Did You Know You’re Living in a Trance? – Episode 519

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Welcome back to another episode of the Ted in Your Head Podcast!
I’m Ted, and If you don’t know already, I’ve been a certified clinical hypnotherapist for 24 years in private practice. I work with people who are struggling with anxiety, fear, low self-esteem, bad habits, insomnia, and the kind of negative thinking patterns that keep them stuck and bummed out.

As a hypnotherapist I work directly with the subconscious mind. That’s where your programming lives. By programming, I mean your automatic reactions, your habitual behaviors, and the beliefs that you carry about yourself and the world. Using the tool of hypnosis, I am a professional belief changer.

If you need some beliefs changed, stick around to the end and I will tell you how to get in touch.
In my last podcast I talked about beliefs. specifically, do they work for you.

Today I want to ask you: Have you ever stopped to think about where your beliefs came from?
Not the ones you consciously chose. Not the ones you adopted after careful thought and reflection. But the ones that just seem like the truth. The ones that feel so obvious and so natural that it never even occurs to you to question them. The ones you inherited.

Because here is what I want to explore with you today:

Did you know you’re living in a trance?

Almost every one of us is walking around in some level of hypnosis and we don’t even know it.

What Is the Trance?

Now, as a hypnotherapist, I use the word trance or hypnosis in a very specific way. Trance is a state of heightened suggestibility. It is a state in which the critical, analytical part of the mind steps back and information goes directly into the subconscious mind without being questioned or evaluated.

What most people don’t realize though is that we are all in some form of trance most of the time.
Not the kind of trance you see in movies, where someone’s eyes glaze over and they start clucking like a chicken or going to the sunken place like in that movie Get Out. (Ever seen that movie? It’s really bad for business!) But a quiet, invisible, everyday trance.

I’m talking about the trance of social conditioning. The trance of cultural programming. The trance of the beliefs, values and assumptions we absorbed long before we were old enough to examine them.

From the time you are born until 8, 9 or 10 years old, your mind is essentially wide open. The critical faculty, the part of the brain that evaluates and questions incoming information, is not fully developed yet. So, everything that comes in goes straight in. The values of your family. The beliefs of your community. The rules of your religion. The assumptions of your culture. Messages of the media. All of it lands in the subconscious mind and becomes part of the programming that runs your life.
And the kicker is this. You don’t see it as programming. You see it as reality. As just the way things are. As the truth.

That is the trance.

How Social Conditioning Works

Let me talk about what social conditioning actually looks like. Because I think when we name it specifically, it becomes easier to see.

Social conditioning is everything we learn growing up about what we can and cannot do. What is right and what is not. What is acceptable and what is not. What we are allowed to want and what we are not. It shapes our ideas about gender, money and success. About what kind of person we are supposed to be and what kind of life we are supposed to live.

And it comes from everywhere.

It comes from our families. The spoken and unspoken rules of the household we grew up in. What was praised and what was criticized. What was talked about and what was never mentioned. The way money was discussed or not discussed. The way emotions were handled or not handled.

It comes from our religious upbringing, if we had one. The moral framework that was handed to us. The ideas about what kind of person is good and what kind of person is not. What is allowed and what is forbidden.

It comes from the region and community we grew up in. If you grew up in a very conservative part of the country, you were conditioned with conservative values. If you grew up in a more progressive environment, you were conditioned with progressive ones.

Neither is inherently right or wrong. But both are conditioning. Both are types of hypnosis. Make no mistake about it.

And then there is the media. Television, movies, advertising, social media. These are perhaps the most powerful conditioning forces in modern life. They tell us what is beautiful and what is not. What is successful and what is not. What we should want, what we should fear, who we should trust, and who we should be suspicious of.

Here is the thing I really want you to grok:

None of us chose this conditioning. It was given to us. Before we were old enough to evaluate it. Before we had the tools to question it. It was simply installed. Like software. And most of us have been running that software ever since without ever stopping to ask whether it is actually working for us.

The Hypnosis of Comparison

Let me talk about something specific that I see constantly in my practice and that I think is one of the most painful forms of social conditioning.

The hypnosis of comparison.

We have been conditioned, deeply and relentlessly, to measure our worth against other people. To compare our success, our income, our appearance, our relationships, our achievements, with those around us. And to feel bad about ourselves when we come up short.
In the age of social media, this has become absolutely relentless. When I was just starting my hypnotherapy practice, I was talking to my mentor and I said “Everyone else is further along than me! Making more money! Buying more cool stuff!”

