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How Hypnosis Rewires Stress, Trauma & Healing From The Inside Out

What if healing isn’t just about what you do—but what your subconscious believes? In this episode, I sit down with Peter McLaughlin to explore how hypnosis can help rewire stress patterns, unlock deeper healing, and shift the mind-body connection in powerful ways. We talk about trauma, transformation, nervous system regulation, and why real change often starts below conscious awareness.

Peter McLaughlin is a certified hypnotherapist and the founder of Blue Sky Hypnosis. His path into mind-body medicine began after a life-altering diagnosis of leukemia and Lyme disease led him to explore deeper healing beyond conventional approaches. Today, he helps clients around the world use hypnosis to resolve trauma, shift subconscious patterns, and create meaningful change in their emotional, mental, and physical well-being.

Connect with Peter:
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thepetermclaughlin
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/petertmclaughlin
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@BlueSkyHypnosis
Website: https://www.blueskyhypnosis.com

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About the Expert

Julia Ward, MD

Dr. Julia Ward

Dr. Julia Ward is a compassionate and forward-thinking physician with over a decade of experience in functional medicine, known for her systems-based approach to healing chronic illness. She is the founder of Balanced Body Functional Medicine, where she helps patients uncover the deeper drivers of disease and restore health by addressing the body as an interconnected whole.
After earning her medical degree from the University of Southern California, Dr. Ward served in the U.S. Navy, practicing general, urgent, and emergency medicine both domestically and abroad. Her own personal struggle with unexplained fatigue led her to question the limitations of conventional medicine and ultimately guided her toward functional medicine.
While she initially focused on identifying root causes, Dr. Ward’s approach has continued to evolve. She now emphasizes the importance of how and when the body is treated—not just what is treated. Through her Balanced Body System Reset™ framework, she focuses on restoring nervous system balance, improving mitochondrial function, reducing inflammation, and addressing root causes in the right sequence to create lasting and meaningful healing.
Dr. Ward integrates advanced diagnostics, personalized care plans, and innovative therapies such as hyperbaric oxygen and ozone therapy, while also emphasizing foundational elements like nervous system regulation, lifestyle, and patient engagement. She believes that healing is not a one-size-fits-all process, but a guided journey that requires both strategy and active participation.
A lifelong learner, Dr. Ward continues to expand her expertise in areas such as precision genomics, brain health, and complex chronic illness. She is deeply committed to helping her patients not only feel better, but truly understand their bodies and take ownership of their health.
A devoted wife and mother of five, Dr. Ward brings both clinical expertise and personal insight to her work, with a mission to transform the way chronic illness is understood and treated.

More from Julia Ward, MD on DrTalks

Guest

Peter McLaughlin

Peter McLaughlin

Founder of Blue Sky Hypnosis

Peter McLaughlin is a certified hypnotherapist and the founder of Blue Sky Hypnosis. His path into mind-body medicine began after a life-altering diagnosis of leukemia and Lyme disease led him to explore deeper healing beyond conventional approaches. Today, he helps clients around the world use hypnosis to resolve trauma, shift subconscious patterns, and create meaningful change in their emotional, mental, and physical well-being.

More from Peter McLaughlin on DrTalks

When you’re driving your car, and you are thinking about something in your life, a TV show you saw, an argument that you had with your husband, what’s going on at work, trying to solve a problem, you pull into your drive when you can’t remember driving the last 10 or 15 minutes, it’s not early Alzheimer’s onset.

It’s actually a form of hypnosis. When your working in you garden, And you come in to wash your hands and you realize you’ve got a big cut in the back of your hand, but you don’t remember how you got it.

You don’ remember any pain that should have been associated with it, that’s hypnosis as well. When you’re watching TV and someone calls your name and they call your again and don”t answer.

They call you a third time and your like, huh? What? That’s Hypnosis. Welcome to the Functional Edge. I’m Dr. Julia Ward, and this is where science meets real-world strategies for living healthier, sharper and stronger.

From uncovering hidden environmental toxins to unlocking peak performance and mental clarity, we cover it all. Ready to take control of your health and thrive?

Let’s dive in. Well, welcome to the Functional Edge podcast. I’m your host, Dr. Julia Ward, medical director and founder of Balanced Body Function Medicine.

Today, we’re honored to welcome Peter McLaughlin to our show. In this episode, Peter will be sharing insights on the powerful role of hypnosis in healing, transformation, and longevity, drawing from his own recovery from leukemia, as well as his work helping others access deeper subconscious change.

