Do you feel like your brain needs a little help?
Maybe you’re tired of “just getting by” mentally. Maybe you’ve realized your mind tends to stay stuck in the past, ruminating on past memories until long after it’s useful. Or maybe you get nervous in social situations, even though the real you knows there’s no need to.
Whatever the case…nature can help.
Science is just beginning to validate what ancient cultures have known for centuries: natural compounds like psilocybin and psilocybe can help rewire the brain. In this article, we’ll be taking a closer look at magic mushrooms and their most neuroplastic benefits.
- Brain Fog: The Struggle is Real
- Adaptation is Everything
- Magic Mushrooms for Brain Fog
- Do You Need to Rewire Your Brain?
- Magic Mushrooms & Meditation
- Additional Benefits of Magic Mushrooms
Brain Fog: The Struggle is Real
Many of the mental limitations we humans face can be summed up with two words: brain fog.
At first this relatively new term just referred to slow, clouded thinking. But why not view brain fog as any type of mental state that puts a damper on feeling your best, including the anxieties and mental ruts we mentioned earlier? Brain fog should be viewed as something more diverse; the things that cause it are nearly infinite, after all.
Potential causes of brain fog include environmental toxins, poor nutrition, electrosmog, and lack of exercise. But we think there could be more to it than that. What if modern humans were actually missing out on a vital part of their traditional diet — substances like magic mushrooms and cannabis, that aided neuroplasticity and brain development?
For now, these are still partially unanswered questions. But the deeper one looks into the issue, the more real psilocybin’s effects on brain fog get.
Adaptation is Everything
If you think about it, a big part of humanity’s struggle against the limitations of the brain could be explained by a simple mismatch. It could be that our external environment has evolved too fast for our internal machinery to keep up.
“The way we eat, sleep, work, and live is flooding, starving, clogging, and disrupting our brains by destabilizing the levels of three crucial brain chemicals: serotonin, dopamine, and cortisol,” explains Mike Dow in his book The Brain Fog Fix.
And this mismatch leads to all sorts of biological problems, Dow argues, including “brain fog, scatterbrain, memory loss, fatigue, anxiety, and the blues.” Things only get worse as time passes: “over time [these problems] turn into chronic insomnia, significant depression, persistent anxiety, and, potentially, dementia.”
Indeed, neurodegenerative diseases don’t paint a pretty picture. Failure to mentally adapt to the things life demands can cause all sorts of problems. And though modern medicine tends to view different neuro-based problems as unrelated…maybe they’re just different points along the cognitive curve.
Magic Mushrooms for Brain Fog
Okay, enough hypothesizing for now. All this context is leading up to something very important: the incredible role that psilocybin mushrooms can play in healing, restoring, and rewiring the struggling brain.
To put it simply, magic mushrooms could help us adapt faster to new environments. And that’s what life is, if you think about it: a nearly endless series of new environments, each of which favors new thought patterns.
In the past few years science has begun to validate these cryptic-sounding concepts. Just check out the following studies!
- “Psychedelics Promote Structural and Functional Neural Plasticity.” The verdict: psychedelics, including magic mushrooms, are fast-acting antidepressants.
- “Depression, Mindfulness, and Psilocybin…” The verdict: “mindfulness meditation and psilocybin could exert complementary effects [on depression] by potentiating or prolonging mutual positive effects.”
- “Psilocybin-assisted mindfulness training modulates self-consciousness…” The verdict: another instance where combining mindfulness + mushrooms led to big changes! “Positive changes in psycho-social functioning of participants [were observed] 4 months later.”
Do You Need to Rewire Your Brain?
In light of all this, it might be time to consider helping your brain rewire itself.
A simple litmus test can help you decide whether or not ‘rewiring’ is needed. Just ask yourself: what type of new environment do you find yourself in? There’s probably something…maybe there’s a few things. How are you adapting to these changes?
If your answer is that things could be better, or that change could be easier, then it may be time to consider giving magic mushrooms a try.
Those with neuro-based challenges like PTSD or depression also have a clear answer. According to one mouse study, substances that impact certain serotonin receptors (5-HT2A receptors, to be exact) can actually help erase memories formed under the influence of fear. As you might expect, these substances include psilocybin mushrooms.
Magic Mushrooms and Meditation
One more insightful quote from Mike Dow’s Brain Fog book: “meditation or prayer isn’t just for monks or for people who want to find God; it also improves memory, mood, and attention span.”
As it turns out, meditation is also for people interested in rewiring their minds with mushrooms. These two activities — meditating and microdosing — go quite well together.
Several of the studies listed above paint a picture of positive feedback loops and positive reinforcements where mushrooms directly facilitate mindfulness. It seems like mindfulness training is even more effective when done in an altered state. Harnessing this synergy for yourself might be as simple as meditating, praying, getting out in nature, or practicing yoga on your next trip.
Additional Benefits of Magic Mushrooms
There are other benefits of magic mushrooms as well. The science is evolving so fast, in fact, that it can be hard to keep up with everything.
So perhaps the best approach is to draw off the knowledge and research of psychedelic experts. In a patent application for his characteristic mushroom stack, mycologist Paul Stamets lists the following benefits:
- Improved memory
- Improved cognition
- Improved coordination
- Improved hearing
- Improved vision
- Improved learning
- Improved neurogenesis
- Improved problem-solving