The medicine opens a door. You’re the one who has to walk through it.

Delos Soul · drawing on Johns Hopkins safety research

What Changes When You Have Real Support

People try psilocybin on their own all the time, and some of them have experiences that change their lives. With the right support, a lot more people would. Preparation and screening, and someone who’s actually there with you, shift the odds in a big way. Here’s what that support really does.

The dose is known

Unregulated mushrooms are all over the place in strength. The same dried gram from the same batch can hit completely differently depending on which part of the mushroom it came from and how it was dried and stored. In a licensed Colorado session the medicine is tested, so the dose is measured and you know what you’re actually taking.

Unregulated mushrooms are all over the place in strength. The same dried gram from the same batch can hit completely differently depending on which part of the mushroom it came from and how it was dried and stored. You can’t reliably dose something you can’t measure.

Screening keeps you safe

This medicine isn’t for everyone. If you or a close family member has a history of psychosis or schizophrenia, that’s a serious red flag. Psilocybin can trigger psychotic episodes in people with that vulnerability, and the fallout can be severe and long-lasting. Some heart conditions carry real risk too, and so do certain medications, lithium especially, and some psychiatric diagnoses. Good screening catches all of that before you ever sit down, and it’s one of the first things we do together.

This medicine isn’t for everyone. If you or a close family member has a history of psychosis or schizophrenia, that’s a serious red flag. Psilocybin can trigger psychotic episodes in people with that vulnerability, and the fallout can be severe and long-lasting. Some heart conditions carry real risk too, and so do certain medications, lithium especially, and some psychiatric diagnoses. Without proper screening you have no idea which side of that line you’re on.

Someone is there when it gets hard

The support problem

Psilocybin can bring up really hard material. Grief you never dealt with, trauma, fear, stuff you didn’t see coming. In a well-held session there’s someone trained right there to help you move through it instead of fighting it. Alone, a hard moment can turn into a crisis.

Integration makes it stick

The integration problem

What it adds up to

What actually helps

The research keeps landing in the same place. Psilocybin with careful screening, real preparation and professional support gives very different results from psilocybin on your own. The substance is a catalyst. The screening, the prep, the session and the integration around it are what decide whether that catalyst helps you or hurts you.

That’s the whole reason this practice exists. I have no interest in gatekeeping the medicine. I want to build conditions where it can actually do something. If you’re thinking about this and don’t know where to start, book a free screening call and ask me everything. I’ll tell you honestly whether it’s right for you right now. And if it isn’t, I’ll tell you that too.

Research referenced: Johns Hopkins Medicine psilocybin adverse effects survey (Griffiths et al.); Lyons T, Spriggs M, Carhart-Harris RL, et al. Nature Communications 2026; National Network of Depression Centers consensus statement on psilocybin safety, 2025.

For educational purposes only. Not medical advice. If you are in crisis, call or text 988.

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Nature Communications · May 2026 · Lyons, Spriggs, Carhart-Harris et al., Imperial College London

What Psilocybin Actually Does to Your Brain

Written by Lindsey Kayne, MA, LPC, NMF

This is one of the most important psilocybin studies to come out in years. It gets at a question nobody had really nailed down. Does one psilocybin experience change the brain afterward, or only while it’s happening?

It changes it afterward. And the changes they found are the ones that matter.

The study

Twenty-eight healthy adults who had never taken a psychedelic got a 25mg dose of psilocybin at Imperial College London. The researchers watched their brain activity live on EEG during the session, and did MRI scans before and one month after. 94% of them said it was the most unusual experience of their lives.

During the session, the patterns loosen

In ordinary life your brain runs on habit. Same loops, same reactions, the same old way of seeing yourself. That keeps you functioning. It also keeps you stuck.

During the session, those patterns loosened a lot. Brain activity got more complex and less predictable. The brain’s machinery for shutting out new information and holding onto habit dropped off sharply. The brain opened up, basically. And the more it opened, the more people’s well-being had improved a month later.

A month later, the brain had physically changed

A month after the session, MRI showed structural changes in white matter, the wiring between the prefrontal cortex and the deeper emotional and motivational parts of the brain. The prefrontal cortex is where judgment and self-reflection live, and where you break old patterns. These changes point to actual anatomical neuroplasticity. Similar changes have been seen after months of intensive meditation. Psilocybin seems to produce them in one session.