He’ll also explore the connection between the mind, nervous system, and physical health and how shifting internal patterns can open the door to true healing.

So stay tuned for an engaging conversation that promises to empower and inspire your path to wellness. Thank you so much for being here today. And thank you for the invitation.

It’s lovely to be here with you. Absolutely. Okay, well, can you walk us through your experience with leukemia and hypnosis became a part of your healing process?

Absolutely. It kind of came out of left field. Honestly, it was technically asymptomatic, even though looking back, I noticed that I had certain things that were going on.

And it actually two diagnoses. One was the leukemia, chronic lymphocytic leukemi, and the other one was Lyme disease. And I got both on the same day. So it was like a twofer.

Yeah, that’s a lot. Bogo. Did you expect both? I mean, how did that come about? Well, this is in the wake of 9-11. Okay. And, I was working a block and a half away from the Trade Center on Wall Street.

And I was, I had wanted to be a firefighter, a volunteer firefighting for a while, but my kids were so little, my wife was like, probably not right now.

And we moved from just north of New York City to Connecticut. When we move there, she said, this would be good time. Okay. Great. I went down to the fire department and I filled out the paperwork and the first thing was an extensive physical.

And the first day of the physical, the doctor said to me, wow, you’re in really good shape for your age. I was 41 at the time. This is 23 years ago. Come back and give blood.

So I gave blood, and then all the alarm bells went off. And that’s when they said Lyme disease and leukemia. Now I immediately went into denial. Immediately.

Like, this is crap. It cannot be possible. Wow. And that started this odyssey that the truncated story would be, I went to see a hematologist oncologist and she said, we don’t know what causes this kind of leukemia and we do not know how to cure it.

I mean, as soon as she says that, it was like, why would I keep going here? This doesn’t make any sense to me. So that started the Odyssey. That started so much research on my own, because I thought, well, you have, what, 10 minutes for a patient, maybe?

And I saw behind her shoulder, she had pictures of small children, and I had small kids, I knew how much time they took. I thought I’m going to have to put my business on autopilot and just start researching.

And as I did this, I was slowly and over time drawn from the purely physical cause and effect into the power that the mind has over the body. That’s what prompted me to want to learn hypnotherapy.

Wow, that’s amazing. Yeah, I can’t imagine being perfectly healthy going in to do a volunteer job and then finding out that you’ve got two major medical issues.

That’s, yeah. And, you know, one of the first questions was, how long do I have? Yeah. The answer I got was maybe 10 years. Wow. Okay. So, the answer that they gave me and that was 23 years ago.

So, was there a moment where you realized that this wasn’t just about recovery, but transformation? Yes. Well, I should say it was more like a series of moments.

Okay. Once I got past the denial, and I get past intensity of the fear, then I started really exploring. So it wasn’ just researching online. I did a punch of karma weekend.

with a doctor who was trained as an allopathic physician and also an Ayurvedic Physician. And this was like living with him in this retreat center and maybe five other patients maybe.

So there was a lot of intensive connection with them and it was meditation and was diet and sauna and it was enemas and your dosha and two-person massage with an oil drip where I was having visions.

Based on what he was talking about, I slowly expanded my consciousness and understanding of how the body is responding to not just the physical environment, physical toxins, a lack of nutrition maybe, stress.

Now that’s moving into the emotional pieces. And I remember one of the things that he said to me was that for a man, it’s the woman you marry, the job you do, and the mother that you have.

And these are, in Ayurveda, tied in with things like diseases. And so this was all expanding my mind and my consciousness so that when all the pieces came together, it was like, In an instant, It has to be hypnosis.

It Has to Be Hypnotherapy. Just in this one crystalline moment. But there were a series of moments that led to that. And then, you know, after I got the training and I started having even more moments where I finally realized this really is about transformation, way more than just my body, Right.

And so, did you go through any traditional treatment alongside this, or did go mainly with this alternative kind of stuff? I went with the alternative stuff, which is funny because these are the oldest.

Right, yeah. It makes it sound like it’s this newfangled thing. But no, for me, and I would never deign to speak for anybody else, but just for I made a decision at some point for me, it was live or die, I’m not going that path.

I am not gonna do it. Got it, yeah. Yeah. Gonna make these other choices and that was just how I chose to do at that point in time with the circumstances and so on.

Yeah, I love it. Love it, okay. Well, many of my patients feel stuck despite doing like all the right things. How do you explain hypnosis in a way that makes sense, both scientifically and practically?

