Placebo Power

Hypnotherapy is a powerful therapeutic tool with broad application. As a teenager Craig Meriwether  discovered its potential which helped him through a difficult mental period. He explains how hypnotherapy can leverage the power of self healing in a safe and effective manor.

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Hi, Craig Meriwether. How are you? Daniel, hi. Thank you for giving up your Sunday night in Arizona. Yeah, well, thank you, Daniel. I really appreciate the invitation to be on your show. I've been looking forward to this because it's not often that I get to talk with a doctor and somebody actually in the medical field. So this is going to be a wonderful conversation. Been looking forward to it. Yeah, I hope so. Craig, I'm really interested in your area, which is hypnotherapy. I've read a bit of research around it and I've read a few of the studies and it is just massive what it can do. You know, people talk about the success with all sorts of mental health. The meta analysis, meaning the number of studies grouped together and looked at as one sort of balanced weight, show that hypnotherapy is extraordinarily successful for things like pain with something like 93% success rate. And you just get that from menace drugs. And the success of hypnotherapy around various habits, smoking, drinking, whatever, is just extraordinary. It is a tool that I think is underutilised generally. And so to bring it to the forebrain of most people is, is a great opportunity for both of us, I think. Yeah, yeah. And there's an extraordinary study that was published in Frontiers in Psychology and, and here in the United States, you can find it on the National Institutes of Health website. But yeah, it's a meta, meta analysis that they looked at 20 years of hypnotherapeutic research and just found extraordinary results not only in, for, for emotional health, mental health, but also physical health. And really what hypnotherapy does is tap into the placebo effect. And of course, all of us at this point, I think, understand the placebo effect. It's basically the mind healing the body through a little bit of trickery. But whenever, let's say drug manufacturer, pharmaceutical company is doing some research and development on new medication and clinical trials are going on and they're going to have to have a control group because they want to make sure the efficacy is better than placebo. And the reason why they have to have a control group is because they know the mind will heal the body. So the only way this medication is going to get out to market is if it shows a slightly better result than the placebo effect. And so let's just say, for example, it's some sort of high blood pressure medication they're working on and they're going to give, they're going to bring in A bunch of people who have high blood pressure that meet their criteria of age and all that stuff. And half the group's going to get the actual medication, the other half, other half of the group is going to get a placebo, a sugar pill, and they're going to, you know, look, watch these people for a while, a few weeks, few months, and at the end they're going to see how many people got better with the medication, but they're also going to see how many people got better with the placebo effect. And so let's say just for example, 30% of the people in the placebo got better, meaning 30% of the people say there's a hundred people in the placebo group. Just to make the math easy, 30 people got better just using their mind alone, lowered their blood pressure, thinking they were getting medication. They weren't. But the mind healed the body anyway because just, oh, we're getting medication. There's a suggestion in the form of a physical pill instead of of words. But there's a suggestion this pill will cure your high blood pressure issue. They take the pill, their blood pressure issue goes away. Let's say 30% get better. Let's say over in the medication, 40% get better. Well, the researchers now have to subtract 30% because maybe 30% of the medic medication people got better through thought too. They also use mind to heal themselves. So really only 10% of the medication people got better. And that's good enough to put it on the market at, you know, 50 bucks a pill. So really what hypnotherapy helps you do is utilise your mind to heal your body, which we know it can do because of the placebo effect. Every research study that gets published in a peer reviewed medical or scientific journal has to have that control group because they know mind will heal the body. So that's what we do with therapeutic hypnosis, tap into the healing power that you already have. The, the big unfortunateness, if that's a word around. Therapeutic hypnosis is kind of the misnomers, the myths, the legends that, the, the baggage that comes with hypnosis. And that word from what people have. Seen in movies, I'm thinking 1950s American television. Yeah, yeah, well, and there's a certain aspect to the entertainment side too. You know, even nowadays, Las Vegas shows and comedy clubs and, and you know, people see videos on YouTube, people doing silly things on stage after being hypnotised by this person. I mean, let's just assume that that's real. It's not the improv troupe in town. It's not a local acting troupe. Let's say everybody there really moves into a relaxed state, a trance state, if you will, and act silly. They dance like Michael Jackson, they sing like Elvis Presley, whatever the gag is, you know, cluck like a chicken, bark like a dog, pretend you're on a roller coaster. The reason they're doing that is because they want to do it. They volunteered