I continue to circle back to this talk with David Spiegel, M.D. on self-hypnosis for sleep, anxiety, habit change, etc.

“The subconscious mind makes up 95 percent of the brain, while the conscious mind is only five percent. If we can learn how to access our subconscious, we have the power to unlock our full potential, personally and professionally.”

on hypnosis–> “I’m not teaching loss of control, I’m teaching control.”

on pain management –> “the strain in pain lies mostly in the brain” –> pain is composed of signals that come from the body where there may be tissue damage but it’s also how the brain interprets it.

Pain is a subjective experience, of course, and according to researchers (shared in “Hurts So Good”), people who have mainly had few and negative experiences with perceptions of pain, tend to have less of a pain tolerance. Whereas folks who experienced more pain and further have been able to change their perceptions of pain through context (safety, lack of actual threat, etc) have a ‘higher tolerance’ or even the ability to find it stimulating in ‘positive’ ways.