's a kind of state people gointo sometimes when they're
being traumatized, and thereforeit's got therapeutic potential.
So I had a woman who wanted touse hypnosis she had been, it
was an attempted rape as she wascoming home from her the

(14:56):
supermarket, and she wanted.
It was getting dark, she wantedto see if she could get a
better image of the assailant,and so she was very hypnotized.
Well, I got her to go back back, reminding her you're safe and
comfortable now, but let's keepyour body floating and
comfortable while you picture onone side of an imaginary screen

(15:18):
what he looks like.
And she couldn't remember muchmore about that.
But she noticed something else.
She said you know, and she, shehad fought him and she suffered
a basilar skull fracture as aresult of fighting, and she was
feeling terribly guilty that shegot herself injured.
So on top of that, she'sberating herself for having

(15:39):
gotten hurt.
And as she looked at it, shesaid you know, this guy doesn't
just want to rape me, he wantsto kill me.
If he gets me upstairs, he'sgoing to kill me.
And so I said now, on the otherside of the screen, I want you
to picture what you did toprotect yourself.
And she said you know what?
He's surprised that I'mfighting that hard.

(16:01):
He didn't think I would.
So on the one, you know, youmight say well, nice going,
spiegel.
You made her realize it wasactually worse than she thought
it was, but on the other hand itmade her realize that what she
had done probably saved her life.
Yes, and so she was.

(16:27):
You know, the essence of traumais helplessness.
But she was not entirelyhelpless and she was, and
sometimes fighting is not theright thing to do, but in this
case it clearly was and she wasable to emerge from it with a
different perspective on thetrauma and to acknowledge her
own bravery.
But wisdom in taking it asseriously as she could and

(16:48):
fighting to save her life, andso entering that altered state,
can allow you to dissociate inthe sense that you keep your
body comfortable.
So your body doesn't have to goback reliving the terrible
trauma.
But mentally she could and shecould examine what she did.
In a way, most trauma survivorsdon't fully recognize and

(17:17):
appreciate what they've done tokeep themselves alive in the
face of trauma.
So it's a way of enhancingcontrol of your body and
expanding your cognitive andemotional perspective on what
happened.

Lisa Danylchuk (17:27):
You've mentioned trauma and dissociation a
number of times.
Most listeners are familiarwith those terms, but I'm
curious for you.
You've been in this field along time, bucket of decades.
How would you describe yourunderstanding of trauma, or just
the understanding of traumaevolving in the last 40, 50

(17:48):
years?

Dr. David Spiegel (17:50):
Well, I think we've come to recognize that
the essence of trauma ishelplessness.
You know, it's a sense thatyou're being made into an object
, a thing.
I was just in Rome recentlywith my family, and there's this
amazing Bernini sculpture ofDaphne being pursued by Apollo.

(18:13):
And she's turning herself intoa tree.
You see, her fingers are beingand her way of escaping it is to
turn herself into a tree.
So he wouldn't be interested inher as the sort of myth of the
story.
But the story is kind ofinteresting because it's a
visual image of becoming a thing.

Lisa Danylchuk (18:31):
Yes.

Dr. David Spiegel (18:32):
And it's, I think, important to recognize
that.
It's the involuntariness, soanything you can do in this
altered state.
So what you do when youdissociate is you say, well,
there's part of me that's beinghurt over here, but there's
another part of me that's tryingto get away and reflecting what
can I do?

(18:52):
Or what happened and why isthis happening and how can I
escape from it?
What can I do?
So it's you know, I've hadpatients who were repeatedly
sexually or physically abused bya parent who just said I would
go to a mountain meadow full ofwildflowers, and it's a way of
preserving some sense ofnormalcy and that you know he's

(19:14):
got my body, but he hasn't gotme kind of.

Lisa Danylchuk (19:16):
Thing.

Dr. David Spiegel (19:18):
And that's an adaptive reaction.
You know we all dissociate inhypnotic-like ways all the time.
So right now, for example,you're sitting in a chair.
There are sensations in yourbody touching the chair, but
hopefully you weren't even awareof that until I mentioned it to
you.
If you were, we could stop theinterview now.
So we naturally do it.

(19:39):
But in more extreme situationsthe dissociation is more extreme
.
What it says is the brain isdeciding what to pay attention
to and what to ignore, and it'sgot thousands of choices of what
to attend to.
So learning to take advantageof that.
And one of the things we see inhypnosis, lisa, is you turn down

(20:00):
activity in the alarm system inthe brain, the dorsal anterior
cingulate cortex.
We've used hypnosis with manyresearch subjects in the MRI
scanner and we can see what'sgoing on in their brains.
And one of them is they just tothe extent that they're
hypnotized, they're turning downactivity in the alarm system.
They're just saying shutting itdown, I don't care what's
happening, so a loud noisedoesn't distract them anymore

(20:23):
and we have a remarkablecapacity to do that.
And that can be a problem attimes, but it very often can be
adaptive and helpful andhypnosis is a way of focusing
your attention, dissociatingthings that would ordinarily be
in consciousness and turningdown that alarm reactivity.
It's also a way of turning downactivity in the posterior part