to be up on stage. They want to do that. Why? Because they're an exhibitionist. They're extrovert. They want to. Want to act silly in front of their friends. They want to be funny. They want a funny video to put on Instagram or tick tock or YouTube or something. And so they volunteered to be up there. They. They bought a ticket to the show, they sat down in their seat, the hypnotist comes out, hey, everybody, we're here to have a fun night. Who wants to get up on stage and have a great show? And a bunch of people raise their hand. And who's that hypnotist going to pick? The people? Not raising their hands, no. He's going to pick the people who are super excited to be on the stage because they're going to be the best volunteers to have a great show. Because he's there to entertain. He's getting paid really well to entertain people for an hour, hour and a half. And so he picks the people who are enthusiastic, who wants to be up there, and then they all sit down in their seats up on stage. He goes down the line, what's your name? Where are you from? And do you want to go into hypnosis and have a fun time? And they say yes. They say yes like seven times before this guy makes them sing like Elvis Presley or dance like Michael Jackson or whatever. And so they want to be there, they want to do it. So what if you want to heal? What if you want to rid yourself of that hurt and pain, whether it's emotional pain, whether it's physical pain. We know the placebo effect works. We know that hypnosis works for pain control because they use it in hospitals. They use it in dentist office. You can go on YouTube and watch videos of people getting root canals because they're allergic to lidocaine and Novocaine. They're getting root canals using only hypnosis, putting themselves so far under that they can just open their mouths and start drilling into their teeth shortly. I understand. But look, at the end of the day, though, most people who come to a hypnotherapist now, do you prefer the word hypnotist or hypnotherapist? So I get it, right? I like, I like hypnotherapist. I, I always, when I hear the word hypnotist, I always think of the shows and the entertainment side of things. Okay, all right, I get that. You know, I, I hear a lot of the old school guys, the old school teachers, they still use hypnotist, but. I think it's just, yeah, understand that people come to, to you, but they have to be prepared or their mind has to be willing to accept that they may be hypnotised. In my profession, a lot of particularly men get dragged along by their wives and they sit there with their arms crossed and they don't even want to be there. And. Yeah, yeah, you know, and people able to be hypnotised? Oh, no, no, not at all. No. If you don't want to be hypnotised, like, in fact, you can even watch some of Those videos on YouTube of the shows of the entertainment side of things. People will volunteer to get up on stage and they get up on stage and then they start having second thoughts because there's a hundred, five hundred people staring at them now and they start getting stage fright. And so they won't be able to go into a more relaxed state. And the big lights are on them, they're people staring at them and now thinking, now I'm going to act silly, I'm going to do all these, this funny stuff up on stage and they start getting stage fright, they start getting the stress response. That's not a great state to be in, to be able to do that kind of work. So they'll actually be excused from the stage. There's actually a great TED Talk. I forget the guy's name, but I think if you just go to whatever the website is, ted.com or whatever it is, ted.org and look for hypnosis or hypnotherapy or something. But this guy is doing rapid induction and that's his TED Talk. He has 18 minutes to discuss rapid induction. He, he does a quick kind of hypnosis session for everybody in the audience and then ask who went super deep, who wants to come up on stage? And just. I can, I can demonstrate rapid induction. And rapid induction is great for, for trauma, it's great for sports. There needs to be a rapport though, in, in sports because you're out on the field and you're going to get somebody back in a more focused, motivated mindset but, you know, it's great for trauma and things like that. That's always doing this demonstration. This guy's a master. He's been doing this work 30 years. He knows how to do it. So he picks 12 people. We'll get onto that. We'll get back onto that. But this podcast is about talking about personal experiences. And really, it's. It's about. It's called a patient story because, you know, I always felt that it's so important for people to tell their stories so people who have similar issues know that they're not unique in the world and know that there's other people that have been down that track and there's help available generally. Craig, you became a hypnotherapist because you had gone through your own personal issues, and those issues were really around your youth and teenage years where you went through depression and anxiety. Can you just talk us through that at what sort of age all of that started? If, you know, any triggers that started that and what it was like for you, you know, what were the symptoms? How were you relating to other people? How were you feeling about yourself at that time? Yeah, the. The depression, anxiety really started around the age of 15 or so, maybe 14. And, you know, things weren't great in the home, and my mom struggled with depression, suicidal thoughts. And so whether I was mirroring it from what I saw in the home or there's a genetic component or combination of both, I started