Removing The Mask With Psychedelics
by MADELINE FERGUSON
The Halloween season always gets me so excited to see what fun costumes my friends, both in person and on the internet, come up with. The people who always seem to pull off the best looks are the ones who fully commit to the character.
I’ve never been good at acting, so it is tough for me to commit to a costume fully but all of this dressing up got me thinking about all of the masks people wear throughout their lives.
Often, we wear the professional and put-together “work mask” or maybe the “fun mask” that comes out with friends or the “security mask” that you break out when you are about to head into a tough situation, like a large family gathering.
These masks have long served purposes in life and will continue to serve us well, but what if we took the time to soften those masks and show people who we truly are, in order to live a more fulfilling life.
But there’s a catch. Most of the time, some of us may not even recognize we are wearing a mask. That’s where psychedelics, like LSD, mushrooms or MDMA can help nudge you in the right direction.
Psychedelics can take the one-way highway in your brain to an eight-lane superhighway, where you can truly see so much more about yourself and your surroundings. This can help you identify masks you are living with and help you decide if you should drop any of them.
Research into psilocybin shows that it can help anxiety by helping folks like more authentically with less rigidity. People with anxiety will tell you that a way they cover up anxiety is by masking it, but, as someone who is in therapy for anxiety, I have now learned that is a temporary fix that will almost always lead to your symptoms becoming more severe in the long run.
Psychedelics can help you realize that anxiety is simply a part of you and help you learn to live with it, rather than spin your wheels trying to change it.
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To dig even deeper into our masks, one study on mushrooms helped scientists begin to realize that the self is an illusion. If you’ve experienced a psychedelic trip, this may seem obvious or familiar to you but it truly is the beginning of a mental wellness renaissance. You can read about that study here.
Part of the reason I believe psychedelic experiences can help us shed our masks is because of their ability to help you see similarities over differences with other people. It gives you a sense of connectedness to your fellow earthlings, which in turn helps you realize that we are all probably going through a lot of the same things and trying to hide those things is leading to even more pain. The alternative to that pain is opening up and honestly sharing experiences to help others feel less alone.
One of the best parts of a psychedelic experience of this nature is that the effects are long-lasting. You can carry these lessons with you throughout the rest of your life, and you will have a new capacity for understanding and universality.
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