Reinventing Yourself – How Psychedelics Can Help Change Unwanted Behaviors

Photo illustration of the mind. University of Cincinnati postdoctoral fellow Neshe Deveno studies psychedelics at the Institute for Sensory Research at the University of California. Credit: Andrew Higley and Margaret Weiner.

People were able to quit smoking considering themselves non-smokers.

Psychedelic drugs can help people change unwanted behavior by helping them rethink and rethink their self-image.

A team of researchers from the University of Cincinnati analyzed the diaries of participants in a 2014 smoking cessation study and concluded that psychedelics have been successful in helping some people quit smoking for years.

In a new paper published in the journal of the Kennedy Institute of Ethics, researchers analyzed participants’ own words and found that psychedelics, when combined with talk therapy, often help longtime smokers see themselves as nonsmokers. This new core identity may help explain why 80% of participants were able to quit smoking within six months, while 60% were not smoking after five years.

A 2014 study by scientists at Johns Hopkins University found that participants who wanted to quit smoking and used psilocybin, the active hallucinogenic ingredient in psychedelic mushrooms, in combination with cognitive behavioral therapy, were much more likely to succeed than those who tried other traditional smoking cessation methods. .

University of Cincinnati postdoctoral fellow Neshe Deveno studies psychedelics at the Institute for Sensory Research at the University of California. Here she holds a “magic” mushroom, which was knitted for her by a student. Credit: Andrew Higley

Lead author and University of Cincinnati postdoctoral researcher Neshe Deveno said the results demonstrate that potential psychedelics should change self-perception to help people break free of old habits or addictions in the face of life’s daily triggers and temptations.

“Over and over again, we saw that people had the feeling that they were done with smoking and that now they do not smoke,” Deveno said.

She studies the science, history and culture of psychedelics at the Institute for Sensory Research at the University of California.

Deveno said this new sense of self can help people resist temptations or old triggers.

“If you want to give up meat but smell delicious steak, it can be hard to resist,” she said. “But if you identify as a vegetarian and your idea of ​​who you are is a person who doesn’t eat meat, that identity helps encourage other choices.”

During a smoking cessation study, therapists gave participants guided imagery exercises in which they were asked to imagine smoking as a behavior external to their core identity. Participants recorded their experiences in writing.

One guided imagery exercise from the study presented nicotine addiction as an external force manipulating behavior for its own ends, like a zombie-creating fungus in the hit HBO series The Last of Us.

“Like the fungi Cordyceps, which functionally turn insects into ‘zombified’ puppets to serve the fungi’s own reproductive purposes, smoking is characterized as a form of parasitic manipulation,” the study says.

Albert Garcia-Romeu, assistant professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Johns Hopkins University, said psilocybin can serve as a catalyst to help motivate and inspire people to change through cognitive behavioral therapy.

“Cognitive behavioral therapy asks us to tune in to the thoughts and feelings we experience in everyday life and how they relate to our behavior,” Garcia-Romeu said. “In turn, people often tend to build a narrative or sense of self around these cognitions and behaviors.

“This sets the stage for the actual experience of psilocybin, which can both provide new insights and perspectives, and serve as a marker of this identity change, as a rite of passage, marking, for example, the transition from a smoker to a non-smoker.”

Deveno said the experiment’s sample size was relatively small, with just 15 participants. But the results are encouraging.

“I feel like I’m somehow fundamentally different from yesterday,” wrote one participant. “I guess I feel like some kind of metamorphosis has taken place!”

Some participants said that psilocybin treatment made it easier to quit smoking compared to past experiences. Another said that the craving for nicotine was unbearable. But during the dosing session, the participant could not even imagine craving for a cigarette.

“The concept seems firmly ingrained in my reality even today that deadlifts are not real,” one said.

How do psychedelics help in this transformation?

Deveno says people often get stuck in the same behavioral ruts, reacting the same way to stressors or other triggers. She compares it to a skier going down a mountain down the same ditch they’ve used a thousand times.

“It’s not that simple, but it’s a metaphor for how we talk about psychedelics,” Deveno said.

“Psychedelics are compared to skiing on fresh snow. Some researchers suggest that you may have more freedom to ski anywhere down the mountain,” she said. “The ingrained grooves of bad habits may not pull as hard on our skis, so we can forge other paths.

“We are looking for ways to help people change their behavior and overcome the inertia of their habits so that they are more in line with their goals and aspirations,” Deveno said. “That’s why psychedelics are of more interest to researchers.”

Reference: “The Psychedelic Identity Shift: A Critical Approach to Set-Up and Set-Up” by Neshe Deveno, Aidan Seal-Feldman, Elise Smith, Tehsin Nurani, Albert Garcia-Romeu, and Matthew V. Johnson, December 2022, Kennedy Institute of Ethics.
DOI: 10.1353/ken.2022.0022

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