People think I'm just condemned to this misery, and the more they believe that,
the more miserable they get. And so if instead you say, I
can teach my brain to modulate these signals right now. For example, Fred,
you're sitting in a chair. I guess you were not aware of the
sensations of your body touching the chair, and so your brain automatically just shuts
it down. I don't need to pay attention to that doesn't matter. Your
brain can do that with pain too, And the problem with pain is that
a lot of people, when they've been injured, they want to be back
just the way they were before it happened. I get that, but all
that does is get you to pay more attention to the pain, unless to
other things you would or narrowly be paying attention to. That's where the focus
of attention and hypnosis is so useful, because it gets you to focus on
what you're for, what you want, not on what you're against or frustrated
by. Hi. This is Gary Leslie from Bay City, Michigan, and
I play at the Bay Valley Golf Club. This is Golf Smarter number two
thirty seven, The Power of self hypnosis to improve a golfer's' focus with doctor
David Spiegel. This is Golf Smarter, sharing stories, tips and insights from
great golf minds to help you lower your score and raise your golf IQ.
Here's your host, Fred Green. Welcome to the Golf Smarter podcast, Doctor
Spiegel. Thank you, Fred, I'm delighted to be here. It's great
to have you on. We always like the Stanford connection anytime where we go
terrific. Well, keep it in the family to be with you, you
bet. Yeah. So I want to go right to this and just ask
you what is self hypnosis? Well, all hypnosis is really self hypnosis,
and it's a capacity that people have that it involves three fundamental features. The
first is absorption, getting so caught up in something that you forget your engaging
and that you've just become a part of it. So have you ever had
the experience when you're golfing, for example, of just being in the flow
of the game and not worrying about anything you have to do later, not
wondering how you got here or who the other players are, just you're in
it. That sense of flower engagement is typical of hypnosis. It's been called
believed in imagination. So you're in a world that you've created, and to
do that, you dissociate. You put outside of conscious awareness things that would
ordinarily be in consciousness, so you cease to worry about things. And I
heard you on your you Know Tigers five Things podcast talking about the fact that
golf is not a contact sport. You know that it really doesn't matter what
the other players are doing. What matters is what you're doing. You're competing
with yourself, not someone else. And so hypnosis helps you put outside of
conscious awareness things that would be in consciousness to enable you to totally absorb yourself
in your experience. Now, the third part is the most in some ways
interesting part, and that's what people have been fearful of, you know,
suggestibility. Somebody will make you, you know, cluck like a chicken,
or the football coach will dance like a ballerina in front of five hundred people
and they'll left. I don't like stage hypnosis, but there is a lesson
there, and that is you can try out being different. You can let
go suppress your usual expectations of who you are and what you are. The
part of your brain that worries about what other people are thinking about and just
let yourself try out being different and see what it feels like. And so
it makes hypnosis a beautiful setting for change, for focusing on something that's important,
putting outside of awareness things that are interfering, and try out being different,
see what it feels like. Well, we talk about flow state a
lot on this show. We've had a lot of people on talking about flow
state. So I guess it's yeah, I knew. Chick sent me high.
You know his book Flow, and you know, one of the things
he said about flow is that it's an autotelic experience. It feels so good
doing it that you just it's its own reward. And there is a way
in which hypnosis can be used to not just focus better, not just perform
better, but change the experience so that the presence of it itself is the
reward is the experience. And I think one problem that many athletes have,
including golfers, from what I understand, is that you focus too much on
the outcome and not enough on the process. If you're if you're busy worrying
about what it's going to mean, if you you know, wind up in
the rough or in a lake, somewhere you're you're disconnecting yourself from what really
matters. There's a there's a book called Zen in the Art of Archery in
which a British research interviewed a bunch of zen masters, and the lesson from
Zen and the Art of Archery is most archers make the mistake of focusing on
the target. And you might think to yourself, well, what the hell
are you supposed to focus on? You know, well, he said,
what matters is your relationship with the bow and arrow, and if the relationship
is correct, the arrow will go where you want it to go. And
that's a real analogy I think for golf, where you know you're if you're
focusing to you obviously you've got to pay attention to where the ball's going,
but that's not where the action is. The action is your connection with the
club and the ball and how you connect with it and then hopefully it will
wind up in the right place. But if you're focusing on the green up
there, you may be disconnecting from the feelings of your body connecting with and
managing the club. Well, we've had multiple conversations here on golf Smarter,
and that's why it's called golf smarter. We've talked to doctor Joe Parent who
wrote Zen Golf and talked frequently about it's the process not the outcome, or
NATO golf not attached to outcome. I mean, there's so yeah done.
