HealthyGamerGG - How Psychedelics Unlock Your Brain’s “Edit Mode”

Episode Date: October 13, 2025

Dr. K breaks down how psychedelics actually work not from hype or hearsay, but through neuroscience, psychiatry, and lived experience. He explains that psychedelics don’t “heal” you by themselves; they temporarily put the brain into edit mode, a state of heightened neuroplasticity where your thoughts, emotions, and physiology can be rewritten for better or worse. Through a detailed look at serotonin receptors, brain connectivity, and decades of clinical research, Dr. K shows how substances like psilocybin, LSD, DMT, ayahuasca, and MDMA can rewire the brain and why they can just as easily cause harm if used without structure, safety, or integration. The episode also explores why guided psychedelic therapy — in a clinical or spiritual context — can lead to long-term healing, while unsupervised trips can lock trauma in even deeper. Dr. K ties it all together by connecting ego death to meditation and Vedic philosophy, revealing how both psychedelics and deep meditative practice dissolve the sense of self — and why that dissolution is often the real mechanism of healing. Topics include: The serotonin 2A receptor and why psychedelics increase neuroplasticity and neurogenesis How “edit mode” rewires your brain and how it can backfire Why integration therapy is critical after a psychedelic experience Set and setting: the real difference between healing and harm Which psychedelics work best for depression, PTSD, and addiction Why microdosing feels good but may not create long-term change The role of ego death and why it mirrors advanced meditation experiences Psychedelics vs. antidepressants - what the data actually says about efficacy and risk This episode is a deep dive into the science, safety, and spirituality of psychedelics offering clarity in a space often clouded by hype, myth, and misinformation. HG Coaching : https://bit.ly/46bIkdo Dr. K's Guide to Mental Health: https://bit.ly/44z3Szt HG Memberships : https://bit.ly/3TNoMVf Products & Services : https://bit.ly/44kz7x0 HealthyGamer.GG: https://bit.ly/3ZOopgQ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The world moves fast. Your work day? Even faster. Pitching products, drafting reports, analyzing data. Microsoft 365 Copilot is your AI assistant for work. Built into Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and other Microsoft 365 apps you use,

helping you quickly write, analyze, create, and summarize. So you can cut through clutter and clear a path to your best work. Learn more at Microsoft.com. slash M365 co-pilot. Hey, y'all, if you're interested in applying some of the principles that we share to actually create change in your life, check out Dr. K's Guide to Mental Health. And so we start by understanding what literally is meditation. How does experience shape us as human beings?

How do we strengthen the mind itself as an organ? And so by understanding our mind, we understand a very, very simple tool, a crucial tool that we have to learn how to use if we want to build the life that we want to. So check out the link in the bio and start your journey today. Hey, chat. Welcome to the Healthy Gamer Gigi podcast. I'm Dr. Al-Ocinoja, but you can call me Dr. K. I'm a psychiatrist, gamer and co-founder of Healthy Gamer.

On this podcast, we explore mental health and life in the digital age, breaking down big ideas to help you better understand yourself and the world around you. So let's dive right in. Hello, Internet. Today we are going to talk about the most important things you need to know about psychedelics. Just as a quick background, my name is Dr. Alok Kanoji. I spent seven years studying to become a monk where I did weird esoteric spiritual practices in places like the Himalayas. And then I went and became a psychiatrist, trained at Harvard Medical School, where I served on the faculty for a couple of years. And today, I'm going to explain to y'all what I think you need to know about psychedelics.

So everyone's super excited about psychedelics. There are studies that show that in treatment resistant depression and PTSD and even addictions, psychedelics have therapeutic potential. But more than that, there are Netflix series about psychedelics. And all of the podcast bros are talking about psychedelics. And everyone in Silicon Valley is using psychedelics. And everyone is having transformative and healing experiences. So that means that everyone should be doing them, right? Not exactly.

So when I hear people talk about the excitement of it, what I oftentimes find is that there is a very, there's just a huge lack of sophistication about understanding how psychedelics work and, like, really what they do. So just to give you all a couple of examples. So as a medical doctor, you know, if you ask me, hey, does this treatment work? There are all kinds of questions we ask.

Like, what is the dose? Which psychedelic are we talking about? Are all the psychedelics the same? Do different doses of different psychedelics produce different effects? Which ones are effective for addictions? Which ones are effective for trauma? How effective are they? How long does the efficacy last?