(20:47):
of the cingulate cortex.
That's what we call the defaultmode network.
So you mentioned, you know,people being nervous about
quacking like a duck.
You know I don't like stageshows where you make fools out
of people using hypnosis, butthere is actually a message in
it.
So if the football coach isdancing like a ballerina, it
means he's able to shut down thepart of his brain that is

(21:10):
judging who am I?
What am I?
What do people think of me?
and just be different.
Now you know I don't make myliving making coaches dance like
ballerinas, but I do use thiscapacity to try out being
different as a way of helpingpeople see that they can be, or
even they were, different.
And that's a powerful tool intreating trauma, because you can

(21:34):
help people to see that I don'thave to feel as physically
uncomfortable in remembering thetrauma as I was when the trauma
was happening.
I can get perspective on it.
I can give myself.
I can.
So my body can be floating in abath, a lake, a hot tub or
floating in space and I canstill be picturing what happened
, but in a way that acknowledgesthe dissociation that it

(21:57):
happened then and it isn'thappening now, and it
acknowledges that, in having merelive this, you're trying to
help me.

Lisa Danylchuk (22:07):
You're not trying to hurt me again.

Dr. David Spiegel (22:10):
There's this, and I'm sure you've seen this
in your yoga work that there aretimes when people feel that
you're just re-inflicting miseryon them and what's the good of
that?
And so they will identify youwith a traumatizer.
And it's very important thatwhen we work with people who
have been traumatized, weacknowledge that, that we're
respectful of it, that we don'tforce them or push them into it,

(22:31):
because the key is using it tohelp them recover and handle it
differently.
And so respect.
You know I've often wondered.
One of the symptoms ofpost-traumatic stress disorder
is flashbacks.
You know, reliving thetraumatic event.
One of the symptoms ofpost-traumatic stress disorder
is flashbacks.
You know, reliving thetraumatic event.

(22:52):
One of the major treatments ishelping people to confront and
relive trauma.
But why don't the flashbacksheal people?
If reliving the trauma, ifconfronting the trauma, is
therapeutic, why don't they makethem better?
And it doesn't.

Lisa Danylchuk (23:09):
That's a great point is therapeutic why didn't
they make them better?

Dr. David Spiegel (23:12):
And it doesn't.
It's a great point, and it'sbecause, in hypnosis and
psychotherapy and working withpeople with yoga, you have an
agreement with them that you'reusing it in a way that they can
control, so you can confront howyou felt, how you feel, how
your body felt, how you cancontrol your body, but you're
not being forced to do it,you're being invited to do it,

(23:32):
and so that puts it in adifferent context.

Lisa Danylchuk (23:34):
It does.
And you're also talking aboutdissociation from the
perspective of, during a traumaright Some part, not being aware
or not being able to fullyprocess or take in, pay
attention to the horror ofwhat's happening.
But you're also talking aboutdissociation as a healing tool,

(23:56):
being able to experience yourbody floating in space, floating
in the lake, while you're alsogoing back to something really
challenging.
So I'm curious when did youfirst know that dissociation was
a thing, and when did you knowit from the harmful standpoint
or the moment of traumastandpoint, and when did you
recognize it from the oh thiscan really help us standpoint?

Dr. David Spiegel (24:15):
I think early in my career I started because
I used hypnosis.
I started treating people withdissociative identity disorder,
what we used to call multiplepersonality disorder.
I chaired the committee thatchanged the name, actually in
the DSM, and because I realizedthat it was more.

(24:35):
It wasn't that they had morethan one personality as I got to
know them, it was that they hadless than one personality, that
it was fragmentation ofidentity rather than the
proliferation of people, becauseI could see how different the
people were and there were theseidentities.
You know, some were afrightened child and wouldn't

(24:59):
act like a young child ratherthan the adult that they were.
Some would be angry and say youknow what?
She deserved it, and that's theway of fantasizing.
Control is pathological, butsaying she didn't run away,
she's going to be punished andthey would do self-physically
punishing things.
And so it was clear to me that,in the extreme sense of people

(25:22):
who have gone through repeatedphysical and sexual trauma, that
the dissociation happens andthat they need to learn to
understand and control it andwork toward integration of these
different elements ofthemselves to try and better
understand and manage theresidue of what has happened.
And so it was clear to me thathypnosis, which is a kind of

(25:46):
much more milder form ofdissociation, could be used to
understand and then controldissociation.
So it came from my working withpeople who had extreme forms of
chronic and severe early lifetrauma that got me seeing the
connections between hypnosis anddissociation and trauma.

Lisa Danylchuk (26:08):
The best kind of training right Directly from
people who are seeking help, ifyou could.
You mentioned that youcontributed to the DSM.
I believe four and five, maybe.

Dr. David Spiegel (26:19):
That's right, that's right.

Lisa Danylchuk (26:21):
If you could magically update all the books
and trainings in psychiatry andpsychology out there, what
information would you include orwhat would you maybe retire?

