Welcome back to another episode of Teach 2 Dumb Dudes with Bobby and Bento! We're talking hypnosis today with Adam Jones. Adam is a hypnotherapist that uses hypnosis to change habits. Want to quit smoking? Adam can kick your habit in just 2 sessions! Listen to find out all the other things Adam could change in your life through hypnotherapy.
Check out Adam at www.squawklikeachicken.com and www.olympiahypnosis.com
Welcome back to another episode of Teach 2 Dumb Dudes with Bobby and Bento! We're talking hypnosis today with Adam Jones. Adam is a hypnotherapist that uses hypnosis to change habits. Want to quit smoking? Adam can kick your habit in just 2 sessions! Listen to find out all the other things Adam could change in your life through hypnotherapy.
Check out Adam at www.squawklikeachicken.com and www.olympiahypnosis.com
What's up everybody. Welcome to another episode of teach to dumb dudes today. We're talking to Adam Jones from Adam Jones hypnosis. So Adam's a hypnotist. He does a variety of hypnotic things. So he does hypnotherapy he does stage shows and yeah, it was a pretty interesting story. I'm not really one that believes in this stuff, but you know, Bobby does.
Rob:What do you, what do you, what'd you think Bobby Bobby always believes? No, it's really cool. I think that hypnotherapy is actually a a pretty cool topic. Something that I'm certainly interested in myself, but I think you know, it could serve a
Bento:purpose. Do you think he could fix your oral fixation?
Rob:No. No. Honestly, I still smoke. Right. And I honestly think 100%. I want to talk about smoking 100%. He could replace smoking with something else I want to quit. There are plenty of reasons that I want
Bento:to quit. We should do a special teach student news episode where you get hypnotized. Then we see the results.
Adam:I mean, I would. Hello. Hey Adam, how are you? Good. How you
Bento:doing? Good.
Rob:Oh, my God, look you, you can get a shirt. It's just hypnotist on it. Is that so that's terrific. That's terrific. I'm Rob by the way. Nice to meet you, Adam.
Adam:Hey Joe.
Rob:Yeah,
Bento:so y'all doing good. I have
Rob:to do doing for you at Alabama,
Adam:Alabama. Currently. I am moving to Olympia Washington next month.
Rob:Yeah.
Bento:I envy that. I got, I love the Northwest. Like I've always wanted to live there.
Adam:Yeah. It's I went there for the first time last summer and post COVID. It was just kinda like if I'm ever going to live somewhere else, that's not here. I might as well get to it. So
Bento:is it for business or just just moving out there.
Adam:It's a little bit of both Washington and the Pacific Northwest is a bit more open to things like hypnosis
Bento:then right. Then I try and say,
Adam:Alabama's not open is, you know, it's been way more open than I thought it would be. Honestly, really. There are a significantly high number of people here who think I might be possessed by Satan.
Bento:Yeah. Right. A couple of hundred, a couple hundred years ago. They'd probably drown you or something
Rob:probably. Yeah, probably more like 50 years ago.
Adam:Yeah, actually it's still technically illegal on the books to do hypnosis in Alabama public schools. It is against the teacher administrative code. Wow.
Rob:Yeah. I wonder if there's any there's ever been any attempts that led to that law.
Adam:Yeah. It's part of a law that also ban things like yoga and meditation and all sorts of other things, because they got kind of lumped in with like new agey, a cultic type,
Bento:right?
Adam:Yeah. Yeah.
Bento:Meditation, yoga.
Rob:Yeah. Cool, man. Well, Hey, well, thanks so much for coming on and talking to us, we really appreciate you taking the time to come, which is something about hypnosis, hypnosis and hypnotherapy. So yeah, we're really excited to have you on it's something that you know, I've scratched the surface of and, and learned a little bit about in my time. But it's certainly one of those things I've never tried. I'm interested kind of what you, what you tell people as, you know, as a hypnotherapist, like how do you get them involved? Like how do you, you know, what's, what's the hook.