If I use psilocybin, does it help me for a year? Does it cure me for life? Does it help me for a day? What about microdosing? So there's a bunch of details around, psychedelics, which people don't usually talk about, but if you want to make an informed decision, you need to understand all of those things. So this is how I think about them as a psychiatrist, and I'd like to share this information with you, which I think honestly is not that complicated.

So the first thing that we've got to get into is what do we mean by psychedelics? Because psychedelics are actually a class of compounds. They include things like ayahuasca. They include LSD, psilocybin, DMT, which is the active ingredient in ayahuasca, also things like the peyote cactus, ibogaine. So there's a lot of these different compounds, and they're actually each different. Now, the reason that we kind of classify them together is because they do have certain shared mechanisms of action. So the primary neurotransmitter that we're sort of focused on or the primary receptor we're focused on is the serotonin 2A receptor. So that's the 5HT2A receptor. And so if we want to understand what separates psychedelics from other drugs, we have to understand

what that receptor does. If you all want to dive deep into the most important topics for our community, check out HG memberships. The first thing to understand is that there needs to be no outcome from small talk. This is a Vassana too. Your mind is Vasanas all the way down. So the key thing about detachment is not that you don't have wants. It is that your wants do not control you. Membership grants you access to monthly streams as well as a back catalog of a year's worth of content. In addition to quests and so much more. If you're interested, you can sign up for $10 a month at HealthyGamer.gamer.g.comberships or click the link in the description below. Hope to see you there. So the 5HT2A receptor does a couple of different things in the brain.

The first thing that it does is it affects things like mood and anxiety. So the 5HT, the serotonin receptor, is also what we're sort of focusing on with antidepressant medication. So we know that if we alter the serotonin transmission in your brain, it will affect things like your mood and your anxiety. Now, generally speaking, when we boost serotonin transmission, mood, like depression, feelings of sadness and things like that go down, feelings of anxiety go down. But this is where things get fun with psychedelics. Because psychedelics, when we're talking about the 5HT2A receptor in particular patterns of activation, there are also other things that this particular receptor does. The first thing that it does is that it increases things like neuroplasticity and neurogenesis. So what

this means is that it changes the way that our brain wires itself or is wired actually can cause stimulation of something called BDNF, which is B, a brain derived and neurotrophic factor, which actually causes an increase in the growth of our neurons, causes new neurons to be born. So we start to see lots of changes in the connectivity of the brain. So let's look at that in a little bit more detail. So here we have MDMA, ayahuasca, psilocybin, and LSD. these are probably the four most well-studied psychedelics. Here's the serotonin receptor, and what we see is that we can see mood disorders and other mental disorders.

They have antidepressive effects, anxiolitic effects, also reduce suicidality, and can alter things like alcohol usage and PTSD. So now let's take a look at what the serotonin receptor actually does. Psychedelics are serotonin-2A receptor agonists, including LSD, ayahuasca, DMT, and psilocybin. also MDMA. So the 2A receptor and specifically psychedelics also increase the functional connectivity of the brain. So psychedelics are different from traditional antidepressants and anti-anxiety medications because they do a couple of other things. So they have those mood reducing effects just like antidepressants. But what we also know about psychedelics is that they increase neuroplasticity, which is the ability for our brain to rewire. They increase neurogenesis, which is the

of our brain to grow new neurons, like basically reproduce neurons. That's mediated by something called brain-derived neurotrophic factor, which is something that stimulates neuronal growth. And then they also increase the way that our brain or change the way that our brain talks to other parts of our brain. So they change the connections between different parts of the brain. So we see neurogenesis, we see neuroplasticity, and we see functional connectivity changes. What psychedelics do is change our brain into edit mode. So this is something that I want you to understand. So when I work with people with psychedelics, I've seen two things, okay?

