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Feeling strange after a lot of psychedelics in sober life, is this normal?

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AwesomeUsername

AwesomeUsername

Esteemed member
As you might have guessed it, at one point in my life I was abusing psychedelics. I'm not really sure why either... Maybe for the fact that I had them on me all the time, or trying to just speed up the process of getting what I'm trying to reach? I don't know...

The definite thing I noticed is that after that period I feel quite different, almost schizophrenic... Is this neuro plasticity? I expected to stop feeling confused, sad and anxious but now I'm just confused and a lot.

A friend of mine who has had this period along-side with me feels the same. The rare occasions where he does go out he refuses a single hit of a joint just because he claimed his reality is already "drugged out" and that is exactly how I would describe it to.

I'm not sure if this feeling will fade over time, but it definitely isn't pleasant, feels very much as if I'm stuck tripping all the time but only just a little. I wouldn't mind feeling this way a day after a trip, but this just doesn't stop.

I can never be sure if I'll return to normal, after having all this insights and for the very fact that my view of "normal" switched drastically. The typical normal I see everywhere actually seems fucked up, bizarre and unnecessary and what's the strangest of everything is that very few see it too. Most are oblivious to it, if not they adapt anyway...

Is this a blessing or a curse? I really can't tell. I'm not even sad, or angry or anything similar to that just very confused about life.
 
Are you still taking psychedelics? Because to me it seems that you should take a break.
I read about your ayahuasca bad trip, and it seems that this wasn't too long ago, so something tells me you are still abusing psychedelics.
So for your own sake, focus on other things then psychs for a while and observe if it makes you feel better.
All the best.
 
About a year or two after I initially discovered psychedelics I went through something similar - the feeling of constantly being right on the edge of tripping out, accompanied by a sense of cold detachment and/or anxiety and paranoia. I was seeing patterns in textured surfaces and I seemed to be able to hold multiple tangential thoughts in my head at once, but it felt like more of a frenzy than a healthy or lucid state of mind. I was hardly able to focus on the more mundane (but necessary) aspects of daily living, and it eventually started to take its toll.

Long story short, it got so bad I was on the verge of panic attacks nearly every day. I decided to quit taking psychedelics, drinking alcohol, and consuming cannabis for an extended period of time and eventually it got better. That's honestly the best thing I can recommend - take a break for a while, focus on other things. Eat well, exercise, get plenty of rest, and I'm sure you'll start to feel 'normal' after a while. It took me about 3 months to get back to what I consider baseline, but YMMV.

Good luck to you :)
 
I went through a period like this when I was a teenager, taking psychedelics excessively every weekend and in the week too without putting much thought into set, setting or intent. Also ended up feeling slightly trippy all the time. I basically had to give up psychedelics, even cannabis, which had started making me paranoid.

I then began drinking too much, which made social interaction easier, but was destructive in other ways. I could go into more detail but haven't got time now. What happened ultimately is that I met a woman, had kids and spent the next twenty years bringing up a family, which forced me to be less self obsessed, gave me a focus in my life and also a reason to be more cautious with the use of mind altering substances.

Im not recommending having kids as a cure for drug abuse, just giving an example of how focussing your energies on some worthwhile project, rather than on yourself can be very grounding and help you grow as a person in a way that simply taking psychedelics wont do.

Anyway, the persistant trippy feeling did eventually go away. Took a few years though. Eventually I got the calling to re explore these substances and found that I was able to appreciate them on a much deeper level and handle the experiences better, coming at them from a stronger and more stable baseline.
 
I used quite some cannabis and was lets face it, addicted to it stuck on the couch for days and whatnot. Forgetting what reality was about.
Ever since i decided to take a break from it, i am drawn more to figuring out my life purpose.
Enjoying and experiencing life for what it is worth.
Being confused and sensitive does not help with staying sober. What does is a passion, a hobby something to keep you bussy.
Keeping focused is an artform on earth, and few can keep it.
Goodluck
p.s. Having a few good laughs definatly helps!!!!! ALOT
 
It's easy to think that taking a constant stream of psychedelics leads to a constant level of self-improvement. There is an especial bias toward this line of thought when you frequently read amazing stories on the Nexus and elsewhere about the positive effects of these substances.

But I think that psychedelic drugs are not magic pills that you can just pop and become a better person. I have personally found that they are a catalyst to help my mind expand/better itself and look for novel ways to help others, myself, and the world.

This can come at a cost though. I separate DMT trips in particular into two different levels of experience: the other worldly trip and the cognition trip. On one level you are flying through hyperspace meeting all sorts of funny entities and seeing all sorts of patterns and beautiful geometries, but on the cognition level I have found that my mind becomes frazzled, I forget who/what I am sometimes, and I can become confused and scared. These cognitive effects can spill over into my everyday life in the form of depersonalization, disassociation, and memory loss.