Adam:Yeah. Yeah. So with the therapy side of things it, it really is what is the goal that you want to achieve? What is the obstacle you want to overcome? And how can we get you there? Essentially what we're doing with a hypnotherapy type thing, we're engaging in a rapid process of self-directed neuroplasticity. So all of the ways in which all of the neurons in your brain connect to each other to form patterns. So for a person who, for example, has a spider. So this person has neurons that are connected between a panic response, which probably runs through the amygdala and the image of a spider
Rob:usually is that like the fight or flight
Adam:response? Yeah, it can be. Yeah. Yeah. So if I can find a way to cause those neurons to make new connections, then I changed the way that the brain experiences that stimulus. Sure. Yeah. So that now when the image of a spider comes up, the person no longer feels the fear, but they're able to have a much more rational response. So if we define a phobia, for example, as an irrational fear we can allow the unnecessary fear and the irrationality of it to go away by reconnecting those neurons to new pathways that are more useful for someone Then the fear that they used to experience most phobias start when someone is really, really young, definitely way before, like the age of seven. And at the age of three, it's probably a useful thing. When you don't have a understanding of how the differentiation between a black widow and a jumping spider, it may be a useful thing for you to have that fear response. But by the time you're 30, if you see a jumping spider and you're having a panic attack over it, that's no longer useful for you. Right? So if we can redirect the neuro-plasticity, if we can make use of the neuro-plasticity to pick your brain, we can form these new pathways that the more you go down, then the more there's old pathways kind of fade away, almost like a pathway through woods and cutting a new trail through a piece of wood. The other one that used to get used by everybody. Eventually we'll become overgrown and forgotten about, as everybody starts to use this
Bento:new, could it go negative though? Could it make you afraid of have a fear of something else, something different?
Adam:Oh, sure. Yeah. Yeah. I always tell people, you know, tell me what you want, not what you don't want, because the list of things that you don't want is infinite. I don't want to be afraid of spiders. Okay. How about I make you afraid of butterflies? You know, like that, what, what is it that you want? So the more we can frame it in positive terms, as opposed to negative the easier it becomes for it to be a better outcome for you in the future. If we can frame the goal around, here's the ideal that I want to get to, then we can start moving the focus of your mind towards that. And I mean, you can, you can, I can do a phobia cure and have someone, you know, they can walk out of my session and see a spider and not have a panic response. The more they act on that, the further that, that new group, that new pathway is going to get carpet.
Rob:Right.
Adam:But that doesn't mean they have to go, right. That doesn't mean they have to go like pick up spiders and hang out with them. But like the more they, you know, get used to it and the more they act on that, the easier it's going to be. But yeah, changing
Rob:that automatic response. Yeah,
Adam:exactly. Exactly. I come at it from the perspective of everybody is already in some kind of trends. If you have a phobia, for example, you are in a phobia trend. My job is really to de hypnotize you from that one and put you into a better one. Yeah, it gives you the freedom you need.
Rob:If you don't mind talk to us for a minute about that state of trends. Right. Cause I think that that's like a really interesting concept. Right. And so if I may, I'll take a crack at it. Right. You're driving to work and when you're driving, you're consciously, all right. I'm leaving my house. I get on the road and the way I go, and then before, you know, it you're at work and technically, you know, you drove to work, but you don't really know point a to point B as much as you in what's called a trans yes.
Adam:Yes. So we even call that highway hypnosis. Right. And then you, you sit there and all of a sudden, you kind of realize, you know, for the last. Five 10 minutes. I've been driving an incredibly heavy piece of machinery and have no idea what's happened. I speed in the world. Hopefully I have not broken any laws or, you know, hit an acute for animals. And it's a perfectly safe way to drive because essentially what happens is your conscious mind takes a break and your unconscious mind comes to the fore and it takes over. So if we define the unconscious mind, has all of the things that you are not actively thinking about, right? Like breathing, like breathing, your heart valve, synchronization, your liver, enzymes, even simple things like reading, writing, talking, walking and your conscious mind is all of your conscious mind can handle about seven pieces of information at once. So right now
Bento:it's only four.
Rob:Yeah, man. I'm a little, I'm going to be like three.
Adam:So right now y'all are thinking about what you're thinking about. Right. But you can suddenly be aware of the color of the walls and the room that you're in, right. Or the feeling of the chair that you're sitting. And you were always aware of those things at an unconscious level, you could be aware of it. So immediately because your unconscious mind was monitoring everything. And your unconscious mind is capable of handling somewhere between three and 30 million pieces of information at any given time. Yeah. So what happens in hypnosis is essentially your conscious mind kind of gets bypassed by your unconscious mind. And some of these natural processes start to take over. So, again, let's stick with the spider phobia. Someone sees a spider, they don't think it's a spider. It's now time for me to raise my heart rate and be afraid. Right. It's just an automatic response if you're driving and all of a sudden, even if you're kind of zoned out you're driving, but your unconscious mind is monitoring everything. So the light changes from green to yellow. You automatically go to put the brake on, right. Or the gas down or the gas.
