TLDR: Biomedical scientists from Spain recently found that DMT (plant-derived drug in Ayahuasca) can massively improve memory and learning, through the birth of new neurons (i.e. neurogenesis).
From this research, it was wonderful to discover:
-Neurogenesis is an effective treatment for clinical depression
-Diseases like Alzheimer's and Dementia kill neurogenesis
Your brain actively filters everything. What you hear, what you see, what you smell. This is on the fly encoding, and that can be disabled on these substances. Also the encoder itself can be affected, which is where things get fascinating. But yes, staying on the subject, the world isn't that silent.
One of the strangest, open questions about ayahuasca, is how indigenous people in the Amazon managed to figure out the formulation needed to orally activate the DMT with MAOI, given the ~50,000 or more species of plants in that region.
Considering other groups, at the time, were circumnavigating the world, forging steel and blasting each other with gun powder it’s not hard to believe that an equally intelligent and able group of people that put their attention to something else could figure out how to get high from a plant.
Perhaps this is due to European destruction of the native history of the Americas - they’re seen as primitive groups with little social complexity. I think that if their histories were better preserved we’d be less surprised that they had an understanding of the native plants around them.
Native Americans have a tremendous influence in what we eat every day...
One of the main reasons of why today everyone has a fridge with a freezer is because Clarence Birdseye, the founder of what today is Birds Eye (frozen foods company) was taught how to freeze fish under thick ice by the Inuit in Canada.
He then took the idea and developed it further using refrigeration equipment. Then they provided grocery stores with free freezers so that they could sell their products.
Then you have potatoes, tomatoes and corn. These crops were also developed by Native Americans. Without that effort, what you would be eating today would be similar to the teosinte, corn's wild ancestor.
Potatoes are responsible for a massive population boost in Europe. The reason is because wheat uses more land, requires more work and has fewer calories than potatoes.
Andean peoples had many techniques for dehidrating food... The word "jerky" comes from the Quechua "charqui", which means dried meat. They also employed freeze drying techniques to preserve food, such as chuño (freeze dried potatoes).
In addition to that, you have many varieties berries (strawberries, blueberries, raspberries, blackberries), cacao (used for chocolate), vanilla, pineapples, etc.
For strawberries, there are many varieties... some from the Americas, some from Europe, some from Asia.
But the variety you eat today is most likely the "garden strawberry", which is a hybrid variety developed in France by crossing Fragaria virginiana (from North America) and Fragaria chiloensis (from South America).
Other varieties of strawberry are not as popular.
Europeans did a great job further developing crops from the Americas. Italians alone bred tomatoes for every culinary purpose you can imagine.
This is my thinking as well. There are surviving remnants of pre-Columbian pharmacopoeia for the Maya, Aztec, and Inca, as only three examples. I wonder if the ingredients and instructions for the brew were previously recorded in a similar manner, but then reduced to an oral tradition once religious people like Diego de Landa showed up and started burning anything that might have challenged the new gods.
Non of these actions are uniquely European or religious.
You'll find similar outcomes throughout history and the world. Whether it's nationalism, communism, religion, tribalism or what ever. Us and them dynamics are constantly being created and exploited by various groups throughout our collective history.
What on earth are you talking about? The parent comment is not underestimating Mesoamerica, the parent comment is underestimating the rate at which people eat random plants.
I think the parent was more suggesting that records of how they discovered / formulated ayahuasca may have been lost to antiquity, and might have answered this question.
Just off the top of my head they managed to keep nature in a kind of cultivated state, which allowed for greater protein yields via game/fish than any amount of cattle could ever produce, also there were less devastating fires and greater ecological diversity.
About ten years ago Utah was doing something where they were emulating herd movements using livestock which helped to create a lot of biodiversity both above-ground and below, which helped water supply, plant growth, really everything improved and this was almost entirely inspired by how native Americans managed land pre-settlers. I think was called something like the Utah grazing improvement project.
That concept is called mob grazing or managed intensive grazing. It’s wonderful for reclaiming marginal pasture land and fighting desertification. The biggest issue is the high labor inputs. If tech solves that problem we can probably regreen much of the Intermountain West.
>it’s not hard to believe that an equally intelligent and able group of people that put their attention to something else could figure out how to get high from a plant
Not really alcohol occurs in nature. Just look up drunk squirrel videos, it's not a far leap to figuring out how to ferment stuff and extract the alcohol. this refinement of a drug is far more complicated.