Dr. David Spiegel (26:34):
Interesting.
Well, I think certainly what Iwork to include was the idea
that the key problem isfragmentation of identity.
It's that your sense of who youare becomes at times so painful
and frightening that you justneed to pretend that it didn't
happen.
But there's a price to be paidfor that, and so I would like,

(26:58):
as I worked with DSM andchanging it from multiple
personality disorder, because Ithought that misrepresented what
was going on.
It's not that you have 12people inside you.
It's that you have thisdifficulty pulling together
these different components ofyour experience and identity,

(27:19):
and that learning to do thatwould be a therapeutic thing to
do.
And I see it in a lot of peoplewho have been traumatized.
It's not that they havemultiple identities, but they do
have multiple components oftheir experience, and that what
I think we do need to see isthat people need to find a way
in therapy, one way or another,to revisit the trauma, but see

(27:41):
it from a different perspectiveand see it in a way that helps
you control how your body isreacting to it.
You know, bessel van der Kolkwrote this wonderful book the
Body Keeps the Score abouttrauma.
He and I were residentstogether at Mass Mental Health
Center many years ago, and theidea is that trauma is a somatic
as you teach with yoga as wellas a psychological problem, and

(28:07):
the way your brain and bodyinteract is clearly affected by
trauma, and learning to controlhow your body reacts as you go
through a therapeutic process isa crucial thing in treatment.
And you know, one of theinteresting things about trauma
is there really is not muchpsychopharmacology that helps

(28:28):
treating PTSD and again, I usepsychotropic medications, but
there aren't any, and even thebig hopes that there would be
new drugs that would stopnightmares and all that just
hasn't worked very well, and soit means that it's a field that
requires our developingpsychotherapies that work and

(28:50):
help people, and I wassufficiently frustrated that it
wasn't getting to people and,despite a career of doing
research and demonstrating inrandomized clinical trials that
hypnosis helps people it helpsreduce pain, even during
surgical procedures.
It helps cancer patients, evenwith advancing disease, control
their pain but it wasn't beingused.

(29:11):
So I built this with colleagues, built this app Reverie, to try
and offer to people thecapacity to use hypnosis for
themselves to deal with problemslike pain and stress and
insomnia, all of which arethings that go along with trauma
because I wanted people to haveaccess to it directly and use
it whenever they needed it, andso my hope is that with work in

(29:37):
these sort of relatively lessyou know, heavily used
approaches to helping withtrauma, that we can get it to
people and they can try it forthemselves and see if they like
it.
So that's why I develop reverie.

Lisa Danylchuk (29:54):
You haven't mentioned this and I don't know
that you've done research onthis, but I also know people use
it in labor and delivery.

Dr. David Spiegel (30:02):
Yes.

Lisa Danylchuk (30:03):
Yes, and anecdotally speaking, from
friends with great success.

Dr. David Spiegel (30:09):
Well, I'll tell you.
I can tell you up close andpersonal, because my lovely wife
, helen Blau, who's BaxterProfessor of Stem Cell Biology
at Stanford and, by the way, wasjust at the end of the Biden
administration awarded theNational Medal of Science for
her stem cell work.

Lisa Danylchuk (30:25):
Congratulations.

Dr. David Spiegel (30:27):
Yeah, it was very exciting.
She had both of our childrenwith hypnosis as the anesthesia,
and Dan, who I was just talkingto on the phone now is a
strapping 44-year-old architect,was 10 pounds, and so a first
child 10-pound labor Ouch, youcan say that.

Lisa Danylchuk (30:49):
That's a lot of baby.

Dr. David Spiegel (30:50):
That's a lot of baby, that's a lot of baby.
And you know it was a nine-hourlabor.
And I said you know she wouldsay you know, david, I teach
pharmacology.
There are drugs for this.
And I said you're floating inLake Tahoe, cool tingling, and
I'm filtered.
I heard out of the pain andopen yourself up.
And she wanted to be sure shewas in control.

(31:12):
We were a little worriedbecause he was so big.
There seemed to be some signsof fetal distress and we wanted
to be sure that she was fullyable to help him get out.
And she was and she did.
And our daughter, Julia was ascant, you know, five and a half
pounds.
And that labor, you know shewent into labor at breakfast and

(31:35):
we had lunch together after shewas born.
It was very smooth.

Lisa Danylchuk (31:38):
Wow.

Dr. David Spiegel (31:40):
So yes, you know, I mean, you know it seems,
oh my God, how could you dothat when we have all these meds
?
But there are problems withthose meds and to some extent
you lose control over the laborand delivery.
And you know it's what humanshave been doing for millennia.
You know giving birth.

