Hypnosis, which is a state of just highly focused attention with a reduction in peripheral awareness, is a powerful way to change the way your brain processes pain.

What if I told you there was a tool in your mind? So powerful! That's simply unlocking it would allow you to access immediate relief from stress, insomnia, and even help you manage chronic pain.

Welcome to the Drupal Podcast. Each week we explore the inner workings of the brain and the body with one of the brightest minds in wellness, medicine, and mindset.

This week's guest is Dr. David Speagle, a psychiatrist, researcher, and world-renowned expert on all things self-hypnosis.

And on today's podcast, Dr. Speagle is here to share his 40 years of clinical and research experience on the topic of self-hypnosis and how it can be a powerful tool in our healing toolbox.

Here are just a few lists of categories that Dr. Speagle has shown with his team that self-hypnosis can be extremely supportive of. Could sleep in insomnia? Anyone dealing with that?

Stress and anxiety. How do you get immediate relief in the moment when you're dealing with stress and anxiety? Improving focus and performance.

Eating healthier and keeping your focus on the healthy habits. Smoking cessation. There's a lot of people that are addicted to cigarettes and breaking cigarette addiction is one of the hardest things to do.

Hypnosis can be supportive in that tool. And lastly, this is a topic that is huge right now, pain management. Dr. Speagle has done some incredible research in this category.

Now a little bit more about Dr. David Speagle. He's the associate chair of psychiatry and behavioral sciences, director of the center on stress and health, and medical director of the center for integrative medicine at Stanford University School of Medicine.

He's also the co-founder of the app, Revery, that's reverie.com, which was designed to make self hypnosis more accessible to individuals around the globe.

If you're curious about the topic of self hypnosis, but don't know where to start, this podcast episode is absolutely for you. Stay tuned.

Dr. David Speagle, thank you for being on the podcast. I'm excited to talk about this fascinating topic of hypnosis. So to start us off in our audience off, can you give us a couple categories that you've seen through your work in your research, where hypnosis can be a powerful tool in our toolbox to make a significant improvement in that category?

Sure, I'm happy to be here. One of them for sure is pain. Pain, you know, the way I think of it is that the strain and pain lies mainly in the brain, and hypnosis is a way of using the brain to alter it.

People assume that pain is this kind of unavoidable sensation if you've injured some part of your body, and it's certainly related to it. But right now, you're having sensations in your back resting against the chair. Hopefully you were not aware of those until I mentioned it to you. If you were, we can stop the interview now.

We are brain makes decisions all the time about how to interpret signals from the body and how much attention to pay to them and hypnosis, which is a state of just highly focused attention with the reduction and peripheral awareness is a powerful way to change the way your brain processes pain.

So we're finding that people using the reverie app get about a 30% reduction in pain within 15 minutes of just learning to do this self hypnosis.

Fascinating. So pain is one of them. You have a couple others that you want to highlight at the beginning of the conversation or hope here is to give people a little bit of a teaser that if they've heard a little bit about hypnosis, they think they kind of know about it. Of course, we're going to unpack it in this conversation, but part of is that we're going to give you a little bit of a preview of what is possible when you can tap into the power of hypnosis.

Absolutely. And one of the nice things about hypnosis and what the app can do is you'll know right away, you know, you don't have to practice it for three weeks to get an impression of whether it's going to help you or not, you'll know within 15 minutes, whether it's likely to help you.

So sleep is another one. A lot of people have trouble falling asleep or staying asleep. The old idea of hypnosis, whether you are feeling very sleepy, that's not what hypnosis is. It's actually a kind of waking up. It's an alerting.

But what you can learn to do is separate your physical arousal from your mental arousal. And what bothers a lot of people trying to get to sleep or get back to sleep is that they feel so tense that they're gearing up for physical activity instead of gearing down for sleep, relaxing self-suiting.

And what you can do is dissociate, separate your mental experience, projecting your thoughts and feelings onto an imaginary screen while you imagine your body floating in a bath, a lake, a hot tub or floating in space.

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