My goal for 2023 is to be less self aware, really! Too much self awareness...

It's funny but this is my goal too. I couldn't agree more

Much love, buddy!

Do you want to be less aware in general? Or spend less time ruminating about aspects of your own personality?

I found the book "Self Awareness" by Red Hawk pretty helpful in disentangling and disambiguating some of this stuff.

It would be good to think about stuff a little less. Do you mean "Self Observation" ?

If it helps, I'm not aware of you at all!

Get comfortable with being uncomfortable

While your advice sounds totally reasonable, it's at the same time incredibly dismissive. In my opinion, it's not much different from "Have you tried being confident/not being depressive, bro?"

If you need courage to face your demons but only facing those demons will give you the courage to do the thing in the first place, then how to solve that circular dependency?

TBH I prefer a macrodose. It's great as a tool if you want to be introspective and change. But I agree that microdosing, at least for me would drive me to be too introspective at times. Balance is good. I've found psychedelics more useful as a point in time tool than as a constant. Macro w/ a goal works better for me than a micro dose.

Being mindful and being introspective are two different things. Most people experience anxiety (including me) from being introspective since they fail to let go feelings after experiencing them. This is a skill that requires exercise and IMO psychedelics are helpful to change the game and let people exercise this.

Had you practiced meditation for a reasonable period of time before having done the shrooms?

Preparing the mind is crucial to using psychedelics responsibly and avoiding that the negative emotions that come up take over you

I find comments like this irritating.

If someone wants to say "I dropped acid and it helped me," fine. People are allowed to share personal experiences, though it's a mistake to universalize them.

But this "oh you didn't meditate enough" or whatever is such nonsense. It's a claim about these drugs and how they work that you have no grounds to make.

It also ignores the potential negative side effects of meditation. It's not without its own risks.

What are the side effects? Isn't meditation just observing one's own thoughts? Metathinking if you will?

I had never heard of anything either so I googled it and there’s quite a bit out there. Meditation induced psychosis seems to be a particularly bad outcome.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8380174/

I had to stop meditating for a while because of the disturbing shit that would surface during it. Still happens sometimes, but I'm more ready for it now, and see it as part of the benefit. Had to change my mindset, though.

It's like those people saying they're vegan when presenting themselves

I've only taken shrooms once and didn't change anything for me either psychologically. I feel like Salvia helped a little bit with enlightenment, but I had to take it semi-regularly. What did change was the onset of HPPD: https://eyewiki.aao.org/Hallucinogen_Persisting_Perception_D...

I haven't taken any hallucinogens in over a decade, but my HPPD symptoms still persist to this day. I have visual snow syndrome, warping, palinopsia/tracers, and phosphenes. They're not debilitating, but extremely annoying and for a lot of people it sends them into suicidal ideation or panic.

As with everything else, YMMV. You might be perfectly fine or you might be one of the rare ones like me that acquire unexpected side effects despite the fact that many people tout these drugs as having mild or temporary effects. Choose wisely.

I had HPPD for a minute when I was 19. I haven't replicated, but I went really hard into DHA enriched soy milk for a while. I don't know if there's anything there to really connect it, but my symptoms resolved. Phytoestrogens may have done something, and the DHA may have done something, perhaps a combination, or maybe the AA profile of the milk... Or maybe it was just rebound capacity thanks to my young age (admittedly the most probable explanation). This is despite continuing drug use.

I also did a lot of meditation, and pretty extensive sessions (40-60m) of it for a few months.

Some things to consider if you're interested.

I've taken DHA enriched soy milk, so unfortunately that didn't help. Based on the link I posted, there's two types of HPPD. Type 1 is temporary and recovers, type 2 is chronic. I have type 2. I haven't tried any of the prescription meds though as most doctors are unfamiliar with this condition and the one neuro-ophthalmologist (who was hands down the best doc ever) I saw is no longer in practice sadly.

I think HPPD is going to get a lot more attention as psychedelics continue to grow in mainstream popularity. The significance of HPPD as a potential long-lasting side effect of psychedelic use has been downplayed a lot in the past, but I've been seeing more uptake of the topic in mainstream discussions.

Andrew Callaghan of "ALL GAS NO BRAKES" suffers from HPPD and has started to discuss it openly: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zUbod5t_2oM&t=1247s

I think hearing HPPD stories from popular media figures like Callaghan can help seed healthy discussions about the risks of psychedelic use. In the past few years, the media has been way too optimistic about the potential positives of psychedelics while almost ignoring the risks and downsides.

I've had HPPD symptoms for many years after my first trip, and all of them are beginning to disappear now that I finally properly continued trauma therapies (with no substances involved).