(32:00):
You know often squatting ratherthan lying down so that gravity
helps you and the brain.
You know the strain and painlies mainly in the brain.
The brain is the processor, andwe've been able to show Lisa
that if you shock people who arehighly hypnotizable and tell
them your hand is in ice water,cool, tilling and numb, you

(32:20):
reduce the brain's response tothe shocks by more than by 50%.
More than that at the beginning.
In the first tenth of a secondwe look at the somatosensory ERP
and you can see that the firstcomponent of the waveform just
disappears.
So the brain is just and theyfeel it.
They say you know, it doesn'tbother me.
The brain is a remarkablestructure for filtering out

(32:44):
information you don't need orwant and filtering in what you
do need or want.
And so the idea that pain isall physical is just wrong.
You know you've got to have abrain responding to the sensory
input and deciding what to dowith it.
And so, even in very painfulsituations and you hear that
from people who've beentraumatized too that they

(33:05):
sometimes didn't realize theywere hurt until after it was
over that's dissociation, and solet's take advantage of that
ability and teach people to doit, and so we have four pain
programs on the Reverie app thatteach people different ways of
filtering the hurt out of thepain.

Lisa Danylchuk (33:24):
I remember you talking about different pathways
in the brain and differentareas.
You know the functionalconnectivity changed in fMRI,
where, if you said the pain isless, or if you said you can
manage the pain better, therewas an impact, or a similar
impact even, but it was througha different pathway.
And that's so fascinatingbecause there's many paths up

(33:46):
the mountain, so to speak.
Right, we can find what's goingto be most effective for us.

Dr. David Spiegel (33:51):
That's exactly right, lisa.
This was a colleague inMontreal, pierre Rainville, who
used PET imaging to tell peoplewhen they were giving them a
shock like the experiment we did.
In one condition they said yourhand is in ice water.
It's cool, tingly and numb, andyou reduced activity.

(34:13):
They got analgesia.
They got less pain In thesomatosensory cortex, which is a
part of the brain thatprocesses all kinds of sensory
information.
In another condition they wereadministering exactly the same
pain but they were saying well,the pain is there, but it won't
bother you very much, not veryimportant, which is like how

(34:36):
people feel on opioids sometimes.
And then you got analgesia ofan equivalent level, but it was
through reduced activity in thedorsal part of the anterior
cingulate cortex where inhypnosis you turn down naturally
you turn down activity.
So that's the alarm system inthe brain the salience network
that tells you and that's partof the pain processing network.
So there are two different waysat least there are more, I'm

(34:59):
sure by which you can getanalgesia mentally by turning
down activity in specific andsalient regions of the brain.

Lisa Danylchuk (35:08):
So great to know that there's more pathway than
one, and there's probably morethat we'll find in time.
People listening are thinkingif they haven't been hypnotized
before or practice hypnosisclinically, people are probably
curious how do people know ifthey are hypnotizable or where
they land on that spectrum ofhypnotizability?
Where they land on thatspectrum of hypnotizability?

Dr. David Spiegel (35:30):
Well, one sort of simple self-test is to
just ask yourself do I ever getso caught up in a good movie
that I forget I'm watching themovie and enter the imagined
world?
So hypnosis has been called,believed in imagination.
And if you have that ability tofocus so intently that you, you
know, stop judging the movie.
You know you're just, you'remore in the movie than you are

(35:51):
in the theater or in your livingroom watching the movie, if
you've had those kinds ofexperiences, the odds are you're
at least somewhat hypnotizable.
About two thirds of adults atleast are somewhat hypnotizable,
about a quarter are extremelyhypnotizable and there's about a
quarter to a third of peoplewho just aren't very
hypnotizable, extremelyhypnotizable, and there's about
a quarter to a third of peoplewho just aren't very

(36:12):
hypnotizable.
We have a test in Reverie thattakes about six minutes where
you can go through someinstructions about your hand
feeling light and buoyant and ifyou pull it down it'll float
back up and you pull it down andyou see what happens.
Does one hand really, you know,have a mind of its own?
And we will tell you whetheryou're one of three types the
poet, the people who tend tofollow their heart and get

(36:33):
deeply immersed in things.
The diplomat people who willhave the experience and then
step back and wonder what was itlike and renegotiate their
relationship to it.
And then the researchers, whowe say are on the low end, who
just analyze everything.
I was just talking with a guythe other day who's interested
in hypnosis.
I was just talking with a guythe other day who's interested
in hypnosis but a littleskeptical about it.
Turns out he's not at allhypnotizable and he said he was

(36:57):
surprised, though, about what Iknew about him being less
hypnotizable, which is.
I said you are a very rationalperson.
You value understanding overexperiencing.
You want to take things apartand understand what's happening
before you do.
And he said how do you knowthat about me?
Yeah, well, that's what I'veseen in thousands of people

(37:17):
based on their differentexperiences with hypnosis.
So you can either go toreveriecom, download the app and
take the test or just try outsome hypnotic experiences and
see how you react to them.
But the nice thing abouthypnosis is you can feel a
change in a hurry Many peoplecan and the worst thing that
happens is it might not help youand that's not terrible.

(37:38):
No side effects.

Lisa Danylchuk (37:40):
Yeah.
Yeah, that is nice.
I'm thinking of a client I hadafter I did my training with Ash
, the American Society onClinical Hypnosis.

Dr. David Spiegel (37:48):
Yes.

Lisa Danylchuk (37:48):
Using it in my practice and I had a client
who's very analytical andrational as an adult but who had
been very artistic as a youngperson and he was coming to
therapy, in part to reconnectwith that self.
And it was so interesting towatch because he would go deep
into hypnosis and have all thisimagery and this like to report.