struggling around 14, 15 years old. And this is the 1980s. This is before the Internet. This is before SSRI medications, selected TER, serotonin reuptake inhibitors, Prozac and things. So really, as a. In the 1980s and before, really, what you had was talk therapy, whatever book you could find at the bookstore or the library. And as a teenager, you're not going to probably either do either of those things because it's. There wasn't a lot of information out there about that, about going through depression and anxiety. I don't think schools really understood how to deal with that. And they didn't have a lot of the resources they. They now have in high schools to help support kids who are dealing with. With, you know, trauma in their lives. And so I just kind of held onto it. You know, moving into the 1990s, it just became this sort of heaviness, like a. Like a heavy coat that you wear that maybe isn't so comfortable, but you just. This is who you. Who you are. This is what I thought it was going to be. I didn't know Any better. You know, it's sort of like, you know, that, that old thing of. How do you describe colour to a blind person? How do you, how do you describe happiness and joy and ease and freedom and peace to somebody who has, has not experienced that or at least hasn't experienced it experienced in a long time? And it was really the birth of my son in the year 2000. I really decided I needed to get my act together. I really need to get my life sorted out. And mainly because if he started struggling with depression, you know, I. If it's genetic thing, he's screwed. If, if he's, if it's mirrored in the home, he's screwed. I'm depressed, my mother's depressed. And so what was I going to be able to. How was I going to be able to help him? And so I thought I better start getting it together. And at that point the Internet was just really starting to blossom. A lot of information you could get your hands on and of course a lot of books out at that point again, library, the bookstore. And I started working on myself and I'm looking at extra, you know, all the techniques and exercises and, and strategies you can use. One of them was hypnotherapy because in the books I was reading, the articles online, the articles in magazines I was finding the blogs and all that. When they were discussing personal development, when they're discussing how to grow as a person, they'd have their bullet points or their, have their top five list or top ten list of things you can do to change your life. And usually they're all different except for one. One was always hypnotherapy. Every single time somebody always mentioned hypnotherapy. So what is that all about? There's got to be. If that's a common denominator in all personal growth and personal development articles and books and things, what's it all about? So I started researching that, looking into that and I started working with somebody and it helped, it really helped me because what's interesting about this work is it's not that, you know, like when I'm working with somebody, it's not that I'm going to fix anybody or that hypnotherapy in and of itself is going to fix anybody. You're going to fix yourself. Again, we're tapping into the placebo effect. And that was, that's what I was able to do for myself. I imagine you've. It's so important that the therapist and the client or the patient, whichever way you Go needs to build a rapport. And without that rapport, does hypnotherapy work? Because there's a lot of trust in, There's a lot of trust involved in what you do. Yeah, yeah. And you're, you're absolutely right, 100%. The rapport needs to be there. Otherwise it's, it's not going to work. They're not going to trust to relax enough. But oftentimes people are in so much pain. Like I, I felt myself in, in so much pain, you're just willing to try it. You're just willing to go. Usually the people I see, you know, I'm the last on the list. And, and they've tried everything else. They've tried talk therapy and for whatever reason, maybe it didn't work for them. They spent years and years talking about the situation and they still hurt, they're still in pain. They, whatever they did and tried other modalities, medications didn't work. So what else is there? Well, there's hypnotherapy, so try that. And so generally I help getting rapport if through a phone call beforehand, whether it's a zoom call or a phone call, and start talking to them, answering any questions I can, explaining what it's all about. And. But yeah, you're like, you're, you're absolutely right. There needs to be a, a trust. And I think a lot of that comes from my side and sending compassion and, and empathy towards a person's situation. In terms of what I was going through, it's, it's is identifying the pain in the body. And I don't mean the physical pain and, but though that's part of it. But that's what you're going through. That's where the emotional pain. Where do you hold the emotional pain? And what's fascinating about. And what, how I went through it, you know, some 22, 23 years ago, whatever it was, is that you feel where the pain is. And through various techniques and exercises, you let it go and you just drop it. And it can be as literal, if you will, literally metaphoric, if that's a thing of pulling it out and letting it go. And what's fascinating about this work, and that's what I found fascinating when I was doing it, it seems like something that shouldn't work, seems like something that's, that's so out there. But again, you're working with the placebo effect and so you're giving instructions to your mind. And what's fascinating is the mind can't tell the difference between what's