She said “Compare and despair.”

We are constantly bombarded with curated images of other people’s lives: Their vacations, their houses, their bodies, their businesses, their relationships. All of it carefully selected and filtered to present the best possible version of reality. And yet we compare our inside to their outside. Our doubts and fears and struggles to their “highlight reel”. And we wonder why we feel inadequate.

I’ve spent a lot of time recently working with clients who are convinced, somewhere deep down, that they’re somehow not enough. Not successful enough. Not smart enough. Not attractive enough. Not productive enough. Not where they should be.

These are good people. Capable people. Smart people. People who by any reasonable measure are doing fine. And yet they carry this quiet, nagging feeling that they are falling short.

I want to be very clear about something. That feeling is not the truth. It is the conditioning talking. It’s the programming.
We have been so thoroughly hypnotized by a culture that equates worth with achievement, success with income, and value with productivity, that many of us have internalized the message that unless we are constantly performing and producing and measuring up, we are somehow failing.

That is a lie. But it is a very convincing one when you have been hearing it your whole life.

The Anxiety Connection

Let’s talk about anxiety.
This kind of conditioning, this constant comparison, this relentless self-evaluation against external standards that were never truly yours to begin with, creates anxiety. A lot of it.

And here’s something I have talked about before on this podcast that I think is worth revisiting. Overwhelm creates a kind of hypnosis. When we are overwhelmed by fear, by negative thinking, by the constant noise of a world that is trying to get our attention by provoking our emotions, we become hyper suggestible. We become more susceptible to the very thoughts and fears that are making us anxious.
It becomes a self-reinforcing loop. The anxiety makes us more suggestible to negative thinking. The negative thinking creates more anxiety. And around it goes.

The attention economy, the news outlets, the social media platforms, they are designed to exploit this. Their entire business model depends on keeping you in a state of emotional arousal. Fear, outrage, comparison, inadequacy. These are not side effects of the media we consume. They are the product.

They need your attention. And the most reliable way to get your attention is to provoke an emotion. Preferably a strong and uncomfortable one.

So when you find yourself feeling anxious and inadequate and like something is terribly wrong with you or with the world, it’s worth asking yourself. Is this actually my feeling? Or is this the result of what I have been consuming and absorbing?
Because a lot of what we think is our own inner voice is actually the voice of the conditioning. The voice of the culture. The voice of everyone who has ever told us, directly or indirectly, who we are and what we are worth and what to believe.
(Secret: no belief is true.)

Moments of Breaking Free

Here’s something I find incredibly inspiring.

Throughout history, individuals and entire movements have broken out of the hypnosis of social conditioning. And when they did, everything changed.

Think about the women’s suffrage movement. For centuries, the conditioning said that women did not belong in the public sphere. That their role was fixed, their place was defined. And then a group of women stepped back from that conditioning and said, Wait! Is this actually true? Does this actually serve us?” And they answered “No!” And they changed the world.

Think about the civil rights movement. The conditioning of an entire culture said that certain people were less than and not deserving. That segregation was simply the way things were. And then a movement arose that looked at that conditioning directly and said, this is not the truth. This is not right. And they changed the world too.

Think about Galileo, who looked through his telescope and saw something that contradicted everything the culture of his time said was true, which was that the earth was the center of the universe. He said no, the earth and planets revolve around the sun. He was imprisoned for it. Because the powers of the time could not afford to let the conditioning be questioned.

The point is this: The conditioning can be questioned. The trance can be broken. It has happened before. And it can happen for you, personally, in the way you think about yourself and your life.

Waking Up from the Trance

So how do we do it? How do we begin to step back from the conditioning and see it for what it is?
The first step, and it is the most important one, is simply awareness. You cannot change what you cannot see. And most of us cannot see our conditioning because we are too far inside it. It just looks like reality.

Start by asking yourself some questions. Look at the place you grew up. Look at the family you were raised in. Look at the religious or cultural framework you were handed. Look at what you were taught about money, success, and what kind of person you are supposed to be. Ask yourself, where did these ideas come from? Are they actually true? Are they working for me? Or are they someone else’s script that I have been following without realizing it?

This is not about rejecting everything you were taught. Some of what you were given is beautiful and worth keeping. But it is about being able to see it as conditioning rather than as absolute truth. Because when you can see it as conditioning, you have a choice. And choice is freedom.

