site banner

Wellness Wednesday for September 7, 2022

The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:

  • Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.

  • Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.

  • Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.

  • Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).

14
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

How bad of an idea would it be to try psilocybin alone with no supervision while on vacation in a foreign country?

Everything depends on the dose and your general experience with drugs, if you're used to having your consciousness significantly altered outside your control, then you probably wouldn't have a problem with mushrooms either. I don't drink and never did any drugs before I tried psilocybin alone for meditation purposes, and I had to start very slowly. If you're someone who feels the need to control everything, be very careful and start slow. The entirety of the difficulty of psychedelics is in not trying to control things you can't control. Weird unfamiliar and maybe unpleasant things will happen, and you can't control any of it (the lack of control scales with dose, culminating in no control whatsoever at 5g or more), but if you try you'll make everything worse.

The way to minimize bad experiences is to start with 0.8g the first time, then 1.6g the second, then 2.4g and 3.2g, all weights in dried mushrooms. Leaving about a week between each dose, done in darkness (sensitivity to light increases dramatically), in bed possibly with headphones listening to classical music, with locked doors, close access to a bathroom, plenty of drinking water (you will pee a lot during the trip, and must not forget to drink water), and in a good mood with clear intentions for why you're doing this and what you aim to get out of this.

edit: some more specific details: the psilocybin content of dried mushrooms varies dramatically, even within a single mushroom between the stem and the cap. So if possible get a large quantity (like 14g) of dried mushrooms and grind them in a coffee grinder to homogenize them. Then buy a milligram scale from amazon and carefully weigh out your dose and put it in boiling water to make a tea out of it, all the psilocybin will dissolve in the water and you won't need to actually eat the mushrooms. This way also avoids the nausea that some people get at the beginning of the trip.

Thanks for the detailed info!

I have been extremely drunk many times but don't have any experience with hallucinogens. Unfortunately, I won't be able to try scale up over weeks because I am only planning on a week or so vacation in a country where mushrooms are legal. Guess I will try a small dose in a hotel room.

These are good pieces of advice for if @badciviilization is mainly concerned with a meditative experience. I will note though that if they're using it more recreationally I've never met a mushroom lover that didn't recommend nature and greenery.

done in darkness (sensitivity to light increases dramatically), in bed possibly with headphones listening to classical music, with locked doors

I would not recommend this set up if the goal is recreation.

Oh, very true! I honestly forget that people do these recreationally and not to understand the nature of self and sensory experience. Though I personally find it hard to think of anything less pleasant than doing shrooms in public.

I do shrooms both meditatively and recreationally, and probably my best experience was going to MoMA on a medium-low dose. It was low-key life-changing.

You'd be surprised. Context hugely changes the experience. One of the most pleasant afternoons I've had so far was taking a gram and wandering downtown Chicago in the summer with a couple friends. You don't want to be in the danger or navigating complicated situations but you're not totally helpless.