We've done so many different episodes talking about this very thing, very thing about
doing that. But there's also the conversations we've had with neuroscientists about not focusing
on your body but focusing on external things. Because when you start focusing,
when athletes start to focus on internal, that's when they get themselves in trouble.
I'm not sure that's true. I don't know who they were and what
their point was, but I actually think that your body is your primary ally
in athletic performance, and you want to be paying attention to it. And
when you when you're using your body well and it's serving you well, you're
sort of enjoying one another. I'll give you an example. Fred years ago,
I Stanford, as you know your son went to Stanford, has a
fabulous swim and swimming team. I mean they are just the best, and
they're you know, the swimmers are recognized every year yep. And and but
their coach noticed that they were actually swimming faster in practice than they were in
meats, And he said, what the hell is that about? I mean,
you would think, you know, you're it matters, you know,
your energy is up, you're focused, you're you know, not concentrating on
anything else. But that's what he observed. So what we realized in talking
to these young women is that they were being distracted by the women swimming in
the next lane during a meat, am I keeping up with her? Is
she doing something I should be doing? And you know, swimming is not
a contact sport, neither hopefully is off and so you're diffusing your energy in
a non productive way if you're paying attention to what she's doing in the next
lane, Because it doesn't matter. What matters is how you're swimming. So
I had them practice doing self hypnosis swimming their best race, just how they
related to their body, how it felt, how they connected with their muscles,
how they swim it forcefully but efficiently, you know, not wasting energy
and part of a stroke that doesn't actually move them forward. And they did
much better because they focused on what they needed to focus on, which is
their connection with their body and how they made it swim as efficiently and fast
as possible. Sure, and with golf, it's really focused on yourself.
You don't worry about the competition because it's not you know, your score against
their score. You're not on offense and defense, right, You've got to
just play your game. And you hear so many people, especially the pros
on Sundays after you know their game, is like, I just had to
stay in my lane. I had to focus on myself and my game and
whatever happens outside I can't control, right, and so if but worse than
that, if it becomes a distraction, if you are thinking about it and
what he or she is doing, you're you're disconnecting yourself from what matters,
which is how you and your body get together. And you know, obviously
the obvious example, I can't get to an interview on golf and hypnosis without
mentioning Tiger, And you know he apparently, I don't anything personally about it.
Be apparently trained and routinely used hypnosis. And one of the things he
did was he would mentally rehearse in a hypnotic like state every shot before he
took it, so he was kind of programming his body to respond and the
other thing that's so striking about him is just how glacially calm he is in
the most stressful possible circumstances. And there it has to do, I think,
with the ability of people using hypnosis to manage the stress in their body
in a way that it doesn't interfere that they're aroused, but they're not overwhelmed
or tensing muscles inappropriately, because you really need smooth coordination among muscle activity to
make the best shot, and if you're unduly tense in spite of that,
you know the bad things will happen. How does this differ than visualization.
Well, visualization is primarily visual, not somatic, so it can get you
to think about it, but you're thinking about it as if you were watching
your own movie, rather than feeling it from inside. And so one of
the standard ways in hypnosis different I will have picture people use visualization, but
do it to get their body into a state that is relaxed and comfortable.
So I don't the last thing I do is say picture yourself being relaxed,
because you know, that's like saying don't think about purple elephants. You know,
you know, oh wait a minute, I'm not relaxed, you know.
So instead I use imagery to have people imagine a situation where their bodies
are safe and comfortable. Imagine you're in a bath like a hot tub,
or floating in space, and get your body to let go first and then
deal with whatever is stressing you. So typically you picture yourself somewhere where your
body is comfortable, and then you picture what what do I want my body
to do? How can I get my body to respond in a way that
will help me accomplish what I want to accomplish, But first, just get
it comfortable. My closest experience was I was trying to water ski. It
looks so cool, you know, and I'm a pretty good downhill skier,
but I just I just kept doing face plants in the water, you know,
And I was more and more frustrated. And then I thought, come
on, Spiegel, you do this for a living, you know. So
I pictured my body first floating in a lake in under lake, and then
I said to myself two things I want you to remember. Arm straight,
knees bent. Arms straight, knees bent, because you know, you do
the opposite. If you're anxious, you pull back, and that makes your
the steadiness of the pull variable, which is very hard to deal with.