I've seen a lot of people will use psychedelics. And in clinical settings and certain like shamans and things like that, they will have positive transformative experiences that lead to significant improvements in their mental health. But I have also seen a ton of people who have used. psychedelics and really screwed up their brains. I've seen psychedelics not only be used to treat PTSD, but I've seen plenty of people who have used psychedelics and have traumatized themselves through bad trips. So they'll trip so hard that it'll basically be like a PTSD-inducing experience. Their physiological wiring changes to where they're constantly anxious, their adrenaline is pumping,

their cortisol levels are high. And remember, we're putting the brain and body, the physiology, into an edit mode. So when the psychedelic trip ends, their control-essing, and they're basically locking their nervous system into a highly stressful state. I've seen the development of PTSD. I've seen the development of things like panic disorder,

which are also, like, the reason that you develop a panic disorder is because your physiology has been locked into a highly anxious state. And so if psychedelics can be incredibly damaging and they can be incredibly healing, how does that work? And if we understand that what they basically do is allow us to edit our brain, this starts to make sense, right? Because if I'm editing my brain,

but the experience that I'm having is incredibly negative and traumatic, then I will sort of wire my brain in a traumatized way, wire my physiology in a traumatized way. But if I have a positive experience with psychedelics, then I will have a sort of positive, you know, wiring, if that kind of makes sense. So what psychedelics basically do is turn our brain into edit mode where we can start editing the source code.

So what that means is that the kind of edits that we make are ultimately what makes psychedelics potentially therapeutic or potentially harmful. Right. So really all they do is allow us to edit. Then the code that we put in is ultimately what's important. And this is what the studies show. So just to give you all an example of like, you know,

what studies on psychedelics actually look like. What we'll do is we'll take like a patient or a set of patients. And for 12 to 14 weeks, we'll have like a 14 week study on psychedelics. What these people will do is they will go to a medical clinic where they will work with a therapist for the period of 14 weeks. They'll do some amount of therapy for like three or four weeks where they kind of say like, okay, like what do you want to work on? Tell me about your trauma. So the therapist knows what your triggers are, what you're trying to focus on, what your goals are. They also know what to protect you against.

So for three or four weeks, you'll kind of do this kind of therapy, and then you'll have your first psychedelic dosing. You have a psychedelic dosing, and this is what's really crazy, okay? So in some of these studies, you'll have a dyad of therapists, one male and one female, who will sit with you for eight hours over the course of the psychedelic trip. Very safe location with two trained professionals for eight hours, making sure that everything goes okay. after the psychedelic trip ends, you then have three or four more weeks where you take all of these revelations and you start to integrate them into your life, into your identity. You try to process, you sort of get rid of the bad, lock down the good. And then you'll have a second dosing where you go through the same process. Then you kind of sort of integrate that into your life.

Sometimes people will have a third dosing. And then in the last few weeks of therapy, what you'll do is you'll sort of take all these psychedelic experiences like I met my ancestors and I, you know, I met my ancestors. and I discovered the nature of the universe and I felt connected to all human beings and this is what's really important. Then the therapist will be like, okay, that's really cool. How are we going to take those revelations

and integrate them into long-term change in your life? How are you going to deal with people differently? What are the choices you're going to make? How are you going to relate to your job? How are you going to talk to your kids? How are you going to repair your relationship with your ex-wife now that you feel super connected to all people and you realize that she wasn't a bad person?

and she was just doing the best that she could. So there's a very important integration component. And this is very different from I'm depressed and doing psychedelics at home. So here's what I've sort of found. Set and setting become really important for figuring out, are the psychedelics going to screw me up and give me panic disorders and PTSD? Or are they going to be healing? Because what we also know about psychedelics is it's not just clinical trials that they figured this out, right?

So most psychedelic substances have been used in. safe spiritual traditions. So, for example, ayahuasca has, you know, particular shamans who will train with the medicine. You know, I've worked with people like this who will go for like one month and they'll be like in the Amazon rainforest guided by like shamans who you have a very restricted diet. They'll give you ayahuasca. Sometimes you'll take it every day for about 30 days. Sometimes you'll eat very little.

