Dr David Spiegel on Hypnosis, Healing, and Regaining Control
On The Mend
High Performance
4.9 • 566 Ratings
🗓️ 14 August 2024
⏱️ 54 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Matt dives into the world of hypnosis with the psychiatrist Dr David Spiegel.
In this episode, Matt finds out just how susceptible he is to hypnosis, with results that truly blow him away, and he gets some practical tips on how to reduce anxiety.
Dr Spiegel is the Director of the Center on Stress and Health at Stanford University School of Medicine and a leading authority on hypnosis. He has 50 years experience in this field and he uses hypnosis as a problem-solving tool to treat physical and mental issues - including pain, addiction, anxiety and trauma.
He talks to Matt about this fascinating therapeutic tool and how he’s giving more people the opportunity to use self-hypnosis, to better manage their minds and bodies, through his Reveri app.
Related links:
The Reveri app use the code MATT20 for a 20% discount
More on Dr David Spiegel
Dopamine Nation by Dr Anna Lembke
(01:46) Dr Herbert Spiegel (David’s father and a pioneer in hypnosis)
(04:38) What is hypnosis and how does it work?
(05:46) Dr Spiegel’s first experience of using hypnosis
(09:41) Is hypnosis safe?
(11:54) How cyclic sighing calms your body and improves your mood
(15:56) The many conditions hypnosis can help (including migraines and phobias)
(19:52) Differing levels of hypnotisability
(21:44) Dr Spiegel tests Matt’s hypnotisability
(27:40) Hypnosis and addiction (including smoking)
(30:00) Hypnosis and trauma
(40:18) Relapse prevention (and the role of dopamine in addiction)
(42:08) The Reveri hypnosis app
(45:09) Hypnosis and anxiety (including practical tips for performers like Matt)
(53:01) Matt’s outro (he’s both amazed and more relaxed)
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Want to know who's coming up next? Hit follow wherever you get your podcast and you'll be the first to find out. |
| 0:09.0 | Hello everybody and welcome back to On the Mend. My name is Matt Willis and in this podcast we talk about addiction, recovery and resilience more generally. |
| 0:16.0 | And this week's guest is the one and only psychiatrist Dr David Spiegel. I'm very excited. I'm a bit of a |
| 0:21.8 | fanboy. Right. Dr. Spiegel went to Harvard Medical School and then chose to specialize in psychiatry. |
| 0:26.8 | He is now the director of the Center of Stress and Health at Stanford University School of Medicine |
| 0:32.0 | and a leading authority on hypnosis. He's a big dog. He says that the brain has an amazing |
| 0:37.1 | ability to control what's |
| 0:38.3 | happening in the body and I get to experience this firsthand because you'll see my surprise reaction |
| 0:43.7 | to a change in mental state when I try hypnosis during this interview and I'm still getting |
| 0:49.0 | over that. It's quite incredible. People sometimes think hypnosis is about giving up control, |
| 0:53.5 | but hypnosis can give control back and be harnessed as a problem-solving tool for physical and mental health issues, including addiction, pain, anxiety and trauma. Dr. Spiegel has 50 years experienced in his field and he's used hypnosis on more than 7,000 people, so there's really absolutely no one better in the world to help us dive into the brain, demystify hypnosis and debunk a few myths along the way. I'm still kind of getting over this. I'm filming this intro post podcast and I've never been more excited about releasing a podcast. This is incredible. |
| 1:28.9 | It's, I mean, I'm still getting over it. |
| 1:32.8 | You're going to love it. |
| 1:33.9 | This is Dr. Spiegel. |
| 1:39.3 | Welcome, Dr. David Spiegel. |
| 1:41.0 | Thank you, man. |
| 1:41.7 | I'm delighted to be here. |
| 1:42.7 | I'm so excited to have you on. I've been a fan |
| 1:45.0 | for a very long time, so this is a real honor to have you on. Thank you so much for coming. Thank you, my pleasure. So I want to go back a bit. Like, your parents are both psychiatrists, right? Yes, they were. Dinner table conversations were pretty interesting. Yeah. And they told me I was free to be any kind of psychiatrist I wanted to be. |
| 2:03.2 | So here I am. |
| 2:04.4 | You are. were pretty interesting. Yeah. They told me I was free to be any kind of psychiatrist I wanted to be. |
| 2:03.1 | So here I am. |
... |
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