Essentials: Using Hypnosis to Enhance Mental & Physical Health & Performance | Dr. David Spiegel

Welcome to Huberman Lab Essentials, where we revisit past episodes for the most potent and actionable science-based tools for mental health, physical health, and performance. I'm Andrew Huberman and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. And now for my discussion with Dr. David Spiegel. David, thank you so much for being here.

Andrew, my pleasure. Can you tell us what is hypnosis? Hypnosis is a state of highly focused attention. It's something like looking through the telephoto lens of a camera in consciousness. What you see, you see with great detail, but devoid of context.

If you've had the experience of getting so caught up in a good movie that you forget you're watching a movie and enter the imagined world, you're part of the movie, not part of the audience, you're experiencing it, you're not evaluating it, that's a hypnotic-like experience that many people have in their everyday lives. If I'm watching a sports game and I'm really wrapped up in the game, but I'm also in touch with how it makes me feel in my body, kind of registering the excitement or the anticipation. Is that a state of hypnosis also? To the extent that your somatic, your body experience is a part of the the sport event that you're engaged with, I'd say that is a self-altering hypnotic experience. If your physical reactions are distracting you or uh make you think about something else, that's when uh it's it's less hypnotic like and more just one of a series of experiences.

We already have this episode, so unlocking it is cheap and permanent: the full transcript (40 minutes, 7,268 words), segment and word-level timestamps, and .txt, .srt, .vtt and word-level JSON downloads, as many times as you like, forever.

No account needed, we create one from your checkout email. With credits it is 1 credit; packs start at 10 episodes for $5, and monthly plans are cheaper still.