So it looks like an O(n^2) search, to try all combinations of two plants where you have to get the intersection right.
However, banisteriopsis caapi is orally active on its own: a brew of just the vine will change perception.
So it's an O(n) search to find the ayahuasca vine, then another O(n) to find DMT bearing plants (there are several), which go with it. A typical preparation of the medicine will have a dozen or more plants in it, with two or three recognized as "active" by the standards of Western pharmacology.
So it's plausible to imagine the curanderos adding a bit of this, a bit of that, as guided by the spirits (or intuition, whatever looked good, your choice), then hitting on the combination.
This might sound like I'm being dismissive of what was most likely a directed search for medicinal plants, which isn't my intention. Just simplifying and glossing over that part, to point out that it's a two-stage discovery, and you don't need both plants in a brew to start using one of them.
I'm also guessing any plant with a substance that acts as a MAOI would probably potentiate the effects of lots of other substances. So my guess is that it may not have taken that long for at least one person (or maybe multiple people independently) to discover that this plant seemed to alter the effects of other plants.
Then at that point some adventurous people may have just started trying combining it with every other plant they knew about and every future one they discovered, including plants that they otherwise believed had no effect. They probably would've stumbled upon a lot of interesting combinations.
And if they determined it had a strange ability to seemingly "unlock" "dormant" plants and if they spread that knowledge, maybe some people were trying it with absolutely every non-poisonous plant out there. And since DMT-bearing plants are pretty common (as you mention), multiplied across a whole society it may not have taken very long at all. And it would take just one MAOI plant for them to get the idea that other plants might have this unlocking ability, and just one DMT-rich plant to discover other plants might have similar effects, so maybe they iterated through combinations of MAOIs and serotonergics until they found one they felt had a good balance of maximal power and minimal undesired side effects.
So the bottleneck might be the first instance of someone ever discovering any kind of MAOI plant (this vine or any other). After that barrier is passed, I suspect it might be almost inevitable that something like this particular combination would be found pretty quickly (just blindly speculating, but potentially within a generation or two?).
I always love some of the “Letters to my lord” regarding willow bark (aspirin).
> There is a bark of an English tree, which I have found by experience to be a powerful astringent, and very efficacious in curing aguish and intermitting disorders. About six years ago, I accidentally tasted it, and was surprised at its extraordinary bitterness
One letter, which I couldn’t readily find, eventually reduced to “My lord, I had a tooth ache and was chewing on random things in the forest. Willow bark made me feel better”
Recounting a tale from a Shipibo curandero (healer) with an unbroken lineage:
It's a relatively new phenomena that the patient drinks the medicine. Traditionally, before Westerners, the curandero would drink alone in the presence of the patient. And earlier still the curandero drank a medicine derived solely from ayahuasca vine (banisteriopsis caapi). That is, the medicine did not contain chacruna (psychotria viririds) as it does today in order to bring about visions. It was not needed for visions and to heal.
Chacruna was added in the 1900s due to the impact of westernization in the region and the negative affect on the curanderos' natural connections.
So it isn't necessarily that a formula of two plants was magically discovered at the very beginning.
EDIT: add to this that when you cut the vine, a rich colored liquid / sap forms on the cut part. It tastes quite sweet. It's not a stretch to imagine the first person simply cut a vine, tasted it and decided to do an extraction in hot water.
> That is, the medicine did not contain chacruna (psychotria viririds) as it does today in order to bring about visions
Indeed, but harmal alkaloids - those contained in b. caapi - are not only selective, reversible MAOIs but also full on psychedelics by themselves, as anyone having taken a significant amount of them (usually either through b. caapi or a peganum harmala seeds tea) could tell you. You get "visions" with them too.
This could probably be explained by the fact that most other animals have predators, and humans don’t (at least not successful ones). It is true of apex predators (that are not themselves killed by humans).
Lots of plants contain DMT and lots of plants contain MOAI. They probably found a weaker or less pleasant combination by accident first, and then once they knew what they were looking for kept experimenting until they found the best version.
There is no "best version" there are many reported with variations of the MAOI or DMT source and with other additives. Species of the Solanaceae familly, such as Brugmansia, being the most commons. But there are also some Ilex species containing caffeine for example.
One of the strangest open questions about Tomatoes is: How did indigenous people in Mesoamerica look at a small, green, somewhat poisonous and awful-tasting berry and think, "I'll bet I could make something of this if I give it a few hundred generations of selective breeding."
