Your Psilocybin Mushroom Companion Quotes

“During psilocybin, people often accessed new perspective and revelations that helped them turn insights and understandings into actions [sic].”51”
― Michelle Janikian, Your Psilocybin Mushroom Companion: An Informative, Easy-to-Use Guide to Understanding Magic Mushrooms—From Tips and Trips to Microdosing and Psychedelic Therapy

“all of the traits associated with openness, like “sensitivity, imagination and broad-minded tolerance of others’ viewpoints and values,” are powerfully positive and predicative of an emotionally mature and well-functioning person.”
― Michelle Janikian, Your Psilocybin Mushroom Companion: An Informative, Easy-to-Use Guide to Understanding Magic Mushrooms—From Tips and Trips to Microdosing and Psychedelic Therapy

“Functional plasticity is the brain’s ability to redirect functions from a damaged area of the brain to a healthier one. Structural plasticity, on the other hand, is the brain’s capacity to change its physical structure often as a result of learning. And scientists at the University of California, Davis, found that psilocin and other psychedelics are able to promote both kinds of plasticity in cortical neurons.”
― Michelle Janikian, Your Psilocybin Mushroom Companion: An Informative, Easy-to-Use Guide to Understanding Magic Mushrooms—From Tips and Trips to Microdosing and Psychedelic Therapy

“2A signaling has been shown to play a role in cognitive flexibility.71 There have also been links between “trait pessimism,” like “pathological brooding” and deficient 2A receptor stimulation.72, 73, 74, 75 Both of these roles of 2A receptors make sense considering how people use psychedelics for personal growth, but some of the most interesting links between the serotonin system and psychedelics have to do with neural plasticity. Essentially, researchers have found evidence that 2A signaling may enhance neural plasticity, meaning that psychedelics may be able to promote brain plasticity by acting on those receptors.”
― Michelle Janikian, Your Psilocybin Mushroom Companion: An Informative, Easy-to-Use Guide to Understanding Magic Mushrooms—From Tips and Trips to Microdosing and Psychedelic Therapy

“The main prescription mix that experts warn against is combining psilocybin with antidepressants like SSRIs and serotonin-norepinephrine reuptake inhibitors (SNRIs) (some popular brand names include Prozac, Zoloft, Paxil, Lexapro, Cymbalta, and Effexor). That’s because these drugs also affect the serotonin system, the main receptor system that psilocybin interacts with. Giordano explains that these types of antidepressants already make more serotonin available in the space between nerve cells in the brain. And so, when psilocybin also acts on that system, there’s a risk of essentially “overdosing” on serotonin, known as “serotonin syndrome.”
― Michelle Janikian, Your Psilocybin Mushroom Companion: An Informative, Easy-to-Use Guide to Understanding Magic Mushrooms—From Tips and Trips to Microdosing and Psychedelic Therapy

“What people specifically should not take them?” like this: “People who are mentally unstable, under enormous pressure, or operating equipment that the lives of hundreds of people depend on. Or the fragile ones among us—those to whom you wouldn’t give a weekend airline ticket to Paris, those who wouldn’t expect to guide you out of the Yukon. Some people have been so damaged by life that boundary dissolution is not helpful to them. These people are trying to maintain boundaries, their functionality. They should be honored and supported, and not encouraged to take drugs. If because of genetic or cultural or psychological factors it’s not for you, then it’s not for you.”
― Michelle Janikian, Your Psilocybin Mushroom Companion: An Informative, Easy-to-Use Guide to Understanding Magic Mushrooms—From Tips and Trips to Microdosing and Psychedelic Therapy

“I would also exercise caution when mixing SSRI antidepressants and microdoses of psilocybin because they both affect the serotonin system in the brain. While an adverse reaction combining SSRIs with a microdose isn’t likely according to Fadiman’s site, as we’ll discuss in Chapter 14, these kinds of antidepressants can lessen the effects of full-dose psychedelics and will likely do the same with microdoses.”
― Michelle Janikian, Your Psilocybin Mushroom Companion: An Informative, Easy-to-Use Guide to Understanding Magic Mushrooms—From Tips and Trips to Microdosing and Psychedelic Therapy

“in the 2018 Anderson, et al. study, researchers tested microdosers and found them to score higher on “open-mindedness,” which they hypothesized considering recent findings on increased openness with higher-dose sessions.120 They also found microdosers to score higher on tests of “wisdom,” which they defined as being able to “reflect learning from one’s mistakes, consider multiple perspectives when facing a situation, being in tune with one’s emotions and those of others, and feeling a sense of connection and unity.”
― Michelle Janikian, Your Psilocybin Mushroom Companion: An Informative, Easy-to-Use Guide to Understanding Magic Mushrooms—From Tips and Trips to Microdosing and Psychedelic Therapy

“Watts warns me over the phone that she doesn’t know if it’s healthy for people to go into a psilocybin experience expecting their brains to be biologically reset, because that’s not exactly how it works. She emphasizes the analogy of a clinically controlled psychedelic experience being like 10 years of therapy in one day, because it’s more about the insights and realizations, the new perspective you have access to, and how you’re going to use that to change your everyday life.”
― Michelle Janikian, Your Psilocybin Mushroom Companion: An Informative, Easy-to-Use Guide to Understanding Magic Mushrooms—From Tips and Trips to Microdosing and Psychedelic Therapy

“what’s most curious in clinical trials with psilocybin is that participants who have the most mystical experiences, as defined by the Mystical Experience Questionnaire (MEQ), a peer reviewed psychological scale,52 also seem to benefit the most from psychedelic therapy, no matter if the study is for addiction53 or end-of-life anxiety.54 But why?”
― Michelle Janikian, Your Psilocybin Mushroom Companion: An Informative, Easy-to-Use Guide to Understanding Magic Mushrooms—From Tips and Trips to Microdosing and Psychedelic Therapy

“a main theme for many of the participants in these trials is realizing how important their relationships are, how their response to their illness is negatively affecting the people they love, and that they want to spend the last chapter of their lives enjoying the presence of others.45 “It helps people live until they die,” Richards tells me, “not just lie in their beds, feeling sorry for themselves and preoccupied with pain. It could transform palliative and hospice care dramatically in the next few years. It’s a very exciting frontier.”
― Michelle Janikian, Your Psilocybin Mushroom Companion: An Informative, Easy-to-Use Guide to Understanding Magic Mushrooms—From Tips and Trips to Microdosing and Psychedelic Therapy

“When the Johns Hopkins team followed up with participants a year later and asked them to fill out a standard personality test,35 they made a significant discovery: Most criteria remained the same, except in the category of “openness.” What they found was those who had mystical experiences were now statistically more open,36 which is meaningful for two reasons. The first being that the average person’s personality doesn’t evolve much past age 30, and so finding a substance-induced experience that could change people is radical. Second, all of the traits associated with openness, like “sensitivity, imagination and broad-minded tolerance of others’ viewpoints and values,” are powerfully positive and predicative of an emotionally mature and well-functioning person.”
― Michelle Janikian, Your Psilocybin Mushroom Companion: An Informative, Easy-to-Use Guide to Understanding Magic Mushrooms—From Tips and Trips to Microdosing and Psychedelic Therapy