5 Simple Reasons Psychedelics Make You a Better Human

Would we be better off if everyone was a psychonaut?

Last week I created a TikTok account. I started making short educational clips about psychedelic medicine.

While the feedback has been largely positive, I’ve had my fair share of comments emphasizing how dangerous and harmful psychedelics are.

The fact that so many people still think this way is precisely the reason I’m on a mission to educate and break the stigma. While I don’t deny that psychedelics can cause challenging experiences, I’m an advocate of guided, intentional use in therapeutic settings and belief that risks in those settings are extremely limited.

Not everyone should take psychedelics, of course.

Yet, my hope is that more and more people will start doing so.

That’s because psychedelics simply make you a better person.

They transform your inside by making your inner world a more loving and accepting place. This, in turn, transform what you bring into the outer world.

Here are the top five positive changes psychedelics are known to commonly trigger in people.

Psychedelics Make You More Self-Aware

Let’s start with the obvious.

Psychedelic journeys are journeys deep into the depth of your psyche. They bring up repressed emotions and memories. They bring light to your patterns. They confront you with your limiting beliefs and your shadow.

None of this sounds fun, and it isn’t.

Yet, as Carl Jung said:

“The greatest thing we can do is to withdraw the projection of our shadow onto others.”

Oftentimes, this requires non-ordinary states of consciousness such as those induced by psychedelics, given that your shadow is deeply buried in your subconscious.

Psychedelics are certainly not the only way to do this work, but I’d argue it’s hard to be a serious psychonaut and not stumble upon it.

Psychedelics Make You More Open-Minded

Psychedelics not only take you into the depths of your psyche but also into the depths of reality.

This 2011 study at Johns Hopkins found that single, high-dose psilocybin aka magic mushroom journey led to lasting changes in the personality dimension of openness. It’s an astonishing finding, given that the field of psychology until then believed the core dimensions of personality to be rather fixed.

My very first insight from psychedelics was that reality as it is and reality, as we perceive it, are not the same thing.

As Jeremy Narby, author of The Cosmic Serpent, notes:

“We never see reality, but only an internal representation of it that our brain constructs for us continously.”

This becomes obvious when you ingest a plant or fungus that drastically (or subtly) changes your perception.

Clearly, what you’ll see isn’t contained in the substances you ingested. For many, this leads to the conclusion that perhaps it’s always already there.

Personally, I believe that our brain filters out a vast majority of the information in order for us to process what we perceive to be reality.

Regardless of your conclusion, it’s puzzling to contemplate this question.

One thing is sure, experiencing this predicament will make you a more open-minded person.

Psychedelics Reinforce What’s Important in Life

After my first Ayahuasca ceremony, I had quite a rude awakening.

During my week in the Costa Rican jungle, I came to learn that one simple belief, which was the product of childhood trauma, had governed nearly every area of my life: the belief that I wasn’t good enough.

I woke up to a life that was built by someone who was surviving on external validation.

Now, I no longer needed it.

Needless to say, much in my life felt misaligned.

Over the next year, I rid myself of much of my designer clothes, left Manhatten for California in pursuit to be closer to nature, and decided I’d have to leave my career as a management consultant, too.

Psychedelics show you what’s important, and it’s not wealth, status, or ownership of nice things.

Here’s how Steve Jobs reflected on his LSD experiences:

“It reinforced my sense of what was important — creating great things instead of making money, putting things back into the stream of history and of human consciousness as much as I could.”

My work with psychedelics has been a key impetus in my creative journey, which has since led me to write over 100 articles — and now, creating many, many TikToks.

Spreading messages that I believe can help other people reconnect has become disproportionally more important than money.

Psychedelics Make You Revere Nature

What’s happening to our planet is a product of mass disconnection.

Modern society has turned from reverence of nature to reverence of capitalism — wealth, accomplishment, status. The biggest victim of that shift: our planet.

Indigenous communities are probably shaking their heads in disbelief about the damage we’ve managed to achieve in the span of a few short decades, let alone our continued inertia to correct it.

Psychedelics help you reconnect with the universal intelligence that created not only all life on earth but the entire universe.

The underlying quality of that universal intelligence is love, which is also the force that makes psychedelic medicine so healing.

As mushroom guide Françoise Bourzat notes:

“It’s not the plant or fungus that heals you, it’s the nature that created the plant that heals.”

That nature has many children — African shrubs, 180+ species of psychoactive fungi, DMT-containing leaves and frogs, and so on.

What all these children have in common is that they are messengers of love.

Most people develop an unparalleled appreciation for nature once they’ve experienced the healing powers of plant medicine. Research also shows that psychedelic experiences increase connectedness to nature.

Hence, I’m hopeful that the growing expansion of psychedelics will aid in fighting the climate crisis, too.

Psychedelics Make You More Connected to Others

Another universal reality psychedelics communicate is the interconnectedness of all beings.

The emphasis on individuality in Western culture has severely disconnected us from each other. In many parts across the world, we walk around as if we’re all complete strangers, from different species. We see other humans and behave in a way as if we had nothing in common. We discriminate based on gender, the color of our skin, sexual orientation, socio-economic background.

As cheesy as it sounds, the psychedelic experience reliably produces the insight that we are all one.

This small insight has a drastic impact on how we navigate the world.

Here’s what it will do in practice: it will make you friendlier, and a better partner, employee, family member, citizen. It also makes you more empathetic and compassionate. It will make you more altruistic, and more likely to be in service of others in any shape or form.

It will make you care more.

Simply said, it will make you a better person.

Curious to learn more about psychedelic healing?

Join my community on Substack, where I publish The Journey, a free weekly newsletter for psychonauts traveling inward with intention.