The second thing is to be very intentional about what you are putting into your mind. The news you consume. The social media you scroll through. The conversations you engage in. All of it is conditioning you in one way or another. All of it is either reinforcing the trance or helping you wake up from it.

If you are spending hours every day consuming content that makes you feel scared, angry, inadequate, and overwhelmed, that is not information. That is hypnosis. And it is not the good kind.

Be selective. Be intentional. Feed your mind things that expand your thinking, broaden your perspective, and remind you of your own capacity and worth.

The third thing is to get comfortable with exploring. One of the most powerful ways to break out of social conditioning is to expose yourself to different ways of thinking and living.

I think this is the value of a college education or further self-education: you get exposed to different viewpoints. Same with travelling to other countries. Read widely. Talk to people whose backgrounds and perspectives are different from yours. Travel if you can. Take classes. Ask questions. The more you expose yourself to the breadth of human experience and human thought, the harder it becomes for any single set of conditioning to hold you completely.

The fourth thing is to examine your self-talk. Because the conditioning doesn’t just live out there in the culture. It lives inside your own head, in the voice that narrates your experience and evaluates your worth. Listen to that voice. What does it say about you? Where did those words come from? Would you say those things to someone you love?

And when you catch the conditioning talking, when you hear that voice telling you that you are not enough, not successful enough, not smart enough, not where you should be, try this. Just notice it. Do not fight it. Do not agree with it either. Just say, “Oh, there’s that conditioning again. There is the trance talking.” And then ask yourself, “What would I think and feel about myself if I had never been told that?”

The fifth thing is to be okay with not knowing. One of the things that makes social conditioning so powerful is that it offers certainty. It tells you exactly who you are, what is right, what to believe, and how to live. Stepping outside of that can feel genuinely uncomfortable. Disorienting. Like the ground has shifted.

But that disorientation is not a bad sign. It is actually a sign that you are waking up. Because reality is more complex, more interesting, and more open than any single set of conditioning can capture.

How Hypnotherapy Can Help
I want to spend a moment on this because it is directly relevant to everything we have been talking about.

Much of what I do as a hypnotherapist is help people de-hypnotize from the conditioning that is creating suffering and limitation in their lives.

The belief that you are not good enough. The feeling that you are always falling short. The anxiety that comes from constantly measuring yourself against standards that were never truly yours. These are not facts. They are deeply embedded programs. And in a relaxed hypnotic state, we can go directly to the subconscious mind where that programming lives and begin to update it based on what you want and what you need.

We can replace the voice of the conditioning with something more truthful to you. More compassionate. More aligned with who you actually are and what you actually want.

It is some of the most meaningful work I do. And I have seen it change people’s lives in ways that years of conscious effort alone could not achieve.

If you suspect that the trance of social conditioning is playing a significant role in your anxiety, your self-doubt, or your sense of being stuck, I would love to talk with you about it.

Closing
In closing, we are all conditioned. We have all been hypnotized. All of us. By our families, our cultures, our religions, our media, our social environments. That conditioning shapes what we believe, how we feel about ourselves, and what we think is possible for us. And most of the time, we do not even see it happening. We just think it is the truth.

But it is not always the truth. Sometimes it is a limitation pretending to be a truth. Sometimes it is someone else’s fear, dressed up as wisdom or advice. Sometimes it is a cultural story that served a particular time and place and has long since outlived its usefulness.

So, here’s the invitation: Step back. Look at the conditioning. See it for what it is. Question it. Keep what serves you. Let go of what does not. And begin, consciously and deliberately, to choose what you believe and how you want to live.

Because the trance can be broken. People have done it throughout history. And you can do it too.

“The truth is that standard, normalized, ‘sane’ human beings are highly conditioned, deeply hypnotized, and severely traumatized by their culture.”
— Dr. Gabor Maté

His work is awesome, check it out.

“The first step toward freedom is to realize that you are a prisoner. You cannot escape a prison if you don’t know you’re in one.”
— Vernon Howard

He wrote “The Mystic Path to Cosmic Power.

When times are challenging and the conditioning is loud and the trance is deep, that is exactly the right time to wake up. To think for yourself. To become the hero of your own story.

Just a reminder: you can watch this on video here at YouTube. Or, Listen to this podcast on Spotify, Apple podcasts, Soundcloud and iHeart Radio

Until next time, remember: your mind is powerful. Use it on purpose. And take care of yourself,
because the world needs the best version of you.

Bye!