There seems to be a certain level of diminishing returns over time when using such powerful chemicals on ourselves. As for you feeling "normal," I would not recommend having such a black-and-white view of the kind of person you'd be without psychedelics. We all change over time and have to learn to deal with these differences in healthy and productive ways.

As others have said, it seems that taking a break and refocusing on what your purposes for living and for taking psychs are would be helpful steps to regaining some sanity. These things have side effects and feeling wigged out can be one of them; it's just a tradeoff we have to deal with in exchange for the possibility of seeing the world in a whole new way.
 
I see psychedelic drugs as tools that primarily work to increase sensitivity of awareness. This awareness is not just sensory; I think on a deeper level tripping opens you up to linking causes and effects in patterns you encounter in your every day life.

You might become sensitive to the awareness that on days you drink coffee, you actually get less done with your day. This logically leads to the observation that you might actually get more done WITHOUT coffee! Despite the obvious connotations with productivity that keep the coffee industry booming. Let's assume somehow, you never noticed this pattern before the psychedelic experience.


The problems with building up your base of personally relevant truths can be numerous. Worth pursuing, no doubt! But you have to always be mindful about keeping these bushes of assumption well pruned, if you will. Otherwise, you will slowly drift into delusional conspiracy theorist territory.

In other words, you have got to take the time, effort, and space between experiences to INTEGRATE! If you don't.... don't say we all didn't warn you! (A billion times)

Integrating can be as simple as coming to the decision that you don't buy into all of the revelations you had during the trip, and that your worldview remained relatively in-tact.

But on the other hand, to a certain degree you CAN'T forget everything you saw, even if you tried to.

You know, stuff like realizing precisely how much you hate your job, based on how many cups of coffee you have to drink to get through the day! Even though in that other trip, you realized how much less you get done with the coffee! Except now you realize you are addicted to coffee now too. And then: you realize that the coffee messes with your sleep and blood sugar, resulting in intense food cravings, and you now stress eat unseemly amounts of pizza every day when you get home from work. Just to take away all of the pain.

Welp, you can't unsee that! For long, anyways. We all try to hide truths from ourselves, consciously or unconsciously. It's just easier or something? Except it actually usually isn't, long term.

At the same time, nobody is perfect, and if we were aware of all of our problems all of the time, we would be freakin miserable!

And this would surely spawn additional problems, before too long.

Conversely, ignorance in certain instances might spawn confidence or relative peace-of-mind, which will translate into better functioning in other useful aspects of your life.

I'm NOT saying that ignorance should be praised here!

I'm saying, theres got to be a balance!



I'm saying that most of us can't spend a whole day on the beach without sunscreen, and not get sunburnt.

Sometimes a sunburn is a good reminder to fix something you just did. Maybe this is to not take naps on the beach, or to wear a shirt or bring sunscreen next time!

But if you keep getting sunburnt over and over severely enough, you keep increasing the odds of eventually developing skin cancer.

And why get sunburnt when you can just plan your day out a little better and enjoy a fun, healthy day at the beach?

Skin cancer: Ain't nobody got time for that!
 
teotenakeltje said:
Are you still taking psychedelics? Because to me it seems that you should take a break.
I read about your ayahuasca bad trip, and it seems that this wasn't too long ago, so something tells me you are still abusing psychedelics.
So for your own sake, focus on other things then psychs for a while and observe if it makes you feel better.
All the best.
Click to expand...

Nah, the trainwreck was my last trip and I've been stone cold sober ever since. Not even coffee. I've been working my ass off however in the hope to keep my mind occupied but there comes the time in the day where all work is done and you have about an hour or two before you get to sleep, and in the morning starting over and getting ready for the job again.

At that point in that little free time my mind doesn't stop racing... I noticed it way before my last trip but I always contributed it to frequent psychedelic use with high doses too. It seemed also an opportunity to go deeper with my trips since I was so familiar with the psychedelic headspace.

A break has been planed either way because I noticed I'm having a lot of the same experiences over and over again. It felt much like watching reruns on TV, but except the fact that these kind of reruns were way more interesting.

Having gone through this I definitely don't recommend doing psychedelics as often as someone would do other drugs like cannabis, booze or coke even. It's not like a weakened drug you occasionally throw somewhere in mid weak because you have some time to have fun.

This period has most definitely been most frequent time I did them since I started a little over a year now.
 