Okay, the best explanation I can give is a practical one, and that is, from a scientific standpoint, everyone’s going in and out of hypnosus all of the time without a hypnotist present.

We just don’t know that’s what it is because we haven’t been taught. We all have heard the words hypnosis, hypnotize and mesmerize since we were little children.

It’s saturated in all of our media. All of it. From comic books to novels. The evening newscaster can use those words. it’s in the lyrics of popular songs.

Its a plot theme in TV shows and in movies and has been forever. And in the entertainment version, it implies that one person, hypnotist, is controlling the other person subject who enters a catatonic sleep-like state.

They do whatever they’re told and they don’t remember anything. Right. That’s what most people have in their minds about what gnosis is. Because even psychologists don’t receive training in this.

Right, right. But it’s such a ubiquitous concept in our culture. When you’re driving your car and you are thinking about something in your life, a TV show you saw, an argument that you had with your husband, what’s going on at work, trying to solve a problem, and you pull into your driveway and can’t remember driving the last 10 or 15 minutes, it’s not early Alzheimer’s onset.

It’s actually a form of hypnosis. When you’re working in your garden and come in to wash your hands and realize you’ve got a big cut in the back of your hand, but you don’t really remember how you got it, you won’t even remember any pain that should have been associated with it.

That’s hyposis as well. When you’re watching TV and someone calls your name and you don’t answer, and they call your names again and don’ t answer. They call you name a third time and your like, huh?

What? That’s gnosis. You mean like just being tuned out. It’s said from the other side of the same coin, it’s tuned in. Tuned in, yeah. So you are so tuned into something that your focus narrows so tightly that everything outside that tiny diameter of focus, it’s like it doesn’t exist.

You’re tuned out of that because you’re so tuned into something else. Yeah, yeah. It’s, like, you get hyper-focused on something. Yep. And everyone’s had the experience watching a movie or being in an intense conversation with somebody that they’ve lost track of time.

The two-hour movie feels like 20 minutes or 30 minutes, not two hours. Right, right. That’s a hypnotic state as well. Okay, yeah. And so what is happening in the brain and the nervous system during hypnosis that allows real change to occur?

There’s something called a critical factor or a Critical Faculty. I think of this as like the executive assistant for a Fortune 100 CEO. The job of that assistant is to prevent you and me from talking to them.

Because if everybody who wanted to talk to him did, they wouldn’t get anything done. They’d spend all day long communicating with customers, prospects, journalists, whatever it is.

Like salespeople. And so the critical factor doesn’t come into being in a human being until they’re between the ages of seven and nine. Okay. And its job is to basically screen information from the outside and to block or prevent anything that doesn’t agree with what’s already in there.

Okay This is what makes it really hard for us to learn. So if you and I wanted to learning to speak, assuming you don’t already, if we wanted learn to speaking Italian and we don’ already and there was a five year old who wanted learning, guess who learns first?

The five-year-old. Right, because they have no critical faculty. Yeah. They are in what hypnosis is also described as a hyper state of learning. And we say in our colloquial language, children are like sponges.

Yes. Exactly. It makes sense from an evolutionary standpoint that the human mind would have evolved this way because it’s really important, especially in caveman days, that a five-year-old learns very quickly what’s going to kill them and what is going keep them alive.

So, you can think of a lot of hypnotic work as retraining the brain, teaching the mind a new way of doing things. When we get in trouble, it’s often because we have an unhelpful pattern that unfolds without us even thinking about it.

Okay, can you give an example? Yep, when people get angry, they mostly get anger at things that are not a direct threat to their life. Okay, yeah. For example, they come home and the children have tracked mud into the house with their feet.

And we told them many times not to do this, and they did it anyway. They might just get really angry. It might be that they were talking to customer service and didn’t get the answer that wanted.

Get really angered. Yeah. Might be they’re driving in traffic. If the person didn’ cut them off and sort of threaten their life that way, but they are just going too slowly, for example.

This person might explode. That response is completely out of proportion with the triggers. But the subconscious mind is behaving as if their life is in danger.

As you know, autonomic nervous system only has two modes. It’s got fight or flight, sympathetic, rest and digest, parasympathetic. That’s it. And so if the person’s getting angry like that, they’re moving into a sympathetic fight-or-flight response.

Yeah. To the subconscious mind, that basically means threat to my life. The danger. Yeah, yeah. And when that happens, which you know better than I do, a cascade of changes that happen.

adrenaline and cortisol go into the bloodstream. If this person wants to lose weight, that’s gonna make it really hard for them because the cortisol is encouraging the body to hold on to all available fat and go find more.