And if your knees are straight, you can't absorb shocks, so any slight
wave or something is going to knock you over. So I've been water skiing
ever since. You know, I was up and I stayed up, and
it was just programming my body to do what it needed to do, not
react to the sense of tension and fear that comes if you think the thing's
going to pull you over. So it's a simple example. And it was
not a great athletic accomplishment, but it wasn't bad either, but it was
an accomplishment nonetheless. All right, let's take a time out. We'll be
back right after this. So David, you're saying that self hypnosis or it's
all self hypnosis is good for golfers. Yes, absolutely, and you know,
of course Tiger is the prime example. But if I was thinking of
another story that you told on that podcast, Fred about the seventeen year old
who you were kind of mentoring and how he looked really promising. You said,
he looked very promising when he was calmed. He fell apart when he
was anxious. And you know, you see, one day you had suggested
meditation or listening to calming slow music, and he did really well. And
then the next day he blew it. And you talked about which is important.
There are math problems that matter, but when I'm thinking, my role
as a psychiatrist is the problem. His problem was just he didn't know how
to handle his anxiety. That you know, anxiety is a good thing and
in that it alerts you to what you need to be concerned about, but
it's not a good thing in that it can cause reactions in your body.
And you know, you were talking about your friend skiing what I call the
snowball effect of anxiety, and that is you worry about something like can I
make this shot? And then your body starts to react to that, and
it starts to tense up because it's a hard shot, and you know you're
worried about, you know, running up a bad score and all this,
and so then your body says, now he's really worried, and it gets
more tense, and then you notice that, you know, your gut tightens
up, you start to sweat, your heart rate goes up, and then
you think, oh boy, this must be really bad. And so it's
like a snowball rolling down hill. It gets worse and worse when you're faced
with a stressor. It's a stressor. You've got to deal with it.
You don't know how. That's start of what's making you anxious. I start
with hypnosis from the body up rather than the head down. I say,
there's one aspect of this situation you actually have immediate control over, and that's
how your body's reacting to it. So what I do is have people imagine
in hypnosis, look up close your eyes, take a deep breath. Imagine
you're floating in a bath of like a hot tever, floating in space.
Get your body comfortable. Now, once your body is better, then picture
on an imaginary screen the problem you're trying to deal with, but with the
rule that no matter what you see on the screen, you keep your body
comfortable. So you get to where you can see the problem, keep your
body comfortable. And then I say, now on the other half of the
screen, I have people divided in half, like what we're doing right here,
and I say, picture one way of dealing with a problem, but
keep your body comfortable. So then you could picture a particular stroke you want
to take and how it would feel to make that swing, but you're doing
it from a position of your body helping you, not interfering, because you've
got control of your body. It's comfortable and ready to respond. And and
that's where this idea of you know, flow and connecting with your body,
I think is very important because it will feel right, you know, and
you'll you'll know it with your body. If what you've done feels right,
you know, you'll know before the ball has gone very far that it's likely
to wind up where you're hoping. But it's a matter of the self control
first. So I think you know your your story about how when he just
you just told him to listen to some calming music actually worked, or try
a little meditation or something that that The issue is bringing your body on board
and making your connection with your body something that improves your game, it doesn't
interfere with it. Well. So I'm going into this new golf season here
in twenty twenty four and I've had I've been on medical hiatus from golf for
about three months. Sorry pinch nerve tennis elbow. So just letting it rest
not a problem. But over these three months of not touching a golf club,
there's been opportunity for doubt to start dictating. You know, Oh,
you're so rusty, it's gonna be terrible. You're gonna have a tough year.
It's gonna be and I'm trying to fight that with Hey, you know
how to swing the club, you know how to score, you know what
you're doing out there. So I have this internal battle going on, and
I'd love to just squash the doubt and just focus on being comfortable and trusting
myself. How can this help? What I would try to do is go
into a state of self ignosis, get your body floating, safe and comfortable.
And we've developed this app, you know about Reverie, where you get
to hear my malfluous voice giving you instructions of how to do it, interacting
with you. Ask a question, you get a response that's different depending on
what you say, and get your body floating, safe and comfortable. We
have a stress management app. And then I would actually ask you to focus
in self hygnosis on your relationship with your body, because the little story you
told me, Fred is one that sort of conveys annoyance or resentment or you
know, damn it, you know this thing is keeping me from what I'm
doing, and I'm just losing time and losing connection with my skill and all
this stuff not a very positive frame. And I would say, you know
what, you and your body are getting older together like me and my body,
and you're doing something that is taking care of your body. You know,
you're being a good parent to your body and helping it recover if it's
got a problem. Your body has gotten you out of a lot of scrapes.
