In this week’s episode of SuperAge, Dr. David Spiegel, who, after receiving a PhD in medicine from Harvard, went on to become a renowned expert in hypnosis, dissociative disorder, PTSD, as well as a Stanford professor. He has also authored many books over the course of his 40-year career, including Living Beyond Limits: A New Hope and Help For Facing Life-Threatening Illness. In our conversation, Dr. Spiegel shares his insights on harnessing the power of the mind for healing and wellness. Drawing from experience, Dr. Spiegel discusses the significant impact of hypnosis in managing pain, stress, and anxiety, especially in cancer patients. He illustrates how self-hypnosis can be a vital tool for emotional and physical wellbeing and provides fascinating stories about its effectiveness. This episode offers a unique perspective on research-backed alternative healing methods, emphasizing the untapped potential of the human mind in health and recovery.
What kind of SuperAger are you? Check the SuperAge Quiz and find out! (visit: ageist.com/quiz)
Thanks to our sponsors:
DIVI – take back control of your hair and scalp health, and do it with Divi's clean, science-backed ingredients. Listeners get 20% off your first Divi order at diviofficial.com/AGEIST or enter code "AGEIST" at checkout.
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Science Research Wellness — improve your cellular health. Listeners receive 20% off all products with code AGEIST20 at SRW.co.
Key Moments
“We started out helping people to stop smoking and we found that one out of five people just stopped smoking using the [Reveri] app right away. So that's about as good as I get when people are sitting in my office and I'm doing it. And it's about as good as you get using varenicline or bupropion or nicotine patches as an alternative.”
“They learned to control their pain with self-hypnosis so that a new pain in their chest didn't automatically mean to them that their disease was progressing. It meant they needed to do something to control the pain. And they did. So they had half the pain. And in our original study that we published in The Lancet, we found that the women randomized to work groups actually live longer than the control patients by an average of a year and a half.”
“We found actually that people with breast cancer who were inefficient sleepers, who had trouble getting to sleep or staying asleep, actually also had shorter survival. But the other way around is that good sleepers live longer. It was having a long period of good 7 hours of consistent sleep at night, predicted with fewer disruptions, predicted longer survival with breast cancer.”
“After a deep inhale, a slow exhale is important. And part of why it is is, you know, we're used to saying, you know, if you're anxious or tense, take a deep breath. Well, actually, the inhale actually tends to increase sympathetic activity because it reduces venous return or blood to the heart. If you think about it, you're lowering pressure in the chest.”
Connect with Dr. Spiegel
Reveri App: Support someone who supports you this holiday season. To gift a 1 year subscription of Reveri to someone you care about, simply head over to buy.reveri.com and use the code RESET for an extra 30% off.
In this week’s episode of SuperAge, Dr. David Spiegel, who, after receiving a PhD in medicine from Harvard, went on to become a renowned expert in hypnosis, dissociative disorder, PTSD, as well as a Stanford professor. He has also authored many books over the course of his 40-year career, including Living Beyond Limits: A New Hope and Help For Facing Life-Threatening Illness. In our conversation, Dr. Spiegel shares his insights on harnessing the power of the mind for healing and wellness. Drawing from experience, Dr. Spiegel discusses the significant impact of hypnosis in managing pain, stress, and anxiety, especially in cancer patients. He illustrates how self-hypnosis can be a vital tool for emotional and physical wellbeing and provides fascinating stories about its effectiveness. This episode offers a unique perspective on research-backed alternative healing methods, emphasizing the untapped potential of the human mind in health and recovery.
What kind of SuperAger are you? Check the SuperAge Quiz and find out! (visit: ageist.com/quiz)
Thanks to our sponsors:
DIVI – take back control of your hair and scalp health, and do it with Divi's clean, science-backed ingredients. Listeners get 20% off your first Divi order at diviofficial.com/AGEIST or enter code "AGEIST" at checkout.
InsideTracker – the dashboard to your Inner Health. Listeners get 20% off on all products at InsideTracker.com/AGEIST.
Science Research Wellness — improve your cellular health. Listeners receive 20% off all products with code AGEIST20 at SRW.co.
Key Moments
“We started out helping people to stop smoking and we found that one out of five people just stopped smoking using the [Reveri] app right away. So that's about as good as I get when people are sitting in my office and I'm doing it. And it's about as good as you get using varenicline or bupropion or nicotine patches as an alternative.”
“They learned to control their pain with self-hypnosis so that a new pain in their chest didn't automatically mean to them that their disease was progressing. It meant they needed to do something to control the pain. And they did. So they had half the pain. And in our original study that we published in The Lancet, we found that the women randomized to work groups actually live longer than the control patients by an average of a year and a half.”
“We found actually that people with breast cancer who were inefficient sleepers, who had trouble getting to sleep or staying asleep, actually also had shorter survival. But the other way around is that good sleepers live longer. It was having a long period of good 7 hours of consistent sleep at night, predicted with fewer disruptions, predicted longer survival with breast cancer.”
