Summary: Dr. David Spiegel on the Tim Ferriss Show
“Feels like it's very similar to two tequilas.”
— Tim Ferriss while being hypnotized by Dr. David Spiegel.
After their hypnosis session live on the Tim Ferriss Show, in which Tim asked his guest to help him relieve his low back pain, Dr. Spiegel asked, “How’s your lower back feeling now?”
“It feels really good, actually,” Tim replied.
Back up: Who is Dr. David Spiegel?
In short, he’s the world’s leading authority on clinical hypnosis.
Some of his accolades include: Willson Professor and Associate Chair of Psychiatry & 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, where he has been a member of the academic faculty since 1975.
Dr. Spiegel has more than 45 years of clinical and research experience, has published thirteen books, and 404 scientific journal articles, and his work has been supported by the National Institute of Mental Health, the National Cancer Institute, and more.
He is the founder of Reveri, the world’s first interactive self-hypnosis app.
And what is clinical hypnosis?
As Dr. Spiegel described so eloquently in his interview with Tim Ferriss,
“It’s just a heightened focus of attention. It’s like looking through a telephoto lens with a camera. You get fully absorbed in the center of your awareness, and things that ordinarily you’d be conscious of, noises on the outside, other things, you dissociate, you put outside of conscious awareness. So it’s a kind of self-altering, highly focused attention.”
It involves three main components:
Absorption, or highly focused attention.
Dissociation from things that could be distractions.
Cognitive flexibility, or the capacity to let go of old premises when new information is presented.
Dr. Spiegel shares so many useful analogies throughout the interview. If you’re still wondering what hypnosis involves, here are a few examples… (If you don’t need more explanation, skip to Trauma helped by hypnosis)
Absorption
The doctor explains that children are almost always in a trance-like state, particularly because they get absorbed in whatever activity they’re doing. If you call your eight-year-old to come down for dinner while they’re playing a game, they’re not ignoring you— they just don’t hear you because they are so focused on what they’re doing.
Dissociation
As you’re reading this blog post, you’re probably not aware of the sensations of your feet touching the floor or the hairs on your head. Dr. Spiegel explains that hypnosis involves putting things that are in consciousness outside of conscious awareness, so you’re not distracted by them.
Cognitive flexibility
This used to be called “suggestibility,” and it’s probably the main thing that gave hypnosis a bad name. Many people believe getting hypnotized means doing anything the hypnotist tells you to do— even if you don’t want to do it. Dr. Spiegel dispels that myth, but shares that the one bit of truth in it is that you are more cognitively flexible. “There’s a message there, not that hypnosis is to make people look silly. It’s that people can try out being different and see what it feels like. They can let go of their usual premises. And that’s where hypnosis is something like a flow state.”
Trauma helped by hypnosis
“I’ve always wondered if exposure therapy works so well, why don’t flashbacks cure PTSD?”
— Dr. Spiegel
He continued, “Flashbacks are symptoms of PTSD. You’re reliving the event as though it were happening again. And the difference I think is that there’s no control. You feel re-attacked by the memory the way you did the trauma.”
This is why hypnosis is so effective at treating trauma. With the help of a licensed psychiatrist, you can go back to the traumatic experience in a controlled environment and rewrite its meaning.
Dr. Spiegel told several stories of war veterans and everyday people he treated who had endured traumatic events. One was a California road worker who was in a construction zone when someone hit him with a car— just two days before his wedding. This badly fractured his ankle and ruined his wedding. But perhaps worst of all, the man couldn’t get over the fact that he didn’t see it coming. He blamed himself. “If I had a nickel for every traumatized person… that blamed themselves for events they didn’t control,” Dr. Spiegel said.
The doctor guided this victim to relive his experience, in hypnosis. As the man recounted the events, he mentioned he noticed the car was going the opposite direction of traffic, and it was headed in his direction. So he pushed himself out of the way, and only his leg was hit.
Then it was revealed to this man that if he hadn’t pushed himself out of the way, the car would have hit him head on, and he’d be dead. “So you saved your life,” Dr. Spiegel reflected back to him. “So think about this: not just what went wrong, but what went right.”
“People who have been traumatized, who have PTSD, feel deep shame. And it’s not because they’ve done anything wrong, but just to be treated like an object, like a thing, is humiliating. And so to be able to relive it in a state where you’re feeling different about who you are is a way of reprocessing and disconnecting from the sense of shame. Just saying, ‘Yes, it happened, I don’t like it, but it’s not the bottom line about me.’”