(38:11):
After he would share all thisinsights or you know, whole
experiences he was having and Iwas just saying very, you know,
banal words, like nothing reallyevocative of what he would
share.
But then when he came out ofhypnosis he would share that
with me and go on to dismiss itlike, oh yeah, but that doesn't
mean anything.
Right, and it was so fascinatingfor me, not even knowing these

(38:34):
types yet, right.
I'm like working with cause.
Some people would take that,that imagery or that, that
inspiration or whatever came tothem and and treat it like gold
and walk away from therapy andcome back next week and talk
about it.
But he'd be like, oh yeah, I Imean this big, amazing thing
happened, but I don't think it'simportant, it's just like what

(38:55):
do I do?

Dr. David Spiegel (38:56):
here.

Lisa Danylchuk (38:57):
This sounds like dissociation to me yeah, yeah,
right he hasn't integrated thesetwo sides of himself, and
that's exactly what washappening was and that was what
he was coming for was tointegrate those two sides, but
it was just such a starkcontrast, like moment to moment.
Okay, all right, well, we canhold all of this in this office

(39:17):
and we can hold it over time andover time.
He made some progress, for sure, but you know, I never feel
like I quite got to what theresistance was there.
I feel like there was somethingunder the surface that never
quite came to light, which isthe case sometimes.

Dr. David Spiegel (39:35):
Well, that's interesting.
It may be that he hasassociated some traumatic or
negative experience that hewants to keep at bay and not let
himself.
If he lets himself go, he couldget back in touch with those
feelings and that could be aproblem.
How do you use hypnosis in youryoga practice?
Yoga and trauma practice.

Lisa Danylchuk (39:54):
Yoga, I feel like, can be so hypnotic.
I have had students in classesask me if I'm trained in
hypnosis before.
I was trained in hypnosisbecause of the pacing, because
of the way that yoga teachersand it depends.
There's so many different waysto teach and practice yoga but I
think I'm more drawn to some ofthe more hypnotic practices and

(40:17):
the focused absorption and thensuggestion hopefully positive,
mostly positive suggestion thatI think I was naturally passing
on this process of okay, let'sget focused, let's get
internally connected, and then apace and cadence of speech and,

(40:37):
yeah, always just offeringdifferent suggestions.
And so I've had people ask meif I'm intending to do that and
usually the answer is no.
Especially before I got trainedin hypnosis, the answer was no.
But now that I'm more aware ofit, I feel even more aware of
just the power of language, andespecially as a trauma-informed

(40:59):
yoga practitioner, teacher.
I mean you mentioned duringhypnosis how powerful language
is and I feel like all the time,and especially in a yoga class,
even if some people use cueslike press down through the
knife edge of your foot, and I'mlike, oh, ouch, no, I'm not
going to say that.
And I'm not going to say thatbecause I might be working with

(41:21):
people who I used to be on thepanel for California victims of
crime Like I'm just not.
I'm not going to mention toolsthat might have hurt someone
while we're trying to buildresources and so psychological
resources.
So that's one of the ways I useit as just being really
intentional about thesuggestions or options or

(41:42):
choices I'm including andintending to the entire class or
session orienting towardspsychological resources right.
So that, especially if I don'tknow of someone's trauma history
and I might never know it,especially if they're just
dropping into a class that I'mconfident that I'm not digging

(42:06):
in there and triggering them,but that hopefully they walk
away more connected to some sortof internal resource or map
that I might never be privy to.

Dr. David Spiegel (42:19):
Well, I think I'm glad to hear that, and it's
a very sensitive way to do it,and you recognize that.
You know, helping people workwith their bodies and change the
way their bodies feel and actwill change the way their bodies
feel and act.
Will, for people who have hadtrauma, naturally trigger
sometimes recollections oremotions that come with changes

(42:39):
in their body experience.
And you know, I've had peoplewho have had a traumatic event
who very often people avoidgoing to places that are
connected with the trauma orsomething like that.
But I've had people who havehad recurrent thoughts or
experiences of trauma even whenthey go into a certain room in
their house, they can't escapeit, and so they have to learn

(43:03):
how to manage theirpsychophysiological reactions
before they can be comfortableeven at home.
And so it's useful to besensitive to that, to recognize
that the words matter, but alsowhat you're doing is teaching
them how to manage their bodiesin different ways and therefore
manage their feelings, and thathas great therapeutic potential

(43:27):
as well, because it helps themhave a greater array of sense of
control over.
Well, even if I do stumble intosomething that's upsetting, I
know what to do about it, I knowhow to handle it.
I know how to change myperspective about what happened,
and hypnosis, as you know, isvery helpful for that, and I
think yoga can be too.

Lisa Danylchuk (43:47):
It's the cognitive flexibility, right.
People think of yoga ascontortion or hand, you know,
handstands or backbends.
Often, I mean, that's whatwe've seen for many years now on
magazine covers.
But the cognitive flexibilityis a big part of where the
healing can come from, of, oh,first becoming aware, like first

(44:08):
becoming aware of sensation inyour body, if there's something
that we've been associated frombut is painful, that we're ready
to digest.
But also becoming aware ofpatterns of thinking, ways we're
thinking about ourselves, wayswe're projecting on the room.
Oh, I'm walking in here and Ijust think it's competitive or
everyone's judging me.
It's like that's not reallynecessarily the case.
And I think over especially alonger yoga practice years.