“After a deep inhale, a slow exhale is important. And part of why it is is, you know, we're used to saying, you know, if you're anxious or tense, take a deep breath. Well, actually, the inhale actually tends to increase sympathetic activity because it reduces venous return or blood to the heart. If you think about it, you're lowering pressure in the chest.”
Connect with Dr. Spiegel
Reveri App: Support someone who supports you this holiday season. To gift a 1 year subscription of Reveri to someone you care about, simply head over to buy.reveri.com and use the code RESET for an extra 30% off.
What kind of super-ager are you? Go to agistcom slash quiz. Take the super-ager quiz and we'll send you directed, personalized information to help you super-age the best that you can. Welcome to super-age. My name is David Stewart. I am the founder of Agist and your host on the super-age show. We talk about how to live healthier, how to longer and how to be happier. Who doesn't want that? Today's show is brought to you by Inside Tracker, the dashboard to your inner health. Go to inside trackercom. Slash agist save 20% on all their products. Today's show is also brought to you by SRW. Aging is inevitable, but how we age is chiefly a matter of our choices. If you go to SRWco, you can save 20% on all their products by using the code AGIST20 at checkout. Today's show is also brought to you by Divi, hair care products specifically designed for men and women who are concerned with hair loss and scalp health. Go to DiviOfficialcom. Slash ages save 20% off your first order. Welcome to episode 163 of the super-age podcast. Oh my gosh, it is great to have you with us. We'll be dropping on December, the 14th 2023. This week on the show we've got Dr David Spiegel and we're going to be talking about hypnosis and self-hypnosis, and Dr Spiegel has 40 years of clinical and research experience studying hypnosis, stress and health, pain control, sleep and, interestingly enough, psychotherapy for cancer patients. He is the go-to expert on the subject, so we're very much looking forward to having him on the show and we'll have that conversation in just a moment.
Speaker 1:I am back in the snowy, cold mountains of Utah, which are really quite lovely, after spending four days in New York where we've actually rented an apartment in this really amazing building. It's called one Manhattan Square and it's this 80-story blue glass tower. That's, if you know New York, it's on the Lower East Side, it's where Canal Street intersects with the East River, so it has unobstructed views of the harbor and the river and it's quite a building. I feel like it's like living in the future, being there, that it's super international, so you hear all these different languages being spoken and it's this sort of self-contained for better word like sort of wellness tower. There's a great sauna, they have a coal plunge, they've got a gym, they've got a spin studio, a boxing studio, a dancing studio, like on and on and on bowling alley, basketball court, like you know, all the mod conveniences and incredibly helpful staff.
Speaker 1:So why did I do this. So you know, it's, I guess, somewhat unusual for someone to, you know, be living here in this you know sort of mountain E-Doll, this hidey paradise here in the mountains, and then go to Manhattan. But I lived in Manhattan for 25 years and, truthfully, what, speaking from my wife and we just said, you know, we want a bigger life. Like I want a bigger life, I want more stuff. Yeah, I want to be here, I want a ski race, I want to be in the mountains, but I also want to be in New York, and New York is not everybody's jam Got it. Now, I live there for a long time and for the things that I want to do with Agist and SuperAge and some of the projects we're working on, new York is where you go.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I just want to say something about the neighborhood. It's an area called two bridges which is next to an area called dime square, neither one of which I'd ever heard of, and I lived there for a long time. So what is this neighborhood? It used to be very Chinese, as in a lot of older Chinese people there who I don't speak much English and live there for a long time. And then you have a conservative Jewish community. You have the projects sort of mixed in there and then you have this really large cohort of, I want to say like sort of 22 to 28 year olds that are everywhere. So it's super cool and it's, as I described, very mixed and everybody seems to get along. It's very dynamic and, because it's sort of off the beaten path, it's like people who are visiting New York don't go here. This is not like a tourist destination, which makes it really rather quiet and sort of neighborhood-y in a very Manhattan way.
Speaker 1:So I had a great time. I don't know what I was expecting. I was sort of expecting to be like, oh my god, get me out of here. This is like I can't manage this, but it was great and it was incredibly relaxing. And for all you people out there who've taken the SuperAge quiz to find out what kind of SuperAge you are, so for all you owls out there, you folks like data I was sleeping almost nine hours a night and my HRV, my heart rate variability, which is a measure of stress, was the best ever, two nights in a row. I don't quite know what to make of that other than to think that, in fact, my being in New York is sort of a stress reducer for me, especially in this building in the neighborhood. I just feel very relaxed there and comparative to my life here. So you know, today I was on the mountain ski racing training for five hours and now I'm doing this podcast and we have a lot of writing to do and client stuff to do.
Speaker 1:And then, you know, everything here sort of involves a car, which you would think is like stress reducing, but it's not. It's like, oh, you got to dig the car out, you got to like put gas in the car, you got to like do whatever with the car. But if you don't have a car and you just want to walk to the little grocery store five minutes, like that's kind of good. So I wasn't expecting to feel this way, but I do and I'm really looking forward to going back. So when all the New Yorkers leave and they go to places like Park City for Christmas, I will be doing the reverse. I will be leaving Park City and going to New York for about 10 days, because my program is take a little break for Christmas, and I mean New York during Christmas. It's just like it's the bomb. So anyway, for all you people out there that are like oh my god, new York, I can't manage it. I get it Like. It's not for everybody, but I love. This sort of bipolar lifestyle that I, you know, manifested here, works for me. We are gonna get with Dr David Spiegel in justa moment.