The brain’s networks were also more integrated. Regions talked to each other more freely instead of staying in their silos. That same pattern has shown up in other studies where psilocybin relieved depression.

The next day, a window of insight

This is the part I care about most, practically. How much the brain opened during the session predicted a real jump in psychological insight the very next day. And that next-day insight is what drove the improvements people still had a month later.

So it goes like this. Psilocybin opens the brain, insight shows up, and lasting change follows if you do something with it. That’s why I push so hard on the day after, and on the weeks after that. Integration is the work.

Cognitive flexibility improved too

A month later, people were measurably better at noticing when the rules had changed and adjusting to it. Rigid thinking sits at the center of depression, anxiety, addiction and OCD. Being able to actually see something differently is one of the biggest things healing gives back, and this study shows psilocybin helps with that at the level of the brain itself.

Source: Lyons T, Spriggs M, Carhart-Harris RL, et al. Human brain changes after first psilocybin use. Nature Communications. 2026;17:3977. doi:10.1038/s41467-026-71962-3

For educational purposes only. Not medical advice. Psilocybin administration takes place only in Colorado, at a state-licensed healing center, for screened adults 21 and over.

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Primary Care Companion for CNS Disorders · January 2024 · Lo et al.

What the Research Says About Microdosing

Written by Lindsey Kayne, MA, LPC, NMF

Microdosing is having a moment, and there’s a lot of noise. Some people swear by it and some roll their eyes. Here’s what 19 peer-reviewed studies actually found.

What microdosing is

Microdosing means taking a very small amount of psilocybin, about a tenth of a therapeutic dose, on a regular schedule, often every few days. You’re not supposed to trip. What people are after is subtle. A little more focus, a little more emotional give, less of that low heaviness that makes ordinary days hard. I think of a full session as a door you walk through. Microdosing is cracking a window. They do different things, so please don’t lump them together.

What the research found

Better mood. This was the most consistent benefit across every kind of study. One study of more than 4,000 microdosers found significantly lower depression, anxiety and stress than in matched controls.

Sharper focus. People said they were more engaged at work and in their relationships. A controlled study backed up improvements in both analytical and creative thinking.

Less anxiety and depression. A month-long prospective study found real drops in symptoms, along with more resilience and social connection, and steadier emotions.

Getting through the day better. In interviews, what kept coming up was function more than transformation. People were microdosing so they could show up more fully, somewhere conventional treatment hadn’t gotten them.

Where I’d be careful

Most of these studies are surveys, which means self-report. One well-designed placebo-controlled study found the microdose group and the placebo group improved just as much as each other over four weeks. So the compound may not be doing all of it. The science looks promising, and it’s still far from settled. Better trials are underway.

How I work with this

Microdosing support is one of the ways I work with people. If you want to do this properly and not as a vague experiment, we design a protocol together. We decide ahead of time what you’re tracking and what would count as it working, and we check in honestly along the way. It can stand alone or run alongside prep and integration for a full-dose session. I’ll be straight with you: the evidence for full-dose sessions is stronger and more consistent than the evidence for microdosing. But microdosing is where a lot of people start, and I’d much rather you did it with a plan.

Source: Lo DF, et al. Modern psychedelic microdosing research on mental health: a systematic review. Prim Care Companion CNS Disord. 2024;26(1):23r03581. doi:10.4088/PCC.23r03581

For educational purposes only. Not medical advice. Microdosing support is a coaching service and is distinct from licensed psilocybin administration, which in Colorado occurs only at licensed healing centers under Proposition 122.

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Delos Soul · drawing on Nature Translational Psychiatry, Cerebral Cortex, and Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience

When Success Goes Quiet

Written by Lindsey Kayne, MA, LPC, NMF

This one isn’t for people who are falling apart. It’s for people who’ve built something real and function at a high level, and who’ve started to notice something inside has gone quiet. The drive is still there and the results keep coming. But the spark, the real creative energy and the sense that any of it matters, has gone dim. If that lands, keep reading.