(44:31):
You start to cracks, start toform in what we project or what
we think, or we start to justhave space to go.
That's interesting.
I fell out of that shape andnow I'm.
I'm berating myself why I'm ina yoga class.
I paid for this.
Like I can step down, it's okay.
It doesn't have to meansomething bad.
And if you have a teacherthat's also holding that space

(44:53):
or pointing out those momentswhere you might be just in the
moment, unnecessary stress, likecarrying something from the
past into the present.
I think we can slowly sloughoff some of the negative
messages.
Default mode network what doyou call?
it the my fault mode network, myfault mode network, exactly.

(45:14):
So we can cleanse that.
Hopefully you know more so thanthan just the physical side of
it.
We can.
I mean it's all obviouslyinterrelated and connected in
one thing, but we can.
We can cleanse through memories,ways we see ourself and and
it's interesting because evenwhen I got trained in hypnosis,

(45:35):
the eight limbs of yoga line upalmost perfectly at the end with
what I was trained in inhypnosis, which was focused
attention, absorption.
And then the suggestion is thepart that's not in the yoga
sutras, but the focusedattention and absorption that's
dharana dhyana, that's straightout of the eight limbs of yoga.
So every time I do apsychological training I'm like,

(45:58):
oh, that relates to yoga inthis way.
Oh, that's so interesting, thatrelates to yoga.
Even I just did deep brainreorienting and we're talking
about base of the neck andforehead and eyes, and I can't
even tell you how many times ina class I say notice what's
happening in your forehead, canyou soften your jaw, the base of
your neck?
So there's just these overlaps,right, it's not that we're
doing hypnosis every class, ordefinitely not doing a certain

(46:23):
protocol, but there's a lot ofoverlap in the trauma recovery
world and the yoga world, and Ithink we can be intentional with
that.

Dr. David Spiegel (46:31):
Absolutely Well, and you know another way
to think.
I think all hypnosis is reallyself-hypnosis.
So you don't have to be withsomeone who's consciously
formally inducing hypnoticstates.
It happens, and I think ofhypnotizability and hypnotic
experience as a kind ofunderutilized app on your phone.

(46:51):
You know it's there, you canlearn to use it as you and you
tap it, as you mentioned as partof the yoga training.
But it's going to happen anyway.
It's a naturally occurring partof the way we're built.
And what happens when you findyou surprise yourself by being
different is that you have moreactivity We've seen in hypnosis

(47:13):
in the executive control network, the prefrontal cortex, and the
more of that you have, the lessactivity you have in the
default mode network.
So when you give yourself overto being different, to managing
your body differently, tothinking about potentially
stressful situations differently, you're inhibiting the part of
your brain that says, oh God,this is really scary, you can't

(47:33):
do this.
You better get away from it andjust shutting that down and
focusing on what you can do andhow it can feel different and
how you can repair the unwanteddissociation between who you are
and what you're doing.
And so you're absolutely rightthat there are many ways to help
people utilize these centralnervous system resources that we

(47:56):
carry around in our heads andunderutilize sometimes.

Lisa Danylchuk (48:01):
You mentioned the power of language.
We were talking about that amoment ago.
Is there anything that'schanged for you over time in
terms of the words you choose orwhat you bring linguistically
to hypnosis?

Dr. David Spiegel (48:15):
Well, I'll tell you one of the big major
things is focus on what you'refor.
Yes, you know, we people whouse hypnosis you may have heard
it in your training at ASH isyou know, the worst thing you
can tell someone is don't thinkabout purple elephants.

Lisa Danylchuk (48:30):
Yep done.
Purple elephants all over thebrain.
Yeah is, don't think aboutpurple elephants.

Dr. David Spiegel (48:32):
Yep done.
Purple elephants Guess what?
Yeah, so if you can reconstructwhere you want to head by
focusing on what you're for,you're much more likely to get
there and get there comfortably.
So you know, I don't tellpeople don't smoke.
I say think of your body as ifit were your baby.
Would you ever put tar andnicotine laden hot smoke into

(48:55):
your baby's lungs?
Hell, no.
Well, your body is as dependenton you as your baby was.
So for your body, smoking is apoison.
I need my body to live.
I owe my body respect andprotection, and the nice thing
about that is that you canremember doing something good,
making a decision to dosomething good for you.
You're not depriving yourselfof something you're.