Also from an evolutionary standpoint. And my understanding is that all the bodies major systems, endocrine, immune, digestive, reproductive, are diminished so that that energy can go to the muscles to run or fight, which the person’s not gonna do with their kids who just track mud into their house.

Right. Exactly. With the person, you know, on the phone with the customer service problem. Yeah. We’re just thinking about what happened at work today.

Yeah. So why do you think people can know what to do but still not be able to make the change? Great question. It’s because of the programming. Think about your computer.

If you hit these keystrokes in this order and then press Enter, it’s always going to the same thing. Why? Because it was programmed to that. Was the hardware programmed?

No. The software was programed. We have hardware called our body, and we have software called the belief systems. the patterns that have been programmed into our mind.

And just like a computer, if some people, almost all of us, have a certain thing that happens, it could be a tone of voice. It could smell. it can be seeing something.

We’re going to notice, I just reacted. I didn’t even think. That’s how we are wired. Mostly, it’s really good. If you had to think every time to walk across the room, you’d probably fall down like a toddler.

But it is because it has become an unconscious competence that you changed your programming so that can do those activities without thinking about them.

There are some, like anger for example, that get in people’s way. Anxiety is another one that gets in their way, Yeah, and it just they get triggered and It just is like executing a command on your computer.

Yeah control all delete You’ve executed a Command and now it’s out of your control in that sense Yeah And what we want to do with the unhelpful ones is we Want to reprogram retrain?

re-educate the mind Essentially that it is not in danger because back to the autonomic nervous system subconscious is going to interpret everything everything you see, hear, smell, touch, everything, you think everything.

You say as either safe. or dangerous. To the subconscious, worried is actually the same as frightened. It’s going to activate the sympathetic nervous system.

And it’s all because something happened in the past that it interpreted as dangerous, could have happened when you were two, and now in your life it gets triggered over and over again.

Every time it does, subconscious says danger and hijacks your nervous Yeah. So you talk about deeper transformation. What does that really mean beyond behavior change?

Well, it could mean something like purpose. It could be something from a spiritual perspective, remembering who you are. You’re not just a meat suit with a 75-year lifespan, and then it’s oblivion.

Yeah. It could be a philosophical understanding that everything including pain, all kinds of pain emotional pain physical pain spiritual pain psychological pain all of it is there for your highest and best interests.

And when you begin to understand this, when something quote unquote bad happens, you’re less likely to get angry or to move into fear. You’re more likely remain in your prefrontal cortex.

you are more like to remain a calmer state where you can A. solve the problem that you up against. And your body doesn’t go into a fight-or-flight response that is actually deleterious to your, especially when it goes often and it’s held for a long time.

Yeah, so transformation is more of like finding your deeper purpose in life. It’s a deeper Purpose in Life, yes, and being able to answer the question that I and everyone else instinctively asks when something quote-unquote horrible happens, which is why?

Why? Yes. When you can answer that, you can begin to take control of what’s happened to you and see yourself less as a victim and more as the creator of your own reality.

That’s an enormously powerful transformation at the deepest levels. Yeah. Can you talk about an example of a shift that you maybe saw through hypnosis that couldn’t have been achieved with willpower alone?

I feel like I see it all the time. And I will speak first of all about myself. Okay. When I went out to Santa Fe, New Mexico to do my training 20 years ago, I had an anger problem.

It wasn’t just when I got diagnosed with leukemia, it came out big time there, but it would come out with my children who were little at the time and they would do little kid things and I would feel my body being hijacked, my jaws getting tight, feeling like it’d be a really good idea and almost like I have to, put my fist through a wall.

Something like this Jekyll and Hyde kind of raid just coming over me, just like we said before, instantly. Was my life in danger? Absolutely not. They were little kids.

What they were doing was not acceptable. It needed to be addressed, but it didn’t warrant me going there. Yeah, yeah. And when I came back, that was all gone, gone.

They could do the same things, same triggers, and I didn’t have the response. I could notice, wow, I can see them doing the thing, but I don’t feel my body is being hijacked.

What am I going to do about it? What’s the right response? How much hypnotherapy had you had at that point? Like how much did it kind of get you to that more balanced kind-of state?

It was probably something like eight sessions. Okay, that’s not too bad. I mean, I will say that these were longer sessions, these are probably two-hour sessions and that is the kind problem that so many people feel like the only solution for them is to manage it.