And you have a lot of people who will sort of guide you through the process. And in cases where. your mindset is good, positive, you know, you're kind of focused, you're ready to do something, and you have enough support structure, whether that's a shaman in a spiritual tradition, or someone like a medical doctor, like a psychiatrist, those become really, really important for sort of creating the healing effects and protecting you from the negative effects. And what I've seen is that there are a lot of people who think, oh, psychedelics can cure me of my PTSD, but they have no idea that the studies that show that are,

14-week trials where therapists are sitting with you for eight hours during the trip, where someone is sort of there and sort of protecting you and keeping you safe. And then what they'll do is they'll think, oh, I'm super depressed. I need to feel better. Let me take this high dose of LSD because they've heard about the heroic dose or psilocybin. And what it'll actually do is induce a state of neuroplasticity where you have no guardrails. You'll get even further traumatized. The depression will get worse. And then when your brain, you'll edit your code in kind of a random way, right, because you're not controlling anything there. And then when you're, you're, you, you hit control as you end up more screwed up than before. The main mechanism of action is that they induce

neuroplasticity, but what happens when your brain is in the neuroplastic state becomes incredibly important. So next, let's see which kind of psychedelics have what effects on which diseases, right? So if you guys are like wondering, this is a great paper, it's called efficacy and safety of psychedelics for the treatment of mental disorders, a systematic review and meta-analysis. And by the way, like, you know, when we say, oh, psychedelics are healthy for you and people are, like, swearing by them, I don't think that most people understand this level of data, right? This is, when I prepared this video, this is just one of the papers that I looked through, right? So you got to really be, like, informed, y'all. Like, I know that people are talking about things on

podcasts, but that's not the same as this. So let's take a look. So if you look at this, right, this shows a bigger improvement than this. Does that make sense? This shows a greater reduction in symptoms than these. If it crosses the middle, by the way, that means that there's not a statistically significant result, so it basically doesn't show a benefit. So what this means is that if we do one measurement, so if we do a single post measurement, so here you are before the psychedelic, here you are after the psychedelic, we see larger effect sizes.

But the moment that we add a placebo, what happens to this curve? Right. So we start to see that things shift to the right. the value of the treatment goes down the second that you add a placebo control. So this is a really good example of people will say, like they'll look at this study and they'll see, oh my God, it leads to 50% improvements. But half of that could be placebo. As we get to more sophisticated trials, the value of psychedelics seems to be going down.

So this is LSD, here's MDMA, here's psilocybin, right? So what's really interesting is that once we add placebo control, the psilocybin seems like it actually, the effect sizes increase. Iawaska, MDMA. Here's MDD. So this is depression. So it seems like psilocybin is quite effective for depression. Here's MDMA.

Seems to be not as effective for depression. Ayahuasca is not effective for depression. So this is the other point that I'm sort of making is that like when we say psychedelics are good for your mental health, which psychedelic and which problem you have with your mental health actually becomes really important. So if you're going to, you know, the Amazon and you're doing ayahuasca because you're depressed, you may not get much benefit from that. Whereas if you have major depressive disorder, psilocybin is sort of like the right medicine to use. And now here's what's really cool.

So if we're talking about treatment resistant depression or recurrent major depressive disorder, this is where we start to see some cool stuff. So the first thing is that if we're talking about simple depression, ayahuasca seems to be not very effective. But if you have treatment resistant depression, now we're seeing larger effect sizes. And we're seeing effect sizes as well for psilocybin. So this is what's actually really cool about psychedelics, and I think this is why people like myself, who are psychiatrists, get really excited. So we have this entity called treatment-resistant depression.

And the whole point of treatment-resistant depression is that it is resistant to treatment. So if I try to treat treatment-resistant depression, it doesn't work. So there's a class of patients that I've absolutely worked with who have depression that doesn't seem to be treatable by things like antidepressant medication. The really cool thing is that some of these psychedelic medications or some of these psychedelics seem to help the people who have difficulty benefiting from other sorts of treatments.

That's why it's really exciting. So we're going to take another look at another table. So this is a table that's looking at comparisons to the effects of – oh, oops. Comparisons to the effects of psychedelics under different evaluation systems. So now what we're doing – so I don't know if this kind of makes sense. This graph, we're going to do Science 101, looking at a condition. So for treatment-resistant depression, here's what psilocybin shows. Here's what ayahuasca shows.