What high performance actually costs

At the level of the brain, executive function is your ability to plan and execute, to filter things out and hold things down. It’s incredibly useful for building companies, leading teams and hitting targets. Run it hard for long enough, though, and it kills creativity.

The prefrontal cortex runs executive control. It’s brilliant at narrowing focus, shutting out what doesn’t matter and keeping you on task. Creative insight comes from loosening, and narrowing works against it. The same machinery that makes you a sharp, disciplined operator actively shuts down the wandering, associative, pattern-breaking thinking where new ideas come from.

The longer you run in high-output mode, and for most executives that’s years, sometimes decades, the more your brain optimizes for efficiency and the less room it has for anything unfamiliar or half-formed. You stop dreaming the way you used to. Problems that used to feel alive start to feel like boxes to tick. You’re excellent at executing. Somewhere along the way you lost the ability to wonder.

The default mode network and why you need it

There’s a network in the brain called the default mode network, the DMN. It switches on when you’re not focused on a task, when you’re daydreaming or reflecting or connecting ideas that don’t obviously go together. For a long time neuroscientists thought it was just the brain idling. They were wrong. The DMN is where insight lives. It’s where you make sense of your own life. In a pretty real way, it’s the part of you that exists when you’re not being productive.

In high-performing, high-output people the DMN is often chronically suppressed. You’ve trained your brain for years to stay in executive mode. And the cost is exactly what you’ve been feeling: creative flatness, running on fumes, not being able to reach something that used to come easily.

Research published in Nature’s Translational Psychiatry found psilocybin’s effects on creativity shift over time. During the experience it increases spontaneous creative insight. A week later, the number of new ideas people came up with had measurably gone up. And both effects were predicted by changes in the default mode network, the exact network high performers have spent years shutting down.

What psilocybin actually does to an executive brain

Psilocybin temporarily throws off the brain’s usual network organization. The tight, efficient, well-worn pathways that run your operational mind loosen up. Networks that normally stay separate, including the default mode network and the executive control network, start talking to each other in ways they usually don’t. For a while the brain gets more associative and more curious, and a lot more open to ideas that don’t fit the existing model.

That’s different from impairment. It’s closer to taking the governor off an engine that’s been run too cautiously for too long. Research on flow, the state of total immersion high performers usually describe as their best work, consistently shows more communication between the default mode and executive control networks, plus a temporary drop in self-critical frontal activity. Psilocybin seems to bring on a related state, and to leave changes in network connectivity that last for weeks.

Put simply, one well-held session can give you back access to parts of your mind that years of high performance have shut.

Usually there’s more going on

Most of the executives I work with are carrying something they’ve been too busy to look at, on top of feeling creatively stuck. Grief over a relationship they poured themselves into. The cost of decisions they had to make. The gap between the life they built and the person they thought they’d become. And that quiet sense that all the achievement hasn’t delivered the meaning they expected.

Psilocybin opens the whole mind, and creativity is only one room in it. The same loosening that brings creative access back also lets you see your life more clearly, the patterns you’ve been running and what you’ve been avoiding. For a lot of high performers, that turns out to be the bigger outcome. The creative energy comes back almost as a side effect of reconnecting with themselves.

What this looks like for someone like you

Preparation looks different for executives. You’re very good at managing and directing experience. What you’ll need help with is learning to surrender instead of optimize, following the experience instead of leading it. That’s a whole different skill, and it takes time to build. It’s why the prep sessions matter as much as the session itself.

Please don’t treat the session like a productivity tool or a biohack. It’s a full encounter with your own mind, in a carefully prepared space, with a trained facilitator with you the entire time. Parts of it will probably be beautiful and parts may be hard to face. All of it is yours.

Integration, the sessions that come after, is where insight turns into changes in how you actually operate. Skip it and the window closes and the old patterns quietly take back over. Do it, and what you reached becomes something you can build on.

If something in this is landing, start with a free screening call. You don’t need to be broken to get something out of this work. You just need to be honest about what’s been missing.

Research referenced: Mason NL, et al. Spontaneous and deliberate creative cognition during and after psilocybin exposure. Translational Psychiatry. 2021.  ·  Luchini SA, et al. Enhancing creativity with covert neurofeedback: causal evidence for default-executive network coupling. Cerebral Cortex. 2025.  ·  Psilocybin desynchronizes brain networks. PMC. 2023.  ·  Enhanced functional connectivity between the default mode network and executive control network during flow states. Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience. 2026.