real and what's imagined. And that's why a nightmare is so. So scary even it can be something ridiculous. It'll change your physiology and turn on the stress response. And so what I was finding with myself is that in my pain, if you can feel where it is, you can actually, you know, do something about it. Yeah, I find it interesting. You said it was so out there, and I. And I wonder where that came from, because hypnotherapy has been around for a very, very long time. The year 1027, there's recorded sessions in Egypt and Greece and throughout the Mediterranean. And through the ages, it's certainly been around in different cultures in different countries, and people have added experiences to it. And in. In 1976, somebody called Milton Erickson talked about separating the conscious and the unconscious mind and how the unconscious mind is more creative, so it's easier to work in that area and that can affect the conscious mind. All of that is incredibly fascinating. And as I said earlier, it is scientifically proven to be so, so effective. Yet here we are. I don't know about you in America, but in Australia it doesn't get prescribed very much by the average doctor. Oh, not at all. Why. Why is something so effective and proven to be so successful, yet people don't say, go and see hypnotherapists. What's going on? Yeah, I'm not really sure. Again, I think a lot of it has to do with the TV shows and the movies that use it to zombify people. So it's like, how are you going to get Jason Bourne to assassinate the Prime Minister of England? I was like, oh, we'll hypnotise him. And it saves the movie people, the producers, a lot of time and effort and money in filming how to train somebody to become an assassin. But, you know, like you're saying, there's so much information out there, you know, Sigmund Freud was a hypnotherapist. He started off studying hypnosis back in the late 1800s. There's two schools of. Of hypnosis in Vienna, and he was at one of them. And I think he. For various reasons that are probably too much to go into now, he wanted to move more into the analytical psychotherapy that he helped develop. And there's a lot more control in that. There's a lot more. It was, strangely enough, there's a lot more control as. As a psychotherapist than there is as a hypnotherapist, even though it seems like the other way around. But it's also, you know, you're sitting there for 80, 90, 100 sessions over two years talking about the pain and the suffering that you may have gone through, the trauma you've gone through, hypnotherapy, let's just let it go. Let's, let's just deal with it. And that's what Melton Erickson would do. Yeah. And, you know, there's some extraordinary articles he, he has written about some extraordinary cases throughout the 60s and 70s. And just through language, just through instructing the subconscious mind, you can create incredible, not only emotional healing, mental healing, but also physical healing. And it's too bad that it's not out there. There's. That, that isn't being prescribed because there's so much research out there. There's just. Speaking of the placebo effect, there's that research study maybe you've heard of, but there's actually BBC documentary about it people can watch on YouTube. It's about this surgeon here in the United States from Texas some years ago, and he's an arthroscopic surgeon and he was working on knees and he wanted to kind of figure out whether the scraping method or the flushing out method was better, who healed faster, who had less pain after surgery, that kind of thing. He wanted to publish it because he's going to do all this work and effort to do this research, and if you're going to publish it, you need a control group. So he actually had people get fake surgery, fake knee surgery. And so he had the one group doing the flushing, one group doing the scraping, and one group getting fake surgery. Meaning he willed people into the operating room with nurses and technicians, and they would. It's kind of done with those little video cameras, you know, so he had somebody else's knee surgery up on the screens. He'd make a little incision on the person's knee, actually put them to sleep, but still pretend to do an operation for 40 minutes in case they woke up and then didn't do anything other than make his little, little cut in their knees, sew it back up, and then get him into pre op. And those people in the group who got fake surgery, who got the placebo surgery, got healed as fast and as, as powerfully as those people who actually got the surgery. Yeah, these are people using walkers and canes and now they're playing basketball with their grandchildren. And this BBC documentary crew followed them for like two years. And they didn't know for two years that they got fake surgery and they Healed themselves. It's amazing why that is. There's. It's stunning. And. And you would think that helping people do that, but honestly, the reason why I think it doesn't happen is because it's not very lucrative. There's no money in it. Yeah. There's nobody in teaching somebody how to heal themselves. So it seems almost like the acceptance of pain, physical or mental pain, and understanding it and letting it go, that also sounds a lot like various forms of meditation. Do you think that's a fair comment? Yeah, yeah, I think it. I think it is. I think with meditation, though, you are one. Yes. Quieting down the nervous system, quieting down the mind, but for the. The effect of creating peace within the body and mind. I think a lot of people struggle with meditation, you know, especially the forms that maybe are at least famous here in the United States that