I've done a reasonable amount of both psychedelics and long distance running (finished full and half marathons + the training required to do that) and they're completely different things.
Both are great, both can be great tools for self discovery, and both can yield annoyingly ardent fans. I personally think everyone who is interested in experiencing life should aim to do a 10+ mile run and take a reasonably strong dose of a psychedelic. But by no means is your life impoverished by having neither experience.
> I felt like I was at peace and all my problems almost went away.
Right away this is a key difference, the peace you feel running is closer to a mild opioid than any psychedelic. Long distance running is fantastic for this sort of deep meditation, and for many people will be much easier than performing long sitting mediation. However I would say the end result of this running is that you travel deep within yourself.
Psychedelics on the other hands will temporarily take your mind apart. It is very common to experience looking in the mirror and seeing 'you' as just another body that is no different than the other bodies on the street. Psychedelics are both more exhilarating and more terrifying. Baggage you are carrying around can easily spiral in to a "bad" trip (which may be terrifying, but many would agree is not really a "bad" thing). At the same time and during the same experience you can see and feel the details in a blade of grass that let you feel a sense of beauty in the mundane that is a very different intensity than the peaceful bliss that can come from running.
I highly recommend you try something like shrooms in the safe environment. Not dissimilar to running a marathon, once can be enough of an experience for a lifetime (where for some people they want it to be a major part of their life, which is fine too in both cases).
> highly recommend you try something like shrooms in the safe environment
Just listened to Seth Rogen's audible book (hilarious, and decent anecdata on shrooms particularly) and he would say shrooms are a lot more intense than LSD. Shrooms take control while on LSD you're "the pilot."
I heard he smokes 5 joints a day. His wife rolls them, so he doesn't smoke too much.
He has good genes, or a high tolerance.
I tried smoking around December, and realized I hated it. I liked it in high school. I couldn't wait until the effect went away. It's weird I kept trying it, and finally gave up. Was about to toss it, but hide it instead--too cheap to toss?
Then again real life has been scaring me for years. I wish there was a calming drug that was easy on the body.
> Then again real life has been scaring me for years.
Especially with the extremely high THC content of modern strains people often fail to recognize that weed is still a psychedelic in its own right.
Alcohol, for most people, will simply make you feel good (up to a point), but strong weed can often magnify strong emotions you have. During a particularly challenging time in my life I completely gave up weed because smoking only served to make me feel worse.
Like all psychedelics the negative experience can be useful, for example if you get very anxious when you smoke it's likely you have some other unaddressed problems, but for those that are just looking for an escape (and most people, myself included, are looking for this from weed) it can certainly make smoking during stressful times a bad idea.
> Shrooms take control while on LSD you're "the pilot."
A counterargument that a friend told me once: a psilocybin trip is like a wagon ride that takes you to what you need to see. LSD is like a jet plane that takes you instantly to where your brain wants to go.
I think it probably depends on the person. My first psilocybin trip was the most intense experience I've had, but then I had a lot that I needed to confront at the time.
I've had probably a hundred lsd trips and dozens of mushroom trips.
In all there were three trips I would call "bad", I went to what I perceived as hell. The mushroom bad trip was nearly indistinguishable from the acid bad trips.
In all three cases I felt immense gratitude for the trips being over yet thankful for the experiences.
May be because with mushrooms, you don't necessarily know your exact dose of the drug, as I'm sure it can vary batch to batch, and shroom to shroom. LSD, you usually know how much you're getting on each tab. Of course, you could could process the mushrooms and figure out how much psilocybin you're getting, then do a comparison... But usually, I think people just eat the mushrooms or make them into tea.
I've heard this many times and there is definitely some truth there, but for small doses (i.e. 100ug LSD and 1-1.5g mushrooms), I don't think you need to overly-concern yourself with minutiae of the differences.
There is no reason to take more than this as introductory doses, and then you can make up your own mind.
Both are great, both can be great tools for self discovery, and both can yield annoyingly ardent fans. I personally think everyone who is interested in experiencing life should aim to do a 10+ mile run and take a reasonably strong dose of a psychedelic. But by no means is your life impoverished by having neither experience.
> I felt like I was at peace and all my problems almost went away.
Right away this is a key difference, the peace you feel running is closer to a mild opioid than any psychedelic. Long distance running is fantastic for this sort of deep meditation, and for many people will be much easier than performing long sitting mediation. However I would say the end result of this running is that you travel deep within yourself.
Psychedelics on the other hands will temporarily take your mind apart. It is very common to experience looking in the mirror and seeing 'you' as just another body that is no different than the other bodies on the street. Psychedelics are both more exhilarating and more terrifying. Baggage you are carrying around can easily spiral in to a "bad" trip (which may be terrifying, but many would agree is not really a "bad" thing). At the same time and during the same experience you can see and feel the details in a blade of grass that let you feel a sense of beauty in the mundane that is a very different intensity than the peaceful bliss that can come from running.
I highly recommend you try something like shrooms in the safe environment. Not dissimilar to running a marathon, once can be enough of an experience for a lifetime (where for some people they want it to be a major part of their life, which is fine too in both cases).