Rob:Yeah. And in Rhode Island, it's always the gas lights, yellow. Shit's going to turn around. Let's go. We're awful
Adam:fair. But that automatic response is an unconscious. And, and that is an example of hypnosis. So this is where in, in some hypnotic, you know, communities there there's always an ongoing debate over is hypnosis or trance. I use them interchangeably. Is it a state or is it a
Rob:process? Yeah. And so that's something I was really interested in too, because when you look at you know, some sort of Eastern cultures or religions and the whole idea of enlightenment, and I always think that that's, at least in my mind, I think the two are almost similar in a sense of, of it is a place where you can let go of those conscious judgments and weird thoughts and, and, you know, kind of depressive states or something like that. And, and just be like, you know what I mean? Like
Bento:a state of being of having a clear mind. Yeah,
Adam:yeah, yeah, yeah. One of the things that happened and, you know, kind of one of the myths of trance that we get in society because of I call it the Scooby doo effect, right? Like hypnosis is this zoned out zombie, like state of mind control where the Hypnos villain creep of the week is using his nefarious power to force people to do his bidding. And so a lot of people that are, that are work with me you know, whether on a stage show or in a therapy thing, and they assume that they're going to be completely just like often LA LA land, not aware of anything that's happening. Yeah. And So then, you know, I, I always tell them, I know, you're, you're going to be aware of everything that's happening around you. You're aware of everything I'm saying to you. You're going to remember when you leave this conversation and this the session you remember as much as you would from any normal conversation. But what you will have during this time is this heightened state of focus in particular on what I'm saying to you and on the things you want to achieve, whether that's losing weight, overcoming a phobia, or if you're onstage, you know, potentially becoming the star of the show that night by doing whatever.
Bento:So let's take one step back because I'm really fascinated about the process of hypnosis, right? Because when somebody says hypnotist, obviously they immediately think of the clock,
Rob:this swings and magician, the
Bento:swirling, our work, and like putting this trance. What is the process of, of getting hypnotized.
Adam:There are almost an infinite number of ways of doing what's called an induction. That is the process where we take you from normal, everyday waking state into a hypnotic trance that there's, there's a more direct method of doing it. And then there is a much more indirect method of doing it. And these are sort of typified by some some of the giants of the hypnosis community. So there's a therapist who lives throughout the 20th century. His name is Milton Erickson and Erickson was a fascinating guy. There's a great documentary on Amazon called wizard of the desert. All about military. And Erickson was a psychotherapist and he was inflicted with polio twice. Two different strains of polio was in a wheelchair the first time he was, he was afflicted with it. He he was in a wheelchair. Then he taught himself to walk again. Then he got it a second time and was paralyzed. Yeah. Was paralyzed on his right side. Had this really gravelly voice he's tone deaf. He he lost all of his teeth. He wore dentures and his false teeth would kind of click around in his mouth. He was color blind. The only color he could see was purple, but he would just like sit in his wheelchair and just like talk to people. And before they knew it, they had experienced total and complete change in their lives. And what he did is he would just string together. These long and winding, almost word salad, nonsensical type sentences that cause people to continue to move their focus further and further and work. And so it would, you know, it would be like, and as you sit there in that chair and notice all of the different sensations of the ways in which your body is interacting with the outside world and think about the concept of time he would just go on and on and on. And all of a sudden you're walking out of his office, you know, an hour later and you're going, what was that crazy old man talking about? And three weeks later you realize, you know, I haven't
Rob:had a cigarette in like three weeks.
Adam:Yeah. Then there is the more direct method which was more typified by a guy named Dave Elman who was another giant and element actually started as a performer in vaudeville, learned hypnosis as a performer, and then figured out, you know, we can use this. He looked at a lot of practitioners from the past who had used hypnosis for things like anesthesia replacement during surgery. Wow.
Rob:Wow. You can really go that deep in a trans
Adam:a guy named James as Dale who was a British medical doctor in India was so good at using hypnosis for anesthesia that he actually, at one point performed a surgery on an 87 pound tumor using only hypnosis as the answer statement. Wow. Wow. Yeah. So Elman starts teaching medical doctors how to do hypnosis. And he uses a much more direct approach. He's going to go in and he's going to do a couple of tests to see how you're responding. He's going to say, all right, I'm going to take three puffs on my cigarette on the third puff. You're gonna close your eyes and go into hypnosis and that's going to be it. And so it's a much more direct way of doing it. You can get somebody into trance in a matter of seconds.
Rob:Wow. But not unknowingly,
Adam:not unloading.
Rob:No. That's, that's the big trick too. I think people, one of the big misconceptions that you have to be a willing participant. Yes.
Adam:Yes. So when you watch like YouTube videos and you see people who, you know, they walk up to somebody and they grab him by the arm, they pull it and they all sleep. There's been a lot of setup. That's actually happened before. That moment that gets shown at the start of the video. Sure. Okay. Yeah, if you just go grab somebody and pull their arm and you'll sleep, you know, they're, they're not just gonna drop into a transition phase probably
Bento:rightfully so. Yeah. I mean, are there people that cannot be hypnotized?
