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This Is What's Actually Happening To You During A Bad Acid Trip, And Here's How To Get Out Of One
Bad trips can actually be beneficial experiences, provided you know how to nagivate them.
Shutterstock/Evil_Motor
By Ben Taub
21 JAN 2018, 12:57
A hell of a lot of science goes on inside your brain when you take drugs, and as with all experiments, tweaking the variables can make a major difference to the results. So while some acid trips are all peace and love, others can escalate into all-out war with your own subconscious. No need to panic though, youâre just having a bad trip, and thereâs a perfectly rational scientific explanation.
Is This Madness?
The idea that psychedelic drugs like LSD or psilocybin are psychotomimetic â meaning they induce madness â has long been abandoned by neuroscientists, although a recent study found that the acute effects of these substances do mirror some elements of psychosis, such as a disintegrating sense of self.
To get a better idea of how psychedelics warp the mind, researchers from Johns Hopkins University conducted a survey to try and categorize the symptoms of bad mushroom trips â or âchallenging experiencesâ, as they are referred to by psychologists. Among the main characteristics of these haunting hallucinatory happenings were âpanic or fear, grief, isolation, feeling as though one is dying, feeling insane, physiological distress, and paranoia.â
Lead author Frederick Barrett told IFLScience that when these sensations combine, âit can often feel like youâre dying or youâre disintegrating, or everything you know about yourself is going away and itâs never coming back.â The distress caused by this sense of having permanently lost oneâs grip on reality can lead to desperate and potentially harmful behaviors, with a small number of suicides having resulted from these disturbing drug-induced distortions, although nothing like the figures perpetuated by the media.
Bad trips can be traumatic for those who are not properly prepared.
Shutterstock/Lightpoet
While most people manage to get through their trip in one piece, particularly difficult experiences can have some lasting psychological effects. Charles Grob, professor of psychiatry at UCLA, told IFLScience that âpeople can come out of a bad trip with some post-traumatic stress disorder specific to that experience. Others have sustained depression or demoralization as a result of bad trips.â
In Barrettâs survey, as many as 7.6 percent of those who had undergone a challenging psychedelic experience required treatment for enduring psychological distress. Yet Grob insists that the vast majority of people do recover, and that lasting psychosis following a bad trip is extremely rare, typically only occurring in those with a particular vulnerability, such as sufferers of schizophrenia.
Challenging Experiences
Falling into the darker regions of oneâs chemically disfigured imagination might not sound like much fun, but it does have its advantages. Counterintuitive though it may seem, 84 percent of participants in the Johns Hopkins bad trips survey said they actually benefited from the experience.
âThe reason we try to call these challenging experiences rather than bad trips is that bad trip makes it sound like itâs all bad,â says Barrett. âBut challenging experiences often have value, and can lead to change.â
Numerous studies have pointed to the potential of drugs like LSD, psilocybin, and MDMA to facilitate psychotherapy. According to Barrett, they do so by âgiving you an opportunity to confront something that youâve been trying to avoid, but in confronting it you work through it and that helps you to heal.â
What Causes A Bad Trip?
Since the 1960s, the term âset and settingâ has been recognized as the golden rule for trip control. In this instance, setting refers to the actual environment in which a drug is taken, including all sensory and social stimuli, while set indicates a userâs mindset and emotional state at the time of ingesting a drug.
This includes elements such as mood and personality, and while no one can predict with any real accuracy whether a person is likely to have a good or bad trip, it is possible to make an educated guess based on certain aspects of their character.
A recent study found that people with higher levels of neuroticism - including anxiety, self-consiousness, and loneliness - tend to have more severe bad trips. According to Barrett, this may be attributable to the way in which psychedelic drugs produce a sense of âego-dissolutionâ, or loss of self.
âIf youâre unable to surrender yourself to that experience and let go of yourself for a couple of minutes then itâs going to be very challenging because you canât control the experience in that way,â he explains.
âAnd people who are higher in neuroticism are more prone to react negatively to emotional stressors and less likely to want to yield control of things because of perceptions of possible harm that can come from that.â
A loss of one's sense of self is a common experience on psychedelic drugs.
Pixabay
On the flip side of this, research has revealed that people who score highly for a personality trait known as absorption tend to undergo more pleasant and mystical-like experiences when on psychedelics.