people practise, like Zen meditation, where you're just having your thoughts float away. Obviously, a lot of research done about that and the healing qualities around that, but that. But what we do in therapeutic hypnosis is very different. In fact, I've had people tell me I'm not a very good meditator. I say, great, because we actually can use an active mind and that may actually work better. So while maybe if you hook somebody up to some biofeedback, looking at their heart rate and their blood pressure and brain waist state and everything, meditation probably looks very close to hypnosis. However, instead of just watching your thoughts float away, what we're going to do is use the imagination and play Pretend. Yeah. Because we might actually just want to pretend. Where do you feel that hurt? Pretend you could feel that hurt somewhere in your body. And what does it look like? What colour is it? What shape is it? What does it feel like? Because these are all clues your subconscious mind is giving you to identify it so you can pretend you take it out. And if your mind can't tell the difference between what's real and what's imagined, there's. There's where the healing happens with you and your experience. How did you. After two or three sessions, how did you start to feel a shift within yourself? Was it almost like a conscious shift? We saying, wow, everything is being explained to me, I'm understanding with greater depth? Or was it an unconscious shift, saying something like, I feel so much better within myself, but I just don't understand why? I think the second. Because there's a lightness that happens, at least for me. I'm sure people describe it in different ways, but for me, well, when you release that heaviness, when you, when you take off that, and this is just an analogy, but you take off that heavy coat, you just feel lighter. It's sort of like if you've ever gone backpacking, you know, out into nature, you're going to camp and you walk, you hike for, for seven, eight hours. Do you want to get way back there, way outside of civilization so you can see the stars and just be one with nature? And you're walking with this 25 pound backpack and after a while you just don't notice it. It's not comfortable, but it's familiar and it just, after a while it's like, oh, this is the way it is. I'm just hiking with this uncomfortable 25 pound, 30 pound backpack on my back. And then when you get to the spot you want to be, or next to a beautiful stream or beautiful field or some, somewhere, and you take off that backpack and you just drop it. That's what it felt like for me. Just felt like you dropped this heavy weight. And, and what's extraordinary about you will heal in the way that you need to heal. And so, you know, I can talk about my personal experience. Everybody else's experience, you know, will probably be different. Even though maybe some of the same kind of similar techniques are being used for the healing. You'll heal in the way that your subconscious mind needs you to heal. You may not know what that is consciously, but that's what's extraordinary about this. We're not using your conscious mind. And you know, in fact, I've even worked with people who were doing the work and they keep insisting that they're not, which is, which is extraordinary because they're dropping. What do you mean? Sorry, I don't understand. It's like they're, they're, they keep having this little voice in their head trying to convince them that it's not happening, that it's not that easy and they'll spend this whole time, you know, this one part of them is like doing the healing work and we're going through it and all of a sudden it's like, I don't think I'm hypnotised. I'm like, but you've done the work. Yeah, you know, it, it's, it's this interesting aspect of mind that maybe is a little bit afraid of change. Sure. What has done the work, man? Do you send them home with homework or, or. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Exercise or. I don't understand what doing the work means. Well, well, in terms of What I meant in that aspect, but I meant doing the healing work, whether it's a visualisation technique or it's some sort of healing technique, we're doing within a session. But it's good that you brought up the idea of homework because, look, I mean, what you practise, you get better at. And so what I liked to help people with, because what I found in my own life is all these techniques I was learning back in the early 2000s and there's tonnes of studies, hundreds of studies out there that show exercise will relieve chronic depression just. Just as much as medication might in some people. True. But you just don't exercise once, you know, if you want to get your body in shape. It's not that you get to go to a personal trainer once and just work out at the gym once or go to spin class once. You have to do that multiple times a week, if not something every day. And so what about your mental health, emotional health? So in my own work, what I found that helped me was just practising these techniques. And, yeah, it took took a bit for me to. To really wire that into my system. But it was one morning I woke up and I was just kind of lying in bed, you know, just kind of watching the sun move through the window. And I just realised I hadn't been depressed in a while because I had kind of reset my services and literally wired my brain differently. Yeah. And so not only is there the healing work that we do in a session, you. You can have all the happiness and joy and confidence you want, but there is practise around that. Are you aware of any research where hypnotherapy has activated any degree of