I mean, it seems no less interesting to me when you put it like that. Sure, the process might have been a bit ad hoc at times and they might not necessarily have known about the particulars of what they'd end up with, but the history of farming and agriculture seems pretty interesting!
Sort of similar to how did the Chinese & Japanese get the right combination of aspergillus(which can cause all sort of skin & ear lesions, as well as ulcers in humans, and is also what is known as black mold) along with a yeast to produce sake.
lots of plants are made into tea, although most don't have a psychotropic effect. Seems entirely plausible that two separate teas were brewed and consumed which, in combination, caused quite a notable effect.
I find that hard to believe considering they do not contain any actual serotonin receptor affecting compounds. Do you have any sources or experience reports? I would be interested to learn more. Perhaps they make naturally occurring DMT or other hormones more effective.
My apology for the late response; my "source" is the vivid trip I experienced taking a 4g seeds syrian rue tea (and nothing else; the trip was also accompanied by strong nausea, though there are ways to mitigate that). That included vivid open-eyes visuals. Beyond that, I'm struggling to find reports on erowid that do not include other substances but I can tell you there are tens of similar reports on the DMT nexus.
Also, you talk about naturally occuring DMT, but be aware that there is absolutely no scientific proof that DMT is contained in any amount sufficient to provoke a trip in the human body, even with a MAOI; it's there, yes, but in minute amounts and almost certainly as a byproduct of the synthesis of something else. Maybe you're right on the other hormones, but if that's the case it's not due to the MAOI properties of harmals either, since we're not seeing people using pharmaceutical MAOIs tripping.
A pregnant woman will often crave the foods that contain just the nutrients her body requires at the time. Has she figured out exactly what her body needs and what foods contain it?
I wouldn't dare call it "she", "knows", "exactly", in the strict sense, but the less-than-conscious parts of a human should have a pretty good though fuzzy experience of what foods are beneficial in which circumstances.
AFAIK, dirt and feces are rich in cobalamine (vitamine B₁₂), which is otherwise scarcely available in non-animal sources.
Calling it a "disorder" and "largely non-nutritive" seems a bit broad, when it could be satisfying a particular need. Even though eating feces might not be a good idea and more serious examples do seem useless and damaging.
I also thought it odd that the article (or perhaps broader academic community) characterizes these behaviors as necessarily disordered. There seems to be a logic to it.
Surely you'd have heard about it from friends or family if it was common for pregnant women to have cravings for nails and bottle caps and that their bodies need the nutrition from them?
...in mice. Mouse brain architecture is still quite different from ours. Although it's an enormously useful animal to study for basic neuroscience principles, the specific neuroscience results don't replicate cleanly in primates.
I would wait until replication in primates (human or non-human) before drinking ayahuasca to grow brain cells.
If this was a correlation study I could agree with you but more accurately I would instead posit that no hypothesis is confirmed. But this is a study about a deterministic mechanistic action.
We know that DMT binds with sigma-1 receptors (S1R) which is known to promote neurogenesis, such as fluvoxamine (in addition to many other SSRIs) in humans; we further know that the medication causes neurogenesis in humans, as do other medications with S1R affinity[0].
We then know that DMT does as well, we then measure that neurogenesis is observed in mice due to the same exact mechanism as SSRI's (i.e. medications with S1R affinity) in humans.
Perhaps at some point we should realize deterministic action in the context of the mammalian brain over human exceptionalism.
Thank you for the context! I looked briefly through the review that you cited. Maybe I missed something, but it seems that the neurogenesis claims are based on cell cultures?
I'd still like to see some human evidence of this effect to be fully convinced, but still that this story fits in this broader context does help convince me that this is likely true in humans.
>> Then behavioral analysis was performed as previously described during 10 days, and finally, animals were “sacrificed” on day 31.
Is “sacrificing” a common practice after test is finished? I’m probably not supposed to be bothered by this, but still kinda feels sad. On the other hand the discovery is fascinating. I guess it’s all part of the deal.
Why not? I'd argue it's better to be bothered by it than just exclaim "ok it's for science" without any critical view. Anyway: it's extremely common especially with mice. You'd be suprised by the total numbers (which might be hard to acquire having to sift through animal-rights but the order of magnitude should be correct; I'm guessing a couple of tens of millions rodents per year in the US is ballpark correct). A bunch of reasons like what a sibling commenter says but also because you can usually not use mice which were used for experiment A in experiment B exepcting A had no influence.