For educational purposes only. Not medical advice. Start with a free screening call to work out whether this is right for you.

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Compass Pathfinder (2025) · The Lancet eClinicalMedicine (2025) · SAGE Psychopharmacology (2025) · Choi et al. (2024)

Psilocybin and PTSD: What the Research Actually Shows

Written by Lindsey Kayne, MA, LPC, NMF

PTSD is one of the hardest conditions in psychiatry to treat. About 13 million Americans live with it, and what’s available to them is slow and often only partly works. A growing body of research suggests psilocybin may work through mechanisms that standard treatment just doesn’t reach.

The problem with current treatments

In the past two decades PTSD has had only two FDA-approved medications, and both are SSRIs originally developed for depression. They help some people. For a lot of others they don’t. Trauma-focused therapies like CPT and EMDR do better, but they ask you to stay with painful material for a long time, a lot of people drop out, and a real chunk of the people who finish are still symptomatic.

Here’s my view. PTSD is a disorder of memory and fear, and of a nervous system that can’t learn a past threat is over. Treating that with a daily pill that nudges serotonin misses most of what’s actually going on.

What psilocybin does to the traumatized brain

A 2024 paper in the Journal of Psychopharmacology lays out several ways psilocybin might act on the biology of PTSD directly.

Fear extinction. A hallmark of PTSD is impaired fear extinction, which means the brain can’t learn that something it once linked with threat is safe now. People with PTSD tend to have a smaller hippocampus and less neuroplasticity there. In a preclinical study, a single dose of psilocybin grew new neurons and synapses in the hippocampus, reversed the drop in neuroplasticity proteins, and produced fast fear extinction that was still holding six days later. In plain terms, psilocybin seems to give the brain back its ability to unlearn fear.

Amygdala reactivity. The amygdala, the brain’s threat detector, runs hot in PTSD and reacts to neutral things as if they were dangerous. Research shows psilocybin lowers amygdala reactivity to negative emotional stimuli and strengthens its connection with the prefrontal cortex, the part that lets you regulate emotion and recognize you’re safe even when your body is screaming otherwise. Psilocybin seems to strengthen the exact pathway PTSD wears down.

Memory reconsolidation. Every time you recall a memory, it goes briefly unstable before it gets stored again. In theory, that window is a chance to change the emotional charge on a traumatic memory. Research suggests psilocybin may open that window wider than other approaches, so people can revisit and reprocess traumatic memories with less defensive reaction.

Psychological defenses and stuck points. In Cognitive Processing Therapy, the beliefs that keep PTSD going, like “it was my fault” or “nowhere is safe,” are called stuck points. A 2025 paper describes how psilocybin may help people reach and revise those beliefs by lowering, for a while, the defenses that normally lock them in place. People in psilocybin PTSD trials kept describing being able to face traumatic material with more distance and less reactivity than they’d ever managed in regular therapy.

The clinical trial results

In 2025, Compass Pathfinder published Phase 2 results from a trial run across King’s College London, Mount Sinai Hospital and Sunstone Therapies. Twenty-two patients with PTSD got a single 25mg dose of synthetic psilocybin. It was well tolerated with no serious adverse events, and symptoms improved quickly and stayed improved out to 12 weeks after that one dose.

The same trial’s qualitative arm, published in The Lancet’s eClinicalMedicine in December 2025, captured what people actually went through. They talked about avoiding less, about not pushing traumatic memories and the feelings attached to them away so hard. They talked about feeling their bodies again after years of numbness, and about emotion finally moving that had been stuck for years. And again and again they said the relationship with the therapy team was central, that it mattered to be held by someone who knew their history and was fully there with them the whole time.

Johns Hopkins is running a randomized controlled trial of two psilocybin doses for PTSD right now, including psilocybin paired with trauma-focused therapy compared with standard psychological support. Results aren’t out yet.

Why who’s in the room matters most with trauma

Trauma happened somewhere safety broke down, where there was threat or helplessness. So asking someone with PTSD to let go into a psilocybin experience takes a kind of felt safety that doesn’t just show up. It has to be built, slowly and on purpose.

