Social Media is Hypnotizing You
How Social Media Affects Your Long-Term Beliefs and Behaviors
Social media allows us to have quick and easy access to friends, brands, celebrities, and influencers like never before. With a simple tap of a screen, we are connected to photo and video content, and thanks to the endless news feed, the content stream is infinite. There are appealing aspects of social media (like keeping up with friends and family, especially those who live far away). But with the overabundance of content combined with an algorithm that knows what you’ll look at, your subconscious is vulnerable in ways that you may not be aware of.
Hypnosis is a trance or dream-like state, and is a very effective state of mind for learning something new on a subconscious level. Overwhelming the conscious mind with data induces a hypnotic state. This data comes through your senses and emotions. Everything you hear, see, touch, taste, smell, and feel sends data to your conscious mind where it is then identified, organized, and interpreted into what you perceive as reality. But when the conscious mind gets overwhelmed with too much data at once, the mind can’t keep up the process of organization, and cannot differentiate what we’re seeing/feeling from what we otherwise already believe. This means the mind is in a state of hypersuggestibility and we are more likely to accept what we are experiencing in this overloaded state as “true.” This happens in a hypnotherapy session, but in a controlled way with a specific intention. But this also happens all the time in your daily life. Hypnosis is a natural state that everyone experiences daily, and many times it is harmless or even helpful. But other times it can cause dysregulation of emotions, or even cause unwanted or dysfunctional beliefs and behaviors.
When scrolling through an endless social media feed, there is no way for the conscious mind to process everything you see in a reasonable, logical way. There is simply too much data coming in too fast and the conscious mind becomes overloaded, which means you enter a hypnotic state and therefore are extremely suggestible. If the content you are consuming includes triggering photos, images, or text, you are more likely to absorb it on a subconscious level, which can affect the way you feel and even influence your beliefs and behaviors. This is especially true when the content induces a strong emotion. If your feed is concentrated with photos and pictures of people showcasing fitness, thinness, or financial affluence, it is likely to trigger feelings of physical or financial inadequacy in yourself. If your feed is concentrated with extreme political content, you are likely to feel agitated or otherwise emotionally riled up. If you are seeing posts with friends doing fun things, traveling to interesting places, or spending time with each other without you, you may begin to feel lonely or left behind. Seeing any of this content in a smaller dose may not have the same effect, because you have the ability to pause and think critically. But when the conscious mind is overloaded, logic and reason are out the window, so you are much more likely to absorb the content on a subconscious level.
Keep all of this in mind next time you are scrolling. You may decide to limit your time on social media to a few minutes a day. At the very least, you may decide to do some housekeeping on the accounts you follow so you have a bit more awareness of what kind of messaging might be taking root in your subconscious and having long-term effects on your beliefs and behaviors.