Yeah. Like so many issues in our culture. You must run this constantly. Yes. Yeah. The mainstream approach to something that they don’t understand is to palliate, is, to manage.

And they have this term, anger management. Yes, yes. Which implies, it’s like saying, you know, your car is pulling to the right all the time. So we’re going to install something to managed that rightward pull.

Instead of, we are going a real line. Or where you’ve got a smoke coming out of your engine problem, so you’re going to need to have a fan installed and take it to the car wash more often or something.

Right, yeah. So do you see unresolved subconscious patterns contributing to physical symptoms? And how do begin to unwind that? Well, the first thing I have to say, of course, is a disclaimer.

I’m not a doctor, so I can’t diagnose anything. But I think everyone knows, even every allopathic doctor knows that the mind and the body are connected.

Yes. And everyone that stress is a killer, but it kind of stops there in the mainstream. Yeah. It doesn’t get into the, well, you’re driving your blood pressure up for sure.

You’re diminishing your immune system. Your dimin wishing your reproductive endocrine and digestive systems. That can’t be very good. Right. So you’ll probably behave impulsively, maybe eat something that you regret later.

Yeah. Or maybe you drive in a way that your regret or you pick a fight with someone. Like these things are so holistic in the sense. It’s hard to imagine.

that if you held this for long enough that it wouldn’t destroy your life in many different ways. Your marriage, your weight possibly, you employment status, blood pressure perhaps, immune response I would think.

is involved in everything. It is. There’s nothing that’s not involved. Everything, exactly. Yeah. Just like your computer. You couldn’t take all the software off your computers and expect it would do anything except turn on.

Right, right. you wouldn’t be able to use it for anything. And it’s the same with us. Like our mind is implicated in every thing. The quality of our sleep, the quality for relationships, a quality our work.

A quality in our social life. Quality of physical health, quality mental health. So you’ve explored the idea that pain has a deeper purpose. How do you help someone reframe pain without minimizing their experience?

If you woke up in the morning and you took a step out of your bed and felt pain coming from your big toe and your right foot, everybody would stop. They’d sit down.

If they had the flexibility, they would look at their big toe and see what’s going on. And if they saw that there was a splinter in there, then they’d know immediately what to do.

They would also know it would be painful to go through the process of sterilizing the needle, getting some rubbing alcohol out, and then You know picking this thing out, but they would also know that once the splinter came out that that would heal very quickly and they Would no longer have pain there.

Yeah, so the pain in that example is your friend Why because it’s calling your attention to something that needs help It’s something that needs to be addressed.

And so often in our culture, when a person feels pain, it’s just, as we said before, just palliated. It is just numbed out. Mm-hmm. When I say pain I really am referring to everything.

Not just physical pain. I’m referring emotional pain psychological pain spiritual pain Pain can be from somebody that you love who passed away. it could be boredom.

That’s a form of pain It could feel like you’re not worthy in some way. It could be yes, physical pain. And to numb it out in my example of the splinter in the right big toe would be, well, I’m just going to walk around on crutches for the rest of my life.

Or I am going wake up in morning and drink vodka. or take painkillers, just manage this. And I know that the example I gave is a ludicrously simple one, but I do believe that pain at any level, that it’s there for a reason.

It’s calling your attention to something deeper that needs to be resolved. And the pain could be coming up in your relationship, for example. I have clients who’ve been through multiple relationships, years at a time, married maybe multiple times, and keep breaking.

Well, that’s painful. What is that pain trying to teach that hypothetical person about what’s going on at the subconscious level, what decisions they’re making, the behavior that they are engaged in that is all happening at that subconscious Carl Jung, the famous Swiss psychologist said that until you make the unconscious conscious, it will rule your life and you will call it fate.

Interesting. That example of having, say, three failed marriages. And if the person says, well, they were all malignant narcissists, There was nothing I could do.

They have essentially taken the keys to the kingdom out of their hands. Hended that they didn’t have a choice in the matter about who out all the fish in this sea that the chose.

Pretending that it takes two to tango is not a thing. And I’m not trying to defend certain kinds of behavior or whatever, and I am not to blame anyone.

What I try to call people’s attention to is that our decisions from a scientific standpoint, our decision, large and small, are in motion based on, quote, subconscious and other factors, meaning we don’t know.

Yeah, yeah. And the conscious mind steps in to justify or rationalize the decision that’s already been made. I say this to level set and to take the idea of blame off the table.

If a person is engaged in patterns that are destructive, that a repetitive, just that got programmed into them. And it’s unconscious. And in Carl Jung’s words, it is ruling their life.