Absorption refers to a tendency to become completely engrossed in experiences, whether reading a book, watching a movie, or tripping on acid. âTo become fully absorbed in something outside of yourself you have to let yourself fall back a little bit. You have to make space for that other thing,â says Barrett. âSo maybe people who are high in absorption are a little more labile in how strongly they hold onto their concept of self.â
Interestingly, one study even found that certain people may be genetically predisposed to having good trips, thanks to a quirk in the gene that codes for the serotonin 5-HT2a receptor, to which most psychedelic drugs bind in the brain.
Results showed that people with high levels of absorption were more likely to have a particular polymorphism â or form â of the gene that codes for this receptor, enhancing its ability to interact with LSD and other psychedelics.
How Do You Deal With A Bad Trip?
Once a drug has started to take effect, thereâs no going back, and all you can really do is wait until it wears off. However, if the trip starts to go a bit south, there are a few things you can do to rescue it.
One thing you shouldnât do, however, is take an anti-psychotic to try and bring yourself back to normality. According to Grob, this tends to âcompound problems afterwards with depression and demoralization, as people kind of get stuck with the experience and they canât work their way through it.â
Instead, youâre better off sticking to non-pharmacological interventions. The Zendo Project is a harm reduction initiative that offers guidance to people undergoing difficult psychedelic experiences at music festivals and other events. Project director Sara Gael told IFLScience that ârather than try and talk people down, we help them turn towards their experience and create a space where itâs safe for them to work through that experience.â
Zendoâs representatives use a range of techniques to help guide people through their trips. âOne of the common phrases that we use is âwhat we resist persistsâ, so if you are feeling some difficulty and you resist it, then itâs going to get worse and youâre going to end up spiraling,â says Gael.
Mirroring Barrettâs rationality, Gael insists that a difficult trip can become a beneficial experience for those who are able to simply accept whatever their mind happens to show them while under the effects of their chosen drug.
And while this may seem like a novel concept that psychologists are only just getting to grips with, it has provided the philosophical backbone for countless indigenous communities worldwide that use hallucinogenic substances for spiritual and healing purposes.
So if you ever find yourself being trolled by the uglier inhabitants of your subconscious, just relax and let go â you may even benefit from it.
The key to getting through a bad trip is to just accept whatever happens to come up - no matter how scary.
Pixabay
Source: http://www.iflscience.com
Bad trips can actually be beneficial experiences, provided you know how to nagivate them.
Shutterstock/Evil_Motor
By Ben Taub
21 JAN 2018, 12:57
A hell of a lot of science goes on inside your brain when you take drugs, and as with all experiments, tweaking the variables can make a major difference to the results. So while some acid trips are all peace and love, others can escalate into all-out war with your own subconscious. No need to panic though, youâre just having a bad trip, and thereâs a perfectly rational scientific explanation.
Is This Madness?
The idea that psychedelic drugs like LSD or psilocybin are psychotomimetic â meaning they induce madness â has long been abandoned by neuroscientists, although a recent study found that the acute effects of these substances do mirror some elements of psychosis, such as a disintegrating sense of self.
To get a better idea of how psychedelics warp the mind, researchers from Johns Hopkins University conducted a survey to try and categorize the symptoms of bad mushroom trips â or âchallenging experiencesâ, as they are referred to by psychologists. Among the main characteristics of these haunting hallucinatory happenings were âpanic or fear, grief, isolation, feeling as though one is dying, feeling insane, physiological distress, and paranoia.â
Lead author Frederick Barrett told IFLScience that when these sensations combine, âit can often feel like youâre dying or youâre disintegrating, or everything you know about yourself is going away and itâs never coming back.â The distress caused by this sense of having permanently lost oneâs grip on reality can lead to desperate and potentially harmful behaviors, with a small number of suicides having resulted from these disturbing drug-induced distortions, although nothing like the figures perpetuated by the media.
Bad trips can be traumatic for those who are not properly prepared.
Shutterstock/Lightpoet
While most people manage to get through their trip in one piece, particularly difficult experiences can have some lasting psychological effects. Charles Grob, professor of psychiatry at UCLA, told IFLScience that âpeople can come out of a bad trip with some post-traumatic stress disorder specific to that experience. Others have sustained depression or demoralization as a result of bad trips.â
In Barrettâs survey, as many as 7.6 percent of those who had undergone a challenging psychedelic experience required treatment for enduring psychological distress. Yet Grob insists that the vast majority of people do recover, and that lasting psychosis following a bad trip is extremely rare, typically only occurring in those with a particular vulnerability, such as sufferers of schizophrenia.