Maybe you can sit down in the evening and meditate, just let it all happen and watch.
Try to focus on your breathing, you will see that when you become one with your breath your mind will become more quiet.
It's rather tricky because often, without noticing it, you will loose your focus and be completely entangled in your toughts again. When you snap out of it, just gently go back to focusing on your breath.
In my experience this works wonders!
Try it! :)
 
I had something similar happen to me after I accidentally dosed more than I was expecting and the result was panic attacks feeling like I was tripping on DMT again for around 10 seconds, waking up in the middle of the night feeling like I was going to break through and also this weird fog that still hasn't left me till this day. It is a kind of derealization, I am viewing the world but sort of like a POV tv series and everything has a sort of unreal aspect to it but nonetheless still exists right in front of me. It is not so much in how it looks but how it "feels" and in how things exist through time. It has shown me how deep things really are, maybe that is all I need to know for now. But I really miss the sub-breakthrough doses and how it felt... the warmth, the intelligence and otherness to it all. I don't want to upset my mind so I just focus on practical things now.

It took about 7 months for me to accept the constant derealization and about 2 months for the obscure residual effects and panic attacks to subside. I took the advice of nexians and focused on practical things like running, eating healthy, reading, socializing and it helped immensely. What helped was sort of not being able to think about things deeply and just be caught up in whatever is going on in observational space. I am sure I will come to a point though where it is time for me to go back and do more searching, and if not then I guess it was a success in deepening my understanding of the world... just maybe not to the point where I am utterly freaked out by everything, lol.

We need to find calm in the storm and our sober state is the key to that peace.
 
On reading this I started to wonder about something...

Id be really interested in finding out what is the correlation of getting these named problems with prolonged use of psychedelics and the personal outlook on this whole topic.

What Ive come to see is that its more likely then not, that people over time will develop some unwanted side effects from high-frequency psychedelic use, on the other hand there are some people who can tolerate doing this stuff weekly for years!

While most of them might as well go through a shortlifed psychedelic crisies, what distinguishes them from the rest is, that they react in a different way, and can continue to use psyches sooner or later without much problems.
While there might be some biological predetermination at play, I think a lot of it comes down to how well the person is able to integrate the experience and the whole concept of working with these substances into their general world outlook and daily life, as well as mental capacities to cope with the changes in perception one might undergo permanently.

Does anyone know if a study on the possible factors about better integration has been done so far? There are many studies based on questioneers about psychedelics out there, so maybe…

On the other hand id be really interested in what those of you (jamie if you read this? :d ), who consume psychedelics in highfrequency, and are able to deal with it(which doestn mean that sometimes it doesnt get difficult!) think about what played a role in their capacity to do so?

Edit: on a side note, wondering if the "Integration Guide" Section is ever going to be finished? :roll:
 
AwesomeUsername said:
As you might have guessed it, at one point in my life I was abusing psychedelics. I'm not really sure why either... Maybe for the fact that I had them on me all the time, or trying to just speed up the process of getting what I'm trying to reach? I don't know...

The definite thing I noticed is that after that period I feel quite different, almost schizophrenic... Is this neuro plasticity? I expected to stop feeling confused, sad and anxious but now I'm just confused and a lot.

A friend of mine who has had this period along-side with me feels the same. The rare occasions where he does go out he refuses a single hit of a joint just because he claimed his reality is already "drugged out" and that is exactly how I would describe it to.

I'm not sure if this feeling will fade over time, but it definitely isn't pleasant, feels very much as if I'm stuck tripping all the time but only just a little. I wouldn't mind feeling this way a day after a trip, but this just doesn't stop.

I can never be sure if I'll return to normal, after having all this insights and for the very fact that my view of "normal" switched drastically. The typical normal I see everywhere actually seems fucked up, bizarre and unnecessary and what's the strangest of everything is that very few see it too. Most are oblivious to it, if not they adapt anyway...

Is this a blessing or a curse? I really can't tell. I'm not even sad, or angry or anything similar to that just very confused about life.
Click to expand...
Love and Trust your Truest Self
I've journeyed enough to have some lasting cognitive effects
It's pleasant to view them as augmentative, and I believe in doing so one affirms on all levels that learning is a positive experience
regardless of the content we may learn from
 
Have you looked into depersonalization/derealization disorders? I've had symptoms similar to what you describe (feeling like I'm going crazy, confusion), and have found many similarities in descriptions of dp/dr. I feel that these states of mind following 'abuse' of psychedelics are similar to ptsd, at least in my experience. Dp/dr is described as a brand of ptsd, commonly brought on by traumatic psychedelic experiences.

Regardless, exercise, a healthy diet, and social support are indispensable tools for your wellbeing. Good luck friend!
 
kajex said:
Have you looked into depersonalization/derealization disorders? I've had symptoms similar to what you describe (feeling like I'm going crazy, confusion), and have found many similarities in descriptions of dp/dr. I feel that these states of mind following 'abuse' of psychedelics are similar to ptsd, at least in my experience. Dp/dr is described as a brand of ptsd, commonly brought on by traumatic psychedelic experiences.

Regardless, exercise, a healthy diet, and social support are indispensable tools for your wellbeing. Good luck friend!
Click to expand...
 
Also, heightened awareness may cause you to notice that everyday life is, in fact, decidedly strange anyhow. This is perhaps a result of deconditioning.
 
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