Their job is to twofold make it conscious and then make a change so their automatic behavior in those scenarios becomes something that they have control over rather than like me when I was angry, I didn’t have to control.

Yeah. So how would you say that this perspective change changes the way someone approaches their healing journey? I think the first thing is it gives them enormous peace, enormous amounts of hope.

When we can see the light at the end of any tunnel, when we realize we’re not just faded, we have the same experience over and over, and, over again. Yeah, It’s the birth of real optimism.

And I believe, maybe you do too, that physical healing requires the mind to be on board. That it’s way more effective if that person is confident, if they have hope, If they’re optimistic.

If you’re fully on-board. if their mind is focused on when they are better rather than all the things that are wrong and all of the other things may go wrong.

Yes. Yeah, absolutely. You know, the whole thing with the placebo effect, which is it’s just this. for the people that maybe don’t know the definition of it, it’s an idea that a drug or a seizure is going to have important salutary beneficial effects.

And when it has been studied over and over again, its been shown that even when something inert is given, or sham or fake procedure like fake knee surgery, just as effective as the real thing, Yeah, yeah, it’s pretty crazy.

It is called the placebo effect, I will bleed. Which to a hypnotist is a hypnotic suggestion for a beneficial outcome. Yeah. And when that’s been shown to be up to 33% of the effectiveness of all drugs, It proves this mind-body connection.

it proves that where your mental state is dramatically affects your physiological outcome and to me, if you marry this, to enlightened medical activity, that’s your best possible outcome.

Yeah. That’s great. There’s growing discussion even from places like Harvard about a mindset and longevity. Where does hypnosis fit into that conversation?

It should be immediately at the vanguard, right in the front. Okay. And in in middle and taking up the rear guard as well while we’re at it. In 1979, I don’t know if you’re aware of this, but this was also Harvard University, 1979. It’s a long time ago.

A study was done that came to be called counterclockwise. And the lead researcher, Ellen Langer was her name, recruited elderly men and divided them into two groups and brought them to a former monastery in New Hampshire that they had mocked up to look like it was 20 years earlier, 1969. So they’d have newspapers, magazines, show movies, all from 1959 or earlier.

Maybe a portrait of Dwight Eisenhower, President Eisenhauer up on the wall or something. And half the group were instructed, you just live here for five days, the other half was instructed to pretend that it 1959. They measured all these physiological markers of these men.

So blood pressure, strength, eyesight, balance. I don’t know, you would maybe know this. How fast do fingernails grow? You do that. Anyway, after five days, the researchers were stunned in that men who had to be helped into this place were standing erect, walking out carrying their luggage.

And that the markers had improved for all of them, 100% of The eyesight, blood pressure, strength, balance, all these things. The men who pretended it was 1959 had even more dramatic effects than the ones who just existed there for five days.

That’s amazing. 1979. Wow. Obviously, started to believe that these men were 20 years younger and changed their physiology to match. That’s really great.

Wow. You could design a whole hotel with this experience of being 20 years younger. Well, yeah. And for a while, I was working in post-acute healthcare.

I just thought to myself, why isn’t every SNF, every skilled nursing facility in the United States, and any retirement center, they just have a room and you call it the 1950s room or the 1960s and the 1970s.

room, the 1980s room. As people get older, you just change the decade and just have everything in that room be like it was in the study by Harvard in 1979, where they’re just encountering media and talking to each other as though it’s that year or earlier.

Why wouldn’t you do that? It just seems like such a silly, simple thing to do. Yeah. I love it. What a great concept. And now, if you also equipped everyone in a skilled nursing facility or an assisted living facility, retirement center of any kind, If you equipped them all with an audio, you could do the same thing.

I have it on my YouTube channel, I call it Counter Clockwise. And I’m helping people program into their mind that they are younger. Okay. I love that.

That’s really great. And I haven’t really put this together before right now, thanks to your question, but there is already a nocebo. So the nocibo is the opposite of a placebo.

Placebo as I will please, positive outcome. Nocebow is like you got six months left to live and the person dies at six month, that’s a Nocibow. When I was a volunteer firefighter and an EMT, a couple of times I’d be on the scene of motor vehicle accident.

and be able to take somebody who’s panicking and they’re in pain. I’d be to able take them out of pain and out a panic in less than two minutes just by talking to them.

Just by using hypnosis. And sometimes another paramedic or another EMT or a firefighter would say like when we were going to put them on a longboard, this is going hurt.

