Hypnosis, meditation and prayer: trainable states with measurable brain changes
September 28, 2026 · 23 min read
David Spiegel's hypnosis research, Andrew Newberg's brain scans of prayer and meditation, and Sam Harris's meditation practice all describe altered states that can be learned and that change brain activity. These practices offer drug-free ways to work with pain, stress and attention.
The rules, numbers and steps worth keeping in front of you.
- Spiegel: hypnosis is highly focused attention, and it gives you more control, not less.
- Trial result: self-hypnosis cut procedural pain by 80% with half the opioids.
- Women with metastatic breast cancer who learned self-hypnosis had half the pain after a year.
- Stress exercise: body floating somewhere safe, problem on an imaginary screen, body stays comfortable.
- If you wake at night, don't look at the clock.
- About a third of adults are not hypnotizable; about 15% are extremely so.
- Eye-roll test: head back, look up, slowly close your eyelids; mostly whites showing suggests higher hypnotizability.
- Spiegel: the essence of trauma is helplessness; self-hypnosis restores a sense of control.
- Newberg: in deep prayer or meditation the parietal lobe quiets and people feel oneness.
- Newberg: practice helps with stress, anxiety and depression, and the brain can change at any age.
- Harris: notice a thought as a thought; anger fades quickly once you stop feeding it.
- Harris: try 30 seconds on your breath without drifting; seeing how hard it is counts as progress.
- Harris calls much of the benefits science provisional; Newberg says scans have limits.
- Use a licensed clinician for medical conditions, chronic pain or trauma.
This is the short form. The full insight has every expert's reasoning, their own words and the sources.