neuroplasticity in the brain, physically changed pathways? I don't. That would be an interesting one to look up, because I would. I'm sure, again, even we know that can happen through multiple studies. And I don't know that specifically. People have researched using it with hypnotherapy. I'm sure they probably have at this point, but I know back in the 90s, there was a research study where they were looking at piano players because they wanted to watch the brain learn something new. And the researchers picked piano and they had people come in to learn how to play piano, learn the simple little chords and tech exercises and little songs you learn. As a beginner, they also had a. The control group who didn't learn anything. Because when you're doing this kind of research, compare and contrast. Here's a brain that doesn't do Anything. Here's the brain that's learning play piano, where the difference is at the end of a week. But they also had a group that only pretended to play piano. So they showed them simple little scales and exercise little songs you. You learn as a beginner. But instead of playing the piano and practising the piano every day, they sat down in a recliner or on the couch, closed their eyes and pretended to play the piano. And at the end of a week, they met, you know, looked at everybody's brain again, this mri, and the control group. Of course, nothing changed to their brain. They didn't learn anything new, they didn't do anything different. No big mystery there. The group that actually played piano, put their hands on the keyboard, worked the keyboard with their fingers, heard the music with their ears, read the sheet music with their eyeballs, developed new neural network and the part of the brain for music, brain cells connecting together, part of the brain for learning. And music. Of course they did. For learning music. Again, no big mystery there. But what's extraordinary is the group who only pretended to play piano also developed the same neural network in the same part of the brain. The brain can't tell the difference between what's real and what's imagined. So you can literally wire that into your brain. Whether you want to call it guided visualisation or meditation or hypnotherapy or neuro linguistic programming or Ericksonian hypnosis or whatever you want to call it, just by playing pretend, you can literally wire that into your brain. And we see this with Olympic athletes, professional athletes, you know, they will spend part of their day practising whatever event, whether running or swimming or skiing or whatever they're doing gymnastics, but then they'll do mental rehearsal and they'll sit in a recliner on the couch and they'll just mentally go through what, whatever sports they're doing because they know it'll literally wire that success into their brains. Yeah, you know. Do your clients talk to you about changes in the way they dream or sleep after several sessions? Not specifically, unless I'm working with them with something like nightmares. Just curious because of the unconscious mind working away there. And I was just curious as to, you know, whether that was impacting dreams or not in your work. What would be the most common sort of person you would see? Why do most people come to you? Most people come to me because they're in so much pain. Emotional pain, mental pain, physical pain. If you struggling with chronic pain in your life, talk therapies, pushed a lot medication, obviously is pushed a lot. It's easier to do in a hospital setting. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And. And, you know, and it's also, I'm sure doctors know that they prescribe exercise for somebody's depression. They're probably not going to do it. No. That's unfortunate, too. We know that people need to be open and willing and build rapport to be a good recipient of hypnotherapy, for want of a better word. But in some other research, it suggests that 5 to 10% of people are highly susceptible to hypnosis. What does that mean? What are they talking about when they say 5 to 10% are highly susceptible? What does that mean for the rest of the clients? I don't. I don't buy that at all. Okay. I think, honestly, I only see that with university studies. And, and I, I don't mean to say this in a derogatory way. Yep. And it may come off like this, but I. I only see that with the intellectuals. And they like their tests and they like their quizzes and they like their statistics. And I don't buy that for one minute because everybody's had some sort of experience with hypnosis and many people can identify them through you, Daniel. And a lot of your listeners can identify with driving somewhere. They're coming home and they start thinking about the next day at work and the presentation they have to give or the PowerPoint they need to get together, or they got family coming over on the weekend, they need to get the house together, they need to go shopping, and all of a sudden they find themselves in their driveway and they don't remember the last seven or eight blocks. They get themselves in that driving hypnosis. They just hypnotise themselves. Just watching TV puts you in a hypnotic trance state. It puts you in the alpha brainwave state, being bored in a meeting at work. Somebody's going on about the counting and the numbers for the month and fourth quarter results or whatever they're talking about, and it's boring. You just start staring out the window. You just put yourself in a hypnosis high school math class, whatever class it was for you back in school, and you just start staring out the window because it's just boring for you. You've just put yourself in a hypnosis trance