Adam:No, there are people that can be hypnotized more easily than others, but anybody that is capable of using their focus, their imagination, anybody that's capable of doing that can experience a hypnotic
Bento:trance. So, I mean, it's a lot like meditation, right? Cause sometimes like you sit down and listen, those YouTube videos and somebody talking to you and telling you to focus on your breathing and let this out. I mean, is it kind of the same thing? Cause if you do that long enough, you can't feel that. Yeah. It's like almost like tantric.
Adam:Yeah. The it's it's very similar. The difference, I would say from at least my perspective as a practitioner is the difference between what I do and what someone who does guided meditation does is I'm going to make sure you experienced some kind of hypnotic phenomena before you leave the session with me as a way of ensuring you that you haven't just been sitting there listening to me talking. So I'm going to stick your hand to something, or I'm going to glue your eyelid shut, or, you know, stick your feet through the floor or whatever I'm going to do something so that you understand you are having inexperienced. That is not.
Bento:Typical
Adam:for you to have, and as a result, that's going to help to reinforce the change work that we're doing in your own mind to say, okay, something actually is happening there and that's going to give you further motivation to act on.
Rob:That's incredible. And so, and so part of your practice, you're actually keeping people's eyelids closed or things like that. They're getting in that deep enough of a trends. Is there levels in a sense to how deep people can go in that trans, like you said, it's easier with some people than not. It is. I mean, like, you know, I, in my mind I'm thinking like, all right, quitting smoking, right. That's probably something that you got to go pretty deep because it's such like a, like a, you know, physical addiction or something.
Adam:Yeah. Less so than you would think. Running's a really interesting spoke is a really interesting category because For the most part, you know, we have been, we have been told that smoking is an addiction, but the interesting thing about it is people smoke the exact same number of cigarettes every day for 30 years, without ever increasing that dosage or increasing the frequency. Right. Which is not quite so what a lot of people have is a smoking habit. Yes. More so than
Rob:an addiction, because it's about where they call it. It's like the, the, are there specific events throughout the
Bento:day, right? Like I get in the car, light a cigarette. I I've, I've heard this in the past. They say that the nicotine addiction is only three days after that it's habit. I don't know how true that is. Very,
Rob:yeah. I felt, I found when I stopped smoking real cigarettes like that first three days, it was really the only three days that you think about it. If you get some sort of. Something to alleviate the oral fixation of bringing a cigarette to your mouth and actually smoking that's the harder part to break.
Adam:Yeah. Yeah. So in terms of, of depth, I always try and take people, you know, as, as deep into it, as I can. The, the working level of hypnosis is what we call some nationalism. Which is just a, it's similar to insomnia, right? The it's, it's a sleep like state, it's an oscillate, but it is a sleep like state. And so my goal is to always take my clients there. Now there is below that something called the Esdaile level, which is named after John says Dale, who we mentioned earlier. And that one, that one's a fun one to go to, but you're not going to get a lot of like, I'm not going to have you. And I don't make people like squawk, like a chicken in my office when I'm doing therapy, but I'm not, you're not gonna spark like a chicken because you're two ways zoned out at that point. It's a lovely place to be. But you're, you're not going to get a lot of phenomenon like that. So, but in the, in the somnambulistic stance, then I will be able to get phenomenon pretty easily. Now some phenomena is right from the very start, you know, at a very, very light state. And you can get that causing someone's eyes to. Be unable to open, not that hard to do. You can do that very lightly.
Rob:Could you do it, could you do it to bento right
Adam:now? Well, I say, well, why don't we do that? Why don't we do this? Take, take your hands. Both of you can do this, put your hands, put them out in front of you like this. All right. Put your hands together. Which prompts, touch each other. Interlock your fingers. All right. Not yet, but in a moment, I'm going to have you stick your first two fingers up in the air, stare at the gap between them. And imagine there are two high powered magnets on them because they will touch. All right. That's on the count of three. Ready? 1, 2, 3, stick your fingers up in the air. Imagine two high powered magnets, pulling those fingers together and feel the force, pulling them
Rob:further there. It really is.
Adam:Yeah. Yeah. And it's, it's your mind, you know, when you put your focus on experiencing. That experience your mind will help create it happen. Your mind unconsciously will send the messages to the muscles and nerves in your body to cause the response to happen. Right? What you're focused on it right now, that's, that's fairly easy to get in a, in a light state of trance. So when I'm doing a stage shift one of the things that I do early on in the stage show is I do a series of things like just like that, that are kind of escalating in difficulty. And then as we progress through the opening stages of the show, I'm weeding out people who are not responding as quickly on that particular night and another night, they might be the star of the show. Right. But for whatever reason that night, it's just not, they're not. So I'm waiting out those people, I'm keeping the people who are responding really well. And then by the time we get to the point that I'm actually doing an induction. They're already gone. I've already gotten, you know,
Rob:I'm taking them through, through, through all the steps.
Adam:Exactly. Exactly. Yeah.