Being bothered is perfectly ok. Just keep in mind the absurdly lopsided balance of cost vs benefit, when compared with something mundane like eating meat (which I do btw and still consider worthy, but is objectively several orders of magnitude less efficient).
Yes, they used immunohistochemistry to tag cells, which generally requires removing the brain and imbuing it in a solution of chemicals and antibodies. Unfortunately, non-invasive techniques (such as MRI for instance) still don't give you the cell-level precision that is the field standard for such studies.
In short: yes, sacrifice is common at experiment completion. Though it's done pragmatically and as an \ethically appropriate measure.
A bit longer: most brain tissue studies require extraction, fixing, staining,... of brain. so are usually done _ex vivo_ .
Even longer: But even where animal could be kept alive, it raises questions of what exactly one should do:
- Do you keep paying for, up to, years to house an animal that can't be used for anything else? (consider, if you've applied treatments to it, you likely discredit it from inclusion in other studies).
- Did your study cause long-term effects that would lead the animal to suffering were you to keep it alive?
- You probably can't release the animal: most are raised from birth in facilities, they'd not likely survive long (not that mice live very long in the wild as it is).
- Or, if you _did_ release them would they spread anything into the wild?
\ ethically appropriate is decided by ethics boards. Please don't argue with me about what is or isn't ethical animal treatment.
...this is a weird thing to say in reply to a post about killing lab mice.
I don't think the corpses were eaten, they took out the parts they needed to autopsy and tossed the rest in a biohazard bag, if it's anything like labs I've worked in.
For large parts of human history, if you wanted to eat meat you'd have not only to kill it yourself, but also to raise it yourself. People still ate meat. Imo the killing part is not actually that bad, it's everything we do to the animals before that that is truly horrendous.
> I think people would eat meat less regularly if they see the animals butchered.
I have been on a carnivore diet for some time now. I wanted to know if I was capable of butchering. With some training from a pro, I did it around 6 times(goat). Gave up on meat since.
For some reason I don't feel the same disgust with fishing, so my diet is mostly replaced with fish. Good thing about sea food is you get a lot more variety!
I dunno, I lived in Africa and it was a pretty regular occurrence to either kill a goat/chicken or kill it yourself. Didn't seem to stop people from wanting to eat meat (including me).
There's a difference between obvious they were butchered and seeing them butchered. E.g. while I'm ok eating a chicken, I'm not sure I'd want one murdered and gutted as I watch, then immediately fried.
It's likely different for people who grew up on a farm and know it as normal life.
It's likely different for people who grew up on a farm and know it as normal life.
I've mostly just seen pictures of cows being butchered, but I did watch a rooster die when it had to be shot. It's not ideal. I still eat meat and will continue to do so until lab-grown alternatives are nutritionally and culinarily indistinguishable, and IMO what humans do for food is far more humane than what most of nature does.
We know that psilocybin alleviates depression by reducing inflammation in the brain, but how?
My pet theory is that given the antiviral properties of fungii, psilocybin cubensis kills off undiscovered viruses in the brain stem, allowing inflammation to recede.
I guess this could be a good treatment for people who have severe symptoms. Or maybe they can find a way to prevent the hallucinations or create a similar drug without those effects. Otherwise, it seems like the person would be injected every other day and lose most of that day to side effects.
It is possible. You simply drink extract of the vine in small doses. As westerners we are a little obsessed with the hallucinatory effects which comes from the chacruna (leaf). The spirit of the medicine comes almost entirely from the vine. A drop of extract of banisteropsis caapi in water in the morning often provides more gentle results without the hallucinations.
Vaporized DMT lasts about 15 minutes. Orally ingested DMT+MAOI lasts about 4-6 hours with hour 1-3 being the most intense. In terms of this study I'd be interested to see if there's a difference between the two.
I remember reading somewhere that if you’re willing to put up with feeling like you’re on the edge to falling into hell for a few days, you can remedy yourself out of depression. I wonder if this puts some weight behind that assumption people have been talking about.
I always see these hallucinogenic articles and think wow why is everyone advertising for hallucinogenic usage. I don't drink, not a single drug besides caffeine and never smoked but there is an appeal to use hallucinogenic for health reasons is crazy to me.
This is a weird take. I hesitate to accuse you of not reading the study, but calling it an 'article' makes it seem like you just read the headline. The fact that there's a compound that has such a profound effect on the nervous system is certainly an important discovery, regardless of where that compound is found.
For context, when I was in undergrad ~10 years ago, it was accepted as fact that a person only ever had the amount of neurons they were born with, and that new neurons could never be produced endogenously.