(49:17):
You're resetting yourpriorities, and your priority is
am I for my body or am Iagainst it if I put that junk in
my lungs?
I'm against it, but I want tofocus on being a different kind
of parent to my own body.
And so, just using language likethat and we have some people,
you know, we've now studiedthousands of people who've used

(49:37):
reverie and they have four outof five of them get immediate
reductions in stress.
One out of four just stopsmoking, just like that Learning
to use self-hypnosis and thatkind of approach, and so the
language is a part of it andsome of them while more
hypnotizable people are morelikely to respond, there are
some non-hypnotizable people whorespond, and it's because

(49:58):
they're responding to theapproach more than shifting into
the hypnotic state and justsaying I can, just immediately.
I'm not feeling like I'mdepriving myself of something.
I'm feeling good about myselfbecause I'm making a commitment.
I'm feeling good about myselfbecause I'm making a commitment,
just like when somebody decidesto learn yoga.
They're making a commitment toenhance their mind-body

(50:20):
relationship and improve howtheir body is functioning.
So you're doing your body afavor, you're doing yourself a
favor, but you're taking bettercare of your body by doing it.
So it's the finding languagethat people can naturally
affiliate with and feel goodrather than struggle with.

Lisa Danylchuk (50:37):
Yeah, and orient to the result that you want,
not to the thing you're avoiding.

Dr. David Spiegel (50:43):
That's right, that's exactly right.
Yeah.

Lisa Danylchuk (50:46):
I'm curious.
You've done so much research,written so much throughout your
career.
What's on your mind right now?
Is there anything you'recurious about unpacking,
studying?

Dr. David Spiegel (50:57):
Well, what I'm studying now, Lisa, is
proving that it can work even inthis widely disseminated way.
I mean, the cool thing aboutapps is how scalable they are.
You know, you just it's there.
Get people to use it.
We have 27,000 people enrolledat the moment.
In Reverie.
We've had almost 900,000downloads and I want it to just

(51:21):
go places.
You know, I want to have as manypeople who want to use it be
able to use it, and we'replanning to use AI to translate
my mellifluous voice into otherlanguages so that it's pretty
easy for us to make itaccessible.
And we do have a Spanishversion of the Smoking Control

(51:41):
Hypnosis app.
What I want to do is make it aswidely accessible as possible
through Reverie and assess howwell that works for people, and
I think we're going to help awhole lot of people in a hurry,
and that's what I want to prove.
And also, we've had very fewproblems with it.
With all these thousands ofpeople.
I've had less than 10complaints.

(52:04):
You know my migraine got worseinstead of better, one or two.
We have one woman who said Ifound myself out on the patio
having sexual feelings in mybody and I thought is that a
problem?

Lisa Danylchuk (52:17):
Yeah, I'm like is this a complaint?
Is this a report?
I'm not quite sure how to flagthis one.

Dr. David Spiegel (52:23):
So you know what I want to devote myself to
now.
My legacy project is to make itas widely available as possible
and document how well it worksand how easily people can learn
to use it.

Lisa Danylchuk (52:36):
So if someone's interested in practicing
hypnosis for themselves, theycan go to Reveriecom and it's
R-E-V-E-R-I but no E at the end,so R-E-V-E-R-I, six letters.

Dr. David Spiegel (52:52):
Reveriecom and you can download it from
wwwreverycom or from the AppStore or Google Play.

Lisa Danylchuk (53:01):
Yes.

Dr. David Spiegel (53:01):
And first week is free.
You can just try it out, seewhat you think about it, and
it's very inexpensive, even ifyou decide to enroll.
But you can get a taste of itand see what it's like.
I just hope that more peoplewill give it a try and see if
they can help themselves.
And we're finding that peopleare sleeping better.
We do pre-post testing, youknow where we say how stressed

(53:22):
do you feel now?
And then at the end we ask themhow, from one to 10, how
stressed you feel later.
And we're getting about a 25%reduction in stress in the first
10 minutes.
So people can tell right awaythat they are.
We were getting the most usesof the insomnia program.
They wanted to help yourselfget to sleep or get back to
sleep, and at first I thoughtwell, that's funny, so many

(53:45):
people are using it.
But we're not getting muchfeedback.
And we started asking peopleand they said I didn't want to
send back the feedback, I justwanted to go to sleep.

Lisa Danylchuk (53:53):
Yeah, and they said I didn't want to send back
the feedback, I just wanted togo to sleep.
Yeah, and they're done.
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(55:19):
If you're feeling called tojoin us, I would love to welcome
you and support you.
Through the program, people cango to reveriecom to practice
hypnosis.
What about mental health folkswho are listening professionals,
people in any kind ofhealthcare really, or wellness
who want to get trained?
I don't think you're offeringhypnosis training anymore, are

(55:43):
you?

Dr. David Spiegel (55:48):
Well, no, not regularly.
I give lectures occasionallyabout it.
There are good courses in ASH.
The American Society forClinical Hypnosis, the
International Society forClinical Experimental Hypnosis
have both have research programsand lectures, and I gave a
lecture at the last Society forClinical Experimental Hypnosis
meeting.
I do that for professionals.
The other is Division 30 of theAmerican Psychological

(56:11):
Association.
The hypnosis division hastraining programs as well, and a
former postdoc of mine is nowthe head of the division there,
and so there is good trainingavailable.
And we've written a textbookcalled Trance and Treatment
Clinical Uses of HypnosisAmerican Psychiatric Publishing
that, if you like readinginstead of listening, that's a

(56:33):
good way to do it.
There are some ways to do it,so there are a lot of good
teaching.
Michael Yapko has a very goodbook that just came out on
hypnotic techniques that peoplecould use, so there are a number
of ways of learning more aboutit.

