Psychedelics can help us get over bad habits without cognative effort by bringing us into a more mindful state

The insights people have from a psychedelic experience tend to be surprisingly banal. Not that their journeys were banal—psilocybin transported them all over the world and through history and to outer space—but the insights they brought back with them were mundane in the extreme. Dr. Matthew Johnson refers to these realizations as “duh moments” and says they are common among his volunteers and not at all insignificant. Smokers know perfectly well that their habit is unhealthy, but under the influence of psilocybin that knowing acquires a new weight, it becomes something they feel in thier bones rather than their brains. They move from conceptual understanding to Experiential understanding. Insights like these become more compelling, stickier, and harder to avoid thinking about. These sessions deprive people of the luxury of mindlessness—our state of brought about by the default mode network—and one in which addictions and habits flourish, and puts us into a mindful one. Similarly, Mindfulness can allow us to get over bad habits without cognitive effort.

Johnson believes the value of psilocybin for the addict is in the new perspective—at once obvious and profound—that it opens onto one’s life and its habits. Addiction is a story we get stuck in, a story that gets reinforced every time we try and fail to quit: ‘I’m a smoker and I’m powerless to stop.’ The journey allows them to get some distance and see the bigger picture and to see the short-term pleasures of smoking in the larger, longer-term context of their lives.

Of course, this re-contextualization of an old habit doesn’t just happen; countless people have taken psychedelics and continued to smoke. If it does happen, it’s because breaking the habit is the avowed intention of the session, strongly reinforced by the therapist in the preparatory meetings and the integration afterward. The “set” of the psychedelic journey is carefully orchestrated by the therapist in much the same way a shaman would use his authority and stagecraft to maximize the medicine’s deep powers of suggestion.

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References

• Pollan, Micheal. (2018). How to Change Your Mind Chapter 5. The Neuroscience of Your Brain on Psychedelics (Location 4913). New York, NY: Penguin Random House.

• Brewer, Judson. (2017). The Craving Mind Why We Get Hooked and How We Can Break Bad Habits Chapter 2. Addiction, Straight Up (Location 637). Yale University Press. New Haven, CT.

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Type:🔴 Tags: Biology / Neuroscience / Pharmacology / Psychology / Neuropsychology / Biochemistry / Neurochemistry Status:☀️