state. We all do it. We do it multiple times a day. I don't. So I don't get this. Only a certain amount of people can be hypnotised. It's like you hypnotise yourself multiple times a day. In fact, the reason you're probably interested in coming to see a hypnotherapist like myself is because you're hurting and you don't know why. You have chronic anxiety, you have anger, you, you, you, you have rage at the drop of a hat. You have back pain, lower back pain, and no doctor or physical therapist can figure out why. You've already hypnotised yourself to create a physical response to an external trigger that you don't even know what it is. You just, all sudden at work, find yourself enraged or really anxious or afraid and you don't know why that is. You're already hypnotised. And so really what we do is dehypnotize people. In your case, as you, you went through the sessions as a young, young man. And how long does that hold for? At what point do you think you're, you're kind of. Is cured a good word, or do you have to keep using continual hypnotherapy boosters? That's a good question. In my case, I went to about four or five sessions over the course of a couple of months and I, I dropped it. I felt I was done because I have changed the instructions within my subconscious mind. Because really, the subconscious mind, that's computer code. And let's say I, you know, put 2 plus 2 equals 5 in my, the computer code in my subconscious mind doesn't matter how much I type on, you know, or, you know, want to change it or talk to people about changing. I have to go in that computer code and change it to 2 +2 equals 4. Yeah. And once it's 2 +2 equals 4, why would it ever go back to 2 +2 equals 5? Now, that's not to say there aren't challenges in life and you have to continually work on yourself just because, you know, you, you know, you have knee surgery. We just mentioned that a little while ago. You know, knee surgery, your knees fix you, but that doesn't mean you, you can't, you have to still work out, you still have to take care of your body and things like that. So to me, you can heal the pain fairly safely and gently and, and pretty quickly, considering a lot of people go to talk therapy for two, three, four, five years. So we're talking weeks and months, not years and decades to do this work. And, but there is, like this, you can heal it, but then you want to keep yourself in shape, so there's still work to be done. I know the risk of side effects and adverse reactions to hypnotherapy are very small, but a small percentage of people report things like dizziness. What do you think's going on there? I think it's just resetting the nervous system. And I think I was working with somebody today actually and they just felt, they felt they had a smile on their face. And they also say, I'm feeling kind of tired and I'm. And I said, yeah, it might be a good time to take a 12 hour nap to reset your entire system. You just dropped decades worth of trauma. Yeah. You know, again, it's sort of like you're taking it off that heavy 30 pound backpack after hiking for eight hours. Yeah, you may feel a little lightheaded and a little, yeah, I better get my balance here. But as you acclimate to that new way of being over the course of hours and days, you just feel lighter, you feel better and like, oh, this is the new way of being. I can't, I imagine being sort of like an astronaut walking on the moon. Oh, this is different, this is weird. But you get used to it and now you understand how to do it. And so, yeah, I think people, as they release and let go, especially if they're, they're letting go, if there's been abuse growing up and they're releasing that and letting that go and healing that, yeah, they're going to feel different and it may be a little discombobulating when they come out and they feel lighter, they feel, man, maybe even more joyful and happy and they've reset their nervous system literally and rewired their brain a new way. So is there anybody that's not suitable for hypnotherapy? Yeah, if you have a extraordinary mental illness like schizophrenia, something like that, if you are unable to maintain a sense of reality, I think that probably be the line, you know, and even with a schizophrenic you can teach them how to relax the body and mind using visualisation techniques. But in terms of doing the deeper healing work, I don't think you're going to be able to deal with schizophrenia with therapeutic hypnosis. It might be under the guidance of a psychiatrist, psychotherapist, you may be a part of the team to help in this way or that way. But what about if people are on some sort of medication like, you know, SSRIs we mentioned earlier, or benzodiazepine type drugs or even natural medicines that affect, physically affect the mind. Has there been any work that uses hypnotherapy together with these things? Is it safe? Oh yeah. Oh yeah, it is safe. Again, you're not really doing anything you're not doing already. It's just you're doing it in a more positive and healing way. Now, of course, you want to be careful if somebody's on blood thinners or some sort of blood pressure medication. You know, you want to be careful with the language you're using. You don't want to start racing their heart or slowing down their. You know, of course, there could be issues around, around that. And a lot of medications have side effects, of course, which may be causing some of the anxiety and depression somebody's struggling with. So that, that's an interesting case when, you know the medication you're on, you're on is causing the depression and anxiety. Can you use hypnosis to instruct the brain to, you know, get rid of