In any event, the authors of this study certainly aren't advocating that anyone start using illegal drugs.
I read much less of calling it an article as a slight than just the fact the GP has noticed hallucinogens in the news lately, which is true. News tends to equate their lumping of words into sentences into paragraphs as news articles. It stems way back to the times of the printed news paper.
Right. This is Nature, arguably the most prestigious scientific journal in existence. It's not some "Increase Your Brain Cells With This One Weird Trick" clickbait article on Taboola.
FTR I've had far more negative physiological effects from caffeine consumption than any reasonable helping of magic mushrooms.
Caffeine withdrawal symptoms are up there with a heavy drinking hangover that just won't go away during which I'll contemplate ending it all.
I think it's important to realize "drugs" is so ambiguous and overused it's basically meaningless. Rather than this clear black and white dichotomy of non-drugs vs. drugs, good vs. bad, safe vs. harmful, non-hallucinogenic vs. hallucinogenic, there's a lot of nuance and every substance has its own risks vs. benefits to be considered, understood, and respected. This extends well beyond "drugs", the same can be said of food, exercise, sports, relationships... it's life.
1) Treatment for severe depression (brain plasticity and resetting long wired state might be why this works)
2) Treatment for end of life (it seems to help with some kind of acceptance of the impending death, creates mental states which make for a less agitated ending)
If you aren't needing 1) above, then thats good. Keep not needing it.
If you aren't needing 2) above, you need to remember we all get there...
I don’t think this deserves the amount of downvotes it’s getting. It’s a genuine inquiry and one I share. They’re a fascinating subject of study that I feel needs to continue.
I sincerely hope the trend that we’ve been seeing where compounds like DMT, MDMA, and Psilocybin are getting the proper scientific attention they severely lacked for over 50 years. I understand why that is, but it’s a shame that it happened at all. Imagine where we would be if we had had that time to study and put these and other substances to good use.
I really think penalizing someone for asking a question, even if it comes from an uninformed point of view, even if it's as simple as a down-vote, is the wrong way to go. All it does is cause most people to dig their heels into their position instead of encouraging them to explore ideas that vary from their own.
Any use of herbal substances for medicinal use is going to require research. Sometimes, the results of that research has the result that was hoped for, while other times it has different results. Some of these unintended/unanticipated results could be bad or good. How do you feel about pharmaceutical drugs? A lot of the pharmaceutical drugs are based on plant research including these hallucinogenic types. They have figured out a way to make a synthetic version of these naturally occurring compounds, and now own patents on them. Just look at how many versions of opiates there are. Does that make you feel any less neutral toward the pharma "medicine"?
I do appreciate the fact that your post is about self reflection on your decisions rather than the judging of others that do decide to participate.
New medicines come from researching different plants and chemicals. People regularly go out into forests in Africa and South America, find a new plant, and then explore it for medicinal purposes. It's an actual profession.
There has been a ban on exploring certain plants in the last 50 years, and with that ban lifting, suddenly there is a constipated rush of research about these plants that would have otherwise been done slowly over decades.
There is a name for the profession, but I don't know it. It's not my field of expertise.
The ban? Schedule one medicine prohibited scientific research of those plants and chemicals. It wasn't until the presidency changed that, by turning a blind eye to it instead of enforcing it. The idea is if states legalize, then research should be legally allowed as well.
Where I live all of this is legal, so it's where most of the research was happening. It's legal in more places in the US today, so for all I know research is happening now in more places.
The media is a consensus-building machine, and there have been indeed more articles/papers/whatnot pushing for increased hallucinogenic usage. The real question is who benefits from this Overton Window shifting.
You're not square at all, these are a good set of questions to be asking.
There has been more research into psychedelics in the past 5 years than in the preceding 5 years. Johns Hopkins, one of the top medical schools in the US, opened a research center dedicated to psychedelics last year. Moreover, they report
“In 2000, the psychedelic research group at Johns Hopkins was the first to achieve regulatory approval in the U.S. to reinitiate research with psychedelics in healthy volunteers who had never used a psychedelic. Their 2006 publication on the safety and enduring positive effects of a single dose of psilocybin sparked a renewal of psychedelic research worldwide.”
More US states are legalizing possession of so-called magic mushrooms.
I’m not seeing a conspiracy here.
(It’s also worth pointing out that academic research isn’t “the media.”)
