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Psychedelics may be used to change all sorts of behaviors, not just addiction. The key is their power to occasion a sufficiently dramatic experience to dope-slap people out of their story. It’s literally a reboot of the system—a biological control-alt-delete. Psychedelics open a window of mental flexibility in which people can let go of the mental models we use to organize reality.
The most important of such model is identity view, which a high-dose psychedelic experience temporarily dissolves by quieting the default mode network. We have an addiction to a pattern of thinking with the self at the center of it. This underlying addiction to a pattern of thinking, or cognitive style, links the addict to the depressive and to the cancer patient obsessed with death or recurrence.
Psychedelics knock the legs out from under that model. That can be dangerous in the wrong circumstances, leading to bad trips and worse. But in the right setting, where your safety is assured, it may be a good intervention for dealing with some of the problems of the self—of which addiction is only one. Dying, depression, obsession, eating disorders—all are exacerbated by the tyranny of an ego and the fixed narratives it constructs about our relationship to the world. By temporarily overturning that tyranny and throwing our minds into an unusually plastic high-entropy state, psychedelics, with the help of a good therapist, give us an opportunity to propose some new, more constructive stories about the self and its relationship to the world, stories that just might stick.
References
- Pollan, Micheal. (2018). How to Change Your Mind Chapter 5. The Neuroscience of Your Brain on Psychedelics (Location 4981). New York, NY: Penguin Random House.
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