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Speaker 1:Did you know that hair loss affects over 80 million Americans? Divi has created a range of hair care products designed exactly for thinning hair. All of Divi's products come together to create a full daily solution that helps both men and women nourish their hair to get to the root of scalp health. Some of their ingredients include copper, tripeptide, tea tree oil, amino acids and hyaluronic acid. Do you want to take back control of your hair and scalp health and do it with clean, science-backed ingredients? We have a special offer for the AGEST and super age audiences. Go to diviofficialcom slash AGEST or enter AGEST at checkout for 20% off your first order. That's diviofficialcom slash AGEST for 20% off your first order. And, as always, just a reminder stay tuned after my conversation with Dr David Spiegel about hypnosis and everything related to that for just try this a little tip to help you live a little healthier, a little happier and maybe a little longer. Dr David Spiegel, I am so happy to have you on the program today. We're really honored. Thank you so much for joining us.
Speaker 2:Thank you, David. I'm delighted to be here with you.
Speaker 1:You have so much interesting work and I just want to start a little bit here, a little bit on your background. You're an expert on hypnosis and you have an MD. You've been teaching and practicing for a long time. What interested you in hypnosis?
Speaker 2:Well, david, I have to confess that it's something of a genetic illness in my family, because both of my parents were psychiatrists and psychoanalysts. They told me that I was free to be any kind of psychiatrist I wanted to be. And so here I am. My father, when he was about to go off to be a battalion surgeon in North Africa in World War II, met Avini's refugee who had learned to do hypnosis. He was a forensic psychiatrist who had a smallpox scar in the middle of his forehead and he noticed that some of these prisoners he was interviewing would suddenly close their eyes and seem to go into some altered state. And so he started to learn about hypnosis and because he couldn't serve in the US military, he offered to teach army doctors how to use it. My mother started using hypnosis to help with combat stress reactions, with pain, and he came back and was going to go back and did go back into his psychoanalytic training, which was big at the time.
Speaker 2:But Freud had given up hypnosis and he was sort of told you know who are you to carry on with it? When Freud didn't. But he had a wonderful supervisor who said you know what? Don't feel so precious about what people think You're going to teach a course on hypnosis at the Analytic Institute because I'm going to take it, so you better do it. So he did and he kept using it and he was a kind of guy who would follow up with patients after a while and see how they were doing. And he discovered that often he got farther with a few sessions of hypnosis than he did with three or four days a week on the couch. So he started shifting his practice. The dinner table conversations were pretty interesting. I got to watch him make movies of patients responding to hypnosis.
Speaker 2:So when I got to medical school I figured I better take a hypnosis course. I did, and my first patient I was on pediatrics at Children's Hospital in Boston. The nurse says speak all. Your next patient is in status asthmaticus. And I was following the sound of the wheezing down the hall. I didn't need the room number and there's this pretty redhead bolt upright in bed, knuckles white, struggling for breath. Her mother is standing next to me crying. The nurses in the room. They had tried subcutaneous epinephrine twice. It hadn't worked. They were going to give her general anesthesia and put her on steroids and I didn't know what else to do. So I said would you like to learn a breathing exercise? And she nods.
Speaker 2:So I got her hypnotized and then I started to sweat because I realized we hadn't gotten to asthma in the course. So I said something very, very sophisticated. I said each breath you take will be a little deeper and a little easier, and within five minutes she's lying back in bed. She's not wheezing anymore. Her mother stopped crying. The nurse ran out of the room.
Speaker 2:My intern comes looking for me. I figure he's going to pat me on the back and say what the hell did you do? He said the nurse has filed a complaint with the nursing supervisor that you violated Massachusetts law by hypnotizing a minor without parental consent. Now, massachusetts has a lot of weird laws, but that one is not on the books. And her mother was standing next to me when I did it and he said you're going to have to stop doing this.
Speaker 2:And, david, this is a story. With hypnosis we don't get no respect. It's either silly or dangerous or both. And he said and I said why do I have to stop? He said well, it's dangerous. And I said you're going to give her general anesthesia and put her on steroids. And you think my talking to her is dangerous? I don't think so. So take me off the case if you want, but as long as she's my patient I'm not going to tell her something I know isn't true.
Speaker 2:So he stomped off and they had a council of war among the intern, the resident, the chief resident, the attending, and they came back on Monday with a radical idea. They said let's ask the patient. I don't think they'd ever done that before and she said I like this, I want to keep doing this. She had been hospitalized monthly for three months. She had one subsequent hospitalization but went on to study to be a respiratory therapist and I thought that anything that could help a patient that much, violate a non-existent Massachusetts law and frustrate the head nurse, had to be worth looking into. And because I could watch it happen right in front of me, I could watch the degree to which she could regain control over her body. And 7,000 patients later I'm still doing it.