The person goes right back into pain because that’s a nocebo. Yeah, because they’re expecting it. Yep. Our cultural nocebo and a person who’s been in a car accident is by definition in hypnosis.

We may call it shock, it’s hypnoses too. Okay. So they are more likely to absorb and respond to your suggestions than a personal who hasn’t just been into car accidents.

Yeah. The cultural nosebo is the aging process. That’s just what happens when you get older. Right, that acceptance of everything deteriorating. All of it.

Yeah. Exactly right. And that study at Harvard proved that that’s not true. It doesn’t, no, then the people’s response to it is true, but it doesn’ have to be that way.

You don’t have use that language. We don’ t have take on those beliefs and those ideas. And we’ve all probably met someone who’s 70 or 80, or maybe even older, who is trim and fit, great eyesight, they’re still driving their car.

They’re taking care of themselves. Yeah. They’re not on a million drugs. Right. There’s a lot existing with walkers and cane, you know, all these things.

Yeah, they’re just fully functional. And those people have succeeded despite our collective dream. Yeah. Our collective narrative of you must be falling apart because you’re old.

Precisely. All right. So, okay, for someone who’s listening, who feels overwhelmed or stuck, where would you suggest that they start? And can you paint a little bit more of a picture of this hypothetical person overwhelmed by what?

Overwhelmed by stress. Let’s say it’s a mom with young kids. She’s just in survival mode. Where should she start with something like this? My YouTube channel is a great resource and YouTube in general is good resource.

I have like 280 pieces of content on my YouTube Channel. Okay. And most of those are devoted to people having their own experience like a guided experience.

So that mom could put on headphones when the kids are in bed. Yeah. And she could just listen to something that’s like de-stress or reduce anxiety or return to calm.

And if she’s only got 15 minutes, it could be done in 15 minute. In those 15 min, she can essentially move her autonomic nervous system from that sympathetic fight or flight response where all of those things that we talked about before are going on inside of her body to rest and digest where the thing returns to the prefrontal cortex.

Right, right. Where the heartbeat isn’t elevated, blood pressure goes down, adrenaline and cortisol recedes. Yeah. The object in motion tends to stay in-motion or a body in emotion tends stay-in-motion.

So the more a person can engage in a practice like that, the harder it is to knock them out of the parasympathetic response. Okay. And the shorter the amount of time they stay and the fight-or-flight response Okay And some of these tracks are sleep tracks.

Okay, that’s good to know. Maybe people have heard of subliminal. Sublimal just means sub or below the level of conscious awareness. Yeah. And I make tracks that people can listen to while they’re sleeping.

I have one track on my YouTube channel that has 3.5 million views for weight loss. Wow. A track isn’t going to get that kind of viewership if it doesn’t work.

And nothing works for all people all the time, but this one’s worked for thousands and thousands of people. You just read the comments. Yeah, that’s great.

They have it playing in the bedroom while they’re sleeping. Okay. I think in that one, it’s maybe ocean waves. The oceanwaves are masking the hypnotic suggestions, which are just below that.

Ah, okay. When people are sleeping, they are also in a hypnotistic state. Okay. So I would say to that hypothetical young mom, I’d say a couple of things.

Number one is listen to something like that while you’re sleeping. Program your mind while your sleeping and don’t borrow problems because the subconscious responds to the news the same way it would respond as if you were in Beirut under attack.

You’ve got to start to be careful about your media diet in the way that you’re careful, about the food that eat or the products you put on your skin that go right into your bloodstream.

Right. right. you don’t want to watching the news right before going to bed. Absolutely not. And heaven forbid that you have the TV on in your room while you’re sleeping because you are being programmed by everything that comes out of that speaker on that TV.

Yeah, yeah. Commercials, the news, violent programming. I mean, think about the marketing, about that advertising that’s used for a movie, for an action film.

It’s a seat of your pants roller coaster thrill ride. They’re talking about your nervous system being activated by the movie. Right. Right. Why would that be?

Everyone knows it’s a two-dimensional image and that it is fiction. It’s because your subconscious has A, no concept of time. Everything is now. Something that happened to you 30 years ago is NOW.

Yeah. And it cannot distinguish between what our conscious mind tells us is fact and what are conscious minds tells as fiction and thats why you get neurologically and engaged through your nervous system when you watch a movie.

It’s pounding, gripping the edge of the seat, crying. So, are there a few simple daily practices that begin shifting the subconscious? Well, yeah. Listening to one of these subliminal tracks at night, you do that every night and you’re not sacrificing time.