I'm just making this up, and have zero studies to quote, but may it be that HPPD is actually a positive sign, on a path to healed trauma?

I think these are normal features of our perception and most people are just used to experiencing them to the point where they are filtered out at baseline level of consciousness.

Have taken shrooms thrice, 16 years ago, and got HPPD right from the first time. Still have the visual snow, increased palinopsia, and "coloured dots" that last about 1 second, from time to time (those have decreased exponentially over the years). It's not really annoying at all in the end but obviously the visual system didn't recover. At the time the sun was thrice the size for me. Would have been great to have only those symptoms...

I'm not sure if it's HPPD but if I stare at anything with a pattern (tile, carpet, etc) it kinda starts to move/bleed together, kinda like a river or paint. I think I first noticed it after doing psychedelics in my late teens but it has persisted since.

That doesn't sound like it, I've had that since I have memories and I didn't do any psychedelics as a baby and my parents nor my grandparents never touched any of the stuff. Visual artifacts like that are normal for some parts of the population.

I think you need to worry if you're getting into depersonalization-derealization, otherwise you might just have some minor visual artifacts.

“ I managed to tuck away very nicely“ There is a fine line between compartmentalization and repression.

for sure, but these memories only bother me with the extremely heightened emotions that mushrooms give me, not normally so it really doesn't feel like something I'm repressing. It already feels dealt with and in the past, it just doesn't need to be brought up

If the trauma surfaces and you have a negative reaction, it's likely the trauma could still be affecting your behavior and thus your life in some way.

It's your decision if the pros outweigh the cons in your situation, but in my experience tackling trauma head-on in a safe environment has measurably improved my overall health.

Even "worse", unresolved trauma affects people around you negatively, whereas it is typical that you have a blind spot for how exactly until you face it. I really strongly urge everyone to work on unresolved trauma, and not keep it "tucked away", even if it may feel like you have it under control and it is "not affecting you in any way".

As someone who had a similar mindset about my childhood, I'd like to share that you might be wrong in thinking they're "resolved" if "dredging them up" still stirs negative emotions in you. Also, even if it doesn't directly, there are other parts of your daily life that it might insidiously influence without you even noticing. So, if you have never talked to someone about these things (I'd suggest a professional, friends and family can inadvertently cause trauma reactivation by offering help or advice, and that can be very dangerous depending on the trauma, especially if gaslighting was involved).

But regarding mushrooms: on their own, I believe they're not that useful for healing. I have a (layman's) theory that post-trip therapy is probably more successful due to increased neuroplasticity of the brain[1]. There was also some research that suggested the DMN gets a bit "scrambled"[2], so another of my layman's theories is that it's able to reach a new "equilibrium" once it was kicked into this unstable state.

[1]: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.02.17.431629v1...., and a more easily digested version is here https://www.sciencealert.com/one-dose-of-psilocybin-regrows-...

[2]: Can't find the thing I was thinking of now, but googling "psilocybin dmn" will yield some interesting reads regardless!

this. also for so successful medical trials for depression, they are always done with a psychologist to help assimilate and direct the experience. If it was just the substance, all party going mushroom popping teens would have gotten cured of depression. My overall view has been that narrative is important, therapy (meds or no meds) is mostly about what story we are telling ourselves. If the story is, i take this, have this mind opening meaningful experience and that will make things better, thats what works here.

Huh interesting. If I was in the same position, I would’ve started talking to a therapist and start processing the past just so I won’t have to deal with it later in the future.

sometimes I'd agree, but like I replied a bit lower, these memories only bother me with the extremely heightened emotions that mushrooms give me, not normally so it really doesn't feel like something I'm repressing. It already feels dealt with and in the past, it just doesn't need to be brought up. Sometimes things are in the past and they are perfectly good staying there

So it didn't do much for you. I know many people who report similar experiences.

Like OP, for me personally it has profound effects on me and helps me improve and maintain my mental health.

Everyone is different.

I wish it has worked similarly for me. When I tried them first, it did feel like I was having a profound experience. But that lasted only for a week or so.

After 2-3 months and giving it another try did not replicate that experience. In addition to it, if anything it lasted for that trip only.

Maybe I should have done something during the trip. I was just watching a movie being cozy at home.

> at worst a fun drug

Mushrooms pulled me back from the precipace of suicide, I will never stop advocating for their usage and legalisation - but this is dangerously wrong.

At worst they can shoot you into a horror space from which you will not return, and that needs to be considered before taking them.

There's also a danger zone (Lana) in between a medium dose and a large dose, in which you're not so incapacitated as to be immobile, but too incapacitated to accurately judge reality.