Speaker 1:Okay. So that answers my next question. I was going to ask you Is it effective, how does it work and is it dangerous? We can skip that, yes, yes, no. Okay, we're going to get back to hypnosis in a moment. You've also done a lot of work with cancer and cancer patients, and, yes, I have. You know, there's something about the title of one of your papers about psycho-oncology, so this is a phrase I've never heard. Tell us what is that.
Speaker 2:Well, psycho-oncology is basically a medical discipline where people study how people react to having cancer, what are the best ways of supporting them through cancer and what are some of the psychological mechanisms that may have an effect on how people cope with it, how they live with it, how they sleep with it, and whether some psychological issues may have an effect not just on quality of life but potentially on quantity of life too. So it's how do we understand and better help people with cancer, live through it, live through the treatments and live better and maybe even live longer?
Speaker 1:Quickly, could you give me some ideas of some of the methods and protocols you've done to help people?
Speaker 2:in this way. Sure, david, we've done randomized clinical trials, sponsored by the National Cancer Institute and National Institute of Mental Health, in which we take women, for example, with metastatic breast cancer. So these are women who've been diagnosed but now have had a recurrence of the disease, which is a more serious situation, and we randomized them either to get standard care with some education about cancer or to attend weekly group support. And I started this in the 70s, at a time when it was considered a bad idea for cancer patients with advanced disease especially to see one another, because some of them were going to die. Metastatic disease doesn't always, but often, results in death from cancer, although it's interesting to note that more women diagnosed with breast cancer die of heart disease than breast cancer. Right, it's not always a death sentence by any means, but it is concerning.
Speaker 2:And so we got these women together. We would meet for an hour and a half once a week. They would talk about their fears. They would learn to better manage their emotion, to not be so suppressive of how anxious and sad they were, but to talk about it, because they could see in other people that they found it comforting to be able to share their feelings and concerns. And even when the worst happened, when members of the group died, they were able to grieve the losses together. And death is not a novel concept to a cancer patient. It's not like oh, I didn't know that could happen. Of course. And one woman said after being in the group for a while that being in the group is like looking into the Grand Canyon, when you were 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. I can't say I feel serene, but I can look at it.
Speaker 2:And so these women strengthened one another and we found over the course of a year that they became less anxious and depressed, just being able to face it. They could see in other women in the group things they couldn't see in themselves. You know they would feel like I'm weak and too frightened and all this. And they would say she's dealing with it the way I am and I don't see her as weak or too frightened. I see her as coping well. And they felt less alone with it than they did before.
Speaker 2:So we found that over time in randomized clinical trial, the women in the support group were less anxious, less depressed, had less pain than the control group. They learned to control their pain with self-hypnosis, so that a new pain in their chest didn't automatically mean to them that their disease was progressing. It meant they needed to do something to control the pain, and they did so. They had half the pain and in our original study that we published in the LANSA we found that the women randomized those work groups actually live longer than the control patients by an average of a year and a half.
Speaker 2:It was no cure for cancer, but they live longer, and there have been a number of studies. Some support that finding, others don't. But the overall studies indicate that good emotional support can actually enhance survival with cancer, which is surprising, but not that surprising. There was a study from out of the Dana-Farber Cancer Center published in the Journal of Clinical Oncology showing that, all in all, married cancer patients live four months longer than unmarried cancer patients, and this is like a study of 700,000 cancer patients in the US. So this is psychoancology. This is the fact that what's going on in your head has an effect on your body. It can help you live better if you handle it better, and maybe it even will help you live longer.
Speaker 1:Are we willing to make the other side of that, saying that increased anxiety increases disease progression and mortality?
Speaker 2:We think it can. One of the other things we did is some psychoneuroendocrinology. So we looked at stress response systems in cancer patients and one of our major stress hormones is cortisol. It's a glucocorticoid. It mobilizes glucose into the blood and we normally have a diurnal rhythm of cortisol. It's highest for me about now, just after you wake up in the morning, and goes down throughout the rest of the day and then rises again at night. And it's very useful if you need to fight or flee. You want more glucose in your blood so you can do it. On the other hand, if you keep firing off that system when you don't need it, you're expending resources and can do some wear and tear to your body as well. And we found that abnormal patterns of this glucose, glucocorticoid, cortisol if they stay high, the pattern gets sort of flat rather than the peak and valley. That's normal, that that actually is a predictor of shorter survival. So the answer is yes. A maladaptive stress response can potentially hasten disease progression, whereas a good one potentially can lengthen it.
Speaker 1:It's super interesting, which brings me to some of the research the intersection of circadian rhythm and its disruption and its limitation for, I believe, the researchers on breast cancer folks, yes, that's correct. What did you find out?