In the research so far, the relationship keeps coming up as one of the biggest factors in how psilocybin PTSD treatment goes. People in the Lancet study described the team as “transparent and human,” and they tied that directly to how fully they could engage with the experience. Psilocybin opens a door. With a trauma history, who’s standing at that door with you matters enormously.

This is why I work the way I do. In trauma work, the preparation and the integration after carry most of the weight, and the session day sits in the middle of them. That takes someone who understands trauma as something your nervous system is doing right now, more than a story you keep retelling. Someone who can stay with whatever comes up without flinching or hurrying you past it. My clinical training is trauma-focused, EMDR and parts work and somatic practice, and for people carrying trauma I think that’s the minimum.

Sources: Choi C, et al. Mechanisms of psilocybin on the treatment of PTSD. J Psychopharmacol. 2024.  ·  McGowan NM, et al. Safety and tolerability of single-dose psilocybin for PTSD. J Psychopharmacol. 2025.  ·  Modlin NL, et al. Psilocybin treatment for PTSD: qualitative study. Lancet eClinicalMedicine. 2025.  ·  Modlin NL, et al. Clinical conceptualisation of PTSD in psilocybin treatment. Ther Adv Psychopharmacol. 2025.  ·  Psilocybin facilitates fear extinction via hippocampal neuroplasticity. PMC. 2023.

For educational purposes only. Not medical advice. If you are in crisis, call or text 988. Outside Colorado, Delos Soul provides coaching rather than psychotherapy or facilitated sessions.

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Johns Hopkins Center for Psychedelic and Consciousness Research

The Conditions Psilocybin Has Been Shown to Help

Written by Lindsey Kayne, MA, LPC, NMF

Johns Hopkins has done the most careful psilocybin research of the modern era, more than 60 peer-reviewed studies. Here’s what that work actually shows, with the numbers.

Why Hopkins matters

In 2000, Johns Hopkins became the first American institution since the 1970s to get government approval to study psychedelics. Their 2006 paper restarted the whole field worldwide. In 2021 they got the first NIH grant in over 50 years to directly study a classic psychedelic. That’s the most cautious funder in American science deciding this is worth the money.

Depression

Two psilocybin sessions with supportive therapy brought depressive symptoms down fast, and by a lot. Half the participants were in full remission within four weeks. At a one-year follow-up, most were still doing better. In treatment-resistant depression, meaning people who’ve tried medication after medication, psilocybin produced big improvements that held for months.

In cancer patients dealing with depression and anxiety alongside a terminal diagnosis, 80% were still significantly better six months later. Less fear of death, less of that loss of meaning and existential grief. Those were some of the most consistent findings in the whole literature.

Addiction

The best pharmaceutical options for quitting nicotine get roughly 35% of people abstinent at six months. In a Hopkins study, 80% of participants were biologically verified smoke-free six months after psilocybin treatment. Biologically verified. Nobody just took their word for it.

For alcohol use disorder, a randomized clinical trial found significantly fewer heavy drinking days in the psilocybin group, and the effect lasted. Research on opioid use disorder is still going, and the early reasoning behind it is strong.

PTSD, anxiety, and more

PTSD research is active and growing. Hopkins is running trials for anorexia nervosa, which has the highest death rate of any psychiatric disorder, and the early results look encouraging. Healthy people get something out of it too. 64% of Hopkins volunteers with no diagnosis said one session raised their well-being or life satisfaction, and it lasted more than a year.

Why it works

The Hopkins researchers keep saying the same thing: the quality of the experience matters enormously. More connection and openness during the session, and more meaning in it, reliably predict better outcomes down the line. So the structure around the experience is doing real work. I’d go as far as calling it the mechanism. And across more than 25 years of careful Hopkins research, there have been no serious adverse events attributed to psilocybin itself.

Source: Johns Hopkins Center for Psychedelic and Consciousness Research. hopkinsmedicine.org/psychiatry/research/psychedelics-research. Accessed May 2026.

For educational purposes only. Not medical advice. Colorado natural medicine services are provided only at state-licensed healing centers under Proposition 122.

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