What do psychedelics actually do anyway?
Without therapy, psychedelics do precisely one thing. And boy is it valuable.
Psychedelics coupled with psychotherapy can achieve amazing outcomes, treating depression, PTSD, eating disorders, and myriad other pathologies. However psychedelics on their own, what exactly do they do? And after five years of psychedelic therapy, am I really any different?
In my view, both psychedelics and meditation do precisely one thing, and they both do it quickly. They give you a teensy tiny space (that you can enlarge) between you, and your thoughts. They allow you to realize that you are not your thoughts.
I went through my first 40 years of life pretty much saying anything that came into my head. I would hear Zig Ziglar and others say the key to good relationships was to ‘taste your words before you spit them out’, but I couldn’t figure out how to do that. It turns out the key is to hear your thoughts, then have the you that heard that thought decide what you’re going to think, say, or do next. Don’t let it be automatic.
We don’t know how psychedelics work. Taking a normal dose of LSD, MDMA or mushrooms without therapy isn’t likely to change you in any way, for the better or for the worse. We don’t know if psychedelics dampen the Default Mode Network (DMN) or…
