Your AI hypno-bot will see you now

Remember Raveen? How about the Amazing Kreskin? Either one of those famous 1970’s show biz hypnotists would have called me up on stage to entertain audiences. I’m that easily hypnotized.  

Back in the day, I discovered just how hypnotizable I am during an assignment for CBC-TV News in Windsor, Ontario. I was interviewing a local hypnotist on the power of suggestion to control pain. Afterwards, the crew filmed me being put ‘under’ for our “B” roll. We thought it would be fun to pretend the guy was actually inducing me into a hypnotic state. 

Except he really did. 

When we returned to the newsroom, I still felt out of it and had to go back to his office to properly be brought back into the real world. Less than a week later, I decided to seek his help with my two-pack-a-day smoking habit. I didn’t light up again for more than a decade. 

(In my defense, I had a good excuse. We were living in Taiwan at the time and writing my first expat book. I only had a brief two-hour window every morning when I didn’t have to deal with the demands of my then two-year-old son Jay. I had thrown the poor kid into a day care but it required a very stressful drive down the narrow, twisting Taipei roads. Who wouldn’t have lit up again?)

But this isn’t about the success of my hypnotizable state of mind for modifying bad habits, although that’s certainly part of the story. It’s about coming to grips with the idea that clinical hypnotherapy can now be delivered on-demand and by code and not by a real live person either on a stage or in a medical office. 

A few months ago, I downloaded a personal hypno-bot by the name of Dr. David Spiegel. He’s the very real American psychiatrist at Stanford University who gave the world the self-hypnosis app Reveri. My sessions with the man I refer to as my nice-Jewish doctor are entirely enabled by AI. How do I feel about that? Two words: Oy vey.

Reveri has an easy tool to measure a user’s level of hypnotizability. No surprise, I have a very high level. That was my starting point to get into the sessions AI Dr. Spiegel offers on everything from alleviating anxiety to improving one’s golf game (it’s about focus of course). Some of the exercises are passive, with Dr. Spiegel inducing the user into a hypnotic state with just three steps. I began with the ones about anxiety and found them to be both meditative and calming.

It was when I moved into the interactive sessions that things starting to get, well, creepy. There were a number of reasons for that starting with was his extremely life-like voice talking to me with such familiarity. And then there’s the adaptive algorithms that allow AI Dr. Spiegel to remember what I had said before and build on those conversations. 

The first time he asked if I wanted to float again in my lap pool in Costa Rica as part of the calming visualizations he creates, I almost jumped out of my skin and out of my trance. Another day he asked if I preferred to be floating in the silky water of the Gatineau River near our old house in western Quebec (another one of my favorite calming floating spots). I thought again, and not for the first time, how much do I tell this guy?

We’re all hearing stories now about the use of Dr. ChatGPT and other large language models to deliver therapy and other mental health wellness activities. There are worrisome privacy issues to be sure. But even worse to me is how startling it can be—and potentially addictive—to realize that your AI shrink has actually been ‘listening to you’ and is more compassionate than some of your closest friends, albeit artificially so.  

The fact is that my sessions with Dr. Spiegel have been incredibly successful. His breathing exercises, as just one example, calmed me down when Rodney and I flew to Naples from Montreal last October. We hit turbulence so bad that I began breathing and breathing and breathing like a banshee and you know what? It actually worked. The turbulence passed and so did my anxiety. That was the moment I realized that Reveri was a game-changer for me.

And that’s exactly what I recently told Jay, now in his late thirties. He’s constantly challenging me on how I use the tech products of late-stage capitalism, the ones that have monetized everything and now, even therapy. 

“Mom,” he admonished me, not for the first time. “You’re the one screaming how evil big tech is and how we should stay away from their apps and not make them richer.”

“You’re absolutely right, honey,” I said. “But it works, so I’m going to use it anyway.” 

I guess that makes me human. Who says irony is dead?

I’ve come a long way from the office of the North Vancouver hypnotist I once worked with to cope with fear of flying and to keep me off cigarettes forever. He had dream-catchers on his walls and the entire vibe was definitely woo woo. Maybe that’s not too far off what I’m engaging in now. AI sure feels other-worldly which perhaps it is. 

That other world is the future.