You're helping it now. And think of it as you and your body
reaching a new understanding about how you will help it get better so it can
help you play better. But it's not that it's an annoyance or an interference,
which in some ways it is. I get that, but more that
you're kind of coming. You're giving your body or vacation and you're helping it
heal and you're hoping that that will have the effect of your body feeling better
and you playing better. So I would try and experience it in those terms,
so that you're appreciating what your body can do and helping it get back
to speed rather than feeling interrupted, interfered with, annoyed. Yeah. Well,
and I think golfers are plagued by doubt. Sure, I think that's
from what I know of that. Yes, so how do you handle it?
Right, I'm asking you? Oh that's my all right? Yeah,
Well, there's a saying. There's a saying Fred that when you come across
an obstacle on the road, it's often a signpost. And so it's it's
I would say, it's a way of telling yourself there's something you need to
pay attention to that can improve your game even more. And so you're you
know, it's a it's a fluid, complex game. Uh little movements have
big effects. And so what you're doing is is further tuning your ability to
interact with your body in such a way that it helps you do what you
want to do. And uh so anything you can learn about your body and
how it's reacting, can you play, learn to play in a way that
is less likely to bother that nerve or you know, affect your shoulder.
Can you can you adjust your swing so that it is less likely to cause
strain that your body doesn't need because this is an interaction between you and your
body. So I would, again, in self ignosis sort of say,
listen to your body as you start to resume your swing and say, what
are the movements that feel good and feel safe and what are the ones that
don't. What can I learn from this about how to play differently and play
better so that I'm not, you know, putting a demand on some part
of my body that it's not capable of fulfilling. So it is a lot
of paying attention to yourself, to yourself and your body, to your body.
You know, it's it's not just yourself, it's your body. And
where's the disconnect between the two yourself your body? Oh, because you know
you and your your body have a partnership, right, you know it let
you do what you want to do, but you control how it does it.
And they're not the same thing. And so you know you can you
can wear it out and overstress it, you know, and do things that
cause it harm, or you can work with it and do things that get
what you want but also keeps your body healthy and safe. And too much
tension, too much pressure, can interfere with both with your body and also
your goals what you want to do. But you're not the same. You
are your body's keeper. You're someone who's looking after it. And if you
look after it well. It will take care of you and if you don't,
it won't be able to. And so I think it's a way of
an hypnosis of coming to a sense of sort of equilibrium, you know,
between your goals and your body's goals. You know, your body's goal is
to stay healthy and function well and yours is to play some great rounds and
things like that. And hopefully most of the time, it probably is true
in your life that's they've gone together just fine, but every once in a
while they don't. Sometimes yeah, yeah, so so. But but think
of yourself, you know, dealing with your body the way you would if
your kid when they were little, was injured. You know, you wouldn't
get frustrated with them. You'd give them a hug and help them, you
know, figure out how to not hurt themselves more and heal. And that's
sort of the role you're in with your body. You're you're not the same
as your body, but you can't live without it, so you want to
take good care of it. Absolutely, take another time out. I'll be
back one minute, all right, David. I need to know the history
of how you got to this point of creating reverie dot com. But also
how you developed your program. Sure well, I developed revery dot com with
the help of Aerial Polar who's a serial entrepreneur who heard me talking in a
Brain Body summit at Stanford about four years ago, and he started Strava,
you know, which is exercise app that's doing very well a bunch of others.
He said, hey, would you like to build a hypnosis app?
And I said, what a cool idea. Let's do it. And so
we started with Alexa. You know, at the time, Alexa was making
very easy for people to build programs so that the talking speaker could you know,
be used by more and more people. And we did a stop smoking
program on the app. You know, got people hypnotized for my body.
Smoking is a poison. I need my body to live. I own my
body respect and protection. We got nineteen percent stop smoking, which is about
as good as you get with Verona, Cleaner, View Appropriate or Nicorette.
