E210 - Dr. David Spiegel: #1 Hypnotism Expert, “Wake Up From The Trance of Your Life”

<p>Dr. David Spiegel is the Wilson Professor and Associate Chair of Psychiatry at Stanford, the co-founder of the hypnosis app Reveri, and one of the world&#39;s leading clinical researchers on hypnosis. He has worked with over 7,000 patients across 50 years, and in this conversation he opened with something I did not expect: he tested my hypnotizability live on camera. I scored a nine out of ten. What followed was one of the most genuinely surprising conversations about the mind I have had on this show.</p><p><br></p><p>What We Dive Into:</p><p>1. The self you walk around with is not a fixed structure. Dr. Spiegel calls it a convenient assumption, something the brain constructs to simplify experience. Hypnosis reveals this by demonstrating how quickly and completely a person can shift, often in a single session.</p><p>2. Memories are not neutral recordings. They are laid down and retrieved from brain regions that manage affect, which means the emotion and the memory are inseparable. Working with a memory hypnotically allows you to enter it, update its emotional meaning, and change how it lives in you.</p><p>3. The same capacity that lets a child survive abuse by mentally leaving their body can, in adulthood, become a habitual distance from experience. Understanding whether your detachment is a protective skill or an old survival pattern still running is one of the more honest questions this conversation surfaces.</p><p><br></p><p>Know Thyself, but not by yourself. A guided space to return home to yourself.</p><p>https://www.knowthyselfcollective.com</p><p><br></p><p>✨THANK YOU TO OUR SPONSORS:</p><p>https://drinkLMNT.com/KnowThyself</p><p>Try LMNT &amp; get a free sample pack </p><p><br></p><p>https://www.timeline.com/KNOWTHYSELF </p><p>Save 20% off your Mitopure® Gummies</p><p>___________</p><p>00:00 Intro</p><p>01:52 What Hypnosis Actually Is</p><p>05:34 The Malleability of Personality and Self</p><p>07:01 How Trauma Gets Stored in the Body and Memory</p><p>12:00 Hypnosis as the Oldest Western Psychotherapy</p><p>15:13 What Happens in the Brain During Hypnosis</p><p>18:36 The Default Mode Network and the &quot;My Fault&quot; Network</p><p>22:29 How Hypnotizability Is Measured</p><p>30:28 What High and Low Hypnotizability Looks Like in Life</p><p>33:58 Live Demo: Testing André&#39;s Hypnotizability</p><p>40:11 Dissociation: Adaptive Defense and Pathological Trap</p><p>45:50 How to Use Hypnosis for Stress and Performance</p><p>49:07 Hypnosis vs. Meditatio