I don’t know. I’m not seeing any malfeasance and I don’t think research into psychedelics is innately immoral or improper, so I’m not motivated to check the institution’s funding sources. You can probably find this out fairly easily.
Why do you put the word research in scare quotes? Do you not personally approve of the research, or do you have evidence that the research methodology or conclusions are problematic?
As I said above, academic research is as susceptible to influence-by-money as anything else. As the parent commenter pointed out, there is a lot more of this being published, and there is a monetary benefit for certain firms to have new types of drugs to introduce and sell. And as I also pointed out, large corporations have funded publications, news coverage, and research that help change the public perception and discussion around things previously less-accepted.
With all the above (more uncharitably, since actors have the means, motive, and opportunity), we should certainly be skeptical when we notice this happening and not hand-wave it away.
It's mostly because the feds have been lightening up on forbidding the research and in granting permission to do it. See also state governments as more evidence comes to light that they just might help (significantly) various neurological issues, particularly depression and anxiety.
To be clear only Oregon has legalized "magic mushrooms" in the U.S.
A bit misleading to say most states or a few states have legalized it.
Sure other states are researching it, but that's a long way from state sanctioned legalization.
I wish everyone in the states had access to it, sadly that's just not the current reality here today. States could benefit economically like most have from legalization of marijuana, billions of dollars to be made.
You’re right. I thought Colorado had at least decriminalized possession but I remembered incorrectly. My mistake.
In addition to Oregon, no states have, but some cities have.
“The movement to decriminalize psilocybin in the United States began in the late 2010s, with Denver, Colorado, becoming the first city to decriminalize psilocybin in May 2019. The cities of Oakland and Santa Cruz, California, followed suit and decriminalized psilocybin in June 2019 and January 2020, respectively.”
You’re right - apologies. I thought Colorado had at least decriminalized possession but I remembered incorrectly.
In addition to Oregon, no states have, but some cities have.
“ The movement to decriminalize psilocybin in the United States began in the late 2010s, with Denver, Colorado, becoming the first city to decriminalize psilocybin in May 2019. The cities of Oakland and Santa Cruz, California, followed suit and decriminalized psilocybin in June 2019 and January 2020, respectively.”
Quite a few ayahuasca users believe they are taking a sacred medicine which lets them communicate with god(s), cure their illnesses, speak to their dead ancestors or the spirit of nature, solve a host of personal problems, see the world in a whole new way, or give them magical powers.
Not really comparable to smoking cigarettes, drinking caffeine or alcohol, which virtually no one believes any similar effect and are usually used for much more mundane reasons.
Many ayahuasca shamans are using exactly tobacco as a support function in ceremonies. So people using that are also believing that they are doing something more profound than simply taking a drug. Not to start a discussion of what that means, but the difference between tobacco and aya which you pointed out to is not as big as you think.
I haven’t done drugs for at least a decade and wasn’t particularly addicted to anything but there is something to experiencing those different head states.
If you are perfectly content and don’t have an urge to try mind altering substances then don’t bother. What’s the reason to risk building a dependency that might be difficult to shake off?
On the other hand if like many people you suffer from anxiety or depression and find that prescription medicine is ineffective then microdosing drugs can have miraculous effects. THC has helped me deal with anxiety way better than prescription drugs so I now micro dose THC capsules. I’m lucky enough to live in a country where weed and its derivatives are fully legal so I can just go to a store and buy what I need.
Just wondering if you've noticed any improvement from regular exercising?
I'm not the best at "regular" (daily) exercise, but I do notice difference in my mental state when I exercise vs when I haven't for prolonged time periods. I have back problems, my idea of exercise is walking around the block. Which works mostly.
Do you have a particular diet you follow to help alleviate anxiety?
(I.e. no caffeine or sugar..etc?)
Just curious about others who suffer anxiety disorder(s) not trying to single you out.
In a good way. It’s kind of like trying pizza for the first time. You can live fine without ever doing it, but it’s fucking great, and it has created countless connections between people. I’m not sure how else to describe it, but I think everyone should try it once in their life.
It gives you a new perspective, but for some it can be traumatizing. I think it's a much better treatment than any drug out there, though, so maybe it has a potential to be integrated into our culture.
Environment seems to be the biggest factor in any successful treatment--drugs, psychedelics, or nothing at all--environment reigns supreme.
From this research, it was wonderful to discover:
-Neurogenesis is an effective treatment for clinical depression
-Diseases like Alzheimer's and Dementia kill neurogenesis
Could DMT become like a coffee of the future?