You know, it's it's not bad. And the remainder cut down substained on
how much they were smoking. And so we thought, you know, this
works, you know, and actually we can do this, and so then
we decide, but he said it was a little clunky working with the smart
speaker, and people didn't like their speakers listening into their conversations at home and
all that. So he said, let's build an app. So we did,
and we've now had about half a million downloads and people are using it
for stopping smoking, for stress, for pain, for insomnia, for eating
better, for focusing attention, which is a key issue, which is really
why I wanted to talk. Yeah, you bet and so, And the
nice thing is you can. You know. All you got to do is,
you know, open the app and get right to the exercise you want
and you hear my voice talking interactively to you. We have the typical exercises
about ten minutes, but you can do We have one minute refreshers and so
you can do it every day, a few times a day. You can
do it before you go out to play and just get your mind in the
right frame of mind for But don't you do it while you're driving to the
golf course. Probably not? Probably not, that's right, Although you know,
there's this phrase highway hypnosis. You know, you realize you were thinking
about something so much that you passed your exit on the freeway. That so
there is a set of hypnotic phenomena. But I don't recommend using the app
on the freeway, that's right, But it is a way of preparing yourself
and focusing attention. So I thought, you know what, I've used hypnosis,
Fred with about seven thousand people in my career, patients and research subjects,
and I thought, you know, that's a lot of people. I
feel good about that. But hypnosis is sort of the Rodney dangerfield of psychotherapy.
You remember Rodney dangerfields. You know, I don't get no respect,
he said. They asked me to leave a bar so they could start happy
hour, you know that kind of thing. And my wife right, And
it's the oldest Western conception of a psychotherapy, the first time that talking interaction
was thought to have therapeutic potential, and yet it is underutilized. There aren't
enough people who do it, who teach people how to do it, and
it's viewed as either silly or dangerous or both. And the way it started
for me, Fred was it is it's a bit of a genetic illness in
my family that my parents were both psychiatrists and psychoanalysts, and they told me
I was free to be any kind of psychiatrist I wanted to be so here
I am, but you know, dinner table conversation was pretty interesting. And
I would occasionally get to watch my father making a movie of a highly hypnotizable
patient having these non epileptic seizures and he could bring them on and the teacher
to control them, and you watch these patients go into the seizure state.
So when I got to medical school, I thought, well, I better
take a hypnosis course, which I did. The chief of psychiatry at Mass
General was teaching one and I was on my Were you at Harvard Harvard?
Yeah? I was at Harvard Medical School and I was on my rotation and
pediatrics, and the nurse says, speak all your next patients in the room
three forty two. And I'm following the sound of her wheezing down the hall.
She's in status asthmnicus and she'd been hospitalized every month for three months.
I walk in the room. Pretty fifteen year old redhead bolt upright in bed,
knuckles white, struggling for breath. Mothers standing there crying, nursed in
the room. And they had tried subcutaneous epinefron twice didn't work. They were
thinking about general anesthesia and steroids, and I don't know what the hell to
do, So I thought, well, why don't I try hypnosis? So
I said, you want to learn a breathing exercise, and she nods,
and so I get her hypnotized. And then I start to sweat when I
realized that we hadn't gotten to asthma in the course yet. So I came
up with something very clever. 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 knuckles aren't white. Her mother
stopped crying. The nurse ran out of the room, and my intern comes
looking for me, and I figure he's going to pat me on the back
and say, great job, Spiegel. He said, the nurse has just
filed a complaint with the nursing supervisor that you violated Massachusetts law by hypnotizing a
minor without parental consent. Now that look on your face, the look too,
I'll tell you, Yeah, I couldn't believe that. You know,
in Massachusetts has a lot of weird laws, but that isn't on the list.
And her mother was standing right next and then you go to California.
Well, I had to escape, you know, violating messages. We don't
have weird laws here. Well, you know, there's actually a story there,
Fred, because at the time on the East Coast, psychiatry was very
much dominated by rather rigid classical psychoanalysis, and Freud gave up hypnosis, so
who was anyone else to use it kind of thing, and California had a
sort of free or feel to it. Actually I can tell you about that,
but I'll just say so. The intern says to me, Spiegel,
you're going to have to stop doing this. And I said, oh,
really why? He said, it's dangerous. I said, are you kidding?
You're going to give a general line of station and you think my talking
to her is dangerous? And he said, well, you have to stop
doing I said, tell you what, take me off the case if you
want, you have the right to do that. But as long as she's
my patient, I'm not telling her something I know is not true. So
he stopped off, and there was a council of war with the Chief Resident
of the attending and they came back on Monday with a radical idea. They
said, let's ask the patient. You know, I don't think they'd ever
done that before. Oh my goodness. And she said, you know,
I like this. Well. She was hospitalized one subsequent time, but went
on to study to be a respiratory therapist. And I thought that anything that
could help a patient that much violate the head nurse and a Massachusetts law that
didn't exist had to be worth looking into. And I've been doing it ever
since, and I just you can see it with your eyes. You know.
