Psychedelics could help people break out of unwanted habits and reinvent themselves. Source: Ralph, gratisgraphics
A study has found that psychedelics may be able to help people change unwanted behaviours through reinventing the way they see themselves.
Researchers at the University of Cincinnati examined post-treatment journals kept by participants during a 2014 smoking cessation study. The findings showed that psychedelics helped some people quit smoking for years.
University of Cincinnati postdoctoral researcher, Neşe Devenot, said that a strong sense of self can significantly help people resist and overcome temptation and triggers.
“If you want to give up meat but you smell a delicious steak, it might be hard to resist,” Devenot said. “But if you identify as a vegetarian and your sense of who you are is someone who does not eat meat, that identity helps encourage a different choice.”
Devenot said the result of the study showed the potential psychedelics have to reshape peoples’ self-perceptions and break out of unwanted habits and addictions.
“We saw again and again that people had this feeling that they were done with smoking and that they were a nonsmoker now,” Devenot said.
Throughout the smoking cessation study, participants were given guided imagery exercises where they envisioned smoking as a behaviour outside their core identity. The participants then documented their experiences in writing.
In one of these imagery exercises, participants viewed nicotine addiction as a manipulative external force, comparing it to the zombie-creating fungus in the HBO series ‘The Last of Us.’
The study found that “like the Cordyceps fungi that functionally transforms insects into ‘zombified’ marionettes to serve the fungi’s own reproductive purposes, smoking behaviour is characterized as a form of parasitic manipulation.”
Albert Garcia-Romeu, an assistant professor of psychiatry and behavioural sciences at Johns Hopkins University, said that psilocybin, the psychedelic compound in magic mushrooms, in combination with cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) could help motivate and inspire people to make positive changes in their lives.
“Cognitive behavioural therapy asks us to tune into the thoughts and feelings that we experience in our day-to-day lives and how those relate to our behaviours,” Garcia-Romeu said. “In turn, people often tend to build a narrative or sense of self around those cognitions and behaviours.
“This sets the stage for actually having the psilocybin experience, which can both provide novel insights and perspectives as well as serve as a marker of that identity shift like a rite of passage, signifying the change for instance from smoker to non-smoker.”