I think this graph, I think, is more important in some ways or better. So now we're looking at, if we look at psilocybin, here's what we find for the antidepressant effect. If we're looking at psilocybin, here's what we find for the anxiolitic effect. Here's what we find for the suicide prevention effect. And if we're looking at LSD, here's the antidepressive effect. Here's the angiolidic effect, right? Here's ayahuasca. Here's the antidepressive effect.

here's the anxiolytic effect. So now we're looking at, and y'all can just sort of see like how far to the left these are. So you can sort of see relatively speaking like this is looking at psilocybin. You know, is psilocybin effective for, is it more effective for depression? Is it more effective for anxiety? So here's a negative, which means symptom improvement. So this is basically looking at each of the psychedelics and looking at which effects they have. This is looking at the conditions and which psychedelics are effective for the condition. You all understand the difference. And then we also have studies. on things like alcoholism, where you'll notice that, like, when we look at something like LSD for alcoholism and psilocybin for alcoholism, what we start to see is that these are a lot more crossing the midline, right? So this doesn't seem to be as effective for substance use disorders as it is for something like treatment resistant depression. So the key thing here is here's LSD for alcoholism and it crosses the midline, which means it's not very statistically significant. Here's psilocybin for alcoholism. This one crosses the midline. line, these two don't. So this appears like psilocybin is more effective for alcoholism than LSD is.

And then we can look at MDMA for PTSD. So this is super exciting as well because we don't have great pharmacologic agents for PTSD, right? We have to do a lot of physiologic rewiring. We sort of walk y'all through that process in Dr. Kay's guide to trauma if you all want to know like how to rewire your brain and identity and physiology. Like we go through that process. So this is what's really cool because we don't have like great drugs for PTSD. But MDMA seems quite promising, right? We're seeing a lot of reductions that are not crossing the midline. So it seems like psychedelics do have very promising efficacy for things like treatment resistant depression, PTSD, alcohol use disorder. Not all psychedelics are the same. And the key

thing to remember is that the way in which we use them seems to be responsible for the benefits that we get. Okay. So if you're super depressed and traumatized and you're just getting using psychedelics in your house at home, it's not clear to me that that is going to be safe or effective. So now let's move on to safety. Here's where things get spicy. So table three summarizes adverse reactions reported in 44 out of 70 total articles. So the first thing to understand is that if we look at 70 studies on psychedelics, in 44 of those 70 studies, something bad happened, right? So what are the adverse reactions? So in 37% of studies, we see no serious adverse events reported. Most common one is headache, nausea, vomiting, dizziness, fatigue, transient anxiety and delusions,

transient increase in blood pressure. So if we look at the safety profile implied by this awesome meta-analysis, which looked at 70 studies, it's like, hey, transient increases in blood pressure. Like, transient delusions. None of this traumatizing crap that Dr. K is talking about PTSD, anxiety, panic disorder, like none of those found permanent panic disorder. So what's up with that, Dr. K? This meta-analysis that looked at 70 studies contradicts what you just said.

And this is why we need to have a sophisticated and nuanced approach. So let me ask you all a question. Let's say I did a meta-analysis in the early stages, right? So these are like FDA trials, Phase 1, Phase 2, Phase 3 clinical trials of benzodiazepines. If I looked at Xanax, Valium, Larazepam, Adavan, Oxycontin, opioid medication, what do you all think the early trials, when before this stuff hit the market and everyone started using it widely, what do you think the side effects were that were reported for these kinds of medications? A little bit of dry mouth, a little bit of fatigue, a little bit of maybe sleepiness.

we didn't see the terrible potential for addiction with these medications, right? So this is something that's really important to understand. There is a huge difference between the side effects that we see in a trial and the side effects that we see in real life. Because in a trial, you have someone who goes to a clinic. They get seen by a doctor for 14 weeks in a row. They're very carefully monitoring what is going on. You've got therapists, if you start to feel a little bit anxious, if you have

a bad trip. You have therapists there with you when you are bad tripping, and you have therapists there to help you process or metabolize or fix whatever goes wrong. This is one of the key reasons why I think the danger, my personal opinion is that the danger from psychedelics is far greater than what the trials suggest. And this is true of basically all medicine, right? So you can look at basically any clinical trial, not, I mean, not all, but a lot of clinical trials and a lot of studies and a lot of FDA approvals will show that medications are generally speaking safe, and then we will start using them in the general population, and it turns out, oh, it's like way worse than we thought. The safety and efficacy profiles of medications, generally speaking, after they get widely used,

the efficacy goes down, and the safety risks actually get worse. So I'll give you all just a couple of examples. So thalidomide was a great antinin nausea drug that we used for cancer treatment. Awesome, looked wonderful, things like that. People started taking thalidomide when they had cancer, and then it worked really well. So then some doctors were like, oh, cool, like this is such a powerful nausea drug. You know what other group of people gets nauseous a lot? Pregnant women.