It's an opportunity for people to change in a hurry and to mobilize and
use a resource they have anyway. You know, people who are highly advertizable,
even without any formal hypnosis, are the kind of people that get lost
in a sunset, you know, or they're so busy working on something that
they forget about dinner or something like that. They tend to engage intently with
other people and really feel what other people. They are sort of intuitively connected
with people, and that's a benefit. It's not a liability, and if
it is, there are some people who are just sort of too open to
other people's points of view. But you know, if we're social creatures,
you know, we're susceptible of social influence. Hypnosis sometimes in a more intense
way, but it's always under your control. Nobody is making you do something.
You're allowing yourself to immerse yourself in that. And you know, God
knows. If you look at, you know, current American politics, you
can see that people are susceptible of social influence. So that's not the problem.
The problem is how you identify your ability and use it to your advantage.
And so that's it. And I'm say I came to California to Stanford
because I since there was an openness to things like this that were different,
and Stanford gave me the opportunity to you know that Nobody, you know,
patted me on the back and said, here will help you do this,
but they let me do it. And if you can, you know,
get grants and write papers and run a lab and take care of patients,
that was fine with Stanford, you know. And that's why I'm still there,
you know. So the opportunity to take advantage of whatever the phenomenon has
to teach us is something that I made the most of at Stanford and feel
good about it. But I want to spread the wealth. I want everybody
to have an opportunity to take advantage of it. So I hope that Reverie
will allow many more people, and we've seen it happening that many more people
have been able to identify and take advantage of their own hypnotic ability. We
even have a hypnotize ability test on it, so we can help people determine
how hypnotizable they are and therefore how easy it is for them to use use
the app. All right, do you need to get that call? But
we need to take a break, so we'll do that right now, you'll
be back. I'm assuming you grew up on the East Coast. I did,
grew up in New York, in New York, Boston, out California.
That's right. You got to you're a heretic, a little bit,
a little bit, a little stop in New Haven for four years on the
way, but that was that was it, okay. And so all this
time you once you figured that out with that first patient, you this kind
of drew you in and you continued to pursue it and develop it. And
it's a course of study now at Stanford, and it is tell me how
far you've been able to take this beyond the app and we'll get to we'll
get to the details of the app in just a moment. Well, you
know, there are there is a community of professionals who use hypnosis. Were
not big, but there are a couple of professional hypnosis societies. I have
colleagues who have done very good research on it, and but I've been able
to publish, you know, about one hundred and fifty papers on hypnosis and
publish in really good journals where people respected. We had to cover of the
American Journalist Psychiatry showing that you can hypnotize people to change their color perception of
color and they actually change. They do that they drain color from a color
grid or add color of black and white grid, and they actually change blood
flow in the parts of the brain that process color vision. So I call
it my believing is seeing experiment. You know where you both of my sons
are colorblind. This would that right, probably not, although it might it
might help them, It would not. It would not make it go away,
but it would maybe. You know, there are sort of on the
edges of color per cues that would give you an idea of what the color
might be, and it's possible that they could use it to sort of pick
up the subtle cues, because for them, if they're trying to look at
color, it's an exercise in frustration sometimes. You know, I just can't
tell red from green, and that, you know, frustrating, and that's
what it is. Green. Yeah, that's the standard one. Actually,
my father and I know that. Like when my son's on the golf course,
the one of them and it's a red flag and there's trees behind it.
He can't see it. I can't see it at all. That's interesting,
And the other one just says, I'm color stupid. I just can't
figure out what goes together. Well, you know, it might it might
be possible for them to try and pick up cues that they might be ignoring,
because what I hear you're both them saying, and I understand, you
know, I'd be like this too, is it's frustrating. So you just
kind of shut it down, you know, just say, don't bother because
you're just going to wind up feeling bad. And so if there any ways
around the edges that they can train their brain to pick up cues that would
hint that there may be a contrast there that they're not seeing, it might
be worth a try just to see if they can improve it a little bit.
