Hey everyone. Hope everyone is having a good day and feeling positive about yourself!

I wanted to open a discussion about expectations that I (and many others maybe as well) set about results or experiences we're "supposed" to have from mushrooms and other psychedelics. I tend to trip a few times a year as a sort of therapy. I find that it helps me balance out my mood and improve my confidence significantly for a few months after a trip.

One of the things I still tend to struggle with when going in to a new trip is trying to temper my expectations for it. I don't want to put too much pressure on myself that this is going to work (or that it has to work) to help me stay in good health. I think this is why I try to downplay the effects for myself when I can so there is less pressure for the trip itself. Since I feel like additional stress and pressure will negatively affect the trip.

Does anyone else experience anything similar to this? How do you deal with it?

On another note, I find when I'm coming into a trip one of the first thoughts I always have is "Is this what its supposed to feel like"? Then I go down the rabbit hole of "What is 'supposed to' mean, anyway? Who is the one behind this 'supposed to'?" It is very strange but also predictable for me now. Like my mind always happens to go there first. Anyway, thought I would share. Happy Friday!

Hey!! I'm an aspiring psychonaut, I've bought some shrooms that I wanna try out soon. I've had a growing interest and I've been wanting to try this out for a while now.

Do you guys have any advice for someone who never did psychedelics before? Rock on!

Psychedelics are a broad class of drugs defined by their ability to induce an altered state of consciousness. These drugs have been used for millennia in both spiritual and medicinal contexts, and a number of recent clinical successes have spurred a renewed interest in developing psychedelic therapies. Nevertheless, a unifying mechanism that can account for these shared phenomenological and therapeutic properties remains unknown. Here we demonstrate in mice that the ability to reopen the social reward learning critical period is a shared property across psychedelic drugs. Notably, the time course of critical period reopening is proportional to the duration of acute subjective effects reported in humans. Furthermore, the ability to reinstate social reward learning in adulthood is paralleled by metaplastic restoration of oxytocin-mediated long-term depression in the nucleus accumbens. Finally, identification of differentially expressed genes in the ‘open state’ versus the ‘closed state’ provides evidence that reorganization of the extracellular matrix is a common downstream mechanism underlying psychedelic drug-mediated critical period reopening. Together these results have important implications for the implementation of psychedelics in clinical practice, as well as the design of novel compounds for the treatment of neuropsychiatric disease.

It was one of the wildest experiences I've ever gone through in my life. I didn't just lose myself, but I became other people. I completely believed I was someone else with their memories, etc. Thinking back on it, It was incredible and a little scary at the same time.

What experiences have you had?

We're seeing psychedelics become more and more popular amongst psychologists and other professionals for treatment of depression and anxiety specifically under supervision in many states.