So we started giving thalidomide to pregnant ladies. And guess what happened? They started giving birth to children without arms or legs. Like legit, that's not an exaggeration. I'm not using this for clickbait. That's like literally what happened. So it is a huge teratogen, really, really dangerous. Now thalidomide is not available on the market anymore because of safety concerns.

We see that a lot with other kinds of medications as well. So another good example of this is antidepressants. The efficacy of antidepressants is probably way less than we originally thought. And furthermore, we're now starting to see things like SSRI withdrawal syndrome. We're seeing permanent sexual side effects in small cases of antidepressant usage. We weren't aware of those dangers when we were looking at the original trials. So my point here is that you have to be really careful about the safety profile that is found in a clinical trial. And the key thing is, if you want that safety profile, you need to duplicate the structure of the trial, because they're safe when a pharmaceutical person, when like a lab is making a precise milligram amount, which is administered to you, not some crap that you ordered off of the internet or grew in your backyard.

I have never seen a single person who uses psilocybin, even when they grow it, who is measuring the concentrate and, concentration of psilocybin in the magic mushrooms that they're growing in their garage. Right? So the safety profiles that we're seeing from the trials are very different from real-world use. So now we're going to get to two fun things, okay? Next thing we're going to talk about is microdosing. So microdosing is like all the fad nowadays. I've met a ton of people who really love to microdose.

So microdosing is when you take, you know, a small dose of psychedelics. And this also is where, like, we have to get technical because what is the dose of microdosing, right? So there's no clear consensus. asking, is microdosing effective? Is it safe? The question becomes, which psychedelic are we talking about? And at what dose are we talking about? I don't hear this level of precision. So we can't say it is safe or unsafe or effective or ineffective, ineffective, unless we actually specify those things. Okay? That's the first problem. So second thing is that in my experience of microdosing,

in the sense of the people that I've worked with, what I tend to find is that microdosing gives a lot of subjective benefit. So when people microdose, they feel a lot better. They feel like it has a very large impact. But that is generally speaking, I think, kind of suss, TBH. And the reason for that is because a subjective experience of feeling better does not necessarily tightly correlate with an actual clinical improvement. And the best example of this is something like adderol or stimulant medication. So if you take someone with ADHD and you give them Adderall, what many of them experience is that they are non-functional without Adderall. Without my Adderall, I can't do anything. And with my Adderall, I become a completely different human being and I can accomplish a lot.

So the subjective benefit of Adderall seems to be very high for people. But if you look at studies, how much does Adderall improve your actual concentration? On average, if you do meta-analyses of studies, it leads to a 30% improvement in ADHD symptoms. Compare that with psychotherapy. So psychotherapy over the course of one year, if you really stick with it, improves ADHD symptoms by about 69%. Right. So it is more than twice as effective as stimulant medication. But if you ask someone, how much does psychotherapy help you? How much does Adderall help you? There is a subjective difference in how much people think it helps them. So if I give someone a year of psychotherapy, they're going to be 70% better in relation

to their ADHD. If I give someone Adderall, they're going to be 30% better with their ADHD. But if I ask someone, how much better are you? The Adderall person will say, I'm way better. I'm like 100% better. And the psychotherapy person will say, I'm about maybe 50, 30, 70% better. They'll say something like that. And that's because we have this bias in our brain where the speed of something working increases the magnitude of the effect. So since Adderall works right away, since I notice a difference, that sort of my brain sort of changes the calculation. I don't need to get more into that, but I hope that sort of makes sense.

The more immediate effects are, the more we think something is effective. This is why things like Xanax and opium and opioid medications feel like they're amazing because they hit us really fast. And if they hit us really fast, the brain confuses that with being very effective. So our brain confuses onset of action and speed of effect with magnitude of effect. This is basically what I think is going on with microdosing, where a lot of people feel like they're doing better. But if we look at a lot of the data that looks, if we look at studies that look at long-term effects, there seems to be a very small effect. So let's take a quick look at a few studies.