It's because I had a patient recently, a delightful woman, very accomplished,
successful, a woman who had to have some chemotherapy that pretty much wiped
out her taste. She just couldn't taste anything. And this is a woman
who was a gourmet chef, a wine kindoisseur, and a lot of the
pleasure in her life came from eating. And it was more and more frustrating,
you could tell, you know, because she had built so much of
the pleasure in her life around those things. And I had her she was
quite hypnotizable, and I had her try to eat in a different way in
which she would retrain her brain to make the most of the sensations. And
I used what so mayas teach you to do. The way that they actually
taste wine when they're serious about it, is that they hold a puddle of
wine in their mouth. They inhale through their mouth and exhale through their nose,
so that because much of your taste is actually in your nose, not
in your tongue, in your mouth, and so they expose all of the
receptors to the taste and the aroma of the food. And I got an
email from her the next day, and she said, I'm cured. I
can taste things again, and started out with something she had some residual taste
for, and that was vanilla ice cream. She loved it, so I
had her start with that, but then other foods that she liked to eat,
and she is just thrilled she's back at it again. And so I
think sometimes what can get in the way of recovery is the frustration that takes
over when things aren't just the way they were before. And instead of focusing
on that, you know, the glass half empty, focus on how you
can retrain your brain to make better use of whatever information it's getting. And
so that's what you might help your sons, and I think is something that
people can use for variety of things. The same is true with pain control.
We have a great four different pain exercises on the Revery app and people,
you know, they think I'm just condemned to this misery, and the
more they believe that, the more miserable they get. And so if instead
you say, I can teach my brain to modulate these signals. Right now,
for example, Fred, you're sitting in a chair. I guess you
were not aware of the sensations of your body touching the chair. I hope
if you were we could just stop the interview now, and so your brain
automatically it's not an area of conflict for you, but it just shuts it
down. I don't need to pay attention to that doesn't matter. Your brain
can do that with pain too, And the problem with pain is that a
lot of people, when they've been injured, they want to be back just
the way they were before it happened, and I would be to I get
that, But all that does is get you to pay more attention to the
pain, unless to other things you would ordinarily be paying attention to. That's
where the focus of attention and hypnosis is so useful, because it gets you
to focus on what you're for, what you want, not on what you're
against or frustrated by. So you can sort of use it like a searchlight
to focus find the thing you want to find and pay attention to and put
the other things outside of conscious awareness. And we found using functional magnetic resonance
imaging in the brain that one of the things that happens in hypnosis is you
turn down activity in what we call the salience network. It's a part of
the brain. The singular cortex is like a c on its ends in the
middle of your brain, and the front part is sort of your alarm system.
You hear a loud noise and it says, wait a minute, what's
going on out there? You better check, and you turn down activity in
that part of the brain. People who are more hypnotizable actually have more binding
of GABBA, which is an inhibitory neurotransmitter gaba aminoguteric acid in the anterior cingulate.
So they've got their own little internal pharmacy. That's the same transmitter that
benzodiazepines activate. And so you got your own little internal hypnopharmacy that will help
you soothe your anxiety center and worry less about things you might be worrying about.
And we actually have on Revera what we call a hypnopharmacy where you enter
a few of the problems you want to deal with, and we give you
a prescription for which of the hypnotic exercises you can use to help you with
that. But it is hypnosis is a sort of built in anti anxiety experience
that will help you and your brain handle problems with less stress. You said
about that woman, she's quite hypnotizable. Then you said, people who are
more hypnotizable than others. What does that mean? And what is the resistance
for those who are not well? It's interesting to use the term resistance,
so the way a lot of people have described it that they're resisting, they're
not resisting. People's brains are different, and we change in hypnotizability until we're
young adults, and then we don't change very much anymore. So most children
are in trances most of the time. You know, you ask your eight
year old to come in for dinner and he doesn't hear you. He's out
playing in the street, and what the hell, you know. And gradually,
as we mature cognitively, as we start to value reason over experience,
you know, we analyze things more, some of us lose some of that
hypnotic ability. And so by the time you're in your early twenties, your
hypnotizability is about as stable as as IQ over at twenty five thirty year interval
that's been studied at Stanford here. And so what we find is that highly
hypnotizable people have more functional connectivity. That is, when one is up,
the other is between the executive control REACHI, and the prefrontal cortex and the
anterior singulate this salience network. And so it makes sense that if the part
of your brain that's thinking is coordinating activity with a part of your brain that's
saying, maybe you should be thinking about something else, that you then are
more likely to allow yourself to go into a deep state of focused attention.
And that's what we see. So about twenty percent of the adult population is
extremely hypnotizable. About sixty percent are somewhat hypnotized. We call the highs the
poets. They're just in it, they just feel it. The majority of
people, about almost two thirds, are at least somewhat hypatizable. They have
an experience, they step back and reflect and wonder what it's like. We
call them the diplomats. And then as twenty percent, we call the researchers
who just aren't. They're not hypnotizable. They can still benefit from the way
we approach problems by focusing on what you're for now what you're against. And
what we generally find is that highs respond more quickly, but others can respond
as well. To just take them a little longer, little more work.