Speaker 2:We found that a disrupted pattern and part of it I was already referring to the cortisol pattern being disrupted abnormal circadian pattern of cortisol predicted shorter survival and this is years later. It isn't like three days before you die. The pattern is different. This is years before. But the other part of circadian rhythm, David, that's very important is sleep and wakefulness, and we found actually that people with breast cancer who were inefficient sleepers, who had trouble getting to sleep or staying asleep, actually also had shorter survival. But the other way around is good sleepers live longer. It was having a long period of good seven hours of consistent sleep at night predicted and with fewer disruptions, predicted longer survival with breast cancer.
Speaker 2:A colleague of mine, Oxana Polish, took the lead on those studies and so it suggests that just managing your stress response during the day and getting a good night's sleep is a good part of therapy for cancer and there is reasons why people may lose some sleep. I was just talking with someone who two years ago, was diagnosed with breast cancer and she found herself waking up at night in a cold sweat, very anxious, and she actually started using Reverie, our self hypnosis app, and she said I'm sleeping. You know, I sleep through the night. No meds, I just I sleep better. So that's that's good for you psychologically, but you know what it's good for your body too. Good sleep, as you know, exercise during the day and good sleep at night are should be a part of everybody's health regimen, but especially cancer patients. So that's what we found 100%.
Speaker 1:I mean I tell people, if I don't care how many supplements you're taking, if you're not sleeping, I'm sabotaging everything that's right.
Speaker 2:That's exactly right. It's good for your brain and good for your body to get a good night's sleep.
Speaker 1:I'm curious about this intersection of heightened anxiety, trauma disease and then reduction of anxiety and possibly addressing past trauma through hypnotism or self hypnotism.
Speaker 2:Yes, hypnosis can be quite effective in helping people deal with trauma For a number of reasons. One of them is that when you're traumatized, you go into a kind of hypnotic like state. You narrow the focus of attention, you dissociate things that otherwise you'd be aware of, and so we've learned that many kinds of treatments for post-traumatic stress disorder involve what's called exposure and cognitive restructuring. So the way you deal with it is not run away from the memory of the trauma, but you address it so that you don't feel attacked by it again. You're saying I'm choosing to pay attention to this and I'm going to put it into perspective, and so you can use hypnosis as a kind of controlled entry but also exit. The nice thing is you focus intently on it and you do some mental work about it, and then you step back from it. So there's been a randomized trial of hypnotherapy for people with PTSD out of Israel, and it shows that in fact people recover more quickly. And I can give you an example if you want.
Speaker 2:I had a patient who was a lovely woman who grew up in a country that is not famous for being nice to women, and she said I realized as a teenager that my body wasn't my own Men could comment on anything they wanted to. It was terrifying. And I learned then that she had been raped by a landlord when she was 12 years old and the family was afraid to do anything about it. They didn't want to be thrown out of the building and all that. So they finally got out of that country, came here. She became a healthcare professional, but she was chronically depressed. She retired work 15 years before she needed to and I initially was treating her for pain with hypnosis and she got rid of the pain. It was from six out of 10 to zero in one session. She was astounded by it. And then we started talking about this, what had happened to her and her depression, and her psychiatrist who was treating the depression had referred her to me and I said well, let's go back in hypnosis and relive what happened to you. And so I said I want you to pretend you're your own mother to your 12 year old self. And she starts to cry and I have her picture herself right after she'd been raped. And I said to her I want you to answer one question for me Is this her fault? Did she deserve this? Did she do something? And she started to cry harder and she said I'm stroking her hair, I'm stroking her hair, this is not her fault, I'm stroking her hair. And she came out of it and she said you know, I feel lighter somehow, I feel different. And about a week later she called me up and she said my psychiatrist wants to know what you did to me, because I'm not depressed anymore. And she said my friends don't recognize me. And I just talked to her the other day. It's about eight months and she said I've had one or one bad month, but otherwise I'm a different person, I feel different. Now, I'm not depressed, and so there are times when you can use states like hypnosis to intensely focus on and work through feelings.
Speaker 2:And, of course, the problem with most sexual assault victims, particularly when they're children, is that they blame themselves for events they didn't control. You know, the worst thing about trauma, about sexual assault, about the horrific things we've seen happen in Israel, is it's not pain, it's not fear, it's helplessness. You're made into an object and we hate that. Agency is taken away from you and so many children especially, who don't understand independent causation figure. If the world is fair, if the world is just and this terrible thing happened to me it must be something wrong with me that made it happen. So they blame themselves for things they didn't control. And so helping people just understand and face that period of helplessness but see it not as something they deserve but as something that was imposed on them, can be very helpful to them in putting trauma into perspective, and hypnosis can be very helpful with that.
Speaker 1:Oh, this is a powerful story. Well, you worked a lot about respiration and mood, which is something we're going to circle back to that in a moment and talk about reverie, because there's a lot there, but talk to us about there's a phrase that I came across called cyclic sighing, which I guess is a scientific term for something that I commonly do, but explain to people. Sure, what do you guys mean by cyclic sighing? Cyclic sighing?