So here's a study that's a systematic study of microdosing psychedelics. So analyses of pre- and post-study measures revealed reductions in reported levels of data. depression and stress, lower levels of distractibility, increased absorption, and increased neuroticism. Notably, the effects believed most likely to change were unrelated to the observed pattern of reported outcomes. Now, what does this sentence mean? This means that what people believed changed is quite different from what actually

changed. Okay. So let's take a look at another study. So this paper is from 2019, so I thought I'd pull something up from 2024. So perceptible drug effects were reported at doses of 10 to 20 milligrams, but not 5 milligrams. This is an LSD microdosing study. No serious adverse effects were reported. Repeated doses of LSD did not alter mood or cognition on any of the measures studied, right?

This is what's really interesting. The findings suggest that low doses of LSD are safe and produce acute behavioral and neural effects in healthy adults. So y'all can look at these papers yourself and draw your own conclusions. But what I kind of read from this is kind of what I already said, which is that when people microdose, they feel like they do better. They feel like there are daily, if you take up, if you microdose every day, there are going to be reductions in your subjective experience of, of mood and anxiety. But generally speaking, over time, your trajectory will not improve. So what my experience has been as a psychiatrist who works with people who microdose is it really becomes a crutch to help

you feel better on every single day. It's almost like an opioid medication where it helps you feel better every single day, but it doesn't actually improve your health very much. There are going to be a ton of people who will disagree with me and fair enough because the research on microdosing is not very extensive. I'm sure that there's a variability of people who absolutely love it. I'm not saying that y'all don't love it. I'm not saying that it doesn't feel great. What I'm saying is that in my experience, it doesn't sustainably improve things over time. And in the worst cases, what it actually does is masks, right? Because you're taking this psychedelic that is like changing your movement. your anxiety, your feeling of your connectedness with the world.

But the moment that the psychedelic goes away, you're back to where you started, right? And so what that sort of means is that it doesn't lead to a sustainable improvement. You're not actually fixing the problems of feeling disconnected from the world without a psychedelic. This episode is brought to you by Redfin. You're listening to a podcast, which means you're probably multitasking, maybe even scrolling home listings on Redfin, saving homes without expect. to get them. But Redfin isn't just built for endless browsing. It's built to help you find and own a home. With agents who close twice as many deals, when you find the one, you've got a real

shot at getting it. Get started at redfin.com. Own the dream. The last thing that I want to talk about is something that's kind of fun, which is more of a subjective experience of how psychedelics work. So remember that we talked about the 5HT2A receptor. We talked about neuroplasticity, but there's one other interesting mechanism, which seems to be responsible for psychedelic healing. Now, this mechanism is subjective. So what I mean by that is that we can look at things like receptors, right? But then there is the actual trip. And it seems like there is one kind of trip that correlates with healing overtime.

And that is a trip that involves ego death. So if you have a psychedelic experience that involves just looking at colors, this does not appear to cure depression or treat PTSD. The trips that actually involve healing are ones where your sense of identity starts to crumble and fall apart, where your sense of connection to other people increases. And there's actually studies on this. So I want to show you all. This is super cool. So someone did their thesis specifically on ego death. So prescribed ego death, the therapeutic effects found in the psychedelic induced absence of self. So some researchers hypothesize that the therapeutic effects of psychedelics come from their acute subjective effects, specifically

ego dissolution. By reviewing five studies that examine this correlation, this review found that the majority of the studies could present a moderate correlation. So what this means is that there is a particular kind of trip that leads to healing, which is ego death. And the really fascinating thing about this is one of the most common questions that I get is, what is the connection between psychedelics and meditation? Because in meditation, we also have, improvements in PTSD, we have neuroplasticity, we have increases in BDNF, we have improvements in depression, we have improvements in treatment resistant depression, we have improvements in addictions. So meditation does a lot of the things that psychedelics does. And if you practice

esoteric techniques of meditation, you will oftentimes have psychedelic-like experiences. You'll travel to other dimensions, you'll feel connected to all of humanity. And we know that one of the that happens in meditation is that our ego starts to dissolve. There are some techniques that will specifically teach. Y'all can check out Dr. K's guide, where we do techniques like Shunya meditation and stuff like that, which are sort of designed. These are specific techniques to trigger this ego dissolution process. Okay. So it seems like ego dissolution is really important. And this is where I think that this is where meditation and psychedelics really overlap. And I think it's really cool that there are some techniques in meditation that induce ego death.

and psychedelic trips that induce some amount of ego dissolution are responsible for healing. So let's understand why that is. So if we look at mental illness, mental illness has a lot to do with me, right? So when I experience PTSD, I feel broken. I feel traumatized. I don't feel traumatized. I am traumatized. I feel broken.

