How Psychedelics Change the Brain

Ways I'm "Different" Now

One of the hardest parts of coping with coming down from psychedelics is adjusting to the changes in your brain and perception of the world. Because of the messaging around psychedelics, I thought these changes would all be good. Of course, they weren’t.

Nearly every positive change had a equal and opposite consequence; every euphoric drug vision had a corresponding nightmare. Here are some of them:

How Psychedelics Changed My Brain:

Enhanced sensory perception & Frequent overstimulation

Enhanced connection to nature & Identity and boundary confusion

Openness to more versions of reality & Seeing “unreal” entities

Sparked creativity & Cycles of depression and mania

Enhanced sense of wonder & Regression

Enhanced focus and productivity & Obsession and paranoia

Seeing personal patterns and wounds & Addiction, waking hallucinations

Trust in intuition & Doubt; suicidal ideation

Dreams that come true & Dreams that come true

There has yet to be much research into the long-term effects of psychedelic use on the brain. Plus, there are financial incentives for proving they can be used regularly with few side effects, like pharmaceutical drugs, but we should know better. Here’s a short clip from Nova showing some of what people know: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pKR-jvGlkNg

It’s not as if psychedelics gave me one or the other condition on my chart. What I’m saying is psychedelics enhanced the effects on the list for me. In fact I don’t think it’s worth evaluating whether the effects were positive or negative. It’s merely true that they all exist for me now.

Psychedelics are amplifiers; they amplify the psychology that already exists so that you can see it more clearly and be with it more calmly. But they also remove the gatekeepers of the psyche and make and strengthen neural connections. This can mean a lot more gets let in, and you can become more sensitive to various stimuli. Personally, I’ve become intensely sensitive to artificial lighting and to sound. I had to leave a concert in the town where I live last summer because someone had messed up the soundboard and it was actually driving me crazy. I avoid places and people who push me into overstimulation.

Psychedelics can retrieve what has been suppressed. I think if you go deep, you’ll get dirty no matter what. Maybe you want psychedelics to make you feel better or to heal you, but using them that way doesn’t respect their power or the power of our own brains to make connections. A old man on the Rez told me the human brain is the most powerful technology ever created.

I don’t recommend learning the lesson the hard way.