Magic mushrooms are one of the hottest substances on the market right now. Many people take them for their psychedelic effects, but there’s also been promising research that shrooms could help with your mental or physical health.
Scientists used to think that magic shrooms made people’s brains less active, but that seems to be far from the truth. These mushrooms could be the key to opening up your neural pathways and having revelations that could change your life for the better.
Here’s a rundown of what happens to your brain when you take shrooms, as well as how these changes could make positive impacts on your life.
How Magic Mushrooms Work
Magic mushrooms contain the chemical psilocybin, which makes you experience psychedelic effects. Your body converts this chemical into psilocin, which binds to your serotonin receptors.
Serotonin has a huge impact on your mood, digestion, sleep, sexual desire, and more. Many people who suffer from mental illnesses have issues producing or using the right amounts of serotonin.
Experts think this process triggers an effect called neuronal avalanching, which causes many changes to the brain. There is increased activity in your visual cortex, which leads to perception changes. You might also experience less travel through your normal neural pathways, opening you up to new possibilities.
When you take shrooms, your brain becomes “hyperconnected,” allowing for increased communication between different regions of the brain that usually don’t talk to each other. The connections are organized and stable, not random.
Think of your normal brain connections as cars on a huge highway going only two ways. When you ingest a magic shroom, cars can now get off the highway and take back roads to their destinations. This can cause huge differences in your thinking and perceptions.
Overall, magic mushrooms don’t slow down brain activity or make you dumber. Instead, they open up the opportunity to discover how the brain works and how different parts are connected.
How Magic Mushrooms Can Change Your Brain For the Better
When you trip on magic mushrooms, you’ll feel immediate effects on your body. These can include:
Euphoria
Awe for things around you
Visual hallucinations
Auditory hallucinations
Changed sense of reality
Drowsiness
Lack of coordination
Introspective or spiritual experiences
Tripping can be an amazing experience that can change your life for the better. Many people who microdose or macrodose magic shrooms report immediate improvements in their health.
When new neural pathways are explored, people might find new perspectives on old problems or attitudes. They might have revelations about themselves and pledge to do better and kick old habits.
Researchers found that the connections created by psilocybin can cause the brain to exhibit synesthesia, or subconsciously pairing numbers, letters, colors, and music. This condition isn’t currently well understood, so it’s very helpful that it can be induced in others.
There’s anecdotal evidence that magic mushrooms can help treat conditions like:
Depression
Anxiety
Obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD)
Fear from terminal cancer
Anorexia
Addiction
Some report feeling these effects for a long time, even though they only took one dose. Others boost their dose of magic shrooms regularly by microdosing small amounts of the substance over time. Taking them regularly can have a huge impact on your health and lead to more profound permanent effects.
How Shrooms Change Your Brain Long-Term
While research still needs to be done, there’s no evidence that magic shrooms damage your brain after use. It’s actually possible that they’re one of the safest drugs you can try.
In 2018, only 0.3% of people reported having a medical emergency after taking psilocybin mushrooms, compared to 0.9% for ecstasy and 1.3% for alcohol. While you should always be careful taking any drug, it looks like mushrooms aren’t particularly dangerous long-term.
However, just because shrooms don’t cause damage doesn’t mean they can’t have lasting effects. People go on intense spiritual journeys when taking magic mushrooms, and these trips can affect their personalities, beliefs, and actions years later.
Some people who have taken magic mushrooms report that it’s one of the most profound experiences they’ve ever had. Some even compare it to the birth of their child.
People who have long-term effects from their trips say that they’re more open to new experiences. They are more curious and experience emotion more deeply. They may also be more capable of appreciating art.
In addition, some people reported elevated mood even 14 months after their dose of shrooms. The implications of being able to treat depression for months after use could be enormous for helping patients with treatment-resistant depression.
One of the most exciting long-term impacts can be in the field of addiction. Studies have found that people who have taken psilocybin mushrooms at any point in their lives are less likely to become addicted to opioids.
A new study has shown that just two doses of mushrooms and talk therapy led to an 83% decline in heavy drinking in participants. At the end of the eight-month trial, nearly half of participants had stopped drinking entirely.
Magic shrooms might even help you quit smoking! A randomized study had 15 people take psilocybin mushrooms in an attempt to help them quit smoking.
After six months, 80% of them had stopped smoking entirely. The best smoking-cessation drug on the market, called varenicline, has a cessation rate of 35%. If these results can be replicated, it could be huge!
Taking shrooms can be a profound and life-changing experience. While researchers still need to determine how they can change someone’s mind so profoundly for the better, there’s definitely evidence that the brain functions very differently while under the influence of psilocybin.
Want to take a journey with magic shrooms to change your perceptions and improve your health? Ground Sounds has you covered!
We carry a wide variety of magic mushrooms in capsules that are pre-portioned so you can safely microdose. You can continue taking our products over time to fully experience the effects.
