A few magic mushrooms, a bit of therapy and a smoker won’t bother with cigarettes anymore, at least it would be a lot easier to stay away from them.
More and more research is being done into the psychological benefits of the hallucinogenic psilocybin, the active ingredient in mind-altering mushrooms. According to a new study, the drug in combination with cognitive behavioral therapy ensures that a surprisingly high percentage of smokers manage to quit.
Identity change
Many test subjects went through a kind of identity change in which they no longer saw themselves as smokers, but as non-smokers. This new core identity explains, according to scientists from the University of Cincinnati possibly why 80 percent of the participants had not yet lit a new cigarette after six months and no less than 60 percent were still smoke-free after five years.
The American team analyzed the participants’ diaries at the time of their psychedelic cognitive behavioral therapy in 2014. The smokers had written down their experiences in their own words. And the researchers kept finding the same patterns in the texts: “We saw time and time again that people felt that they had finished smoking and that they were now a non-smoker,” explains lead researcher Neşe Devenot. “The results show that people can reinvent themselves with the help of psychedelics. The psilocybin ensures that they break free from old habits and addictions. This way they can better resist the temptations and triggers in daily life.”
Successfully quit anything
Behavioral therapy using psilocybin probably does not only work if you want to stop smoking. It’s because of that so-called identity change you’re going through. “If you want to stop eating meat, but you smell a delicious steak, it’s hard to stick to your principles and not think: well, I’ll make an exception this time,” says the researcher. “But if you identify as a vegetarian and you are convinced that you are someone who does not eat meat, that identity helps you make a different choice at that consciously difficult moment.”
Like parasitic fungus
During the study, the therapists guided the tripping participants and asked them to imagine smoking as a behavior outside their core identity. They repeated these imagery exercises and the smokers then wrote down their experiences. For example, there was a visualization exercise in which the nicotine addiction was portrayed as an external force that manipulated the participant’s behavior for his own gain. “Like the infamous Cordyceps fungus that turns insects into walking zombies and directs them to the treetops so that the fungus can reproduce, smoking behavior is imprinted in the brain as a form of parasitic manipulation,” the researchers write.
Psychedelics as a catalyst
Psychedelic drugs can break this pattern. “I am convinced that psilocybin can serve as a catalyst to motivate and inspire people to change their core identity and therefore undesirable behavior with the help of cognitive behavioral therapy,” says researcher Albert Garcia-Romeu of the Johns Hopkins University. “With cognitive behavioral therapy, we zoom in on the thoughts and feelings we experience in our daily lives and consider how they relate to our behavior. Because normally people tend to make up a story or feeling about themselves around their behavior. This forms the basis for the psilocybin experience, which can provide new insights and even trigger an identity shift, such as from smoker to non-smoker,” explains the scientist.
Mental metamorphosis
For example, participants wrote that their cravings for nicotine used to be unbearable, but that the psilocybin treatments made quitting a lot easier. “I feel like I am somehow fundamentally different from yesterday,” one participant wrote. He couldn’t even imagine wanting a cigarette. Another wrote: “The craving for nicotine no longer exists, it is not real. Another concept is firmly entrenched in my brain, in my world. I have the feeling that a kind of metamorphosis has taken place.”
Fresh snow
Devenot explains that people get stuck in the same behavior patterns and react in the same way to stressors or other triggers. She compares it to a skier descending from the mountain, always picking up the same deeply worn track that has been used thousands of times before. “It’s a bit more complicated neurologically, but it’s a metaphor for how we look at psychedelics and cognitive behavioral therapy,” says Devenot.
“Psychedelics can be compared to skiing in fresh snow. People are given the freedom to find a new path. The deep-seated grooves of bad habits have less grip on our skis due to the treatment, so we can chart other paths. We look for ways to help people change their behavior and unlearn unhealthy habits. Psychedelics seem to help enormously with this. It is therefore important to do more research on psilocybin and other mind-altering drugs in combination with cognitive behavioral therapy,” concludes Devenot.