Rob:And so in your show, how many people are you? Are you doing this in front of
Adam:how's that? Oh, in terms of crowds? It depends on where I'm performing, you know, at a high school or college, it can be several hundred at a corporate show. It can be, you know, 50, 75, something like that. I
Bento:it says a hundred people. How many people do you think, you know, you're getting fully fully inducted
Adam:at all those people. If I have a hundred people, I'll probably have 20 to 30 volunteers on my stage. And out of those 15 to 20, I will keep on stage and anywhere between. Three to six will be the big stars of the night. Just because it's, it's the level of depth that they're able to achieve that quickly. And also their, their own personality will play into it. Right. That having been said I have the way I got into this in the first place in college, I saw a hypnotist whose name is Michael C. Anthony. I had never seen a hypnosis show before, went into it, really skeptically. Michael comes on stage and one of my friends, volunteers for the show and he was a relatively quiet, reserved guy. And he becomes the star of the show that night. And he was doing things that I knew this man would never, ever do on his own. And I'm sitting in the audience going, not only have I become a believer in this, but this is the coolest thing I've ever seen in my life. Right. How quickly can I learn this? And, and ultimately I did I wound up studying with Michael through stage hypnosis university, and that's how I formally got on the path of learning hypnosis. Hmm
Rob:that's terrific. And so you started with this stage hypnosis, I'm sorry, what was the academy?
Adam:His program is called stage of gnosis university,
Rob:university. Excuse me. Yeah. And so that's terrific. And then, so in terms of, you know, now you're not just doing the shows, right. You also are working with patients and so you had to go get further credentials for that. I'm assuming.
Adam:Yeah. So I, I Threw him a friend of his, his name and Mike Mendell and Mike and his business partner, Chris Thompson out of Toronto, Canada, I did a, a full year course with them online that culminated in a 40 hour live certification course in, in Toronto. And that's how I got certified on that end of things. So, you know, for the last two years or so since around March 13th, 2020 the business has primarily been the, the coaching side of things, seeing clients and helping people, you know, overcome their, their problems. And I love doing that. I love doing the state side of things more quite honestly,
Bento:you know, it's obviously more
Adam:fun and that yeah. And it's, it's starting to come back, fortunately. Yeah. Good. But but yeah, so I've gotten a lot of, a lot of the therapy side of things and more in the last year or so two
Rob:years,
Bento:I assume this isn't like medically recognized, like the insurance won't pay for this or things like that. Right. Because it all out of
Adam:pocket, I'm not dealing with insurance now. It is actually the, the American medalist medical association has recognized hypnosis as a valid mode of therapy. Oh really? And a useful mode of therapy. Yeah, absolutely. But I, I personally do not deal with insurance companies. No.
Bento:Okay. Sorry. We're going to say Bobby.
Rob:I was going to ask about the coaching. What do you think that people come to the most. Yeah. What have you seen the most success with in terms of helping people, you know, that you would recommend is, is it, you know, I I've heard before, you know, a couple of friends I know who have done hypnotherapist first quitting smoking and it's worked for all of them. Is there anything that you would particularly recommend?
Adam:Yeah, I have a lot of success with my stop smoking clients. Weight loss is it's very good for, in terms of getting your mind focused. One of the things that people struggle with when they're trying to lose weight is just the mindset of the whole thing. Right. I can tell myself I'm not gonna eat this thing. I'm going to exercise, but then. When it comes time to get up off the couch and go exercise. That's where I really need the help Crohn's because once I get started, yeah. Once I get started, I'm good. But until then, yeah. So hypnosis.
Bento:Yep. I was actually, we were talking before you came on and I said, I want to ask them about if, if hypnotherapy could work for someone like myself who like, you know, I just cannot make it to the gym. Like when I go to the gym, I feel good. I know, I feel great afterwards. I know I need to do it, like all these things, but for me just to get out of the house and like do it, I can't even, I can't even explain the mental block that I have to do it because it's, it's, I, I'm a very logical person. It's completely irrational to me. And I just thought I still do it anyways.
Adam:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And that's, that's the type of thing that I think hypnosis is great for when it comes to weight loss, you know, I can't hypnotically, you know, Remove weight from you wish that I could,
Bento:Medical degree. Right,
Rob:right. It's interesting though. Just about removing that block. I mean, that block exists for so many people for so many things. Whether it's you hate work, you hate going to the gym, like you hate senior. In-laws like that block exists for a ton of
Adam:things. Yeah. And so one of the things, you know, we can, we can get to is what is your unconscious mind trying to do for you by creating that, you know, think about let's, let's go back to somebody that smokes for a minute, for somebody that smoked. Their unconscious mind has created a part of them that has told them every day for 30 years, you need to smoke this number of cigarettes per day. At these exact times, that is an incredibly powerful thing right now. Why has their unconscious mind done that? Well, maybe because they thought it was cool when they a kid, whatever, maybe, but for some reason, the unconscious mind is trying to either protect them or give them pleasure. Right. So if we can figure out what the reason is, the unconscious mind has created this part that runs this process. Then if we can work with that and negotiate with that and find it something else to do. So let's take somebody who does smoke. What if we take that part? That's reminded them to smoke 30 cigarettes a day, and then we say, okay, what if. To, to keep this person safe while and protected to give them a good life. We can now have this part, remind them and motivate them. They need to exercise every day. Well, now all of a sudden we've transitioned this incredibly powerful part from something that in the long run was trying to do something good for them, but was creating a net negative effect to now this is really helping them and benefiting them in a, in a huge, huge way.
