A voice coming from my phone tells me to look up, close my eyes and take a deep breath. Laying back on a pyramid of pillows on top of my made bed, I follow the instructions of the disembodied voice. I exhale, relax my eyes – keeping them closed – and imagine I'm suspended, floating, weightless. My phone, the source of so many of my mental distractions, the tiny little box that makes my brain feel like it's liquefying and dripping out of my ears, is now the thing I'm turning to to counteract that tendency to zoom in and zone out. But can the root of my distraction and disappearing attention span also be the secret to repairing them?
The experts behind Reveri, a major player in the growing landscape of self-hypnosis apps, think so. Dr David Spiegel – the voice of the app – is its co-founder and chief scientific officer. Over the past 45 years, he's become one of the world's preeminent experts on the clinical use of hypnosis.
“Hypnosis is one of the oldest Western conceptions of psychotherapy, and yet it's been relatively ignored or made fun of or made into a stage show,” Dr Spiegel says from his home in California. It's there that he works as the director of the Center on Stress