Speaker 2:Well, it means literally sighing in cycles and we all sigh. Our respiratory system is programmed to have a deeper exhalation from time to time. That deep inhale helps to open up all parts of the lungs so that you get air circulating in and out and you don't have some of these little alveoli, these little bubbles in the lung where the oxygen and carbon dioxide transfer happens, sort of remain collapsed so that they don't allow for air exchange. And but after the deep inhale, this slow exhale is important, and part of why it is is you know, we're used to saying you know, if you're anxious or tense, take a deep breath. Well, actually it's.
Speaker 2:The inhale actually tends to increase sympathetic activity because it reduces venous return of blood to the heart. If you think about it, you're lowering pressure in the chest. That's how you bring in more air, and so your heart senses a little bit less blood coming into it and so the sympathetic nervous system says oh, you better start beating harder and faster. So there's just a bit of an increase. When you exhale, the opposite happens. You're forcing blood into the heart. It triggers parasympathetic activity that slows the heart rate. So there's this constant variation going on.
Speaker 2:But basically, exercises that emphasize a long, slow exhale are relaxing because heart rate slows down a bit. The parasympathetic nervous system happens to, goes into action. So if you want to calm yourself down, one very quick way to do it and you can try it now, david, if you want is you just inhale first using your abdomen, so diaphragmatic inhale through your nose. Inhale through your nose, hold your breath and now fill your lungs completely by expanding your chest and now slowly exhale through your mouth, slow exhale. Try it again. Inhale through your nose halfway with your belly. Hold Now, fill your lungs completely, slowly exhale through your mouth. How?
Speaker 1:are you feeling now? I'm familiar with this exercise and I love it. Yeah, it was actually taught to me by a gentleman I had on the show, who was a formal Blue Angel pilot, who was in Top Gun and they're experts at, you know, sympathetic, parasympathetic, being able to oscillate back and forth and he taught me that Good.
Speaker 2:Well, so it's surprising often how instantly relaxing it is. And that's one of the other exercises we have on the Red River app now, and we published a study in Cell Reports last January that if we taught people in a randomized trial to do this particular exercise and some other breathing exercises that also help, like box breathing, which is inhale, hold, exhale, hold maybe seals do that before they go out on maneuvers it's called tactical breathing that we actually found that if people did that just five minutes a day for a month, their mood was better, they felt had more positive emotion, they were less anxious and their average respiratory rate so we had a whoop strap on them that measures their heart rate and sleep time and respiratory rate actually reduce, so their average breathing rate went down, which meant their sympathetic arousal was going down.
Speaker 2:So there are things you can do like that, with not that much time, but just some regular practice that can help lower your overall level of tension and stress.
Speaker 1:I'm going to ask you, since you're a doctor, I'm going to ask you a question about myself. I'm 65 now and what I've found is over the last 10 years I've developed a little bit of an essential tremor in my hand, but it's only when I'm either hungry or highly sympathetically activated. I also have this silly thing I do on a ski racer, and if I do that for a couple hours and I come down and I'm both highly sympathetically activated and hungry, I can hardly hold a spoon. I'm just sort of shaking and I try and bring myself down. The neurologist tells me my basal ganglia are not functioning like the way they should. Any thoughts? Yeah, tell me?
Speaker 2:Yes, sure. Well, where do you get my bill, David? But I Bear it up.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think. Look, in general there are sort of rhythmic discharges of all of our neurons all the time. But in general the sort of fine motor skills are overwritten by the general control systems that tell the hand to move and stop and that your level of tension, which increases sympathetic activation, may sort of bring out some underlying rhythm that is not well dampened. When you're really stressed and activated or hungry and seeking nourishment, your blood sugar may be a little bit low and so it's a kind of subtle, this control in the system that most of the time you can handle. But when you've got strong sympathetic arousal, like when you've been skiing and on a race, it tends to unmask that and I would say I don't think it's anything to worry about. It's not a hell of a lot of fun, but things you can do to self-regulate. And it'd be actually an interesting experiment for you to do when this is happening after you've come down from skiing, do the cyclic sighing there and see if you can slow that down. I'll bet you can.
Speaker 1:I can. I was going to tell you that this works. Oh good, it's where I was going with this. There you go.
Speaker 2:Good, that's what I figured. What you're going is that you're unmasking a slightly uncontrolled sympathetic arousal, and if you can just get the autonomic nervous system back in balance, you can control it. So it's not a hell of a lot of fun, but it's not anything to worry about, and the fact that you have this you can invoke this secondary parasympathetic control is a good thing. So I would view it as something like the temperature gauge on your car If it goes up, you know what to do to bring it back down. But it's interesting actually that you have that experience. But the good news is you can control it.
Speaker 1:I'm friendly with a lot of high-performing athletes and their coaches and this can be trained Really. Yeah, I've had Andy Walsh on this show. He's head of high-performance for Red Bull and that sort of like sympathetic is their world right. Yes, yes, that's right, but they train this. So, after something happens, if you watch a really high-performing athlete, they'll do their thing, and then there'll be like 30 seconds where they're doing this, where they're sort of bringing everything down so they can do their thing again Because they can't stay at that high level consistently.
Speaker 2:That's a good point, that's very interesting and I'm sure that's true. You want the arousal when you want it and not when you don't.
