The Trance of Familiarity: Why You Stopped Seeing Your Own Life

When you move, you break the trance.
My wife said that to me recently, and the more I thought about it, the more interesting the idea became.

Most of us don’t realize just how hypnotic ordinary life can become because we get used to the same rooms, the same routes, the same people, the same routines and the same little decisions that hardly feel like decisions anymore. There’s nothing wrong with familiarity, of course, and in many ways it makes life easier, but it also means that huge parts of our day can begin to run automatically without us really noticing them.

We get up in the same place, make coffee or tea in the same kitchen, sit in the same chair, drive the same roads and look at the same surroundings. After a while, we stop seeing much of it properly because the brain is very good at deciding what no longer requires our full attention. It simply becomes background.

We know where everything is, we know what comes next, and we move through the day with an enormous amount of behaviour running almost by itself. In that sense, ordinary life really can become a kind of trance, not because we’re literally asleep or unaware, but because so much of our experience has become predictable.

Then something changes dramatically, and suddenly the trance is interrupted.

Moving house is a perfect example because almost everything that used to happen automatically has to be reconsidered. You don’t know exactly where things are. You have to think about which road to take, where the shops are, how the rooms feel at different times of the day, and where you’re going to put things that used to have a permanent place. Even trivial decisions become conscious again because the old cues are gone, and that changes the quality of your attention.

For a while, you begin noticing things in a way you haven’t done for years. You notice the light coming through a particular window in the morning. You notice the sounds outside, the shape of the neighbourhood, the way the air feels and smells when you step outside, and all the small characteristics of a place that will eventually become invisible through familiarity.

There’s a kind of freshness to it because your brain hasn’t yet learned what it can safely ignore. You’re paying attention again, and in a very real sense, you’re more awake.

Of course, moving house isn’t the only thing that can do this. A new job, a long trip, a relationship beginning or ending, learning a new skill, taking on a challenge or making some substantial decision can have exactly the same effect. Anything that interrupts the old pattern can cause us to look again at things we had stopped seeing.

Sometimes life does this to us without asking permission, but I think there’s also real value in choosing to do it deliberately from time to time.

We can change the route we always take, rearrange a room, visit somewhere unfamiliar, learn something we’ve never attempted before, or simply alter one of the routines that has become completely automatic. None of these things needs to be dramatic. The point isn’t novelty for its own sake.

The point is that a change in pattern can change attention, and a change in attention can make life feel different because we’re actually participating in it again rather than merely moving through what we already know.

In hypnosis, we naturally tend to think of trance as something that happens when someone closes their eyes, relaxes and turns their attention inward, but there’s another kind of trance that interests me just as much. It’s the trance of familiarity, where the world becomes so well known that we stop really looking at it.

We don’t notice how much of our behaviour has become automatic because automatic behaviour feels normal, and normality is very good at disguising itself.

That’s one of the unexpected gifts hidden inside a major change. It can wake us up. It can make the world feel new again, even if only temporarily, because the old assumptions and routines are no longer doing all the work for us. We’re forced to pay attention, to make decisions consciously, and to engage with what’s actually happening rather than simply running the familiar programme.

I think the interesting question is whether we can learn to do some of that deliberately. We probably don’t need to move house every time life begins to feel too familiar, but perhaps we do need to notice when we’ve slipped too deeply into the trance of the ordinary and then find some intelligent way of interrupting it.

Sometimes changing your life begins with something much simpler than a grand decision. Sometimes it begins by waking up enough to see the life you already have.

And a big thanks to my wife for giving me the idea of seeing moving house as escaping a trance. I think she was absolutely right.

Mike