Bento:Have you seen a working, have you seen it work for you know, like other drug addictions, like opiod addiction, for example, has anybody ever tried something like this?
Adam:I have not personally worked with opioid or other addictions, but I know people who have, and who have seen great successes. There's a guy named Scott Sandlands who, and a woman named Melissa tears who work a lot with drug addiction and they're phenomenal and they've achieved a lot of successful path. Yeah,
Bento:that's
Rob:awesome. Yeah. I assume alcohol would be a little more common, correct?
Adam:Alcohol is fairly common. Yeah. I know there, there are some hypnotherapists who take the approach with alcohol that, you know, instead of turning someone into a complete and total lawn drinker, it's better to turn them into a social drinker. Because the moment you say never again, you're essentially starting a pressure cooker. Okay. Think about like the person who goes on the diet and they're like, I am not going to eat pizza and chocolate and. Something happens. They have no other time, all they have to eat as a slice of pizza and all of a sudden they're bingeing pizza for the next week. Right.
Rob:So, you know, that's the whole theory too about, you know, not biting off more than you can chew when you're trying to make those big changes. Yeah, exactly.
Bento:Incremental change.
Rob:Yeah. Yeah. Thank you. Yeah, that's terrific. And so I think it's so crazy too, that you can just switch somebody's habits like that. Like, you know, like there are literally thousands of books written every couple of years about changing your habits and like, you know, doing it slow and, you know, 1% of it, like there are just so many books on it. And so you're saying though, that you can just replace those habits with something positive.
Adam:I, it, with the smoking clients that I work with, it's a, it's a two session protocol and,
Bento:That's it. Wow. That's incredible. I figured it would take
Adam:me. It's a no, because you, you know, you look at it like this way and I approach it from a lot of different angles when I'm doing a smoking cessation thing, but I approach it from first of all, all you have to do to be a non-smoker is nothing. Right. You literally have to do nothing. It takes no effort. Right?
Rob:There's more.
Adam:Yeah. And I approach it from an emotional angle too, you know if you talk to someone and they say, you know, you asked them, you know, if a doctor told you, if you had another cigarette tomorrow, you would die. Would, would that be enough for you to stop smoking? And for almost everybody, it's not because they've already been told more or less. That same time
Bento:both of my parents were walked out of that doctor's office rolled down the window and light up a mob,
Adam:right? Yeah, exactly. Exactly.
Bento:It's like the old dentist Larry bit, you know, you can put a skull and crossbones on the pack and colon cancer sticks and people be lining up around the block to smoke them. Exactly. It's
Adam:amazing. But if you take the person that that person loves most of the world, and you say, if your doctor told you that if you had another cigarette. You have any doubt in your mind that you could quit? And all of a sudden the answer is I have no doubt in my mind whatsoever,
Bento:but Bobby would kill me for a cigarette. Hell yeah.
Rob:You'd be like, you got a lighter. Yeah. They'll send me a letter over here before. Yeah. God, that's so
Adam:crazy though, because the power of that emotion can produce really strong change in people.
Rob:And so if we take smoking out of the example though and say use it, you know, a different type of behavior change. If we were looking at, you know, like work, right. I think about office, the movie office space, right. Where the guy goes to the hypnotherapist and then all of a sudden he and Stan going to work. I mean, can you really change how people perceive their
Adam:emotions? Yeah. Yeah. By doing really simple things to really take, take someone who really hates their job. Right. And have them say, all right. Now, when you think about going into work, what is the what's the feeling that comes up for you and they'll say, you know, dread or anger or whatever. And then, so let's say they say, you know, dread, okay. Close your eyes. Now, where in your body are you experiencing that dread? Find it physically where it is in your body. Okay. What color is that dread? Right. And they're immediately like, wait, wait, wait, wait. But the confusion gets them going. And as long as I can get them to give an answer, I can change it. Okay. And even if they say something like dread doesn't have a color. Well, if it did have a comfort and if yours had a color, what color would it be? Red. Okay. What kind of, would you rather it be right. And just by changing that I have now stretched their brain in the way that it experiences that particular emotion. And it'll never experience it quite the same way. Again, if I stack other stuff on top of that, if I say, all right, what is the picture that comes into your mind when you think about going into work and you used to experience that dread, what is the picture that comes into your mind? And they start describing it. And then I start changing. I say, well, is it full color or black and white? Oh, it's full color. Well, what happens if we make it black and white? What happens if we do that? What happens to, what if we make it like really grainy, like an old school TV set that starting to go on like the staticky type thing? What if we shrink it down really small? And so I can play with, with the submodalities and completely changed the perspective that. People look at their emotions or their experiences from I've used it to fix headaches. I've been around people that are like, I've got a headache. Really? What color is it? And 30 seconds later I go. And where's that headache gone? And they're like, it's not there.