Speaker 1:Yeah, like the Navy SEALs, you know. Yes, they run through the jungle for 10 miles, all this stuff and they're all jacked up. But now they have to focus, so they have to be able to bring themselves down to do that.
Speaker 2:That's true. Yeah, you want to marshal it, so you've got it when you need it. The coach of the Stanford Women's Swimming Team some years ago. We have a superb women's swimming team and he noticed that they were swimming faster in practice than they were in meets, and that's not a good thing. And what we realized was that they were getting distracted by worrying about what the woman in the next lane was doing, and swimming is not a contact sport, so it really doesn't matter what the other person is. So I had them do self-hypnosis and just practice swimming their own best race, focusing on their communication with their body just the kind of thing you're talking about and having the feeling within their body that they were using their body as efficiently and as well as possible. And their times went up, they went down, they did it faster and better when they were just focusing on themselves and ignoring what was going on in the neighboring lanes. So that's another example of that.
Speaker 1:We had Dr Lauren Lohberg on the show a couple of weeks ago and she's a performance expert, Deals with a lot of athletes, but the conversation was about all of life is performance. Talking to my wife, I need to be able to perform properly. Going to the grocery store, it's all. You're not necessarily an Olympian, but being able to perform properly and being able to focus like this and exactly what you're talking about, which brings me to Reverie. So let's talk about Reverie. What is this?
Speaker 2:Reverie is a digital interactive hypnosis app. I decided that. You know, I've treated a lot of patients about 7000 in my career but there are a lot more people who can benefit from managing their pain, stress, anxiety, insomnia, bad habits and I wanted to make what we've learned available. And there are a couple of sort of tricks to it, and one is that all hypnosis is really self-hypnosis. So is it possible that people can just do it for themselves when they get the right instructions? And we built Reverie.
Speaker 2:Ariel Polar, who's the co-founder of Reverie with me, came up to me after a brain mind summit at Stanford and said would you like to try and build an app that would do this? And at first I was a little nervous about it. You know what would happen if all these people out there were getting hypnotized and I wasn't there watching them. You know and and. But I thought you know why? Not? Because you don't. I don't really hypnotize people. I teach them how to use their own hypnotic ability, and so why can't people? Why shouldn't people be able to do that? But I wanted it to be as much like the experience in my office as I could, and that meant interaction. So, you know, I give some instructions. I see how they're responding. I ask them and then I make decisions about what to do next. So I wanted it to be like that and he said well, you know, amazon's Alexa is making this you know interactive speech platform available. They want more people to use it. Should we try? Let me build you one. So we worked on that together. We started out helping people to stop smoking and we found that one out of five people just stopped smoking using the app right away. So that's about as good as I get when people are sitting in my office and I'm doing it, and it's about as good as you get using Verana Clean or Bupropion or Nicotine Patches as an alternative. So we began to see you know it could work, but the app it was a little clunky and so we decided we hired some great engineers, built up a little company and we've got our own app now that works very smoothly and and helps people get to sleep, get back to sleep, control their pain.
Speaker 2:You know I noticed you had a doctor on the show, afton Hassett, who talked about pain control and that the pain is in part you know the way I like to say it is the strain, and pain lies mainly in the brain. That people brain is an interpretation of signals that come into the brain, and we found, as many other people have, with hypnosis that you can control pain perception. You can make it worse, you can make it better, mostly better. And he talked about how the default mode talks with the salience network. Those are exactly parts of the brain that hypnosis alters. So we found when we hypnotize people that they can turn down activity in the salience network. The dorsal anterior is singular. They can disconnect from the default mode network. So when they're engaged in the hypnotic things, they turn down activity in the default mode and they reinterpret pain signals.
Speaker 2:So we find that about three out of four of the people who use it find within 12 minutes that they've been able to reduce their pain. And so we were viewing this as a way of helping people with stress, with pain, with bad habits and a number of other everyday problems people live with, that reverie can help them do it and it's safe and effective. And if you consider, david, the effect that pharma like Purdue Pharma have gotten hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people addicted to opioids and that last year 82,000 Americans died of opioid overdoses, in the US they're expecting CDC is expecting 111,000 this year. It's horrifying and people are scared of hypnosis and they say it's weirder, it's dangerous or something. We have not succeeded in killing anybody with hypnosis yet, but millions, hundreds of thousands of people are dying of opioid overdoses, and so the possibility and, in fact, the reality that you can control your pain using self hypnosis is something everybody ought to try. It won't work for everybody, but it'll work for a lot of people. We're finding with every three out of four people who use it for pain control feel less pain within 12 minutes.
Speaker 2:And I had a young woman in my office who was seven months pregnant, had bad lower back disease and terrible pain, and she couldn't use drugs because she was pregnant, but the bigger the baby got, the more pain she had, and I got her hypnotized. She was quite hypnotizable. Her pain went from seven to three in a few minutes and she opened her eyes and she looked angry and I said what are you angry about? And she said why are you the last doctor I got sent to instead of the first? And so this is something that people can try, and if it works, great, and it often will and if it doesn't, no harm, no foul, you know. So I encourage people to give reverie a try you can download it from the app store if you have an iOS phone and from Google Play if you have an Android and give it a try and see if it helps.