those side effects? That would be really interesting. I mean, how powerful is a subconscious mind? There's your PhD. Yeah, the answers. There he goes. I mean, there's a, a great quote and see if I can find it here real quick. But there's a great quote by Dr. Andrew Weil, and he's at the University of Arizona, which is in Tucson. And a lot of people will know him from his books from the early 2000s, eight weeks to optimum Health. And he's has a great big beard before. Great big. Yeah, yeah, I remember that guy. Trendy. Well, he's. He's down there at the medical school at the University of Arizona in Tucson, and he has a great quote which I like to send to people. He's the clinical professor of medicine and he's head of the director of the Centre for Integrative Medicine down there at the university. And he has this great quote which I just pulled up here, and he says, I've recommended hypnotherapy to help ease chronic pain, lessen the side effects of chemotherapy, alleviate symptoms of autoimmune disease, and counteract anxiety and sleep disorders. Hypnotherapy can also be used to improve performance skills as a form of sedation for medical and dental procedures, and even to stop haemorrhaging in accident victims in general. I believe that no condition is out of bounds for trying hypnotherapy on. And so. And even I got another quick quote here, since it's right here. This is Dr. Dere Barrett, which is. Who is a psycho psychologist and faculty at Harvard Medical School. And her quote is, I found that many complaints, smoking, overeating, test anxiety, public speaking phobia and chronic physical pain respond more dramatically to hypnosis than other forms of psychotherapy I was using. That's faculty of Harvard Medical School. So, yeah, yeah, these people are using it and seeing extraordinary results and. And so, you know, depending on what the issue is. And of course, if they're being treated by other doctors and things, you want to work in tandem as a. As a team, but Dr. Weil says no condition is out of bounds for trying hypnotherapy. On. In your case, you. You went through sessions, you obviously found tremendous relief and change in your own life. What was the next step to you becoming a practitioner of hypnotherapy or hypnotherapist yourself? Once I dealt with myself and I was experimenting and it took me a bit on and off for several years to the point where I kind of started working with hypnotherapy. And then I felt changed, I felt different. And I also realised I had this toolbox filled with tools, techniques, strategy, skills I had learned over the years, just experimenting and practising with different techniques and exercises. And I came across a book contest by Hay House, our subsidiary of Hay House called Hierophant. And me and a couple other friends were getting together and figuring out how we could change the world in our own way. We had a little mastermind group and I said, hey, there's this, this writing contest. I've never written a book before. And they said, and they encouraged me and I thought about, well, I'll just start. So I just started writing chapters. And it was one of these contests where, you know, start off with 200 people, and then the next month it was 100 people. And they would keep whittling it down until it was just like five of us left. And I. I got into the top five and it was a book on depression, but called depression 180. And that led to me being able to write a chapter for Hay House and one, a book they published, I think, in 2011, 2012, called 30 Pearls of Wisdom, Jack Canfield or sort of things, which was super cool, because then I started the publicity thing and I started talking with a lot of different doctors and therapists about depression with a telesummit. Back in the day, you had a telesummit. And then I just got the opportunity later in life to be able to study hypnosis and go to a great school and focus my attention on training to become a hypnotherapist, because that, that's what helped me a lot. And I like the idea that I'm not going to fix anybody and hypnotherapy and of a self not going to fix you, you are going to fix yourself. And I really wanted to put that out into the world. I found a great school, great training facility called the Hypnotherapy Academy of America here in New Mexico. Here in the United States. People from all over the country, all over the world come to this school and it's extraordinary training and really intensive work. And I was drawn to it from my own healing. I think like a lot of people, they get drawn to the healing arts, if you. If you will, whether it's. It's psychotherapy or physical therapy or something else, because of their own pain that they resolve through that modality. Yeah. And that's what I did with me, that's. I felt the most healing came from hypnotherapy and, and plus adding on these techniques to help strengthen and my. My peace and my joy and my. And my happiness. And I wanted to do it. And I finally was able to kind of arrange my life so I could go to school. Well, your passion and knowledge shines through, so thank you for that. Thank you. Daniel, do you have a website that we can. Yeah. I live in Arizona here in the United States and the name of my practise is called Arizona Integrative Hypnotherapy. And I live in Flagstaff, Arizona, up in the mountains near the Grand Canyon in Sedona, Arizona. So if you just Google searched Flagstaff Hypnosis, you would find me at Arizona Integrative Hypnotherapy. Great work. Really interesting topic and I'm very grateful for your time. Thank you. Oh, thank you, Daniel. I've been looking forward to this and it was fun talking with you. Okay, take care.