Hypnosis vs. Meditation
Going back to what hypnosis involves: absorption, dissociation, and cognitive flexibility, Dr. Spiegel explains that meditation is more like “open presence.” No judgment or evaluation, you’re just being. And in hypnosis, it’s all about doing. You’re doing it to feel an immediate change: to solve a problem, quit smoking, reduce pain, relieve stress or anxiety, etc.
Dr. Spiegel also highlights that it takes considerable training to feel the effects of mindfulness meditation, while hypnosis can yield immediate benefits without any experience.
Hypnosis vs. EMDR therapy
“I’m very curious,” said Tim, “Do you have an opinion of EMDR?”
“Sure, I’m from New York. I’m not devoid of opinions,” Dr. Spiegel replied with his quick-witted humor.
EMDR is Eye Movement, Desensitization, and Reprocessing, used by Veterans Affairs (as well as plenty of psychologists) to help people with trauma. The therapist guides someone to relive a traumatic past experience while moving their eyes in a certain pattern.
Dr. Spiegel illuminates how EMDR is similar to hypnosis in that a person is being guided by a therapist to relive a traumatic memory in a controlled, safe setting. So the benefits from EMDR are most likely due to this, rather than due to the eye movements.
Hypnosis vs. Psychedelic-assisted therapy
Tim Ferriss noted the similarities between Dr. Spiegel’s stories and subjective reports of people who’ve had positive therapeutic outcomes with psychedelic-assisted therapy.
Dr. Spiegel pointed out that psychedelics and hypnosis share an important effect: ego dissolution.
Terminal breast cancer patients have done very well with psilocybin trips, the doctor said, and he has also worked with women dying of breast cancer for years. One of his breast cancer patients said that looking at death is “looking into the Grand Canyon when you’re afraid of heights. You know if you fell down, it would be a disaster, but you feel better about yourself because you’re able to look at it. I can’t say I feel serene, but I can look at it.”
So in both hypnosis and psychedelic trips, you can quickly “suspend your usual selfhood.” Dr. Spiegel says that you can “try out being different” in hypnosis.
His terminal cancer patients could find peace with their impending death through hypnosis, by detaching from their ego and realizing what a miracle it is that they ever got to live at all. The same has been achieved by terminal patients through psychedelic trips.
And what about the risks?
Tim appropriately asked Dr. Spiegel if there are adverse events, as psychedelics are contraindicated for many people. Is hypnosis the same?
As it turns out, there are very few risks with hypnosis. Dr. Spiegel said the worst thing that can happen most of the time is that the hypnosis doesn’t work. Rarely, a person may experience a period of anxiety or stress, which is easily reversible.
“All hypnosis is self-hypnosis,” the doctor said. “The good thing about hypnosis is you can turn it on real fast, you can turn it off real fast.”
Tim summarized: “So adverse risk profile, pretty low. Adverse event profile, pretty manageable.”
Hypnosis vs. Opioids
“Compared to the side effects of drugs, like let’s take opioids for example, where last year, 88,000 Americans died of opioid overdoses, and almost all of them were not suicides. They were just inadvertent overdoses of opioids. Hypnosis has not yet succeeded in killing anyone. It’s just not dangerous.”
Hypnosis can be highly effective for pain management, with none of the side effects. How can this be? Dr. Spiegel explained that the brain has a lot to do with the way we process pain.
Additionally, in the Reveri app, there are four different sets of instructions you can pick from to “filter the hurt from the pain,” as he says.
Too far-fetched? Dr. Spiegel hypnotizes Tim Ferriss live, and Tim’s back pain reduces by half.
Watch that part of the interview here. You can even follow along to see how it helps you:
Dr. David Spiegel hypnotizes Tim Ferriss
So, should you try hypnosis?
In addition to the 7,000+ patients Dr. Spiegel has treated in his clinic with hypnosis and the half million people downloading the Reveri app, a ton of research has validated Dr. Spiegel’s anecdotes.
And the research is ongoing. Hypnosis remains a legitimate rival— or at least supplement— to widely-used therapies and medications for common challenges. The worst that can happen? It might not work. The best that can happen? You can quit an addiction, heal your trauma, and overcome fear of death.
Importantly, Tim pointed out: “It can take forever to find a good specialist… So in the meantime, I could see something like this being incredibly valuable.”
Dr. Spiegel says that Reveri is a legacy project for him.
“A time will come when I’m not available to keep doing this for people. It warms my heart that while we’ve been talking, I’ve helped more people than I used to in months of person-to-person clinical activity. And I want people to have it as a resource for helping themselves to feel better and function better, and I think it can.”
Watch the full interview between Tim Ferriss and Dr. David Spiegel here.