Yeah. For the busy mom who says, I don’t even have 15 minutes or 30 minutes during the day. How am I going to do this? So that costs you nothing. It is zero cost.

Right. You can listen while you’re sleeping. Your sleeping anyway, we’re going to assume. Yeah. For some period of time. Do you recommend listening with earphones or earbuds or just ambient?

Not for the sleep tracks because so impossibly uncomfortable to listen with. So they’re designed to just have it playing in an ambient sense. Okay. The reason that I favor, it’s not all because everybody’s different.

rain or the ocean sounds is because it’s going to rain where you live at some point. So if the music disturbs your sleep or disturbes your partner’s sleep, then hopefully the rain, because of rains anyway, won’t make the oceans sounds.

And as I said, it was so different that I wanted to create a bunch of different options and different ways of attacking. So that’s one thing. Now, if you can find 15 minutes during your day and you want to listen to an audible one that is designed to shift you from being stressed out to being totally calm, that enormous.

Yeah. Enormous because you’re doing what neuro-linguistic programming calls a pattern break. You’re breaking that cycle of through the day it gets worse and worse, and worst, worse.

You are arresting that at some point and you’re bringing yourself back to that parasympathetic response. And it will also activate the creative part of your mind and that’s the part our minds that we use to solve problems.

So whether it’s a problem with raising children or in a relationship or something at work, it is all just going to make you better. JP Morgan, I think it was, might have been one of the other contemporaries, said I can do a year’s work in 11 months, but never in 12. Meaning that he knew he had to get away from it for the creative part of his mind to start working on problems.

Which is what happens to all of us when we go on vacation. We see our life through a different prism. It takes a day and a half or two days. Our shoulders come down.

And then we start having these creative juices flowing. We’re like, I don’t think I can do this differently or I have a different way of organizing the way I take care of my kids or the I’m running a company that I own.

Yeah, that’s awesome. All right, if you could change one thing about how we approach healing in modern medicine, what would that be? It would be that our fixation should be like that of an auto mechanic, root cause.

And it should involve both the hardware and the software. And that this should be a unified approach. Where we don’t just say, here, I’m going to do my little part and then send you away.

Or I am going pretend like this just arises in a vacuum and there’s nothing you can do about it. Because that induces hopelessness and helplessness. I think it should always be, okay, Here are the symptoms.

Just like an auto mechanic. How are we going trace these symptoms back to their root cause? with an awareness that it could be multifaceted. The symptoms that you’re displaying may have a physiological, structural, chemical etiology and also an emotional component.

It blows me away when I think of when i was really flipped out about my diagnosis. of getting blood tests and waiting for the result. I swear to you, I felt like I had been sentenced to some kind of horrible crime and I was waiting the verdict.

What does that possibly do for anyone’s health? Could some creative, intelligent people rethink the system so that it’s more humane? You know, could we have something where people aren’t awakened in the middle of the night in a hospital to take their vitals?

Recognizing that sleep itself is healing in so many ways? Yeah, yeah. That dead food isn’t as healthy as food that’s alive, maybe? Yeah. And what happened to the Hippocratic oath?

Like, first, not second, Not fifth, First, do no harm. Right. Like these are the things you can tell you’ve tapped into a vein here with me. Well, it has really been such a pleasure having you on, and I’ve learned so much about hypnosis.

Where can people find you if they want to check out your content? So, my website is called blueskyhypnosis dot com. If they wanna connect with me, if you wanna check my YouTube channel, that’s also called Blue Sky Hypnosis Awesome.

We will definitely put that in the show notes. Well, thank you so much for joining me on the Functional Edge. I hope today’s episode gave you fresh insights and practical tools to level up your life.

If you found this conversation helpful, I’d love for you to subscribe, share it with someone who might benefit, and leave a review. It truly helps us reach more people and continue bringing meaningful root cause health insights to those who need it most.

So for more resources, updates and behind the scenes content, please visit drjuliaward.com. And until next time, stay strong, Stay healthy and keep living on the functional edge.

Thank you for joining me on The Functional Edge. I hope today’s episode gave you fresh insights and practical tools to level up your life. If you’ve found value in what you heard, don’t forget to hit subscribe, share the podcast with someone who needs it and leave a review.

It’s the best way to support our mission of bringing powerful health solutions to more people. For more resources, updates and behind the scenes content, visit drjuliaward.com.

Until next time, stay strong, Stay healthy and keep living on the functional edge.