Please note; I am not a doctor and I don’t play one on TV. You should consult with your doctor and loved ones before making a decision to use psychedelic therapy. Be your own best advocate, do your own research, and make smart choices working with clinical providers because what’s on the street isn’t the same. This isn’t medical advice, this is my own experience, interpretation, and opinion.
'“What? Wait… are you serious? He can do that?”
It was dinner time on an early February evening so we were both in the kitchen. Sara was standing on the opposite side of the island, and I lingered by the stove putting together something to eat. The conversation was casual enough; that night, all the charisma I tried to put into social situations was nonexistent and I didn’t have it in me to try anything more sophisticated than general politeness. I had been coping with the onset of a major depressive episode for a few weeks by then.
Sara is a beautifully tall girl, the kind of girl that gets described as “willowy”. She’s natural and has this effortlessly granola vibe that works in a Patagonia-modelesque way. She worked at the Sphere when it was being built as a welder and had been staying in one of my rooms for five or six weeks by then. Since I have a large home with two rooms and just me post-divorce, I furnished them and rented them to solo female professionals coming to my city for contract work.
“Yea, it’s a ketamine clinic.” Her boyfriend in northern Utah is an emergency room doctor who also had an alternative therapy private practice where he administered ketamine intravenously. She went on to explain that ketamine had been around for ages as an anesthetic, but that in the last ten years or so doctors realized it was also a really effective antidepressant. I leaned in and listened hard.
Everything I knew about ketamine up until that moment was that it was a poor substitute for ecstasy. Not the feeling, the drug. From about 16 to 19, I was heavily involved in the underground rave scene (before it was the popular commercialized mass version that it is today), and with that came nearly weekly use of the happiest pill on earth. Most of the time, sourcing ecstasy, or E as we called it, wasn’t an issue. But, once in a while a house party would have to sub in for a rave, and Special K would have to sub in for E. All I remember about the experience was sitting on a filthy carpet, staring, caught in a K-Hole.
My depressed mind boggled at the idea. Doctors were just… just dosing people with Special K? What in the millennial-midlife crisis was going on? Were there glowsticks involved?
The next day I followed the link Sara sent me to a TED Talk on it. For whatever reason, having a subject be validated by the TED Community makes it super really real, even more real than when Oprah says something is real.
The next two weeks were obsessive. I consumed every bit of information I could find. I listened to podcasts by Dr. Andrew Huberman and Tim Ferriss. I read as many articles as my browser would populate, some scientific and some op-ed. I researched ketamine clinics in my area and spoke with providers. Ultimately, I made two decisions that I didn’t know would completely change my life: I decided that ketamine was worth trying, and that I would go with an at-home program with built-in support services.
Nearly seven months later, everything I thought I knew about mood disorders, habits, and life choices has been dumped upside down, emptied out, and rummaged through.
How Ketamine Works
Ketamine is a synthetic psychedelic developed as an anesthesia in the 1970s. It’s extremely safe and often used as a pediatric anesthesia. Many people also think of it being used in veterinarians’ offices as an animal tranquilizer (which does nothing for its public image).
As a psychedelic, it provides three different categories of impact;
The Psychedelic Experience: When the reality-based state of consciousness is dissolved, we get access to deeper regions of our brains that we would not be able to access without a mind-altering substance. During the “trip”, people can find great peace in addressing unresolved past traumas, experiencing memories in new ways, or gaining a deeper understanding. This is all very oversimplified, but the meaning is the same; the psychedelic experience itself can be very emotionally healing.
The Antidepressant Effects: Psychedelics such as ketamine, psilocybin, and MDMA seem to have an impact on how the brain fires off neurons and make it much easier for new neuron connections to be made. This, in turn, lifts up the mood. Scientists are still studying this and no one is really clear on how it works, but what we do know is super useful: it works faster and better than conventional SSRIs and has far fewer side effects. More data is needed, but for now, it’s enough to know that immediate relief is available (especially for people like me with MDD and the thick of a bad episode where suicidal ideation is involved. Time is of the essence.).
Neuroplasticity & Integration: This is the cheat code I promised. This is where life changes. The psychedelic experience itself can be earth-real and mystical, and the antidepressant effects can be necessary and life-saving, but the real magic happens after the drug has been fully metabolized.
If you have ever tried to change a habit, you know how hard it is to come at it with nothing but will and brute force. Maybe it’s quitting smoking, or maybe it’s going to the gym in the morning. When the habit fails to stick and the change you promised yourself falls apart, the feedback loop from hell gets going and we all sit around wondering why we are so sloppy and undisciplined. What most people don’t know is that it’s not just behaviors that have to change, but an entire complicated network of neurons firing off in our brain. Think of it like water; if a block of ice is already frozen in place, pushing on it really really really hard isn’t going to change it much. Maybe a little dent will form where the heat of your hand is pressed, but you’d have to hold your hand over it for so long before anything significant happened that your fingers would probably get frostbite (if you could bear the torture that long.)
But, if that same ice is melted into water, it becomes so much easier to move around, to reshape. If that water is poured into a differently shaped tray and then the right container (freezer), the chances of the water becoming the new shape faster and lasting longer are much higher.
That’s kind of how our neurons work. Trying to force our habits into a new shape with nothing but brute force is like trying to melt the ice with our hands - we are probably going to give up before anything significant changes out of sheer unbearable discomfort. But, when we make our neurons like water through the use of psychedelics, it’s a lot easier to reshape them intentionally how we want our lives to look.
This is why integration after a psychedelic experience is so critical in the space of mental health. If we were to only look at this one application, a method of changing habits (it’s worth noting there are many, many applications that neuroplasticity can be used for), it’s a powerful tool. Introducing a new gym habit, or getting rid of an old smoking habit, all become easier with intentional direction and support. The psychedelic itself won’t do the work for us, but it will create optimized conditions for change. Without integration, we will naturally fall back into patterns that no longer serve us. Instead of taking advantage of how much easier it is to go to the gym, we would allow our normalized routine to let us sleep in until we had to leave for work. This is also not to say a single course of treatment is a panacea; for most of us, our unhappiness with ourselves and our lives is not a derivative of a single pain point, but rather an outcome of several lifestyle choices that were made and habitualized along the way. Taking on one focused, intentional change at a time per course of treatment seems to me to be the best use of my own neuroplasticity, and I say that very unscientifically but very authentically.
The way this shows up in my life looks like this; I now get up between 4:30 and 5:00 in the morning, without fail, and go to the gym for an hour and a half of strength training. For years and years, I’ve wanted to be the girl who lifts weights but preferred the mindless movement of cardio paired with an audiobook. I’ve wanted the confidence of physique and strength that only weightlifting can give me, but have never quite been able to make myself do it for more than a few weeks at a time. Seven months later, I go every single day automatically and nearly effortlessly. I don’t have to hype myself up or berate myself into it. Like tying my shoes or driving home, it’s not something I “do”, it’s just something that “happens”.
Since then, I have used this integration practice to habit stack and hack my way to the life I want to live. The consistency of our habits is the primary source of how we experience our lives, and I found the cheat code. I am far from finished - I’d go so far as to say I’m just getting started. But, with a tool this powerful, consciously cultivating the life of my dreams has never felt so accessible.