Lisa Danylchuk (56:50):
And is there anything coming next for you?
Any speaking, next books, nextarticles?

Dr. David Spiegel (56:57):
I have what's coming up.
Well, we're going to havehopefully soon we're just
completing the paper to submiton our experience with Reverie
and with tens of thousands ofusers and their ability to
reduce stress, and we're goingto then go on to pain and other
things.
So we're now trying to publishour experience with Reverie.

(57:17):
I'm getting to give a workshopa year from now in Nice in
France to a French hypnosissociety about hypnosis, and I
just spoke at the InternationalSociety for Trauma Dissociation
in Boston.
Yes, about hypnosis and trauma.

Lisa Danylchuk (57:34):
That was an excellent talk and for those who
were there, it is recorded, andso you can go back and review
it, as I think all the plenarieswere.

Dr. David Spiegel (57:43):
So that's what's keeping me busy at the
moment and I enjoy doing it, andpeople who are curious about
this way of using hypnosistherapists, psychologists,
psychiatrists, others can justplay with reverie too, and you
can get a feeling.
You can sit in, in essence, ona session or two and see what it

(58:04):
feels like and how we approachit.
So that's another possibility.

Lisa Danylchuk (58:09):
Yeah, that's great.
I always ask this at the endand I feel like I have a guess,
but I'm curious what brings youhope?

Dr. David Spiegel (58:21):
these days it's a tough one.
Well, I guess there issomething about.
You know we're getting a lessonin the worst aspects of the
activity and thought.
But you know there have alwaysbeen people and ways that people
learn to tolerate and adaptterrible situations and somehow

(58:47):
surmount them.
And you know it's been true forour country, it's been true for
many people.
I have seen people respondingcourageously and adaptively now
to these very difficultsituations around the world
their own lives and to helpothers.
And so, even when I'm feelingpretty down about the way things
have been going recently, Ikeep hoping that good people

(59:19):
will come together and surmountvery difficult situations now
and there's too much traumapeople are going through.
It's unnecessary, but I'mhoping that people will continue
to use their inner resourcesand their collective resources
to assert what is best inhumanity.

(59:42):
And it's a tough time, but I'mhoping we'll get through it.

Lisa Danylchuk (59:46):
yeah well, we have a potential resource in our
pockets here to cope withstress and sleep better, and all
of that matters.
I mean, as the mom of an almosttwo-year-old and I know you're
a parent as well I can attestfirsthand sleep really matters,
that's right.
If someone's having troublesleeping and you haven't tried

(01:00:09):
self-hypnosis, give it a try.
You know, like you said, theworst case scenario it doesn't
work.
Best case scenario you fallasleep and you don't press 10
out of 10 at the review at theend.

Dr. David Spiegel (01:00:22):
That's exactly right and people and
again, just approaching it theright way of, rather than being
frustrated about the fact you'rehaving trouble sleeping, rather
than being frustrated about thefact you're having trouble
sleeping, focus on feelings andsensations that help your body
and your mind allow itself toget to sleep and replenish
resources.
And it's possible to do.

(01:00:43):
And I used to worry, you know,would reverie and we have an
insomnia program there be asgood as being in the office with
me, and then I realized that ifyou wake up at three in the
morning and need to get back tosleep, you probably don't want
me in your bedroom telling youhow to do it, but actually
you've got it on your smartphone.
So there are more and moreresources available to help

(01:01:05):
people do exactly what you'resaying, like what you're doing,
what we're doing, and I hopepeople will take advantage of
them.

Lisa Danylchuk (01:01:13):
Yeah Well, thank you so much, Dr Spiegel.
It's been great being here onthe show.
Thank you for all your workover the years and I look
forward to the next time I canlisten to you, which might be
very soon.

Dr. David Spiegel (01:01:25):
That's very nice.
I hope so.
Thank you, Lisa.
I appreciate how well informedyou are in the work you're doing
with yoga and hypnosis andtrauma.
It's very important.

Lisa Danylchuk (01:01:35):
Thank you.
Thanks so much for listening.
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(01:01:56):
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Before we wrap up for today, Iwant to be clear that this

(01:02:18):
podcast isn't offeringprescriptions.
It's not advice, nor is it anykind of mental health treatment
or diagnosis.
Your decisions are in yourhands and I encourage you to
consult with any healthcareprofessionals you may need to
support you through your uniquepath of healing.
In addition, everyone's opinionhere is their own.
Guests share their thoughts,not that of the host or sponsors

(01:02:41):
.
I'd like to thank our gueststoday, everyone who helps
support this podcast directlyand indirectly.
Alex shout out to you fortaking care of the babe and the
fur babies while I record.
Last but never least, I'd liketo give a shout out to my big
brother, Matt, who passed awayin 2002.
He wrote this music and itmakes my heart so happy to share
it with you here.

(01:03:09):
Thank you.