Tony Robbins explains lasting transformation through nervous system conditioning rather than motivation alone. He worked with Stanford on a study where two clinically depressed professors off medication experienced recovery using his conditioning framework, part of a broader effort to find non-pharmaceutical interventions for depression.
How do you really create this atmosphere to really get them to, to make it a long-lasting transformation? How does that happen?
I've never been a motivator. I've always been a strategist, but I do know you need energy to follow through. You know, you can have the best tools in the world, but if you're low energy, you're not gonna use 'em, right? Well, what I do is a conditioning process. So like, you understand how the nervous system works. And so that's why I've gotten results for some of the greatest athletes, business people, et cetera, that last. What was interesting is I always knew what it was. So then Stanford comes. And they called me up one day and they said, look, you know, we had two of our professors who were clinically depressed. They're both off all medication. They're both fine. This is pretty miraculous. Do you have any studies? And I said, well, I've got millions of graduates and, you know, testimonials and so forth. Stanford says, well, what if we did a study? I said, great. What do you want to study? They said depression, because now COVID's starting to hit. And they said depression's out of control. People are overdosing on drugs right now like crazy. Suicides are through the roof. And we're looking for an interesting non-pharmaceutical approach to doing this. We'd love to study it.
I said, great, tell me what's the average result?
They said 60% of the people who come for therapy and/or drugs, 60% make zero improvement in their symptoms. Zero. He said 40% improve, and the average improvement is 50%. Some people get well, but most of them are on drugs forever. I know it sounds like hubris, I know it sounds like overconfidence, but I'm just based on history. I bet we'll beat that size. Let's see. So they set up the test group, and then they did it. No drugs, 6 days, no one-on-one therapy. At the end of 6 weeks, 93% of them had absolutely no symptoms. Nothing like it in the history of psychiatry. The 7% that didn't completely solve improved massively. No suicidal ideation afterwards. And 1-year follow-up showed the end of a year never seeing me again, because the way they were conditioned, these people had 72% reduction in negative emotions, 51% increase in positive emotions.