Bento:So just to get their mind off it
Adam:it's. Yeah, well, yeah, because we've changed the way they're experiencing right. Where we're now taking them out of the moment we go to color, we've moved them out of the kinesthetic system. And now we brought in the visual system as the primary way. They're experiencing this thing for a while. And so by the. Does the headache have a sound? What does it sound like? That's interesting for, for people with anxiety, you know, usually they'll have like some, maybe some kind of voice that's playing in their head. So I can say, okay, tell me the direction that voice is coming from. And then I'll say, who does that voice sound like by the way? And it might be a parent. It might be a teacher from when they're school, you know? Well, what happens if that voice that's telling you to be anxious about all of those things? What if it now sounds like miss piggy, how does that change your experience of it? And what if we just like moved it from here to back over here and made it miss Peggy? What's it like now when you try and experience that anxiety and so. You, you are kind of taking their mind off of it, but it's more that you're changing the approach that they take to experience.
Bento:Hmm. If it works for anxiety, I assume it's got application with PTSD as well.
Adam:Yeah. There's a guy named Carl Smith out of Britain who he wrote a book called there's no D and PTSD. And he's got a really great protocol that he uses called kinetic shift that he, he is a former police officer who had his own and military officer, but he had his own really traumatic experience that led him to hypnosis. And that is in large part. What he works with now is, is working with post trauma, posttraumatic stress. Wow.
Rob:That's terrific. How many applications. Right. Oh, it was incredible. I mean, the fact that like, you know, any behavior trauma, like addictions have, it's like, it seems like, you know, technically, like you said, at the very beginning of this, if you have a need and desire for change, it's worth giving it a shot, at least. Right. So you were saying too, like smoking, for instance, like, you know, two sessions and you know that you can, you can kind of change that for them. And I know you don't, because you said it's establishing a new neuro pathway that it's hard for people to fall back into those previous patterns, but does it happen and is there a certain reason maybe that people would fall off that wagon or is it just too hard to fall off and people don't
Adam:oh, sure. People, people could. Absolutely. Because ultimately, you know, the, and that goes back to kind of the misconception that. I am the, in the system, I have this power and I'm using this power on you. I make it very clear to my clients from the beginning that when you're working with me, we are in a partnership with each other, you know, I can show you how to get into a deep state of trance and I can show you how to make these changes. I can't force you to do it right. You've got to work with it. You've got to follow my instructions. You've got to follow my directions when I give you homework to do between now and the next session. You know, I want you to do that. One of the things that all of my clients get is a, is a 10 minute stress relief audio program that I recorded. And I tell them, I want you to listen to this every single day. I don't care when you listen to it, as long as you're not driving at the moment or operating heavy machinery, but whenever you listen to it, I don't care, but I want you to listen to it every single day, because that's helping hypnosis is a skill, just like anything else, all hypnosis is ultimately selfishness. So the more you practice using it, the better you're going to get. So I send them that very early in the process and I say, use this every day between now and our first session. And then I teach them in either the first or second session, depending on how many I'm going to have with them. I teach them how to do self-hypnosis on their. And I say, practice it every day for this issue. So I'm reinforcing, not just in the 90 minutes, they spend with me 60 to 90 minutes, but every day I want them going home and building these skills and practicing them. And that is further increasing that group. If you come in to a session and it's, you know, yeah, I guess I'm going to try this out and I'm going to be one and done, and then you never go do the things I tell you to do. And you just kind of sit there and half heartedly. Yeah. It's not going to work. Right.
Bento:But
Adam:if you will do the work and you're, you really want to make the change, if you're willing to make the change, it'll work brilliant. Like it'll work as well or better than. A lot of other options that you have out there.
Bento:So you obviously have to be open to it and want to do it. Cause like personally someone like myself, I just don't really believe in it. You know, I've attempted to been hypnotized before at, you know, at a state show, we had this guy, I forget his name. He was really well known around here for awhile. I was the RA to hypnosis, you know, and who was at a work party. And you know, I went up on stage and I just played along because I've always been the class clown. So I was just about making everybody laugh. But I mean, you know, there's gotta be some level of willingness I assume, and, and open-mindedness going into it.
