People don’t realize how easy it is to be hypnotized online and not realize it.

I’ve studied hypnosis and NLP since the early eighties, and I’ve been warning for years that bad actors, including Donald Trump, use these methods to influence people.

After seeing how NLP shifted from helping clinicians to being used by salesmen and CEOs, I walked away and went on to learn ethical clinical hypnotherapy instead.

But today the internet is flooded with hypnotic techniques: ASMR, sexually explicit trance videos, and content targeting lonely, anxious young people. Our minds naturally go into altered states that can be healthy when we are in control, but extremely dangerous when strangers online are inducing trance to shape beliefs, identity, and suggestibility.

Social media itself can create trance states through doom-scrolling and dissociation. And authoritarians on both the left and right exploit that confusion to wage psychological warfare!!

We need to protect our minds and help our friends and family do the same. Learn about hypnosis. Understand how your brain works. And whenever someone online is trying to pull you into a trance, say no.

Have you seen these videos showing up on your social media channels? What do you think about them?