Challenging Experiences
Falling into the darker regions of oneâs chemically disfigured imagination might not sound like much fun, but it does have its advantages. Counterintuitive though it may seem, 84 percent of participants in the Johns Hopkins bad trips survey said they actually benefited from the experience.
âThe reason we try to call these challenging experiences rather than bad trips is that bad trip makes it sound like itâs all bad,â says Barrett. âBut challenging experiences often have value, and can lead to change.â
Numerous studies have pointed to the potential of drugs like LSD, psilocybin, and MDMA to facilitate psychotherapy. According to Barrett, they do so by âgiving you an opportunity to confront something that youâve been trying to avoid, but in confronting it you work through it and that helps you to heal.â
What Causes A Bad Trip?
Since the 1960s, the term âset and settingâ has been recognized as the golden rule for trip control. In this instance, setting refers to the actual environment in which a drug is taken, including all sensory and social stimuli, while set indicates a userâs mindset and emotional state at the time of ingesting a drug.
This includes elements such as mood and personality, and while no one can predict with any real accuracy whether a person is likely to have a good or bad trip, it is possible to make an educated guess based on certain aspects of their character.
A recent study found that people with higher levels of neuroticism - including anxiety, self-consiousness, and loneliness - tend to have more severe bad trips. According to Barrett, this may be attributable to the way in which psychedelic drugs produce a sense of âego-dissolutionâ, or loss of self.
âIf youâre unable to surrender yourself to that experience and let go of yourself for a couple of minutes then itâs going to be very challenging because you canât control the experience in that way,â he explains.
âAnd people who are higher in neuroticism are more prone to react negatively to emotional stressors and less likely to want to yield control of things because of perceptions of possible harm that can come from that.â
A loss of one's sense of self is a common experience on psychedelic drugs.
Pixabay
On the flip side of this, research has revealed that people who score highly for a personality trait known as absorption tend to undergo more pleasant and mystical-like experiences when on psychedelics.
Absorption refers to a tendency to become completely engrossed in experiences, whether reading a book, watching a movie, or tripping on acid. âTo become fully absorbed in something outside of yourself you have to let yourself fall back a little bit. You have to make space for that other thing,â says Barrett. âSo maybe people who are high in absorption are a little more labile in how strongly they hold onto their concept of self.â
Interestingly, one study even found that certain people may be genetically predisposed to having good trips, thanks to a quirk in the gene that codes for the serotonin 5-HT2a receptor, to which most psychedelic drugs bind in the brain.
Results showed that people with high levels of absorption were more likely to have a particular polymorphism â or form â of the gene that codes for this receptor, enhancing its ability to interact with LSD and other psychedelics.
How Do You Deal With A Bad Trip?
Once a drug has started to take effect, thereâs no going back, and all you can really do is wait until it wears off. However, if the trip starts to go a bit south, there are a few things you can do to rescue it.
One thing you shouldnât do, however, is take an anti-psychotic to try and bring yourself back to normality. According to Grob, this tends to âcompound problems afterwards with depression and demoralization, as people kind of get stuck with the experience and they canât work their way through it.â
Instead, youâre better off sticking to non-pharmacological interventions. The Zendo Project is a harm reduction initiative that offers guidance to people undergoing difficult psychedelic experiences at music festivals and other events. Project director Sara Gael told IFLScience that ârather than try and talk people down, we help them turn towards their experience and create a space where itâs safe for them to work through that experience.â
Zendoâs representatives use a range of techniques to help guide people through their trips. âOne of the common phrases that we use is âwhat we resist persistsâ, so if you are feeling some difficulty and you resist it, then itâs going to get worse and youâre going to end up spiraling,â says Gael.
Mirroring Barrettâs rationality, Gael insists that a difficult trip can become a beneficial experience for those who are able to simply accept whatever their mind happens to show them while under the effects of their chosen drug.
And while this may seem like a novel concept that psychologists are only just getting to grips with, it has provided the philosophical backbone for countless indigenous communities worldwide that use hallucinogenic substances for spiritual and healing purposes.
So if you ever find yourself being trolled by the uglier inhabitants of your subconscious, just relax and let go â you may even benefit from it.
The key to getting through a bad trip is to just accept whatever happens to come up - no matter how scary.
Pixabay
Source: http://www.iflscience.com