But the highs do it quicker, but you can find out in about five
minutes what your hypnotizability is on the Reverie app. Okay, let's talk about
the Reverie app and what the process is for somebody. I understand you have
a free trial with it. We do. We have a free when we
try it, see if you like it. If you do, great,
if you don't. It doesn't cost anything other than a little bit of time.
And so you can either do the app or the website and it's R
E V E R I. That's correct, and so you can go to
the website. You get a lot of information about Reverie, about me,
about our research on hypnosis. You can get references to our papers, our
publications and some and get a feel for the whole array of treatments that we
have. And it's a health and wellness skille. It's a way to learn
how to better manage your body and problems like insomnia, pain, stress,
focus, phobias and anxieties, eating more sensibly, stopping smoking, stopping vaping.
It's a way of and you can take your pick. You can also
download it from the App Store if you have an iOS phone, or from
Google Play if you have an Android, and you can learn get the downloads
from the website as well, So it could be a fun experience at the
least. At the most, it has changed people's lives. We have people
who just say they're a different person. So does it take dedication to do
it, or is it like once or twice and you're good to go,
or is it an ongoing process. It can be some of both. For
some people, they get it, They just you know. I had one
woman who said, I didn't even want to stop smoking, you know,
but I had thought in hypnosis about protecting and respecting my body. The second
time I tried it, I lit up a cigarette and went, feat who
needs this? And she said, I haven't smoked it. I can't believe
it. Did she come on, dude, did she really go fat fat?
She's big fat. I could do it. And then she said to
me, you know, Spegel, this is some kind of crazy ass voodoo
shit. And I mean that in a good way, she said. But
her friends can't believe it. You know, they say, you smoke for
twenty five years, you were like the smoker. So for some people it's
like that. For other people it's an exercise they can do every day,
in the morning, when they get up, or before they go to sleep
if they're trying to go to sleep, or when they want to get back
to sleep in the middle of the night. So for some people it's more
of a regular practice. For other people, once they make the transition,
they put it aside and go ahead, or they try it for something else.
So it's the nice thing is it doesn't have to take that much time
and effort for many people, but even if it does, it's worth it.
Right. So once the free trial is complete, and how long is
that? That's a week, and then what happened? You have a choice
of signing up for a month at a time, for a year, or
for lifetime, which is not a whole lot more than a year actually,
And so the price has changed, so I won't quote a price, but
it's not outrgeous. It's even for lifetime, it's less than you would usually
pay just to go to a professional for one session to do hypnosis in person.
So it's it's a good investment in your future and in your mind and
body. Wow, this has been fascinating and I can definitely see the uses
for golf. I really can't. I'm glad well, I'm glad to hear
that from you. That that makes me feel good that you can see the
connections. Yeah, well, thank you so much, David. I really
appreciate the conversation and the insights and the education. You're most welcome, Fred,
It's been a pleasure. So I've been traveling a lot lately in the
last month, and that has been really helpful to stay away from golf clubs
and keep my arm in a good place and stretching resistance training every day for
an hour. And I think I'm gonna be picking up a golf club soon.
I'm really excited. But I'm headed out again tomorrow for a long weekend
in Atlanta, and I was really hoping to play with doctor Bob Jones meet
up with him there, but it's not gonna happen, and that's okay because
the weather's crappy there too. But we're still planning to get him back on
the podcast the week of the Masters to talk about golf history and the impact
his grandfather, Bobby Jones, had on the game and that region of the
country. Thanks go out this week to our newest Golf Smarter Ambassador, Gary
Leslie of Bay City, Michigan, Carrie, are you a Bay City Roller?
Okay, if you'd like to get a choice of three great gifts just
for sharing with us where you're from and where you play, right directly to
me and I'll send you simple instructions on how to record. Check out today's
show notes to find links about each gift that you have to choose from,
and thanks for your patience. As Mulligan's continues to be on hiatus, but
it will be back soon and we're going to have a big announcement of our
new format of episodes from our archives in the next few weeks, so please
stay tuned for that. If you have any questions, comments, and especially
about our new AI generated show notes, or maybe suggestions for upcoming episodes,
right to Golf Smarter podcast at gmail dot com or click on the Heyfred button
when you're visiting Golfsmarter dot com.