Adam:Absolutely. Yeah.
Rob:Yeah. I totally think that like myself, like I'm a perfect candidate for this because I enjoy meditation and I liked that, like that state of relaxation already. And so I feel like. Yeah.
Adam:Yeah, yeah. Whatever to show a
Bento:mine. So I guess the big question,
Adam:sorry. I said, if you're ever in a show of mine, we
Rob:yeah,
Bento:for sure. Oh God, let's see him go up on stage. So the big question, right. If there's a lot of applications to this and you know, they all sound amazing. You know, why is this super
Adam:popular? Why is it not? Yeah. Yeah. It was very much used after both world war one and world war two for soldiers, since we were talking about post-traumatic stress earlier, it was used a whole lot. During that timeframe, it kind of just fell out of use. Like a lot of other therapies tend to fall out of use. You know, they, they go through phases, right? Cognitive behavioral therapy is really big and then we're moving into psychotherapy and, you know forayed who began to be more predominant during his life. Comes up with sort of what we think of is, is basic psychotherapy talk therapy. And he was a really awful hypnotist. And so he saw no value in it will Freud starts to become a big thing. So everybody starts moving in that direction. What we're one comes along, these soldiers are coming back. People don't know what to do with them. Doctors start using hypnosis again with them. They start experiencing all of these issues, but you still have the concept of the connection that hypnosis has in popular media, because at the same time you have you know, the therapists that are not a therapist, the, the stage hypnotist that are going around and they're wearing the big turbines and there's not going to learn all these secrets from the east. And so hypnosis is still getting lumped in with all of this very like mystical, you know, stereotypically reading, all this kind of stuff. And they're not looking at the scientific aspect of it, which is what Eric said, an element and as Dale and all these other guys are. Looking at and using within these medical context because at the time when you were doing magic and mentalism and things like that, like that's what you want to, you know, we've all seen the press stage where yeah. Right. And what it is he's using, like Tesla's stuff, but he's out there saying it's, you know, known only to ancient only men or whatever. And that was, that was what it was at the time, because that was what audiences wanted to see.
Bento:I'm sure it didn't help, like, you know, the Christianity part of it, you know, like you said, down in the south and in Alabama where that's, it's looked upon as witchcraft or voodoo, whatever, you know, I'm sure that kind of a damper on it to,
Adam:but interestingly enough, like the Roman Catholic church has recognized it as a valid medical therapy with no connection to, you know, evil or darkness or demons or anything like that. And that's the problem. There is very few. Even within the Christian religion, there are very few denominations that actually prohibit, oh, well they use of hypnosis, but it again, because popular culture says that it's this other thing. People just assume that it is. So as soon as they hear it, you know, I knew people. I tell them I'm a hypnotist and they develop this sudden immediate, inability to look me in the eye. Oh yeah. That's so strange. I find it hilarious. I
Bento:think, oh yeah. Right. I would start, I would try looking at them harder, you know, kind of freak them out, like stare at their chest.
Rob:Like what are you doing to me? Yeah. I use that in public next time. I'm just want to be left alone and you gotta tell people I'm a hypnotist. So this, yeah.
Bento:Introducing you guys to hypnosis
Adam:the the others will want to ask you hundreds of questions, which is fun. Yeah.
Rob:Yeah, that's terrific.
Bento:That's awesome. Yeah. Yeah. So that was cool. Really appreciate your time and coming on and teaching a couple of dumb dudes about getting hypnotized. I
Rob:check it out
Bento:a whole lot about, it's very
Rob:fascinating. You're actually the second hypnotherapist I've met in like two weeks now. And yeah. And so I I'm going to give it a shot. There's a local woman here who I was talking to and I'm like, I'm going to give it a shot just cause I hate work and so why not?
Bento:Awesome. We'll see.
Rob:We'll see. But yeah. Thanks. Thanks a lot, Adam. I appreciate you for having me. This has been so much fun and of course we always, you know, we always want to give our guests the opportunity to get your, you know, get your name out there, your website if there's anything you want to shamelessly plug, now's your opportunity.
Adam:Yeah, so you can find my website at Adam Jones, hypnosis.com. And that is the coaching side of things. If you're interested in that, if you're interested in the stage performance side of things, my website is squawk like a chicken.com,
Bento:a great website,
Adam:and you can find me on Instagram at Adam Jones hypnosis.
Bento:Awesome. Awesome. Perfect. Thanks. Thanks again, Adam. That was fun.
Rob:Thank you.
Adam:Thanks. Thanks man. Have a good night. All right, you too. Bye.
Bento:I'm going to hypnotize. You say every time I fire you go, oh, that's delicious.