Speaker 1:We'll put that link in the show notes and, for those that are listening, reverie is R-E-V-E-R-I. I went on reverie and the first thing that happens is you take a test. Are you the right personality type? I'm like a one personality type for hypnosis the poet, those I mentioned earlier. I have a degree in mechanical engineering, but not my personality type.
Speaker 2:Are you the kind of guy that gets so caught up in a good movie that you kind of forget you're watching a movie and enter the image of work. Yes, there you go, there you go. So that's people using their natural hypnotic ability Spontaneously we call it absorption and people you get caught up in movies, in a sunset and whatever else you're doing. That's a spontaneous self-hypnotic state. And so since you do it anyway, since your brain is configured to help you do it rapidly, deeply and efficiently, why not take full advantage of it? Our major evolutionary advantage is this big brain that sits the three pounds on top of our bodies, but it doesn't come with a user's manual. We don't always know how to make. Take full advantage of it, and this is a way of doing exactly that.
Speaker 1:Talk to me about hypnosis and the ability to change one's own mind.
Speaker 2:Change your mind. Well, that's what hypnosis helps you to do, and one of the things it helps you to do also is to change who you are the turning down activity in the default mode network and that's what experienced meditators do that over time, they turn down activity. The whole thing about meditation is getting over yourself, not focusing on yourself and who you are, but just on experience, on being, on letting feelings and experiences flow through you. And in hypnosis you can do that very rapidly. You can just turn down. That's why the football player will dance like a ballerina.
Speaker 2:And one of those stupid shows is that you can let go of who you think you are or what people think of you, and just be something else. And the cool thing about hypnosis is you can surprise yourself by what you can be and become if you just try it. See what it feels like because you're turning down the part of your brain that's sitting there saying wait a minute. You can't do that. You've got to be having bad pain now because the doctor told you this is wrong and that's wrong. And instead, just what would it be like if I could actually control that pain? Or for you, if I could control that little tremor. You know and you can do it, and you're being very hypnotizable. It'll be easy for you to do that, exactly that by managing your overall level of arousal.
Speaker 1:It's really great learning about hypnosis and like why not try it right because it's so low risk and it seems to be so effective Right?
Speaker 2:right, it helps and we just we get people to focus on what they're for respecting and protecting their body, rather than fighting and urge, which just makes it worse. You know, it's like telling yourself don't think about purple elephants. You know, are you dying for smoke? Yes, I am. I think I'll have no. It's. You focus on your position of respect and protection for your body as if it were a baby. And people can one out of five stop most of the others, at least cut down on the amount of cigarettes smoking. So yes, it can be very helpful. It's worth a try.
Speaker 1:It's been great having you on the show today. It's really an honor and a pleasure, and congratulations on the launching of the reverie up. I hope people get to try that You're most welcome, david.
Speaker 2:Thank you for having me.
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Speaker 1:I've been reading these statistics about the exploding suicide rates among young people, among people in teens and early 20s, and a lot of it is due to loneliness and lack of hope. They feel the world is quite dark and you know, I'm sure social media plays a part in this. There's a lot of factors to it, but what is undeniable is these increasing suicide rates and the feeling of hopelessness and depression among younger people. One of the things that some of us who've walked the earth for a little while have is a sense of perspective. I mean, I grew up during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Remember duck and cover. There's just been like a whole lot of stuff that we've been through and that we've seen, and I think that on just try this this week.
Speaker 1:My suggestion is Share a little time with someone who's younger and ask them how they're doing, ask them what's important to them, pay attention to them, because we all, more than anything, want to be seen and want to be heard, and my guess is they may not feel that way and, if you can, without you know being too invasive, let them know that it's all going to be OK, like we've been through so much stuff that just seemed apocalyptic at the time and it turned out all right. And there is a lot of you know, scary, challenging stuff out there. There's a lot of bad actors on the world stage right now, but try and just let them know like, hey, this is going to be all right. Younger people are having a much, much harder time than we did at their age. All this talk about them being snowballs and this, that and the other thing it's super hard to be young now, in a way that it never was for us. So let's have a little compassion for them and see if we can, you know, let them a helping hand and just say like, hey, I see you, what's going on, tell me, tell me about your challenges and then, if you can, you know, pad them on the back and say like I think it's probably going to be OK. That's this week's.
Speaker 1:Just try this, if you can, this week maybe, leave us a review wherever you're listening to this podcast, leave us a comment. We love that and even more. If you have a moment and you think there's someone appropriate, please share this podcast With them and ask them to subscribe. This is how we grow. This is how we spread influence out there on the sort of messages that we talk about on the SuperAge podcast. Everyone, it's been so wonderful having you with us. Thank you for your time, thank you for your attention and until next week, I hope you all have a wonderful week. Hey, it's the holidays, so I hope you're going to dinners, you're going to parties and, if you're not, maybe have one at your house. Invite some people over. Have a great week. We'll see you next week. Take care now.