A quick note: On the next New Moon, Tuesday July 14th, I’m opening the first cohort of my Surreal 7-Day Phone Detox Challenge with Hypnosis. The first round is completely free. If you already know you want to get those hours back, come join here.

Dear Reader,

It’s 8:20 in the morning, and I’m about to get on the next Underground train into Central London.

Looking around the carriage, I can see how drained people look, energetically sucked into the black mirror of their phones.

The University of Cambridge, sponsored by Virgin Media, ran a study tracking the phone screen time of over 6,000 UK adults over the past year.

Read the full study →

The average UK adult spends 4 hours a day on their phone, and more than a third of that, around 1 hour and 26 minutes a day, is unintentional.

Over a lifetime, this adds up to 4 years and 8 months of staring at a screen without any specific goal or intent (a.k.a. doomscrolling).

The more I study hypnotherapy, the more I see how social media uses hypnotic techniques to keep you in a trance.

Here are 5 ways social media uses hypnotic techniques to keep you in a trance.

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1. Induce amnesia

Do you remember the posts you scrolled past last time you opened social media?

Maybe one or two, but certainly not every post that flew past your eyes.

When fresh content floods your brain every few seconds, it becomes too much for the conscious mind to process.

The conscious mind can only hold a small amount of information at once, and it keeps only what feels the most relevant.

That’s why our phone numbers are designed around the magical number, seven plus or minus two, the upper limit of what our conscious mind can comfortably retain.

When the conscious mind gets overwhelmed, the unconscious mind starts to take over.

Your unconscious then filters which content to remember and which to forget.

By inducing amnesia, your unconscious mind comes online and takes control.

Like every other self-sabotaging, compulsive habit, whether it’s skin picking, hair pulling, or an addiction to alcohol, caffeine, sugar, or nicotine, you consciously know it’s not good for you, but you can’t stop.

When an emotional urge arises, the behaviour that follows is automatic and unconscious.

You are running an unconscious program that runs an automatic habit loop, and conscious willpower struggles to override that programming.

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2. Confusion induction

The grandfather of hypnotherapy, Milton Erickson, would frequently collapse time and space, weaving between different narratives so that his subject lost track of where they were.

He would shift between past, present, and future, move between different topics, leaving the listener’s conscious mind confused about what’s happening in the present moment.

Normally, when we follow a story, our attention holds because each piece builds on the last. But by ripping you between completely unrelated contexts in a short period of time (one video about creativity, the next about a cute dog, the next about seven signs someone is a narcissist, the next about social media growth), your brain simply cannot cope.

The brain doesn’t know which narrative to follow, so it gets overwhelmed.

When the conscious mind gets overwhelmed, the unconscious mind comes online.

By inducing that state of confusion, the platform keeps you in a hypnotic state, and your unconscious keeps you chasing the next dopamine hit.

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3. Eye fixation

In hypnosis, one of the techniques to induce a trance is to narrow your attention and fix your gaze on a single spot.

Think about what you’re actually doing when you scroll. There’s a bright screen held close to your face, and the whole room around you seems to be fading out.

The induction has already started before you’ve even had a thought about which content to scroll.

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4. Time distortion

You know that feeling when you look up from your phone and think, where did the last hour go? That’s a sign you were in a trance.

When your unconscious takes control, you drop into a different brainwave state and you lose track of time. Think of flow states, deep meditation, or psychedelic experiences: time collapses, and it often feels like you’ve slipped into a different reality.

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5. Future pacing

All that aspirational content, the dream lifestyle, the body, the house, the next brand or activity you’ll discover, the life you wish you had, it all invites you to step into a future version of yourself and rehearse it.

In hypnosis, we call that age progression.

Rehearsing that future feels good, but it also leaves you a little hungry, wanting more, and that wanting is what keeps you coming back.

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If you want to stop doomscrolling and get those hours back for what actually matters, whether that’s building healthier habits, starting that dream side business, or simply being more present in your life, I’m launching the first cohort of the Surreal 7-Day Phone Detox Challenge with Hypnosis on the next New Moon.

Next Tuesday, July 14th.

I’m offering this first cohort for free, and I’d welcome your feedback to shape the next iteration of the product.

Learn More & Join the Free Cohort

The first cohort has limited spaces.

But please only join if you’re seriously committed to 15–30 minutes a day for 7 days. There are also two optional (but highly encouraged) 45-minute live Zoom calls at 6–7pm UK time on Tuesday, July 14th and Tuesday, July 21st.

In the meantime, I’ve recorded what a sample day looks like below.

With love,

Ginny