How Often Are You Hypnotized Without Knowing It?

It could be several times per day. Sometimes salespeople, administrators and managers use neurolinguistic programming techniques to trigger trust and compliance (see numbers 1-3.) Since this is a detailed topic, a separate blog will be devoted to how these techniques work and how you can sidestep them.

Sometimes, family members and friends unconsciously hypnotize us (see numbers 4-7.) If you are interested in this topic, let me know, and I can devote a blog to the nuts and bolts of that, too.

Often, we hypnotize ourselves from within or through our connection to the environment (see numbers 8-16.) Relating to nature and listening to music can be enhanced to create a deeper and potentially very pleasurable and even healing trance state. Another blog will give specific steps on how to do that.

Meanwhile, here's the information you were wondering about, that is, how to determine how many times per day you may be in a hypnotic trance without knowing it. You are probably in a trance state if you are experiencing a situation similar to one in which, for example, you find yourself:

1. buying a fancier product than you actually needed or agreeing to take on an extra job responsibility without thinking it through first.

2. eating past the point of being full or salivating at a food ad when you're not hungry.

3. feeling bored by whatever you see on television, but finding yourself unable to actually switch off the set.

4. automatically waving back to a stranger, who, as it turns out, is waving to someone behind you.

5. yawning right after someone else does when you 're not really tired, or getting the giggles from someone when you don't get the joke.

6. wanting to smoke and drink only when you're around other people who are doing so.

7. getting that doctor's office feeling of wearing a paper gown in a sterile room when someone nearby is using alcohol-based hand sanitizer.

8. thinking it's hours earlier or later than the clock says it is.

9. reliving a scene from your past so vividly that the memory seems closer, brighter and more multi-dimensional than the surroundings in which you are right now.

10. arriving at a familiar destination with no memory what occurred on the way.

11. tearing up or getting the sniffles (even though you don't usually respond to sentimental movies) while viewing a movie scene like the following: a young boy throws down the shovel from the trash fire he's been tending, and running, shakes the dust from his overalls as he races through a field of unharvested hay to meet the faithful German Shepherd and Himalayan cat who have traveled hundreds of miles by foot to return to the family farm. Suddenly, you realize it's not the sentiment that's giving you the sniffles, it's your allergies, and your sinuses are responding as if the dog, cat, dust, smoke and hay were right there in the theater with you.

12. getting pain relief from an Altoid or vitamin C that you mistook for an aspirin.

13. feeling time and space opening up limitlessly when you're doing something you love.

14. communing with the ineffable.

15. getting a strong intuition that something you couldn't possibly predict is going to occur, and then, it does occur. (prescience occurs in hypnotic states.)

16. having a deja vu or out of body experience