I feel unlovable. When a child is abused by their parent, they develop an identity of being unloved. even if we look at something like depression, what is going on in depression? In depression, we have a hyperactive ego. Now, what do I mean by that? This is why I'm being technical. I'm talking about the sense of self. So if I ask someone who's depressed, I say, tell me about yourself. They'll say, I'm a loser. I'm pathetic. It doesn't mean that they're egotistical in the sense that they think highly of themselves, but their identity is very, very robust in concrete. I'm pathetic. I'm a loser. I'm worse than everyone else. Everyone would be better without me. We also

You see very, very hyperactive ego in things like the in-cell population, right? I'm a beta, other people are alphas. I am this. I am this. I am. I am. I am. So if we sort of stop and think about what's really going on there in a lot of our mental

illnesses and the ones that are, it's really interesting, right? Because they're very effective for the mental illnesses that have a large part of ego. We don't see a huge ego in schizophrenia. We don't see a huge ego in OCD. We see huge egos in addictions. Oh, yeah, I'm a loser. I'm pathetic. I'm an alcoholic.

Like, I should be able to control myself. I'm undisciplined. I'm lazy. So these three mental health diagnoses, depression, PTSD and alcohol, these are the statements that when I am a psychiatrist sitting with a patient in my office, they make a lot of I am dot, dot, dot, statements, right? These diseases relate to our sense of identity. And so it's really cool that like since ego dissolution happens and what happens in ego dissolution is, you know, who you are, you don't feel like you're bounded by this. Like I'm over here and you're over there, right?

So I exist over here. This is the boundary of me. I have a physical body and you have your life and I have my life. These two things are not connected. But when we have an ego dissolution experience, my sense of self dissolves. I just exist. I exist in a neutral way. I begin to realize I'm not the body.

Like I am that which exists transcendently beyond the body and all this kind of stuff. Look, we talk about all this crap and a ton of other content that we'll try to link down below if you guys want more details on this stuff. I think it's just really cool that ego death seems to be responsible for this healing. And so ego death seems to be the kind of trip that you need to have if you want to heal in these ways. And when I work with psychiatrists and psychotherapists who do psychedelic-assisted psychotherapists, who do psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy, what I find with them is that oftentimes

that reintegration stuff, right? So you have this sense of connectedness. And then once you have this experience, helping yourself live in a way that includes that experience, integrates that experience, like, okay, if you're connected with all the other human beings,

how are you going to be more compassionate towards your ex? How are you going to be more compassionate towards your colleagues, towards your kids, towards your boss? So it seems like ego death is really critical. And I don't think it's surprising. at all that as we engage in ego death experiences, even through the process of meditation,

we see similar clinical improvements. So I hope that this has been a useful video for y'all. We've been wanting to talk about psychedelics for a long time. We've talked about it before, but I think this is, so the TLDR is, do psychedelics work? Are they healing? Chances are, the answer is yes, but under very specific circumstances. Are they incredibly powerful? Absolutely. But don't go playing with fire unless you're ready to get burned. So at the end of the day, are psychedelics effective? Are they safe? And the answer is, it depends.

It depends on the set and the setting, right? What is the approach that you're having when you're inducing this neuroplast? So if you ask me at the end of the day, Dr. K, should I do psychedelics? The answer is probably not unless you can find the right circumstance to do them with their appropriate guidance so that they don't actually mess you. So Dr. K, are psychedelics safe and effective? The answer is, it depends, right? It depends on the way that you're using them, the mindset that you're in, and who is with you

when you are engaging in the psychedelic. And should I use them, Dr. K, the answer is with the appropriate guidance, whether that's a medical profession or part of a religious tradition, and I strongly recommend y'all don't do anything illegal. And so Dr. Kay, should I do psychedelics? The answer is with the appropriate guidance, right? So with the right kind of medical profession, or if you are a part of a spiritual tradition where someone can appropriately guide you, then that's something to be considered.

assuming it's legal. Thanks for joining us today. We're here to help you understand your mind and live a better life. If you enjoy the conversation, be sure to subscribe. Until next time, take care of yourselves and each other. This episode is brought to you by CarMax. Want to buy a car the easy way? Start at CarMax.

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